“Then, having overcome this awkwardness, they [Jesus and friends] are confronted with another: a man ‘possessed’ by a demon, chained and living among the tombs, to represent both his affinity with death and his uncleaness. But nothing had the power to restrain him. And he speaks, or rather the spirit within him speaks: ‘My name is Legion.’ A clear signifier of Roman imperial force.” –Grahm Adams

The above quote comes from Revd. Dr. Grahm Adams’ book Holy Anarchy: Dismantling Domination, Embodying Community, Loving Strangeness, and so far I think it is a really enriching contribution to the nonviolent christian anarchist (NCA) tradition which is concerned with (as Fr. Dear likes to say) universal love, universal compassion, and universal peace (shalom). Aside from the pleasing liberation and queer theological influence and the always wonderful presence of the usual NCA suspects, like Ellul, Dorothy Day, and Walter Brueggemann, I’m pleased to notice the process-relational theological impact on Adams’ thought, demonstrated by references to both Catherine Keller and John Cobb himself!

Early on in Part 2 of the book, while addressing the interaction of psychological forces and social/political forces demonstrated in the encounter of Jesus with the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5.1-20, Adams goes on to say the following, which I really appreciated:

“The ‘spirit’ that possessed him was the spirit of military occupation, ‘possessing’ him at various levels — his land, his people, his own psyche…‘Empire’ is fundamentally concerned with colonizing people’s minds, not just their land and resources. And here we see the damage that it does. the man is in turmoil, nothing can restrain him, because the presence of foreign armies has an effect on people beyond the particular places where they march. The repercussions of military power reverberate through the people, in their public spaces and in their internal lives. It generates fear, because of the violence they do, the threat of more and the rumors of it. It instills anger and resentment in people, but also a sense of helplessness, a grieving over the freedoms that could have been.”

This demonic spirit of Empire also possess its agents. Adams’ continues:

“…the leaders of Empire colonize the minds of the agents of Empire, so that soldiers know what to do even without being told exactly, and the soldiers colonize the minds of the colonized by creating an atmosphere of terror. The structures oppressing the people are therefore both psychological and political.”

This whole notion of economic and political systems of oppression shaping individual human psychologies brought to mind a meme I recently came across from Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology & Psychology,  James Davies, that reads:

“One of the greatest findings of 20th century anthropology is that social structures shape psychological structures, and one of the greatest failings of modern psychology is to have almost entirely ignored this.”

This insight about how larger level ‘meta-narratives’ influence and guide individual behavior may not necessarily be news to the best philosophically and theologically minded people out there whose second nature it is to question all assumptions about all things at all times (lol), but that preface aside, I think it’s a profound and important theory to grasp. In fact with regard to this idea that Empire colonizes the minds of its agents, we need look no further than the Trumpist MAGA movement. It honestly doesn’t take a PhD in medical anthropology & psychology to surmise that the very scary looking dude driving around with a semi-automatic rifle and a Rambo-Trump flag flying fearlessly is, yes, possessed by the spirits of American Exceptionalism, militarism and redemptive violence. Like the person living among the tombs whom Jesus encountered, folks cruising around carrying guns for explicitly aggressive intimidation purposes are obsessed with death and living in a reality shaped by the Augustinian lust to dominate. Frightening indeed.

A brief aside from all of this, being about half done with Adams’ book the only minor philosophical question arising for me currently has to do with their frequent mention of Andrew Shank, a neo-hegalian theologian who I’m not familiar with but whose work sounds fascinating. As a process-relational thinker influenced by Whitehead, however, I do wonder how the metaphysics of change might work for neo-hegalians…? Very insufficiently speaking, as far as I can tell change for Whitehead arises from creative synthesis by integrating past influences into novel harmonies. Conversely, one pattern I’m picking up on in Adams’ book is a focus on ‘rupture’ which does lead me to wonder if change might be thought of here in Hegalian terms as emerging dialectically through negation, which would then make opposition to existing structures logically necessary for progress, I suppose. If this reasoning is correct then my process-relational response would be something like this: because Reality is not a clash of fixed opposites but a flow of interrelated events where each moment inherits from the past and transforms it a focus on rupture may overlook how transformative movements depend on continuity amid change by drawing from tradition while innovating. The classic example would be the civil rights movement, which wasn’t just about abolishing racism but was also about reimagining community through love—we might call this a process-relational creative transformation.

Like I said, just a minor quibble and I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Overall Adams has written a great book thus far and I’m really enjoying it! That said, it is my hope that we all engage the powers and principalities, the structural challenges that impair, distort, and overwhelm the coming of God’s Kin-dom, and may we go out, name and continually dismantle systems of domination, both psychological and social, making room for God’s co-creative vision to emerge just as Jesus did. Amen.

Tags:ChristianAnarchyGrahmAdamshegelHolyAnarchyphilosophyProcessTheologytheologywhitehead