Daniel Bell suggests that

in a globalized world, it is no longer states that wield imperialist power, but rather capitalism and the market….an empire of which states are only colonies

(IRO p.248)

This is exactly the kind of “anti-Christ” at work in the world that I have been thinking about while on vacation. Of course, I see the mechanism that is the Bush administration, and that network of neocons as effective (somehow, effective) and deceptive workings in this wielding of power. But Christians have had apallingly little to say by way of resistance (Smith asks why later on)

Smith goes on to say (or is it still his summary of Bell? Perhaps either is true):

“Capitalism is the new empire the gospel must oppose because it demands an allegiance that rivals allegiance to Christ.”

(IRO, p.249)

“Discipline is aimed at the formation of desire” , and capitalism is a “discipline of desire” that is “a form of sin, a way of life that captures and distorts human desire in accord with the golden rule of production for the market.”

(I’m interested in seeing more of this
Liberation Theology After the End of History by Daniel Bell (Tony Campolo often nade reference to Bell and this work)

What possibilities remain for the “healing of desire”? Smith asks. (10 pages left….but good question…..

Capitalism , then, is not merely an instrument or tool that can be put to work as a servant of other substantive construals of the good; rather, it proposes its own account of the telos to which human desire ought to be aimed (consumption and accumulation)

Smith asks,

Why then has the church failed to resist capitalist discipline — oe even worse, howdidthe church some to serve capitalist discipline? The church and individual Christians have bought secular economic’s myth of religious neutrality. By granting the very notion of a secualr, autonomous temporal realm, the church left it to supposedly secular reason to describe the realities of economic organization.

This is good stuff. It cuts to the heart of something that has really been eating at me lately. What to do about this? Again, we MUST have that sense of polis as in an “alternate mode of living”. The Church of the Saviour talks about it all the time. They delve heavily into and confront the issue of money and its deceptive, ensnaring power.

I believe a similar (or simply another aspect of the same power) that keeps us from relationship. We flee instead to consumeristic modes of relating (and ultimately, to no one). But to resist this empire, we have to have the people of God (most of all to hold us to it; to hold us accountable, and to model for one another that another economy of money and economy of relationship exists. Something like it happened around a time called Pentecost.

This is the area where I feel most trapped, and rebelling, but still wondering what kind of community will finally be there to enable me to do it.