Monday, October 19, 2026: Empire and Christianity: 

The Games of Empire

Once Christianity became enmeshed with empire, we could no longer talk about the opening line of the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3). Emperors don’t want people who are poor in spirit. They want loyalists. They want people who salute the flag and follow the rules. 

They want national security states. Any talk of nonviolence frankly goes underground until the twentieth century. That’s how well empire Christianity buried the gospel message. Empires need clear judgments about up and down, who’s in and who’s out, who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s our enemy and who’s our friend. 

Here’s an example of how thoroughly it infected the church. In 1054, with no sense of irony, the bishop of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople, representing the Latin church and the Greek church traditions, mutually excommunicated one another. Each side effectively called themselves the winner. This was a triumph of dualistic, win-lose thinking. We had the Holy Roman Empire in the West, and the Byzantine Empire in the East, and they basically stopped talking to one another. 

The Holy Roman Empire transitioned into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Similarly, the Spanish Empire brought its version of Western Roman Catholicism to the New World, including my own state of New Mexico. 

These empires handed on a reading of the gospel that did not threaten top-down power, war-making, or the accumulation of wealth, but was presumably perfectly aligned with it. That’s why people think I’m a heretic when I critique capitalism. Did you know that until the 1100s, taking interest on a loan was considered material for excommunication? Now, it’s the only name of the game! 

We are so aligned with our current money-making system that much of Jesus’s teaching, in which he says the top will be bottom and the bottom will be top, doesn’t make a bit of sense to us. (See Matthew 19:30, 20:16.) We don’t agree with it, privately or publicly. 

There are, of course, the outliers, those who remained outside of empire. In the Catholic world there were the desert fathers and mothers, the Celts, and the mendicant orders. In the Protestant world, non-imperial Christianity was probably best illustrated by the Anabaptist movement, which led to groups like the Mennonites, the Amish, the Waldensians, the Bruderhof, and even the Quakers (although the Quakers aren’t really Anabaptists). 

These forms of Christianity emphasize things like a simple lifestyle, non-participation in war, not taking oaths to governments, and not saluting the flags and systems of this world. These groups were never established by any state whatsoever, nor did they enjoy the privileges that came from being the established religion of the Roman, Spanish, or British Empires. This is actually to their benefit because once you’re established, you have to be careful! Your ability to speak truth will be highly limited. There’s a whole bunch of things you cannot say anymore.

Father Richard considers how the lens of empire shifted the interpretation of the gospel: