Violence is all around us and we know this, but we do all that we can to avoid knowing that we know this. And so, when that violence is put in our faces and we are forced to see it, we are confronted with the reality that now we know, that we know that we know.
Enter the weird world of high end shoes.
I do not know who "Lil Nas X” is. From what I see he is a child of God, African American, member of the LGBTQ community who also makes music. The only reason I know this name is that he helped to create something called “Satan” shoes. Nike has no affiliation with these shoes, just like they had no affiliation with the “Jesus” shoes. Chances are you and I did not hear about the Jesus shoes, but you may have heard of the “Satan” shoes.
I am not endorsing either shoe, I think they are both idols. They are both similar in their design using the same base shoe. It is unclear to me if Nike was okay with the Jesus shoe, but they clearly want it known they are not okay with the Satan shoe (everyone is more comfortable profiting off Jesus anyways). While one has a pentagram tag, the other has a golden Jesus on a silver cross. Both has scripture on the side (we will return to that) that translates to their obscene price point. The Jesus shoe was more expensive ($1425 vs. $1018) because the scripture reference was from Matthew 14:25 (“And early in the morning he [Jesus] came walking towards them on the lake”). The Satan shoes reference Luke 10:18 (“He said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.’”).
The Satan shoes have a disgust factor and that is adding to all this I am sure. The Jesus shoe has water from the River Jordan in the shoe. The Satan shoe has red ink and a drop of human blood. Let’s start with that.
The Satan shoes are not the only thing on the market with human blood. Many of us have diamonds on our hands that have blood in them. Fast fashion has blood in it. Technology has blood in it. These are not the first Nike shoes (again, Nike is not involved with these shoes) that have blood in them. What makes the Satan shoes different is that the blood is not masked or hidden. The violence is right in front of you. You cannot pretend to not know the human cost. And when we know that we know that we know, we often get upset. The blood in the shoes is not new, we just liked it better when we could not see it.
The Satan shoes are awful to us not just because of the idolatry we might associate with them. Our collective non-rage of the Jesus shoes suggests that we are okay with the idolatry of Christ in gold form. The Satan shoes are awful to us because they reveal to us that we know what we pretend to not know. We know that we know and we would rather not know that we know. We are a people addicted to violence. We are a people who believe the lie that violence can solve our conflicts. We are a people who believe that there are conditions where spilling of human blood is acceptable - war, capital punishment, abortion, gun violence, etc.
I did not think that we had a limit to where blood could be spilled. Apparently I was wrong.
We draw the line at shoes.