Ted Grimsrud—October 21, 2025
Amidst its diversity, we may discern in the Bible a specific political sensibility. God has called into being a community to know God’s love and to embody that love so as to bless all the families of the earth. Torah provides a social framework for this blessing that includes mutual aid, welcome to the vulnerable, justice for all in the community, no social stratification, and a recognition that God’s blessings can be resisted and will be revoked when the community turns from the core teachings of Torah. Jesus then reinforces this Torah-based framework.
So, what happened to Christianity? My Christianity in the early 1970s little resembled the ideals of the Bible. Christians have tended more to be complicit with empire than oppose it. How did this happen that Christianity accommodated to empire? We have two reasons to repudiate such accommodation. First, to make it easier to recover the truths of the biblical story. Second, to help us find ways to break uncritical nationalism and American warism. We need self-awareness about the problematic of Christianity and empire in order to discern a new healing path.
Struggles with Rome
Early Christians did to some extent embody the way of Jesus, but always with difficulty. The picture presented in the seven messages to congregations in Asia in Revelation 2–3 applies to the first several generations of the Christian movement. In Revelation we meet a few churches that adhered closely to Jesus’s teaching and example and faced persecution. These tended to be small and poor. Others found more prosperity and comfort—but too easily collaborated with the surrounding culture. They risked losing their connection with Jesus and his message.
The Bible does not tell of a golden age when the community got everything right but of an ongoing struggle that continues to characterize Christianity. Those who embody Torah’s and Jesus’s message will always be at odds with their wider culture and tempted to compromise that message. The earliest Christians come from the margins of society. In time, the communities attract more people of higher social status and their antipathy toward the Empire lessens. Persecution of Christians continued as empire elites found that to scapegoat this fringe religious minority helped strengthen their hold on power. By the end of the third century CE, however, many in the churches looked for more accommodation with the Empire.
This gradual accommodation led to a rapprochement between the increasingly organized Christian church and the Empire following a crisis in the leadership of the Empire. A general named Constantine led a faction that sought the throne. He decided to embrace Christianity and gain the support of a group that made up about 5% of the Empire’s citizens and emerged victorious. Right away, he issued the Edict of Milan in 313 CE to end the persecution of Christians and open the way for them to become full members of the imperial society.
The next one hundred years saw the churches move from the edges of Roman society to the center. Prior to Constantine, the law forbade Christians to join the military. By the end of the 4th century, only Christians could be soldiers. We have no record of debates about this change in the relationship between Christians and the Empire. It seemed just to happen. Christians over time became ever more at home in the Empire. The change had an enormous effect on how they read the Bible. They no longer saw in the Bible a clear anti-empire, anti-warism, anti-social injustice sensibility. The Bible became increasingly spiritualized and ever-less political.
Major theological transformations
Constantine believed that differences among various groups of Christians undermined the unity of the empire. So, he called the leaders of the churches together to formalize doctrines and impose unity among the churches. The Council of Nicaea in 323 CE initiated a doctrinal era for Christianity. It became more centralized and institutionalized, closely linked with empire leaders. Theology became more formal, abstract, and belief oriented. Jesus’s message became marginal. God’s perfection took theological priority over liberating slaves and overturning kings. Faith in Jesus focused on pre-existence, divinity, and sinless life rather than his message. With doctrine-oriented Christianity, faithfulness had to do with affirming correct doctrinal beliefs more than living lives free from injustice. The creeds did not overtly advocate accommodation. However, when they ignored Jesus’s message, they little protected Christians from such accommodation.
One major development in the evolution of the Christian tradition as part of the political environment of the Western world emerged at the end of the 11th century. At that point, several European states closely linked with the Church initiated a long series of military interventions intended to end Muslim rule of Jerusalem and its environs. These “Crusades” left a legacy of Christian warism and poisoned relationships between European Christianity and the Muslim world as well as Orthodox Christianity in Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
The Protestant Reformation’s complicated legacy
Religious and political tensions came to a head in the 16th century, triggered by Martin Luther. His protest in 1517 opened the floodgates to big changes and divided Europe between Catholic states and states that favored Protestantism. However, Protestantism remained like Catholics in one crucial element. Both insisted that each territorial kingdom could contain only one church directly funded and led by the state. Neither Catholic nor Protestant elites could imagine that different Christian traditions could co-exist in a single state. Both embraced warring violence to establish and sustain religious sovereignty in Europe’s kingdoms.
Christians continued the uncritical nationalism that dated back to Augustine from the 4th century. The powerful bishop argued that rank-and-file Christians did not have responsibility to judge the moral validity of wars they were ordered to fight. That job rested with political leaders. The rank-and-file had the task simply to obey their leaders. This deference to political leaders led Christians to wage war against other Christians for control of Europe’s kingdoms. It seems to have occurred to no one that Christian commitments should take highest priority.
Protestant theology’s closer attention to the Bible did not lead to widespread attention to the Bible’s center of the teaching of Jesus. Protestants continued to support the warist state. On the margins of the Reformation, though, a small movement arose that did reject warfare and break with the state-church arrangement. These Anabaptists came under immediate fire for their challenge to the state-church arrangement and met with severe persecution. Thousands were killed by state forces with support from both Catholics and Protestants. The movement survived, though, and their influence on issues such as church/state separation, believers baptism, lay people’s engagement with the Bible, and refusal to participate in war grew in the years to come.
The Christian colonizing mission
A key expression of Christianity’s accommodation to empire may be seen in the active spread of Christianity around the world. Often overtly and at other times more as a secondary effect, Christian missionaries furthered both the political and cultural imperialism of the Western nation-states. More significantly, settler colonists established permanent colonies around the world, including along North America’s Atlantic coast. From the beginning, these settlements had strong religious motivations and exercised the fundamental imperial trait of domination and control over the “Other,” people not considered to be part of the kingdom. The dominating of the indigenous people of North America and the importation of enslaved people from Africa defined the imperial character of this new political “experiment”—with strong Christian support.
The US sense of Manifest Destiny (the belief in the divine calling for the US to extend its boundaries) fueled expansion across North America and beyond. Christianity spread through the spread of the American Empire. By 1890, having conquered the North American frontier, the expansionists turned their energies to areas outside of the continental US. The war between the US and Spain at the end of the 19th century led to overt colonial possessions for the US, including the Philippines. The Philippines became the site of a US military intervention in order to establish American domination. Many thousands of Filipinos died as a consequence. This became the first of many imperialist wars for the US over the course of the 20th century.
Total wars in “Christian” Europe
“Christian” Europe exploded into two devasting conflicts in the 20th century. Nations with Christian state churches warred against other nations with Christian state churches. World War I (1914–1918) encompassed most of Europe and beyond. It only ended when the main rivals reached the end of their resources. Almost universally, European Christians rallied to the flags of their own nations to join the war. The churches had no capability to critique the nations’ choices for war or to draw on their international contacts to further peaceful resolutions to the conflicts.
When the dust settled after the first Great War, cries for peace arose and quite a few vowed never to fight again. Leaders created the League of Nations to provide an international structure to prevent further wars. Most of the world’s nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact that formally outlawed war. None of these measures prevented the continued growth of warism, though. When the tensions and continuing arms buildups reached a breaking point in the late 1930s, an even bigger, more devastating, and genuinely worldwide war burst forth.
The ashes of World War II mark the end of the Christianity and empire arrangement. The gospel has never seemed more irrelevant to human affairs as it did in the face of tens of millions of Europeans dead (the vast majority civilians). In “Christian” Europe, six million Jews lost their lives in an orgy of violence. What role did Christian faith play in this devastating conflagration? The elites who set their nations on the course of total war and the rank-and-file who obediently gave their leaders a moral blank check included many Christians. Their faith provided no resources for them to defend themselves against the call to war and its devastating consequences.
In 2009, historian James Sheehan published what now seems like a wildly optimistic book: Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? He argued that the devastating wars led to widespread disarmament in Europe, a post-militarism era. Fatefully, though, NATO, the military alliance led by the United States, remained and relentlessly sought reasons to continue to exist. It enriched too many powerful corporations to disband. NATO initiated conflicts outside its boundaries of an offensive, not defensive, nature (e.g., in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya). Then, it provoked a major war between Ukraine and Russia that led formerly neutral nations, Sweden and Finland, to join the military alliance. This war pushed all the members to ratchet up greatly their military spending and began to welcome engaging in warfare. It appears the soldiers came back.
America’s sustenance of Christianized blank check nationalism
American warism since 1945 has a sordid record. US warism since World War II shows that such warism fails to deliver on its own claims. Remarkably, though, the vast majority of Christians in the US remain supportive of the continued expansion of their nation’s military. We need to look at that phenomenon in order to come to terms with the challenge of Christian pacifism in the American Empire. Such a set of reflections will draw on the biblical story, as I summarize in my previous chapters, for an interpretive framework. One important step in facing this challenge will simply be to look at the American Empire without blinders.
[This is the 15th of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The 14th post in the series, “Jesus the Lamb challenges empire,” may be found by clicking on this link. The 16th post, “This will not end well: The tragic American Empire story” may be found by clicking on this link.]
Thinking Pacifism 
When I lived in Europe back in the late 70s and through the 80s, there was definitely a strong anti-militarism sentiment, esp. among the young folks. Not necessarily anti-army, since most of the young served in uniform. However, their sense of serving in uniform was closer to what in America we might think of conscripted public service (a proposal back on the table again in some quarters) but not aimed at waging warfare. I knew one guy who taught philosophy in the army college, and he saw main task as teaching new army officers the conditions under which they should disobey or disregard orders! I can’t imagine West Point having such a professor, esp. under Hegseth’s Pentagon regime. It seems the sentiments are less anti-militaristic now than back then, but that could be only because now all my information is filtered through the biases of the American media.
Another response to this post, with my heretical Schweitzerian shirt-tail hanging out. Might it be that the fly in the ointment, the worm of the core, of Christianity is that it very quickly became a salvation ideology, thus taking the focus off of clear ethical and social information, at first making that secondary and eventually displacing it altogether? We can sympathize with those who genuinely thought they lived in the final generation before, if not the absolute end of the world at least a world upheaval of some sort. But as the upheaval did not materialize, the salvation ideology sort of took over all the while making its peace with the world as it is. But today still confront fully the Shaefferian challenge, How Shall We Then Live? and this 2000 year old salvation ideology is less helpful than it might otherwise have been.
That’s an interesting point about the “salvation ideology,” Dan. I’m allergic to your “Schweitzerian shirt-tail,” so I would like to look elsewhere than your “final generation” nonsense for an explanation. I do agree, though, that the worm in the ointment for Christianity is the salvation ideology. I’d like to understand better how it arose. I wrote a book about how the salvation theology of the Bible itself is all about “ethical and social information.” JHY thought the problem had to do with the “Jewish-Christian schism” (which Daniel Boyarin links with Christian creedalism).
Another positively provocative post. I’d like to understand better what both you and “deliecht” mean by “Schwietzerian” in this context. I’ve read a couple of his books, but bogged down in his “classic”… “The Quest of the Historical Jesus”. (Much more readable is his last and posthumously published one on the Kingdom views of the early Jesus-followers).
What follows I believe will speak to some of what I presume you’re referring to, and it is indeed a crucial matter to understand the best we can. That means for its profound impact on interpreting many of the key aspects of the NT, and just how Spirit-led were its authors, at least in terms of seeing into the future (or the foolishness of presuming that such foresight was indeed coming from God).
I’m presuming the “issue” re. Schweitzer is whether or in what ways Jesus (and his very early followers, including Paul) was operating from an “apocalyptic” perspective, particularly as to the role of the Messiah. It most certainly is a complex and murky issue. Hard to be definitive about, in virtually any reading of the Gospels.
Paul also is not particularly clear as to “end of the age” matters, with only a couple (that I recall) seemingly non-symbolic references to the “rapture” (I Thes. 4) or Jesus coming, as a thief, when least expected, so “don’t be sleeping” (or equivalent). But definitely coming soon!
Reviewing the end of Rev. again, it seems that “John” there, as earlier, is also expecting only a short period until the fulfillment of his clearly symbolic series of woes, period (1000 years) of peace, followed by final victory and banishment of evil forces, etc.
So, it’s raised a question I don’t think I’ve pondered before: Did “John” directly know (or even know OF) the writings of Paul? (Maybe that’s clear from the letters to the 7 churches, but I’ve not researched that recently, and I don’t recall that I did possibly decades ago.) If so, was he in basic agreement, although it seems he definitely did NOT expect something like a “rapture”? He definitely focused more than Paul on earthly peace and existence, though with at least a seeming nod to supernatural intervention in some form.
What was his understanding of the resurrection of the earthly Jesus? He doesn’t ever refer to the earthly/potentially bodily or evidentiary aspect of that? Similarly to Paul, he presents The Lamb as having been slain and come back to life, but doesn’t speak of it as bodily or of an empty grave. I have a strong hunch this is critical to a good historical understanding of the beliefs and the nature of “faith” for the 1st century (possibly pretty similarly into the early 2nd century) followers of The Lamb…. both in Jerusalem and in the Mediterranean region.