One of my favorite B-Grade horror flicks staring former WWF wrestlers is that 1988 cult classic They Live. In They Live, Rowdy Roddy Piper stars as a butt-kicking Everyman who stumbles across a secret cabal of mysterious aliens, who have infiltrated society disguised as normal citizens, and are controlling the population through mind control, subliminal messages, and mass media. This movie was doing The Matrix before The Matrix was cool.
Truth be told, however, I’ve never even seen the whole film; there is just one scene etched indelibly on my imagination. Because early on in the story, our hero Mr. Piper discovers a resistance group holed up in a church (no coincidence, that), and there he acquires a set of mysterious sunglasses that, when he dons them, allows him to decode the messages that the aliens have plastered across the billboards, magazine covers and television screens of his world.
So, for instance, he might look at a billboard advertising the latest computer software, and it seems normal enough, but when he looks at it through his sunglasses, it turns into a black-and-white sign reading, simply, OBEY. He might look at the photograph of a pretty fashion model on the cover of a magazine in the convenience store, but when he sees it through his sunglasses, it’s a black and white page simply printed with the word REPRODUCE.
You really have to see it to believe it…
I have no idea if the makers of They Live consulted any biblical scholars when producing this film (I kind of think they didn’t) but the reason I find this obscure sci-fi fantasy flick so fascinating is because it’s actually a pretty good analogy for one of the hardest, but also most intriguing books of the Bible. I’m talking here about the Book of Revelation.
We’ve been spending a fair bit of time over the last month at terra incognita unpacking conspiracy theories (as an epistemological phenomenon, not particular conspiracy theories), and up until now we have avoided getting too deep into the Book of Revelation. But I would be remiss, as a Christian pastor talking about conspiracy theories, if I didn’t at least give Revelation a nod in this discussion. This is because, on the one hand, conspiracy theories of the Christian variety tend to be intricately, almost inextricably tied up with the Bible’s apocalyptic writings. I have seen any number of Christian conspiracy theorists, for instance, offering to explain how such-and-such a political leader is really the Beast of Revelation, or how UPC Codes, G5 towers, debit cards, or vaccinations are really a fulfillment of the prophecy about the number of the Beast, or how this or that development in geo-politics is really the machinations of some secret society pushing us towards Armageddon.
The problem with using the Book of Revelation to shore up your conspiracy theory like this, is that the conspiracy theorist who does so is kind of right, but not quite, and not at all in the way they think.
This brings us to the other hand. Because the Bible’s apocalyptic writings actually do help us to discern, and understand, and respond to the “stuff of conspiracy theories”—the machinations of political powers, the manipulations of corrupt economic systems, the dehumanization of omnipotent technology—all of it. The problem is that most conspiracy theories that draw on the Book of Revelation to speculate about the existence of an Illuminati (let’s say) or whether [fill in name of political leader here] is really the Beast, are working with a fundamental misunderstanding of how biblical apocalyptic actually works. Consequently they tend to misread the news, and do violence to the biblical text, both at the same time.
So as a primer in how biblical apocalyptic works, might I refer you to Rowdy Roddy Piper’s “decoder glasses” in They Live. Because what we see here is that the conspiracy, such as it is, is hiding in plain sight. All it takes is something (a set of sunglasses…. a highly symbolic biblical text…) to decode it for us. The adverts and the social media feeds and the economic systems that you take for granted—and this is the key, you accept them as normal because they are normal in your society—that’s where the real conspiracy lies. If only you could see them through the right lens.
A full exegesis of the Book of Revelation is impossible to do in a 1000-word blog post, but suffice it here to say that all of the dark imagery—the idolatrous beasts and the multi-headed dragons, the scarlet Jezebeels and the 666s written on people’s foreheads—all these trace back to specific aspects of everyday life in the Roman Empire: Caesar, and the worship of Caesar, the Imperial Genius and the exploitative economic systems that gave it life, the military conquest and dominance, the pagan idolatry. All of these things were the kind of stuff that your average citizen in ancient Rome would have simply assumed was the way the world turned, systems of government and politics and economics as normal to them as 1st of July celebrations and regular garbage pickup is to us. What the Book of Revelation is doing is peeling back the façade of these things to show—not another human conspiracy—but instead the spiritual reality that lies within these everyday things.
That “Caesar” whom you worship so willingly on your way to temple (Revelation seems to be saying) has a spiritual dynamic to his office, a spiritual entity indwelling his office, even, and whatever else it is, that spiritual entity is best imagined as a demonic beast hell-bent on devouring the world. It’s like putting on a pair of sunglasses and realizing the billboard really says OBEY. Suddenly you see for the very first time that thing that was always there.
I’m wording this very carefully. Because Revelation is not saying (I don’t think) that Caesar himself was the Beast. If it were saying that then you’d have every license in the world to use Revelation to concoct no end of modern-day conspiracy theories. But Revelation is saying something more subtle and more important than that.
There is a bestial power at work within all our acts of “Caesar making”—every human effort at empire building—and this "spiritual power” is the real problem. This is why the early Christians could denounce Emperor worship, in one breath, something they did every time they confessed that Jesus is Lord, but in the very next breath they could enjoin their followers to honor the Emperor (1 Peter 2:17). Because they understood that the mere human being named “Nero” wasn’t the real enemy; the real enemy was the bestial “power” that indwelt Nero’s authority and office as Caesar, the “powers and principalities” which every Christian knows are the real adversaries (Eph 6:12).
That last reference to Ephesians 6 is especially helpful here. In this verse Paul makes it crystal clear that for a Christian, no human being, be they Caesar or otherwise, is our enemy, and it is a failure of Christian courage to make it out as though they were. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” he says, “but against the (spiritual) rulers, the (spiritual) authorities, the spiritual powers of this dark world.” Paul is doing here in shorthand, I think, what the Book of Revelation is doing at length; or rather, Revelation is an extended, poetical exposition of this basic principle. Human beings are not the enemy. The enemy is the fallen spiritual entities that indwell all human power structures, be they political, economic, technological or otherwise.
This is why I say that plugging your pet conspiracy theory into the Book of Revelation to give it juice does violence to the text. Because most every conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard starts with the premise that there are some mysterious unknown human beings in power, secretly trying to manipulate us, and because they are in league with the devil, these human beings must be the enemy. Even if there were real conspirators behind this or that modern day problem, which for all I know there may be, Revelation would ask us not to see them as the enemy themselves, but as victims of the enemy, tragic casualties of the real war. When we fail to realize this, and use the Book of Revelation instead as a way of gaining power over other people (even if they are the unseen people behind my theoretical conspiracy), we may actually fall into the Beast’s trap, playing by his rules and grabbing for his power, even as we are trying to expose him.
As an alternative, we can let the Book of Revelation be a set of They Live sunglasses that allow us to see the spiritual dynamic at work behind, beneath, and within every human power structure, and especially within those power structures we take for granted as normal. In saying this, I realize that the analogy breaks down almost immediately, because in They Live, the aliens were disguised as human beings, making people the enemy again-- but hey, that's what you get when you turn to former WWF wrestlers for your theological analogies.
So maybe we should just stick with the Book of Revelation itself. If we did, it would remind us that even the conspirators (such as they may be) aren’t the enemy. The real enemy is a spiritual one, hiding out in plain sight, and because this enemy truly is spiritual, it can only be “fought” in those ways that Jesus himself taught us to fight: with prayer, with truth, with cruciform humility, and with self-giving love.
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