Special Episode: The Colonized God: Reflections on Christian Nationalism and Jesus by Dr. Matthew Taylor
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In this special episode, Brad introduces an audio essay by Matt Taylor titled 'The Colonized God.' Taylor, known for his work on the New Apostolic Reformation, explores the complex relationship between Christians who are not Christian nationalists and Christian supremacists, who use Christianity to gain power and marginalize others. The essay delves into how different interpretations of Jesus' teachings can divide communities and the impact of Christian supremacy on contemporary American politics, especially in light of events like the January 6th Capitol riot. Taylor also reflects on his personal journey as a Christian amidst these tumultuous times and calls for a return to the core values of humility and compassion epitomized by Jesus.
00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview
02:00 The Colonized God: An Audio Essay by Matt Taylor
02:06 Christian Symbols and January 6th
05:23 Christian Supremacy and Its Roots
09:59 Theological Reflections on 1 John
13:28 Gnosticism and Early Christian Conflicts
23:47 Modern Implications and Personal Reflections
35:09 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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This is from Matt Taylor and it's an audio essay that he wrote and it's called The Colonized God.
Many of you are familiar with Matt as the creator of Charismatic Revival Fury and just one of the world's leading experts on the New Apostolic Reformation.
Today what we have from Matt is a little different.
It's a theological essay about the ways that those who are not Christian nationalists can understand both their relationship to those among us who are Christian supremacists and Christian nationalists, those who have used Christianity to take power and to marginalize others.
It's also an articulation of how he understands Jesus, not as a powerful elite or somebody who would vie for nationalistic might, but instead a different kind of Savior.
I want to say that for a lot of you, this will be a really welcome contribution, something that will be refreshing and a version of what you consider the gospel that Might be inspiring and helpful in a time that often feels full of religious people who are doing the very opposite of what their faith tradition seems to be teaching them.
On the other hand, I also know there's a bunch of you out there who are not religious or have had bad interactions and experiences with religion.
Folks who really are not in the mood to do more religion, to hear more sermons and so on.
So this may not be the episode for you, if that's the case, and we'll totally understand if right now you decide, hey, I think I'm going to sign off and listen to something else.
Nonetheless, I hope that this is something that for a bunch of you is helpful.
I know that Matt put a lot of time and effort into it, and it is very clear and a nice articulation of the gospel that is much different than what we are normally talking about on this show.
Without further ado, here is Matt Taylor delivering The Colonized God.
As they packed and traveled cross-country to be in Washington, D.C.
on January 6, 2021, as they dressed that morning and chose which signs and flags and banners to carry, the Capitol rioters consciously, individually decided what message they wanted to convey on that portentous day.
And a lot of what they wanted to convey was about Jesus.
Some rioters carried flags or signs that said, Jesus 2020.
A name we can only presume they did not actually write in on their ballots that election.
A variety of Christians were surrounding the Capitol, praying in the name of Jesus as violence overtook the building.
One popular flag and or shirt read, Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.
As though those two thoughts were inseparable.
Preachers, sometimes using amplified speaker systems, shouted and pleaded the blood of Jesus repeatedly at the besieged building, believing that the power of this invocation, this incantation, would spiritually buoy the rioters and swing the election to Trump.
Groups of Christian worshippers gathered to sing songs to King Jesus even as, yards away, rioters viciously assaulted Capitol Police officers and aimed to capture or even kill elected lawmakers doing their constitutional duty.
Jesus was the message of the day.
His was, evidently, the only other positively invoked name after Trump, of course, throughout the unruly crowds.
They had endless profanities and death threats from Mike Pence, disloyal Republicans, and despicable Democrats.
But Jesus was perceived to be on their side, the heavenly patron of their attempted coup.
What would Jesus, the first century Galilean peasant, think of all this postmodern mayhem?
It's certainly not the first time his name has been leveraged for power in a hyper-partisan or violent setting.
Where is Jesus, the meek and the mild, amid the bedlam?
As a religious studies scholar specializing in modern radical religious movements, I spent the past three years immersed in January 6th.
It was a day of violence baptized in religion.
Yes, there were out-and-out militia groups, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, the less well-known Three Percenters, not to mention QAnon conspiracists who stormed the Capitol, but far more people who were present that day in the surrounding crowds or breaching the iconic center of American democracy did not identify with any militia groups.
Among this larger crowd, a huge subset were simply ardent, self-professed Christians.
Hence all the Jesus references.
Many people have characterized the Christianity on display on January 6 as part of Christian nationalism.
And they're not wrong.
Such a blending of Americana and Christian piety, the endless variations on the cross and flag aesthetic, definitely fits under the heading of American Christian nationalism.
But what I've found, delving deeply into the theologies, leadership networks, and Christian communities that were at the heart of the Capitol riot, is that while the molten core of the problem is within Christian nationalism, it's also more narrow and concentrated than generic Christian nationalism.
A lot of Christian nationalism in the U.S.
is hazy, nostalgic, sentimental, and passive.
The Christian networks and ideologies that gave theological scaffolding to the attempted insurrection are part of the hardened, radicalized edge of American Christian nationalism.
What I call Christian supremacy.
Christian supremacy, by my definition, is a mindset and a bouquet of theologies that demand Christians' superiority and priority in society.
It's akin to, and overlaps with, white supremacy, in that each movement views one type of person—whites, Christian—as intrinsically better than other people.
Christian supremacists believe that Christians have been mandated by God to take over and reorganize modern societies around their interpretation of Christianity.
They've piled together certain concepts from the Bible, words like dominion, contrast between light and darkness, or angels versus demons, the battle imagery of the Old Testament, all to frame an assertive Christianity.
Of course, Christian supremacists disdain Christians like me, who are quite content with the separation of church and state, and who don't feel superior to our Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, non-religious, and atheist friends.
I don't feel any need for America to be a Christian nation to validate my faith.
But I don't count.
Because in the Christian supremacist minds, real Christianity is aggressive, crushing all demonic opposition, and building God's kingdom on the earth by hook or by crook.
I found in my research that the same Christian supremacist networks that instigated January 6th were thoroughly entwined with Donald Trump's two previous presidential campaigns and his administration, making up the lion's share of his official and unofficial evangelical advisors.
And these same Christian supremacist leadership networks, particularly one called the New Apostolic Reformation that I've written about in a forthcoming book, Created the theological frameworks that have made Trump palatable to broader American Christianity.
Most terrifying, Christian supremacy is growing in popularity and in ferocity as we enter the crucible of the 2024 election.
I wish I could inform you, dear listeners, that January 6th was an aberration, an interesting historical footnote, but I live and breathe this stuff, and the leadership networks and theological ideas that gave us January 6th are far more popular today than they were on January 6th.
Christian supremacy is spreading rapidly in the United States as Trump and his oligarchic Christian allies activate more and more run-of-the-mill Christian nationalists with radical theologies to envisage a wholesale Christian commandeering of the United States.
I'm not one for predicting the future, but all the ingredients are in place for more Christianity-inflected political violence amidst, God forbid, once again following a hyperpolarized election.
But if you want to know more about modern Christian supremacy, the New Apostolic Reformation, the merger of Christian theology and far-right politics, and the particular leaders who are leveraging access to Donald Trump to maneuver a radicalization of American Christianity,
Please go listen to my audio documentary podcast, it's called Charismatic Revival Fury, or read my book on that topic titled The Violent Take It By Force, because that's not precisely what this essay is about.
Here, I want to think about the rest of us Christians.
How are we, who are not Christian supremacists, not Trump supporters, not Capitol rioters, to think about the growing co-optation of Christianity and Jesus, all in support of a petty would-be despot?
This essay was born of a sermon I didn't want to write.
I'm a Christian who was trained as a minister.
I have a seminary degree, but I haven't been in the headspace for sermonizing of late, immersed as I've been in the deep reaches of Maga Christianity.
I speak in churches all the time, yet I come there as an expert, a teacher, a scholar.
In my research, I labor in the Christian fever swamps, and it's easier to be clinical than personal or theological there.
Then my friend asked me to preach at her church while she was away.
Even worse, hers was one of those Presbyterian churches where the preacher gets assigned the lectionary passage to preach from that week.
I couldn't even choose my topic, or text, or recycle an old sermon.
But, unable to find any good excuse to overcome a friend's request, I agreed to do it.
I was assigned 1 John 3, a passage I could almost recite by heart from childhood memory, but it didn't strike a chord for me this time.
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.
The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him.
Beloved, we are God's children now.
What we will be has not yet been revealed.
What we do know is this.
When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.
I was nonplussed.
What was I, a disturbed and hapless researcher of Christian extremism, to do with such uplifting and, frankly, mushy sentiments?
What cheerful message of love and affirmation and being God's children could I find the heart to preach when every day I'm confronting just how berserk and dangerous God's children can become?
Historically, we don't know very much about this little letter of 1 John.
One John, as Donald Trump might say.
Christian tradition titles the author John, and there are echoes of other texts in the Johannine tradition here, but we honestly have no clear historical idea who wrote this letter, when precisely it was written, or even how many authors contributed.
So let's just call the authors him, her, them, First John.
The letter gives us some clues to the situation of the recipient community.
What is evident, if you read First John's prose carefully, is that this is a community in the midst of trauma.
A group of fellow believers, how many is uncertain, have broken off.
The author writes in chapter 2, They went out from us, but they did not belong to us.
For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us.
But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us.
It's very First John to say the same thing three times in slightly different ways.
Who were these going out Christians?
Why did they depart?
What is apparent in 1 John's exhortations is that this community has fractured over a theological fight, a fight about Jesus, particularly Jesus' identity.
1 John notes in chapter 4, many false prophets have gone out into the world.
By this you know the Spirit of God.
Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.
The going out group has apparently embraced a vision of Christianity fixated upon knowledge or special insight, in the Greek gnosis.
This vision would eventually be labeled Gnosticism.
But when this letter was written, this new theological trend might not have even had a name yet.
It was just another version of the Christian message, and it was quite popular, spreading along with the early church.
For some centuries, the texts and identity of the Gnostics were lost to history, so all we had were other polemical Christian texts denouncing Gnosticism.
But in the 1940s, an Egyptian farmer stumbled across some ancient scrolls hidden in a sealed jar in a cave.
These turned out to be a set of Gnostic source texts, probably written down a hundred years or so after 1 John lived.
They're technically called the Nag Hammadi Library, though it's sometimes shorthanded as the Gnostic Gospels.
These are texts written and collected by the Gnostics themselves, peepholes into their worldview.
So, within the last century, we've learned a lot about Gnosticism.
The Gnostics claimed that they were the real Christians, who got special knowledge directly from God or directly from Jesus.
They talked less of sin and redemption than illusion and enlightenment.
Believing the right insight could ignite the divine spark within each of us.
The Gnostics were uncomfortable with the idea of God being embodied, as in the Jesus of the Gospels, because bodies are icky and bedraggled.
Similarly, they didn't like the cross or the image of a tortured, dying God.
The Gnostics were spiritual elitists, claiming that they had to keep their special knowledge of God secret and exclusive within their enlightened group.
Many later Orthodox church leaders would eventually label Gnosticism a heresy.
But this letter came before all that.
Back when proto-Gnosticism was growing like a lively weed in early Christianity's verdant and blossoming theological gardens.
In 1 John's letter, we encounter Gnosticism, not as a developed sect or potent heresy, but as a nascent tendency, with this quasi-Gnostic group having just broken off from 1 John's audience church.
The remaining members of the church are left evidently traumatized, in need of hope and encouragement that they don't have to attain special membership, elite Christian status, or platinum level Christianity.
Hence, 1 John reassures them in chapter 2, But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and all of you have knowledge.
I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and you know that no lie comes from the truth.
Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ?
This is the Antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.
Now, when was the last time you heard a good Antichrist reference?
The Antichrist is not someone you talk about at nice theological parties.
Raised as I was in a fundamentalist evangelical household, this Antichrist concept really struck a chord in my youth.
I was taught that the Antichrist would emerge suddenly, within history, take over the global order and inaugurate the end of time.
My family even had arguments about whether Bill Clinton could be the Antichrist.
He sure looked evil from inside our little 1990s evangelical Republican enclave.
But for First John, Antichrist is not one single person.
The author even calls this break-off group, the spiritual elitists who went out of the church, Antichrists, plural.
This is from chapter 2 again.
Children, it is the last hour.
As you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so now many Antichrists have come.
From this we know it is the last hour.
They went out from us, but they did not belong to us.
For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us.
But by going out, they made it plain that none of them belonged to us.
Here, antichrist is not a person, but a propensity.
A state of being antichrist.
A denial of the meaning of the cross.
A vision that is antithetical to the character of Jesus.
Crucially, for 1 John, Antichrist is not a power or an identity that emerges outside of the church.
No, Antichrist originates within the church, among people who claim that they are for Jesus, but who undermine the nature of Jesus.
Over centuries of interpretation and speculation, we Christians have blown up this Antichrist character into the arch-singular villain of the apocalypse, the last card in the devil's hand.
But perhaps we've missed the original point.
In fact, in Greek, the prefix anti- means against, just as it does in English.
But it can also mean in place of.
1 John seems to be accusing the Antichrist of substituting another Jesus, or perhaps taking the place of Jesus themselves.
Indeed, 1 John is the one who appears to be responsible for coining the concept of Antichrist.
In the New Testament, the word appears only here and in 2 John.
This more open and capacious understanding of Antichrist as the dark matter of disdaining or replacing Christ, which originates within the church, may have been the intended interpretation all along.
Sometimes the people who espouse the greatest love for Jesus are the ones who hold him in the gravest contempt.
These proto-Gnostic antichrists sound not so unlike today's Christian supremacists.
So what is the author's message to the remaining community, the onlookers of these flashy antichrists?
To a community that has been beaten down, abandoned, and told that they lack the special insight to truly know God, the real knowledge that will make them real Christians?
To them, the author writes words of comfort.
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.
The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him.
Beloved, we are God's children now.
What we will be has not yet been revealed.
What we do know is this, when He is revealed we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is.
My first impression was that these words were cloying, mushy.
But in the context of the community's trauma and self-doubt, we hear how 1 John's message cuts to the heart of the matter.
The two words the author repeatedly uses to address this harassed and insecure community of early Christians are children and beloved.
This is 1 John's unmistakable theme.
Don't let the Antichrist knock you off the path.
It's all fine and good to be knowledgeable, but it's more important to know that you are beloved children of God.
The heart of Jesus' teaching and life is not that we are special because we have knowledge or power.
It's that God has stooped lower than any God ever dared.
And the stooping God invites us to imitate them because in lowering ourselves we find the grace and the peace of being children of God.
This is what the Gnostics of the early church and the Christian supremacists of today miss about Jesus.
Jesus, the God-man, did not take on flesh in order to form an elite clique.
Jesus was not to elevate his followers above the rest of humanity.
No!
Jesus taught us to serve, to deny ourselves, to take on his humility, his compassion, his gentleness.
Gospel of Jesus is not spiritual elitism?
It's not Christian supremacy?
Lord, help us!
Even a cursory glance at church history reveals that Christians in the church are now and always have been deeply corrupted and corruptible.
It's oddly comforting to me that even early Christianity was full of antichrists.
Because we're allowed no idealizing of the past.
No restoration of a time when Christianity was not this ungainly creature we see before us.
Christianity has given the world all sorts of abuses.
Pogroms, crusades, inquisitions, colonialism, racism, and imperial violence.
Christianity is a human tradition, full of human follies and human tyranny, all loaded up on the whip-scarred back of a humble Jesus.
Not that I'm proposing some alternative to Christianity.
A Christian I am, a Christian I remain, despite a deep acquaintance with much of the pain Christians have inflicted upon this world.
It's just that Christianity is, like the two natures of Jesus, contradictorily full up with humanity and divinity, wheat and tares, Jesus imitators and antichrists, sublime insights and crooked institutions.
I've heard many stories from friends and colleagues who've left Christianity.
Disgusted by the abuse scandals, authoritarian pastors, ossified churches, and televangelist hucksters.
I get where they're coming from.
I've considered it.
But leaving Christianity has always felt, in my gut, perhaps my soul, like an American citizen so disillusioned upon learning the whole ugly history of America, the manifest destiny, enslaving, colonizing, warmongering history, that they simply decided to stop voting.
How does that make anything better?
And I am still hauntingly, relentlessly drawn to the gospel Jesus preached and lived.
That God has drawn near to our hapless humanity.
And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.
God with us.
God among the God forsaking.
God the draggled.
The self-emptying one who summons us to be self-emptying ones.
The fact that proud Christianity has never lived down to Jesus' summons, but tokens are still in need of redemption nature.
But what hope can a humble, compassionate, gentle, self-emptying church have in a world of powerful Christian antichrists?
Our Christian supremacist brothers and sisters, and yes, though they are Antichrist, they are still somehow our sisters and brothers.
They seem to be on the upswing.
They have the Christianity that gets politicians' attention.
They have the snazzy, upbeat, energetic Christianity that attracts the crowds.
They have the special knowledge.
It's true.
Their Christianity looks more presentable, more forceful, more captivating.
Theirs is a proud Christianity worth fighting for.
A muscular Christianity.
A victorious Christianity.
But we have Jesus.
Jesus, the peasant carpenter, knows nothing of their elitism.
Jesus, the suffering servant who willingly goes to the cross, he knows only the sharp receiving end of their domination.
Jesus, the compassionate one who always had time for the littlest and the least, Repeatedly denounced their supremacy and their proud cliques.
They are antichrists because, in place of Jesus.
Because Jesus wasn't good enough for them.
They've decided to conquer the world.
But conquest was never Jesus' aim.
Domination was never Jesus' game.
Jesus' aim was to stand with our beat-down, bedraggled, forlorn, and forsaken humanity to make us children of God and beloved.
The Antichrists have lost the plot.
They forgot Jesus' most fundamental lessons.
The servant of all, I am gentle and humble in heart.
Suffer the little children for Christ's sake.
How can people with so much knowledge, such elite status, have lost sight of the very bedrock of our faith?
Christ on the cross, the visible love of God.
If you know nothing else, know that!
In truth, Jesus, the historical human being, was born and died colonized by the Roman Empire.
In his life, he stooped under the threat of arbitrary death, random police violence, impoverishing taxation, all propagandized with imperial doublespeak Pax Romana.
Jesus, the colonized God, was executed by the authoritarian empire in the name of Make Rome Great Again.
But then, Jesus the Christian God was colonized by the Roman Empire three centuries later, when Constantine saw a savvy path to power.
How many empires have brandished Jesus, the homespun rabbi, who fled from every nominating party and platform of worldly authority, making him their weapon of war for power and dominance?
How many wannabe tyrants have invoked his name and sold their own colonized Bibles for a healthy profit?
Among the things I dislike most about imitating Jesus as I, we, failingly aspire to do is the call to love our enemies, even our Christian enemies, even our Antichrists.
Because Jesus absurdly, bizarrely, frustratingly loves the Antichrists, his enemies.
Jesus longs to tutor and serve them too, to call them beloved and children of God, if only they would repent of their violent fantasies and dreams of empire.
So, what will happen?
Will the Antichrist win?
Will Christian imperialism rise from the grave of the Enlightenment, marching across America and the globe with a modern Constantinian ambition?
Will the rickety scaffolding of our constitutional democracy hold through this election?
Can we survive another brush with despotism?
Will civility and pluralism persist so that we Americans can keep living into that complicated, painful, uncharted, genuine miracle of a multi-religious, multi-racial democracy we possibly could be becoming?
I love how First John gives voice to her, his, their own uncertainty.
Beloved, we are God's children now.
What we will be has not yet been revealed.
What we do know is this.
When He is revealed, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is.
We don't know what's ahead for us.
We have all this beautiful biblical imagery of the resurrection, the new creation, streets of gold, swords into plowshares, but we still don't know quite what we are intended for.
Humanity, us, remains a mystery to us.
What will our final outcome be?
What is God's theory?
The hypothesis behind this wild experiment called humanity hurtling through the millennia?
Well, according to 1 John, that's still yet to be revealed.
Hidden in the mysteries in the mind of God.
It's a great mystery of just how bad Christianity can get.
How low can we sink?
How much dehumanizing can be done in the name of the ever-colonized Christ?
How much spiritual elitism in Christian supremacy?
How much Christendom and crusades and inquisitions and pogroms and racism and elitism must the world endure of these antichrists?
Jesus told us, not even I know the day nor the hour.
We do not, we cannot know what our final outcome will be, but we have one truth to cling to.
Jesus.
When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.
Jesus, the eternal word and flesh.
Jesus, the self-emptying God-man.
Jesus, our elder brother.
Jesus, our bedraggled friend.
Jesus, the colonized and humble God.
The Antichrist can have all the world.
It'll turn to ashes in their hungry mouths.
Their special knowledge and platinum membership were always childish cliques.
Just more humanity dominating humanity.
That same old game.
Their will to power will never be satisfied.
Their supremacy will be their end, perishing like all the kingdoms of this world.
War and tears, innovation and decay.
We'll stand with the littlest and the least, the lost and the lowly.
We'll deny ourselves.
We'll follow Jesus into the empty and wild places.
We don't need a modern-day Cyrus to deliver us from exile.
For cultural exile is the heartland for a healthy church.
Christianity was always at its best when it was lived at the margins.
The center of power has proven too tempting for Christians, who've exchanged the blood-soaked cross of the colonized for the Constantinian sword over and over and over.
