Soon after reading the striking words, “… every empire is evil,” in Ray Daniel’s book Grace Over Guns (my review of which some of you have seen here) I started working on this article. Rev. Daniel went on to assert that the U.S. is an empire. As such, it “shares the moral failings of all empires.” And now, the U.S. has a president who acts like an emperor (my words, not Daniel’s).
There is a long
history of the U.S. being considered an empire, and that was considered
meritorious. In a 1785 letter, George Washington praised New York, calling it
the “Seat of the Empire.”
According to my
A.I. buddy Claude, this use of empire is “unambiguously positive—a
term of pride tied to size, wealth, influence, and status as a center of
commerce, culture, and innovation.” Consequently, after the U.S. defeated Spain
in the Spanish-American War of 1898, Great Britain began to express pride that
its former colonies had become a world empire.
After the U.S. acquired
colonial possessions of its own, Britain no longer saw America as a resentful
ex-colony but as a fellow imperial power with shared interests. That stance of
the U.S. as an empire was justified by President McKinley and his supporters.
A little over three
decades later, the Empire State Building was constructed, completed in a
remarkable 13½ months in 1930-31. At that time, it was the world’s tallest
building, and it was so named as a monument to the identity and global stature
of the Empire State, New York.
But beginning in
the 1960s, the word or concept of empire began to be called into question,
and the glamor of empires became greatly tarnished.
When the
U.S. Empire Became “Bad”
By the 1960s
most of the 20th century empires of the world had fallen. Empire had
become morally discredited and anti-imperial movements were global. Thus, in
the shadow of a global collapse of empires, to much of the world, the U.S.
looked like the last Western empire trying to hold back Asian self‑determination
(in Indochina).
Civil rights
leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. linked racial injustice at home to imperial
violence abroad. In “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” his April 1967 speech
at Riverside Church in New York City, MLK charged that the U.S. was “the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Recently, in
addition to Daniel’s negative views of empire (mentioned in the first paragraph
above), last year Herald Press also published Kat Armas’s book, Liturgies
for Resisting Empire. Ms. Armas was born in Cuba, so she knows something
about the evils of empire because of how it affected the country of her birth.
In her first
chapter, “Resisting Empire, Embracing Joy,” Ms. Armas cites words from “Christ
in the Rubble,” Munther Isaac’s Christmas 2023 sermon that went viral. Rev. Dr.
Isaac is a Palestinian Lutheran pastor, and in that sermon, he spoke with
prophetic urgency against what he calls “empire theology.”
Isaac insists
that Christ is found not in the triumphs of empire but in its ruins, among the
wounded, the displaced, and the silenced. His witness turns lament into
resistance, calling the church to stand where God stands: with those crushed
beneath the weight of empire.
That is Ms.
Armas’s position: standing against the imperialism of the U.S. and Israel and
for the Palestinians who have suffered so much, and who are continuing to
suffer although the media spotlight has now shifted to other matters.
What about
the U.S. Empire Now?
The current
POTUS seems to embrace an imperial mindset with he himself being the most
powerful emperor in the world. We have seen what he has done in Venezuela, and how
he has profited by his imperial actions. And we have heard his imperial musings
about Greenland, Panama Canal, Cuba—and even Canada (the possible 51st
U.S. state!).
But regardless
of when or where it is, as Dr. Diana Butler Bass posted on her Substack account
on August 22, whenever or wherever it is, the evil of empire “is always the
denial of the dignity of human beings, demeaning them, and treating them with
no grace, mercy, or empathy.”
_____
Note: Next month U.S.
Empire: A Handbook, edited by Mischa Honeck and Mahshid Mayar,
will be released. It synthesizes recent historical scholarship on the U.S.
as an imperial power and probes fierce contestations over the place and meaning
of empire in US history at this time when the U.S. is renegotiating its
position as a leading actor on the world stage.
