Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

Throughout Scripture Babylon is always darkly associated with the evils of empire. What do I mean by empire? Empires are rich, powerful nations who believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their own agenda. Empires want to rule the world. Empires seek a hegemony producing an unholy homogeny—what Hannah Arendt called totalitarianism and what Walter Brueggemann calls totalism. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s fertile imagination, this is “the one ring to rule them all” formed by the Dark Lord Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom. (Certainly The Lord of the Rings can be read as a tale of heroic resistance to the totalism of inhuman empire.) Empires insist that the only legitimate way of arranging the world is their way. Empires claim that only their hegemonic rule will bring peace to the world. This is the satanic imposter of the peaceable kingdom of God—the Pax Romana in opposition to the Pax Christus.