Killing the Buddha have reproduced Nathan Sneider’s “No Revolution Without Religion: Why the Occupy Movement Needs to Occupy Religion” from n+1’s Occupy! The OWS-Inspired Gazette (issue 4).

There was a flash of wisdom in Occupy Wall Street’s controversial and otherwise unsuccessful attempt to occupy a plot of land owned by Trinity Church on December 17 of last year: if the movement is going to last much longer, it is going to have to occupy, and be supported by, faith. By “faith” I mean religion—the more organized the better. “Hey, church,” one could almost hear the Occupiers saying, as they mounted the giant yellow ladder over the fence and dropped down on the other side, “act like a church.” And, this being just a month after the eviction from Zuccotti Park, “We need you.”

The Occupy movement has been largely a white, urban phenomenon, and one with a bit of a tendency toward vanguardism, which makes it not entirely surprising that it’s often blind to the fact that there is no force more potentially revolutionary in U.S. history or in the country today than religion. But the movement remains oblivious to this fact at its own peril. You who are blind, see.

On the other side of the Atlantic, left intellectuals have been starting to discover what they have to learn from religion about revolution. Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben have all written about the apostle Paul in recent years: he stood at the intersection of Judaism and Christianity and was the architect of an underground movement that eventually subsumed the Roman Empire. During the early days on Liberty Plaza, actually, I felt like I was witnessing a glimpse of how Paul described his early church: the holding of all things in common, a single-minded asceticism, and local cells miraculously spreading throughout the known world. Living in societies far less religious than ours, thinkers on the European left are realizing that the loss of religious imagination can mean losing the capacity to imagine and take steps toward a radically different kind of society.

Read the rest here.

Barry Taylor links Slavoj Zizek’s reflections on Occupy and emerging Christianity, to suggest that the emerging church is a “pregnant vacuum”, an opening for the New. The comments include another quotation from Zizek on silence (from both “Burned by the Thing” and Lacan: The Silent Partners, Verso: 2006, p.224), via Adam Moore.

This autumn, Verso will publish Slavoj Zizek’s The Year of Living Dangerously.

Slavoj Zizek writing in today’s Guardian.

John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), p.18.

I’ve been thinking about this quotation, about praying and weeping, hoping and sighing, in relation to the criticism that the Occupy Movement lacks concrete demands.

Slavoj Zizek speaking on Smiley and West.

Kester Brewin has written a couple of great posts reflecting on the occupy movement in relation to his ongoing work on Christian piracy:

“Mutiny! Why St Paul’s is the perfect place for ‘Occupy’ Protests” and

“Don’t Blame Bankers: What Alternatives are ‘Occupy’ Proposing“ 

BBC News article by Stephen Tomkins.

“This weekend, in light of the continuing protests at St Paul’s, many in the Church will be asking themselves whether they side with the protesters or the authorities.”

Guardian article by Mark Townsend, “Coalition of Christian groups plan to prevent forcible attempts to remove tents outside St Paul’s Cathedral.”

Giles Fraser’s first interview since resigning over the possibility of forced break-up of the Occupy London camp.

 Slavoj Zizek writing yesterday in The Guardian.

Last Thursday, Sim and I went to a small group discussion of the 1973 Chilean coup d’etat that ended the presidency of Salvador Allende on “the other 9/11.”

One of the participants emphasised that Chile is the perfect example of how just getting a socialist government democratically elected is not enough to transform society in any lasting way. As the group discussed the history of the Chilean revolution, it emerged that Allende’s government had attempted to appease the generals earlier that year by, for example, bringing some of them into his cabinet. This strategy of placation clearly didn’t work, ending in the military coup of September 11 1973 and Allende’s death.

We also learned that one of the strategies in place in Chile to deal with student protests today is the conscription of youth into the military, which, as another participant commented, seems to be a dangerous strategy (dangerous for the dictarship, that is) because such a conscription means that the rank and file of the state apparatus (military and police) are drawn from the same social strata as the protestors. And we wondered whether this commonality between the military, police, and protestors was the reason that the army in Tunisia and Egypt, for example, refused to use force on the protestors.

If the military and the police exist (along with the judicial courts) to prop up the State, then lessons from Chile suggest that the Revolution should seek not to appease the military establishment but to win the rank and file of the military and the police to the Cause. They will then refuse to fire on protestors, refuse to use tear gas and flash grenades, and, in this way, refuse to be the instruments of the State and the Status Quo.

Could the Occupy Movement learn from these reflections on the relationship between the Revolution and the State Apparatus? Especially in light of the violence of Oakland Police Force against protestors in California?

What does the Occupy Movement need to do to win the police and the military to the Cause?