A culture of death: this is surely the only inference we can draw when a sitting President of the United States issues tweets that incite and affirm shooting and shares a video that declared ‘the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat’.
This is not a new phenomenon: the killing by police officers of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week is just one of more than one thousand people, per year, killed by police officers in the United States. I do not deny that there are times when it is necessary for police to respond with force, and sometimes lethal force. For those officers who have to do that, it must be an awful thing to have to live with.
But the wider situation is outrageous. One thousand persons and a huge majority of them are African Americans, out of all proportion to the population.
Put this alongside the number of people who die from mass shootings every year and the complete inability of the society to negate the gun culture—even to the point where people take their guns to church, and we have to name this as a culture of death. Even more amazing is the reality that many who support this gun culture also identify as ‘pro-life’.
A culture of death: that is, where many of the dominant values and practices actually lead to death—early and unnecessary death.
Christian faith is not pro-death, even though part of its story is about a life-transforming death, the death and resurrection of Jesus. This faith does not celebrate death, but rather lives is the hope that death is not ultimately to be feared. It is not separation from God but transformation into life fully with and in God. We do not know what this fully means, but in this life it is possible to have some sense of this transformation, as we live into new beginnings, re-creation and healing of much that is broken or alienated. This is possible. Hope is not without foundation. The Spirit of God is alive and present in the world inviting us to live into this death-transforming new creation. This is what Pentecost means.
By contrast, so much of what we call our life-style is in fact a death-style, a way of living that leads to destruction, at so many levels: in our bodies, our relationships, our minds, our families, our communities and our environment, the earth. We live in such a way that death and destruction are the outcomes. The gun culture in the USA, based upon fear and prejudice, is a very clear example; but there are so many other dimensions of this. Substance abuse of all kinds is another rampant example. Our dependence on motor vehicles is further example: slowly but definitely they are killing the cities in which we live. Air pollution, water pollution, the sheer volume of plastic in our oceans—destroying the sea life from the inside out—and the increasing likelihood that the earth will warm to the point where human life is impossible: all this exemplifies our culture of death. Culture is a set of values and a way of continuing them, and this culture does indeed continue and pass on its ‘values’.
Latin American Liberation theologian Jon Sobrino long ago wrote about the death dealing idols, developing a statement of the sainted Archbishop Oscar Romero. It is not only in ancient or so-called ‘primitive’ cultures that people have idols. On the contrary, the so-called sophisticated cultures of the world are completely captured by idolatry. The central feature of this argument rests on the idea that certain things in our lives are allowed to become ‘absolutes’, even when we claim there are no longer any absolutes: they take control; they are more important than anything else; and they become our gods. The vital (that word has to do with life, what gives or threatens life) thing is what we allow to take this position, what do we consider or treat as an absolute.
Sobrino identified five things about such idols:
- They are not a thing of the past, nor merely part of the ‘religious sphere’. They exist, now.
- These really are idols, in the sense that they take on ‘the trappings of divinity’ and claim self-justification and are untouchable. The saying, ‘Business is business’ portrays this.
- The idol which is the originator of all the other idols is the economic configuration of society, with all the systems that sustain it: ‘military, political, cultural, juridical, intellectual and often religious’.
- The idols demand rites and an orthodoxy (an ideology) and promise salvation—making people rich, like others … but actually they du-humanize, removing the distinctive cultural identity of peoples and undermining their communal life; and
- These idols ‘produce millions of innocent victims, whom they despatch to the slow death of hunger and the violent death of oppression’.
(Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator’, pages 184 – 187)
Sobrino went on to reflect on Jesus’ affirmation that you cannot serve both God and ‘mammon’ (Matthew 6. 24): money, the relentless power and pursuit of wealth, is the idol that produces its victims, the poor. Then he notes that in Paul’s theology, in the Letter to the Romans, idolatry is a rejection of God and the denial of truth: a choice for lies and adoring creatures rather than God. It is the denial of freedom, the choice to give away the God whose great declaration of values, in the Decalogue, Exodus 20, begins with the affirmation of that freedom. You are to have no other gods precisely because the one who speaks is the champion of your freedom, the one who brought you out of slavery. This is the basis of these ‘commands’ or words of God: though they may sound like negatives, prohibitions, they are in fact affirmations of life, of how to live together in freedom.
No idols: do not bow down and give your life over to any thing. This is the beginning of the culture of death.
God is for life, for freedom, for the dignity and self-determination, the choice and responsibility of every person to live towards wholeness, maturity and fulfilment—and in the splendid diversity of cultures which make up the human family.
How did it all go so wrong? How did we come to be so afraid that we traded our freedom and life for the idols of death?
This is a moral, political, economic and ultimately a life-determining question: and it is so crucial that unless we can grasp it and resolve it, the culture of death will indeed destroy us all. Idols, as Sobrino and his colleagues put it, are death-dealing. This Faustian deal is always a trick. We may seem to gain for a while. But the bell tolls: and death is not to be denied. The culture of death will have its dividend.
I cannot end here: to do so would be to accept that these are the only gods.
There is a reality which gives life. It is a gentle but strong reality, which is indeed the source of life. It invites us to another way: to belong rather than dominate, to hope rather than fear, and to share rather than accumulate. This is the power that is life, the life of all the living, the breath of creation. It is that to which the Bible points if we learn to read it with humility, rather that seeking there a self-justifying ideology. No, the Bible invites us to see beyond itself and beyond ourselves to this source of life and to live into that vision, that life which can, could, just might somehow and some day overcome even our addiction to a culture of death.
How?, we might well ask. There is only one way. Stop. Breathe. This is how we began, in the moments of our birth: Receive the breath of life. Breathe, for the gift of life, the life-breathe which is also the spirit of the creator, is what we most need. Learn to receive and from that moment we can join the culture of life. Together.
This is our Pentecost hope: not just for a day, but for all time and all creation.