“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris
"One way to think about the Trump-Musk-Putin project is that it is Neo-Barbarism. The old left critiques of ‘Neoliberalism’ actually assumed the horizon of a liberal democratic order (credit John Gamey). In other words, however ‘radical’ critics of Neoliberalism thought they were being, they were attacking the established order from within a framework which assumed the existence of nation states, international trade, intergovernmental organizations, civil society organizations and liberal democratic institutions in at least many of the most important states.
"What the Trump-Musk-Putin axis does, is to blow this all up (credit Nancy Ries). They are not only destroying the old order, but also rendering standard critiques of Neoliberalism irrelevant. In their new world , instead of nation states there will be billionaire barons allied with armed garrisons; instead of international trade, coerced resource extraction; instead of social participation and welfare provision, massive repression and individualised struggle for survival.
This explains why Trump can talk so freely of seizing Canada, Greenland, Panama: he no longer assumes any of the external or internal constraints on power holders that have, however unevenly, developed over the last 200 years. This is not about going back to 19th Century colonialism or further developing 20th Century Neoliberalism. Rather, this imagined future corresponds most closely to something like the western part of the Roman Empire in 500s and 600s: magnates with armed hordes swirling across ill-defined territorial boundaries, slaughtering and seizing resources, while production falls off a cliff and the standard of living of the mass of the population falls to unfathomably low levels."
Now...
You know, the way to see the nightmare dystopian vision of these dark ages late late Roman Empire tech bros is,
Editor’s Note: The Observer published this column in its April 11, 1997, edition under the headline: “Texas: Laboratory for Lunacy.” That year’s private school voucher proposal narrowly died at the Lege.
Three strikes and you’re out? Watch Texas spend more on prisons than it does on schools. Thinking of making your tax structure more regressive? Come to the Lone Star State and see how it’s done.
The latest brainstorm to afflict our friendly pols in Austin is school vouchers. Consider the beauty of this nifty scheme as it might eventually be worked out under the guidance of the Texas Lege. To improve the public schools (I swear, that’s how the advocates are advertising this lunacy):
■We give vouchers to all the students who are already in private or religious schools around the state. Right there, before anybody else even gets a voucher, we will have taken, say, $1 billion out of the budget for our public schools. Shrewd move, eh?
■We also give all the kids now in public school a voucher, thus theoretically enabling these children to attend the schools of their parents’ choice: Unfortunately, private schools might find themselves under no obligation to accept any of our kids; they could be rejected because of their religious affiliation, their disabilities, on the grounds that they’re not bright enough, because the school administrators don’t like their looks—any reason not specifically excluded by law.
The Texas Freedom Network, a normally sensible group of good guys, is running around like Paul Revere, trying to alert the citizenry to this dread downside of the school voucher idea. “Proposed voucher legislation would allow private schools to recruit the best athletes and students at taxpayer expense.” Folks, we’re talking football now! I knew you’d be concerned. Quel horrifying thought: The whole high school football tradition is in dire peril. Stop the madness now!
On a more sober note, the good private schools we’d all like to send our kids to already have waiting lists a mile long. No public school kid is going to St. John’s in Houston or St. Mark’s in Dallas with a voucher clutched in his or her little hand; those schools cost $10,000 a year, and our little school voucher won’t cover half the cost.
Now maybe, just maybe, some upper-middle-class folks might be able to afford a fancy private school with a voucher to help, but working-class and middle-class kids are going to be stuck just where they always were. Why should we spend public money to help just that one thin slice of the population when it won’t improve the public schools?
The rural kids are really going to get burned by this idea. As you may have noticed, almost all private schools are in cities. Hundreds of rural school districts don’t have a single private school, but because of the way state education financing works, they’d still lose thousands of dollars from their budgets for the public schools without a single kid going to private school.
I realize this means nothing to our Legislature, but it should be mentioned that the whole idea is rankly unconstitutional.
All in all, this concept is so bad that it has an excellent chance of passing the Legislature. Much as we would like to help the rest of the nation by demonstrating once more just how stupid ideas work out in practice, couldn’t we give this one a miss?
In case you’re wondering who is pushing this dingbat notion, it’s the religious right, the same charmers who helped elect the right-wingers who now grace the state Board of Education. If you haven’t checked in on the state board lately, you really should. It’s a lot of fun—fruitcakes unlimited, flat-Earthers, creationists, all manner of remarkable specimens. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that there’s even a bill in the Lege to replace it with an appointed board again.
You may recall that we’ve had this fight before. In keeping with my Theory of Perpetual Reform, I now favor an appointed board. Last time, I favored an elected board. What I really favor is the idea that no matter what we try, in about ten years, it’s always a mess again and we need to try something else.
Speaking of matters educational, let me take on a sacred cow that is long past its prime: local control. Have you noticed that the people who consider local control of the schools a sanctified arrangement are the same people who are always complaining about how terrible the schools are? If local control is such a great idea, then how come the schools are so bad? Have we considered the possibility that maybe local control is the problem?
A truism of the everlasting education debates is that someone somewhere has already solved whatever the problem is. Someone somewhere is always doing a brilliant job of teaching physics to inner-city kids, or teaching music to a bunch of rural kids in the 4-H who have heretofore considered Loretta Lynn classical music, or getting bored suburban brats excited about Herman Melville.
The problem is that we can’t seem to replicate the successes in the schools across the board because there is no across the board. Instead, there’s local control. Sometimes it’s superb, granted. But often, it’s hopelessly knot-headed. Ask the folks in Dallas—they’ve had some lulus lately. It seems to me just possible that maybe what we need to do is take education out of the hands of insurance salesmen, Minute Women and other odd ephemera of the electoral process and put it in the hands of… well, educators.
Can you believe how predictive OOO was of all this ... we talked about accelerationism a lot. A lot! We got dissed a lot by the Landians for going off message, I feel, off the message of white Progress... it went on and on. And on. Graham and I got screamed at in Amsterdam by an accelerationist ... and it was when I had started to say that accelerationism was sadistic.
ICE AGENTS IN CHURCHES ‘DOES NOT BODE WELL FOR THE FUTURE OF RELIGION’ IN AMERICA
“They’re de facto endorsing government interference with the church—the very government interference with the church that they've complained about in the past.”
Last week, the federal Department of Homeland Security reversed longtime policies restricting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection arrests in certain locations including churches, schools, and hospitals.
The department’s announcement has sparked fierce pushback from immigrant advocates, school officials, and faith leaders. For decades, some religious activists have used houses of worship as “sanctuaries” to shelter migrants in danger of deportation. DHS’ policy reversal came swiftly after Trump’s inauguration and is part of the administration’s efforts to ramp up removal of undocumented people, with daily ICE arrests quickly rising to more than 1,000, per the agency. An Atlanta man was already arrested by immigration agents outside his church.
“Christians have been tempted by—what do we call it?—I guess the siren song of power.”
David Brockman is a Christian theologian and author based in Fort Worth. He is a nonresident scholar in the Religion and Public Policy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute and teaches at Texas Christian University, and he’s contributed regularly to the Texas Observer’s coverage of religion.
Earlier this week, the Observer spoke with Brockman about the federal policy change, the First Amendment, and what Christians should do now.
TO: Now that ICE agents are allowed to arrest immigrants in churches, what do you think this shift signals for U.S. society and for Christianity in the U.S.?
To be honest, the very first thing I thought of when I heard about this policy change was the extreme irony. I’ve been studying Christian nationalism for the past 10 years, and one of the common claims by Christian nationalists about church-state separation—if they’re not outright denying that it exists at all—is they will call back to the idea that the wall of separation is a one-way wall that is meant only to keep the government out of the church, not to keep the church out of government. It’s a common claim that they make. With this change of policy, the president they support is potentially sending government agents into the churches, synagogues, mosques, and so forth to seize and arrest worshippers. That’s not keeping the government out of the church. I found that very ironic, to say the least.
For the U.S. as a whole, this policy signals a return to some of the cruel and shameful policies that we’ve seen in our history, like the forced expulsion and resettlement of Native Americans in the Trail of Tears, or the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. It’s the same order of shamefulness, and it’s rousting people out of their homes and livelihoods for no real justifiable reason. I know that many of the defenders claim that the people they’re arresting and deporting are violent criminals, but even their own statistics don’t show that. So, that’s a very flimsy excuse. For Christianity, I think that this policy means the end, at least for now, of any kind of separate sacred space, a kind of religious realm that’s off-limits to the government and enshrined by the First Amendment. The implications of that also are troubling.
If the government can invade sacred space and seize worshipers, what’s to keep it from dictating what can and cannot be preached, what people should or shouldn’t believe, and so on? I don’t generally like slippery-slope arguments, but I think this does have greater implications for religious life than just whether some undocumented people are arrested in a church setting. I think this does not bode well for the future of religion in the United States.
For Christian nationalists who are okay with ICE coming into churches, when do they want the government out of their churches?
Again, that’s that irony that I was talking about before. Christian nationalists have complained about the Johnson Amendment keeping them from being able to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. Essentially they feel it is keeping them from being able to preach what they want to preach. But I think that we have a situation here where, through their endorsement of President Trump, they’re de facto endorsing government interference with the church—the very government interference with the church that they’ve complained about in the past, and government interference of a worse form.
What does the Bible say about how Christians should treat immigrants?
The Bible is a big book. It’s really a collection of books. The Bible can be used to prove just about anything, and it has been used to prove all sorts of crazy things in the past. But I think that serious students of the Bible—Jewish and Christian alike—if they sit down and read through the biblical texts, they’ll see running throughout the Bible the duty to care for the stranger, alongside widows and orphans, and other vulnerable people. One of the key stories in the Torah, that is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, is the story of the ancient Israelites themselves being migrants, living in a foreign land. They migrated from their homeland to Egypt to escape a famine. It’s a very similar kind of situation to migrants that we see today who are fleeing famine or violence, warfare. There’s this theme that you just can’t miss in the Bible that we are to care for the stranger in our midst. For Christians, that’s something that’s commanded of us. That’s kind of the bottom line.
There are all sorts of practical questions that come from that. How do we care for them? Does that mean that we just have a wide open border in which anybody can move around with no restrictions? Those are separate questions that have to be dealt with. But the bottom line is that Christians are supposed to care for the stranger among us.
Other than the irony, what else did you think, as a theologian, when you saw the announcement about ICE enforcement in churches?
I just feel a deep sense of grief, sadness, and I guess this is not so much as a theologian, but as a student of the history of Christian theology and of Christianity. President Trump could not have won reelection without the enthusiastic support of conservative Christian and evangelical voters. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and his threats of mass deportations were crystal clear during the runup to the election. So conservative and evangelical Christians who supported Trump had to know that something like this was going to happen—not necessarily raids on churches and schools, but maybe raids on workplaces and so forth. He talked about that in the past, and if they didn’t know about it, if this is a surprise to them, they just weren’t paying attention prior to the election. One of the things that I grieve about is that what we see here is a kind of echo of other shameful episodes in Christianity’s past: the Crusades, antisemitic pogroms in Europe, biblical defenses of American slavery by Christians.
I think that too often throughout Christianity’s history, Christians have been tempted by—what do we call it?—I guess the siren song of power. Tempted by the desire for power over others, to stray from Jesus.
How do you see churches and faith community leaders like Bishop Mariann Budde organizing to protect parishioners or pushing back?
We’ve had this fire hose of executive orders and we’re all struggling to figure out what the state of play is. I think there’s going to be a kind of discernment process where religious organizations are going to have to figure out what to do. I think it will help to hear from denominational leadership bodies like the National Council of Catholic Bishops or the United Methodist Church Council of Bishops. What may be needed right now is a kind of declaration—from particularly the mainline Protestant churches in the United States, like the Barmen Declaration. Let me give you a little context for that. Do you know what I’m talking about?
I don’t think I do.
Basically, in Germany, after Hitler took over, many German Christians willingly subordinated their theology, and they even regarded Hitler as a prophet. They were countered by a group of Protestant clergy and theologians that called themselves the Confessing Church, who were horrified by the church bowing down before Hitler. They collectively issued a declaration. It was more or less a statement of principle in opposition to bowing down before any earthly rulers, including Hitler. The point of the declaration was to say “We Christians are not bowing down to this new Nazi regime, we intend to stay faithful to what we understand to be the gospel, and if that puts us at odds with political authorities, so be it.”
The major religious bodies in our country will need to come together and declare their fidelity to the basic core teachings of Christianity. I’m not equating Trump with Hitler, or saying we’re in the same boat right now. But I do think that this is something that Christians should be considering right now: a united statement to show the Trump administration that it does not have the support of all Christians. Not that that will not do anything politically, but at least the administration will be on notice of where many Christians stand. What would be even better would be to cross religious lines as well, to include Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and other religious groups. I think that’s something that Christians need to think seriously about.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
SIGN UP FOR TEXAS OBSERVER EMAILS
Get our latest in-depth reporting straight to your inbox.
Hi--for those of you keeping score (none I hope!), this means that for books have over 2000, citations, with Hyperobjects leading the way, approaching 6000. There was a time a few years ago when "Queer Ecology," my essay, outranked several of my books, but that is no longer the case. "Queer Ecology" is now just below all the books that have been out for a while, apart from my earliest books on Shelley and spice.
Dark Ecology is a very beautiful book and it's one of my deepest. I was a great honor to be a part of the Wellek lectures along with Derrida and Balibar and Cixous.
