by Cornel West
The rise of Constantinian Christianity in America went hand in hand with the Republican Party’s realignment of American politics—with their use of racially coded issues (busing, crime, affirmative action, welfare) to appeal to southern conservatives and urban white centrists. This political shift coincided with appeals to influential Jewish neoconservatives primarily concerned with the fragile security and international isolation of the state of Israel. In particular, the sense of Jewish desperation during the Yom Kippur War of 1973—fully understandable given the threat of Jewish annihilation only thirty years after the vicious holocaust in Europe—drove the unholy alliance of American Republicans, Christian evangelicals, and Jewish neoconservatives.
On the domestic front, the fierce battle over admissions and employment slots produced a formidable backlash led by Jewish neoconservatives and white conservatives against affirmative action. The right-wing coalition of Constantinian Christians and Jewish neoconservatives helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. The fact that 35 percent of the most liberal nonwhite group—American Jews—voted for Reagan was a prescient sign of what was to come. When the Reverend Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority received the Jabotinsky Award in 1981 in Israel, Constantinian Christianity had arrived on the international stage, with Jewish conservatism as its supporter. Imperial elites—including corporate ones with huge financial resources—here and abroad recognized just how useful organized Constantinian Christians could be for their nihilistic aims.
The rise of Constantinian Christian power in our democracy has progressed in stages. First, ecumenical groups like the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, and liberal mainline denominations (Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Congregationalists)—who spoke out in defense of the rights of people of color, workers, women, gays, and lesbians—were targeted. The Christian fundamentalists (with big money behind them) lashed out with vicious attacks against the prophetic Christian voices, who were branded “liberal,” and worked to discredit the voices of moderation. In McCarthyist fashion, they equated the liberation theology movement, which put a limelight on the plight of the poor, with Soviet Communism. They cast liberal seminaries (especially my beloved Union Theological Seminary in New York City) as sinful havens of freaks, gays, lesbians, black radicals, and guilty white wimps. Such slanderous tactics have largely cowed the Christian Left, nearly erasing it off the public map.
The Christian fundamentalists have also tried to recruit Constantinian Christians of color in order to present a more diverse menagerie of faces to the imperial elites in the White House, Congress, state houses, and city halls, and on TV. The manipulative elites of the movement knew that this integrated alliance would attract even more financial support from big business to sustain a grassroots organizing campaign in imperial churches across the country. The veneer of diversity is required for the legitimacy of imperial rule today.
The last stage in the rise of the Constantinians was their consolidation of power by throwing their weight around with well-organized political action groups, most notably the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority. With this political coordination they gained clout, power, legitimacy, and respectability within the golden gates of the American empire—they were acknowledged as mighty movers, shakers, and brokers who had to be reckoned with in the private meetings of the plutocrats and their politicians. Imperial elites recognized just how useful the Constantinian Christians could be for their nihilistic aims. The journey for Constantinian Christians from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to George W. Bush’s selection in 2000 has been a roaring success—based on the world’s nihilistic standards.
Never before in the history of the American Republic has a group of organized Christians risen to such prominence in the American empire. And this worldly success—a bit odd for a fundamentalist group with such otherworldly aspirations—has sent huge ripples across American Christendom. Power, might, size, status, and material possessions—all paraphernalia of the nihilism of the American empire—became major themes of American Christianity. It now sometimes seems that all Christians speak in one voice when in fact it is only that the loudness of the Constantinian element of American Christianity has so totally drowned out the prophetic voices. Imperial Christianity, market spirituality, money-obsessed churches, gospels of prosperity, prayers of let’s-make-a-deal with God or help me turn my wheel of fortune have become the prevailing voice of American Christianity. In this version of Christianity the precious blood at the foot of the cross becomes mere Kool-Aid to refresh eager upwardly mobile aspirants in the nihilistic American game of power and might. And there is hardly a mumbling word heard about social justice, resistance to institutional evil, or courage to confront the powers that be—with the glaring exception of abortion.
Needless to say, the commodification of Christianity is an old phenomenon—and a central one in American life past and present. Yet the frightening scope and depth of this commercialization of Christianity is new. There is no doubt that the churches reflect and refract the larger market-driven nihilism of our society and world. Yet it is the nearly wholesale eclipse of nonmarket values and visions—of love, justice, compassion, and kindness to strangers—that is terrifying. Where are the Christian voices outraged at the greed of corporate elites while millions of children live in poverty? Do American Christians even know that the three richest men in the world have more wealth than the combined gross domestic product of the bottom forty-eight countries or that the personal wealth of the 225 richest individuals is equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the entire world’s population? Philanthropy is fine, but what of justice, institutional fairness, and structural accountability?
There are, however, groups of prophetic Christians who are taking up the challenge of confronting the rise of the Christian Right and have realized the necessity of countering those powerful organizations with their own. There is Jim Wallis, who leads the activist group Sojourners; the Reverend James Forbes of Riverside Church in New York City; Sujay Johnson Cook of the Hampton Preachers’ Conference; the Reverend Charles Adams of Hartford Memorial Church in Detroit; the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity Church in Chicago; Bishop Charles E. Blake of West Angeles Church of God in Christ; the Reverend J. Alfred Smith of Allen Temple in Oakland; and Father Michael Pfleger of Faith Community of Saint Sabina in Chicago. And there are quite a few more.
Yet it is undeniable that the challenge of keeping the prophetic Christian movement vital and vibrant in the age of the American empire is largely unmet as of yet. The pervasive sleepwalking in American churches in regard to social justice is frightening. The movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.—the legacy of which has been hijacked by imperial Christians—forged the most subtle and significant democratic Christian identity of modern times. And it now lies in ruins. Can prophetic Christians make its dry bones live again?
The Constantinian Christianity of the Bush administration—especially of President Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Congressman Tom DeLay—whatever authentic pietistic dimensions it may have, must not be the model of American Christian identity. Its nihilistic policies and quests for power and might supersede any personal confessions of humility and compassion. Even the most seemingly pious can inflict great harm. Constantine himself flouted his piety even as he continued to dominate and conquer peoples. Yet a purely secular effort against the religious zealotry will never be powerful enough to prevail; it is only with a coalition of the prophetic Christians of all colors, the prophetic Jews and Muslims and Buddhists, and the democratic secularists that we can preserve the American democratic experiment.
The recent controversy over Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ reveals the nihilistic undercurrents of the conservative coalition and potential rifts within it. The vicious Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism over the past eighteen centuries stem primarily from the wedding of biblical narratives of Jesus’s Crucifixion that highlight Jewish responsibility and Roman innocence to C
onstantine’s incorporation of Christianity into imperial power. As long as the early Christians—themselves largely Jewish—were a persecuted minority in the Roman empire, their biblical claims about Jewish culpability and Roman indifference regarding the murder of Jesus were a relatively harmless intra-Jewish debate in the first century AD about a prophetic Jew who challenged the Jewish colonial elites and Roman imperial authorities. For example, when the phrase “the Jews” is used sixteen times in Mark, Luke, and Matthew and seventy-one times in John, these writers of the synoptic Gospels—themselves Jews—were engaged in an intramural debate between themselves and non-Christian Jews. Both groups were persecuted by imperial Roman authorities. And all knew of the thuggery of such authorities—including that of Pontius Pilate fifty years before. With the Roman destruction of the Jewish temple in AD 70, rabbinical Judaism emerged alongside the Jewish-led Christian movement. The Christian and Judaic struggle for the souls of Jews in imperial Rome was intense, yet under oppressive conditions for both groups.
With the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire in the fourth century AD—and the persecution of all other religions—the intramural debate became lethal. And the phrase “the Jews” in the Gospels became the basis of a vicious Christian anti-Judaism and pernicious imperial policy that blamed, attacked, maimed, and murdered Jews of Judaic faith. With the injection of race, Christian anti-Judaism (a religious bigotry) became Christian anti-Semitism (a racist bigotry). Jews who converted to Christianity could avoid the former, but all Jews suffered the latter. And the history of both bigotries is a crime against humanity—then and now.
Mel Gibson’s gory film of Jesus’s murder, which verges on a pornography of violence, resonates deeply with the ignorance and innocence of sincere Constantinian Christians in the American empire, whose grasp of the source of anti-Semitism is weak and whose complicity with imperial arrogance is ignored. His portrayal of Jewish responsibility and Roman innocence fits the centuries-long pattern of Christian anti-Semitism—in its effect, not in his intention.
Ironically, those Jews who eagerly aligned themselves with Constantinian Christians to defend imperial America and the colonial policies of the Israeli state now see the deep anti-Semitism of their Christian fundamentalist allies. And they are right. But these same Jewish conservatives—Constantinian Jews—fail to see their own complicity with imperial American elites who support and condone colonial policies and racist anti-Arab sentiments of Israeli conservative elites. Democracy matters—promoted by prophetic Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and secular progressives—require moral consistency and ethical integrity. We all fall short yet we must never fail to fight all forms of bigotry, especially when racist propaganda is conjoined to nihilistic quests for power and might. Will the deep dimensions of Christian anti-Semitism shatter the conservative coalition in imperial America? Will Jewish elites in Hollywood begin to question the racist stereotypes of other groups they’ve condoned now that this controversy has turned against them?
I speak as a Christian—one whose commitment to democracy is very deep but whose Christian convictions are even deeper. Democracy is not my faith. And American democracy is not my idol. To see the Gospel of Jesus Christ bastardized by imperial Christians and pulverized by Constantinian believers and then exploited by nihilistic elites of the American empire makes my blood boil. To be a Christian—a follower of Jesus Christ—is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. This is the radical love in Christian freedom and the radical freedom in Christian love that embraces Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope. If Christians do not exemplify this love and freedom, then we side with the nihilists of the Roman empire (cowardly elite Romans and subjugated Jews) who put Jesus to a humiliating death. Instead of receiving his love in freedom as a life-enhancing gift of grace, we end up believing in the idols of the empire that nailed him to the cross. I do not want to be numbered among those who sold their souls for a mess of pottage—who surrendered their democratic Christian identity for a comfortable place at the table of the American empire while, like Lazarus, the least of these cried out and I was too intoxicated with worldly power and might to hear, beckon, and heed their cries. To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely—to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic Christian identity in the age of the American empire.
6
THE NECESSARY ENGAGEMENT WITH YOUTH CULTURE
It is a fallacy of radical youth to demand all or nothing, and to view every partial activity as compromise. Either engage in something that will bring revolution and transformation all at one blow, or do nothing, it seems to say. But compromise is really only a desperate attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. It is not compromise to study to understand the world in which one lives, to seek expression for one’s inner life, to work to harmonize it and make it an integer, nor is it compromise to work in some small sphere for the harmonization of social life and the relations between men who work together, a harmonization that will bring democracy into every sphere of life.
—RANDOLPH S. BOURNE,
Youth and Life (1913)
When Public Enemy first came out we used to say “Public Enemy, we’re agents for the preservation of the Black mind. We’re media hijackers.” We worked to hijack the media and put it in our own form…. Every time we checked for ourselves on the news they were locking us up anyway, so the interpretation coming from Rap was a lot clearer. That’s why I call Rap the Black CNN.
Rap is now a worldwide phenomenon. Rap is the CNN for young people all over the world.
—CHUCK D with YUSUF JAH,
Fight the Power: Rap, Race, and Reality (1997)
When we ask, what is the state of Hiphop?, the quick answer is that Hiphop (the community) must mature to a level of self-government where it creates, regulates, and profits from its own elements, resources, and intellectual properties. The state of Hiphop is that Hiphop is being negatively exploited by the recording industries of America who manipulate its public image to sell the fantasy of pimpin’, thuggin’, hoein’, flashin’, flossin’, and ballin’ to predominantly young White Rap fans that are impressed by such behaviors. On the one hand it is Hiphop’s rebellious image that attracts young people to it. However, on the other hand, the real lives of those that live around pimps, thugs, whores, drug dealers, etc., are far from being just fantasies of defiance that you can turn off and on when you want to feel sexy or macho! The real lives of those that are affected by injustice, lawlessness, and corruption created (and continue to create) Hiphop as a way out of oppression.
—KRS-ONE, Ruminations (2003)
In past moments of national division, young people have played a disproportionate role in deepening the American democratic experiment. The black freedom struggle and the antiwar movement in the 1960s were largely sustained owing to their vision and courage. As older folk become jaded, disillusioned, and weary, the lively moral energy of reflective and compassionate young people can play a vital role in pushing democratic momentum. Yet one of the most effective strategies of corporate marketeers has been to target the youth market with distractive amusement and saturate them with pleasurable sedatives that steer them away from engagement with issues of peace and justice. The incessant media bombardment of images (of salacious bodies and mindless violence) on TV and in movies and music convinces many young people that the culture of gratification—a quest for insatiable pleasure, endless titillation, and sexual stimulation—is the only way of being human. Hedonistic values and narcissistic identities produce emotionally stunted young people unable to grow up and unwilling to be responsible democratic citizens. The market-driven media lead many young people to think that life is basically about material toys and social status. Democratic ideas of making the world more just
, or striving to be a decent and compassionate person, are easily lost or overlooked.
This media bombardment not only robs young people of their right to struggle for maturity—by glamorizing possessive individualism at the expense of democratic individuality—but also leaves them ill equipped to deal with the spiritual malnutrition that awaits them after their endless pursuit of pleasure. This sense of emptiness of the soul holds for wealthy kids in the vanilla suburbs and poor kids in the chocolate cities. Neither the possession of commodities nor the fetishizing of commodities satisfies young people’s need for love and self-confidence. Instead we witness personal depression, psychic pain, and individual loneliness fueling media-influenced modes of escapism. These include the high use of drugs like cocaine and Ecstasy; the growing popularity of performing sex acts at incredibly young ages, such as middle-school-age girls giving boys blow jobs because it will make them “cool”; and the way in which so many kids have become addicted to going online and instant messaging or creating Weblogs in which they assume an alternate personality. This disgraceful numbing of the senses, dulling of the mind, and confining of life to an eternal present—with a lack of connection to the past and no vision for a different future—is an insidious form of soul murder. And we wonder why depression escalates and suicides increase among our precious children.
The most dangerous mode of dealing with this bombardment is addiction—to drugs, alcohol, sex, or narrow forms of popularity or success. These addictions leave little room or time for democratic efforts to become mature, concerned about others, or politically engaged in social change. The popular way of escaping from the pain and emptiness is self-medication—the first step toward self-violation and self-destruction. This is why so many—too many—of the youth of America are drifting, rootless, deracinated, and denuded. They have hardly a sense of their history, little grasp of what shapes them, and no vital vision of their human potential. Many have been reduced to a bundle of desires targeted by corporate America for consumption. Their armor of life is often too feeble to enable them to withstand the emotional trauma generated, in part, by the fast-paced capitalist culture of consumption that confronts them. In short, many lack the necessary navigational skills to cope with the challenges and crises in life—disappointment, disease, death. This is why so many are enacting the nihilism of meaninglessness and hopelessness in their lives that mirrors the nihilism of the adult world—often they are so disillusioned in large part because they can see that the adult world itself is so bereft of morality.
