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DSA Religion and Socialism Working Group posted at 23:41

First Things First: Why Politics Needs to Wait

Kat Armas’s Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World meets readers amid a renewed consolidation of Western imperialism. It is equally part memoir, spiritual and consciousness-building guide, and cultural criticism. By tracing the long history of imperialism and how its violence continues to live “unchecked” in our contemporary minds, bodies, language, and social practices, Armas points the way for how we can begin to heal through a global decolonization project rooted in radical Christian hermeneutics.

By emphasizing the beginning point of this comprehensive decolonization project, Armas suggests we largely hold off–for now–on the concreteness of the project’s political dimension because so many are still in a recovery phase. As such, Liturgies serves as a humbling reminder to students of liberation theology of how early we still are in the struggle and how much necessary spiritual work remains to be done on both inter/intrapersonal levels before the Christian Left (and the broader U.S. Left) can meaningfully confront and overcome empire.

The Two Tracks of Healing from Empire

Each of Liturgies’ nine chapters follows a four-part structure: a folklore tale from the colonized world; an analysis of topics long discussed in post-colonial studies (such as ideology, hierarchy, dualism, dominance, violence) and its corresponding, desired alternatives (think wisdom,kinship, paradox, connection, peace); a prayer of resistance; and last, a benediction.

“This is not just about individual transformation but also a commitment to fostering collective change.” Armas writes. “We cannot build something in the world that we haven’t first cultivated within ourselves.” Accordingly, Armas argues that the path to decolonization unfolds along two sequential tracks, reflecting liberation theology’s insistence that a commitment to God is both horizontal and vertical: first, a healing oriented toward the self, our ancestors, and all within the “kin-dom” who have been harmed by imperial power; and second, resistance to an imperialist apparatus enforced by a conjuncture of the state and its military hardware, capitalism and extractivism, and the soft power of the reactionary forces in Christianity.

Liturgies tilts heavily toward this first healing track, focusing on the unlearning of the beliefs and affective habits that Armas and other victims of empire have internalized as part of a colonized existence. We read about Armas’s experience as a young adult in Miami with an evangelist church to which she enthusiastically gave up her life to serve faithfully. But when Armas became disillusioned with her church’s aggressive, commodified push to prioritize the recruitment of “twenty thousand souls,” she pivoted away from evangelism. Armas speaks of her Cuban-American ancestry and separation from the homeland in the context of Cold War politics as well as of the trauma of her Abuela Flora’s multiple suicide attempts.

Armas’s writing evokes the voices of bell hooks, adrienne maree brown, Homi Bhabha, and especially Gloria Anzaldúa. The Anzaldúa influence is evident when Armas argues that healing rejects “clean lines of binaries” and is instead a process where we sit with the “tangled tension of human life” and embrace the “thin space” that disrupts the borders between heaven/earth and time/space. Faith is a “paradox” and the mysteries of Christian theology (Jesus/human/divine and Mary/virgin/mother) are ones never to be solved.

I found this discussion on the tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes the most interesting feature of the book. But in this moment of political despair, my mind longs for a political and precise description of the most potent strategies for organizing a collective, decolonization project.

Constituting Theology

Certainly, the absence of a “What is to be Done?” strategy in Liturgies isn’t because Armas lacks a direct understanding of those suffering from the impact of imperialism.

Armas recounts how, during a mission trip, she helped distribute free Bibles to Haitians. One woman thanked Armas for the gift but declined it, stating that eye glasses were much more a priority. After that exchange, Armas shares that she felt “useless” for having failed to “see” what was most critical to the poor. Armas therefore recognizes the urgent need for Christians to organize to do the type of collective, political work described in Romans 1:11–12 and elsewhere.

Using “liturgy” in the book’s title evokes a distinctly Christian vision of power from below, as liturgy signals an engaged community poised for resistance. As Armas writes, empire “fears our togetherness, our longing for belonging.”

In her efforts to flesh out some sort of a specific political vision, Armas cites Acts 2 where a decentralized multitude is “wrapped in chaos” as each speaks in languages other than the language of empire, thus representing a subversive threat to empire. There are references contra state power, and “kingdom” becomes “Kin-dom” in a world decolonizing. The activities described in Jeremiah 29:5 (building houses and planting gardens) operate alongside prayer as concrete political actions that can spark “rebellion,” Armas suggests.

Both personal and collective healing–as well as political transformation and the transition to socialism–are extended political processes that don’t come with exact timetables. This has long been recognized in classic Marxist texts such as Lenin’s State and Revolution, Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, Engels’s “The Principles of Communism,” and in specifically-imperialist context, Cabral’s “The Weapon of Theory.” But Armas’s political playbook for struggle includes just a handful of tactics and practices (such as land reform) in which to bring down empire–and none of them particularly revolutionary. Once again, we can’t help but seek more militant solutions that directly speak to the urgency we face on the U.S. Left. Yet the constricted political terrain available for resistance and reconstruction in Liturgies may be by design, directing readers toward the cultivation of a faith-based foundation before engaging the political structures necessary to overcome imperialism.

The Trajectory of Trauma & Political Mobilization

Like many of us on the U.S. Left, Armas is understandably pessimistic about any immediate, political insurgency to get things going in the right direction. One might be tempted to compare Armas’s political vision unfavorably with the clarity and confidence of earlier generations of liberation theologians. In the 1970s and 1980s, Juan Hernández Pico interpreted the Book of Joshua (6–9, 18) and other passages to argue that Salvadoran guerrillas and campesinos rightly embraced a “co-responsibility” with God in launching social struggles. Just as the Israelites urged Joshua to see himself alongside God as a liberatory agent for his people, Hernández Pico contended that Salvadorans, too, were called to become active protagonists in their struggle for freedom.Yet Armas surely recognizes that our present political moment is markedly different from Pico’s El Salvador of forty years ago.

This is speculation, but I believe that Armas is addressing the collective trauma that has long occupied a significant place in postcolonial scholarship. Because many aspiring revolutionaries only read Fanon’s famous first chapter (“Concerning Violence”) in The Wretched of the Earth, they’re missing out on the larger, more important point he outlines in the last chapter, which consists of a series of clinical reports on psychiatric patients (who include both the colonized and colonizers). For Fanon, political violence against empire may be necessary to decolonization, yet it is not, by itself, liberatory. Violence, then, in his account, is not an end but a catalyst for healing—a process the colonized must continue long after the achievement of state independence.

The preliminary task for the activation of healing, Fanon argues, is for the colonized to continually ask–and contemplate–during the resistance and beginning again, nation-building phases of decolonization, “In reality, who am I?” Certainly, readers of faith will welcome such non-violent, regenerative practices in constructing political alternatives to empire.

Several generations later in the never-ending struggle against imperialism and in the tradition of the colonized speaking in their own voices on the experience of trauma (including as they do throughout the Bible), Armas also recognizes that the U.S. Left is nowhere near articulating the organizational capacities and power structures that could be put into place to overcome imperialism. Accordingly, the starting point for Armas’s approach to launching such a political project is for us to be vulnerable in “bearing witness” so that we may first call things as they are–and then deploy an appropriate political response. Such a strategy is on the surface a modest one but it is vital to overcoming our despair and isolation and ultimately, activating the long struggle leading to liberation.

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