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Easter: Resurrection as Archetype, Not Empire

Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus (yes we’re skipping over the birthday stuff), traditionally seen as the cornerstone of Christian faith. For many, the resurrection has been co-opted. Instead of liberation, it has often been used to justify colonization, epistemicide, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

Elaine Pagels suggests that resurrection should be understood as an archetype, not a literal event1. In Miracles and Wonder, she shows how early followers used resurrection narratives to inspire hope, not doctrine. Texts like the Gospel of Thomas centered inner transformation over external authority, contrasting sharply with the hierarchical Christendom that would follow.

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The archetypal resurrection is not simply a story of one man rising, but a collective pattern of rising again and again, from oppression, from despair, from death-dealing systems. The myth holds power not because it proves a historical event, but because it points us toward spiritual truth: that liberation is possible, even in the face of empire.

Christ was real. He lived, and he died, but he lived so fully, so fiercely, that his community refused to let empire have the last word. In the face of brutality, they told stories not to deny his death, but to defy its finality. They said, “He never died,” not because they believed in physical immortality, but because they believed in unbreakable spirit. These resurrection myths became a form of hope, reverence, and resistance, a sacred refusal to let empire define the end of the story.

From Christ to Christendom: The Co-optation of a Movement

Christianity began as a radical, inclusive resistance to empire. It uplifted the poor, healed the sick, and confronted injustice. Jesus was a brown-skinned Jewish mystic and revolutionary living under Roman occupation. His message threatened empire. But as history has shown us, empire always adapts. It doesn’t just fight resistance, it absorbs it, repackages it, and sells it back to us.

Over centuries, Christianity was transformed into Christendom: a system of domination cloaked in sacred language. Christendom turned a faith rooted in humility and compassion into a mechanism for conquest and control. This transformation wasn’t random. It was powered by several interlocking forces:

• Evil, as Steven Bartlett defines it, is not merely intentional harm, it’s systemic. It results from psychological immaturity and a society that rewards detachment, domination, and narcissism2.

• Old Happy, according to Stephanie Harrison, is a toxic, performative model of happiness rooted in capitalism and perfectionism3. It teaches us to suppress our humanity and pursue image over substance.

• Epistemicide refers to the erasure of entire knowledge systems through colonization, particularly Indigenous and non-Western ones4.

• Necropolitics is the sovereign power to decide who may live and who must die5.

• Wetiko is a mind-virus of consumption and domination, as adapted by Paul Levy from Algonquin teachings6. It turns us into spiritual cannibals, devouring others for power.

• Yurugu is a term coined by Marimba Ani to describe disembodied, conquest-driven Western logic7. It severs mind from body, soul from society, and ethics from empathy.

Together, these logics created a theological regime that replaced relational spirituality with rigid hierarchies and justified conquest with holy language.

Christendom: When Power Becomes Doctrine

Christendom was never about spiritual liberation. It was about domination. It criminalized pluralism, silenced ancestral knowledge, and exalted state-sponsored theology. It decided whose lives mattered, and whose could be sacrificed for God and Country.

The Christ it preached was no longer the revolutionary healer. It was a sanitized, militarized idol made in the image of empire. This was not about saving souls. This was about building kingdoms. It offered not salvation, but subjugation.

Under Christendom, faith became a colonial tool. Churches blessed plantations. Missionaries baptized genocide. The cross became a sword.

I Saw the POSIWID

Some Christians argue that these atrocities were “abuses” of the faith. But from a POSIWID lens, the purpose of a system is what it does8, Christianity, as a global structure, either failed to stop Christendom or actively enabled it.

I did not vibe with Christianity my whole life because I was raised rather secular and frankly….was paying attention. What I saw wasn’t a few bad actors, it was a systemic pattern of harm, upheld by theology and enforced by institutions. The Christ many claimed to love had been weaponized. My distance was wisdom.

Ethiopia: A Sacred Refusal and a Spiritual Archive

To truly understand the difference between Christianity and Christendom, we must look at Ethiopia, not as an abstract symbol, but as a living example. Christianity took root in Ethiopia not as conquest, but as communion. It was not imported through violence. It was integrated through cosmology. Ethiopian Christianity exists as a powerful example of a faith that was never fully absorbed by empire. It retained ancestral veneration, sacred herbalism, protective magic, astrology, and a cosmology grounded in Indigenous continuity.

When European missionaries came with the gospel of empire, Ethiopia responded with refusal. It said, “We already know God, and you don’t get to rewrite our relationship.” This was not a naive rejection of modernity. It was a deeply discerning protection of spiritual integrity. Ethiopia remains one of the few nations never fully colonized, and its Christianity evolved on its own terms, refusing to conform to Western Christendom.

Ethiopia is not utopia. But it is proof. It is sacred technology in motion. It is the Christ story retold in Blackness, sovereignty, and ancestral power. It didn’t need Rome. It didn’t need rebranding. It needed only memory, place, and community.

Reframe: Not Just Theology…Tactic

Ethiopia invites us to do more than admire, it invites us to reframe. To rethink what Christianity could look like if it had resisted empire, if it had remained grounded in land, ancestors, and spiritual sovereignty.

This isn’t just a theological detour, it’s a tactical inheritance. Ethiopia shows us how a faith tradition can integrate Christ without Christendom, ritual without rigidity, and power without oppression. It teaches that spiritual identity is not dependent on colonial validation or Western ecclesiology.

In this light, the Ethiopian case study becomes more than a historical anomaly, it becomes a living map for those of us trying to reclaim sacredness from empire's ruins. A reminder that faith can be both ancient and alive, ancestral and adaptive, collective and liberating.

What Ethiopia Offers Us Now

Ethiopia offers a mirror to the world. It reminds us:

• That Indigenous spiritual sovereignty matters
• That faith can evolve without assimilating
• That rituals can be sacred and subversive
• That resistance can be liturgical

We are not asked to imitate Ethiopia, but to study it, to extract from its story the technologies of resilience, rootedness, and relational theology. It is not nostalgia. It is ancestral strategy.

Christianity’s Systemic Failure

To be clear: this isn’t about individual Christians being good or bad. It’s about systems.

Christianity as an institution, especially in its European and American expressions, failed to prevent Christendom’s rise. It failed to stop its transformation into a mechanism of empire. And often, it did not just fail, it participated.

From the blessing of colonial charters to the silence during slavery, from the defense of apartheid to the endorsement of militarism and white nationalism, the historical record is not one of passive betrayal but of active complicity.

The POSIWID principle makes this clear: the purpose of a system is what it does. If a system continually produces violence, marginalization, and erasure, then that is, functionally, its purpose. Intentions don’t matter. Outcomes do.

Universal Human Dignity and the Perils of Moral Disengagement

At the heart of Jesus’ message lies the principle of universal human dignity, the inherent worth of every person, regardless of status, race, or power.

But systems of domination rely on moral disengagement, a psychological mechanism described by Albert Bandura9. It allows individuals to justify harm while maintaining a self-image of goodness. It’s the voice that says:

“That’s not real Christianity.”
“Those slaveowners weren’t true Christians.”
“That colonizer priest didn’t represent us.”

But if these actors shaped doctrine, led churches, baptized babies, and were canonized by their communities, then the disavowal is dishonest. It’s not theological clarity. It’s damage control.

Accountability cannot begin with denial. It begins with confession and collective reckoning. The refusal to reckon is not spiritual, it is strategic amnesia. And amnesia, like silence, protects power, not people.

POSIWID, CREDs, and the Truth About Christendom

POSIWID tells us what a system really does. CREDs (Credibility Enhancing Displays) tell us what people really believe10. If someone says they believe in love and justice, but their life is steeped in domination and silence, then their CREDs contradict their creed.

In the early Jesus movement, CREDs looked like:

• Sharing wealth
• Risking persecution
• Living in radical compassion
• Healing the sick and feeding the hungry

In modern Christendom, the dominant CREDs are:

• Megachurches aligned with billionaires
• Silence in the face of white supremacy
• Theologies of prosperity, purity, and patriarchy
• Christian nationalism dressed as holiness

If a faith tradition bears fruit that poisons the spirit, then it is not sacred. It is performative, even parasitic.

InCREDulous Atheism: Disbelief by Design

A major reason people leave religion today is because they don’t see God at work in the communities that claim divine authority.

Psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Will Gervais found that disbelief often arises not from rebellion, but from lack of credible, lived belief11. When people grow up surrounded by hypocrisy, by those whose words and actions do not align, they naturally become “inCREDulous.” That is, they cannot believe, because belief requires visible coherence.

Disbelief, in this context, becomes not a rejection of spirit, but a refusal to accept spiritual fraud.

“Real Christians”: The Comfort of Disavowal

There’s a phrase I’ve heard all my life, especially when bringing up the historical atrocities carried out in the name of Christianity:

“But those weren’t real Christians.”

It shows up every time the church or a self-proclaimed Christian is implicated in slavery, genocide, colonization, or white supremacy. When a Christian burns crosses or bombs Black churches, defenders rush to clarify that this person must be “not truly Christian.” But if that’s true, why were they welcomed, taught, ordained, or canonized?

This is the No True Scotsman fallacy in action: changing the definition of a group after the fact to protect its moral purity12. It’s a convenient defense mechanism—one that protects identity but prevents accountability.

And it’s not just rhetorical. It perpetuates harm. Because if every perpetrator can be cast out retroactively, then the system is never held accountable for who it empowers, enables, or endorses. The distinction between “real” and “fake” Christian becomes a shield, not a call to transformation.

If Christianity is to evolve, it cannot just disown its abusers. It must examine the systemic soil that produced them, and ask what parts of its structure, theology, or silence allowed these actions to grow unchecked.

Resurrection Means Reimagining

To follow Christ is not to merely affirm a resurrection happened once, it is to embody resurrection now. Elaine Pagels reminds us that early Christian communities didn’t all agree about the nature of resurrection13. Many didn’t see it as a physical event, but as a symbol, an invitation to awaken, to rise, to transform.

Christ becomes an archetype, not a theological line in the sand. The story of death and rebirth is not limited to one moment in time, it is a universal pattern. It is the path from empire to liberation, from despair to possibility, from domination to shared dignity.

This isn’t metaphor as denial. It is metaphor as medicine. The resurrection is a spiritual technology, a way of speaking to what must die in us (and our systems) in order for new life to emerge.

Social Justice and the Morality of Power

Empire teaches that power equals virtue, that those in charge must be right, and those suffering must be at fault. This is the Divine Right of Kings, rebranded for neoliberalism.

But liberatory theology (Black, queer, Indigenous) rejects that logic. It knows that power is not proof of righteousness, it is a test of it. If your spirituality cannot stand beside the oppressed, then it is not spiritual, it is performative compliance.

To spiritualize injustice is not holiness, it is heresy.

Monoversality and the Logic of Empire

Modernity teaches us that matter is primary and consciousness is a byproduct, a glitch in our neurochemistry. But this dead cosmology has made us sick. It has separated soul from system, spirit from science, and life from meaning.

In contrast, sacred traditions across the globe, from African cosmologies to Buddhist insight, affirm that consciousness is fundamental. That awareness is not an accident, but the very ground of being.

Western modernity did not just colonize land, it colonized reality. It imposed monoversality: one right way to know, be, believe, and live. This logic underpins white supremacy culture: binary thinking, rigid hierarchy, and totalizing certainty.

Monoversality kills diversity in the name of order. It flattens the pluriverse into a monoculture. This is epistemicide in action, the erasure of other ways of knowing.

Marimba Ani calls this Yurugu: the hyper-rational, disembodied mode of consciousness that justifies conquest. It’s the voice of empire. It is not wisdom, it is control masquerading as coherence.

But the world is not one thing. It is many. And the sacred is not singular. It is plural.

Jesus Didn’t Come to Make Us Comfortable….He Came to Make Us Conscious

Too often, Jesus is portrayed as a mild-mannered peacemaker who just wants everyone to get along. But the Jesus of the gospels was a disruptor.

He flipped tables in temples. He called out corrupt clergy. He refused to flatter the powerful.

His teachings weren’t designed to soothe the status quo. They were meant to rupture it. His sword wasn’t literal violence, it was discernment. A piercing clarity that cuts through illusion, performative piety, and spiritualized apathy.

To follow Christ is not to remain neutral. It is to be pierced by truth.

Silence Is Complicity. Neutrality Is Betrayal. Apathy Is Empire.

James Cone, the father of Black Liberation Theology, wrote:

“If God is not for us, if God is not against white racists, then God is a murderer, and we had better kill God. The task of Black Theology is to kill gods that do not belong to the Black community.”

This is not blasphemy. It is a moral demand: that divinity cannot be neutral in the face of suffering. That religion cannot claim to be sacred while remaining silent. Anyone telling you to separate religion from politics or politics from religion is trying to benefit from your disconnectedness.

Silence maintains the status quo. Neutrality is not harmless, it is alignment with harm, it is Yurugu.

When churches refuse to speak on racism, patriarchy, or injustice, they don’t remain “above politics”, they become tools of empire. This is why we need more people to have moral courage and to develop their moral intelligence, so we can collectively beat this Evil.

Reclaiming Spirituality: Connection, Not Consumption

Spirituality is not about being “positive” or “productive.” It is about being present, grounded, and in right relationship, with self, others, land, and the cosmos.

Real spirituality reconnects:

• Self to truth
• Body to breath
• Ancestors to memory
• Ritual to purpose
• Ethics to embodiment

It is not about escaping the world. It is about self-transcendence and falling deeper into reality, awake.

Embodied Liberation vs. Escapist Religion

Escapist religion teaches transcendence without accountability. It spiritualizes trauma without healing it. It waits for heaven while hell continues on Earth.

But the great sages, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, the Orishas, did not float above suffering. They entered it. They walked alongside the poor, disrupted the status quo, confronted injustice with embodied truth. They didn’t retreat into silence or privatized piety, they participated in the world.

Their spirituality was not sanitized. It was subversive.

They did not see “political action” as separate from sacred responsibility. In their view, justice was prayer. Liberation was liturgy. To be spiritual was to be in right relationship, with community, with land, with power, and with the suffering of others.

They remind us that to turn away from injustice is not neutrality, it’s betrayal.
And to spiritualize disengagement is not holiness, it’s abandonment dressed in robes.

Embodied liberation is about bringing spirit into the body, justice into the system, spirit into the street. It’s about bringing back visible CREDs and living with integrity.

Christ as Archetype: Pagels and the Sacred Pattern

Elaine Pagels reminds us that Christ, for many early Christians, wasn’t just a historical figure to believe in, he was a pattern to live into.

Christ as Archetype represents the movement from death to life, from ego to love, from fear to truth. Resurrection becomes not just a doctrine, but a daily discipline.

To follow Christ is not to worship a distant savior, but to practice resurrection in your own life, relationships, and society.

Pluriversality: Many Ways of Being Sacred

We reject the imperial lie that says there is only one way to know the divine.
We affirm pluriversality, the sacred expressed in many languages, rituals, bodies, and cosmologies.

Truth does not belong to one book. Spirit does not speak with one accent.
There are many names. Many paths. One reverence.

What We Need Now: A Living System of Embodied Liberation

We don’t need revival.
We need rebirth.

A new spiritual system must be:

• Flexible, not rigid
• Liberatory, not escapist
• Justice-aligned, not neutral
• Pluriversal, not monolithic
• CRED-conscious, not performative
• POSIWID-aware, not idealistic
• Culture-agnostic, not supremacist
• Self-correcting, not infallible

This is what Embodied Liberation Dharma (ELD) offers.

Not salvation. Not hierarchy. Not purity.
But a living, breathing framework to build lives, communities, and futures that embody the sacred in action, not just in name.

Because divinity is not about worship.
It is about relationship.
It is about right use of power.
It is about systems that liberate.

(Stay tuned to learn wtf ELD is)

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