Totalitarianism and Division — A Brief Reflection

I just began reading Thomas Merton’s 1956 book The Living Bread. While the primary subject is the Roman Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, I am finding it also speaks of the body of Christ and humankind in a way that this Presbyterian can easily affirm. The following quotes come from the Prologue.

Totalitarian states ruthlessly manipulate human beings, degrading and destroying them at will, sacrificing bodies and minds on the altar of political opportunism without the slightest respect for the value of the human person. Indeed, one might almost say that the modern dictatorships have displayed everywhere a deliberate and calculated hatred for human nature as such. The techniques of degradation used in concentration camps and in staged trials are too familiar to be detailed here. They all have one purpose: to defile the human person beyond recognition in order to manufacture evidence for a lie….

Techniques of degradation systematically foment distrust, resentment, separation and hatred. They keep men spiritually isolated from one another, while jamming them together physically on a superficial level—the plane of the mass meeting. They tend to corrode all man’s personal relationships by fear and suspicion so that the neighbor, the co-worker, is not a friend and support but always a rival, a menace, a persecutor, a potential stool pigeon who, if we are not careful, will have us sent to prison. (The Living Bread, p. 16)

As I watch the continuing descent into madness in this nation and around the world, Merton’s words speak loudly to me. From the unwarranted, illegal, and immoral actions of the government against immigrants to the attacks that are being committed in the Caribbean to the atrocities committed in Palestine and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, I see the degradation of basic humanity, what Scottish Poet Robert Burns called Man’s inhumanity towards man. (Source: Man Was Made to Mourn)

I also see destruction and division being sown in the rise of christian nationalism and the political, ideological, and theological fighting in the church. The idolatry that is christian nationalism is not what Jesus revealed in his calling of the twelve disciples to follow him. It is not what he spoke about in The Sermon on the Mount (specifically in the Beatitudes). In this setting, Merton calls us to remember that Christianity is a religion of life, not of death. (p. 14)

Creating division and sowing seeds of hatred, fear, and mistrust only harms human beings both individually and collectively. There is a better way for humankind to live. In this Advent season as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, my prayer is that the tide will turn and the peace that passes all understanding will transform this world.

Then the words of Jesus might be fulfilled. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind… and also love your neighbor as yourself. (my paraphrase of Matthew 22:36-40)

May it be so…