And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism

But the criticism has another dimension.  Plastaras has seen that the narrative of liberation began with the grieving complaint of Israel in Exodus 2:23-25:

And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage and cried out for help,  and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant. . . . And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition.”

I will urge later that the real criticism began in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things all all right – either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room.  And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.  

As it happened, yesterday’s New York Times had an example as reported by Elizabeth Dias, a religion reporter, of what happens to those who have bought onto that imperial pretense for an imaginary imperial past AS CHRISTIANITY! which never was as they imagine it AND NEVER WAS MUCH IN LINE WITH THE GOSPEL OR THE PROPHETIC TRADITION and which in the Republican-fascist period meets head on with the reaction to the empire of our racist, inequality, especially as embodied in a Black president and a Woman candidate for the presidency, in reaction to those who have been moving the items genuine grievances of the imperial past and today.  In which the white evangelicals in a very large majority in and around Sioux City, Iowa signed onto the program of probably the closest thing we've had to an de facto pagan president, Donald Trump who went there to announce, 

“Christianity will have power, If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.”

Or,  “Trump is your shepherd, you shall not want.”  a promise as bad as the character of the as-seen-on-TV huckster and New York City real-estate gangster who made that promise of a worldly kingdom to them in exchange for their souls.  Though it is certain that that real estate will be as "not as advertised" as everything else Trump has ever peddled.  Yet the imperial imagination of the self-righteous “christians” in the article lap it up.   

Though, and this needs to be always remembered,  not so much in the evangelicals of color nor, as should also be pointed out, not even among even all white evangelicals. 

The whole article is as good an example of these people articulating their reason for supporting so enthusiastically a combination modern day Pharaoh, Herod, and Nero in exactly the triumphalist “Christianity” that arose after Constantine began that earliest domestication of the ultra-radical Gospel of Jesus and the long period of corruption through power set in.   In one of her essays about the modernist and earlier Christian denigration of the Mosaic tradition Marilynne Robinson asked the apt question of what the New Testament would have been like if it had included the violence, evil and oppression of official Christianity in a comparably long period as the Old Testament covers.  The entire collection of writing is a warning that even when you briefly manage to attain what the prophetic imagination offers, you are always in danger of giving it away or being seduced into abandoning it.  Looking at how the largely literate American people have been so seduced by such a vulgar, crass, absurd, bronzer painted and blonde dyed Trump should allow us to humbly understand how easy it was for those in the illiterate, impoverished, anxious past to give up their chance for a decent life under their own versions of Trump.  And that's not an exaggeration, accredited universities and colleges, WHICH SELL THEMSELVES AS "CHRISTIAN" IN CHARACTER  figure into the spectacle of Trumpian degenerate imperial rule. He made that self-deifying statement at one.   Many of his worst and most publicly sycophantic promoters are products of the most elite of our secular institutions of higher learning.  

We should always be humbled by our own unwillingness to live a decent life with all of our advantages when looking on the sins of our ancestors in that very same regard.   Instead of looking down on "bronze age goat herders" we should look down on ourselves who are doing far worse things than they did,even as asses out of Harvard like Pinker soothe us with idiotic ahistorical nonsense about this being a golden age.

And the kind of domesticated god of “christianity” which Bruggemann has already talked about in a more general context is not the sole property of evangelical Protestantism, I’m very familiar with something perhaps earlier and more poisonous in the kind of Catholicism that now despises Pope Francis but which, I assure you, despised good Pope St. John XXIII and Vatican II before Francis. The same kind of thing on display among the reactionary Dutch Reformed Trump supporters in their embrace of anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic violently nationalistic and, lest it be forgotten, racist self-consecrated god,  Donald Trump, a man who has not only lived a life of sacrilege and scandal  but, as is always more important to such people, when he has explicitly said it in public and as captured on tape, is fully on display in not only the millionaire-billionaire financed neo-integralism as funded by the like of Tim Bush, but is lavishly on display in the Catholic hierarchy in such figures as Cardinals Raymond Burke,  Timothy Dolan, and a number of others, especially as appointed by JPII and Benedict XVI and internationally by the likes of Bishop Carlo Maria Vigano and Cardinal Robert Sarah.