Messianism Against Christology

Resistance Movements, Folk Arts, and Empire

J. Perkinson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137325198
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

Messianism Against Christology: Resistance Movements, Folk Arts and Empire is a work committed to re-thinking the Christian tradition from the point of view of messianic movements of eco-sustainability and social justice rather than magnified individuals.Framed by considerations of political struggle and insurgent folk art in contemporary Detroit and ancient Ethiopia, the work concentrates its attention on the biblical tradition, teasing out memories of pastoral nomad resistance not entirely erased by the repressions of agricultural empires, that are revitalized in the prophetic movements of Elijah, the Baptist and Jesus. It also underscores the relevance of these "little tradition" practices for eco-politics and indigenous solidarity efforts today.

CHAPTER 1

Wildlands Memorialization: Messianism Mapped

Jackson likes to tell the story of the old Sioux Indian who watches a pioneer plowing up the prairie sod, stoops to examine the furrow, straightens up, and says, “Wrong side up” (Eisenberg 1999, 328).

And the Lord said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground (Gen 4:10 after Cain has killed Abel).

Writing about Christianity at this particular juncture of history demands a certain focus. In a US landscape soaked in half a millennium of colonial bloodletting, whose conquering culture has yet merely to acknowledge, much less redress, that unrelenting violence, confession stands paramount. Recent work by native scholars, such as Shawnee/Lenape Steven Newcomb’s Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, has begun detailing the degree to which a fundamentally religious idea has anchored the entire project of Euro-conquest here (and indeed, around the globe). That idea is Christian in derivation, absolute in its effect, and foundational for the whole colonial edifice. Its essential presumption, conjured out of thin air, was the supremacy of Christianity to all native practice thereby designated and denigrated as “heathen.” Its explicit assertion was the legal claim of Euro-sovereignty wherever land might be “discovered” to be unclaimed by any other “Christian” power. And its clear consequence was ruthless takeover.

Newcomb’s particular contribution is archeological. He digs relentlessly under the murk of American exceptionalism to uncover and decode the root-stock of doctrinal concepts—long since buried under technical legalese and popular ideology—that simply assert, without warrant, sovereign European rights to own the land and grant or revoke, at will, native occupancy and “use.” As he painstakingly lays bare, those concepts trace their genealogy to a basic theological equation of Euro-Christians with the Hebrew peoples of biblical fame. These latter were understood to have invaded and decimated Canaan in the second millennium BCE on the basis of a vaunted “divine” promise to nomad Abraham that the spine of hill-country running through Judea and Samaria would be given to his seed in perpetuity. Without question the biblical binary “Hebrew/Canaanite” became the archetypal root-structure organizing European approach to the conquest of the Americas, translated into their own discourse as a primal “Christian/heathen” differentiation (as well as the more broadly secular “European/Indian” and more generally cultural “civilized/savage” designations) (Newcomb 2008, xvi, 37–50). In the equation, brute conquest, as indeed coerced assimilation, was justified as divinely mandated. And Euro-Christian expansion haloed itself as “salvific” and supreme.

At the deepest level, this writing takes Newcomb’s polemic as the necessary “Genesis” for all subsequent “American” theology, throwing down a gauntlet of such thorough-going challenge, as to require a profound break with the very premise of modernity and indeed of this particular country’s assumed right to exist. Obviously, embracing Newcomb’s claim would require a profound rethinking of the nation’s founding, and radical confession and change on the part of churches. While the nation-state thus far shows little willingness to engage the way the “doctrine of Christian discovery” has illegitimately anchored the imagination of US sovereignty or the entire prospect of US property law, more and more church bodies are beginning to confess the reality of the history and repudiate the premise of the doctrine officially. My particular focus in what follows does not seek to rehearse that work, but rather affirms its utter necessity, as the US equivalent of the political theology emerging in Germany following World War II that took as its impossible mandate the question of how to do theology after Auschwitz. The equivalent here might be phrased, “How do theology after Sand Creek (or the Trail of Tears or Wounded Knee)?” where the particular named debacle stands not simply on its own, but represents the entire regime of genocidal Christian conquest in this hemisphere that revisionist research would now peg at somewhere around 150 million dead bodies (counting African deaths precipitated by the slave trade alongside native deaths by disease and deliberate policy) (Stannard 1992, ix–xv, 317–318).

My project stipulates Newcomb’s argument, confesses imperial/colonial Christianity as one of the most destructive ideological formations the planet has seen, and then asks how the tradition, as now embraced by more than a billion people globally, can be read “against itself” to begin to open up a different “Christian” response to indigenous cultures across the planet. I seek neither to disavow Christianity wholesale nor to try to rehabilitate its orthodoxy as somehow coopted and misused by empire. Rather I want to probe its varied configurations as yet carrying—buried, within some of its writings and ritual practices, like a recessive mytheme or a hidden transcript—traces and memories of the indigenous cultures it “metabolized” or reinvented. Arguing such is not to posit a supposedly pristine Ur-christianity that somehow became corrupted and warped, but rather to take seriously its origins as a resistance movement, inevitably reproducing (even while wrestling against) elements of the domination structure against which it was reacting in its very attempts to open new social space for eclipsed practices and repressed traditions.

More particularly, I want to dig into the topsoil of Christian enculturation around the globe, seeking to uncover the seeds and roots, tendrils and sprouts of older indigenous cultures, conquered and/or evangelized by one or another version of expansionist Christian conviction, that have remained rhizomically alive and at least partially resistive to imperial routinization, harboring memory of older possibilities for living sustainably in given ecologies. In particular, the work here is beholden both to ancient folk tradition and more recent theorization going by the name of anarcho-primitivism. It is animated by the conviction that the entire trajectory of civilization—the 10,000-year-old expansionist project of settled mono-crop agriculture issuing in the industrial and digital “revolutions”—has brought us to the threshold of collapse (global warming, peaking oil, population overshoot, species extinction, ocean acidification, topsoil erosion and desiccation, aquifer depletion, watershed destruction, rapid disappearance of long-standing human cultures and languages, etc.). Whatever the possibilities for using state-of-the-art technology to change course and draw back from the brink of catastrophe, certainly the sociology and mythology of older modes of organizing our species-life on the planet offer salient witness to some of the necessary cognitive and affective alteration required (if not indeed, the only prospect of “salvation” we have available). And to the degree Christianity has been understood and organized historically as part of various regimes of imperial conquest and reengineering of local cultures and ecologies, there is much to answer for, much to denounce and repudiate, and much to reinvestigate and reimagine. It is especially in service of this latter conviction that I write.

The effort here will sample the history of Christian development and formation—beginning with the oldest biblical stories up through quite recent amalgamations of the tradition with various indigenous cultures—to uncover and lift up “little tradition” versions of the kind of practices that became exemplary in Jesus’ Palestinian peasant movement or show up as creative adaptations in various folk responses to being evangelized elsewhere around the globe. It will probe such under the rubric of messianism, seeking to profile subaltern christologies, indigenous epiphanies, animist theologies, and vernacular prophecies as features of collective initiatives that push back behind imperial routinizations of Christian tradition to more sustainable lifeways. “Composted”¹ inside imperial Christian formations are traces and memories of older orientations, based not on enslavement, surplus product accumulation, and tribute taking but on the complex symbiotics and reciprocities of hunter-gatherer, pastoral nomad, and subsistence agriculture lifestyles. It is these traces—enlivened in and “riffed upon” by various messianic movements rebelling against imperial enslavement—that will exercise our imagination here. As such, exactly what might constitute “messianism” will be part of the critical issue. And in the mix, the Jesus movement of the first century will offer insight not as fetishized norm but merely instructive version—one among many—itself congealing certain older creative practices that gain significance alongside of and in cooperation with other indigenous practices, predating Christian contact, that imperial Christianity only partially metabolizes and refracts as it expands by way of evangelism and conquest.

What Messianisms Memorialize

But first it is important to establish a kind of thought-horizon within which my (admittedly heuristic and idiosyncratic) use of the term “messianism” will signify. Specifically I am concerned to represent (indeed “construct”) this category in relationship to popular memory of more just and sustainable forms of social order. Messianisms invoke and partially embody an alternative to domination and enslavement. They emerge historically, I suggest, in the context of urban-controlled systems of mono-crop agriculture that are in the process of materializing their expansionist ambitions by taking over less specialized and more sustainable lifeways. In ideal-typical terms, there are three such orders that show up in various combinations and permutations (given their own histories and ecologies) that remain enough counter to imperial logics to warrant reference as “alternative.”

These are rooted first of all in the hunting-gathering formation of our species, dating from its earliest advent on the planet that encoded its foraging orientation into our DNA during our two-million-year span of Pleistocene existence as homo habilis/ergaster, homo erectus, and homo sapiens. Even today (though probably not for much longer, given the resource-interests of beleaguered national governments and globalizing corporations), a few such hunter-gatherer groups remain in existence, albeit engulfed in and compromised by the products and media penetrating their once pristine life worlds (the fate of “uncontacted tribes” grows increasingly dire, as organizations like Survival for Tribal Peoples regularly reports). While the research on hunter-gatherer communities remains the subject of debate, there is strong evidence that at least a good percentage of such groups elaborated lifestyles that for centuries (if not millennia) lived in sustainable mutuality with their ecosystems and did not practice anything like warfare on other groups (Wells 2010, 193–195, 208). John Gowdy’s anthropological anthology of forager structures (Limited Wants, Unlimited Means) both highlights the debate and underscores the profile of such communities as what Marshal Sahlins once famously christened “The Original Affluent Societies” (Gowdy 1998, xv–xxxi; 5ff).

These “band societies” typically curtailed impulses to destructive over-reach in various ritual practices that maintained the community of humans as symbiotic members of a broad spectrum of diverse life forms (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1976, 308, 314). At the same time, they inhabited that diversity (and its geologic and aquatic surroundings) mythically and culturally as a kind of kinship system—if not indeed as a “second skin.” Death was understood as the passage of community elders into transfigured status as living elements of the local ecology (e.g., the sprouting of corn or rootage of cassava as effectively the continuation of “ancestors”) and birth as the transformation of ancestral plants and animals back into human form. Life was lived in face-to-face groups of 150 people or less,² exhibiting levels of social cooperation and even in many cases gender parity beyond what we have seen in most of our (supposedly) progressive modern liberal societies (Leacock 1998, 139; Wells 2010, 118–119; Woodcock 1998 87).³ “Work” activity often took up only 3–4 hours per day and served a “gift economy” approach to resource management (Gowdy 1998, xxi). The wide sharing of tools and shelter, and immediate consumption of game and food, left large amounts of time free for rest, play, ritual pursuits, and social interaction.

And it is no surprise then that European colonists again and again expressed astonishment at the peace and gentleness and generosity observed on first contact, even among groups that combined hunting and gathering with low-tech agriculture (Columbus gushes over the Taino life he encounters on the island of Haiti as a veritable paradise on earth; Thomas More finds visions of utopia filling his head upon hearing the reports) (Stannard 1992, 63; Weatherford 1988, 122). Of course, post-1492 and post-European expansion around the globe, the desire to take over such “Edens of sustainability” also quickly gave rise to a huge and continuous “disinformation campaign,” designed to legitimize the never-yet-halted conquest and plunder by pillorying indigenous life as hopelessly “backward” and “savage” (Weatherford 1988, 127; Hobbes,).⁴ And it is this latter denigration rather than the former fascination that most of us in the West inherit as our default picture of indigenous life around the globe.

But it is deeply tendentious. While by no means all hunter-gatherers managed to elaborate relatively sustainable, nonaggressive social forms of existence, they nonetheless remain critical “to think with,” as offering counterevidence that our species is doomed (by “original sin” or some other endemic flaw) to either war or ecocide.⁵ Gaining perspective on this most formative of earlier lifestyles is crucial for grasping the kinds of impulses a messianic politics seeks to realize. It is in many ways the evolutionary baseline from which our dreams of “Eden” spring—more nearly and more often approximating such in actual social and ecological relations than the violence-laden hierarchies we have developed in the last 5,000 years. Some scholars would even argue that our DNA “frequency” was effectively “set” on a forager orientation through the long trek of our ancestry across the succession of ice ages and warming periods that have shaped our existence on the planet (anarcho-primitivist scholars will even argue that we are a species now living “out of our ecological niche”) (Jensen 2008, 4; Shepard 1982, 4, 6, 9, 130).

In the long durée of our emergence as a species, however, management of both plant and animal life—as indeed of our own social relations—eventually became more dominating and controlling. Early humans were effectively hybrid creatures, “living and moving and having their being” as “grass-people,” allied with perennials that provided the grazing bounty for the game humans relied upon for their own sustenance (Eisenberg 1999, 4–8). Symbiosis implied adaptation to the slow pulsations of Pleistocene climate change as well as to the seasonal cycles of life on the steppe—moving with the grasses as they extended their reach during ice ages or gave way to woodlands during interglacial periods when the temperatures rose. Over time, our Mesolithic cousins even learned to perpetuate the savanna-like conditions favorable to big game during the more stressful warming periods (when dense forests crowded out the open grasses), by initiating controlled burns to halt the takeover of trees. But some 10,000 years ago, a more radical shift occurred (probably initially by accident) as we discovered the possibility of switching our primal plant-alliance to annuals reproducing by means of seeds rather than underground runners and roots. With the invention of cultivation, the flux of hunting fortunes and population numbers attending glacial advance and retreat was decisively interrupted. The advent of agriculture meant we no longer needed to run plant nutrients through four-legged middlemen, but could go straight for the “green” (Eisenberg 1999, 5–6).

In learning to prepare seed-beds and clear out competitor plants, a “weed-human” covenant began to emerge to the advantage of both species. Whether in the form of wheat, oats, or maize, the annual grasses that soon became domesticated staples were essentially wild weeds, now controlled in cultivated beds, securing a growth-wave of our species (and of those grains) that has not ceased its planetary takeover of other ecological niches and cultural lifeways ever since. Hunter-gatherer comity with the wild began to face into the winds of a genocidal spread of new seed: the invasive human-annual alliance that goes by the name of mono-crop agriculture. In some places—most notably among the Levantine Natufians—an arboreal-human experiment also evolved, working out a symbiosis between olive, almond, and acorn trees and hill-dwelling Mediterraneans (Eisenberg 1999, 7). (Indeed, the Genesis stories may well reflect this human/fruit-tree mutualism as an early vision of paradise). But it was really the model of clear-cut colonization and grain-cultivation that became the new exhibit for how to be “human” on the planet—and “the rest,” as they say, “is history.”⁶

Except now ten millennia later, the blowback from wild nature on our ruthlessly expansionist project of domesticating and reengineering many of the life-forms on the globe, including our own,⁷ is serving notice that the project is patently unsustainable and likely apocalyptic.⁸ “More and more” and “better and better” in service of increasingly pot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Wildlands Memorialization: Messianism Mapped
• 2 Ancestral Invocation: Messianic Traces from Abel to Isaiah
• 3 Parabolic Incantation: Movement Messianism and the Jubilee Jesus
• 4 Metaphysical Speculation: From Messianism to Christology
• 5 Talismanic Depiction: Messianic Repair and Folk Arts (Ethiopia)
• 6 Insurgent Beat: Messianic Decay and Vision Quest
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index