Beyond Empires and Toward Hope

On Daniel's Dream, Tumultuous Times, and How Hope is Not Work

I’ll be on vacation with family next week. Be good to each other.

Taking the Temperature of An Empire

Erin H Moon

has written a piece that resonates with a lot of folks: it’s an impassioned acknowledgement of America as a kind of possible place, where democracy happens in spurts and which has always had more promise than fulfillment. In what follows, I want to offer a response, not because I disagree with her frustration, but because I think there are some things which need to be added to be able to see our way through a dark wood.

In her essay, Erin puts her finger on the right pulse, that “enslaving ourselves to the powers that perpetuate (dehumanization), counting on them to be our savior is reckless, and frankly, idolatry. Every July 4th, American Christians (myself included) offer laments about the state of the union, because the promise doesn’t live up to the expectation. Naming this “an empire of death”, she calls for “joyful insurrection”, to reject the god of American sufficiency.

Having rejected that god, the essay calls us to work:

We do not grow weary of doing good, though we will need to accept that rest is inevitable. I know we’re tired. I know this is exhausting. I know it’s about to get worse. I am sorry for that. I am sorry if you’re older and this is how you’ll leave. I’m sorry if you’re younger and this is how you’ll start. I’m sorry for all the ways you’ve not been shown compassion about how hard all of this is. I’m sorry you were told this place is perfect, and if you don’t think it is, you can leave. I’m sorry. This place has never been perfect….This place has been beautiful at times. And what is our work if not to try and make it so again?

The end aim here is to redouble our efforts, though not in the terms of what got us here. She rightly points out the limits of macro-level solutions, in that these are the kinds of solutions which think that the small works of looking after our neighbors, listening to stories, and active care work are head-patting kinds of offerings. The little way of goodness is before us, and the darkness is manifold. This sounds familiar, I think.

Photo by Ilona Frey on Unsplash

In what follows, I want to trouble the waters a bit, not because I think that she’s wrong about America, but because I think that how we frame our call to action depends on what kind of problem we think confronts us. We’ll do this in two parts:

1. How we frame the problem determined what we see.

2. What we must see is hope, and hope is not work.

Empires Always Have Do Their Laundry

I’ve written before about how I think empire criticisms don’t do the work we think they do, and how the real enemy (practically speaking) is bureaucracy. I won’t reiterate the arguments for that here, but just presume it.

How we frame what we see as the problem matters here. The language of empire, conjures up something so total, of overwhelming power which we can only hope to destroy entirely. But if we learned anything from nine movies about space wizards, empires exist because of micro-processes populated by bungling dum-dums who do things like build exhaust ports that go straight to the main reactor.

I bring this up as the first sign of hope: that empires don’t last, for they are built upon very ordinary kinds of things which are always being repurposed.

Empires, as behemoths, either have to exist or be destroyed. They have to work as a totality, or be completely done away with, both of which leave us digging around after the whole of the world has been done away with. The image here is Daniel 2, with the rock destroying a multi-layered statue, leaving nothing but rubble. As far as a dream goes, it’s quite dramatic and makes the point quite effectively: God will put an end to whatever political schemes we have. But as a process, it can’t be so easily stretched. For what we find frequently, both biblically and politically, is that after hegemonies break down, there’s always pieces underneath which were persisting as if the empire wasn’t really all that big of a deal. At the risk of belaboring a nerdy Star Wars example, all of the far flung galaxies seem to just start organizing under Timothy Olyphant or the Hutts or whoever almost before the Death Star explodes.

Life in some form goes on because it was never about what was happening in one corner of the galaxy on the Death Star. By focusing our attention on the bureaucracies, we ironically have hope, because bureaucracies are full of people, doing all kinds of things in disparate and non-hegemonic ways, and people can be redeemed, theologically speaking¹. The rules which institutions set forth as iron laws always have exceptions, generated by the judgments of people, provided you can talk with them².

All of this means this: the Empire is made up of clones, some of whom become Finn. They’re not immutable. They’re boring, to be honest. But what they do do is suck up our attention by making us think that they are the immutable and the most important things. They make us despair of their end because we can’t think of what might happen if the totality were to disappear.

But in truth, when they end—as they always do—large scale institutions never go belly up all at once, nor do they go away entirely, for some of the reasons I’ve indicated above. The light begins to break through, because underneath there was always something else already, forms of life which could not be eradicated insofar as even humans in the worst circumstances continue to plant gardens and seek the welfare of whatever cities they find themselves in.

Hope is Not Work, God is Not the World

If it’s true that the real opposition is found in the multiplied bureaucracies which produce social conditions, but which are made up of people, then this leads us to a very heterodox conclusion: the way forward isn’t to work, but to hope, wait, and follow.

I take Erin’s point here of doing the small things in love to be very much the right direction, and coheres to what I’ve said above about the problem being bureaucracies—which are porous and tenuous as opposed to monolithic. The cracks are already there, but not—as I’ll flesh out in a moment—as the basis for a new system, but as a sign of that which cannot yet be named.

It is very easy—having perceived social issues as primarily macro-institutional ones—to conform our collective lives as a counter to their pathology. Put differently, our reaction begins to mirror the problem: we galvanize coalitions in opposition to faceless monoliths, and in the process, become machines ourselves, for only a monolith can defeat a monolith. Only a rock can destroy a statue.

BUT: in the story of Daniel, people are not the rock which destroys the statue.

I cannot emphasize this point enough.

God is the one who destroys the statue. God is the opposite term to empire. And this is a disarming move, in that it means that, like the saints under the throne, the people of God must first give themselves to prayer and doing the things they know to do. Acts 1, before Pentecost, is a great time of anticipation in a blank space of waiting for something they can’t quite name yet. The apostles, notably, did not take what they had to construct a counter-system to the Temple, but continued to see that which was before them as the place through which God would do something new: less empire, more pliable bureaucracies.

And so, it was. The temples and the synagogues were, we see, the places where the resurrection was proclaimed, where the lame were made to walk and the blind made to see. The temples and the synagogues were the places where the Good News began to gather in a multitude which could not have been predicted in advance, not because the synagogues were magic, but because God was bringing about something which did not look quite like synagogue or quite like the marketplace, but like Christ’s own body bringing together enemies in a new way which could only be followed but not managed.

In Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, God destroys the statue out of nowhere. This is, I think, part and parcel of how God seems to work in Scripture, as the plot twist which we always see coming in retrospect. The judgments in Scripture about the fittingness of God’s work to our situations always seems obvious, but only in the rearview: Moses as of course the guy to lead out of Egypt. But the truth is reverse: they do the thing, and then it seems obvious that of course this was the way forward all along—some dude living in the desert with no experience leading thousands of people³!

The answer to the question “What now?” begins not with creating a new hegemony, but with waiting for what cannot be expected, but only hoped in: the God who will not be known as a new kind of president, but as God.

And in that waiting, we do the things we know to do, as Erin rightly points out, but not expecting that if we do those things, the renewal of creation will be a success. For God is not an object in the world, though God is persistently available, the Holy Spirit sent of the Son by the Father. And because God is not an object in the world, that which God will do to renew the world will always be a trick of recognition in reverse.

It may not come in the form of saving our democracy, nor in the abolition of creation, or in some other kind of large scale institution, but in only the small and personal. But however it will come, it will come, as God’s own work, to God’s creatures, in a form which will always and ever lead us through the world’s frailties to God. And such things may very well make us enemies among those who counted us friends so long as we were aiming at a counter-revolution.

Hope becomes other than work, then, in that we are drawn always to God, knowing that our plan may very well bottom out, and that there may be unjust suffering which is incurred. The point is not to make good on America’s promise, but to meet for our prayers, to appoint the one to replace Judas, to talk well and wait for God’s promise which I cannot yet name to show itself. I do not make light of what difficulties this may entail, except to note that God’s presence to the suffering is promised far more frequently than God’s presence to the flourishing. And in that, we trust not that the plan will work, but that God is present always and ever.

And who knows what form that act of God might be, what form that hope might take? If Scripture is right, I will probably not recognize it, though I hope I will. Perhaps the form of one coming from the desert, born of Mary, out of Nazareth, having nothing to attract our attention.

1. I know, I know: Curtis Chang has been going on for some time about how institutions are the new nations and what not. I think that’s kind of nonsense. See here, beginning with 45:17, where he describes institutions as “image bearers”, a moniker traditionally reserved for people.

2. Following Agamben, it’s very plausible to say that institutions are exception-generating entities: get an Amazon customer service person on the line, and you’ll find that their return policies get very flexible very quickly.

3. The major example here is of course Jesus: Messianic prophecies were post-hoc readings of Scripture in light of making sense of the one who was raised from the dead was the one they were looking for all along. It doesn’t make the recognitions of Jesus as the Son of God by the folks who get it wrong! It just means that the prophecies worked in reverse, obvious once the thing happens.