trashing god's office
celestial CEOs in the age of mangione
No deity in human history has been studied more rigorously than the Christian God.
Before “God is dead” became inseparably tethered to Nietzsche, Hegel negotiated Christian doctrines, exploring the death of God as a means of transformative redemption:
It is only as spirit that the self has that value. The death of this representational thought contains at the same time the death of the abstraction of the divine essence which is not yet posited as a self. That death is the agonized feeling of the unhappy consciousness that God himself is dead. This harsh expression is the expression of the inmost simple-knowing-of-oneself, the return of consciousness into the depth of the night of the I = I which no longer differentiates and knows nothing external to it.1
Where Hegel saw God’s death as a bitter process of the spirit coming to know itself as a necessary step to truly knowing Him, Nietzsche’s attitude towards God’s death was an avid rejection of Him and a profound declaration of Christianity’s redundancy as a moral and philosophical chauffeur in the modern world.
This is most deftly captured by the Parable of the Madman, where Nietzsche writes of a ‘madman’ entering a marketplace, holding a lit lantern in broad daylight, seeking God. The townspeople ridicule him. He asks where God is once more before answering himself:
Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward. forward. in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as though an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too. decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.2
The ‘madman’ falls silent and so do the townspeople. He throws the lantern on the ground, smashing it to pieces.
"I have come too early," The ‘madman’ says."My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.”
A foul-mouthed, cynical God—voiced by Tom Ellis (who ironically played The Devil in the fantasy crime series Lucifer)—is pulled into a meeting by the corporate board of Heaven. They’re sending him to Earth to live among the dysfunctional Higgins family as a cat to rehabilitate him of his celestial apathy.
Exploding Kittens is the latest on-screen endeavour to allegorise Christian cosmology as a corporate structure. The disappearance of the Supreme Arch-angel Gabriel in Good Omens Season 2 shows Hell at odds with Heaven’s “head office”, a supernaturally minimalist bureau where a committee of Arch-angel higher-ups baulk, bicker and vie for a promotion in the absence of their supreme chief.
Season 1 of Miracle Workers follows Craig Bog, the sole employee of the chronically under-funded department of answering prayers. Further up the ranks, Steve Buscemi’s God shares an apathy on a par with Tom Ellis’ Godcat, albeit twinged with more bumbling incompetence. Buscemi’s God, however, is afforded a greco-romanesque back-story; we learn he is the black sheep in a family of successful deities, contending with brothers and sisters who’ve created universes far more impressive than the absurd failure of Earth and thus, we meet him as an under-achieving nepo baby, in cringeworthy receipt of cartoonish sibling mockery and narcissistic parental scathing. In Miracle Workers, all God cares about is a Laz-Z-boy.
In these portrayals, we see a hazy outline of what Nietzsche’s madman saw. The death of God not as a tremendous spectacle but as a corporate restructure of divinity.
These are not omniscient, omnibenevolent renderings of an all-powerful entity but flawed and petty cogs in a machine grander than themselves. Perhaps ‘we’ have killed the very spirit of God by assigning him a job role as we exist at a stage in civilisation where we feel our job roles are killing the souls of us.
The cinematic endeavours of yesteryear that dramatised divinity as a corporate structure reflected the cultural attitudes of yesteryear that slanting towards optimism.
If we go back to 1941, Here Comes Mr. Jordan reveals the story of Joe Pendleton—a boxer who dies prematurely. Once admitted into heaven, Joe is told by the dapper-suited Mr. Jordan (an angel with some sort of formal seniority over the other angels) that his death was a clerical error. Pendleton’s soul is ferried from body to body as Mr. Jordan—prim, proper and a principled bureaucrat, dedicates his efforts to serving Pendleton's homeless soul. Mr Jordan, it seems, reflects America’s self image—a patriotic sense of duty and grave concern for a job well done.
Where God is concerned specifically, Here Comes Mr. Jordan side steps any notion He is able to do wrong. Any mean-spirited circumstances arising in the film are never attributed to God directly, likely due to the 1930’s production code that stipulated “no film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith”.3
With the aftermath of World War II and an economic boom on the horizon, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant schema that wrangled itself into the default gaze of public consciousness simplified its own existence: war-ready men of honour, lily-white nuclear families, rewarding quotidian life, and unabashed faith in, and weekly attendance to, the church.
God, at this juncture, was a figure so respected and feared by proxy of the institutions that worshipped Him that He’d often be rendered a disembodied voice in cinema, his image often considered too sacred and costly to be dramatised on screen.
In the following decades, political ups and downs shifted the on-screen rendering of God to and fro—Reagonomics ravaged, satire soared, neoliberalism swelled, Catholic priests abused—yet an optimism about God himself stayed humming in the cultural psyche despite the turbulence surrounding Him. The sensitivity of this dynamic is best captured by 2003’s Bruce Almighty.
Mobilised by Bruce’s frenetic blasphemy, Morgan Freeman’s God is wise, supernaturally calm and forgiving in the face of Bruce’s disbelief and disrespect. Morgan Freeman’s God isn’t necessarily a CEO—though aesthetically he dons a veneer-white business suit and proves his divinity to Bruce by supernaturally extending a filing cabinet drawer across the full length of a vacant corporate office. “Big Boss” status is heavily implied. Oozing decorum and imbued with a quiet confidence of knowing, Freeman’s God “takes a vacation” and puts Bruce in charge to show him how hard a feat it is to handle the whims of humanity but also to educate Bruce specifically about embodying the change that he wants to see. Hammering his point home by masquerading as a lowly janitor, Freeman’s God is humility incarnate, respectfully secular and an emblem showing good not only exists in the world—but still governs it.
I have a lot to say about Morgan Freeman’s God. Audiences largely accepted the notion of a Black God, though I believe it is just as insufficient to fathom the box office success of Bruce Almighty as a white progressivist win as it is to simply call it “another instance of a wise black person helping a white person achieve insight”.4 A third thing was happening ambiently. The waning health of a Christian God in the Euro-American psyche meant a profound sense of spiritual loss and aimlessness was permeating through western society post-9/11 and the aid of magical negrofied divinity was a cognitively dissonant palette cleanser; a way to re-conceptualise God that allowed whiteness to maintain egotistical superiority while appearing willing to be ushered onto a righteous path. One of my more harebrained theories is that Barack Obama doesn’t become the American president without Morgan Freeman’s role in Bruce Almighty (but that’s an essay best explored at another time).
Exploding Kittens’ presents a God who’s strayed far from (and vulgarly defiant of) the 1930’s Code that prohibited the ridicule of any faith. Personally, I enjoyed the show in the same way one enjoys a parma violet ice lolly on a humid summer’s day; if you get through it quickly it’s pretty refreshing but if you spend too long on it, it starts to get sticky. Certain jokes—such as calling unicorns ponies with face boners—snap at the ankles upon landing but despite the show’s hit-and-miss flirtations with corniness, Godcat’s emotional journey is shucked with a genuine earnestness that brings a welcome relief from the tightly-wound cynicism which has become so indigenous to modern media.
Yet, cynicism needs to be baked into Exploding Kittens' very skeleton in order for the story to register to a modern audience. In order for Godcat to have a compelling arc, he must face an adversity that isn’t going to make us groan with blasé familiarity and thus, the final episodes reveal the boards of Hell and Heaven are planning a corporate merger that’ll be reified by the extermination of mankind. In his hampered Godcat form, the task of stopping the collating boards of Hell and Heaven falls to Beelzebub— who dispatches them in wrathful inferno. The implications of this scene are fascinating—the Devil “saves the day” and the conceptual being of God who was once so powerful that Hollywood studios erected laws not to speak ill of Him is rendered redundant by a mythical board of Heaven. What does it say about the moment we’re in that a celestial corporate merger of boards is more powerful and more cunning than God himself?
“The faceless board” has been rising in frequency and popularity as TV’s staple antagonist of choice. In Killing Eve, there is the collective known only as “The Twelve”. In Gangs of London, there are “The Investors”. The Blacklist has “The Cabal”. These powerful organisations are untraceable, unattributable any one person or entity, operating as formless, apolitical amoebas who’re impossible to hold accountable and are as omniscient and omnipotent as the narrative requires them to be. “Faceless boards” have usurped God—basking as the cinematic personification of laissez-faire capitalism. Gone are the days where evil is attributed to the tragic tale of the Devil. Instead, the greater woes of the world are traced to the anonymous, insatiable, untouchable “faceless board”, who are fundamentally unconcerned with the cultural optimism of yesteryear or the traditional edifices of good and evil.
What once populated our imagination as a robed old man in the sky who worked in benevolent but mysterious ways is now more legible as a poorly-run spiritual conglomerate whose only care is profit, growth or expansion. It introduces an interesting dimension to the more classical theological ideas.
For example: The teleological argument or The Argument From Design5 purports the world works in such a glorious harmony it must be intelligently designed and therefore God is the intelligent designer. A common counterpoint: intelligent design is a matter of human perception and we impose it on a chaotically functional world that’s been brought about by pure chance. The divine corporatism of Exploding Kittens allows for a compelling counter-counter point: the genesis of the world was a work project headed by an indifferent and/or incompetent boss who had to work on all of creation on a strict 6-day deadline with the board breathing down his neck. Any existential/environmental contradictions are a product of economic streamlining, cost-efficiencies and superhuman error.
Oh great, the orifice police are here. You try creating everything in six days. When you’re down to the wire, some orifices are gonna get combined.
— Godcat.
Film and TV provide an invaluable cardiograph for the cultural pulse of the general population. The media that gets greenlit represent both what the public is willing to consume and what those in positions of cinematic power are willing to feed them. You can glean the health of a people by what they indulge in.
Buscemi’s God and Ellis’ Godcat are emblematic of a civilisation that no longer fears His wrath but is more concerned with satirising His corpse. These examples of God as a chief executives—who, at best speak about humans with a paternal possessiveness and at worst, treat life with a blithe nonchalance towards whether humanity lives or dies, run in perfectly parallel with the real world event of people celebrating, en masse, the death of the United Healthcare CEO. If we’re adamant about re-conceptualising God as a CEO and we also celebrate the killing of CEOs in acts of vigilante justice then we must reckon with the political disenchantment as well as the spiritual, as they have become one in the same. We must reckon with the idea that the light from the madman’s stars might finally be reaching our eyes.
In life or death — no deity in human history has been studied more rigorously than the Christian God.
From the Enlightenment period onwards, an astounding amount of European thought has been dedicated to God, in theology and theothanatology. By comparison, surprisingly little has been dedicated to philosophising the moral health of the European superstructure in any meaningful way. Earlier, when I suggested that ‘we’ have killed God by giving him a job, I did so with a tacit understanding that my Blackness historically ostracises me from ‘we’ as my Blackness—in the vein of Afropessimist thought—is “precluded from the category of ‘human’”.6
“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” — Anne Lamont
I am an outsider looking at this topic with the cold indifference of a god executive. As I cobbled together this essay, it astounded me how much I had to disassociate in order to research historical philosophers who were regarded as moral bastions of western thought. Immanuel Kant (who made some of the more compelling counters to the aforementioned teleological argument) was considered “the father of modern ethics” and a man whose ideas revolutionised philosophy. He once said “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous”7.
So much wood has been sacrificed to populate the paper with the feverish musings of learned men—stroking their chins about God’s true nature and His influence on the moral trajectories of Europe as they held some of the most anti-social, unsavoury views towards any person who was not a white men that you’ll ever hear. Anyone studying them is meant to compartmentalise their rampant misogyny or thirst for eugenics when, on principle alone, such glaring callousness should disqualify the validity of their ethical claims and compel the contemporary scholars of western culture to completely collapse the entire intellectual structure of ethics as we know it.
Instead, we careen towards a strange juncture where Anglo-European society at large descends slowly towards anti-intellectualism and incuriousity, expressing exhaustion with the gate-kept knowledge acquisition of academia. The cultural fatigue with this intellectual inaccessibility has conveniently reached a fever pitch at the same time as concerted efforts to apply feminist lenses, queer, re-contextualise and/or decolonise academia from within have begun to take shape—which is perhaps why the Olfactory Ethics of Dr. Ally Louks became such a fricative viral moment.
As a Black man observing it all, I can’t help but think that Nietzsche’s madman was wrong. Close but wrong. God never died and the suggestion that white European modernity killed Him is far too smug and self-congratulatory a conclusion. God—and Europe’s faith in Him—has cast a shadow long enough to hide a whole continent’s cruelties and callousnesses. Perhaps, God was simply never alive in the first place.
Your final paragraph drew a comparison to Orwell’s 1984 for me, and why I raised my son to resist claims of unverifiable realities— Santa, tooth fairy, gods, ghosts.
Being trained to live in fantasy is how people are able assert otherwise untenable moral codes.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Damn good stuff. My favorite "faceless board" divinity tale is Mr. Robot. The hero is determined to take them down, but has to contend with his own role as a pawn of unimaginable power. God is insane and has made us in that image. Madman's stars, indeed!
It's a dreary read, but "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" by Thomas Ligotti is a full treatise on pessimism that you might find interesting and on-topic.