Giving Unto Caesar: Thoughts on Power and the Church in a Day of Politicization [Firebrand Big Read]
Photo by Ilona Frey on Unsplash
Recently, like many Americans, I watched the first Republican debate of the 2024 presidential primary. Since the primary and presidential debates leading up to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 until today, I have found myself oddly riveted to the political drama that has unfolded and captured the American mind, including my own. Odd, because over the past seven or eight years, I have found myself becoming more politically invested than I have ever been. Even more than invested, I feel I have been instigated and provoked into politics by its sheer intrusiveness and forcefulness in these times. The pandemic of politics has infected us all to some degree. By nature, I am just not politically wired. I never had the taste for it and had never acquired one. It is not who I am.
The Politicization of Everything
Throughout my life I do not recall being a person overly concerned about or interested in politics, at least not any more than the average citizen. I was always politically aware of the times and familiar with the ongoing issues of the day. I regularly performed my civic duties like being informed about the issues and voting accordingly. I had my opinions and loose party affiliation, but I never considered myself to be “political.” I never thought I had to be. Growing up in the 1970s, there were hot political issues and conflicts, but party politics for the vast majority of mainstream society was in the background where it should be. We lived our lives of family, work, friends, and leisure. Politics basically did its job and supported our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness with the normal bumps in the road here and there. Our country was not without its typical political debates and crises during those times. But we were not politicized to the degree that we seem to be today—politicized and polarized.
It seems like polarizing politics has gotten its nose into everything, such as our sporting events, music and entertainment, marketing and advertising, social media, corporate America, our educational system, and the list goes on and on. Politics seemed to work best when it was doing its job to serve the public humbly and semi-honestly in the background and not dominating center stage of our every waking moment. The politicization of American culture has become draining and exhausting for the average citizen. Nothing, regardless of its seeming innocence, appears free of some sort of costly political implications and ramifications, whether one is drinking a beer, listening to a country music song, shopping, or watching a football game. Politics always manages to get a word in. It is encroaching on every sphere until it is becoming everything. Everything has become political.
Even the church has not been immune or safe from this plague of politicization that has hit society and infected the culture for the last seven or eight years. More and more the church’s message echoes that of the political left or right. One cannot tell where our political platform begins and our faith ends. We find the church as divided as America into blue (liberal-progressive) and red (conservative), and split over the very same issues, like abortion, human sexuality, gun control, violence and crime, our national borders, education curriculum, parental rights, energy and climate change, foreign wars, etc.
Understandably, as Christians, we need to give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and fulfill our civic duties, but the viral politicization of America and its rabid, divisive, inflammatory means of articulating its agendas have infected the church, clearly to its detriment. Believers are being seduced into conspiracy theories and “insurrection” on the right or radical, “peaceful” (violent) protests on the left. If necessary, many Christians in these movements are willing to wield force from the left or the right to implement their agenda. This is not a good thing and never has been. When the disciples wanted to ascend to power and sit at Christ’s left and right, he strongly rebuked them (Mk. 10:35-45). Those who aspire to be great and wield power must become the least and the servant of all. Throughout its history, the church has had to negotiate with progress and power, while considering their impact on its own faithfulness. Measured acculturation in tension with orthodoxy is always needed. Further, church dogma and practice have and will perennially wrestle with various scientific, political and social debates, changes, and innovations.
The Church and the Will to Power
We have always had to negotiate prayerfully accommodation to such forces for better or worse. But let us not forget that human depravity has never been kind to the church or the state wielding power, specifically as it has been administered against the weak, the marginalized, and the poor. Perhaps we have misread the injunction “to take dominion” in Genesis 1:28-29. Naming and dominating “the other” supplants our ethical obligation to serve “the other.” A strictly instrumental, political imago Dei that misreads Genesis sets up a power structure a priori that can readily utilize the polis or the ecclesia as a weapon.
In such a case as today’s political arena, it is too easy for a Nietzschean will-to-power to become transcendental and definitive of human doing and being, specifically for the church that seeks God’s kingdom to reign through it. By “will to power,” Nietzsche meant that human knowledge and relations are primarily defined by the drive to exert one’s will on the surrounding world, to dominate through strength and force until the world conforms to one’s wishes. Under the will-to-power, all of the church’s or its members’ decisions would presuppose divine fiat and God’s imprimatur. Our agency and activity would operate under a divine right to power. “Might makes right” and “survival of the fittest” are not principles distilled from the Sermon on the Mount. The church has been heavily critiqued by the left for its patriarchy, heteronormativity, and empire. Proponents of postmodern, post-Christian, postcolonial hermeneutics, functioning as self-appointed prophets, have attempted to equalize by toppling the socio-political hegemonies and regimes that they have deemed “oppressive” to the marginalized other. However, the dialectics stemming from the hermeneutical left, historically, seem driven in their revolutionary fervor to find a problem for every solution. Insurgence is preceded by and predicated on perpetual grievance and cynicism. When suspicion is the essence and driving force behind perception and interpretation, what else could one expect? As it is said, when you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. We are for what we are against.
Postmodern and postcolonial subversion intended to deconstruct binary power structures has done much to condemn but little to redeem the notion of power and build just replacements. Such commercial “social justice” crusades have consistently demonstrated an inability to transcend their own critique, falling victim to the fallacy of self-reference, as violence breeds violence. Look at the outbreak of raging violence in our cities in 2020.
The right who have suppressed and oppressed in modernity is toppled by the left who are suppressing and oppressing in postmodernity. We live by the sword; we die by the sword. Power vacuums are filled with power structures that may vary in form but remain the same in substance. The game stays the same. The players merely switch teams. Oppressive binaries are retained. They just swap roles. The oppressed become the new oppressor. Proletariat becomes dictator (dictatorship of the proletariat). As the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin so shrewdly declared, “When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the People’s Stick.’” This type of equity is not natural but impossible. When equity as uniformity is an absolute mandate, force will not be far behind to ensure completion of the mission. Diversity is leveled and compelled to conform and toe the line.
The Terrors of Totalitarianism
It seems whether it is the left or the right, each one wants it all. The political arena is rapidly becoming a zero-sum game of totalization. With totalitarianism the risk is so great, even if it seems the probability is small, that we cannot afford to take it. We need to refresh our memory and recall the cycles of totalitarianism and oppression that stained the twentieth century with the blood of the masses. For example, we note this sort of totalitarian transfer of power from right to left to right in Russia over the last one hundred years. In the early twentieth century, Russia moved from the heartless autocracy of the Czar (Nicholas) to the Russian Revolution and the reign of the communist scourge under the ruthless and bloody iron fists of Lenin and Stalin. Subsequently, the Nazi Third Reich, under the megalomaniacal monster Adolf Hitler, invaded communist Russia on June 22, 1941, in operation Barbarossa. Nazi Germany occupied most of Eastern Europe and began to occupy strategic sites in the USSR, like Leningrad. The Soviet Union valiantly warded off the fascist onslaught and drove them back through Eastern Europe to Berlin, taking control and occupying each country along the way. Soviet victory in Eastern Europe solidified the power of communism in the conquered territory, forming the Eastern Bloc, where the Soviets mercilessly ruled with an iron rod over their newly acquired empire.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the rending of the Iron Curtain (1991), another power vacuum was created and filled by the regime of Vladimir Putin, who sought to rebuild the former glory of Russia and invaded Ukraine for nationalist interests. Russia provides a salient example of how totalitarian power, whether left or right, offers few options and no difference. One oppressive regime gave way to the next. Both equally crush the souls and bodies of the people under their capricious, pathological lust for power and control. To conquer and control a people effectively and totally, first control their minds, and then control their language (the primary carrier of culture), then their heritage, culture, systems, and institutions will fall, including their systems of communication, economy, and military. Then the deed is done. So let us beware of attempts at controlled thought and speech. It is only the beginning.
Unfortunately, we have readily forgotten or were never taught the lessons of the twentieth century when arguably more persons were killed under totalitarian left and authoritarian right regimes than in all human history, with modest estimates around 262-360 million (Rudolf Rummel, Statistics of Democide, 1998). “Democide” is the genocide, mass murder, systemic torture and killing, politicide, executions, systemic starvation, forced labor, imprisonment, massacres, and extermination of innocent people under totalitarian regimes and dictators, such as Lenin and Stalin (62 million), Hitler (21 million), Mao Zedong (35 million), Tito (1.1 million), Ho Chi Minh (1.6 million), Pol Pot (2.3 million) and others. Of all the types of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, communist states have killed the most (G.W. Scully, Murder by the State, 1997, and R.J. Rummel, Death by Government, 1997).
Rudolf Rummel’s thesis is that power kills because it can. When injustice, oppression, and violence are not opposed, then power kills. We find power unbridled in totalitarian regimes, as opposed to democracies, which are basically non-violent and peacekeeping. In his epic research, he states, “My overall aim was to test the theoretical hypothesis that the more democratic a regime, the less democide; the less democratic and more totalitarian a regime, the more democide . . . Power kills, power kills absolutely.” Rummel’s monumental work calculates the democide from totalitarian regimes throughout history and compares those statistics with those of democracies to show the immense disparity and provide evidence for his hypothesis.
When Power is Everything
The bottom line is with the will-to-power, violent, oppressive, totalizing regimes are rabidly and blindly toppled by other violent, oppressive totalizing regimes, ad infinitum, an eternal return. The law of unintended consequences comes full circle. Make no mistake. The extreme left is no different than the extreme right. Totalitarianism is totalitarianism regardless of which side it comes from, the colors it dons, or the flag it flies. Totalizing regimes are created and sustained through self-serving power.
The perpetrators do not see it as self-serving, because for them power is natural and ubiquitous. The mentality of totalization understands power as a universal field in which we all live, and it’s being used ironically to build binary structures that privilege one at the expense of oppressing the other. When everything is interpreted as the will to power, there is no escape. Everything is oppositional. Conflict becomes metaphysical. We become trapped in a closed field of power that ebbs and flows, exchanges, and utilizes control but is always conserved—the law of the conservation of power. When power and warfare are a priori, then we begin and end with violence. Our claims to know and wield justice are often self-righteous, even hypocritical. No one is innocent. We oppress and have been oppressed, and that cycle will most likely continue. The entanglement of innocence and guilt is too deep within us all to unravel. Think of the new lexicon of gender, e.g. cis, fluid, trans, two-spirit ad infinitum and the predominant binaries, eg. oppressed and oppressor, BIPOC and White, or LGBTQ and Cis. These carefully crafted and sharpened poles have no grounding in any research of the sciences but seem to be mere will-to-power assertions—too many are majoring in political biology.
Understanding Justice
Justice needs to be defined by the only one who is righteous. God’s righteousness is not of this world, its philosophies, or its systems. His righteousness is indeed an alien righteousness that must transcend our self-serving knowledge, ability, and morality. The church is not called to be the instrument of the Republican party, nor is that party called to be the mechanism of any realized eschatology. And the Democratic cultural political left is as compromised. The secular dogmas (the new sacred) of the new left fundamentalist puritanism that we have constructed around overly simplistic, naïve, romantic notions of equity, which eliminate agency and responsibility for certain classes or groups, are illiberal, half-baked platitudes, salads of un-defined or ill-defined loaded buzzwords, sales pitches, and desperate manifestos distilled from the leftover, misguided, primal rage of revolutionary saints gone wild whom we should never have canonized in the first place. And the same goes for any other political or ecclesiastical mission, on the right or left, that operates from the same a priori. The goal of the church in America is not to be incarnated by or become an instrument of the Democratic or Republican parties, even though there may be certain shared values and concerns. Many of our concerns about various social ills, such as systemic racism or unconditional abortion, are warranted, but our corrective methods are not only ineffective and wrongheaded but often exacerbate the condition by utilizing strategies and practices that created the problem initially. As my Nana would instruct us as children, “Two wrongs don’t make a right!”
There is a vast difference between so-called social justice and scriptural justice. True justice and righteousness are the Lord’s, and they yield the fruit of peace and joy. The government shall rest upon his shoulders alone. If any impulse of a functional imago is to be reappropriated, Christ and his mission of sacrificial service is the sole paradigm. We affirm the rule and reign of Christ through the power and authority of the Spirit. Yet Jesus is Lord whether we acknowledge it or not. He is a King that can be neither elected nor impeached. From everlasting to everlasting, he is God. Yet, he emptied himself to show us what it means to be human and how to live like one. The Almighty has demonstrated that power and privilege are laid aside to serve and suffer for those without, and when the weak become strong, to do likewise.
But somehow, we have forgotten his image and imprint that he has left upon this world. Image, in part, seems to be the problem. The church, through its skewed gaze, is reflecting on the wrong image and being formed in the image of the culture, which is nothing less than idol worship. We have lost sight of our created telos and the true image of God, which is Jesus Christ. Today, image is everything, at least image in terms of identity. As individuals and groups, we exert strenuous effort to create, identify, project, and manage our image. Left and right have reified, politicized, commodified, and weaponized constructs and images of race, gender, party, or conspiracy. We grant these relative categories, such as gender or race, metaphysical, or all-encompassing status. In doing so, we totalize them or make them everything, which in turn makes them nothing or meaningless. Due to a metaphysical void in the West with the collapse of religion and the philosophical noumena, we are prone to essentialize what is nominal (e.g., gender) to fill the vacuum. Our notions of identity or social location and image stand on no metaphysical ground, nor do they ascend to any transcendent referent. Identity and image have been reduced to optics, and further, contrivance and appearance. Ethics and metaphysics become merely optics.
Western culture is in a severe identity crisis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and politics. The old margin has become the new center, and the former center constitutes the new margin. The binaries flip 180 degrees. Each site has taken on a totalizing, logocentric role, where everything only has meaning in relation to each site and its new “orthodoxy.” The sites have become “denominations” with a “body of dogma” that constitutes uncontestable, a priori, presuppositional truth that defines the center and the new “other.”
The Image of God
These domains of sex, race, class, and politics are relevant and significant and need our attention, especially where scriptural injustice has been done. Many of these injustices are real, but we have addressed them inappropriately—perpetuating the same cycle of power and oppression—as the new regime opposed the old. I believe such a cultural cold war is going on in the West between the old controlling institutions that have been critiqued as oppressive and hegemonic (i.e., patriarchy, capitalism) by the neocritical intersectionalist, often with the same exclusion, intolerance, violence, and binary categories that were employed by the old regime. Hypocrisy is near to us all.
Power needs to be deconstructed scripturally. Following the fall, the image of God remained intact but disfigured, disordered, and in need of redemption. The whole human person, reason and will, is averse to the will of God and incurvatus in se (curved on itself). Through the incarnation, Christ identifies with the dependence and weakness of our humanity to the fullest extent, even our sin (2 Cor 5:21). Christ took on the human condition to become an offering for humanity in order to renew the fallen image of God in Christ (imago Christi) and restore our relationship with him. In restoring our relationship with God, the hope is that our relationship with creation and artifice will begin to be restored as well. We are a new creation only in Christ.
We need to rethink identity and image in a radical scriptural way. As created and newly created beings, we are defined in terms of Christ (2 Cor 5:17). Christ, as the true image of God, points to his divine representation as Messiah but also his ontological and relational connections to the Father, as Son who is one in being with the Father. We are being renewed in the image of God in Christ also as representatives and as daughters and sons who are one in Christ through the Spirit. At Pentecost, the Spirit democratized his anointing upon all flesh, breaking down all barriers of age, sex, race, and class (Acts 2:17–21). “In Christ” is the new eschatological reality and only true participatory metaphysic. All other “centers,” divisions, binaries, or pseudo-metaphysical constructs have been deconstructed and dissolved in Christ, whether they are sex, race, class, or otherwise based (Gal 3:28). It is not that these distinctions are eradicated or meaningless, but that the old referents and the old way we defined and used them are crucified and resurrected anew in Christ. They are not forever abolished, but their true logos is fulfilled in him. The old in Adam is gone, and the new has come in Christ.
Christ becomes the beginning and end of our identity and our salvation. The Athanasian idiom claims that “God became human that we may become like God.” The Incarnation is the grounds and goal of our sanctification, theosis. Humanity is made in the image of the Logos, and the Logos became human in Christ Jesus. The God-man defines the image of God and reforms the shape of that image in us. The image of God in Christ is revealed to us through him that we may become like him. The Incarnation, the image of God in Christ, is understood relationally. It is a hypostatic union between God and humanity, divinity and humanity in a person. The Incarnation defines who Christ is and why he came to save us. The Incarnation defines our image in creation and redemption, our genesis and our end. In creation, God identified with us by making us in his image. In salvation, Christ identified with us, so that we can identify with him. We begin to learn and practice his righteousness. For the Kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.
“Whose image and inscription are engraved on that coin?”
“Caesar’s!”
“Well, give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s! And whose image and inscription are engraved on your soul?”
“God’s!”
“Well, give unto God what is God’s!”
Peter J. Bellini is Professor of Church Renewal and Evangelization in the Heisel Chair at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.