Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day in America. As part of our collective social memory, we set aside yesterday to remember Dr King's prophetic voice in demonstrating the evils of racism in our lives. What we forget, so often, though, is that Dr King's prophetic voice also offered connected criticisms in economics and in violence.
Ultimately, that lack of memory is connected to our inability to grasp the unifying theme of Dr King. He was, after all, a minister of Jesus Christ. Which means his voice and work and life were attempts to understand America biblically.
What does it mean to "understand America biblically"?
First, let's explore what it doesn't mean. To understand America biblically doesn't mean to construe the Bible Americanly. The goal of the prophet is to speak the word of The Lord. But, more often than not, when Americans approach that word they do so with a radical violence to its character and content. We find proof-texts to foster our belief that America is the promised land. The city on a hill. We misappropriate the political images of the Bible. We conceive of America as Zion -- the righteous nation. A people of superior political morality. A country esteemed and specially chosen by God.
Thing is, it's profane -- it's even hubris -- to read the Bible as an apologetic for America. We violate the Bible when we read it as a justification for America.
Because the Bible, when it talks of human political institutions, uses a key word, a fundamental yet radical word: Fallen. The Bible is about the politics of fallen creation and the politics of redemption; the politics of the nations, institutions, ideologies, and causes of this world and the politics of the Kingdom of God; the politics of Babylon and the politics of Jerusalem; the politics of the Antichrist and the politics of Jesus Christ; the politics of the demonic powers and principalities and the politics of the timely judgment of God as sovereign; the politics of death and the politics of life; apocalyptic politics and eschatological politics.
This is a vision of salvation and politics that King saw and worked for. For the Bible -- and therefore for Dr King -- the reality of human life consummated in society within time in this world, here and now, is the promise of renewal and fulfillment vouchsafed for all humans and every nation -- for all of Creation -- throughout time.
In short, salvation is very this-worldly -- The Kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. This is why the subject of the God's word in inherently political.
But, what's more, the Bible's political vision depicts our moral fallenness intimately associated with our captivity and bondage to "the principalities and powers".
Dr King wasn't talking about "restoring" America to the Christian path as a moral revolution in the lives of individuals. That kind of pietistic approach is overly naive about the nature of the Fall and the degree to which inviduals have become enslaved to and bound up with social, cultural, economic and political structures and ideologies -- what the Bible calls "the principalities and powers". Thus, a moral revolution in the hearts and souls of individuals cannot happen until we attend to our ideological and political captivity and slavery. This wrestling with the principalities and powers is another reason as to why our spiritual struggle in inherently political in nature.
Dr King knew what most Americans don't: We're naieve when it comes to understanding the Fall in Genesis 3. Most folks read that on individual terms. A focus on individual moral action -- Christian piety, being a nice and responsible person -- isn't enough to address the full scope of the Fall.
For that -- and this most crucial for Dr King -- biblically speaking, is the failure of moral theology, in the American context, to confront the principalities -- the institutions, systems, ideologies, and other political and social powers -- as militant, aggressive, and immensely influential creatures in the world as it is. Any ethic of social renewal, any effort in social regeneration -- regardless of what it concretely projects for human life in society -- is certain to be perpetually frustrated unless account is taken of these realities named principalities and their identities and how they operate vis-a-vis one another in relation to human beings.
Or, to put it more starkly, America is deluded. Any social concern, Dr King insisted, which neglects or refuses to deal with all the ways these principalities oppress, is doomed.
To behold America biblically, then, requires we have prophets who name these fallen principalities. The goal of that prophetic exposition of the powers is to create the capacity for moral freedom in the quest for societal renewal, the search for life in the midst of death.
This is why I so often insist that America is Banylon. When I attempt to understand America, the prophetic vision that captures my imagination isn't "the city of a hill", but Revelation 17-18.
As we read in Revelation Babylon is a demon-infested city, ruled by an ethic of death. Babylon in Revelation is a prophetic moral parable and description of every nation, principality and power. In short, America is Babylon.
But how?
America is Babylon not just as the place that wicked men rule in high places. The problem is that America is characterized by a generalized moral incapacity -- a hardness of heart, a lack of conscience that is rooted in how our moral lives have been taken captive by organizational and institutional idolatry.
If there be evildoers in the Pentagon or on Wall Street or in prosecutors' offices or among university trustees and administrators or in the CIA or on Madison Avenue or in the FBI or in the ecclesiastical hierarchies or in the cabinet (I'm actually surprised if there's not), that isn't as morally significant as the occupation of these same and similar premises by men who have become captive and immobilized as human beings by their habitual obeisance to institutions or other principalities as idols. These are folks who have become so entrapped in tradition, or, more often, mere routine, who are so fascinated by institutional machinations, who are so much in bondage to the cause of preserving the principality oblivious to the consequences and cost either for other human beings or themselves that they have been thwarted in their moral development.
Take a second to think the Legislative and Executive branches of government in 2013. What I'm describing here is what Arendt has called "the banality of evil" in her analysis of the mind of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The evil here is the moral apathy and obviousness -- the thoughtlessness and mindlessness described by Arendt -- produced by institutional traditions, policies, procedures, culture, expectations and routines. This is the moral sleepiness induced by "just doing my job". Americans have become captive and immobilized as human beings by our habitual obeisance to institutions or other principalities as idols.
In the language of Ephesians our battle is not a battle against flesh and blood -- against the "wicked men in high places" -- but against the moral apathy and oblivion produced by how the America public is enslaved by idolatry to the principalities and powers. The American institutional and ideological ethos incubates a profound apathy toward human life. We have become stupefied as human beings, individually and as a society. We've lost our moral sanity which results in a strange and terrible quitting as human beings.
Think about our responses to the cycles of abuse and neglect, violence and harm, inflicted on us every day. And how we do nothing. Folks who can't feed families because we slash food stamp benefits. And then chide them for being lazy. Children who shoot other children in a country that glorifies violence in its news.
This is why it really shouldn't surprise folks that I hold up who are in conflict with the established order -- those who are opponents of the status quo, those in rebellion against the system, those who are prisoners, resisters, fugitives, and victims. They are our prophets. Just as Dr King.
Because our movement into freedom and moral vitality involves being set free from idolatrous bondage to the principalities and powers of American life.
This freedom -- this salvation -- is a cultural exorcism. The failure of conscience in American society among its reputed leaders, the deep-seated contempt for human life among the managers of society, the moral deprivation of so-called middle Americans resembles the biblical "hardness of the heart". It affects not only individuals but also nations. Thing is, biblically, when your heart is hardened, you live by another spirit. You're demonically possessed.
Biblically, the demonic is comprehended as a moral reality. Hence, for a man to be "possessed of a demon" means concretely that he is a captive of the power of death in one or another of its manifestations which death assumes in history.
The moral impairment of a person (as where conscience has been restrained by its hardness) is an instance of demonic possession. In a somewhat similar way, a nation may be such a dehumanizing influence with respect to human life in society, may be of such antihuman purpose and policy, may pursue such a course which so demeans human life and so profits death that is must be said, analytically as well as metaphorically, that that nation is in truth governed by the power of death. That nation is Revelation's Babylon.
Dr King's concern was to exorcise that Babylonian spirit from America. It is a work left for the church in America. Because it is a work unfinished.