“It is all too significant that historically our great creators of ethics have initiated their callings by assaulting or dissolving all given or manifest established ethics, turning all such categories upside down, with the consequence that our ethical revolutions have been inseparable from an ethical anarchism” – Thomas J.J Altizer “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” – Jesus of Nazareth

The AntiFlag Unfurled

It was September 1996 when the Antichrist circled the world. Each stop on his journey was a polarizing event, drawing both the ecstatic masses in their thousands, as well as the fiery condemnation and threats from religious and political leaders. A congressional hearing was held to determine if he was corrupting the youth of America, an unsurprising measure considering that at nearly every stop, a Bible would be torn up and thrown into the crowd. The figure responsible of course was none other than the infamous Marilyn Manson, touring with his album Antichrist Superstar, a tour in which he willingly became the personification of every form of blasphemy imaginable. From his sneering iconoclasm to his open expression of gender-bending, to his blank-eyed nihilism, and flirtation with totalitarian imagery, Manson effectively became our generation’s most formidable enemy to what is known as the figure of Christ.

However, could it be possible the figures of Marilyn Manson and Jesus of Nazareth form a strange coincidence of opposites? In my previous post I argued that what has been housed under the name of the church are the unholy values of divine sovereignty, priestly hierarchy, ideological mystification, phallic morality, and most importantly, a regressive and otherworldly nihilism. The Church then, in its death drive to escape to heaven (or to accumulate wealth and power) is essentially the institutionalization of world-destruction. If Manson (as the musical re-incarnation of philosophical anarchist Friedrich Nietzsche) sets himself up in direct opposition to what has called itself “Christianity”, what are we to make of the fact that the gospels present Jesus as the militant antagonist towards the institutional religion of his day – the one who for example, threatened to obliterate the temple? What are we to make of the fact that Jesus took the established wisdom, values, and dreams of his own culture, and ultimately turned them on their heads? With these contradictions in mind, is it possible to draw such a comparison?

Betray Me (Reversing the Reversal)

In Nietzsche’s assault on Christendom, his most damning charge of the church is that its very institutionalization is both betrayal and reversal of the figure of Jesus. For him, Jesus’ message of liberation from religion (a theme also developed in the album Antichrist Superstar) is eventually re-appropriated by religion, becoming instead the sordid ground of “slave-morality”, a morality of enslavement, repression and self-hatred as demanded by the religious and political elite. However, this does not mean that Nietzsche merely dismisses Jesus as an irrelevant symbol to be discarded, but seeks to repeat the Spirit of blasphemy that Jesus first enacted against a priestly religion. In his view, Jesus enacted “…an insurrection against…the whole hierarchy of society…against caste, privilege, order, formalism. It was unbelief in “superior men,” a Nay flung at everything that priests and theologians stood for” (Nietzsche, 17). We see this image emerge in inflammatory statements such as “take this mountain (the temple) and throw it into the sea” (Mk. 11:23), his open association with the refuse of society (workers, lepers, and prostitutes), and his damnation of the priestly class.

If Christianity in its religious form is, in fact a betrayal of the original emancipatory message of Jesus, then does it not stand to reason that faithfulness to Christ – (the figure who was executed for blasphemy and sedition) requires nothing less than a double betrayal on our part – a betrayal of the domesticated mascot of Christ upheld by the Church out of its own interests? In this effort, Peter Rollins (re)employs the evangelical slogan WWJD (What Would Judas Do?) as a helpful guide. Contrasting the parable of the Mustard Seed with Jesus’ principle of the scattered wheat in John 12:24, he argues that if the mustard seed is allowed grow unhindered, it is doomed to become a structure which houses a nest of vultures (the priestly class). To the contrary however, if the wheat is scattered and allowed to die, it is multiplied exponentially, growing into an enormous harvest. In other words, if emancipatory movements are doomed to one day be become oppressive establishments, they need to contain their own fail-safe: the ability to auto-deconstruct. For this reason, Rollins argues that Judas (as the radical of the group) was entrusted to betray Christ – so that the collective would not become a new religious hierarchy based upon a cult of personality, but rather a horizontal emancipatory movement subtracted from religion that could spread like wildfire, shaking the very foundations of the ruling class. As Rollins suggests, betrayal is inherent to the very aspect of identifying with Christ, because Jesus’ betrayal (first by his disciples, later by Paul) was the catalyst which unleashed the radical and egalitarian Christ-collective upon the entire known world. As Rollins suggests then, the most violent ideological attack upon the bloated establishment of Christendom does not come through the cynical and elitist dismissal from New Atheism, but rather through a radical faithfulness to the symbol of Christ. In his own words:

“There are a few who betray Christianity not because they no longer believe in it, but because they believe in it so deeply, because they understand that unless the seed of our Christianity falls to the ground and dies it will remain a single seed, but if it is allowed to die it will produce many seeds.” Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal

Antichrist

If Christendom is a reversal of the good news of Jesus – the “deification of nothingness” and the crucifixion of life itself, and if this reversal serves the interests of the powerful, then we can see that to truly identify with Christ is to betray this false Christ and this false gospel. Christianity then, is both the poison and the anti-venom.When this reversal in enacted, what we are faced with is the anti-religious figure of the (anti)Christ, a figure which is certainly not the arrival of some mythological figure in the near-future, but is rather a symbolic category, one which represents the ethical stance of blasphemy.

The first aspect of this symbol is a return to a Nietzschean anti-ethics through the radical theology of Altizer. While anti-ethics may sound nihilistic, even Satanic, this is actually an apocalyptic act which ruptures old paradigms of morality, and thus demands the creation of “an absolutely new ethical world” or new ethical horizon (Altizer, 68). This transvaluation of values is a move from “slave morality” to “the will to Power”, or a move from self-loathing and self-sabotage to what Tillich named”the courage to Be” – the Resurrection, or a Yes! to life in all its complexity and difficulty.

We see this clearly in Jesus’s apocalyptic reversal of all established values in the gospel narratives. For example, consider the earth-shattering impact of the Sermon on the Mount – is this proclamation anything less than the inversion of Mt. Sinia? If the Ten Commandments amount to nothing more than an enormous prohibition from God, consider the implications of Jesus proclaiming a new kingdom, in which division between God and humanity, the sacred and the profane are overcome. Consider his proclamation that the downtrodden, disease-ridden masses are indeed the site of (an inner) kingdom of God, that they are indeed blessed in their very state of wretchedness – the site of a revolutionary rupture in the established order. Consider the great reversals enacted in his parables: the elite are damned while the damned become honored guests at the banquet. (Matt 22), or when an entire estate is thrown away for the chance to participate in the creation of a new world (13:45). Consider Jesus’ desecration of all that is considered holy – temple, laws, traditions, and priesthood – they are all cast into the fire. As Nietzsche claims, Jesus as (anti)Christ abolishes the concept of sin in his very forgiveness of sin, and the concept of sacrifice by displaying the perversity and absurdity of sacrifice itself on the cross (Nietzsche, 22). While religion only offers enslavement through these examples, Jesus instead offers rest for the weary (Matt. 11:30). Most importantly, Jesus’ very existence undermined the possibility of a pathological metaphysical deity in the sky. As Altizer has put forward, with the Incarnation, God-the-Father is emptied both forward and downward into history itself. This death as such is the price that must be paid by God in order to become human.

However, even this conception of the (anti)Christ does not go far enough, the reason being that these great destroyers of established values fail to rupture the established phallic morality of Patriarchy in their criticisms of religion. For this reason, it is important to include the work of radical feminists such as Mary Daly. She employs exorcism in the endeavor to bring liberation and healing to those who have had their bodies and minds raped in the name of God-the-Father. Exorcism becomes necessary, because even after the death of God, his oppressive voice remains internalized within the psyche of the subject, a voice that objectifies her, and robs the subject of her subjectivity (Daly, 50). For Daly, Christ as a liberating figure does not fully break out of the problem, as it is a male symbol which continues to glorify maleness (72). In contrast, the Virgin Mary stands for sexual independence from men, the repressed symbol of paganism which Christendom could only suppress but not banish. (87). She goes on to argue that if the First Coming was the enshrinement of both men and orthodoxy, then the Second Coming is “the arrival of female presence, once strong and powerful, but enchained since the dawn of patriarchy (96). This conception of the (anti)Christ then, is a form of radical sisterhood, “a spiritual uprising that can bring us beyond sexist myths” (140). As Daly argues, this movement beyond binary gender categories and phallocentric ethics will require a new “Fall”, a movement beyond our slave morality or false consciousness. Such an event can only occur “by bringing ourselves and the other half of the species to eat the forbidden fruit – the knowledge refused b patriarchal society. This will be a Fall from false innocence into a new kind of adulthood (67). This new adulthood will require nothing less than a revolution of the mind – a smashing of “masculine metaphysical madness” and the unholy trinity of Rape, Genocide, and War (87).

And so in the name of the (anti)Christ we need to ask ourselves: what form is religion taking in our own situation? What are our societies most sacred values? What toxic morality still lurks in our social unconscious despite our proclamations of secularism and post-secularism? With the unlikely companion of the (anti)Christ as put forward by these prophetic thinkers, we begin to understand the theological roots of our problems, and the price which must be paid to even begin the task of reversing the world-devouring ideological structures that threaten to destroy us.

Resources

The Call to Radical Theology: Thomas J.J Altizer

The Antichrist: Friedrich Nietzsche

The Fidelity of Betrayal: Peter Rollins

Beyond God the Father: Mary Daly