where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and people know no justice or compassion

Third, the great song of Moses is the most eloquent, liberating, and liberated song in Israel.  The last energizing reality is a doxology in which the singers focus on this free One and in the act of the song appropriate the freedom of God as their own freedom.  In his recent typology David Noel Freedman places this song at the head of the period of militant Mosaic Yahwism.  By a study of divine names he observes the repeated use of the name,  the very name of freedom which Egypt couldn’t tolerate and the freedom of slaves could not anticipate.  The speaking of the name already provides a place in which an alternative community can live.  So prophets might reflect on the name of God, on what his name is, on what it means, on where it can be spoken, and by whom it might be spoken.  There is something direct and primitive about the name in these most primal songs of faith and freedom.  Egypt is wont to hedge the name with adjectives and all manner of qualifiers,  but the community of justice practicing the freedom of God cannot wait for that.  

Prophesy cannot be separated very long from doxology or it will either wither or become ideology.  Abraham Heschel has seen most wonderously how doxology is the last full act of human freedom and justice.  The prophetic community might ponder what the preconditions of doxology are and what happens when doxologies that address this One are replaced by television jingles that find us singing consumerism ideology to ourselves and to each other.  In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and people know no justice or compassion.  

This section of the book is long and complex and I decided to post the entire thing because it serves as an indispensable introduction to the rest of the book.  It continues on, which I hope to get to tomorrow, but this point, in 2020 when the Mammonist Trump and his goon Barr and the rest of the crooks and gangsters of his regime, joined in by "Reverends" sons of "reverends," bishops and cardinals, are doing exactly what Walter Brueggemann talks about here,  they talk about someone they call “God” but it is not more than a “jingle” a slogan, a button to push to trigger a particular hate-filled, resentful, fearful demographic who like their god domesticated and in service to the stable order they like, one which the Republican party and the media that has served it and, now, the Roberts court in order to do exactly what is said will inevitably be the result “In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and people know no justice or compassion.”  The very same people who stole babies from their parents and put them in cages with plastic blankets and who UNSURPRISINGLY, CONSIDERING THAT RECORD,  insist on policies that have gotten more than one and a half thousand Americans YET  killed in a pandemic they are making worse and are about to make catastrophically worse in school openings so Trump can save face - which he won't - are reciting those slogans to rope in some reliable suckers - they hope.  And, based on the insights of the Hebrew Prophets,  Walter Brueggemann anticipated that happening more than forty years ago.

That is so potent and timely a point that I’m not going to comment more on it just now.