Resurrection People Don't Crave Empire
Because our God has called us to be caretakers, not kings
I stood in the kitchen after another semester immersed in reading books and learning U.S. and global history. Switching to a history major to accompany my English degree had opened intellectual doors I didn’t know were closed. My Christian professions at my Lutheran university pushed me to explore and consider the stories I had always believed about who I was and how I fit in the world as both a Christian and an American.
“But America is a Christian nation,” my mom pushed.
“No it’s not, Mom. It never has been.”
“But it was founded on Christian principles by Christian men.”
I don’t remember where the conversation went after that, but I’m pretty sure I was a college student know-it-all who had the right information but had no idea how to persuade my mom to believe otherwise in a short conversation. And since I’m a notorious conflict avoider, I probably just let it go and silently stewed about it for the rest of the day.
My understanding of the world had started to change. My understanding of what it meant to be a Christian in the world had started to change. And the slow, painful process of decolonizing my faith had begun.
I just didn’t realize it yet.
I grew up Lutheran in Evangelical adjacent spaces, so while I regularly heard “Grace Alone, Faith Alone, Scripture Alone” in my faith community, my parents also regularly listened to Christian radio and more charismatic Christian voices. That meant my sisters and I also listened to those voices because we were in the car with them or listening to our parents repeating the same stuff they were hearing on a regular basis. It also meant we were repeatedly exposed to fears of Christians losing their grip on American society.
As a parent of two teenagers now, I understand some of the concern. I don’t want my own children destroying their hearts and minds with dangerous behaviors. I want my children to grow up to be faithful Christians. I want them to develop faith practices that are life and soul-giving. I want them to love and serve God in everything they do. I want them to love Jesus and love others, and I want that love to bear fruit that furthers the Kingdom.
But this is not the dominant Christianity I see in America anymore. Christian Nationalism has fed into the fears of mostly white American Christians who are afraid of the changing landscape. The dominant emotion is not hope in the Resurrection but fear of those who are different. After all, white Christians consistently speak about fears of immigrants changing us from being a “Christian” nation (which has never been the case about America), all while ignoring that the vast majority of immigrants coming from the global south are in fact Christians who follow a conservative moral framework for how they should live their lives. They fear intellectual institutions while forgetting that our first universities were founded as Christian institutions built to educate the masses and prepare them for fruitful citizenship. They fear medical advancements while ignoring the role Christian institutions have played in ensuring medical care for people around the world.
And this fear is not just destroying our nation; it’s destroying the American Church.
Christendom has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. - C.K. Chesterton (from The Everlasting Man)
A lot of things happen when we ignore history. History rhymes and echoes. It doesn’t repeat itself, but it does repeat patterns that can teach us about our current moment.
Throughout history, when the church has aligned itself with political power, it has corrupted theology and doctrine in order to serve those in power: Constantine, the Crusades, a series of corrupt and immoral Popes leading to the Reformation, the Spanish Inquisition, witch trials, civil war in Ireland, etc. A religion that grew out of Roman occupation in the ancient world spread across the globe within centuries, defying the ordained political and spiritual order and offering the world something new. But as kings and religious leaders discovered the power they could hold over the faithful masses, human nature took over.
Over and over again, history has shown us how survival of the Church becomes tied to survival of the State. The State uses its power to coerce belief and therefore obedience to the State. After all, if the leaders of nations are selected by God, how can people stand against them? Questioning the leadership of both the State and the Church means also questioning the very tenets of one’s belief system. And if the belief system is proven wrong, then what does that mean for the present? What does that mean for the afterlife? What does that mean for one’s own understanding of their place in the world?
Fear causes people to cling to power structures that help them make sense of the mess around them. But Jesus never promised us trouble-free lives. When the prophet Jeremiah wrote, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord,” God’s people were headed into exile. Yet God told them he had “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”1 Their hope wasn’t in a resurrected empire. Their eventual hope lay in a resurrected Messiah.
Modern American Christians, especially, have an uncomfortable relationship with hardship. For those of us born after WWII (which is most of us), all we’ve known is a country swimming in wealth and prosperity. While the reality of wealth and prosperity may be out of reach for many of us, the American Dream we have been sold since birth has convinced us that it is ours for the taking if we just reach out and grab it. And that environment of wealth and prosperity has also impacted our churches. The achievement of the American Dream has become tied to faithfully living a God-fearing life. And prosperity gospel isn’t just tied to making money; it’s been tied to our relationships (in the form of purity culture), politics (in culture wars), and even discussions of the afterlife.
We’ve forgotten what drew faithful Jews and then Gentiles to Jesus and then the apostles after Jesus’ death and resurrection. The early Christians faced very real threats as they practiced their faith. They were countercultural and that made them dangerous to the empire. They didn’t seek to overthrow the empire itself; they sought to change the hearts and minds of the people they interacted with on a daily basis. They didn’t demand that their non-Christian friends and neighbors follow a strict moral code; they persuaded them to change just by living differently. They were weird and defiant and they held firm because they believed in the Resurrection.
As Rachel Held Evans said in Searching for Sunday, “Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It’s certainly not something resurrection people worry about.”2
The American Christian Church at large has forgotten what it means to be Resurrection people. It has sought salvation in political power, and in doing so has risked losing all meaningful influence on the culture. A recent Pew Research poll finds that 44% of Americans now believe religion does more harm than good. Social media is full of people who have been harmed by the Church in a variety of ways. People look at the 8 in 10 Evangelical white voters who voted for Donald Trump and see nothing but hypocrisy.
Those of us who have been shoved to the margins in our faith communities because we took an unpopular stand against the pursuit of power at all costs continue to believe in and fight for something better. We remember that when Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert, the Messiah refused the temptation to take power. We remember the suffering of the early Christians and look to them as an example of how to build something better.
In Othered, Jenai Auman writes, “Practicing resurrection after weathering harm means we lay down the weapons and strategies of the culture around us. We refuse to play the game…We breathe life just as life has been breathed into us. We meet others who are wandering through the wilderness and practice being present with them. We learn what it means to breathe life into even those who disagree with us. And we love our enemies—the ones we had to flee from or the ones who chased us into the wilderness—by believing they deserve to have life breathed into them.”3
We see the empty cathedrals across Europe and know that there has to be something better. When the Church has failed to lead as Christ leads believers, the institution crumbles and is replaced with something else, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
In Searching for Sunday, Evans presents her own vision for what the church looks like after Christianity falls from its position of prominence in American culture. She says, “I hope it looks like altars transforming into tables, gates transforming into open doors, and cure-alls transforming into healing oils. I hope it looks like a kingdom that belongs not to the rich, but to the poor, not to the triumphant but to the meek, not to the culture warriors but to the peacemakers. If Christianity must die, may it die to the old way of dominance and control and be resurrected to the Way of Jesus, the Way of the cross.”4
She didn’t live to see what the Church could look like once it steps away from Empire building, but for those of us who are grieving and seeking a better way forward, her words ring true.
People who believe in Resurrection do not seek power and prestige because the eternal battle has already been won for them. They lead by example, not with a sword. They offer a light in the darkness, not a firestorm that will burn everything down. They believe Jesus has already made all things new and that a government made in the image of our human nature cannot be the vehicle by which we spread that Good News.
Until God's people stop seeing our fellow human beings as a threat, we cannot be a light to the world.
It is the message we need to remember right now, and always.
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Jeremiah 21:11
Evans, Rachel Held. Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church. Thomas Nelson Incorporated, 2015. p. 225
Auman, Jenai. Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized. Baker Publishing Group, 2024. p. 186
Evans, Rachel Held. Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church. Thomas Nelson Incorporated, 2015. p. 225-226