If all goes according to plan, this will be my final writing before the 2024 election.
I find myself not only anxious about the election itself, but about what might be coming after.
So, instead of political election talk, I’d like to turn to societal and theology talk.

It was probably in the early 1990s that I first stumbled on the cult-classic film, “THEY LIVE,” by John Carpenter. It was late at night, I was at home, bored in my apartment, and it probably came on something like early Cinemax or Showtime. I was mesmerized by both is campiness, and also it’s social commentary.

I want to talk about “THEY LIVE” today, because the closer we get to this election the more the “Overstory” of “THEY LIVE” feels like where we are in our world right now.

“Overstory” is a word I’m borrowing from Malcom Gladwell’s new book, “Revenge of the Tipping Point.”

Gladwell himself borrows “Overstory” from ecology. But, for him, “Overstories” are a kind of meta-narrative, that shape not just our thoughts, but also our actions. They are stories we believe, that tell ourselves, about how the world is. I think they must be very close to what I often call “meta cultural metaphors.”

“THEY LIVE” was released in 1988, in and around the election of that year. The “Overstory” of “THEY LIVE” is a world in which a race of “Others,” horrifically disfigured aliens, secretly controls everything. Except, (much like the later “Matrix” series) most folks can’t see it.

Only when the protagonist (a nothing-man literally named “Nada”) puts on special sunglasses he sees the horribly disfigured creatures, hiding in plain sight. The sunglasses help him “see” what is really there.

These creatures are slowly taking over the world, while the world sleeps, blissfully unaware. As writer Eileen Jones describes it:

“…the film is known for its wonderful device of the special sunglasses that, when put on, enable the wearer to perceive the reality that most can’t see. It’s a stark dystopia controlled by colonizing aliens who ideologically overwhelm the colonized with subliminal messaging. Every surface is covered with messages such as “OBEY,” “CONSUME,” “MARRY AND REPRODUCE,” “DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY,” and “STAY ASLEEP.”

But, with those glasses on, the viewer can see all this.

And what they see is: Living among us are hideous inhuman creatures, destroying our world secretly and day-by-day, from the inside.

It’s not hard to see how this is an “Overstory” for how almost everybody behaves today. Increasingly in our political discourse, we see people describing political opponents increasingly stark and non-human ways.

It happens so casually now that I fear we don’t even realize how often we all do it.

MAGA people are called “deplorable” or “irredeemable” by the left.
Conversely, immigrants are “vermin” by the right.
George Soros is apparently taking over the world, and somehow related to every living Democratic power broker alive today(1).

The “Overstory” that I see loose in America is as follows:

Almost everybody has a pair of sunglasses they have been given by “Team Red” or “Team Blue” (credit: Ezra Klein). And we see the world through those binary choices and those different “team” sunglasses. Naomi Klein’s (no relation to Ezra) recent book on this called “Dopplegander,” where she suggested that there is a bizarre “mirror world” at work on both “sides” of our political debate.

There is a “Team Red Overstory.”
There is a “Team Blue” one.

But for my purposes today, I only want to note the commonality…that both Overstories increasingly “see” their opponents not just as adversaries, but as “enemies.” Almost like horribly disfigured aliens, secretly taking over our world. By these last sentences, I mean what average, ordinary Americans seem to be taught to see through our own versions of subliminal messaging

As a Christian, there are two teachings of Jesus that come quickly to mind. The first, is Jesus’ reminder that it is not our job to judge our neighbors (or even our “enemies”); but instead it is our job to love them.

In this world, Jesus says very clearly, “The Wheat And The Tares” (read: “Wheat and the Weeds”) are supposed to grow together.

We are not meant to separate to into geographic, cultural, and political islands. But that is very clearly what we HAVE been doing over these past 50 years. We are balkanized and divided —and I know this gets trite to say it—like no time since the Civil War.

Except now, the “Teams” are not differing states.
Every “Blue State” has 20-45% Red team members.
Every “Red State” has generally the same percentages in the other direction.

And yet, we all pretend we live in divided cultural islands, when in fact we are actually growing together like wheat and “weeds.”

To whit…
Here in “liberal” East Dallas, there’s a Trump sign, just down the block; while on a rural Van Zandt County Road, I recently saw a large Harris banner, hanging off the cattle gate.

Our divisions run “hot,” but they are not “clean” like geographic states would be. They are messy, and the wedges divide even people who live next to each other.

The second teaching of Jesus that comes to mind is Jesus’ concept of “Incarnation.” We see it most clearly in his parable of the last judgement.

“When you love, serve, and the least, lost, and left out,” Jesus says… “you do it to me (read: Jesus).”

Loving others is literally loving God, Jesus says. This is the mirror Overstory-opposite of seeing my opponent as an evil enemy. Our call is to see the incarnate God in all persons, whomever they are.
Nobody is a “vermin,” and nobody is a “deplorable.”

These are the kinds of slurs that poet/philosopher Sam Keen correctly identified decades ago as our all-too human ability to “Otherize” our adversary into “our enemy.”

But, spiritually, God calls us to see God in all people, places and things.

ALL people.
ALL places.
ALL things.

It is hard?

Hell yes, it’s hard.
It’s the hardest thing God asks us to do.

Because this Otherizing tendency is not just a “bug” in our system…it is a feature of our being a human being.

This is always, Sam Keen believed, a theological journey. Yes, we have cultural differences with people in the real world. But not until those differences become theological do we see the “Other” as a non-human evil.

In his book “Faces of the Enemy,” Sam Keen’s poem, “To Create An Enemy” basically tells you the Overstory of his book in a few lines of free verse.

Here it is:

“To Create An Enemy” by Sam Keen

“Start with an empty canvas
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and
Dip into the well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and
stain the strangers with the sinister hue
of the shadow.
Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
your own.
Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.
Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every finite heart.
Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.
Strip flesh from bone until only the
abstract skeleton of death remains.
Exaggerate each feature until man is
metamorphasized into beast, vermin, insect.
Fill in the background with malignant
figures from ancient nightmares – devils
demons, myrmidons of evil.
When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.
The thing you destroy will have become
merely an enemy of God, an impediment
to the sacred dialectic of history.”
(from the book: “Faces of the Enemy”)

This is what Fascists do best. It’s also what those, on either side of political debates in our country, for as long as we’ve been a country, have done to a lesser extent to try to stir up the electorate during election season.

The Overstory of Keen’s book is that our enemy-making has a purpose: So human beings can go to war. Because unless and until the enemy is sub-human, an animal, a “vermin,” they cannot be killed without guilt or shame. This is where politics and religion form into religious nationalism.

In my own mind, my own theology and spiritual life, this the deepest of all of our human “Overstories.”
I have previously suggested that it might actually be the best candidate for what “Original Sin” really is.

This is what we humans do. (Again: not a “bug” we can “remove” from the system, although technologists and some in science continue to foolishly logically assert we can…that’s too logical a fix for flesh and bone creatures).

Otherizing is a feature of who are human beings are. We are —deep in our spiritual, cultural DNA— tribal. And our tribal spiritual DNA demands we Otherize. (This, I believe, is also what the science of “implicit bias” is telling us)

For much of world history, this spiritual DNA was activated by external enemies. (National ones) Every war between nation states or empires, for as far back as you can go in history, repeats this enemy-making process.

For Americans in World War II, “the Japs” were subhuman…which is why we could round up innocent Japanese-Americans into concentration camps.
More recently, combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq were called “Towelheads” or worse. The horror of Abu Ghraib should have been a metaphor for just how deeply entrenched this enemy-making process had become in young soldiers, during that war.

Sam Keen believed the good news was this: That it is actually very hard for human beings to decide that whole classes of humans are “subhuman” or “vermin” or “the enemy of god.”

That is why we have to train soldiers so thoroughly; and conversely also why they have troubling “coming back from the war” once that training is buried deep inside of them.

For Americans, our external wars allowed us to believe the “enemy” was “always over there.”

This was the primary point of Keen’s book, in the era he was writing. He was looking globally. We was looking at the war propaganda that every nation produced about it’s “enemies.” Here is an image from the original book, and here is a long essay I once wrote about it.

But we always had “internal” enemies too. And this is my point today. The disfigured, subhuman enemy-making process can be turned inward. And, increasingly, this is what America is doing to itself. Please understand, we always had perceived-internal “enemies.” But as our politics have become more harsh, divided, and even crass these past five decades, the rhetoric increasingly manifests itself into human behaviors in the real world.

African-Americans have always been an “enemy within” to many White Supremacist Americans. From the time of enslavement, through Jim Crow, and most definitely into the present day, the Otherizing of Black people has been part of American culture.

“Communism” became an “enemy within” during a broad swath of the 1900s, and fear of communist monsters among us survives into the present day.

But in my mind, starting in the 1980s, Americans increasingly have turned this spiritual weapon on each other with greater regularity. This is always done in the attempt to bolster the splits between “Team Red” and “Team Blue.”

Gay and lesbian people leaped to the front of the line in the 1980s, and stayed as the “enemy of choice” through much of the 1990s. Transgender people are being made a specific boogyman target, right now.

In the 1990s, both political parties adopted the dangerous language of “Superpredators” which was mostly meant to describe an “enemy within” that was really just young Black men in the 1990s. It was a trope to suggest they should be incarcerated at higher rates.

Interspersed, all along, have been a simmering fear and anger toward Immigrants of all sorts, from many countries. But most explicitly, the “immigrant enemy” has been seen through the lens of Latinos from the southern border.

I mean, just look at the movie poster from “THEY LIVE.” It’s literaly the kind of rhetoric we hear in actual political ads, right now:

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV.
You might even vote for one this Fall.
You think they’re people just like you.
You’re wrong. Dead wrong.”

As you know, Donald Trump has recently been using the fascist language of “the enemy within.”

But words like these have consequences. People start to believe the Overstory…that there really IS an “enemy within.“

Again, the important caveat here is I am talking about how these Overstories affect average Americans.

Are there shadowy networks, plotting to take over our government.
Why, yes there are.

We literally just hosted a screening of “Bad Faith” at Kessler Park UMC, that helps unpack the dangerous Christian Nationalism of the “Relgious Right.” And when you first see it, it is indeed like being given sunglasses that help you see what is beneath.

But what is beneath all of this are other human beings….not vermin. They are flesh and blood, just like you are. Dehumanizing each other can lead the thoughts about “vermin,” turn to violent action.

I think back to just after September 11th, where White Texan, Mark Stroman, was so angry with all Muslims, that he randomly targeted brown-skinned convenience store workers in my city. One of them was my friend, Rais Buiyan, who thankfully survived….but suffered horribly because of being blindly Otherized by a White man in the wake of 911.

But back the “internal enemy” tropes and this election.

There is literally a Donald Trump ad running RIGHT NOW that tries to combine three of these tropes together! An actual Trump ad, right now, suggests that Harris supports transgender surgery for immigrants in prison.

I literally laughed out loud the first time I saw it, because of how ridiculous it was…and because of how UN-skillfully it tries to fear monger three issues at once!

1. Trans people.
2. Immigrants.
3. “Tough on crime” prisons.

My snarky brain wonders: If you really think Trans surgery is harmful and dangerous, wouldn’t you WANT it done on “immigrant vermin” who are locked up a “super-predator prison?”

Please read this last sentence as bitter and snarky sarcasm, born of deep anger and sadness for the way real-life Trans people are being Otherized RIGHT NOW.

That very tiny sub-minority of Americans is being pummeled by horrific rhetoric about their alleged evils.
And it’s not right.
It’s twisted and sick.
But it’s just the latest incarnation of this long, horrific Overstory of American enemy-making within our borders.

But…there’s another part of the legacy of “THEY LIVE” that helps us see where we are today. The original “Overstory” —the one John Carpenter intended us to “get”— has been coopted or claimed by people from the exactly opposite political and social side of the spectrum.

Writer Steven Hyden noted this a few years back. He wrote:

“…head down any number of online wormholes and you’ll discover that skeptics of all political persuasions have embraced the allegorical significance of They Live….if you remove that original context timely to 1988, it can apply to any supposedly fascistic regime—whether you’re against Barack Obama, or Donald Trump, or a more subterranean world order that controls both political parties.”

As it turns out, “THEY LIVE” has now been embraced by White Supremacists and radical leftists, and any number of commentaries in between…all of whom see their own “Overstory” in the metaphor of sunglasses that help you see the truth, and monsters who secretly rule the world.

All of this has baffled and angered John Carpenter.
He didn’t “intended” any of these alternate “Overstories” for his film. He had a very specific point he was trying to make, originally.

“I made They Live back in 1988, and nothing has changed! Everything has stayed the same. Reaganomics has continued to flourish. . . . The problem is unrestrained capitalism. It’s worshiped and adored by everybody here. Well, not everybody, but a lot of people. It’s unbelievable, and I’m scared. I’m just scared of the future.”

Carpenter intended the film to be an Overstory about the dangers of the Reagan era. I’m sure it will not shock you to understand that the general world-view of his original overstory is one I also shared. I too believed folks were “asleep” during the 1980s…an era where our slide into infotainment culture began.

But, flash forward to today, and White Supremacists and the Political Right now have flipped that Overstory of conservative monsters, and made them into liberal ones. A White Supremacist once said of “THEY LIVE” that they had “probably seen it 100 times. It breaks down everything!”

As Stephen Hyden notes, by 2013, the film’s own star (Roddy Piper) had completely severed the original leftist Overstory that John Carpenter intended, and was appearing on ALEX JONES’ show, saying the film was “kind of the Cliffs Notes for what’s going on.”

Eventually, and I know this won’t surprised you, antisemites embraced the “THEY LIVE” Overstory as a metaphor for Jewish Control…or Liberal Control…of innocent people on the political right.

This all horrified John Carpenter. On multiple occasions, he took to social media and other venues to lambast the cooption of “THEY LIVE” by the Right.”

Carpenter intended a story about “Yuppies” and unrestrained Capitalism.

But, like all art, once you let it go, it’s kind of out of your hands to control people’s interpretations. (Yes, I guess I just called this film, “art.”)

I feel sorry for John Carpenter. This actually happened to me as well when, once upon a time, a conservative hearer of one of my sermons told me it reminded him of Rush Limbaugh…
My jaw dropped.

This again gets me to Naomi Klein’s book, “Doppleganger,” where she asserts that there seem to be two “mirror worlds” at play in our society. This came out of her own experience of repeatedly being confused with a conservative commentator also named “Naomi” who drifted into the vaccine-denying world of conservative commentators. Meditating on that led Naomi Klein to see that the “war on facts” in our world is actually much deeper…it’s a cultural division of how we see realty itself. Every part of culture now has its “Doppelgangers,” it’s mirror opposite…like seeing the other side as the monsters withing America.

As more evidence of this… I think of two recent podcasts that I’ve been binging.

One is called “Charismatic Revival Fury.”
It details the Christian Charismatic leaders who were at the heart of the January 6th Insurrection. It’s well worth your time.
It talks about the kind of Christian Nationalist leaders, and the conspiracies they believe, who portray leftists as evil and godless.

But…the other podcast is “Conspirituality.”
This podcast (and brilliant book) looks at the spiritual practice of the far left. It notes how many practitioners of “healthy living” yoga culture, and alternative spiritualities actually helped spread COVID denialism, and to this day routinely traffic in left-leaning “conspiracies.”

This gets at the heart of what troubles me about our time. Because the lack of faith in facts isn’t just coming from Alex Jones’ on the right, it’s also coming from the Robert Kennedy’s of the left.
Distrust of institutions is at an all-time high.
From your garbage collector to those who will count the votes in two weeks, Americans distrust our systems.

And so, into this hot mess of a confusing cultural stew, we find ourselves two weeks from an election.
And where does that leave us?

In a hell of a mess, my friends.
A hell of a mess….

Here’s what I see.

I see the possibility of post-election violence as very real.

As clearly as I can say this…I don’t want that…nor do I believe saying I fear it is irresponsibly willing it into being. Quite the opposite. But America tells itself opposing Overstories that each “side” believes to be indicate an “enemy within.”

Trump’s followers have been fed the message that he only way he can lose is if the election is stolen.
But, we must say, there are far-left activists who want, or at least assume political violence, should Trump win.

I don’t believe the folks who “want” violence are large groups in either direction. But great fires can be set from small sparks, especially if nobody trusts the institutions that are supposed to tamp them out.

And so the questions front of my mind…to either scenario is:

How will this play out, in a world where both sides see “The Other” through their enemy-making sunglasses?
Have we devalued and degraded each other to the place that Civil Was is actually possible?
Isn’t there another way?

Mass violence, regardless of the result this election, would be a horrible outcome. But increasingly I am hearing folks on both ends of the spectrum who assume mass violence almost certainly will happen.

I am hearing people assume they will have to move…or relocate…to some “friendlier” part of the country depending on who they are.

Liberal friends talk of moving to Mexico, or Colorado…
Conservatives talk about “Greater Idaho” or even here to Texas…

When I hear these things, my question is: WHY DOES ANYBODY HAVE TO MOVE ANYWHERE?
Maybe the assumption that we do is our first problem.

I come back to Jesus’ parable of the Wheat and Tares(weeds).

Depending on which team’s glasses you wear, the “Tares” are a totally different group. But Jesus would say that doesn’t matter. What matters is that, whomever your “enemy” is, God calls us to live together in this life.

God calls us to “see God,” not an evil enemy, in ALL people…not just those on our team.
God call us to love our neighbors.
And in the parable of the Good Samaritan, God clearly reminds us that our “neighbor” is always the one we think is our “enemy.”

Far from killing them, far from calling them vermin, far from eliminating anyone, we are to love all God’s children…as we also love our own family, or our own team.

Is this HARD?
Yes.

Does it feel almost impossible?
Yes.

But I don’t know anything else to do on this beautiful October day, but put down these thoughts.

Our Overstories are…just that…stories.
We can change them.
They don’t have to be inevitable.

I have said many times that we are in a fight against Fascism in American right now. This election is a part of that fight. And even assuming a Harris win —which I do not today— these issues will still be with us for some time.(2)

If Harris wins, I’d guess we’d still face several more elections where the threat of Fascism would be very real. (I have been telling you the fight against fascism will last several election cycles…)
But, also if she wins, the threat of violence from the right is absolutely real as well.

If Trump wins, I fear that those who credibly fear for their lives and our collective futures under increasingly facsist rule, will also be led to immediate violence as well. Again, some far-leftists seem to want to “burn it down,” and a Trump win could give them that excuse.

One more time, I continue to believe those to want violence are a very small group on both ends.
I believe those who fear it…from either side…are a much larger majority. And this gives me some hope as well.

——————————————

Gustavo Guttierez died yesterday. He was an OG “Liberation Theologian” whom I studied in college. He wrote that God has a “preferential option for the Poor.”

When I first read him, I thought he was a wacko. I argued with him fiercely in my journals, and in my head. He disturbed my world greatly. My world needed disturbing.
But I later came to deeply appreciate the move he was trying to make.

Are there systems of oppression that keep down the poor and marginalized?
Yes, of course there are.
And we should help dismantle them.

But my own mentor, Dr. Bill McElvaney and others, helped fill in Liberation Theology for North Americans…by noting the ways in which our hierarchical system oppresses even the most privileged as well. True liberation of the oppressed makes space for the salvation of the oppressor too.
(Hint: This is the power of the Vader/Luke Overstory in Star Wars….)

God wants a world without the lesser and the greater…
Without cultural, religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities being used as political footballs by the powerful…
God wants freedom for oppressor AND oppressed…

God wants us to understand that the story of Jesus was supposed to be a Messiah who came to destroy the dynamic of “redemptive violence,” not one who came to reinforce it and turn it a Holy Overstory.

Jesus’ Gospel was about breaking down the “tribes” of his day, and calling all people to see each other as God’s Children, not God’s Enemies.

A place where wolves lie down with lambs, and immigrants feel safe among White Men.
Where Trans people are not this year’s “leper.”
Where nobody sees anybody as deplorable, irredeemable, vermin, or an enemy within.

We are a looong way from all of that.

But whatever happens November 5, I’ll be here preaching that Gospel…come what may.
And in the meantime, I pray for every single person in our nation, every day.

——————————-

(1)Twice this week, I’ve been forwarded a 2019 meme that is coming around again…that claims the Clinton’s, Pelosi’s, and Gavin Newsome all have marriage ties to Soros. NONE of that is true…but it’s being believed and shared right now…

(2)I don’t assume a loss, either.