On Christmas and the Nuclear Imagination

The waiting game up until Christmas, called Advent, is a season of play of light, expectation, surprise, and subtle hints of hope. The brilliant dark of winter, the stars, the rumblings of carols all sing of a parched and frozen earth looking for warmth and heat (at least such is the case in the snows of my beloved North Dakota prairie). The season is one of trained waiting, of anticipation of hope, about impossibly hopeful paths emerging in the quotidian of our daily lives. Advent is, in some ways, about the surprise of a future in the midst of dead-ends.

I have been searching long for words and text to express feeling in this Advent season. Its been a fall and a winter of waiting and lament. Much of our political discourse continues to feel like a dead end. The policies expressed by the incoming administration in the United States fly in the face of the hopes of Gospel. Much has been lost this year by many of us: people we love, artists who inspired us, relationships that helped to make us who we are into the present moment. I find difficulty in knowing where to begin writing some days. But some words in our political discourse must be challenged and called out for the dead-ends they offer.

This past week, on December 22nd, President-elect Donald Trump called for an expansion of nuclear arms capability first over Twitter and then in other outlets , and I find myself in sitting in horror at this nuclear imagination. He argued that the United States nuclear arsenal would outshine the rest of the world (as if it didnt, already). On MSNBC , Trump argued, Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.

Many dangerous logics inform the President-elects words. The words express a desire for security and securing a future of power against unnamed threats. The argument is common in the United States and around the world. Political power likes to imagine enemies and justify the means of violence for protection from them. Gun rights lobbyists make this argument a personal level: We need more guns to prevent violence. That argument expanded to a national frame expresses itself in nuclear imaginations, violent and racist manifestations of policing, and military industrial complexes. That logic is one of violent power and self-preservation at the expense of the neighbor. And that logic is false, deadly, proven wrong and ineffective time and time again. The United States lives a gun crisis unheard of in the rest of the world and a military imagination that flows out and contributes to a globalization of that crisis. The call for further development of nuclear weapons is reckless, risks inciting more violence, and the level of destruction such weapons can bring about is not only personal but planetary. To call for a nuclear arms race is to call for a possible future slaughter of the innocents, human and nonhuman who live their lives in creative love.

Theologians have long challenged the desire for the planet-burning light of nuclear armaments. Paul Tillich called for resistance to nuclear destruction on all levelspolitical, personal, and spiritualin his address on The Hydrogen Bomb. Sallie McFague rewrote theology for a nuclear age arguing that relationship and friendship should constitute our contemporary models of God and Christian life in our current moment. Others write with similar theological passion. Such models would challenge the political desire and power of destruction represented in the flash of a nuclear bomb.

In the days leading up to Christmas, I cant help but hear these calls for a false sense of security and power in light of the gospel narratives. The desire to secure power is a very old temptation, riddled with bad decisions. Herod fears challenges to his power and his political might by the rumors of Jesus birth and resolves a nuclear option. In the Gospel of Matthew, that Herod calls for a militarization and preemptive strikethe murder of innocent childrenhoping to wipe out the threat. The actions mean to secure Herods future political power, to outlast them all. He imagines an enemy and innocents suffer at his calls for violence. Terrible actions are justified out of the anxiety of political insecurity.

Joseph Sittler wrote the words that cling in my mind this Christmas. Addressing the World Council of Churches in 196 1, the Lutheran theologian argued that, Ever since Hiroshima the very term light has had ghastly meanings. But ever since creation it has had meanings glorious; and ever since Bethlehem meanings concrete and beckoning. Advent is about imagining different plays of light and hope in our contemporary moment. There seems no stronger juxtaposition, then, than the light of a nuclear military set alongside the light glistening in a babys eye in a cattle shed.

The advent of Christmas imagines power and security in ways that challenge the fundamental values of the nuclear imagination: Instead of weapons, nativity. Instead of violence, wonder. Instead of power, care. Instead of fear, hospitality. Instead of animosity, friendship. Instead of the silencing of innocent victims, singing. Instead of scorched earth, the joyful cries of sheep and shepherds. Instead of dead ends, the light of hope. Instead of destruction, creativity. Instead of death, birth.

The call for further nuclear weaponry in the United States is tantamount to risk a call for a future slaughter of innocents. Trump and the military industrial complex surrounding his nuclear imagination argue for a story that could eerily mirror Herods. For Christians the question is which light is more beckoningthe raw power of nuclear death and false security it sells or the beckoning light of childlike wonder and hospitality in a nativity in Bethlehem. That nativity shimmers in the brilliant darkness of our hearts, calling us to practice advent through and in the face of destruction. We do so with faith, love, wonder, lament, protest, and justice.