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Popular Culture Review
and controlled by a bokor, a wizard or sorcerer. The human, without a soul, is
dead. And the bokor, having control over the soul of the deceased, thus becomes
the ultimate puppet master, able to send the zombie body out to do his bidding.
We risk a subtle form of racism and exoticism by summarizing and
portraying a religion so strange to mainstream American experience thus. But to
be sure, one needn’t look beyond the Christian religion, in fact, for traces of
belief in reanimation and resurrection. By definition, one could argue that Jesus
became a zombie on the third day after His crucifixion. To those who believe
that such a statement borders on the sacrilegious, this is, in fact, one of the risks
of Christianity—and precisely one of the risks against which Christians are
specifically warned. That is, one of the lessons of liberation theology and the
post-theism movement of the 1960s and ‘70s was that the theistic notion of God
had become an idol in Christianity. Christians were treating the metaphysical,
supernatural, and paranormal conception of God as a thing to be worshipped
when this completely misses the point of Jesus’ teachings. Christianity is a
social-political-ethical system more than a metaphysics or a cosmology; and
Jesus, at every opportunity, lectures on how we should pursue justice in the
world, not wait for a reward in Heaven and not wait for Him magically to create
justice for us. When Jesus feeds the masses with a single loaf of bread, we miss
the point of the story if we think “Wow! Jesus had awesome magical baking
powers!” Instead, the point is that we must feed those who are hungry around us
even if it seems we don’t have enough for ourselves—even if it seems
impossible. When Jesus tells us to prepare for Heaven, we miss the point if we
think we must place all of our hope in some supernatural afterlife in which we
will float up into the clouds and live forever in a perfect Disneyland.7 Instead,
He tells us “The Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the Earth though men do
not see it.” In other words, this world and this life are already our Heaven if we
only start acting in such a way as to make it a Heaven. And when Jesus dies and
is resurrected, we miss the point of the story if we begin worshipping zombieJesus (which, to be frank, is what the majority of Christians do today: there is a
reason Mel Gibson’s The Passion o f the Christ plays like a horror movie).
Instead, the lesson is that, as the Greek tells us, Jesus can still appear to people
even after He is, physically, gone. Thus we get words such as
“emphanerosen”—meaning “manifested”—to describe the coming to faith
experience that people have before and after Jesus’ resurrection. When Peter, for
instance, has the realization that Jesus’ teachings are good and true, we are given
the words “Jesus manifested to Peter.” This is the same language we get when,
after death, Jesus manifested himself to the five hundred, to Thomas, to his
disciples, etc. That is to say, “manifestation” and “appearance” are indicating the
strength of the message and not a physical sight. To think otherwise is to run the
risk of focusing merely on the fact that Jesus died and came back—on the
metaphysics and the magic—rather than on what it all means.
We have gone on this extended detour into Christian Scripture because
it is making the same point we have been investigating concerning zombies. The