Replacing a Deadly Worldview
Or: why getting over the colonizer mindset brings life to your life
Before it was iconic, we were in the movie theater, sitting in seats covered in burgundy fabric and munching on popcorn covered in Flavacol. It was 1999 when a black-clad Laurence Fishburne offered Keanu Reeves two pills: one red and one blue. One would return him to the delusion he had always known while the other would open his mind to the world as it really is.
Before he became Neo, the One, by this endeavor to see the world as it really is, Reeves’ character was a young programmer, Thomas A. Anderson, who believed there was something more to discover in the matrix, something greater than he knew.
There is little wonder that this is the fruit of conspiracy theory today, memed by post-libertarian edge lords looking to destroy the deep state — precisely because the truth, that a geriatric congress and the wolves that dominate wall street are earnest in their beliefs, is so damned boring. Like the would-be influencers taking selfies on showroom floors to pass off as their own homes, so many of these keyboard warriors have made a fantasy to believe so the world can be disbelieved.
Sitting in that theater, watching this gnostic epic for the first time, it served as a beautiful metaphor, not for some insane belief that whole political parties could be full of pedophiles or that vaccines would be loaded with microchips, totally deranged ideas that are sincerely held today as a kind of mass psychosis, but as the experience of living in a completely different way — like the ones not succumbing to QAnonsense or, as we’ve since learned, that the film was also a trans allegory.
The film’s most obvious interpretation, however, was as a Christian allegory, with Neo becoming the central messianic figure who seeks to help others see the world as it presently is: overwhelmed and corrupted by a colonizer (alien) empire which exploits the people and uses them to power the supremacy machine. This makes today’s red-pilled memes deeply ironic, as they all serve to further empower existing empires, memed alongside images of dictators and Death Stars. An actual red-pilling would help us see the exploitation, not advance it.
This is what the Bible does for many who engage with it — helping us recognize that it is, as Brian McLaren describes it, “the collective diary of an indigenous people who saw what the colonizer mindset was doing to humanity, to the Earth, and to her creatures.” It is about responding to the pain and exploitation at the heart of colonizing, at the heart of empires. The red pill doesn’t reveal a fantasy of human batteries, but the supremacy of a colonizer mindset, full of selfish, willful consumption.
“[The Bible is] the collective diary of an indigenous people who saw what the colonizer mindset was doing to humanity, to the Earth, and to her creatures.”
— Brian McLaren
When we see that our work is to live in harmony with the cosmos, the colonizer mindset, with its supremacist ways, makes humans look like parasites and the many eras of crusading Christians become just like the hated Babylonians and Romans — the antagonists of the story. Which makes the memes and politics we’ve wrestled with for the last decade something far greater than ironic or accidental. They are quite intentionally blue-pilled, intentional and willful distortions, because Crusaders want supremacy, control, power, domination. Politicians who adopt a crusader mindset are rejecting the fundamental vision of Jesus while offering one that is utterly unrecognizable as Christian when we read the gospels.
The vision Jesus offers is a revitalized worldview that is both consistent with Hebrew teaching and generous to those outside of it. And he tells us that it can be summed up with a single word: love.
The “sin of empathy”? Nope. Love. In fact, check out the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12). Not just empathy, but mourning, protecting, peacemaking with those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
In a society that condemns the poor and the weak, that exploits our people as it does our common natural resources, which privatizes pain and treats human needs as profit centers, can you see how a different vision becomes necessary? How Jesus offering us a red pill that matches his dream of God would allow us to see, not just what’s wrong, but how much better things could be?
We love more when we love — when we choose to love rather than hate. We have more happiness when we build happiness in our world. We have more justice when we build more justice. This should be obvious, but people have always needed reminding that fire doesn’t put out fire — and neither does gasoline or dry timber. Control doesn’t yield freedom nor does pain yield joy.
To live, we must actually live.
Life isn’t easier with a sensitive heart and a life-giving mindset. But it feels more real, more connected to what we want and who we desire to be. And it helps knowing it is literally the only way to make these things work.
Be well,
Drew
Daring Read: Life After Doom
This is a reflection from my journaling as I read Life After Doom by Brian McLaren; a book that starts at the end and then talks about after. If you want to join with me, read along (I wrote up the schedule here). Or join the weekly Zoom check-in or in-person office hours for those who live local (or want to visit!).
On the Podcast
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Yeah, it’s been awhile, but I’ll do one soon!
In the most recent episode, I suggest that the idea that something being called “controversial” doesn’t necessarily mean that it actually is. And who benefits from this lazy label. You can also catch it on YouTube.
Over on the blog
I explore why we always get so distracted by the cost of the celebration that we forget the point is to celebrate.
Here is a sermon for Sunday about the prodigal sons (yes, there are two of them!) — and describe what it is we actually are doing in the Eucharist each week.
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Well said.