Resources for Resistance

William Cavanaugh, in Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism(TI):

Clearly Christians have to an alarming degree adopted the salvatio mythos of the state as their own, and submitted to the state's practices of binding. We submit to these practices, even give our bodies up for war, in the hope that the peace and unity promised by the state will be delivered. What I have tried to show is that the state mythos and state religio are distortions of our true hope, and that the Christian tradition provides resources for resistance.

This speaks to me this morning as I get hit early on with some samples of thecomplete adoption of the state mythos of salvation through violence. I was confronted with the French response to the youth violence as some sort of challenge to what I can only surmise is "you criticize America and therefore you must adore France, those pussies" kind of thinking. I'm not even a French citizen. In terms of nationality , I am an American citizen (which by contrast means NOTHING up against my citizenship in a People of God), and so I am attached to the "peoplehood" of this nationality as opposed to others, and so I can only compare the ways in which the "assurances" of our state as such today with the "promises" of the Kingdom as proclaimed by Jesus.

The citizenship in the Kingdom of Godt so completely obliterates all other loyalties that any calling to account for national actions must appear as hate to those who can see no other loyalty ( despite claims that they do) , and yet that "other loyalty" is but the mythos of the state retrofitted into an emasculated gospel; a gospel devoid of resurrection, which makes it no gospel at all.