It began with Caesar Augustus. It began with the Mongol conquest of Asia, the Bantu migration in Central Africa. It continued with the rise of the Aztec and Inca kingdoms in the Americas, the British Empire and the now-current American and Chinese century.
It's the moral and spiritual compass of the US. No one ever talks about it -- least of all Christians. We made an investment in its outcome a long time ago. For us, it started with Constantine, it continued in the Medieval Synthesis. It grew arms and legs with Luther's support of the nobility. Luther's "two kingdom" theology. The American insistence that our "civil religion" is biblical religion. It continues in our "culture wars": The binaries of right-left, inherited from the Enlightenment, from modernity.
The moral and spiritual compass points in just one direction -- for conservatives and liberals alike: Death.
At the end of every battle in our culture wars comes the promise of pillage. Battle now, get paid later. This make empire financially possible.
It's the identical philosophy of the "buy now, pay later" and "zero-percent-down" schemes so ubiquitous throughout the West. The relationship between empire and pillage has changed little from Rome to America. Except that now we have the ability to export nature. And it's outpaced humanity's ability to exploit one another (though it hasn't replaced it). Where there is a center, there must also be a frontier to feed the center.
Where there's a shopping mall, there must be a factory; where there's energy, there must be ecocide; where there's health, there must be sickness; where there's consumption, there must be waste; where there's pristine, there must be polluted; where there's progress, there must be regression and destruction.
I'm not playing this up too much. Because we're taught to downplay it by a system whose sole hunger is death.
The whole bloody edifice is "drunk on blood" (Revelation 17). Witness against the left or right, witness against conservatives or liberals, refuse to participate in the civil religion and witness for Jesus and the result is always the same. The system -- she'll eat you up.
That's why we're bought and sold a bill of goods. Our desires are shaped long before we want. Our minds are made up in support of the system. Long before we know it, the game's fixed.
How? Advertising. Within each of us there's an insatiable thirst for increase and abundance. It's fueled by advertising, propaganda and, increasingly, self-delusion.
We're on the "right side", fighting for the "right cause", defending the "right way of life". By ... shopping?
On the afternoon of September 11th, then-President Bush urged us through the death, through the war, by doing what? See!
The economic graph these days always points in one direction -- growth.
It governs our relationships, our careers, our sex lives, our friendships, our families, our waist lines, our jobs, our purchasing, our houses, our cars, our travels ... everything. According to this way of thinking, satisfaction is a sign of weakness. Being content? You've obviously settled. "If you're not growing, you're dying."
Poverty becomes a sign of laziness and ineptitude. Wealth is a sign of attraction and prowess. Wealth is God's blessing, reserved for the faithful.
And we are, after all, the faithful.
But faithful to what?
To idolatry, I tell you. It was a false idol for Christians living in Rome under Caesar. They resisted. And the system didn't handle their resistance well. Read 1 Peter. Read Revelation.
But their resistance was their life. Because Jesus is the resistance to death.
The moral and spiritual compass points in just one direction: Death. The consciousness of our world today, is dependent on a single paradoxical truth: Infinte growth.
But the only infinite growth I know is cancer. Which leads to death.
So I'm calling this system and all that back it up exactly what it is. Not because I'm a Commie, or a lefty, or a liberal. But because I follow Jesus and hope for a real, true life. It's idolatry, I tell you, and it won't end well.
Just look where the compass is pointing.