Barmen and Empire.

                                                   

Jesus Christ,

as he is attested in Holy Scripture,

is the One Word of God

which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey

in life and in death.

We reject the false doctrine,

as though the church could and would have to acknowledge

as a source of its proclamation,

apart from and besides this one Word of God,

still other events and powers, figures and truths,

as God’s revelation.

These words, composed by Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, constitute the first thesis of the Theological Declaration of Barmen.  The leaders of a minority of Christians in Germany drafted the Declaration in 1934, in response Hitler taking power.  The new Nazi government tried to do what governments in Europe had generally done for centuries: control the national, state-funded, church.  That's Christendom.  Barmen stands as the first real statement of the Christian Church in opposition to the religious nationalism that is a central component of fascism. 

For over a century, fascism has loomed as a constant liability and attraction in the Modern world.  As liberalism increasingly fails to deliver what it promised, as our institutions continue their disintegration, as the climate crisis intensifies, and as human migration swells, nationalistic, xenophobic far-right ideologies and conspiracy theories gain more traction.  Their effect is to maintain, strengthen, and institutionalize the ignorance, paranoia, bigotry, and division on which they thrive.  Fascism is a conscious attempt to "return" to an imagined simpler, more ordered, unified, and positive past, a time when we were "great" which we want to have back "again."  But to get there requires us to intensify the autocracy, bigotry, and violence already permeating the system.   

I use the term "empire" to talk about the political/economic regime that has dominated the West since the adoption of agriculture.  Its identifying characteristics include militarism, plutocratic oligarchy, expansionism, resource extraction, patriarchy, social and political stratification, and subservient religious institutions.  Empire is all prejudice and violence.  The economy of empire is designed to increase the wealth and power of those who already have it, mainly by exploiting human labor and the natural world.  This describes the dominant regime in the West from the time of ancient Egypt, to the Assyrians and Babylonians, to the Greeks and the Romans, to the Feudal order in the Middle Ages, to its manifestation in our present era: Modernity.

We who have grown up under its influence have been taught to think of Modernity as an evolved advance beyond this imperial regime.  The spirit of Modernity is supposedly all about good things like freedom, democracy, equality, and progress.  America, we hear, is a democracy, not an empire.  But, while it always exuded such self-serving propaganda, beginning by calling itself "Enlightenment," and proclaiming faith in "reason," "science," and "humanism," in reality Modernity exhibited all the characteristics of empire, albeit in different and sometimes more subtle and hidden ways.  The bourgeoisie or merchant-class -- the owners -- simply replaced the previous hereditary nobility, then justified itself with claims to be a rational meritocracy.  But all we got was just a different mode of privilege and entitlement (still largely hereditary).  Remember that among the groups that loudly called for "freedom" were slave owners and capitalists.  Freedom was always a limited commodity. 

Modernity is empire perfected; it is empire with a vengeance; it is barbarism with a happy face mask.  Indeed, no preceding system has had Modernity's catastrophic, even existential, effects on people and planet.  Its ideology of techno-materialist, individualist secularism may have felt liberating to its protagonists and beneficiaries.  But Modernity's actual expression in colonialism, slavery, capitalism, industrialism, racism, misogyny, genocide, and constant and increasingly technologically sophisticated and deadly warfare belies this rosy assessment.  It preaches "democracy," but the political economy of Modernity failed to follow democratic values when it came to what really mattered to it: money.  Corporations and businesses are generally not in the least democratic; rather they are ruled by some combination of oligarchy (rule by a few), plutocracy (rule by the rich), and monarchy (rule by a single owner or family).  When it does manage to include more people, it usually happens because it has found others elsewhere to exploit or more efficient technology.  When politicians say they want to run the government "like a business," they mean applying more autocracy, like a sole proprietorship; they mean staying fixated on profit not service, what is gained not what is given, extraction not contribution.  The truest political expression of capitalism is therefore fascism.  Under capitalism, that is where politics inevitably wants to go.  What passes for democracy is mere window-dressing and public relations schemes designed to hide and make palatable a system based on greed, inequality, and violence.  

Empire also always utilizes religion.  Over the centuries, much of Christianity was neutered and domesticated, reformed into a religious institution subservient to empire, the arrangement which Kierkegaard named as "Christendom."  Christendom rendered Jesus Christ little more than a quaint and empty logo, a useful mascot defined, projected, and managed by the owner class in their interests, or an embarrassing ancestor whose crazy ideas we may safely dismiss and ignore, even as we piously keep his picture on our wall -- invariably an ethereal white man with perfect hair.  We reduced him to a nice, patriotic, Anglo, middle-class, ineffectual, inoffensive, and fairly irrelevant, man of the past, someone to remember and revere, but under no circumstances actually follow.  His core message, announcing the establishment of God's Kingdom on earth, was diluted into an empty promise of a better afterlife in heaven or some hope only realized at the end of time. 

Maintaining the social, political, economic, and moral order of empire became the main thing for Christendom, with its rationalizations, explanations, and defenses of all manner of cruelty, injustice, and violence.  When Christian leaders offer reasoned apologies for slavery, or encourage mass murder in war, or justify rapacious capitalism, or promote lynching and other types of cruelty towards the weak, or exclude and vilify gender non-conforming people, or wield the flag in nationalistic militarism, or provide religious cover for colonialism, or applaud the round-up and incarceration of people in detention centers, they do not follow the Jesus Christ to whom Scripture attests.  Nothing undercuts the mission of the Church more effectively than the obscene spectacle of Christian leaders spouting the nationalist, militarist, patriarchal, white-supremacist line, and participating in, and benefiting from, the inhuman atrocities it spawns. 

Under Christendom, the empire seduced, bought out, and domesticated the Church, claiming the role of Christianity's defender, patron, advocate, and agent, keeping and managing the public image of Jesus Christ, while putting other state-approved "events and powers, figures and truths," in Jesus' place, even within the gathering of disciples.

In many countries, the nation-state, as the local jurisdiction of Empire, directly supported and controlled the Church.  In America this happened more subtly and indirectly.  Under the influence of Modernity, churches willingly put themselves under the control of "the people..." which sounds democratic and reasonable.  It even has some precedent in Christian history.  But Modern citizens always gravitated towards a  primary loyalty to the state and its economy from which they benefitted.  They tended to shape a faith subservient to the state.  (To demonstrate this allegiance, we systematically injected a national flag -- often topped by a golden, imperial eagle no less -- into Christian worship spaces.  One historian confided to me that one of the biggest donors of flags to churches in the 1920's was the Ku Klux Klan, an explicitly fascist organization.  And once a flag has materialized in an American church extracting it can be very difficult, even today.)  

The perpetual projection and amplification in Modernity of "other events and powers, figures and truths" to supplant and distract from the One Word of God, Jesus Christ, makes this apparent.  Modernity operates by imposing on people completely manufactured categories like nation, race, gender, borders, and class, generating the divisive enmity, fear, and anger on which it feeds.  It projects for the population twisted and spun versions of "history" that favor and glorify the owner class, while ignoring, vilifying, or subjugating everyone else, especially minorities and women. 

The disgraceful spectacle of "Christian" nations regularly making war on each other culminated in the wanton, disgusting, but very profitable, industrialized slaughter of the 20th century.  When the Church succumbs to the "other events and powers, figures and truths" projected by empire, rather than "Jesus Christ as attested in Holy Scripture," or even pretends that the scriptural Jesus underwrites all these "traditional values," the Church forfeits its identity as the community gathered in the Spirit of Jesus Christ and takes on the role of hood ornament on empire's armored bulldozer.

This is what Barth saw in 1914, as his teachers, the guardians and proponents of Liberal Theology, fell into line supporting the German war effort.  Two decades later, as Germany descended into fascism, he drafted the Barmen Declaration.  Fascism is where Liberal Theology ultimately if unintentionally leads.  Barmen insists against Liberal Theology that the Church, as the gathering of people who trust and follow the Jesus Christ attested in Scripture, must always see everything we do through the lens and in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.  From creation, to the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures, to its ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ, the liberating, saving, healing, redeeming Word of the Creator has always given us the antidote to empire.  This applies as well to Modernity as empire's latest and most virulent expression.

Not everyone agrees that Barmen is a suitable starting point for this work.  Barth himself later recognized and confessed that the Declaration does not directly and explicitly address the racism, anti-semitism, and militarism which were at the core of the Nazi movement.  But I suggest that Barmen addressed what must be affirmed before all else, grounding all other social/political/economic commitments, without which they quickly drift off course.  If we do not first settle the question of who lives at the core and center of our life, if we do not decide who and whose we are, everything that follows will suffer from ambiguity, egocentricity, and compromise.  Particular issues and policies are necessarily downstream from this basic affirmation.  The declaration states the Source of our life and identity, and it declares the Church's allegiance to him alone, and therefore its independence from the secular state.  If this is not laid and affirmed as the only foundation, to be reaffirmed and returned to constantly as a defining Presence and destination, whatever political/economic/social initiatives we take will be fatally corrupted by both ego and empire.  This is why Barth himself had such a powerful allergy to what was then called "natural theology."  If we start basing our faith on extraneous elements picked up from the culture, dreamed up in imaginations conditioned by empire, made apparently "necessary" by the economy, or demanded by political expedience or the state, the Church ceases to be the Church, and becomes just a tool of the demonic powers loose in the world.  But if we do exert care to maintain this foundational commitment to Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture, we may participate in and express the love and destiny offered by the Creator for all the world.  

In Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture we see the Way of love revealed, in compassion, gentleness, confession, simplicity, humility, nonviolence, forgiveness, healing, inclusion, thanksgiving, justice, hope, joy, and advocacy for and solidarity with the poor, powerless, and marginalized.  People who actually live according to this Way, therefore, inherently and necessarily fall out of synch with empire and therefore with its expression in Modernity.  Empire will always see such behavior as a threat to its power, and deal with it accordingly.  

From time to time, though, especially when Christianity veers off course, the Holy Spirit leads some Christians to hear anew the Scriptural witness and calls the Church back to discipleship.  Thankfully, in spite of attempts to dilute or adulterate it, the Church so far has always had the Scriptures in which we may rehear its unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ.  Barmen says nothing new in the sense that every authentic movement of renewal in the church must find its grounding in "Jesus Christ, as attested in Holy Scripture."