El Ciudadano
Por Pelao Carvallo
Brad Sigmon, at the time of his death, had two certainties and one hope. He was certain that he would die at the time, date, and place determined by the US justice system, and he was certain that he had a solid argument to escape the fate carved out for him by the criminal justice bureaucracy. And he had one hope: that argument was the foundation of both his own culture and the society of which he had been a part until that moment. Sigmon said very movingly, “I want my final statement to be one of love and apology,” and that “We no longer live under the law of the Old Testament; we now live under the New Testament.” He proved, in front of the firing squad, that he had been wrong. The New Testament had been defeated.
The influence of the New Testament in the social, cultural, and geographical sphere known as Christianity is steadily declining, being displaced among those who call themselves Christians (regardless of the specific denomination with which they identify) by the greater weight of the Old Testament. Both Testaments together form the sacred book of Christian beliefs, the Bible. That the text to be interpreted (the Old Testament) has abolished the guiding text, key, and key to interpretation is a cultural, social, political, and historical event of such magnitude that the little attention we have paid to it can only be explained by the fact that its emergence has come after a long and slow gestation of centuries, as many centuries as what, because we are unaware, we continue to call Christianity.
The New Testament captures the original vision and perspective of Christianity. Without the New Testament at its center, there is no Christianity. In fact, the Christianity of the New Testament contradicts the Old Testament. And vice versa. That is why the relationship between the two was to use the New as lenses to see the Old. The new allowed us to understand the old with this new perspective, a perspective that can be summed up as a permanent rebellion against the cultural forms of the old. In contrast to the local, the stipulated, the bureaucratic, the authoritarian, the dogmatic, the divisive, the warmongering, and the punitive nature of the old, the new presented egalitarianism, flexibility, universalism, and anti-hierarchy, which could be summed up in a strategy of growth through empathetic radicalism: from destroying walls with trumpets to loving your enemy. From the seven plagues to turning the other cheek.
From the local to the universal, from the politics of hatred and revenge to the underground strategy of empathy and affirmation in contradiction: I oppose what you do so much that I turn the other cheek for you to strike. The strength of powerlessness in the face of the old, which proposed the strength of punishment. The New Testament, the basis of Christianity, started from a position of powerlessness as the pillar of its worldview: the last, that is, the last on all scales, the weakest people, will be the first. In an insurmountable Proudhonian dialectic, Christianity is based on an impossibility: making the last the first until the new last replace them. An impossibility that always found opposition in the institutions of Christianity.
Being the first for almost two millennia cannot be sustained by a policy as repulsive as radical empathy. That is why the New Testament was offered to the powers that existed at the time of its expansion, together with the Old Testament, as that text did offer a language of power that was useful to them. A game lasting millennia has allowed the New Testament to continue playing its role as interpreter, key, and strategy within the universe of Christianity. In order to acquire an institutional framework that would ward off persecution, Christianity had to hand over a tool to administer that institutional framework from a position of power: the Old Testament. Weighed down by something that contradicts and conditions it, Christianity spread throughout the world telling the last that they would be the first and the first not to worry, that they would remain the first.
It is no surprise, then, that we live in the age of Trump, Musk, and similar figures, whether on the left or the right. The surprise is that we do not realize that it is inevitable that this culture will give rise to such politicians, since the cultural checks and balances that existed in Christianity have been abolished: the New Testament no longer matters. It is true that other cultural constructs (left-wing atheism, individualistic Eastern spiritualities, neo-pagan fascisms) have sought to end or diminish the influence of Christianity from outside, but the one who has succeeded in this task is Christianity itself, which has shifted from the New Testament to the Old as the axis and center of its culture. Christianity has succeeded in the task of de-Christianizing itself. Today, therefore, there is little or no Christianity in what is called by that name. When Trump speaks, for example, what we hear is the Old Testament. When Musk, Orbán, or any similar example speaks, what is said is Old Testament. And so it is, bro, of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
Aggression, non-confrontational servility in the face of that aggression, the policy of striking with advantage and malice aforethought, media criminalization from positions of advantage, constant barking as a form of communication, reciting slogans without the ability to interpret them, elites awash with the feeling of being a chosen people, whether economically, politically, or aesthetically, this uncomfortable moment of self-justified authoritarianism in authority and nothing more than that, in short, the permanent arbitrary management due to excess ego and selfishness, all of this is how social logic operates in this culture which, after almost two millennia, has discarded the New Testament and has completely switched to the Old Testament as its basic way of thinking. We are at that moment when the situation has become clear. Even if we don’t have a name for it and it sounds strange to call it Old Testament Christianity. De-Christianized Christianity. That is, without hope or rebellion, as Brad Sigmon learned on the night of March 7, 2025, in South Carolina, USA.
Por Pelao Carvallo
(English translation: Andrea Ixchíu)
Pelao Carvallo, member of the CLACSO Working Group on Collective Memories and Resistance Practices and the Latin American and Caribbean Antimilitarist Network (RAMALC).
August 7, 2025
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