Liberation theology is back in business. After decades of official censure (including from the present pope, in earlier guise), the big narrative of Christian theology is once again one of liberation for the poor and the oppressed. Salvation is not some private transaction between the individual and God, it is a public story in which the oppressed find freedom in the here and now.
Theology, so liberation theologians insist, is a practical business and not an intellectual exercise. This is Jesus as half Marx and half Moses. Forget academic theory, angels dancing on pins, sterile arguments about God’s existence, the church’s obsession with clothes and buildings. Instead, think praxis: good news to the poor, freedom to the captive, sight to the blind. Doing is believing. And from the favelas of São Paulo to the shantytowns of Johannesburg, it rejuvenated Christianity by returning to its revolutionary roots.
So why was it that these Palestinian Christians were having none of it? We were sitting in a cafe in Ramallah, close by the Kalandia checkpoint. Despite the fact that my Palestinian friends were constantly on the lookout for hermeneutic resources that might aid in the struggle against Israeli occupation, they seemed extremely reluctant to align themselves with liberation theology.
It was only when we started talking about Moses that the scales fell from my eyes. From a western perspective, the Exodus story is the primary text of the biblical cry of freedom. The African slaves who sang spirituals in the cotton fields of America would link their suffering to that of the Jews under Ramses II. Thus, for instance, they sang: “Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s land, Tell ole Pharaoh To let my people go.”
But from a Palestinian perspective, one person’s liberation is another’s slavery. The very story African slaves told each other as the story of their anticipated liberation is, according to Palestinians, at the root of their current occupation. The slaves come out of Egypt and into a land promised them by God. And, for Palestinians, this promise is responsible for their military subjugation, for walls and settlements. How can a Palestinian Christian admire liberation theology in a world of “Guns ’n’ Moses” T-shirts?
I went to see the new Exodus film the other night. And yes, Batman playing Moses and Breaking Bad’s Jesse Pinkman playing Joshua was a bit freaky. But the thing that really puzzled me was why Egypt, along with several other Arab states, has banned it. If anything, I thought it remarkably unsympathetic to the Jewish story. The Hebrew God comes across as a petulant psychopath, and Moses as a born-again loon. Indeed, when God starts murdering Egyptian infants, I find myself emotionally on the side of the Egyptians – which is not how Passover stories are supposed to make you feel. Short of agreeing with Freud and suggesting that Moses was actually an Egyptian all along, it would have been hard for Ridley Scott’s film to have disrupted the simple biblical binary of goodies (Hebrews) and baddies (Egyptians) any more than he did. And, for all the film’s multiple faults, I kind of admire him for that.
The Egyptian ministry of culture says it banned the film because of historical inaccuracies that “offend Egypt and its pharaonic ancient history, in yet another attempt to Judaise Egyptian civilisation, which confirms the international Zionist fingerprints all over the film”.
They must have been watching a different film to the one I saw, because I think that the people who ought to be most offended by this film are Jews, not Egyptians. OK, it suggests that Jews built the pyramids, which they didn’t. But as to it being a part of some big Zionist conspiracy, that’s ridiculous. If anything it seems to me an attack on Zionism.
Unless, of course, the real worry is not with Scott’s interpretation, but with the Exodus/Promised land story itself. For the part that story plays in Zionism is, as my Palestinians friends attested, a complicated one. Liberation isn’t always as neat and tidy is it seems in the movies.
