Photo by Edward Cisneros
The Trump era has provoked a flurry of popular commentary on whether the United States is currently witnessing a Christian revival, in particular among younger Americans. Recent headlines tell of record catholic conversions and ask whether Gen Z is “fueling a religious revival in America.” Others offer more sober assessments, pointing out that Gen Z remains the most secular generation of Americans, arguing that the real story is the growing divide between men and women, on religion as elsewhere. Recent years have, according to Gallup, seen a reversal of a longstanding gender gap on religion: where religion was once more important to women by a large margin, data now show that greater numbers of men say religion is very important in their lives. According to critics of the religious revival thesis, there is actually no empirical evidence of a Christian revival in the United States at scale. Just as young women have become more progressive as young men have turned to the right, so has the religion gap widened.
As Hannah Hartley writes this month for the Rumi Forum’s Center for Faith Identity & Globalization, “Christianity is not growing among Gen Z in any meaningful aggregate sense. It is consolidating, becoming smaller in total membership, more male, more politically conservative, and more legible as a vehicle for political identity.” The clickbait mirage of religious revival has obscured these very real trends for years, forestalling a more relevant and important conversation about the role Christianity plays in American politics and culture. And that conversation is worth having for several reasons, not least of which is that it underscores the deep ambivalence and ambiguity of Jesus as a figure in our cultural history. Hartley’s claim that Christianity has become a way of communicating one’s political identity tracks recent conversations on the “casinofication of the church” in the United States. To discuss this phenomenon, The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins recently interviewed theologian Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today and formerly president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. After reading Coppins’s story on gambling’s socially disastrous takeover of sports, Moore applied this idea of casinofication to the church, arguing that just as “the love of the sport itself was transformed by it becoming a vehicle for gambling,” the church and the gospel of Jesus have become instrumental means to some other end:
The gospel and the church become carriers for what we already care about on our own individual or tribal terms. When the gospel becomes a tool—for culture war, institutional survival, partisan politics, and personal brand—its relevance feels sharp and immediate. The things I already care about are being addressed. But the slow formation of intuitions, instincts, and affections is being hollowed out.
But during the interview, Moore drew an inapt comparison between current dynamics within the evangelical movement and the mainline Protestant churches during the civil rights era. The words of Jesus clearly carry a revolutionary social, political and economic message, just not in the sense of violent revolution. Sociologist and pastor Ryan Burge hit much closer to the mark in a recent interview when he remarked that “mainline churches have ‘long been a great mixing of American life,’ noting that in the postwar era Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, could be found sharing a pew on Sundays.” Burge also argues that popular reports of a spiritual revival in the country are based largely on vibes: “American Christianity is losing ground, with older and whiter congregations—heavily skewed towards conservative politics—often closer to dying than experiencing long-term growth.” He says that if there is a religious upswell to be found in America, then “it’s not a blue-collar revival,” “with church attendance skewed towards upwardly mobile professionals with a conservative bent.” The interview observes that “[t]he 19th-century reform movement sparked by Protestant clergy who proclaimed the social Gospel is now labeled as heresy in many evangelical pulpits.” The ideas of that movement became integral to the causes of peace and slavery abolition.
Americans are perpetually obsessed with the connection between Christianity and political and popular culture. Even among the secular, atheists, and agnostics, there seems to be a deep and enduring sense that the political and economic system requires some kind of spiritual validation or rationalization. But our ongoing obsession with reading Christianity and Jesus himself through the lens of our country’s toxic, superficial culture functions as an impediment to encountering the more radical traditions that are far more faithful to Jesus’s teachings. This cultural overlay (of, for example, figures like John Wayne, even of Trump depicting himself as Jesus) obscures the historical Jesus. It isn’t that American Jesus is a slight twist on the real, historical one; this American Jesus functions structurally as a total replacement, a cultural and political proxy representing and serving the very systems of power and injustice opposed by the real Jesus. The real Jesus implored people to give away their wealth, to reject even self-defense, and to live in open, active love and solidarity with social outcasts, a moral system that completely inverts the religious, social, and political system of purity, power, and prestige.
America and the Two Jesuses
What is perhaps most striking about the discourse on Christianity in our country is how little any of it has to do with the actual teachings of Jesus himself. His words have arguably been the ultimate casualty of our country’s obsession with Christianity’s place in culture and politics. When we talk about Christianity in our culture and politics, Americans want to talk about everything but what Jesus taught, perhaps because what he taught is so inconvenient for mainstream political narratives. Indeed, America’s current relationship with Christianity seems to discard the real Jesus almost entirely in its fixation on purity, rules, revenge, and ritualized political violence. American evangelicals in particular seem to have created a convoluted, identity culture-driven worldview that is actively hostile to the historical and philosophical Jesus.
American culture has preserved the name of Jesus as a brand identity even as it forgets his values. The truth is that the real Jesus cannot be made compatible with either our culture or its social, economic, and political system. But the casinofication of Christianity in the U.S. has meant that the cultural proxy version of Jesus, American Jesus, is fully integrated into the political-economic system and the authoritarian state apparatus. We have Jesus as a thin marketing cover for the status quo. Americans today cannot encounter the real Jesus because our social mainstream, including the church, constantly erects barriers to any genuine confrontation with what is a deeply challenging and revolutionary message. If the church is actually emptying out, not in a period of revival, then it is due to its saturation with an American culture that worships concentrated wealth, size and speed for their own sake, and the grotesque mass-violence of the modern imperial state. It’s hard to imagine anything but a hollowing out of communal spiritual life when Jesus’s subversive, counter-cultural demands are swapped out for a transactional and casinofied religion that serves to sacralize the power and greed of a tiny ruling class. No one will come to American Jesus, to thin blue line Jesus, to MAGA Jesus. Why would they? What is the lasting appeal of hate-your-neighborism? If American Jesus is the god of the privileged and powerful, where is the god of the poor and powerless today?
It wasn’t always this way. Our history includes many who did take Jesus’s radical message seriously. A longstanding American tradition, influenced by the ideas of the Quakers, understood that Jesus’s message cracks the foundations of our political system, invalidating even the state itself. Firebrand abolitionists like Henry Clarke Wright and William Lloyd Garrison advanced a philosophy of Christian nonresistance based on a strict reading of the Sermon on the Mount. This philosophy tolerated no compromise with the systemic violence of government. As Lewis Perry wrote, “Some abolitionists had come to believe that the Biblical injunctions against violence meant that Christians had to renounce all manifestations of force, including human government; this is the belief we call nonresistance.” Presented with a fundamental choice, align with the victim, as Jesus did, or with the apparatuses of violence and oppression that victimize others, the church has long opted for the latter. The story of Jesus’s crucifixion is among the ultimate mask-off moments for the arbitrary violence of both the state and organized religion. Jesus undermines the legitimacy of both in taking the place of the victim who is in fact innocent. The Quakers and nonresistants—and later Leo Tolstoy—saw that this narrative applies to all governments and all attempts of some humans to dominate others. You can’t make the innocent victim your god, your object of worship, and yet participate in exercises of power.
When he wrote his 1894 classic The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy explicitly drew on American Quakers and nonresistants. Quakers had responded earnestly to his book What I Believe years earlier, resulting in a fruitful correspondence that led Tolstoy to a form of Christian anarchism:
The Quakers sent me books, from which I learnt how they had, years ago, established beyond doubt the duty for a Christian of fulfilling the command of non-resistance to evil by force, and had exposed the error of the Church’s teaching in allowing war and capital punishment. In a whole series of arguments and texts showing that war—that is, the wounding and killing of men—is inconsistent with a religion founded on peace and good will toward men, the Quakers maintain and prove that nothing has contributed so much to the obscuring of Christian truth in the eyes of the heathen, and has hindered so much the diffusion of Christianity through the world, as the disregard of this command by men calling themselves Christians, and the permission of war and violence to Christians.
Tolstoy’s unorthodox views dispensed with the supernatural or mystical elements of Christianity, which he regarded as delusional. He believed that Jesus’s teachings pointed out a practical way of life based on the notion that it is impossible to fight evil with evil, to overcome violence and injustice with more of the same. Around the time that he heard from the Quakers, Tolstoy also heard from the son of William Lloyd Garrison, who sent along “a declaration or proclamation of ‘non-resistance’ drawn up by his father nearly fifty years ago.” This was the 1838 Declaration of Sentiments of the Peace Convention. The document is worth reading in its entirety. It sets out a principled and passionate denunciation of government, war, and all other forms of organized violence and suffering. “Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity only as we love all other lands.” Tolstoy argued that Christians had largely abandoned Jesus’s most important teachings, opting instead for something close to their opposite. “In affirming my belief in Christ’s teaching, I could not help explaining why I do not believe, and consider as mistaken, the Church’s doctrine, which is usually called Christianity.” The authorities took notice, and “Tolstoyans were severely persecuted and all but wiped out by Stalin.”
Perfectionism and Nonresistance
The radical peace activist and abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright was perhaps the single greatest influence on Garrison, particularly on these questions of theology and the moral obligation of nonresistance. The encounter between the two men would prove important to the lives of both and to the broader fight to abolish slavery. After they started discussing these major theological and philosophical questions, Garrison confided to a family member that he was moving in the direction of nonresistance: “I am more and more convinced that it is the duty of the followers of Christ to suffer themselves to be defrauded, calumniated, and barbarously treated, without resorting either to their own physical energies, or to the force of human law, for restitution or punishment.” It would be difficult to overstate Wright’s influence, not only on Garrison but on a number of radical movements. The Pulitzer Prize winning historian Merle E. Curti argued that “the story of the non-resistance movement in New England is in considerable measure the story of Henry Clarke Wright.” In his book on Christian anarchism, Alexandre Christoyannopoulos argues that Garrison had only a “brief Christian anarchist phase,” during this period of close association with Wright, thereafter reversing course, “whipping up support for the Civil War and campaigning for specific Presidential candidates.” Wright was clearly central to Garrison’s radicalization and embrace of full nonresistance, and no less to the development of a broader and more consistent conception of Garrison’s own projects.
Though their long friendship was not without its own controversies, Garrison was perhaps closer to Wright than to anyone else outside of his family, with the possible exception of the English parliamentarian and abolitionist George Thompson. They made a formidable team. A letter from Wright to Garrison in the spring of 1836 sheds some light on the nature of the relationship between the two men and that between the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and The Liberator. Wright says many are worried that “Abolitionism is losing ground,” and that the cause would advance faster if he, Garrison, were living in Boston. Wright proposes that Garrison’s salary be increased to accommodate the move. Records of the proceedings of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society show that the following year, in 1837, the subject of The Liberator’s finances remained an interest of the Board. According to these discussions, there was a running game of hot potato with regard to the support of this pillar of the abolitionist movement.
Wright’s views reflect a commitment to perfectionism, “absolute obedience to the law of God,” and a corresponding belief that this is practically attainable. The idea entailed, to Wright and many others, total, uncompromising submission to the law of love, and the command that we stand in solidarity with the weakest among us, regardless of the consequences or the politics. The perfectionism of this period embraced a set of claims and prescriptions arising from the ferment around the Second Great Awakening, in particular its Methodist and holiness strains. Though not unified doctrinally, these currents shared the confidence that believers could, by grace, reach a state of “entire sanctification,” in which intentional sin could be overcome, no longer ruling the human will. Particularly in the radical form accepted by Wright, this was and remains a controversial idea. The foundation of these beliefs comes from a number of more literal readings of certain New Testament commands and imperatives. Perfectionism as we find it in nonresistants like Wright was the moral reordering of the heart and soul, so that the individual could align their motivations with God. In Wesleyan terms, this meant that Christian love must be the guiding principle for every action, whether in the political realm or not. By the 1830s, revivalists who had inherited these ideas pushed them with a new sense of urgency, and they entered contemporary political debates like those about slavery. Within this social and religious context, perfectionism refers to both private moral fortitude and the broader idea that Christians must live as if the Kingdom of God were already here. For Wright and many others like him, this meant refusing any act of unity or complicity with slavery-supporting churches or with any law or government body.
For Wright, full nonresistance and nonviolence were not a choice or something he could opt out of even if he wanted to. As the subject of frequent attacks, many violent, he likely did not want to. But he believed that perfect love could not do harm and perfect obedience to God was at odds with all violence. His perfectionist doctrine taught that Christians could not compromise with sin, even in its institutional forms, even by taking up special titles and costumes. The antinomian valence of Wright’s ideas is in his reading of the gospel of Jesus Christ as releasing believers from an obligation to any human law, whether moral, statutory, or otherwise. His pacifism and abolitionism were practically implied in the more general idea that we have a duty to follow the New Commandment and hue to nonviolence even when these would directly contradict the law of the land. The only binding law for Wright was heaven’s perfect law of love. His defense of human rights is an early precursor of contemporary thinking about that term; he argued that one’s membership in the human family is the only proper basis for any idea of rights.
In Wright’s view, war was an ethical lapse rooted in the same godless logic that justifies slavery. In a letter to the English abolitionist Joseph Barker in 1842, shortly after Massachusetts celebrated Thanksgiving (the holiday was celebrated on various dates in different parts of the country), Wright wrote of “the ridiculous folly and downright madness of seeking to make ourselves safe by surrounding ourselves with weapons of death.” We might wonder what Wright would make of the nuclear age, the internet age, the AI age, &c. Beneath his forceful, often aggressive rhetoric, Wright was a sophisticated thinker and his pacifism was both moral and strategic. Like Gandhi and MLK later, Wright thought that nonviolence was vital to preserving the integrity of the movement. He thought that even defensive violence would beget more violence. “We can have no hope of making others love us while we have the means to kill them in our hands,” he wrote to Rev. Barker. Elsewhere he writes, “If defensive war be ever right and Christian, even in the last extremity of provocation, then every scene of horror recorded in this book, however revolting and shocking, may be reconciled with the spirit and precepts of Christianity; for such deeds are its inevitable accompaniments.”
The Liberator in its Time
Given these views, Wright and Garrison were the subjects of sustained and almost constant charges of everything from strategic folly to treason and everything in between. Garrison and The Liberator were at the tip of the spear, at least among white abolitionists (indeed it was not without the early and committed support of the Black community that he was able to keep the fledgling paper alive). In formal terms, The Liberator always stood alone as an institution. It was never officially tied to or subsumed under any other organization, whether founded to promote anti-slavery or nonresistance. The paper was committedly independent, and it was in large part this independence and the boldness of its anti-slavery message that made it such a compelling force for freedom. From its beginnings with a modest circulation and tight money, it became a key nerve center of the abolitionist movement, functioning as a kind of community bulletin board for many. Today’s radicals will note several core aspects of the Garrisonian abolitionists in their strategies and practices. They build a voluntary, decentralized network of independent presses and abolitionist papers, anti-slavery groups, churches and lecture halls open to their message, and travelers and distributors. They coordinated, but they were independent and autonomous. The Garrisonians aversion to party politics, evident in their disdain for the Liberty Party and the burgeoning Republican coalition, lays an anti-political framework for later radicals in the U.S., including the anarchists.
Throughout the 1830s and ‘40s, Wright undertook sustained, multi-state lecture tours, often moving towns every few days. These tours frequently found him covering hundreds of miles over the course of a month, moving on foot, by stage coach, and any other cheap means he could find. Massachusetts was a major hub of anti-slavery organization and action at the time, and the New England Anti-Slavery Society was officially founded in 1832 in Boston. Many opponents of slavery during Wright’s day wanted to make sure that the slavery question was kept completely separate from every other political issue, an effort to avoid alienating potential allies. The New England Non-Resistance Societywas established in Boston in 1838. That year also saw the Trail of Death, the forced relocation of almost 900 members of the Potawatomi tribe from their homes in Indiana to a reservation in Kansas. But Wright saw all issues as connected. The Reverend Elijah Parish Lovejoy’s murder in November of the previous year had only aggravated tensions already growing within several reform movements, creating divisions among the agitators for slavery abolition and peace. Lovejoy was among the most outspoken opponents of slavery in the clergy before his murder; he operated a printing press and circulated anti-slavery articles.
This was a time of extreme brutality and indifference to human life. Wright’s abolitionism comes out of this context, and he recognized the connections between the issues, for example, between the treatment of enslaved people and that of the native tribes. Wright used one address to urge fellow citizens to “treat the slaveholder as they would a robber, a murderer, or a pirate.” The uncompromising position he staked out came to be called the Natick Resolution, and it was sent along with letters to both John Brown, in an expression of support, and to the governor of Virginia at the time, Henry A. Wise:
Whereas, Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God; therefore,
Resolved, That it is the right and duty of the slaves to resist their masters; and it is the right and duty of the people of the North to incite slaves to resistance, and to aid them in it.
The Natick Resolution came on the heels of John Brown’s heroic raid on Harpers Ferry, and while Wright himself always urged non-violence, many of his fellow anti-slavery agitators believed the language risky and alienating. They argued that it should be moderated. If the nonresistant abolitionism of Garrison and Wright was too extreme for the mainstream of the Liberty and Republican parties, then it nonetheless fell short of John Brown’s zeal. The Garrisonian pacifists were careful to distance themselves from Brown and his actions, even as they lauded his moral courage and shared his view that slavery must be abolished immediately. Garrison had this to say about John Brown in the wake of his death: “As to Capt. Brown, all who know him personally are united in the conviction that a more honest, conscientious, truthful, brave, disinterested man, (however misguided or unfortunate,) does not exist…” Another reaction comes from Charles K. Whipple, a frequent contributor to The Liberator and a member (and at the time on the board of managers) of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society: “But if Brown is not to be praised for fighting, even for liberty, what is to be said of Wise, and the military ruffians of the Slave Power, who shed blood in defence of slavery?” Wright likewise understood that the “defensive” violence of the political ruling class always carries its own motives and momentum, creeping outward from its stated mission. He believed that the state’s ultimate advantage was violent confrontation, and thus that violent resistance played to the strengths of the ruling class.
Sacred Violence and the Scapegoat
American “power Christians” have little use for this part of our past. Theirs is an authoritarian movement that stands for exactly the kinds of people and social dynamics Jesus spoke out against, that invokes religion to justify violating the rights of others. It is the empty, cynical Christianity of copaganda, racism, and misogyny. America’s brand of red, white, and blue evangelicalism has become poisonous and contrary to the clear message of Jesus. As it did in Rome after Constantine, Christianity has become a regime religion in the United States, blotting out a radical message of love and equality for a largely meaningless brand capable of covering a system of global empire, extreme exploitation, and domestic repression and police statism.
Christian anarchism presents a very different interpretation of and response to the message of Jesus, one that foregrounds Jesus’s lack of regard for power and position, his egalitarianism and message of love and compassion. The clear message of the gospel is one of love—love for people different from you, love for the poor and the downtrodden, love for the stranger and the migrant, love for the sinner and the criminal. It is not a message of hatred, reaction, nationalism, bigotry, or xenophobia. By identifying with the victim, Jesus stripped religious violence of its apparent legitimacy. If the gospel reveals and discredits sacred violence, then followers of Jesus should move in the direction of nonviolence, reconciliation, and solidarity with victims rather than participation in systems of coercion. Too many American Christians have turned this message on its head by embracing and adopting the violence of the state, attempting to put it back in the place of sacredness. But the embrace of state power is the ultimate insult to the faith they claim. For the Quakers, nonresistants, and Christian anarchists generally, violence is never a pathway to redemption or salvation. It can only continue a cycle of evil, destruction, and suffering. Their “ultra” position, the total rejection of war, politics and elections, the death penalty, and punishment itself, is their active recognition of the fact that violence is not sacred and never could be.
