Dionysus on a Bike

by Justin Marquis

Last week I was asked by an old friend, “Why Jesus?” regarding my return to a life of faith. This is an unsurprising question given my past rejection of Christianity and the Church. I have attempted to answer this question before, but that answer was just as provisional as this one. What follows is my answer to my friend’s question. This is not my last word on the subject, and there is much more to say, but this is a start.

Why Jesus, indeed? The death of God and secularization of society has not gone as it was hoped that it would.

Take the basic fact that American white culture, the culture of the descendants of settler colonizers is steeped in genocide, racism, and submitting to the Capitalist powers. It’s often said that people like me, people whose generational memories of the “old world” have faded into nothing, that we do not have a culture or even worse that our only culture is the exploitative capitalist consumer culture that characterizes the dominant American culture today. This lack of culture and the fact of our ancestors’ past steeped in colonizing genocide mean that there is nothing to hang onto or look back toward that grounds our present existence in ways that give it meaning. Even the myths and stories that do exist that could be called “our” culture are the myths and stories that are used to both justify and hide the slavery and genocide that our dominant culture is based on.
This is how I evaluated the Christianity I was raised in and that I took as my own as I became a young adult. My culture’s use as a toolbox of oppression was the reason I ended up rejecting it. People like me, the white descendants of European settler colonizers, do have a culture, Protestant Christianity, and this culture is life-denying, justifies and legitimates colonizing racism and exploitative Capitalism, and produces a subject, a Christian, who is weak, pathetic, and hides from difficult and important truths about the world.

Coming to this evaluation of the Christianity I was raised in, I rejected it as being antithetical to my highest values. I agreed with Nietzsche’s analysis that the vacuum created by the absence of Christianity calls for the creation of a new culture based on new values that are no longer life denying. The alternative to this is to live without culture, without a unifying set of values, myths, stories, and goals that bring people together in community reminding us of our interdependence and our inability to live significantly meaningful lives without a shared context to live our lives among one another.

Having left Christianity after having found it life-denying left me without the culture of the people who raised me and of my ancestors who bequeathed me the culture in which I live. Losing this culture is not in itself a bad thing because the culture was toxic and gave rise to and legitimated some of the worst evils in human history. Nevertheless, leaving Christianity is experienced as a loss because there is nothing there to replace it other than the dead emptiness of consumer capitalism. As a Nietzschean, I believed the alternative to this loss of culture was to create new values, a new culture that is no longer life-denying. This task proved more difficult than I ever could have anticipated, and while it is possible to create values for the isolated self, finding a community of shared values that can actually have an impact on the world and create conditions for human flourishing is nearly impossible, at least for someone in my position.
There is another option besides being culturally adrift or inventing a new culture to replace the old. One could instead adopt the culture or cultures of others whose cultural background is not mired in legitimizing colonization and oppression. For example, I see much that is valuable in the indigenous American cultures that resist colonization and capitalism while maintaining an understanding of nature and human society that emphasizes sustainability and mutual dependence. On the surface this looks like a solution, culture that provides meaning, community, and highest goals without the baggage of Christianity. Some might argue that this is illegitimate appropriation of non-white cultures by the oppressor, and while this is a danger, one can take on a culture that isn’t one’s own provided one is respectful and doesn’t reproduce inequalities and injustices in doing so.

I considered all three options other than a return to the church and to Jesus. I tried accepting that there are no narratives that are normative and lived without myth or communal meaning, rejecting all meaning-making attempts, basically nihilism. I tried creating my own set of values and meaning-making narratives, a new religion and a new morality. And finally, I did even spend time researching and attempting to understand other ways of valuing and creating meaning, indigenous American and Buddhist, among others. While learning from indigenous ways or even taking on indigenous values is not by itself necessarily problematic cultural appropriation, taking on a set of cultural meaning-making practices that are not “mine” is limiting. While I might become a Buddhist or participate in indigenous communal practices, since I am a guest in these virtual spaces, I cannot play with them or as easily make them my own. Respect for the other requires that I do not place myself at the center or modify what they have given me. Certainly I make the beliefs and practices my own personally, but I cannot play with them, reform them, or put them to use in new contexts without myself becoming the colonizer.

What culture does the white descendant of the European colonizer have? Christianity. I was happy to reject it because of all the harm it caused and how life-denying its expressions are. Yes, I felt the lack of meaning-making community, but I thought such is modernity and late, post-Christian capitalism. My Nietzschean hope was that some sort of new values would replace the old, and new meaning-making communities would give society the ends and connection it needs for people to flourish and work toward something that means something to the community as a whole and all the members that make up that community. Then the unexpected happened, and I learned something about my culture and the culture of my ancestors that gave me pause and eventually led to my reevaluation of Christianity.

It’s entirely contingent and seemingly chance that I got a job at a neighborhood Lutheran Church in Chicago when I needed a decent paying part-time job to make ends meet. Spending time there working with its pastor and congregation, I realized that Christianity was far from a single monolithic thing. The church is not a unity but a polyvalent multiplicity. Certainly some of its dominant expressions legitimated and facilitated oppression, misogyny, racism, greed, and colonial exploitation, and I was as glad as ever I rejected these. What I discovered is that the side of the white, descendant of colonizer culture that resists those things also has its expression in the church, has its expression in the meaning-making communal traditions of Christianity.

I always knew in an abstract way that the church was diverse and that there were myths of liberation and wholeness and resistance to oppression as well as myths that opposed those things. The myths that enable oppression in Christianity are far more visible, far louder, and more confrontational. Despite my abstract knowledge that this wasn’t the whole story about the church, this dominant side of the church erased my awareness of the opposition from within and the counter-narratives that went with that opposition.

In a sense I have returned home. I am a Christian. I was raised a Christian, and almost all of the formative influences in my life have come from cultures that grew out of Christianity. Even Nietzsche was buried in a churchyard. What is clear is this Christian culture is far from monolithic. Its dominant voice is one of restricting human meanings and making them small and petty and self-loathing, and this is rightly to be resisted and rejected. What I didn’t realize is that there is a counter-narrative in the culture I was raised in and in the church, and since this culture and church is the one I was raised in and educated in, I am free to play in it, reform it, transform it, shape it into new forms and send it off into new directions.

In Jesus I found ways to frame my own quest for meaning and value and at the same time, I also found a call to unite people in peace for the good of all. Even this last impulse toward the “good of all” could be used for oppressive ends to totalize the other, but there are series of counter-narratives within the church that resist even that, that see the formation of intentional, consensual community as compatible with difference and a social world that is characterized by peace, mutual aide, and hospitality without spiritual or material coercion.

This way of understanding Jesus’s message is certainly a counter-narrative to the dominant strands of Christianity throughout Western history, but this is to be expected. When a culture, the one that gave birth to me, has spent centuries legitimizing and then intentionally forgetting acts of self-serving genocide and enslavement, it makes sense that its underlying myths and narratives would be bent to the end of justifying those things. It also makes sense that as long as there is resistance to oppression from within a culture, those same myths and narratives can be taken up and molded as acts of resistance and as part of the formation of communities of resistance.

That is what I ultimately want and why I have returned to Christ. I want to play a role in the formation of communities of resistance. There are many ways one could go about attempting to form such communities. I was wrong that I would be able to find them and help form them in academia. I’m not saying that there is not revolutionary potential in the academy, but in my particular position, I was not empowered to help form that kind of community there. I have been empowered to form it within the Lutheran Church. Their understanding of the gospel coheres quite well with my understanding of human interdependence and the importance of community and mutual-aide. I am steeping myself in the Christian anarchist tradition in order to understand how a community formed out of the pressure of being occupied by the Roman Empire can be used to resist the current forms of empire.  

Jesus’s teaching, example, and the message of the church he mythically founded are rooted in three primary concepts, love, grace, and gratitude. While it is certainly the case that those same teachings and example have been used to justify and enable the worst ends of empire, patriarchy, and even capital, those concepts—love, grace, and gratitude—lend themselves more easily to something other, something better. I have not changed my view that I wish to see a new world built on the ashes of the old. I continue to hold that if we expect our salvation to come from the outside and the beyond, then we are lying to ourselves and denying the conditions of our actual existence. Jesus, I believe, can be understood to create communities centered around love and an understanding of our need for one another. The immanent value of resisting oppression with mutual aid, that is what I wanted all along, and it is in the church where I can live that way while feeling both at home and challenged to help create a better home.