Christianity and Zombie Ants

Katja Schulz/Flickr (Creative Commons license)

by Piotr J. Małysz

“… the whole world was torn apart by factions and battles, everyone competing in lawlessness.” Athanasius of Alexandria

Niccolò Machiavelli observed long ago that rulers need not actually be moral, or faithful to a principle that does not immediately reduce to their self-preservation; they need only create the appearance of such faithfulness. It is all about perception, a matter of optics. Now, that was half a millennium ago. In our own day, even that fig leaf appears to be superfluous. The push, on the part of the Republican senate majority led by Mitch McConnell, to have the president’s Supreme Court nominee confirmed and installed before the end of President Trump’s first term and the beginning of new Congress does away with even a shred of appearance. When, in this light, one considers the Republican protestations in the last year of President Obama’s tenure against Obama’s own nominee, it is all a fine specimen of what in Poland is called “primitive” morality: “I steal a cow: good! A cow stolen from me: bad!” Such apparently are the times. What matters is only self-preservation that need not bother any more covering its shameless immodesty with any appearance. It is all about power, unclothed and in your face.

There are of course weighty reasons to worry about the disappearance of faithfulness to principle exhibited by our elected officials, even something as low as a principle one sets for oneself. Lack of self-consistency, for all the casuistic excuses, will never ultimately inspire trust. It will only lead to a further atrophying of our civic institutions.

Now, that’s politics. It is, we are told, what it is. What interests me, however—and this is a much larger question extending beyond the issue at hand—is whether Christians should be egging the spectacle on, or even cheering as it unfolds. I have every reason to doubt we should. For one thing, even if we assume that, somewhere at the end of the power convulsions we are witnessing, there is a desirable state of affairs (say, a legal ban on abortion), it seems rather naïve to think that one can invest ourselves into it all, suspend our identity, our ethics, or just plain decency—in order to resume being all that later on. Let’s not deceive ourselves. A constant state of exception becomes only that, a permanent state of exception. In the end, only power matters. Because, in the end, the end actually never comes. There is no paradise of stasis awaiting us regardless of how ruthlessly we play the game. It is just a carrot always being dangled before the deceived by the cynical. Perhaps those two sides engage in their back-and-forth within a single person, much as any sinner does, saying, “This must, and sure will be, the last time.” All this is a very risky game for Christians to play because it summarily declares that there is no point of contact in which Christians ethics can ever meet the worldly.

But in addition to this formal concern, there is also an even more important material worry, as well, that informs it. It stems from the biblical vision of Christian existence as conforming to Jesus Christ. It has so happened that, in these past days, I have re-immersed myself in some moving passages by the second-century church father Irenaeus. In Irenaeus’s cosmic vision of salvation, God the Son becomes a man within his own creation in order to liberate us in its midst and to restore to us a way of being that was forfeited by Adam. What is absolutely striking and supremely important here is how Christ does it all. Even though what Irenaeus calls “the apostasy” has snatched humanity by force from its God-appointed place and role and has ravaged God’s creation—Christ does not respond to this violence with corresponding violence on his part. He never allows the apostasy to determine his bearings and to dictate his actions. Rather, he redeems us, as Irenaeus observes, justly, that is, in faithfulness to his own character. Out of his own creative goodness and provision, Christ simply picks up where Adam left off. In doing so, he ends up offering to God the Father a human life that Adam should have lived, a life that is God-beholding and faithful through and through. A life that, then, becomes the motor of our own. This, of course, makes Christ—as it will make us—vulnerable. Even when faced with the devil’s overwhelming fury, Christ is only who he is, entirely consistent with himself. But in killing Christ, as the apostasy does with all humans, the devil bites off more than he can chew. God, who has now decisively secured godly life for us—to have and live—explodes the grip of death, as it were, from within. Writing at the time when the church confronted a constant threat of persecution, Irenaeus offers to us, across vast centuries, a hymn of praise about the power of the life of Christ, as it now becomes our own.

All this leads me to ask the following. How are we, as Christians, to respond to the world around us in a way that doesn’t require us to forfeit the life we have in Christ? Is Christian life something we can simply bet away for the sake of a future windfall? Is it worth it to gamble our identity away, for the sake of displaying it later on when we can actually afford to do so? If our answer is in the affirmative, then let’s be clear that there is a price to pay. What our life, our wheeling and dealing, will make abundantly clear to all and sundry is that a Christian identity and ethic are simply impracticable in this world—beyond its mere specter manifest in self-policing and self-improvement. Still, even those must sound hollow when we allow them to be eviscerated by the overarching self-deception and cynicism. This is to say nothing of the gospel and its alleged power, which will ring all the more hollow, the more out-of-this-worldly and spiritual the gospel thus becomes. 

As I think of American Christianity (all of it, to be clear) at this juncture in time—however out of joint our time might really be (I am not disputing that fact)—I see much alien life that blends itself into the native processes. More and more. What comes to mind is the picture of an ant infected by a fungus that comes to control the ant’s life functions. For a while, it will still behave like an ant and it will continue to look like one, but it will be more and more of a shell until that which animates it will possess it entirely and then explode and discard the now useless carcass.

The analogy is imperfect of course, insofar as we are the ones toying with the alien life, injecting it into our bloodstream—seemingly for the sake of at some point, again, being able to be what we are. In the mirror one may still see an ant, and the behavior will still be to some degree true to form … but let’s not deceive ourselves.

We were called to be a people of principle and decency; and to defend principle and decency. However vulnerable we may seem to ourselves in doing so. This, too, is our service to the world.

Piotr J. Małysz is an associate editor of Lutheran Forum.