Page Title

IMPERIAL POLITICS, CHRISTI-
ANITY AND THE TRUE JESUS
(THE 2004 ELECTIONS)

IMPERIAL POLITICS, CHRISTIANITY, AND THE
TRUE JESUS: REFLECTIONS ON THE 2004
ELECTION

Remarks by David Korten in Dialogue with Cynthia Moe-
Lobeda

Slightly more than five years ago, in September 1999,
many of us who are here tonight gathered in Saint
Marks Cathedral for a Conference on Global Economic
Justice sponsored by Seattle’s churches. Marcus Borg
and Anuradha Mittal were among our speakers. It was
just before the historic confrontation between the World
Trade Organization and Global Civil Society that made
Seattle an icon of the global economic justice
movement. How many of you participated in that
conference or in the WTO demonstrations that
followed? I think we can safely assume that most of you
here are familiar with the issues that define the global
struggle against corporate globalization. I will touch on
those issues briefly, and then direct my attention to
placing that struggle in its larger context and reflecting
on the implications of last week’s election. I left the
September 1999 conference filled with hope that
America’s Christian churches were flowing with a new
spiritual energy that carried the potential to reshape
America and its role in the world in the service of justice,
peace, and love for all of God’s Creation. We meet here
tonight with an awareness brought home by the events
of the election last week that a particular segment of
America’s Christian faith community has moved to the
center stage of American politics and is indeed
reshaping America and its role in the world.
Unfortunately, however, rather than advancing a vision
of a world of justice, peace, and love for God’s Creation,
it is serving a political agenda sharply at odds with the
moral teachings of Jesus. It raises some difficult
questions: What does it mean to be a Christian; and
what is Christian morality?When we met in September
1999, our attention was focused on the efforts of global
corporations and financial institutions to circumvent the
processes of democratic decision making by working
through organizations like the World Trade Organization
to rewrite the rules of global commerce to free
themselves from public accountability for the social and
environmental consequences of their relentless pursuit
of profit. A little more than a month later fifty thousand
people took to the streets of Seattle — including
thousands from the faith community — to say No! This
historic demonstration drew the attention of the
world to an epic moral struggle to determine
whether money or life will be humanity’s defining
value. In the words of the Earth Charter: “We stand
at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when
humanity must choose its future.”The Great
Turning Buddhist spiritual teacher Joanna Macy
speaks of the Great Turning. A 5,000 year Era of
Empire is dying. The Earth and civilization can no
longer bear the burden of a global system of
imperial domination. A new era — an Era of Earth
Community — is birthing. We are experiencing the
chaos and uncertainty of a Turbulent Transition as
the cultural and institutional foundations of Empire
disintegrate and the cultures and institutions of
Earth Community begin to take form from Empire’s
remains. These are frightening times, not only because
of the uncertainty, but also because evidence of the
dying is so much more visible than evidence of the
birthing. Our mission at YES! magazine is to make the
birthing more visible and help people engage. I
especially recommend the article on “Phoenix Rising
from the Ashes” by Van Jones that presents his
reflections on the implications of the 2004 election in our
forthcoming Winter 2005 issue on the theme “Healing
and Resistance.”Following the September 11, 2001
terrorist attack, the Bush administration brought new
clarity to our understanding of what is at stake in the
Great Turning when it announced that henceforth the
United States would pursue its global interests through
a policy of unilateral pre-emptive war, including the
possible use of nuclear weapons, to protect American
interests in whatever way the Bush administration chose
to define them. That shifted the frame of our work from
confronting two hundred years of pillage by global
corporations to the work of bringing to an end a 5,000
year history of military empire that began in
Mesopotamia, in the land we now know as Iraq. By its
explicit articulation of the U.S. imperial agenda the Bush
administration also stripped away the illusion that the
United States is the modern citadel of democracy to
expose the truth that we are an imperial nation ruled by
people of extreme wealth. The shock of that exposure
led me to take another look at U.S. history, which leaves
little doubt that we have in fact been an imperial
plutocracy since our founding. It is instructive to note
that the economy of every Empire in the recorded
human experience has been built on a foundation of
slavery or its equivalents of bonded labor, sweatshop
workers, and disenfranchised migrant agricultural
laborers — all stripped of their basic human rights. It is
axiomatic. The power and privilege of the few depends
on the oppression of the many. Corporate globalization
is simply a modern manifestation of a 5,000 year
pattern. Contrary to the saying “The Poor will always be
with us,” poverty is not inevitable. It is a product of failed
human institutions created by human choice. We can
make different choices — and it is our moral obligation
to do so!The epic struggle between the forces of Empire
and the forces of Earth Community has deep historic
roots in the Christian church. The historic Jesus stood
against Empire and called on his followers to live into
being a world of peace and justice. Perhaps he rightfully
bears the title of founder of what we now call Global
Civil Society. However, the religious movement Jesus
founded was soon co-opted to the service of Empire
during the rule of Emperor Constantine. The struggle
between the imperial and the egalitarian Christian
traditions continues to this day. The American churches
of our time that align with the Imperial Christ and
presume to speak as the voice of all Christians played a
deciding role in last week’s election. The churches that
align with the living Jesus, the Jesus who called us to a
world of peace and justice, remained on the sidelines.
Images of God was first exposed to the ideas of Jesus
scholar Marcus Borg at the September 1999 conference
where he spelled out the significance of Christianity’s
contrasting images of God. By Borg’s reckoning, the
anthropomorphic God that we visualize in human form is
the monarchical God of Empire. The God of Jesus and
the Christian mystics is the Spirit of Creation manifest
through all being. It brings forward a dynamic image of
Creation and its continual unfolding that is universal,
egalitarian, and calls us to create the world of peace
and justice for all beings at the core of Jesus’ teaching.
It is the sacred story of Earth Community. Our very
language traps us in the Imperial Christianity. It is
virtually impossible to speak the name “God” without
evoking the image of an elder male with a white beard
and a fierce expression --- the image of the imperial or
monarchical God — who created the heavens and the
Earth with a sweep of his hand as objects external to his
own being, is jealous of our loyalty, and demands strict
obedience to his will. Our images of the sacred shape
our sense of the human place and responsibility in
Creation and thereby of our politics. With this thought in
mind, I turn to a question that may have occurred to
some of you: How did the far right carry the day in last
week’s election?The Election. Let’s start with a crucial
fact. Apart from members of the corporate plutocracy,
most Bush voters did not vote their economic self-
interest. Pundits say they voted their moral values.
Actually, I suggest they voted their psychology: their
longing for meaning, identity, and community in a world
of family and community breakdown. Demagogues of
the far right have turned this positive and healthy
longing against feminists, gays, and lesbians as the
scapegoats for a very real crisis caused by a brutally
unjust economy in which a growing percentage of
available jobs pay less than a family wage and offer no
benefits. For the media to suggest that only Bush
voters were voting their moral values is surely quite
odd. Economic justice is a moral issue. Leaving
trillions of dollars of debt to our children to repay is
a moral issue. Destroying God’s creation to make
money for rich people is a moral issue. Killing tens
of thousands of innocent people for a lie is a moral
issue. These are all moral issues at the heart of
Christian teaching. Perhaps we should say so in our
public discourse. Manipulation of human emotions for
dark ends is nothing new. Imperial rulers have for 5,000
years played to desires for meaning, identity, and
community with stories of imperial god kings, heroic
nationalism, and dangerous foreign enemies. These
stories are carefully crafted to legitimate the power of
the rulers, cast them as the courageous father
protectors of the national family, and gain the voluntary
submission of the oppressed by embedding in the public
mind an image of a dangerous world divided between
the worthy and the unworthy, the good and the evil. The
right wing in America has mastered this story telling art.
To understand what really happened in the election it
was necessary to tune into the right-wing media,
particularly the right-wing radio talk-shows. The strategy
of the Far Right was elegant in its simplicity. It turned on
defining two words — “liberal” and “leader.”Right-wing
commentators and talk-show hosts have for years been
repeating versions of the refrain, “liberals are elitist
snobs who look down on ordinary people, have no
values, hate Christians, criticize America, and side with
evil terrorists.” “Liberals hate Bush because he is a
Christian.”The right-wing definition of “leader” is based
on the metaphor of the strict father who acts with moral
certainty based on Christian biblical teaching, rules with
an iron hand, does not negotiate with his lessers, and
has no need to explain or apologize for his actions.
Much of the Bush campaign was devoted to defining
Kerry as a “wishy-washy liberal.” To those uninitiated in
the right-wing definitions of “liberal” and “leader,” this
seems a substance-free, almost silly, claim. To the
initiated, however, the terms “liberal” and “wishy-washy”
communicated a powerful psychological message:
“Kerry is an elitist snob who has no values, hates
Christians, looks down on ordinary people like you and
me, and lacks the moral backbone to protect the
national family from its evil enemies.” “Bush is a God
fearing Christian guided by the moral certainty of biblical
text and called by God to guide and protect the nation
as a resolute father leader in a war against evil.” Since
the early 1970s, a dedicated alliance of corporate
plutocrats and religious theo-crats has been laying the
foundation of their takeover of U.S. political institutions
by building a powerful network of right-wing think tanks,
media outlets, and churches. The think tanks frame the
language and the stories of the public discourse. The
media outlets and churches disseminate the language
and the stories. And the churches turn out voters. This
infrastructure has proven a powerful vehicle for
advancing a Politics of Empire based on division, fear,
manipulation, and domination. It is a bullying politics
reminiscent of a childish playground brawl that
substitutes name-calling and character assassination for
problem-solving and undermines the credibility of our
political institutions. The challenge before us is to
displace the politics of Empire with the politics of Earth
Community based on inclusion, possibility, and
partnership — an authentic values-based, problem-
solving politics of mature adulthood consistent with the
moral teachings of Jesus. We humans long for spiritual
meaning. But the only voices most people hear
speaking about values and spirit in the public discourse
are those of the Far Right. Virtually every progressive
leader I know is working from a deeply spiritual place,
but we rarely speak openly in our environmental, peace,
and justice work of values or the sacred. The time has
come for the nation’s mainstream churches to come
out of the closet and speak publicly of values and
the spiritual foundations of the progressive agenda
and to articulate spiritually grounded stories of
human possibility and the world that the living
Jesus called us to create. This is the challenge
before us. We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for.
Thank you.

FOLLOW-ON-REMARKS[The Rauschenbusch Center
Dinner was followed the next morning by a Brunch
conversation at Seattle’s University Baptist Church. The
following is a reconstruction of David Korten’s follow-on
remarks as a participant in that conversation.]I want to
comment on what others have said this morning and
then share an epiphany I had last night. As we move
forward in our work of creating a world of peace and
justice, it is important to remind ourselves that we are
not alone. Indeed, as David Bloom mentioned earlier
this morning, there are many positive initiatives already
underway in the faith community. Our role is not to
duplicate existing initiatives, but rather to strengthen
them and help them link together.It is also important to
remind ourselves that irrespective of the election
outcome our values and vision are share by the vast
majority of Americans — and the vast majority of the
world’s people — including the majority of Americans
who identify themselves as conservatives,
fundamentalists, evangelicals, and Republicans. Those
with whom our differences may be irreconcilable are
limited to a relatively small fringe of ruthless,
unprincipled extremists who claim to speak for these
groups as they claim to speak for all Christians, but
whose views are inimical to the teachings of Jesus and
far out of the mainstream. This fringe element has been
organizing for more than thirty years to move American
politics to the extreme right by controlling the language
and stories of the political discourse and ruthlessly
attacking the character of all who challenge them. We
must begin the work of honing the stories and language
of a transformational politics of peace and justice and
develop the media strategies to bring them forward into
the public consciousness. Those who mobilize on the
far right did not wait for the media to come to them. Nor
did they gain their media voice by sending out press
releases. They created their own think tanks to hone
their language and messages, and hired well-paid
professional spokespersons to advance the movement’s
media outreach. They cultivated relationships with
reporters and commentators. They groomed young
people for media careers, developed their own talk
shows and religious programming, and bought their own
media outlets. I’ve become aware that virtually every
activist I know is working from a spiritual place. Some
have explicit religious affiliations. Others, like myself, do
not. In my experience, however, it is rare for progressive
leaders of either group to speak explicitly of the spiritual
grounding of their work. I believe it is time for all of us to
come out of the closet to begin speaking in the
language of values and articulate stories that
communicate the spiritual beliefs underlying our work.
Members of the Christian faith community face a
particular challenge to tell with courage and conviction
the story of how the life and teaching of Jesus conflicts
with the falsified doctrines of those who advance Empire
in Jesus’ name. Although coming to terms with issues
relating to our image of God is central our longer-term
work, our immediate work of countering what Cindy Moe-
Lobeda referred to last night as the idolatry of the far
right centers on the story of Jesus. Who was Jesus?
How did he live? What did he teach? What was his
vision for the world? And how were his name and image
co-opted to the cause of Empire following his crucifixion?
This brings me to the epiphany. At the banquet last
night, I was a bit troubled that all the awards were to
persons and groups involved in hosting the Tent City of
Seattle’s homeless. This is good and important work,
but it seemed to me at the time a bit of a diversion from
the more difficult work of eliminating the causes of
homelessness. At the same time I was stunned by the
story told by one of the awardees of the man in his
congregation who accused those who advocated
hosting Tent City on church property of aligning
themselves with Christ’s executioners. I spent much of
the night wondering how anyone could get it so wrong.
The epiphany centered on the possibility of turning Tent
City into a learning opportunity. It began with the
question: “If Jesus were among us today, where would
we most likely find him?” The answer, of course, is that
we might well find him living in Tent City. He would not
be there dispensing charity, but rather the gift of respect
and dignity — perhaps enlisting its residents to join his
band of disciples. Although few residents of Tent City
live there by choice, the condition of their lives is not so
different than that of the members of a spiritual
community who have renounced material possessions
as distractions from their spiritual search. I was deeply
moved by the strength, dignity, sense of community, and
concern for one another of the members of Tent City
who joined us for the dinner last night. To encounter
Tent City is a lesson in the cruelty and violence of an
economic system that takes no heed of the plight of the
many intelligent and caring human beings for which it
has no place; it is also a lesson in the possibilities of
surviving with dignity in a caring community even under
the most adverse of circumstances — a wonderful
antidote to Empire’s call to individualistic greed and
materialism. It occurred to me that the people who so
strongly oppose hosting Tent City at their churches are
partly afraid for the safety of their property and children.
But I suspect that what really troubles them is Tent City’
s unspoken reminder to those who live only a paycheck
or two away from homelessness themselves of the
vulnerability we all share in an uncaring society. It is a
reminder some prefer to keep out of sight and mind. I
am very aware of how my own experience living and
working in some of the world’s poorest countries
transformed my spiritual and political consciousness. I
also observed the impact on my daughter Alicia’s
development of her choice to live with some of the
poorest people on the planet, including several days
living in the simple home of scavengers constructed
from scraps on Manila’s infamously fetid garbage dump.
What if some of Tent City’s hostile opponents found the
courage and compassion to live voluntarily for a few
days, as Jesus might have done, as guests of Tent City’
s residents? How might that experience transform their
lives? What if the churches of our region came to come
to look at the hosting of Tent City not as an act of
charity, but as a learning opportunity and greeted the
residents of Tent City as teachers? It might just be the
foundation of a profound political and social
transformation.