Derek Penwell
Caesar has no objection to faith, provided faith knows when to keep its mouth shut.
When a reporter asked Donald Trump about the Rededicate 250 prayer rally last week, the president offered what he seemed to think was a compliment to the faithful. "When you have strong religion, you have less crime," he said. "It's like, 'Gee, I want to go to heaven, so I'm not going to do this or that.' Who knows."
Who knows, indeed.
Setting the sociology aside for a moment, what's theologically revealing about the president’s statement is just how clearly it exposes what religion is supposed to do in the imagination of the same man 80% of White evangelicals have crowned as their champion.
On this account, religion keeps people in line by being useful to the state in roughly the same way a good police force is useful to the state: cheaper, maybe, and it works on the conscience rather than the body, but the function is pretty much the same: Keep the troublemakers in line.
This isn't some new-fangled idea, either. The Romans called it religio, which was the duct tape that held society together. Constantine figured out you could harness Christianity for that very purpose. And every authoritarian government since has understood that a compliant religious community is an asset.
But what I find shocking is how little resistance the evangelical world has shown to this rather unflattering framing. And I think the cost of that pliability is worth considering. I have real questions; I’m not just trying to score points.
Because somewhere along the way, a significant part of American evangelicalism made a questionable deal: Political access and cultural visibility in exchange for unquestioning religious approval.
To be fair, the deal seemed reasonable at the time. I mean, if you're at the table, you get a say in the menu, right? If you have your people strategically placed in the right offices, your values get enacted.
Except that’s not quite what happened, is it?
What happened is that the right words were spoken, the right symbolic bills were passed, and the right prayer rallies were staged until the evangelical vote became almost automatic for one political coalition. Less, I think, because the promises were being kept than because the performance was convincing.
And now here we are, watching a president describe faith as a divine deterrent system, and the silence from evangelical leadership is an indictment.
Fine. Progressive Christians aren’t immune to this temptation, either. We know how to confuse access with faithfulness, too. But Trump’s little “who knows” does something especially revealing: it exposes religion as empire prefers it as useful and manageable. It’s better for Caesar if the Jesus of the Gospels stays as far away from civil religion as possible.
Trump's throwaway "who knows" is worth shining a bit more light on. It's the kind of comment that comes from someone peeking in on religion from the outside, calculating its usefulness.
And, if we’re honest, we know that recognizing the image of God in the stranger, the prisoner, the hungry, and the despised, for example, doesn't compute under empire's efficient cost/benefit analysis.
The real question posed to religion in this utilitarian calculation is: Does it keep people in line?
And that leaves the church with a question it can't outsource to a campaign consultant or smooth over with another prayer rally.
Question: When the people who invoke your faith most loudly and most publicly treat it primarily as a management tool, what does faithfulness actually look like?
I think it looks like remembering that Jesus wasn't executed for pacifying the masses and making the herd easier to control.
Jesus was executed for announcing a new realm that exposed every other political realm as provisional and afraid. He forgave sins the authorities sought to control and touched people they wanted quarantined. He healed those the empire considered irredeemable. And if we want to be faithful to the path he pointed us down, that’s what our lives should look like.
Think about it: What would it look like to be part of a community that refuses to sing from Caesar's hymnbook while the doors get locked on people looking to find a merciful Jesus?
Because the point of following Jesus was never to become easier to manage, but to become harder to buy.
Derek Penwell
