Biblical reflections on drift to authoritarianism
Introduction
Let me say at the outset that historically, Christian people have mostly lived under authoritarian rule. The early Jesus followers had to negotiate between the fact that they are ruled by despotic kings and equally oppressive religious leaders and the fact that their faith had to survive under colonial Rome, whose emperors deified themselves and bid them to bow the knee.
Today, we are seeing once again the rise of authoritarianism, not just in the traditionally totalitarian societies like China or Russia, but in countries that have embraced democracy and now seeing a decline in democratic values and the efficacy of its institutions.
The Philippines is one of them. There was a time when we thought we would return to democracy. Our People Power uprising enabled us to at least restore the institutions that collapsed under the Marcos dictatorship. But very quickly, the old faces of the regime recycled themselves, and the entrenched political and economic elites hijacked the people’s project.
We failed to restructure the political and socio-economic system such that political dynasties are dismantled and economic power is de-coupled from those who hold positions of power.
The return of authoritarianism in the shape of Duterte’s populism is in a way a ‘revolt of the poor.’ The three succeeding decades after People Power saw the tremendous growth of the 2% or so who are in the top rung of the economic ladder, and the massive slide into poverty of those left behind by the digital divide and globalizing forces.
Some months after our February revolt, social activists coming from the three main church traditions in the country — Catholics, the National Council of Churches and evangelicals — met together to reflect on what we did right and what we could have done better.
I spoke in behalf of evangelicals and said that there were two things that could have served the movement better in returning to democracy: the social insights of our faith, and the resources of our culture. Instead of reflecting a bit more on the social implications of our faith and culture, we very quickly embraced western theologies that de-mobilized Christians from responding to our political crisis, and allowed foreign ideologies like Marxism to frame our social analysis and action.
These days, we are once again struggling for insight as we grapple with the failure of our democracies and the looming shadow of China’s imperialism.
So how do we live and find the spaces where we can stretch the margins of what is possible given the narrowing democratic space?
First, some insights from Scripture.
Subverting structures
The Bible’s metaphors on what the church is about – salt, light, yeast – suggest that to give flavor and preserve the best of our cultures, to bring light to people who are in darkness, to penetrate the workings of a system like yeast so that the dough rises, transforming a lump of flour into life-giving bread, — needs only a small minority.
In this sense we are not so much revolutionaries – tearing things down so we can build our own vision of what society should be – but subversives, deep penetration agents who go softly, not attracting attention to ourselves, but quietly influence and transform our spheres of competence and responsibility. This is consistent with the way the Lord Jesus went about his messianic task:
“He will not argue or shout, or make speeches in the streets.
He will not break off a bent reed, nor put out a flickering lamp.
He will persist until he causes justice to triumph, and on him
all peoples will put their hope.” (Matthew 12.19-21)
This is a very Asian way of going about our business of changing things. Instead of a head-on confrontation, as is the usual western approach, we all tend to abide by the military strategist Sun Tzu’s advice to break the enemy’s resistance without fighting. We see China applying this in its thrusting to dominate East Asia through a policy of attraction and infiltration rather than conquest.
The Early Church also had to live and endure structures that were oppressive. The Greco-Roman civilization was borne on the backs of slaves. The few who were Roman citizens, like Aristotle, saw a slave as merely “a living tool.”
Under the absolutist rule of the Caesars, there was no way the colonized peoples of Rome could insert themselves into political space. This explains the so-called political conservatism of someone like Paul, who by and large accepted the existing structures and counseled restive Christians in Rome to be subject to authorities. Husbands and wives, children and parents, slaves and masters were merely enjoined to practice mutual submission and carry out their responsibilities out of reverence for Christ. (Ephesians 5.21-6.9)
This new social ethic, however, soon transformed not only the relationships within these structures but contributed to the eventual erosion of these hierarchies.
Today, in our time, while racism, gender and economic inequality continue to exist, they are at least considered socially anathema and morally unacceptable. This we owe to Paul’s vision that in Christ, ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.’ (Galatians 3.28)
Sociologists and social historians tell us that it only takes 2% to 5% of the population to turn a country around. You just need a determined minority, what sociologists call a ‘critical mass’, to impact a whole society:
“We should not underestimate the significance of the small group of people who have a vision of a just and gentle world. In Japan a very small minority of Protestant Christians introduced ethics into politics and had an impact beyond all proportion to their numbers. They were central in the beginnings of the women’s movement, labor unions and virtually every reform movement. The quality of a culture may be changed when two percent of its people have a new vision.”
— Robert Bellah, UC Berkeley
In other words, we need to have a strong missional sense in our vocations, a very intentional project of transforming the institutions where we happen to be. We are to be game changers, turning evil and unjust structures more towards the purposes of God for human society.
Change the narratives
It is not an accident that the first thing an autocratic government does is to muzzle independent media and let loose a flood of propaganda and fake news that will shape public opinion. It was Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who said that if you repeat a big lie often enough people will eventually believe it.
Today we live in a media-saturated social environment. Much of what we think and feel is now shaped by anonymous authorities behind news rooms and computer terminals. I have a sense that when Paul talked of the ‘prince of the power of the air’ in Ephesians 2, this refers in our time to those myth-makers who conjure a shadowy world of images that are untrue.
It is not enough to critique the culture around us; we must create culture, new metanarratives, a new social imaginary that engages the imagination of our people.
Walter Brueggemann in his commentary on the book of Isaiah underscores the significance of nurturing a ‘prophetic imagination’:
“…[it is] the most subversive, redemptive act that a leader of a faith community can undertake in the midst of exiles. This work of poetic alternative in the long run is more crucial than one-on-one pastoral care or the careful implementation of institutional goals….
“That is because the work of poetic imagination holds the potential of unleashing a community of power and action that finally will not be contained by any imperial restrictions and definitions of reality….
“…Jesus’ way of teaching parables invited his community of listeners beyond visible realities of Roman law and restrictive Jewish law, ….[it was] out of tradition, specific, open-ended, an alternative society of the ‘kingdom of God.’ He had no blueprints nor programs, “but turns people loose from the givens of the day [so they can] live toward new social possibilities…”
— Walter Brueggemann,
Hopeful Imagination, Prophetic Voices in Exile
This means that artists, story-tellers, ought to be at the center of the church’s witness, creating in language people can understand that the Kingdom is here, there is a new world of justice and righteousness that is invading human history, even if it looks like Apocalypse Now.
The big elephant in the room
Countries that have experienced colonization either get inferiorized, as with the Philippines, or aggressively belligerent, as with China, now that it has the power to take on the West after its century of humiliation. Imperialism is a sin that cuts deeply and has historical consequences that do not seem to end.
In Paul’s speech at the Areopagus before the Athenians, he affirms both the unity of humankind and the diversity of peoples as they develop cultures out of their allotted habitations. It is God himself who set the boundaries. (Acts 17.26)
Self-determination is not just an idea out of the civilizational evolution of the West after the Treaty of Westphalia. The nations that emerged as independent states have a God-given birthright to map out their own ‘times,’ and fulfill their own destiny and sense of the future.
Unfortunately, the populations of Majority World countries today have yet to share the international norms that developed out of Europe’s conceptual history. Like China, we have yet to evolve norms similar to the highly-developed language of the West for ‘rights’ and ‘rule-based’ approaches to ordering society.
The biblical imperative for us as a global community and the local churches on the ground is clearly to stand alongside movements like the Hongkong pro-democracy protesters who are fighting for a future independent of China.
I think of what could have happened if the churches were not present during our People Power revolt. Our Institute was assigned to organize the religious presence in the barricades. For once I saw the whole nation down on its knees – Catholics, Protestants, Muslims. I wonder if it was this element that was missing in Tienanmen Square.
Our social analysts could not make heads or tails of the religious impulse that drove so many to stand bravely before the oncoming tanks. It was not a revolution along the lines of the libertarian ideas birthed in the French revolution, nor was it a socialist revolt like that of the Bolsheviks or Mao’s Red Army. Our intelligentsia have yet to decolonize their mental models of how the world works. Even now we have yet to develop consensus on what actually happened in 1986.
But the one thing clear is that the churches, like yeast, had a leavening presence. Before the great military might of the most powerful President we have ever had, we relied on the redeeming and reconciling power of the cross, trusting in the living presence of the Spirit as an incalculable force in tilting the balance of power towards the good.
John Howard Yoder articulates the mystery of this:
“Between the absolute agape which lets itself be crucified, and effectiveness (which it is assumed will need to be violent), the resurrection forbids us to choose, for in the light of resurrection crucified agape is not folly (as it seems to the Hellenizers to be) and weakness (as the Judaizers believe) but the wisdom and power of God. (1 Corinthians 1.22-25)
–John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus
The refusal to use force as primary instrument of change is something we need to take seriously whenever our societies are in extremis and there are pressures towards violence as an option. Part of the life of faith is to believe that even in a realm where the powers seem strong and ruthless, Jesus is able to turn the tables and win power out of seeming weakness.
The in-breaking Kingdom opens up history, blasts through windowless social systems, and creates options where none save the use of violence seems possible.
Our relatively bloodless uprising against what seemed to be a monolith of power is witness to the mysterious power of vulnerability combined with the moral invincibility of a just cause.
We may not be aware of it, but the Church is the historic presence of Christ on earth. In the same way that Jesus united in his person the offices of prophet, priest and king, so must we be as the Body of Christ.
Often, when we are face to face with tyrannical powers, we feel psychologically on the defensive, preoccupied with just surviving, but Scripture tells us that
“the Church is on the offensive, the blows it receives from Satan comes from a retreating enemy.”
(Richard Lovelace, The Dynamics of the Spiritual Life)
When we are truly ‘church’ – confessing together that Jesus truly is the Christ, even in the darkest places – we can storm the gates of hell and have the confidence that they shall fall and not prevail against us.
Let me end with this encouragement from Deng Xiaoping in his speech at the UN in 1974:
“If one day China should change her color and turn into a superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to her bullying, aggression and exploitation, the people of the world should identify her as social imperialist, expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.”
— Melba Padilla Maggay, Ph.D.
