Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

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.

In a culture that venerates materialism and militarism, the only way to truly follow Jesus is to be countercultural. Sure, the prosperity gospel extols materialism and the religious right celebrates militarism, but these are nothing but attempts to smuggle the idols of Mammon and Mars into Christianity.

A synchronistic religion that attempts to amalgamate Jesus and American values may be popular, but it’s unfaithful to the Spirit who calls the people of God out of Babylon.

It wasn’t the religion of the Christians that got them in trouble per se, but the political implications of their religion.

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 Christianity at home in an empire is the kind of compromised Christianity that the book of Revelation so passionately and creatively warns us against.

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?

The ways and values of superpowers are incompatible with the ways and values commanded by Jesus.

Any serious attempt to live out the Sermon on the Mount in the context of a superpower will cause you to be viewed by the majority as a freakish outlier—a Jesus freak, if you will.

Christendom is dead...but Christ is risen. What may appear to some Christians as a loss is actually an opportunity for the church to return to its radical roots. 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.

The gospel is not motivational talks about happy marriages, being debt free, and achieving your destiny. That all belongs to the broad world of proverbial wisdom. It’s fine as far as it goes, but it has little or nothing to do with the gospel. The gospel is about the cross and the cross is about a scandal. The cross is a scandal because it involves shame. But who is shamed by the cross? Is it the naked man nailed to a tree or the principalities and powers who in their naked bid for power put him there?

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.

done. Colonial interpreters and imperial theologians can and have forced the Bible to serve a violent lie. But on Good Friday the truth is told, for at Golgotha we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies.

A church in bed with empire cannot credibly call the empire to repent.

If the church is to be an ambassador of the good news and an agent of healing in the world, the church is going to have to become serious about being something other than the high priest of religious nationalism.

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.

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. This is what makes it prophetic.

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?

In the civic religion of Americanism, “It’s the economy, stupid” always trumps “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In a culture supremely committed to the economy, a president can sink to the lowest moral ebb as long as the Dow runs high. But if you feed on that lie, it will poison your heart and compromise your Christian identity.

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.

Whether you interpret the kingdom of heaven as an optimistic dream or a haunting nightmare depends on what you’re hoping for. 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.

mistaken. 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.

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.

We have to decide if we’ll pledge our allegiance to the Empire of Power or the Empire of Love, but we can’t do both.

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.

Looking for some dude on a horse, Jerusalem missed the Messiah who rode in on a donkey.

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.

The urge to empire is an insanity that inevitably drives nations to ruin.

I understand the devil as more than a metaphor, but less than a person; the devil is a phenomenon—but a phenomenon so complex that it verges on self-awareness.

Why doesn’t God just destroy the (d)evil? Because the satanic phenomenon is inextricably connected with who we are. God cannot simply destroy the devil in one fell blow without destroying us too.

Jesus destroys the devil by calling us out of rivalry, accusation, violence, domination, and empire, into heaven’s alternative of love, advocacy, peace, and liberation—this is what the Bible calls the kingdom of God.

Our task is not to turn the world into a battlefield, our task is to turn the world into a garden.

In an economic-military superpower, it’s only by acquiescing to the falseness that Christians can hold political dominance.

If making America great again involves waterboarding, nuclear weapons, child detention camps, and ridiculing environmental concerns, it’s a project Christians cannot participate in.

With a low ecclesiology, politics trumps everything.