Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

The whole package of dominant triumphalist faith adds up to “God and country,” with “country” being the tail that wags the dog of “God.”

The Jesus of the Gospels is far more suited for an F.B.I. Wanted poster than for being the poster child of American values. While the historical Jesus certainly wasn’t a hippie, he was obviously dangerous and subversive. After all, Rome didn’t crucify people for extolling civic virtues and pledging allegiance to the empire. In announcing and enacting the kingdom of God, Jesus was countercultural and counter-imperial. This is why Jesus was crucified. His crime was claiming to be a king who had not been installed by Caesar.

And those of us at the 1970s Catacombs knew that what Jesus represented did not have an easy fit with the materialism and militarism of American culture. If anything, what Jesus taught was an out-and-out repudiation of American materialism and militarism.

In time, most of us ceased to be countercultural Christians and instead became conventional conservative Americans with a Jesus fish on our SUVs.

slowly seduced by the siren songs coming from the prosperity gospel and the religious right. The gradual synthesis of the gospel with material prosperity and political power happened gradually enough, and with enough biblical proof-texting, to make it seem plausible. And I went along for the ride.

following Jesus was the new and true way to be human.

It’s worth noting that the word culture comes from cult. Culture is derived from how and what people worship.

Jesus and his two most important apostles, Peter and Paul, were all executed by the Roman Empire. Why? Not for their religious beliefs about an afterlife, but because the kingdom of heaven they announced and enacted posed a challenge to the dominant myth that Rome had a manifest destiny to rule the nations and a divine right to shape history. Either it was Jesus who was the last best hope of the earth or it was Rome. But it couldn’t be both.

followers of Jesus are called to renounce revenge and love their enemies. Always. This is the Jesus way.

Then what do we say? Should Christians in Nazi Germany have dutifully supported Hitler and his blitzkriegs by citing Romans 13? (By the way, they did!) No, obviously something has gone wrong.

It’s not simply a matter of determining when Caesar has stepped over the line. That would be endlessly debated. Rather, it’s a matter of understanding that though Caesar may serve a beneficial role as the town constable, Christians will never join with Caesar in waging war.

So this is my question to American Christians who are fond of using Romans 13 to call for endless military buildup and waging what can only be an endless “war on terror.” Why are the American Revolutionaries of 1776 exempt from Romans 13? Shouldn’t they have been “subject to the governing authorities”[8] as Paul says? Is the use of Romans 13 to call for Christian support of American waging of war principled and consistent, or is it self-serving and inconsistent? Are we using Romans 13 to help clarify how Christians should live as “exiles” within an empire, or are we using Romans 13 to endorse the militarism of our favored empire?

And we should never forget that the man who wrote Romans 13 was executed by the government for not submitting to the governing authorities out of fidelity to Christ!

And even if the Beast can bring about a kind of order amidst chaos with his sword, for the Christian it doesn’t really matter—we are followers of the slaughtered and victorious Lamb. We are called to “overcome evil with good”[10] and imitate those who “did not cling to life even in the face of death.”[11]

Tying the gospel to the interests of empire had a deeply compromising effect upon the gospel, as seen in the sordid history of the church being mixed up with imperial conquest, colonialism, and military adventurism around the world. If secularism helps bring that to an end, I can only say, hallelujah!

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

It’s not the task of the church to “Make America Great Again.” The contemporary task of the church is to make Christianity countercultural again. And once we untether Jesus from the interests of empire, we begin to see just how countercultural and radical Jesus’ ideas actually are. Enemies? Love them. Violence? Renounce it. Money? Share it. Foreigners? Welcome them. Sinners? Forgive them.

Paul also said it was the power and wisdom of God, contending that “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”[5] Paul doesn’t mean that when God is weak, God is still stronger than humans. That wouldn’t be scandalous but just a typical boast about conventional power. Rather Paul is saying that God’s power is weakness! Think about that for a moment and you will realize that such an assertion is still scandalous today.

Violence is so prominent in the Bible because violence is the problem the Bible must address. The Bible looks honestly and unflinchingly upon the world as it is, and thus the pages of Scripture often drip with blood.

In a world that admires men of power and wealth, supremely exemplified in the Caesars and their modern equivalents, Christians are to follow the example of a poor and humble Galilean who was crucified by a Roman governor. No wonder Peter speaks of Christians as exiles! The ways of empire are to be utterly foreign to those who worship and follow Jesus of Nazareth. The priorities of a superpower will inevitably be the antithesis of those found in the Sermon on the Mount.

In our wounded world abuse has a way of replicating itself so that it spreads like a virus. We all know that the abused often become abusers and that hurt people often end up hurting other people. Woundedness begets woundedness. This is especially true in the highly volatile realm of violence. Violence is a contagion that with its spread and inevitable escalation creates its own perverse logic;

In his resurrection Jesus speaks peace to his disciples and commissions them to flood the world with his forgiveness.

Every wound we inflict upon another we also inflict upon our own soul.

It’s not yet another war that will heal the world, but the wounds of Christ. Calvary was the last battlefield that made any sense. After Calvary, every other battlefield is a failure to understand that the ways of Cain and Caesar, the ways of war and greed, all died in the body of Christ on Good Friday. So now when we are wounded, we don’t lash out at our adversary, we don’t retaliate and replicate the virus; instead we forgive our brother-enemy and bring our wounds to the healing wounds of Christ. The body of Christ is where sin goes to die. And we who have been baptized, have been baptized into the body of Christ. This is a great mystery, but the baptized now belong to the wound that heals the world.

When the church lacks the vision and courage to actually be the church, it abandons its high calling of proclaiming the Lordship of Jesus and panders to power, soliciting its services as the high priest of religious patriotism. 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 idea of waging peace by patience instead of waging war by violence has been lost where the church has been willingly conscripted into serving the nation’s military agenda. War is the ultimate impatience.

In civic religion, war is always publically remembered as an act of sacrifice. Public remembrances of war are deeply liturgical because war is memorialized as a sacrament within civic religion.

When the American flag is placed in supremacy over all other flags—including a flag intended to represent Christian faith—aren’t we saying our faith is subordinate to our patriotism? Is there any other interpretation? And if you’re inclined to argue that I’m making too much out of the mere arrangement of flags on a church lawn, try reversing them and see what happens!

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.

One of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that in it we find the narrative told from the perspective of the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, the conquered, the occupied, the defeated.

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.

And that’s the challenge I face in reading the Bible. I’m not the Galilean peasant. Who am I kidding! I’m the Roman in his villa and I need to be honest about it. I too can hear the gospel of the kingdom as good news (because it is!), but first I need to admit its radical nature and not try to tame it to endorse my inherited entitlement.

Exile on Main Street is also an apt turn of phrase for describing the Christian’s somewhat ambiguous relationship with nationality. Christians are on Main Street as citizens in the nation of their citizenship, but they are never fully at home in it. We’re on Main Street, but we’re also exiles on Main Street. This is the tension created by baptism—from the moment we are baptized into the body of Christ we become expatriates in the land of our birth.

They were in danger of becoming so at home in Babylon that they would lose their identity as the chosen people of Yahweh. To put it simply, these Jews were in danger of becoming Babylonian. Assimilation now threatened to become apostasy. This is what the prophetic books of Ezekiel and Daniel are about—how to be the people of God while living as exiles in a pagan land.

Daniel is about how to live responsibly but faithfully in an idolatrous culture. Thus Daniel is a book that’s always relevant for the people of God—whether ancient Jews living in Babylon or early Christians living in Rome or modern Christians living in America.

Economic superpowers always need a source of cheap labor to support their affluent lifestyle—whether to bake their bricks or pick their cotton—and they generally prefer to exploit an ethnic minority that can be readily identified as an outcast “other.”

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 a culture that may wear a thin veneer of Christian civic religion but in truth venerates Mars and Mammon, what does it look like to maintain fidelity to the Prince of Peace who says you cannot serve God and money?

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

bluntly when he said, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”[8]

if you feed on the empire’s liturgies of economy and security, you will be formed in the opposite of faith, hope, and love—a malformation of the human soul that is perhaps best described as fear. This kind of fear is a spiritual pathology ensuing from a toxic diet. So refuse it. Feed instead on a kosher, anti-empire diet that nourishes faith, hope, and love.

Those who feed on faith, hope, and love stand out in a culture characterized by fear; they are distinguished by the healthy glow of a robust peace. But it should be acknowledged that standing bravely in a culture that bows down to fear is not always safe...as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego found out.

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.

Those looking for a heaven-sent revolution that rearranges the social order for human flourishing see it as a hopeful dream, but those deeply invested in maintaining a status quo of privilege for the elite see it as a dreadful nightmare.

if you’re the most powerful man in the world, it’s almost impossible not to hear this news as bad news or experience this dream as a nightmare. 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.

That’s when the king’s head exploded. There’s something about not paying public homage to the emblems of empire that evokes almost maniacal rage among kings and their courtiers.

Tyrant kings and kingdoms are accustomed to controlling people through fear, especially through the threat of violence.

If we rightly claim that abortion for convenience is incompatible with Christian ethics because Christ was once in the womb, we must also recognize that refusing refugees is incompatible with Christian ethics because Christ was once forced to seek asylum in a foreign land. Christians must have their ethics informed by Christ, not by the vested interests of tyrant kings.

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. We even have a genre of the New Testament known as “the prison epistles.” 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.

After five centuries of waiting, Zechariah’s donkey-riding King of Peace had arrived in Jerusalem, but Jerusalem’s blind faith in the ways of war made it impossible for them to recognize it. Their expectation of a militant Messiah prevented them from seeing the things that make for peace. Looking for some dude on a horse, Jerusalem missed the Messiah who rode in on a donkey.