Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

A society that has long been the heir of Christian legacy can easily forget that it is not by merely knowing the words of Christ, but by actually doing them that a Christian society stands upon a sure foundation.

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. That’s the falseness that prevails. That’s the deception of a material society. Can you feel it? The great lie is that life is about the acquisition of money and other forms of power. The grand deceit is that in the pursuit of wealth and power all means are justified. Every war is justified if it’s for the sake of The Economy. The lie is that to live the abundant life you have to have proximity to power—especially the power to kill. In Babylon this lie is pervasive, persuasive, and seductive...as idolatry always is. But can you feel the falseness of it all? Don’t you realize that even if the idolatry of materialism and militarism is preached beneath steeples and ensconced behind stained-glass it’s still antichrist? Resist it! Don’t tolerate it! Rise above it! Cain was wrong and his city was built on a lie. The meaning of life is not about besting your brother, beating your brother, conquering your brother, killing your brother. Life is about caring for your brother. That’s not naiveté, that’s Christianity! 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’...

Let’s remember again the radical profession that we Christians make. We confess that Jesus is the world’s true king. We confess that Jesus is Lord...right now. The rightful ruler of the world is not some ancient Caesar, not some contemporary Commander in Chief, but Jesus Christ! Jesus is not going to be king someday, Jesus is King of Kings right now! Christ was crowned on the cross and God vindicated him as the world’s true king by raising him from the dead. This is what Christians confess, believe, and seek to live. We have no king but Jesus. And our king has nothing to do with violent power. 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.”[9] The kingdom from heaven that Jesus brings into the world does not come riding an M1 Abrams tank. In the kingdom of the Prince of Peace, we study war no more, we turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, we turn tanks into tractors and missile silos into grain silos. Our task is not to turn the world into a battlefield, our task is to turn the world into a garden. Our goal is not Armageddon, our goal is New Jerusalem. We’re marching to Zion, the beautiful city of God.

There’s nothing more false than Gott Mit Uns when the task at hand is to kill all your enemies.

We’re not called to win but to be faithful. When we adopt a win-at-all-cost approach to our participation in partisan politics, the cost may be our soul—our Christian authenticity.

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. When Joshua met the angel of the Lord and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?” the angel replied, “Neither.”[15] It’s a hard lesson to learn, but Joshua learned it—we cannot assume that God is on our side; rather we can only seek to be on God’s side.

The resurrection of the Son of God changes everything, and if it doesn’t influence our political theology, we are failing to do theology as Christians.

And it is only now, now that we have the whole sweep of the book of Acts before us that we can see where we are today, why we have arrived at this point, and perhaps even where we must go. We know that we’ve got to get to Caesar with the gospel, we know today far better than many generations that we have to announce to the principalities and powers that their time is up, that Jesus is Lord and they are not. That the unchecked power of mammon is an idol that has to be named and shamed. That the seductive enticements of Aphrodite are a ghastly lie which must be refuted and resisted. That the horrid trumpets of the war god Mars appeal to all that is worst in us and will make the world a worse place. We know all this. We know we must resist paganism in all these forms in the name of Jesus the crucified and risen Lord. And we are to bring this message to bear, locally and globally. We are not a complacent church. We are struggling to be a faithful church.[1]