Revolutions Without Christ: The Bane of our Fighting Spirit
The Christian call is to see the opposing, persecuting, vengeful person as the image-bearing recipient of God's grace and mercy through the cross. If this out-of-this-world virtue is negated from our fights for justice, we will be left with victors and the vanquished.
Communism is appealing. There I said it.
It is true that the utopian world Karl Marx envisioned to actualise has got its pull. It looked to make the world a better place. The oppressed workers are to be set free and the resources are to be shared (by force, but we'll skip over that tiny detail) among all. Gandhi's adage "There's enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed" would've been actualised. But Communism failed wherever it was tried.
It was one of the many revolutions that aimed to make the world a better place as the revolutionaries envisioned it. History is replete with people groups rising to topple the powers that be and usher in a new era of prosperity, equality and peace. However, they all end up doing the exact opposite. It is no wonder for they lack Christ.
A Divided World
Let me explain. These ambitious revolutions are unresolvedly polarised. The French Revolution, the American Civil War, all wars of independence, the Intifadas, the World Wars and finally the recent elections in the US and India. In all instances a supposedly immovable object is rammed by a seemingly unstoppable force. If the object topples, the status is reset and a new norm sets in. But for these entities to collide there must be resolute differences. If not, the force stops or the object moves and compromise sets in. That's not what happens in revolutions. Ardent hostility is the fuel of revolutions.
This is evident in the recent political climates of USA and India. The Republicans aim to preserve the Constitutional integrity and founding values of their nation and perceive the Democrats as a threat to the same. The Democrats see the Republicans as fascists overcome by every conceivable phobia who deter the nation's progress into a new era of racial and gender perception. India sees a similar tug between I.N.D.I.A and the NDA, wherein the latter wants to undo the founding identity and usher the nation to its new Hindutva centric-Vedic era identity. Neither side is going to give in. And where does the hostility lead to? A divided nation.
In India film stars who were once loved by all lose out on the appeal of one faction the moment they join politics. A saffron flag donning youth is not seen in friendly light by a Christian or Muslim because they sense that they are looking at someone who is calling for their expulsion from India or forced conversion to Hinduism. It could just be that the peaceful tolerant young man isn't fully aware of what that flag means for other communities and simply followed his elders. In a nation and culture where the youth are often used as pawns and where blind obedience to elders is seen as the utmost virtue, this isn't too hard to imagine. It may be improbable but you see what I'm getting at. Each side sees the other as irreconcilably distant.
This is precisely what happens when we remove Christ from our political and social revolutions. The Christian call is to see the opposing, persecuting, vengeful person as the image-bearing recipient of God's grace and mercy through the cross. If this out-of-this-world virtue is negated from our fights for justice, we will be left with victors and the vanquished. Should I gleefully look down upon the ones that I've toppled? As difficult as it sounds, I am to love them and show them the light that shines within me - the love of God.
Christ the Revolutionary
Christ toppled the social order of His time on Earth. He uplifted the women and outcasts to their God-ordained heights of human dignity. He earned the animosity of the religious political powers of the land. They weren't unmovable but He was truly unstoppable. Yet He forgave them on the cross. He was the victor but He knew whom He vanquished. It was not fallen humans who held different classes in the social strata. It was the root cause and fruit of all evil: sin and death. Christ the Revolutionary didn't come down to topple humans but to lift us out of our depraved state. Christianity tells us that apart from God's mercy revealed through that rugged cross, we were all fit to be vanquished.
All the Christ-less efforts to make the world a better place isolates the other and creates further division and animosity. They falsely assume that class, social hierarchies and seats of power are the root cause of the evil around them. The base assumption is that the social environment we construct and place ourselves in is the decider of our status. We are the sole masters of our destiny then. They treat the symptoms but not the disease. It ends up shifting the scales of vengeance in favour of the defeated who is now fired up to topple the newly enthroned. Isn't that what we see in election cycles?
The zeal within us to make the world a better place becomes the source of further brokenness and destruction, all because our compass is distorted enough to guide us towards toppling the compromised possessors of power while unaware that the malignant tumor that had rendered them fit to be toppled plagues us too.
As we strive to tilt this Earth towards Heaven and away from Hell, let Christ be the cornerstone of our efforts. Let the Word shine light to our paths lest we be enamored by the zeitgeist - the god of this age - as were the many futile revolutionaries of the past.
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