Liturgies of Flesh

Below is a repost from an essay published in Church Life Journal, which riffs off my book Redeeming Flesh: The Way of the Cross with Zombie Jesus (Cascade 2016).

One of the hosts of The Eucatastrophe podcast remarked on air that the rhythms of the liturgy act as a form of resistance to capitalism. In particular, in being so repetitive, the liturgy resists capitalism’s drive for perpetual innovation.

Many decades before podcasts ever existed, and a continent away, a scene unfolded that was beamed into televisions across the country. It was a scene from an episode of the Walking Dead entitled “Them.” A roaming band of survivors of a zombie apocalypse are holed up in a barn, surrounded by “Walkers.” The group band around Rick Grimes, a former police-officer and unofficial leader. Grimes tells the survivors to do what is necessary to survive, which meant presuming themselves to be dead in order to live.

Rather than erect a wall between themselves and the undead outside, Grimes says “we tell ourselves “we are the walking dead.” The scene culminates in the band pressing up against a worn out barn door, trying to stop an incursion of undead. Intermittent lightning strikes reveal the faces of the zombies on the one hand, and the survivors on the other. Over time, the face of one becomes indistinguishable from the other.

Though made years and continents apart, these two examples are profoundly linked—liturgy is that link. I argue that the zombie is not only a pop culture icon—one that will be more in our face than usual as Halloween and the compulsory trick-or-treating approaches. The zombie is also a highly potent cultural critique. The zombie and the survivors enact this critique by being protagonists of a liturgy, a “liturgy of the zombie,” one that mimics but ultimately parodies the liturgy of the Eucharist mentioned in the podcast. At the center of these two liturgies is flesh, divinized and devoured.

Flesh

In focusing on liturgy, capitalism is not let off the hook. For if flesh lies at the heart of both liturgies, then capitalism is caught up in both because of its peculiar relationship to the flesh. For capital needs flesh to extract surplus. However automated the global economy has become, flesh is still deployed in order to keep the system humming, whether it is pressing a button, maintaining machines, purchasing a product, or selling a body.

To do this, capital must first commodify flesh and turn it into an economic unit to be exchanged and managed. We see this commodification most immediately in turning workers into units of labor, bank and insurance accounts. What we do not see, however, is the subtler outworking of this commodification, one that is more immediate to the liturgy of the zombie. This is…Read the full essay in Church Life Journal.

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