Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

world.

Well that is quite the opening!

The Roman catacombs have become a kind of symbol for pre-Constantine Christianity, a subversive underground movement challenging the idolatrous claims of empire, a dangerous countercultural society confessing that because Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not. Christians praying underground in the Catacombs and Christians martyred above ground in the Coliseum have become the two enduring icons of the Christianity that predates Christendom.

We didn’t see Christianity as a form of civic religion in service of American values but as a direct challenge to the assumed cultural values of America.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about the Jesus Movement is that it took the Sermon on the Mount seriously.

The Jesus of the Gospels is far more suited for an F.B.I. Wanted poster than for being the poster child of American values. While the historical Jesus certainly wasn’t a hippie, he was obviously dangerous and subversive. After all, Rome didn’t crucify people for extolling civic virtues and pledging allegiance to the empire. In announcing and enacting the kingdom of God, Jesus was countercultural and counter-imperial. This is why Jesus was crucified. His crime was claiming to be a king who had not been installed by Caesar.

If anything, what Jesus taught was an out-and-out repudiation of American materialism and militarism.

In a culture that venerates materialism and militarism, the only way to truly follow Jesus is to be countercultural. Sure, the prosperity gospel extols materialism and the religious right celebrates militarism, but these are nothing but attempts to smuggle the idols of Mammon and Mars into Christianity.

But eventually the Jesus Movement was absorbed by the Charismatic Movement and would be slowly seduced by the siren songs coming from the prosperity gospel and the religious right.

Literally, a cult is a system of religious devotion directed toward a particular figure.

The cult of emperor worship was really just a way of personifying empire worship.

To place a dash of incense in a censor before a bust of Caesar in the marketplace was not much different than saluting the flag or placing your hand on your heart for the National Anthem.

Indeed, from the very beginning Christians did believe that Jesus was God, but the radical and dangerous thing about them was that they worshiped Jesus as emperor! This is what they meant when they confessed, “Jesus is Lord.” The titles “Son of God,” “King of Kings,” “Savior of the World,” “Prince of Peace, and “Lord of All” were already in circulation as imperial titles on Roman coins when the Christians began re-appropriating them in their worship of a Galilean Jew who had been crucified by a Roman governor.

It wasn’t the religion of the Christians that got them in trouble per se, but the political implications of their religion.

The Revelator is desperate to remind the seven churches in Asia Minor that even when the emperor is seemingly humane and tolerant, the empire at its heart remains a beast, as typified by Caesar Nero

Though it’s well known, it still needs to be emphasized that Jesus and his two most important apostles, Peter and Paul, were all executed by the Roman Empire. Why? Not for their religious beliefs about an afterlife, but because the kingdom of heaven they announced and enacted posed a challenge to the dominant myth that Rome had a manifest destiny to rule the nations and a divine right to shape history.

If Christianity is not seen as countercultural and even subversive within a military-economic superpower, you can be sure it is a deeply compromised Christianity.

I often encounter Christians using Romans 13 as a kind of rebuttal. (Though whom they’re rebutting—me or Jesus—isn’t always clear.)

Why not take the Sermon on the Mount at face value and insist that any interpretation of Paul must line up with Jesus?

What Paul is doing in Romans 13 is calling Christians living in the Roman Empire to obey civil laws and not be drawn into violent revolutionary movements.

What is obvious is that we should never pretend that Romans 13 is the only passage in Scripture that alludes to government. Far

Jesus was “subject to the governing authorities,” but in doing so he shamed the principalities and powers in his crucifixion and was vindicated by God in his resurrection. This is the posture toward evil that followers of Jesus are called to imitate.

It took an encounter with the risen Jesus to open their eyes to the truth that Christ would not bring the kingdom of God with a slashing sword on a battlefield but with blessed and broken bread on the Communion table.

The kingdom of God does not come through political force and cultural dominance but through the counter-imperial practices of baptism and Eucharist.

It’s not the task of the church to “Make America Great Again.” The contemporary task of the church is to make Christianity countercultural again.

Rather Paul is saying that God’s power is weakness!

The cross is a scandal because it involves shame. But who is shamed by the cross? Is it the naked man nailed to a tree or the principalities and powers who in their naked bid for power put him there?

Every crucifix reminds us that our systems of civilization built around an axis of power enforced by violence are not to be trusted. The myths, monuments, anthems, and memorials of every empire are designed to cleverly hide the bodies of the weak who have been trodden down by the mighty in their march to “greatness.” The cross is the unveiling. The cross is the great truth-telling. The cross is the guilty verdict handed down upon empire. The cross is the eternal monument to the Unknown Victim. Yes, the cross is where the world is forgiven, but not before the world is found guilty.

The Bible looks honestly and unflinchingly upon the world as it is, and thus the pages of Scripture often drip with blood.

A billion crucifixes have revealed God as nonviolent.

The violence of the cross is not what God does, the violence of the cross is what God endures.

In that chapel you can gaze simultaneously upon a suffering Savior forgiving his enemies and a warring saint killing his enemies. Did no one notice the stunning incongruence? I suppose we can call this an unwitting testament to the divided allegiances of Christendom.

In empires obsessed with “greatness,” armies and economies are always given cultic devotion.

This is Peter’s cryptic way of telling Christians living in the provinces that Rome was not “a shining city upon a hill,” but an idolatrous empire in rebellion to God. Rome was not the Eternal City, but Babylon...and Babylon is always falling.[13]

The blood of Jesus became the vaccine to cure our addiction to reciprocal abuse and retaliatory violence. Week after week we partake of the Eucharist so that we might be agents of healing in a wounded world. Christians are to be carriers of the new contagion of forgiveness. In a world where the capacity for retaliatory violence is nearly infinite, forgiveness is our only sane and saving option. In a world of conflict every side sees the righteousness of their own cause, but the only righteousness that can save the world is the righteousness that imitates Christ in forgiveness.

It’s not yet another war that will heal the world, but the wounds of Christ. Calvary was the last battlefield that made any sense. After Calvary, every other battlefield is a failure to understand that the ways of Cain and Caesar, the ways of war and greed, all died in the body of Christ on Good Friday.

When the church lacks the vision and courage to actually be the church, it abandons its high calling of proclaiming the Lordship of Jesus and panders to power, soliciting its services as the high priest of religious patriotism. When the church colludes with the principalities and powers, it can no longer prophetically challenge them. A church in bed with empire cannot credibly call the empire to repent. The loss of prophetic courage leads to a pathetic capitulation.

Christian philosopher Lactantius (240–320) who said, “Religion must be defended not by killing but by dying, not by violence but by patience.”[3] Sadly, we are no longer a patient church.

Often this is done by equating combat deaths with Jesus’ nonviolent sacrifice of love. At the Courthouse in Andrew County, Missouri, where my father served as judge, a new war monument was dedicated on Memorial Day, 2017. It included this inscription: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. John 15:15.” The obvious implication is that Jesus’ death at the hands of the Roman Empire is somehow similar to the death of American soldiers who are killed while prosecuting war. It’s true that both deaths are sacrificial, but the nature of these sacrificial deaths is quite different. The failure to see the clear difference between Jesus sacrificing his life while forgiving his enemies on the cross and the sacrifice of a soldier slain while waging war on a battlefield is an indication of the degree to which a commitment to militarism has obscured the implications of the gospel. But when waging war is regarded as a religious sacrifice, such confusions abound.

Interestingly, it was during the Vietnam War that the American de facto state church shifted from Mainline Protestantism (which often opposed the war) to conservative Evangelicalism (which unequivocally supported the war).

Fascinating!

What about patriotism? Is it permissible for a Christian to be patriotic? Yes and no. It depends on what is meant by patriotism. If by patriotism we mean a benign pride of place that encourages civic duty and responsible citizenship, then patriotism poses no conflict with Christian baptismal identity. But if by patriotism we mean religious devotion to nationalism at the expense of the wellbeing of other nations; if we mean a willingness to kill others (even other Christians) in the name of national allegiance; if we mean an uncritical support of political policies without regard to their justice, then patriotism is a repudiation of Christian baptismal identity.

symbol, flags are among the most revered signs. So when a church flies the American flag above the Christian flag, what is the message being communicated? How can it be anything other than that all allegiances—including allegiance to Christ—must be subordinate to a supreme national allegiance? This is what Caiaphas admitted when he confessed to Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar.”[8]

America is a profound complexity and as such it is many things. America is a nation, a culture, an empire, a religion.

But they should not labor under the delusion that the nation itself can be Christian. Only that which is baptized can be Christian, and you cannot baptize a nation-state.

Despite abundant testimony from church history that ecclesial entanglement in the agenda of empire always leads to a compromised Christian witness, much of the American church is resolute in being tangled up in red, white, and blue. Today religious nationalism (which is disturbingly connected with white nationalism) is on the rise.

We need to make it abundantly clear that “America First” is incompatible with a global church whose mission it is to announce and embody the kingdom of Christ.

One of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that in it we find the narrative told from the perspective of the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, the conquered, the occupied, the defeated. This is what makes it prophetic. We know that history is written by the winners. This is true—except in the case of the Bible it’s the opposite! This is the subversive genius of the Hebrew prophets. They wrote from a bottom-up perspective. Imagine a history of colonial America written by Cherokee Indians and African slaves. That would be a different way of telling the story! And that’s what the Bible does. It’s the story of Egypt told by the slaves. The story of Babylon told by the exiles. The story of Rome told by the occupied. What about those brief moments when Israel appeared to be on top? In those cases the prophets told Israel’s story from the perspective of the peasant poor as a critique of the royal elite. Like when Amos denounced the wives of the Israelite aristocracy as “the fat cows of Bashan.”

Every story is told from a vantage point; it has a bias. The bias of the Bible is from the vantage point of the underclass. But what happens if we lose sight of the prophetically subversive vantage point of the Bible? What happens if those on top read themselves into the story, not as imperial Egyptians, Babylonians, and Romans, but as the Israelites? That’s when you get the bizarre phenomenon of the elite and entitled using the Bible to endorse their dominance as God’s will. This is Roman Christianity after Constantine. This is Christendom on crusade. This is colonizers seeing America as their promised land and the native inhabitants as Canaanites to be conquered. This is the whole history of European colonialism. This is Jim Crow. This is the American prosperity gospel. This is the domestication of Scripture. This is making the Bible dance a jig for our own amusement.

What does it mean for a Christian to refuse to eat from the kitchen of empire? Well, what’s the empire cooking? Mostly a steady diet of consumerism and militarism. It’s the menu of Mammon and Mars.

Also individualism

There’s a reason why “It’s the economy, stupid” has become an unassailable proverb in American politics. In the civic religion of Americanism, “It’s the economy, stupid” always trumps “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Prioritizing the economy above principle changes Christians into de facto pagans.