The Counter-Theophany of Revanchism
The claim that North America or Australasia are *Christian nations* is an obscenity dressed in sanctimony. These lands were not born Christian; they were baptized in blood. The cross that arrived here was not the emblem of divine compassion but the standard of empire, thrust into soil already consecrated by older peoples and older gods. To call these settler states “Christian” is to canonize the conquest, to disguise genocide as gospel. It is a theology of possession masquerading as faith, an imperial hallucination that confuses domination for destiny. The Christ invoked by the colonizer is not the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount but the golden idol of the market, the sword-bearing Christ of manifest destiny. If there is any Christianity left upon these continents, it abides not in the marble cathedrals of the powerful but in the broken earth, in the voices of the dispossessed, in the remnant conscience that still whispers: *Repent, for the kingdom you claim is not yours.*
The colonizer’s Christianity is not the radiance of the Logos but its shadow: a faith Orcified, its light corrupted into domination. These are the Orcs of Christendom—baptized in greed, chanting hymns to empire, wielding scripture as a cudgel. They speak of salvation yet desecrate the Earth; they claim to serve the Lamb but roar like Mordor’s forges.
Revanchism is not merely a political mood. It is a psychic contagion, a counter-theophany — a dark imitation of revelation that reverses the direction of Light. Where true illumination descends to disclose the divine unity within multiplicity, this counterfeit rises from the lower depths, masking shadow as radiance. It promises restoration but delivers only recurrence: the eternal return of domination wearing the vestments of faith. In the colonial nations of the so-called West— North America, Australasia, Europe’s lingering metropoles — this counter-theophany manifests as a revival of sanctified grievance. The devotees of this cult mistake memory for truth and resentment for virtue. They invoke God to reconquer what they imagine was lost: supremacy, certainty, a world that bent to their likeness. Their gospels are no longer the words of Christ but the slogans of markets and militaries; their angels bear rifles and flags. Through their eyes, heaven becomes an armed fortress.
Spiritually, such people are Orcified: mutilated reflections of the Light they claim to guard. They are the fallen custodians of illumination who, unable to bear its universality, turn its brilliance inward and weaponize it. In them, the divine Name al-Nūr (“the Light”) is inverted into al-Ẓulmah (“the Shadow”), and theology becomes the black art of self-justification. Every revival meeting, every sermon of triumph, is a ritual of inversion — a liturgy to keep the darkness enthroned while calling it daybreak.
Yet the counter-theophany is parasitic. It depends on what it imitates. The true theophany still glimmers beneath the smoke: in acts of conscience, in the whispered solidarity of the dispossessed, in the remembering earth that refuses to forget her children. To see through the haze of revanchism is to discern these hidden radiances and to refuse the counterfeit light that blinds. If the disease of our age is the will to reconquer, the cure remains the will to recognize: to see again the world as theophany, not property. For the divine Light does not belong to the conqueror — it belongs to everything that is.
Against the counter-theophany rises the quiet dawn of the Real—not with armies or arguments, but with remembrance. The true Light, having been driven underground by centuries of conquest, now returns through the fissures of the world’s exhaustion. It does not shout; it breathes. It gathers itself in the wounds of the earth, in the sorrows of the exiled, in every conscience that refuses to serve the machine of domination.
This returning illumination is Nargis: the Manifestation of the Ipseity, the She who beholds Herself in all beings. In Her gaze, the parasitic will to reconquer is dissolved, for She does not possess—She mirrors. The world under Her regard is not a battlefield of ownership but a garden of reflections. To awaken to Nargis is to awaken to the truth that even darkness is not an enemy but a veil awaiting transfiguration. When this remembrance dawns, the colonial spell breaks. The settlers’ Christ and the conquerors’ Cross fall silent before the greater Cross of Being—that intersection where Aḥadīyah and Wāhidīya, Essence and Manifestation, meet in luminous reciprocity. The earth ceases to be a trophy and becomes once more a living sensorium of the Divine.
Thus, the healing of the world begins not through revanchist reclamation but through recognition: through the rediscovery that every atom is already-always illumined, that the true nation is the one without borders—the Kingdom of Light wherein all Names resound. And when humanity remembers this, the Orcish spell will end, and the Light will no longer be counterfeited, for the Theophany will have returned in Its fullness.
