Christian prophetic witness means naming the world as the world – to uncover the hidden reality beneath the rubble of imperial violence. Jesus’ ministry was the antithesis to Roman imperialism. It is the antithesis of American imperialism today. Jesus’ refusal to be placed within the confines of imperial insecurity was radically queer, as queerness is the refusal to be categorized and defined. The imperial world cannot name Christ, Christ names the imperial world.
Jesus’ immediate context was an empire that was maintained through slavery and patriarchy. The state religion was the Pax Romana, or the Peace of Rome, which maintained that the state’s prosperity was the sole result of Caesar’s imperial military might. Violence was the means through which citizens achieved their salvation. The religion of Pete Hegseth, Christian Nationalism, is nothing more than a Pax Americana using Christianity as a disguise, a grotesque skin mask covering the face of a walking corpse – for there is nothing truly alive within fascism.
This is not to say that Jesus simply represents another political entity that opposes the present constructs. Rather, Jesus’ Way erodes a community’s trust in imperial lies by demonstrating and proclaiming the truth that the Empire is always attempting to hide – their own deep insecurity. Empires are incredibly fragile. They are pathetically weak and must rely on propaganda, scapegoats, and tyranny in order to maintain their footing. God presented a truly secure person to the world in the person of Christ. Jesus demonstrated full self-knowledge, full faith in God’s love of His complete being.
It is for this reason that He was able to face Pilate privately and meet his questions with the full weight of both silence and reflection. It is how He is able to stand with the woman caught in adultery in the face of a veritable firing squad. It is how He is able to shoulder the weight of the death penalty – thus being treated as an enemy of the state, subject to the state’s ultimate act of control. Of course, He nullifies that illusion of control three days later through His Resurrection.
Jesus confronts the world and names it as world, and He is able to do this because He is unafraid, and He is unafraid because He truly knows Himself. He is always centered. Indeed, He is the Center itself – the Source to which we are always pulled when we begin to find our True Selves.
Christianity is political. It is anti-imperial. But Christianity is not anti-imperial in the way in which a political party will oppose a regime. We are against the ways of the Empire peripherally. Our opposition is not the core of our being, nor is it any sort of telos or goal. It is simply the result of living according to the co-suffering way of love of neighbor. Such love is devastating to a Pax Americana that demands insecurity, for it can only have power through the dissemination of a perceived, but absolutely false, inherent lack. But love is an outpouring of self, a sharing of self, an overflow. Ours is a politics of that overflow of self.
And this is why it is so necessary to continue to call out a Christianity that has abandoned Christ in favor of imperial power and control. A Christianity of power is no Christianity at all. And it has relinquished its gift of prophesy, which is not so much about predicting the future as it is reading the truth of the present.
This is why my church and so many other progressive theologians and clergy have harped on so much about the “Empire.” This is why I have posted political writings for fifteen years. It is not an effort to mirror the world, but to name it. The world is deeply good and beautiful and so much of it is ruled by insecure and frightened tyrants. The world is good, beloved, and in pain. The pain is the result of a cosmic lack of self-awareness. A world ruled by fascists does not know that it has inherent value. But God names it Beloved.