There is a scene early in the 1987 vampire comedy classic “The Lost Boys” when the two teen boys, moving into their grandfather’s house with their newly divorced mother, can’t find the television. They do, however, find the “TV Guide.” Grandpa’s response? “Read the TV Guide, you don’t need a TV.”
I sometimes feel like that when I am reading book reviews, in the Times or the Post, so many books reviewed that I will never actually read. As it is, I buy books faster than I read them. So it was that I read in a recent issue of “The New York Review of Books” Cass Sunstein’s piece about a biography that there is exactly zero chance I will ever purchase, borrow, or read, for it is a new biography of one of my favorite villains, and sadly, not the fictional kind.
A Russian Jew born in St. Petersburg, Alissa Rosenbaum announced her atheism at the age of thirteen, not because she could not reconcile the world to the concept of God, but because, with stunning hubris, she refused to accept that there was any entity superior to the human. About that…
She watched as her father’s pharmacy was seized in the revolution, leaving her with a searing hatred of all things Bolshevik. She immigrated to the United States, lying in order to obtain a visa then remaining in the country illegally, ironic since her cult includes many anti-immigrant white nationalists.
You don’t know her as Alissa Rosenbaum, for the name she used in America was Ayn Rand.
Rand’s belief system, generously called a philosophy by some, boils down to egotism as a creed, selfish individualism and “might makes right” and all that is incompatible with every major world religion, indeed, all that is incompatible with decency and civilization. It is a poison seed that has found fertile soil among generations of teenagers, particularly boys, who are busy with the natural process of crafting a sense of self independent of the nurturing family. In one sense, every healthy and differentiated young adult is a tear-away.
Rand’s ideas look so much like the best parts of American rugged individualism that her novels act like a literary Trojan Horses, pleasant on the outside but filled with destruction. Fortunately, most, though not all, teens outgrow Rand’s call to sociopathy. If you wonder how that sort of life turns out, there is that new biography. Let me know what you think of it…
If Rand is at one end of the spectrum, she is responding to the other end, a lifelong tantrum directed at the sort of collective terror that held sway for a time in Paris, that flared in the Bolshevik hijack of the Russian Revolution, that lived in Soviet-style communism and continues to live in the authoritarian communism of the Peoples Republic of China. It is a framework that views the individual as worthless, unless of course, it is the individual with power, when some animals are more equal then others, as Orwell noted wryly in “Animal Farm.” All things are permissible as long as done in the name of “the people,” a poorly defined collective that rarely benefits from the latest act of expropriation or suppression.
And here we are, a people, our teens face-down to their phones, manufactured in China, streaming videos over China’s TikTok app, while the Randian cult controls so much of our political narrative, all bootstraps in a time of bodybags.
God forbid some Millennial point out the relative success and personal happiness of those who live in the social democracies of Northern Europe, Sweden excepted at the moment, for they cannot get to the end of a single sentence before someone from an older generation screams communism, for common good and common purpose are to be lauded right up until they bump up against me, place a demand on me, cost me, for my convenience and my fear are the measure of all things.
The bad wiring of McCarthyism, of duck-and-cover, is still there, so that today’s text from Paul’s Acts of the Apostles becomes a socio-political battlefield, with lefties holding it up to show early Christianity was socialist, while others do their best to explain it away, and most pastors skip it altogether, unless they have an axe to grind. There is little room for rational dialogue, for it won’t be long before a verbal grenade in thrown, a conversation stopper, the same thing that happens should you be foolish enough to speak about gun control or Israel in a public space. Or meat-packing plants. Or plastic straws. Just about everything has been politicized these days.
But here’s the thing. The early church was not socialist. We cannot project the idea of socialism back onto that early church. It makes no more sense than trying to decide whether Judah was for or against the Designated Hitter, that American League abomination. And yes, even as a Yankees fan, I think the DH is a problem, though I’m not a fan of the twenty pitching changes you get in a National League game either. Oh for the long-lost days of a complete game, before analytics and the shift. Or for that matter, any game at all.
Those early Christians were also not free market capitalists, for that makes no sense in the Ancient Near Eastern context either. Jesus, and the first community of disciples, lived in the economic system of Colonialism, and a pretty brutal colonialism at that. To describe it as a free market society is like describing Holland as a free market society under Nazi occupation. Everything was oriented toward survival, with some collaborating openly with the foreign enemy, who sowed seeds of cruelty and reaped a harvest of resources and labor. The only real means of exchange was complicity.
Hebrew Scripture provides plenty of evidence that economic monkey business is as old as human society. It gives us rules designed to mitigate the ways humans exploit one another. It calls out those who cheat, who use false weights. It urges us to look out for the vulnerable, to be generous when our own nature, our lower lizard brain, might drive us to hide and horde like some mythic dragon, that greatest of all lizards.
In Jesus, we are called to a radical generosity, a selflessness and sometimes even a sacrificial selflessness. The kind practiced by Jesus. The kind practiced by Don Giuseppe Berardelli, a Catholic priest in Northern Italy, who had a respirator purchased for him by his flock due to a long-term illness. When Covid-19 hit the region, he offered that life-sustaining equipment to a younger patient and died, the sort of selfless act Ayn Rand would loathe and describe as weakness.
The early church was not an authoritarian collective. It was an example of what anthropologist Victor Turner called “communitas,” a space of equality and solidarity driven by the fact that is was liminal, outside of the bounds of normal social structure liminal sharing a root with limit, outside of the boundaries, a space in-between.
But we don’t need anthropological terms to describe this gathering on the Way of Jesus. They were bound by love.
The notorious WWJD, “What would Jesus do?,” so popular with Christian conservatives, actually originated with the Social Gospel movement, that is, with Christian progressives. It is both helpful and totally useless in helping us organize our life together, as church, as a society. As noted earlier, Jesus operated in a cultural and socio-political context that was nothing like the one in which we live, though plague and famine feel a lot more real these days.
Moreover, if we are to believe the texts, and folks have been trying to fudge this for almost 2000 years, Jesus believed that Creation was going to reach fulfillment, a Day of the Lord, at any moment, and called people to drop out of society to follow him. We now have an idea what happens when economic activity freezes up, which is essentially what Jesus was suggesting. Paul, also expecting the eschaton, basically called the early Christians to “shelter in place,” that is, not to change their lives significantly, because, why bother?
But, again, we can look not at what they said, but at what they did, in the historic context in which they found themselves. They placed love over fear, generosity over selfishness. The measure of all things we not me but was instead them, the other, those at the margins, those who were afraid, who were mired in aimlessness and sin, those who were hungry, poor, physically sick, imprisoned, mentally ill. That is where they were told they would find Christ. And it is only there that we can find ourselves.
So too would those Early Christians find God-with-them when they broke bread and told the story, when they stepped out of themselves and into the not-self of prayer, the not-self of love, the not-self of creativity.
They were not communists, nor socialists, nor, for that matter, were they free market capitalists.
Nor, for the record, was the Early Church a democracy in the way we think of democracy today. While the Athenian experiment had come and gone by the time of Jesus, he and his followers sat in a region that had always been threatened and conquered by regional super-powers. Monarchy was their frame, though they dared to claim that Yahweh, not Caesar, was in charge. They did have a democratic process of sorts, discerning together in councils, but the goal of every council was not “I like” and “I don’t like,” was not winning, as is so often true in the life of the modern consumer church. The goal of every council was listening for the Holy Spirit and trying, together, and this is the important thing, together they tried to discern God’s will.
And God’s will is hard, for it is transcendence and creativity and love which is to say it is not that tiny little thing we call self, but is this immense other, is always movement.
Don’t let anyone claim that God endorses their economic system, their immigration policy, their political party, their denomination or religious practice. And don’t claim that God endorses yours either. They don’t own God, and we do not own God. Any god that could be owned would not be God.
The only measure we have is whether a system contributes to human thriving, to the thriving of this planet and all that is on it, for we are all inter-connected. The measure is whether it lifts up rather than tears down, whether it liberates rather than binds. The only measure is love.
Amen.