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    Kingdom Vs. Empire
    Kingdom Vs. Empire
    Kingdom Vs. Empire
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Kingdom Vs. Empire

    By David Benjamin Blower

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    About this ebook

    David Benjamin Blower's first book was devised as 100-odd pages of liner notes accompanying his latest musical output. But what he and musical comrades the Army of the Broken Hearted have been communicating for years, on stages and in alleyways throughout Birmingham and the UK, found new, vociferous life as it spilled into the written word. Kingdom vs. Empire emerged as an explosive manifesto for politicised faith in 21st Century Britain.

    The book reads with the boiled-down intensity of Biblical prophets, painting an apocalyptic social critique and appealing for an integrated spiritual response. No words are wasted.

    Fuelled by the theological and philosophical ideas of St Augustine, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Wink, Paulo Freire and Walter Brueggemann, still the book draws overwhelmingly from familiar Biblical texts. Accessible in its universal relevance, it is a book written to awaken the faith of everyday people to action.

    This book presents a bleak vision of the social, political and spiritual powers of our time: the society-draining power of our economic system and the sexually oppressive power of our mass culture. Categories of right and left are discarded as defunct. The Biblical categories of Kingdom and Empire are recovered to cast a truer and more empowering light on contemporary British life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Benjamin Blower
    Release dateAug 30, 2013
    ISBN9781301850020
    Kingdom Vs. Empire

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      Book preview

      Kingdom Vs. Empire - David Benjamin Blower

      Kingdom vs. Empire

      By

      David Benjamin Blower

      Copyright © 2013 David Benjamin Blower

      All rights reserved

      Published by Minor Artists at Smashwords

      All Biblical Quotations are taken from the NIV translation unless otherwise specified.

      Special thanks to Kate Blower, Joel Wilson, and Lizzy Piffany for their suggestions and editorial assistance.

      Contents

      Introduction

      1 Take Back the Space

      2 Asleep for a Long, Long Time

      3 Trouble in the Empire

      4 We’re Not Going to Buy It

      5 We’re Going to Drag Our Burdens Through the Streets

      6 Ride That Beast

      7 Judgment

      8 O My People

      9 The Tyranny of the Giant Faces

      10 Repentance is the Revolution

      11 Wake Up Dry Bones

      Epilogue

      Kingdom vs. Empire

      Introduction

      This book was originally conceived as the liner notes for the album of the same name by The Army of the Broken Hearted, which you may have also. Having released a fair amount of work as a musician in the last decade, I had arrived at the dispiriting conclusion that, under the current powers, music had become a feeble mountain to preach your message from. It certainly now seems ridiculous to try and convey ideas of substance and change on a pop record, even if it's an alternative one. While we may be doomed by our nature and passion to continue being musicians in a time when music has become a sacred space for the trivial and unimportant, we will at least do the best we can with the situation. I decided to drag this lame mountain-top up a different mountain range, to see if that would help. A record multiplied by a book: media squared.

      Before too long I have to say I found myself far more engrossed in this short book than in the record that it was supposed to be a handful of notes on. It's perhaps no longer a record with liner notes so much as a book, with a musical guide if you get stuck. You can think of it either way around, as you like. If one isn't so much to your taste, perhaps the other will say it to you better.

      The record in question is not a totally arbitrary collection of songs, but a fairly coherent set of ideas (or so they seem to me) progressing toward a very particular conclusion. The questions are roughly these: what are the power structures that dominate the lives of everyday people in this, our moment of history? And can we, the everyday people, bring change of any kind? If so, how?

      No doubt those who are upset by anything that smells of religion will know whether or not they want to brave this book by the time they've finished the first chapter. And the religious will know by the same point whether their sensibilities are likely to be overly disturbed. This is a piece of social criticism and a piece of theology, and the two are in total reliance on each other. For this book, it couldn't be any other way. I'm convinced that this kind of critique, consciousness and action – whether it be as explained here by myself, or by one of the various others who explain it much better than I do – to be of critical importance to anyone who wants to understand this moment of history, and who dares to contemplate altering its trajectory. The issue here is as pivotal for the religious as it is for the non-religious, since both camps currently stand equally and pitifully co-opted, neutralised, excluded from history, and rounded up in the ghetto of self.

      * * *

      I want to be able to say that The Army of the Broken Hearted was never meant to be a mere band in the first place, but I'm not sure if that's really true. We were indeed a band of some kind, stuck somewhere in that hell for mediocre music acts – the lower rungs of Birmingham's music scene. It was a futile arena in almost every way, but most notably we were aware that nothing we said seemed to matter in those places, and that the audience themselves mattered even less. They were the lesser part of an equation that added up to almost nothing anyway. They existed to buy drinks and we existed to get them there. And all this was packaged in a shabby emulation of mass culture's tired out rock and roll spectacle.

      We had bigger ideas, and not particularly musical ones. We wanted the Areopagus right here in Albion. We wanted to reawaken the public sphere in the city. We didn't want an audience, we wanted a people. So, using what we had, we took our music to public space – to the alleys and bridges, the buses and monuments and finally to the high streets. We let people join in and ruin the songs. We posed the questions and problems of our moment in history to our people. We had discussions and sometimes arguments. We made friends and we made enemies and we tried to love them both. We wanted to reclaim public space for the public, to re-awaken public discourse, and to make way for a culture that truly comes from the public, in an age when culture is manufactured and sold to the public by industries.

      We were influenced somewhat by Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash and Tom Waits, yes, but perhaps all the more by Marshall McLuhan, Theodor W. Adorno, Adam Curtis, Paulo Freire, Walter Brueggemann, and to reach back a bit further, St Augustine of Hippo. But undoubtedly, from the start and before, we were influenced most heavily by that strange and radical arts collective, the Biblical prophets. They were artists who were concerned, not with their own success in the least, but with the life of their people. They were not concerned with abstract notions, but with the questions of their own moment of history. Their work was never a finished thing in and of itself – it categorically insisted that only the people could complete it, for good or ill, with their own response or the lack thereof. They were writers, performance artists and musicians and they filled public space with every kind of noise and furore. They were social critics of the most biting kind, and at the same time, of the most compassionate kind. And perhaps most pivotally of all, their social critique came not from a soup of perspectives or a genealogy of ideals, but from the consciousness of a war between two sides that simmers under the surface of ordinary life. Their allegiance to one side inevitably made them rebels and dissidents in the eyes of the other, and so they themselves became thin places, points of transparency, where the hidden dialectic could all of a sudden be seen by all. It is in this spirit that we act.

      * * *

      When engaging in the practice of dragging our burdens through the streets (as discussed here in chapter 5), a variance of dialogues with people often emerge. One of the predictable and not-so-thoughtful questions that comes up a lot when making a show of dissent against mass culture's more misogynistic imagery is, are you gay? I'm sure this is

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