Thursday, September 11, 2025: The historical reality of Christian empire, like Christian anti-Semitism, is bathed in irony

Jesus was an oppressed brown Palestinian Jew, living in a Middle Eastern nation that was occupied by a European empire centered in Rome. Jesus challenged the empire of Rome by proclaiming an alternative empire, the empire of God. The similarity of the terms highlighted the radical contrasts between the two empires:  

Rome’s empire was violent. God’s empire was nonviolent. 

Rome’s empire was characterized by domination. God’s empire was characterized by service and liberation. 

Rome’s empire was preoccupied with money. God’s empire was preoccupied with generosity and was deeply suspicious of money. 

Rome’s empire was fueled by the love of power. God’s empire was fueled by the power of love. 

Rome’s empire created a domination pyramid that put a powerful and violent man on the top, with chains of command and submission that put everyone else in their place beneath the supreme leader. 

God’s empire created a network of solidarity and mutuality that turned conventional pyramids upside down and gave “the last, the least, and the lost” the honored place at the table.  

Not surprisingly, the Roman Empire saw Jesus and his nonviolent movement as a threat to their violent regime, so they had him tortured and publicly executed as a matter of standard procedure. By pinning a naked human being to wood … the empire showed its own absolute dominance and its victim’s absolute defeat. The message was clear: Jesus’ message of truth and love meant nothing in the face of the empire’s crushing power and domination….  

Echoing its founder’s nonviolence, the Christian faith initially grew as a nonviolent spiritual movement of counter-imperial values. It promoted love, not war. Its primal creed elevated solidarity, not oppression and exclusion: “For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26–28). 

The early Christians elevated the equality of friendship rather than the supremacy of hierarchy (3 John 14, 15). 

15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. John 15:15

15 “If you love me, keep my commands. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be[c] in you. 18 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. John 15:15 – 20

Because of their counter-imperial posture, including their refusal to be soldiers in the Roman army or to participate in the imperial cult that proclaimed the divinity of the emperor, they were often mocked, distrusted as unpatriotic, and persecuted. 

What has Christianity lost in its embrace of the power of empire:

Since Constantine, Christianity has repeatedly claimed a legitimate right to do violence to its members [and others] to protect its interests and conserve its supremacy. It has sought far-reaching and sometimes almost limitless control over the behavior and minds of its subjects. At times, it has behaved like a totalitarian power, suppressing dissent and claiming divine and absolute authority, capable of absolute corruption. 

The historical reality of Christian empire, like Christian anti-Semitism, is bathed in irony.

Brian McLaren reflects on the different understandings of power held by the early Jesus movement and the Roman Empire: