12. The Religion of
You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with
the world is hostility toward God?
Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an
enemy of God.
- James 4:4
And I saw another beast coming up out of the earth;
and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spoke as a dragon. And he exercises all the authority of the
first beast in his presence. And he
makes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose
fatal wound was healed.
- Revelation 13:11-12
This is pure and undefiled religion in the sight of
our God and Father, to visit orphans and widows in their distress, to keep
oneself unstained from the world.
- James 1:27
From the beginning of history, the purpose of religion has
been to lead the worship of the state, to make sure that everyone admires the
naked emperor’s new clothes. In
exchange, the state favors the fawning religious leadership and thereby gets
credit for doing service to God. The
In
Before going on, I must state again that however precisely the religion of American nationalism may seem to fulfill the most ominous warnings in Scripture, we go astray if we read them that way. As I argued in Chapter 1, the scriptures are not about identifying any particular entity as the great enemy. For each of us, the great enemy is the doctrine of the beast within ourselves, by which we are led to reject the faith and perseverance of the saints. And what is that? “Whoever kills with the sword must be killed by it, and whoever leads into captivity must be led into captivity.” Any religion or ideology in the world that rejects this faith is in the end the same enemy of our relationship with God in Christ. The reason to emphasize its American religious manifestation is simple: for my audience, for American Christians and others that have to deal with us in one way or another, the religious “faith” described in this chapter is the principal vehicle of our apostasy, the system of deception that most effectively ruins us. For others, say North Koreans, the enemy of their faith wears a different face. I’m not writing to them here, but to my own people, although these others too may find principles to apply in their own case. For any of us religious adulteresses, deliverance is to see the lies in our national religions so that seeing these in ourselves we may recover from our religious love affair with this present world.
It’s essential to point out here that this friendship
with the world comes in different brands.
If the surrounding world approves homosexuality or abortion, then
churches will be found to trumpet these causes.
As belligerent nationalism has retreated recently under frustration in
This faithlessness comes at a cost. American Christians are assured of not being persecuted for the sake of Jesus, because instead of testifying with him that the world’s deeds are evil (John 7:7), we teach that its virtues are noble and that whatever it despises is indeed to be despised. But in so doing, we make ourselves God’s enemy, as our Bibles tell us. His word finds no place in us because we have rejected it, so His power is absent, however we may disguise this emptiness by liturgy, eloquent preaching and teaching, speaking in tongues and “prophesying,” or exciting “worship” music. When these fall short, the problem is always in the people. As the Pharisees liked to say, “This multitude who do not know the Law are cursed” (John 7:49). They need to give more, come to church more, try harder. Not for nothing did Paul call this religion weak and beggarly. It’s always pulling on your clothes for something, but it never quite gives rest to the weary.
What kind of religious system can so completely seduce sincere seekers after God into such total rejection of the teaching of Jesus while calling him “Lord, Lord?” It does indeed have two horns like a lamb – looking like Jesus - while it speaks like a dragon – words of deceit and violence (Revelation 13:11). Like the religion of Jeroboam the son of Nebat described in 1 Kings 12:25-33, it has its own salvation story and sacred scripture, its own creed, its own holy communion, its own blood sacrifice, its own blessed hope, its own doctrine of resurrection, and its own sacraments of separation and commitment.
The American
Salvation Story
Biblical salvation history might be said to begin with the call to Abraham to leave his country and go out to a land he did not know. His descendants became slaves under a foreign king. Moses led them out from under his hand and gave them God’s law. Jesus came and completed the work of redemption by giving his life to save his people from sin and to make them one through his death.
American salvation history tells of people drawn to this new land by divine guidance to create a new divinely inspired society. George Washington and the other Founding Fathers led the people to freedom from the tyrannical British king and gave them a divinely inspired law, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – which have become the Holy Scriptures of American civil religion. Abraham Lincoln led the nation through the Civil War, giving his life to free the slaves and save the Union. Abraham Lincoln is the American Man of Sorrows.
Well, isn’t that how it happened? God must have done this, so America really must be the earthly embodiment of the kingdom of God.
What’s wrong is that this parallel only holds up by pressing our thumbs rather hard on the scale. American history didn’t really happen this way. It only looks like it did if we pick certain events and look at them in a certain way, and more importantly, if we suppress a great deal that doesn’t fit, notably much iniquity, robbery, and bloodshed – and an unyielding commitment to the worship of Mammon, which worship is a root of every evil (1 Timothy 6:10). “Every evil” certainly includes the kingdom of antichrist, whose number is 666. The Bible tells us that 666 talents of gold was Solomon’s annual income (2 Chronicles 9:13). 666 is the number of money, of a kingdom that keeps people in line by kicking them out of the economy if they get out of line (Revelation 13:17).
As the apostle John warns us, suppressing all this truth to show how excellent we are guarantees that we walk in darkness (1 John 1:6-10). Walking in darkness is not the way to see things as they are!
The American salvation story is American myth, not American history. The real meaning of this story is America’s need to see itself as the people of God, His kingdom, the light of the world and its hope of salvation– regardless of what actually happened. This is the doctrine of a secular messianic spirit, a spirit of antichrist. The Bible – although pressed into service to this myth - gives us no cause to believe that this is reality. In fact, the Bible makes it clear that there is only one kingdom of God, which is not of this world (John 18:36). There is no other genuine salvation history, only counterfeits. This alternative salvation history is an example of what Paul called “another gospel,” warning us as follows (2 Corinthians 11:3-4):
I am afraid, lest as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ. For if one comes and preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not accepted, you bear this beautifully!
The “different spirit” spoken of here is a spirit of antichrist, a counterfeit savior that promises a counterfeit salvation in this world by its earthly methods.
The importance of this counterfeit salvation story is not simply that it is wrong, like other self-flattering national myths. It’s much worse. It is especially crafted to deceive the Christian people of America into a near total identification with the spirit of this world, finding their identity in America and not in the historical people of God, and their home and their commonwealth in “the good old USA” and not in heaven. What has this done to us?
In Matthew 5:13, Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become tasteless, how shall it be made salty?” What does this mean?
To understand that, consider the “you” that Jesus is speaking to. Clearly, it is the “you” to whom he is speaking immediately before, in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12). Salt is these blessed qualities, begotten in us by God as we hear and believe what He says. But these are so absent among us that most “Christians” – calling Lord the one who said these things - dismiss them as impractical dreaming, and therefore dismiss their “Lord” as an impractical dreamer. To think and live in such practical rejection of Jesus and his teaching is indeed to be tasteless, and good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men, just as Jesus said.
Is there any hope? Can we be made salty again? Yes indeed, in one way. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). That mercy even covers taking the Lord’s name in vain by calling him, “Lord, Lord,” while dismissing what he says as impractical dreaming.
The American Creed
The official creed of the American state is the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States, adopted by Congress in 1954. It runs as follows:
I pledge allegiance
to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it
stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This creed is recited in schools and elsewhere in just the same way that the Nicene Creed is recited in Christian churches – and indeed sometimes in them, revealing how identified these churches are with this present world.
The first 20 words of the Pledge are unobjectionable to Christians, since God has ordained authorities and we owe them allegiance, of the conditional sort seen in Joseph, Daniel, and others in the Bible.
Trouble starts right away thereafter. First, all the praise that follows suggests that the allegiance involved rests on the excellence of the republic in question, with the implication that if such excellence is lacking, such allegiance can and should be withheld. This is a basic tenet of the religion of revolution, which is why revolutionary regimes, starting with the US and down to the various modern totalitarian states, are always praising themselves and demanding the adulation of others. Being revolutionary, having overthrown someone else for not measuring up to their own standards, they must forever deny that they might be no better than those they overthrew. A utopian revolutionary has to be a Pharisee, because he has to think he is better than other people.
From that basic lie proceeds all the rest of the lying, because lies beget lies, as we see in any 4-year old. If being under God has anything to do with recognizing His authority and doing what He says, the United States is not and never has been under God, and with all its religious patter has had no more interest in being so than the scribes and Pharisees who, when they robbed widows' houses, for a pretense made long prayers.
This is just what Jesus said to expect. You cannot serve God and Mammon! The USA, like all other nations as Jesus said, has always been about the pursuit of and worship of Mammon. 90 years of slavery after their revolution, of the most total betrayal of the principles they claimed to hold dear, was the rather large sacrifice they made to this god, and they have made many such sacrifices to it ever since. The gods you really serve are known by whom you sacrifice to. Throughout its entire history from 1607 to this day, how much has America sacrificed to obtain wealth and power, and how much to perform the words in the Sermon on the Mount? Work it out for yourself, and you will see what gods America has adored since that year.
“Liberty and justice for all” of course doesn't even pass the laugh test. The "Christians" who can let such blasphemy proceed from their mouths obviously don't believe what they say about the injustice of abortion, as they stand on 4000 corpses every morning in order to praise the "liberty and justice" which they are thereby confessing has been done upon these innocents. And of course they avert their eyes from much other injustice at the same time, as they always have. Did they learn this behavior from Jesus and the prophets?
True worship, as Jesus said, must be in spirit and in truth. There is no other. It's no surprise that demonic worship is about lying. The lying is not incidental - it's the sacrifice of our humanity demanded by whatever evil spirit we worship. Joseph Stalin did not receive adulation because people were mistaken about him, but because the willingness to confess what they knew to be the lie was the assurance to Stalin that the worshiper was willing to set even truth aside to be loyal to Stalin. And that's why the creed of American civil religion is all about lying. The spirit of American messianism, which demands that we consider America the light of the world, the city on a hill, wants to know from us that to be loyal to America we will repudiate truth. Christians who serve this idol specifically repudiate the truth that only the real disciples of Jesus are God's city on a hill and that only He and they are the light of the world, the only nation that is or ever was under God.
For most people, truth is worth flinging in the street in order to show loyalty to their gods. I'm glad to report that the God I serve, who made heaven and earth, does not demand a choice between Him and truth - in fact, He's the only God out there who is chosen precisely by choosing truth and rejected whenever we reject truth. Many do think they're serving Him when they reject truth supposedly for His sake - but then Jesus did say the days were coming when those who kill His disciples will think they're doing service to God. Many of those will think they are Christians, as we've already seen for nearly 2000 years.
The American
Eucharist (Holy Communion)
My 12-year-old son saw the cover of Torture and Eucharist by William Cavanaugh on my nightstand and asked what Eucharist means. I explained it briefly, and he said, “Oh, Thanksgiving is the American Eucharist.” He saw this the moment he learned the word Eucharist, which he had never read before, and I never noticed it until he pointed it out. How obvious this is, and how dense I was!
The Eucharist is the Christian communion meal. In it we remember that we are one loaf, the bread of God for the world, as we ourselves eat the bread of God who both died and rose again to eternal life (1 Corinthians 10:16-17, John 6:45-51). Jesus further said that his words are spirit and life (John 6:63), so this is the communion of those who share in the words of Jesus which become flesh in us as we come to do them. This communion is not for those who despise the words of Jesus. Whoever despises the words of God from Jesus, but eats and drinks with us as though he is one of us, is taking the name of God in vain. Paul warned them in Corinth that such false communion makes us weak and sick, and sometimes dead (Corinthians 11:24-30). This reality is clearly seen in our churches.
Christians remember the death of Jesus in the Eucharist, and Americans remember the sufferings of the Pilgrims and their harvest meal on the Thanksgiving holiday. For many Americans, it’s just a time to relax, eat, and watch some football – besides a little extra blubber, no harm done. But for many Christians, it really is a time to commune in this myth, and that’s trouble. To paraphrase the Eagles in Hotel California, “Some eat to remember, some eat to forget.” God gives us the Eucharist so that we remember the death of Jesus. In Thanksgiving American Christians forget - among other things - the American Indian genocide.
As James Skillen of the evangelical Center for Public Justice has pointed out, for American evangelicals the faith is individual[1] – the community of faith is a strange concept. For such Christians, their real church, the body they really belong to, is the United States of America. Americans assert in the Pledge of Allegiance that they are “one nation under God,” “indivisible,” “with liberty and justice for all.” The Bible clearly states that these properties are true of no nation of the earth but only of God’s holy nation (1 Peter 2:9), those born out of the suffering of the cross, as we remember in the Eucharist. The people of God are one nation because there is one faith, one baptism, one God, and one Lord Jesus Christ. Any unity proceeding from ourselves is only the unity of Babel, which is by no means indivisible. Knowing Genesis 11, those who believe the Bible must tremble at the insolence of America’s claim to be indivisible. God’s holy nation is the only nation in which there is even the hope of “liberty and justice for all” because only in the kingdom of God does authority consist of being the servant of all. In every other nation of the earth, most certainly in the United States of America, the rulers claim to be benefactors even as they lord it over people and rob them (Luke 22:25-27).
For Christians to so blasphemously equate the people of God, who are His temple, with America or any kingdom of this world shows how completely identified American Christians are with this present world - how alienated from the true body of Christ formed in the blood of the cross. It follows that professing Christians in America have been consistently the most callous toward black slaves and others who have been oppressed as God’s people were in Egypt, the most heartless and inhospitable to immigrants and other strangers, and the most merciless to the harlots, tax gatherers, and sinners that Jesus served and preferred in the days of his flesh. Because they find their communion in this present world, American Christians value the comfortable and respectable – the bankers and business men, the well-fed men in fancy clothes and nice cars (James 1:27-2:7).
Being joined to this world instead of the body of Christ, American Christians are the most implacable enemies in American politics of Christians in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria – consistently supporting their persecutors, notably the state of Israel in all that it does to the Christians of Jerusalem and the West Bank, and seeking to overthrow those governments- notably Syria - which have been most hospitable to Christians. Where the needs of Middle Eastern Christians conflict with American ambitions, American Christians choose for American power and against Middle Eastern Christians every time.
Why is this? It’s quite simple. Human beings are not simply individuals but members of a community. We can only resist the corruption of the world as members of one another. Because American Christians view faith as individual and have their communion in America instead of in Christ, they resist the word of Christ beautifully and stand stoutly against the blood of their fellow Christians in the Middle East, in Latin America, and anywhere else that American power finds it expedient to torment them. But when it comes to resisting the world’s corruption at any point, we’re dishrags. We love the same corrupt entertainments, have the same passion for money, are equally faithless to our marriage vows, set the standard in America for deferring to wealth and power while despising the poor and the weak, and are driven by the same worldly fears as anyone else in America.
Due to these fears, by which Satan directs his slaves, what cruelties will American Christians not deny or excuse in the name of America?
Systematic torture, recommended by our attorney general when he was White House counsel and approved by our President and Secretary of Defense? No problem.
Hundreds of thousands of dead civilians since 2003 due to indiscriminate bombing of Iraqi civilians from the air, destruction of infrastructure, and American-sponsored death squads? No problem.
Tons of depleted uranium dust to kill people and give little kids cancer forever, and even to disable and kill American soldiers? No problem.
Aggressive war and wanton robbery of people who have done us no wrong, justified by lying equal to anything we saw in Communism? No problem.
Keeping our own soldiers in service past the time agreed through trickery and fraud, cutting their veterans’ benefits, and cheating them out of their medical care? No problem.
Between excuses and denial, most American Christians in my experience have no difficulty swallowing all of these camels. But in the judgment, the German villagers who knew nothing about what was happening in the concentration camp a mile down the road will rise up against this generation and condemn it. Germans who protested could get in real trouble in Hitler’s Germany, but what have we ever had to fear? Failing to discern the body of Christ has indeed exacted a high price – taking the broad road that leads to destruction by calling him “Lord, Lord” and not doing as he says, not recognizing him in those whose torment and humiliation we support, or at least do not oppose (Matthew 25:31-46).
The American Blood Sacrifice
The foregoing certainly documents the willingness of Americans, including its Christians, to shed innocent blood in the hope of salvation from the things they fear. But this is not simply meanness, sadism, or simple bloodlust. It is a positive theological imperative, which is why American Christians have been remarkably enthusiastic about murder, at least since the Puritan massacre of the Pequot Indians of what is now Mystic in 1637.
The Christian blood sacrifice is of course the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. John the apostle’s evidence for the resurrection to us who never saw it is a chain of reasoning, much like how he saw the things in the empty tomb, deduced what had to be, and believed (John 20:6-8).
In 1 John 1:7 John reasons as follows. We experience that the blood of Jesus makes us clean, and we know in our bodies that only living blood makes clean; therefore the blood of Jesus is alive; and therefore Jesus himself is alive from the dead. This makes sense because we know that our living blood cleanses our bodies from infection, and that gangrene happens when that cleansing blood fails to circulate, as with diabetes. God accepted the sacrifice of Jesus by raising him from the dead, so that his blood is now alive with the rest of him and therefore makes clean – which John the apostle points out we experience on our skins. Here the folly of those “Christians” who blame the Jews or anyone else for the death of Jesus is obvious - why blame anybody if he’s not dead anymore? Did they arrest Peter for cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant, seeing that the ear was no longer missing?
The American blood sacrifice is a completely different “faith.” Thomas Jefferson once said, "The tree of liberty must from time to time be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots." Most Americans respond to this statement with hearty approval. It indicates devotion to the liberty of men, courage, and refusal to compromise with oppression. It sounds a lot like Patrick Henry declaring, "As for me, give me liberty, or give me death."
This liberty is so precious that those who fight for it somehow always find themselves justified in stepping on someone else in order to get it. Lenin said you can't make a revolution without breaking eggs, and in this he was just paraphrasing Jefferson. The eggs are men; revolution is simply a pagan religion of human sacrifice, a cult of Molech, in which one gains the favor of the god by pouring out the blood of people on his altar.
This cult is firmly driven into the hearts of Americans, with Christians foremost among them. If anyone lacks enthusiasm for their aggressions, they remind us that those who are sent to slaughter others in our names are fighting for our freedom, and that we owe our freedom to their shed blood. But the Bible teaches that our freedom comes by the blood of Jesus through his resurrection, and by the blood of no one else.
That this is most certainly a religious spirit is proven by how deeply it offends Americans to put the blood of American soldiers in its proper theological place. It feels to them like desecration to deny that the blood of American soldiers is holy, just as the men of Gideon’s home town were offended when Gideon cut down the altar of Baal. This is a counterfeit gospel, a counterfeit salvation, a counterfeit atonement. It is a religious doctrine that equates the blood of sinful men with the blood of Jesus, a doctrine of demons taught by a spirit of antichrist.
The tree is known by its fruit. American soldiers are always said to have given their lives for our freedom, as Jesus did, when for the most part they lose their lives unwillingly. Jesus died for his enemies although innocent himself. American soldiers kill not only their enemies but also many innocent people in order to protect their own lives, along with the luxurious living and worldly power of those who send them. American soldiers do not die for many sinners like Jesus, but their many innocent victims die so that they themselves might live. In word and sacrament, we proclaim the death of Jesus, but the doctors and nurses, two-year-olds, and old men killed by American bombs and bullets we conceal as much as possible – thereby declaring our unbelief in the God Who sees in secret. They never appear on the front pages of American newspapers.
Far from giving anyone salvation and liberty, the national doctrine of blood atonement enslaves people through guilt and pride, and through the desire to be approved by our fellow Americans around us – the world. To class the blood of American soldiers and their victims in any way with the blood of the resurrected Jesus is a grotesque blasphemy - an offering to demons - and as Paul said, we cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons (1 Corinthians 10:20-21). This alienation from the communion of Christ is obvious among Christians who ascribe their liberty to the blood of American soldiers. God is not mocked.
The American Blessed Hope
Christians are saved by the hope of eternal life, by which we do not mean in some far off future but right now in ways that assure us of a complete fulfillment in the future. David said in Psalm 27:13, “Unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” Having such confidence, he could go on to say, “Wait for the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage. Yes, wait for the Lord” (Psalm 27:14).
American religion teaches that our hope is in the American Dream, never well-defined but having to do with prosperity and success in this life. It has to do with self-fulfillment, as opposed to self-denial in order to find our place in God’s purpose as servants of one another.
Christian hope and American “hope” are completely incompatible. Hoping in God we are saved in many ways, not least in being free to lose whatever we have in the world for God’s kingdom and his truth, so that we need not do injustice to protect our position in this world. Since the American hope is of this world, it gives only the peace that this world gives, not the peace that Jesus gives (John 14:27). It leaves people fearful of anyone who might take away our worldly position and our stuff, and hence our peace – immigrants, poor people, foreign enemies, and even one another. Look no further to understand why churches are such lonely places, especially for those who fail to measure up somehow or to fit in - why abandonment and betrayal are so common among religious people. It’s no surprise that such a “hope” leaves us incapable of loving our enemies or doing anything else that Jesus commands us. “In hope we are saved,” but a counterfeit hope only betrays us.
American Resurrection
And one of its heads as if it had been smitten to
death, and its deadly wound was healed. And the whole world was amazed and
followed after the beast.
- Revelation 13:3
Every form of antichristian religion bases its legitimacy on a resurrection story. Nazism claimed to be raising Germany from the ruin of World War 1. Caesar Augustus proclaimed himself the savior of the world, bringing peace and order after the civil wars that destroyed the Roman Republic shortly before the birth of Jesus. And the kingdom of the beast amazes and wins over the world by the divine evidence of being raised from the dead (Revelation 13:3).
America likewise bases its legitimacy on resurrection myths. The Civil War nearly destroyed the American union, but it emerged confirmed, and boasting in the Pledge of Allegiance that it is “indivisible.” Pearl Harbor severely damaged the Pacific fleet, but America emerged from the war the world’s most powerful nation, not just militarily as today, but also economically, culturally, and in the whole world’s esteem. Finally, America’s recovery from the September 11th attacks feels like resurrection to many people, especially some Christians, who do not realize that these were in fact pinpricks compared to similar destruction of towers in Beirut together with massive death and destruction throughout the city by the Israeli Air Force in 1982, besides the civil war that went on for fifteen years. From all of this Lebanon has recovered at least as dramatically as the United States, even though for such a small country this was a much harder blow. Although the material damage to America was slight, there is no question that the American messianic spirit, its spirit of antichrist, was greatly strengthened by this attack.
All this makes it clear that wounding an antichrist in the flesh instead of waging a war of truth against its evil ideology is a disastrous mistake. Jesus spoke well when he advised us, “Do not resist him who is evil,” teaching us instead to refute the evil doctrine that deceives him and makes him what he is. So did Paul when he wrote, “Do not return evil for evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Baptism, Eucharist, and the Sacrament of Torture
This is my body, which is for you; do this in
remembrance of me.
- 1 Corinthian 11:24
I don’t remember! I don’t recall!
I have no memory of anything at all!
- Peter Gabriel, “I Don’t Remember”
Baptism is the Christian sacrament of initiation. In it we yield ourselves, in particular our bodies, to the death of Christ and therefore to his resurrection. Baptism says that we no longer belong to this world because we have died to it, just as the people died to life in Egypt when they crossed the Red Sea and as Noah died to the old world when it went under the flood. Paul urged us “by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God, which is your rational worship” (Romans 12:1). What’s rational about this offering?
When his enemies asked him in order to trip him up whether we should pay Caesar taxes, Jesus looked at the tribute money and asked, “Whose image and superscription is this?” When they answered, “Caesar’s,” Jesus answered, “Give to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
But what did Jesus think are God’s things?
Some of us may have trouble answering that, but those who were questioning Jesus knew instantly, and it shut them up. Since we’re supposed to give to Caesar what bears Caesar’s image, we’re supposed to give to God what bears God’s image. Those questioning Jesus remembered where it is written, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” People, male and female, bear God’s image, so our reasonable tribute is to yield ourselves and other people to the Ruler whose image is stamped on us.
We are baptized bodily because God calls our bodies into His service, not just our minds or spirits into creedal confession or religious contemplation. Likewise, in the Eucharist we remember the bodily death of Jesus – not as an abstract historical event but as a present reality which God calls us into right now. In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus makes it clear that in “the least of these my brethren” he is suffering bodily right now. In case we wonder where we come in, Hebrews 13:2 says, “Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves also are in the body.
Where torture and bondage happen, Jesus is suffering at that point. To follow him is to be tortured there with him. Any agreement with those who practice enslavement or torture becomes impossible, and any fellowship with torture and those who do it is to receive the mark of the beast and to be cut off from Jesus Christ the tortured. In the Eucharist we remember the death of Jesus by torture, as Mel Gibson so thoroughly documented in his movie The Passion of the Christ.
A common objection to Gibson’s movie is that it makes the torture of Jesus the central concern, rather than his teachings. In truth, so do the gospels. The teachings of Jesus can find no place in us unless we deal with the reality of torture, because torture and death are how Satan disciplines the world to walk in his ways and be like him. The teachings of Jesus can only become real for us as the world fails to discipline us through torture and death to turn away from Jesus and from his teachings. When we proclaim the death of Jesus in the Eucharist, we proclaim the defeat through resurrection of death by torture.
When we remember the death of Jesus by torture, we also remember that death by torture is the stick that this world always has in reserve. God calls us to yield our bodies to Him, and we celebrate that relationship to Him in baptism and communion. The world claims our bodies for its purposes – for its pleasures, for its immoralities, and for its wars. Because any antichrist must claim our bodies for himself, any antichrist will celebrate his ownership of our bodies and proclaim it to us by calling us to participate in the liturgy of torture – making us choose between being tortured ourselves and approving or doing it to others. We see this in how the schoolyard bully recruits others to join him and enjoy the show so that the bully won’t do them next.
The torturer creates a world of anguish in which he causes us to know that we are wholly in his power, and that no other power and no other relationship matters besides our relationship to our torturer – that he is our God. The Roman power said to Jesus through Pontius Pilate, “Do you not know that I have the power to release you, and the power to crucify you?” In the same way, Nebuchadnezzar told the wise men of Babylon, “The command from me is firm: if you do not make known to me the dream and its interpretation, you will be made into limbs, and your houses will be made a rubbish heap. But if you declare to me the dream and its interpretation, you will receive from me gifts and a reward and great honor; therefore declare to me the dream and its interpretation” (Daniel 2:5-6).
In these we see that torture is not simply about pain, but about power – the torturer’s assertion of divine power to reward as well as to punish. This assertion of absolute power and divinity is the whole point of the liturgy of torture, which makes every torturer an antichrist. Jacobo Timerman tells of a torturer who came to him after he had been sitting in the rain for hours tied to a chair:
Everything about him
transmits generosity, a desire to protect me.
He asks me if I’d like to lie down a while on the bed. I tell him no. He tells me there are some female prisoners
on the grounds, if I’d care to go to bed with one of them. I tell him no. This gets him angry because he wants to help
me and, by not allowing him to, I upset his plan, his aim. In some way he needs to demonstrate to me and
to himself his capacity to grant things, to alter my world, my situation. To demonstrate to me that I need things that
are inaccessible to me and which only he can provide. I’ve noticed this mechanism repeated
countless times.[2]
William Cavanaugh in Torture and Eucharist (p. 279-280), describes the conflict between Christ and antichrist, the kingdom of God and the omnipotent state, as follows:
If torture is
essentially an anti-liturgy, a drama in which the state realizes omnipotence on
the bodies of others, then the Eucharist provides a direct and startling
contrast, for in the Eucharist Christ sacrifices no other body but his
own. Power is realized in
self-sacrifice; Christians join in this sacrifice by uniting their own bodies
to the sacrifice of Christ. Christians
become a sacrifice to be given away to others, as illustrated in the practices
of the Vicaria and the Sebastian Acevedo Movement (Catholic
defenders of torture victims during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile). In
giving their bodies to Christ in the Eucharist, a confession is made, but it is
not the voice of the state that is heard.
The torturer extracts a confession of the unlimited power of the
state. The Eucharist requires the
confession that Jesus is the Lord of all, and that the body belongs to Him. . .
Torture is so useful for isolating individuals in a society from one another in large part because of the inability of people to share pain. Pain is incommunicable beyond the limits of the body, and the sufferer must suffer alone. Christians, nevertheless, make the bizarre claim that pain can be shared, precisely because people can be united together into one body.
Thus we understand that Jesus suffers in those who hunger and thirst, who are in prison, who are sick and under torture just as he said (Matthew 25:31-46). Hiding from such suffering subjects us to the isolation and discipline of torture by which the world and its rulers claim our bodies and souls for themselves and their purposes. To share in the sufferings of the victims unites us to Jesus. Which way we choose has eternal consequences.
The American Liturgy
of Torture
The church cannot confront the torture system simply
by treating it as a violation of any individual’s human rights. From the church’s point of view,
torture should be read as aspiring to the disappearance of the visible body of
Christ.[3]
- William Cavanaugh, “Torture and
Eucharist”
Torture has been a central feature of American life since we got off the boat 400 years ago. The ritual flogging of slaves while making all the others watch and learn was the liturgical climax of plantation life, the ritual celebration of its reality. Cruelty was king.
But Americans do not celebrate this history today. They hide from it, like the Pharisees saying, “If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them.” Indeed they hid from it then, assigning the celebration of this liturgy to an overseer down among the slave huts, not in sight of their friends and the ladies at the big house. Today we keep it off the evening news, and we prefer to delegate it to the Egyptians, the Moroccans, the Jordanians, and other underlings.
Today enormous numbers of petty criminals fill American prisons, and merciless beatings, rapes, and other degradation are routine. Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act in 1996, supposedly to stop frivolous lawsuits by prisoners, but written so as to make it nearly impossible for prisoners to recover damages even for heinous acts of sadism, and these indeed go largely unpunished. Americans have supervised torture and trained torturers in Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and elsewhere in Latin America for over 50 years at the School of the Americas (since renamed after some of its torture manuals were made public in 1996). Torture was prominent in the Philippine-American War, along with mass executions, with total deaths exceeding 200,000. Torture was routine in Vietnam. Torture has now become so routine that several officials have written memos justifying it and been rewarded by our President with nominations to the cabinet and Federal bench. In short, torture is now official policy while people sort of pretend otherwise – much as lynching was official policy after Reconstruction while people sort of pretended otherwise.
At the same time, Americans are on the whole not at all comfortable with torture. In this respect, America is not Assyria. America’s relationship to torture is like that TV evangelist who stoutly preaches against sexual immorality, was busted some years ago for an act of sexual perversion with a prostitute, and tearfully confessed on TV, “I have sinned!” - but has since been caught a number of times doing the same thing. America’s addiction to torture truly resembles addiction to pornography and sexual perversion – the forms, indeed, that American torture frequently takes.
The evangelist can’t get cured because he thinks he has a problem with sexual immorality which makes him commit immoral acts with prostitutes. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. He has to do these acts, and so he has a problem with sexual immorality. But why does he have to do them? Maybe exalting himself above others sentences him to be enslaved to what he condemns in others; maybe it’s some other problem. But until he can recognize whatever the problem is and tell the truth about it, he’ll be stuck.
Likewise, Americans don’t torture because they’re cruel. Americans are cruel, and ashamed of it, because we need to torture. If we’re ever to be cured, we need to find out why we need to torture.
The ritual of flogging the slave while making the others watch taught the slaves their total helplessness, but this liturgy, like all others, was mainly meant for those who celebrated it – in this case the masters and overseers. What were they supposed to learn from it?
The flogger and all who join him are safe. They won’t be tortured or punished. Upon the back of the wicked, lazy, rebellious slave is laid the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). By his scourging we are healed; we will not be scourged (Isaiah 53:5). Because we have the power to punish, we ourselves will never be punished. As Isaiah wrote of Babylon, “You felt secure in your wickedness and said, ‘No one sees me (Isaiah 47:10).’” Our wickedness is where we take refuge and feel safe, by which we keep the truth about ourselves off the evening news.
The perseverance and faith of the saints is to know that whoever leads into captivity will be led away captive, and whoever kills with the sword must be killed by the sword. The saints are those who hold this truth even as the kingdom of the antichrist is proving that the brotherhood of captivity, murder, and torture is freedom, peace, and safety to all who participate and approve (Revelation 13:10). The American religion of antichrist, with its sacrament of torture, quite intentionally mocks the death of Jesus. The whole world saw that the Iraqi man on a box, arms spread out and attached to electrodes, is Christ. So did those who mocked him, like the soldiers in Herod’s court and those who passed by as Jesus hung on the cross, stark naked like those they stripped in Abu Ghraib.
Torture makes Americans feel safe. This is clearly revealed in how practicing torture comforts Americans whenever they are frightened, not only of enemies real or imagined, but especially of their own guilt. It is noteworthy that during World War 2, when Americans really had something to be afraid of, they had much less guilt, and so committed less torture than in Iraq today, even of captured Japanese officers.
But in any bar or indeed in any church after September 11, 2001, Americans asked about torture heartily approved, and their servants in Afghanistan and Guantanamo promptly began to give them what they wanted. After the Civil War, southern whites soothed their fears of losing the mastery over black people by flogging, burning, castrating, and skinning them alive– the more so as they had more guilt and less to fear from their victims. Lynching reached its high point in 1892 and 1893, after white supremacists had completely overthrown Reconstruction and firmly reestablished white supremacy.
Torture and flogging increased during slavery whenever the masters feared slave revolts. Puritans in New England who feared witches tortured those they suspected. Muslims picked up after 9/11 were routinely beaten and tortured even when it was clear that they were not guilty of anything, as documented even by the Justice Department’s inspector general.[4] As American soldiers and their masters have become increasingly fearful in Iraq, they have resorted routinely to torture – often of people they knew to be guilty of nothing – clearly because to exercise such power over the helpless soothes their anxiety. United We Stand! And there is no unity like the unity of a lynch mob or a band of torturers in their guilt and in their brazen denial of it.
The liturgy of torture has formed America as a privileged community – the community of the not-tortured – which for all who go along supersedes the body of Jesus Christ. Tell them the truth, and it won’t be long before somebody tells you, “Love it or leave it!” to remind us of the complicity in innocent blood that this privileged community demands of us through silence, denial, and willful blindness. No marvel that the reality of the true Christian community, the body of Christ, is talked about much but nearly unknown in American churches.
The Torture of Nations
How the oppressor has ceased,
How fury has ceased!
The Lord has broken the staff of the wicked,
The scepter of rulers which used to strike the peoples
in fury with unceasing strokes,
Which subdued the nations in anger with unrestrained
persecution.
- Isaiah 14:4-6
The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.
- Proverbs 12:10
When Pharaoh commanded to throw all male Hebrew babies into the Nile, his target was not simply individuals but Israel as a people, as a nation. He had no objection to individual Hebrews, especially women that could become concubines of Egyptians. But a people with a sense of themselves as a separate nation among the Egyptians – Pharaoh could have none of that. Likewise, as long as American Christians see themselves first as Americans, willing to destroy human beings - even fellow Christians - in service to that worldly identity, America will never persecute us. But if we realize that God has called us to be “a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9), whose king is Jesus and whose first loyalty is to his word and to his kingdom, things will become clear. Foremost in persecuting us will be religious people who hate us for our faithfulness when their own deeds are evil, just as happened to Jesus in the gospels. The world, like Pharaoh, does not object to individual piety. But it cannot tolerate in its midst a people of truth, a nation of strangers.
Torture aims to destroy social identity. The torture of black slaves, while others were made to look on, was designed to make them realize that they were nothing and nobody as a people. For this reason, as Jacobo Timerman explained above, the program of torture includes favors as well as torments in order to undermine identity.
Black slaves were not only flogged and terrorized. Some were offered a soft life as “house niggers” in exchange for loyalty to the master’s family, especially if they warmed the master’s bed. They were invited to despise the “field niggers” as inferior, receiving some relief for their individual self-contempt in exchange for internalizing self-contempt of themselves as black people.
When Lyndon Johnson determined to induce the Vietnamese to submit to becoming an obedient American client state instead of insisting on full national independence, he did not rely only on bombing, burning villages, and driving people off their ancestral lands into camps called “strategic hamlets.” He also offered carrots, notably a vast development program, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority, if only North Vietnam and the Vietcong would abandon the war. When the Vietnamese, like Jacobo Timerman, rejected the offer, Johnson was enraged just as Timerman’s merciful torturer was.
Torture as national discipline has fully flowered in Iraq. A brutal sanctions regime targeted civil society by making most citizens more dependent than ever before on Saddam Hussein’s regime, while killing by American admission at least 500,000 children by 1996 – and the meter was still running in 2003. The conquest of Iraq in 2003 featured further destruction of its national institutions by abandoning the country to looting, excepting only the Ministry of Oil and the Interior Ministry in keeping with the occupier’s interests. Order 39 of the “Coalition Provisional Authority” – in total violation of the Hague convention of 1907 - privatized Iraq’s economy and overturned nearly all legal defenses against plunder of its assets by foreign corporations. The invaders boasted openly before the invasion that this project would not really cost anything, because Iraqi oil revenues would pay for reconstruction. That is to say that American weapons makers would make money on the war, and that then American construction companies like Bechtel and Halliburton would make money afterwards on the reconstruction, all financed by the victim’s wealth. And if it rolled over, the new colonial possession, in exchange for being Americanized, would become an example of the master’s kindness, as Japan did after World War 2, except that Iraq’s oil wealth in the hand of American interests would keep Iraq from becoming the financial liability that Japan was.
Now if the victim had rolled over, all would have gone according to plan. However, like Jacobo Timerman, the victim failed to respond to the torturer’s kindness, because as the proverb says, “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.” A massacre of unarmed demonstrators on April 28, 2003 antagonized the people of Fallujah, who drove the occupiers out. The occupier’s daily contempt for the lives and dignity of Iraqi people soon antagonized most of the population. And so, like Lyndon Johnson, the merciful torturer – insulted by the victim’s refusal of his kindness - has responded with rage.
The Red Crescent of Iraq estimates that the latest invasion of Fallujah in November 2004 killed 6,000 civilians[5], and what the invader did there was carried into the rest of Iraq by fleeing witnesses, as was the case in April. Like torturers everywhere, the invaders sought concealment by immediately seizing one hospital and destroying two others with rockets and bombs, so that the doctors could not reveal to the world what was happening, as they had done in the earlier invasion.
However, torture is designed to be both secret and common knowledge, in order to terrorize the others into submission. The secrecy in which the Marines razed Fallujah was not intended only to hide the shameless deed from the world. It was also designed to increase the terror of all Iraq as people were left to guess what the invader was doing away from view. In Chile, what was done in Villa Grimaldi was hidden, but everybody knew – and so its name was terror. Torture in Villa Grimaldi was not hidden to keep people from knowing what was happening there, but to increase its terror through mystery.
Why else did the American military boast that they had now broken the back of the insurgency, even though they knew full well that they had given ample time for the defenders to escape and regroup before the invasion? The target was not military. The target was the Iraqi people – not as individuals but as a people with a sense of themselves as an independent people. Like all torturers, the invader aimed to cause the victim to know that his tormentor is his God – and that there is no other (2 Thessalonians 2:4). The rape of Fallujah was a religious event – a liturgy of torture.
Where did we learn this, to torture an Iraqi city to make the rest of Iraq learn its place while Americans hide their eyes? It began with the first black slave that we flogged for being a bad nigger, out of view of the ladies in the big house, while the other slaves were made to watch, nearly 400 years ago. As Mick Jagger has Satan put it in Sympathy for the Devil, “I’ve been around for a long, long year.”
[1] James W.
Skillen, “Religiously Political
Conservatism” in Capital Commentary,
[2] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist (Malden, MA: Blkackwell Publishing, 1998), p. 34
[3] Ibid, p. 70-71
[4] The report may be read at http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/oig/detainees.pdf. It’s clear from the report that the OIG realized that a great deal of abuse had been successfully covered up.
[5] BBC
News,