America!

I began writing the following piece before this latest item of news hit our screens, and when it did I went back and finished it: Gainesville, Florida, the Dove World Outreach Center has announced a Burn Quran Day, planning the burning of the Quran to commemorate the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks…



America, fearful freaking America. A great big beautiful country occupied by a beautiful people occupied in turn by an ideology of absolute selfhood and absolute violence to defend it.

America, named after Amerigo who circumnavigated the twin continents, wrapping them in a single act of imagination, and now that imagination, or its northern half, grips the earth like a fearful vice.

America, America, when will you see that you are the most Christian of nations, the most Christianly sick, the most full up with half-cooked, failed and poisoned Christianity? You had no Middle Ages, no chorus of cathedrals, no network of monasteries, no begging bowls of friars. Of course, yes, there were abuses in all that, we know that and have heard it many times. But there was also mutuality, community, an experiencing of the self as stand-in for the other. The self in its deepest self as already the other, as simply (an)other other…the precondition for love. From where did the American absolute self come from?

And now we have a church burning the Quran, the most absolute of gestures against the other, to erase their words. And not just any words but words which belong to a billion and a half people, a huge communal other whose voice this “Dove World” church wishes to erase. For those for whom the bible is an authoritative book there may even be a verse that might seem to encourage the burning of the scriptures of others. But what I do know is that the founder of Christianity, Jesus who told us actually how to read our bible, said this: “Woe to the world because of scandals [i.e. violent behaviors that cause mental or emotional falling down in others—the mimetic contagion of violence]. Scandals are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the scandal comes” (Matt. 18: 7); “If anyone compels you to go one mile [read military forces with power of empressment, i.e. any violent force which constrains us] go two miles with him” (Matt. 5:41); “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’ but I say to you, love your enemies” (Matt. 5: 43-44).

In fact Jesus is the one who has made the absolute self impossible, again and again making the hidden, despised, hated other return to view, and thereby hangs the deep sickness of Christianity, its deep internal self-hatred and anger. The only way the Christian self can uphold itself in absolute terms is through the backing of an ultimate Absolute Self, God, the One who crushes the other with absolute impunity, Jesus included. Where did this so-called Christian God come from? It came from the dark side of the Middle Ages which constructed its theology out of metaphysics and feudal violence and which North American Christianity has no problem inheriting. God, the Father of Jesus, needed some place to put his terminal violence in response to sin, so he put it on his Son. Even so is absolute violence toward the other built in to the Christian thought of things. Even so does the Christian God crush its Jesus!

But no matter how we kill the other to establish the self, the other returns to challenge it. And, again, it does so expressly because of Jesus—patiently, subversively, irresistibly working to overturn formal Christianity—through his teaching and above all rising from the dead and vindicating every victim of our violence. All violence is bad faith (i.e. just as much our own issue as to do with the one we’re attacking) because Jesus has shown it to be so. But it is worst faith when it is Christian violence.

American Christians will never be happy and America itself will never be happy unless it accepts a God who is as profoundly accepting and loving of the other as Jesus was. A God who gives and forgives out of the well of his/her own self-for-other (the Trinity!), not out of any supposed objective order of justice and compensation. After all what would a truly just God do, settle accounts with sin by an answering violence, or change the roots of our humanity so sin, and violence, may no longer exist?

America, fearful freaky America, crammed out with bombs and guns and people itching to employ them, let it all go! Surrender your famous super self, your righteousness and private salvation. Hand yourself over to your brother, your sister, without reserve, without fear!

America, named after Amerigo who circumnavigated the twin continents, wrapping them in a single act of imagination, you are always talking about Jesus, now is the time to let your imagination be his!

Tony