 |
| Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
When Christianity Forgets Christ
& Witness Becomes Propaganda
A Christian Confession of Faith v Power
by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT
You cannot serve God and mammon.
- Jesus (Matthew 6:24)
Put your sword back into its place.
- Jesus (Matthew 26:52)
They shall beat their swords into plowshares.
- Isaiah (Isaiah 2:4)
Christ Against Empire. Love Against Fear.
- A General Christian Sentiment
Christianity + Power = the Deformation of the Gospel
- A General Christian acknowledgment
On the Corruption of Faith
On Power and Corruption
Where power asks devotion, idolatry has begun.
- R.E. Slater
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- Lord Acton
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
- Hannah Arendt
Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.
- Simone Weil
On Religion and Idolatry
The Gospel is Not a Political Ideology.
- R.E. Slater
The greatest danger to Christianity is Christendom.
- Soren Kierkegaard
It is not the violence of evil that most threatens us, but the refusal to resist it.
-Jacques Ellul
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
On Justice and Human Dignity
I cannot believe what you say, because I see what you do.
- James Baldwin
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
- Albert Camus
Do not be silent; there is no limit to the power that may be released through you.
- Howard Thurman
On Truth and Ideology
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
- George Orwell
The real test of a person is not how he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how he plays the role destiny has imposed on him.
- Vaclav Havel
Preface
Four concerns arise when reading of Christians responding in this way:
First, there is the problem of confusing witness with power. Christianity has often been strongest when speaking prophetically to power, not sacralizing power.
Second, there is the problem of messianic overreach. Whenever a political figure is treated as uniquely anointed, indispensable, or beyond moral critique, Christian language begins drifting toward political idolatry. That is not a small accusation, but historically it is a recurring danger.
Third, there is the problem of inflated civilizational rhetoric, where “saving Christianity,” “restoring the nation,” or “protecting the church” can become totalizing slogans that absorb the gospel into a culture-war narrative. This is the lane which Maga-Christianity has directed itself into.
Fourth, there is the problem of inheritance distortion. Many observers, including some evangelicals, have quietly noted the contrast between Billy Graham’s generally broader public posture and Franklin Graham’s sharper political alignment. Whether one sees that as fair or unfair, it is part of why his-and-other Evangelics overstatements stand out.
Generally, my own thoughts run along these lines of reasoning: large-scale Christianity might not be the problem. Public Christianity might not be the problem. Even politically engaged Christianity might not necessarily be the problem.
The problem begins when the scale of the platform amplifies the scale of the claims, until hyperbole starts substituting for discernment.
That is when proclamation can become propaganda.
And if we might rearrange our theological grammar closer to Whiteheadian instincts, it is where relational faith can harden into ideological fixation. Where relational process becomes hardened systems. And, processual witness becomes an instrument for propaganda.
These then become serious concerns. Concerns which have been growing since the 1980s when a group of evangelicals met in Chicago and began recasting the bible in terms of "inerrant, infallible, trustworthy, true, reliable, authoritative, etc." All of which have been written of here at Relevancy22 over the years.
And so, let us offer yet another process-theological critique of Christian nationalism and how Graham’s populist rhetoric might be read through the lens of Jesus....
The Background for a Christian Response to Christian PoliticalizationLet us sharpened our response by distinguishing between i) Christianity as a faith centered on the way of Jesus, and what might be called ii) an ideological capture of Christianity.
A process-theological critique of Maga-Christianity, including rhetoric associated at times with zealous overstatements by Evangelical pulpiteering, would begin not with partisanship, but with first principles. (*Maga = Make America Great Again)
In Whitehead's Process theological sense, If God is understood not as a God of coercive domination but as a God of (loving) relational lure toward truth, beauty, justice, and richer forms of coexistence, then any movement organized around fear, exclusion, domination, or ethno-national hierarchy stands in tension with the divine aim to loving encircle and reframe one's life.
This theological assessment is not merely a political disagreement with Christian nationalism's idea of God - it is a metaphysical contradiction of God's Self, Character, Ministry, and Love as seen from both a gospel and process perspective.
One could frame this critique across five fractures:
First, it fractures Jesus-centered ethics. The teachings associated with enemy love, peacemaking, hospitality to strangers, care for the poor, and solidarity with the socially vulnerable become displaced by identity defense and power retention. The center shifts.
Second, it fractures the doctrine of the human person. A process view treats persons as relationally constituted, possessing value in and through being and participation. White nationalism, supremacist insinuations, or categorical diminishment of immigrants, women, trans persons, or gay persons deny that relational dignity. They reduce persons to threat categories.
Third, it fractures the idea of truth itself. Persistent overstatement, conspiratorial apocalypticism, providential claims about leaders, and theological jingoism often substitute mythic political narrative for discernment. In process terms, this blocks novelty. It closes inquiry.
Fourth, it fractures peace. The fusion of Christian identity with militarism or expansive “just war” rhetoric can sacralize coercion. Yet a process-relational theology tends to see peace not as passivity, but as the difficult creation of sustaining relations. Peace is constructive, not merely the absence of conflict.
Fifth, it fractures ecclesial communion. As previously noted in past articles, family breakage, church breakage, and communal estrangement are not side effects. They are signs of theological disorder. When a theology leaves a trail of social fragmentation, one must ask what spirit animates it.
Hence, we could put a Christian reply to Maga-theologies as follows:
The deepest Christian question is not whether a leader protects Christianity.
But whether in that activity Christianity still reflects a loving Christ.
And that is not the same question.
To observe that “Maga-Christianity has fractured Jesus theology” can be expressed thusly:
A political theology becomes distorted when allegiance to power overrides the primacy of love, truth, and shared human dignity. Not only "empire-power" but any kind of power that distorts God's love for creation and creation's response back to God.
This is a serious theological claim, and it is an arguable to legitimately take.
There is also a specific historical irony here. Christian nationalism often invokes civilizational protection, while repeating patterns the church has struggled with before:
Constantinian triumphalism, crusading logic, apocalyptic absolutism, and ethno-religious boundary making. None of these historical precedents are new. They are old, fallen temptations. And all of them put civilizations at cultural risk and at extreme unprotection by a religious faith claiming that activity.
Let us now move to a deeper category... that of accommodation of religious power as theological deformation.
From Gospel to Ideology
The above phrase, "... accommodation of religious power as theological deformation," bears historical weight and precedent:
The church has long wrestled with what happens when faith ceases to critique power and instead seeks protection through it. What is known as ideological idealism is, in part, a sacralized political imagination where contingent political arrangements are treated as if they carry transcendent - i.e., divine - warrant.
This posture is always dangerous to the health of societies.
A sharper formulation might be described as something like this:
Seven Marks of Theological Deformation in Accommodated Christianity
- Accommodation to power
When the church seeks proximity to state, nation, party, or strongman as a source of identity rather than maintaining prophetic distance.
-
Ideological idealism
When political myths replace moral realism, and national destiny is narrated in quasi-redemptive terms.
-
Departure from social and ethical responsibility
When concern for the poor, vulnerable, migrant, outsider, and excluded is subordinated to identity preservation or grievance.
-
Cruelty masked as moral order
This is a severe but necessary category. When coercive treatment of trans persons, restrictions rooted in gender fixation, or categorical exclusions of women’s leadership are defended as “biblical order,” one must ask whether order has become detached from compassion.
-
Mythologizing of scripture
Not using myth in the literary sense, but turning the Bible into an ideological arsenal, where texts are abstracted from history and weaponized for prior commitments.
-
Presumptive theological assertions
Claiming divine sanction where humility would demand silence. Announcing what God has endorsed in matters far more ambiguous than such certainty allows.
-
Fracture as evidentiary fruit
When the social result is broken families, estranged communities, intensified fear, and diminished solidarity, those outcomes themselves become theological evidence.
This last point matters.
In Christian thought, "fruits = outcomes" matter.
A tree is partly known by what it produces. So too a bush, a garden, a person's works.
From a process perspective, "any form of accommodation to power narrows relational possibility. It reduces the field of becoming. It suppresses novelty, mutuality, and creative transformation. It tends toward closure. In Christian jargon, "the Holy Spirit is unable to redeem, restore, renew, transform, or resurrect" because of the interference of God's people, and here, the church, have produced across a society or culture.
And in reference to the term, "closure" - in a Whiteheadian/Process sense - is often a form of diminishment.
As example, when the church perpetuates the inhuman actions of "forced gender fixation," it is not merely a social criticism of the church - but a critique of its rigid religious metaphysics - of turning historically contingent constructions from the biblical past into indefinite, eternal structures of cruelty and brutality.
This is a philosophical argument as much as a pastoral one.
And so, "Yes," the presumptive claims of Maga-Evangelicalism should be answered, and can be answered - not merely by opposing them politically, but by exposing the theological grammar beneath them.
Christianity, Power, and the Deformation of the Gospel
The Christian faith is compromised when accommodation to political power displaces allegiance to the ethical, relational, and spiritual center of the way of Jesus.
The problem is not public faith, civic responsibility, or moral engagement in political life. The problem arises when Christianity is fused with ideological identity, nationalist mythology, coercive social order, or providential claims made on behalf of political leaders or movements. At that point, faith risks becoming not witness, but instrument.
This deformation may be recognized in recurring patterns:
- It appears when proximity to power replaces prophetic distance.
- When ideological idealism substitutes political myth for moral discernment.
- When social and ethical responsibilities toward the vulnerable, including migrants, women, trans persons, the poor, and the socially marginalized, are subordinated to systems of exclusion, control, or grievance.
- When cruelty is defended as order.
- When the Bible is mythologized into an ideological weapon rather than engaged as historically mediated witness.
- When presumptive theological assertions claim divine sanction where epistemic humility should restrain speech.
- When the fruits of such religion include family fracture, ecclesial division, fear, estrangement, and diminished human solidarity.
These are not merely social failures. They are theological distortions.
From a process-relational oriented understanding of God, divine power is not best understood as domination, but as persuasive lure toward justice, beauty, truth, compassion, and richer forms of coexistence. Therefore, movements shaped by exclusion, supremacy, coercion, or sacralized nationalism stand in contradiction to that divine aim of a loving, mediating God.
Moreover, the Christian faith must also alertly reject:
- the casting of political leadership as God-like, providential figures,
- the conflation of Jesus' gospel of God's love with enculturated nationalism,
- the sacralization of violence through expansive "Just War" reasoning,
- the distortions of apocalyptic absolutism - as in, "This is America's Destiny!" And,
- the use of religious certainty to justify inequality or deny the dignity of persons.
A theology centered in Jesus is measured not by its capacity to preserve power, but by its fidelity to love, truth, peace, justice, hospitality, and the flourishing of life together.
The central Christian question is not whether religion can be used to defend a nation, a party, or a social order.
The question is whether Christianity still reflects Christ.
Where faith hardens into ideology, where witness becomes propaganda, where power eclipses compassion, and where fear overrides love, theological resistance becomes necessary.
For these reasons, we affirm a Christianity of prophetic distance from power, ethical responsibility toward all persons, interpretive humility, non-coercive peace, and relational solidarity. We reject forms of accommodated Christianity that deform the gospel through nationalism, supremacy, cruelty, exclusion, or ideological absolutism.
If divinity is to mean anything, it must mean love, or it must mean nothing.
Consequently, these stated affirmations in response to Christian Nationalism read less as reaction and more as principled theological policy. It has the shape of a manifesto, or perhaps even the opening of a longer "Confession Against Christian Nationalism."
Let us then proceed to the formation of such a confession....
The Necessity for a Christian Confession of Faith v Power
In response to Evangelicalism's consistent pro-Trumpian rhetoric over the years let us create a foundational baseline "confessional" statement for the Christian Church in line with Jesus' own person, actions, ministry, and witness....
Firstly, though we could easily offer a partisan response to Graham, it may be more helpful in providing a theological reply stripped of politics. Moreover, this confession arises in response to consistently recurring forms of Christian rhetoric over the past decade that has been voiced-and-acted-upon in public life - including claims advanced by prominent religious figures who have fused Christian witness with:
- nationalist idealism,
- providential political claims,
- civilizational fear and alarm,
- apocalyptic eschatology, and
- ideological certainty.
Such rhetoric requires response - not because Christians should avoid public life - but because public theology, when distorted, can wound and harm both faith and neighbor.
The problem addressed here is not in "Christianity's engagement with society" - but "how" it is engaging with society. That Christianity has accommodated itself to political power - not for the first time, nor for the last - but presently and forcefully. That it's engagement has not only become a staple of Christian news - but has negatively affected Christianity's attitude, national posture, and politicized policies - which must be responded to clearly and vigorously:
When faith seeks protection through political dominance, when religious speech inflates leaders into providential agents, when exclusion is moralized, when coercion is baptized, when cruelty is defended as order, and when nationalism borrows the garments of gospel, theological resistance must become necessary.
The following Christian Confession is offered in the spirit intended. To speak against these politicized inflations of accommodating theological positions....
A CHRISTIAN CONFESSION
of FAITH v. POWER
Preface
This statement is offered not as a partisan tract, but as a theological reply to Christian Nationalism.
It arises in response to recurring forms of Christian rhetoric in public life, including claims advanced by prominent religious figures who have fused Christian witness with nationalist idealism, providential political claims, civilizational alarm, and ideological certainty. Such rhetoric requires response, not because Christians should avoid public life, but because public theology, when distorted, can wound both faith and neighbor.
The problem addressed here is not Christianity engaged in society.
It is Christianity accommodated to power.
When faith seeks protection through political dominance, when religious speech inflates leaders into providential agents, when exclusion is moralized, when coercion is baptized, when cruelty is defended as order, and when nationalism borrows the garments of gospel, theological resistance becomes necessary.
This confession is offered in that spirit.
I. The First Principle: The Gospel Is Not an Ideology
Christian faith is compromised when accommodation to political power displaces allegiance to the ethical, relational, and spiritual center of the way of Jesus.
The problem is not public faith, civic responsibility, or moral engagement in political life.
The problem arises when Christianity is fused with ideological identity, nationalist mythology, coercive social order, or presumptive claims made on behalf of political leaders or movements.
At that point, faith risks becoming not witness, but (oppressive) instrument.
The gospel does not exist to sanctify a nation.
The gospel does not exist to protect a ruling mythology.
The gospel does not exist to baptize grievance.
The gospel calls persons and communities toward truth, compassion, justice, reconciliation, and peace.
Where these are eclipsed, deformation has begun.
II. Seven Marks of Theological Deformation
1. Accommodation to Power
When the church seeks proximity to state, nation, party, or strongman as a source of identity rather than maintaining prophetic distance.
2. Ideological Idealism
When political myths replace moral discernment, and national destiny is narrated in quasi-redemptive terms.
3. Departure from Social and Ethical Responsibility
When concern for the poor, vulnerable, migrants, outsiders, women, and socially marginalized persons is subordinated to exclusion, identity preservation, or grievance.
4. Cruelty Masked as Moral Order
When coercive treatment, forced gender fixation, categorical exclusions, or inequalities are defended as righteousness.
Order detached from compassion becomes domination.
5. Mythologizing of Scripture
When the Bible is abstracted from history and turned into an ideological arsenal.
6. Presumptive Theological Assertions
When divine sanction is claimed where humility would require restraint.
7. Fracture as Fruit
When the result is broken families, ecclesial division, estrangement, fear, and diminished solidarity.
A tree is partly known by its fruits.
III. Against the Inflation of Political Power
We reject the inflation of political leaders into providential figures.
We reject the conferral of messianic overtones upon rulers.
We reject the suggestion that Christianity’s future depends upon loyalty to a political personality.
Such claims do not strengthen faith.
They weaken discernment.
They substitute devotion to power for fidelity to truth.
IV. Against Christian Nationalism and Sacralized Violence
We reject the conflation of gospel and nationalism.
We reject the sacralization of violence through expansive just war reasoning.
We reject jingoistic Christianity that mistakes militarized identity for moral seriousness.
Peace is disciplined moral courage.
A faith centered in Christ cannot make coercion its grammar.
V. On Human Dignity and Relational Worth
We affirm the dignity of persons as irreducible.
No person should be reduced to threat category, cultural symbol, or ideological enemy.
This includes immigrants seeking liberty and justice.
This includes women whose gifts and leadership are constrained by rigid systems.
This includes trans and gay persons whose humanity is often diminished in the name of moral certainty.
Any theology that requires inequality to sustain itself has already entered crisis.
VI. A Process-Relational Clarification
From a process-relational understanding, divine power is not domination.
It is persuasive lure toward richer forms of coexistence.
Toward justice.
Toward beauty.
Toward truth.
Toward compassion.
Toward peace.
Movements shaped by exclusion, supremacy, coercion, or sacralized nationalism stand in contradiction to that divine aim.
Accommodation to power narrows relational possibility.
It suppresses novelty.
It diminishes mutuality.
It closes what should remain open.
And closure is often a form of diminishment.
VII. What We Affirm
We affirm:
A Christianity of prophetic distance from power.
A Christianity of ethical responsibility toward all persons.
A Christianity of interpretive humility.
A Christianity of non-coercive peace.
A Christianity of relational solidarity.
A Christianity measured not by its power to preserve dominance, but by its fidelity to love.
VIII. What We Reject
We reject forms of accommodated Christianity deformed by:
Apocalyptic manipulation.
Presumptive religious certainty in service to political power.
Coda
The central Christian question is not whether religion can defend a nation, a party, or a social order. The question is whether Christianity still reflects Christ:
Where witness becomes propaganda, resistance becomes necessary.
Where power eclipses compassion, repentance becomes necessary.
Where fear overrides love, reconstruction becomes necessary.
And where divinity is invoked to justify domination, theology itself must answer.
For the crisis before the church is not merely political. It is spiritual, ethical, and theological:
It concerns whether the language of faith will serve truth or illusion.
Whether religion will deepen human dignity or sanctify exclusion.
Whether Christianity will remain captive to power, or recover the difficult freedom of prophetic witness.
For the church does not lose itself all at once. It is diminished gradually:
Each time fear is called faith.
Each time cruelty is called order.
Each time nationalism is called discipleship.
Each time power is mistaken for providence.
Yet what is deformed may be reformed.
What has been accommodated may be disentangled.
What has been captured by ideology may be reclaimed by truth.
And what has been hardened by fear may yet be opened again by love.
That work of reorientation is not secondary to faith - it is part of faithfulness itself.
For the calling of Christianity is not to preserve dominion, but to bear witness.
Not to sanctify power, but to humanize it.
Not to defend empire, but to embody compassion.
Not to conquer through certainty, but to participate in truth.
If divinity is to mean anything, it must mean love, or it must mean nothing.
Expanded Bibliography
I. Process Theology and Philosophical Foundations
Alfred North Whitehead
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967.
John B. Cobb Jr.
Cobb, John B., Jr. A Christian Natural Theology: Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead. 2nd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.
Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976.
Catherine Keller
Keller, Catherine. Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki
Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology. New York: Continuum, 1994.
II. Political Theology, Power, and Nationalism
William T. Cavanaugh
Cavanaugh, William T. Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.
Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Stanley Hauerwas
Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
Hauerwas, Stanley, and William H. Willimon. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
III. Prophetic Critique, Scripture, and Public Faith
Walter Brueggemann
Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.
Brueggemann, Walter. Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014.
N. T. Wright
Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996.
Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.
Richard B. Hays
Hays, Richard B. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996.
IV. Justice, Marginality, and Ethical Theology
Howard Thurman
Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
James H. Cone
Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed. Rev. ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997.
Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011.
Gustavo Gutiérrez
Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Rev. ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988.
Kelly Brown Douglas
Douglas, Kelly Brown. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015.
V. Christian Ethics, Peace, and Nonviolence
John Howard Yoder
Yoder, John Howard. The Politics of Jesus. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.
Glen H. Stassen
Stassen, Glen H., and David P. Gushee. Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context. 2nd ed. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016.
Dorothy Day
Day, Dorothy. The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day. New York: Harper & Row, 1952.
VI. Hermeneutics, Scripture, and Theological Method
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Paul Ricoeur
Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.
Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.
VII. Contemporary Critiques of Christian Nationalism
Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright, 2020.
Jemar Tisby
Tisby, Jemar. The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019.
Samuel L. Perry
Perry, Samuel L., and Andrew L. Whitehead. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
