I kissed Christendom goodbye

“The church was not something to be explained, but something to be experienced.” So begins Dr. Theodore Hopkins’ investigation into how the church should function within the world as Christianity loses its hold on state and cultural power. In his book Christ, Church, and World: Bonhoeffer and Lutheran Ecclesiology after Christendom, Dr. Hopkins wonders how the church can imagine its place in an “emerging post-Christian world”. In his context, the particular expression of church that serves as his critical home base is Lutheranism (and, even more specifically, the Missouri Synod sub-brand); but Dr. Hopkins’ analysis has broader ecumenical applications. Indeed a question many are asking across Western church denominations is similar: how will we survive outside the majority in a “post-christian” culture. Before I go too far into Dr. Hopkins’ book, I do want to address the very idea of “post-christian.” It’s a phrase I have used myself in the past, and one that needs some unmasking.

Kirk Cameron, Christian actor

To figure out what we mean by a “post-Christian world” we must describe what we mean by a “Christian world.” There was a time in the not-too-distant past when “Christian” was a noun[1] rather than an adjective. “Christian” now modifies other nouns and has become a shorthand for “acceptable for Christians”. “Christian music” is different from “music”. “Christian movies” are different from “movies”. “Christian schools” are different from “schools.” “Christian nations” are different from “nations.” And the implication – certainly from Christians! – is that these modified things have an attachment to the sacred and the holy while those other nouns belong to the profane. The unmodified version of things is unsafe, unclean, ungodly. The “Christian” version of things was the de facto version in the White Evangelical subculture that grew out of the 1960s Jesus movement, and it’s why there’s such a weird subculture of “Christian things” today. There’s a Christian alternative to just about everything from video games to pop stars to streaming services. This is the multiverse of late-stage capitalism: consumer products for all audiences, no matter how niche.

If we scale up this usage of “Christian” as a modifier, we move away from Kirk Cameron and Skillet and towards something with more sinister implications. How many of us grew up with the teaching that “America is a Christian nation?” Prayer opening civic events, American flags in church sanctuaries, “God” being invoked in patriotic songs and rituals, the Puritan mythology, the Pilgrim mythology, the deism of our early politicians and businessmen. Only in the last twenty years has “Christian” started to feel less like the default setting for American life. The “Christian nation” myth has done more to dilute the word “Christian” than all the “Christian Rock” in the world. If our nation is Christian, it’s easy to say that all other nations are not: from the godless Communists of yesterday to the shithole countries of today. If our nation is somehow less “Christian” than it once was, what does that say about our past? Was the imperial violence that is the very foundation of this country – the genocide of the land’s previous inhabitants and centuries of race-based chattel slavery – “Christian” in any sense of the word?

When the empire becomes the church

Rather than “post-christian”, we may speak of the western world as being post-Christendom. That is, past the days of the Christian church and its members holding the reins of power and driving cultural and political forces toward some vaguely utopian goal. Constantine’s conversion and militant promotion of Christianity in 300CE literally rebuilt the Roman Empire into a “holy” empire. Christianity now enjoyed the privileges of the ruling class. Pre-Christian religions began fading away as the wealthy and powerful clamored for imperial favor by converting. Eventually, all people born in this new “Christian empire” were automatically Christians. Imperial armies literally rode to war with the church’s symbols on their shields. There were now prayers before every battle. Rome was no longer conquering for legacy or for pax but under the auspices of Jesus Christ himself.

Christendom continued as the church-run states of Europe embarked on a christianizing and colonizing project that would remake the majority world into its image. America, though having no state church of its own, is a colony of this project and an extension of its purpose. Just because there is no official state denomination (like the Lutherans of Norway or Germany, the Catholics of Italy or the Anglicans of England) does not mean America was not founded as an outpost of Christendom. But Christendom was never about following the way of Jesus, it was about the marriage of power between religious and political forces to exert greater control over people, enrich the coffers of monarchy, and exploit natural resources for the expansion of borders and corporate wealth.

Outpost America, the final frontier

Church-state laws like the Doctrine of Discovery[2] gave rise to our current state of affairs. Founding documents like the American Declaration of Independence invoke both the Creator God of Christianity and condemn the “merciless savages” of the continent. Christendom and colonization are inseparable[3]. Christendom has the veneer of Christianity – its language, its artifacts, its symbols, its rituals, its traditions – and yet it is not synonymous with the church. Paradoxically as Christendom has waned over the last century, Christianity has continued to spread. As Christendom has lost its power – first across Europe and now in North America – Christianity has developed deeper roots among indigenous and majority-world practitioners. Post-colonial Christianity, those Christians who follow Jesus among the ruins of the colonial experiment, does not have the centered power of Christendom. And yet God is working at the margins of power to call a people to himself: there are more Christians today in “non-christian” and “shithole” countries than in all of old Christendom[4].

So to wrap up this detour: we are not living in a “post-Christian” world. Dr. Hopkins clearly recognizes the complicated legacy of Christendom and the adjectival “Christian”. He rightly introduces the problem as one of “after Christendom.” It has become increasingly difficult in the last century to “explain” the church apart from western (and especially American) culture because the two are so often conflated and mischaracterized in public life. This makes speaking of “culture” a thorny topic, and it means Dr. Hopkins has his work cut out for him as he explores the tensions among “church” and “world”.

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1 Acts 11:26 “And the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch”. Originally a slur better translated “Christers” meaning “of the party of Christ” which denoted sectarian allegiance and cultural ‘outsider’ status within the Roman empire. “If you are reproached as ‘Christer’,” Peter writes in 1 Peter 4:16, “don’t be ashamed but think of it as an honor before God.” The early Christians did not use this word as self-identity until at least the 2nd century. The earliest term serving the same purpose is something like “followers of The Way” (Act 9:2; Act 18:25, 26; Act 19:9; Act 19:23; Act 22:4; Act 24:14; Act 24:22). The Romans apparently also used “sect of the Nazarenes” as recorded in Acts 24:5.

2 For an in-depth look at the Doctrine of Discovery from indigenous North American Christians please see the work of Sarah Augustine, author of The Land Is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery and Mark Charles, author of Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.

3 Dr. Willie James Jennings digs into this matrix in his recent work on Whiteness. “As [European Christians] begin to realize their power, they also realize the power to shape the perceptions of themselves and others. That is, they begin to understand that not only do they have the power to transform the landscape and the built environment, but they also have the power to force people into a different perception of the world and of themselves.” Whiteness Rooted in Place, Christian Century. Another excellent introduction into Dr. Jennings’ work is this OnScript interview from Sep, 2021.

4 A decade ago Pew Forum study on Global Christianity found more than 1.3 billion Christians living in the Global South, compared with about 860 million in the Global North. This is the inverse of even 100 years ago, and the balance is only increasing.

Disquiet the empire

For some reason, my kids are really bad at geography.

Back in analog times, I remember having these huge vinyl maps that could pull down from a tube mounted to the blackboard in school. Talking about the Sahara desert? Pull down the African continental map and point it out. Talking about West Germany? Pull down Europe and point out where the wall is erected. We had globes in every classroom. I even had a small globe in my bedroom that I bought at a rummage sale. You can see where the USSR was, on the other side of the globe, just by spinning it and watching the oceans and islands and international borders slide by. My freshman year of high school we all had to take a one semester Geography class. We had photocopies of land masses we’d have to color code and label and memorize foreign capitals.

My kids though? No idea. We literally live less than 2 miles from Lake Michigan: one of the largest freshwater lakes on Earth – a perfect way to orient yourself in the city (hint: it’s east!), the state (again, east!), and the country (the Great Lakes are up at the top in a blue clump). When we look at maps together, they get confused: where’s Wisconsin in relation to Canada or the Atlantic Ocean, where is India or Ethiopia or Norway?

The maps in your head

Our conception of “the world” is limited to what we’ve learned about geography. To some, “the world” is limited to the confines of your neighborhood. To others, “the world” is your country of origin and whatever happens elsewhere is of little concern. To a privileged few “the world” is made up of all the countries in which you’ve vacationed or studied abroad or taken gap years. We are in an age of globalism where international food and music can be right outside our front door, where international tv, movies and sports is a click or premium subscription away. Our experiences of “the world” vary, but most people have had direct contact with someone or something from another place. When we talk about “the whole world”, we all picture some version of the spherical earth – maybe a NASA video we saw online or a weather radar image from a news broadcast about a tsunami or even that old globe in the corner of the library. “The whole world” is most of the “cool” countries we can remember off the top of our head (Iceland, Australia, Ghana, Japan), and then if we sat down we could probably remember a bunch more of the lesser-known ones (looking at you Federated States of Micronesia).

Climate change has us thinking about “the whole world” more than ever. The Amazon rain forest, flooding in Tuvalu, glaciers in the Arctic circle. The choices we make at the grocery store and birthday shopping online effect farmers in Mexico and garment workers in Indonesia. “The whole world” is at our finger tips and on our mind.

In 1st century Palestine, “the whole world” meant something different. When people spoke of “the whole world”, they meant the Roman empire. Let me just pull down a map here… [*vinyl map unspooling sound intensifies*]

“The Whole World”, ~117 CE

The worlds we inhabit

The writers of scripture used the Greek word oikoumene, which has been translated with the phrase “the whole world” or “the inhabited earth.” In context, it can almost always be alternately translated “the Roman empire” or just “the empire.” The Greeks used the word to refer to their own “world” as a distinctly separate place from “the barbarians” (ie. anyone not Greek). When Rome took over, the word came to be associated with the Roman empire or even “all the subjects of the Roman empire.” Luke 2:1 is a good example of this usage:

Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of oikoumene

A census was taken of “the whole world” according to English translations. The decree had nothing to do with China. What is being stated plainly to audiences of the time was “A census was taken of the Roman empire.” They didn’t have vinyl maps or spinny globes. When people in ancient times spoke of the world, they meant the world they experienced. The world that effected their daily lives. The world of family, villages, trade routes, agriculture, temples and – somewhere far away – the emperor. They knew a little about other ethnic groups and empires, but not much, and certainly did not include the Han or the Bantu or the Maya or the Saami in their descriptions of “the whole world.” Here’s Jesus speaking in Matthew 24:

This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in oikoumene as a testimony to [all the nations]

Jesus is instructing his disciples to preach his message across the empire, to every subject of the empire – don’t leave anyone out. [NOTE: That bracketed bit is a whole other post.] Do I mean to say Jesus’ knowledge of geography or people groups was limited in any way? Do I mean to say Jesus was excluding anyone outside the Roman empire? Not exactly. But I am saying the words the author of Matthew chose to communicate Jesus’ message had a specific meaning to their audience. I’m saying that the original disciples of Jesus (and a little later, Paul) were given a very specific task – and by all rights accomplished it.

Look, here’s that map again, but this time it’s just the part where Jesus lived, died and resurrected. Where all his miracles and teachings and travels took place. Where “The Way” (as it was known in the early 1st century) originated.

Jesus’ life and ministry in Judea

And I’m probably being generous with the size of that circle. During the disciples’ lifetime, The Way spread across oikuomene (the entire empire). The historical account of that happening is captured a little in the book of Acts. Here’s one testimony from a seaside village in ancient Macedonia (today’s Greece):

These people who have disquieted oikuomene have come to this region as well, and Jason has welcomed them, and they all act in opposition to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.

Resistance through remediation

By claiming Jesus as their king, they are not only opposing Caeser, they are disrupting the peace of the empire. Pax Romana (or Pax Augustus) was not so much an absence of violence as it was an absolute dominance by so formidable a power that open revolt was almost unthinkable. “The peace enjoyed by a domesticated animal, kept solely for what it could produce,” as Neville Morley writes in The Roman Empire: Roots of Imperialism.

Acts chapter 19 tells three stories of the kind of disruptions The Way is causing throughout the empire. The most detailed account is of a group of laborers and artisans whose “wealth depends on this business” of crafting shrines to the goddess Artemis (Diana). Paul, we learn by testimony of these artisans, “persuaded and turned away a considerable number of people, saying that gods made by hands are not gods at all.” This is a serious disruption to a religious system, but more than that it is a serious economic and social disruption.

In Roman society worshipping at temples was a religious act but it was also a civic act. It united the disparate people under Roman rule and it supplied food, art, taxes, festivals, songs, prayers, entertainment used to create a social identity across the empire. It was this imperial cohesion that was at stake, it was the precarious unity of citizens, slaves, allies, colonies, aristocrats, soldiers, farmers that was at stake. The economic engine of oikuomene was at stake.

Later, Paul is arrested and charged with inciting political revolts among the people:

This man is stirring up insurrection among the Jews – like a plague throughout oikuomene – as a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes.

Translation decisions effect how we understand the text. In this case, there are many instances of this word oikuomene that bring added clarity to the story of the earliest followers of Jesus. The point in scripture is often this: the beliefs and practices of the people of The Way were direct challenges to the rule of imperial Rome. Nero went so far as to proclaim himself “god and saviour of the oikoumene.” By claiming that Jesus is our king, Christians are committing treason against every empire, whether it’s the 1st century or the 21st. Christians, when confronted with the powers of empire, must resist – as scripture calls us. No imperial or colonizing power is a threat to God’s reign; there are no competing authorities or co-rulers with Jesus. On the contrary these powers must be resisted by the people of God if they prove themselves to be engines of injustice. If the Christian is comfortable within any empire, she has forgotten her calling.

In Luke’s biography of Jesus, he includes a story of Jesus being tempted to give up his calling. Jesus finds himself face to face with the Enemy (in Greek, diabolos), who offers Jesus the keys to the empire if he would but bow to him:

And he led Him up and showed Him all the authority of oikuomene in a moment of time. And the devil said to Him, “I will give You all this domain and its power, for it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I want. If You worship before me, it shall all be Yours.”

The authority of the Roman empire is buttressed by worship. This was a temptation Jesus resisted, but Jesus’ followers over the millennia have had a more difficult time saying “No.” The panicked reaction of the idol-makers in Macedonia should be our model: “These people who have upset the empire have come to this region as well.” Idol-makers, who help prop up the empire by providing economic power driven by alternate forms of worship, should lament “they all act in opposition to the decrees of Caesar,” rather than see the people of God as another source of income. “They have ‘turned the world upside down’,” one translation puts it.

Why does this matter? For one thing, western Christianity is complicit in the colonial project due to its global missional impulse. We were tools in the toolbelt of conquest for the Spanish, English, Dutch, French, Italian and other empires. Had Christians resisted their empires rather than baptizing them in “mission”, the colonial project would have collapsed. The old colonial ideas die hard. There have been recent “well, actually” perspectives that claim the slave trade was good because it Christianized the African continent… or that pogroms against indigenous North Americans were good for the same reason. To interpret Jesus’ command as a coercive, globalising dictate is to submit Christianity to imperial expansion. History has shown that, unlike Jesus’ refusal to consider state power, Christians across the western world have made much, much worse alignments. To think we can do it better or differently in the 21st century is chronological snobbery: we’re not so different from our ancestors as we imagine ourselves to be. We ignore our responsibility to hold imperial powers accountable to our detriment and to the detriment of our neighbors.

How can followers of The Way, so far removed from Jesus’ time and context, put into practice the kind of ethic that upsets the empires we find ourselves confronted by and living within? What would that resistance look like? It could be to

• publicly proclaim God’s gracious gifts,
• repair brokenness as a witness to God’s restorative justice,
• love our neighbors characterized by humility and empathy,
• remediate systems of evil by overcoming them with works of truth, beauty and excellence,
• practice The Way in a community that brings life and produces good fruit through the working of the Spirit.

May we be a people of whom it is said we unsettled the oikuomene, whether we know where Lake Michigan is or not.

Cross burning, 1956

We wrinkled our noses at the kerosene crawling out over the beach
jumped and laughed nervously at the popping wood
we saved the best seats for our friends

it wasn’t hate that made us burn the cross
I guess it could have been mistaken for hate
but there were no Blacks around here in 1956
at least there was no occasion for them to be at the lake that night
not that they were unwelcome

we were thinking the burning would mean “God’s holiness,
shining in the night”
or maybe we thought “Light of the world whoever follows me won’t walk in darkness”

we worked all week making a cross big enough for the whole lake to see
our white hands nailed the beams into place
we built a raft so the whole thing would float
in 1956 there was no electric out on the beach
the cross provided light so we could sing praise songs
there were no black folks this far north
I guess someone could have got the wrong idea
but this wasn’t the South
wasn’t Klan territory
this was a cross burning and it was public
but we meant nothing by it
nothing except “the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it”

people would have seen that burning cross as a symbol of Faith
and heard the children singing about God
and known it wasn’t anything
it wasn’t anything at all
it wasn’t anything
it was just a cross burning.

For Vivienne

What kind of husband takes a vow of celibacy?
Yours was a smirking mess of a man,
a proper expatriate bound by decorum
and fettered by the existentialist’s tedious ego.

Virginia once called you a ‘bag of ferrets’
but surely your vitality and insanity
weren’t so far removed from her own.
(She was at the bottom of the Ouse
seeking her long rest six years before you.)

Confined to your own wasteland were you thinking
of Bertie’s hands on you or the years your
pen helped explain the 20th century?
How reduced is your life, after the pass of decades,
to be “his first wife”, a footnote in history?
What more could have been done to preserve your place
among the survivors and coddled, privileged addicts
of that traumatised generation?

You were more than a subplot in Tom’s Russian novel.

Those final, panicked nights — wandering London.
Alone, lost, wondering if the rumours were true:
(“Will you come back with me?”)
wondering if he had been beheaded.
(“Come back.”)

The chemists & fascists offered little relief.
You made encouraging signs to the orderlies
and swallowed the pills one by one
until the bottle was empty.

Benton Harbor has a history of racial unrest

We drove in early to get lattes and
saw the landscaped arts district full of
white people enjoying Sunday morning.
Bearded and glowing, nodding, laughing over
local bacon and artisan jam.

On the way out we drove past low-income housing
and broken sidewalks, past churches
with names like “Pentecostal Power” and
“Apostolic Tabernacle” and “New Mission Baptist”.
Their parking lots were scattered with the faithful
and the seekers.

Benton Harbor has a history of racial unrest.
Riots on the swampy shore of the Paw Paw
among the ghosts of wild rice and cholera.

First published in Portage Magazine #1

Why anti-racism?

Recently a friend asked me why I’m so interested in the “Race” discussion. It was a good question – one I have not really thought too much about. The “why” wasn’t as important as just jumping in to the struggle with both feet. But I gave him an answer, and I thought “You know who also loves personal reflections and substantive responses to serious questions? The internet!” So here’s why:

We got it wrong

The simple answer that I am 100% “in” on tearing down systemic and personal racial hatred in my lifetime is that white American Christians have gotten it wrong for 400 years. God has given the white church in America opportunity after opportunity to step up, and we got it wrong. The Puritans got it wrong when they allowed slavery in their religious communities. The Christian churches throughout the south got it wrong when they allowed slaveholders to be members in good standing. The Christian missionaries got it wrong when they spread a white, colonizing Jesus among the First Nations people. Christian landowners got it wrong when they turned humans into property. Christian husbands and fathers got it wrong when they raped enslaved women. Priests and pastors got it wrong when they held back from condemning their parishioners.

White American Christians had the power to stop slavery and genocide in their tracks. I can’t say it enough: They had the power. They had the power and they did too little, too late. They looked the other way, they participated in the satanic destruction of black and brown bodies made in the image of God. They tore apart families, robbed children of their parents, robbed women of their dignity, robbed men of their honor, robbed families of their homelands, robbed God of justice – for 400 years. White American Christians allowed Jim Crow and the hoods of the Klan to terrorize the people Jesus died to liberate. White American Christians lynched and burned and beat and threatened their brothers and sisters in the faith. White American Christians invented and embraced anti-Christ theology to prop up their ideologies of hate. We tore apart cultures and languages and traditions. We ignored and silenced and bullied. We supported separation over unity, segregation over diversity. We hated. We are skeptical and suspicious in our churches today. We mock and stereotype and slander from the pulpit and in our private classrooms and homes now.“Not all!” you might be thinking. Yes, praise God there were a few who stood against the demonic powers of white supremacy. Certainly there were a very few. Too little, too late. We used Jesus and scripture to commit acts of shameful violence and sinful hatred against men, women and children for hundreds of years.

Our “Christian” legacy

In my lifetime things are objectively better for people of color in America than 400 years ago. But the legacy of millions of white American Christians, who created hell on earth for millions of black and brown people, still stands. That legacy still ripples through our laws, our class structure, our popular culture, our consumer habits, our real estate transactions, our religious beliefs, our educational institutions, our health care system, our financial practices. There is not a place you can go in America today where white supremacy does not linger. It’s the air we breathe and once you see it, you can’t unsee it; once you learn it, you can’t unlearn it. To paraphrase the ancient Christians: may God damn me if I ignore my sisters and brothers! (Romans 9:1-3)

God is faithful, even when we’ve been so faithless. God continues calling people from every nation, ethnicity and language group – the very people we have sought to eradicate. This reminds me of the words of poet Lucille Clifton “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me /and has failed.” White American Christianity has failed people of color over and over and over again. I can’t make that right, I can’t atone for it, I can’t redeem or repair it, there’s nothing to reconcile because there’s never been peace between us. But through the power of God’s spirit it can be done. By allowing God to convict me of my own racial animus, to break my heart to the same things that break God’s heart, to embolden me to speak and act and vote and march and love today where my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents failed. I can’t tell Frances Baker, when he set foot on land taken from the Nauset and Wampanoag, to turn around and go back to England. But I can tell Greenleaf and Soren Baker that Black Lives Matter, that God loves native people in their cultural specificity, that the colonizers were wrong, that Jesus isn’t white, that immigrants are precious to God no matter their legal status.

I’m not “making up for” the sins of the past. I’m making sure they stop here and now with me and my family. If I have any power today – in my vote, in my hands, in my voice – let it be poured out for the sake of my sisters and brothers. White American Christians failed at every crucial juncture of history. What a different country we would be living in if they had liberated the enslaved people on the White Lion, if they had lived in peace with the First Nations stewards of the land, if they had recognized the humanity of every ethnic group they came into contact with. We got it wrong. History is as harsh a judge as God is a righteous one. Every new generation has the opportunity to follow Jesus to the cross – to live self-sacrificially, in humility, in weakness, in love with the world. We got it wrong thousands of times, God help me to get it right just once.