“Why, then, have you come to interfere with us? For you have come to interfere with us and you know it yourself. But do you know what will happen tomorrow?… I shall condemn you and burn you at the stake as the most evil of heretics, and the very people who today kissed your feet, tomorrow, at a nod from me, will rush to heap the coals up around your stake, do you know that? Yes, perhaps you do know it.”
The Grand Inquisitor to Jesus (in Ivan Karamazov's tale)1
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky2
Here’s the way it sounds in my head:
HELL IF I KNOW
Through the patio door of my ground-floor college apartment strode Justin and Tim. As usual, Justin had pressed his face to the glass and seen me sitting on the sofa. And there was no need for the formalities of knocking before entering. Tim hailed from Boston. He was built like a brick house, thanks to years of martial arts and hours in the gym, but he was really a mystic and philosopher at heart. Justin, too, was a house, but it wasn’t made of brick. It was formed mostly of dough and cheese from the snack bar’s All-You-Can-Eat-Pizza Tuesdays. He was easily the most impulsive of the three of us, probably the most fun. But today, he was wearing his horn-rimmed black glasses, which meant there was something serious on his mind.
As Tim slid the patio door closed, Justin levelled his widened eyes at me and blurted out, “We’ve been talking this over for, like, two hours and we came to see what you think about it.”
I put a bookmark into chapter 57 of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and raised my eyebrows. “Well, color me intrigued,” I responded.
“We’ve been pondering Hell,” Tim followed on, as he dropped into the armchair across from the sofa and swept his dark shoulder-length hair out of his eyes.
I shuffled in my seat. “So… nothing all that serious,” I said.
Justin chimed back in, “We think we’ve worked out that Hell doesn’t exist. At least not the way we’ve always been taught about it.”
Alarm bells and sirens of various timbres and intensities began to sound off inside my head. There was a brief but awkward silence as I gathered my thoughts. “Hmmm…” was actually the smartest thing I could muster up, and with a scrunched-up face. Then: “O.K., I’ll bite. What have you come up with?”
We discussed the nature and character of God. We discussed Gehenna and Hades. We talked about Jesus and Paul and John of Patmos. We reflected on the Apostolic Fathers and Augustine and Calvin. And all the while, the twin senses of frustration and righteous indignation burned hotter and hotter within me.
People were guilty of their own mistakes, weren’t they? They were the ones who’d had premarital sex, or were gay, or had under-declared their tax liabilities, or had voted Democrat. An eternity of conscious fiery torment seemed like a pretty reasonable consequence to me, considering God’s admittedly high standards. I mean, you can’t say we weren’t warned. And anyway, a Get Out of Jail Free card was a mere sinner’s prayer away. Yes, Jesus himself sat patiently by the phone, waiting to take our call, accept our apology and offer forgiveness.
So foundational was the idea to my particular brand of Christianity that I couldn’t fathom how my friends could question it. The anger within me bubbled up as they spoke, until at last I blurted out the following: “If there’s no Hell, then what’s the point?”
Indeed, what was the point? What was the point of even being a Christian? What about Jesus himself? What was there for him to do if there was no Hell to save us from?
These questions remained with me long after Tim and Justin shuffled back through the sliding door and into the outer darkness. On the surface, our conversation had little to do with the American nation and its politics. I now realize it had everything to do with those things. Because the questions of who Jesus is and what his work in the world entails sit right at the guts of how we address politics and of the posture we adopt toward any nation.
DE-LORDED
How do Christian nationalists answer these questions about Jesus? Sure, we’re quick to speak about our ‘Lord and Savior’ Jesus Christ. From the earliest days of the movement, Christians have defined their faith around the acknowledgement of Jesus as Lord. Peter ends the first great evangelistic speech of the Christian era at Pentecost with this final flourish:
“Therefore, let all Israel know beyond question that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
Acts 2:36
Even the word ‘Christ’ here holds a royal, lordly meaning. Beyond that, in a universally known passage in Romans 10, Paul stresses the importance of confessing Jesus as ‘Lord’. These are but two examples of a New Testament that speaks with one voice about the Lordship of Jesus. The early Christians believed he was now in charge, that the powers of the world had been beaten and were merely hanging on to their last gasp of life. We know they meant it, because they restructured their lives around that reality.
For Christian nationalists, in actual practise, ‘Lord’ seems like more of a ceremonial position. I say this because we appear to want to police the world all by ourselves, without much input from Jesus. Of course, we claim to act on Jesus’ behalf. I can’t see how that’s true, since we don’t want to follow any of his suggestions or do things the way he did.
There isn’t much room for loving our enemies when what we really want is to destroy our enemies. Our craving for vengeance upon our ‘persecutors,’ to return blow for blow and insult for insult, doesn’t give us much scope for turning the other cheek. Eschewing power? Taking the position of a servant? We want to grasp power, the power of the highest offices, with both hands. We’re not patient for a kingdom that grows slowly, like a seed or yeast in a batch of dough, either. It takes too long. We scrabble for as much power and influence as we can get, here and now.
UPPER-LEVEL MANAGEMENT
How, then, do we deal with Jesus, since we can’t exactly get rid of him? We promote him. He gets an executive office on an upper floor and a clearly defined role: to administrate the afterlife. He sells the tickets to post-mortem bliss – and no one gets past the velvet rope into Heaven without his say-so. Yes, Jesus has a side hustle or two, like sending out warm and comforting feelings to his followers. As long as this doesn’t distract his attention from making that list of ‘Ins’ and ‘Outs’, the Heaven-bound and the Hell-bound, and checking it twice.
In that upper-level corner office, he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty doing the very un-Jesusy things we’re clearly prepared to do. We get to mock and denigrate and dehumanize our enemies, to crush them if we can, to marginalize people who don’t share our political views, to claw for authority by any means necessary. He gets plausible deniability. Sitting comfortably up there in a rolling chair, he gives us a knowing wink as we get about the very messy business of day-to-day political wrangling, ready to give his blessing to our actions. And at the end of it all, he’s there to forgive us for the countless times we brazenly cross moral and ethical lines. He understands, after all, that realities on the ground require us to divert from his teachings (and aren’t those teachings ‘spiritual’ anyway?). Hey, if you want to make omelettes, you’ve got to break a few eggs.
Eventually, even we Christian nationalists believe, Jesus will return. He’ll descend in the elevator from the executive level to take charge of things on the ground. At that point, we’re anticipating a completely different Jesus to emerge from those elevator doors than the one who showed up in first-century Palestine. We all recognise, I suspect, that first-century Jesus wouldn’t find a ready welcome among us. No, the Jesus we’re expecting will follow company policy to hate and condemn all the same people we do. Our Jesus is coming to chew bubble gum and kick ass – and he’s all out of bubble gum. Of course, by then, we should have things pretty well sorted out down here, so his job will be an easy one.
In that upper-level office, Jesus doesn’t have to get his hands dirty doing the very un-Jesusy things we’re clearly prepared to do.
Adam Lee Benner
HIS KINGDOM, HIS WAY?
Thus, effectively de-Lorded and relegated to a salvation data management position, Jesus becomes yet another underemployment statistic. But the upside is the creation of American jobs, since his Lordship duties are outsourced to the true-blue American patriots at the top of the Christian nationalist pyramid scheme and the political leaders they’ve anointed.
There’s nothing especially novel about the way contemporary American Evangelicals have restructured the divine order to write ourselves a blank check for dominion here on the earth. Christian nationalists have consigned Jesus to heavenly bouncer duty since the days of Constantine, through the age of Christendom, and the states of post-Reformation Europe, right up to the present day.
Yet what if the question of Jesus should be answered in a far different way? What if we couldn’t banish him upstairs with a blithe, “His kingdom is not of this world” (as inadequate a translation and as flimsy an interpretation as ever there was3). What if, like the most ancient Christians believed, Jesus was king now, and here, and we were not? If Jesus was more than just Savior-in-Chief? If he was Lord, and not just ‘Lord’ in name only. If he didn’t simply sanction our agendas from afar? And what if Jesus didn’t need or want us to make a play for terrestrial power, or to lord that power over others? In other words, what if he wanted us to live out his kingdom in his way?
Well, that should change everything. And for me, it did.
Until next time…
The grace of the Lord be with you,
As you seek to live out his teachings in your comings and goings,
As you work for his kingdom here on the earth.
- Whilst sitting at a pub with his brother, Alexei (the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel), the intelligent but cynical Ivan relates the narrative of a poem he’s thinking of writing. In the tale, which takes place during the Spanish Inquisition, Jesus himself unexpectedly shows up in a city square and raises a young girl to life. The old and powerful Grand Inquisitor has him arrested and imprisoned. He then visits and ‘interrogates’ Jesus at the prison – which is really more of a diatribe on Jesus’ temptation by the Devil. The bitter Inquisitor tells Jesus he was wrong to reject the Devil’s offers of power. So the Church has now corrected his error (!) and taken power over the people to bring them to heel.
- Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translators, Vintage, 2004; p. 250
- An inadequate translation because ‘of’ is too vague a word in English. The Greek of this verse in John reads as ‘εκ του κοσμου τουτου’, which would better equate to ‘from this world’ or ‘arising from this world’. In other words, Jesus’ kingdom is not the sort that arises in the way the world’s kingdoms do. It’s not from this world – but that doesn’t mean it’s not for this world
image sources
- ‘Redeployed’: Drawing by A. Benner (author)
Adam Lee Benner
A teacher and writer born and raised in New Jersey’s Philadelphia suburbs, Adam writes about his former life in American Christian nationalism and the Evangelical right – and (hopefully) better ways to be Christian. He lived for several years with his wife and best friend, Renée, as missionaries in Asia before relocating to her hometown of Melbourne, Australia with their two sons.
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