Calvinist Left
Christ, Lacan, and the shattering of the Other —reclamation of Christ for the people
Christianity needs reclamation. It bleeds into the body politic, so deeply that even the western left is ensconced in its grasp, subtly and safely buried away in their unconscious. The Calvinist shaming, the chosen elect, the pre-destination, it’s all so utterly American, and so utterly chauvinistic underneath the guise of woke freedom and social justice buzzwords. At it’s heart it’s still the equivalent of a fear of a fiery hell and disconnection from humanity as its impetus—thus the Calvinist Left exists without even knowing what it is.
The televangelist prosperity gospel and Calvinist distortions—these are not the wisdom of the Christ figure. Fear of eternal damnation wasn’t the gospel he
preached.
You can’t pray your way into riches.
He instead preached of freedom. Freedom to know God not through an intermediary but directly. In Lacanian terms, he shattered the Other, the Unknowable god never existed, the symbolism of ripping down the temple’s curtain as the earth shook, so perfectly fits into the destruction and reordering of the world.
The void left, was filled by a new path to God, man himself directly. The saints were no longer needed. The hierarchy of priesthood was no longer needed. There were no pre-ordained elect with special access to God.
To tie it back to our western left, those who brand with scarlet letters any who every so slightly deviate from their puritanical lines of “correctness,” act as the gatekeepers of the faith, or in this case, the body politic of post-modern leftist movements, where meaning is subjective, and lived experience supersedes material reality.
Instead God became knowably human. Christ removed the barrier to entry.
The power structure of the church was in that precise moment flipped on its head, “the meek (I argue is a bad translation but the right word is the now-powerless) shall inherit the earth” takes on a meaning of emancipation from the yokes of corrupt church officials, and power hungry prophets.
Is that not the modern New Left dancing on the mirror stage? Trying desperately to sew back the curtain that separates them from the working masses they so despise?
With God turned man, a divine being with human nature, it was a death blow the Old god of wrath and impersonal and immense distance. God, for the first time in that sphere of the world, became knowable by the common man.
What a parallel with the rejection of liberalism. Though its rejection, socialist participation in self-governance becomes a reality. In this regard we’re talking about religion qua power like a gun is power, like money is power.
If we accept money is power, we see Christ preached common prosperity
Sell all your belongings and follow me Matthew 19:21
Was the mandate.
The whole group of believers was one in heart and soul. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they held everything in common. Acts 4:32
This was proto-socialism. And it was open to all, not just the elect Calvinist Left, sitting on high shaming and almost as if a ruling class of ideology, monarch decreeing what is “Left” enough, they become no better than the money changers in the temples. They see themselves as the pre-ordained and not everyone is holy enough or righteous enough to join their impotent little club.
Espousing these ideas, Christ was a revolutionary against Roman exploitation. He rejected the idea of god-unknowable, rejected that only the elect could find grace. So ahead of his time, he transcended it by emancipating man from religious alienation. Thou dost Protestant too much in the Anglosphere.
The theology of Christ was liberatory, emancipating, and empowering. He condemned the selfish, the swindlers corrupting the faith; the impassable metaphor of the rich and the needle’s eye, upset his day’s ruling class.
For that he, as a man, was sentenced to death. Then as power tends to do, he was bastardized posthumously, to give us well, this. 👇🏻
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