"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Morning Coffee by Dermot Bolger directed by Eithne Hand
A stranger from the past drives into the yard of on an elderly couple. Is this seemingly benign intrusion the action of a man seeking to make atonement and bring justice, or wreak havoc on the lives of the couple?"
Morning Coffee is a play that is either about a man refusing to accept any status of victimhood or else about a man so traumatised by childhood events that he cannot admit them into his present life, even if they have shaped his life. It is about a perpetrator who has slowly come to understand the implications of his actions and now feels a need to be shamed and published in old age. It is about an elderly couple who, after decades of loneliness, have found each other and built a small republic of love where they are determined that whatever secrets they share will go with them to the grave.
Starring Donncha Crowley, Tatiana Ouliankina, Helen Roche and Eamon Morrissey
THE NEXT QUESTION, as well, was obscured but, based on the answer I think it was about what was going to happen to the Church in the predatory economy.
Well, the Church is being kicked out of Egypt so we're going to find out. It means to abandon our notions of establishment and entitlement and privilege. I don't want to be dramatic but as von Aber(?) said, "to become poor men and women after the poor Jesus." And we are, us institutional types are ill-equipped to do that. But that's what's going to happen. And institutional types regard that as a great misfortune. It might be the best thing that could happen to the Church. Which means we got to sell all these big buildings to someone else and so on and so on.
At Andersen where I worship, about two years ago it's like all at once everybody decided to quit going to church. It's happening. And I think for the institutional Church that's the chickens coming home to roost for the way we've ordered our life. And it doesn't feel very good.
It didn't feel very good when they left Egypt. They're two verses into the wilderness and they want to go back. And they say to Moses, "you brought us out here to die."
So the power of Pharaoh keeps pulling us . . . It's like [characters in] these movies who try to leave the Mafia and you can't get out. You can't get out of Egypt but you have to go.
Then the man who I assume is Peter said: You know it's happening. I don't know if you know Rich at Emmanuel Presbyterian. So he's decided to talk to the Church and [they decided] to take some of the money out of their endowment - most people think the purpose of the endowment is [to watch the endowment and keep it large] - and invested it in a neighborhood cooperative food market. That is a huge step out of [Egypt?].
I've filled in with what I think I may have discerned on the recording but am not fully confident I got the words right. What is in square brackets is my assumption of the meaning of what I couldn't hear.
Which suggests a good example of how to start leaving the predatory economy in which an endowment is more important than the least among us. As they said, it's happening, taking a chance on giving food in a modern urban food desert. Jesus told People to sell everything they have and give the money to the poor and follow him. I know of one church building around here which was abandoned - along with its congregation - by the Catholic dioceses of Maine. The building was sold and bought by an activist, semi-moderate, for Baptists congregation which turned it into pretty much a social service entity as well as a place with Sunday services. That hadn't been absent in the previous Church but it was clearly ineffectively weak on that. Such things had more theoretically been encouraged but the US Catholic Conference of Bishops has been far more caught up in squabbles about issues like LGBTQ+ clergy and same-sex marriage, not to mention the priest-pedophile scandal. The Baptists there now seem to ignore issues like marriage equality, I have the feeling they won't be a "welcoming church" in that regard - which, as a member of the LGBTQ+ community I certainly don't agree with of find just - but they feed People and provide them with some other services. The same is true for the UCC Church in the next town over, though even with that their congregation is certainly petering out through the indifference of younger people. Which I find pretty hard to take but I haven't joined them, either. Most of those Catholics I know who were members of the parish obliterated by one of JPII's bishops have stopped going to church. If mainline Protestantism is in danger from the indifference of its members Catholics are even more so from the clerics who hold all of the power.
I think Christianity is going to be sorely missed if the more pessimistic view turns out to be true. Certainly missed by those who need to be served by it, though they don't seem to join enough to keep it going. I think the problem is that the popular culture and, to a far less powerful extent in terms of actual influence, academic orthodoxy is all in with the gangster (Pharaonic) regime. I can't resist pointing out that given my usual identity of most governments with gangster rule, I take it as confirmation of my theory that someone as wise and insightful as Walter Brueggemann compared those to the Mafia.
This all reminds me of Karl Rahner's prediction that Christianity of the future would be a "winter" Christianity without the elaborate, florid growth of institutions and culture of the past.* If those old elaborations were replaced by what Brueggemann and others are talking about as the Gospel, Law and Prophetic action I think it would probably be the best thing that could happen to it, though I'd certainly miss the great organs and choirs which are a part of that old institutional church. I don't think those were at all entirely superfluous to attracting People to church where they could be encouraged to stand up against Pharaoh. We are, after all, up against a system which gains its influence by attracting the greatest number of eyes and ears.
I am confident that the "spiritual but not religious" substitute is not going to be any kind of replacement, neither will American style Buddhism or "mindfulness," though that seems to be fading in fashion. What is needed is the opposite of what I imagined when I first read about Rahner's prediction which, I realized in writing this, was like the secret Christianity under communist governance or like the secret Jews from the time of the expulsion and forced conversion in Spain which reportedly survives even in Latin America. Such a private, quietistic Christianity under indifference instead of oppression would be the worst thing that could happen because then there would then be no reason for Christianity to survive.
Another inaudible question followed but it was about The Lord's Prayer, whether the line should be "forgive us our debts (as we forgive our debtors)," as opposed to "forgive us our trespasses." which is certainly a directly relevant question considering the topic of the lecture is a predatory economy. Walter Brueggemann's answer was:
Presbyterians - I'm a Calvinist. [The question was] in The Lord's Prayer do we say "Forgive us our trespasses," or "Forgive us our debts."
I'm a Calvinist, Presbyterians would rather have their debts forgiven than their sins. [laughter] Isn't that right? [laughter] But, you see, you can also do "trespasses" and you could think about how the predatory economy trespasses on the life of vulnerable People. So you can do it either way. The new translation is "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us," the problem with that is "sin" is a terribly misunderstood word in the Church. And that's probably not very helpful either.
I follow the French Catholic translation and say "Forgive us our wrongs" though I alternate with all of the above, too. As an Irish Catholic I might not be able to define sin but I believe I know it when I do it and am far more confident about my ability to know it when someone does it to me.
The last question seems to have asked if there was a just economy anywhere in the world.
Well, I think that you'd have to think in terms of, not in terms of absolutes but in terms of relative arrangements and some neighborhoods are currently more that way than other neighborhoods. I guess that if one were to talk about national economies one would probably talk about the Scandinavian economies but I don't know much about that. I think there are gestures in neighborhoods that make those efforts. But not absolutely so. Well, if it's in terms of nations I would think those Scandinavian countries come close to it but the problem is all of those models for us is no other nation in the West has a history of slavery. And the history of slavery has wounded all of our possibilities in that regard. Which makes it so much more difficult and so much more complex here. That's what I think.
While it isn't true that other countries in the West don't have some history of slavery in virtually no other country with a written Constitution which still governs its ruling structures and institutions was slavery so deeply embedded into what remains as the current Constitution.
The features of it supporting slavery still fully active to accomplish those goals, even with the alleged emancipation of slaves pasted onto that slave-market edifice. The cultural remains and habits of such a deeply evil thing in a country remains for many generations but when the legal support for that evil is not expunged it probably takes many more generations than it would have and I think it never is defeated until those constitutional and legal and judicial supports for slavery are abolished in fact as well as in mere legal notions.
I think it is one of the worst things about the Constitution that we still have, for all intents and purposes, including the unjust stealing of labor and the results of labor and wealth by the wealthy, the same Constitution, especially as most of the Supreme Courts have twisted it to mean, has given us most of our worst problems and we are still required to worship it and its writers. America is founded in that kind of idolatry. And it is entirely a secular idolatry. The modern "white evangelical" deification of the founders, the Constitution, the various myths of the South, West, Mid-West, etc is decisive proof that it is as saturated with a particular modern, Hollywood fed paganism as admittedly secular gangsterism is. And so is the secular academy and, far more so, media.
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I think that this short lecture and question session is one of the most important ones I've heard in a while. I could mention that something of an extended version of it was given in Walter Brueggemann's Willard Lecture which can also be heard, though I'm not up to transcribing an hour and a half, these days.
He is almost certainly right that once it leaves our modern, Western, secular Egypt, better days for the Christian Church may be ahead for us but it won't come in the same old wine-skins. I am beginning to think the same about the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement and Intentional Eucharistic Community movement as opposed to the official Catholic Church, though Francis seems to me to be making the path for progress straight for whoever comes later. I certainly don't think better days for Christianity can come in trying to claw back a time which has about run its course. The same is true for American democracy though it's probably a lot less likely to survive, it certainly won't without those kind of changes I talked about above.
I'm also so grateful for Walter Brueggemann, his work, his continuing witness and testimony and the generous abundance of his writing and speaking available to us. I can honestly say he's had such an important impact on my life this past number of years and I hope he has on others. I have no doubt that his work will help guide Christians for generations to come.
* Elizabeth A. Johnson described the situation of Christianity in "winter" as consisely as anyone I've read, including Rahner.
A winter season: such is Rahner's metaphor for the situation of faith in the modern world. Keeping his eye on middle-class educated European persons who are trying live a Christian life, he sees that this is a world that no longer easily communicates the faith. First off, a person can no longer be a Christian out of social convention or inherited custom. To be a Christian now requires a personal decision that brings about a change of heart and sustains long-term commitment. Not cultural Christianity but a diaspora church, scattered among unbelievers and believers of various stripes becomes the setting for this free act of faith. Furthermore when a person does come to engage belief in a personal way, society makes this difficult to do. For modern society is marked not only by atheism and agnosticism but also by pessimism, which restricts what we can know to data accessible from the natural sciences,; secularism, which gets on with the business at hand, impatient of ultimate questions, with a wealth of humanistic values that allow a life of ethical integrity without faith; and religious pluralism, which demonstrates that there is more than one path to holy and ethical living. All of these call into question the very validity of Christian belief.
I think that Johnson's optimistic view of secular "humanism" and ethics is as unrealistically optimistic as the traditional view of what comes out of easy, socially conventional or inherited Christianity. I think the most frequent outcome of such secular ethics is at least as vulnerable to fading, within an individual, personal life but certainly in a family history is that it fades rather faster than much of genuine Christianity. Even when it does continue to go through the motions. So I don't buy that it is something that a community and ever more so a country can depend on to maintain what is needed to keep out of the clutches of Pharaonic gangsterism translated to modern life. Marxism faded to gangsterism much faster than The Law did for the Children of Israel, they managed to avoid rule by a king for a long time, and even then it was no paradise on Earth. The fading of modern Israeli democracy for Likud coalition fascism is another example of that.
But that is what Christianity is up against and, I am ever more convinced the perils of the attempt to live authentic Christianity in community and the peril that American democracy faces are precisely intertwined. Egalitarian democracy EVERYWHERE is dependent on the moral content of Golden Rule equality and the practice of that, in turn, depends on a belief that God has constructed human life in that way. I agree with Brueggemann that in the context of the United States, it is dependent on the rejection of our indigenous form of fascism (gangsterism), white supremacy. I recall that when he visited the United States the Lutheran martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer found authentic Christianity in the Black Church and not in the white Churches and seminary. As he noted "only a suffering God can help." You don't find a suffering God in easy, cultural Christianity or in any kind of secularism or humanism. Ironically, the hope that comes along with the crucified Jesus is an antidote to the pessimism of secular modern paganism with its material gods because on the third day he rose from the dead into new life. See Also: James Cone, The Cross And The Lynching Tree.
UNFORTUNATELY the next question that Walter Brueggemann took is inaudible. From his answer I assume it was a practical question, as the most important questions we can deal with are, about how we can more effectively build the alternative to the predatory system, now.
HIS answer after joking that that was a question for Peter, that all he did was read "ancient texts" was:
Obviously, it has to do with creating neighborliness. It has to do with helping People position themselves in NETWORKS OF SUPPORT AND OBLIGATION. And to abandon People without that kind of human network is to abandon them to death. So, it is a matter of networking in very local ways, I think THAT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO DO, BUT NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THAT.
And I think the case I cited about Nehemiah when he forced the have and have-not Jews into covenant with each other, he was creating a network of mutual responsibility and support.
And I think you can see that in Paul's letters as well. You know, Paul in Galatians, almost back to back, he says "Everyone must bear their own burdens," and then, right quickly, he says, "BEAR ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS." You gotta do both.
That was my capitalization for emphasis.
I don't know about you but I've relatively frequently heard the first part of Paul's formula referred to by those who oppose benefits for poor People and those in destitution, pretending they're all about individuals being responsible for themselves. Or from "new atheists" who want to attribute lack of charity to Christians. I've never heard anyone else cite the second part of it in which everyone is responsible for the burdens of their neighbors. Perhaps liberals here pay a price for their Biblical illiteracy. I don't know if in other places not so under the influence of what New England Puritanism decayed into, the stingy, self-righteous conceit of selfish individualism if the mutual sharing of burdens is mentioned but I never heard anyone mention that part of what Paul said. I think that decay of Puritanism extends well into the middle-part of the country, by the way. It would seem to be wide-spread among "white evangelicals" in Iowa.
And it's part of not only the selfish individualism of the Trumpian fascist right that is in opposition to networking of mutual obligation to those who have burdens heavier than our own, I found that well within the would-be hippy fad of my early adulthood. I never could much buy into that because I'd seen a genuine alternative in The Reverend Martin Luther King jr's Beloved Community already. And other never to be fashionable alternatives.
The American myth of individualism, "rugged individualism" does decay into what Walter Brueggemann said, as posted yesterday: So Donald Trump, for example, has this long list of neighbors who he perceives as threats. And it turns out that's a winning way to label People and then you don't have to be neighborly.
That's not only encouraged by personal selfishness but the paranoia instilled by TV and movies and pulp fiction. Cabloid news specializes in that kind of acid thrown at any tendency towards neighborliness.
Neighborliness, especially to People who have little to offer someone who has way too much already, is presented as a burden. And there is a burden to it. The exclusive neighborliness of the affluent based in a chance of taking or finding advantage instead of burden sharing is an entirely different thing. It's easy for the affluent or those who aspire to be affluent to be nice to other rich people or those who can enhance their status, it's unthinkable for a Trump to do anything to the poor or destitute or even the middle-class but game them and exploit them for gain. The American affluent ethos is the ethos of the con man.
The entire success of American Republicans since Eisenhower and even before was the management of the worse and worst tendencies among the middle-class and working class, setting them against their neighbors, their fellow workers in competition, managing them and their often media created fears and anxieties and pressures to conform and then setting them against THOSE BELOW THEM IN WEALTH. The insularity of white communities under a color line which could enjoy a pittance of privilege was enough to set them against Black People, other People, even other whites within that category, to their mutual harm and for the managed benefit of those with real wealth. Our institutions are largely part of that, including the elite educational institutions and even the allegedly Christian churches. That may be most true for those states which longest maintained legal segregation, which is reflected in their generally abysmal standard of living for even poor-whites and their depressed incomes, healthcare and education. But I doubt there is a single state in the United States where it is not true to one extent or another. In New England it is often far less formal but it is there, often tied to where someone went to school or the wealth of their family.
It even extends well into the would-be left in which snobbery and class is certainly a determinant of things. Marxists who see the underclass as "masses" to be managed, not individual People to be supported and to support a local network of mutual love and kindness hold as ruthless a view of life as the financier and investor class who they allegedly oppose, which is why Marxism with real power instead of theoretical imagining turns out to be grindingly oppressive.
The United States with its legacy of genocide and land stealing and slavery and, yes, subjugation of Women is an especially hard sell for what Brueggemann is pointing to in the Jewish tradition of Jesus and Moses. Which is one of the reasons you can find Republican-fascists these days rejecting the Jesus of scripture for a comic book white-supremacist fascist superhero of their illiterate imagination.
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As I will never stop pointing out, lies and false witness and slander are an absolute guarantee that that kind of neighborliness can't happen. The Constitutional permission to lie is one of the most serious obstacles to it because of our own indigenous founding myth. I was thinking of hearing one of the liberal-lawyers of MSNBC, this one directly from the civil rights community, reciting the insanity that Donald Trump had "a right to lie" which always infuriates me. I don't think the elite-university trained lawyer even really thought about what he was saying as he said it. He certainly didn't take the consequences of such an insane notion into consideration. So much of the bedrock of predatory systems is a matter of such conventional thinking. Even such obviously irrational thinking.
I will try to conclude this series tomorrow with a rather chilling prediction about the future of the Church which could be the best thing that could happen to it.
THE LAST SENTENCE in Walter Brueggemann's short lecture on Pharaoh's economy as it is today is: It could well be we are the fourth repreformance of a neighborly economy in the face of predation.
His first answer to a question lays out the evidence for that being the truth. I'll remind you some of the questions are not audible on the recording, part of the first one wasn't on my computer.
Questioner: How are we as individuals participating in that[the predatory economy]?
Brueggemann: I think that the consumer economy is our participation in an unsustainable standard of living. And the reason that we have to have such an incredibly strong military is to protect an unsustainable standard of living. If we didn't have to be managing and manipulating the world economy through globalism, which we have to do to sustain the way we're living, the way some of us are living, we wouldn't need to spend ourselves into oblivion for the military.
Does that make sense? That's what I think.
And I think our moral capacity to live that way is grounded in the theological notion of American exceptionalism. "We are, in fact, God's chosen People so we are entitled to live this way at the expense of many other People."
That's what I think. And that's what makes it so hard. Who wants not to do that "when it's so terrific?" That's what I think. We wouldn't have had that scary article about inequality if we were not propelled by greed that is grounded in our fear of running out and being scarce. So it's an endless proposition in which most of us continue to go through the motions. And the longer that we participate in this unsustainable scheme the less we stay in touch with the humanity of our neighbors. Because all of our neighbors turn into rivals and competitors and threats. So Donald Trump, for example, has this long list of neighbors who he perceives as threats. And it turns out that's a winning way to label People and then you don't have to be neighborly.
One of the things which has been remarked on about those who have been arrested and convicted of Trump's attempted putsch on January 6th, 2023 is that most of them were affluent. They are either solidly middle class or noticeably above middle class. Certainly almost all of the leaders of the effort, from Trump down to his indictable lawyers and those scheming in the Willard Hotel were quite rich. Most of them had the leisure time and wealth to travel to DC and stay in hotels there - working class and poor people don't generally have the means to do that, no matter how The Apprentice and FOX Lies addled they may have been. Just as those who participated in the successful 2000 "Brooks Bros." putsch begun by Jeb Bush and Bush cousin John Ellis on FOX Lies to put their brother and cousin in the presidency - with the collusion of a bare 5 to 4 vote of the usurping Supreme Court - were stinkin' rich. No one should for a second believe that the attempted putsch of 2020 is unrelated to the successful one in 2000.
The corruption of the United States is the corruption of the super-rich and the rich and those who aspire to be rich in the 1780s rigging the system to prevent rule by the large majority who are not rich and have nothing but a deluded notion that they are going to be rich. The Electoral College that both the Bush family and billionaires foreign as well as domestic used to put Bush II Trump in power was one of the longest lasting successes of those super-rich framers of the Constitution and it worked just as they, no doubt, hoped it would to thwart the will of a majority of voters who are not rich and who may sense the system is rigged against them. And it's corruption is so endemic to the United States that we will be hard pressed to get rid of the thing, so many of the smallest population states being so thoroughly in the hands of white supremacists and others propagandized by phony civics, a bit from school but most of that absorbed through the lying media, the entertainment division the most potently corrupting of that.
That we are seriously in a position to have to worry about a Trump or a DeSantis or any other Republican-fascist regaining the white house and controlling the judiciary and the Congress and the military and police AFTER THE DISASTER THAT TRUMP HAS BEEN is all the evidence any rational person would need to show just how bad off we are.
The extent to which that is a product of the media corruption of the minds of the American People cannot be overestimated because with the rise of electronic mass media that is the most influential force in the United States. More than education, more than old-fashioned off-line Churches, more than the residuum of common decency that the popular culture has done its best to swamp. The consumer culture that Walter Brueggemann correctly points to in his answer is the major force in corrupting even those who still have some of that fading remnant of something like The Law, The Prophets and The Gospel in their unconscious memory. It is seductive in attracting us to want things, things we need, things we think we need, things that anyone with any maturity and sense would know they not only don't need but have no use for, advertising as well as what's allegedly not advertising in the entertainment programming is all a part of that. It is, for worse and even worse than that, what has constructed the American culture which now is in the process of losing egalitarian notions and even majority-wins electoral democracy because an effective minority of the voters in enough states can swamp the majority no matter how much the majority wins the general vote by.
Pretending that the slave-holding, land-stealing, shady-financiers who drafted the Constitution and adopted the Bill of Rights were importantly ready to live by majority rule and that American history is a history of those who wanted equal rights of struggle against the Constitution and the Supreme Court which has, in fact, been the most persistent force for thwarting equality and effective democracy is our national myth just as the tales of Solomon as presented in a children's "Bible" or some Hollywood "Bible" epic might construct the uninformed imagination of another of the reenactments of the Pharaonic system as presented in the story of Joseph in Egypt and in Exodus. I think it is not at all irrelevant that among the models of the American government most intentionally studied by those who wrote the Constitution was the Roman republic which was plenty unjust and immoral and violently oppressive even before it naturally devolved into the hellishness of the Roman empire. I will point out what God told Samuel to tell the Children of Israel when they asked him to anoint a king for them just like all the big countries surrounding them had. It got them a Saul.
And we are so TV, internet and movie addled that those of us who want one will settle for the As Seen on TV glory of Donald Trump, with his morbid obesity, his drug use, his diapered incontinence and his absurd clown makeup and hair extensions.
That is the cost of white privileged faux affluence for an effective minority of the voters under the influence of the freest media in the history of the world. That is the cost of our consumer economy. That is the old story that goes back to before the Exodus.
One of the hardest of the several hard truths about how to get out of this we have to face is the extent to which those of merely comparative privilege due to their whiteness and temporary good fortune AND THOSE WHO ARE DECLARED TO BE OPPOSED TO ALL OF THIS are seduced and habituated into the basis of the corrupt system and how some of its worst features have been sold to us as "civic virtue," that replacing the actual morality of the Scriptures. No doubt something like that along with the distracting purity policing, also found in the scriptures, permitted even many in the underclass to get seduced into the Solomonic regime, the colonial system under Persia and in Palestine during the Roman occupation. It should never be forgotten the extent of French collaboration and merely passive acceptance of Nazi occupation in France and those occupied by some of the worst regimes in modern history. Among the things we will have to do is to tell the truth about American history, including the Constitution and the sanctified idol of the Bill or Rights. None of this is going to be easy, none of it will happen on the grounds of secularism, it doesn't have what is needed to even face the truth.
HAVING BEEN A SOCIALIST for all of my early adulthood and into my early senectitude and never having been a captalist, then or now, it was a great shock to me to find out, starting in the late 1990s, that socialism is a mild anodyne compared to the radical economics of Jesus and the milder form of the same economics in the Mosaic tradition. If you want a radical presentation of redistribution and reparations, the Gospels and the Prophetic tradition growing out of the Mosaic law is the most radical thing I've ever come across. That most of the talk about reparations in the United States comes from what it considered a radical part of the civil rights struggle, the belated reparations paid by the part of the American population which has benefited the most from white supremacy, white People to those who our indigenous form of fascism has targeted for exploitation and early death is no great surprise. Those who benefit from inequality suffer from a pandemic of either poor eyesight or feeble-mindedness. Which could account for the controlling faction in Republican-fascism devolving way past the point where even some affluent Republicans feel uneasy about watching their antics and hearing their ravings.
That some of the worst of that comes from those who claim "Christianity nationalism" as a part of white nationalism they really favor is of absolutely no account. No more than the fascists claim to champion "freedom" and "democracy." I'm convinced that lying is the foundational sin of our Bill of Rights addled intellectual foundations. The foremost sin of our founding was the leaving out of the Constitution the word "slavery" which was the motive of so much of it, our founding document is riddled with that enormous sin and its remnants remain even after the post-Civil War congress sought to abolish it definitively in the few and far from unsullied years before Rutherford Hayes used the pro-slavery provision, the Electoral College and a corrupt deal with the slave-power to end Reconstruction.
But the biggest suckers in our country's tradition, the poor-whites who don't notice their exploitation blinded by their merely somewhat privileged level of privilege within the scheme, are also targeted by white supremacy. The media has convinced them that instead of the rich and the corruption baked into our system through the Constitution and, yes, the Bill of Rights and the wealthy who exploit that, it's their fellow victims who are to blame for their troubles.
I say that to remind you that this is a political blog, the idea that we are to leave the radicalism of the Monotheistic tradition out of our politics is another scheme to disempower what has been the most powerful engine of struggle against the political-economic system of the United States - the merely secular struggle against it as embodied in such things as the ACLU have been everything from relatively impotent to downright collusive with the worst of it. Look for ACLU in my archive to see examples.
But back to Brueggemann for the real tradition any effective change in the country will have to come from, in the end.
So there are incredible provisions in the Book of Deuteronomy that protest against the predatory economy.
There are provisions that say things like you have to pay People their wages on the day they earn them. No wage theft.
It says that you take anything in collateral for a loan from a poor person that if they have one coat you can take their coat for collateral during the day but you've got to take it back to them at night cause they need to sleep in it. You can pick it up the next morning for collateral but then you've got to take it back at sundown. Imagine doing that on a 30 year loan. Moses's idea is you should bother with it.
In Deuteronomy 15 the Mosaic regulation is at the end of seven years you've got to cancel debts because Moses had determined that there should not be a permanent underclass. And the way to prevent a permanent underclass is to cancel debts.
And then in the Jubilee year Moses ups the ante by saying every 49 years you've got to give everything back to People, everything you took from them. Which is REDISTRIBUTION AND REPARATIONS.
So The Bible is, essentially, from the Mosaic tradition, is an act of alternative to the predatory economy.
Now, very quickly, I think I've used up my time, but very quickly, I want to tell you about three reperformances of the Exodus narrative in The Bible. Two of these you will know about one you may not know about.
First, Solomon, King Solomon was Pharaoh's son-in-law. And he is the principle predator inside Israel. So Solomon taxed People to death. So Solomon must have been a primordial groper - if I can use that presidential word - because he had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines. And he is known for having built the grand Temple in Jerusalem that is filled with Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! and cheap labor.
The gold came from predatory commerce and taxes and the cheap labor meant that he didn't have to spend much of his gold to build The Temple. So The Temple in Jerusalem is a monument to predatory economics. And if you read the texts carefully, the Biblical God says, "I ain't gonna stay there, you can't put me in a place like that and expect me to stay there! For I am a God of emancipation."
The response to Solmon's predation is the whole prophetic movement of the eighth and seventh century BCE in which their oracles are essentially an expose of the predation of the elite of the city of Jerusalem.
I've come to wonder as an alternative to the modern speculation that Deuteronomy was a very late addition to the Five Books of Moses conveniently "found" while they were doing some renovation at the ol' Temple, which just happen to coincide with Josiah's reforms. . . I wonder if it may have been an actual ancient text which the corrupt Solomonic regime had suppressed but didn't dare to obliterate entirely. As an aside, I fully believe the long description in Exodus of all the gear and duds that the priestly class got to have was probably an addition done under that priestly corruption. If you want to see how easy it is for that to happen under a regime of corruption, look at what the Supreme Court did to the 14th Amendment as its adoption was still within living memory and to other provisions of the Constitution and duly adopted laws. The Supreme Court is our corrupt temple priesthood working in that abysmal temple the Congress should kick them out of and turn into a Museum of Constitutional Corruption. I think that Deuteronomy, as it probably originally was, may have been an authentic attempt to encode The Law as it came to Moses. Of course it, like all of the Old Testament was subject to a long tradition of editing and amending, so what we have now isn't "the original" which may have been superior or inferior to what comes down to us.
The second reperformance of the Exodus in the fifth century BCE under the Persian government - this sounds contemporary - what those governments did, empires basically exist to collect revenue, that's what all empires do. Including the US empire/ And what they do is hire locals to collect the taxes to send to the imperial capital. So Nehemiah is one of these governors that collect money to send to Persia. He taxes other Jews. In Nehemiah 5, if you do not know Nehemiah 5 see if you can find it in your Bible and take a look. Nehemiah 5 says People were having to sell their children to pay their taxes and to sell their fields to settle their mortgages. They were desperate.
And when Nehemiah the governor hears about it he is indignant and he calls a meeting, in Nehemiah 5 of the Jews who were vulnerable and Jews who were predators and he says, "You guys are all Jew. You need to stop doing this to each other, " and he forced them into a covenant. Now mutatis mutandis.
What I want to suggest to you is that what has happened in our society is that very many People have been so trapped by the empire, by the predatory empire that they have forgotten that they are human. And when you forget that you are human you can exploit other human beings and not notice that they are human. So the work of somebody like a Nehemiah is to get these People who have forgotten they are human and to remind People of their common humanness, which requires economic solidarity that is worked out as Jubilee.
The third reperformance, that I'll do in one sentence, is that the Roman empire was another predatory system and in the New Testament The Jesus Movement is essentially a response of a neighborly economy to the predation of Rome with which some Jews had colluded. Simply observe how badly we have read The New Testament when we thought it had to do with private sin and going to heaven. When, in fact, The New Testament is essentially about a neighborhood alternative in economics. Jesus got executed by Rome because the empire is scared to death of a neighborly economy.
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There is nothing that the American empire fears more than the real political-economics that would come from those who believe themselves to be Christians or others whose religious tradition contains things like The Law, the Prophets and the Gospels taking those, in the context of egalitarian democracy, as normative for not only their own actions but the way that governments and secular laws should be.
The idea that the merely administrative non-denominationalism necessary for there to be justice in terms of governmental action in a diverse country should be normative for our public lives and as a basis of law making is one of the biggest and most successful campaigns for suckering of the American People starting in the 18th century. The biggest part of that suckering was through making Christianity an unthinking, unknowing object of disrepute among those who never found out the first thing about it and many who understood that giving it up was a prerequisite for social and professional acceptance.
Democracy is rare in the world, egalitarian democracy far rarer. It's clear that not every substrate of religious or secular ideology will produce equality and democracy. They certainly won't produce economic justice and a decent, sustainable life for everyone on a reliable basis. Of course The Law as found in the Old Testament meant to govern The Children of Israel or even the teachings of Jesus meant to govern individual lives or small communities beleaguered by worldly kingdoms will not, by themselves produce something like an egalitarian democracy in the modern sense. Time continued after the presentation of those revelations for a reason and the reproduction of the context in which they were given is not only not going to happen, it cannot happen.
But the moral content of those in terms of an egalitarian society is a bedrock requirement of such a national government. Anyone who can't or won't agree to equality, economic and political and legal justice, protecting the environment and other necessary values needed to do that has no safe inclusion within the community or the country except on the basis of their, perhaps reluctant, acceptance of them. Corrupting the minds of The People against those has no safe place in an egalitarian democratic country. Especially no mass media promotion of the opposites of those should be allowed to swamp those egalitarian life giving, life sustaining values, our experiment with anything goes in the mass media has brought us to the brink of violent fascism, where we are teetering at the moment, capable of recreating the worst of 20th-21st century oppression and mass murder as any other People, anywhere. Hollywood promotes little else than anti-democratic degeneracy, the unregulated tech sector produces even worse.
The dangers we face are dangers based in the corruption of The American Peoples' minds and nothing did that more than the mass media.
That there will be problems from religion in our political discourse is a given. THE GREATEST STUPIDITY OF THEOCRACY IS THAT IT REFUSES TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT ALL HUMAN INSTITUTIONS, RELIGION NO LESS THAN POLITICS OR ACADEMICS OR THE LAW IS BOUND TO BE AN AVENUE OF CORRUPTION AND THAT MUST ALWAYS BE FOREMOST IN OUR MINDS. The great Jewish tradition is great because of its acknowledgement of that in-baked tendency towards building corruption, as Brueggemann implies when he cites Solomon himself as a reenactment of the signal injustice of the Joseph-Exodus narratives. I think his example of the period of Persian hegemony carries a warning for Americans of the romantic-secular-would be radical notion that if only we could do what Lenin or Stalin or Mao or some other damnably romanticized gangster of nominal Marxism of socialism had done to their People, it would be better than what the white supremacist gangsters did here. It never was, it was just a different form of gangster rule. That along with the suckering of us under anti-anti-communism on behalf of some of the worst of American "radicals" was what caused the American left to go seriously wrong, to our lasting disablement. What the flying goons of Republican-fascism revive under that freest of free presses that secular left got for the fascists.
It is one of the greatest things about the Hebrew tradition that their religious Scriptures carry their own confessions and warnings that even when People try to live under the most radical programs of justice devised, there is always almost a guarantee of failure which we must recognize for what it is. That failure being in that tradition exactly placed in those humanly constructed institutions that are treated with the most pious stupidity, the government and the established church. In American in 2023, the idols of secularism, of "civic religion" in Sandra Day O'Connor's putrid phrase, replace those of religious establishment. "The Bible," even "Jesus" turned under that from what they are into totems of white supremacist gangsterism as a rub on bronzed, bottle blond-troll-doll haired, lying, As Seen on TV, tub of lard is our Solomon in his golden toileted temple of Mammon something that even those who want what the Constitution claims to protect and defend can't keep from regaining the presidency with his crimes and lies right out there in the light of day.
You've always got to be on the look out. There is no automatic vehicle of man-made institutions or man-made law that is going to protect us from having our most innocent seemingly innocent weaknesses and follies and tendency to sin known and exploited by those who want to con us into slavery (Black) and servitude (White) and death (all of us.) The Constitution including the Bill of Rights, especially in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court included in that. That is how radical this really is.
I'M GOING TO EASE back into daily or nearly daily posting by starting with a short series going through a talk Walter Brueggemann gave to a group about how The Bible is a response to a predatory economy. My rule for myself is that I have to transcribe the whole talk before I start posting the parts. Then I will present parts of it with my own observations on it.
I don't know who the group he was talking to was, I also don't know who "Peter" (Block) he refers to is, though I would guess he's the pastor or leader of the group he's addressing. If someone knows I'd welcome the context. I will note that at the end, where he answers questions, some of the questions are audible and some are not, though his answers are. I'll note which are which when we get to those.
--------------------------- Well, I'm glad I get to be with you to talk a minute.
Three theses about the Bible.
- The first thesis is that the Bible, most of the Bible, Old Testament and, for Christians, The New Testament originated in a context of a predatory economy, that was extracting wealth from vulnerable People to transfer it to powerful People. And that was practicing unfair allocation of resources.
There was a lead story in the New York Times this morning, did you see it? A long article saying that inequality is only going to get worse and worse and none of our efforts will do anything and the only thing that will disrupt it will be a war. So that's the context in which we read the Bible.
- The second learning I've had about The Bible is that the Biblical Community, Israel and the early Church in the New Testament make a response to the predatory economy that is one of resistance and that proposes a neighborly alternative.
- And the third learning I have had is that The Bible is best read in a context of a predatory economy. Which means we've got the best context in which to read The Bible because we live in a predatory economy that practices the unfair allocation of resources. So that's an overview of what I've been learning of late. And, then, what I want to do, cause The Bible does it, you have to reduce those theses to narrative, so Peter is going to have us tell stories after a while. The Bible is essentially, I propose, a series of stories about a predatory economy and the neighborly response to a predatory economy.
So the first and big story that governs all the other stories is the story of Pharaoh in Egypt. Pharaoh may or may not have been an actual historical person. But what Pharaoh is, he's a type or he's a metaphor, He's a stand-in for all predatory economies. And the story of Pharaoh is a story of a nightmare of scarcity and a policy of accumulation, the success of monopoly, and then as will always happen with monopoly, when accumulation ends in monopoly it always ends in violence.
Predatory economies are intrinsically violent.
Anyone who thinks that the tsunami of gun violence that the United States drowns in is unrelated to to the media and legally mandated predatory economics that rule American life is a fool. There is absolutely no distance between the one and the other nor the fact that it is the party of predatory economics. The Republican-fascist party both in electoral politics and in the federal and state judiciaries are the ones who are preventing effective regulation of gun ownership and use and the champions of the predatory economy. As I've pointed out a number of times, that is certainly not news to those groups who have been the focus of the predatory economy, Black People, Native Peoples, Women, and previously the specific target of that controlling violence. The difference now is that middle-class White People are unable to escape it as the inequality cavalierly declared to be insoluble by the New York Times and also unable to escape the violence that the judiciary and the political rigging of our politics has expanded.Of course what's needed to solve it is considered impossible to those who run and write the "paper of record" because they are totally invested in the predatory economy and what it needs to be imposed. That story of Pharaoh is in the book of Genesis [the story of Joseph in Egypt]. And when you flip over into the first chapter of Exodus where we meet the Children of Israel who have become slaves it says that Pharaoh treated them harshly. Which means they had incessant production demands because they had debts they couldn't pay and they had debts they couldn't pay because of Pharaoh's predatory policies.
So that's the context in which the most paradigmatic story of the Old Testament arises. And Moses is the lead character in a response to that predatory economy. And the Mosaic drama takes place in three parts, and you know those but it's useful to think about them because our response to the predatory economy might be in three parts.
First part is the Exodus narrative, which means the exit of the predatory economy. And what Peter has taught me as you know is one way to exit the predatory economy is keep the money local. That's an exit from the predatory economy, keep it out of the hands of the banks.
The second moment in Moses's response is the incredible experience in the wilderness of abundant bread, abundant water and abundant meat. They get water from a rock and bread from heaven and they got meat from quail. The Bible doesn't explain any of that. But what The Bible affirms is that if you run the risk of getting outside of the predatory economy you move from frightened scarcity to inexplicable abundance. And the problem is that we cannot know that ahead of time.
The third moment in Pharaoh's work [he meant Moses's work, I believe] is at Mount Sinai in which he got the ten big rules for neighborliness. The Ten Commandments were ten rules for neighborliness at the center of which is the Commandment about Sabbath. Which is a rule to say do not bust your ass to gain approval from Pharaoh. That's what Sabbath is about. And I have come to think that for our society Sabbath is the most important and most difficult of all of the Commandments. Because I go around saying if you want to keep Sabbath you have to turn off the NFL. I said that at a wealthy Episcopal church in Charlotte a couple of Sundays ago and a priest started backing me off, "Well I think People ought to go to church before they go to the football game." And then I found out the reason he was doing that was the owner of the team was in the audience. So it was a little bit tricky about that.
I will forego any more comment for now and give you this from Pops Staples.