The tragic American Empire story in light of the gospel

Ted Grimsrud—October 24, 2025

I recognize my upbringing as a proud citizen in the world’s most powerful empire to be part of my identity. As I described previously, I experienced an eventful meeting between two world-defining stories—the American Empire met Jesus’s gospel of peace. American Christians tend to see faith and nation as fully compatible, even mutually reinforcing. In contrast, for me their meeting was a collision that forced me to make a choice. It had to be one story or the other.

I chose the Jesus story to be my defining story—and chose against the American Empire. That choice led me to affirm Christian pacifism and turn from the uncritical nationalism central the Empire story. I started to interpret the story of the American Empire without blinders. At the same time, I found the Bible to be a key source for a peace-oriented, anti-empire defining story. My fundamentalist Christian teachers had asserted a high view of the Bible as direct revelation from God. However, such an assertion had not protected them from uncritical nationalism. Rather than rejecting the Bible when I rejected fundamentalism, I started reading the Bible in a different way. I no longer ignored Jesus’s peace teaching as I had been taught; I made it central.

The basis for stepping away from uncritical nationalism

When I began to read the Bible for peace, I noticed its critique of uncritical nationalism. I noticed the Bible did not teach the submit-to-the-government message as Americans assumed. If the Bible be central, I would choose Jesus’s gospel of peace instead of uncritical nationalism. The Old Testament provides a template, in Torah, that critiques all human territorial kingdoms. Torah pointed to a new kind of kingdom committed to justice and the wellbeing of all its people. The Old Testament kingdom, though, in practice evolved ever more toward injustice, militarism, economic stratification, and corruption. The brokenness grew to a point where the prophets saw the kingdom’s leaders not as agents of God but as enemies of the original vision of a just society.

Eventually, those who retained a commitment to Torah made sustaining those convictions more important than remaining loyal to any kind of territorial kingdom. The story continues with Jesus’s ministry. He announced the presence of God’s kingdom as a non-territorial communal expression of the ways of Torah. Echoing Genesis 12, Jesus’s kingdom message meant to bless all the families of the earth. This blessing would not come through a close connection with territorial kingdoms (or nation-states). Rather, the blessing would come through the witness of countercultural communities that put convictions about the ways of Torah at the center.

Does this story have relevance for our contemporary world? Let me identify four biblical themes that speak to life amidst the world’s empires. (1) The practice of justice should define the aspirations of societies that seek to be healthy. This justice will center on care for the vulnerable of the community since a society cannot be healthy without the good health of those most easily exploited and discarded. (2) People in power should always be treated with skepticism. Power tends to corrupt. People in power tend to be deluded by their commitments to sustain that power at all costs. Such people should be pushed to guide the society toward justice with an expectation that they will likely tend toward serving their own interests and not those of the vulnerable in society. (3) The “horses and chariots” problem tends to define territorial kingdoms and leads to the proclivity to prepare for and engage in warfare (warism). The accumulation of weapons of war favors society’s wealthy and powerful and leads to devastating conflicts. (4) Throughout human history (and in the Bible’s stories), territorial kingdoms and nation-states have provided some of the central rivals to God as the objects of human trust. This type of idolatry, as Israel’s prophets show, leads directly to injustice.

These four themes provide the core elements of a critical sensibility toward the American Empire. How do we evaluate the Empire in light of this sensibility? In my following posts , I summarize the story of the American Empire with an emphasis on the past eighty years. Understanding how we got here will be essential background to discern where to go moving forward. To imagine a human future, we must cultivate a sense of distance from the Empire. The ideals for humane life that animate the biblical story remain guiding ideals for healthy communal life today. These need to be embodied in efforts to cultivate hope for a post-empire future.

What is the American Empire?

I use the term “empire” in a simple sense: A powerful nation-state (territorial kingdom in the Bible) that dominates (militarily, economically, culturally) other peoples outside that state. An empire seeks to enrich its elites. The term “empire” has a negative connotation when I use it. That is why many Americans have tended to resist using the term for their country.

A kind of “spirituality” characterizes empires. To justify domination, they foster beliefs about their own superiority. Such beliefs give empires the right to exert their power for self-benefit at the expense of others. These beliefs often involve a myth about their benevolence as they exercise their power. Empires demand loyalty from their subjects. This idolatrous demand explains why the Bible presents them is such a negative light—and sees them as rivals to God.

An empire spirituality has been present from the first settling of North America. It undergirds a hierarchy of values that places wealth and control at the top and diminishes the humanity of those who are “Other” (such as enslaved Africans and indigenous North Americans). This spirituality also affirms the “myth of redemptive violence”: At times furthering the “good” requires violence. From the start, the American Empire has furthered its interests through violence. Violence always requires some kind of justification, and Americans justify their violence by assuming the US to be aligned with God. Whatever furthers the interests of the United States (read, the elite of the US) thus by definition reflects the will of God.

In the years since World War II, the US has more overtly than before pursued an imperial agenda. In recent years, that agenda has increasingly been questioned. Is the American Empire truly a force for good? Always, some Americans have opposed and even actively resisted American imperialism—generally, though, from outside the main corridors of power. The US does have a significant record of humanitarian policies. However, quite often even these policies occur in the context of broader policies that serve the imperialistic concerns of the US elite.

The importance of noticing uncritical nationalism

I experienced uncritical nationalism as a young person as a hidden conviction. Such convictions rarely emerge as the fruit of self-aware reflection or evidence-oriented discernment. They usually take hold before such deliberative processes. In fact, these embedded convictions often shape beforehand what kinds of evidence and what kinds of questions we consider. Biblical faith pushes us, I suggest, to be quite suspicious of our embedded affirmations of empire, territorial kingdoms, nation-states, and other forms of centralized political power.

In the Bible, empires exist as powerful temptations toward idolatry. The Big Story of Torah, the prophets, and Jesus challenges such idolatry. This critique assists us as we work to scrutinize our own culture’s nationalism and deep-seated spiritual belief in redemptive violence. Certainly, other perspectives also may help in such scrutiny. I also recognize that most Christians who affirm the biblical story read it differently than I do and accept blank check nationalism. Nonetheless, the resources inherent in the biblical story can be potent and iconoclastic.

How does the Bible’s Big Story counter the blinders that most American Christians wear when they consider the American Empire? Most fundamentally, it centers the call to bless all the families of the earth. This call should shape how we see everything. Love of neighbor always has the highest priority. It provides a fundamental interpretive principle for evaluating the state’s demands. The call to love has a concrete social and historical meaning. Love means to embody Torah in an environment of widespread oppression. It resists temptations to give loyalty that belongs to God alone to various territorial kingdoms and nationalistic ideologies. The shape of the Hebrew people’s core convictions in Torah emerged directly from their experience of enslavement within the Egyptian Empire. Throughout the rest of the Bible, the work to embody Torah always faced one especially difficult challenge. How do the people resist the lures of the various empires? This included the temptation of Israel itself become like the empires.

In the story of Jesus, these dynamics remained central. He sought an alternative “kingdom” or “empire” or “nation.” He meant this way of life to be embodied in history and to resist the kingdoms of the world. The Powers of empire, temple, and legalism colluded to resist Jesus’s message and ultimately to put an end to his life. Tragically, in time Christianity lost its sense of calling to be an alternative to empire. In so doing, it lost its ability to notice the nationalistic blinders that most Christians inevitably have worn.

The blinders of the American Empire

In the posts to follow, I will sketch an account of the American Empire over the course of its history with a focus on the years since 1945. I will be mainly descriptive, but I will zero in on elements in the story that emphasize its expansionist dynamics. The actual practices of the American Empire have not been consistent with the public image of the United States as pro-democracy and pro-self-determination for the people of the world.

The United States has built and sustains a military with strongly destructive capabilities and has not hesitated to use it. However, like other empires its power has more to do with how it is perceived than the brute force it commands. The powerful dynamic of uncritical nationalism with which most Americans grow up plays a key role. Many cultural structures and signposts that I grew up with have been weakened and even no longer exist. For example, it is difficult to imagine young men today quietly acquiescing to a military draft. However, the unquestioning acceptance of the need for an all-powerful US military remains as widespread as ever.

We have many examples since 1945 of American hurtfulness toward people around the world. Nonetheless, remarkably, the notion of the American Empire as a force for good in the world remains powerful. On this point, a biblical sensibility could help. The Bible may be read, as I have discussed, to be quite critical of human kingdoms, empires, and superpowers. Perhaps the key to challenge the assumption of the benevolence of the US Empire is simply to look at it with a suspicious disposition rather than the unquestioning affirmation most Americans give.

We may consider the evidence of the past eighty years and seek to interpret the evidence on its own terms. A clear-eyed analysis, taking seriously a biblical sensibility, likely will note that the US does not represent God’s will but opposes it. We see how the main Powers of Jesus’s context (state, religious institutions, and cultural overseers) rebelled against God. They did not act as God’s agents for good in the world. They actually served Satan when they colluded to execute God’s Son. Our context may not seem clear cut. So, people need a critical sensibility to perceive the evidence accurately and see the empire without blinders.

My story here asserts that gospel-oriented Christian faith will conflict with convictions that justify the American Empire. This story will not center on opposition, though, but center on the positive, the empowerment to love and live free from idols. The core convictions of the gospel mainly to say yes to life. Such an affirmation, though, requires also a no to empire.

[This is the 16^th of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The 15^th post in the series, “Christianity’s accommodation to empire,” may be found by clicking on this link. The 17^th post, “Empire as a way of life: The colonial era to World War II” may be found by clicking on this link.]