For three hundred years, Jewish Christians, Jewish rebels, and Christians from Europe, Africa, and Asia gathered in secret, challenging the dogma and hegemony of pagan Rome. They met in caves and in homes. They wandered the villages, towns, and cities of the Roman Empire. The people would feed, clothe, and shelter them, the preachers, organizers, healers, and prophets. When exposed, ratted out, fingered, and sold to the constables, the legionaries, and the local authorities, they met certain death. On the cross they were crucified; with iron pegs nailed into their arms, left to die in the heat of the desert sun. They were stretched on the rack and on giant wheels until every bone broke and every muscle and tendon tore. In Jerusalem, and cities with a large underground support of the Christian and Jewish rebel movement, the local authorities demanded city residents stone early Christians to death. Their brethren killed them one pebble at a time, hurling insults and small rocks, with the blade of a short sword at their backs and the eyes of the Legionnaire, a Rabbi, and a local merchant gazing out to make sure city residents killed the Christians with relish and enthusiasm. They were fed to the lions, where Romans and imperial troops ate, drank, laughed at the bloodshed of gladiator games and death by wild beasts as part of the week’s entertainment, like UFC fighting, boxing night, or the daily news cast of bunker busting bombs bombarding the middle east.
But the movement spread. They chopped off the head of John the Baptist. In the year 33 or there about they captured and crucified Jesus Christ. He didn’t die. He rose. His disciples continued to preach the good news throughout Jerusalem, and even when captured, they preached the gospel of human brotherhood and solidarity to their torturers and jailers. In 70 A.D., a generation later, the children of those Jews who witnessed the first wave of the Christian movement rose up against the Roman Empire. Pushed on by the Zealots, a militant underground political organization not afraid of armed struggle against Rome, a coalition of Jewish forces battled Emperor Titus, leading to ultimately the siege and destruction of Jerusalem and destruction of the second Temple.
Another generation passed, and a revolt began in Egypt, Cyprus, and Libya, in the Kitos revolts of 115-117 AD in the Jewish diaspora. Again, the movement was repressed. A generation further and the Bar Kokhba revolt was ultimately crushed by the might of Rome. An estimated 500,000 Jews were killed, the remaining enslaved or exiled, scattered in hiding across the Roman empire, and east into Asia.
Jewish Christians, the legend has it, were non-violent. Like Martin Luther King, Jr and Mahatma Ghandi they believed in brotherly love, healing the sick, self-reliance, equal opportunity, and non-violent civil disobedience to convert the oppressor through their own moral authority to the side of the oppressed.
It took another 150 years. The Jewish Christian resistance movement converted Roman subjects, Africans, middle-easterners, Asians, and Europeans; prophets, saints, disciples, and believers, from Gaul, Spain, Egypt, Syria, Britain, to Rome herself.
In one of many faction fights among the Cesars of Rome, with the rebel movement growing in size and scope no matter how much repression, deaths, inquisitions, and persecutory investigations, Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity.
Over the decades, Constantine decided to make his version of the powerful social movement and theological doctrine the only one that his subjects could worship and follow. Appropriation of religious movements into something that upholds state power and twists and deforms and flips upside down the theology of liberation.
Did Christ win Rome to the rebellion? Or did Rome appropriate and disfigure God’s law, making a mockery of early Christian theology?
Did the ideology of non-violence civil disobedience win over the justices of the state, the Warren Supreme Court, and bring about mass desegregation in the 1960’s? Or did Capital merely transform again, replacing Jim Crow with mass incarceration, a racial caste system, and another wave of immigration that replaced the working population of the previous peoples who rose up against the segregation state?
A new general Constantine was in a war with his rivals in the pagan nationalist movement in the eastern United States.
The pagan nationalists, ideologies always malleable, contorted and reimagined by the power structures wielding the tools of propaganda, thought control, and incessant indoctrination. Ideology was secondary. Power came first.
The centers of power were the interests that dominated the nation. Real estate. Military power. Oil wealth. Finance. Agriculture. Across the continental divide one could find their bases of power, the citadels and towers in an island metropolis, the pentagram office complexes overseeing domestic military branches, foreign warfare operations, and over 200 military bases spread out across the globe, buttressing a river that divided the national security establishment of the southern side and the halls of lobbyists and standup comic reality tv elected representatives to the north. The oil fields of Texas’ Permian basin were his enemies’ buttresses, their foundation of support. With control of a vast evangelical army, a coalition of pagan nationalists, cultural warriors, corporate raiders, old money financiers, and white male misogynist racists, they put up candidates, to the military, the judiciary, and officials in the deep state’s psychic police in Langley, Virginia.
Constantine lived in the wicked west. He came from money and was indebted to money for his rise. Supported by the liberal oligarchs of San Francisco, including Salesforce, Oracle, and Google, he didn’t exactly represent the technological surveillance state and army of apparatchik overseeing the social order. He wanted power independent of them. So, he turned to the language of social justice, of workers’ rights, and corporate racial diversity to triangulate between the enterprises that put him in office and the vast underground of slaves and serfs with their multigenerational aspirations to live free with dignity. By balancing social forces, he thought he could build power for himself.
He put a black woman prosecutor up for vice President. But the tides turned, and she was running for President now, with another man at her flank. What would he do to maintain his grip on a west beset with drought and wildfire?
She lost. The pagan nationalists won. Would he try for power again?