Capitalism

Maybe the Mayans Weren’t Wrong

January 14, 2013 by Bo Sanders 8 Comments

In all of the hub-bub surrounding the Mayan apocalypse that came and went without incident, it was tough to resist the funny one-liner on Facebook and Twitter. We have become so calloused against the doomsday predictions that have fueled the religious airwaves, TV broadcasts and book sales of the last 30 years.

I get that. I came to faith during the cold-war in the heyday of characters like Hal Lidsay, Harold Camping and the Left-Behind phenomenon. Y2K was a bust and everyone was holding on for the December 2012 end of the Mayan calendar. But I’m afraid that in our hurry to make funny quips we may have missed something important:

This actually could be the end of time.

It is similar the snark-fest regarding the Hostess bankruptcy and the end of Ding-Dongs and Twinkies. Lost in all of the jokes was the reality of unjust labor practices by the cooperate execs of Hostess who, even at the end when massive layoffs could have been averted, continued to pay themselves ridiculous salaries and bonuses.

Hostess stole money from it’s workers pensions to use for things like operations – the whole while paying millions of dollars in bonuses to it’s 19 executives who were leading it into bankruptcy.

We didn’t address the illegal, and unjust practices of the mis-management, I suspect, because there were just too many jokes to be made about Twinkies.

It appears that a similar scenario has blinded us to the reality of the Mayan calendar.

Never mind that the Mayans didn’t predict an end-of-the-world on the actual day – only that the calendar ended.
Never mind how the ancient people may have conceived of the cyclical nature of time.
Never mind the odd fascination that descendants of European colonist have with indigenous artifacts from a genocidally exterminated people.

Jokes about the Mayans provided too many punchlines.

The Mayans were made a joke.

But, like the Hostess bankruptcy, I wonder if a much bigger issue was ignored in the flurry of Facebook snark and apocalyptic themed parties.

What was lost in all the end-of-the-world banter was a sobering look at the realties that we face as humanity and that, if one had ears to hear, would sound an alarming warning signal that the world as we know is in real crisis.

I fear that like the proverbial frog in a kettle, that we have slowly adjusted and grown comfortable in rising temperature of the water and have failed to acknowledge that things might soon boil over.

Just take three areas

Economy
Environment
Military Tensions

Long ago, I left-behind the reading of Revelation that causes so many to live in fear of an impending catastrophe. But I’m not sure that people of faith can afford to grow comfortable thinking that the world we see is in it’s final form. Capitalism, Democracy and Nation-States are assumed to be the as-is realties on the planet.

Zizek is oft-quoted as saying Christians are fascinated with the end of the world because it is easier to imagine life ceasing to exist on planet earth than it is for Christians to imagine an economy after capitalism.

Global capitalism has bankrupted itself. The European Union (with countries like Greece and Spain) is in real trouble. The American economy is being exposed with its massive debts and downgraded dollar. China has mixed capitalism in with a form of communism – and a massive population – in a way that leaves most experts baffled.

The environment is being degridated. It is conceivable that our ground water could be toxified, our warming oceans could cause extinction of the seafood we eat, and our thirst for easy energy (what the Frack are we doing?) could have repercussions that would make the planet uninhabitable for the human species.*

That is all before nuclear fallout. Tensions is the middle east, America’s admittedly endless war on terror, and desperate global disparity are now more consequential than ever.**

It one takes the failing global economy, the toxification of the environment and the realities of perpetual war – maybe the Mayans weren’t wrong after all.

Maybe we have moved into the end of time.

_________________

* The practice of ‘mountian-top’ removal in places like West Virginia coal is instructive about environmental impacts.
** The Isreal-Palestine conflict and America’s role are especially illuminating.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, living, media, news, politics, post-something, public policy, science, thinking Tagged With: book, books, calendar, Capitalism, China, December 2012, doomsday, economy, end of world, environment, European Union, fracking, Israel, left behind, Mayan, Palestine, War, war on terror, zizek

Is David Fitch right about the Church’s task?

December 29, 2012 by Bo Sanders 33 Comments

This morning David Fitch tweeted this:

“The biggest task of today’s church is to undermine in its members the blase unexamined acceptance of secular assumptions for everyday life.”

I have been thinking about it all day. I’m not sure he is right on this one.

Now just to let you know where I am coming from:

David Fitch is the author of “The End of Evangelicalism?”
Tripp got to interview Fitch as last year’s Inhabit Conference
John Cobb talked about secularity and secularism at the Emergent Conversation 2012
I have been reading Madan Sarup on Identity, Culture and the Post-Modern World
As well as reading and listening to anthropologist Saba Mahmood and her address of embodied spirituality (Islam for her) in Politics of Piety and on the Canadian show “Ideas”

When you put that all together, I am just not convinced of Fitch’s assertion. Here is why:

I am increasingly suspicious that secularism is both a consequence and a side effect of Christendom. It is the West’s Frankenstein if you will. We made it. Then it took on a life of its own – a life we don’t like very much and which damages our efforts and injures our cause. I think we have to start there.

I agree with Fitch that there is a ‘unexamined acceptance” and would go even further and say that it results in an assumption that what we see is the way it is. That our current mechanisms of organization are final forms and that the ‘as-is’ structures come with a large measure of ‘giveness’. Tripp often applies this capitalism, nation-states and democracy. I would tack on both denominations for the church and militarism for US America.

I am just not so sure that our main task is to undermine. Maybe that is where my hangup comes. I am leery of this approach because it seems like we are defaulting the ground rules in the initial move and framing the task in a conceding first move.

I might be naive here but I am just not sure that the church needs to
A) give that much ground initially
B) frame her task in the negative.
I know it’s just so much one can do with a tweet but … there is something there that gives me caution.

So what is my constructive proposal? I’m working on it.

I would want to frame it more like Stuart Murray does in the book Post-Christendom and acknowledge that initial concession was early on with Constantinian Christianity. Then Christendom. Then Modernity. With those three concessions we admit that the as-is nature of existing frameworks for both church and culture are thoroughly compromised and corrupted.

BECAUSE of that. We abandon the recuperation, rehabilitation, reclamation , and renovation projects (and mentality) all together! (all 4 faces of it).

It’s over man. Let it go.

THEN we start new and in the positive. The 21st century provides fresh possibilities and opportunities IF ONLY we will let go the idea of getting back to something or getting something back. I know we never start from scratch – we never get back to square one. But …

I don’t want to be the undermining parasite ON the big organism. That is too small a task. I want to partner with God in the healing of world (Tikkun Olum in Hebrew). I want to participate in the development cosmic good – until then at least the common good.

Help me think this through!

PostScript: now that I started down this “re” line I can’t stop coming up with words I want to flesh out further!
Restore: no
Re-imagine: yes
Represent: yes
Re-member: sure
Resurrect: ummmm not really
Reflect: probably

Filed Under: church history, emergent, engaging, latest, post-something, thinking Tagged With: book, books, Capitalism, Christendom, church, Constantine, Culture, david fitch, democracy, God, jesus, john cobb, Madan Surap, modernity, postmodern, Saba Mahmood, secular, secularism, secularity, Sprit, Stuart Murray

Hipsters and Zombies as the end of civilization

December 3, 2012 by Bo Sanders 8 Comments

Last week I went down to Tripp’s office to work on some stuff for the podcast. I walked in while he was talking to Jordan and Christian from the Homebrewed Culture Cast. They were recording a segment about zombies and the Walking Dead series.

The conversation was great – you will really enjoy that episode when it comes out. Toward the end, Christian asked about why the surge in popularity of zombies and vampires. After Tripp’s market driven answer (which was sweet) I jumped in with a theory that I wanted to elaborate on here.

I quoted Ballard in Kingdom Come

Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along. … They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad.
- Ballard, Kingdom Come

When we live in a time when like ours, where the as-is structures are assumed and there is a certain giveness to the system, we view them as final applications. Nation States and capitalism are just two areas where this can be seen (Tripp explains this well in the interview).
In this consumerism as culture humans are defined by their external signs and symbols. These become signifiers that form more than our image, they project our identity. It is in this cul-de-sac and the end of the wide road of consuming that the monotony of round and round sameness becomes soul-numbing. You can see why things on the fringes, that lurk in the dark and just below the surface begins to titillate and become attractive.

We are bored.

Alasdair MacIntyre (who asses the situation so well in After Virtue – even though I disagree with his solution) says this about what the church becomes

nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences and who understand that world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret reality as a series of opportunities for their enjoyment and for whom the last enemy is boredom.

Our fractured and contentious societal situation is inflamed by (at least) three cultural elements: consumerism, globalization, and pluralism. The first is the disposition of individuals within a society, the second impacts the proximity of different communities, and the third affects the posture when approaching a disparate series of relationship for communities.

Consumerism is hyperbolized in an examination of Hipster ‘culture’ by Douglas Haddow entitled “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization”.* Haddow provides a vicious critique when he says:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

It this both the dislocation of generational continuity and the isolation of consumerist aesthetics that are troubling about the brand obsessed and all too self-aware ironic sensibilities that alert one to the incredible disenchantment and disassociation of the youth culture. It is these very same consumerist influences and institutions that give rise to their embodied expression and vague angst that manifests in such irresponsible yet elaborate demonstrations of the Hipster’s intentionally senseless displays.

Ironically, we have more stuff and access to more toys, information, and treats than ever before … but we are soul-numb bored. This is the danger of thinking that what we have is everything in it’s final form. That our representative democracy, that our free-market economy, that our United Nations are the pinnacle and the end of history.

This is why that Zizek quote about living in the end times is so great – that it is easier for most Christians today to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine living in some other economy beside capitalism.

Hipsters and the suburban fascination with zombies and vampires … are trying to tell us something.

* The subtitle of this article says “We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality. “
Mark Douglas Haddow, “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters”, n.d., http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

Filed Under: engaging, latest, media, news, politics, pomo, post-something, thinking Tagged With: after virtue, Ballard, book, books, Capitalism, city, end of civilization, end of history, End of the world, hipster, MacIntyre, Occupy, religion, suburban, Twilight, vampire, Walking Dead, zizek, Zombies

God is in charge of this economy?

June 21, 2012 by Bo Sanders 23 Comments

I have always been suspicious that this was true. If you follow out the way that folks talk about an interventionist God who meddles, tinkers, intervenes and interacts with ‘His’ (always his) creation … then it has to follow that some within that stream will think that God actually runs the economy.

I have met people who think this. I have reported it and based some of my posts on it – only to have it be consistently rebuffed as a case a few superstitious, uniformed or immature people or groups. Then, last week this article by Paul Froese came out in Religion & Politics called “How Your View of God Shapes your View of the Economy”. It turns out that it is worse than I even thought!

People who look at data and conduct surveys and polls are always looking for variables. One of the wrinkles that has gotten a lot of attention lately why some conservatives – mostly based on social concerns like abortion and gay marriage – vote against their own economic interest. Why do those who are not benefiting from the current economic structure continue to put forward policies and candidates who reinforce the status quo and hierarchy?

It turns out that even though Jesus says you can’t serve both God and mammon (whatever that is) but what if you didn’t have to make that distinction? What if within the protestant work ethic there was a mechanism by which God was in charge of the economy?

To put this more concretely, approximately 31 percent of Americans, many of whom are white evangelical men, believe that God is steering the United States economy, thus fusing their religious and economic interests. These individuals believe in what I call an “Authoritative God.” An Authoritative God is thought to be actively engaged in daily activities and historical outcomes. For those with an Authoritative God, value concerns are synonymous with economic concerns because God has a guiding hand in both. Around two-thirds of believers in an Authoritative God conjoin their theology with free-market economics, creating a new religious-economic idealism. Nearly one-fifth of American voters hold this viewpoint, signaling that it can be a major political force.

It is actually a fascinating set of findings in the study (I would encourage you to read the whole article). The search becomes twofold:

Does the willingness of God to fix the economy become dependent on us to deal with our social ills? In other words: does prosperity result from faithfulness?
Believing in this Authoritative God, depending on where you live in the world can lead one to a socialist conclusion or a non-capitalist structure. Why in the US does it mean a unquestioned allegiance to a laissez-faire ideology?

The article explains:

… the United States stands as a clear exception. Americans who feel that “God has a plan” for them and their country are much more likely to think that “success is achieved by ability rather than luck” and that “able-bodied people who are out of work should not receive unemployment checks.” And over half (54 percent) of Americans who think God controls the economy feel that “anything is possible for those who work hard”; in contrast, only one-quarter of Americans who rely on human resourcefulness, rather than God’s plan, feel this way.

Perhaps it is the fervent individualism of American Christianity which makes free market capitalism seem like a Divine mandate. Because evangelicals assert that you alone are responsible for your eternal salvation, it makes sense that the individual is also responsible for his or her economic salvation without government assistance, especially if God is the only assistance you really need.

I am fascinated by this. I have written (and talked on TNT) so often about the implication of this type of evangelical-charismatic-protestant mentality that believes in personal piety (small) and super-structure cosmic spiritual warfare (large) but has no framework for (linking middle) ‘powers the be’ in systems, structures, and institutions.

If God magically made the world in 6 days, made the Sun stand still, can time earthquakes to get Apostles out of jail and one day will pull back the clouds and ride into to dole out justice and end the whole bloody thing… I guess it makes sense that God is guiding the economy.

This is why I am so passionate about a better way to read the Bible – we need a mature hermeneutic that see the text with its eyes wide open, aware of the world as it is not just the way we want it to be or we used to think it was.

I might need to apologize for my sassy tone here – but I truly am interested in you thoughts. Don’t get distracted by my style, I want to hear what you think about the subject! What say you?

Filed Under: engaging, latest, living, news, politics, public policy, thinking Tagged With: Bible, blessing, book, books, Capitalism, conservative, economy, God, GOP, jesus, laissez-faire, miracle, money, prosperity

A funny thing happened on the way to Pentecost

May 26, 2012 by Bo Sanders 26 Comments

Tomorrow is Pentecost Sunday in the liturgical calendar. As one who emerged from a charismatic evangelical background and is now employed at a mainline church, this is my favorite Sunday of the whole year!

Here are just 3 funny things about Pentecost Sunday:

Charismatics don’t celebrate it. Because the large majority of Pentecostal & Charismatic churches don’t follow the liturgical year, this Sunday goes unnoticed in any special way. It is just another rockin’ week of worship songs! I find that hilarious. When you exist in a context that does not observe Lent (or even Advent) then both Easter and Pentecost are just one more occasion for ‘feasting’. This is a glory theology and neither fasting nor waiting are on the menu (speaking in generalities).

It’s tough to be a Christian and get away from it. Reading the Bible as a white-westerner can cause disorientation and cognitive dissonance. In the Gospel of Mark, fully 65% of Jesus’ ministry was based around miracles, mostly healing and exorcism. If you are going to read the Bible, it is going to be tough to get around just how much time and effort the writers spend on this element of ministry. But if you are part of an educated (enlightenment) tradition that is primarily intellectual about faith … you may have never seen a miraculous healing, exorcism, or manifestation of God’s power. Most of things we call ‘answers to prayer’ are slightly amplified coincidence – like getting a job you applied for and were qualified for or finding it in your heart to forgive someone which brought about reconciliation.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think that those things are miraculous and answers to prayer. I just want to note that there might be a difference in intensity from what is recorded in the Book of Acts.

Africa, Asia and South America are foreign to us. We hear lots and lots of reports from the Southern Hemisphere about the explosion of Pentecostal and Charismatic (P&C) Signs and Wonders movements (S&W). Many are calling it ‘the Future of Christianity’. It is tough to argue with when you compare it to the decline in church attendance in Europe and N. America, the overly analytical and often paralyzed intellectual brand of church that is embarrassed at both the zeal and simplicity of the fundamentalist and evangelical branches of the family.

Here are my two hesitations about the southern hemisphere being the future of the church:

1) As many have noted, the latest turn in the P&C movement is one toward the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ and the wildly demonstrative ‘Signs & Wonders’ movement where the spectacular and the sensational are prized above all else! (including Biblical precedent). This is an ominous turn. I am deeply suspicious that with the rise of global capitalism, deregulated markets and multi-national corporations’ economic and environmental policies … the prosperity ‘blessing’ might be a one-generation phenomenon with a vicious cynical backlash waiting behind it. This bubble will burst and both the pain and disillusionment will be inconsolable.

2) ‘The weirder the better’ is an ugly mantra. I recently talked to a traveling Charismatic evangelist who was disappointed that his most recent rally did not have more pizzaz. Sure good things happened and people reported both salvations, significant personal growth (like forgiveness) and a couple of minor healing (anorexia, etc.) But nothing really demonstrative or spectacular. That is not the part that caught my attention (I am used to that). It was the reasoning behind it.

“ If you come from a background where you have never seen Signs & Wonders then you are less likely for it to happen to you. Seeing it happen creates something in you – a faith or an openness – that allows God to do it with you.”

I was stunned. Did he really just say that if you have never seen it, that it is less likely to happen? Well, actually that makes a lot of sense. If you have never seen someone be ‘slain in the Spirit’ then you may be less likely to go to the ground when prayed for (ever heard of ‘carpet time’?). This is where testimony and teaching are SO valuable.

Now the funny thing is that this dear minister has no idea that I have Lindbeck & MacIntyre ringing in my head like alarm bells at a fire station! I wanted to say ‘Language not only helps us interpret experience … our language helps create our experience.”

Those two things – the Prosperity turn in the South and the awareness of language/experience – are the two things that keep me from being 100% stoked about the future of Pentecost. – Bo Sanders

_______

If you would like to read an interesting book on the subject, check out Philip Jenkins’ The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South

Filed Under: engaging, latest, post-something, thinking Tagged With: Acts 2, Africa, Asia, book, books, Capitalism, church, future, Global South, God, Holy Spirit, jesus, Latin America, Pentecost, Philip Jenkins, prosperity, South American, theology

May (the End of) Your Kingdom Come

February 16, 2012 by Bo Sanders 30 Comments

I think that I might be done with the kingdom – not the dynamic of God’s power or God’s interaction with the world – just the word ‘kingdom’ and its imperial implications. It comes with too much baggage, it is so antiquated, and it is masculine in the way that is unhelpful.*

Here are three reasons that I think we have permission to move on if we were so inclined:

Jesus didn’t use the word.

It might seem simplistic but Jesus didn’t speak english and there is nothing magical about the english word ‘kingdom’. The New Testament uses the phrase Basileia Theou. Maybe we should just go back to that. We keep words like ‘koinonia’ and ‘selah’ in their original form so maybe we could just say when Jesus did and let it go untranslated. Then people would have to reconstruct what the concept means without importing all of their preconceived impressions.

The age of Kings is over.

I can not believe the hysteria that occurred around the ‘Royal Wedding’ of William to Kate Middleton – especially by Americans. Just the name the House of Commons make me wince. I am so glad that Age of Kings is over. Divine Right would be just laughable to me … if I didn’t know how much sway it held for so long. Regardless, those days are over and maybe it is time to update our language about God’s ways as well.

The power of pronouns.

Even those who acknowledge that the nature of language is symbolic and metaphorical – even those who recognize that God language is not univocal – can get caught up if one refers to God as ‘She’. Even those who know that it is only a pronoun that functions as a place holder want to be careful about the antecedent to the pronoun. That is why I am not sure that it would work to move to a counter Queendom, a more inclusive Kin-dom or a non-authoritarian Commonwealth.

Now I know that there will be some obstacle to overcome.
Number one among them will that ‘it is in the Bible’. Let me say two things
A) I love that it is in the Bible. It was powerful imagery for its day and it says something really important about God.
B) The authors of scripture conceptualized of God’s work in a way that was relevant to their time. Maybe we should as well.

Another problem I see is Christmas pageants. What will be do when we quote passages like Isaiah 9:7 which get translated into english as “His kingdom will have no end”. But I think it would be fine to have passages like this along side the shepherds and the manger (both are virtual artifacts of an agrarian society) - as long as it was not our primary (or only) way of articulating and conceptualizing the work of God in the world.

One last thing to suggest: Jesus was in a context that was dominated by Empire. He positioned his vision and language in contrast/opposition to it. But is that our predominant contemporary element? I would suggest that in a venue of Global Capitalism it may be more appropriate and powerful to speak of the Economy of God.

* I always have to clarify that as a man, I am not anti-masculine. I really like being a man – it’s just that only using masculine terms may have been helpful for clarity when Genesis 1-3 was written, it has become unclear and unhelpful. The hegemonic patriarchy of religious language is pitiful to hold onto and especially when it is done in a univocal way.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, engaging, latest, living, thinking Tagged With: Basileia Theou, Bible, book, books, Capitalism, church, economy, empire, God, Isaiah, jesus, Kingdom, Kingdom Come, She, univocal

Claremont School of Theology

Maybe the Mayans Weren’t Wrong

Is David Fitch right about the Church’s task?

Hipsters and Zombies as the end of civilization

God is in charge of this economy?

A funny thing happened on the way to Pentecost

May (the End of) Your Kingdom Come

Search

Subscribe via iTunes

Support the brew