(Christian) America has a problem
the difference between American civil religion and early Christianity
“America First” Christianity could not be further from the teachings of a first-century Palestinian Jew named Jesus and the religious tradition that worships him as God incarnate. Sadly, evangelicals often pass off American exceptionalism as gospel truth.
American versions of Christianity look more like the empire that killed Jesus than the community that formed around his life, death, and resurrection. But the more I learn about early Christianity, the more I realize how politically radical it once was to be Christian.
Some early Christian communities understood themselves in opposition to empire, as is demonstrated in the Book of Revelation. Written toward the end of the first century CE, the writer of Revelation, who calls himself John, pleads with his followers of social and economic privilege to stop participating in political oppressive systems. The faith John wants to inspire in his audience will cost them everything.1
The earliest Church was messy and imperfect, just like people of faith are today. But what was different was their social location: at best, they were insignificant or annoying to empire. At worst, they were violently killed by the state, like their Christ, in sporadic periods of local persecution. A few centuries later, the persecuted became the persecutors, stamping out heresies with the military might of their former enemy, Rome.
This history is very difficult for white settler/European Americans to comprehend. Christ religion was not always so easily confused with the violent politics of imperial powers. The irony is that some white evangelical Christians today claim to be marginalized by culture and society and, at the same time, hold disproportional power and privilege in the U.S. political system over people of color, gender and sexual minorities, and people of other faiths.
Progressive American Christianity has also been far too invested in the politics of domination. Election night 2016 was a wake up call for white progressives and white post-evangelicals. We had the luxury of believing America was slowly and surely getting better—a privilege of hopefulness that Christians of color have never been afforded in America’s history.
2016 was the death of my story that history would automatically move humanity toward freedom and dignity for all. I was ignorant of the ongoing work Black Americans have always been doing to inch our country toward progress, to bend the moral arch of the universe toward justice. And I was naive to how deep systems of oppression like white supremacy, patriarchy, xenophobia, and queerphobia run in the United States.
The rise of Trump disabused me of those false notions and likewise woke up many of my friends who had grown up evangelicals. We began questioning everything: our history, our doctrines, our churches, our families, our political, our lack of awareness.
Years later, facing a third Trump candidacy, I can definitely say I’m a lot less naive. And I am no longer beholden to a civil religion that has been coopted by the politics of empire.
A victim of Roman imperial violence, Jesus announced the arrival of the now-and-not-yet justice of God. The hope of Revelation is not an empire of exclusion and domination, but an ancient anticipation of an expansive, earthly age to come where the survivors of violence and marginalization finally experience peace.
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
[God] will dwell with them;
they will be [God’s] peoples,
and God [God]self will be with them;
[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”2
—
Author’s note: This post was written on the unceded and traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations.
Harry O. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation after Christendom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), loc. 76-82, Kindle.
Revelation 21:3-4 (NRSVA). My edits are bracketed.