A Psalm of Asaph.
1 O God, the nations have come into your inheritance;
they have defiled your holy temple;
they have laid Jerusalem in ruins.
2 They have given the bodies of your servants
to the birds of the air for food,
the flesh of your faithful to the wild animals of the earth.
3 They have poured out their blood like water
all around Jerusalem,
and there was no one to bury them.
4 We have become a taunt to our neighbors,
mocked and derided by those around us.5 How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever?
Will your jealous wrath burn like fire?
6 Pour out your anger on the nations
that do not know you
and on the kingdoms
that do not call on your name.
7 For they have devoured Jacob
and laid waste his habitation.8 Do not remember against us the iniquities of our ancestors;
let your compassion come speedily to meet us,
for we are brought very low.
9 Help us, O God of our salvation,
for the glory of your name;
deliver us and forgive our sins,
for your name’s sake.– Psalm 79:1-9 (NRSVUE)
Psalm 79 feels a little too close to home these days.
Psalm 79 tells the story of the beginning of the Babylonian Exile, when the Kingdom of Judah effectively ceased to exist, causing seismic upheavals in the life of Yahweh’s people. The dead littering the streets, shockingly rapid social change, the rise of an authoritarian government hellbent on oppressing particular populations simply because of who they are, the bitter erosion of hope, and the birth of what can arguably be described as a dystopian hellscape: we’re experiencing all of this – and more! – at this moment. In the way that history can sometimes create wondrous moments of simultaneous realities, wormholes we can enter where we feel that we can actually touch and experience the past, Psalm 79 opens a window onto a particular moment in the life of God’s people when they face their absolute and imminent ruin, and are forced to somehow respond. This is a raw lament, the heartbroken agony of absolute devastation, the end of everything, and the birth of a dystopic reality: a people cut off from their literal roots, becoming second-class citizens, at best, in an absolutely foreign empire.
The psalmist faces the choice of accepting the story told by the Babylonian invaders (of the weakness of Judah’s God and the overwhelming might and power of the authoritarian imperial state – a dystopia where the people of God cease to exist due to state violence, and thus become powerless pawns of authoritarian overlords), or to instead tell their own story, one that can empower and offer hope for a just future. What are these stories: the ones we tell ourselves at the end of the world to make sense of the impossible and the devastating?
As I suggested above, one potential framework could be the modern story form of dystopia. Dystopian fantasies are stories imagining the collapse of society and the human responses to that collapse, in contrast to utopian fantasies. As these narratives tell two sides of an imagined world, dystopia (meaning “bad place” in Greek) is thus the opposite of the common understanding of utopia as an ideal society. These stories offer oft-profound reflections on the true nature of the human condition alongside prescient mirror-reflection warnings about the direction society is moving, especially the inherently and irresponsibly risky ways that people imbalance every foundational aspect of society and court complete societal collapse simply to maintain the status quo to which they have become accustomed. (Ironically, this status quo is often itself a utopian vision – at least for those in power, of course.)
The story told in Psalm 79 is not difficult to understand through this lens: the psalmist faces the end of the world as they know it, and desperately tries to adapt to a rapidly evolving, and increasingly terrifying, new world previously thought unimaginable in its scope of utter, irrational devastation. Jerusalem has been destroyed, her population have been eviscerated (and left lying in the fields to rot and become fodder for carrion birds), and the Temple was defiled (vs. 79:1-3, 7).
This impossible dystopian fever dream feels overwhelming and untenable, a crisis demanding divine remedy. The challenge expressed by the psalmist, however, is that they believe (and tell the story accordingly) that this is the divine punishment of Judah for her continuous failures to align with the will of God. Of course, the psalmist doesn’t argue that the punishment is unjustified; however, they do directly question God and their choices, critiquing God’s seeming inaction against the Babylonian invasion as both deeply unjust and terribly unfair.
The psalmist seems to express a bold confidence in their relationship with God, arguing directly and insistently, demanding both a fair hearing and a fair resolution of the unjust circumstances. I can imagine the psalmist getting so flustered and frustrated that they just stop halfway through to express their shock and disbelief: “how long are we going to have to deal with this horror show, God? I know that we did some things that you decided to punish us for, but why are you doing it to us now, when these other people don’t even know your name? You need to know that our neighbours don’t interpret this as our just punishment, and instead see it as further proof of how weak you are! Why don’t you stop punishing us, and save us (and your own reputation) instead? (vs. 79:4-6, 8-9)?”
God’s appreciation of humanity wrestling with God is well-attested in the Jewish Biblical text, including some of the most famous incidents in Biblical history, such as Jacob wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:22-32) and Abraham negotiating with God for the survival of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:16-33). This is an essential Jewish understanding of the divine nature: God expects us to argue, to complain, to push back and demand a different world.
Yet, this different world cannot, and should not, be simply the mirror of dystopia. One reason is tied to the word: utopia means “no place” in Greek. When Thomas More popularised the term utopia by using it as the title for his satirical comedy, published in 1516, he acknowledged upfront – in the title itself! – that this is a speculative work of fantasy, describing a society that doesn’t (and hasn’t) existed. As fantasy, therefore, utopias are fundamentally impossible in real life: as the ideal is a “no place”, it will forever be the horizon towards which we journey.
Utopia can therefore only ever be said to “exist”, in any definable way, as the actions we take in the present to ensure the flourishing of humanity in the future. In that sense, utopia is always becoming, but never becomes. The history of utopian movements throughout history is chock-full of examples of communities who failed to root themselves in the solid, fertile soil of the present, instead losing exactly what they were mesmerised by: the fantastical, exhilarating uncertainty of the future.
Yet despite that, I appreciate the prophetic power and intellectual satisfaction which dystopia stories are often imbued with. As art to engage with, particularly in times that emit the fumes of dystopia, they are invaluably helpful when processing the waves of fear and paranoia that deluge during the super-typhoon that is the rise of authoritarianism we are currently bobbing amidst. The story forms of dystopia include any number of possible causes for social collapse, whether they be unsustainable social inequality, climate collapse, mass social upheaval, cataclysmic natural disasters, nuclear annihilation, famine, or even the peculiar grimness that is the complete and global collapse of the internet.
For example, our current moment is the dystopia of the capitalist utopian fantasy of continuous growth coming apart at the seams, with the inevitable climactic and economic collapse. No matter how much we shovel into the open maw of industrial globalism, we will never be able to reverse the inevitable downward-turning growth curve currently dominating our models for the future climate of our planet. We’ll experience a significant bit of damage, even if nearly all carbon was immediately eliminated from the atmosphere. At this point, our pursuit of this crazy utopian dream is killing us, and everything else; ironically, exactly what happens in a dystopia story.
At one level, the specific cause of the nightmare – the Babylonian army, in the case of Psalm 79 – is essential to dystopian stories as they serve as the obvious, fundamental target for the critique the story is seeking to make about their current society. The particularity of the moment when these stories were first told indelibly marks itself at the story’s roots, irrevocably shaping the story’s frame and appearance.
In this way, the particularity of the story’s roots will thus inherently influence the life of the story for as long as it is told. It gives the story life by rooting it in a living moment, creating a doorway through which we can always travel to the past from the future, experiencing a specific historical moment through the life imbued in the story as it was originally told. And yet, these stories all have one essential universal commonality: they all deal with collapse in some form, and offer some potential answers to the universal question facing all people dealing with the utter and absolute inevitability of troublingly profound change: what now?
The story of the exile is told in numerous books of the Jewish Bible, from the perspective of prophets, leaders, even the utterly awesome Esther. Even this specific moment – when the armies of the Neo-Babylonian empire massacred entire swathes of people and deported even more towards an entirely uncertain future in Babylonia – is narrated elsewhere, with Jeremiah’s tale kicking off the book. Yet, no other story is this one, from this perspective, this specific context: the voice, the particularity that emerges from Psalm 79. Stories, therefore, exist at the crossroads of the particular and the universal, and thus depend on maintaining a balance between those two elements.
We must remember that stories are only alive as they are told and retold, embedding themselves in a society’s soil and growing as people inject energy through letting the story play out in the world. The stories that are most alive are the ones that speak authentically from a particular place, with enough silences and space for a potentially limitless succession of people to find themselves in the story as well.
Living with Psalm 79 this past week has actually brought me some comfort, perspective, and wisdom as I deal with the particularly trans dimension of experiencing my tiny community (erroneously) rendered the scapegoat for not only the murder of Charlie Kirk, but also causing violence on a scale far exceeding what our actual population would ever be capable of. The story told about trans people as simultaneously weak, unmanly, weirdo mental patients and the most dangerous people alive (with the power to corrode the very fabric of Western civilisation, somehow?) is itself dystopian, as it is both absolute fantasy and absolutely violent.
This is the story that has led to the violence of having my government, in the pursuit of silencing trans voices and erasing our existence, steadily erode, crumble, and dissolve the rights of my community in a fusillade of legislative, bureaucratic, and systematic violence directed against us. By rejecting this dystopian (and thus completely false) fantasy world that is a twisted and warped framing of current reality, we can also dismiss the stultifying fantasy of an ideal society, whose comforting perfection can become a siren song when faced with the need for pragmatic action.
We can definitely defeat ourselves by choosing the wrong story. For example, I’d of course love to be able to enact the utopic vision of an entirely trans-welcoming world, especially during my lifetime. Yet, as this week demonstrates, the dystopian story being currently told right now about trans people in our society simply does not accept the potential for any competing ones to emerge.
Now, I don’t need to accept this situation, nor should I: as Psalm 79 reminds us, it’s our job as God’s creation to always question the unjust and immoral stories our society tells, and even to act as if the impossible could be made possible. However, clinging to the rigid story form of a beautiful future utopia that demands perfection – or nothing – has the potential to actually choke off opportunities to respond to changing situations with our own evolution.
When our stories are allowed to breathe and adapt, we will also be able to breathe. Let’s never fail to tell stories that comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, particularly as these are the stories that God keeps wanting to tell.
