Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

I’ve been a pastor going on four decades and I can tell you that the greatest challenge to making disciples of Jesus in the American context is that most people are already thoroughly discipled into the rival religion of Americanism.

America is a religion—a religion complete with creation myths, holy days, holy ground, founding fathers, canonized saints, canonical texts, revered hymns, hallowed temples, sanctified statues, liturgical gestures, and sacred liturgies.

Christians can and should be productive citizens within the particular nation they happen to have residence; they should pray for political leaders and pay their taxes; they can vote and participate in public service and contribute to the public good. 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.

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 confuse the nation with the church, it may not do any particular damage to the nation, but it will do irreparable harm to the church. When we reach for the sword of violent power, we let go of the cross of Christian discipleship.

The people of God are sustained by the Holy Spirit, not hydrogen bombs.

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.

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? Voluntary poverty? Not necessarily. But certainly the Bible calls me to deep humility — a humility demonstrated in hospitality and generosity. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with being a relatively well-off white American male, but I better be humble, hospitable, and generous!

By setting the book in Babylon during the sixth century instead of the Seleucid Empire of the second century, the anti-empire stories in Daniel were less dangerous during the persecution of Antiochus. But the lessons on faithful survival drawn from the Jewish experience in Babylon could easily be applied to contemporary Jews living under the rule of the Seleucid Empire. Daniel is about how to live responsibly but faithfully in an idolatrous culture.

Directed by the divine I AM encountered in the burning bush, Moses returned from the wilderness to issue Pharaoh the divine imperative, “Let my people go!” After a bit of persuasion from God (ten plagues!), Moses brought the Hebrews out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, and led them on their long trek to the promised land. This was the birth of a nation—a nation of former slaves who had surprisingly been adopted as God’s own people. 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?

To hear the well-known stories of Daniel as children’s Sunday School lessons is safe and easy—romantic tales about fiery furnaces and lions’ dens from a time long ago in a world far away. What’s not safe and what’s not easy is to pull those stories into our present context and take the imaginative leap to be Daniel in the lion’s den, to be Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, to be Jewish exiles on Babylon’s Main Street. What’s not easy or safe is to ask what it means to be a Christian in a culture that doesn’t want you to actually live according to the Jesus way.

In the American experience, the economy is the most sacred obsession—all things are justified in the name of the economy. 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.”

The other sacred obsession in the American superpower is security. 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. Jesus put it bluntly when he said, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”[8] And centuries before Christ, the psalmist said, “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.”

(The powerful are often inordinately paranoid; after all, when you’re on top there’s nowhere to go but down.)

The book of Daniel says, “Nebuchadnezzar had such disturbing dreams that he couldn’t sleep.”[11] If we’re paying close attention, we recognize we’ve already heard this story in the Bible. The Bible repeats itself because history repeats itself. Just as the fabulously wealthy Pharaoh had been haunted by dreams of scarcity in the days of Joseph, now the fabulously powerful Nebuchadnezzar is haunted by dreams of insecurity.

It’s fascinating to notice that the dreams of the prophets and the nightmares of kings are often one and the same.

If our gospel is not heard as somewhat threatening to the one percent who are most privileged by the current arrangement of things, we may want to question if our evangelistic news is really gospel. If our gospel is not especially good news to the poor, Jesus and his apostles would not recognize it as the gospel of the kingdom they proclaimed.

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.

Today, American Christians are metaphorical exiles within the modern empire of America. But most do not see themselves as exiles. Most fail to see American culture as something we need to come out of. Instead of coming out of an American culture built on consumerism and militarism and being the church, many Christians are attempting to return to a mythical past where they imagine America as a kind of New Israel. All of this is tragically mistaken.

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. To put it another way, King Jesus is not the best version of Caesar; King Jesus is the anti-Caesar. This is what “Jesus is Lord” has always meant.

(not made king, but born king),

Herod’s fear of a baby shows just how fragile his ego was.

You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb the world to peace.

In response to the inevitable and sometimes angry pushback of drawing political implications from the Christmas story, Stanley Hauerwas in his theological commentary on Matthew says, Too often the political significance of Jesus’s birth, a significance that Herod understood all too well, is lost because the church, particularly the church in America, reads the birth as confirmation of the assumed position that religion has within the larger framework of politics. That is, the birth of Jesus is not seen as a threat to thrones and empires because religion concerns the private. Such a view does not intentionally downplay the importance of the gospel, since it is assumed that the private deals with the most important aspect of our life, which is often labeled “morality.” The gospel of Matthew, however, knows no distinction between the public (the political) and the private. Jesus is born into time, threatening the time of Herod and Rome.[5]

In the flight to Egypt we see the Holy Family as refugees, and once we have seen the Holy Family as refugees fleeing a violent Middle East despot, it must forever influence how Christians view modern-day refugees in similar situations—in the eyes of God, they too are a kind of holy family. These acts of prophetic imagination (to borrow a phrase from Walter Brueggemann) are necessary for those who would read the biblical Christmas story with contemporary relevance and not just romanticized sentimentality.

Stanley Hauerwas says, “Rome knew how to deal with enemies; you kill them or co-opt them.”[8] Usually the rich get co-opted and the poor get killed.

The limitation of tyrant kings is that they can only control those who are afraid. The principalities and powers are adept at harnessing the fear of death—the fear of loss in all its forms—to control those who make their place of privilege possible. But those who have disarmed fear by being formed in maturing love (“perfect love casts out fear”[13]) are beyond the control of tyrant kings—even tyrant kings who would kill babies.

Those who follow Jesus are a prophetic challenge to abortion for convenience and a prophetic challenge to carpet-bombing for a cause. If it threatens the wellbeing of children, followers of Jesus oppose it. Nothing less is truly pro-life. This is why a consistent pro-life Christian ethic opposes the death-friendly practices of abortion, capital punishment, torture, war, predatory capitalism, environmental exploitation, unchecked proliferation of guns, neglecting the poor, refusing the refugee, and keeping healthcare unaffordable for millions.

Using an anti-abortion position to provide moral cover for pro-death practices and policies advantageous to the principalities and powers should not be confused with a pro-life ethic derived from the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.

Christians must have their ethics informed by Christ, not by the vested interests of tyrant kings.

With John in jail, the baton was passed, and now it’s Jesus who is announcing the onset of God’s kingdom. An important transition in the gospel story occurs when one of the most important figures is hauled off to jail. We should notice how remarkable it is that so many of the central characters in the story of the New Testament are arrested. John the Baptist, Jesus, all of the twelve disciples, Paul and his companions, John of Patmos—they all end up in jail at some point.

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.

Tyrant kings did not violently attack the kingdom of heaven that John and Jesus were announcing because it was a purely spiritual kingdom affecting only the interior life or postmortem fate of the individual, but precisely because their gospel carried subversive political implications. John and Jesus were explicitly declaring that the kingdom of God was arriving, and implicitly declaring that the time of tyrant kings had expired.

The question is, which parade will we march in? The parade that celebrates empire and militarism and trusts in war to shape the world? Or the parade that celebrates the Prince of Peace and trusts in God to heal the world? One parade is led by some dude on a horse (or a tank) and those who follow are armed with swords (or combat rifles). The other parade is led by a king on a donkey and those who follow are armed with nothing more deadly than palm branches. The people in each parade think the people in the other parade are persisting in absolute folly—so you’ll have to make up your own mind about which parade you want to march in.

And yet Christians celebrate Palm Sunday year after year. Don’t we believe that something monumental happened when the King of Kings eschewed the warhorse to ride a peace donkey? Don’t we at least believe Jesus offers us an alternative to all those dudes with their horses, tanks and ICBMs? We must believe it! The Palm Sunday shout is hosanna! It means “save now.” In a world married to war, now more than ever, we need to acclaim Christ as King and shout hosanna. But our hosanna must not be a plea for Jesus to join our side, bless our troops, and help us win our war—it must be a plea to save us from our addiction to war.

I understand the world is going to have its infatuation for the kind of conquest and militarism symbolized by those dudes-on-horses statues seen in every capital city. But must it be so among those who are heirs of the Hebrew prophets and followers of Jesus of Nazareth? Isn’t part of what makes the world the world and not the church, the fact that the world still holds to the old ways of war, while the church follows the king who refused to ride the warhorse? At least isn’t it supposed to be that way?

Jesus conquers as a slaughtered lamb—by shedding his own blood on the cross and speaking God’s word of forgiveness.

In giving my testimony to the saving power of Jesus, I can say that I have seen the white horse and its rider. Indeed, the one on the white horse wears all the crowns! I’ve been slain by the word that comes from the rider’s mouth, and I’ve been raised to new life. I belong to the armies of heaven who follow the rider called Faithful and True. And though I confess that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead, I read Revelation 19 as an apocalyptic portrayal of present realities. Christ as a victorious conqueror on a white horse is not something waiting to happen, but a reality that has been ongoing since his resurrection and ascension.

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.

But haughty arrogance leading to insanity is not unique to Babylon, rather it’s a template imitated by empires throughout history. According to the New York Times Magazine, in 2002 a senior White House advisor told a journalist, We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.[12] “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Really? Creating “your own reality” could be a textbook definition of insanity. Reality is ontological being—and being is a gift from God. We can no more create our own reality than we can create our own universe. We may think we can, but that’s a form of insanity.

Life is not a game; life is a gift. The purpose of life is not to win; the purpose of life is to learn to love well.

In an attempt to understand what the Bible is trying to communicate about Satan, we should keep in mind that Satan is not a proper name and really should be rendered as “the satan.” Satan is simply the un-translated Hebrew word for accuser. Thus in Zechariah 3:1 we are told that “the satan” stood up to “satan” Joshua (that is, the accuser stood up to accuse Joshua). The same is true for the Greek diabolos (devil)—it too means accuser. Though we are accustomed to treating “satan” as a proper name, this is a result of popular custom and not something found in the biblical text. What we should take away from the use of the word “satan” and “devil” is that accusation, blame, and slander are the essence of the satanic and diabolical. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of advocacy—the unholy spirit is the spirit of accusation.

Easter is the door opened by Christ that leads to a world beyond the brutality of the Leviathan, beyond the thin red line of bloody battle, beyond a world under the domination of Satan. And no one has captured the idea of Easter as the inauguration of a new world better than G.K. Chesterton. Just as Orthodox Christians always quote from Chrysostom’s Paschal homily on Easter, I cannot let Easter come and go without quoting this poignant passage from Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.

Dostoevsky understood that a society so saturated in falseness, no matter how Christian, could not continue to endure.

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.

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 we see faith leaders fawning over proximity to political power, don’t we feel the falseness of their faith?

Yes, politics are always complicated, but what does Jesus want your attitude to be toward Syrian refugees, Honduran asylum seekers, and undocumented day laborers? You already know. You’ve always known. Some will say power trumps everything, but you’ve always known that mercy triumphs over judgment. Hold on to what you know to be true and don’t be talked out of it by compromised faith leaders.

But how does such a deception take hold? It happens when spiritual leaders who cannot rise above the material life capitulate to the machinations of empire. And it happens when people assume that God is on their side regardless of what they do. When that assumption prevails, all critical and moral assessment is abandoned; all that matters is what we think benefits the prosperity and security of “our side.” As Bob Dylan pointed out, “You never ask questions when God’s on your side.” But Gott Mit Uns[13] has more than a dubious history. There’s nothing more false than Gott Mit Uns when the task at hand is to kill all your enemies.

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.