Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. In this episode, I had the privilege of speaking with Rebecca Mooey. Now, Rebecca, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, was one of the first, interviews that I actually did. She was, with a a group of women, who were interviewed, and she's actually been on at least 1 or 2 other times since then. So, I've I've talked with Rebecca quite a lot over the years, and, we've had plenty of interactions.

Derek: 01:00

So this, this episode was actually, a little bit more haphazard for me than normal. I usually have quite a lot of questions, and I I, guide those questions, in a particular order. And, it's it's pretty organized, at least on my end, even if you don't get to see that exactly, if you never go and check out, the notes that I put, in the show notes, the links that I have to the questions. So, really, for this one, if you take a look, the differences is, night and day. I mean, I had just a few general discussion points that I wanted to speak with Rebecca about, And, we kind of we ended up talking a little bit about those points, but we ended up going all over the spectrum.

Derek: 01:47

So it's it's a little bit of a different sort of interview than perhaps you're used to, in this season. But at least on my end, it was a lot of fun to just kind of go wherever the winds took us. And the winds took us to quite a lot of places. You know, originally, I had intended on talking a lot about Roman propaganda and, just kind of some of the the correlations, or the corollaries that there are with propaganda today. And that we did discuss a little bit of that, but we actually ended up talking quite a lit a lot more about modern empires, which is something that Rebecca is very into and something that I've been reading a bit about over the past few years as well.

Derek: 02:32

And that's because empire is, the culmination of of the all of the propaganda that we talked about. From day 1, we have been building up to seeing how empire or government is the great propagandizer, and that's because empire is all about self interest and control. It's all about survival. So maybe more so than any other episode, this discussion with Rebecca, since we did kind of go all over the place, hits on so many of the themes that I've talked about, this this season. You know, just right off the bat, we started off the season by talking about abusers.

Derek: 03:18

And so when we talk about empire, we end up talking about how they are so similar to abusers, which is actually the first topic that Rebecca came on to to discuss, in our season on nonviolence. And that leads us to discussion about patriarchy and nationalism and about, how empires like to to claim that they are providing peace, they're providing, this sense of security, while simultaneously isolating victims. So there's there's a lot of that discussion that kind of looms in the background. And then we get to talk about one of the questions that I've brought up a number of times in in, this season, which is the idea of what do you do with the idea of cancel culture or with the idea of, sifting through truth. You know, like slaveholders, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, are they heroes of the faith?

Derek: 04:19

Are they sinners, who are beyond repair, who you shouldn't listen to because, their message is corrupted, or are they somewhere in the middle? And so we kind of talk about, Rebecca brings up the idea of of redeeming the colonizer and why that's so much of a focus for a lot of people and kind of the results that that has. So there's a lot going on this episode. I definitely recommend that if there's a thread that is pulled on in this episode that's piques your interest, go back in the season, and and check out some of the episodes that might fill in those gaps a little bit more and color in the details. And there are some other episodes that are coming up, which are going to hit on some of the same themes that we talk about here.

Derek: 05:09

So check out the show notes if you would like time stamps to, sift through. If not, just go ahead and listen to the whole thing, and I hope you enjoy.

Rebekah Mui: 05:22

Hi. I'm Rebecca, and I've been on this podcast a couple of times with some other guests. So I'm really excited to be back here talking about the Roman Empire. I approached the Roman Empire through the work of historians. I'm not a historian myself.

Rebekah Mui: 05:43

What I do currently is I'm like a PhD student in theory. And there is a strong relationship between history and theory. Like, historians kind of, like, go into the archives. They find the data, and they know how to use historiographical methods, historical research methods to kinda uncover what the data is, like, what the history is. Now theorists kind of take the work of historians, and they think about it, basically, and they look for patterns, and they try to think of, like, explanations, causes, relationships.

Rebekah Mui: 06:21

I am, doing some history work as part of my, like, graduate studies, but I'm not a historian. Like, I'm not the real historian. So what I'm going to do today is talk a little bit about the Roman Empire and what I call, like, its gospel. It kind of I kinda believe the Roman Empire presented a very much, gospel of its own, like, its own good news that it was proclaiming with its own king. And, I'm gonna talk a little bit about that, maybe refer to some sources from people who have done sort of history and theology combined because a lot of, people who study theology and religion are themselves using historical methods in studying history because it's, let's say, the 1st century.

Rebekah Mui: 07:11

If you wanna understand early Christianity, you have to understand a lot of the history as well. So, a really a a mix of sources, and I can provide, links and citations, in the show notes.

Derek: 07:27

Yeah. Something I I appreciate about you is, you're always extremely thorough. Everything that I I read, you know, when I when I go through and I read it, I'm like, well, but what about the subject? And then, like, a paragraph later, you get to that. So, I'm sure you can provide me with all the all the links, and I will put those in the show notes for everybody.

Rebekah Mui: 07:47

Yeah. And I'm hoping there can be more, like, open source, articles and things that people can look at. Or if if you can't, you can get, like, account at JSTOR or your local library that often gives you access to some of these sources too.

Derek: 08:04

Yeah. I just figured out that JSTOR I think you get, like, a 100 free articles or something. Because I I used to never be able to get articles, but then recently, I I got an account and they're like, you get a 100 free articles a month. So definitely something to check out.

Rebekah Mui: 08:20

Yeah. Awesome.

Derek: 08:23

So yeah. I want to talk a little bit, like you said, about, the the Pax Romana and the Roman Empire, in part because, you know, doing a season on propaganda and and being a Christian, it centers a lot around Jesus, and he lived at the time of the Roman Empire. And, you just have this this culmination of good versus evil that you see. But in our modern historical context, at least in in Western Christianity, we kind of seem to divorce empire from what's going on with Jesus. And as I was as I was thinking about the propaganda of empire in regard to, like, the West and the United States and things, I thought it would be very valuable, especially as a Christian, to be able to discuss this in light of, you know, an empire that were divorced from by 2000 years, because sometimes it's easier to see the evil in others that you're distanced from than to see it in yourself.

Derek: 09:27

And once you see it somewhere else, then it's then you can kind of start to apply it to yourself. But, you know, as I was as I was reading a lot of resources, there's not really anybody that I found at least in in in mainstream literature, nontechnical literature that really talks about propaganda of of empire. And so you were the the best person that I knew who might, be able to to wrestle this kind of stuff because you deal a lot with empires both, in modernity and antiquity. So I'd love for you maybe to just kind of start us off by, kind of laying out what was the Roman Empire and, around the time of Jesus and and this idea of the Pax Romana.

Rebekah Mui: 10:12

Yeah. So the Roman Empire is, in fact, the place where we get the word empire, literally, the imperium in Latin. I mean, there were empires before. There were the Greeks, the Persians, those things existed, but the Romans coined the term. And I think what's really significant about the Romans is their place in sort of global history and the continuity.

Rebekah Mui: 10:40

So they very much, appropriated a lot of, what the Greeks did, how they structured empire. We know that Alexander the Great basically conquered a lot of territory and united them under his sort of huge overarching empire. And there are many such empires who did such things, but this was a big project. And so the Romans were in a way, they stole some homework from the Greeks. They used some of the, you know, the appropriate Greek religion.

Rebekah Mui: 11:12

They renamed some gods, and they they kinda put their own spin on things too. The reason why the Romans and the Greeks like, we call them the Greco Roman antiquity, the reason why they're so significant is that if you trace sort of that history from, let's say, 1st century, right, that's when Jesus was had his ministry. And then you trace that history up till today, there is a continuity because European empires that came after Rome kind of decided to coin themselves, you know, holy Roman emperors, or they kind of model themselves after Greco Roman classicism. And so you see this copying of, like, architecture, you know, the Greek columns. There's a reason why.

Rebekah Mui: 12:07

I think society is full of these symbols, and the symbols reflect kind of the aspirations, the values. And so, just to be really, really brief, what happened with the Roman Empire that I think the reason why it's so important for us today is because the Roman Empire gave birth to a Christian empire, what became, you know, rope split, the east and west, Constantine. The Roman Empire adopted Christianity, became sort of like Christianized empire where soldiers had to be Christians, and and where they persecuted pagans and, Jewish people and so forth. Anyone who did not sort of come under this new sort of Christian identity of the empire And then going into that'll be 1st century, then going into right up till the medieval ages, you have this thing forming called Christendom. And it started with Rome, so it was from the beginning an imperial Christendom.

Rebekah Mui: 13:16

Now we had different political structures throughout that history. But then after the medieval ages, you have you know, there is the pope struggling with all the, kings of Europe for supremacy, which comes first, who's more important, the religious power or the imperial power. And then the different kings or emperors or whatever they wanted to call themselves model themselves after the original Roman Empire, but they also were under Catholicism. And then we have the birth of, that's a long history. I'm trying to condense it.

Rebekah Mui: 13:54

But, you know, from the 1500, we have Columbus, and then we have, like, 450 years or so of European imperialism. A lot of it, whether it's the British, the Austrian, so far, all model themselves after sort of the glories of empire, the the myths of Rome. So, like, for example, in British public schools where they trained statesmen and leaders, they will be studying the classics like Homer. They'll be learning Greek and Latin for a reason because there is this historical continuity both in terms of politics and religion that goes all the way back from, like, let's say, 19th century Europe all the way back to Rome. So, like, all leads all roads lead to Rome kind of does apply here as well.

Rebekah Mui: 14:47

But this is very much in a western context, I should clarify, because there have been other empires like the Chinese empires or the Mughal empires that have operated under different cultures and structures, but they haven't had the sort of, like, global system that we had with European colonization. That

Derek: 15:11

that's kinda what I wanted to ask. Like, was there something special about, about, the Roman and Greek empires, or was it just kind of a, you know, happenstance or circumstance that it it just so happened that from that empire sprung Europe who ended up, you know, having a a sailing dynasty, essentially, that that just traveled farther and and was able to spread?

Rebekah Mui: 15:34

I would say that part of it is the size, just like the sheer scale of it. The Romans and the Greeks kind of had an empire that crossed from North Africa all the way to the Middle East, and then the Romans actually conquered all the way up to Britain. So that's all of Europe, fair bit of the Middle East, quite a bit of North Africa. And so, I mean, during that time, sort of the center of the world, so to speak, was the Mediterranean for trade, you know, for just a whole bunch of things. And then if you're talking about European empire that came later, what we are dealing with now, sort of the residual effects, it would have covered about 84% of the planet, not including Europe.

Rebekah Mui: 16:26

So that's Europe plus 84% of the planet. So it's like a huge thing. A long period of time, 4 150 years, and about, 75% of people on Earth today were formally, like, in countries or cultures formally colonized by European empire. So there's this kind of, like, a huge territorial expansionist kind of logic to this. The the sheer scale of it and sort of the historical impact, I think, makes it something relevant to look at in conversations about empire.

Derek: 17:08

So, you know, the the history that you just gave, it sounds very tumultuous and, filled with a lot of violence and not so good stuff. But right now, I've heard people say that we're living in something, you know, that half jokingly, but not really call, you know, the Pax Americana where, for the most part, the the broader world has known peace since, World War 2. I mean, there have been some some conflicts, but not on the scale of of a world war. And with the cold war, you know, it's it's largely posturing, and but there wasn't a lot of violence and killing, and and territorial borders just haven't changed all that much globally in in the last 70 to a 100 years. So it seems like we're kind of in a peace of sorts with with, empire, and there was a a time called the Pax Romana back in in Jesus's day, as well.

Derek: 18:11

So could you describe a little bit before all that tumultuous stuff in the middle? Like, what was the the Pax Romana, and and how does it compare to maybe a little bit of where we are today?

Rebekah Mui: 18:24

Yeah. I would say, like, the term tumultuous. I think empires, no matter how big, no matter how stable, anyone who's in a position of superiority always has a sense of insecurity about them. It's almost like the more power or influence you have, the more insecure you are about possibly losing it, having that eroded, and so forth. And so there's this sort of, like, I think imperialism comes with its own anxieties, that really then motivate it to enforce that.

Rebekah Mui: 19:04

And so what you're describing, basically, whether it's Pax Samaricana or Pax Romana is like a system where you have a huge someone who's oversized, like, a sort of, like, big brother figure, keeping all the smaller, potentially dangerous, potentially, you know, insurrectionist groups at bay. And so that's what we have. I have a quote here, from these theorists on empire, Hart and Negri, and this was written in the year 2000 called Empire and World Order. And it it they have here a brief description that says, the concept of empire is presented as a global concert under the direction of a single conductor, a unitary power that maintains social peace and produces its ethical truths. And in order to achieve these ends, the single power is given the necessary force to conduct, when necessary, just wars at the borders against the barbarians and internally against the rebellious.

Rebekah Mui: 20:18

From the beginning then, empire sets in motion an ethical political dynamic that lies at the heart of its juridical concept. This juridical concept involves 2 fundamental tendencies. 1st, the notion of a right that is affirmed in the construction of a new order that envelops the entire space of what it considers civilization, a boundless universal space. Secondly, a notion of right that encompasses all time within its ethical foundation. So, basically, it's a very consuming thing.

Rebekah Mui: 20:52

And then from this, like, there emerges the concept of peace, perpetual peace, and so forth. I'm gonna find another quote here on Pax Romana. I think it's on another window. But what we have here is, like, the idea that you need everything under one sort of umbrella of authority, one single conductor of power to maintain cohesion. Part of the doctrine of Pax Romana was that it's good for you because it's for your prosperity.

Rebekah Mui: 21:22

It's for your peace. It's without it, you won't be able to function. It's sort of it's like this big thing invades the space, takes over, creates almost like a threatening force, and then convinces you that you need this. Without this, then they invent sort of enemies, the barbarians at the border, the rebels within. And they're like, those things are the threats, and I'm good I'm here to sort of protect you from the threats.

Rebekah Mui: 21:52

I'm here to maintain this, cohesion and order.

Derek: 21:57

Yeah. It's it's, it's really amazing because the the way that we started off the season was to talk, on the smallest scale possible. And so I talked, you know, with Judy and Rosanna, you know them. We talked about abuse. And the things that abusers do that is easier for us to comprehend because it's on a small scale.

Derek: 22:17

It's like the exact same thing that empires do. Right? So they they, make the the victim feel a need, you know, that they need the abuser, make them feel like the abuser's really benevolent, and then they cut them off from other, other outside sources. And, yeah, there there's the isolation and dependency. It's it's all kind of the same thing.

Rebekah Mui: 22:44

That's incredible. And I think there's a very good precedent for why these 2 things to me, like studying abuse and studying empire, why they are. It's the same system. It's just on a different scale, basically. And there's a there's actually a precedent for that.

Rebekah Mui: 23:04

But first, I just wanted to read this little quote here, and then we'll talk about, like, sort of the the relationship between social structures and political structures. So this is another quote from Harte Niggweets. Augustus Augustus considered Pax Romana to be his greatest contribution to the empire. Pax Romana was the establishment of universal peace among people of different national and ethnic backgrounds under the banner of Rome and was hailed as one of the most remarkable accomplishments in history. Oh, sorry.

Rebekah Mui: 23:35

This is actually by, this is a quote by Street, 2013, not Hart and Agree. Just realized. Okay. So, the emperor guaranteed peace and security to all nations that submitted to his leadership, promising that the Roman military would protect their borders from invaders and maintain concord within their provincial boundaries. Those rejecting his unity plan were conquered militarily and subjected to Roman rule.

Rebekah Mui: 24:04

The Pax Romano was the political goal of Roman domination. It was the good news that Rome offered to the world. The the emperor utilized several powerful means besides the military to bring people in line with his will and preserve the peace, including the use of political collaborators, economic policies, Roman banquets, patronage networks, the rule of law, Romanization of the masses, and civil religion. And so in the Virgil, which is a classic piece of Roman literature, it the Virgil writes in poetic form of Rome's heavenly entitlement to rule the world and to conquer and crush all resistance. There's there's a kind of I'm curious what you think about this because there's a kind of, like, parallel in terms of this is a very gospel sounding thing, its own gospel of peace with its own king and its own kingdom.

Derek: 25:03

Yeah. There's, I mean, if you read books on on empire and, I've I've read one on, like, Empire and Mark and Empire and John, and those those books do really good at at drawing out some of these terms. But, honestly, I mean, I I know he's controversial, but, Shane Claiborne and he he's a little bit intense, but his Jesus for president actually has a a really good section that, that kind of lists quite a lot of the, like, the the Roman inauguration ceremony and all of those other things, and and all of the terms that are used. Like, you know, son of god was used of Caesar, and the, you know, the the the robe imagery with Jesus, and the crown imagery with Jesus, and, just so many of the phrases that they said. And even, you you reference street.

Derek: 25:58

One of the books, that I read was Caesar and the sacrament. And in that, he talks about, augury and how augury was was really big. In fact, we get our word inauguration from it. And so what they would do is, like, you know, Romans, they've got this this symbol of the eagle. And so they said, okay.

Derek: 26:17

Well, nobody's truly an emperor or a leader or whatever, their position was until an eagle comes and, like, rests on their house. Like, they needed the the sign of the of the eagle or of a bird. And, so street kind of talks about how baptism and the dove descending on Jesus was actually imperial imagery of this augury, And instead of an eagle, the spirit coming down as an eagle, he comes down as dove and the the imagery that the dove has. So the Bible is just filled with with imagery of empire, counter empire, all the time, and it's just yeah. It it's filled with it.

Rebekah Mui: 27:00

I I'd like so, like, in kingdom theology, there's like, oh, yeah. There's a kingdom of Satan. There's the kingdom of Christ. But I kind of find the more you dig into it, like what you're describing, there is sort of this back and forth kind of, like, appropriative or imitative relationship between sort of the ultimate sort of evil, which is empire, and then we have the ultimate sort of truth and good, which is the kingdom of god. Like, both claim peace.

Rebekah Mui: 27:34

Streets the book that I'm quoting is streets subversive meals, which is about the Eucharist meal. And he talks about it it feels like almost every element of the Lord's supper. Yes. It's the Passover, but it's also a banquet, and it's an enactment of, like, a counter banquet to Rome's banquets because Roman banquets were Romans, like, were full of the symbolism. They had to enact symbolism all over the place.

Rebekah Mui: 28:00

So they were like, they'll have these banquets. The patron would be at the head, and everybody would, like, prophesy or praise Caesar, and they would it was basically a very, inactive thing that showed Roman power and Roman ideology in just about every aspect, hierarchy, domination, patronage, and all that. And then the Christian banquet has Christians declaring Jesus as lord, saying that their daily bread comes from, you know, the, lord's prayer. Just every aspect of it is actually a political statement. Even a meal is a political statement.

Rebekah Mui: 28:37

And so that kind of, like, makes you think, Jesus came calling himself a king with a kingdom. I mean, an emperor with an empire, a very different one. But still, there's sort of this, like, back and forth appropriation of both concepts and words and ritual and symbols that so fascinating.

Derek: 29:00

Yeah. I think we miss out on quite a lot that's present in the Bible without knowing history and without I mean, personally, I think my one of my big issues is I don't give a bunch of fishermen and tax collectors who who write books, like, from 2000 years ago. Like, in my mind, they're barbarian ignorant barbarians. Like, you know, what do they know? I don't expect this high literary form from them yet.

Derek: 29:25

I think I think there's a very high literary form there, and, we just under not undermine, but we we fail to expect that from them.

Rebekah Mui: 29:38

Yeah. I feel like so, like, you talk about symbols or you talk about propaganda. The cross is a form of propaganda for both empire and for the kingdom of god, but it symbolizes 2 completely different things. And yet it symbolizes it is a symbol, and it's a form of propaganda. According to, like, Figueroa and tombs, crucifixion was a form of Roman propaganda to basically scare everyone into non revolting because they were very insecure, and they had to keep reminding people that we're the ones in charge here.

Rebekah Mui: 30:15

Don't you dare. So it it serves as a it's very public. It's very visceral, and it's designed in every way to humiliate the person, to humiliate their body, which the body for them is synonymous with your status as a person. So if you have an unviolated body, like, you've never been defeated in battle or for them it was sexual too as well, like you have an unconquered body, then you were true victorious. You were masculine.

Rebekah Mui: 30:50

You were imperial and Roman. So they violated the bodies of criminals or insurrectionists for a reason to say, this is what we'll do to you, but, also, we are powerful. We are violent, and this is how we keep the peace. But then the peace of the kingdom of God, on the other hand, is Christ, Christ in this in this very, countercultural way, in a way that's shameful and and in both Jewish culture and Roman culture, he's he dies on the cross. And not only that, Christians literally keep talking about this shameful death that you would think they would prefer to forget about.

Rebekah Mui: 31:38

You know? It's the worst thing possible. It's like a a degradation and humiliation that I don't think we fully realize what the political meaning of it was, but it symbolizes the kingdom of God. And I think more than the suffering itself, it symbolizes Jesus's rejection of what the Romans thought power was and what the Romans thought peace was. Like, it's it's a rejection of this ideological system of empire beyond Rome.

Rebekah Mui: 32:10

Also, like, you know, Satan offering Jesus all the kingdoms of this world because you wanna be right on top and sit on the throne. It's like rejection rejection of the top down system and just establishing something completely different. So to me, more than anything, it symbolizes, Jesus' victory over Rome and Jesus' victory over, like, evil and the imperial ideology.

Derek: 32:39

Yeah. I would just I would qualify that. So I know what you mean. But in regards to calling the cross propaganda, I think what what I've come to realize and and it took me forever to figure out how to kind of parse it out because, you know, I'm like, well, what's the difference between propaganda and discipleship? Right?

Derek: 32:57

Because it's just that I believe the thing that I'm telling my kids is true. Right? Well, what if you believe that the propaganda you tell your kids is true? Like, so Oh, I

Rebekah Mui: 33:08

see what you mean. Yeah.

Derek: 33:09

Yeah. So am I propagandizing my kids, or am I discipling them? Well, it depends on if what I tell them is true. But I think, so if you can

Rebekah Mui: 33:19

The the term I would use, it's sort of it's a huge symbol. Like, it's a herald or a proclamation.

Derek: 33:29

Yeah. Yeah. And I think a a big difference is so when Rome tried to proclaim something with the cross, like, the the symbol that they're using, they're trying to mask something. Right? They're trying to prop themselves up.

Derek: 33:45

They're trying to, cover over any weakness. Like, don't think about messing with us. And you had mentioned earlier that it seems like the more power you get, the, the more, testy you are in regard to, to to people kind of rebelling. And Noam Chomsky has a a good article called, The Power of a Good Example. And he talks about, you know, like, a country like Granada, this tiny country.

Derek: 34:11

Well, why does the US go in and and mess with Granada? Why does the US mess with Haiti? Why does the US mess with Cuba, the Dominican Republic, all these places? And he says, well, a lot of times you'd think that they'd let the weaker places alone. But what you have to understand is that if a super weak place becomes a good example, that's worse than if a strong country becomes a good example.

Derek: 34:33

Because if a weak country can do it, then anybody thinks that they can do it. And so with places like Haiti, you know, you saw when they when they, won in the French revolution, around that time, you get a lot of laws in the south starting to become more harsh because you get, like, Gabriel's rebellion in the 18 in 1800 and a bunch of other slave rebellions because they're looking at Haiti and saying, hey, if they can do it against an empire, like, we can do it too. And so it's a huge threat. And so I would say, like, Rome uses the cross to mask something, whereas what nonviolent action, which is which is what Jesus did with the cross, the cross isn't masking anything. It's saying, hey.

Derek: 35:17

Here's what you have. This is truth. This is reality. Here's what empire does.

Rebekah Mui: 35:22

It's unmasking. Like, it's exposing.

Derek: 35:27

Yeah.

Rebekah Mui: 35:28

I I really like, when looking into sort of Foucault's theories of power, because I think part of the the propaganda of empire is that power is only found at the top, and, therefore, everybody should want to try and get to the top. Whereas a more sort of critical, critical in the general so it's just like a view of power that recognizes what it really is, recognizes that it's everywhere. And that just as much as the people on top have power, so they are actually fearful of the power that individuals have, that, opposing forces have. That's you know, and, like, in Christian nationalism, there is an obsession. The the the logic behind Christian nationalism, according to Whitehead and Perry, is maintaining America's status as a global superpower by maintaining its status of favor with God.

Rebekah Mui: 36:33

So you they wanna institute, like, sort of righteous, legislation and so forth because they want god to continue to give America a very special place in the world and that the special place only comes about because they're, like, exceptionally holy or exceptionally called. And there is so much like, culturally, there's so much insecurity. The people with the most power are the ones who are most insecure about losing the power and concerned that everybody else is out to get them. You know?

Derek: 37:09

Yeah. So, going back to abusers. Right? When is, when is the most dangerous time for people people to leave abusers? Or or when's the most dangerous time is when when they try to leave an abuser.

Derek: 37:22

Right? And I I think that's what you get with Christian nationalism here, which is, hey. We have all the power. Well, now people are, like, in in larger numbers are saying, no. That's we don't want a part of that.

Derek: 37:35

We wanna change it. And so they're trying to leave. And so that's when that's when you get insurrections and and other sorts of things.

Rebekah Mui: 37:44

Yeah. Like, bring going back to that abuse topic. The interesting thing about Rome was that it's constructed the empire is constructed as a household. So, to going back a little further, Roman the word paterfamilias, father of the family or basically patriarchy, comes from, from specifically Roman slavery, not in relationships with family and children. It's relationships with their slaves.

Rebekah Mui: 38:17

So you have these, enslavers. They are sort of the leader of this household. And normally, the term another term would have been dominoes, which is you know, it basically conveys what it think we conveys, basically, lord. And so they're like, we wanna make it sound nicer. So we're gonna come up with this concept of a fatherly relationship between slave owners and their slaves.

Rebekah Mui: 38:46

And then what you what you realize is from this within Roman culture, you have Caesar who places himself as sort of the father of the Roman imperial household, patria, father of the fatherland. And so what the Romans constructed it as is a parallel system between social domination and political domination. So whether it's your imperial subjects that you've conquered through war and enslaved or whether it's the small households that you know, Roman households under Caesar, both were ruled by the same system, which is a system where the person who uses violence, who uses sexual violence against slaves, slave children, against conquered subjects, and so far, this system of violence is always painted over with a very civilized, affectionate, benevolent veneer. Jesus knew that because it was what everybody understood at the time. So he says in Luke, like, the rulers of the generals lorded over them and call themselves benefactors.

Rebekah Mui: 40:01

So this ruling violently and and framing your rule as being the most loving, affectionate, caring thing possible for your inferiors because they believe they were mentally like, your like, the people you enslaved, colonized, anyone who is not Roman or in the case of Greeks, not Greeks, women. Everyone else is literally not as human and not as physically and mentally and rationally and in terms of self control. Just not as superior as you are. You are perfect. You are superior.

Rebekah Mui: 40:40

And, therefore, they're all dependent on you, and you are their benefactor. No matter what you do, even if it's sexual violence or, like, killing your slaves or your even children, they they always framed it in the most beautiful, benevolent, happy, harmonious, peaceful terms possible.

Derek: 41:05

So, kind of a side question, but and I should have known this before, but is that where we get our word patriotism from,

Rebekah Mui: 41:14

Yeah. Yeah. I it's like sort of the it the root word is father. But then, like, fatherhood as a concept in the Roman language was not like, their cons construct of it is not what we construct it as, and therefore, it includes slavery. We actually so if you look at the, like, sort of the gospel of empire, I call it an un gospel of the Netherlands.

Rebekah Mui: 41:40

You can see this pattern throughout history starting with, Constantine, like, in theology and Christian history. For example, Augustine in chapter 16 of city of God literally takes the Roman part of familia's system, and he he creates a theology around it. He says, you know, you are there to benefit all in your household and your slaves. You carry a greater spiritual burden for them. And when you, discipline your slaves, by word or blow, it's for their eternal happiness.

Rebekah Mui: 42:14

So he he combined sort of Christianity with slavery and and the household rule and sort of the benevolent, affectionate, and we see that. We literally have people within, like, like, antebellum slavery. They genuinely believed that it was a mutual relationship of, quote, wise subordination on one hand and kindly affection on the other. That is how colonizers describe their relationship with people. They literally invaded and, you know, colonized.

Rebekah Mui: 42:52

That is how Christian nationalists and also slavery apologist, like Doug Wilson, literally frame it. They say, slavery was a benevolent patriarchal institution. And they use the word patriarchy because they've read the history. They they take on that ideology, and they'd say, slavery and patriarchy are the same thing because they're the same system. And that's true in Roman history.

Rebekah Mui: 43:16

And for much of European Western history, it kind of was.

Derek: 43:21

Yeah. I guess is one of the things that you can appreciate about those types of individuals is that, they're at least more consistent with their beliefs. You know, I I think one of the things that's especially going through this season, just looking at the shaping of our views, it I'm becoming more frustrated with how people are we're so myself included on on various issues, but we're so blind, willfully ignorant as well as ignorant to the implications of what we truly believe. And we take the parts that give us power, and we deny the parts that, that create injustice, which, I mean, I think you see that a lot in the United States where, we want to accept certain parts of history and deny others. So, yeah, I I really appreciate your insight into the way that language was used and and how it was from that.

Derek: 44:24

It's, interesting. I never heard that, you know, slavery was tied in with, with the patriarchal system or or that word.

Rebekah Mui: 44:34

Yeah. For the for the Romans, it very much was because the Romans considered themselves like, Roman males were the manly men, slaves, females, colonized subjects were all considered feminized and female in different ways. So gender was not so much about relation like, it's not about biology at all in the ancient world. It was actually about relationships of power and, constructs around that.

Derek: 45:06

Yeah. Yeah. I'd read, I can't remember the name of the book, but it was about, soldiers and moral injury, and it it it went back to, like, you know, the the Greek days and stuff. And it talked about how, if somebody was pierced, right, that that was, like, that was not good, kind of like the, you know, the, homosexuality, in in ancient times. It was okay to be on the giving end, but not the receiving end because the the penetration was considered, like, feminine.

Derek: 45:37

So, you know, when it says that Jesus was pierced, that's that's really, weak and and terrible.

Rebekah Mui: 45:44

Yeah. So the debates around sort of, like, what's happening with the debates around Jesus' so called masculinity, is whether it's actually a debate, and this is from an article that I found. Like, literally, it's a debate about whether Jesus would take up the sword or not. So you have Christian nationalists saying, Jesus was the one we based the second amendment on, and Jesus would carry an AR, you know, 15. And, literally, one of the family research council leaders made a speech where he said Jesus would have carried an AR 15, and everybody laughed.

Rebekah Mui: 46:18

He said, no. I'm serious because everybody's feminizing Jesus. And no. So, literally, there's a connection between sort of masculinity and violence and sort of Jesus' rejection of violence and his the violence done to him on the cross, which to me is not a statement that Christians should like, oh, you know, gladly suffer physical or sexual violence. No.

Rebekah Mui: 46:43

What it's saying is that Jesus exposed the evil for what it was and completely rejected those systems. And I think that's the unique work of the cross, that I, like, I don't believe or call to replicate that. And and the and then when people take sort of that suffering and they fetishize it and they make it the center of the Christian life, that's when you have people who are guilted in staying staying in abusive situations or being silent about abuse because you're supposed to suffer like Jesus was. They may not even realize the people teaching this that Jesus suffered a sexualized form of violence, but what they are doing is taking that and and literally replicating it and causing people to suffer. Yeah.

Rebekah Mui: 47:34

I should I I have a quote. Oh, you you had something? You're saying something?

Derek: 47:38

No. Go ahead.

Rebekah Mui: 47:40

So, I had a quote here, from and I think this article will be coming out soon. So, hopefully, when it does, I'll, give you the link. But according to one colonizer, Baron Craneworf, he said of the colonization of, I think, Kenya, he said, we give peace where war was. We give justice where injustice rule. We give law and order where the only law was the law of strength.

Rebekah Mui: 48:07

We give Christianity or a chance of it where paganism rules. Whether the native looks on it in that light is another matter. I'm afraid that he doesn't as yet truly appreciate his benefit. And then another, theorist on slavery said, you know, for slaves, it is a blessing because they're deprived of further opportunities of wrong wrongdoing. They behave better under somebody else's direction than their own.

Rebekah Mui: 48:34

So there's this attempt, kind of like a fastification and, like, propaganda, benevolence, the idea that somebody with power over you who has violently taken that power and who wants to rule your life, whether as a slave or as a woman or as a colonized subject, they get to control the propaganda and the language because imperialism is an ideology. It's a, is a logic. It's a knowledge system. And so there will always be that that wool that they will attempt to pull over our eyes and that we are immersed in this world, and therefore pulling and masking that is unmasking so many things about our world and the way that we perceive power, benevolence, government, imperialism, and so forth.

Derek: 49:32

Yeah. One of the things that, you know, that you that we've kind of touched on quite a lot is slavery. That that kind of brought to mind. So it was a a really big part of the Roman system, and I know that it was a a big part, you know, after 1600. Mhmm.

Derek: 49:52

But I don't really know anything about slavery in between. It seems like if it was such a huge part that it would there'd be a lot of continuity, but my impression of the middle ages is that it it was a dwindling institution. It wasn't something that was that was really big in Europe. Do you know anything about slavery under Christendom, in that middle time?

Rebekah Mui: 50:17

I think part of Christianization, I think there was some attempt to reframe social relations. But slavery is just one example of this benevolent sort of household system. One prominent example of this, and it has a different name, would be like feudalism, where the serfs were essentially slaves. Like, the Russian serfs all the way up to, like, 18th century, they could be killed by their lord. They were tied to the land and to the feudal lord.

Rebekah Mui: 50:52

They they could not leave. They had to pay taxes. So it's a slightly different system, but it operates on the same logic. And what we see in, class systems, what we see, like, with the concepts of, like, the aristocracy and being born of, like, good breeding, that was their version of it, so to speak. Like, they the aristocracy came from, you know, the feudal lords or the dukes and all that where you had your subjects, and you were you were superior to them by birth.

Rebekah Mui: 51:32

They genuinely did believe just, like, maybe a 100, a 150, 200 years ago that if you were born poor or working class, that you simply did not have the intelligence or the rationality to be, prominent in society, etcetera.

Derek: 51:49

I guess that's, yeah, that's a good point. Because when I think of Rome and I know that they had, slaves of, you know, of of their own empire, but I usually think of, like, imported slaves, people from conquered places, so other groups of people. And when I think of, more modern slavery, I think of, you know, from the 1600 on, I think of slavery where we went and took people from Africa. But I guess in in the middle time, I picture, well, it's just Europeans, and they're not importing people from from Africa. But, yeah, I guess the Europeans themselves were slaves.

Derek: 52:26

Like, the the serfs, were essentially slaves.

Rebekah Mui: 52:30

Yeah. And, also, the it must have been it must have been something that was already a logic in their society because the from the moment that Columbus set foot, the so called new world, they already started enslaving indigenous Americans. The reason why they had to have a transatlantic slave trade was because they had, they had essentially done genocide by slavery. They had worked people to death across Hispaniola and several other different, colonies. So the practice was there.

Rebekah Mui: 53:09

I could I know there are some histories of there actually were different versions of slavery in Christendom in Europe now that I think about it. There's a history I remember reading, but instances of it would pop up maybe here, maybe there. But the logic seemed to have carried with them. Like, it didn't go away, and it was not for a very long period that they did not have, slavery.

Derek: 53:39

So here's a thought, and it's off the cuff. So it might be totally terrible, and you can you can dismantle it if it is. But it seems like something like slavery then, and you you brought up Foucault earlier. And one of the things that I appreciate about him is he's he's very, skeptical of power. And so he's like, it it it doesn't go away.

Derek: 54:00

It just changes forms.

Rebekah Mui: 54:02

Mhmm.

Derek: 54:02

And, so if if I were to think, okay, slavery was big for the last 2000 years. There's no way that it's just gone away today.

Rebekah Mui: 54:10

No. One of the one

Derek: 54:11

of the issues that I have with with empire when people people say, well, the United States is so benevolent. We, you know, we're so good. We don't have slaves and those kinds of things. We export our violence. And so, I mean, we we do have our own ghettos and and, things that we create here with poverty, but by and large, what we do is we export our violence.

Derek: 54:36

So Haiti, Cuba, Philippines, Iran, coups, South America, Central America, all those things, and we do violence elsewhere. And then, you know, we we, economically leash various countries, and then we make them work at slave labor wages, essentially. In fact, when I was doing my, episode on Haiti, Frederick Douglass was, like, one of the one of the first I think he was, like, the 4th ambassador to Haiti. And he only lasted, like, 18 months because, what the US did was they sent in a a bunch of big business guys, and they're they're like, okay, Frederick. Time for you to, you know, to to get us in and make these good deals for us.

Derek: 55:23

And Douglas was like, no. Like, I'm not gonna betray these people. And so they they got rid of them. And, so so that's what we do. Like, we essentially have slaves in Mexico, slaves in Haiti working in, slaves in China.

Derek: 55:40

And

Rebekah Mui: 55:40

In the prison system.

Derek: 55:42

Yep. But we don't see the violence because it's it's not in the United States. And we say, well, that's so terrible what China does, but they're making stuff for us. And, it's so terrible how poor Haiti is. Yeah.

Derek: 55:54

Well, that's because of the things that we've done to them the last 200 years. And it's easy to dismiss this our slaves because we don't have our slaves on southern plantations. We we outsource that slavery.

Rebekah Mui: 56:10

And, I mean, there is a lot of exploitation. It's and it follows the same logic of, like, people may not be so explicit nowadays, but back in 19th century, it would have been social Darwinism where you're, you know, more evolved or superior. It's basically based on the same ideas that Rome and Aristotle would have conceived of. Like, some people are born to be rulers. Some people are born to be ruled.

Rebekah Mui: 56:38

Now nowadays, sort of that biological aspect is is something that people have kind of removed because they understand that to be racism or unacceptable today, but then they will talk about characteristics or intelligence. There are many subtle ways that you you take away one thing, but it continues in many ways. I mean, in the US, there's a lot of exploitation that goes on to, for example, like, there have been studies about how when when slavery was so called, abolished, how the prison system continued to enslave and exploit largely, especially in certain states, black labor. And people could be arrested and imprisoned and basically enslaved on almost like, basically no charge sometimes. There was a good exhibit on that at the Smithsonian on African American history.

Rebekah Mui: 57:38

And so a a lot of that still persists. I think it's a and you tied it to colonization. Colonization is very much neocolonialism is very much certain countries having a choke hold on other countries, forcing them to export resources at, like, very low prices and then forcing them to buy your products. There are so many ways in which this happens. And so, from a Foucauldian perspective, there's a certain logic to domination, but it's also a hierarchy, meaning there are many different archies that operate in many different levels and in many different ways.

Rebekah Mui: 58:18

In the US, for example, prostitution, like human trafficking, continued even after the abolition of the slave trade. So there were people who were enslaved as prostitutes in the lumber camps in Wisconsin in the 1800. Or in San Francisco, the Asian women who are imprisoned and enslaved in brothels. And there were many, many different ways in which this surfaced in society. So, yeah, you're absolutely right.

Rebekah Mui: 58:52

It seems to be it seems to never really go away, and you have to you have to keep you you can't just, pull them, like, pull the wool over our eyes and say, look. That thing is gone, and therefore, Western Empire is a good thing because I literally have people come on my Twitter page all the time to tell me that colonization was amazing for the world and that and, like and then I'll be like, well, here's a chart on exactly what you're the argument that you're using, which is that, and you talk about this a lot. Like, do the ends justify the means? What is that called? The kind of, like, philosophical ethical argument?

Derek: 59:31

Consequent consequentialism or, utilitarianism.

Rebekah Mui: 59:35

Yeah. Yeah. There's I think that comes into it as well. Like, does this end result, what we have today in the world, even development, democracy, all these things, does it justify the genocide, the erasure of these these these peoples? We never talk about that.

Rebekah Mui: 59:51

It's always trying to humanize the colonized and say, well, they were doing the best the best they could in their time, or they were you following, you know, ethics and you can't judge them by today's standards, or they did so much good for the world and you can't talk about all the bad. But there's literally a trail of essentially slavery and genocide.

Derek: 01:00:14

Yeah. I one of the things that, you know, I I didn't realize that it was a good strategy necessarily, but I I'm realizing, that it is now is that I've always liked to read broadly, and I've always liked to play the devil's advocate. So I like to read from opposing viewpoints, And that's something that on the issue of racism and slavery, I found to be absolutely invaluable to understand. Because, yeah, 10 years ago, I I probably would have said some similar things, like, it's just so hard to reconcile. Like, you know, Jonathan Edwards or, George Whitfield and, Thomas Jefferson.

Derek: 01:00:55

Like, they did such good things. Okay. They made they made a mistake, you know, with slavery, but they were blind to it. You know, they were men of their times. And so I just I had some sense of empathy of, like, I just don't think I can dismiss these guys.

Derek: 01:01:11

Yet, when I started reading broadly from, like, the the black perspective, which is harder to do. The further back you go, it's harder to do. But you have quite a number of of slave narratives that, that exist. Like there's, William Brown wrote, he he wrote, like, the first African American, novel, I think right around 12 years a slave came out around the same time. But then, you have, like, I think it's David Walker's appeal to the colored citizens of the world, and just like all these people.

Derek: 01:01:48

And what's amazing to me is that they they have these slave narratives, but they're also Christians. Like, these are Christian people speaking, and they're able to critique their system and say, how could how could the slavers not hear the screams of women being separated from their children and not understand the humanity. And when you hear from the black perspective, that no. No. No.

Derek: 01:02:14

These people, they knew what they were doing. Like, they absolutely 100% knew what they were doing. And you have these Christian black men laying that bare that helps to kind of slap me in the face.

Rebekah Mui: 01:02:28

Because I think in in trying to redeem the colonizer, there is an element of still because they instituted a system where they were human and everyone else was not human. This is a Roman thing too. And then by only by by sort of the established narrative, those the lives that were lost don't count because they are invisible. We don't know their stories. We we just hear what we are told like, what they want us to hear.

Rebekah Mui: 01:03:01

And so there is so much when it comes to, say, indigenous American history and so forth. There are so many things that are simply lost in the shadows of history and that we will never know because they were erased. And there's a reason why. Like, Jennifer Morgan is a historian who wrote Reckoning of Slavery, and it's a book about women in the Atlantic slave tree. And she says, the silences in the archive, in the record, tell us as much as what the record says.

Rebekah Mui: 01:03:34

So, like, there were a lot of omissions, especially of women. Don't even know, like, the number, the experiences, what happened, and so forth, the sexual assaults that happened on the ships. All of that is silenced in the archive for a reason because then you can look away, and then you only see from history the perspective of the people writing the story and their humanity and their religion and culture. And and yeah. It it I think there is a thing that we have to, reckon with, which is what we even consider human and what we don't the the many things that we don't think about because they're lost to history.

Rebekah Mui: 01:04:23

There is a so, like, I talk about this thing this thing a lot on on my Twitter account, which is called I call it the Roman order. And I think it's really important to understand the Roman order because it characterizes abuse and so much of colonialism and empire today even. And, Roman order being sort of this political, social, enslaving, colonizing, and also gendering, like, it has to do with women too, the system, this belief, this this thing that we always go back to the benevolence argument, the propaganda. So, like, investment in this Roman order is also tied to investment in sort of the Constantinian project or in this idea that justice comes from top down power and from the benevolent exercise of coercion. So, like, one book that I found is this.

Rebekah Mui: 01:05:23

It's a it's a kind of a dry historical tome so far, but it's a piece about the early proto Christian anarchists, by Perry Lewis Perry. So it's called red Radical Abolitionism, Anarchy and the Government of God and Antislavery Thought. And there's a lot of, like, the evolutionist movement was by no means perfect. There were a lot of personalities that were kind of egotistical and crazy, and they were sometimes very self absorbed in sort of being the savior of the enslaved people in America. But they questioned the Roman order.

Rebekah Mui: 01:06:01

They questioned this ideological system. And from this, from the antislavery movement actually came, like, the women's movement. Because once you start questioning one piece of this imperial propaganda, you start questioning it all. And so that's why the even the very charge of anarchy as being sort of this evil, chaotic thing comes from imperial propaganda because Rome or every other empire will tell you, without me, you will have total chaos and violence and lack of peace, lack of pastoral manner, and therefore, nobody will be able to function. That's what people say, you know, like, the umbrella of authority theology.

Rebekah Mui: 01:06:46

That's like, nothing will function if you don't have basically a dominator in charge of things.

Derek: 01:06:54

That's really interesting because, I'm I'm part of this, one reformed group on, on Facebook, and there are definitely some pro Doug Wilson people there and some very anti Doug Wilson people there. So you you see some clashes. And I I don't know just just from what you referenced about him. I'm assuming he takes a certain position, but I don't I don't personally really know very much about him. But a lot people in those in that camp, I know who who defend him will a lot of times like, every once in a while, I'll see something come up about, well, slavery isn't always bad.

Derek: 01:07:33

It was just, you know, when we were stealing people. But but, like, they basically defend the institution of slavery. And yeah. And for that reason, because they don't like this liberal slant of of losing, power.

Rebekah Mui: 01:07:51

It it almost seems like the clash between Christian nationalism and those opposed to it. The clash between people who want a certain social order, it it almost there are two views of justice. One view of justice is it is it comes from the top down, and therefore, it's by the institution of laws, by superiors towards the inferiors, and this holds the universe in place. This is and I'm sure you know more about this than I do, but this is sort of what what is central to the concept of the what's it called? The 3 in in reformed theology and in Lutheran theology, there's, like, 3 systems, government, household, and church.

Rebekah Mui: 01:08:36

I think, ek eklesia, and okay. Economia is household. Eklesia is a church and then Polynesia, which is a government. And I've heard people come at me when I talk about nonviolence because they're like, no. No.

Rebekah Mui: 01:08:52

No. God made these three systems to keep the world in order. It's it's essentially Luther constructed these things, and he borrowed actually very directly from Aristotle and not from the bible. So it's a clear like, he literally references Aristotle or he's yeah. And Augustine and so forth.

Rebekah Mui: 01:09:16

So have you, like, this has come up in your circles at all? Like the whole,

Derek: 01:09:21

I I largely am a lurker. I kind of watch the the things that go on. I don't really participate too much. That's, yeah, that's not really an area that I just I just don't really care that much what Luther and and other people said. So, in in regard

Rebekah Mui: 01:09:38

Yeah. Yeah. It's called Luther's 3 Estates. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Rebekah Mui: 01:09:43

Yeah. I'm sure I'm sure that's a term familiar. Heard,

Derek: 01:09:46

yeah, heard it referenced.

Rebekah Mui: 01:09:48

There's a paper called Luther's use of Aristotle and the 3 est 3 Estates. And you see that in Gothard. For for Wilson, I would say Wilson would 100% basically reflect Roman propaganda because he literally says a man a man penetrates, colonizes, and and all that. Like, he defines masculinity by penetration, which is what the Romans did. And then he literally then he literally frames slavery as, like, the benevolent these are, like, the famous quotes from Wilson that I think really underline what he's saying.

Rebekah Mui: 01:10:25

But, you know, the thing about him is just, like, he's super clear that this is what he's for, the Roman order, or, like, Stephen Wolf who wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism, which Wilson's Canon Press published, literally goes on Twitter and talks about, like, the white Teutonic race. And yeah. I think the hard the harder discussions can be had within groups that attempt to have more of a veneer of respectability or acceptability and then who, like, kind of fascicate and maybe they would reject. Like Owen Strachan disagreed. Stephen Wolf disagreed with Owen Strachan because Owen Strachan talked about how Jesus didn't come to establish the white race.

Rebekah Mui: 01:11:10

And, so he would like, he's with the family research council, but he openly identifies as a patriarchalist, a Christian nationalist. So it you know, there's a whole spectrum of these ideas circulating around or, you know, you would have, like, Wade Gudem, for example, and whole complementarian movement. But if you really look at it, even if it's presented in the most positive light, there's always an intertwined, like, belief about Christian nationalism, about racism. Like, they would be very anti anti racism. So they'll be, like, writing entire books, or they would talk a lot about the war on men and how men are the most oppressed in society and how masculinity is being ostracized.

Rebekah Mui: 01:11:56

Like, these are all things that are tied together because they are the Roman order. It kind of is very obvious.

Derek: 01:12:03

Yeah. It's it's just so crazy that, yeah, you can you can take the empire that murdered the guy you say you follow and used all this imagery that is, you know, antithesized, if I can make that a verb, in, you know, in, in the New Testament.

Rebekah Mui: 01:12:26

Mhmm.

Derek: 01:12:26

And you have all this counter propaganda, all this imagery that just, like, lays that bear. And what you do is you say you follow the guy who was killed, but then you you enact the propaganda from the empire that killed him. It just it kind of it's like you want the power and the I don't know. I don't know why you want Jesus and the power, or, I guess, unless you just implement Jesus as a another form of propaganda to get that power.

Rebekah Mui: 01:12:54

Interestingly, I, there was a picture, on a page by the American Historical Association that that talked about how under after Constantine, the Romans and the Byzantines deliberately reimagined Jesus. So you actually see a change in how Jesus is painted before, like, a lowly shepherd with sheep. And then after that, there's this huge, like, imperial imagery that tries to make Jesus into this glorious Romanesque king. And and that the like, it was a deliberate act of imperial propaganda to to create a more acceptable Jesus, the John Wayne Jesus or the it's so the pattern is, like, so blindingly obvious what they're trying to do with Jesus, the a r 15 Jesus, for example. Jesus is not Barbie in a sense that you can just put a costume on and then just be anything, astronaut, imperial ruler, you know.

Derek: 01:14:02

Well, I I think that just goes back to, you know, talking about understand the importance of of understanding the Bible as as a document that has a higher literary form than we come to it expecting and that we come to it willing to dig into and research. Like, we just wanna face value reading of the text. And I think that's one of, you know, Beth Allison Barnes and other people talk about some of the downsides of inerrancy, you know, using it as a shibboleth and, you know, be being able to kind of keep people out based on your interpretation that you say is is really god's interpretation. But if you come to the Bible expecting to not expecting to be skeptical of, academics who who really delve into the Bible and, like, really take the Bible seriously, then just a pure face value reading without doing a whole lot of homework is gonna cause you to miss all of these symbols. And so you you talk about the John Wayne Jesus.

Derek: 01:15:04

I mean, it's it's easy to understand when you have a revelation Jesus and you have all the other, you know, forms of Jesus in the gospels because you can kind of pick which Jesus you want if you can take a face value reading of something like like Revelation.

Rebekah Mui: 01:15:22

Yeah. I I mean, the book of Revelations, I think, it it depends on where you're coming from reading this. If you are a persecuted church and you and very differently, I would say, from the modern church that sort of almost valorizes a culture of martyrdom. If we take revelations as saying that that martyrdom is not some perfect ideal that we should aspire to, but rather it's something that evil does to us and that god is actually angry about. I think that's a very good thing that we can take away from the book of revelations.

Rebekah Mui: 01:16:02

And it's written, like, by and for a persecuted church, not for a church that's using imperial power and then using the imagery of God's righteous wrath where people are suffering, and persecuted to then justify imperial ideology. Like, it's a very, very different like, these you know, like, almost where you are in empire or, like, how you look at the Old Testament. I mean, look at, like, god's wrath. I think there, there's a lot more to dig into, I guess. But, definitely, I think where we stand and and you talk about where we stand makes a difference, and you talk about coming coming to the bible at face value.

Rebekah Mui: 01:16:44

The thing is we are not. We're all wearing the glasses of imperial society. We grow up in, in in a world, with with different views about, you know, ideologies of supremacy and all that. It's in the world that we live in. And so when we come to the bible, we're not actually reading it in in its raw form.

Rebekah Mui: 01:17:06

We we're we have glasses on. We're just not aware of those glasses. And we also have, how many centuries, 100 and 100 of years, say, from the 4th century until 21st century, of Christians who have been interpreting the bible in support of empire, like Augustine. And we have a Christianity that has deliberately downplayed, like, the political implications of even the crucifixion and turned it into some other, like, aesthetic suffering or turned it turned like, completely obscured what it was. And so I don't know that we so much need to be experts in 1st century history.

Rebekah Mui: 01:17:50

It's so helpful, and it doesn't take a lot to start learning about it because it there are certain patterns. But it's more like getting rid of all this junk that's accumulated on. I'm picturing, like, people cutting off, like, layers of calluses on their feet, you know, like dead skin. There's, like, all this junk that has been accumulated in the Christian culture, in our world culture that we live in shaped by colonialism. And then by in theology, that that takes away from the raw message of scripture.

Rebekah Mui: 01:18:26

And, like, a Christian, we talk about, like, nonviolence or Christian anarchism. Right? I think a Christian in a persecuted country is not going to have, say, the same delusions that many of us might have about trying to obtain political power or trying to, like, equate this, you know, government with the rule of God, the kingdom of God. Like, they're not under these delusions. They automatically have a kingdom theology a lot of the time because because they are in this very similar position to early Christians.

Derek: 01:19:03

Yeah. That's a, you know, that's a good summary point for why I wanted to do this season on propaganda because, you know, I started this as a podcast for nonviolence and and issues related to that. And, kind of what I discovered was and that all started in 2016 with the, you know, the infamous election, and I was just like, I can't understand what is going on with my community's ethic. And how can we how can we be willing to do evil? And and that just leads you down a, you know, a a very steep slope to understanding that there's a lot that you do to justify various positions that just aren't biblical.

Derek: 01:19:48

And so that kind of culminates here and okay. How did how did I ever get there? How did we as a community get there? And that's that's through propaganda. So maybe you could talk, just kind of close things out and talk about you you you gave a good illustration about cutting off calluses.

Derek: 01:20:08

How how do people begin to start unpropagandizing themself, themselves if they are caught up in empire and partakers in the the fruits of empire, most of us?

Rebekah Mui: 01:20:26

I think one way is to be more connected with the body of faith as a community that we learn and we study and we live out the scriptures together, like, to open up our community of faith, whether it's the books we read or the people that we talk to or that we follow on Instagram or Twitter, to a bigger community and have things that are outside our comfort zone or, you know, starting to question that. Like, what what can we do to sit at the feet of and learn from Christians who are, suffering for their faith, who are who, you know, not just in the sort of western narrative like all those evil countries overseas, but what does it mean to be a Christian who is, like, a minority under empire, who doesn't have power? I think we can start to listen and learn from, one another in this way. Like and I think that returning to the simplicity of Jesus is a really good way to start because if we really, really do sit and listen to what Jesus says and I actually talked to a new testament scholar on on Twitter, and I just mentioned, like, my impression is that Paul is really hard to read and some of his Greek is really obscure, and we still don't know what he actually meant in some of these passages.

Rebekah Mui: 01:21:58

The the terminology, the grammar, it's just but seems to me that we don't really have any dispute about what the gospels are saying. And, and and the scholars seem to reply very much in the affirmative that, yeah, it's Jesus, like, in the gospels, is not difficult to read in the sense of we don't really have translation controversies the way we do about first Corinthians 7 or 11. And so there's so much there that I think we can start to imbibe sort of a kingdom view. Jesus said, you know, what you do to the least of these, you do to me. Or Jesus, you know, the sermon on the mount, his his example on the cross, his teaching to sell all you have.

Rebekah Mui: 01:22:49

The way of empire is constantly about acquiring, taking, stealing, killing, destroying. To me, I come from I I started looking at nonviolent or kingdom theology from using very different verses than what commonly are used. Basically, you jump straight to the Sermon on the Mount and what, you know, is said there, which I think I and I talk about on my podcast, gospel of peace, is that, like, we have taken a few things in in the Sermon on the Mount, and we have inflated them to the extent that it becomes harmful for abuse survivors. It's like, you know, turn the other cheek or, you know, all those things. It it it's out of it's a little bit out of context.

Rebekah Mui: 01:23:35

To me, I come at it from, say, looking at empire, looking at the world today, like John 10 where Jesus says, the thief comes to steal, to kill, and destroy. I've come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly. To me, that's the crux of it. Or, in John 8 where Jesus talks about, you know, you have the desires Basically, he tells people you have the desires of the evil one inside of you. And the very concept of desire, like, to be across scripture, sinful desire, our very concept of salvation is actually very much linked to harm, to the the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, lack of love for your neighbor.

Rebekah Mui: 01:24:18

I think these things are all there for us to kind of rediscover what a gospel of peace means, like, starting very simply with just our relationships with one another. Or, you know, Jesus said, the rulers of the Gentiles lorded all of them, but it shall not be so among you. The greatest shall be the least. The greatest shall be the servant. The last shall be the first.

Rebekah Mui: 01:24:40

It's all there, and it's very exciting. And if we start with just like what is a relationship, that's a relationship of love, that's a relationship of the kingdom. I think that's just, like, so exciting, and that's probably one of the best places to start.

Derek: 01:24:58

And I guess that what you highlighted there is is something that, you know, I think goes very wrong in evangelical circle circles, and I think it's especially pronounced in in my reformed circles. But, you know, we have a transactional view of the atonement, which means that, you know, Jesus basically came. He came to clear a debt, came to get what he purchased so that he can then move on to the, you know, the big stuff, like conquering in Revelation. And so a lot of times, we wouldn't say this, but the the implication and the way that we understand it is that, Jesus's life was practical. He laid down his life to get something and to to gain power over in a sort, and, we don't view it as an example to to follow.

Derek: 01:25:51

And so Jesus isn't a discipler. He's a propagandist. He came to manipulate and, you know, not not to exemplify. So what you what you just said there, I think, is perfect.

Rebekah Mui: 01:26:04

Oh, wow. I yeah. I think this is another example of just obscuring because, I mean, Jesus literally said, teach them all that I've commanded you or, like, you know, follow me.

Derek: 01:26:15

Well yeah. And that's so we would never say that Jesus didn't didn't mean that, but we don't we don't really take the things that he said seriously. I I don't think.

Rebekah Mui: 01:26:30

So it's it's a matter of actually then going back to, like, well, the word of God's really important. You can sort of use sort of the conversations around the importance or infallibility of scripture to be like, Jesus is really important. He's a author and finisher of our faith. And, yeah, I'm I'm my project for my thesis has currently become, like, discovering what does sin mean and what does salvation mean in the context of empire. And that's just such an exciting discovery.

Rebekah Mui: 01:27:01

So if you guys have any thoughts on that, I would love to know, like, what pieces of scripture, what, ways of interpreting, listening to, reading, or carrying out, you know, this kingdom of god life really what what is that? Yeah. I'd love to hear from people.

Derek: 01:27:20

Yeah. Yeah. If I hear anything from anyone, I'll let you know. I will just say one one thing that I found interesting. I haven't thought too too much about it, but it it seems like there's probably something there is, and this might just be because I was stupid all these years and and didn't realize something obvious.

Derek: 01:27:37

But, you know, with Passover, I had always thought, well, because Jesus' death on the cross, atonement. Right? I had just thought it was a celebration of atonement, but Passover obviously is not the celebration of atonement. It's a celebration of liberation from empire.

Rebekah Mui: 01:27:55

Dangerous word there. Liberation.

Derek: 01:27:57

Yeah. So, I mean, like, what what implications does that have that the time Jesus chose to die wasn't the day of atonement? Like, it was Passover, liberation from from empire.

Rebekah Mui: 01:28:13

Yeah. And and empire not being just one big structure, which I think even the word empire can be, deflective in a sense that, actually there's empire in each and every one of us. I mean, that's the temptation that Jesus faced that, do you know what? Do you wanna rule over all the kingdoms of the world? That's the question that we are all facing, not just in terms of all the kingdoms of the world, but maybe one another or in small relational

Derek: 01:28:40

ways. Yeah. And maybe domain would be a better word because the domain of death, the domain of sin. I mean, there were multiple domains that he came to liberate us from.

Rebekah Mui: 01:28:48

Or the concept of, like, lust, you know, lust of or so many different things, and being set free from that to a different relationality, which is, like, love.

Derek: 01:29:00

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I will make sure to put all the links and everything that that you send me in there as well as the links to your podcast and your Twitter feed. You're a very prolific Twitterer. I that is one thing.

Derek: 01:29:14

Or I guess it's x now. Is that what it is?

Rebekah Mui: 01:29:17

I still call it Twitter.

Derek: 01:29:19

Okay. Okay. Yeah. So I'll make sure to put links to all that stuff. Thank you so much for for taking your valuable time, out of your day to spend that chatting.

Rebekah Mui: 01:29:30

This has been really fun. I'm looking forward to sharing it.

Derek: 01:29:33

Alright. Talk to you later. That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network.

Derek: 01:30:05

Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom Living.