A Short Preface
I wrote and recorded this essay before Trump began bombing Iran. Trump entered the Republican nomination process in 2016 by attacking Jeb and the Bush administration for their wars abroad. He was championed as the “no new wars” candidate. During Obama’s administration, he repeatedly suggested that he would attack Iran to distract the country and get the “rally around the flag” popularity bump. Now we are here, attacking Iran without a vote in Congress or even a case made for the attack. We are still waiting for the Trump administration to release all the Epstein files, something he signed into law. Trump is enacting the very vision of the world that his advisor, Stephen Miller, voiced. It was Miller’s line that inspired this essay.
Epigraphs
“The strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak suffer what they must.” —Thucydides, The Melian Dialogue
“God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” —1 Corinthians 1:27
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” —Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” (1967)
A Confession and a Question
I’ve been sitting with something that troubles me deeply.
It’s a quote from Stephen Miller, one of the chief architects of immigration policy in the Trump administration. He said that the “real world” is governed by strength, force, and power. Not ideals. Not principles. Not compassion or justice or any of the lofty words we learned in Sunday school. Strength. Force. Power.
Now, I could react to this the way we’ve all been trained to react in our exhausting culture wars—with outrage, with a quick dunk on social media, with the satisfying feeling of having identified another villain. But I’ve grown weary of that game. It generates heat but very little light. And I suspect it’s part of the disease rather than the cure.
So instead, I want to sit with Miller’s words. I want to take them seriously. I want to ask what it means that a prominent leader in a movement that claims to represent Christian America is articulating a vision of the world that sounds, to my ears, not very Christian at all.
In fact, it sounds ancient. It sounds like something a Roman senator might have said while watching gladiators die for his entertainment. It sounds like the philosophy of empire that Jesus was executed for threatening.
But it also sounds American. It sounds like something whispered (or shouted) at every stage of this nation’s history when power needed justification. It sounds like the doctrine that blessed slave ships and Indian removal and Jim Crow and mass incarceration. It sounds like the theology of whiteness dressed up as realism.
Here’s the question I can’t escape: What does it mean when leaders claiming to represent Christian America are articulating a worldview that is, in its bones, pre-Christian and anti-Christian?
I want to suggest that we may be witnessing not the triumph of Christian nationalism, but its quiet replacement by something far older and far more familiar. We may be watching the return of the gods of empire, strength, and domination that Jesus came to dethrone—gods that never fully released their grip on America in the first place.
And if that’s true, it’s not just a political problem. It’s a spiritual crisis. It’s a question about who we are, what we worship, and what kind of people we’re becoming.
The “Real World”—But Whose Reality?
Miller’s Claim as a Window
Let me be fair to Stephen Miller. He’s articulating something that many people feel, even if they wouldn’t say it so bluntly. There’s a sense, especially among those who feel displaced or disrespected by cultural change, that the world doesn’t run on niceness. That power is what matters. That the strong survive and the weak get trampled, and anyone who says otherwise is either naive or lying.
This isn’t a new sentiment. It’s not even a particularly partisan one. You can find versions of it across the political spectrum, in the boardroom and the locker room, in foreign policy debates and schoolyard arguments. “Nice guys finish last.” “It’s a dog-eat-dog world.” “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Miller is just saying the quiet part out loud.
But here’s where I need to bring in some conversation partners who have helped me see this statement in a different light.
The Half-Truth That Leads to the Abyss
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in the shadow of fascism, would have recognized Miller’s sentiment immediately. And he would have begun, surprisingly, by admitting that Miller is not entirely wrong.
This admission may discomfort my progressive friends, but honesty requires it. The world is shaped by power. Nations do pursue their interests. Human groups never willingly subordinate their interests to others. To deny this is to succumb to what Niebuhr called the “stupidity of the children of light”—a sentimental liberalism that believes conflicts can be resolved through education and goodwill alone.
But here is where we must be precise: there is a vast difference between acknowledging the reality of power and worshipping it.
Niebuhr distinguished between two types of people. The “children of light” are moral idealists who understand that we ought to seek justice and cooperation—but they are often foolish because they underestimate the power of self-interest and the persistence of conflict. The “children of darkness,” by contrast, are wise about the mechanics of power—but they are evil because they recognize no law beyond their own will.
Miller speaks the language of the children of darkness. He understands power. But by asserting that force governs the real world—that it is the final word, the ultimate reality—he makes an idolatrous claim. He sanctifies the instrument of survival as the ultimate meaning of existence.
To say that power is a factor in human affairs is a truism. To say it is the only factor is to embrace what Niebuhr called “the toxic corruption of realism”—a political nihilism that knows no restraint, that justifies whatever the strong wish to do to the weak.
This is not realism. This is the abyss.
The Historical Mirror
The British historian Tom Holland, not a Christian apologist, has helped me see just how ancient this abyss is.
Holland argues that the values we consider “Western”—human rights, the dignity of every person, care for the weak, suspicion of power—are not natural. They’re not self-evident. They’re not universal truths that any reasonable person would discover through reason alone.
They’re Christian.
More specifically, they’re the result of a revolution that began with a crucified peasant in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire and slowly, over centuries, rewired the moral imagination of the West.
Before that revolution, Holland shows, the world operated on very different assumptions. In ancient Rome and Greece, it was simply obvious that the strong should rule the weak. The very concept of “virtue”—virtus in Latin—was rooted in masculinity and martial strength. A virtuous man was a victorious man. Peace was not an abstract ideal of harmony; it was a condition maintained, as Holland puts it, “at the point of a sword.”
The Roman senator and historian Thucydides captured this worldview perfectly in the Melian Dialogue: “The strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak suffer what they must.”
This was the “real world” for most of human history.
Can you picture a world before mercy felt obvious? Before the weak had rights worth defending, before compassion was anything more than a sign of frailty? Stephen Miller is not describing a new political reality. He’s describing the old one. He’s articulating a return to the default setting of human civilization before Christianity disrupted it.
Miller’s “real world” is the world before the Sermon on the Mount.
The Revolution We Forgot
What Christianity Actually Changed
To understand what we might be losing, we need to remember what Christianity actually introduced into the world. And this is where Holland’s work becomes so valuable, precisely because he’s not a believer. He has no theological axe to grind. He’s simply trying to understand, as a historian, how we got from there to here.
The Cross is the key.
In the Roman world, crucifixion was the ultimate symbol of state power. It was reserved for slaves, rebels, and the lowest of the low. It was designed not just to kill, but to humiliate—to strip every shred of dignity from the victim and display the consequences of defying Rome. The cross was a billboard, and its message was simple: This is what happens when you challenge the strong. This is the real world.
The scandal of Christianity was to take that symbol and invert it completely.
The earliest Christians proclaimed that the crucified criminal was, in fact, the Lord of the universe. That in his weakness, God’s power was made perfect. That the victim on the cross had defeated the empire that killed him. The Roman instrument of terror became, for Christians, the sign of hope and liberation.
This was not a minor adjustment. It was a depth charge in the foundations of civilization.
Paul, writing to the Corinthians, put it starkly: “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are.”
Try to imagine how that sounded to Roman ears. It was madness. It was an inversion of everything decent people believed. The weak shaming the strong? Does the despised nullify the honored? This wasn’t just a new religion. It was a new moral universe.
The Fruit We Take for Granted
Over centuries, this revolution worked its way into the fabric of Western culture. Not completely—the church has always been compromised, always entangled with power, always falling short of its own gospel. But enough to change things fundamentally.
We got hospitals—originally Christian institutions designed to care for the sick who couldn’t pay, which would have baffled the Romans, who saw no point in wasting resources on those who couldn’t contribute to society.
We got the concept of universal human rights—rooted in the Christian claim that every person, regardless of status or ability, bears the image of God.
We got the abolition of slavery, driven largely by Christian activists who insisted that you cannot own someone made in God’s image. (Yes, Christians also defended slavery. The story is complicated. But the moral logic that eventually undermined it was also Christian.)
We got the instinct that power should serve rather than dominate, that the strong have obligations to the weak, that the vulnerable deserve protection rather than contempt.
These ideas feel natural to us. They feel like common sense, like basic human decency. But Holland insists they’re not. They’re distinctly Christian. They’re the fruit of a very specific tree.
Goldfish in Christian Waters
Holland uses a vivid metaphor that has stayed with me. He says that modern Westerners are like goldfish swimming in a bowl. We don’t notice the water because it’s all around us. It’s invisible. It’s just “the way things are.”
But the water is Christianity. The moral assumptions we breathe without thinking—that every person has equal dignity, that the powerful should be held accountable, that victims matter, that compassion is a virtue—these are Christian ideas that have soaked so deeply into our culture that we’ve forgotten where they came from.
Even secular progressives who reject Christianity are, Holland argues, living off Christian capital. Their concern for the marginalized, their suspicion of power, their insistence on justice for the oppressed—all of it flows from the same revolution that began at Calvary.
We’ve become so used to the light that we’ve forgotten someone turned it on.
And now, perhaps, someone is reaching for the switch.
IV. The Return of Caesar
The McCain Moment
I want to focus on a specific moment, because I think it reveals something important about the shifting moral landscape.
It was July 2015. Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, was speaking about Senator John McCain. He said: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
The crowd laughed.
I need to sit with that. John McCain endured five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was tortured repeatedly. He refused early release because it would have meant leaving his fellow prisoners behind. Whatever you think of his politics, his suffering was real, and his rejection of special treatment was honorable by almost any moral standard.
And he was being mocked. Not for a policy position. Not for a vote. For being captured. For suffering. For, in the world’s eyes, losing.
Tom Holland noticed something in this moment that many of us missed. He argues that Trump’s mockery wasn’t just a gaffe or a political miscalculation. It was, perhaps unconsciously, a theological statement. Before going further, I want to acknowledge that beneath the laughter and harsh rhetoric, there are real longings that animate many Americans. There is a widespread desire for dignity, for respect, for a sense of safety in a world that so often feels unpredictable and unforgiving. These are human needs, not partisan instincts—and they help explain the hunger for a kind of strength that seems to promise protection and security in turbulent times. And yet, in Trump’s words, Holland sees something else: a return to the ancient Roman concept of virtus—virtue as victory, strength as the only thing that matters.
To the Romans, a captured soldier wasn’t tragic; he was shameful. He had failed the fundamental test of manhood. He deserved not sympathy but contempt.
For nearly two thousand years, Christianity had been teaching a different story. The story of a God who was captured, beaten, mocked, and executed—and whose followers proclaimed that this was the moment of triumph. The Cross sanctified suffering. It dignified the prisoner. It insisted that losing in the world’s eyes might be winning in God’s.
When Trump mocked McCain and the crowd laughed, something ancient stirred. The old gods were waking up.
What haunts me is this: many of the loudest defenders of that mockery were people who call themselves Christians. People who wear crosses around their necks. People who sing on Sunday mornings about a Savior who suffered and died.
I don’t say this to condemn. I say it because I think we need to ask ourselves an honest question: When we cheered—or even just shrugged—what were we saying about the Cross?
Were we standing with the Crucified One? Or had we, without realizing it, joined the crowd that jeered him?
The Aesthetics of Empire
Tom Holland makes another observation that I find both fascinating and troubling. He suggests that Donald Trump operates less like any previous American president and more like a Roman popularis—a politician who builds power by appealing directly to the masses, over the heads of the elites, through spectacle and the shattering of taboos.
Think of Nero. (Yes, that Nero.) Holland points out that Nero was wildly popular with ordinary Romans precisely becausehe offended the aristocracy. He performed in public, raced chariots, and mocked the stuffy formality of the Senate. The elites were horrified, and the people loved it.
I’m not making a direct comparison between Trump and Nero. But I am asking us to notice something about style, about aesthetics, about what we’re drawn to and why.
Consider the gold. The towers with his name in giant letters. The beauty pageants and wrestling appearances. The insults, the nicknames, the rallies that feel more like rock concerts than civic gatherings. This is not the style of a servant-leader. It’s not even the style of a Roman republican leader, who at least pretended to be “first among equals.”
It’s the style of an emperor.
Holland points out that the American Founders knew this danger. They had read their Cicero and their Plutarch. They modeled the Republic on Rome specifically to prevent the rise of a king, to guard against the concentration of power in a single glorified figure. They built in checks and balances. They cultivated a civic religion of humility and public service.
There was, you might say, a “Caesar taboo” written into the American DNA.
And yet here we are, drawn to gold towers and promises of total victory, to a leader who speaks of himself in terms of unparalleled greatness.
I wonder if we’ve spent so many years arguing about whether America is a “Christian nation” that we missed something slipping in through the back door—something neither Christian nor republican. Something older. Something that glitters like gold and promises strength to those who feel weak.
The Evangelical Bargain
Now I need to speak carefully, because I’m speaking to family.
I grew up evangelical. I know the hymns, the potluck dinners, the altar calls, the genuine warmth and sincere faith of so many people in that world. I also know the fears—and they are real fears. There is a sense that the culture has turned hostile. That your children are being shaped by forces that mock everything you hold sacred. That you’re losing your country, your voice, your place at the table.
I understand why, in that context, a strong man looks appealing. Someone who will fight for you. Someone who won’t be pushed around. Someone who treats your enemies with the same contempt they’ve shown you.
I understand the bargain. I just want to name it honestly. Protection exchanged for prophetic integrity; that is all.
Tom Holland suggests that many evangelicals voted for Trump not as a moral exemplar, but as a Caesar—a protector of the tribe. They know he doesn’t live by the Sermon on the Mount. But he promised to defend those who do. He would be the strongman so they could remain the faithful.
It’s an old bargain. Constantine offered something similar in the fourth century. The church has been tempted by it ever since.
But here’s my question, and I ask it with genuine grief, not judgment: What happens to our witness?
When the world sees us cheering for cruelty and calling it strength, what do they learn about Jesus?
When our children watch us excuse in our leader what we would never tolerate in our pastors—the lies, the boasting, the mockery of the vulnerable—what are we teaching them about where salvation actually comes from?
When we embrace the language of “winning” and “dominating” and “crushing,” are we still recognizable as followers of the one who said, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you”?
I fear we’ve made a trade we don’t fully understand. We’ve traded our birthright for a bowl of political stew. We’ve gained protection—maybe—but we’ve lost something more precious: the integrity of our witness, the coherence of our message, the beauty of the Gospel.
We said we wanted to save Christian America. I wonder if, in the process, we’ve forgotten what made it Christian in the first place.
The Cross Without the Crucified
Let me tell you what I think has happened—and I say this more in sorrow than in anger.
We’ve kept the cross. It’s still on our bumper stickers and our flag pins and our church steeples. It’s still tattooed on arms and hanging from necks.
But somewhere along the way, we removed the body.
The cross, remember, was Rome’s way of saying: This is what happens to those who resist. This is the power of the state to crush the weak. This is the real world. It was a billboard for empire, a warning to slaves and rebels.
The scandal of Christianity was to take that symbol of imperial cruelty and transform it. The crucified slave became the Lord of the universe. The executed criminal became the Savior of the world. The tortured body became the image of God’s love poured out for the powerless.
But when we remove the body of Christ from the cross—when the cross becomes a tribal marker, a cultural symbol, a vague gesture toward “heritage” rather than a confrontation with power—we return the cross to Rome.
We make it, once again, a symbol of our power. Our tribe. Our dominance.
And in that move, we lose the whole story. Because the cross without the crucified Christ is not Christianity, it’s empire with religious branding.
Holland puts it starkly: without the Christian narrative, there is no logical reason to prioritize the victim over the victimizer. We return to the abyss where the torturer wins.
I look at the movement that calls itself Christian nationalism, and I see crosses everywhere. But I also see a will to power, a hunger for dominance, a barely concealed contempt for the weak.
And I want to ask, as gently and as urgently as I know how: Where is the Lamb?
Where is the slaughtered one who alone is worthy to open the scroll? Where is the king who washed feet and touched lepers and forgave his executioners?
If he’s not at the center, we’re not telling his story anymore. We’re telling Caesar’s story with Jesus’ name awkwardly attached.
V. The American Genealogy of Force
A History We Must Name
I’ve been speaking of ancient Rome, of the pre-Christian world that Tom Holland describes. But there’s a more recent history I need to name, and I confess I should have named it sooner.
The rhetoric of “strength and force” as the governing principles of reality has a specific American genealogy. And we cannot understand where we are unless we reckon with where we’ve been.
Gary Dorrien, the theologian and historian, has traced the connections I’ve been skirting around. Drawing on the Black Social Gospel tradition—on Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West—Dorrien helps us see what Holland’s Roman lens might miss: that the philosophy of force has been the operational theology of white America from the beginning.
The historian Vincent Harding called it the “white superiority version of America’s truth”—and named it what it is: a self-serving lie.
It is the logic that justified the slave ship and the plantation. It is the theology—and it was a theology—that blessed “manifest destiny” and Indian removal. It is the creed, spoken or unspoken, that maintained Jim Crow: that this nation was conceived by white men, to be maintained by white men, through force.
When Stephen Miller says the “real world” is governed by strength and power, he is not merely channeling ancient Rome. He is channeling a specifically American tradition—the tradition of the slaveholder, the colonizer, the segregationist. He is speaking the oldest American language of all: the language of domination dressed up as natural law.
The Fusion of Domination and Survival
Dorrien’s observation continues to ring in my imagination since I first encountered it. He notes that for white Americans, the “will to dominate” and the “will to live” have historically been fused.
This is why Miller’s rhetoric doesn’t sound like ideology to many who hear it. It sounds like survival. It sounds like reality. It sounds like common sense.
But that fusion—of domination and survival, of supremacy and security—is itself the product of a specific history. It is what happens when a people build their identity on being the masters rather than the servants, the conquerors rather than the neighbors, the winners rather than the community.
The fusion feels natural because it has been repeated so many times, reinforced by so many systems, blessed by so many pulpits. But it is not natural. It is a choice—or rather, a long series of choices made by people who had other options and refused them.
And here is the tragedy: this fusion doesn’t deliver on its promise. The masters are never secure. The dominators are never at peace. The winners are always looking over their shoulders, always afraid of the revenge they know they would take if the positions were reversed.
The will to dominate does not protect life. It consumes it.
The Giant Triplets
Martin Luther King Jr. saw this clearly. In his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam”—delivered exactly one year before his assassination—he named what he called the “giant triplets” that were destroying America’s soul:
Racism, materialism, and militarism.
These three, King argued, were not separate problems but a single interlocking system. Racism dehumanizes the other. Materialism reduces all value to profit. Militarism sanctifies violence as the solution to every problem. Together, they form a trinity of death—a counter-gospel that promises security through domination and delivers only endless war.
King warned: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Spiritual death. Not just political decline. Not just moral failure. Spiritual death—the extinguishing of the divine image, the loss of the capacity to recognize God in the face of the other.
When Stephen Miller declares that strength and force govern the real world, he is confessing the creed of the giant triplets. He is announcing that America has chosen the way of death and is calling it life.
And what haunts me most is this: King delivered that diagnosis in 1967. He was murdered a year later. And nearly sixty years on, the triplets are stronger than ever—now wrapped in the language of Christian nationalism, now blessed by preachers, now cheered by people who claim to follow a crucified Savior.
The Gangsterization of America
Cornel West—drawing on King’s prophetic tradition—has given us language for what’s happening in our own moment. He speaks of the “gangsterization of America”: the triumph of raw power over democratic accountability, of market fundamentalism over human dignity, of authoritarian swagger over the common good.
West argues that American democracy is being devoured by three dogmas: capitalist fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism.
Miller’s statement is the confession of a nation possessed by all three.
It is the worldview of the gangster elevated to political philosophy—the belief that strength is the only virtue, that winning is the only morality, that those who can take what they want are entitled to it.
Dorrien calls this “political nihilism”—a condition that sets the tone for public discourse when market moralities and raw power dictate the landscape of a stifled democracy.
We have seen this before. We know where it leads. The prophets have warned us. The history is written in blood.
The question is whether we will listen.
VI. The Other Side of the Same Coin
To My Progressive Friends
Now I need to turn to the other side of this cultural divide, because I believe in fairness and because the analysis demands it.
If MAGA represents one way of losing Christianity—by openly embracing a pre-Christian and white supremacist ethic of strength and domination—progressivism may represent another: keeping the ethics while severing the roots.
This is where I need to be honest with my own tribe.
Tom Holland points out that the social justice movement is not, as many assume, a rejection of Christianity. It’s actually a hyper-Protestant heresy. Think about its core commitments: centering the marginalized, listening to the oppressed, casting down the mighty from their thrones, scrutinizing systems for hidden injustice.
This is the Magnificat. This is the prophetic tradition. This is Jesus in the synagogue reading from Isaiah: “Good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, liberty for the oppressed.”
The progressive instinct to side with the victim against the oppressor isn’t “natural.” The Romans would have found it absurd. It’s Christian—a secularized inheritance from centuries of Christian moral formation.
But here’s the problem: we’ve kept the fruit and cut down the tree.
Grace Without Roots
When you remove the theological foundations—the image of God in every person, the call to love even enemies, the reality of grace, and the possibility of redemption—the ethics become unstable. They can curdle into something harsh: a call-out culture with no forgiveness, a hierarchy of victimhood with no reconciliation, a relentless judgment with no mercy.
Holland observes that progressive movements have inherited Christianity’s focus on the victim but often rejected its doctrine of grace. And without grace, you get purges instead of restoration, cancellation instead of redemption, endless cycles of accusation with no possibility of absolution.
Niebuhr would recognize this failure. He would call it the foolishness of the “children of light”—moral idealists who are right about justice but naive about human nature, including their own. They see the sin in their opponents clearly but are blind to the self-interest that corrupts even righteous causes. They build liberation movements that become, in time, new systems of domination. I have to confess that I am not immune to this pattern; I have often failed to see the ways my own good intentions are tangled up with self-righteousness and pride. I name this not out of shame, but in hopes of modeling the repentance and humility that I believe we all need.
I say this as someone who shares many progressive commitments. I believe in racial justice and economic fairness and care for creation. But I also believe that these commitments will not survive long without the soil that grew them.
You cannot keep the fruit after you’ve cut the root. Or rather, you can—for a while. A cut flower still looks beautiful. But it’s dying.
The Children of Light and Darkness
So here we are, in early twenty-first-century America, watching a culture war that both sides misunderstand.
It’s not faith versus secularism. It’s not religion versus reason.
It’s two different ways of abandoning Christianity, each blind to what it owes and what it’s losing.
On one side: the children of darkness. Wise about power, evil in recognizing no law beyond their will. They wrap themselves in Christian symbols while embracing a pre-Christian ethic of strength and domination. They’ve kept the cross but lost the crucified.
On the other side: the children of light. Foolish about power, naive about human nature, unaware that their moral vocabulary is borrowed from a tradition they’ve rejected. They’ve kept the justice but lost the grace, kept the prophetic critique but lost the possibility of redemption.
Niebuhr would say that the children of darkness are winning, not because they are stronger, but because the children of light are stupid. They brought sentimentality to a power struggle. They thought they could have the fruits of Christianity without the roots, the ethics without the theology, the kingdom without the King.
If we are searching for a way to remember the crucial warning of these pages, let me put it plainly, echoing King’s giant triplets: 1) Beware Power. 2) Name Idols. 3) Pursue Beloved Community. This triad is the key: not just to critique what is wrong, but to shape what comes next.
Both sides are swimming in Holland’s goldfish bowl. Both are unaware of the water. One has decided the water is too restrictive and is climbing out. The other insists the water will stay warm forever, even after they’ve unplugged the heater.
I don’t know which error is more dangerous. I suspect they feed each other—each side’s excesses driving the other further into its dysfunction.
But I know this: neither is the way of Jesus.
The way of Jesus is neither the will to power nor the purity spiral. It’s not domination dressed in religious language, and it’s not judgment without mercy dressed in secular language.
It’s something else entirely. Something we’ve nearly forgotten. Something we desperately need to remember.
The Abyss
Nietzsche’s Prophecy
I need to introduce you to an unlikely prophet: Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was a fierce critic of Christianity. He called it a “slave revolt in morality,” an inversion of ancient values that elevated weakness over strength. He looked at the Christian God dying in European culture and saw—what, exactly?
Here we must be careful. The popular image of Nietzsche as a cheerful atheist celebrating Christianity’s collapse is a caricature. The famous “God is dead” passage in The Gay Science is spoken by a madman who arrives too early, is met with blank incomprehension, lights a lantern in the bright morning, and is laughed at by the marketplace crowd.
“What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?” the madman cries. “Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?”
This is not triumph. This is terror.
Nietzsche understood—better than many believers—what the death of God would mean. If the Christian moral framework collapses, he warned, there will be wars such as the earth has never seen. The twentieth century would be a time of nihilism, of meaning draining from the world, of humanity stumbling in the dark.
He was writing in the 1880s. Within decades, Europe would tear itself apart twice, with a body count in the tens of millions.
The scholar Walter Kaufmann, who spent decades rescuing Nietzsche from his worst interpreters, insisted that Nietzsche did not want this catastrophe. He diagnosed it. He saw it coming. He hoped that a few rare individuals might find a way through—might create new values, new meaning, on the other side of the collapse. But he held no illusions about the cost.
Tom Holland argues that Nietzsche was right about the stakes, even if we reject his proposed solutions. You cannot remove the Christian foundations of Western morality and expect the building to stand. The “rights” and “dignity” we take for granted are not natural. They’re not self-evident, despite what Mr. Jefferson wrote. They’re theological claims rooted in Genesis and the Gospels.
Pull out the theology, and the structure becomes unstable.
The Nietzsche That Wasn’t
But here I must pause to address a historical injustice, because Nietzsche has been blamed for horrors he would have despised.
The association between Nietzsche and fascism is largely the work of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. After Nietzsche’s mental collapse in 1889, she took control of his unpublished writings, edited them to suit her agenda, and promoted his work to the Nazi regime. She literally presented Hitler with Nietzsche’s walking stick as a relic. The Nazis quoted a version of Nietzsche that Nietzsche himself would not have recognized.
The actual Nietzsche broke with his friend Richard Wagner, in part, over Wagner’s anti-Semitism. He wrote that anti-Semites should be “expelled from Germany.” He mocked German nationalism as the posturing of “beer-soaked” mediocrities. He called the state “the coldest of all cold monsters.” He despised the herd mentality of mass movements and would have viewed rallies and tribal loyalty oaths with contempt.
His infamous “will to power” was not a call to political domination. It was primarily about self-overcoming—the artist’s struggle with resistant material, the thinker’s battle against easy answers, the individual’s lifelong fight to become who they truly are. When Nietzsche praised “strength,” he meant the strength to stand alone, to create, to resist conformity—not the strength to crush others underfoot.
Nietzsche criticized Christianity’s elevation of weakness, yes. But what he opposed was not compassion itself. He opposed what he called ressentiment—the spirit of revenge disguised as virtue, hatred of excellence masked as love of equality, the tendency to call one’s limitations a moral achievement rather than honestly confronting them.
He hoped the death of God might produce poets, artists, and philosophers brave enough to create meaning in a meaningless universe.
He got propagandists.
The Vulgarization
So when Stephen Miller says the “real world” is governed by strength and power, he is not channeling the real Nietzsche. He is channeling the vulgarized Nietzsche—the Nietzsche of the dinner party and the talk show, stripped of subtlety and irony and reduced to a bumper sticker. He is channeling Nietzsche’s sister’s Nietzsche. He is speaking the language of those who raided a philosopher’s corpse for slogans.
Here’s the bitter irony: Miller is also confirming Nietzsche’s darkest fear.
Nietzsche worried that when the Christian moral framework collapsed, what would replace it would not be the heroic individual creating new values. It would be the herd stampeding toward whoever promised them power. It would be the mob—directionless, resentful, looking for a strong hand to tell them who to hate.
Nietzsche despised that mob. He would have despised its twenty-first-century incarnations. But he saw it coming.
When a political leader describes a “real world” where strength and force are the only governing principles—when crowds cheer for cruelty—when suffering is mocked and domination is celebrated—we are seeing not the fulfillment of Nietzsche’s philosophy but the confirmation of his prophecy.
The abyss he warned about has opened. And many are walking toward it willingly, mistaking the darkness for light.
Three Prophets, One Warning
What strikes me is how three very different prophets—Nietzsche, Niebuhr, and King—converge on the same warning, despite their vast differences.
Nietzsche, the atheist critic of Christianity, saw with terrible clarity what the collapse of Christian morality would cost: the return of cruelty, the worship of raw power, centuries of violence as humanity stumbled toward new foundations—or failed to find them.
Niebuhr, the Christian realist, warned that when nations embrace the creed of pure power—when they recognize no law beyond their own will—they become “demonic.” He had watched fascism rise in Europe. He knew what happened when the children of darkness seized the levers of the state.
King, the Baptist preacher, named the specific American form of this demonry: the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism. He warned that a nation addicted to violence was approaching spiritual death.
Three prophets. Different contexts, different faiths, different politics. But the same warning:
The abyss is real. And we are walking toward it.
A Warning, Not an Accusation
I want to be very careful here, because I am not making a direct comparison between anyone in American politics and the worst horrors of the twentieth century. That would be both unfair and counterproductive.
But I am asking us to pay attention to trajectories. To notice where certain ideas lead when followed to their conclusions.
Holland notes that the Nazi movement was, in a very specific sense, an attempt to reject Christianity’s elevation of the weak and return to pre-Christian values. They quite explicitly wanted to undo what they saw as the “slave morality” Nietzsche had diagnosed. They celebrated strength, will, and dominance. They despised compassion as decadence. They dreamed of a world where the strong would rule without Christian inhibitions.
This was, as Kaufmann spent his career demonstrating, a betrayal of Nietzsche, not a fulfillment. The Nazis wanted collective power, tribal dominance, the submission of individuals to the state and race. Nietzsche wanted individuals strong enough to stand alone, to create their own values, to resist every herd—including, especially, the nationalist herd.
But the Nazis could not have so easily hijacked Nietzsche’s language if that language had not been available. And the language became available because the Christian moral framework was already weakening—already losing its hold on the European imagination.
Dorrien reminds us that America has its own history of this ideology—not in the dramatic form of European fascism, but in the grinding, everyday violence of white supremacy. The logic of force has been with us from the beginning. It didn’t need to be imported. It just needed permission to speak openly again.
I’m not saying we’re there. I’m not saying anyone currently in power is planning such horrors.
I’m saying that when political leaders describe a “real world” where strength and force are the only governing principles—when they mock the suffering—when they speak of enemies as “vermin” and promise to be “retribution”—we should pay attention.
We should remember that we’ve heard this music before.
We should recall that the instinct telling us such language is wrong is not natural. It’s the fruit of a revolution that began with a crucified Jewish peasant in a backwater province of the Roman Empire, and continued through the witness of enslaved Africans who sang of a God who heard the cries of the oppressed.
And we should ask ourselves: Do we really want to find out what the world looks like when that revolution is fully undone?
Swimming Toward Home
Naming What’s Happening
Let me name what I think is happening, as clearly and fairly as I can.
We are not witnessing the triumph of Christian nationalism. We are witnessing something more subtle and more dangerous: post-Christian nationalism wearing Christian clothes.
The cross is still there, but emptied of its scandal. The language of faith persists, but is recruited into the service of tribe and power. The Christ who washed feet and loved enemies has been quietly replaced by a Christ who blesses borders and baptizes grievances.
Meanwhile, on the other side, the Christian ethic of justice persists, but severed from grace, it has become something harsh and unforgiving—prophecy without hope, judgment without redemption.
Both sides are losing Christianity. Both are blind to what they owe. Both are standing in water that’s getting colder by the day.
The Beloved Community
But here’s the good news—and I do believe there is good news:
The story isn’t over.
Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t just diagnose the disease. He offered a vision for healing. He called it the “Beloved Community.”
The Beloved Community is not a utopia. It’s not a fantasy of a world without conflict. King was too much of a realist for that—he had read his Niebuhr, and he had been to jail enough times to know about the persistence of evil.
But the Beloved Community is a vision of power redefined. Not power as domination. Not power as the capacity to crush your enemies. But power as the capacity to achieve a constructive, shared purpose. Power as the ability to create conditions where everyone can flourish.
In the Beloved Community, strength is real—but it’s the strength to love, to reconcile, to rebuild. It’s the strength that kept King nonviolent in the face of dogs and fire hoses. It’s the strength that enabled enslaved people to sing of freedom while in chains. It’s the strength of the Cross—the strange, subversive strength that looks like weakness to the wise of this world but is, in truth, the power of God.
Dorrien calls this vision a “sublime madness.” I think that’s right. By the standards of the “real world” Stephen Miller describes, it is madness. It makes no sense. It will not compute.
But by the standards of the Gospel, it is the only sanity. It is the narrow way that leads to life. It is the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in a field, the kingdom that is coming and is already here.
The Remnant
The way of Jesus has survived every empire that tried to crush it. It has also survived every empire that tried to co-opt it. It outlasted Rome. It outlasted Christendom. It will outlast whatever this is.
Because the way of Jesus is not a program or a platform, it’s a path. A way of being in the world that trusts the logic of the Cross over the logic of Caesar. A community of misfits and failures who have discovered that weakness can be a gift, that enemies can become friends, that death is not the final word.
I’m not calling us back to some golden age. There never was one. The church has always been compromised, always entangled with power, always falling short.
But there has always been a remnant. A faithful few who remembered the real story. Who fed the hungry and visited the prisoners and welcomed the stranger. Who stood with the powerless against the powerful. Who believed that the Lamb who was slain is worthy to receive power and wisdom and strength.
That remnant exists today. I’ve met them. They’re in every denomination and tradition. They’re exhausted and discouraged and often invisible.
But they’re there.
In the church basements, where the homeless are fed without a loyalty test. In the sanctuary movements protecting the undocumented. In the prayer vigils outside prisons and detention centers. In the quiet, stubborn insistence that every person—every person—bears the image of God.
They are keeping the faith even when it seems foolish. They are tending the flame as the darkness closes in.
They are the hope of the world.
An Invitation
I don’t know who is reading these words. I don’t know where you stand in the culture wars or what wounds you carry from them.
But I want to offer an invitation—not to a political party, not to a theological system, but to a way.
The way is narrow, and few find it. The way involves losing your life to find it. The way asks you to consider the lilies and the sparrows, to take no thought for tomorrow, to store up treasures that moth and rust cannot corrupt.
The way looks like foolishness. It looked like foolishness on Calvary, and it still looks like foolishness now.
But the way is alive. The way is risen. The way is still calling us to follow.
There is a world beyond the “real world” of Stephen Miller—a world where the last are first and the first are last, where the meek inherit the earth, where those who mourn are comforted and those who hunger for righteousness are filled.
That world is not a fantasy. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s the deepest reality there is—the reality that spoke the universe into being, the reality that hung on a cross and rose from a tomb, the reality that is making all things new.
We can live in that reality now. We can embody it, imperfectly and incompletely, but truly. We can be signs of the kingdom that is coming.
We can refuse the abyss.
We can swim toward home.
A Closing Prayer
I want to end the only way I know how—with a prayer.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God,
We confess that we have preferred the crown to the cross. We have loved power and called it faithfulness. We have baptized our fears and called them convictions. We have followed the strong man and forgotten the Suffering Servant. We have built walls when you called us to build bridges. We have blessed bombs when you called us to be peacemakers. We have worshiped whiteness and called it Christianity.
Forgive us.
Teach us again what we have forgotten: That your power is made perfect in weakness. That the last shall be first and the first shall be last. That the meek—not the mighty—will inherit the earth. That there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, For we are all one in you.
Give us the courage to follow you, Even when the crowd is cheering for Caesar. Even when the empire offers us a seat at the table. Even when the cross looks like foolishness and defeat. Even when our own tribe calls us traitors.
Bind us to one another across every divide: Red and blue, black and white, rich and poor, citizen and stranger. Make us the Beloved Community we have glimpsed but not yet become.
We don’t know what’s coming. But we know who goes with us.
And that is enough.
Amen.
Join the Online Lenten Class with John Dominic Crossan!
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.
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Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
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