This invisibility is disempowering and deliberate. Competing and flattening narratives from liberals and conservatives and even many U.S. Coptic Orthodox clergy members tend to discourage Nashville’s working-class Copts from organizing and from participating in mutual aid.

Above: Lydia Yousief (left) and Keria Nashed

Enter Elmahaba Center, an independent Coptic community organization founded in 2019 by Lydia Yousief. It serves all of Nashville’s Arabic-speaking immigrants, refugees, and their children—and anyone else in town who asks for help. Elmahaba offers mutual aid, tutoring, college prep classes, art classes, civic engagement, case management, livestream informational sessions for new immigrants, Arabic and English classes, and an oral history project. Elmahaba Center also creates and sponsors art and cultural events around Nashville. (Because they’re Middle Tennessee’s only Arabic community organization, the’ll create and sponsor other programs as needs arise.)

Elmahaba Center is unique because of its focus on an unserved community—the Arabic-speaking working class. Learn how Elmahaba Center navigates deficient and sometimes false narratives to support Coptic and Muslim working-class solidarity, often against the wishes of the workers’ religious clerics. Learn how Elmahaba’s leadership does so by living out a vibrant Coptic Orthodox faith.

Above: the Elmahaba Center van, chock full of diapers.

You’ll hear from Lydia, from two volunteers (well, three, counting me), and from Anthropology Professor Candace Lukasik, who has written about Elmahaba’s work in her recent book Martyrs and Migrants. You’ll hear parishoners singing in a Nashville Coptic Orthodox Church and volunteers talking about their work as they hand out diapers to Nashville’s young Arabic-speaking families.

My thanks to Keria Nashed and Lydia for meeting with me and to Lydia for being my guide to the liturgy during my visit to Nashville’s St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.

Above: part of the narthex entryway of St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.

Above: doors from the narthex to the nave in St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.

The title of this series of occasional essays, The Spirit of Revolution, takes Arendt’s term. The essays will focus on what her book calls “the problem of beginning,” a concern she shares with Benjamin in the context of revolution. As a potential solution, Arendt’s concept of natality more than resembles Benjamin’s concept of “a weak Messianic power.” The interplay of these concepts fuels these essays.

Apropos of a sestercentennial, this first series essay concerns calendars.

Winter, Spring

At the other end of a telescope, if the Big Bang’s distant past were to peer back at us, New Year’s Day might seem to it an arbitrary holiday. Why January First? Any day could start a revolution. Why not July Fourth?

To associate the two holidays, of course, is to conflate two senses of the word “revolution.” The first English use of “revolution,” as historian Garry Wills points out, referred to the stars’ paths across the night sky and the planets’ paths around the sun.2 The English started using the word in this sense early in the seventeenth century, when Johannes Kepler fixed the planets’ revolutions.

Later in the same century, English politics appropriated the scientific term, describing two big changes to their government—the royalist victory when Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660 and Parliament’s victory when William and Mary ascended the throne in 1688—as revolutions.3 (The latter revolution is the “Glorious Revolution” and is usually what is meant by references to the “English Revolution.”)

Proponents of these two opposed political upheavals called them revolutions because, in their view, something long missing was restored to English government, just as the earth is restored each year to some arbitrary place in its revolution around the sun. For these proponents, ancient liberties had been restored and history, like the planets, had come full circle.

Even a century later, England’s founder of conservatism supported revolutions. To Edmund Burke’s way of thinking, a revolution is the necessary exception that makes continuity in government possible. As a conservative, Burke reasoned that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”4

For Burke, flexibility means strength. On the ground, so to speak, revolution is the wobble, or maybe the detour, that permits the state to continue its course, which in England’s case includes the hereditary succession of monarchs. Burke saw each succession as a revolution:

[Hereditary succession] is the spirit of our constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions. Whoever came in, or however he came in, whether he obtained the crown by law or by force, the hereditary succession was either continued or adopted.5

Some English kings usurped the throne, Burke admitted, but England, imbued with its constitutional spirit of hereditary succession, resumed its governmental circuit after each usurpation. Revolution is the exception that makes the rule of succession.

Burke understood the French Revolution differently, though. He saw it not as a change that permitted a return to France’s “settled course” but as a change that would start France on a new and dangerous course. The word “revolution” would lose its meaning in such a context, Burke thought. Proponents of the French Revolution, he believed, “take the deviation from the principle for the principle.”6 The revolution’s English proponents, whom Burke warned his readers against in his famous book Reflections on the Revolution in France, wished to bring France’s perverted notion of revolution to England. They wished to substitute France’s deviation for England’s settled course by eliminating hereditary succession as well as other institutions that kept England in its fixed political orbit.

Burke’s understanding of revolution, then, is circular and sempiternal. However, the new understanding of revolution brought by the French Revolution—the understanding we’re now more familiar with—is rectilinear, grounding government not in a return to longstanding institutions but in a new conformity to the rights of man or to the people’s “general will” or both.7

Was the American Revolution a revolution in the English or in the French sense? Was it a circular return to ancient liberties or a rectilinear experiment based in large part on John Locke’s natural rights theory, which also influenced the French Revolution? Burke argued in 1775 that the Americans based their claims against English policy on a desire to restore to themselves the liberties of the English Constitution. The Americans are, he claimed, “not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles.”8

In asserting independence a year later, of course, the erstwhile American colonies could no longer base their position on the English Constitution. But even the Americans’ reliance on abstract theory—on John Locke’s doctrines of natural right and revolution—was indirectly grounded in English constitutional law, according to John R. Stoner, Jr.:

. . . at least as much as Locke ever intended, into [his] theory were integrated doctrines and practices of English common lawyers and their notion of an ancient constitution—an unwritten constitution subject to development as well as decay but ultimately aimed at protecting English liberties.9

Just as the American revolution, from a temporal standpoint, came between the English and French revolutions, so also the American Revolution seemed to adopt both the continuity Burke saw in the English Revolution and the new start that the French revolutionaries set out to make in 1789. As Hannah Arendt summarizes it, speaking of the American revolutionaries,

What they had thought was a restoration, the retrieving of their ancient liberties, turned into a revolution, and their thoughts and theories about the British constitution, the rights of Englishmen, and the forms of colonial government ended with a declaration of independence.10

Above: Map of Heavens and Earth. From the New York Public Library. Public domain.

Summer, Fall

So far we’ve enjoyed a kind of springtime, dear reader, finding symmetry in the American Revolution reminiscent of a French garden. Guided by the English etymology of “revolution,” we’ve discovered that the American Revolution is both English and French, both cyclical and rectilinear.

It would’ve made a good essay, too, I’ll venture, if I’d venture no further. But our assay of the American Revolution’s mettle hasn’t completed its circuit. True, we’ve walked through the sources of American liberation. Now that I’ve brought up Hannah Arendt, though, we must look at the American Revolution also for its late-season bloom, the political flowering that often needs the heat of our fights for liberation. We must look for public freedom.

Arendt’s 1963 book titled, appropriately enough, On Revolution, focuses mostly on the American Revolution and its aftermath. The book casts the French Revolution as the American Revolution’s wayward, younger sister. When Arendt looks at both revolutions’ first years—and she focuses more on the American Revolution’s beginnings than on its sister’s—she’s more interested in the process of independence than in its products. Regarding the former revolution, Arendt is more interested specifically in the experiences and interactions of the delegates to the Second Continental Congress than in the Declaration of Independence that resulted from them.

As the delegates labored in Philadelphia for liberation, she says, they stumbled upon the delights of something different from liberation. While they were founding a nation, they found public freedom. Compared to this freedom, liberation from “taxation without representation” seems . . . well, banal:

Whatever the merits of the opening claim of the American Revolution—no taxation without representation—it certainly could not appeal by virtue of its charms. It was altogether different with the speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing which proved necessary to drive this claim to its logical conclusion: independent government and the foundation of a new body politic. It was through these experiences that those who, in the words of John Adams, had been “called without expectation and compelled without previous inclination” discovered that “it is action, not rest, that constitutes our pleasure.”11

Few eighteenth-century revolutionaries sought this public happiness, though, because few knew of its existence before they began to act together for liberation:

The men of the eighteenth-century revolutions had a perfect right to this lack of clarity [between liberation and freedom]; it was in the very nature of their enterprise that they discovered their own capacity and desire for the “charms of liberty,” as John Jay once called them, only in the very act of liberation.12

Genuine revolution, Arendt says, must involve both a new beginning and this public freedom. Consequently, every coup d’état or civil war, ancient or modern, doesn’t amount to a revolution.13 Political freedom and beginning something new, she says,

are at the root of the enormous pathos which we find in both the American and the French Revolutions, this ever-repeated insistence that nothing comparable in grandeur and significance had ever happened in the whole recorded history of mankind, and which, if we had to account for it in terms of successful reclamation of civil rights [i.e., liberation], would sound entirely out of place.

Only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution.14

In a real revolution, before liberty bells ring, public freedom must ring inside the citizens’ assemblies, as it did in the Second Continental Congress.

But does that mean we’ve left revolution’s orbit? That is, has revolution in modern times become only rectilinear, concerned as it is with novelty “connected with the idea of freedom”?

Arendt’s entire book may be considered a search for modern revolution’s orbit, a search for the American Revolution’s missing institution that would serve as a kind of temple for the return of revolution’s spirit. After the American Revolution ended, Arendt laments, “the spirit of revolution—a new spirit and the spirit of beginning something new—failed to find its appropriate institution.”15

The new revolution’s revolution would cycle differently than would the restorations claimed by the supporters of Charles II or William and Mary. These early modern revolutions claimed the restoration of only civil liberties. In Arendt’s orbit toward restoration, civil liberties wouldn’t be restored, or at least not at first. Instead, citizens themselves would be restored, and restored to public life.

A modern revolution, Arendt suggests, would not be out of bounds if it promulgated a new calendar to aid in public life’s restoration. The French Revolution’s calendar, which made 1789 its Year One, attests to a country’s new political start, Arendt says, but also to something greater. It signaled “an entirely new era” that discovered in revolution something beyond the sempiternal cycles of governments among the one, the few, and the many typical of ancient and even early-modern revolutions.16 Theoretically, citizens living in this newly mapped time would imbibe revolution’s spirit as they practiced public freedom.

A new calendar certainly gives witness to a new beginning. In an American calendar, July Fourth could become January First. But does a new calendar suggest, in each year’s revolution of witness, the kind of institution that would keep the spirit of revolution among us?

Arendt’s good friend Walter Benjamin thinks so. Benjamin points to the same revolutionary calendar as evidence that ordinary time can be interrupted by remembrance just as it can, on Day One, be interrupted by revolution itself:

The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance.17

A time-lapse camera confounds ordinary time and links the past with the present. As we view its film, our July 4, 2026 would not just remind us of July 4, 1776. Instead, our first July 4 would be present among us, disguised as our present July 4. A calendar—frankly, even our present calendar, and this year’s sestercentennial to boot—could serve as an archetype of the revolutionary spirit’s temple. But as an archetype, it only draws something of the true temple’s contours.

Woodrow Wilson came closer than a calendar to Benjamin’s kind of living historical consciousness. Wilson observed that the U.S. Supreme Court is “a kind of Constitutional Assembly in continuous session.”18 America’s momentous 1787 Constitutional Convention and all of its ratifying conventions appear in the guise of nine robed justices each time they deliberate on a Constitutional question.

The Supreme Court serves—or at least was designed by the Founders to serve—as the institution for the spirit of America’s 1787 Constitution. But what would serve as the institution for the spirit of America’s 1776 revolution?

Arendt points to another president’s conception of bringing the past into a living present. Thomas Jefferson traced his love of public freedom to his past as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress.19 After his presidency, he wrote at least eight letters advocating for Virginia (and by extension, for other states) to make his and his fellow delegates’ experiences in Congress available to all citizens. His plan was this: divide Virginia’s counties into wards, each with around a hundred citizens. Jefferson wanted direct democracy at the local level. In each ward-republic, all citizens would govern the local areas where they lived and, in the process, would develop and maintain face-to-face, public relationships.20

American citizens’ practice of daily, local public freedom, Jefferson believed, would keep America from falling into the hands of an autocrat:

Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs . . . when there shall not be a man in the state who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his powers wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.21

The inverse is also true: if Americans don’t practice public freedom, they’ll lose even the liberation they won during their revolution.22

Public freedom can be practiced in limitless ways, including updated versions of Jefferson’s local assemblies, direct action, community organizing, mutual aid, public lamentation, street liturgy, hospitality to strangers, indigenous public traditions, community art centers, carnivals, intentional communities, and anticipatory democracy.

Arendt calls the American Revolution a “simple fact.” But even simple facts can be forgotten:

. . . facts are stubborn; they do not disappear when historians or sociologists refuse to learn from them, though they may when everybody has forgotten them. In our case, such oblivion would not be academic; it would quite literally spell the end of the American Republic.23

Arendt isn’t concerned that we will forget that the American Revolution happened. She is concerned that we have no institution that would restore the living presence of the revolution to us. She describes an oblivion that begins without presence and ends without liberty. In that case, the spirit of revolution would find no purchase. It would hover over America’s dark, oligarchic waters indefinitely.

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Above: “Gloster B. Current, Ruby Dee, and Malcolm X at radio station WMCA.” From the New York Public Library. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

I felt responsible for our three neighbors. But most of my angst involved turnout: I was expecting maybe a dozen people at our city hall meetup, and who knows how many counter-protesters. But around 400 of us showed up, and we saw maybe only six counter-protesters.

Above: “No Kings rally in Mineola, New York, 28 March 2026,” photograph by terryballard. Used by permission.

We lined the sidewalks downtown and waved our signs at the passing cars and pickups. Many vehicles honked back approvingly. Overall, too, the silent majority of drivers seemed to take our presence with grace.

Just as in Nashville, some guy with a megaphone paced along the sidewalks, leading us in chants. But one old favorite—“Whose streets?” “Our streets!”—was quite out of place. We crossed only at crosswalks and only when we had the green light. And after we had left—as in Nashville—there was no longer any sign that the streets, or the sidewalks, had ever been ours in any sense.

Above: at our town’s March 28 No Kings rally.

Many signs (and tee shirts) were thoughtful and clever. As would befit a small-town protest, no signs involved profanity. If they did, I didn’t see them. Still, I don’t think our signs were as effective with our ostensible, motoring audience as the nearby service station signs advertising fresh, sky-high gas prices.

I really don’t go to these rallies because I’m convinced they’ll make a difference. I’m not. The rallies may or may not help to rein in the president’s desire to reign. Now involving 2% of the population, the rallies may or may not eventually lead to approximately 3.5% of Americans protesting, the percentage associated with regime change in Erica Chenoweth’s frequently cited study of nonviolent movements from 1900 to 2006.

And even if it does, 3.5% involvement really doesn’t signal big, positive change anymore. Since 2006, mass movements approximating that size or larger haven’t fared nearly as well as those earlier ones Chenoweth cites. Our protests may look like our forebears’ protests, but as Zeynep Tufekci points out, pre-digital-age movements were forced to develop organizational capacity alongside their direct action. By contrast, today’s social-media-driven movements “lack both the culture and the infrastructure for making collective decisions.” Modern mass movements, therefore, generally don’t pivot well.1 Many of them never remove the training wheels of, say, infrequent afternoon protests.

Revolution—and even the reassertion of a revolution begun 250 years ago in the case of the United States—is complicated. Vincent Bevins studied the mass protests during the 2010s in ten countries and found that “seven of these countries experienced something worse than failure. Things went backward.” Bevins attributes these bad results in part to mass man’s belief in masses:

Too often, it seemed that the approach employed in the 2010s could be summed up, fittingly, in a tweet:

1. Protests and crackdowns lead to favorable media (social and traditional) coverage

2. Media coverage leads more people to protest

3. Repeat, until almost everyone is protesting

4. ????

5. A better society2

Even Chenoweth, in a later report, points out that, using her own framework and accounting, the success rate of nonviolent protests dipped from 65% during the 1990s to 34% in the 2010s.

So the No Kings protests alone may not bring what most people might consider to be success.

But the keys to balancing this reality check may be the words “alone” and “success.” If we add other means of direct action and community organization to protests and look at success from the standpoint of process and not just product, maybe we see a brighter picture. Activist Tim Hjersted summarizes what protests may lead to:

Protests rarely achieve their maximalist demands on their own. But they do things nothing else can: they shift public discourse (Occupy didn’t break up the banks, but the language of the “99%” permanently changed how Americans talk about inequality), they energize waves of downstream organizing (the Women’s March fed directly into the candidate recruitment and voter mobilization that flipped the House in 2018), they build relationships between people and groups who might never have connected otherwise, and they make visible the scale of opposition in a way that no online petition or social media post ever will.

This sanguine summary comes from Hjersted’s piece “How To View Protests Like an Organizer.” But how about viewing the No Kings protests like a denizen of what Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven?

The No Kings protests may not lead to what I long for—functioning models of God’s just and participatory community. They don’t, for instance, live out what they desire, as did the early church’s modeling of God’s messianic kingdom. (Using Dan Swain’s term, they don’t involve themselves in “ends-effacing prefiguration,” in which the group’s desired future changes as they learn from seeking to live it out.3)

The No Kings protests also have no plans to organize in small groups and take responsibility for their localities, as the Israelites did under the Torah’s constitution. This Jewish vision of the messianic era, as Daniel J. Elazar describes it, involves “a restoration of Israel’s tribal system.”4 Jefferson’s plan for village-states approximates this approach. It must be said, however, that the proliferation of No Kings events—now up to 3,300 in rural, suburban, and small-town locations as well as urban ones—suggests to the imagination something like Jefferson’s wish to divide the country’s counties into small wards for the purpose of spreading republican government to the country’s citizens.

So at these No Kings rallies, I kind of channel the old people present when the foundation of Jerusalem’s second temple was completed. The young focused on the limited freedom that the temple represented and shouted for joy. But the old remembered the fuller freedom that the pre-exilic, original temple represented and “wept and wailed aloud.”5

But from a messianic standpoint, there’s also reason to cheer. The No Kings protests perform three vital, foundational tasks toward the re-establishment of public life. Remarkably, these three tasks seem to coalesce around the thought of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has instructed the church on messianic time.

Why “remarkably”? I think any confluence of political task and philosophy is remarkable. Agamben, true to a philosopher’s form when addressing politics, resists being pinned down to application, to a particular political program. But Agamben does offer one application in his 1990 book The Coming Community—the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Those protests exemplify the three tasks he identifies and that I find also in the No Kings protests.

The first task is to challenge state sovereignty. As the phrase “no kings” suggests, the No Kings rallies organize themselves around the idea of rejecting sovereignty and supporting the U.S. Constitution’s balance of powers. The Bible organizes itself around the same concept: God alone is king. When God raises Jesus from the dead, he declares his judgment against all forms of earthy sovereignty and the dark spiritual forces that support them. I can get behind the “no kings” of No Kings.

Agamben finds the same overall assertion of political freedom against sovereignty in the then-recent Tiananmen protests:

What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict . . .6

Many participants of both No Kings and Tiananmen advocate for specific policies that a state would implement, but the overall thrust (democracy, “no kings”) suggests something more foundational: a way of doing politics without the state. Pointing to Tiananmen, Agamben gestures toward this deeper conflict between the now and the desired future:

The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever sovereignty and the State organization.7

This “whatever” as in Agamben’s notion of “whatever singularity”—the key concept in The Coming Community—isn’t an indifference to the things that we might use to organize ourselves into communities (Agamben at every turn exemplifies this tendency with examples such as “being red, being French, being Muslim”). Agamben’s “whatever” doesn’t reject the universal for the specific or the specific for the universal. Instead, it describes a way of actively loving the world as a lover loves their beloved (a particular universal), including their particular traits, but not based on their particular traits.8 This love, expressed as community, is what Agamben says the state cannot abide:

What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging . . .9

Our intolerance for separation as a means of belonging, one that finds no need for the nation-state’s binding, brings me to the second task of the No Kings protests: to demonstrate this undifferentiated belonging. The No Kings protests attract people from many actual or would-be “identity groups.” The protests involve all ages, races, and sexual orientations, for instance. Protesters come from many walks of life and categorize themselves by different social and political labels.

Above: also at our town’s March 28 No Kings rally.

Agamben doesn’t reject these and other categories. He finds, in fact, that contemporary politics wrongfully “unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities.”10 But he argues that to use such categories as the basis for a political movement—and eventually as the basis for a new or a revised state—would attempt to oppose the state with the state’s own logic. If we adopted this nation-state strategy—if we grounded the political community in the notion of a particular identity or of a coalition of identities—any success in that endeavor would eventually replicate the state’s failure.

What’s left without categories? Agamben doesn’t counter communities that make particular categories of identity a condition of belonging with notions of a “negative community,” which he defines as a community mediated by “the simple absence of conditions.” The coming political community, instead of being based on conditions or on an absence of conditions, will be based on unconditional “belonging itself.”11

This political belonging is located in our faces, Agamben says:

My face is my outside . . . In the face, I exist with all of my properties (my being brown, tall, pale, proud, emotional . . .), but this happens without any of these properties essentially identifying me or belonging to me.12

This understanding of political community processes Tiananmen as a threshold, or what Agamben calls “the event of an outside.”13 When he counsels us to “Be only your face. Go to the threshold,” he insists that we reclaim our political life from the mere spectacle that politicians and media establishments (now including social media) present to reduce public life.14

A spectacle is a single visage. Spectacle fools us into thinking that the true substance is the unseen person behind the visage. Spectacle teaches us that the face is a simulacrum, something that hides the truth.

But true politics isn’t spectacle. Politics is located not in the visage but in the face, “the simultaneity [the simultas] of the visages, that is, the restless power that keeps them together and constitutes their being in common.” Politics teaches us that when we come together face to face, we encounter together something like the face of God, a face that Agamben describes as “the simultas of human faces” and that Dante describes as “our effigy.”15

This is No Kings’ third task. The protests get us over our thresholds and into public life, even if just to show our faces to one another.

Showing our faces means more than just showing our signs. Politics can’t be reduced to merely communicating messages. Real politics communicates ourselves as communicators,16 and at this early stage of our recovery from spectacle, I thought I’d point the way to this distinction with some meta-protest.

Above: Yours truly, at our town’s March 28 No Kings rally.

Admittedly, my “We are the signs” sign signals that my signage hasn’t advanced much since my “I don’t have time for this” sign that I waved in 2010 at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” Those on the left who criticized the 2010 rally, I think, missed the rally’s implicit invitation to public life and its foundational message about public freedom. They missed the comedians’ reflection on what Shakespeare calls man’s “glassy essence,” something Ann E. Berthoff picks up on:

Man is a Sign. Salvation lies in agapism . . . The agapastic process moves beyond individual man and out of our circle of society, that “loosely compacted person,” into futurity . . .17

Here, in semiotic terms, Berthoff echos Agamben’s idea of love in public life, the notion of a lover moving beyond both the universal (“individual man”) and the specific (“our circle of society”) and into the coming community.

And here, Agamben says, is where the State sends in the tanks.18

Rejecting sovereignty, coming together in diversity, and showing our faces to one another in public spaces might not seem like much. It’s not a political program. But these tasks amount to the ontological foundations of any healthy political program. More importantly, they also point to the coming community.

Agamben identifies these tasks, finds them happening in the Tiananmen protests, and asks for nothing more. His foundational approach helps me celebrate No Kings for what it is while acknowledging, at this early stage of crossing our thresholds, what it isn’t. As the prophet asks those rebuilding the temple, “Does anyone scorn a day of small beginnings?”19

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Above: my other No Kings meta-sign. Cat-Cat himself protests by twitching his tail and offering us his butt. Agamben explains why the cat doesn’t need my sign: “Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it. That is why they are not interested in mirrors, in the image as image.” Agamben, Means without End, 93. My meta-sign is my perfect mirror, my claim to my own exposition.

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Acton: This used to be the school chapel.

Phil: Walking in, I thought it was a cathedral.2

Divya: Making a chapel a theatre isn’t such a big transformation. Take out the communion rail, put up a raised stage.

Acton: No raised stage here, though, unless we want a traditional proscenium. We can also make a theater in the round like last spring. We use movable seating risers to design different spaces and involve the audience more.

Phil: Woah, Transformers’ alt-mode! But it’s all the same, right? No matter how you manipulate it, the stage is the stage, and the audience remains spectators.

Above: Detail of The Laughing Audience (1733) by William Hogarth.

Acton: You’re saying the fourth wall stands.

Phil: Sure, the fourth wall. Sounds untouchable, like the third rail.

Acton: Pretty much. Diderot came up with it. Aren’t you a philosophy major?

Phil: I read a dialogue Diderot wrote about the theater, but it didn’t mention any wall.3 Are you going back to the house anytime soon?

Acton: I’ll probably be here all night. Remember last fall’s show?

Divya: What’s the fourth wall?

Phil: I thought The Stranger was a novel.

Acton and Divya: It is.

Divya: But Acton’s troupe is transforming it into a play. So what’s the fourth wall?

Acton: Diderot says actors should imagine a wall between them and the audience. Eliminating audience distraction would allow players to concentrate on acting well.4

Phil: Acting well is also the point of Diderot’s dialogue. Two guys argue over whether actors should get emotional or whether they should be calculating—whether they should think through every inflection and gesture and do it the same effective way each performance.

Divya: Who wins the argument?

Phil: Diderot wins. The Enlightenment philosopher writes the dialogue, right? So guess what. Forget sensibility. Be rational, even on the stage giving an emotionally charged performance. Diderot calls it the paradox of acting. That’s what he named his dialogue, too.

Divya: Was his fourth wall descriptive or prescriptive?

Phil: The stranger was convicted for smoking at his mother’s funeral, right?

Acton: Not exactly. [Turning to Divya] Phil doesn’t know what “prescriptive” means. Long before Diderot, Shakespeare had a fourth wall if you don’t count the asides and soliloquies. Or the groundlings shouting at the actors. So maybe descriptive.

Phil: Okay, ready for this? Prescriptive, too. It was like Diderot’s encyclopedia, which he said was meant to change how people think.5 The 18th-century theater had loads of audience interaction. In Paris and London, patrons walked around on stage with the actors and waved to their pals up in the boxes. Audience members would scream and wail during death scenes, too. Diderot wanted to change that.

Above: Detail of Portrait of Denis Diderot (1767) by Louis Michael van Loo.

Divya: How did the patrons get away with it?

Phil: Actors had the social rank of servants. At home, people undressed in front of their servants because the servants didn’t count. At the theater, people would act up because actors didn’t count.6

Divya: How could the actors possibly act?

Phil: Diderot’s point exactly.

Divya: It also sounds like we can trace our actor worship back to Diderot.

Acton: Probably. Before him, people focused on the lines. Theatre-goers knew what was coming—what was coming on stage, anyway. Few plays opened in Diderot’s day. People would see the same shows over and over and would respond to them each time in similar ways. But the similar ways weren’t exactly the same each time.7

Divya: Sounds like liturgy.

Phil: Liturgy’s a good analogy. Until Diderot, a play was seen as one way of getting across text. The actors were considered rhetoricians, and so were priests. The priests in church were the best rhetoricians because they had the best text.8

Divya: “Liturgy” means the work of the people, and the people sure seem to have done more “work” in the 18th-century theater than in more modern ones.

Phil: One sociologist thinks Diderot’s debate between actors’ sentiment and their artifice broke the connection between acting out the text and the authority of the text.9 People stop judging a sermon, say, by the compunction it causes. Instead, people start judging it by its oratory.10

Acton: I was going to say pre-Diderot theater is like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. My grandfather saw it all through college. The movie bombed after like the first week, so the theaters started showing the movie only at midnight. But people came again and again at midnight wearing wild but predictable costumes and throwing the same props in response to the same lines. When a particular character proposes a toast, as he seems to do each viewing, people throw dry toast.11 Rocky Horror became the longest running movie ever.12

Phil: Yeah, Rocky Horror’s the revenge of the 18th century. The audience was making the movie genre into a joke. Or I guess the joke wasn’t the movie. The joke was the idea of sitting silently in public watching a movie.

Acton: The joke was the fourth wall. The fourth wall makes us go out in public only to watch actors develop their characters’ inner lives.13 Some public encounter.

Above: Victoria (right) and her friend Lyneve in costume for a Boy George and Culture Club concert in April 1984 in Nashville.

Divya: That’s why the stranger was executed.

Phil: For throwing shit during a theatrical production?

Divya: Not exactly, Phil. Meursault—the stranger and first-person narrator—has no inner life for the jury to hear about. He smokes during the vigil in front of his mother’s casket. He sleeps with a new girl the day after the funeral. The murder, of course, has nothing to do with any of this. But the prosecution wants to show that Meursault doesn’t follow social conventions. Based on the facts, the jury should convict him of something like second-degree murder. Instead they sentence him to death.

Phil: He doesn’t follow social conventions, so he must’ve planned the murder.

Acton: Right. The court and the prosecutor pry into his private life. They want interior theater, like our fourth-wall moviegoers. And Meursault won’t oblige them.

Phil: So the court reenacts Robespierre’s hunt for hypocrisy. Camus was French, right?

Acton: Yeah, but . . .

Phil: Words and deeds are the stuff of public appearance, Hannah Arendt famously claimed. But the motives behind words and deeds are cloaked in the heart’s darkness and should remain there. All motives become suspicious in public daylight.14 Are you guys doing The Stranger straight up or art nouveau?

Divya: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

Phil: Jesus?

Divya: Jeremiah.15

Acton: Toss in that jeremiad when you defend your M.Div. thesis, Div. [To Phil] Art nouveau, Phil, if you will. If you must.

Phil: Robespierre made patriotism a heart matter, so he shined the public light on the hearts of his enemies and allies alike. Dark hearts lead to rolling heads.16

Divya: And to Meursault’s execution, I guess. Though his heart wasn’t exactly dark. It was just illegible. “Who can know it?”

Acton: Maybe Robespierre was channeling Jesus. Didn’t Jesus rail against hypocrisy?

Divya: Not as we understand “hypocrisy”—or as the members of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety understood it. The Greek word we transliterate into “hypocrisy” didn’t begin to refer to the inconsistency between private behavior and public presentation until the second century A.D.17

Phil: What did “hypocrisy” mean before then? I’ve heard Jesus was essentially calling the Pharisees actors—as people playing public roles.18

Divya: Right. But “actors” wasn’t the word’s primary meaning.19 Back in Attic Greece, hupocritēs meant someone who recited or declaimed Greek poetry or drama. In Jesus’ day and for centuries leading up to it, it also meant someone who interpreted text, including an actor. Hupocritēs derives from the Greek verb krinein, which is concerned with interpretation. Krinein gives us English words like “critic,” “criterion” and “discern,” all having to do with interpretation. The association of hupocritēs with acting was derived from an actor’s role in interpreting.20

Phil: So Jesus wasn’t calling the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites?

Divya: He was calling them hupocritēs, which is better translated as hypercritical, not hypocritical, interpreters.21 Matthew’s Anchor Bible translates the “woe” lines in chapter 23 as “Away with you, you pettifogging Pharisee lawyers!”22

Phil: “Pettifogging”? Was Jesus British?

Divya: Pettifogging. Quibble about petty stuff. A fog machine belching out pettiness.

Phil: Will your art nouveau production use fog machines? Hey, stage noir . . .

Acton: No. But we’re making the audience the mourners at the funeral and the jury at the trial. They did this ten years ago in a German production.23

Phil: Rocky Horror!

Divya: Liturgy!

Acton: So what was Jesus’ deal with the Pharisee lawyers?

Divya: They were interpreting the Mosaic covenant narrowly and oppressively. One of his seven woe’s captures this best: they tithed even their herbs but they neglected—Jesus charged—justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

Phil: Wasn’t that hypocrisy as we understand it?

Divya: Not really. When Jesus points to a discrepancy, it’s between the scribes’ and Pharisees’ public personae, like their long public prayers, and their systemic public injustice, such as forcing poor widows to pay so much in tithes and taxes that they lose their homes. But you could say that their interpretations were private in one sense: their interpretations of scripture were outside of the great tradition advocated by the Hebrew prophets and later by Jesus.

Acton: So the Greek word for hypocrisy has mutated like modern theater. Both started out having to do with the text’s interpretation. Then both had to do with an actor’s inner state, whether that state is emotional or calculating.

Phil: Performance mirrors philology.

Divya: Something like that. And the transitions in both cases have to do with the fourth wall. Jesus wants everyone participating in public life. His first “Away with you” addresses this directly: the Pharisee lawyers have shut the door to God’s kingdom in people’s faces.

Phil: If the kingdom is no longer about text, speech and action,24 then it’s solely about the human heart. And the public light on the human heart brings a pandemic of suspicion. Hunts for hypocrisy in the modern sense keep people out of public life, too.

Divya: Jesus addressed the human heart, of course. But he wasn’t making the Mosaic law more private. He was diagnosing why public life keeps going wrong: contempt, greed, lust for honor.

Phil: How will you guys deal with Meursault’s suspicious and unknowable human heart?

Acton: The director in the 2016 German production made Meursault into a community. Three actors played him. We’re doing the same.

Above: Photograph of Albert Camus.

Phil: Each actor gets his own night?

Acton: No, all actors play Meursault every night. They’re passing around his lines based on which part of Meursault is best suited to land them—or, because it’s Meursault, to fail to land them. The dialogue among the Meursaults becomes a functioning Greek chorus of sorts, a voice of the community of Meursault.

Divya: How will that challenge the community’s Robespierre-like hypocrite hunt? What will it say about the jury’s sentencing of Meursault based on his suspicious interior life?

Acton: If a court defendant’s thoughts are portrayed as three people, an “interior” public life isn’t possible. Meaning isn’t within but among. Spaces of interpretation open up among the Meursaults. The chorus, as always, serves as a public mirror, but here the public—the healthy, meaning-making public—is itself on trial. Meursault’s death sentence suggests the death of public life.

Divya: The inversion of Jesus’ death, which inaugurates God’s reign.

Acton: I suppose so.

Phil: I’m going to bed.

Acton: Wait. Grab me some pizza. Get some for Meursault, too.

Phil: I’m not feeding a chorus.

Divya: I’ll go in on it. We’ll be back in a minute.

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Above: The Laughing Audience (1733), here in its glorious entirety, by William Hogarth.

Political Devotions news

I don’t use artificial intelligence to write, revise or edit anything. But I’ve been using Bing Image Creator for many of my posts’ illustrations, the ones in the style of illuminated manuscripts. I’m also now using Claude to help me research. It’s fun! Claude’s a boon companion, though he needs to be challenged often. To err is human, I guess. And when Claude is shown to be wrong, he’s forthcoming and contrite.

I’m also had ElevenLabs generate the audio version of this dialogue. Claude helped me through using ElevenLabs for this purpose: making a dialogue into an audio file with three distinct voices isn’t something that comes easily to ElevenLabs. Claude even helped me pick out suitable voices on ElevenLabs based on how I described our three characters. I hope you like the audio, though I can’t say the voice acting is too good.

But the biggest news of all: Political Devotions has new office space! Substack wants us all to put mailing addresses out there, and it seems beneath the dignity of my own Substack to use our home address. So I went to the nearest town and snapped up P. O. Box 29.

In Northern Virginia where I’m from, renting a P. O. Box with a number as low as four digits is an accomplishment. My new, two-digit address makes me feel like a big shot around these parts, like a former mayor or an absentee landowner or something. (The town—Mount Pleasant—has lots of three-digit P. O. boxes to support my illusion of instant entrenchment.)

All to say that my writerly self now lives out its corporeal existence in this venerable, fusty box:

So do it the hard way. Drop me a line at:

Bryce Tolpen
P. O. Box 29
Mount Pleasant TN 38474-0029

Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness.1

There’s so much delicious irony in this long, periodic sentence, and irony is the vernacular of biblical justice. As with all periodic sentences, nothing really happens until the sentence’s subject and verb finally show up: “the word of God came.” God chooses the time. All of the authority and actions of Tiberius Caesar and Caiaphas and the rest are reduced here, syntactically speaking, to subordinate phrases and clauses. The empire and its client rulers add up to nothing but backdrop.

The sentence’s syntax, then, reinforces its semantics: the word of God doesn’t come to this world’s rulers but to John, a man eating locusts and wild honey and clothed with camel’s hair.2 God chooses the space: we hear of Galilee, Itruaea, Trachonitis, and Abilene, but John shows up outside of the Roman Empire’s way of organizing space. God’s word comes to him “in the wilderness.” John is off the grid.

Rulers like grids. Grids are a part of the orderliness and sameness that modern rulers prefer in their domains. Political theorist Benjamin Constant discovered this preference from observing Napoleon:

The conquerors of our days, peoples or princes, want their empire to possess a unified surface over which the superb eye of power can wander without encountering any inequality which hurts or limits its view. The same code of law, the same measures, the same rules, and if we could gradually get there, the same language . . . The great slogan of the day is uniformity.3

To govern cities more efficiently, kingdoms and empires often build or reconstitute cities using lines that intersect at right angles, creating grids. A city’s grid structure is most evident not to a city’s pedestrians but to the principalities and powers that govern the city from above the city’s communities. This bird’s-eye grid pattern presents a tradeoff in favor of the city’s rulers and against its inhabitants, as James C. Scott points out:

Although certain state services may be more easily provided and distant addresses more easily located [through a grid street layout], these apparent advantages may be negated by such perceived disadvantages as the absence of a dense street life, the intrusion of hostile authorities, the loss of spacial irregularities that foster coziness, gathering places for informal recreation, and neighborhood feeling.

Scott concludes that while the grid may work “for municipal and state authorities in administering the city,” the grid’s assistance in administrating a city “is no guarantee that it works for citizens.”4 Communities need “spatial irregularities,” he says, and their citizens need those irregularities’ gathering places.

Grids privilege buildings over spaces between buildings. The sameness of a city block’s rectangle sets an architect’s building design off to best advantage. But many city planners, doing what they can with the reticulation of streets they’ve inherited, fight with architects to factor in “figural space” when designing their buildings, their “figural objects.” Here’s how city planner and architect Jeff Speck defines figural space:

[Traditional urbanism] believes that the shape of the spaces between buildings is what matters, because this is the public realm—the place where civic life plays out.5

It’s not as if architects don’t understand figural space. A similar concept, “solid-void theory,” shows up as “Thing #5” in Matthew Frederick’s book 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School:

Solid-void theory . . . holds that the volumetric spaces shaped or implied by the placement of solid objects are as important as, or more important than, the objects themselves.6

Good architects, of course, apply solid-void theory inside their buildings to create interesting spaces. But good, civic-minded architects apply it also, if they can, to their buildings’ exteriors, taking advantage of their buildings’ contexts of streets and other buildings to create interesting spatial irregularities as potential nests for public life.

Grids are also an example of what theologian John Milbank terms “simple space.” Simple space is “suspended between the mass of atomic individuals” below and a centralized government above.7 Simple space helps eliminate horizontal spaces that make for free associations among citizens. Simple spaces do this even when a central government seems tamed by a social construct to which citizens impliedly consent. One can see the effect of a simple-spaces mindset even in the American Revolution’s slogan, “No taxation without representation.” The slogan, purely vertical in its orientation without a hint of free association, is a pre-war surrender of sorts, ceding liberty to a future simple space between atomized individuals and a centralized representative government.

By contrast, Milbank’s concept of “gothic space” is horizontal and complex in nature. Its complexity honors “the irreplacability of individual vantage-points for the making of judgments.”8 Instead of merely mediating between part (individual) and whole (sovereign), the associations that congregate in gothic space tend to become signs that are themselves mediated, fostering a community of interpretation. Using Milbank’s less semiotic phrasing, the associations “become themselves a new sort of context, a never ‘completed’ and complexly ramifying ‘network’, involving ‘confused’, overlapping jurisdictions, which disperses and dissolves political sovereignty.”9

Gothic space, then, threatens the sovereignty that thrives above the grid’s simple space. Gothic space adjusts “to the innovations made by free subjects, without thereby surrendering the quest of harmonic coherence.”10 Gothic space’s coherence isn’t that of brutalizing sovereignty: “. . . not only does the whole exceed the sum of the parts, also the parts escape the totalizing grasp of the whole.”11

Gothic cathedrals mirror these ideals found in the complex relationships of gothic towns and medieval life. The “upwardly aspiring building, representing hierarchy and the sacred,” is at the same time “subordinated to the function of sheltering the many altars, many depictions, many procedures, enacted within its frame.”12 One recalls the psalmist’s description of the unforeseen mixed use in Jerusalem’s temple:

The bird also has found a house, And the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, Even Your altars, O LORD of hosts, My King and my God.13

The swallow’s usage of the altars’ figural space suggests how, in God’s presence, “parts are in turn wholes.”

But figural space isn’t merely a way to picture these ideals. Architecture can be an invitation to public practice: as Milbank says, “Variegated space has to have literal embodiment.”14

In simple space, citizens have little agency since God’s public presence is reduced to the theoretical source of the government’s authority. Likewise, God’s economic presence is reduced to becoming the mover, if not the creator, of the market’s invisible hand.15 But in gothic space, agency and diversity are privileged over statism and capitalism: “every act of association, every act of economic exchange, involves a mutual judgement about what is right, true and beautiful, about the order we are to have in common.”16 Because this order comes from an “irreducible diversity” (much as the Trinity is, as Walter Brueggemann describes God, “irreducibly, inscrutably relational”),17 and because this order is mediated by the parties to the association and exchange, it “tends to be imbued with a ‘sacred’ character.”18

Medieval streets match medieval cathedrals in their “irreducible diversity.” An aerial view of medieval cities would have had “the look of disorder,” according to Scott:

Streets, lanes, and passages intersect at varying angles with a density that resembles the intricate complexity of some organic processes. . . . The cityscape of Bruges in 1500 could be said to privilege local knowledge over outside knowledge, including that of external political authorities. It functioned spatially in much the same way a difficult or unintelligible dialect would function linguistically. . . . Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside cities. . . . Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.19

Other “rural analogues” to medieval streets include the paths created by America’s First Nations and many of the animals they lived among, paths that were largely illegible to colonizers.20

John the Baptist’s wilderness, coming at the end of Luke’s long, periodic sentence, provides a biblical “rural analogue” to medieval streets. The wilderness made John’s power illegible to the civil and religious authorities that framed his life and message.

But in the United States, the grid works against spaces like John’s wilderness as much as it works against civic life. Soon after the Revolutionary War, Congress adopted Thomas Jefferson’s plan to divide the American wilderness west of the Ohio River into rectangular lots and townships. The resulting regularity, Jefferson argued, would create “legibility for the taxing authority” (Scott’s words), and it also would create “a convenient and cheap way to package land and market it in homogeneous units.”21 Jefferson’s grid system covered what is now two-thirds of the United States.22

Due in large part to Jefferson’s grid overlay, “a way of thinking about space took shape in America that was primarily concerned not about actual space, but its possible price,” according to Willie Jennings.23 For our new nation and other nations that adopted our approach,24 the grid system organized land the way race organized bodies reoriented from their lands, Jennings points out:

Like the formation of racial vision organized around white bodies, the grid system operated without regard to any specific geographic features. And like the conceptual turnings of whiteness in which tribes and peoples, their stories, their ways of life were charted through the visual logic of their phenotypes and racial classifications, the grid system drew lines through mountains, valleys, rivers, burial sites, and so on.25

Jefferson’s grid system facilitated our domination and reconstitution of what we considered to be wilderness. These imaginative grids chopped through the land’s topographical features and through the indigenous communities that inhabited the land.

A grid, like greed, reduces reality to mere potential. Due to Jefferson’s grid, white Americans settling west of the Ohio bought “space, rather than land,” John B. Jackson points out, and this space “was so easy to buy, so easy to sell, that commitment to a specific plan for the future must have been difficult for many.” Grids of streets in western settlements emptied out sometimes more quickly than they were constructed, Jackson says.26 But that abandonment was according to plan. Jefferson’s grid system, Jackson says, was “never meant to produce close-knit communities.”27

The future is a creature of covenant. Most American settlers moved away from a real future—a future together in covenant—even as they moved west to seek a new economic future as individuals. Luke’s account of John’s advent suggests that any incursion by God’s kingdom to establish community will start against the grid.

Discussion questions

1. What do you think the significance of the wilderness setting was to John and to those he baptized?

2. What changes to government, aesthetics, community, or other factors might have contributed to the move from the aerial-view chaos of medieval cities to the aerial-view orderliness of many modern cities?

3. What came first (if either came at all)—the American settlers’ individualism or their commodification of land? Is one the cause of the other?

4. What examples of simple or complex space do you find in America? What parts of America favor figural objects? What parts of America favor figural space? What is each part’s community life like? In any of these parts of America, is there any correlation between space and community life?

5. “Luke’s account of John’s advent suggests that any incursion by God’s kingdom to establish community will start against the grid.” Discuss.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.2

Theologians gravitate also to the same language in Matthew 16, which applies to Peter instead of to Jesus’ entire community.3

Outside of these two verses, the meaning of binding and loosing in the New Testament is not particularly abstract or debatable. In the 41 other uses of “bind” (δέω, or deō) and the 40 other uses of “loose” (λύω, or lyō), the context leaves little doubt about what the words mean. The meanings for each word, though, differ depending on how they’re employed. The semantic range of “bind” (deō) stretches from the binding of prisoners and of Satan to the binding in covenant.4 The semantic range of “loose” (lyō) stretches from forgiving debt to delivering from bondage to destroying something.5

These different meanings give us a lot to work with when we return to Matthew 18:18, the catalyst of this devotion. The meanings suggest that one or more of them might fit each of our verse’s more open-ended “whatever you bind” and “whatever you loose” categories. But which, and what to make of the results?

The various meanings cause theologians to draw various conclusions about the verse as a whole. Do “whatever you bind” and “whatever you loose” refer to the apostles’ power to excommunicate? Do they echo the disciples’ authority, found in John’s Gospel, to forgive or retain sins? Do they refer to the binding of demons and the freeing of people possessed by them? Do they institute the Roman Catholic Church?6

Or whether you believe or don’t believe they do any or all of the above, could “bind” and “loose” also reconstitute what we call political theology? Despite the crowds of theologians surrounding Matthew 18:18, this possibility is worth expending some theopolitical imagination.

And more importantly—and for those of us with only a small stake in the interdisciplinary field known as political theology—could “bind” and “loose” help us restore the public realm?

I think so, with help from the verse’s context and from Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt.

Let’s start with the most prevalent current view of “whatever you bind” and “whatever you loose”: Jesus, consistent with (arguably) contemporary rabbinic teaching, is referring to his disciples’ “halakhic authority”—that is, to their authority to decide how, if at all, a given mitzvah (command) applies to a given situation:

In this practice of halakhic binding and loosing, rabbis uphold the law as eternal and universal but recognize that new contexts require new decisions about how to bind or loose particular behaviors.7

This kind of binding and loosing is necessary. Of course, it can also get pretty punctilious. KindaLee Pfremmer DeLong provides an example:

. . . certain rabbis allow a hot bath on Sabbath but “bind” washing and “loose” sweating. In other words, if a person soaks in a warm bath on Sabbath, scrubbing is considered work—a violation of the divine command to honor the Sabbath—but sweating is not.8

Jesus, of course, isn’t exactly known for engaging in punctilio, and it’s not likely that his enigmatic statement pertains merely to authorizing his disciples’ engagement in it. But Jesus is, on perhaps a deeper level, asking his disciples to work out communal norms, which is a form of binding and an aspect of covenant. In the New Testament, after all, binding in covenant is a frequent meaning of deō.

Another source of finding how “bind” and “loose” work in Matthew 18:18 is the verse’s fuller, political context.9 Though the verse makes “bind” and “loose” into abstractions, Jesus places his abstracting remark itself in a concrete communal context.

Jesus’ binding and loosing remark comes just before and after he speaks about covenanting and forgiving in community life. Right before the remark, he speaks about the number of witnesses necessary for the assembly to hear and adjudicate about someone’s sins. Implicit in this context is both covenant, present in the assembly’s formation, and forgiveness, which the assembly is ready and willing to offer.10 Then, right after the binding and loosing remark, Jesus speaks of two or three that “agree on earth”—that covenant, or that act under their preexisting covenant—will have their request granted “from my Father in the heavens.”11

Then Jesus returns to forgiveness. Jesus answers Peter’s question about how many times he must forgive his brother.12 This conversation about forgiveness leads DeLong and others to conclude that “loosing” in verse 18 also includes forgiveness.13 In the conversation, Peter seems to be asking for, and receiving, clarification about loosing, part of what two chapters earlier in Matthew were seemingly his exclusive rights as the person holding “the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”14 But here in chapter 18, Jesus implies that we all have the keys of the kingdom—the authority to bind and loose, to covenant and to forgive.

Jesus’ “whatever you bind” refers to covenanting. Jesus’ “whatever you loose” refers to forgiveness. These phrases surely refer to other things as well. The verse invites us to explore layers of meaning.

But could Jesus be presenting covenant and forgiveness to humankind as keys to a public realm he calls the kingdom of God?

If so, may we accept these keys? May we, in the first place, engage our theopolitical imaginations when reading the Bible? And may we, in this particular act of imagination, read the Bible to find guidance on and inspiration for political and community life? Arendt bemoans how Jesus’ sayings, many of which “sprang from experiences in the small and closely knit community of his followers” and constitute challenges to his community’s political authorities, “have been neglected because of their allegedly exclusively religious nature.”15 Consistent with Arendt’s observation, our modern understanding of religion as separate from politics makes many of us relegate the stretch of Matthew 18 in question here, including our enigmatic verse 18, entirely to theology and its subset ecclesiology—to “church life” and “church government.”

But as Arendt seems to have intuited, Jesus’ assemblies—the one he started and the ones later started by the likes of Peter, James, and Paul—are at once political and religious communities. They offer public freedom and an alternative to the larger political and religious community known as the Roman Empire.

After the Roman Empire collapsed, some political thinkers came close to returning to this fuller understanding of Jesus’ ancient communities. In late medieval and modern times, political theorists and movements have accessed both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to explore new means of conducting civic life together. The early-modern republicans, for instance, studied the Bible for over a century and discovered a model republic there. Both Walter Brueggemann and Nicholas Wolterstorff use the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to flesh out political concepts involving covenant, justice, and mercy.16

Carl Schmitt, the Nazi political theorist credited with inspiring our new interdisciplinary field of political theology, is only one of the recent influential thinkers to at least partially ground their political theory in the Bible’s pages.

Arendt, who escaped the Nazis’ grasp twice, is another. She suggests that Abraham discovers the power inherent in covenant. With her tongue perhaps only partially lodged in her cheek, Arendt offers this summary of Abraham’s wanderings:

. . . [Abraham’s] whole story, as the Bible tells it, shows such a passionate drive toward making covenants that it is as though he departed from his country for no other reason than to try out the power of mutual promise in the wilderness of the world, until eventually God himself agreed to make a Covenant with him.17

Likewise, Arendt credits Jesus with discovering “the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs.”18 She points out that Jesus’ miracle of healing a paralyzed man was proof that “the Son of man hath power upon earth to forgive sins.”19 This power to forgive is “upon earth,” Arendt emphasizes, and “must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also.”20

Just as Jesus links binding and loosing to covenanting and forgiving, so also Arendt links covenanting and forgiving to each other. To be clear, Arendt, as far as I know, never references Jesus’ remarks about binding and loosing. But her insights into Abraham and Jesus as fellow political thinkers serve as lenses we might use to understand Jesus’ remarks about binding and loosing in this more theopolitical light.

Arendt views both covenanting and forgiving from the standpoint of action, the “sharing of words and deeds.” Action is vital to Arendt’s concept of public spaces: action “not only has the most intimate relationship to the public part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it.”21 For Arendt, covenanting and forgiving aren’t merely instances of the Bible teaching us about elements of healthy political life together. For her, on these two faculties—covenanting and forgiving—hang all that is necessary to protect us from the potential harmful consequences of our public action:

The two faculties [of covenant and forgiveness] belong together in so far as one of them, forgiveness, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose “sins” hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men.22

Unpredictability and irreversibility, Arendt argues, are the strengths but also the burdens of action.23 Enter covenants and forgiveness. Covenants counter unpredictability, and forgiveness counters irreversibility.

For Arendt, forgiveness doesn’t erase the past so much as it redeems it: the community learns from its mistakes and moves into the present together. Likewise, covenant doesn’t fear the future but stabilizes it through a chosen public kinship. Redeeming the past and covenanting the future allow the seeds of public speech and action to germinate in the present.

Arendt claims that action has ontological roots, and her claim reinforces the ontological earth-and-heaven language that Jesus employs in Matthew 18. By describing action as “ontologically rooted,” Arendt means that our very being—and our being together—ground our public freedom:

The miracle that saves the world . . . is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope . . . It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”24

In this public world of speech and action, she says, the relevant aspects of morality must arise from this ontology. Only two forms of morality do this, Arendt says: covenanting and forgiving:

[Public morality needs] no more to support itself than the good will to counter the enormous risks of action by readiness to forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them.25

Arendt insists that Jesus preaches not behavior, strictly speaking, but action.26 In this regard, Jesus’ binding and loosing set out a morality of action that allows his communities to create a future and redeem the past in order to make his community’s political and religious action possible in the present.

Compare this Abraham/Jesus/Arendt ontology with that of Schmitt, known as the founder of political theology.27 Schmitt famously defines the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.”28 With Schmitt, the possibility of an exception—an emergency decree—becomes “a general concept in the theory of the state,” setting aside covenant even before an emergency arises. Schmitt argues that the exception is analogous to a biblical miracle, presumably because a miracle constitutes an exception to the general course of nature. This “miracle” of the exception makes the sovereign analogous to the omnipotent God. Compare Schmitt’s association of miracles with tyranny to Jesus’ association of miracles with forgiveness, or compare it to Arendt’s association of miracles with natality. Arendt’s natality gives humankind its ontological standing to overturn the kind of oppressive structures that Schmitt’s theory champions.

In Jesus’ terms, Schmitt sets aside binding in covenant and absolutizes loosing—not the loosing of forgiveness but the loosing of destruction. Time under Schmitt’s political theology isn’t hopeful and redemptive, as it is with Jesus’s binding and loosing, but becomes a pathological form of an earthly eternity, without past or future.

Jesus’ binding and loosing, when cross-pollenated with Arendt’s twin faculties of covenant and forgiveness, offers an ontological foundation for political theology and public life that would set aside Schmitt’s theoretical, if not historical, claim to the same.

The first action Jesus preaches is to repent and believe the gospel of God’s realm.29 Surely part of that repentance is to re-adopt the good will “to forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them,”30 and to find ourselves in political communities small enough to make forgiveness and covenant lived encounters with other people.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

How do Coptic migrants navigate between these narratives of exemplary martyrs and undesirable migrants? I interview anthropologist Candace Lukasik, who writes about these issues in her new book published by NYU Press, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire.

Above: View from a monastery in Upper Egypt, fall 2009. Photo by Candace Lukasik. Used by permission.

I met Dr. Lukasik last fall at the Political Theology Network’s biannual conference in Nashville. She co-facilitated our section “Up/Rootedness” about place and migration, themes dear to my heart. After choosing the section, I found that I had migrated to a land of anthropologists, and I got a three-day practicum there on ways that anthropology can inform political theology (and vice versa).

At first, our section seemed a bit like an Indiana Jones convention, full of professors who early in their respective movies seemed to trade in their tweed jackets and classrooms for fedoras and foreign fieldwork. Presenters discussed their extensive and often dangerous work in places such as Kashmir, the Columbian Amazon, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Egypt.

I discuss some of that anthropological adventure notion with Dr. Lukasik, who has a different perspective. For her, anthropology is both an intellectual and a spiritual practice, and it backgrounds any distance and difference between her work at the university and in the field. While reading her book and interviewing her, I found that anthropology also has led her to remarkable friendships, a subtler and more gracious view of the world, and a conversion to the Coptic Orthodox faith.

The video interview is lavishly punctuated with several of Dr. Lukasik’s striking photos from her fieldwork (see Photos & timestamps below).

I hope the interview inspires your own desire to cross borders and to learn from and support those you find on the other side.

Topics & timestamps

00:30 — Setting the scene of Martyrs and Migrants: the Copts as a Christian minority in Egypt and as an Egyptian minority in the United States; the Copts in the U.S. being understood as persecuted Christians and Middle-Eastern Other

01:35 — Lukasik’s book summary: What has migration to the West done for and to the Copts? What light does the Copts’ struggle shed on geopolitical issues? What issues about the practice of Christianity today do the Copts’ experiences raise?

04:30 — What drew Lukasik to her work with the Copts in Egypt and in the U.S.? Her background, her trip as a teen for an Arabic language program and her discovery of Coptic Christianity and its “in-between-ness” within Christianity.

06:30 — Her trips to Egypt and slow discovery of migration’s effects on the Coptic tradition

07:10 — Her growing relations with Coptic friends and families; her description of her fieldwork, particularly during the violence of 2017

09:00 — The effect of the martyrdom of the twenty Egyptian Christians and one Ghanaian in Libya in 2015 and subsequent violence in Egypt had on her ongoing work

12:00 — The effect of images of this violence on the Coptic diaspora and on transnational relations among Copts

13:10 — How fieldwork affects her teaching; how she presents anthropology to perspective students; how she has come to understand the interplay of classroom and fieldwork (versus Bryce’s “Indiana Jones” theory of the professor with the adventurous side students hear about but don’t experience); anthropology as attending to the messiness of the world

19:10 — The blend of her spiritual and intellectual journey involving her classroom, her research, and her fieldwork, including her conversion to Coptic Orthodoxy

20:45 — How the situations of Coptic Christians and Palestinian Christians compare with respect to the powerful Christian persecution narrative and the applicability of Lukasik’s concept of an “economy of blood.” The nature of narratives that make a people visible to empire.

24:50 — The “economy” of the “economy of blood” and the “blood” of the “economy of blood”; the “economy of blood” through theological and political lenses

29:20 — How asylum law as practiced with Coptic petitioners often differs from other, less legible Middle Eastern Christian petitioners because of the economy of blood

32:00 — The tension between the Christian persecution narrative and the need for specific harm in Coptic asylum application hearings to create legibility before the law

35:12 — Copts work in law enforcement often to create visibility within the police forces for Copts in the community and to help the forces differentiate between Copts and Egyptian Muslims. Copts work in law enforcement often in an attempt to keep Copts from being seen as the Other.

39:10 — Copts in law enforcement are somewhat like Irish emigres working for law enforcement to become legible as part of their new American community. A group’s distinction from Dangerous Others is part of becoming American.

40:42 — How the Coptic Orthodox Church serves as the governments’ point of contact with its Coptic population in both Egypt and in places like Nashville, Tennessee. The causes and downsides of such relationships: the church wants to play to the role that the broader geography expects of it, but that role is challenged by the needs and perspectives of poor and working-class Copts.

44:12 — The innovative work of Lydia Yousief and the Elmahaba Center in Nashville in community organizing and community support, work that makes up for the inattention to new Coptic migrants by the Coptic Church in Nashville

46:12 — The first Coptic migrants came to Nashville to build the next phase of Opryland

46:52 — How Tyson Foods covered up the exposure of Coptic workers to COVID; how the church discouraged the Tyson workers from unionizing and from forming coalitions with other migrant workers

47:22 — Elmahaba Center interrupts the neoliberal emphasis on who are—and who are not—members of the Body of Christ by emphasizing community needs and the need for different perspectives that a community carries

Photos & timestamps

00:31 — Cover of Martyrs and Migrants

05:44 — Candace Lukasik in 2009, visiting around 40 monasteries over four days with a Coptic Orthodox youth group in Cairo

09:36 — Coptic martyr blood behind glass at the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo

16:34 — An image on martyrdom in a Coptic church that Dr. Lukasik used in her class the day before the video. The image is from the bombing near Saint Mark’s Orthodox Coptic Cathedral in Cairo in December 2016.

17:56 — An image on martyrdom in a Coptic church that Dr. Lukasik used in her class the day before the video. The image is from a commemoration room at the Cathedral for the 21 martyrs of Libya.

19:31 — Bahjūra from a rooftop

26:43 — Image from a church in Upper Egypt. It might be seen as a metaphor for thinking about the economy as part of inclusion in the Body and reflection of the outside

27:44 — U.S. and Egyptian flags in a Staten Island home

29:07 — A Coptic Church in Jersey City

30:37 — One of the computers Copts use in Upper Egypt to enter in Green Card Lottery information

31:06 — A white board where Coptic migrants take their photos to apply to the Green Card Lottery in Upper Egypt

37:28 — “Honeywell Security / Proud to be a Coptic American”: issues of security and inclusion

43:47 — An image of St. Mina in a Nashville gas station where Copts work

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In Rome there were no persons such as there were in ancient China who could be acclaimed . . . as members of an “untitled nobility.” Wealth and “honors” were made to converge. The one could not be achieved or maintained without the other. For this reason, when approaching wealth in the later empire (as in most other periods of Roman history) we must make a fundamental transition “from a [modern] mental cosmos in which power depends largely on money to one where money depends . . . largely on power.”1

In modern times, power depends on money, but in Rome, money depends on power. Here, as with any effective chiasmus, a contrast in syntax mirrors and strengthens a contrast in semantics: power < money ^ money < power.

Admittedly, President Kennedy achieved a stronger rhetorical effect in his famous chiasmus, “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” But I now think Brown’s chiasmus is more profound.

I didn’t see the chiasmus’s larger importance at first. But as I was thinking through Brown’s suggested reorientation, I realized that I needed to go through a similar reorientation to understand how money and power work not in Ancient Rome but in America’s federal government since the 2024 election.

Up until recently, money made power. Now power makes—or breaks—money.

Power and money have switched polarities.

Above: detail from page 1 of the April 29, 2019 edition of The Washington Post.

Up until the election, if you couldn’t otherwise explain why bad politics persisted, you wouldn’t be far off if you repeated the old adage, “Follow the money.”

Why don’t we have affordable health care as do other developed nations? Follow the money.

Why don’t we ban assault weapons, despite their use in mass killings? Follow the money.

And so on.

Before the reverse polarity, the current was generally running one way: money was making power. Large corporations would back candidates and hire lobbyists to control legislation. They’d get naming rights on major stadiums and arenas. They’d control the research agenda at universities. And so on.

We’re still largely an oligarchy, as Jimmy Carter observed after Citizens United, because the rich still buy power and influence. But this reverse polarity between power and money since the 2024 election shows that we’re becoming something else—an authoritarian regime.

These days, to spot the big, regime-altering moves, don’t bother following the money. Instead, follow the servility. And start with the billionaires and CEOs who got to come in from the cold to witness and celebrate the president’s inaugural.

Witness, for instance, yesterday’s effective shuttering of the Washington Post by its owner, Jeff Bezos, along with the paper’s previously severed relationships with several reporters and writers who weren’t permitted to publish pieces critical of the administration.

Or witness the administration’s use of power to extract large settlement sums from legacy media and to have television shows the president dislikes canceled. Or the administration’s use of power to threaten federal research funding cuts to universities. Or its orders punishing law firms for advocating on behalf of people or causes the president disfavors.

Or witness areas where the administration, to this point anyway, hasn’t met with servility: the administration’s cuts to federal grants to four blue states or the administration’s plans to cut federal funding to sanctuary cities and states.

The administration’s use of power to affect the pocketbooks, and thereby the decisions, of perceived enemies doesn’t stop at the country’s borders. It has used tariffs and the threat of tariffs to influence the internal political decisions of certain countries.

Admittedly, it’s hard for the poor and the middle class to stand on the shore of a great ocean of money and power and discern which way the current is flowing. But once we feel the strong undertow of moneyed obedience, we know that the political current is shifting as surely as global warming is causing ocean currents to shift and in some cases to reverse themselves.

In the case of both politics and oceans, it’s also hard to know exactly what the results will be, but the results likely will be dire. Our new power-makes-money polarity could lead us to ancient Rome, or at least to something like it.

Brown points out that, during the Roman Empire, “most people lived miserable lives,” and their “very bodies remained at the mercy of the Roman state.” Another recent book on Roman history, this one by J. E. Lendon, describes its empire’s “crude application of force (or its insidious threat), reliance on the willing compliance of the subject to authority he acknowledged as legitimate, and the subtle workings of patronage.” There’s also the Roman army, Lendon points out, which not only expanded and defended the empire but also acted against its civilian population.2

You knew all that without my citing these history books. And it’s impossible to know if any of these specifics will come to pass in an American version of authoritarianism. But Rome wasn’t good, and this won’t be good.

Actually, Brown is quoting Lendon’s book, Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World, when he mentions the “mental cosmos in which power depends largely on money to one where money depends . . . largely on power.” I like what Lendon says right after his chiasmus, though, to exemplify this reorientation of money and power: “. . . from New York to the Mafia’s Sicily.” All of Rome’s centuries-long “honor,” Lendon suggests, comes down to violence and extortion.3

Classical republicanism, still in vogue 250 years ago when the founders signed the Declaration of Independence, advocated a simple manner of life, one that avoided luxury and excess wealth. Republicans (small “r”) knew that private riches would divert us from active public life. And Jefferson advocated for the daily practice of public life in small communities precisely so we wouldn’t fall for “a Caesar or a Bonaparte.”4

The Bible makes a similar warning about riches, starting with what the King James expresses in its own chiasmus:

. . . supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself. But godliness with contentment is great gain.5

Classical republicans similarly understand contentment as gain, as a boon to our public life together.

The writer of 1 Timothy then fleshes out how the love of money hurts us:

. . . for the love of money is a root of all evils, and reaching out for which some have wandered from the Faith and pierced themselves about with many pains.6

Have we not seen over the past several months how quickly the rich have pierced themselves, how easily they have been manipulated by power?

Are they free?

I don’t think the relationship between public freedom and money can be expressed any better than how Janis Joplin has sung it: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”7

A lot of the smart money had a lot to lose, and still does. A lot of it has surrendered to power’s newly minted willingness to extort.

And like the rich, soon we also may have to choose: our money or our public life.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Come and see four inner-city neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama. Or hear them, rather, in this 18-minute podcast episode.

Gerrel Jones has discovered Jesus as an effective community organizer, and his Renew Birmingham and its extraordinary team of staff members and volunteers are putting Jesus’s community-building principles to work in the four poorest neighborhoods in Birmingham. Renew’s story, its approach and its outcomes will challenge you to help communities in new ways—and perhaps to understand Jesus and his mission in new ways, too.

Above: Gerrel Jones, Renew Birmingham Founder and Executive Director

Resources:

Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America by Nathan McCall

Gerrel’s plug for Makes Me Wanna Holler:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Gerrel’s plug for Man’s Search for Meaning:

Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine by Richard A. Horsley

Jesus and the Politics provides an excellent theological and historical framework for understanding Jesus’s work as a community organizer.

From the publisher: “Learning from anthropological studies of the more subtle forms of peasant politics, Horsley discerns from these sources how Jesus, as a Moses- and Elijah-like prophet, generated a movement of renewal in Israel that was focused on village communities.”

Renew Birmingham’s website

Gerrel Jones’s talk before a group of Birmingham church leaders on what church should look like

Connective Tissue’s great interview of Gerrel Jones

Above: Jason Williams, Renew Birmingham Youth Program Director

Music: “Wild Wild Wet” by Pecan Pie. Used by permission.

Citations to quotes:

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second edition (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 318.

Richard A. Horsley, You Shall Not Bow down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul (Cascade Books, 2021), 71.

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While a nation-state doesn’t constitute what Arendt describes as a political place, a properly functioning nation-state may contain such places.

ICE’s recent killings of two citizens in Minneapolis, the circumstances of which the federal government is attempting to distort,2 threaten the United States’ political structure as a nation-state. The killings represent the clearest evidence to date that the federal government intends to encourage ICE’s violence against United States citizens and operate ICE as a police force answerable to no court.

Arendt died in 1975, long before ICE was established and long before the present administration encouraged ICE’s agents to act without appropriate restraint in its community sweeps and in its on-the-street patrols. But she scrutinized and critiqued uncannily similar European police forces working to deport stateless people3 during the Interwar Period. She concluded that these police forces undermined the nation-states in which they operated, first by compromising the nation-states’ rule of law.

Above: Konstantin Yuon, The Symphony of Action (1922). Public domain.

According to Arendt in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, police deporting stateless people from European nations before World War II helped to undermine the rule of law in those nations in four ways:

1. The police charged with arresting and deporting immigrants began to rule directly over the populations:

This was the first time the police in Western Europe had received authority to act on its own, to rule directly over people; in one sphere of public life it was no longer an instrument to carry out and enforce the law, but had become a ruling authority independent of government and ministries.4

Over the past year, the United States has seen ICE transform into a law-enforcement agency with little effective government oversight.5 It has broadened its scope by arresting and detaining over 170 U.S. citizens.6

2. The stateless people were put in internment camps, where they had far fewer rights than if they were incarcerated in a normal jail or penitentiary:

The same man who was in jail yesterday because of his mere presence in this world, who had no rights whatever and lived under threat of deportation, or who was dispatched without sentence and without trial to some kind of internment because he had tried to work and make a living, may become almost a full-fledged citizen because of a little theft. Even if he is penniless he can now get a lawyer, complain about his jailers, and he will be listened to respectfully. He is no longer the scum of the earth but important enough to be informed of all the details of the law under which he will be tried. He has become a respectable person.7

America has established such camps. Many people detained in these camps were arrested by ICE agents while pursuing a change in immigration status in courts. Despite a federal statute requiring immigration jails to allow members of Congress access to the facilities unannounced, the administration currently refuses to permit such visits. Previous visits by members of Congress and testimony by people incarcerated in these jails suggest widespread overcrowding, malnourishment, and physical abuse in several of these jails.8

3. The police in these countries became used to cooperating with their counterparts in Nazi Germany, so when the Nazis conquered their countries, the countries’ police were willing accomplices to Nazi rule there:

That the Nazis eventually met with so disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries they occupied, and that they were able to organize terror as much as they did with the assistance of these local police forces, was due at least in part to the powerful position which the police had achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination of stateless and refugees.9

4. Because the police in Eastern European countries effectively weren’t answerable to courts on deportation matters, those countries’ populations grew accustomed to a state not bound by the rule of law. As a result, the countries gave in more to the temptation of police rule over its citizens:

The clearer the proof of their [the states’] inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.10

Making legal distinctions among classes of people, Arendt suggests, is a nation-state’s kryptonite. When the nation-state turns to nationalism and takes away the rights of minorities and stateless people, the state built around that nation can no longer effectively exercise its core mission of providing equality before the law. When this happens, the nation swallows the state, and the country is no longer, strictly speaking, a nation-state:

Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states.11

In America, such a “mass of over- and underprivileged individuals” seems have started by terrorizing the aliens in our midst and incarcerating many of them, some in prisons outside the United States and outside the aliens’ countries of origin. But it hasn’t stopped there. The administration recently announced that federal funding will end this month for sanctuary cities and states, even though city and state policies of non-cooperation with ICE are legal.12

We Christians are exiles, a political status we hold for the healing of the nations. If we deny our political calling and, as citizens of a nation-state, countenance the persecution of our fellow exiles, we’ll lose the country we think we serve.

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Above: Konstantin Yuon, The New Planet (1921). Public domain. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

What am I able to say? I was helping a group in Memphis distribute fresh fruit, bread, and canned food. I was taking pictures only of the community organizer, whom I was permitted to photograph as part of a future podcast episode. But how could the people be sure that I wasn’t taking pictures of them?

After I left, some people contacted the organizer with their concerns about me. Their community had been affected badly by ICE’s actions, and they didn’t want photos ending up in the wrong hands.

What else can I say? I changed the location and the nature of what we gave the people in this account because, as I say, the people must stay invisible.

Poorer communities have long been invisible. Most immigrants, for instance, were invisible long before our country began taking some of them from their homes here and sending them back to their countries of origin or to prisons in third countries.

Above: this picture is intentionally left invisible.

Impoverishment and invisibility work together to further marginalize historically targeted minorities. Thus, a book on Americans’ misconceptions about First Nations places the biggest misconception in the title: “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans. A recent book about systemic racism is entitled, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness.

Invisibility, then, is a big problem. For sure, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament care a lot about the poor’s need for food, shelter and clothing. But both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are concerned even more with the poor’s invisibility. Witness Jesus: he begins his Sermon on the Plain by equating poverty with political place in the coming age of God’s earthly rule:

“How blissful the destitute, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”1

In the early models of that rule—the first two centuries of life among the Jesus assemblies—Jesus’s followers are known around the empire for their care of and respect for the poor.2

But this care and respect aren’t always the case. And in the New Testament’s epistles, when assemblies mistreat the poor, we read about shame as much as we read about hunger. The apostles Paul and James address how the poor are shamed and, through shame, made invisible. Here’s Paul:

Therefore when you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper, for in your eating each one takes his own supper first; and one is hungry and another is drunk. What! Do you not have houses in which to eat and drink? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing?3

The Corinthian church, Paul says, shames the poor. Shaming happens in public; it’s actually a shutdown that excludes people from public life. Paul’s emphasis here is not on feeding the poor—though Paul frequently refers to his efforts to help the assemblies do just that4—but on honoring and therefore benefitting from the poor.

James makes the same point when the churches to whom he writes refuse the poor chairs, when they make the poor stand or sit on the floor at the rich people’s feet:

Listen, my dear friends: has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to possess the kingdom he has promised to those who love him? And yet you have humiliated the poor man.5

Future political stature promised again. Present shame and humiliation experienced again. The wicked distinctions we make—who eats and who doesn’t, who sits in chairs and who stands—make people visible or invisible. We end up shutting down those who are rich in faith, those with much to give.

John Adams, like Paul and James, notices poor people at church—and at other places, too. Adams also emphasizes the poor person’s shame and invisibility:

The poor man’s conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed . . . He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market . . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable.6

Quoting Adams’s remarks, Hannah Arendt observes that Adams’s “. . . conviction that darkness rather than want is the curse of poverty, is extremely rare in the literature of the modern age . . .”7 The rarity of Adams’s conviction may be explained by the modern age’s insouciance toward public life. A sufficiently engaged public wouldn’t stand for poverty because it needs the opinions and contributions of everyone, and poverty silences people.

Aristotle agrees with Adams, though Aristotle emphasizes that poverty silences people not through shame but through necessarily long hours of work. The poor have little or no leisure time. Consequently, Aristotle thought that the best democracies pay their poor. That way, the poor would have the leisure to participate in civic life.8

The Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes agrees with Adams, too. It suggests that when we deny public life to the poor, we risk destroying ourselves. The Solomon figure makes this point in a parable:

There was a little city, with few men in it; and to it came a great king, who invested it and built mighty siege works against it. Present in the city was a poor wise man who might have saved it with his wisdom, but nobody thought of that poor man. So I observed: Wisdom is better than valor, but

/ A poor man’s wisdom is scorned, / And his words are not heeded.9

Like this little city, we shame the poor and fail to listen to them. bell hooks explains our failure to hear or even to see the poor in terms of who gets to hold the public megaphone:

We live in a society where the poor have no public voice. No wonder it has taken so long for many citizens to recognize class—to become class conscious.10

A point well taken. But I think there’s a broader reason why we understand the plight of the poor solely in terms of want and not also in terms of invisibility: we’re almost invisible ourselves. Society at large has given over its own megaphone to political and economic rulers. We don’t cultivate public spaces where we can speak and act and see and hear one another speak and act.

As a society, we put little value on what Arendt calls “the space of appearance.” The space of appearance, where we as equals appear to one another in words and deeds, doesn’t exist in every age, Arendt says. And without the space of appearance, we are “deprived of reality”:

. . . reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; “for what appears to all, this we call Being” . . .11

Without a space of appearance—without a public world not dominated by consumerism, racism, and rulers—we lose our sense of reality. We begin to wall ourselves off from those whose wisdom and life experience could give us broader perspectives.

We begin to experience, even before death, the great gulf separating the rich man and Lazarus, who begged outside the rich man’s gate in Jesus’s parable.12 Because we don’t appear with the poor and experience what James C. Scott calls “the infrapolitics of subordinate groups,”13 we may do some insensitive things. Even when we may try to address the poor’s physical needs, we may end up taking pictures like tourists.

Of course, when we take deliberate steps to make the poor even more invisible, such as threatening to arrest them and deport them, we harm our own public life. When we start disappearing our neighbors, our public life has long since disappeared.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

The story of the tower, scholars now understand, describes a Babylonian ziggurat,1 a terraced, brick temple in the service of Babylon’s gods. Genesis presents the temple-tower “as an imperial embodiment of pride and self-sufficiency,” theologian Walter Brueggemann says.2 The bricks stand out in the story’s confused and rough language used to describe the city’s and the tower’s building process. One literal translation, Hebraist Robert Alter says, is “Come, let us brick bricks and burn for a burning”—language that Alter suggests is as fractured in the original Hebrew as it is in modern English.3 Genesis further emphasizes the builders’ material by contrasting it with biblical building norms: “And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar.”4

Bricks are fired, but stones are found. Bricks are uniform, but stones are unique. The bricks described in the Tower of Babel story were made uniform and strong, historians of the period tell us, by a violent and homogenizing process of molding clay that has been mixed with “sand, water, mud, and organic material, husks or straw” and of firing this mixture in a kiln.5

The Torah impliedly contrasts Babylon’s incoherent brickmaking with what Alter calls “the language of stones.”6 Jacob, for example, uses a stone to demarcate a pact and a border between him and his father-in-law Laban. God commemorates his covenant with Israel by giving Moses two stone tablets with the Ten Commandments “written with the finger of God.”7 Stones are later prescribed: when Israel wishes to make God an altar, Exodus tells us, the alter must be of stones.8

This stone-language speaks of a more indigenous politics. The Hopi and Maori peoples share a “story of four sacred stone tablets that contained their laws for living and their prophecies,” according to Unangan Kuuyux Ilarion Merculieff.9 When indigenous peoples start communities, they often connect with their land by way of identifying—and identifying with—a foundational rock.10

Israel, surrounded by some of the world’s first civilizations, struggles in the Bible’s pages to keep its connection with something more permanent than civilization and empires.11 Genesis gets it, referring to God as “the Stone of Israel”12 and to a single stone as God’s house.13 But the struggles return in the prophets. Soon after Assyria takes Israel captive, the prophet Isaiah refers to God as “a stone to strike and a rock to stumble over”—God as an offense to Israel. Isaiah also refers to a future “just, firm-founded city” (Alter’s words)14 in the language of stones: “I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.”15

The Bible’s bricks and stones, then, suggest two ways of building communities.

The Tower story’s account of languages and scattered peoples draws comparisons with the New Testament’s day of Pentecost. In Genesis, God famously confuses the language of the tower’s builders. Unable to communicate with one another, Babel’s occupants scatter over the face of the earth. In Acts, though, the Jewish diaspora comes together from many nations in Jerusalem to celebrate an ancient feast.

In a sense, Pentecost is Babel in reverse. The Spirit speaks to the people of each nationality in its own tongue, but the various tongues don’t divide the nations the way God earlier divides and scatters the speakers and nations in Genesis. Instead, the Spirit unifies the diaspora while honoring their differences. The diaspora describes Pentecost’s miracle in the language of unity and diversity: “. . . all of us hear them telling in our own tongues the great things God has done.”16

While telling the story of Babel in reverse, then, the story of Pentecost doesn’t seek to re-establish a pre-Babel world in which everyone speaks one language. Instead, the disciples’ miraculous communication with these dispersed peoples in their own languages leaves intact those languages and the peoples and cultures those languages represent. This unity-in-plurality, theologian Michael Welker argues, constitutes the political meaning of Pentecost:

The point of the Pentecostal experience and of the outpouring of the Spirit is not the unintelligibility of glossolalia but instead a miraculous intelligibility. Without dissolving or suspending the different languages, the different loyalties and historical customs, a differentiated, differentiation-protecting experience of community is established.17

Like the Spirit, Peter on Pentecost also protects the nascent community’s plurality, but he does so by citing the prophet Joel, who foresees the Spirit’s outpouring on women as well as men, on young as well as old, on slaves as well as free. Welker finds in Joel’s prophecy a promise that “takes a giant step beyond all concepts of community which stop with sameness (where a specific group may dictate just how unity and equality are going to be provided).”18 Welker pictures the politics of Pentecost: community isn’t built by uniformity.

By contrast, as Luke was writing Acts, the Roman Empire was uniting the world by conquering it, uprooting and enslaving the world’s peoples, and gradually offering citizenship to these newly uniform slaves stripped of the context of their families, clans, tribes, tongues, and lands. This violent process blurred the division between Romans and outsiders, according to historian Mary Beard,19 so making peace—or at least establishing the Pax Romana. That kind of peace earns Rome a role as Revelation’s Babylon.20

Unlike the Pax Romana, God’s peaceable kingdom doesn’t destroy plurality. It never turns the lions into lambs. Instead, it causes the lion and the lamb to lie down together.21 Reverting to the language of stones, we may say that God never forms and fires us into uniform bricks. We stay stones, the “living stones” of the “spiritual house” Peter describes,22 vibrant in all of our plurality, as the Spirit builds us into a community.

Despite the striking contrasts between Pentecost and Babel, Pentecost isn’t Babel’s chief biblical foil. That honor belongs to New Jerusalem. The city of New Jerusalem in the Bible’s last book replaces Babel’s abandoned city and tower in the Bible’s first book.

Like Luke on Pentecost, John’s vision of New Jerusalem seems to tell the Tower of Babel in reverse. The two cities, for instance, move in opposite directions. Babel’s tower was to rise “with its top in the heavens,”23 while John sees New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God.”24 The horizontal movements are different, too: Babylon’s movement is centrifugal, but New Jerusalem’s movement is centripetal. Babylon’s efforts to unite humanity in empire results in scattering (“the Lord scattered people over the face of the earth”),25 but people from every nation will gather in New Jerusalem and walk in the city’s light.26 Here’s another contrast: Babylon was to have a permanent temple—the Tower of Babel—but New Jerusalem has no temple because “its temple was the sovereign Lord God and the Lamb.”27

The greatest contrast between the two cities, though, brings us back to building materials. Revelation tells us that, instead of Babel’s brick, “the foundations of [New Jerusalem’s] city wall were adorned with precious stones of every kind . . .”28 We are the precious stones of New Jerusalem, a city introduced to John as “the bride, the wife of the Lamb.”29 As the stones in the city’s walls, we are God’s city, God’s community.

Paul contrasts precious stones with the stuff of bricks when he tells the Corinthians how to build their common life around Jesus, the cornerstone of God’s flesh-and-blood habitation:30

If anyone builds on that foundation with gold, silver, and precious stones, or with wood, hay, and straw, the work that each does will at last be brought to light; the day of judgement will expose it.31

Hay and straw make bricks, representing the forced conformity of mass culture and empire. The twelve distinct and precious stones found in New Jerusalem (e.g., chalcedony, sardonyx and chrysoprase, my personal favorites) suggest another form of unity, one that celebrates the gifts, points of view, and personages of each member.32

Exodus gives us an engineering lesson similar to Paul’s. In building God’s altar, the stones used must not be hewn, “for your sword you would brandish over it and profane it.”33 This translation by Alter is a departure: most English translations render the Hebrew word for Alter’s “sword” as “tool” because the verse employs the object to cut stone. But Alter insists that the word “patently means ‘sword.’” The Hebrew word for sword, he says, is “pointedly used because of its association with killing.”34 Violence and conformity, the tools of empire, never build God’s communities.

Discussion questions

1. What are the most important differences between bricks and stones in this devotion—or in your way of thinking?

2. What parallels or contrasts do you find in Genesis’s account of the Tower of Babel and Acts’s account of Pentecost?

3. What does Messiah require or expect of the nations he comes to free? How much, if any, of the nations’ culture would he change? Do you agree with Michael Welker about the political meaning of the Pentecost account in Acts?

4. What would it be like to encounter a spiritual home that honors the peoples’ “different languages, the different loyalties and historical customs”? How would such a home foster such cultures?

5. Is it possible for a political community to be founded and built without violence?

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Nevertheless, Emerson acknowledges how absurd the suggestion seems of a nation of friends as the basis of a polity. “Such designs, full of genius and full of fate as they are, are not entertained except avowedly as air-pictures.” People who advance such designs seriously, he says, are met with disgust and contempt.

Emerson, however, never gives us a straight answer to whether a nation of friends is possible. Is it just an “air-picture” for him? Perhaps it’s a matter of degree. As his essay suggests, the more character a people demonstrate, the less “abuse of formal Government” a people experience.1

Above: detail of Crowded street scene with woman playing tambourine from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. Used by permission.

But he doesn’t leave his “nation of friends” as a mere variable. Emerson rarely employs qualifiers, anyway. He prefers to speak in the absolute language of aphorisms, tempering them only by contradiction, ambiguity, misdirection, or other act of disassociation. He concludes this 1844 essay, “Politics,” by summarizing a recent conversation that we suspect inspires the essay:

. . . I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible, that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.2

Can friendship so scale? Can a kind of friendship develop among thousands that would involve not just “the grandest and simplest sentiments” among them but also—and more importantly—the “exercise” of those sentiments among them?

Perhaps Emerson’s “nation of friends” can start small—in a city neighborhood. On urban activist Jane Jacobs’s block, for instance, a stranger grabs a dime from another stranger who has been holding it as part of his 15-cent bus fare. He chases after the thief, offering his nickel to him, too. He also has seen it all: a neighborhood boy fell through a plate-glass window and (the neighborhood learns later) is losing enough blood to threaten his life. In 1950s New York City, the first stranger needs the dime to call for an ambulance. Meanwhile, a third stranger is saving the boy by applying an expert tourniquet.

After the ambulance leaves and the boy starts down the road to recovery, no one in the neighborhood sees the three strangers again.3

Above: detail of Children. New York, NY from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. Used by permission.

Why does this all happen in Jacobs’s neighborhood? Her neighborhood, she says, fosters the public life that welcomes the strangers and many like them to play their public roles. Jacobs describes the “ballet” of small and often ritualized movements in her neighborhood that develops and sustains public life. One small part of this daily dance involves interactions she has for over ten years with the fruit vendor standing outside his doorway. As she passes him each morning on her way to work, they both look up and down the street, then smile at each other. Their smiles, Jacobs says, signal that “all is well.”4

Her relationship with the grocer, like her relationship with many of her neighbors, is merely public. But these public acquaintances protect one another’s privacy; in fact, these acquaintances often share in responsibilities that make private life possible.

Associating the word “friendship” with civic life isn’t just Emerson’s notion. Hannah Arendt refers to Aritstotle’s concept of philia politike, which she likens to “a kind of ‘friendship’ without intimacy and without closeness”5—suitable, perhaps, to any conceptualization of a “nation of friends.” Professor Luke Bretherton prefers to characterize “citizenship in terms of neighborliness rather than public friendship” because it “allows for both less and, where appropriate, more intense forms of direct concern of others.”6 A friendship by any other name, perhaps, would work just as well. Jacobs’s daily routine and her story of the strangers’ exceptional concern over the neighborhood’s injured boy correlate with Bretherton’s understanding of neighborliness.

Whether we call them friends or neighbors, such basic, nickel-and-dime public relationships are rare without a city’s mix of residences, businesses, and the strangers who are drawn over time to the businesses, to the diversity of uses, and to the spectacle of other people.

Public life is rare, then, in project housing. Like most suburban neighborhoods, city projects contain only residences and attract no strangers looking to share in public life. Consequently, most project residents, Jacobs says, are “faced with the choice of sharing much or nothing”—of developing close friendships or of maintaining complete distance from their fellow residents. Making acquaintances, on which public life thrives, isn’t often plausible in projects: residents often fear that making acquaintances will lead only to trouble.

Moderns tend to seek intimacy as a precondition to acting together in public matters, sociology professor Richard Sennett thinks. In his book The Fall of Public Man, Sennett claims that this tendency contributes to the loss of public life:

In community groups, for instance, people feel they need to get to know each other as persons in order to act together; they then get caught up in immobilizing processes of revealing themselves to each other as persons, and gradually lose the desire to act together.7

Public enervation, Sennett says, comes from people’s wish to be intimate friends before allowing themselves to be neighbors.

This primacy of private relations combines with single-use public environments to create an unhealthy cycle. Sennett points out that this unfortunate “intimate vision is induced in proportion as the public domain is abandoned as empty.” Sennett regrets the street-level space in New York’s Lever Square skyscraper, for instance, where “no diversity of activity takes place” despite its “miniature public square” design.8 The design is right, but the uses that would create public space aren’t present around it. Sennett’s skyscraper seems to resemble Jacobs’s projects and most suburban spaces in this regard.

Jacobs tells the story of a sociable project resident who, with a great deal of effort, becomes friends with all ninety of the mothers of young children in her building. Despite her friendships, when her own young son gets stuck in an elevator car and screams for two hours, no one helps him. This resident later complains about the episode to one of her new friends.

“Oh, was that your son?” her friend responds. “I didn’t know whose boy he was. If I had realized he was your son I would have helped him.”9

Which of these two neighborhoods—Jacobs’s or the project resident’s—is neighbor to its unfortunate young son?

Above: New York, NY from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. Used by permission.

The parable of the Good Samaritan plays with various forms of distance among people. The priest and the Levite know that they are obligated by law to help a crime victim, a fellow Jew, whom they run across, but they cross the road to avoid him. The Samaritan, by contrast, has no connection with the wounded Jew other than their shared humanity and—for as long as it takes for the Samaritan to help the Jew—their proximity.10

Neighborliness is not an inconsequential relationship; we know this from the second greatest commandment that Jesus’ parable examines. We know it also from the way Jesus’ question “Which was neighbour?” transforms the commandment’s concept of neighbor from a presumed relationship into a deliberate one.11 The parable’s three candidates for neighbor, of course, are strangers to the crime victim. “Neighbor,” the parable suggests, is a face-to-face relationship—not a private one, but an immediate and an active one.

“Neighbors” in this sense may be locals who don’t know one another well or even one-time visitors to a neighborhood, as in two of Jacobs’s examples. They may meet outside of their respective neighborhoods, as in Jesus’ example. And they may become a nation by the imaginative application of their encounters, such as the Samaritan’s, along the paths that connect their neighborhoods.

Discussion questions

1. Are Jacobs and her neighborhood’s grocer friends? In what sense, if any, could Jacobs and her grocer be said to share a covenant relationship?

2. What do these two accounts of neighborhood boys suggest about good city planning? What can a city or town do—or stop doing—to foster the public life Jacobs celebrates?

3. Can a housing project or a suburb move from what Jacobs calls a “togetherness or nothing” model to a public model, such as one Jacobs’s neighborhood fosters? What would it take?

4. Can an entire neighborhood resemble a neighbor, as the essay’s fourth-to-last paragraph implies? Does the question “Which of these was neighbor?” in the Good Samaritan parable help to inform the question “Which neighborhood was neighbor?” in that paragraph?

5. Can mixed uses help to develop a neighborhood’s moral character?

6. The essay’s last two paragraphs suggest a distinction between acquaintances and more private relationships. Would you use other terms for each form of relationship? Are your acquaintances merely potential friends, or are they important to you in their own right? Are they important to your public life?

7. One might argue that for Luke, roads lead to encounters in which someone is recognized. The road to Emmaus (Luke 24) and the road to Damascus (Acts 9), for instance, lead to characters recognizing the stranger as Messiah. Does anything like that happen on the road to Jericho in the Good Samaritan parable?

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Above: Group of children, mostly boys, gathered under sprinkler, in East Harlem, New York City from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. Used by permission. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

The body of Christ blocked traffic. It “read a litany of regime abuses, handed out leaflets signed ‘Movement against Torture,’ and sang,” according to William T. Cavanaugh in Torture and Eucharist, his 1998 book analyzing the church’s responses to the Pinochet regime. That day, twenty-four of the seventy nuns, priests, and laypersons who constituted the body of Christ were arrested.1

Above: “Disappear” by annalisa ceolin. Used by permission.

Two months later, the regime disappeared two children. Their father, in an act of protest and despondency, set himself on fire at the foot of a cathedral’s outdoor cross, confessing his sin to a priest who was drawn to the flames. The Movement against Torture, first seen exposing the prison, took on the parent’s name, becoming the Sebastián Acevedo Movement against Torture.

The movement grew to include more people than just Christians, and it was considered secular—that is, not an official part of the Chilean Catholic church. More sitings of this augmented body of Christ, sometimes involving close to 150 people, followed its initial prison appearance. Each of the body’s appearances, Cavanaugh says, was liturgical:

Until the Movement began, public denunciation of torture had been carried on primarily at the level of words and in doomed judicial proceedings. What was so different and disruptive about the Sebastián Acevedo Movement was its sense of liturgy . . .”2

In liturgy, symbolism matters, and “locations were chosen for their symbolic importance”—locations like courts, media centers, and more clandestine prisons. Also liturgical were the movement’s activities. Members might sing or they might read or recite a litany of the injustices surrounding a particular person’s disappearance.

Above: A stumbling sticker, designed by Sushmita Mazumdar, on an Arlington County, Virginia sidewalk indicating where ICE abducted an Arlington resident.

How have churches in the United States responded to their neighbors’ removals, and in some cases, enforced disappearance, refoulement, and subjection to state-sponsored violence in third countries?3

One church in Arlington, Virginia, recently participated in street liturgies on spots where masked ICE agents had abducted seven of its neighbors.

Arlington Presbyterian Church’s pastor, Ashley Goff, worked on the idea with an Arlington artist, Sushmita Mazumdar. Mazumdar and Goff drew on their past attendance at the installation of some of Arlington’s stumbling stones, small plaques honoring African Americans who had been enslaved where the plaques had been installed.

Arlington’s stumbling-stone initiative, in turn, was inspired by Germany’s Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” small plaques installed in front of over 70,000 Holocaust victims’ last-known residences.

Mazumdar designed stumbling stickers commemorating Arlington’s disappeared neighbors, and Goff wrote the brief ceremony for placing the stickers on or near the spots where Arlington neighbors were seen being disappeared or last seen before they were disappeared.

Excerpts from my interview of Suzi Wackerbarth,4 a member of Arlington Presbyterian Church who attended one of the ceremonies, suggest the ceremonies’ mix of prepared text and participant interaction:

The “stumbling” in stumbling stones implies a pedestrian’s initial physical interaction with the stones, which have offended far-right sensibilities here and in Germany. Gunter Demnig, the artist who creates the plaques in Germany, explains the “stumbling” reference: “You won’t fall. But if you stumble and look, you must bow down with your head and your heart.”5 This posture of curiosity and reverence applies to Arlington’s stumbling stickers, too.

The “stumbling” also suggests Isaiah’s “. . . he shall be . . .for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offense,” the prophet’s metaphor of a stone just below our line of sight that trips us.6 Isaiah’s rock of offense is often associated in Christian teachings with the Psalmist’s “stone which the builders refused” that becomes “the head stone of the corner,” or the “chief cornerstone.”7

Arlington’s stumbling stones keep us from forgetting the past. And Arlington’s stumbling stickers keep us from ignoring the present. Part of Goff’s liturgy makes this clear in the ceremony performed at the spot of each abduction:

A person was taken. A family was harmed. Neighbors faced fear.

We mark this place in mourning and protest – so this story is not erased. So ICE does not get the last word.

Arlington’s stumbling stones and stumbling stickers, as well as the ceremonies installing them, give public witness to the justice promised in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures for those marginalized, imprisoned, or killed by the powerful or by the rich.

Power and wealth have gradually affected our culture’s receptivity to liturgy. The influential liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanagh complains that liturgy today, “hemmed in by state sacrality on one side and bourgeois profanity on the other, . . . attracts few and generates obsessive neuroses even among these.”8 Why not, then, let liturgy spill over into the streets, as it used to?9 Let it trip up and offend what Kavanagh here identifies as the worship of the nation-state and the concomitant and profane privacy of the bourgeois.

Street liturgy as some citizens of Arlington practice it not only helps to keep us from forgetting our disappeared neighbors. It also helps to keep us from disappearing from public space and from permitting rulers to dominate there instead. So by participating in street liturgy, we renew our public lives together as stumbling stones, as rocks of offense.

Above: “Venice disappear” by by annalisa ceolin. Used by permission.

The appearances of Christ’s body in Santiago were always quick, lasting usually “no more than five or ten minutes,” Cavanaugh says.10 They were even quicker if the police arrested the body’s members before they disappeared into the crowds or the street traffic.

But before the movement began, the body of Christ had been slow. Its first public appearance in front of the clandestine prison came a full decade after Pinochet’s CIA-supported coup. By 1983, most of the regime’s 3,216 murders and enforced disappearances had already happened.11 Church leaders and other members had done a lot of brave things, but they usually acted individually and through channels that the state had allowed to remain open for individuals or leaders to communicate with the regime.

The reason for the slowness? The body of Christ in Chile had not come to terms with who it was. Put in more academic language, it had to unlearn “a set of ecclesiological presuppositions firmly engrained in the Chilean Catholic church,” Cavanaugh says.12

Starting in the 1930s, due to the spread of Catholic Action, the encyclicals of Pope Pius XI, and the writings of French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, the Chilean church had come to understand itself as what it called a mystical body. Cavanaugh summarizes this self-understanding:

The Kingdom hovers above history, entering it only in the soul. Christians enter the temporal world as individuals; the church does not act as a body in the temporal realm. The church does not have a political body but only a religious body, a mystical body, which unites all Christians above the rough and tumble of the temporal.13

During the early years of Pinochet’s regime, the church therefore worked for “a mystical communion of Chileans above the party political fray,” a goal that coincided with the regime’s own goal—a united, depoliticized Chile. Consequently,

. . . the church’s stress on subsuming conflict into the organic unit of Chile had the effect of causing the church to identify its own interests with those of the nation-state.14

In fact, the church’s “. . . bishops assumed that the church and state stood in organic relationship as the twin guardians of the Chilean national heritage. The bishops assumed the imagination of the nation-state . . .”15 The church in Chile saw the junta as the nation-state’s body and itself as its soul.16 It fell into line with the nation-state imaginary.

This imaginary leads to rationalizations about disappearance and torture. “Torture isn’t everything,” one Chilean bishop argued, reasoning that focusing on the regime’s excesses would detract from its “accomplishments in achieving order.”17 One major 1975 statement by Chilean bishops claimed that “Jesus was a patriot.” Had Jesus lived in Chile, the statement reads, he would have been “one hundred percent Chilean . . . an authentic son of our people and our land.”18

But “the pedagogy of terror,” Cavanaugh writes, began to teach the Chilean church “how to be oppressed and thus become incarnate in opposition to the state.”

As long as the church limits itself to the care of people’s souls and supports the state’s claimed authority over people’s bodies, it submits to the nation-state imaginary and to the disappearance of itself “as a visible, social body.”19

But the Bible teaches that soul and body can’t be placed under separate sovereignties. The body is a “temple of the Holy Spirit” and belongs to God.20 Disappearance and torture contest God’s claim to bodies.

Disappearance isn’t just an attempt by the state to enforce its imaginary territorial boundaries against immigration, which according to the Torah, is bad enough.21 It’s also an attempt to control its population from both a juridical and a psychological perspective.

From a juridical perspective, disappearances accustom a state’s population to the state’s claims that even within its borders, it may act lawlessly. The state starts its descent from the rule of law by asserting sovereignty over people who the state claims have no rights. Hannah Arendt describes this tactic as the first step to totalitarianism:

The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man. This was done . . . by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness . . .22

Many American Christians are taken in by this nation-state imaginary. They reason that, while the Bible specifically commands us to treat aliens as we would natural-born citizens,23 the logic of the nation-state trumps the Bible. “Face it: we live in a nation,” many Christians reason. “Fundamental to its sovereignty is the enforcement of its borders against undesirable immigrants.” But Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection demonstrate that only God is sovereign. In addition, the example of my ancestors and those of many others—people who came to America without the original inhabitants’ permission—should also make us question the nation-state’s logic from the perspective of both history and hypocrisy.

Once the state’s lawless conduct to a segment of its population is accepted, more segments become unprotected by law, as Arendt points out.24 One better understands German Christians singing in church as the gas chambers killed their Jewish neighbors.

Beyond its deleterious effects on a polity’s expectation of justice and the rule of law, disappearance by the state is a form of psychological control, and not just of those who are disappeared, as Cavanaugh explains:

The very occult nature of disappearance—the way it obfuscates knowledge of what is really going on—augments the fear and anxiety which separates people from each other. Disappearance works to discipline the family and friends of the victim. The relatives of disappeared persons, with no body to prove what has happened, live in a limbo world between fantasy and reality. On the one hand, to believe that the person is still alive is to prolong visions of torment to which the victim has undoubtedly been subjected. . . .

On the other hand, to decide to assume the disappeared person is dead is, in effect, to kill him in one’s own mind. In the face of official denials, the death becomes the family’s own invention. The dilemma is exceedingly cruel. It disturbs the normal processes of grief and mourning, and it often succeeds in buying the silence of the victim’s family and friends. Unable to know the whereabouts of the victim and thus unable to give up hope, hope is controlled for the regime’s purposes, as the relatives cooperate with the authorities for fear that their actions could bring reprisals on their loved ones.25

Kashmir mothers and wives protesting the enforced disappearances by the Indian government, however, treat their missing sons and husbands as if they were dead—in part because they almost certainly are. In monthly protests, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) often practices what anthropology professor Ather Zia calls “affective politics,” which is “a ritualistic public mourning, marked alternately by funereal silence and lamentation for the disappeared men.”26

By identifying themselves as mourners, these Muslim women create a culturally acceptable way of appearing in public spaces traditionally filled by only men. Their lamentation also “becomes part of the counterspectacle to the spectacle of enforced disappearances.”27

While Zia focuses on protest in terms of spectacle and counterspectacle, Cavanaugh focuses on protest in terms of liturgy and anti-liturgy. Cavanaugh understands disappearings and torture as a form of “perverse liturgy”:

Torture is liturgy—or, perhaps better said, “anti-liturgy”—because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes an act of worship of that mysterious power. It is essential to this ritual enactment that it not be public . . .28

But the imaginary of the Eucharist is different from the nation-state imaginary of disappearance and torture. The ritual of the Eucharist is public, not private. It involves a body’s appearance—the appearance of the body of Christ—not its disappearance. This is true even though “Christianity itself is founded in a disappearance,” as Cavanaugh points out in his book’s last paragraph:

The tomb is empty, the body is gone. At Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), Jesus blesses bread, breaks it, and gives it to His companions, but then vanishes from their sight. And yet the disappearance is not the last word.29

Disappearance is not the last word. This is the message of the street liturgies performed by Kashmir’s APDP and by Chile’s Sebastián Acevedo Movement against Torture. It’s also the message of the simple street liturgy performed recently at seven spots in Arlington where neighbors had been disappeared.

There will come a day. And as Paul never tires of reminding us, the presence of Christ’s body demonstrates that the day has also come.

Any appropriate and effective street liturgy for the disappeared will be influenced by a host of factors. The legality and social acceptance of protest, for instance, differed in Chile, Kashmir, and Arlington. The relationship of the protestors to the disappeared—fellow citizens in Chile, husbands and sons in Kashmir, and neighbors in Arlington—also differed. The culture’s religious dynamics and the protesters’ religious backgrounds and affiliations, of course, also matter a great deal.

But here’s a working model. It’s inspired by Imagining Argentina, a novel about Argentina’s 1970s-era disappearings. In it, after Carlos Rueda’s wife is disappeared, he gains powers of imagination to see into the struggles and sometimes the fates of many of those that Argentina’s regime disappeared from Buenos Aires. In one scene, Carlos is tempted while swimming to accept the generals’ narrative and to surrender to the current’s downward pull. But he realizes then that his death would also kill his wife, wherever she is. That’s because, at that point in the novel’s more faithful narrative, she was alive only in his imagination.

Imagining Argentina isn’t a “Christian” novel. But it speaks to the power of our collective imagination to involve ourselves in “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God,”30 including the imaginaries of nation-states.

This liturgy is written mostly in a Christian idiom because I’m immersed in that tradition. You might revise it for your own tradition, circumstances, and proposed action. I hope the occasion of revising it will lead to some fruitful discussion and action.

We come today to grieve,
to protest, and to demonstrate
the kingdom of God together.
The rulers of darkness
and their human clients31
have disappeared our neighbor[s]
[name the name or names].

[Sing a song together]

If you know our missing neighbors,
please share something about them
if you’d like to.

[Space for sharing]

We’ll be silent for a minute
and pray for our missing neighbors
and for their families and friends
and neighbors who love them.

[Silence and individual prayer]

If you’d like to, please lead us
in a prayer for our disappeared
neighbors and for our community.

[Space for public prayer]

We are here to stand and walk
in the public world we imagine,
a world in which neighbors
appear in public together
to care for one another
and for the earth.

We imagine a people who love
the immigrants among them,32 a people
who don’t disappear into their homes
when their neighbors disappear
from their own homes.

We also acknowledge and decry
the injustice of disappearings
and the harm they do
to our neighbors and to our community.
Sometimes we fear the worst
for our neighbors and for our community.
But we say that the worst
isn’t the first or the last.

So we climb the mountain together
where Moses and Elijah
—those who disappeared—
conferred with him who would
also disappear from a tomb.33

We stand together in that place
of death and disappearance where
Mary’s first question to Jesus
was “Where have you taken him?”
and where Jesus’ response
was “Mary.”34

So we say our missing
neighbors’ names again, too.
[name the name or names].

We may not know
where our neighbors are
or how they fare
or what is happening to them,
but you know them, Lord,
and their names remain on our lips.
Their lives stay here in our hearts.

We cry out, Lord, for your mercy.
We cry out for justice for our
neighbors. And as part of that justice,
we pledge to support our neighbors
who remain and whose lives
have been disrupted by disappearings
or by the threat of being taken.

[Network and organize
to help our community.]

Besides protest and public liturgy, we have many other nonviolent ways to support our neighbors threatened by the prospect of deportation or of being disappeared (or both). I’ve volunteered for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. Your state may have a comparable organization. Court watching is also supportive, and the Public Spaces podcast will have an episode on this soon.

Amica Center for Immigrant Rights (amicacenter.org) organizes visits to jails, staffs a detention hotline, and provides interpreters for the preparation of court cases. They also need help with letter writing, research, and transcription.

In Northern Virginia, La ColectiVA (lacolectiva.org), “an inclusive collaborative led by gentle Latinx who are committed to upholding social justice and equity,” organizes the community to, among other things, discourage ICE activities in Arlington and improve conditions at the ICE detention center in Farmville, Virginia.

Chicago is now the focus ICE arrests, and community members there have developed many nonviolent methods for supporting one another. Charlotte and Raleigh, too, have responded with creativity to recent ICE violence and disappearings.

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Above: “ghosts” by Patrick Marioné. Used by permission. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

When I checked in last month at the political theology conference, my worst fears were immediately realized. I wasn’t registered. The registrar apologized and searched, but my badge was nowhere. Then I happened on it: I had forgotten that I had registered as Bryce Tolpen, my pen name.

We laughed: I didn’t know who I was. And I had no business being there. I have no degrees in theology or political science. As it turned out—lovely people—it was all the same to them.

We citizens are generalists in a world of specialists. To rediscover democracy, we must lean into our imposter syndrome.

The second: intentional walk

No subtitle has earned an author more notoriety than Hannah Arendt’s A Report on the Banality of Evil. The criticism seems unfair. Arendt makes the same point about the Holocaust a dozen years earlier in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and nobody cares. My theory is we don’t read theory. But when she applies her theory to a specific mass murderer, and implicates not a monster but mass man, we pounce.

Here, in a nutshell from that earlier book, appears the incipient Eichmann in Jerusalem:

The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything—belief, honor, dignity—on the slightest provocation.1

Himmler, in sum, recruited not criminals but the bourgeois, knowing they’d do anything for security. That security, Arendt says, involves not just financial stability but the routine of work:

For the ruthless machines of domination and extermination, the masses of co-ordinated philistines provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were well organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs.2

Our work life trains us not to love the world.

At my recent high-school reunion, an old friend described his adjustment to retirement. It took him only a year, he said, to acclimate himself to irrelevance.

Me, too. But I’ve had the benefit of going through something like retirement once before. Half a lifetime ago, I quit my law career and almost lost my mind. Who was I when I wasn’t drafting pleadings and negotiating claims weekdays from 9 to 5? In Arendt’s terms, I was a bourgeois who by becoming a minister had also become a philistine, “the bourgeois isolated from his own class.”

So I got therapy for three years. During my first few sessions, though, I knew I could avoid working through all that darkness if I chose to get my relevance back. Would I have participated in genocide to get it? God, I hope not. But I might have come out of retirement just to prosecute my shadow self.

The third: sign stealing

Just as the nouveau Texan is all hat and no cattle, so also the nouveau patriot is all flag and no republic. But it was “to the republic, for which it stands” for which I stood each school-day morning, a form of government that pledges, first and foremost, to protect the res publica, the public “thing.” What’s a signifier without its object? And what becomes of us as representamen? “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?”3

The fourth: pine tar

In Arlington, Virginia, stickers and stones may yet break the bones of oppression.

Stumbling stones are being installed in sidewalks to mark where African Americans spent their lives enslaved in what’s now a Washington, D.C. suburb. And stumbling stickers are being stuck to sidewalks to mark where neighbors have recently been disappeared by ICE agents.

There’s something urgent about stickers, especially compared to stones. The comparison brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s distinction between brochures and books at the outset of his collection of feuilleton known as One-Way Street:

Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.4

Stumbling stickers and the brief liturgy that accompanies their placement are the minutemen of Arlington’s exacting moment.

The fifth: mound visit

The Quaker equivalent to the Lord’s supper is a business meeting.5

Both the Lord’s supper and a business meeting, of course, can be done perfunctorily. People may watch the clock. But both can be enriched by a sense of Presence. And both, when done with the right heart, can lead to inner transformation.6

For inner transformation to occur in a business meeting, according to a 1993 Quaker pamphlet, Friends shouldn’t try to reach consensus. Instead, they should wait for a sense of the meeting.

Three practices enhance Quaker business meetings and invite the collective inward Presence to lead the group to a sense of the meeting. The first is release, the patient, nonjudgmental listening to others’ pent-up emotions. The second is long focus. “. . . Ideas in competition shorten focal length,” says Barry Morely, the pamphlet’s author. Instead of contention and compromise, Friends “stand on an inward high place and look beyond the ideas being discussed.”7

The third enhancing practice is transition to Light. “. . . long focus brings us to the Source of resolution and clarity. It is in this Light that God’s voice is heard.”8

Of course, all of this can make for a long business meeting. When I first read this pamphlet, I was also reading Francesca Polletta’s book Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. She describes how the American pacifists active before World War II put in the time to work things out among themselves. The pacifists used the Quaker sense of the meeting to resolve “tensions between the absolutism of personal conscience and the demands of concerted group action.”9

Perhaps public freedom—and personal transformation, too—really is an endless meeting.

The sixth: warning track

Behold, those who insist on literal readings live in king’s houses. If you enter, watch your step. Nathan had to speak in a parable to King David. David himself had to speak as a madman before Achish, the king of Gath. Hamlet does the same before his uncle, the King of Denmark. It’s a rare king who doesn’t demand, as Prince Hal does of Falstaff, to “come, roundly, roundly.”

The entire New Testament circulated just outside of the Caesars’ grasp. To hear its range, we must leave our fine homes and go out into the wilderness to see.10

The seventh: double clutch

A recent college grad and I had coffee last month, and they used a big word. I wish I had interrupted them and asked them to tell me its meaning, but of course I was too proud. If I had done so, I would’ve always recalled the word as pleasantly as I blush.

The eighth: fan interference

This hour’s story is the story of the widow interrupting the story of Gehazi about the same widow to demand her house and land.

The king was questioning Gehazi, the servant of the man of God, about all the great things Elisha had done; and, as he was describing to the king how he had brought the dead to life, the selfsame woman began her appeal to the king for her house and land. “My lord king,” said Gehazi, “this is the woman, and this is her son whom Elisha restored to life.”11

It’s the story of another king, King Ahasuerus of Persia, who couldn’t sleep, so he had his servants read to him from the chronicles. He learned from the chronicles that Mordecai had saved his life. As they read to the king, Mordecai was outside the king’s gate in sackcloth and ashes, mourning the king’s edict to kill the Jews, and Haman was walking in to ask the king to kill Mordecai first.12

The past now is more than prologue; it’s present. This hour is the hour when the men of Nineveh and the queen of the south will rise up,13 when many of the bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep will rise and enter our cities to be seen by many.14 No story is safe.

We are those “upon whom the ends of the ages have come,”15 and we just want a little distraction, a little peace. But what gives us peace demands justice.

The ninth: pitch framing

One model for a diverse, republican polity is what historian Richard White calls the Middle Ground, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Great Lakes region over which neither the Algonquians nor the French who lived there could impose their will.

Each side operated there consistently with its own worldview, but each side had to speak to the other in terms of the other’s worldview. In these interactions, any congruences were precious.16

One important congruence was the concept of a father. In their relationship with each other, the French wanted to be the fathers, and the Algonquians wanted to be the children. This isn’t surprising, given the two sides’ different conceptions of fathers:

The French were quite at home with such patriarchal formulations and attached quite specific meanings to them. For them all authority was patriarchal, from God the Father, to the king (the father of his people), to the father in his home. Fathers commanded; sons obeyed. The Ottawas understood the relationship somewhat differently. A father was kind, generous, and protecting. A child owed a father respect, but a father could not compel obedience.17

When the relationship between the Algonquians and the French would fray, it was usually because either the Algonquians had been “disobedient” or the French had been ungenerous or unsparing. Each side would remonstrate with the other by trying to make the other’s concept of a father more like its own.

I wonder if something like this divergence in the concept of a father explains some of the New Testament’s divergent uses of the word “father.” Paul, for instance, laments the surplus number of tutors in the Corinthian congregations, pointing out that he is something more important—their father.18 Jesus, however, tells his disciples not to call anyone “father”:

“Do not call any man on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor must you be called ‘teacher’; you have one Teacher, the Messiah.”19

Paul seems to refer to something like the Algonquian sense of a father, while Jesus seems to warn against something like the French sense of a father.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus refers to his Father in heaven at almost every turn. It isn’t until after Jesus’ resurrection, though, that he pointedly includes his disciples as children of God in the same sense:

“But go to my brothers, and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”20

Jesus’ resurrection makes him a big brother; when he rises from the dead, he becomes “the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.”21 These verses seem to lay the foundation for Jesus’ assemblies made up of people from many nations, assemblies characterized by equality and love.

What’s the greater of the two models for a diverse, republican polity found in the Middle Ground? The cultural norms developed by gradual mutual understanding among disparate peoples or the Algonquians’ political freedom and lack of subordination associated with their concept of a father? Maybe, from a republican standpoint, between these two models some congruency exists.

Thanks for reading (or listening)! Feel free to comment below on any or all of the nine innings that make up this bullpen post. — Bryce

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

But Tocqueville on balance favors political associations. If a government disallowed political associations, such as political parties, the people would be dissuaded from forming something very different—civil associations,^⁠5 which “are as necessary to the American people as [political associations], and perhaps more so.”^⁠6 Americans form civil associations “to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes,” among “a thousand other kinds,” Tocqueville reports to his French countrymen.^⁠7 In a democracy, these civil associations lift an impossible burden from the government, which could never “carry on the vast multitude of lesser undertakings which the American citizens perform every day, with the assistance of the principle of association.” Without associating, Americans would require governmental assistance for “even the commonest necessaries of life.”^⁠8 Government would grow uncontrollably.

In order to keep the size, undertakings, and inefficiencies of its governments from swelling, Americans must be schooled in this principle of association so they’ll participate in civil associations. That’s where political associations come in. They encourage participation in these civil associations and train citizens in “the general theory of association.”^⁠9 How would political associations encourage participation in civil associations? Political associations are usually large and concern themselves with “important affairs” that draw adherents, Tocqueville believes:

In politics men combine for great undertakings; and the use they make of the principle of association in important affairs practically teaches them that it is their interest to help each other in those of less moment.^⁠10

Civil associations, usually of “less moment,” are often faced with a tough sell:

In civil life it seldom happens that any one interest draws a very large number of men to act in concert; much skill is required to bring such an interest into existence^⁠ . . .11

The experience of political associations encourages and teaches those in civil associations, which are as difficult to start and maintain as they are necessary for limited government and for public freedom.

Since Tocqueville’s time, though, civil associations—unless one includes large (indeed, often global) corporations in the category of civil associations—have languished, the size and undertakings of governments have swelled, and citizens have mostly isolated themselves from public life. (Today, we generally use the term “civic associations” to refer to what Tocqueville referred to as “civil associations,” so henceforth I’ll use “civic associations,” too.)

This self-isolation gained national attention with the publication of Robert D. Putnam’s bestselling 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In addition, Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis in 2024 created the documentary movie Join or Die, which chronicles Putnam’s research and field studies. With interviews and its own, supplemental research, Join or Die, which is now available for streaming on Netflix, also amplifies Putnam’s claim of policy suggested by the movie’s title: to help save democracy and to become a happier, more civil society, we should get involved in civic associations.

Tocqueville’s thesis seems to modify Putnam’s thesis just a little: to help keep government decentralized, we should get involved in civic associations. But Tocqueville’s thesis requires Tocqueville’s first step, which seems to find in Putnam’s thesis a case of reverse causation. According to Tocqueville, to save civic associational life, we should get involved in politics—specifically in political associations.

A hundred years ago, the English pluralists seemed to accept Tocqueville’s chain of causation from political life to civic associational life. But this political movement went further than Tocqueville’s vision for increasing involvement in political associations in America’s one-person-one-vote representative government as a means of fostering civic life. The English pluralists argued that to save civic life—and to save democracy, too—civic associations should directly comprise much of national government.

To revive civic life, the United States should consider amending its Constitution by adopting the English pluralists’ proposals. These amendments would also help to revive the Constitution’s balance of powers by eliminating America’s growing executive sovereignty.

English pluralism itself revives the associational life of the Middle Ages.^⁠ The English pluralists believe that the British Parliament’s modern sovereignty over churches, unions, and other associations is far less desirable than the “enormous development of corporate life in the Middle Ages, guilds of every kind, and the whole notion of the system of estates in the body politic,” according to John Neville Figgis, an English pluralist and an Anglican monk and priest.^⁠12

It’s no accident that the Middle Ages’ rich associational life came in the context of non-sovereign realms. States, particularly those with national assemblies that claim to represent “the people’s sovereign power contained a real threat to autonomous associations,” according to Paul Q. Hirst, because “the independent life of such associations challenges the principle of sovereignty.” English pluralists offer the same challenge to sovereignty.13

English pluralists challenge state sovereignty by challenging the widely unexamined notion of general representation. G. D. H. Cole, during his relatively short stint as an English pluralist, distinguished between the general representation found in most centralized governments and the functional and partial representation found in associations. He found that the “functional representation” practiced by associations made more sense than the theory of general representation that undergirds representative governments today:

It is impossible to represent human beings as selves or centres of consciousness; it is quite possible to represent . . . so much of human beings as they themselves put into associated effort for a specific purpose.14

True representatives, then, don’t represent people “but definite and particular purposes common to a number of persons.”15

At first glance, Cole’s understanding of functional representation seems to prioritize the association over the individual. However, it honors the individual by limiting individuals’ representatives to individuals’ specific interests and expertise. Hirst summarizes Cole’s take on the individual’s ability to be adequately represented in government:

Cole is the relentless opponent of any narrowly reductive and utilitarian individualism, but the whole ethical and analytic basis of his social theory is an exalted conception of the individual. Associations are necessarily specific to certain purposes, but “[e]very individual is in his nature universal . . .”16

This understanding of individualism and representation undermines the British Parliament’s claim to sovereignty and accounts for most modern legislatures’ reliance on lobbyists and degeneration into corruption:

Parliament professes to represent all the citizens in all things, and therefore as a rule represents none of them in anything. . . . It is, therefore, peculiarly subject to corrupt, and especially to plutocratic, influences, and does everything badly, because it is not chosen to do any definitive thing well.17

Cole purports to have found the root of modern representative democracies’ dysfunction. Our “dysfunction” is by design: our democracies aren’t organized around “the principle of function.” Cole, like Tocqueville before him, notes that we function in society through our interests, our vocations, and our care for our particular corner of the earth. Our representatives, Cole says, should represent the parts of us that associate around these functions and not represent us as individuals.

Cole would replace Parliament with “a system of co-ordinated functional representative bodies.” In Cole’s system, each body of functional representatives—those drawn from bowling leagues and those drawn from steelworkers’ unions, for instance—would have its own executive and legislative powers, breaking up the state’s monopoly in those areas. In this respect, these representative bodies would reflect the powers exercised by specific associations, which act as direct democracies, finding ways to decide what to do (the legislative power) and ways to do it (the executive power).

Consider how radically and effectively this associative rule would end sovereignty, according to Hirst, compared with most attempts at merely limiting sovereignty:

The widely canvassed measures of political reform such as proportional representation, a Bill of Rights, and a Freedom of Information Act, while desirable changes in themselves, do not fully touch the issue of centralized sovereign state power in a situation where there is no consensus as to how it shall be used. Such measures are restraints on state action rather than a change in state organization such that the state’s capacities for action are altered in a way that lessens the need for restraint.18

All of Cole’s representative bodies would have legislative and executive powers, and none of the representative bodies would exercise sovereignty. Even foreign policy—even any declarations of war—would be made by co-ordinated functional associations.

The English pluralists’ idea of associative rule resembles Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s notion of how communes would associate to form a polity’s government. The practical work of these associations and communes would legitimate them as participants in government, meeting Buber’s requirement that a community should “not be made into a principle; it, too, should always satisfy a situation rather than an abstraction.”^⁠19

Buber attacks the notion of one-person, one-vote representative government for a similar reason: it turns a community into an abstraction. A real community “declares itself primarily in the common and active management of what it has in common, and without this it cannot exist.” Buber’s notion of community seems to have arisen out of God’s covenant with the world’s first community of people in the Garden of Eden, a non-representational model. To Buber, “a state of practically unlimited representation” leads to “the reign of practically unlimited centralist accumulation of power” that would make such a community impossible.^⁠20

But Cole’s functional representation would empower a community by conceivably giving each individual a practically unlimited involvement in democracy. By contrast, “one man, one vote,” Cole says, “is the cant of false democracy”:

The essence of functional democracy is that a man should count as many times over as there are functions in which he is interested. To count once is to count about nothing in particular . . .21

In this way, Cole and Buber would help solve one of Tocqueville’s dilemmas in Democracy in America. In part 1 of that work, Tocqueville celebrates representative government because it tends to “mitigate the excesses of political association”: political parties can’t claim to be majorities in a polity where everyone’s vote is counted.^⁠22 However, in part 2 of Democracy in America, published five years after part 1, Tocqueville dismisses representative government as a people’s means of choosing “their own guardians.” Each voter, Tocqueville ruefully points out, can take solace that “the people at large . . . holds the end of his chain.”^⁠23 If Cole has his way, though, the representatives wouldn’t represent the people, of whom they would otherwise be guardians, but would represent the people’s associations in larger associations that share the same functions. As a result, each individual would be effectively represented by one or more persons who share their interests as expressed in their shared associational memberships.

Each representative also would bring their various expertise to a government of disparate associations, each with its own executive and legislative powers. As a result, America’s spirit of association, as well as its commitment to a truly representative government, would strengthen Americans’ political freedom and make its government more responsive and competent.

How would English pluralism change the balance of powers that the American Constitution purports to achieve among its branches of government? It would, in a new way, restore American federalism to its ideal as a balance of legislative, executive, and judicial powers among different bodies.

Recall that the Constitution’s separation of powers is not a complete separation of functions. In medieval fashion, according to political theorist Samuel Huntington, the Constitution “perpetuated a fusion of functions and a division of power . . .”24 Presidents, for instance, have a legislative veto. Likewise, the Supreme Court inherited “the [medieval] judicial power to declare what the law is,” but this power, Huntington says, “became the [American] mixed judicial-legislative power to tell the legislature what the law cannot be.”25

Similarly, in Cole’s version of English pluralism, the separation of powers among the associations of functional associations would have a mix of functions. As I’ve described Cole’s thought, each of these larger, representative associations would have its own legislative and executive functions. This would make the judiciary the only centralized branch of government.

At the top of Cole’s organizational chart, Cole would have a “co-ordinating agency . . . a joint council or congress of the supreme bodies representing each of the main functions in society.” It would act more like a court than a legislative body:

It does not in the normal case initiate, it decides. It is not so much a legislature as a constitutional judiciary, or democratic Supreme Court of Functional Equity.^⁠26

Today’s least powerful branch—the federal judiciary—would have the final say about disputes among these associations and their potentially overlapping functional domains.

This vision of Parliament’s replacement—and by extension of Congress’s and the presidency’s replacement in the United States’s federal system—is a vision of Parliament’s past, and it’s also a vision of the federal court system under the American Constitution. This history and this vision of a federal court system would help us to appreciate what many have long derided as courts’ tendency to “legislate from the bench.”

In 1910, a controversy surrounding American courts legislating from the bench was so pronounced that Charles McIlwain, an American historian and political scientist, wrote The High Court of Parliament to explain the medieval origins of the court’s legislative practice.^⁠27 The idea of mixing legislation and adjudication comes from the feudal period.^⁠28 Back then, the king’s Counsel, which was often called Parliament,^⁠29 had three functions: “It was court of law, advisory council, and exchequer all in one.”^⁠30

Part of the multiple roles of the various English courts had to do with the medieval conception of law. Legislation as we understand it today was virtually unknown in medieval England.^⁠31 Instead, courts were tasked with discovering and declaring existing law. The scandal in medieval times wouldn’t be that a court discovered law but that a body of men—whether termed a legislature, court, or an executive agency—would presume to legislate in the first place.

The Tudor era, which despite its earlier timeframe gives the American Constitution its notion of a balance of powers, was a time “when Parliament and King were joint organs of the commonwealth,” McIlwain says.^⁠32 It was only in response to the modern claim to sovereignty first made in England by James I, the first Stuart king, that the Long Parliament presented England with “a legislative assembly of the modern type—no longer a mere law-declaring, but a law-making machine,” McIlwain points out.^⁠33

The civil wars between the Stuart kings and Parliament resulted in Parliament’s sovereignty in 1688, when Parliament’s gradual evolution from “high court to supreme legislature,” in Huntington’s words, was completed. From that point forward, with the English courts subordinate to a sovereign Parliament, “the supremacy of the law disappeared . . . and with it disappeared the mixture of judicial and political functions.”^⁠34 In England, the courts’ mix of judicial and legislative functions was “checked by the growth in the seventeenth century of a new doctrine of parliamentary omnipotence.”^⁠35

By contrast, the English pluralists, like America’s framers, advocate a kind of federalism. They wish specifically for a consociation, Luke Bretherton says,^⁠36 which he defines as “a mutual fellowship between distant institutions or groups who are federated together for a common purpose.”^⁠37 Federalism necessarily causes litigation and requires courts. (The United States Constitution, of course, gives the Supreme Court original jurisdiction for litigation between states, jurisdiction that makes it “impossible not to feel that the Court . . . is no ordinary body,” Tocqueville says.38) As Professor A. V. Dicey says, “federalism substitutes litigation for legislation.”^⁠39

A true federalism achieves a balance of powers, and that balance in written constitutions involves the judicial authority ruling on constitutional matters. When we lament that American courts tend to legislate from the bench, we may be also pining after sovereignty. “Stop legislating from the bench” and “Give us a king” come from the same political impulse.

Tocqueville lauded and defended the power of America’s federal courts in maintaining a balance of powers and in keeping sovereignty at bay:

The peace, the prosperity, and the very existence of the Union are vested in the hands of the [Supreme Court’s then] seven judges. Without their active co-operation the Constitution would be a dead letter: the Executive appeals to them for assistance against the encroachments of the legislative powers; the Legislature demands their protection from the designs of the Executive; they defend the Union from the disobedience of the States, the States from the exaggerated claims of the Union, the public interest against the interests of private citizens, and the conservative spirit of order against the fleeting innovations of democracy.40

The United States Supreme Court would find its fulfillment in federalism as a separate branch of government and as an arbiter among associations and functions if the likes of bowling leagues constituted our legislative and executive authorities.

Discussion questions

1. In supporting Jefferson’s proposal to divide counties into little republics, Hannah Arendt admits that it would “spell the end of general suffrage as we understand it today.” She doesn’t seem to mind, though, for reasons that may apply to English pluralism as well: “only those who as voluntary members of an ‘elementary republic’ have demonstrated that they care for more than their private happiness and are concerned about the state of the world would have the right to be heard in the conduct of the business of the republic.”^⁠41 Would you be concerned that both the English pluralists and Jefferson propose a direct democracy as opposed to voting, at least at the local level?

2. Think of today’s clubs, churches, and service organizations. What would they bring to a kind of consociation?^⁠42 How would you structure such a consociation? Would people who “care for more than their private happiness,” as Arendt puts it, but don’t want to join the Lion’s Club or the synagogue down the street, for instance, create their own associations? How might you structure the rest of the government?

3. Do you agree with G. D. H. Cole that an individual qua individual is too “universal” to be represented, and that representational government must arise from her involvement in associations and institutions, groups in which specific parts of her are engaged with a small portion of the polity? What would a representational government modeled after Cole’s thinking look like? How would it compare with representational government under the United States Constitution?

4. Do you agree with Martin Buber that a representational form of government leads to centralized power that destroys the community life it purports to serve?

5. Is representative government, as Tocqueville claims, a people’s means of choosing “their own guardians”? Does Cole offer a valid treatment for Tocqueville’s diagnosis?

6. Could English pluralism help to create a more unified federalism, one focused on healthy “vertical” relationships between local communities and their distant representatives?

7. Could English pluralism help to foster associational life?

8. Do you think with Putnam that joining civic organizations such as bowling leagues, Habitat for Humanity, and the Elks Club could help to strengthen democracy? Do you see Putnam and Cole coming at the same problem from opposite angles?

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

It certainly was. Victoria and I were returning home from my fiftieth high-school reunion, where the reunion committee had asked me to give the opening prayer. I think my invitation to pray stemmed from my teenaged, Jesus-freak zeal. I preached a lot in the school hallways during lunch and passed out a lot of Chick tracts, including “This Was Your Life.”

Back then, in my old life, someone leaving a tract on a bathroom’s hand dryer would have been considered shy. In him, the love that caused us to witness was mixed with the fear of man, so he’d leave tracts around to do the work for him (with, he’d rationalize, the Spirit’s help).

The ideal witness, on the other hand, might have been someone like Rainbow Man, who wore an attention-getting rainbow afro-wig while sitting behind the goalposts at NFL games. During field-goal and extra-point attempts, he’d waive a poster that read, in its entirety, “John 3:16.” Nothing shy there, I believe.

And, from my old life’s reductionist, evangelical point of view, John 3:16 was also enough said.

On page 14 of “This Was Your Life,” the tract’s protagonist—I’ll call this anonymous person Guy—sits at church, listening to the preacher quote the famous King James Version of John 3:16:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

But Guy looks distracted. Whereas Rainbow Man sits in the stadium with his mind on John 3:16, Guy hears John 3:16 with his mind in the stadium. His thought bubble reads, “I wonder who’s winning the ball game.”

Of course, Guy can’t discreetly glance at his phone for the score since Chick tracts came out long before cellphones. (I mean, this is the exact same tract I passed out over half a century ago.) “This Was Your Life” is dated in other respects, too. Guy, for instance, wears a tie to the family dinner table, and his TV is about as deep as it is tall. Speaking of TV, the tract’s play on the 1950s series This Is Your Life is, of course, lost on most Americans now.

Despite all that, I wasn’t surprised to find the tract still in circulation. The tract’s understanding of John 3:16 and the tract’s unstated, apolitical assumptions about what the KJV translates as “world” and “eternal life” persist today.

Because I love John 3:16 now even more than I did during the years I handed out Chick tracts, I want to help free the verse from these assumptions through its context in Jesus’s religious and political project, the kingdom of God. I’ll cite a few theologians and political theorists along the way.

Let’s start with “world” in “For God so loved the world.” The Greek word transliterated as kosmos and found in John 3:16 is different than the Greek word transliterated as oikoumenē, which theologian David Bentley Hart defines as “the inhabited world of human beings.” Compared to oikoumenē, kosmos is a lot more . . . cosmic.

Hart uses “cosmos” for every kosmos in his translation of the New Testament, including the kosmos in John 3:16. To him, the English word “cosmos” best fits a Greek word “that most literally means ‘order’ or ‘arrangement,’ or even ‘loveliness of design.’”1 In New Testament times,

the “cosmos” was quite literally a magnificently and terribly elaborate order of reality that comprehended nature (understood as a rational integrity organized by metaphysical principles), the essential principles of the natural and animal human condition (flesh and soul, for instance, with all their miseries), the spiritual world (including the hierarchies of the “divine,” the angelic, and the daemonic), the astral and planetary heavens (understood as a changeless realm at once physical and spiritual), as well as social, political, and religious structures of authority and power (including the governments of human beings, angels, celestial “daemons,” gods, terrestrial demons, and whatever other mysterious forces might be hiding behind nature’s visible forms).2

God, then, so loved his order. That is, God loves what he does in Genesis’s first chapter, which, as Rabbi Everett Fox points out, describes “God’s bringing order out of chaos, not creation from nothingness.”3 That order includes the political order that God redeems from imperial chaos both at creation and at Jesus’s crucifixion. It includes “the rulers of this age,” who if they had known better, “would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”4 It includes the physical earth, too, and all of its flora and fauna, including its human beings. So “the world” in John 3:16 is a lot more than humanity.

It’s hard for us reductionist and materialist moderns to imagine such a cosmos. God’s cosmos, Hart says, is a “vision of the whole of things that is unlike any with which most of us are today familiar, and that simply does not correspond to any meaning of ‘world’ intuitively obvious to us.” But here we are, already swimming in the cosmic waters of a deeper and broader John 3:16.

What does God’s love for such a cosmos have to do with the verse’s purported promise of eternity in heaven away from this cosmos? Well, nothing. And how could a God who loves such a creation send us away from there for eternity—and to do so as a reward for our faith? We have lots of compelling cultural imaginings of a restored world. But what are our cultural imaginings of eternal life in a heaven separated from that restored world? Cumulus clouds, haloes and harps. I can’t take harp music for five seconds. How about for eternity? Would eternity work?

Happily, John 3:16 makes no promise of an eternity in heaven away from earth. Theologian and New Testament scholar N. T. Wright anticipates people’s shock when, after he quotes the KJV’s John 3:16, he compares the common understanding with how the New Testament uses zoe aionios, the transliteration of what the KJV translates as “everlasting life”:

There we are, think average Christian readers. This is the biblical promise of a timeless heavenly bliss.

But it isn’t. In the many places where the phrase zoe aionios appears in the gospels, and in Paul’s letters for that matter, it refers to one aspect of an ancient Jewish belief about how time was divided up. In this viewpoint, there were two “aions” (we sometimes use the word “eon” in that sense): the “present age,” ha-olam hazeh in Hebrew, and the “age to come,” ha-olam ha-ba. The “age to come,” many ancient Jews believed, would arrive one day to bring God’s justice, peace, and healing to the world as it groaned and toiled within the “present age.”5

John 3:16, then, doesn’t tell us how to get to heaven. It promises instead that God will involve us in reordering the cosmos “to bring God’s justice, peace, and healing” to it. That’s because God loves the cosmos, despite what we and the dark forces in it have done to it over the centuries. I don’t like harp music, but let’s look at the matter from the cosmos’s standpoint. It would be odd for God to express his love for the cosmos by sending his best political agents away from it forever.

Hart’s perspective on zoe aionios is similar to Wright’s. Hart points out that aionios corresponds to various forms and uses of the Hebrew olam or the Aramaic alma, words that typically mean “age” and not “eternal.” Because of this Hebrew correlation, Hart is as straightforward as Wright in finding no categorical word for “eternal” in the New Testament:

There really is no word in Hebrew that naturally means “eternity,” either temporal or atemporal, or any word that naturally means “forever”; the claim occasionally made by champions of the received view—that both aiōn and olam in scripture mean “eternal” typically rather than defectively—is not merely logically impossible to verify, but simply false.6

Hart’s translation of John 3:16 captures this understanding, substituting “the life of the Age” for what we typically read as “eternal life”:

For God so loved the cosmos as to give the Son, the only one, so that everyone having faith in him might not perish, but have the life of the Age.7

Wright’s translation renders zoe aionios in John 3:16 similarly:

This, you see, is how much God loved the world: enough to give his only, special son, so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age.8

This more political understanding of “the cosmos” and “God’s new age” referred to in John 3:16 comports with the rest of the verse and with the next verse, too. Theologian Raymond E. Brown’s Anchor Bible points out that “He gave the only Son” (Brown’s translation) refers implicitly to Abraham, who gave his only son Isaac as part of his covenant with God. Abraham’s offering is an echo of God’s political, covenantal plan for turning chaos back into creation since, in Brown’s words, “even the mention of ‘the world’ fits in with this [Abrahamic] background, for Abraham’s generosity in sacrificing his only son was to be beneficial to all the nations of the world.”9 Just as Abraham comes out of an empire to set the nations free from the chaos that includes empires, so also Jesus is crucified by an empire to set the Gentile nations free from the same recurring chaos.

Brown’s assumption of the New Testament’s message of eternal life causes him to spot a change of subject in John 3:17:

If 16 assures us that the purpose of the Father’s giving the Son in Incarnation and death was eternal life for the believer, 17 paraphrases this in terms of salvation for the world.10

But Jesus doesn’t really change the subject in verse 17. Verse 16 already involves us in the world’s salvation. John 3:16 promises our involvement in the kingdom of heaven, which, as Wright points out, “is not about people going to heaven. It is about the rule of heaven coming to earth.”11 The heavenly city is, after all, last seen in the Bible coming down to earth.12 John 3:16 promises that, in the next age, we’ll have political work to do.

Even Guy in our tract seems to understand this at some level. On page 6, as an angel whisks him to the judgment seat of Christ, he protests that heaven is really “here on earth.” But the angel, informed by an evangelical view of heaven as eternally separated from earth, simply ignores him.

This difference of ages helps us understand the New Testament’s different attitudes towards the cosmos. If we live in the overlap of what Paul calls “the present evil age”13 (or what he also calls “the hour of crisis”)14 and “God’s new age” that begins at Jesus’s crucifixion, then “for God so loved the cosmos” fits with John’s admonition, “Do not love the cosmos or the things within the cosmos.”15 Don’t love the corrupt world of this present evil age on its own terms, but love the world as God sees it, the world God calls “very good” after his initial creation,16 the world God will renew in the new creation.

But to me, the best gift that a biblical understanding of “world” and “life of the Age” in John 3:16 involves its help with our politics today, before the new age fully comes. Several modern thinkers point out that we’re suffering from a battle in the public realm between the world and bare human life. Politics, these thinkers point out, should provide an abundant, public life and places where we meet to care for our parts of our common world. But in recent centuries, this notion of politics has given way to a more social and selfish form of politics aimed at addressing our individual concerns en masse.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben believes that our modern inability to distinguish a politics for all from a politics for each en masse makes our politics dangerous:

We can no longer distinguish between zoē and bios, between our biological life as living beings and our political existence, between what is incommunicable and speechless and what is speakable and communicable. As Foucault once wrote, we are animals in whose politics our very life as living beings is at stake.17

John 3:16 would help us get politics right if it doesn’t love the world by leaving it. But the prevalent understanding of John 3:16 as God’s way for us to escape the world seems to condemn the world, if I may adopt the language of John 3:17. This understanding would exacerbate what political theorist Hannah Arendt calls the “modern growth of worldlessness” that makes true politics next to impossible. In this “withering away of everything between us,” she says, we become atomized and begin to overvalue mere biological life as a substitute for the political world among us.18 Life itself, and not the world, becomes, in the words of English theologian Paul Fletcher, the “unsurpassable and supreme” good.19

Austrian philosopher and theologian Ivan Illich would agree with Fletcher. Life has become exalted even as it has gotten more commodified. According to his friend and literary heir David Cayley, Illich believed that life in modern times had

taken on the character of a substance or entity. This was a “shadowy” substance and yet, even so, life had become “stuffy—a thing which has stuff.” He had many examples of this—from the “lives” in which news media calculate the damage done by war or natural disaster to the habit of speaking in categories like “manpower” and “human resources.” What these many usages have in common is the imagination of life as a “compact reality” capable of management.20

In the political desert created by this worldlessness and this emphasis on a commodified life, governments are more likely to focus on managing and protecting life. Thomas Hobbes envisioned such a government. To protect us from our neighbors’ violence, Hobbes would have us enter into a

covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner.

In this “commonwealth,” Hobbes’s Leviathan becomes “that Mortal God to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defense.”21

Fletcher finds that this Mortal God “replaces the transcendent God” to a great extent. In this form of idolatry, the state becomes “the creator and upholder of life as such.”22 Illich’s critique of society’s concept of life as manageable and “stuffy” is similar: he describes this exaltation of bare life as “the most powerful idol the Church has had to face in the course of her history.”23

But it is Arendt who most famously contrasts the tension between bare life and the world we share:

Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.24

Arendt’s words seem written in the spirit of John 3:16. God gives up his only Son for the love of the world. We’re called to have the same faith for the same love.

My limited proviso: although I insist that any reading of John 3:16 must account for its political message (ergo, the “necessarily political” in my subtitle), I do not insist that anyone else adopt my own specific reading here of John 3:16 (the modest “a” in my subtitle).

Heck, though I have my qualms with “This Was Your Life,” I didn’t even take the bathroom’s copy out of circulation. I left it on the World Dryer. After all, my own journey to Jesus’s economic, political, and religious kingdom is ongoing, and it began with the likes of Rainbow Man’s poster and Jack Chick’s tracts. Who am I to quench the Spirit?

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Above: A John 3:16 poster back when the Lions and Bears were both bad. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

In the middle half of Luke, particularly, Jesus seems never to be too far from eating at someone’s table, from giving advice on hosting or attending a feast, or from telling a parable about a feast. This emphasis on banqueting, according to theologian David P. Moessner, provides Luke’s eleven-chapter account of Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem with much of its structure. Banqueting, Moessner says, also gives much of the context for Luke’s message: Jesus, though always a guest, is “the Lord of the Banquet in their midst”; he is “Lord and host of the Banquet of the Kingdom of God.”2

He’s the Lord of the Banquet both now and later, celebrating God’s reign on earth that has come and is always coming.3 In this way, as Moessner explains with scrupulous detail in his book Lord of the Banquet, Jesus fulfills Deuteronomy’s promise of a New Exodus from Israel’s anticipated exile. In sum, Jesus parties because Deuteronomy commands Israel, once in the promised land, “to enjoy the blessings of the covenant life by eating ‘meat’ and ‘fruit’ according to ‘all their desire.’”4 He parties because Deuteronomy promises Israel that, after returning from exile, it can have this life again.5

Jesus’s fellow partiers are important in this eschatological regard. Jesus mixes with tax collectors (political and economic oppressors) and sinners (generally, fornicators, criminals, and people who ignore purity codes) just as Israel is commanded to “share their firstlings and first fruits with the poor—the stranger, the widow, and the orphan—as well as the Levite in their city.”6 Adulterers and criminals, as kinds of categories, seem pretty distant from widows and orphans, but Jesus sups with them all. In fact, as Nicholas Wolterstorff points out, Jesus both echoes and adds to Deuteronomy when he tells his hosts that “. . . when you give a party, ask the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” His Pharisee hosts, in theory, would be fine with hosting the poor, but hosting the crippled would cause these hosts to violate their own purity codes.7

Jesus asks his hosts, in essence, to make their banquets public. Deuteronomy’s anticipated celebrations, after all, aren’t private but public. They’re organized around Israel’s households, Moessner points out, but the households must subordinate their own domestic felicity to the public good. The households’ celebrations, for instance, often include those outside the home. In fact, the celebrations themselves often occur outside the home “at the one place which the Lord shall choose,” which, of course, became Jerusalem.8 These pilgrimages put the various strata of Israelite society—the rich and the poor, the blue bloods and the foreigners, the upright and the “sinners”—on a literally equal footing, as Chaucer’s account of a pilgrimage to Canterbury also puts his characters.

These values permeate Jesus’s own long pilgrimage to Jerusalem that constitutes the middle half of Luke. New Exodus feasting involves everyone—everyone, that is, who will accept invitations to these public and inclusive feasts. Jesus’s Parable of the Great Feast, told in the middle of Jesus’s pilgrimage, suggests that many won’t accept these invitations.

This caveat of acceptance is what makes Jesus, in a political sense, antisocial.

“Society,” in Hannah Arendt’s political sense of the term, isn’t just any large community. Society involves the mindset and means of relating to one another in polities where private concerns—concerns about our physical survival, comfort, and propagation—have, in Arendt’s words, “conquered the public realm.”9 In society’s victory over public life, the public realm is made to serve the household and the workplace, the home and the economy.

Arendt points out that many of our widely accepted economic and political concepts, such as capitalism’s “invisible hand,” our selective forms of enlightened self-interest, and the dogma of inevitable progress, have, in recent times, aided society’s takeover of politics in liberal societies:

All the so-called liberal concepts of politics . . .—such as unlimited competition regulated by a secret balance which comes mysteriously from the sum total of competing activities, the pursuit of “enlightened self-interest” as an adequate political virtue, unlimited progress inherent in the mere succession of events—have this in common: they simply add up private lives and personal behavior patterns and present the sum as laws of history, or economics, or politics.10

In societies, people’s private wants, needs, and actions add up to what society is pleased to call public life. Arendt acknowledges that ant colonies and beehives exemplify this scaling from individual, private concerns to societies. But, she says, since people “are neither ants nor bees, the whole thing is a delusion.”11

To those with eyes to see, national elections expose this delusion. Though many believe that a particular candidate would, if elected, substantially reduce the polity’s political freedom, those people—along with everyone else—realize that the election’s outcome is most closely tied to whom the electorate believes would best handle the economy. In a society, then, private matters trump public freedom even in what’s considered our most important expression of public freedom—elections.

Our family life and our private needs, of course, are vital, but they cannot substitute for our public lives. When our private matters displace public matters, God’s kingdom and its justice become solely religious practices or tenets or cease to be practiced at all. Notice the private preoccupations of the invited guests in Jesus’s Parable of the Great Feast and how these preoccupations prevent the guests from accepting their public callings (their “invitations”):

One after another they all sent excuses. The first said, “I have bought a piece of land, and I must go and inspect it; please accept my apologies.” The second said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am on my way to try them out; please accept my apologies.” The next said, “I cannot come; I have just got married.”12

None of these excuses involves the invitees in inherently bad pursuits. Instead, their excuses privilege private matters—marketplace and work, marriage and family—over the public feast.

So the master of the feast ends up filling his banquet with “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame”—the very people Jesus tells his host to invite, those excluded from Israel’s society. In this way, the Lord of the Banquet, mirroring Deuteronomy’s New Exodus and God’s now and not-yet kingdom, creates public life.

The master of the feast, then, is antisocial. That is, he’s against what Arendt is against—the social realm’s takeover of the political. He grows angry when private matters assert themselves against participation in the public realm.

In this political sense, Jesus is equally antisocial in the only two Gospel passages where he warns against adopting Gentile practices. The first practice involves putting our private needs ahead of a just polity, which Jesus calls the kingdom of God:

Do not ask anxiously, “What are we to eat? What are we to drink? What shall we wear?” These are the things that occupy the minds of the heathen, but your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well.13

The second Gentile practice—ruling over people—may at first seem unrelated to the first practice:

. . . Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that, among the Gentiles, rulers lord it over their subjects, and the great make their authority felt. It shall not be so with you; among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all . . .”14

These two Gentile practices Jesus identifies—authoritarian rule and the public’s abandonment of public space—do, in fact, support each other. Arendt finds the concepts’ connection in the thought of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. A society—a collective of people focused solely on family, career, and the market—may eventually attract a “Leviathan,” an authoritarian ruler, to dominate its public life. And that domination, in turn, will further drive people into their private lives, Arendt says:

Deprived of political rights, the individual, to whom public and official life manifests itself in the guise of necessity, acquires a new and increased interest in his private life and his personal fate. Excluded from participation in the management of public affairs that involve all citizens, the individual loses his rightful place in society and his natural connection with his fellow-men.15

In a vicious cycle, then, the loss of people’s natural political connection with others drives people into private relations of pure competition, causing people to need an authoritarian’s protection even more.

Unlike many political thinkers, Arendt doesn’t attribute Hobbes’s ideas about a protection-racket government to Hobbes’s supposed pessimistic view of human nature. Instead, she understands Hobbes as a prophet of today’s private, bourgeois society in which people focus on their private lives and fortunes and, therefore, need protection from their fellow societal members above everything else:

[Hobbes’s] new body politic was conceived for the benefit of the new bourgeois society as it emerged in the seventeenth century and this picture of man is a sketch for the new type of Man who would fit into it. The Commonwealth is based on the delegation of power, and not of rights. It acquires a monopoly on killing and provides in exchange a conditional guarantee against being killed.16

In society, the state enforces its role of protecting us from our neighbors with death, if necessary. Indeed, as theologian William T. Cavanaugh points out, “the foundation of the state in Hobbes is not a common good but rather a shared evil: the fear of death.”17 This fear of death alienates people from pursuing the common good, such as participating in charity, and Hobbes’s Leviathan obliges. Leviathan, for instance, doesn’t require anyone to give to the poor. His state simply excludes the poor from society, as Arendt points out:

By assigning his political rights to the state the individual also delegates his social responsibilities to it: he asks the state to relieve him of the burden of caring for the poor precisely as he asks for protection against criminals. The difference between pauper and criminal disappears—both stand outside society. . . .18

Society, then, excludes its economic losers as it does its criminals.

Society’s list of excluded people, including the poor and the criminals, soon begins to resemble the list Jesus makes of those who are—shockingly, from his society’s standpoint—invited into the Kingdom of God. Jesus welcomes into the public sphere those excluded from society.

Hobbes’s remedy for society’s excluded people, though, isn’t acceptance into the public realm but violence:

Hobbes liberates those who are excluded from society—the unsuccessful, the unfortunate, the criminal—from every obligation toward society and state if the state does not take care of them. They may give free rein to their desire for power and are told to take advantage of their elemental ability to kill, thus restoring that natural equality which society conceals only for the sake of expediency. Hobbes foresees and justifies the social outcasts’ organization into a gang of murderers as a logical outcome of the bourgeoisie’s moral philosophy.19

Under Hobbes, society’s losers are tacitly encouraged to take up arms and rebel. Society thereby approximates the political situation at the time of Jesus’s birth caused by acts of exclusion that lead to armed resistance. The tax census that leads Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem also leads a would-be messiah to start an unsuccessful armed rebellion against Rome.20

Jesus, of course, is one of many Roman-era Jewish messiahs. But unlike the others we know of, Jesus doesn’t take up arms.21 Instead, by fulfilling Israel’s long-promised New Exodus, he affirms and practices the public calling of Israel’s covenant-based communities. He extends this New Exodus even to the Gentiles who, like Israel, suffer under the Roman Empire’s fear and oppression.

Hobbes may have been a prophet, but the social, wholly private mindset his proposed commonwealth addresses has been fostered by rulers for centuries, including the Roman Empire during our era’s first century.

Jesus offers a different model of living together as both a present alternative to society and a promised future of a just polity. By walking out Deuteronomy’s long-awaited New Exodus to Jerusalem, Jesus points back to Deuteronomy’s balanced constitution based on federal, theocratic, and republican principles. He points back also to the Torah’s economic justice based in part on its sabbatical years and its years of jubilee.

Jesus’s partying with society’s poor and its outcasts is one way Jesus announces that God’s kingdom, despite the social and political injustice experienced by his listeners, has come.

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The above illustrations are generated from Bing Image Creator. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

We don't like this. We want God to show up first. In translations, we mangle the Bible's opening syntax so that God creates from nothing: "In the beginning, God created . . ." But the Hebrew starts with the situation God addresses in creating—the situation of tohu wabohu, or chaos.2 We'd prefer, though, that God act independently of situation, that God have it all under control.

But control is chaos. Improv performers know this. Try to control a performance by coming up with something original—something out of nothing—and we’ll block the performance. Chaos ensues. Keith Johnstone, in what may be improv's most renowned book, links originality and chaos:

Ask people to give you an original idea and see the chaos it throws them into. If they said the first thing that came into their head, there'd be no problem.3

In other words, if you want some fun, just say "Yes, and . . ." to what the performance hands you. Chaos left to itself, as Johnstone suggests, is enervating and ultimately boring. But when God says, "Let there be light," he basically says to chaos, "You've got potential." That's startling, politically speaking, because chaos in the Bible—from Genesis to Revelation—represents empire and political oppression.4 Chaos really is control.

To say that "God is in control," then, is a little troubling since God doesn't cause chaos. Instead, God improvises with chaos. He accepts what he finds around him and puts it in the context of a bigger story. His voice, as in "let there be light," carries all the originality he needs. Us, too: we create public spaces when we stand up to chaos and speak.

Political chaos, of course, wants you voiceless; it doesn’t want you creating. If you doubt your voice, however, you might start with someone else's. (In composition classes, we call these voices “mentor texts.”) Sometimes, in his improvisation, even God uses someone else’s voice. When God challenges Pharaoh's Egyptian empire, which the Bible equates with chaos,5 he talks like Near-Eastern kings. Recall all those proclamations of "I am the Lord" in the Torah? It’s a derivative practice. Proclamations of "I am YHWH" simply appropriate the earlier "I am Mesha," "I am Yehawmilk," and "I am Azitawadda, the blessed of Ba'l," Professor Moshe David Cassuto points out:

. . . in accordance with its usual practice, the Torah employs the language of men, and commences the declaration in keeping with the opening formulae of the proclamations of human kings.6

I can hear YHWH now: "'I am Azitawadda'? Hey, I can do that."

Then with the plagues, God beats all the Egyptian deities at their own games and frees Israel.7 The Egyptian frog goddess and symbol of fertility?8 God gets into it. In a wink, he has frogs hopping in the Egyptians’ kitchens and ovens and—with a wink—their bedrooms and beds.9 God’s “yes, and . . .” often involves an element of satire.10

Irony, too. He demonstrates his justice by bringing down the mighty—and sometimes, as with Pharaoh’s chariots11 and Haman’s gallows,12 by turning the rulers’ own oppressive tools against them. When “the peoples hatch their futile plots,” after all, “He who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord derides them . . .”13

You’ve heard of distributive justice? Procedural justice and restorative justice? All good. God’s also into derivative justice. (Derisive justice, too.)

God does improv. He creates with what's at hand. He finds mountains and makes them valleys, and vice versa.14 He finds Israel's neighboring kings oppressing their subjects with covenants. So in his derivative justice, God picks up the covenant practice, but he uses his covenants to bless. As Rabbi Everett Fox suggests, God borrows (purloins? filches? liberates?) cultural practices such as covenant-making to great effect:

. . . the stylistic pattern in [the institution of the Mosaic covenant, Exodus chapters 19-24] resembles what is found in Hittite treaty texts . . . [but] no other ancient society, so far as we know, conceived of the possibility that a god could "cut a covenant" with a people. This . . . fact leads to the observation that, for Israel, the true king was not earthly but divine.15

Even an Israelite innovation, then, is at the same time derivative: a god can cut covenant like a king! Regarding justice, God might also appropriate Tim Cook’s characterization of Apple: “not first, but best.”

Ever wonder, by the way, why God chooses to be known as a king at all? For one thing, his choice means that, for people serving God, the job's already taken, as Fox here suggests. Still, "kingdom of God" seems an odd fit for an outfit run without rulers, which is how Jesus describes God's politics.16 But ancient Israel was surrounded by powerful kingdoms and empires. Perhaps the “kingdom” in the kingdom of God is yet another instance of improv.

Israel's not the first oppressed nation to improvise with the political concepts of its oppressors. Subjects of kingdoms and empires—and refugees from them, too—often do that: they describe just societies by repurposing the language of oppression. They might, for instance, describe a political space without sovereignty, such as a democracy or a republic, as a millenarian kingdom. Sociologist James C. Scott finds this phenomenon among hill peoples who, the world over, have fled from the hegemonic lowlands for political freedom:

. . . virtually all the ideas that might legitimate authority beyond the level of a single village are on loan from the lowlands. Such ideas are, however, cast loose from their lowland moorings and are reformulated in the hills to serve local purposes. The term bricolage is particularly apt for this process, inasmuch as lowland fragments of cosmology, regalia, dress, architecture, and titles are rearranged and assembled into unique amalgams by prophets, healers, and ambitious chiefs. The fact that the symbolic raw materials may be imported from the lowlands does not prevent them from being confected by highland prophets into millenarian expectations that may be used to oppose lowland cultural and political hegemony.17

Hill people put this "bricloage" from "cultural and political hegemony" to new uses, ones that often oppose the oppressive ways of the fragments' sources. The villages, such as the ones in Jesus's Galilee, get together and improvise with this political bricolage.

And in their improv, these villagers neither accept nor block oppression. Instead, as theologian and theater buff Samuel Wells says, they "overaccept"; that is, they accept by using the oppressors’ fragments to suggest a larger and better story.18

Princess Di (speaking of royalty) gave us a famous example of overacceptance. A reporter asked her, a year before her divorce from the Prince of Wales, if she thought she'd ever become queen. Her response: "I'd like to be a queen . . . in people's hearts, but I don't see myself being queen of this country."19 Wells points out that Diana didn't block "the awkwardness of her predicament.” Instead, she overaccepted "the sadness of losing her throne" and placed herself "in a far more significant narrative" as the queen in people's hearts.20 She overaccepted “queen” to suggest a greater queendom.

How does overaccepting work on the improv stage? Johnstone has his students practice overacceptance with a few rounds of "It's Tuesday," a game named after its invariable first line. Everything but this first line is contingent. Johnstone presents a possible progression among players A and B:

A: It's Tuesday.

B: No . . . it can't be . . . It's the day predicted for my death by the old gypsy! [Prolonged, agonizing death, ending with] Feed the goldfish.

A: That's all he ever thought about, that goldfish. . . . Fifty years' supply of ants' eggs, and what did he leave to me—not a penny. (Throws spectacular temper tantrum.) I shall write to Mother.

B: (Recovering) Your mother! You mean Milly is still alive?21

In this exercise, each player accepts the chaos of the other's lines. But the acceptance—the overacceptance—creatively makes something out of that chaos. The overacceptance begins to tell a new and larger story. Here’s a table with the specifics:

How might overaccepting work in public? Gerrel Jones, the founder of Renew Birmingham who made his home in the city's most violent neighborhood, may help us out. He was challenged by an elderly neighbor to do something about some drug dealers who recently had moved into a nearby rental. Gerrel knocked on their door and introduced himself as a neighbor. They all sat down on the front porch and started to get to know one another. Meanwhile, a customer approached, and one of the dealers on the porch tried waiving him off. Gerrel said, "No, don't worry about it." Gerrel witnessed the drug deal, but he never addressed it with the dealers.

Gerrel was signaling to the dealers that fear wouldn’t work in their new neighborhood. He didn't just accept their drug dealing; he overaccepted it, staying around to watch a deal and treating the dealers with love and respect. His overacceptance told a story beyond drug dealing, the story of a neighborhood where people respect one another and don't surrender their public space to criminals.

The dealers found themselves having to change or leave. They moved out within ten days. Gerrel explains:

People say, “That doesn't happen, oppressors never leave without the rebellion of the oppressed.” But what I’m talking about is a form of rebellion. It's the same form that Gandhi, King, and Jesus were talking about — it’s bringing positivity and love, but proactively.22

Jesus talks about it, and demonstrates it, too, in his parables about the kingdom. “Call my people a weed?” Jesus seems to say. Characterization accepted. But this prolific mustard seed becomes God's kingdom, Wells points out:

. . . the mustard plant is after all a weed, growing out of control where it is not wanted. This therefore is the way Jesus commends his revolution—not by accepting or blocking oppression, but by the surprise and abundance of a remarkable crop and by the uncontrollable spread of an infuriating weed.23

Jesus thereby says, "Yes, and . . ." to humanity, even to his enemies, just as God does when he mimics the earthly kings' language. Jesus says it also in his teachings involving the second cheek, the second garment, and the second mile, teachings in which Wells finds "a perfect embodiment of overaccepting."24 Theologian Warren Carter understands Jesus's strategy in these three "seconds" similarly:

Instead of cowering submission or violent retaliation, Jesus urges a nonviolent response to the superior’s slap, offering the other check to deflect the intended intimidation and demeaning [Matthew 5:39]. In 5:41 Jesus requires compliance to angaria, a custom whereby Rome requisitioned labor, transport (animals, ships), and lodging from subject people. But followers were to subvert imperial authority by carrying the soldier’s pack twice the distance, putting the soldier off-balance, in danger of being disciplined for overly harsh conduct.25

In improv terms, “cowering submission" is accepting the offer, and “violent retaliation" is blocking it. However, the essence of nonviolent resistance is (ironically, given the tactic’s name) overaccepting, particularly the creative use of oppressive fragments to suggest a larger story. Carrying a soldier's pack two miles instead of one? The larger story may be Messiah's law: "Carry each other's burdens."26 Going two miles thereby becomes the requisition of being requisitioned.

Jesus trains his disciples to enter into conversation with their enemies by expropriating their enemies' best material. Imagine the conversations over two miles that might come up between a Roman soldier and his kibitzing caddy.

Jesus also trains his disciples to recognize when they themselves may have become oppressors. Jesus appears to get a taste of his own overaccepting medicine when a Syrophoenician woman—a Gentile, on whom the Jews of Jesus's day look down—asks him to cast a demon out of her daughter. Jesus takes the role of the oppressor:

. . . the woman came and fell at his feet and cried, “Help me, sir.” Jesus replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” “True, sir,” she answered, “and yet the dogs eat the scraps that fall from their master’s table.” Hearing this Jesus replied, “What faith you have! Let it be as you wish!” And from that moment her daughter was restored to health.27

Jesus calls her a dog, but the woman overaccepts the cruel characterization. By extending Jesus's metaphor, the woman participates in placing God's messianic table in the context of a greater banquet, one to which all humanity is invited. Whether Jesus was serious in his characterization or rather, as theologian G. B. Caird suggests, Jesus's words "were almost certainly spoken with a smile and a tone of voice which invited the woman's witty reply,"28 the Gentile woman’s overacceptance corroborates Jesus's remarks elsewhere suggesting that God's kingdom would be extended to all the world's peoples.29

In cutting covenant with Abraham, God, too, sets out to bless "all the nations of the earth"30—the same nations bound by their earthly kings' covenants. He announces the first fruit of that covenant by improvising—by refining his announcement to employ Sarah’s and Abraham’s responses to his announcement. That's how Isaac got his hame. I love how Frederick Buechner's rendition of what happens when God tells one-hundred-year-old Abraham and ninety-year-old Sarah that Sarah would finally have a child:

Then they laughed. One account says that Abraham laughed until he fell on his face, and the other account says that Sarah was the one who did it. She was hiding behind the door of their tent when the angel spoke, and it was her laughter that got them all going. According to Genesis, God intervened then and asked about Sarah's laughter, and Sarah was scared stiff and denied the whole thing. Then God said, "No, but you did laugh," and of course, he was right. Maybe the most interesting part of it all is that far from getting angry at them for laughing, God told them that when the baby was born he wanted them to name him Isaac, with in Hebrew means laughter. So you can say that God not only tolerated their laughter but blessed it and in a sense joined in it himself . . .31

By improvising, God joins in the fun. And Isaac, this impossible Laughter, is the first evidence of the nation God would use to set the other nations free.

Here’s a table summarizing some of the creation through overaccepting that we’ve seen so far:

As the table’s last line suggests, Isaac’s birth is all part of God's Grand Plan. But God’s plan, as Buechner’s account makes clear, doesn’t play out in fatalism. God’s plan plays out unexpectedly in improvisation. God's improv demonstrates that even the Grand Plan is contingent. We can stay at home with our blinds drawn and trust in some inexorable arc of the moral universe, or we can, like Martin King, improvise in public spaces.32

Both the seriousness and humor of God’s political improv point to the contingent nature of what the church calls the secular age, which begins in the book of Acts—the joy and even the fun that contingency affords us. In this “present evil age,” as Paul calls it,33 the age to come overaccepts the things of this age, breaking open “divisions between sacred and profane. If something is secular,” theologian Luke Bretherton points out,

it can be both sacred and profane, rather than sacred or profane, concerned with both the immanent and the transcendent, able to participate simultaneously in the penultimate and the ultimate. Secular time is thereby ambiguous and contingent.

God creates in this contingent secular time. The transcendent overaccepts the immanent. This age, Bretherton says, is where the fun starts:

. . . the secular, like pieces of Lego, is supposed to enable free and imaginative play. No one shape is definitive or determinative. Theologically, the secular is a time for the church to improvise forms of witness in response to the prior work of Christ and the Spirit, who are drawing creation into its eschatological fulfillment.34

To "improvise forms of witness" is to understand creation itself as improvisation—as the redemption of broken things that come to hand. Creation is redemption.

There's much to redeem. So much commentary today focuses on the tragic nature of our nation's politics. Other commentary focuses on how to keep ourselves sane during this unfolding tragedy, how to develop or continue certain life-giving hobbies and disciplines. Both of these forms of commentary, I think, are vital.

But they're also incomplete, as good tragedies might suggest. The best tragedies involve more than tragic events and intermissions with their respites in theater lobbies offering popcorn and bottled water. Tragedies also involve comic relief. Regarding Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance, Samuel Johnson notes that "the scenes are interchangeably diversified with merriment and solemnity."35 Why? Without the gravediggers' rustic logic, Polonius's pomposity, and Hamlet's wit, we'd never take on the tragedy's full weight. When I’ve had to process tragic circumstances, too, I've often found that laughter triggers my longed-for tears.

A tragedy's unrelieved tension, Shakespeare knew, "can lead to emotional fatigue or apathy," Sumneet Kaur and Himani Choudhary write.36 Political commentators, too, seem to fear that our nation's long and unrelenting movement away from republican government will lead to our fatigue or apathy (or both). Yoga or baking or even Orwell's roses may give me much-needed intermissions from relentless tragedy, but only my public overacceptance of the tragic forces will help me live out God’s command not to be overcome by evil. Paul explains:

“BUT IF YOUR ENEMY IS HUNGRY, FEED HIM; IF HE IS THIRSTY, GIVE HIM A DRINK; FOR IN SO DOING YOU WILL HEAP BURNING COALS ON HIS HEAD.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.37

Feeding our hungry enemies is both overacceptance and resistance.

Of course, like life and unlike Hamlet, improv isn't scripted. We do plan, but we plan in a community of interpretation practiced in an improvisational tradition. The Bible, too, which can be treated as a mere script, is an open-ended drama. Chaos returns and returns to the Bible's pages (e.g., Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Rome) as it does to our own public life. In response, we don’t read the Bible to find our lines. The Bible instead invites us, as Rowan Williams says, “to 'create' [ourselves] in finding a place within this drama—an improvisation in the theater workshop, but one that purports to be about a comprehensive truth affecting one's identity and future."38

Our lines—even, perhaps, our final lines—aren't fixed. Jesus suggests as much by telling us not to prepare for what might be our ultimate public performances:

"But when you are arrested, do not worry about what you are to say, for when the time comes, the words you need will be given you; it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking in you."39

In such a situation, we probably won't speak famous last words. But if we improvise, we'll say "yes, and . . ." to our last moments as we have to our previous public moments. We'll place these last moments in a greater, redemptive story. And we'll speak what we will have become practiced in—our Father's own derivative justice.

A related post:

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The above illustrations are generated from Bing Image Creator. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Over two hundred years after the Iroquois murder, another murder also highlighted differences between Western and indigenous notions of justice. This time, though, the murderer was an American Indian.2 In 1883, Crow Dog killed Spotted Tail, a BrÛlé Sioux chief who, in the words of Vine Deloria and Clifford Lytle, had “extended his chiefly privileges to include the wives of some of the traditional [tribal] leaders.” After the murder, the families of Crow Dog and Spotted Tail met and, in accordance with Sioux custom, negotiated compensation from Crow Dog to Spotted Tail’s family. The families were “eager to resolve their problems and avoid a continuing feud within the BrÛlés.” The whites living in that part of South Dakota, though, were horrified that Indian justice didn’t lead to Crow Dog’s execution. So Crow Dog was arrested, and a federal court jury convicted him of murder.

After Crow Dog’s conviction, things got better for him but worse for Native American justice. The United States Supreme Court overturned Crow Dog’s conviction on the grounds that Indian tribes had jurisdiction over their own criminal cases. The decision, however, only caused white public outrage to grow against BrÛlé Sioux principles of justice. In 1885, Congress, feeling the pressure of white opinion, passed the Major Crimes Act. The legislation and its later amendments stripped Indian nations of their jurisdiction over most felonies in their territories.3

Above: detail of Washington Landscape with Peace Medal Indian (1976) by T. C. Cannon.

Unlike Western justice, which is oriented to the punishment of individuals, Native American justice is oriented to the restoration of community harmony. One can see this dichotomy in the two systems’ different notions of an ultimate punishment. In Euro-American collectivities that emphasize the individual over the community, the ultimate punishment is death. Native American justice, however, regarded banishment as the ultimate punishment, according to Deloria and Lytle:

Banishment, not execution, was regarded as the most serious punishment since an individual without a community or relatives literally did not exist as a human being for many groups.4

In collectives of individuals, the individual’s death brings oblivion. But in communities, the individual’s banishment brings oblivion.

Another killing—this one staged in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—leads to a heated debate over death and banishment. The debate’s lead-up is well known: Romeo kills Juliet’s murderous cousin Tybalt and faces punishment for it. Earlier, after the play’s opening riot, the Prince warned the feuding families that further disturbance would result in execution. But despite his warning, the Prince decides not to execute Romeo. Instead, he banishes Romeo from Verona.

Romeo flees to Friar Lawrence, and the two argue about which of the two sentences is worse. Lawrence calls the Prince’s edict “dear mercy,” but Romeo thinks banishment is as bad as, or worse than, death. The argument hinges on their views of community. Romeo reasons that in a community, proximity is honor. “Carrion-flies” in Verona have more dignity than Romeo banished from Verona, he says, and banishment is more “mean”—more undignified—than death. Lawrence, though, holds a less place-based view.

One sees the characters’ different views of community in this exchange:

Friar Lawrence:

Hence from Verona art thou banished.
Be patient, for the world is broad and wide.

Romeo:

There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.5

I must admit that during the first fifty or sixty times I taught Romeo and Juliet, I had the same reaction to Romeo’s arguments as does Lawrence: “O deadly sin, O rude unthankfulness!”6 But I’ve recently reassessed Romeo’s and Lawrence’s respective orientations. Romeo finds his identity in his community, but Friar Lawrence argues from a more Western viewpoint, characterizing communities as fungible. The world is full of communities, Lawrence suggests. Take your pick of places, pack your identity and toothbrush, and accept exile.

Above: All the Tired Horses in the Sun (1971-72) by T.C. Cannon

This Shakespearean debate reprises the drama in the Garden of Eden. In it, God acts much like Shakespeare’s Prince. He warns Adam and Eve that if they eat from the garden’s tree of the knowledge of good and bad, they’ll die. But, like the Prince, God ends up banishing the guilty parties instead.

Between these events, Eve recounts God’s warning to the serpent, and the serpent’s retort seems prescient: “You certainly will not die!”7 Friar Lawrence sees things from the serpent’s more Western, individualistic perspective, pointing out that the Prince’s earlier threat of death literally won’t come to pass.

Is the serpent’s retort the final word about this inconsistent God? Adam’s sin brought death with it, Paul says,8 but the couple’s banishment is also a synecdoche of Israel’s long exile.9 If the wages of sin is death, as Paul maintains, then those wages are paid in the specie of exile, as N.T. Wright points out: “Exile is the payment for sin, so forgiveness of sin means the end of exile.” To the New Testament writers’ way of thinking, the Messiah came to save us from both death and exile.10

Romeo would get the connection between God’s warning of death and the first couple’s exile. Romeo, after all, claims that “exile is death”:

Hence “banishèd” is “banished from the world,”
And world’s exile is death. Then “banishèd”
Is death mistermed. Calling death “banishèd,”
Thou cutt’st my head off with a golden ax
And smilest upon the stroke that murders me.11

Our Western society’s unwillingness to associate exile with death suggests its alignment with Friar Lawrence’s—and the serpent’s—side of the argument. We can avoid death, or at least deny death’s power, if we “become like God,” disassociating ourselves from our particular Eden.

In other words, we can avoid death if we become the earth’s overlords and thereby, so to speak, self-banish. Instead of developing community life, we live above communities and their places as self-sufficient individuals.

Deloria contrasts this Western avoidance of death with the acceptance of death among indigenous cultures. He attributes the difference to the communal orientation of indigenous cultures:

The singular aspect of Indian tribal religions was that almost universally they produced people unafraid of death. It was not simply the status of warrior in the tribal life that created a fearlessness of death. Rather the integrity of communal life did not create an artificial sense of personal identity that had to be protected and preserved at all costs.12

By contrast, Eden’s serpent wishes to protect and enhance this “artificial sense of personal identity” by offering the poisoned fruit of an individualized, supremacist worldview—to “become like God.”

Above: Woman's Dancing Feather (2012) by Michelle Possum Nungurrayi

All human cultures are tempted to manage the fear of death with some form of supremacy, Professor James K. Rowe says in his book Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital:

. . . the intense existential fear caused by the reality of death compels humans to psychologically buffer themselves with cultural constructions of supremacy that compensate for the overwhelming helplessness they feel in the face of finitude.13

Western cultures generally suppress death with “cultural constructions of supremacy,” Rowe says, but indigenous cultures generally fight these constructions by locating humanity within the natural environment and by making death part of everyday life. Offering an example, Rowe summarizes Coast Salish people’s integration of death into life:

The awareness of the dead that pervades everyday life for many Coast Salish people is, in effect, the opposite of death denial. Uncanny encounters with the ancestral dead are a part of real life. These encounters may be odd, or even frightening, but few dispute that spirits exist and have the power to influence the living.14

This kind of practice, Rowe says, amounts to a developed resource “for facing and transforming that fear” of death, one example of a resource that is “more likely to produce nonsupremacist and egalitarian worldviews.”15

Rowe examines how the fear of death, and the suppression of that fear through the denial of death, creates supremacist societies. Rowe doesn’t discuss, however, how such societies perpetuate themselves by exploiting the fear of death. The egalitarian Iroquois probably sensed this exploitation in the executions their French neighbors wanted them to enjoy.

The Roman Empire, to offer a more famous example, reserved the very public execution by crucifixion for political criminals. Rome used the spectacle of crucifixion, of course, to maintain its domination over its conquered peoples. It’s in this political context of crucifixion that we might consider the New Testament’s recognition, in the book of Hebrews, of how rulers exploit the fear of death and its claim in Hebrews that Jesus came to deliver us from this tool of subjection:

Since the children share in flesh and blood, he too shared in them, so that by dying he might break the power of him who had death at his command, that is, the devil, and might liberate those who all their life had been in servitude through fear of death.16

In reflecting on this passage, we should keep in mind that in the New Testament, the devil is a political as well as a religious figure. The devil tempts Jesus with earthly kingdoms—a supremacist form of government. In resisting this temptation, Jesus doesn’t challenge the devil’s claim to the world’s kingdoms. Instead, by means of his crucifixion, Jesus paradoxically defeats the dark powers behind rulers—”the cosmic powers and authorities”—associated with the devil.17

Jesus’s defeat of ”the cosmic powers and authorities” liberates us from those who, in association with those powers, have a monopoly of permissible violence. One sees this liberation play out in the book of Hebrews after the above “fear of death” passage. Hebrews cites people who are killed or otherwise persecuted, and in every case the book implies that the death or other persecution comes from political sources.18 Jesus’s victory in death, then, means (among other things) that we are liberated from regimes that use the fear of death to keep us from public freedom.

But do we exercise that liberation? Deloria, who had once been an Episcopal priest, asks why most Christians fear death:

If the Christian religion is a victory over death, why do Western peoples who have had the benefits of the Christian religion for two thousand years fear death?19

We find material to address Deloria’s question in Romeo and Juliet. The church, personified by Friar Lawrence, has too often participated in perpetuating the fear of death by serving hegemonic regimes. We find additional material to answer Deloria’s question in the Garden. The West, like the individualistic first couple, desires hegemony to keep death at bay and pays for its bargain with exile.

Jesus’s offer of freedom from the fear of death, though, raises a deeper question: is there an alternative politics, one grounded in something more substantial than hegemony and a monopoly of violence?

One alternative politics could be based on the kinship that makes exile in indigenous cultures tantamount to death. During the colonial and revolutionary eras, according to historian Richard White, many First Nations offered kinship to whites, and many whites accepted.20 Jesus, too, offers kinship with Israel to Gentiles. Jesus’s death, the writer of Ephesians says, ends the Gentiles’ exile from God’s people:

Thus you are no longer aliens in a foreign land, but fellow-citizens with God’s people, members of God’s household.21

We can learn about living in public freedom by studying and listening to communities, like those of many First Nations, that fear exile more than death.

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Above: Washington Landscape with Peace Medal Indian (1976) by T. C. Cannon. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.