I promised Joe Bageant a while back that I’d have a shot at his post “Redneck Liberation Theology.” He was kind enough last week to send me a copy of his new book Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. I just finished it, and I’ll post more about it shortly. But for now the Great Redneck God.

If you haven’t read any of Joe’s stuff, you ought to. I won’t embellish it anymore than that. If a good Southern story teller is a kind-hearted bullshit artist (Joe, did I get that from you?), then Joe is a kind-hearted bullshit artist who doesn’t bullshit. So go read some Joe.

What Joe wants, I think, from his redneck liberation theology is no less than a new Jesus. I don’t think he knows this, but the signs are all there.

We are, Joe and I both believe, living in a new age of Empire. Instead of bread and circus we have what Joe in his book calls “the hologram,” that 3D matrix of sedating media, financial spectacle—see either Enron or the lottery nearest you—and purchasable identity. (I buy mine from Target. Sorry, ChaliceChick!)

If you want to read all about it, and I mean that in a Harvard Square sort of way, you can read Empire and Multitude, or browse over to Hermenaut to read up on fake authenticity.

You’re already bored out your tree reading all these damn footnotes, so I’ll cut to the chase now. We lived in Empire then, and we live in Empire now. By “then” I mean during the so-called “Axial Age,” those five or ten centuries when all the big religions sprouted up. (Just to throw in another footnote, Karen Armstrong can fill you in about that.)

In all those spots where religion popped up, it was in response to the alienation and oppression wrought by Empire. We start to see folks like Jesus and Buddha laying out new ways of crafting a self and being in relationship with one another.

Karen Armstrong wonders if we’re entering a new Axial Age now. Joe lays out a good case as to why it would be good if we were—we look to be entering a new feudal era now. White collar folks make good livings for themselves financing and lawyering and educating in service to Empire, and everyone else gets pushed into heart numbing shift and service work. Or as Joe puts it in his book:

The people hwo have gained the most from [Empire] are the most to blame for its destruction, particularly the upper middle class and the affluent suburban classes that serve the administrative needs of the empire—it’s commissars, lawyers, public accountants, and stock brokers. These are the catering classes, the men and women whose identity is granted them by the corporation, the brand for which they work…In much the same way that old-line fascists dutifully served the state, so the catering classes, both liberal and conservative, serve the brutal American brand of market capitalism. Without them, none of it could possibility work.

Or again, this time about “the hologram:”

From inside the hologram there is no history, no memory, no way to equate the tribute rendered to the credit card companies, the insurance companies, the IRS, the power cartels, and the home mortgage banks with the kind of debt bondage they actually represent. Yet we must pay such tribute to be allowed to survive in our society, even if that tribute is a trailer payment at usury rates or alowing a credit card company access to our medical insurance payment history.

That’s enough blockquoting for this post. But you get the point.

There is always resistance to Empire; we are not passive objects upon whom Empire works its will as it pleases. But Empire almost always wins. It always has. Every great once in a while a Gandhi or King or Mandela wins. But not usually.

I sometimes wonder how we’d be thinking of Gandhi or King right now if they hadn’t been so familiarized to us by the mass media. Or throw in Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, Che Gueverra, whoever rocks your boat. Maybe we have new Jesuses and Buddhas, but they’ve just been branded as warm fuzzies.

We’re not out of the woods yet though. You can’t organize your way to a new Buddha. You can’t write your way to one either. And that’s what me and Joe know how to do, which pretty much sucks for us. That leaves us with a lot of sitting around and waiting.

So what are two white boys with wordy gurdies and Scots Irish roots to do? I’m reminded of a certain voice in the wilderness shouting, “Prepare the way of the Lord!” And even, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

I’m all about that, but I’ve got to go get ready for that trip to Portland.