"Our God is Marching On."

I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps ....

Photo by Chandler Cruttenden on Unsplash

We choose our Gods as Gods have always been chosen.  They answer our deepest questions and fight alongside us against our most dangerous enemies. 

If the present worldwide rise of warrior Gods, Pentecostal, Nationalist, committed to a fight again what they perceive as injustice is surprising, it should not be.  For those, experiencing extreme poverty and inequality, marginalized and disdained, written off as “trash” or “deplorable,” a new Great Awakening is occurring in many countries, including the USA.  Marshalling political fervor and moral outrage, the peoples of these God are fighting secular, liberal forces that have created a world where so many live outside the new alabaster cities of culture, wealth, pleasure and gated isolation. 

Why would people not choose a God as their champion?  And if the pillars of society, or as some of them say the mountains of privilege, are in the hands of “enemies,” then the battle is certain and hard and worthy of the strongest warrior spirit.  For “our” God will prevail.  It is the teaching of the old canon, the accounts of a warrior God in the first books of the Bible. 

Studies of religion made by anthropologists describe the relevance of religion to specific times and places. Let the great theologians battle over the nature of a universal God, a cosmic mystery that touches the complexities of quantum physics and the tears on the face of an abandoned child.  The average person demands a God for their lives, a God who will lead them into their battle.

Many of us, blessed with lives of wealth and hope, do not pray to these Gods.  We live apart from “The Wretched of the Earth.”  And if we do interact with them, we often appear to exploit their labor, under the guise of bringing democracy and free markets to the world. 

That we have made many lives better, with modern medicine, and lifted up many to seats at the tables of wealth, does not offset the bitterness of the many more left behind. 

Their God is on the march.  Glory, Glory, Hallelujah. 

The inspiration for this piece and an article well worth reading: The Rise of Spirit Warriors on the Christian Right by Katherine Stewart, in the New Republic.