By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
The only things more dangerous than stupidity and amorality coated with patriotism are stupidity and amorality coated with religion.
Here’s the latest example: the USA Vice President, J.D. Vance.
See:
The second man of the most powerful country in the world, an empire with enough weapons to destroy this planet, literally says:
“Although I wouldn’t be surprised if we were living in the end times, I try to focus on doing as much of God’s work as I can right now,” the vice president concluded. “If that leads to the end of the world, so be it.”
In other words: if his actions lead to the end of the world – well, so be it. They will lie, rob, seize, attack and enslave, declaring all of it to be “God’s will”. If the price of it is the end of the world, they’re willing to pay it. This is the oldest trick in the book: proclaiming your own arbitrary will to be the will of God.
First and less important. Western fascists love to bang on about “political Islam”. Vance’s words, however, are a perfect example of “political Christianity.”
So what does “political Christianity” bring to the table? Colonial conquest and countless victims, for one thing, all in the name of “spreading Christianity.” People hunted down like animals and sold into slavery so that their poor souls might be saved and they themselves delivered into the embrace of the white God. Then there was the Christianization of South America, which entailed the extermination of entire peoples, often with the biological weapons of the age—infectious diseases against which those poor people had no immunity.
Europe, being the motherland of “political Christianity,” would go on to give the world two world wars, and perhaps even a third one. From that European soil, fascism and Nazism would spring like poisonous weeds. Did the Red Brigades and the RAF emerge from the Islamic tradition?
The radicals who stormed the Capitol and who were practically instructed by the man who is now the president of the United States were Muslims?
But there’s no sense going back into the distant past, why travel across the ocean? It wasn’t that long ago when a group of radicalized Christians committed genocide over Muslims in Bosnia, claiming they were just “defending Europe from Islam”, while another group of radicilized Christians – the so-called “bulwark of Christianity” – started doing what’s now known as the joint criminal action of creating a para-state of ‘Herceg Bosnia’. The results of “political Christianity” in Bosnia are impressive indeed. As are the impressively shameless funeral rites occasioned by the death of the “Christian knight” Mladic.
Now imagine that the leader of any Muslim country had said what Vance said: that he was doing God’s work and, if that led to the end of the world, so be it. Just imagine the headlines about “Islamic fanaticism”… Imagine social media blazing with warnings about the threat of “political Islam,” posted by fascists brimming with righteous indignation…
Second and really important. J.D. Vance is now a member of the Catholic Church. Before that, he was an evangelical Christian, and then an atheist. However, his apocalyptic self-assurance reflects the teachings of evangelical apocalypticism, the dominant American religion. There’s nothing surprising about that. Every great European idea has reached America badly distorted, rendered unrecognizable, turned into a grotesque version of the original ideal- and Catholicism can hardly be an exception. Every discourse, however lucid, contains its own aporia. America is the aporia of the West.
Vance’s remarks about a politics that leads to the end of the world belong to a long heretical tradition that developed within Christianity. Its name is millenarianism. Its roots reach back to the very beginnings of Christianity, to the Book of Revelation, which closes the New Testament. They reach back to Saint Paul, travelling among the early Christians and rebuking those who had taken John’s text rather too literally and therefore spent their time waiting for the imminent end of the world, an end that stubbornly refused to arrive. See Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, where he says that the end is coming, but that there’s also a force restraining its arrival, the katechon.
For our purposes, we will go back to the period when Europe was being swept by the heresy of the Free Spirit. It formed an important part of the ideology of the millenarian movements of the time: we find it among the Taborites, in Müntzer, and among the Anabaptists who carried on where he left off. The followers of the doctrine of the Free Spirit were also known as Beghards. They seem to have enraged the Church more than almost any other heresy of the period. The Church set about destroying every text concerning them, however insignificant. Even so, some details of Beghard belief have been reconstructed.
“The Beghard recognizes no authority beyond direct experience. His cult of the self is so powerful that it literally becomes self-deification, allowing him to live in complete amorality. Nothing is forbidden any longer,” Haddad writes in his book Biblioclasts: The Messiah and the Auto-da-Fé. Every abomination he commits, the Beghard justifies by abusing Paul’s words: To the pure, all things are pure. The followers of the Free Spirit believe that there is nothing wrong with exploiting other people in any conceivable way. They hold that “sexual promiscuity is a symbol of emancipation.” All in all, it is difficult to tell the difference between the European of today and the Beghard of old: both insist on individualism and individual rights to the point where it becomes difficult to say where commitment to the principle of individualism ends and selfishness begins; both believe that other people are tools to be used and discarded as required; both strongly oppose moral prohibitions, which they regard as a form of moral violence; and both believe that opposition to promiscuity is a sign of backwardness.
Where does this similarity come from? Liberal capitalism, like every millenarian movement, insists on the abolition of the Law. Slavoj Žižek cites an observation by UCLA’s Ken Reinhard, who notes that human rights today are understood as the right to violate the Ten Commandments—as a Law that places the Mosaic Law outside the law: “The right to privacy= the right to adultery, committed in secret, when no one can see me, since no one has the right to interfere in my private life. The right to pursue personal happiness and possess private property = the right to steal (to exploit others). Freedom of the press and freedom to express one’s opinion = the right to lie. The right of free citizens to bear arms = the right to kill. And finally, freedom of religion = the right to worship fake gods.”
The Anabaptists launched a revolution and seized control of the city of Münster in 1534. At the heart of Anabaptism was the conviction that a single act of baptism was insufficient, because a child is incapable of freely choosing to accept Christ. Only a second baptism is valid: an act that an adult must choose independently, of his own free will. Only such a baptism, in their view, is truly an act of faith.
After taking Münster, the Anabaptists renamed the city – the New Jerusalem. The Bishop of Münster fled the city and declared war on its new rulers. Inside the besieged city, a proto-communist experiment unfolded. As is so often the case with revolutions, and with communities living under the intense threat of an external enemy, terror ruled the city. The revolution produced its “internal enemies” – the very children whom the force of the new age would be first to devour.
Following the death of the first leader of the Münster revolution, the commune got its first sovereign. John of Leiden proclaimed himself King and Messiah of the Last Days. The city was starving, while the false Messiah and his courtiers lived in luxury. To suppress fresh rebellions in a city already in rebellion, John intensified the terror. At the same time, he proclaimed the community of all goods, including marital ones, and made polygamy compulsory. According to Freud’s insight in Totem and Taboo, the final prohibition to be abolished in the revolt against the Father and his tyrannicallaw is the prohibition against incest with the mother. The history of messianic movements records that too, more than once. For example, Tanchelm of Antwerp: the 12th-century fake messiah proclaimed himself the resurrected Christ, organizing a wedding with a statue of the Virgin Mary. Through that symbolic act, he abolished the final prohibition.
Anabaptism gave rise to a multitude of sects which, broadly speaking, split into two groups. The first, pacifist current preached withdrawal from the world, isolation from society and non-violence. Today, we know this branch of Anabaptism primarily through the Amish (see Peter Weir’s film Witness). The second, millenarian current wanted change and was willing to bring that change about in this world. And rapid change can be achieved only through violence. Cities burned across Europe; in numerous breakaway communes, sexual perversions replaced the liturgy; in some places cannibalism took the place of Communion; the earth could no longer absorb all the blood being spilled. Wherever millenarian movements ruled, “the world is flooded by a torrent of blood rising as high as the horses’ heads.”
The traces of this second Anabaptist current can today be seen most clearly in the American evangelical movement. And that’s where Vance enters the story.
This is just for you to know the tradition from which the second most powerful man in the world and his end-of-the-world “political Christianity” comes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZONmTgzz8-E&list=RDZONmTgzz8-E&start_radio=1
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily the opinions or views of the CdM news team)
