Cultural Chokeholds...

It's like me demanding and requiring everyone I meet to love blues music and the most freakin' hot peppers and on top of it really STOP liking other music styles and outlawing more mellow or bland foods and seasonings... OR.ELSE.

Well, I come at this from years of recognizing that not only pre-or-unbelievers -but professing followers of Jesus have so often been fans or gotten co-opted by various powers seeking to use the church to gain ever more power, money and control. Guess what? Garden-variety capitalists within and alongside the churches have always done it with music, dress, even the forms used for Sunday morning services. What do I mean by this?

In a deep study of missions we find Christian missionaries have always had "a checkered past", really sweet and really stinkin' and tragic. If you can't handle that verifiable reality stop reading now. For that matter, let's be honest that our individual judgments on this or that church (right, wrong or a mix) are often just as checkered -or stop reading because you're not yet ready to be honest about your own flaws.

Still here? Well, Wikipedia has a great definition of something theologian John Stott mentioned quite some time ago in a quote where he was talking about followers of Christ dying to self, specifically dealing with suffering. The two-word phrase leaped out at me, I'd heard it before, knew what it meant and thought it important to write about it here:

From Wikipedia: "Cultural imperialism is the imposition by a dominant community of its own culture onto another community. Imperialists may use wealth, media power, and violence to establish cultural hegemony. Cultural imperialism may take various forms, such as an attitude, a formal policy, or military action—insofar as each of these reinforces the empire's cultural hegemony." Cultural colonialism is in this ballpark as well.

To be clearer still, the term "hegemony" is defined "strong influence or authority over others, domination -and- the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group."

Plenty of nations beyond the U.S. have played this game and of course we have done it plenty in history regardless how hard various politicians wish to deny, whitewash and pretend it's fake -but fakes often play the "those who disagree with me are the REAL fakes!" card. Text-book propaganda, turn-the-tables when you have no other defense. Old as the hills.

"DO IT THE WAY I/WE DO OR WE WILL USE ALL MEANS POSSIBLE TO FORCE YOU TO DO IT OUR WAY."

Various rulers, elected or not, have historically done such and perhaps the most glaring version in the U.S. and Canada is how the eventually dominant white European settlers treated and literally murdered some thousands of Native Americans (Canada: First Nations) people with cultural imperialism and the very definitions you read above here. Fact.

What I always find of interest is how many fled other nations in the world, coming to North America to get a shot at freedoms, religious and otherwise... and then did what had been done to them to those they decided needed to accept -their- culture.

Blood. Far too much blood has been shed on this earth over who gets to control whom.

Only the blood of Jesus and genuine repentance saves eternally. Meanwhile pay attention to the modern-day fanatics who demand allegiance OR ELSE as if they're somehow the Savior or culture police God sent to fix things.

We're all sinners, broken and as such, only the true Savior Jesus Christ can fix us. We don't need to dominate. We need to receive and offer Jesus' love to others, even those very unlike the illustrious "us"!

As always, thanks for stopping by. -Glenn