Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

by N.T. Wright

the inevitable forces of history propelling themselves towards a utopia of workers and farmers as much it was a materialistic and industrial appropriation of the Christian concern for the poor, the Christian virtue of justice, and the notion of earth and city as a common treasury for everyone. The Hebrew Bible, the teaching of Jesus, the ethics of the apostles, and the social vision of the church fathers are saturated with concerns about the poor, oppression, injustice and God’s radical reordering of power in the hereafter. In the earliest days of the Jerusalem church, the believers held all their possessions ‘in common’,

Indeed, Basil the Great’s On Social Justice is an indictment of the injustices of his own day, and Gregory of Nyssa’s famous sermon9 innovatively claimed that slavery violates the laws of God and nature. Both theologians show just how much of abolitionist, socialist, liberationist and Marxist doctrines carry Christian genes.

Marx then was basically articulating a Jewish vision of messianic justice but without God.

This explains why there arose a tradition of Christian socialism, from the English ‘Diggers’ of the seventeenth century, to Christian Democratic Socialists of the nineteenth, all the way through to the Catholic Liberation Theologians of the twentieth century.11 As such, Marx, though a professed materialist and atheist, was ‘oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil’.

Even so, we should note that the similarities between Christian social teachings and Marxism have obvious limits. While there are varieties of Marxism, Marxist regimes always fail in their objectives to lift the poor out of poverty. Marxists end up oppressing their own people with guns and gulags.

In addition, for all their cry for equality, some people always end up being more equal than others. George

On the one hand, Communism is too Christian in that it constitutes an over-realised Christian eschatology, trying to bring heavenly justice to earth by violent revolution, attempting to manufacture the conditions where ‘the last will be first, and the first will be last’.

On the other hand, Communism is not Christian enough because it lacks a doctrine of total depravity. In Marxism, evil is what capitalists do, what the bourgeois do, what the factory owners do, but it cannot accept that evil lives in the hearts of Communists too.

When we warn of the evils of Christian nationalism, we are warning of the danger of the government trying to enforce Christian hegemony combined with civil religion (that is, an outward and merely cultural version of Christianity). In other words, the danger is that Christians are given special privileges by the State and Christianity becomes an outward display of patriotic devotion rather than part of true religious affection.

After September 11, 2001, Tony Blair spoke about ‘evil’ being at large in the world and of his determination to deal with it – almost as though this was a new and unexpected problem – but that with his policies and leadership evil could be conquered. We know where that led.

The messianising of leaders to prop up an imagined ‘Christian empire’ can have dire consequences for social freedoms as well as proving injurious to the integrity of the Church’s own witness when it allies itself too closely with an earthly power. Remember that the Scriptures have a special title for someone who claims to possess kingly and religious authority, who is both presidential and priestly: the word is ‘Antichrist’. Such a person is against Christ by assuming Christ’s own role, because Christ alone is both messianic King and the Great High Priest.

Christian nationalism of the kind we have described is bad on every level imaginable. Christian nationalism does not lend itself to a tolerant society since it diminishes the rights of the people of other religions or no religion. It leads to a superficial Christianity rather than to sincere faith and deep discipleship. Political leaders end up pretending to be religious merely to win the favour of their constituents. Christianity is used to justify unchristian policies and actions related to wars, immigration, income inequality, healthcare and a myriad other issues. Remember that even the devil can quote Scripture and try to rub it in the face of Jesus.

The other problem with Christian nationalism is which type of Christianity should be supreme.

As we all know, there are different Christian denominations, so which one should be supreme in a Christian nationalist state?

Religious liberty thus protects Christians from other Christians. And, if you are going to give religious liberty to Christians, then why not to non-Christian religions as well? The logical implication of religious freedom for Christians is religious freedom for all people, irrespective of their religion or lack thereof.

Another deficiency of Christian nationalism is that it leads government to try to regulate religion.

The problem is that, if you take the route of the government as the guarantor of Christian religion, then that requires government to adjudicate in matters of religion, to solve theological disputes and to hold heresy trials.

Christian nationalism, in its Protestant form, can lead to a certain degree of Erastianism,35 where Protestant governments attempted to regulate religion to keep it pure and publicly acceptable.

Christian nationalism also lends itself to feelings of ethnic superiority and promotes interracial tensions especially when Christianity is aligned with ‘whiteness’. In countries where one religion is dominant, it is usually dominant

among one ethnic group.

Christian nationalism is impoverished as it seeks a kingdom without a cross. It pursues a victory without mercy. It acclaims God’s love of power rather than the power of God’s love. We must remember that Jesus refused those who wanted to ‘make him king’ by force just as much as he refused to become king by calling upon ‘twelve legions of angels’.39 Jesus needs no army, arms or armoured cavalry to bring about the kingdom of God. As such, we should resist Christian nationalism as giving a Christian facade to nakedly political, ethnocentric and impious ventures.

We have in mind what happens when a state seeks to regulate as much of the individual’s beliefs, convictions, conscience and religion as possible. A system where non-state-centric forms of life are corroded by constant surveillance and deliberate over-regulation.

emphases on a hierarchy of ‘identities’ rather than the rule of law and equality before the law to negotiate relationships between citizens; 2 adoption of a mode of moral reasoning that assigns all people into the binary slots of either ‘oppressor’ or ‘oppressed’; 3 legal preference for bespoke notions of ‘equality’ rather than accommodating religious and cultural differences; 4 the State conceived no longer as an instrumental good, but as an ultimate power with jurisdiction over every facet of life, in order to achieve a comprehensive renovation of society according to the State’s progressive vision.

In other words, we are concerned about a progressive post-liberal order that does not value the right to dissent, the value of ideological diversity or the necessity of public debate, and that does not tolerate religions it cannot dictate to.42

Some species of political progressivism amount to liberationist sentiments without liberalism, a post-colonial project which does not end caste systems so much as reinvent them. There is danger in an aggressive collectivism which argues that persons should not be treated as individuals who are equal before the law so much as expressions of specific sexual and ethnic identities.

The result is a state that invests religious energy into its own icons and living saints, that punishes dissent from its own narratives,43 that finds oppression everywhere except in itself and its system, that rewrites history as the history of group identities in perpetual and unending conflict, and that champions ethnic and sexual diversity while eliminating ideological diversity.

Many political progressives see Christianity as the number-one enemy against which they are struggling. As such, Christian communities, institutions, cultural influence and moral vision are the darkness against which their post-religious enlightenment is intended to shine. Christianity’s influence can only be eliminated by realigning institutions towards a secularised morality, by narrowing the parameters of religious freedom, by a coercive catharsis of religion itself, and by deconstructing resident fixtures such as history, constitutional law and even family. In the end, the progressive political vision amounts to what US political philosopher Stephen Macedo calls civic totalism, where the State is invested with all power and seeks to regulate as much of public and private life as possible.47

For civic totalists, the danger of religion is that it creates a competing social vision and an alternative morality, which divides the loyalty of citizens away from the State’s objectives for human conduct, rendering certain forms of religion as hostile to the State’s ambitions.

There is something terrifying about a state so convinced of its own self-righteousness, that excites its citizens into a frenzy of rage and worship, a state that feels free to control, coerce and kill, all in the name of its empire, for the sake of progress, or to prove it is on the ‘right side of history’. As Lévy cautions: I fear nothing so much as a state which mobilizes, inflames the hearts of its subjects, dispenses them from the trouble of thinking, and then one fine day leads them like sleepwalkers along the paths of glory and concentration camps.59 The danger of post-liberal progressivism is that it turns into a secular type of Puritanism for people who have never read works by John Locke or Thomas Paine about tolerance and individual rights.60

The fact is that so-called ‘social-justice warriors’ have much in common with sixteenth-century Puritans in their effort to purify society with a certain vision of public morals and to compel the Crown (the UK) or the White House (the USA) to acquiesce to the spiritual authority of the ‘Church’. Swap out ‘Church’ for social advocacy movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ExtinctionRebellion, #MeToo and it’s the same thing in a new garb. The fact that those movements regard themselves as possessing a divine-like mission, based on preventing harms, ending injustices and removing fears, underscores precisely their Christian qualities. For it is perfectly Christian to love one’s gay or trans neighbour, to cry ‘Let justice roll on like a river’, to sing ‘In his name all oppression shall cease’ and to believe one exists in a covenant with creation/earth.

Hence G. K. Chesterton’s complaint that ‘the modern world is full of old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.’

It is a comic irony that the secular State has an innate inability to realise the ideals of love and justice taught by Jesus precisely because they believe such ideals must be attained without him!

Post-liberal progressives need to learn that one does not burn down the village (political rights and freedoms) in order to save the village from the barbarians (uneducated, religious or rural people who are not progressive).

The crusade to restrict freedoms of speech, association, conscience and religion in order to prevent certain deplorable people from exercising the aforesaid freedoms is not going to end well.

Likewise, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) sets out human rights to life, freedom of religion

and conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association, voting, due legal process and equality before the law. The notion that such rights can be diminished, denied or derogated by a particular progressive faction that demands to be unchallenged because of its own self-assured sense of being ‘on the right side of history’ must be dismissed. True, there are limits to religious freedom and freedom of speech. However, if we are to maintain the liberalism of a liberal democracy, there must always be limits to the limits we put on basic rights.68

Although a multicultural and liberal democracy will be conflictual – there are going to be different views on the common good, different solutions to political and economic problems, bitter arguments over sex and end-of-life issues – the resolution to any conflict is managing differences within diversity in a way that is equitable, charitable and proportionate. As one Canadian provincial court declared: A society that does not admit of and accommodate differences cannot be a free and democratic society – one in which its citizens are free to think, to disagree, to debate and to challenge the accepted view without fear of reprisal. This case [Trinity Western University v. The Law Society of British Columbia] demonstrates tha...

The elite class’s inability to accept the notion of difference and dissent, combined with anxieties over the perceived disloyalties of the working class, an antipathy towards people of faith, and a desperate need to silence critics, lends itself to a sinister soft authoritarianism that could easily morph into something potentially Orwellian.

Civic totalists attempt to subordinate the nation, family, religion and individuals beneath their ideology. In defiant response, the Church, as it defends its own freedom of worship and witness, must also stand for the liberties of others.70 Laura Alexander acknowledges that the ‘purpose of the state is to promote human well-being by providing order, protection, and the material and social goods that allow people to live reasonably stable lives and pursue good and meaningful ends’, but she adds the important caveat that the state is not itself an ultimate end to be pursued, or an ultimate authority that merits people’s highest loyalty. States’ promotion of their interests, and their use of sovereign power, remain subject to critique from a higher moral plane.71

Every church, whether in Nigeria or Nicaragua, in Uzbekistan or the United States, must address injustice, oppression and tyranny, and seek to discern its calling to be a city on a hill. That

1. The word ‘Fascism’ comes from the Latin word fascis, meaning a bundle of rods, including an axe, symbolising the

The word ‘Fascism’ comes from the Latin word fascis, meaning a bundle of rods, including an axe, symbolising the power of a magistrate, stemming from Etruscan civilisation. It was inherited by ancient Rome and then taken up by the National Fascist Party in Italy with Mussolini. Fascism is perhaps best defined as a form of far-right authoritarian ultra-nationalism characterised by dictatorial power and forcible suppression of any opposition, with a strict regimentation of society and government regulation of the economy.

power of a magistrate, stemming from Etruscan civilisation. It was inherited by ancient Rome and then taken up by the National Fascist Party in Italy with Mussolini. Fascism is perhaps best defined as a form of far-right authoritarian ultra-nationalism characterised by dictatorial power and forcible suppression of any opposi...

Brazilian Catholic archbishop Hélder Pessoa Câmara famously said, ‘When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.’

Erastianism is a political doctrine that advocates the supremacy of the State over the Church even in religious matters. It originated in the sixteenth century and was named after Thomas Erastus, a Swiss theologian who supported the subordination of the Church to the State.

As I write this, the Queensland government in Australia is proposing legislation that would compel clinicians and medical professionals to prioritise ‘public confidence’ in safety over the actual ‘health and safety of the public’. In other words, a government could impose penalties on health professionals who say anything that is out of step with whatever the government of the day says about treating gender dysphoria or the risks associated with vaccines. This is an instance of a government deliberately politicising medicine rather than leaving best practice and advice to medical bodies and health professionals.

See David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The new upper class and how they got there (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

See Paul Embery, Despised: Why the modern left loathes the working class (Cambridge: Polity, 2020); and Matthew Goodwin, Values, Voice and Virtue: The

new British politics (London: Penguin, 2023). While both books apply principally to the British context, they are eminently translatable to wider Anglo-European political theatres.

Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: Civic education in a multicultural democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,