Chapter Twenty One: Jesus, Power, Truth and the Generation That Won’t Look Away, by Andrew Boakye

As we round off this two-parter on Christianity and power, I remind you of the two remaining research questions to address in Part 2, and open with two quotations. First, a reminder of the research questions:

3. Empire, rooted as it is in the politics of domination, is inherently evil.

4. Young people are more likely to embrace a form of the faith governed by the above maxims [i.e., Christianity contains a deeply embedded theology of strength-in-weakness; the only true power is selflessness; empire, rooted as it is in the politics of domination, is inherently evil].

Now to the two quotations:

Jesus told his disciples to go and do likewise by loving and serving the least of these, but we’ve cuddled up to the empire, made an idol out of power, and gone out of our way to justify our allegiance to Rome. We’ve sold our sanctity for the illusion of power and privilege, comfort and safety. We’ve become the whore of Babylon that John tried to warn us about in his apocalypse, the one that sold its soul to the beast. We’re the Nicolaitans whom Jesus warned about in Revelation, who confessed Jesus as their Lord and Saviour but spiritualized their faith to the point of irrelevance, stripping it of its subversive power in order to make the Christian faith compatible with the Roman Empire. But we do more than just make it compatible. American Christianity doesn’t just fit alongside the empire. In America, the empire is a Christian empire, a so-called “Christian nation.” We’ve taken the mark of the beast and sanctified it in the pursuit of comfort and privilege>.

Zach Hunt, Unraptured: How End Times Theology Gets It Wrong (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2019), electronic version.

Since Constantine, many religious systems have claimed Christ’s name while serving the interests of the first beast—power, hyper-nationalism, and material gain. The Crusades turned faith into warfare. The medieval church amassed immense wealth while the poor suffered and whoever stood against it had to face the Church’s inquisitions. Nazi Germany co-opted Christianity, blending it with Aryan nationalism to justify unspeakable atrocities. Even today, Christian groups and individuals take advantage of faith for monetary profit, and individuals and movements involved with politics frequently manipulate faith to further their own objectives, rather than truly promoting the Kingdom of God.

Eitan Bar, Revelation: A Jewish Perspective [Self-Published] 2025, p86.

It has always been a source of deep consternation for me attempting to reconcile Romans 13:1–7 with Revelation 17–18 – and the difficulty is precisely because of my ruminations on Empire. John the Seer launches into a scathing critique of empire in the last book of the New Testament. Rome, in all her finery, is Babylon, the mother of prostitutes, who is drunk on the blood of the saints (Rev. 17:5–6) and who arrogantly proclaims, “I sit as a queen and not as a widow” (Rev. 18:7, riffing off Isa. 47:7 – Revelation contains so many allusions to the Hebrew Bible, but virtually no direct citations). Yet, the Apostle Paul teaches us that we should respect the government, claiming that it is a divinely appointed rulership, established to maintain justice, law and order, to mete out punishment for wrongdoers and to protect the citizenry. The age-old question comes; did God appoint the Third Reich? Are tyrannical governments to be obeyed? How do we decide when it is time to be subject to the authorities and when to wage war with the Lamb against Babylon?

Indeed, the contrasting contexts between the two texts helps us to see the difference, as Heathershaw nicely summates:

The critical difference emerges in how authority relates to God. When people accord the state absolute loyalty and obedience that are due only to God, the state becomes the Enemy [John Heathershaw, Security after Christendom: Global Politics and Political Theology for Apocalyptic Times (New York, NY: Cascade Books, 2024), 220].

Paul is, of course, describing the ideal; he is not describing authority for authority’s sake, but authority that serves the purposes of God. He depicts the ideal – government that rules in order to fulfil the divine mandate to protect, to maintain law and order and to ensure justice for all. To the extent that this is the remit and practice of the government, it is to be obeyed. As Jesus himself taught, we ought to give to Caesar, the things of Caesar - but only as we give to God the things of God (Matthew 22:21). If an administration goes rogue, engaging in oppression, marginalisation, brutality and injustice against the people in pursuit of its own ends of power and domination, it has ceased to be the instrumentality of God and has become the great whore (Rev. 17:1).

It is difficult to think of the insidious symbiosis of Christianity and empire without thinking of Constantine’s legalization of Christianity. Whilst it may well have curbed persecution against the Church, it simultaneously virtually reduced the Jesus movement to a tool of the state. Christianity, from its most embryonic phase, was forged in the crucible of suffering - beginning on the cross of Calvary - and called forth a sacrificially motivated allegiance to Jesus, the Messiah of Israel. It quickly devolved into a mere symbol of political power brokerage, military expansion, conquest and wealth. The criteria for bishops and overseers as outlined in the Pastoral Epistles became mere footnotes of what once was. Now, Christian overseers were afforded all manner of state-sponsored privileges, and Christianity was soon used to justify imperial expansion (Bar, Revelation, 86). The church was gradually drawn into imperial court life and intrigues, with senior bishops increasingly drawn from court families, and imperial concerns for uniformity led to persecution of non-conformists [Keith Ward, Is Religion Dangerous (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006), 66].

As in the second citation above from Eitan Bar, this unholy union between the Church and Empire has persisted since the days of Constantine, manifesting in different garb, but taking the sacrificially loving faith of Christ and transforming it into a mechanism of control and terror. It is the easiest, the most self-serving and the most insidious way to justify oppressive manipulation, coercive control and abject cruelty to dress it up in the iconography and symbolism of Christianity. As Zach Hunt notes above, one of the most pervasive and pernicious examples of this today is the assignation of America as a Christian nation. In my view, it is not only true of America - in any context where religion is defined in terms of nationhood, it is the mother of all frauds.

The premise with which this investigation opened, of course, makes my position unambiguously clear. I think the entire western colonial project was inherently evil. It was rooted in economics - colonisation was about the theft of resources and the transatlantic slave trade about securing an unpaid labour force to prop up the western agricultural economy. Both of these projects were justified on the grounds that non-white people groups were in every way inferior to the European and needed the supervision of intellectually and morally superior white men in order to survive. I cannot pretend to be neutral in my hatred for Christianity rooted in the politics of empire, for imperial politics have always been the tool of the oppressor.

Some will be so bold as to argue that the imperialists built infrastructure in Africa and India, which had benefits for the indigenous peoples which lasted far beyond the existence of Western owned colonial states. It would be misleading to say that this was utterly untrue. As Jedwab and Moradi have shown, some 88.3% of total rail mileage in Sub-Saharan Africa was built before independence [Jedwab, R, and A Moradi. 2013. “Transportation Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of Colonial Railroads on City Growth in Africa.” CSAE Working Paper Series. University of Oxford, page 1]. However, this should not be mistaken for a Western attempt to build a strong Africa/India or to work for the betterment of African and South Asian people. Building roads, railways and ports lowered transaction costs and aided export production, which generated colonial tax revenue. As Gardener puts it:

Colonial railways, roads, and ports reduced transaction costs and facilitated rapid growth in export production, which in turn increased revenue from the two main taxes levied by colonial governments: customs tariffs and poll taxes [Leigh A Gardner, Taxing Colonial Africa: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 2012), 31]. For a virtually identical conclusion, see Ambe J. Njoh, “Implications of Africa’s Transportation Systems for Development in the Era of Globalization,” The Review of Black Political Economy 35:4 (2008): 147–162.

The purpose of the infrastructure which the colonisers built was to make the extraction of natural resources more efficient and to generate revenue from taxation. From start to finish, it was a money-making exercise, founded on the inherent notion of supremacy, a deviant sense of entitlement and a deeply racist imperial mentality.

With the above in mind, we turn to the more immediate critical question as we consider the effects of a Christian faith rooted in the context of empire. There is no single and unambiguous rationale for imperial ideology; broadly speaking, states build empires to garner power or wealth - usually both - often seeking to obtain natural resources, control over trade routes and/or access to labour. However, as successive empires have shown through history, the ultimate objective of all empires is world domination. As McKnight, Modica and Crouch have argued, the drive for such domination is

…rooted in the fundamental human impulse toward expansion and control. An empire succeeds by combining “hard power” (military might and technology) with “soft power” (ideology, philosophy, and theology), using both visible enforcement and invisible systems of thought to make imperial rule seem natural and inevitable. These ideological systems become the true source of imperial power, embedding themselves so deeply in how people understand the world that they exist beyond ordinary challenge [Scot McKnight, Joseph B. Modica, and Andy Crouch, Jesus Is Lord, Caesar Is Not: Evaluating Empire in New Testament Studies (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), 8–9].

This is the crux problem in my limited understanding, and why the proponents of Empire, whether they are Christian or not, often defend its underlying premises. On December 18, 2000, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore resolved the disputed election and named Bush president-elect, Bush wryly quipped, “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier... just so long as I’m the dictator”! Herein lies the rock and the hard place. Even in its most seemingly benevolent expressions, people with imperial mindsets often justify the politics of empire on the grounds that as long as it is their empire, it will have only positive effects on human community. If the European colonised the backward African, it would help the African; if Christian leaders governed society, it would be like the Kingdom of God on earth; if the indigenous Americans were displaced, the European settlers could build genuine infrastructure, if the British Raj maintained control of India and its associated territories, its wealth and resources could benefit many – if, if, if. The historical reality is, of course, that all of the above colonial projects resulted in oppressive, dehumanising regimes which left the colonised people impoverished and playing socioeconomic catch up on the world stage.

For those who are genuinely invested in Jesus’ life work, his absolute refusal to be “the benevolent dictator we never knew we needed”, must be a cause for curiosity. There is no sane reading of the Gospels, and certainly no sound reception of their truths by later Christians, which might lead one to think that Jesus built an empire or had any designs on empire. Indeed, he seemed to eschew everything empire building might demand. He muted Peter’s violence immediately following his arrest, sternly arguing that violence only begets violence which typically consumes the instigators. He shunned wealth, telling stories about condemnation upon the rich (Luke 16:19-31) and uttering maxims about how difficult it would be for wealthy elites to enter the Kingdom (Mark 10:25). He leapt to the defence of marginalised classes and embraced humility as a virtue, despite it being considered a defect within typical Greco-Roman social norms. Yet even in a modern context, there are those who consider the notion of a kind of “righteous conquest” to be consistent with the Gospel. By way of what I hope will be a useful example, let us just look at one form of empire fuelled Christian thinking – the so-called seven mountain mandate.

Whilst I very much doubt that any of its modern proponents would see the seven-mountain mandate as an expression of “imperial Christianity”, once its core values are properly understood, it is very difficult to see it as anything else – no matter how laudable it ends are seen to be by insiders. Of course, this is the central problem. Insiders will contend that the ends justify the means, and it is precisely this kind of religious/theological and political naivety which is ripe for deconstruction.

The seven-mountain mandate urges Christ believers en masse to assume control over seven major spheres of social influence: education, religion, family, business, government/military, arts/entertainment, and media. In its more developed forms, the mandate insists that such control is a precursor for the second coming of Christ. To master these seven mountains is to exert Christian influence upon the shaping of social discourse and, as such, the practice of social life.

The mandate has its roots in the dominion theology of the 1970s - that re-reading of the dominion/stewardship directive of Genesis 1:28 such that it covers not just creation, but society itself. Allegedly, the concept originated when “Youth with a Mission” founder Loren Cunningham and Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright claimed to receive the same divine message about targeting these seven spheres. Most recently, it has been energised by the so-called New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) – the movement prevalent within certain strands of charismatic Christianity which places its trust in a select in-group of leadership figures known as “apostles”, believed to be divinely called to direct the trajectory of the Church. As Van Loon notes, the NAR was originally a loose network of like-minded churches but has increasingly coalesced around Republican political involvement, developing distinct leadership and direction [Michelle Van Loon, Downsizing: Letting Go of Evangelicalism’s Nonessentials (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2025), 133].

Some modern advocates of the seven-mountain mandate use Deuteronomy 7:1 as an intertext to explain it. In the passage, Israel must conquer seven nations before entering the promised land. Moreover, the mountains are currently under secular government, behind which are demonic principalities so powerful that only specially placed “workplace apostles” can withstand and overcome them. The ultimate goal, then, is to ensure the “apostolic” governance of the seven spheres of influence. It is not uncommon to see in seven-mountain mandate literature, the language of ‘possession’, ‘occupation’ and ‘invasion’ to depict Christians conquering the seven spheres [see, e.g., Johnny Enlow, The Seven Mountain Prophecy: Unveiling the Coming Elijah Revolution (Lake Mary, FL: Creation House, 2008), 67].

Different expressions of charismatic Christianity take up the mandate with divergent degrees of intensity; as such, it is not completely accurate to tar them all with the same brush. Some of them employ the mandate to argue that Christians should influence rather than take over these spheres and, depending on how that manifests, there could well be some truth to that. In its classical form, nonetheless, it is a colonising ecclesiology. It implies a form of domination. It is the effective reincarnation of the kind of Constantinian “Christianity” which was ultimately politically motivated. Readers should be clear that when people say Constantine became a Christian, that this is something of a misnomer. Constantine was a lifelong worshipper of the sun; his so-called embrace of the faith following his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge having seen an apparition of a cross in the sun amounted to him adding Jesus to the pantheon of gods he already worshipped. This is nothing that the earliest believers would have recognised as genuine allegiance to the God of Israel, which meant a renunciation of idols (1 Thess. 1:9). This is the kind of domination rooted in the centralization of power.

Let us imagine, for example, Christians managed to dominate the ‘mountain’ of education. What would this mean? Would creationism have to be taught in all schools? Could other religions be taught in schools? Would methodologies like critical social theory be banned from our higher educational institutions? How accepting would we be of educators coming from non-Christian or even non-religious backgrounds? Could schools and universities still have Muslim Societies, Humanist Societies, Jewish Societies, Socialist Societies, etc. What if the evangelical right dominated the ‘Mountain’ of entertainment? Will there be a veto on movies conflicting with their ideals? What would become of racy political satire? What would be the fate of dating shows or stand-up comedy lampooning the Christian religion?

It seems to me that Jesus’ agenda was never to work out who our opponents were, label them as the enemy and attempt to dominate them. His agenda was to flood the world with heaven’s love, so that people could see our good deeds and give honour to the Creator. Even the most cursory look at the modern social landscape makes clear how this approach would be welcomed. If those who do not trust Messiah saw his followers fighting for the underprivileged in the way that Jesus did, they could not help but give honour to God (even a god they do not believe exists)!! If they see us trying to dominate in the same way they see bullish politicians trying to dominate, even if we claim that our domination is benevolent… well, you can fill in the rest.

One of the key reasons that these kinds of domination movements fail, is because they are based on eschatology invested in human action. There is nothing in the writings of the early Church which demands that human attempts to make earthly political systems resemble the Kingdom of God are the starter pistol for the return of Christ. As Larson has argued:

The [Seven- mountain] movement’s eschatology ironically depends on human action rather than God’s sovereignty, contradicting proper kingdom theology of God’s present reign and future return, and it becomes anti-katechonic—working against the proper restraint of evil to allow the gospel’s freedom [Duane Larson, Ubi Deus Dixit: Where God Has Spoken: The Lutheran Doctrine of Two Kingdoms (New York, NY: Cascade Books, 2025), 208].

Of course, we can point to moments in the gospel record when Jesus showed a correlation between the advent of the Kingdom of God and the dismantling of the Kingdom of Satan (e.g., Luke 11:14–23). This is precisely the place within the study of the Gospels where Jesus’ words and deeds must be examined side-by-side (it was a failure to do this that confused the second quest for the historical Jesus - seeking only to determine the authenticity of Jesus’ words, groups like the Jesus Seminar really did not grasp the nettle). Jesus was a revolutionary, but one who called upon the revolutionaries to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile and love their enemies. He was not anti-imperial in the sense that he very directly confronted imperial power. He criticised secular leadership (Mark 10:41–45), lambasted the hypocrisy of Israel’s thought leaders (Matt. 23:1–36), challenged Herod’s corruption (Luke 13:32) and pronounced judgement on the Jewish temple for its failure to be the house of prayer for which it was designed (Matt. 21:12–13; Mark 11:12–26; Luke 19:45–48; John 2:13–22). However, what is far more significant is that Jesus embodied a counter imperial stance. He operated within the contours of an imperial system, but did so in such a way as to undermine its very foundations with a form of resistance which transcended the very imperial/anti imperial binary [Jason J. Ripley, “Glorious Death, Imperial Rome and the Gospel of John,” Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 15 (2020): 35. Cf. Ryan LaMothe, Care of Souls, Care of Polis: Toward a Political Pastoral Theology (New York, NY: Cascade Books, 2017), electronic version].

Jesus practiced a kind of anti-imperialism which neither endorsed violent overthrow of one’s enemies nor forming some kind of underhanded alliance with them. In that respect, Jesus was neither a zealot rebel nor a Sadducee-like collaborator. Jesus could have Matthew the tax collector and Simon the Zealot both in his inner circle precisely because his revolution did not involve conquest, violence, corruption or financial means, as it is written:

15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. 16 So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one, for you do not regard people with partiality. 17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. 20 Then he said to them, “Whose head is this and whose title?” 21 They answered, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” 22 When they heard this, they were amazed, and they left him and went away (Matt. 22:15–22, emphasis added).

It is tempting to read Jesus’ response in verse 21 above as a stealthy way of sidestepping a serious question. There were many who held that the Messiah would be an anti-taxationist who, by calling upon Israel to refuse to pay taxes to Rome, would strike at the heart of the imperial system and sound the starter pistol for violent revolution. Luke mentions one such person named Judas in Acts 5:37. Josephus tells us that this Judas “incited his countrymen to revolt, upbraiding them as cowards for consenting to pay tribute to the Romans and tolerating mortal masters, after having God for their lord” (Josephus, War 2.118). The key to properly understanding the passage is noting the two groups who were interrogating Jesus - Herodians and Pharisees. The Herodians, as their name implies, were staunch backers of the Herod dynasty and demonstrated as much by encouraging their followers to pay taxes to Caesar to show loyalty. The Pharisees, on the other hand, had contempt for Caesar. As strict adherents of the Torah – so strict they even valued the interpretations of the Torah which they inherited from earlier generations – their only true sovereign was the God of Israel. Had Jesus simply answered yes, it might have curried favour with the Herodians. Had he said no, some of the Pharisees might have been impressed. Rather, what his answer did was suggest that Caesar’s rule is only effectual in the sense that it is a small part of God’s world. Caesar’s face may have been on coins (complete with semi-blasphemous titles like a ‘son of the gods’) but God’s imprint was on the universe. By all means, you could pay your taxes to Caesar as long as it did not conflict with anything that God demanded. This takes us right back to the tension between Romans 13:1–7 and Revelation 17–18. The ultimate ‘powers that be’ are in Heaven; if earthly power becomes rogue, Christians have a duty quite precisely not to submit to it and to join the Lamb’s resistance.

So then, a reading of the Christian faith which grows from the soil of imperial domination is inauthentic. Jesus’ Great Commission called his followers to encourage people to be students of Christ, that is, his disciples, through baptism and teaching. Not only does he never call his followers to dominate their social world or label and marginalise opponents, He actually does quite the opposite:

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

Even if we considered education which champions secular values, non-Christian religions, progressive family rearing models, worldly, profit-driven business, governments comprised of the candidates we did not vote for, entertainment which caters for tastes we dislike and media undergirded by worldviews very different from our own to be the enemy, Jesus is unambiguous. The idea is not to dominate and conquer them, but to love and pray for them.

This is all very well, you might argue. You might even be persuaded that the reading of the faith I am suggesting here – one which opposes empire, promotes a theology of weakness and reads selflessness as true power - would be more appealing to young people. However, if you were to then turn around and say none of that makes my reading correct, I would have to agree. As such, as I bring this reflection to a conclusion, I want to suggest that it is precisely because this reading of the Christian narrative is a more authentic reflection of Jesus, that young people are more likely to embrace it. In addressing the dilemma of the conflict between the spiritual gospel and the social gospel, Park puts it beautifully:

<The solution to the dilemma is to switch from a dualistic hermeneutic that prioritizes the spiritual over the social to the Old Testament mindset that maintains both spiritual and social axes as cohesive for human existence. Such a holistic hermeneutic is the bloodline that pulsates throughout Paul’s letters, Jesus’ teachings, and the Old Testament. For example, one charge levelled against Israel’s ignorance of God and her idolatry (Is 1:2–4) is lack of social justice in Israel (Is 1:15–17, 21–23); where injustice reigns, Israel’s worship is repugnant and rejected (Is 1:11–15) and her election is void (Is 1:10). That the social dimension affects the spiritual in Isaiah is not a reinvention, but reiteration of covenant requirements in the Ten Commandments/Decalogue (Ex 20:1–17; Deut 5:6–21) that encompass both vertical and horizontal relationships> [M. Sydney Park, “Letter to the Philippians,” in E. McCaulley, A. Peeler, J. H. Ok, & O. Padilla (Eds.), The New Testament in Colour: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), 443].

As Park shows above, in Isaiah, for example, it is Israel’s ignorance of God and her idolatry which leads to compromised social justice in Israel. The rampant injustice turns Israelite liturgy into a stench before God. It is quite clear in Isaiah’s prophetic vision that a refusal to administer social justice emerges from the people’s distance from God and leads to liturgical practices which God does not even acknowledge. It is the proverbial vicious cycle; defective worship and a lack of justice go hand in hand. The social gospel and the spiritual gospel are one and the same - this is the authentic gospel that young people seek. Singing religious songs did not sanctify a theology of domination and empire. There is no formula by which we can baptise selfishness or reject the cruciform theology of weakness which sets human hubris to one side. To allow divine power to work, as one Christian writer put it, “we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Cor. 4:7).

Efrem Smith rightly and candidly proclaims:

<As an African-American and Evangelical pastor, I must preach a Gospel that lives within today’s tension of being both evangelistic and socially just. This is what I call a holistic approach to ministry. If people are giving their lives to Christ, but we tolerate domestic abuse and the treatment of women as second class to men, what difference does the Gospel truly make? In turn, if we fight for equality and peace, but do not proclaim the necessity of new birth, we present an incomplete Gospel> [Efrem Smith, “Freedom and Good News for All,” Mutuality Magazine 13:1 (2006): 15].

What both Smith and Park above have outlined is a particularly important moment where clarity is definitely required. The authenticity of a gospel which is both spiritually conscious and socially conscious is far from accidental, because it never constitutes one with the other tacked on. It is not a faith grounded in spirituality, worship, and evangelism, which tacks on a bit of charity work and progressive politics to tick the social consciousness box. Nor is it a socially focused gospel, where a practitioner goes to church at Christmas and Easter to keep the minister off their back and ensure they have “done church for the year”. The gospel is authentic quite precisely because Jesus’ kingdom message both transforms those who embrace it and then works to reconfigure relationships, status, community and power dynamics. As I have hinted at in an earlier post, it is not simply that young people want Christianity to become social activism. What is far more apparent and, indeed, what the evidence appears to confirm [see https://www.barna.com/research/young-adults-spiritual-reasons-church/?utm] is that young people want transcendence, but this transcendence must have substance, meaning and form. They want the Divine – they seek prayer, meditation, contemplation, spiritual experience and community, but for the purpose of transforming their environments, understanding themselves and discovering their place in the world. Whilst the clarion call often emanates from places young people inhabit, the paradigm is one for us all to embody - authenticity is not the sole purchase of the young!

If we are really willing to admit Jesus’ maxim that “God so loved the world that he was willing to give His only Son”, then it almost stands to reason that encountering him should cause Christians to actively engage in the pursuit of justice, helping the poor advocating for the marginalised and being a voice for the oppressed. If the faith we embrace revolves around doing the right things so that we can go to heaven, then we have quite simply misunderstood Jesus.

I like to imagine Jesus’ fellowship table, which was a constant source of despair for those Jewish leaders who were sceptical of his ministry. They constantly wanted to know why he ate with ‘tax collectors and sinners’. Yet the nature of the gospel is such that how could he not eat with tax collectors and sinners? Jesus’ meal tables were not just places where hunger was overcome - something very deeply spiritual was at play. These meal celebrations were acted parables of the arrival of God’s forgiveness - which is precisely why they were being opposed by certain leaders. They were Jesus’ way of saying “tax collectors and sinners” were worthy of divine grace. However, there is also something deeply social at play. Disreputable people were being welcomed and included at the table. Low status people with no pedigree, some of whom even blatantly flouted the Law of Moses, were being welcomed and celebrated. Of course, Jesus demanded faith and repentance, but this was his call to everyone - not just the people who had the right religious badges. Indeed, Jesus could say that the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of the religious elites (Matt. 21:31). So, the same act of table fellowship was both profoundly spiritual and profoundly social. This was Jesus’ gospel. This is the form of the faith, whether young or old, we should embrace and be committed to - and it does not require us to dominate, conquer or marginalise anyone.

Concluding Reflections for Christ Centred Deconstruction

It is, of course, only my opinion, but I think the phrase ‘benevolent empire’ is inwardly contradictory. Even if this is not ‘logically’ true, the evidence of historical empires fully supports it. Christianity is, by definition, cross-shaped; it invites us to come and die with Jesus (John 11:16), not to come and rule with him. It demands that human weakness is the most natural arena for divine power to be made manifest. This is not a slavish, false humility, but an admission of our inherent human limitations and a plea for divine intervention. The religion of Jesus is energised by selflessness – Jesus (Mark 12:28–34), Paul (Gal 5:14; Rom 13:9) and Jews more broadly (Babylonian Talmud, b. Šabb. 31a) knew that the entire law could be summed up in the statement, “Love your neighbour as you love yourself”. As many a rabbi would quip, the Law stipulates that you love one another – everything else is commentary. The cross is the quintessential symbol of loving one’s neighbour as oneself. The cross is where love meets justice, and this is the very definition of deconstructing empire.

The cross operates as a fundamental challenge to imperial power by embodying absolute power deployed entirely in service to others—a direct repudiation of what Nietzsche termed “the will to power”. Christ’s crucifixion establishes that Christ is fundamentally different from Caesar, inverting the logic of domination that empires depend upon [Brint Montgomery, Thomas J. Oord, and Karen Strand Winslow, eds., Relational Theology: A Contemporary Introduction, Point Loma Press (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 95]. Crucifixion itself was Rome’s instrument of state-sponsored terror, designed to suppress rebellion and maintain control over conquered populations. Empire classifies and controls all dimensions of existence—determining who counts as citizen or slave, civilized or barbarian—and the cross exposes this sinister machinery. Yet God in Christ appears not at Rome’s seat of power but at the cross itself, as a colonized Jewish subject—the racialized “other” under imperial occupation [See Gabriel Salguero, “The Cross,” in Prophetic Evangelicals: Envisioning a Just and Peaceable Kingdom, ed. Bruce Ellis Benson, Malinda Elizabeth Berry, and Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Prophetic Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2012), 135–137].

Moltmann argued an interesting case. He suggested that the cross exposes the theological deception undergirding imperial legitimacy. Early Christian-imperial theology unified divine and earthly authority through a hierarchy (one God, one emperor, one empire) and identified Christ’s peace with Rome’s peace. The Trinity, however, describing God’s essential unity with the crucified Son, cannot support a divine emperor, since the Trinity exists only in God and not in creation [Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 325–326].

Believers at various stages of deconstructing Christian faith, but still committed to Jesus, may well find themselves in a state of “empire fatigue”. This is not official nomenclature, but I use it to describe the kind of wearisome heaviness that so many of us can feel at times when we see the iconography of Christ faith being co-opted by the power crazed. It is even more soul destroying when the attempt to legitimate politicised domineering attitudes is hidden behind disingenuous grins, the veneer of benevolence and the sense that the Empire knows what’s really good for you. If you are in the throes of this fatigue, rest assured that Jesus is tired too! He did not come to build an empire. Rest assured that Jesus is ashamed to know that marginalising and ostracising practices, violence and bullying is done in his name. For young people discussing these ideas in their circles, I urge you to return to the Jesus of the Gospels. Try to read them anew, with fresh, discerning and critical eyes, willing to push back on age-old and dehumanising narratives of colonisation. Ask the Lord to open your eyes that you may behold wonderful things in His law (Ps. 119:18) and to enlighten the eyes of your heart (Eph. 1:18). I pray that you behold the real Jesus, who is beauty and glory and sustenance and healing. He does not need your money in order to grant blessing or healing, he does not need a political candidate to speak on his behalf, he does not place doctrine over people, he is unconcerned with your wealth, status or educational background, and demands rather that you, I, and everyone repent and love one another. His cross inverts the world’s value system with the paradoxical news that hope arrives through defeat, that suffering and death do not have the final word, that the last shall be first and the first shall be last [Jude Lal Fernando, Faith in the Face of Militarization: Indigenous, Feminist, and Interreligious Voices, (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2021), 228]. In cruciformity stencilled around Jesus, Paul crystallized this subversion by championing “weakness” and “foolishness,” juxtaposing the “folly of the cross” with the “power of God” to challenge the conventions and norms of imperial discourse [Jeremy Punt, “Pauline Agency in Postcolonial Perspective – Subverter of or Agent for Empire?” in The Colonized Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes, ed. Christopher D. Stanley, Paul in Critical Contexts (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011), 58]. Seeking this Jesus will fill conversations in the world young people inhabit with hope – hope which, young or old, we all crave – in a world which seeks validation from power and status and a church which can sometimes seem indistinguishable from it.