Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

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

I’m not sure why Protestants abandoned crucifixes for empty crosses, but I think it was a mistake. I know that Protestants often argue that Jesus didn’t remain on the cross; but he didn’t remain in the manger either, and Protestants don’t seem to have an objection to Nativity scenes.

couldn’t help but be struck by the tragic folly engulfing the majority of white evangelicals on the other side of the Atlantic. Their absurd line of reasoning was that God was going to accomplish divine purposes through a morally bankrupt (and occasionally financially bankrupt) real-estate tycoon turned reality TV star. Just

The gospel is not motivational talks about happy marriages, being debt free, and achieving your destiny. That all belongs to the broad world of proverbial wisdom.

And yet what is it that is being depicted in these billions of crucifixes? On a purely objective level, it is the torture and execution of an innocent man at the hands of those who run the world by the means of violent power. The crucifixion is the damning indictment of the world as it has been arranged.

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.

on Good Friday the truth is told, for at Golgotha we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies.

The violence of the cross is not what God does, the violence of the cross is what God endures. The cross is not what God inflicts upon Christ in order to forgive. This is what N.T. Wright has called a “paganized soteriology.”[7] The cross is not the violent appeasement of a pagan deity, but what God in Christ suffers as God pardons the world. God does not employ and inflict violence; God absorbs and forgives violence.

In one of the chapels in the Burgos Cathedral the suffering Christ and the murderous Matamoros are present in the same altarpiece. In the same altarpiece! In that chapel you can gaze simultaneously upon a suffering Savior forgiving his enemies and a warring saint killing his enemies.

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.

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.

The consistent attitude of the early church toward the vocation of waging war is reflected in the words of Saint Cyprian (200–258) when he said, “The hand that has held the Eucharist will not be sullied by the blood-stained sword.”

we should listen to the early 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.

Stanley Hauerwas has taught us that nationalism is a religion with war as its liturgy.

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).

This is what Caiaphas admitted when he confessed to Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar.”

And in the American experiment the United States deliberately broke with the Christendom practice of claiming to be a Christian nation with a state church. It was America that pioneered the experiment of secular governance. America is not a Christian nation; it never was and never can be. The only institution that even has the possibility of being Christian is the church.

When we admit it’s impossible to govern according to the Sermon on the Mount, we also admit it’s impossible for a nation that maintains a nuclear arsenal to be Christian. To contend that America could not survive without nuclear arms is to make my point. The people of God are sustained by the Holy Spirit, not hydrogen bombs.

What ends up happening is Christ being reduced to a “spiritual” king (whatever that is), while the state is made the real king. Let’s just say that Luther’s “Two Kingdoms” experiment did not end well in Germany.

I’m a citizen of a superpower. I was born among the conquerors. I live in the empire. But I want to read the Bible and think it’s talking to me. This is a problem.

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.”

I am a (relatively) wealthy white American male, which is fine, but it means I have to work hard at reading the Bible right. I have to see myself basically as aligned with Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, and Caesar. In that case, what does the Bible ask of me?

Pharaoh and the princes of Egypt were about to find out the hard way that Hebrew Lives Matter.

This kind of story should make the thoughtful Bible reader wonder where we find Jesus in the formative years of America—was Jesus guiding Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson in the White House, or was he picking cotton in Mississippi and walking the Trail of Tears?

In the civic religion of Americanism, “It’s the economy, stupid” always trumps “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In a culture supremely committed to the economy, a president can sink to the lowest moral ebb as long as the Dow runs high. But

We guarantee our prosperity by a demonic devotion to the capacity to unleash hyper-violence upon our enemies. It’s why the maintenance of a multi-trillion-dollar war machine appears perfectly reasonable rather than ludicrously insane. You can’t claim to trust in God and spend trillions on weapons.

It’s fascinating to notice that the dreams of the prophets and the nightmares of kings are often one and the same. For example, Isaiah sees a day when “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains”[14] and we call it a dream; when Nebuchadnezzar sees the same thing, he calls it a nightmare.

Sadly, the church after Constantine has a long history of assuring their rich and powerful benefactors that the gospel is a spiritual message about how to go to a spiritual heaven after they die, and so they need not be concerned about the kingdom of heaven challenging their earthly privilege here and now.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had arrived at the crucible of dual citizenship...and it was a literal crucible!

This needs to be made clear: America is not an extension of the kingdom of Christ, America is a continuation of Babylon. America may (or may not be) a gentler, kinder Babylon, but it’s a Babylon nonetheless.

King Jesus is not the best version of Caesar; King Jesus is the anti-Caesar. This is what “Jesus is Lord” has always meant.

The church has called this horror the Slaughter of the Innocents, but modern day kings and kingdoms have sanitized it with the Orwellian term “collateral damage.”

This should alert us to the truth that the gospel is uncomfortably political. The gospel of the kingdom is not partisan—it will not serve the partisan interests of a particular political party—but it is intensely political. It’s political because it poses a direct challenge to the principalities and powers and the way the world is arranged.

The kingdom of God is built on all that the kingdom of Satan is opposed to. Instead of rivalry, there is to be love. Instead of accusation, there is to be advocacy. Instead of violence, there is to be peace. Instead of domination, there is to be liberation. Instead of maintaining the vicious cycle of beastly empire, Jesus comes to establish the humane kingdom come from heaven. This is the gospel! The demonic is all that is negation, pro-death, and anti-human. Jesus brings all that is flourishing, life-affirming, and truly pro-life.

Jesus destroys the devil by calling us out of rivalry, accusation, violence, domination, and empire, into heaven’s alternative of love, advocacy, peace, and liberation—this is what the Bible calls the kingdom of God.

Romans 13 where the Apostle Paul says, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” Love that fulfills the law looks like welcoming the stranger, not taking away their kids and imprisoning the traumatized children in detention camps.

But the only place I’m required to remove my shoes in America is at airport security—in our secular age, security may be the only thing America holds sacred.

Even the High Priest Caiaphas is complicit in this lie when he confesses, “We have no king but Caesar.”[8] Imagine the moment when the Jewish high priest removes his religious mask and admits that his ultimate allegiance is pledged to a pagan emperor!

In an economic-military superpower, the truth is that money and power trump everything. That’s the truth that is the lie. That’s the functional atheism of religious people who pretend at faith but bow the knee to Mammon and Mars.

Yet far too many Christians who profess to be appalled at Nietzsche’s axiom, “God is dead,” seem enthralled by Nietzsche’s Will To Power. When American Christians tacitly agree with Nietzsche and openly agree with Ayn Rand, you know that something has gone horribly wrong—the falseness has become malignant.

Our king has no use for nuclear weapons. Why? Because you can’t love your neighbor with hydrogen bombs. Our king said his kingdom does not come from the world of war, which is why his servants do not fight. Jesus told Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my servants would be fighting.”

Some will say power trumps everything, but you’ve always known that mercy triumphs over judgment.

Evangelical support of torture is an “eruption of the real.” It’s a horrifying moment of unintended truth-telling where we discover that allegiance to national self-interest and the idol of “security” trumps allegiance to Jesus Christ.

You can’t absolve the sin of being pro-torture by claiming to be pro-life.

Christian Trumpism and Christian nationalism are essentially synonymous.

When authentic Christian faith is trumped by white evangelical fear, we have a problem.