Kingdom Politics vs. Imperial Power

John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now

Jesus of Nazareth, the man believers call Christ, existed in a time and place. Too many Christians read the Gospels like a fairy tale, a pleasant lesson unmoored from historical context. But, as former Servite Catholic priest and DePaul professor John Dominic Crossan writes, Jesus’ mission took place in the direct shadow of Roman bloodlust and Herodian greed. Jesus’ message contains references to human power, and postulates an alternative kingdom, without hierarchies crushing the multitudes.

Like most Crossan books, this isn’t casual reading. An alumnus of schools in America, Ireland, Rome, and Jerusalem, Crossan approaches biblical exegesis with an erudite background, and his arguments are long, intricate, and extensively source-noted. His chapters are unusually long for mass-market religious books. Yet for his intended audience of serious-minded, literate Christians, he provides a worthwhile argument about political Christianity, grounded in Jesus’ first-century context, and the ways Jesus’ world resembles ours, and doesn’t.

First-century occupied Israel saw several feuds between competing kingdoms. Rome and its local allies, the temple priesthood, made and unmade Israelite kings. The Herodians and Hasmoneans had their partisans for the Jerusalem throne. Meanwhile, synagogues encouraged regular Jews to ignore the kings, and insist on their uniquely Jewish identity. All these feuding kingdoms asserted their primacy, demanding loyalty from farmers and laborers whose lives would be equally crushed, no matter which king wore the crown.

Against these earthly kingdoms, Jesus postulated the Kingdom of God, where hierarchies are inverted, servants are rulers, and the first shall be last. The Emperor Augustus claimed to be the son of God, savior of the nations, and bringer of peace on earth; Jesus (or anyway his followers) pilfered these titles for an alternate Kingdom. Nor were these parallels accidental, or so Crossan says. Jesus’ Kingdom deliberately reversed imperial claims on human lives and souls.

This is, of course, the short version. Crossan breaks down, in intricate detail, Romes’s history of peace through victory. Crossan believes Jesus offers an alternate vision he calls “peace through justice.” (He carefully defines “justice,” a word that, like “freedom,” changes definitions by context. Crossan is a stickler for close definitions.) Crossan finds multiple places where, to those well informed on first-century history, Jesus’ message recorded in the Gospels deliberately pokes Rome in the eye.

John Dominic Crossan

Crossan’s argument approach suffers some limitations. His level of intense detail is only possible in writing, and restating his claims out loud would bog down in verbosity. Crossan’s arguments are thus not particularly useful in correcting your right-wing uncle who sees Jesus as a conservative nationalist. Crossan’s source-heavy style is persuasive to readers who already essentially agree, but need meat on their arguments’ bones. They’re unlikely to persuade people evangelized mainly by basic cable TV.

Further, his approach is thoroughly Catholic. By this I mean he’s heavily catechistic, and focused on doing, not believing. In Crossan’s telling, Jesus invokes Kingdom law now, on Earth, not in some future glorious return. This approach contradicts Lutheran and Calvinist eschatology (I’m overgeneralizing, but not by much), but also contradicts the Apostle Paul, who expected Jesus’ Second Coming imminently. Crossan says Jesus awaits neither Heaven nor Armageddon, but we reside in the Kingdom immediately.

It bears stating that Crossan’s argument requires Jesus’ physical existence in a historical context. Crossan repeats the phrase “the historical Jesus.” Astute religious readers will recognize this linchpin of the Jesus Seminar, an organization that attempts to blow the later mythological dust off Jesus, the person. Like his organization, Crossan believes Jesus was a divinely inspired human, not necessarily the divine immanence, and his text reveals Crossan questions the Resurrection, and disbelieves the Second Coming.

This may seem confusing to both outsiders and rank-and-file Christians. Crossan is Catholic, but pooh-poohs doctrine. He’s Christian, but could take or leave the Resurrection. He frequently writes “we Christians,” while contradicting Christian belief dating back to the ancient ecumenical councils. Therefore he rejects the moral certainty that often infuses Christian writing, and frequently admits his exegesis is subjective. He invites readers to use discretion and discernment, not to simply believe him, or indeed anybody.

Yet I find this approach invigorating. By embracing Christianity shorn of dogmatism, he challenges us to examine which beliefs are innately Christian, and which are cultural baggage. You almost certainly won’t agree with everything Crossan says. But he makes a persuasive case that Jesus’ message reflects an anti-imperial core, one which remains painfully relevant today, in Nova Roma. If we take Jesus seriously, Crossan asks, we must decide: which kingdom do we occupy, right now?

For another book by John Dominic Crossan:
The Bible as Literature vs. The Gospel as History

Christian Politics Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

John Fugelsang, Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds

Let us pray.

Lord, we come before you today in a state of grief. Not only grief for our broken world, the poverty we allow to fester, the disease we fail to heal, the human lives we let slip through the cracks. But also grief for the religious language that others use to justify this rampant injustice. So many people actively making things worse claim to work in your name, Lord. We have seen your mercy perverted into violence and empire.

But in our grief, Lord, you’ve also motivated many among us to recommit ourselves to what your message really means. Actor, comedian, and talk show panelist John Fugelsang is merely one among that number, though this world’s systems have surely provided him a larger platform than others have enjoyed. In these hours of religiously motivated bigotry, he’s chosen to dedicate his platform to challenging the hatred he’s seen perpetrated in Christianity’s name.

Fugelsang isn’t a Biblical scholar himself. His parents were both professional Catholic religious before they left their vocations to get married. But they never relinquished their dedication to the Beatitudes, the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, and the Catholic social teachings in support of “the least of these.” They taught him from infancy that Christianity is a responsibility to serve the dispossessed, not a shield against consequence or justification to self-righteousness.

He pitches Biblical literacy, including context and history, against those who see Christianity as “a clique rather than a calling.” Religion has the power to bring people together, but the same nominal religion can give people a sense of holy mission, or an in-group they feel compelled to defend. Which choice they make defines how public-facing Christians relate to the poor, disfranchised, and foreigners among them.

This book is structured not only to debunk widely held Christian falsehoods, but also to help readers challenge those falsehoods in others. Fugelsang anticipates readers debating their racist, nationalist, or otherwise intransigent relatives in casual settings where we’ll have to answer pat talking points quickly. His counterarguments are detailed and sourced, but brief, easy to memorize and quick to deploy against the most common thought-terminating cliches.

Fugelsang dedicates chapters to why the Bible isn’t anti-gay (notwithstanding certain Levitical passages), anti-feminist, or pro-gun. Against popular prooftexts and “clobber verses,” he presents a package of thorough Biblical literacy, grounded in history. He also insists on context, and reads popular orphan verses in their full text, demonstrating how, to the audience who first received the Bible, passages often mean the opposite of what modern nationalists claim.

John Fugelsang

Again, Fugelsang isn’t a religious scholar. He grounds his arguments in his spiritual autobiography, and makes many claims based on practical lived experience. But he never relies on mere anecdote. He consults many scholars to ensure he has the full historical and religious background for every claim he makes. This includes consulting Jewish scholars to ensure he doesn’t read the Tanakh through Christian-tinted glasses, a common fallacy.

Many quoted scholars are, like Fugelsang himself, media figures with high public profiles. He repeatedly cites Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Pastor John Pavlovitz, and Professor Kristen Kobes du Mez. Were I to cite one law with Fugelsang’s reasoning, it would be this reliance on high-profile media figures, whose theology sometimes reflects their demi-celebrity status. It’s possible to be factually right, but still disconnected from the worm’s-eye view.

But his sources’ media-savvy responses also make their arguments concise enough for informal argument. When there isn’t time for lengthy perorations and exhaustive detail, speed and brevity are sometimes necessary. Fugelsang organizes his claims well enough that, when somebody says something factually incorrect or spiritually ignorant, readers can say: “That’s wrong, and here’s why.” It’s good to be correct, but better to be correct and comprehensible.

As a comedian, Fugelsang does use earthy humor in his book. (“Earthy” being a euphemism for occasional cusswords.) But he reserves most of his humor for his autobiographical passages and personal ruminations. He takes his spiritual positions seriously, and never lets his stage performance come between him and his message. His writing is useful, informative, and fast-moving enough to never bog down in unnecessary scholarly language.

Writers like Fugelsang give me confidence, Lord, that Christianity doesn’t have to belong to the bigots and nationalists. Your message of mercy and generosity remains persuasive to many Christians today, Lord, specifically because it’s missing from our political and media leadership. The worst Americans have hijacked your message, Lord, but Fugelsang reassures me that this hijacking is neither inevitable nor permanent.

Amen.

White Supremacy Has Shown Its Real Face

The now-infamous photo of an unidentified woman surrounded by
Patriot Front members, captured by Reuters stringer Cheney Orr

By now we’ve all seen the photo taken on July 4^th, 2026, of a lone Black woman on a Washington, DC, commuter train. She’s surrounded by White men in matching polo shirts, balaclavas, ballcaps, and wraparound shades: Patriot Front members heading for a White supremacist march through the capital streets. The woman looks not quite into the camera, not quite at us, the picture of determination and despair.

From the photo’s publication, it struck me that not one White person looked at the Black woman. Though their philosophy relies on the presumption that they are better than her, or at least more deserving of life’s protections, they apparently can’t face her while pushing that agenda. Even on the commute, they remain in uniform, shrouded in comfy anonymity. Imagine  construction workers refusing to remove their hard hats and PPE.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears restatement. Harper Lee presented lynchings, the once-common act of racial supremacy through violence, as an overflowing of po’ White trash hatred in a moment of moralistic outrage. Lee’s “Old Sarum boys” rushed the county prison fueled by indignation and moonshine—but, importantly, they retreated as soon as Scout Finch recognized one and called him by name. Losing anonymity broke their momentum.

Except that’s not how it happened. Anybody who’s read American race history knows that lynchings were almost always planned, usually for days in advance, and frequently took place in broad daylight. Perpetrators photographed themselves with the victims, both before and after the murder, and often sold the resulting pictures as penny postcards. Perpetrators of racial violence didn’t feel obliged to conceal their identities.

This wasn’t coincidental. As theologian James Cone wrote, American lynchings served the same role as Roman crucifixions, an official reminder that the dominant population didn’t just run the country, they owned the underclass. Perpetrators showed their faces, both during and after the violence, not only because they feared no consequences, but to ensure the targeted population knew they feared no consequences. Racial oppressors were brazenly, monumentally unperturbed.

I already anticipate the counterargument: didn’t the KKK wear masks and sheets as uniforms? Yes and no. D.W. Griffith’s silent movie Birth of a Nation popularized the image, but that popularity was commodified by racist huckster D.C. Stephenson, according to journalist Timothy Egan. The Klan hood was an image sold to American racists by a former door-to-door salesman, who wanted to monetize American bigotry.

The Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, February
1960. Note that the participants on both sides aren’t afraid to show their faces. (Source)

My point is, racism used to happen in broad daylight. The counterprotesters who opposed the Woolworth’s counter sit-ins or the Freedom Riders, not only didn’t cover their faces, but they didn’t even mind being photographed. They openly put their faces and names to their violence; the white hood existed mainly for weekend pageantry. These historic bigots would’ve scoffed at needing to hide their faces from anyone, particularly a Black individual.

Saturday’s bigots, by contrast, concealed their whole faces. Other than the occasional nose poking out, all identifying characteristics are sanded off. The matching beige ballcaps with identical patches, the matching polos with Betsy Ross flag decals, the matching Oakley wraparounds: any of these men could be any other. They’ve erased their identities because, as participants discovered in Charlottesville in 2017, the consequences of being identified are now severe.

Indeed, because their faces and facial expressions are whitewashed away, there’s only one way of spotting how these men feel about their situation: none of them, not one, looks at the woman. They avoid even the possibility of meeting her gaze, even through the armor of their mirrored shades. People generally avoid meeting others’ eyes for two reasons. First, they might believe the other is more powerful or of higher standing.

Second, because they’re ashamed.

Patriot Front members might yearn for a beatified past where their melanin-deficient skin would’ve provided them with protection in America. But they know America’s cultural currents have moved on without them. Not that racism has receded; as Derrick Bell taught, racism has a nearly infinite ability to adapt itself to changing cultural conditions. But we’ve reached a point where their outright bigotry and cross-burning theatrics have become pathetic, not terrifying.

But more importantly, society hasn’t just changed; they’ve internalized that change. These men conceal their faces because they know they’ll never recover if they’re identified on camera. They know that we’re not afraid of them anymore, they’re afraid of us. They hide their faces where their ancestors didn’t, because they know they’re doing wrong. And that knowledge won’t just go away, not during their lifetimes anyway.

American State Myth in the Living Era

Today’s quarter-millennium anniversary of American independence is purely formal, if you read history. The document signed on July 4th, 1776, merely clarified the terms of the Continental Congress’s July 2nd resolution of Independence; the signatories famously didn’t begin signing the Declaration of Independence until August. Besides, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, generally considered the start of the American Revolution, occurred on April 19th, 1775.

What, then, does America celebrate today? We celebrate a story, a myth. Like the Christian Nativity, which almost certainly didn't happen on December 25th, Independence Day celebrations hang a neat date on the otherwise vague, shapeless division between the Before Times and the Age of Salvation. Such divisions create clarity, sequence, and an almost catechistic transition from benightedness to true vision.

The parallels between Christianity and American state mythology deserve further consideration, because they speak to our national identity. I've written before about how the official Thanksgiving story serves the same role in America that the Genesis creation narrative serves in the Bible. But if Jamestown and Plymouth commence America's Hebraic “wandering in the wilderness” epoch, the Declaration of Independence is definitely Christmas in the American story. For good or ill.

Like Christ's ministry, the American “Experiment” involves reams of teachings. John Locke, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine serve the same role as the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables. These teachings come from an era, not an individual, so the parallels are imperfect. But American schools teach simplified, bowdlerized versions of these texts just as Sunday School teaches a paraphrased Bible for kids.

But Sunday School elides the contradictions and nuances that make the Bible frequently difficult, even for scholars. Likewise, schoolbook history removes the conflicts, doubts, and often slippery moral center surrounding the Revolution and what came after. Like reformers today, the Founders fought each other as much as the enemy. But you wouldn't know that from most official schoolbooks.

The Book of Acts records that, without Christ around to resolve questions, the Apostles fell to infighting. But they resolved the most important debates at the Council of Jerusalem. Likewise, Jill Lepore records how the American Constitution represents the Founders’ best available solution to their internal divisions. The Council of Jerusalem has no published proceedings; we know only the conclusions printed in the Bible. The Founders tried to achieve the same effect by refusing to publish the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention until all participants had died.

Then the parallels become loaded. The Gospels record Jesus preaching, teaching, and giving theological interpretations. But when crowds started clamoring for him personally, or tried to make him king, Jesus fled. Only after Jesus was absent, and Paul's Epistles became scripture, did the person of Jesus, rather than his teaching, become prime in Christianity.

Likewise, while the Founders lived, they argued about principle and procedure. How direct should popular control be? How strong can the Executive Branch become before it threatens the nation? Only after the Founders’ deaths do we start seeing the personal veneration of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and latterly Lincoln. The individuals, not the philosophic process, become the source of capital-T Truth.

As Jason Stanley writes, when we venerate old texts and dead persons, debate about how to apply their Truths becomes impossible. Too much American political discourse today focuses on the Founders’ words and persons, the fallacy of Originalism. Changing how we apply the Founders’ principles to real life, becomes seen first as decline, then as blasphemy. Truth becomes a fixed, oracular artifact, not a function of how we live.

The idea that we can Make America Great Again relies on the principle that greatness derives from the past, not from how we live now. Change can never happen, since change grants primacy to the present. Our living, breathing needs become a barrier to Truth, which the dead uncovered in 1776, and which must be treasured and preserved, never used.

Jesus himself hated this veneration of the dead. When challenged on “marriage at the resurrection” in Matthew 22, Jesus replied, “God is lord of the living, not the dead.” Even without a literal God, American state mythology should follow the same values. America is a living nation, not a graveyard of ideals. Any moral Truth that impedes living Americans is a contravention of the philosophic process that Washington, Jefferson, and Paine put in motion.

If today is a day to celebrate the dead, then who cares. But if we recommit ourselves to living Americans, we truly remember what this day is about.

The Beginning of Truth at the End of Civilization

Ronald Malfi, Bone White

A scruffy, frostbitten mountain man wanders into a rural Alaska diner, orders a hot beverage, and casually confesses to eight murders. Then he patiently waits for the state bulls to arrive from Fairbanks. The accused’s strange confession, and the particularly gruesome murders, soon become national news, and Paul Gallo, a Maryland literature prof, recognizes the landscape where his brother disappeared. So he catches the next plane to Alaska.

I have conflicted feelings about Ronald Malfi’s thriller of isolation, atmosphere, and paranoia. On one hand, Malfi subjects his characters to innovative tortures on the perimeters of civilization, tortures which explore the characters’ depths and the extremes they’ll reach to survive. On the other hand, Malfi relies upon the Blair Witch horror model, the city-dweller’s terror at wilderness, amplified by the characters’ lack of Cub Scout-level survival skills.

Investigator Jill Ryerson of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation as seen remarkable crimes on America’s “Last Frontier.” For her, human rationality comes to the tundra to die. But even she’s shocked by the violence and rot she finds in Joseph Mallory’s isolated cabin outside Dread’s Hand, Alaska. (Yes, “Dread’s Hand.” Malfi’s symbolism isn’t light-handed.) But for all his candor, Mallory refuses to explain his motivation, leaving Ryerson even more confused.

Paul Gallo absolutely knows his twin brother is among Mallory’s victims. Danny’s last text came from Dread’s Hand, after all. Paul and Danny were Corsican twins growing up, but as adults, they’ve felt disconnected, and wandered through life seeking purpose. So Paul heads for Alaska, hoping not only for answers, but also to reconnect with the missing half of his soul. Imagine his shock when Ryerson’s investigation turns up…

Nothing.

Malfi’s story heats up in Act II, when Paul, disgusted with Ryerson’s lack of procedural headway, undertakes his own investigation. The East Coast city boy rents an SUV and heads into Alaska’s mountainous interior, and if this sounds ominous, it is. Malfi’s high-handed atmospherics really gain steam here, as Paul questions a community that’s kept secrets aggressively for generations. As often in horror fiction, local yokels are the scariest phantoms.

Ronald Malfi

Simultaneously, however, Malfi relaxes into genre stereotypes. His dead-eyed provincials shouting “Y’all just git!” are pinched straight from better-known literature; James Dickey’s Deliverance, and its better-known movie adaptation, spring to mind. Malfi has described this book in interviews as his most autobiographical (I don’t know his CV, so can’t confirm). But one starts suspecting Malfi has lived much of his life through books and movies.

His worldbuilding supports this doubt. He makes fleeting mistakes about both Fairbanks and Annapolis which reveal, to those with local knowledge, that he mostly researched these locations online. So many Dread’s Hand locals warn Paul that he’s risking getting stranded all winter that, when it doesn’t happen, we’re astounded. I’m not sure whether I appreciate or loathe this subversion of Chekhov’s Gun. Maybe a hybrid.

Wilderness, for Paul (and Malfi), is metaphorical, not physical. When Paul abandons the signposts of comfortable suburban life to seek truth in the hinterlands, he abandons the comfortable presumptions which his White American upbringing bequeathed him. An AmLit professor, he’s spent his life teaching students to find truth in others’ texts. But he reaches a point where his only truth exists in places where no paths or pre-built infrastructure exist.

Which, when presented in LitCrit analysis, sounds pretty cool. But Malfi’s actual storytelling relies on mass-media depictions of country life, including crude nature demigods, crudely drawn animals, and fear of countrified superstition. One gets the feeling, reading Paul’s journey, that Malfi never took an orienteering course or camped overnight in the woods. His depictions are crude, sweeping, and stereotyped, yet somehow, Paul finds ways of surviving.

I can’t help wondering if Malfi read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about another college-educated city boy who abandoned the map in Alaska’s wilderness, and learned the wrong lessons. Malfi seemingly believes that the physical, non-metaphorical wilderness is a place where people go to learn themselves, push their limits, and emerge transformed. Which it can be, if they take the time to prepare. But that’s not what Paul does.

The contrast is ironic. Malfi writes about a man who escapes the comfortable but stultifying confines of White modernity to discover the harsh but liberating truth. But he writes it using familiar, market-tested storytelling tropes, assembled like Lego bricks. There’s a lot I like about Malfi’s book, particularly his ambitious themes and deeper questions. But the tools he uses to address those themes and questions are just too comfy.