The God Who Riots Read online

  The evolution of religion is driven by the way religion assigns value. Religion has been used to justify an unequal distribution of power and resources by valuing some over others, and religion has also been used to empower people to abolish these unjust systems because their religion teaches them that they’re way more valuable. Religion evolves because the oppressed reshape the religion of their oppressors in order to empower their struggle for liberation, and in turn the oppressors reshape the religion in order to sustain their oppression. Religion has always served these two roles because this is how religion evolves. It cannot be reduced to one or the other. Both expressions are always at tension with one another as we all evolve.

  We must acknowledge these two forms of religion if we choose to be religious today. Will we use our religion to justify the ways we are devalued in society? Or will we use religion to resist all the ways we are devalued?

  In our current capitalist society, an alternative method of valuation is needed more than ever.

  Under a capitalist economic system, everything is turned into a product to be bought and sold. A product’s value is no longer determined by its usefulness. Now, a product’s value is measured by its exchange value, or rather how much money it could make in a system where the sole motive is profit. Naturally, the value of humans is reduced in this way too. Our usefulness is measured by how much money we make for businesses with our labor.

  This has horrendous effects on the way we see ourselves.

  The constant effort to prove our value through work affects every part of our lives. In our relationships, we do things, say things, buy things, and act in ways that will make others perceive us as valuable enough to be loved.

  Humans cannot be reduced in this way. Humans are useful, yes, but we are also beautiful, underneath all our efforts. Beauty transcends usefulness.

  I’m not talking about looks. I’m talking about the beauty that is revealed through the entirety of our being. This beauty is inherent. Your beauty exists because you exist. Beauty causes immediate delight in the person who perceives that beauty. That delight is not caused by any sense of usefulness or gain. That delight is caused by the mere existence of that beautiful subject. It is beautiful because it is full of beauty just as it is, without the need to prove anything or earn anything.

  Remember the times when you have felt the safest and the most loved. I’m sure you’re thinking of those—family or friends—who were able to welcome and love every little bit of you. They saw your weaknesses and limitations and embraced them as they embraced you.

  Consider all the ways the world praises that which it sees as useful within you but shames you for your limitations. It splits you in two. There are the parts of you that can be presented as useful, and parts of you that are hidden because of their perceived uselessness. We hide our vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and limitations because we are inundated with the message that if the useless parts of ourselves were exposed, then we would be exposed as useless.

  Affirming your whole self as full of beauty and deserving of love and justice is a courageous effort in a world that suppresses us in this way.

  This method of dehumanization is not a bug within our current structure of society, but a feature of it, and a necessary tool to keep it functioning. A society that is dependent on the labor of its workers benefits when it reduces us to the labor we give to this system of endless production for endless profit.

  And so, any religion worth practicing in this society must be one that empowers us to struggle against the systems that dehumanize and devalue us. It may be difficult for some of us to imagine a religion that can empower us in this way, especially because so many of us have experiences in religious communities that increased our dehumanization. And yet, at its core, religion has always been capable of helping people discover their true value. We encounter this alternative method of valuing everything and everyone through the concept of holiness.

  Holy Shift

  At the core of religious life is the holy.

  Even though we often associate holiness with moral goodness, that’s not the original intent of the concept in the history of religious development, so forget everything you’ve been taught about what holiness means for a moment. In the Hebrew Bible, the word that gets translated to “holy” is qadosh, which literally means “set apart.”

  Setting something apart as holy was always a way of helping people discover the true nature of things, not to transform their nature. We are the ones who transform when we recognize the holiness of something.

  Take the Sabbath, for example. The Sabbath is the culmination of the workweek where we take a day to rest and remind ourselves of our inherent value before we return to our labor where our value is determined by the work we do.

  In the biblical narrative, God introduces the Sabbath to the ancient Israelites after they are freed from slavery in Egypt. Imagine the contrast between grueling daily work as enslaved people and a day of rest for the first time as free people. On that day of rest, they are reminded of their true value in contrast to the value assigned to them by their old Egyptian slave masters.

  Holy days are days we set apart to spend time away from typical daily activities and reconnect with the self underneath everything we do. Holiness reveals the distinction between our inherent value and the value assigned to us by others.

  Creating rituals to help a community remember this truth is a significant function of religion. No matter what society says about us, holiness says something different. Abraham Joshua Heschel explains it beautifully in his essential book The Sabbath:

  Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.2

  The assertion that our soul belongs to Someone Else is the foundation for resisting any system that attempts to define us for us. My soul does not belong to this capitalist system of endless production and profit. My soul belongs to Someone Else. You cannot reduce me to my usefulness and claim this reduction is me. I am so much more. And whenever I am able to rest from my work, I am reminded of where my value really comes from. I am reminded that I am full of beauty and deserving of love and justice exactly as I am.

  Favoring the Unfavorable

  This theme is clear in the New Testament as well. From the beginning, we can see this in the story of The Annunciation of Mary, the mother of Jesus. In the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke we read about a virgin named Mary engaged to a man named Joseph in a little town called Nazareth in Galilee.

  Mary is visited by an angel named Gabriel who says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”3

  A visit from an angel is obviously a strange experience—even in the Bible—but the strangest part for Mary is the words the angel chose. The next verse says: “But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.”

  Perhaps Mary is perplexed when an angel calls her favored because she was not in any sort of special position of wealth, or power, or prestige. She is caught off guard when she’s called favored because she was not favored by the society around her.

  The second-century Roman historian Celsus criticized the early Christian movement and considered the story of Jesus’s miraculous birth to be absurd. He accused Jesus of making the story up, and Celsus further spread the rumor that Jesus was the illegitimate child “of a poor woman of the country . . . convicted of adultery.”4

  To be clear, Celsus didn’t think Jesus’s birth story was absurd because he was skeptical of these kinds of supernatural events. There were plenty of stories of miraculous births, including one told of Augustus Caesar, the Roman Emperor at the time of Jesus’s birth. According to legend, his mother, Atia, fell asleep inside a temple, and while she slept, the god Apollo disguised himself as a serpent and had sex with her. Ten months later she gave birth to Augustus.

  The reason Celsus found the Christian story of a miraculous birth absurd was because it was about someone as poor and powerless as Jesus, with a mother as poor and powerless as Mary. Celsus believed heroes and rulers get miraculous birth stories, not average, forgettable nobodies like a poor Jew from Nazareth.

  So, of course, Mary is perplexed by this angel’s greeting.

  In response to Mary’s reaction, the angel says, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.”

  That’s the key distinction that begins to bring clarity to Mary’s confusion. Mary is favored, but where does this favor come from? It comes from Someone Else. Mary has found favor with God, not because she has done anything particularly useful to deserve it, but because she simply is who she is.

  The favor Mary found with God is the favor we all share, even while we are consistently unfavored by the society we live in.

  Jesus uses his public ministry to announce this special favor we share, but Jesus recognizes that the ones who need to hear this message the most are the ones who are most consistently unfavored in their everyday lives.

  So Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”5

  The poor, hungry, and weeping are the ones who least expected to be blessed because of how society had devalued and dehumanized them. By calling them blessed, Jesus reminds them that their value does not come from their position in society, but from somewhere else—from Someone Else. To claim that someone is “blessed” is a way of saying God is on their side. A blessing is an assertion that they are favored, they are holy, and they are full of beauty exactly as they are, despite the ways they are devalued by the world around them.

  Bottom-Up Blessings

  These days, we’re used to the word “blessed” being used to refer to those who are already filled and already laughing, not to those who are hungry and weeping. The word is often used to refer to the materialistic advantages mostly experienced by those with privilege and power.

  And yet, privilege and power are results of historical exploitation at the expense of the poor and powerless—the ones Jesus called blessed. Jesus calls the poor and hungry blessed, and says woe to those who are rich and full, so how did we flip that?

  Here’s an interesting example of this confusion around blessings: In 2020, the evangelical megachurch pastor Louie Giglio suggested Christians use the term “white blessings” instead of the popular term “white privilege” because of the controversial political baggage associated with it. He explained to his congregation, “We understand the curse that was slavery—white people do—and we say that was bad, but we miss the blessing of slavery: that it actually built up the framework for the world that white people live in and lived in.”6

  He was making an analogy to his interpretation of the crucifixion, saying that Jesus became cursed on the cross so that we may live in the blessings achieved as a result of that curse. So he used that symbolism to give a sloppy explanation of the privileges white people have as a result of the “curse of slavery.” He was trying to get his uncomfortable white audience to understand their privileged position in society by talking about it in evangelical language. Instead, it sounded like he meant slavery was God’s personal blessing given to white people.

  After much backlash, he issued an apology saying he misspoke, but when we look at Christian teaching from a historical perspective, we see that Louie Giglio was expressing what many Christians had been communicating for a very long time: that socioeconomic privileges are a sign of God’s blessing.

  Louie Giglio was just preaching the Protestant work ethic without realizing it.

  When the English Puritans colonized the Americas, they used Christian teaching to justify colonization and exploitation of Black and Indigenous people, as did the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Catholics. The English, however, rooted their interpretation of Christianity in the teachings of Protestant Reformer and theologian John Calvin and his intellectual successors.

  The Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election dictated the way the English related to non-Europeans. This doctrine claimed God had chosen specific children and predestined them to turn to Christ and go to heaven. As for everyone else, they were predestined to reject Christ and go to hell. The key to the Calvinist doctrine of election is that the election process is based on God’s decisions and has nothing to do with our own decisions. It’s unconditional. No matter the choices you make in life, if you’re one of the chosen, then you are destined for heaven, and if you’re not, then you are destined for hell.

  On an individual level, it created a tricky dilemma that required a theological solution. How do you know if you’re one of God’s chosen?

  As these Christians looked for a solution, they determined that wealth and property must be signs of God’s election. This led to a new justification of socioeconomic hierarchies. If your work led to great wealth and property, then they interpreted this as a sign of God’s blessing, which meant you were one of God’s elect. So therefore, poverty and a lack of resources was a sign that you weren’t one of the elect. This dynamic led colonizers to see the people in the lands they colonized as the non-elect because of a perceived poverty based on the unwillingness to use their lands’ resources in the ways colonizers would.

  Since enslaved Black and Indigenous people lacked wealth and property as signs of their salvation, they were told they could attain their salvation through hard work. Hard work became a new sign to help determine who was chosen and who was not, and became the avenue for colonized peoples to attain the salvation their colonizers already had, even though the colonizers’ salvation was signified by the wealth and property they stole. The idea that work can save your soul is the Protestant work ethic, first named by sociologist Max Weber in 1904, who observed the ways this phenomenon was integral to the development of capitalism.

  It’s easy for us to view this doctrine of election as destructive because of the ways it justified the elect’s exploitation of the non-elect, but the initial intention behind its development was really an attempt to avoid this kind of exploitation. This doctrine developed as a corrective to the way the Catholic Church practiced the doctrine of election at the time.

  One of several issues Protestants tried to solve was the existential instability every Christian had about where they stood with God. Catholic priests kept this instability alive by frequently demanding monetary offerings to the church as a way to decrease an individual’s severity of punishment in the afterlife.

  Early Protestant Christian teachers, such as John Calvin, wanted to liberate Christians from this instability and to give every Christian absolute certainty that they are one of God’s chosen, no matter how much they do or don’t do, or how much they give or don’t give. The Protestant doctrine of unconditional election was supposed to give Christians certainty that they are loved, valued, and blessed by God just as they are, and not for their usefulness to the church. The problem of this doctrine arises when you wonder about everyone else. Our natural inclination would be to assume God hates, devalues, and curses everyone else simply because of who they are, no matter what they do.

  This doctrine of election was supposed to assure Christians that they are favored by God in a world that disfavors the poor and powerless. The way it has been used to justify colonization and class inequality would likely have been condemned by Calvin, who was also known for frequently preaching on the Christian duty to care for the poor, and against corrupt business practices that exploited the poor.

  I understand the need to give Christians existential security in the face of such great insecurity, but if you preach that only a fraction of people are favored by God, then the practical implications of that worldview will always lead to “the elect” justifying their violence and exploitation of “the non-elect.”

  The way out of this dilemma is to rediscover the favor of God that we all share, no matter our differences.

  As 1 Timothy 4:10 says, “We have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.” This doesn’t mean those who believe are valued more than those who don’t, or that believers receive a special salvation. This God is the Savior of all people.

  Christians are not valued by God more than non-Christians. God is the Savior “especially of those who believe” because Christians are called to cultivate a deep awareness of the value we all equally share, and to announce this good news to the world. That’s what you see in the book of Acts. The first Christian evangelists announced God’s favor to the world, as it was revealed through Jesus, and invited people to embody that truth in community. They believed all humans were made alive in Christ,7 that all flesh would see salvation,8 and that the fullness of God fills all in all.9 This was understood as a gift for all, not a reward for some.

  So when Louie Giglio talked about “white blessings,” he was unknowingly reflecting the ways that the institutional church has flipped the concept of blessing upside down.

  When Jesus declared God’s blessing on people, he asserted that those without power, privilege, wealth, and property are blessed. He announced that God is on their side. The criterion Jesus used to determine on whom to bestow God’s blessings was the direct opposite of the criterion developed through the Protestant work ethic.

  While it is easy to perceive those with power and privilege as blessed, Jesus would look to the poor and powerless, and declare them blessed. Then he would turn to those with power and privilege and say, as he does in the rest of that passage from Luke, “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.”10