A Wider Set of Options:
Logic, Impulse, Resistance, and the Divine Lure in Empire
by Rev. Jennifer Nordstrom
A response to Rev. Justin Schroeder’s “Our Bodies Are the Place”
Prairie Group 2017
First I want to thank my colleague Justin for his courageous and vulnerable paper inviting us to reflect deeply on what embodied knowledge might unlock at this table of intellectual feasting.
Justin writes that empire seeks to disconnect people from their bodies, their emotions, and their desire to connect with the rest of creation. In the spirit of returning to the body, I would add that the logic of empire, which Matthew Johnson called “a way of thinking as much as an economic, political, and military power,”[1] and which Rev. Jin S. Kim framed as empire’s “idea that life is competition, that human beings are competing with nature, or that one ethnos is competing with another ethnos, or darker skinned people with lighter skinned people,”[2] is a logic with a material goal and ends.
If we are to return to the body and honestly assess its trauma, as Justin invites us, then we must return to the material conditions in which the body is located and for which it is traumatized. Empire deploys its logic as a tool for control of the material world. It seeks to disconnect people from their bodies and from the rest of creation in order to concentrate material resources and the control of them (power) in the hands of a very few people. Its logic is designed to make this extreme concentration of power and wealth viable on an earth full of intelligent, creative billions.
Empire uses many tools to enforce this reality, as it must to have a chance of success against the will, beauty, and creative life force of most of humanity, the planet, and god herself. The logic of empire is one tool; physical violence is another; disconnection from the body, from our own labor, from each other, and from creation itself is a third; and the social construction of race, racism and white supremacy is a fourth. All of these tools, along with numerous others, have been deployed with rigor in order to create and maintain empire.
As Justin argues, returning to the body is therefore a form of resistance, one of many possible forms of resistance to the many tools of empire. In Unitarian Universalism, which is deeply steeped in the culture of intellectualism and dissociation from the body, re-connecting to our bodies could be a transformative step towards decolonization. To be honest about the state of the body, its feelings and needs, means getting into the messy territory of the reality of multiple bodies, and empire’s different effects on them. To return to the body as a site of contest and resistance requires us to reckon with the reality that empire affects different bodies in different ways, and therefore our resistance must vary according to empire’s effects, including the internal colonization of bodies and minds, and the external exertion of power and violence on those bodies in order to achieve empire’s material ends.
Kim warns us that empire’s logic becomes embodied in our bodies, “because even when we explicitly oppose the logic of empire, we nevertheless can have internalized those impulses, which are very powerful. On a moment to moment basis, we could be consumed”[3] by various forms of empire’s logic of competition. White supremacy is one of the most powerful and insidious ways the logic of empire and its belief in rigid hierarchies exerts itself. Our Universalist theology resists this logic in its call to the understanding that we are inextricable parts of one creation. In Kim’s framework, this interwoven resistance is the Logos of God’s Kingdom, while many UUs understand the interconnectivity as the interdependent web of all existence.
While I find the theological resistance to empire in our faith, I also find the logic and impulse of empire. I find the same battle between the resistance to and the impulse of empire mirrored in my own body. In Christ and Empire, Jeorg Rieger calls this the battle between “reality” and “the real,” in which reality is “the commonly accepted version of the way things are… upheld by power”[4] and the real is that which has been repressed by reality, but is nonetheless there, below the surface. Rieger calls this “real” the “Christological surplus”—the alternative realities of Christ that are in simultaneous resistance to the empire of Christ. Rather than naming it a surplus, or the bubbling up of the repressed margins, as Rieger does, I experience this resistance as the body’s inherent impulse towards connection, and the spirit’s impulse towards the divine whole.
I notice the contradictions between the impulse of and resistance to empire in me in the very writing of this response paper. Is the first page of arguments and citations following my internal impulse towards empire by obeying the logic of white supremacy that the only way to be respected is to be knowledgeable, academic, and mind-based? Am I protecting myself with whiteness’s logic of staying in the head? Or am I resisting the impulse of patriarchy by countering the assumption that women are less intellectual, more embodied, and more focused on feelings than on logic? I don’t know.
Is this response to Justin’s invitation to engage the body, written without discussing my own body, following the logic of empire by colluding with whiteness’s impulse to disconnect from the body, or is it resisting the logic of empire, by refusing to allow my body to be the site of contest in a conversation that will inevitably include patriarchy? I don’t know.
I do know that when I read Justin’s paper, my heart started beating faster, and my breath got shallow. I started to shake my hands. I stood up, and began to walk in circles. Every time I talked about the paper, I paced, and wiggled my fingers. I also know my physical reaction is about the ways whiteness and patriarchy intersect in my body and in my life.
Rieger writes that “the problem with empire has to do with forms of top-down control that are established on the back of the empire’s subjects that do not allow those within its reach to explore alternative purposes.”[5] He also writes that the Christ who never quite fits in “creates a theological and Christological surplus” and that this surplus is experienced more by people at the margins of empire than it is by those in the center, that “those who do not meet the demands of the status quo and are repressed by it … have a wider set of options that transcend the system.”[6] Like Kim, Rieger argues that the impulse of empire is more firmly and fully rooted in the center, which both gives those at the center material benefits and controls them more completely, through controlling them internally. As Justin and Susan Raffo explain, those less controlled internally are more controlled through external violence enacted upon them.
Those of sitting in this room are located in differing relationships to the center of empire, and thus have differing relationships to mechanisms by which empire extends its control. Justin’s invitation into the body is asking us to learn from our own body’s wisdom about where the impulse of empire lies within, and what it has done to us there. There are also those of us in this room whose bodies have been on the receiving end of the external violence of empire. It is important to remember that resistance to empire must be both internal and external, engaging healing for bodies that have been traumatized while also working to shift the conditions that continue to traumatize bodies internally through the panopticon and externally through violence.
I believe we all contain an inherent impulse towards connection that is the divine draw to both bodily and spiritually resist both the internal and external enforcements of empire. However, for centuries, the logic, impulse and force of empire has been attacking those lures towards love, connection, and wholeness. Those attacks have left inter-generational trauma stored in our bodies. Trauma must be attended to carefully, and held with compassion and tenderness, if we are to have any hope of authentic communities built on trust. Decolonizing Unitarian Universalism will mean pairing dismantling the external forces of empire with careful attention to the internal wounds of empire.
Our hope is to recognize what will give life and energy to our resistance, by separating out “reality” from “the real,” and then continually feeding that Christological surplus and inherent divine lure towards connection and wholeness, while undermining the logic and impulse of empire. Like whiteness, empire is a clever snake that twists and contorts into the next form to control and separate in a new way. Parsing out whether this or that impulse, idea, or behavior gives life to top down control around axes of power in order to control bodies and resources, or feeds resistance to control and nourishes dignified connection and empowerment of and through all being, is not a question easily answered, but it is one we must pose constantly. When we are in doubt, our bodies will give us a clue. Learning how to wield this tool of embodied connection as resistance to the logic and impulse of empire will be a powerful early tactic for our culturally cerebral Unitarian Universalism in the long and shape-shifting struggle of decolonizing not just the individual mind, body, and spirit, but the traditions, institutions, and collective body of our faith.
Nordstrom 1
[1] Johnson, Matthew. “Flowers in Concrete: A Broad Context of Faith and Empire,” paper delivered at Prairie Group, Nov 13, 2017.
[2] “Resisting the Logic and Impulse of Empire,” by Rev. Jin S. Kim, Prophetic Resistance Podcast
[3] Kim, “Resisting the Logic and Impulse of Empire”
[4] Reiger, Jeorg, Christ and Empire, p. 10.
[5] Reiger, p 3.
[6] Reiger, p. 9.