I was basically finished writing my first work of Christian theology when we witnessed Israel’s genocidal escalation against Palestine and Donald Trump’s re-election as president. Since then, the landscape has changed, although whether this change is in degree or kind can be debated. For many in Canada and the United States, liberalism had maintained a minimal veil protecting our moral conscience from the imperialism often executed at arm’s length through neoliberalism’s slow violence of debt, austerity, and privatization. It at least gave western political leaders a level of deniability for the violence that was wrought in the world. The hijacking of subsidies and escalating political differences we experienced during COVID and the George Floyd uprising began tearing that veil in the West. But with Trump and Israel the quiet parts of colonization, imperialism, fascism, and racism are being heralded out loud. The final editing process for my book had left my intellectual energy threadbare and so I did not engage these realities directly. There was, however, one chapter I kept editing to the very end and deserves further development.
In Nothing will Save Us: A Theology of Immeasurable Life (Pandora Press, 2025) I make a simple claim. The biblical prohibition against idols remains relevant, it can be traced through the Gospel, and it can inform us today. The prohibition of idols in the Hebrew scripture is matched by acknowledging and condemning the seeming inevitability of idols. Idols are the norm. Idolatry is the attempt to control the form and measure of value for everything. Within the biblical context, household idols could serve as markers of inheritance and possession. For nations, idols stood as the foundation backing its authority. In modern terms, the question of idols was at once political and economic. Biblically, an idol is known for making its worshippers dead, just as it is dead. Idols extract life from the living. The Northern Kingdom of Israel secedes and establishes itself with idols at the north and south. I & II Kings declare that every king of the north from that time on (whether relatively benign or violent) cause the people to sin. Conversely, to resist idolatry is to keep nothing at the center of worship (Exodus 25). This is holiness, the reverse of idolatry. Holiness undoes the death dealing forms of the world so that life is not extracted but flows outward (Isaiah 6). Such holiness is rare (certainly at scale anyways). Hebrew scripture all but admits to the impossibility of holiness and the inevitability of idolatry.
The New Testament accepts this condition. Christ comes as ‘a sign of contradiction’, one who does not consider equality with God something to be grasped and so becomes nothing. It is in this way that Christ enacts the impossibility of holiness, Christ is nothing to the world. This is why so much of scripture turns to the poor and oppressed as those who are in the world but not of the world. To borrow from Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Colucciello Barber (who in turn work with Antonio Negri), some are too poor for measure, neglected and refused the measure (the idols) of the world. What is impossible for the world becomes possible through poverty, a true universal, what else is more accessible than poverty? Existing outside the measure of the world, a measure which extracts life from the living, affords immeasurable potential.
The result of all this wrestling was really to go no further than Liberation Theology’s claim that there is no salvation outside the poor. This is a structural claim in which I try rigorously to avoid reifying or romanticizing poverty or the poor. What I found in the process of developing my own theopolitical formulation was a practical theology with a sharp edge that did not lead to the abuses of authority so common among conservatives but also did not abdicate authority as I so often experienced among liberals. Christ’s authority is this sign of contradiction. It names something impossible, to be in the world but not of the world. The world exists through various institutions and structures, these systems are inherently self-serving cleaving to their own form and measure. This is inevitable. The self-serving nature of institutions is as inevitable as idolatry was to the prophetic imagination. In response to this inevitability the impossibility of the Gospel is not one of aspirational ideal but a thoroughgoing judgment of the world. In Chapter 10 of my book, I wanted to see how deeply the edge of this judgment could cut.
In Chapter 10 I tracked my experience with the rise of a chapter of Proud Boys in my home city of Winnipeg. This was in the midst of Trump’s first term around 2019. The trajectory of the Proud Boys was formally short lived. The Proud Boys itself were founded by a Canadian, Gavin McInnes, in 2016 and designated a terrorist group by the Canadian government in 2021. What I wrestled with at the end of the chapter was the liberal response to the increasing rise of far-right political expressions. The early 2020s marked what seemed to be a new collective consciousness in matters of present and historic injustices. In 2020, thousands gathered at the Manitoba Legislative Building in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. The following summer around Canada Day there was a growing public sentiment claiming ‘no pride in genocide’ referring to the Canadian colonization and cultural genocide of Indigenous populations (particularly in the growing understanding of the harm of Indian Residential Schools). In Winnipeg, a group gathered again on the legislative grounds and pulled down a statue of Queen Victoria in protest. Since then, social and economic impacts of COVID (marked increase in homelessness and addictions), the re-election of Trump, and Israel’s devasting actions in Palestine have revealed that there was no political durability to these earlier liberal sympathies.
Since those social protests a wave of new nationalism in Canada has arisen borrowing the hockey metaphor of keeping our ‘elbows up’ in the relation to the United States’ trade wars. Taking advantage of the crisis that is Trump, our new liberal Prime Minister (who is broadly recognized as an economic conservative in practice) is looking to fast track ‘national building’ projects such as new oil pipelines and resource extraction that seem to have a clear limit to Indigenous feedback or resistance. In Winnipeg, while we wrestle with accessible and affordable housing, our mayor and left-wing provincial government continue to place securitization and policing as the vanguard of responding to social struggles with the predictable consequences of creating more desperate high conflict situations. Finally, while Canada may have budged a little in recognizing the state of Palestine both present and former Liberal Prime Ministers have stated public support for the project of Zionism with now Prime Minister Mark Carney stating that any Palestinian state should be a ‘Zionist Palestine’. Again, this is the liberal and establishment left in Canada. We also have our Conservative leader beginning to ‘challenge’ DEI as well as Charlie Kirk style figures creating public events to ‘debate’ the impact of Indian Residential Schools.
I tinkered here and there on this chapter right until the end. I couldn’t help despair over liberalism’s willingness to fold when pushed, and the establishment Left looking for conservative acceptance through tough on crime political points. I kept thinking of historic warnings. In 1950 Aimé Césaire claimed that what the Christian bourgeois “cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘blacks’ of Africa.” And Fred Moten’s words from an interview published just over a decade ago feels fresh. When asked about white allyship Moten addressed the sympathetic white (liberal?) seeking coalition directly stating, “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”
I cannot escape the simple conclusion that liberalism offers acceptance and support when convenient. As James Cone wrote in 1969 stating that the liberal “wants progress without conflict.” When the liberal asks what he can do, what he really means is, “What can I do and still receive the same privileges.” Liberalism remains unwilling to truly reckon with, never mind resist a capitalist order to which everything must submit to the demands of a maximized return on investment (which are found in labour cuts, resource extraction, military spending, inflated tech sector, etc.). Even the more moderate economist Karly Polanyi understood “the problem of fascism is as old as capitalism. The threat was there from the start.”
Many liberal and progressive Christians emerged from more conservative and fundamentalist spaces. We came to abhor the type of judgment we experienced and valued the breathing room liberalism could offer in terms of personal freedoms. However, this liberalism has primarily existed within a (typically white) minimum middle-class security. Having demythologized and deconstructed our faith we have rightly discarded conservatism’s cruel damnation while keeping our class status, letting our hearts bleed just enough in public so as to not jeopardize having ‘received our reward in full’ (Matthew 6). For progressive Christians, it is time to return to the judgment of Christ. Unable to avoid the Zizekian inflection, the problem with conservatism is that its judgment was not thorough enough. The only authority I find myself able to trust is in attending to the people and places considered and condemned as nothing and from there ‘to let things which are not abolish that which is’ (1 Corinthians 1:28). Such attention is not given towards an already existing communion of saints but open into a politics as discipleship without offering a political program as such. This judgment is complete in relation to both the church and the world, indeed of all human institutions. Human institutions are inevitable but they exist with an inability to put themselves into fundamental question for the sake of what truly matters. Here we must also resist liberalism’s equation of judgment as personal guilt and allow it to become a way of discipleship. The judgment of Christ, this sign of contradiction, is not to some arbitrary eternal damnation nor a personal deposit vouchsafed by grace but rather a mechanism, demand and engine of redistribution, letting what is not undo what is for the sake of the whole. This judgment is grace when we pay attention to the inflicted and unnecessary suffering in the world. Our common poverty becomes the way and the means to a common, immeasurable life. But this message is unbearable, terrorism, for those guarding their wealth against moth and rust. And so the Gospel remains folly, nothing to the world, but to those willing to face our common poverty it remains the power of God for salvation.
