A WORLD MADE STRANGE: THEOLOGY IN A PANDEMIC
Relativity by M.C. Escher.
For a world in the grip of a pandemic, theological reflection is not the most important thing. We should not need theology to know we must avoid spreading the risk of death to others; to support those who have lost or are at risk of losing livelihoods, food, and shelter; to care for loved ones, and for oneself; to support those of us made most vulnerable through incarceration, eviction, dispossession; to pray for those of us who are sick and those of us working to save them.
These priorities have not emerged at random, however, and the forces which formed this world function at theological depths—the depths where ideologies creak, rupture, and are soldered together. It is in these reaches that life has been tied to money, then money consolidated as racial capital. It is not a coincidence that healthcare has been tied to employment, nor that the right to sustenance has been tied to income and labor, nor that resources are largely concentrated in white hands, nor that black and Latino communities have been hit hardest by both the virus and the economic shutdown. It is not an accident that it is easier to imagine sacrificing the living, even without countenancing it, than it is to see past an economy which demands that sacrifice. And though it is simple to designate these things demonic, it is hard to think beneath them in terms which could unravel their inexorable hold over the USA's political imagination. The fear and love of God can be one catalyst for this unraveling. Here, then, is a role theology can play.
'Theology' has many meanings. Here it means exploring how beliefs about God mediate transformation. This is a time of crisis and we will be changed by it, one way or another. How might Christian doctrines mediate this change, and how might they in turn be infected by the new? Transformation can itself be murderous, of course—Christianity’s colonial encounters bear witness to that. Nonetheless, it is in this space that theology does its work, for better or worse. This post thus begins by reflecting on two things this crisis has made strange. It then asks, how might an encounter with these breaks be inflected by the beliefs held at our limits? How might these beliefs in turn be reconfigured in ways that help unmake the 'necessities' which have formed our world this way?
Made Strange: Contagion and Value
The first subject is what quarantine is designed to prevent: contagion. This word summons up a host of associations and their oppositions: contamination/purification, sickness/health, infection/inoculation. It is not just a medical concept, but a political, spiritual, and social one. For as long as nations have been 'bodies politic', this language of health and threat has been used to shore up its limits and expel or incarcerate those who 'contaminate,' 'infect,' 'corrupt.' One need only think of the President's recent invocation of borders. In spiritual terms, the themes of sin and holiness can follow a similar pattern, where the soul is either contaminated by an original disease or infected by an accidental corruption. Grace is then imagined as a kind of vaccine, effecting for the soul and the church what deportation, military, and prison logics do for the social body.
These ideological patterns frame what our bodies will and won't do, what we do and don't fear. When individual well-being depends on national well-being, and national well-being depends on purifying the body-politic, this will drive us toward shoring up resources and excising those who might corrode their value. Indeed, identity itself can come to be conceived in these terms, as something which must be seen as free from contamination or possessed of the resources to deserve healing. 'I' must not be a potential source of contagion, an impurity; 'I' must not bear impurity within myself; 'I' must not be a body of sin. And what do I fear, if I take this to be true? Who do I fear, what relations do I fear, where does my treasure lie? Quicker than a reflex, these fears can easily determine what it means to be community, to be a body bound to other bodies, to be a self formed by contact with other selves.
The current crisis shows the deception of this imagery. It shows the fundamental disanalogy between medical, political, spiritual, and social realities. Here, today, contagion is rightly feared—not for abstract ideological reasons, but because COVID-19 kills. And this visceral reality shows that it is not life at stake in the other instances, but a presentation of life, a translucent overlay taken for the real thing. Original sin is not a contagion, even if the forms through which it is expressed are socially inculcated. There is no reality to which an 'impure' identity can be opposed. And the social borders and political weapons designed to inoculate the nation from sin and impurity do not ground well-being, but enforce an image of what well-being should be.
Quarantine should make strange the use of medical imagery in other spheres. We can see today what it actually looks like to protect against a disease. We can see why it matters. With COVID it is about care. By contrast, the company of those judged sinners, or dangerous, or not like us, does not by itself threaten ‘contagion.’ Threat and harm might still be real, and if so should be taken seriously. But it is not this. We know this, because society does not cease for fear of it; it is only organized to avoid it. We know this, because the deprivation of shared presence has shown just how much sharing space—and so the possibility of mutual influence—means for communicating love. Isolation made imperative throws a strange light on the distinctions which have driven 'normal' social isolations. It throws strange light on ways of distinguishing people that have shored up and inoculated corporate identity.
This brings us to a second subject, distinct but connected: money as a measure of distinction. It became possible to treat persons as bearers of financial value through the transatlantic slave trade, especially through the tools used to insure enslaved bodies. Over the course of two hundred years, property ownership and income dependence were normalized, as were the methods of debt imposition and collection which now determine the conditions of entry into full society. The result is a nation almost entirely structured by mechanisms of financial distinction, where monetary value is the most significant predictor of friendship. The identities which must be preserved against contamination and contagion, the society which must be defended, is one organized according to auditable value.
It is here the greatest sleight of hand takes place: money is then made the way of securing oneself against threats made real by the distinctions which solidify monetary value. The consequences of failing to preserve this identity are real—economic precarity is created to kill, and its distribution according to a racial calculus marks bodies for death. It is here that life is tied to income, physical well-being to financial viability. And it is according to this pattern that the effects of COVID-19 are being distributed as they are; not just regarding who gets sick, but which laborers are asked to put themselves in danger, who is at risk of losing everything, who it is that is deemed worth sacrificing (apart from Glenn Beck's pseudo-messianic posturing).
If quarantine makes strange the language of contamination, it should also make strange the language of monetary worth. Large pockets of the economy have stopped. But the people are still there, the buildings still stand, and well-being is still both necessary and possible. Only the flow of money supposedly necessary to support it all has gone. The idea that accommodation, healthcare, and food should be tied to an ability to pay ceases to make sense when income ceases and hunger remains. The idea that siphoning value off debt interest is in the interest of anyone beyond financial circles is also nonsensical. Of course, if this is nonsensical now, it was equally unintelligible before COVID-19, when it may have seemed 'normal,' at least to most of our eyes.
Doctrine at the Limit
All this is already 'theological.' One doesn't need to look too far for religious invocations of medical language, and it has been convincingly argued by Devin Singh in Divine Currency that monetary and Christian theology cannot be neatly separated. The question for theological reflection becomes whether Christian beliefs about who God is might mediate what quarantine has made strange in ways that communicate and manifest the reality of grace.
A first thought is this: given the disanalogy between real contagion and spiritual metaphor, how can a theology of grace tease apart the threads of contagion and communication? Grace is a thing imparted, communicated. In its communication, it creates bonds of community. These bonds are not those of purification or inoculation, but of entanglement. Let us assume, then, that if sociality exists for the possibility of entanglement rather than protection from contagion, so too the communication of grace should promote combination and reconfiguration, not entrench a purifying distinction akin to that between God and creation. How, then, could churches and Christians communicate this grace in ways that do not equate encounter with spiritual threat?
Relation and entanglement are the preconditions for violence as well as grace, however (this might be the fundamental paradox of Christianity). The world is as it is because of a series of disguised entanglements structured by, among other things, principles of monetary value. Violences of race, gender, and sexuality are fundamental to this economy. Grace as entanglement is a movement towards realizing what is, not by itself the realization of what should be.
A second line of inquiry is thus to explore a conceptual unraveling—namely, how unraveling the hold of contagion might be combined with dissolving the various calculi which distribute security and precarity, value and abjection. Can Christian doctrine read this making strange of the financial economy in ways which undercut the violence of entanglement? If so, then preaching unconditional love alone will not work; belief is only half the battle, and if not substantiated can express self-deception rather that God's truth. Churches must erode the basis on which vulnerability has been so inequitably distributed, reading the Rich Young Ruler more in terms of those occluded by the economy that made him rich than his isolated spiritual standing.
Beyond this, I must confess I have instincts rather than fleshed out answers—one of which is that this is a question worth asking and working on as a community. My instinct is that Christians working out responses in their own communities will do more good than an answer proffered here. This is a theological question whose urgency is heightened by COVID-19, and which can be asked anew in the fractures exacerbated by quarantine. Theology is not the most important thing, but this question might get at the root of why the things which matter now have been made to matter in terms of precarity, rather than care written into the logic of our social existence. The intertwining of financial value and living flesh must be untangled. Christians can bring their faith into encounter with this knot, in hope that the reality of creator becoming creature will help to effect this unraveling.
