Theological Journal - March 14: Empire and Joy

Joy, as the authors of Joyful Militancy conceive it – (re)connection to our true selves and sources of strength and creativity – entails two movements inextricably related and mutually reinforcing. I think that even though these authors are not believers the pattern they have discerned in their work with various activist communities in resisting the reach and grip of empire is easily transposed and deepened in a Christian framework. Those interrelated movements are what an older Puritan theology would call mortification and vivification (vivid terms worth retrieving, I think). The putting to death of the old life and its ways and embracing the new life and its ways – the rediscovery of joy enables and spurs both movements and they deepen our joy the further we enter into the process.

Gen.11 tells am instructive tale about the early empire of Babylon. It’s worth a brief look here.

-it was totalizing (one language, vv.1,6)

-it created an ideology that promised to address our human needs for significance and security (v.4)

-created a faith to promote itself and its idols

That strikes me a pretty perceptive critique of imperial practice. Rejecting empire’s totalizing reach and its enervating ideologies and practices (mortification) is thus necessary for everyone of us is implicated and have internalized them to some degree. Freeing ourselves from them, though grace-assisted, is a lengthy and difficult struggle. And it needs to be complemented by a corresponding set of learnings and practices that inculcate the new life and its ways (vivification). This too is a long and difficult process. In fact, both are part and parcel of the same process.

We American have been nurtured on a “middle-class” ethos which have featured a drive for safety and security, a consumeristic/capitalistic ideology which promotes and requires a consumptive drive for ever greater comfort and convenience, and a “greatness”/exceptionalistic worldview reflecting pour drive for significance. Empire, in our context promotes, teaches, extends, and punishes deviations from, this set of ideologies. Joy spurs us to find increasing ways to free ourselves from the tentacles of this all-embracing way of life and the “sadness” (in Spinoza’s sense) it seeks to normalize as our way of life.

Safety and security, comfort and convenience, and exceptionalism represent the particular tentacles of Empire’s grip on us. What might be some the ways that joy might lead us to explore and embrace that lead to freedom from or at least a lessening of the grip of these tentacles on us? It might be worth remembering that God’s response to the rise of Babel is to call one family (part of one family, actually) to walk away from Babel’s wisdom and ways and into the insecurity and freedom of a whole new way (Gen.12).

Anyway, we’ll look at some of that in the next post in this series.