The Christian concept of a god is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world… In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy! Friedrich Nietzsche – The Antichrist¹

Take a drive through almost any suburb in North America, and you can find an almost universal landmark. Look for the largest buildings – the ones with acres of parking space around them. You will then be confronted with an enormous phallic structure, clawing at the very heavens. Amid the walking paths, cute shops, and flower-adorned cul-de-sacs, you will discover something out of place: an ancient symbol of terror, suffering, and of death. Outlined like a scar across that clear blue sky, what you will inevitably find is a towering white crucifix.

It is fitting really, that an institution that has authorized and sustained such violence, idiocy, cruelty, and inequality, continues to identify itself with a symbol of torture and execution. Reserved as the most excruciating form of execution by the Roman Empire, the Cross is probably rivaled only by the atomic mushroom cloud in its symbolic representation of death. While there is certainly a PC trend among many liberal evangelicals to scrub the Cross from its imagery, the religious structure as a whole remains fundamentally the same: the actually-existing-church with its escapist fantasies of heaven, and its stubborn suspicion of human flourishing is nothing more than institutionalized nihilism. In the name of saving the soul, we are told that our bodies must be rejected. To appease a pathological narcissist-in-the-sky we are told to assume the role of slaves. In order to attain heavenly bliss, we are told that the earth must be handed over for total annihilation. It is ironic really, that orthodox Christianity has become identical with the heresy it first opposed; what we face today under the roof of the Church is the return of Gnosticism on a global scale. In the Johannine struggle between darkness and light (John 1:5), darkness has truly overcome. As such, this wholesale crossing-out of existence – the enshrinement of non-being, is what the Cross stands for today in its so-called allegiance to the figure of Christ.

But what about the rich tradition of Christian charity? The soup kitchens? Education programs? The woman’s shelters, and orphanages? Am I merely building a strawman of the worst tendencies within religion? While these aspects of Christianity have and continue to be done by individuals in the name of love and selflessness, these approaches (as extensions or counter-forces of institutional religion) can also be understood as something far more sinister – they are often nothing more than the band-aids over the bullet-holes caused by the religious edifice itself (that is, as a form of ideological mystification which obfuscates a long history of religious violence). Would domestic violence for example, be so widespread without the continued domination of religious patriarchy and anti-feminism? Is homelessness an individual failure to be reconciled with God – or does the stigma itself stem from the falsity of the Protestant work-ethic? Are recycling, and “green” projects (as a contemporary “religious” practices) anything more than modern “indulgences” in the now-globalized religion of Consumerism? Here, as Žižek claims, the practice of charity can really have a much darker ideological function – they absolve us from the guilt of participation while blinding us to the demonic violence of the systems we participate in.

With that said, let’s take the centerpiece of orthodox Christianity: the promise of eternal life. Nietzsche once named this tendency “selfishness to infinity”, and for good reason – while the thought of eternal heavenly bliss may sound harmless enough, perhaps even comforting, the idea has an obvious dark side: the ultimate rejection of material existence. Is this an unfair critique? Much like Nietzsche, one only has to take a look at the requirements involved to attain heavenly bliss, the so-called “Christian” values. How about fear of sexuality, masochism, and the paternal (and condescending) duty to “love thy neighbor” ? What about sexism, blind obedience to authority, tribalism, and the sacred duty to dominate the earth? Take these “values” and multiply them billions of times over centuries-long campaigns of conversion, and you begin to understand the extent of the problem. Starve the body, feed the soul – this is the mantra of “Christian” values.

In psychoanalytic terms, the religious impulse to attain eternal life is what Freud would categorize as a Death Drive. The concept was developed out of the Great War, in which the imperialist powers of Europe destroyed the continent in the capitalist struggle for global dominance. Unlike the Pleasure and Reality principles, the death drive arises in the psyche of both individuals and communities as a fanatical impulse which urges us to attain a goal or an object which we believe will complete us – an urge that ultimately disregards health and happiness in the illusory pursuit of the object which we believe will make us whole². The Death Drive is perhaps best encapsulated in the figure of the zombie – a figure which has no drive but to fulfill an incessant hunger. The zombie has no regard for the loss of its body parts in its pursuit of living flesh. As Žižek remarks, the Freudian death drive is also (paradoxically) the drive for immortality: the drive to insist after biological death³. If this sinister attraction to otherworldly fulfillment can be categorized as a Death Drive, then we can see why eternal life (as the end goal in protestant Christianity) and the ethics which it upholds undermines the very ground of being itself. Like the undead, those who are possessed with the drive to escape the earth (space-capitalists included) will sacrifice the world we live in to achieve eternal (or interstellar) fulfillment – a fulfillment that simply does not exist.

Although the quickest way to clear a room of evangelicals is to mention the name “Nietzsche ”, the problem remains that Christianity in its popular sense has set itself up in the name of a truly poisonous nihilism – not a rejection of mythical/metaphysical claims to Truth as in the classical procedure of nihilism, but rather its opposite: the categorical rejection of existence itself in the drive for eternal life. In this sense, the cross continues to signify not a symbol of salvation, but rather a symbol of our enslavement. Insofar as it remains in the symbolic arsenal of religion, and insofar as religion continues to crucify the world in its conquest for heaven, we can expect no possibility of any sort of meaningful life on earth.

However, what if it were possible to reverse the symbol of the cross – to invert it? Is there still a potential within Christianity for a Resurrection – for a revived form of life? This is where my hope lies. As I will explore in my next post, liberation from religion does not materialize from impotent rejection of Christianity as we see coming from the smug armchair-atheists such as Hitchens and Dawkins. The nihilism of religion runs too deep to simply be banished – it must be exorcised of its demonic power. The wager of Radical theology is to turn the symbol back on itself – to turn the cross upside-down, and to do this in the name of Christ.

Resources

¹ Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Antichrist. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000.

² Rollins, Peter. The Divine Magician: The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith. Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.

³ Žižek, Slavoj. In Defence of Lost Causes. New York: Verso, 2008