Radioactive Christianity

My last post was deep and I think the only way out is to get in deeper still. I find myself in these two blogs presenting something of a programmatic argument. I didn’t really start out intending to, but now I’m in it up to my neck I must, as Doris said, “Just keep swimming.” So, please, continue to swim with me!

Last time I argued for the Christian sources of freedom, capitalism and romanticism. I did this in a positive sense, as the emergence of a gospel-based desire for the things of this earth. I did also point to what I called the dark side, the obvious respect of how destructive unbounded freedom and desire can be. Now, for some people that would be a pure “Oh Yeah??” because “The Christian sources of capitalism” would not represent simply a redundant statement but a sick joke too. They would say there is something systemic in Christianity which is destructive of the earth, and this would then turn my original proposition on its head: gospel-based desire rather than creating a positive relation to the earth creates an intensely destructive one. So here is a further, trickier aspect to the whole question and I need to follow where it goes. I must do so in order to understand more deeply the false Christianization of the world, including, in the scope of this phrase, official Christianity too.

A recent article in an online news service called truthout.org described the plight of indigenous peoples across the globe under pressure from the West. One particular example was arresting because a successful Christian-based feature movie has recently been made about them. They are the Huaorani, a tribe of hunters and gatherers inhabiting the rainforests at the headwaters of the Amazon. Numbering about 3000 they had no contact from the outside world until as recently as the late 1950's.

A leader by name of Moi Enomenga describes the situation provoked by a western oil company in their area: "First they drill, then they extract oil, then there is a highway, then there is colonization, then there are so many problems, because, here, the forest is clean, but when the companies enter, they destroy so much. The people don't have what they need to live, because the Americans don't respect much, because they take the oil, instead of letting us live. This is why the Huaorani ask for the oil-drilling to stop."

Encroachment by the oil industry took place in the last two decades. The original contact in the nineteen fifties was through Christian missionaries and, according to Enomenga, it was members of the Huaorani who had been taken away and educated at missionary schools who were bribed to facilitate the deal with the oil company. Ergo, missionaries are spies for the big companies and converts are their stooges.

As I say, all this was of intense interest because the Huaorani people and the initial group of missionaries were the subject of an effective mass-distribution film called “End of the Spear” (2006)—in fact we watched this movie on one of our WHH movie nights. The film told the story of the killing of five males from the missionary group and their nonretaliatory deaths. Subsequently it was the response of the wives caring for the people in the midst of a polio epidemic which seemed to have brought many to Christian conversion. The absolutely central theme of the movie was the gospel principle of nonviolence. The motivating factor driving the missionaries—in particular a central figure, a small-plane pilot with the providential name of Nate Saint—was the relentless cycle of warrior revenge among the Huaorani, which was driving them to extinction. Some time after the killings a Christian translator is asked by one of the tribe why the Christian missionaries (including Nate) did not use their guns when attacked. She replied, invoking the name for the tribal high god, Weangongi. She said the missionaries came to tell the Huaorani “that Waengongi has a Son. He was speared and didn't spear back, so that others would live well." Released in the wake of 9/11 retaliatory wars the movie seemed to me to have a powerful self-critical aspect. If this was the message of Christian missionaries from North America evangelizing a tribe of indigenous peoples, what should that mean for people in North America who called themselves Christian? The movie therefore seemed to me part of the steadily emerging alternative language of Christianity , which seems to come contextually, from a world subliminally informed by the gospel message, including popular culture, rather than formal doctrine. This idea is in fact at the basis of all my blogs, but especially the last two and this one. But let’s return for a moment to the Huaorani.

Here is Enomenga’s quite different assessment of the same events. "Twenty-five years ago, we were still living free. We didn't have borders. Our territory went from Peru into Ecuador. My father and grandfather always defended our territory … they guarded it very well. Nobody came inside. If people disrespected our laws and came to hunt on our territory, they would get killed. In 1957, American missionaries, five of them, showed up at the village of my grandfather on my mother's side. Those five missionaries were killed there. I always thought about this when my mother and father would tell me their stories. I thought when I turned twenty-five I would then defend my land. After the five missionaries were killed, more came and said we would be bombed if we didn't move. So they took us away from our communities and moved us to one area. Today there is a community where the missionaries took everybody. I always thought that this kind of thinking can't be permitted on our land. My father and grandfather defended our territory by killing. Now I have to defend our territory by making friends with people and organizing.”

Enomenga’s comments actually corroborate my overall argument of an alternative contextual language of Christianity. He says he can now have an impact by making friends and organizing, rather than killing. But this possibility has to be provided by forces prepared to listen to him, people who want to become his friends, who have a concern for the environment and for native peoples. These attitudes must be counted an oblique or refracted form of the gospel—i.e. contextual concern for the victim provoked by the gospel story and its crucified prophet, the man from Nazareth. What other historical-ethical figure could possibly give global political status to 3000 tribal people lost at the headwaters of the Amazon? At the same time it is small immediate comfort to Enomenga, and to many others in the world, when the natural environment in which they live is being raped and destroyed.

Enomenga then adds another aspect which is even more challenging.

"About 50 years ago, colonists came here, and brought diseases, and an enormous number of Huaorani died. This is why the Huaorani don't want them here in Ecuador. Here, we have a lot of history, stories about how the planet was born, how the Huaorani lived.... I would teach them about this, but they come here to educate us, but I don't want them to. The missionaries lie. I don't believe them. I believe in our own spirituality here: the forest."

The question is truly, do missionaries lie? In the movie when the explanation is given “He didn't spear back, so that others would live well” I don’t think they lied. I think they spoke bedrock gospel truth: that Jesus effected a radical shift in human being through profound nonretaliation. But what about the whole metaphysics in which a statement like this is usually embedded: of eternal salvation in another heavenly place, of a disembodied spiritual self that belongs there, of Jesus’ payment of a debt of sin, of faith as the prize lottery ticket to this other world, of resurrection of the body as a confusing and redundant afterthought? I think this is the highly fraught Christian religion and spirituality implied by Enomenga, a spirituality that goes along with the destruction of his forest, and over against which he prefers his own. His own, I’m sure, would have the forest as a place alive with meaning and associations, with stories of ancestors, of gods, of animals, of dread and blessing. It is the immediacy of the divine or the transcendent to the lived world that he was talking about, not a spirituality that displaces us to some nebulous space halfway between death and an invisible planet in the sky.

At any rate this alienated Christianity spirituality provides a very powerful counterthrust to a claim of positive Christian desire in the earth. It would in fact lead some people to say that the very idea is hogwash and Christian desire is almost always negative in the earth. It is because of this that the central structure of my argument here—and everywhere—is that there are in fact two very different Christianities. I have the courage to say this because I think these two are already separating themselves out before our eyes. There is the formal-doctrinal, most-often-preached variety with its default metaphysics of a heavenly hereafter, and there is the contextual, subliminal, infectious, historical and anthropological variety. The latter is the apparently unintended but true consequence of the gospel. It’s as if the gospel is a form of radioactivity, used formally for one set of purposes—we might say it’s locked up in the nuclear reactors of the churches for the sake of its power—but in the meantime it continues to render everything around it luminous and alive with positive desire, nonviolence, and compassion for the victim.

It all comes down finally to desire, to its highly fluid or volatile character. And I have briefly to state this in an analytic way to make everything plain. We all know desire can be destructive and violent whoever and wherever you are. There is conflictive desire in the rainforest just as much as in the salons of Paris or the streets of New York: nobody disputes the cycle of intense warrior revenge among the Huaorani. Desire is conflictive because it is mediated, because it springs from a relationship to the object in which a third party models for me that relationship.

Neuroscientists have recently discovered that even monkeys become very highly interested in an object when it is grasped or held by another monkey or by a human. Under these circumstances it is almost inevitable that the person who models to me the value of an object is going to become my rival, my enemy. I want precisely what he wants. In this light religion and spirituality can be broadly characterized as a means to control desire through sanctions and threats of punishment (religion) and as a creative mediation of a positive or nonconflictive relationship to the object (spirituality). But Christ is the only figure of mediation who seeks proactively to overcome all human violence in relationship, through forgiveness and love, and therefore ultimately to turn all religion into spirituality. The love and forgiveness demonstrated by Jesus renders religion redundant and makes the whole of life potentially constituted by intense spirituality. Here then finally is the secret of the truly enormous liberating effect of the Christian message. In Christ, at least in principle, all desire becomes good because all violence is transformed into love. In a world shaped by Jesus the world is literally everyone’s oyster!

This, as I say, is the final root of the enormous dynamic of Western culture. It is the root of the contextual, infectious radioactivity of the gospel, proclaiming first that all earthly objects are good, and then, more radically, inviting compassion for the victim and demonstrating through any number of ways, including movies, the path of nonviolence. What Christians have yet to do is catch up with their own dynamic spirituality. For, in this light, it is possible to understand historical Christian religion as an unhealthy hybrid of violence, metaphysics and Jesus, but today that hybrid is separating out progressively into its component parts. In Christ it is possible to have a mediation that gives us a relationship to every object filled with love, and this makes religion redundant and “the way” of Jesus truly everything.

The past Christian relationship with the earth has been an unhappy marriage of positive desire and restless alienation, leading to the typical smash and grab capitalism which is wrecking the planet, while promoting an other-worldly spirituality which says essentially “what the heck, we’re going to heaven anyway!” But now in the radioactive light of a new emerging Christianity I would say that in every berry on every tree there is God because of Christ. In every bird and every stream. And not just in the natural world. In every glass of Pinot Noir or Glenlivet or lemonade, in every fresh loaf of bread, in every chocolate ganache, in every pizza and dish of pasta, in every quesadilla and rich taco. And not just at the gastronomic level. In every shirt in the store, in every sweater and pair of pants, in every tube of toothpaste, in every perfume by Christian Dior, in every Toyota and Ford, in every Apple computer, in every Ipod, Christ is waiting to be seen. This is because true desire for them is authentically mediated by Christ. In Christ, and only in him, I can want all these things not for myself but truly for you—and by implication also for myself, as another you loved by Christ! I can truly desire them, for the sake of the great “You” of love which he announced in the world. So long as I begin to relate to a Christ-irradiated universe this kind of talk is not cheap grace. It means that the concrete human space is really filled with the endless nonviolence of Jesus. This is what makes it possible--that Jesus “did not spear back" and I know this in the depth of my soul. Because of Jesus everything is liberated for love. My brother, Enomenga, you, like the rest of us, are already half-Christianized, by radioactive Christianity. I hope you, and all of us, will live to see and know a full and deep Christianity by the progression of this astonishing radioactivity throughout our human community.