"The Coming Exile" was published in that wonderful magazine, The Other Side in July - Aug 2003. It was my first extended attempt at looking at what we had become as Empire and where we were going. It began life as a sermon at our Eighth Day faith community.

The Coming Exile

The war is over. As I write, the United States is celebrating its victory in Iraq. We witness parades for our troops and high poll numbers for the president. We congratulate ourselves on minimizing civilian casualties and on our humane efforts to feed the people, rebuild their country, and guide them toward democracy. Our leaders continue to speak of our national commitment to freedom and our responsibility to ensure a world free of terrorism. The nation celebrates its military might, the righteousness of our cause, and the nobility of our national character.

The overwhelming victory and the removal of a brutal dictator seem to justify the rush to war. True, many Americans are beginning to wince at the unforeseen post-war chaos and the lack of Iraqi gratitude for their liberation; but for most Americans the aftermath of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" sanctifies the United States’ magnanimous intent as we prepare for further conflict—perhaps Syria, Iran, or Korea.

Those of us who opposed the war are tempted to confusion, despair, perhaps even submersion in the tide of approval for the military action. We are not certain what to do. So the challenge before us now is a critical one. In these days we must sharpen our discernment and deepen our faithful convictions. Now is a critical time to interrupt the public revelry of our national power and greatness with a radically different word.

Jeremiah has been much on my mind lately. Jeremiah had a particularly grim prophetic vocation: He saw the coming defeat of his nation and the exile of his people. Long before anyone else could even smell the decay, Jeremiah saw that the rot had spread throughout all of Judah. Even as the political and religious leaders were still celebrating their power, Jeremiah saw that it was too late—even repentance and forgiveness, though always possible, were not going to happen. Jeremiah’s message was painfully simple: "It’s over, folks—prepare for exile."

A prophet of national doom might seem strangely out of place, given the seemingly overwhelming power and dominance of the United States in the current geopolitical context. But in fact, I am haunted by the relevance.

At the heart of Jeremiah’s prophecy is this stark truth: There are consequences to breaking the covenant with God. A nation that abandons its poor, that pursues self-aggrandizement rather than love and forgiveness, that seeks security through military power rather than the protection of God—that nation will face calamity. Although his prophetic voice was incomprehensible to those who could see only Judah’s glory, Jeremiah knew that his nation had lost its way. The imagery he uses is raw: Judah has been a prostitute running after lovers, sullying herself, her land, and God, her spouse (Jer. 2:22-28, 3:1-5). Despite this promiscuity, God had been willing, even anxious to take Judah back. But eventually things progressed too far. Judah was no longer capable of returning to God (VERSE).

Jeremiah saw the coming exile. He saw the imminent military and political disaster as a spiritual crisis, the result of disobedience and sin. Our situation is not much different. So I wrestle with the question: Where are we now? What might things look like from Jeremiah’s perspective? It’s an urgent question for the church in this country.

Far from being proof of righteousness, the Iraqi war is symptomatic of a profound sickness that permeates our national life. The task of the faith community is to pierce through the media fog and public rhetoric—"liberation," "brutal regime," "weapons of mass destruction," "threat to America." This is a time for truth telling.

Part of the truth we must tell includes decades of U.S. realpolitik that first helped prop up and arm an oppressive dictator, then turned against him when our interests were threatened; the twelve-year stranglehold of sanctions that decimated Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands; the months of political maneuvering and deception to justify the invasion; and now the myth that our military efforts are meant to foster democracy in the Middle East. We must unmask the blatant collusion of political and corporate interests: the same small group of CEOs and policymakers who pushed for the multi-billion-dollar orgy of bombing now will reap multi-billion-dollar contracts to rebuild (all at taxpayer expense).

We must tell the truth that, in invading Iraq, the United States ignored four hundred years of international law, the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Accords, and the clearly articulated will of the rest of the world, seriously destabilizing international relations. The war was a crime, regardless of our soldiers’ loyalty and courage, regardless of motive, regardless of outcome. We must unveil the core immorality of the new "Bush doctrine," in which the United States unabashedly reserves the right to attack any country preemptively, to overthrow any government that we perceive as a threat. We must recognize that the war in Iraq and even the broader "war on terrorism" are part of a comprehensive plan, developed by a few, small, intensely ideological “neo-conservative” groups (many of whose members are now in positions of power) over the past twelve years, to reassert U.S. global dominance—a plan that includes an explicit commitment to expanded nuclear weaponry and even possible first-strike usage.

We must also look at other ways that the United States has in recent years wielded the big stick of unilateralism for the sake of our global dominance. We have sabotaged a long list of international treaties: the Kyoto accords, a treaty to ban land mines, the ABM treaty with Russia, an agreement to reduce international "small arms" sales, the International Court, and others. Against the rest of the world we have financed and supported virtually without constraint Israel’s occupation of Palestine. With new U.S. military bases planned for Iraq and the new bases in Asia resulting from the war in Afghanistan, we now have military semicircles ringing both Russia and China.

All of these, as disturbing as they are, are still only symptoms. We must learn to name the radical sickness itself: It is nothing less than empire.

True, U.S. imperial designs already have decades of gestation and expression, from President McKinley’s vision of civilizing "our brown brothers" in the Philippines to the declaration of "the American century" after the Second World War through our support of brutal Central American governments during the 1980s. But recent events have served to unmask a raw and unapologetic form of U.S. imperialism that is unlike anything that came before. This new imperialism is a political and economic threat to the world—and a spiritual threat that we must take very seriously.

U.S. empire is fed ultimately by our affluence and consumerism, which demand a disproportionate share of the world’s resources. Our standard of living is neither just nor sustainable and depends upon economic and political structures that impoverish others, structures that can be maintained only by domination. Addicted to consumerism, the American people cannot, for the most part, see the connections between our lifestyle and the recent deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and soldiers. We are unable to acknowledge that our material comfort is built upon the backs of both the world’s poor and our own grandchildren.

In order to maintain our affluence, we have committed ourselves, with almost religious zeal, to an extreme, free-market economics. The Bush Administration has declared that there is "a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise." Yet it is increasingly clear that such a view of capitalism—unfettered by government—leads inexorably to lethal injustice and ecological destruction. Within the last generation, we have forced the rest of the world to accept this same economic structure, damaging the local economies of many poor countries.

Our commitment to such a death-dealing system requires both media for justification and military power for protection from the backlash of the vast majority who lose out. Through exquisitely sophisticated advertising, the U.S. media inflame desire, leading us (and everyone else in the world) to consider Western consumption normative. An accelerating concentration of media—all owned and operated by the wealthy—creates a well-documented bias in the way the news is presented, especially news that would threaten the system. The unwillingness of the media to seriously challenge the Bush Administration’s flimsy weapons-of-mass-destruction rationale for the invasion of Iraq is just one example.

U.S. economic power, and the resultant injustice, cannot ultimately be maintained without force. Consequently, the United States has found itself on the wrong side of almost every conflict in the developing world, as we have militarily supported non-democratic governments that accede to our economic interests.

But we cannot be content to cite the usual laundry list of egregious offenses by the United States—militarism, consumerism, corporate power, and media complicity. We must recognize these as not separate elements but integrated components of empire. The whole is far more powerful than the sum of its parts.

Our discernment must go further still. Reflecting biblically, we must confront the truth that U.S. empire is a prime manifestation of the powers and principalities in our time. As followers of Jesus, we must see these as spiritual powers that must be opposed spiritually.

Of course, from an historical perspective, empire and its workings are hardly new. Empire always controls the military and the media. Empire is always controlled by and for the wealthy few and exploits the many who are poor.

But there is something new and terrifying in the equation for us today. Unlike empires of the past, we have the technological sophistication for unthinkable death and environmental devastation. Since 1945, we have had for the only time in human history, the capacity to wipe ourselves out—and that capacity grows every year. Not only has the United States committed itself to an expanded nuclear arsenal, but technological advances are also refining weapons of mass destruction, making them available to virtually any committed group of people. More potent, genetically modified, easily disseminated biological strains; more powerful poisonous chemicals; more compact, easily transportable nuclear weapons; and other weapons we cannot conceive are all in our future.

The empire has correctly identified terrorism as a central threat to us all. It has mistakenly concluded that military force will be an effective response. Depending on such violence for security is a dead end—literally. We are developing tools that we are not, as a species, capable of handling. Given the scale of potential ecological damage and the inevitability of more destructive terrorism and war, human beings have only a short time to grow up spiritually if we wish to escape massive destruction. There is a race on between our technological growth and our spiritual growth. It does not look good.

I am not optimistic for the immediate future of our country or the world. The military, political, economic, and social paths on which we are embarked do not lead toward a beneficent future but towards our own version of exile—although it is not yet clear what that exile will look like. Devastating ecological damage seems certain. Militarism rages and increases. An unfettered free market is devastating the poor of the underdeveloped world. AIDS is ravaging Africa and Asia. We will not find our hope in optimism.

Jeremiah held no optimism for the future of Judah, either. He even suggested capitulating to the enemy forces to avoid further destruction. Judah was going to be destroyed by Babylon. Jeremiah did, however, have hope, for he realized that even in the coming devastation, God was still God. God’s purposes would ultimately be fulfilled. Jeremiah would not himself see the return from exile, but he knew of God’s love for God’s people and the ultimate shalom that would come.

Perhaps this is the real issue for us: hope. Like Jeremiah, we must embrace a vision of hope. We must believe in and live the power of love in the world, which, we know by faith, is always ascendant; God’s love will still be victorious. This is not the same as optimism: Perhaps God will raise our culture out of its devastation; more likely, the culture will be utterly destroyed. But out of the future God will create something beautiful. In that we find our confidence.

But what do we do? How do we act hopefully? We can begin by educating ourselves about what is happening. We must read the signs of the times: despite the economic, political, and military power we see marshaled around us, the United States is in that stage of inevitable decline marking any empire that forgets justice for the poor. Despite appearances, we are moving toward exile. We must begin to speak this harsh, prophetic word to the larger community. In the coming years there will be more events like September 11, further markers of our decline. As these happen, we must not again be caught with nothing to say against the dominant voices. We must be ready to interpret such events spiritually to the wider community as consequences of our sin and disobedience. This will, of course, lead toward a different kind of exile, our exile from the culture.

Second, we must convince ourselves and others that the love and forgiveness of the Gospel have become practical political necessities, not just spiritual niceties. We must, as Jeremiah did, call the people, the church, the nation, and the world back to values reflective of God’s covenantal love—not because these are noble ideas, but because the survival of our world depends on the enactment of those values. Justice for the poor—guaranteed economic equity around the world—is a non-negotiable component for a stable world community. Non-militaristic resolutions to conflict must be found, or the cycles of technologically sophisticated violence will engulf us all. Issues such as global warming, corporate globalism, and U.S. national security strategy all must be addressed in a coherent way, not as isolated arenas of resistance and organizing. They are of one cloth. Love and forgiveness must become our foreign policy. Literally.

Third, we must recognize how thoroughly the Empire contaminates each of us. In going back to the Book of Revelation, we can discover how the early church—facing similar issues—lived through the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. (Wes Howard-Brook’s and Anthony Gwyther’s study of Revelation, Unveiling Empire, is a good tool for reflection.) We can re-read Bonhoeffer and the story of the Confessing Church living through Nazism. Yes, the church has always been accomplice to empire, but we can recount those hopeful moments when parts of the church—the Black church in South Africa, the base communities in Latin America—have spawned resistance and alternative visions. Drawing on these stories, we will discover that our life in community becomes utterly essential if we are not to be overwhelmed by the powers surrounding us.

Perhaps the core of our challenge is this: How do we remain an alternative community in opposition to the dominant imperial culture? For most of world history, this was hardly a question: You opposed the powers and you were persecuted and likely killed. But our society has refined co-optation to an art form. Walter Brueggemann has suggested that if Moses were alive today, Pharaoh would make him a talk-show host. Our alternative stance is tamed into a benign example of society’s "tolerance of dissent." God’s word becomes one voice on a panel discussion. The powerful seduction of the culture continues, indefinitely, waiting for our resolve to grow weary, and we are lured back or find ourselves suddenly enmeshed without knowing quite what happened.

How, then, do we as a community remain in opposition? Of one thing I am certain: Our disciplines become more important than ever—prayer, meditation, proportional giving, study, worship and liturgy, commitment to the poor, and simple living. Similarly, celebration is vitally necessary for those living in exile.

Finally, we must find ways to act. As Walter Wink wrote in these very pages, "It is of the nature of the Powers that they wish to appear invincible. They do not want their great vulnerability revealed." One of the perverse effects of the torrent of media images that washes over us every day is to make our little efforts feel meaningless. But as Wink also suggests, "There is no such thing as objective powerlessness. Our belief that we are powerless is a sure sign that we have been duped by the Powers." We don’t have to do big, important things. God can and will use our small, individual acts of faithfulness to achieve God’s purposes. But we must do something if for no other reason than to defy the propaganda of the Powers—and leave the responsibility for results up to God.

The war is over—or at least we have seen the end of one particularly brutal expression of the powers and principalities of our times. But the powers thrive, and surely more war is coming. Our task is paradoxical: to live in a society that will probably collapse yet continue to work with hope for peace, for justice, and for more humane, democratic structures. This is a task fit for people of faith, accustomed (as we should be) to God’s taking our pitiable offerings and fashioning them into newness, miraculous and surprising, despite our lack of vision.

This is not a call to a new political agenda. It is an invitation to recognize that, as Christians today, we are a community in exile, that we live in opposition to our culture, and that we desperately need each other. The primary task of the church is to be a community of resistance. I am convinced that it is only within such community that we will have the strength and fortitude to continue the long struggle. Our little, raggedy groups are our only chance.

© David Hilfiker 2003