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.
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