Tag: Politics

Conclusion: A Christian pacifist in the American Empire [part 2]

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Ted Grimsrud—November 21, 2025

I have found Christian pacifism, properly understood, to be a most helpful framework as I try to understand the world I live in. In this series of 24 blogposts, I explain how I came to affirm pacifism and what it means for me. I have also showed how my pacifism shapes the questions I raise and criticisms I offer in relation to the American Empire. In this final post, I offer reflections on moving forward to live in the Empire in light of pacifist convictions.

Rethinking power

Christian pacifism posits two central affirmations— (1) We are called to resist and to seek to overcome evils in the world (“evil” most simply understood as that that harms life) and (2) We must work against evils in ways that do not add to the evil. The practice of pacifism helps us hold these two affirmations together. Committed to overcome evils, we engage the American Empire, the source of so many evils in our world. Committed not to add to the evil, we seek to find consistently nonviolent means as we strategize and act. One of the main ways human beings have tended to add to evil is to resist the wrong through the use of violence and coercion.

The American Empire cannot realistically be transformed in any immediate way. To try too hard to transform the Empire may lead us to take moral shortcuts that change us in ways that result to our actually adding to the evils that the Empire is doing. Violent resistance uses evil means to seek what might be good ends and may transform the effort into something that adds to the evil. On the other hand, many people try to reform the Empire through efforts that all too often actually result in compromise with the Empire on key issues and little genuinely changes.

We should recognize, then, the problematic character of conventional, top-down politics. Let’s use the term “Constantinianism” for politics that both tries to control history by making it turn out right and uses top-down power that is coercive and dominating. The embrace of such methods ensures that our efforts will add to evil, not overcome it. Pacifism understands power in a different way. It recognizes that we are not in control and that the only way to overcome evil is always to act consistently with love. One of the great insights of Gandhi and King was to recognize that ends and means must go together. We only achieve genuine healing when we act in healing ways. Violent and coercive means cannot achieve healing ends.

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The fatal alliance: The US and Israel

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Ted Grimsrud—November 14, 2025

Along with the various pillars of the US national security state that were established during the 1940s (such as the building of the Pentagon, establishing the nuclear weapons program, and creating the CIA and the National Security Council), another key element of the American Empire that dates back to the 1940s is America’s close alliance with Israel. The “special relationship” of the US with Israel has been the 21st century’s definitive expression of the American Empire. No other nation has as regularly backed American foreign policies. Israel’s failure to resolve its persistent conflicts with the people it has shared Palestine with throughout its existence has had huge ramifications for the US and its moral standing in the world. The US actually played only a secondary role in Israel’s foundation and early history. It was after the Six Day War of 1967 that the alliance become close and nearly unconditional.

The emergence of Zionism

The Zionist movement originated in Eastern Europe in the 19th century. These early Zionists imagined ancient Israel’s territory as a Jewish homeland. Early in the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire dominated Palestine. European Zionists began to move to Palestine and hoped eventually to gain political control of the area. The Arab population largely tolerated those initial Zionist settlements. In time as it became clearer that the new settlers did not seek harmonious coexistence and in fact wanted to displace the original inhabitants, tensions inevitably followed.

The European Zionists sought a major power to align with. Eventually, the British became that power. The Zionist cause was helped by the presence in Britain of Christian Zionists in positions of power. The British wanted a foothold in Western Asia near the newly constructed Suez Canal. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 set British policy for the following decades. It affirmed British support for the creation of a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine. The Declaration alluded to respect for the rights of the native Arab population—but only in a general sense with no support for a state for Palestinians. In fact, the Palestinians remained nameless.

Britain gained direct control over territories in the region after World War I in hopes mainly to strengthen control over the newly established oil production sites. The new League of Nations gave the British a Mandate to govern Palestine, directing the British to prepare the territory for self-governance. Palestinian Arabs increasingly recognized the Zionist settlements’ threat to their interests. However, they found it difficult to unify politically. The British overseers encouraged the tensions among the various Palestinian factions.

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Empire as a way of life: The colonial era to World War II

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Ted Grimsrud—October 28, 2025

In the posts that remain in this series, I want briefly to flesh out what we see when we describe without blinders the American Empire as it has emerged and functioned over the past 500 years. I consider this story with a critical perspective shaped by the biblical politics I have summarized above. I am especially concerned with how this Empire has embodied oppressive and violent sensibilities typically characteristic of the great empires of the world. A clear-eyed look at the American Empire may well lead one to recognize that it is not worthy of the kind of blank check loyalty it asks for.

The reasons that Europeans first moved to settle in North America varied greatly. Their impact, though, was to extend the newly emerging European empires with powerfully devasting effects on the inhabitants of the “new world.” Some Europeans stayed only temporarily, mainly having interest in profiting from their time away from home before they would return from the adventures and resettle in Europe. Many, though, intended the trip from the start to be one-way. Those who meant to stay in North America may be called “settler colonists.” Since they intended to stay, they needed to displace those already living on the land. Settler colonialism depended on violence. It reflected the basic assumptions of empire: The people not part of the core colonial community will be seen as “Others” who may be exploited, displaced, even eradicated.

Settler colonialism and Manifest Destiny

Imperialistic ideology had been central in the settling of North America and remained central to the identity of the newly established United States. The new nation continually expanded West, dominating and displacing the indigenous nations without pause. The land taken from the natives came to be worked by massive numbers of forcibly imported enslaved Africans.

The term “Manifest Destiny” was not coined until 1845. However, its basic meaning that God willed the expansion of the US to the Pacific Ocean characterizes the intentions of the new settlers from early on. Throughout the colonial era and beyond, Americans simply assumed that God had called their nation into existence, a sense of divine calling that lent an air of inevitability to the expansionist efforts. God supported displacing the “heathen” indigenous populations and exploiting the “heathen” enslaved Africans. Once the drive to expand the US Empire across the continent took hold, it would not stop when the “frontier ended” in North America by the end of the 19th century. At that point, the empire was only getting started.

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Christianity’s accommodation to empire

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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.

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Jesus the Lamb challenges empire

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Ted Grimsrud—October 17, 2025

The Bible has a reputation of being pretty pro-violence. Some Christians want the Bible to approve of violence—that helps them justify the violence they currently support. I decided back when I first embraced pacifism that I wanted to try to read the Bible as pro-peace as much as I could. I still do. An early test for me came with trying to understand the book of Revelation. Is it truly about visions of future God-approved warfare and violent judgment?

I had heard because God wants wars in Revelation, God may also want wars in our time. I decided to study Revelation to see what it actually says. I soon discerned Revelation may be read as a book of peace. I also realized that Revelation is not about predicting the future; it is about applying Jesus’s message of peace and healing in our present. A key concern in Revelation has to do with following Jesus while living in the idolatrous Roman Empire. Thus, Revelation becomes for us an essential text for reflection of the relation between Christian faith and empire.

Revelation as part of Jesus’s peace agenda

For Jesus, to resist the Empire means: Love our neighbors, say no to idolatry, give our loyalty to the God of mercy, and recognize the empire as the enemy of God, not God’s servant. Early Christians faced constant temptation to conform to Rome. It could be costly to resist. Many also found the imperial claims to be seductive. This struggle with conformity to the empire had a tragic ending for Christianity; we will see in our next post that it became an empire religion. In the early years, though, the struggle led to a sharp critique of the Empire—see Revelation.

Revelation does not collect predictions about “End Times” but describes the dynamics of imperial seduction. It describes the deep conflict between the ways of empire and the ways of the gospel. This “war of the Lamb” can only be successfully waged in one way. Wage this war with what the New Testament letter to the Ephesians described as the “whole armor of God”: The belt of truth, the breastplate of justice, the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and sword of the Spirit (which is the word of God) (Eph 6:13-17).

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Jesus’s political alternative

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Ted Grimsrud—October 14, 2025

Christian pacifism challenges mainstream Christianity by arguing that Jesus’s life and teaching actually do provide direct guidance for politics. Jesus, like the rest of the Bible, offers a direct alternative to the politics of empire and domination. Christians have misrepresented the Bible insofar as they have embraced uncritical nationalism. My realization that Jesus does give us a realistic peaceable direction caused me to turn away from my nationalistic embedded theology and never look back. In this post I will offer a summary of that peaceable direction.

Jesus affirmed that Torah and the prophets reveal God’s will for the world. When he taught with authority, showed love with his healing, and called together a community to embody the justice of God in the world, he fulfilled the Old Testament. Jesus’s life incurred the deadly wrath of the religious and political leaders. God raising Jesus from the dead in defiance of the leaders’ verdict of condemnation vindicated Jesus’s message. Jesus culminates the political message of the Old Testament when he critiques empire, rejects territorial kingdom as the channel for God’s promise to bless all the families of the earth, and the embodies Torah as the alternative to the ways of the nations. Like Torah and the prophets, Jesus practices power as service, offers compassion and justice for the vulnerable, and resists the powers of domination.

Politics and the gospels

The gospels present Jesus as a king. The gospel of Matthew begins with “an account of the genealogy of Jesus the Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). Christians tend to think of “Christ” as a religious term having to do with the divine identity of Jesus Christ, the savior. However, it literally means “king,” a political leader. The descriptor of Jesus that follows in Matthew 1:1, “son of David” confirms the political sense of “Messiah.” David stands as the paradigmatic king in ancient Israel, a kind of ideal king.

The rejection of the OT territorial kingdom points ahead to an alternative way to imagine the peoplehood. God never revoked Abraham’s vocation to bless all the families of the earth. If not as a territorial kingdom, then how will the promise be embodied? Jesus will be in continuity with David’s role in carrying on the promise (a great leader for the peoplehood). However, he will be in discontinuity in that his political path will not be to lead a territorial kingdom like David. The gospels provide an account for this alternative political path.

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Breaking the hold of territorial kingdoms

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Ted Grimsrud—October 10, 2025

Peace theology centers on Jesus’s life and teaching. Jesus’s life and teaching, though, make the most sense in relation to the bigger story of the Bible. In two posts, I will emphasize a few elements of the story. First, in my previous post, we note the Bible’s strong antipathy toward the big empires. Those empires powerfully challenged the Bible’s faith community—due both to the empires’ violence directed at the community and to the empires’ demands (often met) for loyalty and even idolatrous trust. The Bible offers a counter-empire vision for human life in the teaching of Torah and Jesus. These teachings explicitly offer alternatives to empire ideologies.

Second, Torah politics differ from state politics. Territorial kingdoms and nation states imitate the empires. They use coercion, exploit the vulnerable, protect boundaries, and demand absolute loyalty. The Bible’s faith community, called to bless all the earth’s families, sought to carry out that vocation as a territorial kingdom. The story shows the eventual incompatibility between the vocation to bless and identifying too closely with a territorial kingdom.

Abraham and Sarah and a new intervention from God

Genesis 12 tells of God calling Abraham and his spouse Sarah to parent this community. God gave them a child even though Sarah thought herself too old to bear children. The story that follows in the rest of the Bible presents the community in both success and failure. It offers guidance for the faithful practice of a politics of blessing. The continuation of the promise will be risky and tenuous. The human actors always risk derailing the process by their injustice, violence, and turning toward other gods. The channels for the blessing will always be imperfect human beings. The process will often be surprising. Key actors consistently will not be the people we would expect to be heroes. God’s hand in the dynamics is often difficult to discern, but somehow the promise and the blessing remain alive.

At the end of Genesis, the family of the promise moves to Egypt in order to survive a terrible famine. Then, in the book of Exodus, we learn the family does survive and multiplies, but in a condition of enslavement in the Egyptian Empire. These suffering, enslaved people cry out in their pain. God remembers the promises to Abraham and resolves to intervene. God will guide them into a recovery of faith and a new resolve to embody the promise to be a blessing.

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The Bible’s suspicion of the empires

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Ted Grimsrud—October 7, 2025

In the years from 1987 through 1996, I preached several hundred sermons. Almost all had to do with biblical bases for peace theology. Then I began college teaching and most of my classes were relevant for how Christian pacifist convictions could inform living in the American Empire. In what follows, I will present the message of the Bible that relates to peace theology. This message provides the grounding for an unblinkered look at the American Empire from the perspective of Christian pacifism—something I offer in the series’ final posts. The story I have told in my previous posts describes how I got to my commitment to peace theology. Now, I will turn to the story of where that commitment has led me, first theologically and then politically.

Holding the Bible loosely, but with respect

I view the Bible as a conversation partner. The big picture that comes from all its stories read together gives me a perspective from which to engage the world. To me, it is not a source of normative, explicit commands nor a miraculously accurate source of information about the past of God’s people. Yet, it is not simply ancient writings from a distant time. I see it as a fascinating collection of various kinds of literature. It reflects various human perspectives that hang together, loosely, to guide and inspire. The authors’ moral commitments give the Bible its coherence.

When read in light of Jesus’s message that centers on the call to love neighbors, the Bible serves that call. It presents a worldview shaped by love. Jesus does not originate this worldview but echoes and reinforces the Old Testament message of Torah and the prophets. The Bible tells a “Big Story” where all its parts hang together and convey a vision for life shaped by God’s love.

I discovered the Bible’s Big Story through my struggle with American warism. I found a way out of my embedded warist view of the world through an encounter with the story of Jesus. That encounter shaped how I have read the Bible ever since. In asking questions of the Bible about war, justice, and social transformation, I discovered that the Bible truly cares about politics and social transformation. It provides a powerful framework for interpreting the world.

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A Christian political agenda? The Bible’s radical politics (part four)

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Ted Grimsrud—June 16, 2025

In the first three parts of this series on the Bible’s radical politics (part 1; part 2; part 3), I have sought to show the continuity between the Old Testament and the story of Jesus. Throughout the Bible we see a critique of the great powers and the presentation of an alternative to the politics of domination and exploitation. The Bible presents the way of peace and restorative justice as a genuine alternative that it expects the people of the promise to embody.

In this series-concluding post, I offer some brief reflections on how to apply these teachings from the Bible to contemporary American political life. I started this series motivated by a sense of my country—and the wider world—being caught in a spiraling series of social crises. This spiral gets worse as our political system displays an increasing inability to respond to the problems with creative and transformative solutions. Can the Bible help?

The Bible approaches politics in the context of life within empire

From Genesis through Revelation, the Bible reports the people’s efforts to navigate a world dominated by ruthless great empires. These empires offer two distinct challenges to the people—(1) the constant threat of violence and oppression and (2) the constant temptation for the communities of the promise to absorb and embody the ideology of empire.

From the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt through the conquering violence of Assyria and Babylon and down to the Romans who executed Jesus as a rebel and destroyed the Jerusalem Temple, the Bible presents empires as God’s enemies, intrinsically hostile toward Torah-guided social justice. Yet empires are also seductive and alluring—either in the sense of seeking to be honored and even worshiped by those within their boundaries (see the book of Revelation) or in the sense of providing the template for the unjust ordering of life within independent kingdoms (as in the Old Testament’s Israel and Judah).

In the contemporary United States, people of faith face a strong pull from our great power to give it our ultimate loyalty. Probably nothing reflects this call to loyalty as much as demands for support for American wars and preparation for wars. Americans, with little dissent, devote their nation’s best energies and almost unlimited resources to this warism.

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Ancient Israel as a failed state: The Bible’s radical politics (part two)

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Ted Grimsrud—June 11, 2025

After considering ancient Israel among the great powers, I now want to focus on ancient Israel as what I will call a “territorial kingdom” (i.e., a political community that has boundaries and exercises sovereignty within those boundaries). The Bible’s politics start in enslavement in Egypt. The community coalesced as a people liberated by God, instructed in counter-empire living by Torah, and provided a territory wherein to live out Torah.

The story takes it for granted that the Hebrew people needed a Land where they could establish a permanent home and embody Torah. Between the time of liberation (the exodus) and of entrance to the Land, the people spent decades moving about in the “wilderness.” They struggled to maintain fidelity to Yahweh. In the end, only a handful of the original community that escaped Egypt were allowed to enter the Land with the children and grandchildren of the original community members.

The descendants of the original Hebrews faced the challenge: Overcome the hostility from surrounding nations and remain faithful to Torah in face of temptations to conform to the religious and social practices of those nations. This struggle, sadly, would be so difficult that the territorial kingdom would not be a viable arrangement for the way of Torah. The Bible actually offers a different option. You don’t have to be a territorial kingdom to embody God’s kingdom.

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