This is why we should place DDT, which destroys parasites, carriers of disease, on the same level as Christianity, which roots out heresy, natural impulses, and evil. . . .It does not call the colonized to the way of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 7)

“Anyone who claims to be fighting against the problem of oppression and does not analyze the exploitative role of capitalism is either naïve or an agent of the enemies of freedom (James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p. xvii)

I ended a recent dispatch with “Let’s take the power back,” borrowing a little from Rage against the Machine. One impediment to taking this power back, like our mostly mis-education in schools, is religion. In this post I argue that religion is counter-revolutionary. That is, the normative practice of religion is a countervailing force to ameliorative change; it is a conservative force, antagonistic to transformation. Using a deeply critical lens on the institutional practice of religion (i.e., the human-run system of the church: buildings, investments, man-made doctrine/dogma, apologetic histories, outright lies, etc.), I attempt to make real Marx’s sense that religion is, indeed, an opiate to mollify the masses. And, when coupled with nationalism, it provides a potent force for preserving the status quo.

This post was prompted by our final day at a basic school in Jamaica at which the children gathered in the yard for their Wednesday morning devotions. It struck a few of us that, while the kids were impressive, the meaning of the activity was relatively empty as far as its proposition for the substantive change that Jamaica, other poor countries, and the disenfranchised anywhere need.

Of course, these 4-6 year olds were/are not poised to activate the change their society needs at their age, nor should they be. What these children were learning, however, like the hidden curriculum in schools, was an uncritical acceptance of dogma that has been used for millennia to domesticate masses of marginalized peoples around the globe. Acceptance of particular versions of Christianity (like the Pentecostal ones so prevalent in Jamaica) breed an almost singular focus on the afterlife, tolerating the objectionable lot dealt in this life. If a mass of people can be convinced that their reward lies in heaven, then they probably won’t make much trouble in this life while resources are raped from their land, money is stolen from their banks, and their people are used as slave labor in the new global economy. And, what I find so particularly obscene is that the people foisting these conditions and religion on the masses presume they will enjoy the same heaven as the enslaved humans under their economic whip.

A question asked in the dying light of one of our final evenings in Jamaica by my dear friend and mentor Milton deserves our utmost attention and requires an answer: Who among the black, brown, or poor is better off that the missionaries came? (What I think is also quite noteworthy is that missionaries didn’t come until slaves were emancipated. Before then, slaves weren’t viewed as humans. According to Christian philosophy at the time, they had no soul to save, so why bother? Diane Austin-Broos’ Jamaica Genesis is a good source on this.)

Instead, what these children need (and we need) are large doses of education that trains them/us to ask questions, to believe in themselves/ourselves, to be intellectually curious, and to know they/we can make change. There are certainly brands of all institutionalized religions which speak to the liberatory possibilities, like Gustavo Gutierrez’s version of Liberation Theology in Catholicism or James Cone’s Black Theology of Liberation, which I draw from in this dispatch, but these strands of theology are celebrated by a minority of the relative privileged. The majority profess and oppress with more conservative Christian theologies, and we do little to stop them. In order to be moved into action, I think we have to understand that the usual ‘gift’ of Christ from these more conservative Christian theologies to the poor is no more about bringing everlasting life to the oppressed (who are probably already more Christian than those who ‘sell’ Jesus) than the war in Iraq or Afghanistan is about bringing democracy to the Middle East.

So, my main argument is this: That which gets counted as religion (dominated by, interpreted by, and sold by relatively wealthy white folks in the Global North and oppressing of, celebrated by, and bought by relatively poor folks in the Global South) is counter-revolutionary. This institutionalized religion tends to mythologize reality through the propagation of convenient narratives and tends to domesticate the masses, like education, through alienating practices meant to create uncritical automatons ultimately leading to self-destruction. As an antidote, analogous to what critical pedagogy might do for education, what we must seek is a more liberatory spirituality that centers the amelioration of oppression as our democratically constructed human covenant.

Mythologizing our reality

Recently, my partner and I had dinner with a former member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and we discussed our work in the Global South. He related the following, citing an often-told story:

When the missionaries came they had the bible and the people had the land and the resources. When the missionaries left, the people had the bible and the country from whence the missionaries came had the land and the resources. Correlating with Milton’s question above, I think we are hard-pressed to think of a counter-example of which this would not be true: Asia, Africa, Latin and South America, the Caribbean, Native Americans, etc. (See Howard Adams, 1989, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View from Saskatoon Publishing for some good reading on this.)

The theology that these Christian missionaries bring (and few critical Christians interrupt) is the myth that our reward lies in heaven—that our grace is embodied in the death of the human Christ who died to save our immortal souls. All we need to worry about is accepting Jesus, leading a faithful life to His Gospel, and waiting for our reward in heaven. In other words, there is no need to save yourselves because God has either already done it or will be back to save you once and for all.

As far as I can tell God is not coming back to save us. Who does this narrative myth serve, anyway? What cruel God would place his/her people in such jeopardy or make their earthly lives so economically miserable? James Cone acutely argues, “God cannot be both for [the black oppressed] and the white oppressors at the same time” (p.7). It reminds me of the conversation overheard at a Jamaican children’s home at which one of the Christian missionaries told one of the children disfigured by cerebral palsy that God would give them a new body in heaven. Who does this narrative serve? Does it help the missionary sleep better at night living in this mythological world? Or, on another read, what is the missionary saying about the quality of this child’s life in this world (the only one we’re sure of)? What sort of top-down hierarchy have they created relative to physical ability? What will we not do for this child in this life if we are led to believe that they’ll have a better body in the next life?

It is these myths—this quite fashionable version of Christianity—that is killing the poor. “It would seem,” a Chiapan revolutionary in Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power quipped, “that the Spanish brought Christ to America to crucify the Indian.” Indeed, the crucifixion continues and widens its breadth.

Domestication/Alienation of the Masses

In the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre laments, “The colonized protect themselves from colonial alienation by going one step better with religious alienation with the ultimate end of having two accumulated alienations, each of which reinforces the other. In certain psychoses, therefore, tired of being insulted day in and day out, the hallucinating individual suddenly gets it in his head to hear an angel’s voice complimenting him; this doesn’t stop the jeering, but at least it gives him a break” (p. liii).

So, the religion propagated by the oppressors is, ironically, used as a salve to shelter the oppressed from the same oppressor. Slick. Again Cone makes us aware that God is not for both the oppressed and the oppressors at the same time. Nonetheless, since most people don’t read Cone and/or prefer black/white, right/wrong, uncomplicated/noncomplex answers, this myth rolls on to serve a dual purpose—to domesticate (a subservient subject is certainly preferred to a critical and revolutionary one) and to alienate (each colonized from him/her self and the collective colonized from each other), which initiates the possibility that the oppressed will take out their frustrations on each other or on themselves rather than on the culprits of their oppression.

Fanon sees it this way: “So one of the ways the colonized subject releases his muscular tension is through . . . collective self destruction. . . .Such behavior represents a death wish in the face of danger, a suicidal conduct which reinforces the colonist’s existence and domination, and reassures him that such men are not rational. The colonized subject also manages to lose sight of the colonist through religion. Fatalism relieves the oppressor of all responsibility since the cause of the wrong doing, poverty, and the inevitable can be attributed to God. The individual thus accepts the devastation decreed by God, grovels in front of the colonist, bows to the hand of fate, and mutually readjusts to acquire the serenity of stone” (pp. 17-18).

Marge Piercy, in The Wrong Anger, lyrically notes, “Infighting, gut battles we all / wage so well. Carnage in the fish tank. / Alligators wrestling in bed. / Nuclear attack / across a breakfast table. / Duels in the women’s center. / The fractioning faction fight.”

That is, we take it out on each other, whether it is gang warfare in the internment ghettoes erected for people of color; working class and poor people that comprise one nation’s army fighting the working class and poor people of another nation’s army (each army, of course, run by a ruling elite and, perhaps, sponsored by the same corporations); suicide on the reservations; alcoholism and meth addiction in the rural wastelands, etc. For the imperialist wars of capitalism it is crucial to fan the flame of patriotic fervor, to render a sizeable portion of the population helpless and economically bereft (thus malleable to your wishes), and to spit vitriol from the pulpits about the righteousness of one religion’s God over another. (In this post, I point out the fallibilities of Christianity, a tradition I have past familiarity with. I presume similar critiques could be offered of Islam, Judaism, etc.) Faith, particularly the fundamentalist sort, and nationalism, particularly the jingoistic sort, go hand in hand to oppress the masses.

Toward something more Humanizing and Liberatory

“Liberation theology is an expression of the poor to think out their own faith” (Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, p. xxi)

So, what might frame a democratically constructed human covenant that places the amelioration of oppression as its centerpiece? Toward this rubric for revolution, we might first build on Farmer’s framework of observe, judge, and act to:

• Focus our efforts on agency-inducing behavior. What can we do as a group to take advantage of our agency? What global to local or local to global changes might we take up to illustrate this agency? What short term changes can we work on that might layer into longer term change?
• Continue to connect the dots of history (figuring out what we don’t about know we don’t know) in order to de-mythologize our reality and to understand how religion and nationalism can be used to oppress such that we might become, as Milton urges, “people of the (T)ruth”
• Change the game

In this rubric, then, I seek more humanizing and liberatory ways of knowing (epistemology), ways of being (ontology), ways of connecting with a creator or spiritual force (theology), and ways of teaching/learning (pedagogy).

Inducing Agency

First things first: “The only correct way to love the poor will be to struggle for their liberation. This liberation will consist, first and foremost, in their liberation at the most elementary level—that of their simple, physical life, which is at stake in the present situation” (Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power, p. 145). So, teams I travel with to Jamaica that partner with these schools and children’s homes have been pretty good at this first step, focused on the short term amelioration of human suffering. But, what work can we do that then turns to the pedagogical and ontological? That is, how can we help teach and learn agency? What activities might we engage with our partners that better illuminates our role in the struggle? That critique capital? And, what activities might we initiate with our partners that helps instill a sense of power to change circumstances—that throws off mythical narratives and grounds the work in a profound sense of struggle and belief in the change they seek?

Freire would call the work we are doing an aspect of his “dialogical action,” more precisely, “unity for liberation.” Gutierrez thinks of it this way: “Unity is not an event accomplished once and for all, but something which is always in the process of becoming, something which is achieved with courage, freedom of spirit, sometimes at the price of painful, heart-rending decisions” (A Theology of Liberation, p. 82). How long are we willing to engage this process (that has no easy answers)? Do we see this process toward human agency as a valuable aspect of unity?

Demythologizing (our) Reality

In order to fully engage this process, we must continue to demythologize reality for ourselves and others, coming to a more skeptical and critical epistemology. “This involves discovering that evil not only is present in the hearts of powerful individuals who muck things up for the rest of us, but it is embedded in the very structures of society, so that the structures, and not just the individuals who work within them, must be changed if the world is to change” (Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power, p. 143). As M. Scott Peck notes, and we begin to realize more and more each day, we are living as “the people of the lie.” Our realities in the Global North are built upon myths (of individual achievement, progress, etc.). As the relative privileged, we buy them. We must buy them. To do otherwise would be to admit the lie we live. That is why the current system of schooling is so important—to drill this false reality into us and get us to focus on other things like a future job and consumption. If we taught something more akin to the truth, however varied that is, our existence would be turned inside out.

Religion, then, works as a convenient arm to schooling, helping to corroborate the myths and render them mystical, thus beyond human understanding and reproach. My recent experience at the Creation Museum near Cincinnati is proof positive of this. (See www.creationmuseum.org for their propaganda and http://uncautiouslypessimistic.blogspot.com for a friend’s commentary on the visit.) Yet, I know many do not want to accept my premise that religion is counter-revolutionary. So, how do we negotiate a more revolutionary approach? I appreciate Cornel West’s advice: “To follow Jesus is to love your way through the darkness of the world. To be a Christian is to look at the world through the lens of the cross and thereby keep one’s focus on human suffering and struggle. . . .[M]uch of American religion is market religion—such as our pervasive post-resurrection Christianity which identifies with the world’s winners based on health and wealth. . . .[T]o be a serious Christian is to live dangerously against the grain of the world. For too much of Christianity, to follow Jesus is to seek comfort devoid of courageous compassion and bold witness for the ‘least of these’” (The Cornel West Reader, p. 355).

How do we avoid the pitfalls of this market religion? How do we live a spirituality that is something other than post-resurrection Christianity (read: Christo-fascism) or other institutionalized religions that is “dangerously against the grain of the world?” What will our courageous, compassionate, and bold witness entail? Can we even think outside of the firm boundaries of market religions that even my critique falls prey to? Gutierrez brings it back to solidarity: “It is not a matter of struggling for others which suggests paternalism and reformist objectives, but rather of becoming aware of oneself as not completely fulfilled and as living in an alienated society. And, thus, one can identify radically and mutually with those—the people and the social class—who bear the brunt of oppression” (A Theology of Liberation, p. 82).

How can we keep each other on this hook? Can we really make a commitment to continue this deconstructive path: reading, reflecting, dialoguing, reflecting, reading…? We all know how tough this is; how easy it is to walk away (particularly without the disciplining nature of courses/classes to give us assignments or the extrinsic rewards that jobs provide us for the work we’re supposed to do). This is voluntary and must emanate from a deep appreciation of and willingness to struggle. This is where the real commitment is. This is our chance to be in the struggle—well, at least the first step of it. If we are not about the business of coming to consciousness (understanding our role as subjects in the historical process and coming to terms with the myths we believe that make us objects of the historical process), then there really isn’t much need to go further—as everything will be foundationalized on shaky ground at best.

Changing the Game

James Cone, in the Preface to A Black Theology of Liberation, quotes Malcolm X: “Don’t let anybody who is oppressing us ever lay the ground rules. Don’t go by their games, don’t play the game by their rules. Let them know now that this is a new game, and we’ve got some new rules” (p. xiii). So, what are the new rules? Milton was masterful at bringing us to consciousness at Bellarmine University relative to setting our own terms for victory. Often, these revolved around voice and visibility. What might that look like for our partnerships in Jamaica? For instance, the game is not set up for our team of physical therapists to succeed at the children’s homes, for the teachers to succeed in training revolutionary subjects, for the Jamaicans to get out of their situation. So, how can we help change that? What might that look like in the confrontation of missionary groups from the US—or, at least in the courage it might take to strike up a dialogue about how they see their role in Jamaica? What would that look like in confronting our own missionizing tendencies? How do we continue to move toward a model of social change, away from social service?

In any event, we know we must avoid too easy answers, fundamentalist readings of faith, and the allure of silence that grips us in times of confrontation. I’m not sure if religion has a role to play in the ameliorative change the world needs. I know the institution of religion, market religion, can’t play a role (and that Christ would probably not recognize the Christianity that is used to kill and oppress in His name. As well, I’m sure Mohammed thinks the same of Islam, and Yahweh is trying to figure the same thing out about Judaism). I’m sure a form of spirituality does have a role to play, but only if it is foundationalized in dialogue, reason, democracy, and demystification. It must emerge from the lived experience of the oppressed and the struggle of all those willing to work for the eradication of suffering. That faith, that spirituality, would be revolutionary.

Spirituality should liberate: us and others. Religion tends to close this possibility down, opting for conservation of current systems which oppress. The oppressed do not need us to go to church or to argue over theology (or to fight wars over it). They/we need radical doses of revolutionary practice that liberates. I don’t think religion can give that to us in its current state (in the same way that I don’t think our current system of schooling can deliver an education that we really need). In this way, I think religion is counter-revolutionary.