Dear Beloved Community,
REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIANITY AND POWER STRUCTURES
One of the central questions running through Christian history is simple but uncomfortable: does Christianity stand with power, or does it stand with those pushed to the edges by power?
Unfortunately, in our modern political culture, we often see those who claim the name Christian more concerned with appeasing the powerful than standing beside the vulnerable. Yet the roots of the Christian faith did not sprout from fields of power. They grew in the soil of a people who remembered slavery and liberation and were watered by the tears of prophets who spoke against kings. Jesus lived and taught in that same ground, among the poor, the sick, and the socially unwanted. The earliest Christians were not the cultural center. They were the margins.
But history shifted. As Christianity moved from persecuted minority to official religion of empire, the church often began to protect stability more than people. The same Scriptures were read, but now from the seat of authority rather than from the underside of society. A faith once planted in hard earth learned to grow comfortably in imperial gardens, and the fruit changed with the soil.
Black liberation theologians have forced the modern church to face this tension honestly. Writing from the experience of slavery, segregation, and racial violence, they ask: When Christianity blesses oppression, does it remain faithful to Christ at all?
Black churches became fertile ground for the Civil Rights Movement, and its leaders called on white pastors to join them in their fight against injustice. The response was often silence, with many arguing that churches need to stay out of politics and focus only on saving souls. Black theologians remind us that the gospel never has been and never can be apolitical. A faith that ignores suffering, excuses injustice, or asks the harmed to be patient while protecting the powerful has taken the side of empire. The Christ revealed in Scripture stood in solidarity with the oppressed. Jesus was crucified for standing against empire and power structures.
A century before black theologians embraced liberation as the hallmark of their faith, abolitionist Frederick Douglass identified the core conflict that existed and continues to exist in American Christianity. He spoke of the Christianity of Christ as pure, peaceable, impartial, and a defender of the oppressed. This faith is centered on love, redemption, and liberation. Douglass contrasted this with the
Christianity of the Land, which he called a “climax of all misnomers,” a “boldest of all frauds,” and a “grossest of all libels”. He condemned this type of Christianity in the sharpest of words. He defined the Christianity of the Land as a slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering religion practiced by hypocrites who use faith to justify cruelty.
Today, we might define the Christianity of the Land as a stranger-rejecting, trans-scapegoating religion grown in the soil of fear and watered by the tears of the oppressed.
Perhaps my gardening metaphor here is overgrown and needs some trimming, but Jesus taught us how to judge faith: look at the fruit. When fear, exclusion, and harm grow from it, we already have our answer. The Christianity of the Land is not bearing good fruit.
And a tree that bears bad fruit is not healed by pruning. It must be pulled up by the roots and replaced with a tree rooted in the Christianity of Christ.
Blessings,
Pastor Brian