Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

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. A

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 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. The cross is where God in Christ transforms the hideous violence of Good Friday into the healing peace of Easter Sunday.

Violence is a contagion that with its spread and inevitable escalation creates its own perverse logic; it’s the logic of terrorism. We’ve all wondered how a terrorist can inflict such murderous cruelty on innocent people. But the terrorist has his logic. The terrorist will defend his actions by citing past abuses his people have suffered, and in the mind of the terrorist his means are justified by the ends he believes will be good. The terrorist always sees his actions as a response to previous violence and perceives his actions as primarily defensive. René Girard says, “the fact that no one ever feels they are the aggressor is because everything is always reciprocal ... The aggressor has always already been attacked.”[16] This is the defense that ISIS and Al-Qaeda give. And isn’t this precisely how President Harry S. Truman justified dropping two atomic bombs on cities full of civilians? Truman’s argument for killing 200,000 people was no more sophisticated than that we were attacked and atomic bombs brought a good end. The winners get their face minted on money and the losers get tried for war crimes, but it’s all the same logic.

When the case is made that it is the American military that defends Christian religious liberty, 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.

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).

Sometimes you embarrass yourself when you get drunk on hubris. At times you display an arrogance that borders on blasphemous. I’m talking about the kind of religious patriotism that makes you an idolatrous rival to my faith in Jesus Christ. Your capital city is filled with none-too-subtle religious iconography. Take for example The Apotheosis of Washington in the Capitol Rotunda that depicts George Washington seated on the throne of glory in heaven. Obviously you know that apotheosis means to “make a god of”—because that’s clearly what you’re attempting to do with Washington. You appropriated the Christian iconography of Christ ascended to heaven and replaced Jesus Christ with George Washington. Come on now! That’s a bit much, wouldn’t you say? Honored as the nation’s first President, fine. But made a god?! Do you mean to suggest that America is a divine creation with heavenly authority to rule the nations? And if that’s not what you mean, then what do you mean to indicate with The Apotheosis of Washington in the Capitol? And this is just one example. You know I could cite many others.

So perhaps the best moral sense Christians can make of the story of Christendom now, from the vantage of its aftermath, is to recall that the gospel was never bound to the historical fate of any political or social order, but always claimed to enjoy a transcendence of all times and places. ... That being so, surely modern Christians should find some joy in being forced to remember that they are citizens of a kingdom not of this world, that here they have no enduring city, and that they are called to live as strangers and pilgrims on the earth.[11] —David Bentley Hart

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.

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.

Until we see America as a kind of New Babylon instead of a kind of New Israel, it will be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for Christians to faithfully embody the holy otherness of the kingdom of Christ.

As Walter Brueggemann says in The Prophetic Imagination, “The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation.”[10]

Hurricanes are weather systems formed by moist warm air, the rotation of the earth, and a few other relatively simple factors. The satanic, on the other hand, is generated from the greatest complexity we know anything about—the complexity of the human psyche and human social structures. Out of human anxiety, rivalry, rage, and blame, the devil is born.

Nietzsche was wrong. The meaning of life is not found in power, the meaning of life is found in love. God is not totalized will to power, God is kenotic self-sacrificing love. 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.

When more than half of the adherents of a Christian movement cannot identify torture as immoral, what is there left to say?

Politics is the art of compromise, but there are some areas where Christians must not compromise. You can’t absolve the sin of being pro-torture by claiming to be pro-life. If making America great again involves waterboarding, nuclear weapons, child detention camps, and ridiculing environmental concerns, it’s a project Christians cannot participate in.

For me, Donald Trump was the reality TV embodiment of three of the deadly sins—lust, greed, and pride.

In Think Big, Donald Trump’s win-at-all-cost tough guy persona is on full display as he writes, The only way to get rich is to be realistic and brutally honest. ... It is tough, and people get hurt. So you have to be as tough as nails and willing to kick ass if you want to win. ... My motto is: Always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.[1]

evangelical scholar and Messiah College professor of history John Fea explains it like this. This election, while certainly unique and unprecedented in American history, is also the latest manifestation of a long-standing evangelical approach to public life. This political playbook was written in the 1970s and drew heavily from an even longer history of white evangelical fear. It is a playbook characterized by attempts to “win back” or “restore culture.” It is a playbook grounded in a highly problematic interpretation of the relationship between Christianity and the American founding. It is a playbook that too often gravitates toward nativism, xenophobia, racism, intolerance, and an unbiblical view of American exceptionalism.[2]

John Fea concludes his book with these sobering words. Evangelicals can do better than Donald Trump. His campaign and presidency have drawn on a troubling pattern of American evangelicalism that is willing to yield to old habits grounded in fear, nostalgia, and the search for power. Too many of its leaders (and their followers) have traded their Christian witness for a mess of political pottage and a few federal judges. It should not surprise us that people are leaving evangelicalism or no longer associating themselves with that label—or, in some cases, leaving the church altogether. It’s time to take a long hard look at what we have become. Believe me, we have a lot of work to do. Believe me.[3]

Again, John Fea: In the United States we don’t have kings, princes, or courts; but we do have our own version of religious courtiers; and many of them have what Southern Baptist theologian Richard Land has gleefully described as “unprecedented access” to the Oval Office. Disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, now back with his own television show after being released from prison, praised prosperity preacher Paula White because she can, “walk into the White House any time she wants to” and have “full access to the King.”