Their Minds Are Set on Earthly Things

Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
(Philippians 3:17-20, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

The late theologian Walter Brueggemann warned constantly of the dangers of “Empire,” a shorthand for the ways in which people organize human societies to reserve wealth and power for themselves at the expense of others. The contours of Empire might vary from one setting to the next, but Brueggemann often discerned elements of Christian nationalism and capitalism floating in the mix.

“I believe the crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative,” he says at the beginning of his Lenten devotional, A Way Other Than Our Own. Instead, he warned, “it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.”

Many Quakers consider themselves unsusceptible to this form of “American exceptionalism” by virtue of their faith and practice.

For the most part, in my experience, Friends do tend to avoid falling into the traps of unbridled capitalism—and we usually do a pretty good job of walking the walk when it comes to pacifism and non-violence. But I’ve also met Friends who, with no small amount of pride, give their historical predecessors starring roles in an epic saga of American liberty.

If you’ve heard anything about Quakers in America, you’ve probably heard that they fought tirelessly to free the slaves. While they did play a prominent part in the abolitionist movement, that came about only after more than a century of participation in the trafficking and enslavement of human beings. Moral clarity didn’t come without intense conflict, and some of the first Friends to speak out became pariahs in their communities.

We can dive into the history of other issues besides slavery, of course. But, skipping ahead for now, let’s simply say that positioning Friends as “America’s conscience” or some such does our faith and practice no real good. At worst, it risks increasing our complicity in the degree to which the United States has come to resemble Brueggemann’s Empire.

Paul Kingsnorth looks beyond the American circumstance and sees a much rougher beast taking shape.

The English essayist calls it the Machine, “an intersection of money power, state power, and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies” that works ruthlessly to eliminate all other competitors for humanity’s allegiance. One could easily identify the Machine’s end as destruction, its animating deity a belly ravenous for, as Kingsnorth suggests, “growth” and “progress.” And the Machine surely views the philosophy underpinning the cross of Christ as its enemy—so much so that it aims to appropriate that cross and warp it into a beacon, luring people into its clutches by encouraging their basest desires.

The title of the book where Kingsnorth lays all this out, Against the Machine, leaves no doubt as to where he stands. Just in case, though, I’ll share another of his admonitions: “Rebellion is necessary, if we are to remain human at all.” His particular path toward rebellion has involved conversion to the Romanian Orthodox Church; I can relate to that quite easily, having made my way back to the Religious Society of Friends in shock and disgust at the ascendancy of Donald Trump— an ascendancy propelled, perhaps, if you believe in that sort of thing, by the dark spirit of the Machine.

I don’t think Kingsnorth has everything exactly right. 

I don’t share his hostility to what he calls “the transgender moment,” for example, and I worry that he may not fully thread the needle when it comes to preventing the love and respect for local culture which he promotes from devolving into violent, exclusionary nationalism. Despite my qualms, though, I appreciate his effort to guide humanity away from the seductive allure of earthly things and remind us of our citizenship in heaven.

Or, if you prefer, in the blessed community. Or, as Brueggemann called it, the neighborhood of shalom, in the Hebrew word’s fullest sense not just of peace, but well-being and fulfillment: “the neighborhood of shared resources, of inclusive politics, of random acts of hospitality and international acts of justice, of fearless neighborliness that is not propelled by greed or anxiety or excessive community.”

To me, citizenship in that kind of blessed community sounds awfully appealing—and, like many people, I’ve become increasingly doubtful the nation-states of neoliberal capitalism will or even can get us to that point. I don’t even think the Religious Society of Friends will get us there on its own… but at least, when the focus remains on Spirit, it seems to have sent us off in the right direction.