Who is our “final boss”?
That might be a confusing title if you’re not a nerd, so let me explain.
In many video games, you control one or more heroes as you advance through a story. That story, openly or more subtly, is broken down into “levels” or “chapters,” each of which introduces a new location or new game features—and with new enemies to overcome.
Most of the enemies you face in a video game are easy to vanquish (you might think of a koopa troopa, a Super Mario foe that is a turtle-like monster with a green shell). Every once in a while in the middle of a level you might come across a tougher villain—we usually call these mini-bosses. Then when you reach the end of a chapter (for those who know Mario 3, think of the castles at the end of each world), you reach a boss.
Who knows they they’re called bosses? (Seriously, I’d like to know who knows this. I tried Google and AI, and they both just said ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.) It seems to be an organic term that became popular because the big, difficult enemy at the end of a level is seen to be “in charge of” that level.
Anyway, at the very end of a video game, at the end of the final chapter, when the hero reaches the climax of the story, they must face the FINAL BOSS. This is typically the most difficult enemy to defeat in the entire game. I hope this lengthy tangent has provided enough context for the cool people out there who have never picked up a Playstation or Xbox controller.
Get to the point, Jon
My point is that I sometimes wonder who our final boss is.
When I say “our,” I mean either all of us on the planet, or everyone in this failing democracy called the USA. I’ve been wondering this for a while now. At the Wild Goose Festival a couple years ago, I asked pastor and writer Josh Scott, who was doing a Q&A during a podcast recording, who he thinks our final boss is (I will reveal his answer below). What follows is my meandering (but hopefully brief!) attempt to explore what it means to try to answer this question.
Years ago I, a good evangelical at the time, would have perhaps said Satan. Bosses don’t get much bigger than the father of lies, the enemy of the good, the OG fallen angel! I don’t believe in literal demons anymore, so this answer is out. What about the other evangelical answer I might have given—sin? At the time, of course, I would have meant individual sin. The greed or selfishness or lying or pride that lurks in people’s hearts.
I think this one’s out too. There are probably ways to reframe it that would still resonate with me, like shifting from individual to corporate and systemic forms of sin, and defining sin not in a holiness/shame way but more of a flourishing/harm way. I think this is far too broad, though. This view of sin is essentially just all the bad things people do. It’s like saying the final boss of a video game is every enemy you must face throughout the entire game. We need some specificity if we want to name exactly what our most important and difficult challenge will be.
Thoughts on our final boss
So my list of prospects are evil bosses like this: patriarchy, white supremacy, (intentional, enforced) poverty, religious abuse, ableism/ageism… just to name a few. To be clear—and maybe I should have led with this—I am writing this piece to ask the question, not answer it. I won’t pretend to be able to weigh the relative harm or intractability of, say, racism and sexism. But a few notes about some of the bosses we face:
I think patriarchy can be expanded to something like “transphobic heteronormative patriarchy,” as this kind of system exists to entrench power among cis, straight men.
Of course what we have in the USA is the conjoining of these bosses into a massive mega-boss. For instance, our systems (economic, educational, justice) are designed to concentrate wealth and power not just with cis straight men but cis straight white men. It’s not so simple to view patriarchy and white supremacy separately.
Is there a word for this mega-boss? For all the -isms and systems of oppression designed to empower and enrich only certain groups of people at the expense of others? Yes, I think there might be, though it’s not a word you hear every day: hegemony (heh-JEM-uh-nee). Maybe not in its original and precise meaning, which has to do with the relationships among nations. But in its broader sense: one group exercising a dominating leadership over another.
Josh Scott’s answer to my question was capitalism. (Certainly very related to economic hegemony.)
Another answer that comes to mind is violence. Not just the explicit and brutal violence of war or terrorism, but more familiar examples—what Myles Werntz calls ordinary violence, “a deeply intimate feature of all times and places” that ought to lead us to “a constant life of repentance and repair.” This week at Harbor we will explore nonviolence.
When you think of our work together—whether as Harboristas or Americans or Canadians or Christians or human beings or living organisms on this planet—what do you think are our most important challenges to face?
