Regardless of the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election in the United States on November 5th, we need more critical examination of the way we imagine our political identity, especially those of us who have long benefited from Christendom’s shaping influence. 

Our actions toward injustice, relationship with our neighbors, the way we handle power, the way we treat differences, and how we engage elections can all flow downstream from a subterranean imaginative framework. The way we imagine ourselves as ‘political-and-Christian’ puts us on a trajectory before we’ve started to work out the concrete details, and the wrong starting point can put us in a place we neither intended nor aspire to be. 

I’m convinced this isn’t just abstract quibbling over terms. It matters for what we end up doing with our bodies, which of course, is right at the heart of politics.

The way we imagine ourselves as 'political-and-Christian' puts us on a trajectory before we’ve started to work out the concrete details, and the wrong starting point can put us in a place we neither intended nor aspire to be. Share on X

Misdiagnosing Our Identity: Actually, We Are Babylon

For this reason I want to problematize the tendency, particularly among some white evangelical Christians¹When I single out white evangelical Christians in the United States in this article, I don’t mean to suggest that only white evangelicals have functioned as Babylonians. This is my own tribe, and I mean to speak into the well from which I have drawn, but also to say that white evangelicals are a representative group: i.e. those who have never really known what it means, as a people, to have their backs against the wall, and who have largely benefited from social privilege. I’m aware that “evangelical” is an inherently fuzzy set, and so I specify “white” evangelical to distinguish from BIPOC and/or immigrant minority evangelicals, who actually do know in their history and lived experience what it means to be “strangers and aliens” in a world where they are not in charge. in the United States (my own tribe), to imagine themselves as “exiles in Babylon.” Prominent theological voices like Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon popularized this way of thinking in their book Resident Aliens over thirty years ago. Earlier this year, the influential evangelical scholar/speaker Preston Sprinkle released Exiles: The Church in the Shadow of the Empire, which includes a spin-off conference tour across the U.S. that is stocked with a who’s-who of “we’re-evangelical-but-not-that-kind” plenary speakers.²The plenary speakers who are part of Sprinkle’s “Exiles” tour represent a diversity of opinions and postures in their explicit and implicit political theology. So, I mean to emphasize the total aggregating effect of the “exile” discourse and the way that the conference as a whole functions to represent and reify the existing exilic imagination among white evangelicals, which is not to suggest that each individual speaker explicitly or implicity operates totally inside that imaginative framework.  

Framing “Exile against Babylon/Empire” is a good way to draw contrast as theologians, and in one sense, it’s aspirational. We do want to cultivate an exilic consciousness in contrast to one of empire. But it’s not how we heal from death-dealing tendencies, or how we avail ourselves unto the world that God is making new in Jesus by the power of the Spirit.

In order to heal, we need first to embrace the extent to which we are not exiles; we are Babylon. Or, at least, we are recovering Babylonians – naming our complicity and owning the need for the healing of our diseased imaginations in order to become the kinds of people who can discern the difference between the politics of God’s kingdom and the politics of the empire.  

Embracing our troubled identity as Babylonians – that is, as those who have operated with the consciousness and power of empire even while calling it Christian – is the beginning point for Kingdom political identity because repentance is the ongoing posture for reorientation into the life God is making new in Jesus. Repentance involves reckoning with what is real, especially the shadows, so owning our Bablyonian history and tendencies is embracing reality and leaning toward the possibilities of reorientation.   

This means one of the biggest dangers of evangelicals imagining themselves as exiles in Babylon is that, despite the desire to detox and distance from empire identity, it can function precisely to evade or otherwise cloak our shadowy empire tendencies, and thus leave us stuck inside its politic.

In order to heal, we need first to embrace the extent to which we are not exiles; we are Babylon. Or, at least, we are recovering Babylonians. (1/2) Share on X

Recovering Babylonians name our complicity and own the need for the healing of our diseased imaginations, so that we can discern the difference between the politics of God’s kingdom and the politics of the empire. (2/2) Share on X

 How Did We Get Here? 

If the exilic political identity is not coming from an assessment of reality, then where is it coming from? Beyond a failure to read exilic themes in Scripture contextually, when those in privilege read themselves too quickly into places of marginalization, we are frequently dealing with a refusal or inability to reckon with the actual history of conservative, white evangelical Christianity, and its relationship to political structures in the United States. This is a failure to wrestle with social dynamics and that most basic political question: What’s going on and how did we get here?

*Editorial Note: The Bible Project on exile (See embedded video above) is a solid place to begin if you are fuzzy on the notion of exilic identity throughout the Scriptures. ~CK

I also wonder how much of the impulse to identify as exiles is a way of bypassing the task of looking behind the curtain after we are genuinely horrified by the empire tactics being revealed in the lives of those we consider our colleagues, family, and friends. Are we really just like them? We don’t want to be, and perhaps it’s easier not to look beneath the floorboard to see what we have hid. 

As the monsters of Babylon and empire are revealed, many of us feel like we no longer fit inside our evangelical tradition. This means that it is possible that imagining ourselves as exilic is not a descriptive evaluation of the concrete influence and social standing of white evangelicals inside political structures in the US, but more an inside debate about how we ought to imagine our identity.

Feeling this tension, we create distance between ourselves and the loud, belligerent parts of the religious right (without necessarily leaving evangelicals’ classic theological commitments and social spheres). What often follows from this desire is a genuine acknowledgment that Christian witness is larger than the American West, and that there are Christian globally who really do have a thicker exilic identity. 

But have we stopped to acknowledge the difference between learning from them and uncritically claiming their identity as our own? Don’t we learn from global friends actually in exile by allowing them to help us see our own demons?

The problem, of course, is we cannot heal and move toward what ought to be without first detoxing from the ways we have internalized a politics of dominance and death under the Christian flag. We should cultivate an ‘exilic consciousness,’ or something like it (Personally I prefer the term “thinking margin”), but we cannot merely choose to identify with exilic identity because it feels right. Nor can we claim exilic status if it merely relieves some of the tension we feel about the demons emerging from within evangelicalism. 

No, we must take a journey – a journey that begins with repentance and owning the truth about ourselves.

Embracing our troubled identity as Babylonians – that is, as those who have operated with the consciousness and power of empire even while calling it Christian – is the beginning point for Kingdom political identity. (1/3) Share on X

This is because repentance is the ongoing posture for reorientation into the life God is making new in Jesus. Repentance involves reckoning with what is real, especially the shadows. (2/3) Share on X

Therefore, owning our Bablyonian history and tendencies is embracing reality and leaning toward the possibilities of reorientation within God's kingdom. (3/3) Share on X

A Failure to Heal Our Imagination Has Consequences

Uncritically flying the “exiles” banner amounts to both a failure of imagination, or possibly a failure to seek the healing of our shared diseased imagination. Both of these possibilities beget the consequences of perpetuating the death-dealing fruit, both for the internal ecclesial life of white evangelicals and especially for those neighbors we are called to love.

One consequence of this failure of imagination is that it blinds us to ourselves. It creates evaluative distance between our own lives and the broken structures we live within, largely without reckoning with how we have been complicit in extending these broken structures. The problem is that we continue to choose the same death-dealing behavior, simply wrapped in nicer language. Asserting that we are the church in the shadow of the empire confuses who we ought to be as we fail to reckon with who we actually are in reality. More problematically, when we are blind from seeing ourselves, we miss how structures of domination have and continue to oppress our neighbors.

A second consequence of this failure of imagination is that it funds a monolithic, sharp distinction between us and the world around us. Rather than listening, learning, and growing in dialogue with those who are different from us (arguably, one of the most fundamental activities of politics), we spend time policing and clarifying how ‘they’ – the ‘other’ in our mind – are not Christian like us..Additionally, a sharp distinction between the church and the world is often unquestioned, or unintentionally reinforced, when we imagine our identity as exiles in Babylon. This sharp distinction funds a further rupture between God’s kingdom and the world we live within.

A third consequence of our failure of imagination is that our politics quickly becomes primarily defensive in nature. Rather than examining our shadows, working toward healing, and connecting with our neighbors in a posture of reception, we police the borders of belonging, endlessly clarifying ourselves in contrast against a secular world. We imagine that “secular” thinking emerges in a vacuum apart from the world that we helped manufacture, and it has come from “out there” to threaten the purity of our way of life. The reality of course is deeply ironic: Much of what evangelical Christians chastise as “empire” is actually a symptom of the self-inflicted wounds created by these Christians themselves, acting like Babylon.  

A particularly toxic version of this defensiveness is the “faithful remnant” belief, which is where the exiled church is trying to whittle itself down to a more “pure core.” Exiles are those who are true disciples of Jesus, and if people defect from our way, it is God’s winnowing work in our midst. Of course, we can and should ask serious questions about what is consistent with the way of Jesus and what is not. But we also must reckon with the political valence of this way of imagining belonging. When faithful remnant thinking is captured within a diseased imagination, it becomes toxic and dangerous.

What is needed for this moment is not to become more “pure,” but rather more “faithfully weird.”

Don’t we learn from global friends actually in exile by allowing them to help us see our own demons? We must first detox from the ways we have internalized a politics of dominance and death under the Christian flag (1/2) Share on X

Rather than listening and learning in dialogue with those who are different from us – a fundamental political activity – we spend time policing and clarifying how 'they' – the 'other' in our mind – are not Christian like us. (2/2) Share on X

Getting Weird and Violating Babylonian Identity

In addition to being more curious, critical, and compassionate about our Babylonian tendencies, repenting our way into Kingdom politics looks like following the Spirit into a ‘weirder’ identity. By weird, I simply mean allowing the Spirit to lead us through discernment deeper into our new creation, discovering who we actually are in Christ with one another. Like the apostle Paul, who never stopped claiming his Roman identity, we will violate our latent Babylonian identity in this process of repenting and following the Spirit into less “pure” forms of empowering love for the sake of our neighbors. These violations can both unsettle the power of the empire and witness to how God is renewing all things in Jesus. This is part and parcel to the politics of God’s kingdom.     

By reimagining ourselves as recovering Babylonians, we can begin to forge embodied, social habits that are distinctly Christian. We can then engage in our socio-political systems beyond an amorphous call to “vote for Jesus” or claw back a world where the church/Christians are in control.

Remember, we can do two things at the same time! We can have a healthy suspicion about the claims of the State while also nurturing loving engagement with concrete political structures. We can remain distinct while also nurturing connection with those unlike us, especially those whose desire is to nurture abundant life for all while also being non-coercive.

As recovering Babylonians, we can begin to see that there are clusters of democratic practices already happening on the ground, in our communities, but also on a national scale, that should not be collapsed into the dark hand of the state. Just because it’s democratic work doesn’t mean it’s the State! We must learn to discern the difference.

Not lording God’s kingdom over others means both a refusal to dominate others and also the humility to say we cannot know or determine beforehand the exact shape God’s kingdom will take in history. Many of my white evangelical colleagues reaching for a “neither donkey nor elephant posture” emphasize the first sense but largely miss that second sense of refusing to lord it over one another. When we miss that second sense of not lording it over, we risk leaving our own lording tendencies in the shadows, feeling pious while still funding injustice. We also shield ourselves from participating in deliberation with those who are different, which is necessary for discovering new forms of shared life.         

Within the democratic dialogue of these very deliberations is the first fruits of our engagement in helping to shape God’s kingdom in history. We are helping to co-create an openness to change, learn, be wrong, and grow, as well as the conviction that God’s newness must be discovered uniquely within our complex contexts. We do this trusting that the way forward is not arbitrary or willy nilly, that there will always be faithful coherence to the logic of God’s love revealed in Jesus, even if we’re surprised by the shape faithfulness ends up taking.

Perhaps our invitation is to remain open like Peter was in response to Cornelius’ vision in Acts 10.   

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By reimagining ourselves as recovering Babylonians, we can begin to forge embodied, social habits that are distinctly Christian. We can then engage in our socio-political systems beyond an amorphous call to 'vote for Jesus.' Share on X