What was in the beginning? Most Christians know the answer before the question is even asked. There was a great Someone in the nothing. What was over the waters before the land? We know. The Spirit hovered over the waters. What was in the garden God planted? We all know it. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, of course! But we cannot forget there was a second tree there, one that bookends the cosmic epic of Scripture: the Tree of Life (Gen. 2:9 cf. Rev. 22:2).
While the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was good to make one wise—to be like God, supposedly—the Tree of Life was always and forever to be second-hand wisdom, from God to humans. To eat of the Tree of Life was like being plugged into an electric socket, never-ending life-giving energy, but it came through a tether. The allure of the fruit was to be your own power-generator—mobile and independent from God. “After all”, Eve might have thought, holding the venomous fruit in her hand, “I might be doing God a favor by unleashing myself to worship Him more freely.” As mankind sunk its teeth into death, the question should still linger in our mouths: did we become like God?
Flash forward to Genesis 11. The whole world has unified under one banner, seeking one grand and glorious purpose, to reach to heaven via a tower stretching to the sky. We moderns may feel a kind of implicit distance with this story, as if it could not possibly have bearing on our world today. But look closer. What’s actually happening in this archaic scene? That same fruit that has been fermenting in the belly of humankind has driven them to a seemingly sensible and contemporary conclusion: that reality is what we make it. The exact language of the builders of the tower in Genesis 11 parallels God’s own language in the creation of man, but instead of “let Us make man…”, they say, “let us make bricks…” (Gen. 1:26 cf. 11:3).
Everything mankind touches we mold into bricks, the building blocks of our little kingdoms—walled fortresses designed to protect our prosperity, wealth, and power. In short, the seeds of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil grow into human empires. In the hands of God, a lump of clay becomes the immeasurably valuable human life, and in the hands of man it becomes the modular block with the sole purpose of creating and cementing human regimes. These two channels run down the length of Scripture and history: the fruit of the Tree of Life and the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Essentially two kingdoms: one ruled by God and one ruled by humans, both molding like clay the world they touch.
Fatally Wounding the Gospel
Flash way forward to 1700. The Christian kingdoms of Europe are exploding over the world map, penetrating the heathen lands with the light of the gospel, or so they think. I do think many of them thought they were really bringing good news, only their good news was not “the good news of the Kingdom of God” (Luke 4:43). They may not have even confessed it was the good news of western modernity, education, or better living conditions. The gospel they brought survives to this day, and it’s summarized well in a 1701 confession written for African slaves who wanted to become Christians: “you do not ask for holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the duty and obedience you owe to your master while you live, but merely for the good of your soul” (1).
We wonder how it’s possible that people could slaughter, enslave, subjugate, and brutalize one another all in the name of Christ. As a Christian evangelical and a student of history, I know I cannot dodge this question by ignoring it or putting a good spin on what we know of “Church history”. It’s there, ugly and putrid in the daylight. What do we do with it? A clue lies in that 1701 slave’s catechism. We’ve been peddling a gospel for the dead, a free ride to Elysium, a faith merely for the good of your soul. That could never be good news because, according to the Word of God, you are not just a soul imprisoned in a body, you are the image of God in the flesh. You’re body is worth resurrecting and living with Christ on the new earth for eternity! So the gospel cannot be the good news of earth or the good news of heaven, it’s got to be the good news of the One who stepped in between and made a kingdom there—it’s the good news of the reign of Jesus Christ.
But what do we get when, for centuries, we’ve preached a gospel merely for the good of souls? What comes of a church preaching a gospel that’s only good news for disembodied spirits bubbling up to heaven? We get a power vacuum here on earth, and those with the bricks are happy to step in the gap. What results is what we’ve seen splattered all over the pages of history: religion’s complicity in empire. I don’t say the Church here, or Christianity, or even Evangelicalism, but religion. We might claim our brand of Christianity is not a “religion, it’s a relationship”, and rightly it ought to be—but if it’s not eating from the tree of life there’s only one other camp it can be in.
Baal Worship and the State
Let’s do some quick deduction: what is a religion? A religion is a “social institution that involves a unified system of beliefs and practices that recognizes the sacred” (2). To be clear, a religion doesn’t have to be based in objective reality, it only needs to be agreed upon by a given context of society. For this reason you see ancient religions in South America, the Near East, and sub-Saharan Africa worshiping, praying for, and cursing things which are all unique to their local needs, values, and conflicts. Religion and the idea of the sacred is a natural leap of reasoning for human beings because we are imprinted by the God who is Spirit and consequently we’re haunted by the supernatural from birth.
Likewise, just as human beings have the inescapable self-consciousness of a supernatural reality, we also have the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil sitting like a stubborn rock in our stomachs. It doesn’t just whisper to us that we are like God, it laces our psyche with the lie that we can experience personal godhood, that we don’t need to be tethered to the One Creator to experience the good life. Sound familiar? Babylon is built on that same foundation—power and life on our own terms, emancipated from bondage to heaven.
In religion this looks like the conniving worshipper or priest, trying to barter with, manipulate, or cheat the gods into getting what he/she wants. Remember Baal worship in your Old Testaments? Baal was the Philistine god of storms, and a moody and fickle god at that. Everyone, from the farmer to the king, needed rain to live so the priests of Baal hatched outrageous ideas to convince Baal to give them what they wanted. They set up little statues in their temples to make it appear there were more worshippers. They carried around totems of pregnant women as fertility icons. They offered human sacrifices and mutilated their own bodies all to manipulate the indifferent wills of the gods.
God’s own people fell into this mode of “worship” time and again, not because these morally abhorrent practices were attractive, but because they were willing to do whatever they had to in their context to get what they needed. And that would make perfect sense, if God had not already promised and proved to them that if they came to Him He would meet them and provide for them and do all that it meant for the creator, Father God to be your God. In a world entirely suffused with awareness of the supernatural, and yet with very natural needs, it has always been advantageous to marry state and religion. Thus, all over Scripture, wherever you see Babylon you will never see her as a national entity only, but as a name linked with an insidious spirituality.
But, you may ask, what does this all have to do with us today? We have separation of church and state, and to add to that, almost every nation on the globe considers themselves a “secular nation”. A nation is never it’s paper-policies, the nation is the people who make it up and those people have a heritage, a culture, and a set of values which even their leaders share. They all have a shared idea of what is sacred, what is forbidden and what is needed—what is right and “worth fighting for”. For this reason, every nation will have a dominant religion, and that religion will often fit more the passions of the nation rather than devotion to it’s religious tenets.
American State Religion
So, what do we call it when religion and nation meet in an unholy union? “When the identity of a nation state is fused with an (often) misused version of a religious identity to the exclusion of others, that is called religious nationalism” (3). In Indonesia, you have a special breed of Islam, in Myanmar you have a unique kind of Bhudism, in America you have Protestant Evangelical Christianity. The question isn’t “when did Protestant Evangelicalism begin to go down the road of becoming a state religion?”—to answer this, you’d probably have to start with Annanius and Sapphira (Acts 5:1–11). Rather, the question ought to be, “why have we become so bad at pointing out the fatal sin of Christian nationalism when we see it?”.
Wherever you stand on the recent capitol riots, it stands as the peak of a state-religious iceberg long submerged and subdued. The Christian rhetoric and affiliation surrounding the capitol riots has caused many evangelicals to turn their heads in shame, but it’s long past time to look away, we must begin looking within at what we’ve been calling “Evangelical Christianity” in America. This isn’t just a quirk or an embarrassing phase in Christianity, it’s been our shadow from day one. It’s deeply embedded in human nature to take what was meant to be a life-giving union with God and twist it into a social device to secure our rights and goods. The gradual sell-out to Babylon has been a steady and relentless battle in the Church, and today we cannot deny that the large bulk of evangelical Christianity in America is surrendering to Caesar far and above what belongs in his crooked fingers. The Christian religion becomes Babylon when it does not submit to the Kingdom of God.
Stop Believing You’re Orphaned
If our religion really is to become a relationship, we have to stop pretending we’ve been orphaned by Christ (John 14:18). The early church squarely understood that Jesus Christ was their actual (not metaphorical) King when they stood up to Ceasar and expressed the reality that “Jesus Christ is Lord”. The signs waved at the capitol saying: “Jesus is my Savior. Trump is my President.” say more than I think they intended. They confess a sick gospel, one with Christ still dead in the tomb and a mass of frightened “Christians” willing to outsource to Babylon for a drop of rain. If the rioters waving their NIVs would have stopped to read them, they would know that Christ is raised from the dead “And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6).
To be saved is to know Christ, to be completely united with Him body and soul, moving with His movements and thinking His thoughts through the Holy Spirit. He was the ideal citizen and is the perfect King of the Kingdom in between—a nation which will have no end. He has called you and I, and even those who dragged His name through the mud at the capitol, to join Him on His throne, ruling as administrators and gardeners of a new creation that has begun now (1 Cor. 5:17)! This new nation holds these truths to be self-evident, that the fruit of the tree of life came to us as a baby in a manger and opened the way for every person to enter into the union He shares with God the Father from before the foundations of the world.
Okay, these are very nice churchy-sounding words, but what do we do with all this? To begin with, we take Jesus and what He said seriously. Most likely you can actually imagine, with close accuracy, exactly what Jesus would say to you if He was sitting across from you. It would sound something similar to what he said to the Apostle Peter: “Do you love me?…Then feed my sheep.” (John 21:17). Until you begin actually obeying Jesus, seeking Him, following Him, and really trusting Him as the keeper and leader of your life, you will never actually know Him (1 John 2:3).
This kind of living is what Jesus called “eternal life”, not just life after death, but life lived in and through Himself, incarnating heaven on earth in a kind of inbetween Kingdom. This is the good news of the Kingdom of God, that you and I can really live there. So my challenge to you is this: drop your flag and pick up your cross; and implore others to do the same. Your gospel is worth more than something to save your soul, it will give you a life, a family, and a home the world is already desperate to find. It’s time for us to completely ditch Babylon and enter the Kingdom of God.
Footnotes:
- Michael O. Emerson 2000
- Sociologist Émile Durkheim 1915
- Chris Ophus 2021
