GODS FOR SALE

       The gods are for sale these days in case you hadn't noticed. Employable gods became available with the death of God 300 years ago after philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Reimarus, suggested that reason could replace revelation. Since then there has been little recourse to reason but the spiritual vacuum created by dying religious authority has spawned various divine inventions such as a fascination with violence. Historian Tony Judt has written that what fired the growth of fascism among young people at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was “precisely the bloody deadly aspect of war” that came to be celebrated as “the defining moment of their youth.” We see a fresher version in the film American Sniper that glorifies the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the honor conferred by lost American blood.  

In the past half century another attraction followed the Second Vatican Council with Catholics joining the Protestants in stressing God as personal. Creeping into modern liturgies is the possessive "our God," or worse, "my God." You can have a sense of ownership. Instead of Barth's "totally other" the new version of God is just like you, just a little better.

A new age of preferences, choices and special privileges has emerged about gods writ small. Such is the case with Netanyahu’s Israel.  Bibi” began his address to the U. S. Congress this week by reminding all present that “we share the common destiny of promised lands.”  This trump card, little noted by the media, was played early in his opening hand (on page one) to remind us that the god of Israel and the god of Puritan exceptionalism have the shared trait of being in our employ.  Implicitly, a state of warfare exists permanently with all those other nations that lack such a divine promise.

        There is a narcotic effect in “promised land” theology that places employable gods in the service of profound inequality and violence.  Ethics, reason, shared development resources, an end to African and Middle East poverty, global citizenship for all are goals that recede beyond the horizon.

  

        Middle East leaders know, of course, that Israel has an arsenal of an estimated 80 nuclear warheads. They also know that the rhetoric at the joint session of congress was little more  than a plank in Netanyahu’s re-election campaign.  In the U. S. the same rhetoric of godly violence provides congressional leaders with strategies for their re-election.  It creates good deals for military contractors in their district who sell weapons-related hardware to Israel (who buy it with American money granted by the Congress) and, happily, will finance their next election campaign. 

        Israel with its nuclear arsenal is profoundly equipped to annihilate all god’s enemies, including Iran.  There is this problem however.  There are other god’s for hire who command an overweening devotion from their followers who are at work with their own blood sacrifices: inspiring vast networks of suicide bombers and endless violent Jihad.  Boston-style bombers or Paris-style assassins could be coming to your own mall soon.

   

        This melancholy theology of Israel and U. S. god-given primacy takes on different shapes and forms around the world and generates many cousins: White on Black police shootings on an almost daily basis remembers the day of legitimate, legal slavery.  Sunni superiority over Shiites in Syria revives ancient authoritarianism. Documented versus undocumented neighbors revive ideas about those who are justly “called” and those left behind.

        Courtesy of Netanyahu and Congress the bad old days are back. They threaten everyone with the whirlwind born of all the gods for sale.   The antidote is a religious (or humanitarian) spirit that insists on a God who is not for sale, and whose other name is justice.