Decolonizing Jesus.

1.  Modernity Is Our Empire. 

To profess faith in Jesus of Nazareth is in no uncertain terms the denunciation of the so-called Jesus of the American Empire, and all empires for that matter.  We have either pledged our lives to the lamb and his Kingdom of self-giving sacrificial love, or to the empire of the beast with its gods of conquest, war, famine, and death.

--Ryan Cagle

The Western world has been dominated by a succession of empires since the Egyptians.  Empire's most recent iteration is the hegemony of Western European nations that began to congeal around the 16th century and then metastasized across Europe and colonial North America, finally overshadowing almost all of the world.  It's called Modernity.  

Modernity has done far more comprehensive damage to the earth and humanity than all previous empires combined.  From the intensifying climate catastrophe now beginning to disrupt ecosystems and civilization, to the related savaging of the land, poisoning the air and water, depletion of natural habitats, and igniting mass-extinction, this empire has done uncountable damage to the planet.  It spawned slavery, colonialism, nationalism, militarism, racism, and fascism, ravaging most of the human population as well.  Even the arguably positive benefits it produced have been tainted.  Its vaunted science and technology have been dedicated mainly to war and producing profit for the few, and brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  Its aspiration to human rights is overshadowed by the demolition of traditional cultures and the painstaking, haltingly slow inclusion of people who are not straight, male, white, and rich.  It throws up sprawling, ugly commercial wastelands, and poisons the human psyche with corrosive ideas and images.  We suffer epidemics of depression, anxiety, suicide, heart disease, and cancer.  Modernity destroys families, communities, and traditions.  Its lofty dreams of equality are regularly stifled by its enforcement of class inequality and racial hatred.  Its capitalistic economics generates wide inequality between the rich and everyone else, rewards exploitation, and elevates the worst individuals to positions of influence and power.  It's supposed commitment to democracy has not only always been selective, controlled by money and the slick, misleading propaganda it buys.  And so on, and none of these are accidental and unintended consequences; they are built into Modernity's nihilistic design from the beginning.  

Modernity is also itself disintegrating and morphing into something else, which generates the uncertainty and chaos surrounding our historical.  Something will eventually replace it, which many fantasized as a new golden age of Aquarius... but the previews are not so good.  We are looking at a new empire which will be a totalitarian AI hellscape on a barely livable planet, with people driven by manufactured lies into gated enclaves, and a world swamped by tsunamis of desperate refugees.

Modernity's main and definitive move was to replace God with the human ego at the center of life and reality.  Man became the measure and disposer of all things.   Reality was reduced to a flat linear/temporal/material plane.  (I use "man" deliberately because Modernity is almost exclusively a project of, by, and for white men; women remain relatively powerless.)  With no authority other than human ego and power, embodied in their supposedly "objective" science, every traditional deadly sin was elevated into a virtue to be striven for and rewarded.  People are now to dedicate themselves to the acquisition of three things: wealth, attention, and power.  Whoever procures  more of these rules those with less. Dostoyevsky's dictum that if there is no God all things are permitted, has come bitterly true.  And we have seen that there is no bottom to what is now permitted.

Francis Bacon, one of the early proponents of the Enlightenment, would wax eloquent about the new regime of science and reason, using the image of nature as a woman strapped on a rack and having her secrets tortured out of her.  Bacon's description remains nauseating and deplorable... and sharply accurate.  As it turned out, vivisection is the perfect metaphor for Modernity's approach to... everything.  Nothing is sacred, nothing holy, nothing redemptive except man and his murderous tools.  Modernity is the systematic demolition of beauty, transcendence, and wholeness in the name of progress.  That is our empire.  Think of a beautiful mountain in West Virginia, which a coal company blows apart in order to extract something within it arbitrarily deemed valuable.  That is our planet and everything in it under Modernity.  A beautiful creation demolished to increase the comfort and power of a handful of rich, white men.

In an unwitting regime of collective suicide, the Church has routinely compromised with and capitulated to this empire.  We do this when we set aside or radically reinterpret the standards of our own stories, rituals, and traditions, and adopt instead those of Modernity, even though they are usually in existential conflict.  We even allowed and embraced the extractive and colonizing methodologies of Modernity in our own life.  We put our Scriptures under the knife, selling it as courageous self-criticism in the service of truth, freeing our story from our own communities, deriding them as corrupt and corrupting institutions.  Thus we placed our own egocentric and biased methodologies above God as arbiter of truth.

Protestantism in particular, while it appeared as a resistance movement to the prior empire run by monarchs, hierarchies, and bishops, soon identified itself with the urban class of businessmen then becoming prominent.  It became the religion of Modernity, steadfastly defending the interests and adventures of that class even when they ran afoul of the gospel in atrocities like slavery, war, genocide, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialism.  Modernity became the widest-spread and richest empire in history; Protestantism mostly went along for the ride.

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