Training Montage: Revolution, Christofascism, & The Spectre of Divine Violence

[content warning for biblical violence, religious abuse]

i was just listening to the song Training Montage by my favorite band The Mountain Goats (https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztu3Kze4mBI&feature=share) and it got me thinking about revenge and revolution. the chorus goes "i am doing this for revenge / i am doing this to try to stay true / i am doing this for the ones we had to leave behind / i am doing this for you. "

(note to self check quote before posting)

I really vibe with this song, i listened to it every day for months after it came out whenever i had to do dishes at the café i work cause that's the only time (being invisible to customers) we can have headphones in. my friend told me that a lot of people have constructed it as a trans anthem, which i can really see. personally i read it as very ecclesiastical. TMG's work often deals with themes of spiritual abuse and the song Training Montage explicitly occurs at a temple, the narrator lives in (a carceral, monastic, and/or otherwise) sparse cell, he's in training for some confrontation with someone whom i get the vibe is higher up in a hierarchy who holds a level of spiritual authority and betrayed their obligations. the vibe i get is injustice within a church or religious community, and specifically systemic hierarchical injustice. as a deeply spiritually gifted and spiritually troubled kid in an often hostile church, that rings hard on my bones.

Christian moral teachings can be mobilized against revenge. The figure of the willingly sacrificed God somewhat precludes recourse to violence or revenge, even ro the point that revenge is like cows at night all painted grey, absolutely unacceptable and (equally and oppositely) unknowable, subject to no analytical framework except judgement. this is ironic in a dialectical way when judgement (personal, social, economic, legal, etc) reproduces the logic of vengeance, but this can be solved by giving certain parties (the King, God, Father) a special license to commit violence in general and vengeance in particular. it is the very political nature of vengence which motivates me to say we must reject this Hear No Evil, See No Evil orientation to vengence and instead understand vengence as something more mundane, a moral but also political, spiritual, and cosmic phenomena.

furthermore, the Christian tradition is not without it's own internal acts of vengence which it tolerates and often utilizes. there are certain scenes in the scriptures as well as heretical but historically reliable texts wherein Jesus of Nazareth employs violence--the cleansing of the Temple being the primary example, arguably be is violent towards demons implying cosmic revenge on the part of the forces of Holiness against demons, and if not revenge then at least violence. it's not as if those demons are happy to get evicted, even in the story where they get 3000 self sacrificing pigs as consolation.

(do i bring up that this story is probably a post-hoc, 30th plus AD piece of political propaganda playing off Jewish dietary laws?)

Jesus also talks about Divine Violence carried out of not on behalf of his followers, then at least against some of their enemies. this is too be expected; Jesus was part of a long and flourishing tradition of apocalyptical and eschatological prophets who devoted occupying powers as well as Israelite elites like Herod Antipas, promising an eminent end of the world, resurrection of the dead, divine judgement against evildoers (including but not limited to evil kings and roman governors, tax collectors, slave owners, etc). while most of his career seems to have been devoted to healings and exorcisms, probably especially exorcisms, these acts themselves replicate in miniature the eschatological grammar--a demon or illness is overcome, the body is plboth put into working biological order and reintegrated into the community (healing lepers implied directly undoing and attacking the power of strict mores enforced by religious and civic authorities which drew a hard border against touching, eating with, inviting into your house, etc. those known to have the condition). he constantly humiliates his enemies by forking them with clever questions which they cannot answer without losing face and potentially losing control of the crowds. these humiliations will only be compouned, the Nazarene declares, once God has made the low high and the high low, redistributed the lands, cancelled the debts, killed or exiled the wicked, and generally punish those who oppose the political projects which Jesus aligned himself with as a prophet and martyr.

...

Divine Justice is easier to find, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob having had a much longer career than that of Jesus as a deity, and specifically having a background as the primary and later sole member of the pantheon of a small battered nation during an era of religions history when it was generally assumed as common knowledge that gods of weaker nations could be overcome by and subsumed into the spiritual universe of political enemies, requiring Gods in some cases to act in self defense, for their own sake and that of their people's international standing. a vengeful God is by definition a political asset, since he acts as a deterrent against the threat of outside aggression. Deterrence requires an ever present spectre of retaliation to be effective. such a spectre as the Angel of the Lord carrying out the 10 Plagues of Egypt, the last of which is an explicit inversion of the infanticide the Pharaoh's administration carried out against the Hebrews.

and yet this is not just deterrence, diplomacy. revenge is so effective as a deterrence because of it's [Latin, though the heavens may fall] almost yes even nihilism, which may even discard self preservation in the long run, what is often thought of as a departure from self interest, but is perhaps it is best to say recalibrates self interest along the lines of a-self-existing-for-revenge, a self which may thereby be as easily preserved for use in attending that aim, that maxim in the sense of the categorical imperative. this is terrifying because the deterrence doesn't even have to make sense in terms of the game theory calculations of which it is a part during the moment it's carried out. the object it's ostensibly protecting, the current and future lives of the nation, might even be foregone specifically in order to avenge past lives lost, an effect which both contributes to the long run reputation of the protector-deity as fearsome but also tenders them alien even to their own people, carrying out operations of cosmic justice at such a scale as to pass outside of what a single individual could personally relate to even a small fraction of the people punished by the deity.

exhibit: it isn't just a matter of forcing the Pharaoh's hand to release the Hebrews, since God hardens the Pharaoh's heart in order to extract a kind of vengeance-based justice, paid out in a currency of children's lives? it is precisely the way in which this superb act of cruelty shrugs off the utilitarian logic of negotiating with the Pharaoh in order to deploy violence for its own sake that gives this event the structure of revenge par excellence: the spectre of retaliation does not exist, perhaps cannot exist, merely to be used as deterrence, but rather it's function in the grammar of deterrence is strengthened by the way in which the spectre thirst to drown its own grief, it's demands dictated by an arithmetic less open to negotiation than the exchange rates of the market or pressure points of political strategy: blood for blood, child for child, life for life. only the hope that this orgy of violence can reach sufficient extremities to make it the last of it's kind for at least a little while offers a silver outline of peace, dubious and unstable.

this logic is simultaneously reproduced and subject to a kind of absurd self cancelation in the death of God's own Son/Self, under ransome theory of attonement, and i find that interesting too, the way the natural logic of revenge is never not assumed to be real and natural and valid and something that makes sense, even if the retribution itself in the Ransom Theory's retributive model of justice (formalized revenge) is apparently fungible, being able to be undertaken by Christ (simply by dying a single death, a death which isn't even particularly permanent!) who didn't commit sin for all past and future humans who by dint of being children of Adam are immediately, inevitably, and originally sinful. no, far from it, the absurd conditions reaffirm and re-require a sort of Vengence Realism, our rightful damnation never to be abolished per se but only other suffered for us by an other(s).

the concept of Christofascism is relevant here i think, namely how there's this intercourse of signs between the charismatic leader, the party, the state, and the Godhead. and but i also think it's also important to note that christian moral injunctions not to commit any violence but especially not to exact vengence are used by the State to punish those who resist the state's more systemic crimes, calling them terrorists and criminals those without the political capital necessary to defend themselves and fight for a better world, a fight which need not restrict itself to a logic of revenge but which does overlap such a logic in it's actions, targets, affect, and aims.