Speaker 1Welcome to another change-making conversation from Baptist News Global. You're listening to a special podcast series titled Highest Power, Church and State, featuring writer, poet, and musician Rick Pidcock. Now, here's Rick.
Speaker 2Growing up in independent Baptist fundamentalism, I often heard warnings not to conform to the world. We'd remind ourselves of Jesus' words that the world will hate us. So we figured that meant non-evangelicals would hate us for the offensive things we believed. But when I grew up, went to seminary, and began to learn about the world the Bible was written in, I eventually realized that the world, in the Bible times, wasn't non-evangelicals. It was the empire. Empires ruled the world. Their way of life was to rule the world. They ruled the world. Their way of systematizing everyone into authority and submission hierarchies under the threat of punitive violence embodied the values of power over neighbor that governed everything. So, when Jesus comes along and offers good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and to set free those who are oppressed, that means his followers would have a liberating presence in the world, one that deconstructs the empire's values and frees people to love their neighbor as self. As a result, the world, as defined by empire, would hate them. As we consider how the church and state have merged in the pursuit of highest power, we have to be honest and admit that evangelicalism has become the world. But because evangelicalism pulls its inspiration and language from the scriptures, which were written during empire, sorting these dynamics out can be tricky. One author who helps us do that is Matthew D. Taylor. He was the author of The Violent Takeover, and he wrote a book called The Violent Takeover, The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Democracy, and he actually has the same book editor and publisher that I have. Broadleaf Books has a number of really good resources on Christian nationalism and authoritarianism coming out over the next month, and one of the resources is Taylor's new book, Defying Tyrants, Following Jesus in a World of Antichrists. So, for today's episode, I sat down with Taylor to discuss how some of the themes in his book are showing up in the news today. I don't know if you saw this or not, but Benny Johnson went to Washington, D.C. last week for a meeting at the White House with Josh Howerton and Nick Freitas about a very powerful new Christian revival, which was kind of weird. And he said there were crusaders waiting for us outside the White House gates. And he also posted a video of them driving into D.C. that showed a golden statue of soldiers on horseback with the caption, this is what greets you when you enter the capital city. We are the Roman Empire. Must be made great again. So, before we apply this to today's Christian nationalists, could you just give us some of the backstory about what the Roman Empire was actually like?
Speaker 3Yeah, the Roman Empire was a horror. I mean, unless you were part of the Roman elite, right, maybe 3% of the Roman population that had it really great, that had plenty of money and plenty of slaves and military spoils of war and luxury goods, that was about 3% of the empire had that access to that kind of luxurious existence. The other 97% were pretty miserable. And so, obviously, history of Rome goes back a long ways. You have the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic really comes to an end under Julius Caesar in Jesus's grandparents' time, kind of mid-first century BCE. And then you have following after Julius, his successor, Octavian, who names himself Augustus, really inaugurates this period that gets called by historians and even historians of the time, the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome. But it wasn't peaceful for the occupied people of the empire. It was peaceful for the elites. I'm sure it was a very pleasant couple centuries for the Roman elites. If you were not part of that elite, then you were probably poor. And when we're talking about poor in the Roman empire, we're talking about people who barely get enough calories to sustain their body weight, barely enough food to survive. And that was probably 50, maybe even 60% of the empire. About a quarter to a third of the empire was enslaved people. The occupants of the empire were enslaved who had no rights, including no rights to their body. And then, of course, outside of the central Roman provinces, it was all colonies. And so you had the Roman empire there. An occupying empire army that would inflict great pain and suffering on people, forced taxation. And if you rebelled, you would be crucified. There was nothing unique about crucifixion in biblical story. We have tended to emphasize how important crucifixion is for all these kind of symbolic reasons and everything. For the Romans, it was not symbolic. It was a way of inflicting immense pain. It was kind of the apex punishment that they had for anyone who was an enemy of the state. And we know that tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people in the Roman empire were crucified. And it wasn't always in the way that we see depicted in kind of biblical movies or whatever, with a cross beam and a central kind of pillar. Sometimes it was to trees, sometimes it was to upside down. But the whole point of crucifixion was to terrorize the community, to inflict the most painful suffering they could on an individual as a message to the community, as a billboard. To the community, you step out of line and we're going to enforce some Pax Romana on you as well. And so, no, the Roman empire, when people start. And of course, the literary sources that we tend to have tend to come from those elite circles, where sometimes the Roman elites openly debated whether it was more pleasurable to rape male slaves or female slaves. I mean, this was the way that the Roman elites thought. It was about dominance. It was about power. It was about control. And they wanted to. They wanted everyone under their foot.
Speaker 2And my understanding is that there really was no upward mobility within those hierarchies. It was just basically your relationship structure was essentially authority and submission to those above and below you. And then, you know, if you don't submit, then, like you said, you face the punishment of violent power.
Speaker 3Yeah. I mean, there were possibilities of kind of personal advancement. But even that, you had to play by the power system that the Romans had created. So you could advance, say, through kind of serving in the military and kind of rise through the ranks of the military. If you were someone of lower birth, that was a potential path into a kind of more public or elite life. That participation meant that you were also part of this colonizing project and you would be dispatched out to conquer new people and slaughter new people, to put down rebellions, right, to crucify people. And so you had to kind of play by their rules. There was also a very elaborate system of patronage where people would basically find an elite person to sponsor them. But then you become a subsidiary of that person. You attach yourself to some kind of Roman elite and they become your patron and sponsor you. But you have to do everything that they say. So it's still hierarchical. But there were paths for men, not really for women, for men, who were not slaves, who perhaps could kind of have some claim on citizenship to rise in certain ways, but all within this system of power and domination. So the way that you might rise is through dominating and subjugating others.
Speaker 2So within that context of empire, we find the four gospels in the Bible that tell the story of Jesus. How did they depict Jesus' life and teaching in relationship to Rome?
Speaker 3One of the most interesting archaeological, kind of biblical archaeological discoveries we made in the last century and a half is we started to find some inscriptions, many of them from the reign of Augustus. Augustus died when Jesus was a teenager. So kind of spanning right around kind of the birth of Jesus. And what's fascinating about these inscriptions is they use language that we find in the Bible, but they're applying it to Caesar. And so these inscriptions will say things like, hey, we have good news, euangelion, the word that we translate as gospel. Hey, good news. You, the occupants of the empire have been conquered and your conqueror is actually a divine king, a God descended to earth. His name is Augustus and he has brought peace to the world. And he's making all things right in the world. Right? So this language, when we talk about the term euangelion, that term was a piece of imperial propaganda before it was appropriated by the Christians to speak about Jesus. And so I think you have to ask the question, well, then what are they, what are the gospel writers doing? Taking this language from the empire and applying it to Jesus, I think what they're doing is highlighting an extreme contrast between Jesus and Caesar. Jesus is the anti-Caesar. I think we see this most clearly in the gospel of Mark. Mark writes a very rebellious and subversive gospel where he is perpetually contrasting the Jesus in the story versus Caesar, right? And so when Jesus talks about the kingdom of God, a phrase that has become kind of banal in Christian discourse now, well, what is the kingdom of God? What's going on in the kingdom of God? Well, it's the opposite of the kingdom of Caesar. In Caesar's kingdom, Caesar sits on his throne in Rome and commands the fate of people at a distance and demands their worship, demands that these lowly occupants of the empire all worship him as a god. This is what is called the imperial cult. One of the few rules in the Roman empire religiously was you have to bow before Caesar and pretend he's a god. And so when Jesus talks about the kingdom of God, he's using all these nature parables. He's talking about people on the fringes of this bigger empire. And the king, Jesus, walks among them. And he's talking about the people on the fringes of this bigger empire. And the king is a lowly peasant. The king serves and sacrifices. Caesar demands that everyone else sacrifice on his behalf. Jesus sacrifices on behalf of the occupants of the kingdom of God. And so I think there's a very, very intense contrast going on there. And this, I think, has led to a lot of confusion in Christian history because we fail to see the irony of this phrase, the kingdom of God. People who are writing these things, Jesus himself is consciously contrasting the kingdom of God with all the kingdoms of this world, another phrase that we find sometimes in the gospels. And the kingdoms of this world are built around power, domination, imperialism, slavery, conquest. The kingdom of God comes in the form of a helpless baby in Galilee. The kingdom of God comes in an itinerant healing preacher who is going around the country, saying, blessed are the poor, right? It's an inversion of Caesar's kingdom. And I think that that in and of itself is a part of this subversive nature of the New Testament. I mean, when Jesus gets executed, when he is crucified, he is being treated as an enemy of the state. And not like in a kind of, oh, you know, sometimes Christians will say, you know, the Romans really didn't understand Jesus. And they perceived him as a threat, even though he wasn't a threat because his kingdom was not of this world. That's BS. No, Jesus was a threat. What Jesus was teaching was undermining the very vision of power, the vision of hierarchy, the vision of control and domination that was predominant throughout the empire. And when in Mark chapter 10, Jesus turns to his disciples who are fighting about power, who are having an argument about power and superiority. And Jesus says to them, look, look around you. Look at the lords of the Gentiles. Look at the rulers of the Gentiles. They are tyrants. And they rule over, they love to lord it over each other. He says, but not so with you. Whoever wants to be great among you must be the slave of all. And whoever wants to be the first has to be the last, right? Jesus is perpetually undermining and subverting notions of Roman hierarchy and challenging his followers to live by the rules of a kingdom that will knock the empire in this world because it is about servanthood. It's about sacrifice. It's about loving the least and the lowest. But that in and of itself is a defiant stance. And so when Jesus goes to his execution, especially in the gospel of John, I think this is extremely clear that the authorities, the Jewish authorities who are handing him over to the Romans, they're speaking to Pilate. And in the midst of trying to persuade Pilate that they have nothing to do with his Jesus guy, they tell Pilate, don't you know that anyone who claims to be a king is defying Caesar? They're correct. Jesus is claiming to be a king. And in that act, he is defying Caesar. That's what gets him killed. And I think the lesson I take away from that is that Jesus is anti-tyranny. Jesus is anti-authoritarianism. He is opposed to human beings dominating other human beings in the broader society. And I think that is what gives the early church its deeply anti-authoritarian character as well and leads to Christian persecution.
Speaker 2He's like a king with quotation marks around it. Like you're, you know, to really understand the kingship of Jesus is to be in on the joke of what, you know, he really thinks about empire.
Speaker 3Yeah. And in the same way that when we talk about Jesus is the son of God, we have to kind of empty that notion of son of all of the assumptions that we have about it and let God fill it up with new, let the Bible and let the tradition fill it up with new content or the same way that Jesus is saying as he comes that he is Christ, but then he has to redefine Christ for his followers. He's also redefining king for his followers. Jesus is not a king the way that Caesar is. Jesus is a king who rules through servanthood, who rules through persuasion rather than coercion, who is inclusive and welcoming, even of the people who rebel against him, who calls his followers to love their enemies. What empire has ever loved its enemies? And yet this is the rule in the kingdom of God. It is an inversion of the notion of hierarchy. And I think that part of what got the early church and the Jesus movement in so much trouble was their unwillingness to cooperate with the Roman system of hierarchy, right? When Paul writes in Galatians that there is no longer slave nor free, male nor female, Jew or Gentile. Well, those are the hierarchies that structure life in the Roman empire. And when the Romans got really frustrated with the Christians and the few kind of historical documents that we have that from the Roman side that testify to this persecution, one of the things that they are most miffed about, about the Christians is the relationship between slaves and slave owners. They're like, why, why are they eating together? Why are they calling each other brother and sister? There's something wrong with that. Why are women being included in leadership in these communities? There's something, there's something subversive. There's something egalitarian about that, that they find deeply troubling again, because their whole system is built on hierarchy and domination.
Speaker 2So fast forward to the United States. One of the themes we're seeing appear constantly on the right right now. And like we saw this all over rededicate two 50 is this appeal to going back to the original intentions of the founders. So if we, if we just like ignore all of their assumptions for a moment, like what did the founders actually think about emperors?
Speaker 3Well, I mean, I don't think you have to read too deep into the declaration of independence to find out what, what the founders thought about emperors and tyranny. I mean, we, we use sometimes these terms and there are shadings of meaning, right? Like monarchy, dictatorship, authoritarianism, tyranny, you can keep multiplying all these words. Those are pretty roughly synonyms and most human beings throughout history have lived under some form of tyranny, some form of a single person or an oligarchy holds power over society and governs in their own interests to the expense of everyone else and demanding submission from everyone else. That's most of human history. Right now we are seeing a rising tide of authoritarianism. Again, but that's the reassertion of a very old norm in human history, democracy, especially liberal democracy, enlightenment style democracy, like what the founders of the U S were advocating for has very much been the exception in human history. And I think when I read the founding fathers, especially in a document like the declaration of independence, I mean, if, if there is a theology to the declaration of independence, which I think is an arguable thing, if there's a theology to the declaration, it is that there is no divine right of kings. There is no claim that a tyrant or a dictator or a monarch can make that they are given that position from God, right? This is what it means that individual human beings, every human being is endowed by their creator with these inalienable rights. Well, who's going to alienate those rights? It's a ruler. It's a dictator that threatens those rights. And so what the, what the founding fathers are arguing, and I think largely they're inspired by enlightenment reasoning and kind of enlightenment philosophy in this respect and the teachings of people like John Locke and others, but they're, they're, they're also partly inspired by theology. The, the original seal of the United States, the, the, the, the original draft seal of the United States, which was put forward by, I think it was Jefferson and, and, and Franklin, um, was, was, it had an image of Moses and Pharaoh on, uh, with the, the, the red sea coming down on Pharaoh. And on, at the top of the, this, the seal was the phrase rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. Now that didn't actually become the official seal. They kind of, they kind of put that one forward and the constitutional Congress was like, and they kind of tabled it and they wound up going with something else eventually. But I think that really signals something about how the founding fathers were thinking, right? They saw rebellion. Against tyranny as, as, as truly following the, path of God, that God was inspiring rebellion against tyranny. And I'm not going to stand here and tell you that all the founding fathers were devout Christians who were steeped in good, wholesome Christian theology. They were a model bunch at best, and their attachment to Christianity was variable, let's put it that way. But I do think that through kind of their own kind of vision of the alignment, but they're also looking at Europe, and they're watching what has happened in Europe in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformations, as you see religious wars sweep through Europe, as you see state church alignments that then persecute minority Christians throughout the empire, what are called dissenting Christians. And part of what they're trying to do in the founding of the United States is to say, you know, that all this blending of church and state, that has been a real problem, not just in recent memory, but in historical memory. And we need to try to find a way out of that conundrum. And what Jefferson calls the wall of separation between church and state is that idea. I mean, this is what the First Amendment of the United States is about, is about trying to find a way to protect free religious expression and religious kind of engagement, while also curtailing the alignment of that with the state that leads to then the persecution. And it was a grand experiment that they had about religion and about separating religion and state. It has been a remarkable success. Religion has flourished in the United States in a way that it has not in Europe, as you've had in a lot of the places where you've had these more church-state alignments, because people have had flexibility and freedom to innovate and think new ways and think new thoughts and start new religious movements and start new churches and start new denominations, and has led to this great flourishing. That is what the Christian Nationalists and the Christian Churches have done. And that's what they've done. And that's what the Christian Supremacists today want to rein back in.
Speaker 2So, getting into today's Christian Nationalists, one of the arguments they often make is that government gets its authority from God. You'll notice this in some of their worship lyrics, like, all thrones and dominions, all powers and positions, your name stands above them all. Or Mark Driscoll just posted yesterday, government belongs under God, and when it rejects his authority, freedom is always at risk. He said, government gets its authority from God because God is always over government. And so, it's like, it's a logic that sounds good to conservative Christians, because it feels like it's building Jesus up. But, like, how do you respond to this logic? Because it's like, then to question, it feels like you're tearing Jesus down, and you're putting him down.
Speaker 3Yeah, and this is the way that imperial Christianity has always kind of justified itself, is to say, well, God is in power over humanity. The king, or the emperor, or the oligarchy is in power over this section of humanity. And so, therefore, what we have is a hierarchy, right? And the tyrant, or the dictator, the emperor, is accountable to God, and is put in place by God. And then, everyone under the emperor must be in the position that they're in, because that is the order that God has ordained, and that, therefore, everyone needs to kind of stay in line. This is the kind of logic of imperial Christianity. And that logic, I think, really begins in the fourth century, when you have the conversion of the emperor Constantine, who, I mean, his story of conversion is the classic story of tyrants appropriating Christianity, right? He comes along and says he's going into battle, he's going into maybe one of the biggest battles of his lifetime, and he claims the night before the battle, he has a dream where Jesus appears to him, and he says, I'm going to kill you. And he says, I'm going to kill you. And he says, and shows him the cross and says, by this sign, you will conquer your enemies. Sounds just like Jesus, right? Like, this is absurd. And yet, this is the claim. And this becomes, then, the religion of the emperor. We have a Christian emperor who's going to rule over our enemies, who's going to rule over those who are opposed to us. And God must have converted that emperor and put him in place to rule over us. I think that the entire chain of logic there runs completely counter to the teachings of Jesus, right? Jesus is not walking around first century Galilee and Judea and saying, you know, God put Caesar on the throne, and we all have to just kind of get in line. He's going around at every point in the Gospels where Jesus is encountering these kind of power differentials, these hierarchies that structure Roman society. He's constantly undermining those hierarchies. Do Jewish people think that you're better than the Gentiles? Well, I'm going to go hang out with some Gentiles. I'm going to honor them. Oh, wait, you Romans think you're better than Jews? Well, let me put you in your place as well. Oh, you men think you're better than women? Let me show you how I treat women. Oh, you adults think that you're better than children. I'm going to bring the little children to myself and honor them and use them as an illustration of faith, right? Constantly, he is challenging this hierarchical notion, this idea that all order is God-ordained order. I think actually what Jesus is saying is that hierarchy is opposed to the kingdom of God. There is no hierarchy in the kingdom of God. There are no princes. There are no oligarchs in the kingdom of God. Jesus is the king, and the king walks among us and is the slave of all, is the servant of all, and summons the rest of us to join him. And I think that this is really, especially what I write about in my book, I think is a rooted in the doctrine of the incarnation. The idea that if God was going to incarnate God's self as a human being, God could have been born into Caesar's household and taken control of the empire that way. That's within God's power. But instead, God becomes a peasant on the outskirts of the empire. Somebody who is himself oppressed by that empire. Somebody who himself, winds up being executed as an enemy of the state. And I think part of the problem that we have in Christian history is we've spent all this time saying, we need to imitate Jesus. We need to follow Jesus. Jesus is our model in all things. I agree. I agree. He is the keystone of what it means to follow and inhabit the kingdom of God. Why do we not pay attention to Jesus's politics? Why do we not imitate Jesus's politics? Jesus is executed by tyranny. Jesus stands against hierarchy. Jesus calls his followers to serve the people, the dregs of society, the people on the outskirts, the least of these, and says, that is really where the kingdom of God, where the rubber meets the road, is where Christians and followers of Jesus care for the people who the empire is squelching and oppressing and serve those people. And then Jesus in his own lifetime, I mean, at one point the Pharisees come to Jesus and actually to their credit are kind of trying to warn him about Herod's ill intentions towards Jesus. And so they say, you got to watch out for Herod. And Jesus turns around and says, don't tell that fox. I'm coming to Jerusalem. We'll meet there. That does not sound to me like somebody who's like, Hey, there's a divine order. And Herod's in power. I've just got to submit. And I've just got to kind of knuckle under this tyrant, right? No, Jesus, I think, lived and practiced a defiance of hierarchy that I think is the model of what Christian ethics and politics is, is that we would challenge any claims by human beings to be better than other human beings. None of us are better. We are all dignified by the image of God inside of us and the incarnation of God becoming a human being. But none of us can claim superiority over another person. And that is the logic of empire, is the institution of hierarchies, the justification of hierarchies. I mean, in the vision of the kingdom of God, especially that we see in the book of Revelation, at the end of Revelation, what is ostensibly the vision of what eternity will be, there's no sense of hierarchy. There's no sense of an elite class, of a superior group of Christians. It's everyone and Jesus. And when it says that Christians will reign or the followers of the Lamb will reign, they are reigning all together. It's all of them. There is no king here other than Jesus. And so, I think that this is what has fueled a certain strand, what I call the tradition of Jesus within Christian history, is Christians who have taken up that calling, that taken up that challenge of imitating Jesus' politics, standing with strong spines against authoritarianism. And I think we desperately need that vision again in the church today, because people like Benny Johnson, people like Donald Trump, people like Paula White Kane and Pete Hegseth and Doug Wilson, all they're trying to do is warm up the leftovers of Christian imperialism. For hundreds of years, Christians in the wake of Constantine and the building of Christian empires, Christians became convinced that they were entitled to power over everyone else. And they would frequently persecute Christians who did not align with them. I mean, many of the worst persecutors of Christians in Christian history have been Christians, Christian rulers, Christian tyrants. And then we have all these Christians who want to go back to that, who want, they're like, oh, that's the good old, those are the good old days. We need to get back to that. I think that is a history of Christian horrors that we desperately need to learn some lessons from.
Speaker 2So, I know you don't want to get into the prediction business. That's always a dangerous game to play. But like, in 2011, Curtis Yarvin talked about how Trump was one of two figures that seemed biologically suited to be an American monarch. And Trump has definitely played into that imagery. He's kind of an over-the-top figure. His social media posts, you know, his attempts to rule without accountability. But as we approach the end of his power, these impulses for authoritarian power are the ones that are going to be the most important. Not going to go away in broader Christianity and evangelicalism. So, how do you see the Christian nationalist obsession with empire adjusting? Are there things we need to look out for? Because they're probably not going to find another person just like Trump. But are they, is it just going to dissolve? Are they going to try to embody it in a different way?
Speaker 3It's an important question. It's one I think a lot about. I'm not sure I have predictions, but I have thoughts. So, I think this, is one of those rare places where Curtis Yarvin is actually fairly insightful. I think Donald Trump has the soul of a Caesar. I'm not even being euphemistic. I mean, he literally wants to build an arch to celebrate his conquest and victory. He is literally bedecking the White House, a building so iconic that the color of the house is part of the name. He's bedecking it with gold in his own image, right? He is gilding the lily of the most iconic building of the world. And he wants to then turn around and say that he is somebody who is for the American people. No, Donald Trump has always and only been for himself. It's always been a project of self-aggrandizement. For him and greed and power. And so I think that the challenge that we're seeing in the world today is in the era of the founders, the claim of monarchs was, well, we were put in power by God. This is the divine right of kings idea. And therefore we are entitled to rule over you. Well, democracy has become much more normalized since that time. And especially since World War II, democracy has become a sort of global norm. And so now wannabe tyrants have to present themselves as politicians. They've got to work the system of democracy to get into a position where they can exercise the kind of will of a Caesar. And Trump is just kind of the apex predator in a class of these wannabe tyrants. And not all of them are Christians. I mean, a lot of them are. You got people like Bukele and Millet. And I mean, there are a number, Putin, right? There are a number of these figures around the world who are trying to use kind of theology and forms of Christian nationalism to prop themselves up. We also see this in Islam with figures like the president of Turkey. We see this in kind of the Hindu nationalism in India with Narendra Modi. We see this in Buddhist nationalist circles. So there's a moment now of kind of surging religious nationalism, these kind of wannabe tyrants. And this is the thing democracy is fragile. Democracy is very hard. And it requires a kind of balancing of these different powers and interests in society so that no group can kind of move into that monarch position. No single person can move into the monarch position. But on all sides, democracy is always embattled by wannabe tyrants who want to replace we, the people, with I, the dictator. This was true in ancient Rome. This is true in modern America. This is true in all kinds of democracies. This is true in all kinds of democracies around the world. And so Trump, I think we can get stuck in cycles of American exceptionalism and America-centeredness where we start thinking that what's going on here is exceptional or weird. What's going on here is A, what has happened throughout human history, and B, it's happening all around the world. We are seeing a rising tide of authoritarianism, often linked with far-right populism and these kind of reactionary currents. So no, I don't think when Trump departs from the scene, hey, it's morning in America again, and all this stuff's going to go away. He is riding a wave of authoritarian appeals around the world. And many other leaders are riding that wave as well. And there are a lot of other people who want to grab a surfboard and hop into that race. I think that we're seeing right now some really deep fracturing within Trump's base. Actually, a lot of it has to do with Christian theology about Jews and Israel. And there are kind of these two camps that have emerged within Trump's base, within his coalition. They've always been there, but they kind of lived in harmony through most of the first administration and have really begun, have kind of degraded into a kind of low-grade civil war within Trump's coalition in the last year and a half. And on the one side, you have these kind of Christian Zionists, evangelicals who are very supportive of Israel, what we kind of historically would call philo-Semites, Christians who ostensibly love Jews, love Israel, but it's kind of a suffocating, controlling kind of love. And then at the other end of the Trump spectrum are these anti-Semites who hate Israel, who hate the Jews, kind of the Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuente's kind of Nazi wing of the Trump movement. And they are deeply opposed to the war in Iran, deeply opposed to the U.S. alliance with Israel. And that has become a really gravitational force in Republican politics in the last few years. And I think we're going to see a lot of that fracture continue. I don't know which of those sides ultimately went out or whether they can remain in any way in any sort of coalition, but we are seeing this kind of fragmentation happen around that divide. And then you've got a bunch of ambitious new wannabe tyrants. I mean, you've got a guy like Marco Rubio, circa 2015. He sure seemed like a good Democrat, not like lowercase d Democrat, like somebody who cares about liberal democracy and promoting democracy around the world. I think what he has exposed in the second Trump administration is that he is actually an autocrat. He thinks that Donald Trump should have all this power because he wants all this power. Same with J.D. Vance, same with Pete Hegseth, right? There's a whole class of these figures that kind of rising stars, the next gen of Republican politics who've shown that they are much more comfortable with authoritarianism than they are with democracy. And I think what we are experiencing right now is just the very beginning of what is going to be a generational struggle in American politics between those of us who care about preserving and protecting. And I think at this point, we have to say restoring American democracy versus this group of authoritarians who do not agree with each other on everything, but they agree that they are united in their will to power and their vision of installing a new American dictatorship that they think will dominate the world.
Speaker 2Well, there's a lot we don't know, but I think it is definitely helpful to get some clarity on, you know, empire, Jesus, what Jesus thought about empire. And I appreciate your book, Defying Tyrants, that's going to be coming out here soon and how that is going to help bring some clarity to some of these conversations. And I appreciate you coming on and sharing that with us. Thanks, Rick. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. Please like, subscribe, and rate us on your favorite podcast platform. And we'll be back with another episode on Monday.
Speaker 1This has been another change-making conversation from Baptist News Global. The episode you've just heard is part of a special podcast series titled Highest Power: Church and State. Be sure to follow BNG Daily at BaptistNews.com and subscribe to get notifications about future episodes. Baptist News Global is a national nonprofit news service that is independent, free, and faithful. BNG is supported by readers and listeners like you. Learn more at BaptistNews.com. This episode was produced and edited by Mac Bowles of TKG Communications, LLC, Dallas, Texas.
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