The Social Death of the World

Reflections on the Lectionary for September 11th

Sociologists have a phrase, “social death,” that describes what it’s like to be on the outside of social structures. Social death happens when a person is no longer thought of as fully human by other human beings, and they aren’t accorded the rights and dignities that human beings might otherwise receive from each other. Social death can describe people in prison who have their very basic rights and protections stripped away from them, with the approval of broader society that comes from a sense that criminals deserve no rights—that they are “animals,” or otherwise subhuman. Social death is part of the dynamic when tent cities pop up alongside high-end retailers or in public parks, and their unhoused occupants are either ignored by the rest of society or violently chased away. Social death arises from racism, sexism and misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, xenophobia, and other forms of social boundary-making that puts some people outside the borders of humanity as defined by a majority. It pushes some people to the margins to make other people feel more secure in themselves by creating and enforcing a dichotomy of persons and nonpersons, humans and nonhumans.

The lectionary for September 11th has a lot to say about social death. Most of the texts for this week, but especially the gospel reading from Luke, begin with the assumptions that status and behavior can reliably sort people into categories, with some categories of people being worthy of respect and attention, and others not. These passages are playing with our innate understanding of social insider-ness and outsider-ness, and dancing around those boundaries as a way of talking about how God works in the world. This leads to some troubling moralizing, but also to some even more troubling theologizing.

In Luke 15:1-10, there’s a familiar setup: Jesus is hanging out with some of his coreligionists and colleagues (Pharisees and scribes, who despite centuries of Christian interpretations were far closer to Jesus’ allies than his enemies), and Jesus is also hanging out with “tax collectors and sinners.” The categories are front and center here; the whole crowd is divided into a) Pharisees, b) scribes, c) tax collectors, d) sinners, and e) Jesus. The conflict in the story is that the people in categories a and b think that Jesus’ association with people in categories c and d is illegitimate. (It’s not clear whether the opposite is true, but it might well be). Take away the religious layers from this story, and it could describe nearly any situation within a group of human beings: colleagues in a workplace, kids in a middle school, politicians appealing to their base, people walking down the street. It’s less a story about Pharisees and tax collectors, and more a story about human nature. Tax collectors were unpopular figures for obvious reasons (they collected taxes, which no one is really thrilled about), but also for less obvious reasons (they were said to extort people, and they collaborated with the Roman Empire in its occupation and domination of the land and people). A kind of social death attended them; their work made them unpeople. “Sinners,” meanwhile, is a more general term. The Greek word here carries connotations of not only behavior but social death; the great Greek dictionary BDAG defines it as “pertaining to behavior or activity that does not measure up to standard moral or cultic expectations,” and adds that “being considered an outsider because of failure to conform to certain standards is a frequent semantic component.” So “sinners” probably locates these people on the outside of whatever social structures groups a and b sought to maintain. We can use our imagination, and assume that many of the same factors that make us think of someone as an outsider might have been part of things 2000 years ago too: race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religious affiliation, etc.

Jesus’ response to their boundary-drawing is curious. He unleashes a rhetoric of lost-ness. Instead of arguing that the categories are wrong, and that there ought to be no such thing as a social death that removes someone from society, Jesus argues that the “sinners” with whom he associates have simply wandered away, and need to be brought back. Jesus doesn’t challenge the legitimacy of the dividing line, but instead challenges the permanence of people’s locations on either side of it. He tells the parable of the 100 sheep, in which the one sheep rightfully belongs with the other 99 but has simply temporarily wandered off. The solution, in the parable, is for the shepherd to find the one and reunite the 100. The norm and ideal is total unity. Likewise, the parable of the lost coin understands that the rightful place for the tenth coin is alongside the other nine. Jesus makes the comparison explicit in verse 10: when sinners repent, heaven rejoices, because it is like the one sheep or the one coin being rejoined to the rest, where they belong. Social death isn’t necessarily an unjust social structure, in this passage, it’s simply a fact of the world and a useful set of guardrails to help keep people on the right path.

Something similar happens in this week’s reading from 1 Timothy. The author (who likely isn’t Paul, but is someone writing in Paul’s name and tradition), describes themselves as “formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” who “acted ignorantly in unbelief.” The author describes receiving “mercy” and “grace” that led to “acceptance” and salvation. This puts the writer’s life first on one side of a divide and then the other—first firmly in the category of “sinner” and then later in the company of the saved. Psalm 51 puts forth the same dynamic (and 51:10 will be familiar to anyone who, like me, grew up with praise songs in 1990s evangelical subculture and the kinds of social death that were floating around that scene). Psalm 14, too, presumes the dichotomy between sinners and the righteousness that comes from God. This week’s lectionary is full of examples of the biblical text cosigning society’s ways of dividing people and excluding some part of them—excluding them from participation in meals and conversations, excluding them from righteousness, excluding them from salvation. Personally, I would wish that the text fight against those kinds of structures existing at all, but instead, it treats them like a cautionary tale: you don’t want to end up like those people—like sinners.

With all of that in mind, look at the passage from Jeremiah. The lectionary lists Jeremiah 4:11-12 and 22-28, but the middle missing verses, 13-21, fit the theme pretty well too. Try to read it as a passage about social death, and see what emerges. “For my people are foolish,” God says through the voice of Jeremiah, “they do not know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good.” Here is another linkage of behavior (sinfulness, evildoing) and status. But in this passage, it isn’t other human beings who are enforcing social death, pushing some categories of people out of society and into nonhumanity. Instead, it’s God, and the death is not simply social but also environmental and territorial. The earth “was waste and void,” the heavens “had no light,” the mountains were quaking, all the birds had fled, and “the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD, before his fierce anger.” God, in this passage, is so infuriated by human waywardness that “a hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my poor people, not to winnow or cleans—a wind too strong for that.” God becomes the chief enforcer of the boundary, and God consigns the people to a kind of social death, at least where the company of the divine is concerned. God will no longer associate with humans, and seemingly with that choice having been made, God will no longer sustain the earth to sustain them either. The destruction of society is accompanied by a destruction of the earth, all because God needs to teach us a lesson.

These days we hear a lot about the entanglement of environment and society, and how a breakdown in one brings on a breakdown in the other. We live in a time of environmental destruction brought on by a changing climate—mega-fires (like the Bush and Bighorn fire near Tucson, pictured at the top of this post), mega-droughts, more frequent and intense floods and hurricanes. These environmental catastrophes lie easily over social cataclysms like racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. (Here’s a great book that I have an essay in, on the subject of water and environmental racism). The consequences of natural disasters are not equally distributed, but they rest most heavily on communities that have already been marginalized, and that already experience a kind of social death. Wealthy people can spend their way out of danger, but the poor and excluded always suffer most.

The biblical tradition links the destruction of the earth with the degradation of society and morality, from start to finish. The expulsion from Eden and the requirements of labor in Genesis are an outcome of human sinfulness, and Revelation is a fantasy of violence and destruction brought upon the earth by God as a punishment for wickedness. In between, passages like this one from Jeremiah underscore that the consequences of human fallenness are visited on the world. Although we might not ascribe such direct divine action to flooding in Pakistan or drought in Europe or wildfires in Australia, it has become common to tell the story of such modern disasters as a tale of human culpability. We live in an age that sees the kind of “hot wind” that Jeremiah anticipated; “the whole land shall be a desolation” isn’t far from what shows up on our weather apps or our news stations.

I wonder if the difference has to do with purpose. In biblical texts like Jeremiah, environmental destruction is often a teaching tool—it’s meant to show human beings how to live more justly. Fire and flood are leveraged in the bible to teach us to do better; just think of Noah’s flood or the parable of the sower. In our own time and place, fire and floor are not so much warnings as they are reminders that we have already failed. Ecological disasters are markers of the social death of the world; our world is diminished and degraded as a sign that we have excluded it already from our company. For generations we have treated the earth as a commodity and not as a neighbor, sending it out like the 1 sheep from the 99 or like the 1 coin from the 9, and only too late are we recognizing that we belong together with the earth if we want to remain whole.

Still, if the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin tell us something, it’s that separation never has to be permanent. Social death doesn’t have to be irrevocable. Reconciliation is possible, and what 1 Timothy calls ignorance in unbelief can be remedied and reversed. We can show each other mercy, and we can restore some of what has been lost in our relationships with each other and with the earth. The last word in the Luke passage—the final word of Luke 15:10—is a common one in the New Testament, metanoeo. It means “to repent,” in the sense of turning back from wrongness and embracing a new path. It has to do with changing your mind and behavior alike, and with a radical reconfiguration of direction and priority. Luke’s Jesus says that there is rejoicing in heaven when that happens, but the litany of destruction in Jeremiah suggests that the earth rejoices in the turning too.