Release the Rancid Reservoir and Dig a Brand New Well

on using the master's tools, like Christianity & religion

Maybe we’re never going to fully tear down the master’s house. Maybe we’re never going to fully out the old.

Maybe the new gets layered over the old by degrees and half-measures and one beautiful, laborious story at a time.

Share the vision widely enough, get enough others to buy into the new fiction, so that you can cover over the old, cover over part of the old, fill in gaps in the old, create new edges of possibility in the old.

Make the revolution irresistible.

I sing my kids a Bright Eyes song as a lullaby. The Bottom of Everything. An excerpt:

We must take all of the medicines
too expensive now to sell;
set fire to the preacher
who is promising us hell.

Doesn’t it feel so-very-Gen-X?

Very this-or-that, us-vs-them, out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new?

Enough with that dualistic angst. I don’t want my kids repeating lines about setting anyone on fire. For any reason.

Instead we can release the rancid reservoir.

That wisdom tradition got a bit polluted, didn’t it? Lots of people getting poisoned by that body of water now. Time to release it. Time to destroy the dam; drain the reservoir. Release those old attachments. Let the stream run wild again; let the delicate displaced ecosystems and populations regrow. It gave more life, fostered more entangled interbeing, when it was small and free. Before it got captured; redirected; dammed and swollen and stagnated to serve the needs of empire.

Time to dig a brand new well.

The future appears by degrees.

We discover it, invent it, story-tell and consensus-build and conjure it into existence, one possibility at a time. We layer it onto what already exists; a new city over the ruins of the old; saplings over McMansions over old-growth.

Christianity, religion—these are for sure the master’s tools. Tools of empire. Tools used largely to oppress, to control, to justify all manner of genocidal violence.

But as Alnoor Ladha says in the video linked at the top, in our current context, we’re not going to be able to amputate Christianity (he said this of capital). The master’s tools may be the only ones that people understand. “So instead of trying to amputate it, how do you work with it?” How do we “co-opt, Jiu-Jitsu, hack, dismantle existing structures, and use that system—including capital, including rationality, including…” Christianity & religion?

For Christianity, this makes me think of smaller, more humble manifestations of the belief system.

It makes me think of Nathan Evan Fox’s Hillbilly Hymn:

Or Jordan Smart’s Who Would Jesus Bomb?

It makes me think of Sophie Strand’s book, The Madonna Secret (about which admittedly I’ve only regrettably listened to interviews so far) and her thoughts about the illiterate Aramaic storyteller:

And the “decolonize for Jesus” work of Sarah Augustine.

Both excellent, challenging books for readers of all worldviews. Check out the books, the newsletter, and the podcast.

Release the rancid reservoir. Don’t try to amputate the whole belief system. Work with it; transform it; use its own logic to denounce its violent impulses. Don’t leave all biblical interpretation to the wolves.

This is not work for everyone. I’m not sure it’s for me. But I’m grateful to everyone out there doing it.

And religion as a whole? Can we co-opt that tool of empire more broadly, beyond Christianity? Can we dig a brand new well?

I think that’s what we’re doing here. I think that’s the stream I’m trying to tap into. The work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, of Richard Powers, of The Emerald and Sophie Strand and The Great Simplification. Of Joanna Macy. That’s the political-spiritual practice—praxis—that Alnoor Ladha speaks of.

We’re digging a brand new well. The spiritual complement to our political work.¹

Let’s co-imagine it. Let’s co-enact it.

Thanks for being here with me, friend. Can’t wait to see where you take this.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.

1. Sorry to disagree with you, Sophie Strand, I think for many of us or at least for me the distinctions between “spiritual” and “religious” continue to feel a bit arbitrary; a bit dependent on who you ask. I’m continuing to use the words “religion” and “spirituality” as more-or-less interchangeable.