American Is Ruled By Static and Material gods As Certainly As Ancient Egypt Was

Walter Breggemann then goes into several long, numbered analyses of what was so radically different between the new, Mosaic way of life and that which was typical of the world, then and now.   I will remind you of what has developed into one of the main themes of my study of how the American, really the English language left has failed so disastrously, that a number of scholars looking at the problems of democracy have noted that modern, egalitarian democracy has its source in a combination of the radical justice, economic and social of the Mosaic Law and the radical interpretation of that, and more, in the Gospel of Jesus.   As noted in a number of posts here, some have gone so far as to persuasively argue that those are the only source and source of sustenance  that egalitarian democracy has, that nothing else has proven to be capable of producing it in any reliable way.  I don't know if Brueggemann would agree with that statement but studying the question rather intensively for the past fifteen years has convinced me that that is the truth.

(1)  The radical break of Moses and Israel from imperial reality is a two-dimensional break from both the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation. Moses dismantled the religion of static triumphalism by exposing the gods and showing that in fact they had no power and were not gods.  Thus, the mythical legitimacy of Pharaoh's social world is destroyed, for it is shown that such a regime appeals to sanctions that in fact do not exist.  The mythic claims of the empire are ended by the disclosure of the alternative religion of the freedom of God.  In place of the gods of Egypt, creatures of the imperial consciousness, Moses discloses Yahweh the sovereign one who acts in his lordly freedom, is extrapolated from no social reality, and is captive to no social perception but acts from his own person toward his own purposes.  

In re-reading this the image of the ending of the criminally racist, pro-terrorist movie Birth of a Nation, the triumphal ride of the KKK which supported a pseudo-Christian version of exactly the same kind of system that Moses exposed and discredited slavery supported regime, complete with its material gods, its materialism, its oppression and exploitation. What today's Republican-fascist party is all about. 

I will also remind you of how frequently American slaves, under law and under de facto slavery and oppression made recourse to the story of the Exodus, how many times they cited the Jewish Prophets in protest and resistance to that system.  That's not any kind of a coincidence. 

At the same time,  Moses dismantles the politics of  oppression and exploitation by countering it with a politics of justice and compassion.  The reality emerging out of the Exodus is not just a new religion or a new religious ideal or a vision of freedom but the emergence of a new social community in history,  a community that has historical body, that had to devise laws, patterns of governance and order, norms of right and wrong, and sanctions of accountability.  The participants in the Exodus found themselves, undoubtedly surprisingly to them, involved in the intentional formation of a new social community to match the vision of God's freedom.  That new social reality,  which is utterly discontinuous with Egypt, lasted in the alternative way for 250 years. 

It must be point out that our "new order of the ages" has about run for that length of time and is on the verge of imploding, so the failure of the attempted political, social system under the Mosaic Law (or attempt at being that) is nothing we can claim to have bettered with modernist scientistic "enlightenment".  

I interpret the 40 years that the Children of Israel spent in the wilderness as, among other things, being an indication that the habits of thought that the former slaves used to their enslavement - as symbolized in those who hankered after and pined for the cucumbers they had in their slavery* - had to die out before a really radical new beginning could be made.  Even Moses, himself, was not allowed to enter the promised land, though he was allowed to see it from afar before he died.

We will not understand the meaning of prophetic imagination unless we see the connection between the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation..  Karl Marx had discerned the connection when he observed that the criticism of religion is the ultimate criticism and must lead to the criticism of law, economics and politics. [I don't think there is any getting by the unpleasant and hard necessity of attacking the millionaire and billionaire financed religion of neo-confederacy and such right-wing neo-integralist Catholicism in attacking Trumpian Republicanism.  If Christians don't do that, Protestant and Catholic, alike, they are complicit in idolatrous immorality.] The gods of Egypt are the immovable lords of order.  They call for, sanction and legitimate a society of order, which is precisely what Egypt had.  In Egypt as Frankfort has shown, there were no revolutions, no breaks for freedom.  There were only the necessary political and economic arrangements to provide order, "natural,"  the order of Pharaoh.  Thus the religion of the static gods is not and never could be disinterested, but inevitably it served the interests of the people n charge, presiding over the order and benefiting from the order.  And the functioning of that society testified to the rightness of the religion because kings did prosper and bricks did get made. 

The gods of the United States are, aside from money, the Founders, the Constitution, the First Amendment, that is the beginning of understanding how this works out in our time in our place.  The static nature of it is the "Constitutional" order that not only permits illegitimate presidents to be chosen by the Electoral College or by Supreme Court fiat as in Bush v Gore in which the corrupt putsch of the Brooks Bros. rioters is installed and maintained but which keeps the even more obvious criminal and even traitor Donald Trump in power as administered by his criminal associates, most obvious in his Attorney General, the old hand at fixing the system to enable and facilitate criminality - and, let's not forget oppressing and killing the powerless - all "by law" all not yet deemed to be that terrible and inconvenient "Constitutional crisis" that would give the mass media the vapors.   I'm still waiting to see how corrupt, how criminal, how clearly fraudulent and illegitimate it has to get for one of those to be declared.  The stasis that Brueggemann talks about is seen on CNN quite regularly as they or the opinion pages of the New York Times smooths over things so as to maintain "order".   

*  I also interpret that as yearning for the reportedly popular Egyptian alcoholic drink made by burring cucumbers in hot sand till they fermented, though it doesn't say that in the text.  It could have contained a kind of beer joke that we aren't equipped to get, so much of humor being all about knowing context.