Mourning empire and energizing toward Christ
Well, here we are. Donald Trump is the 47th President-elect. His supporters have long complained the country does not take their strongman and them seriously, despite ample evidence to the contrary and their pyrrhic victory at the ballot box.
We know what comes next, or at least what Trump will try to do. The federal government faces a purge of dedicated civil servants who will be replaced with sycophants, human wrecking balls with no vision for healthy governance. Our communities are staring down the threat of federal agents and even the military ripping people from their homes and deporting them, including some who are citizens under the law. Extreme tariffs will send prices skyrocketing and inflict intense economic harm on families of all stripes. A weaponized Justice Department will target anyone who criticizes Trump, who knows he is basically immune from criminal prosecution. Republican war-mongering risks setting off a full-scale war in the Middle East, and the growing embrace of Vladimir Putin threatens to snuff out Ukraine as an independent nation-state.
We know this because Trump has said these things, repeatedly. His strident supporters demand we believe him, and they are not dumb. They know what he plans to do and they want these things to be done. The sadistic cruelty is still the point, and Trump’s supporters are more than willing to damage themselves in the process.
Much of the analysis about why the election went the way it did is overanalyzing the shortcomings of the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party. Little attention is being placed on the systemic problems that allowed Trump to ascend. Our fractured media ecosystem that siloes Americans into different realities. The misogyny and racism embedded in American society. Our lack of national repentance from our post-9/11 militarism. The theological catastrophe that is white Christian nationalism, the cancer that is gutting American evangelicalism and other culturally conservative forms of Christianity while fanning the flames of MAGA extremism. According to NBC’s national exit polls, 82% of white evangelicals voted for Trump.
This is America. This is who we are, maybe even the majority. And that’s the problem.
For those of us Christians who seek to follow the compassionate Jesus in Scripture —not the fake, gaudy, and domineering version white evangelicals try to force on everyone— despair is real. We can see the immense harm to human life that lies ahead. But it would be wise to take a moment and consider what we are really up against. When we do, there are outlines of hope.
Living in the confusion of Empire
These past few days I have seen some upset Christians point to that infamous scene in the Gospels in which the crowd vehemently chooses Barabbas over Jesus. Here is the account from The Gospel According To Mark:
Now at the festival he used to release a prisoner for them, anyone for whom they asked. Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder during the insurrection. So the crowd came and began to ask Pilate to do for them according to his custom.
Then he answered them, “Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” For he realized that it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed him over. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead.
Pilate spoke to them again, “Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” They shouted back, “Crucify him!” Pilate asked them, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him!” So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them, and after flogging Jesus he handed him over to be crucified. (Mark 15:6-15)
Some are suggesting this is what evangelicals are doing with Trump: choosing Barabbas. To me this is a poor analogy, one that may blind us to a much more severe problem. Evangelicals aren’t choosing a modern Barabbas; heck, Trump was too cowardly to even attend his own insurrection. And I’m not comfortable having anyone as a stand-in for Jesus, including Kamala Harris.
Evangelicals are choosing the kind of empire that made the offer of Jesus or Barabbas in the first place. Let’s be clear: this is far worse. America is a modern day Rome, both in the story we tell —our country is exceptional, indispensable— and in our actions, from far-flung military bases to for-profit prisons to placing personal piety and charity above the relentless pursuit of justice.
We are empire, just like Rome in our belief that our country is eternal and in no need of accountability. We are like the empire that not only crucified the God-Man, but nailed to the Cross his vision of a whole and just world, for the sake of mockery.
Empire is more than might makes right, it is infection. Empire silently weaves its way into your mind, body, and soul, bending and breaking you to its will. Empire pulls the human being toward extreme individualism and personality cults while blinding us to the dangers of institutional injustice and decay. Empire confuses by pointing a finger at the marginalized, screeching they are to blame! for problems the they often have nothing to do with. Empire tosses scapegoat after scapegoat to the people for sacrifice, merely to preserve its own power by dodging accountability and repentance.
There is a reason the Old Testament prophets spent so much of their time railing against systemic and institutionalized sin. The prophets saw empire for what it was. So did Jesus. Empire is antichrist.
Evangelicals embrace American Empire more enthusiastically than most others because of their unhealthy obsession with authority and deep desire to outsource the responsibility to be discerning, so as to avoid consequences for their own actions. But they are not alone. Both major political parties participate in empire, albeit in different ways to different effect. All Presidents have. Non-evangelical churches, too. We all live and participate in empire. Even those who are consciously struggling against empire know they may be able to resist its pull, but never its consequences.
Empire is the problem lurking behind so many of our other problems. Trump is no aberration. Neither are his loudest supporters. They are symbols of one of the oldest forms of American Empire. It is this Empire that evangelicals worship, one in which white America is God’s chosen nation. An Empire in which women and minorities will be submissive...or else. An Empire that considers itself exceptional with no evidence for doing so.
This Empire is entirely self-serving. It’s history is littered with charlatans and false messiahs, some eerily similar to Trump. We tell ourselves otherwise. This history has great prophets, wise voices who saw American Empire for what it was and called it out. We water down those prophets today. Many people have fallen somewhere in between —presidents to preachers to ordinary folk— the lukewarm who are trying to keep their rafts afloat in the raging river of empire, unable to see the welcoming stillness of the shoreline right next to them.
When Trump won in 2016 there was reason to hope our country would regret it. Some people did, but many still see the damage done as righteous. People can’t plead ignorance this time. They fully know who Trump is and the Empire he stands for. They voted for it, some with glee.
It’s hard to see a silver lining in this moment, but one is there. The weakness is self-evident. The worst kind of American Empire, MAGA, has already lost half the country, and most of those it has lost clearly have no desire to go back. 2016 and 2024 were backlashes by this Empire to this reality. Put another way: empire always acts in self-defeating ways when its strength is eroding. From performative displays of power to threatening rhetoric to inflicting real harm on real people, empire ends up scaring and driving away some of its own adherents when challenged, turning them into the seeds of its own demise along the way.
We see this truth everywhere today. The growing critiques of unfettered, planet-killing capitalism. The conservatives who have left the Republican Party. The young liberals demanding the Democratic Party cast their elitism aside and be more human. The moderates rejecting the mind-numbing, performative centrism all of us have had to put up with for far too long. The throngs of people leaving white evangelicalism. The labor unions that are taking the gloves off with unfair employers. The scholars and experts who are writing and teaching in plainer ways to help us find a better path forward. There are real costs to breaking away from empire, but more and more people seem willing to pay them.
My point is twofold: (1) Jesus did not end up on the Cross by accident and (2) seeing the Cross as beginning and end is foolish. The name of Jesus outlived the empire that tried to make a mockery of his life. He has dismantled other empires that falsely claimed power in his name. He will do the same to the MAGA Empire, too, and he invites us into that great work.
This is where our hope is found, even if the days ahead are difficult. Yes, we get to confess “Jesus is Lord,” but that is no hollow phrase. That confession demands a different way of living, one that puts us on a collision course with empire in community with others. One that proclaims the end of American exceptionalism and extreme individualism in favor of beloved community. One that sees even the most virulent Trump supporter as a victim of that Empire’s propaganda. It’s a confession that holds space for mourning and action, that doesn’t claim all is well, but that —one day— truly all will be well.
Forming and energizing ourselves against empire
Some days I struggle to understand how I participate in empire. I have found the Lord’s Prayer to be a practical way in helping with that. I’ve known this simple prayer since I was a child, but it’s only been the past several months of reciting it daily that I’ve come to realize how radical it is:
Our Father in heaven, may your name be revered as holy.
May your kingdom come.
May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from the evil one. (Matthew 6:10-13)
The Lord’s Prayer is inherently anti-empire. May His name be revered, not empire’s. May His Kingdom come and will be done, not empire’s. Provision of food for all in God’s economy and the forgiveness of debts and debtors, acts of love empire scoffs at. A plea to avoid the trials that empire uses to see who is loyal. A plea to be rescued from the evil one, a figure who is associated with the destructive values of empire.
This prayer is formative. It directs us away from empire in all forms —including Trumpism— and toward the Kingdom of God.
There is something else that stands out about this prayer, at least for our purposes. It’s what is missing. There is not a single I in the Lord’s Prayer, just our and us. We are neither supposed to go through this life nor struggle against empire alone. These words are a rejection of American exceptionalism and extreme individualism. Community is key. Praying this prayer daily is an exercise in disentangling ourselves from the pitfalls of empire as we move toward the Kingdom of God.
Additionally, here are four books that I have found helpful in understanding what empire is and how to resist it:
1. The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann. One of the most respected biblical scholars of our time offers a theological and ethical reading of the Hebrew Bible. Brueggemann explores a vision for the community of God whose words and practices of lament, protest, and complaint give rise to an alternative social order that opposes empire. Linking Exodus to Kings to Jeremiah to Jesus, he argues that the prophetic vision not only embraces the pain of the people, but creates an energy and amazement based on the new thing that God is doing.
2. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. This very short read is a practical guide to resisting authoritarianism as we have it today, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.
3. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild. This examines the four forgotten years between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and labor. Sound familiar? Hochschild spotlights this forgotten repression while celebrating the Americans who strove to make things better.
4. Ministers of Propaganda: Truth, Power, and the Ideology of the Religious Right by Scott Coley. Part of resisting empire is understanding how its propaganda functions. Coley does not cover all forms of the propaganda we are dealing with today, but instead goes straight to the heart of white evangelical propaganda, which is central to the survival of the MAGA subculture.
Many of the specific answers we seek are not found in these resources, but they are helpful starting places for better understanding our moment and what we are being called into.
Closing Thoughts
Regular readers will know my day job involves working with genocide survivor communities in Sudan. Naturally, studying Nazi Germany and the Holocaust have been major components of my education, both in college and in my own ongoing studies and experiences afterward.
I have always been hesitant to draw a direct comparison between Nazi Germany and Trumpism in the United States. They are not the same thing, but echoes of Nazism do emanate from the MAGA Empire. Embedded in American exceptionalism is a dangerous tendency to turn the United States into an idol and the Christian faith into a vehicle for white ethno-nationalism. These echoes grow louder with each passing year.
But as I have learned in my studies, we are not the first people to face such a dilemma. At the end of 1942 and in the final days of his freedom, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a moving essay now known as After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Years 1943. In it, he observes the ruins of Germany and the German Church under Nazism, questioning what the Christian witness should be amid the utter darkness.
Writing of those supporting the regime, Bonhoeffer observed “In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him,” in service to the abysmal situation. This rings eerily true of the MAGA Empire, especially its white evangelical core. Bonhoeffer goes on to suggest that only an act of radical intervention from the outside may be the sole option left to save people from the near-total control they were under. I hope I am wrong about this, but there is a part of the American citizenry that seems to have lost the capacity to self-correct, much less even consider mild critique. There are no quick answers to this problem.
Looking to the future, Bonhoeffer considered what those opposed to the empire needed to become in their moment:
“We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds. We have become cunning and learned the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech. Experience has rendered us suspicious of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical.
Are we still of any use? We will not need geniuses, cynics, people who have contempt for others, or cunning tacticians, but simple, uncomplicated, and honest human beings. Will our inner strength to resist what has been forced on us have remained strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves blunt enough, to find our way back to simplicity and honesty?”
Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo roughly four months later. The Nazis executed him at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp in April of 1945, cutting short the life of a 39-year-old man whose growing wisdom was often found in the haunting questions he asked. Questions such as Are we still of any use? and Will our inner strength to resist what has been forced on us have remained strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves blunt enough, to find our way back to simplicity and honesty?
These questions hit me very differently today now that I am the same age Bonhoeffer was when the Empire of his day began closing in on him. As we mourn the existence of our own Empire, it seems to me we should also be asking these sorts of questions of ourselves, not so much to determine what we should do, but who we should become.
The immense harm and dangers lying ahead of us have been chosen by a slim majority, including people who declare only they get to speak for Jesus. There is a darkness there words cannot explain. That a majority of people voted against their own neighbors —indeed, even against themselves— warns of a grim sickness that cannot be healed from within.
But it is in mourning that we can better understand who the real enemy is. It is not the average Trump voter; if anything, they may be the most unwitting victims of the MAGA Empire. Some are making the best decisions they can with the false and misleading information they have, bad information that is being pumped into their heads by angry politicians and pastors who bring nothing but shame to their offices. Still, the fact remains that if empire did not exist, we would all be living in a much simpler and honest reality, the kind Bonhoeffer yearned for. Empire, then, is the true enemy.
Mourn and be angry today. Find healthy community. Tomorrow, we resist in the ways Jesus did.
About Me
I explore faith and church culture in the American South from my hometown of Memphis, TN. I’m an institutionalist who believes the means are just as important as the ends. Everything here is an expression of my faith and love for the Church.
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