MAGA Is the New Empire

Christian nationalism forgets its Jewish beginnings—and why they still matter

Are you going to church today—or are you stepping into the locus of resistance, a two-thousand-year tradition that began with Jewish revolutionaries against a militarized empire? Because that’s what the Jesus movement was at its birth: not a chaplaincy to empire, but a defiance of it. Before the creeds, before Constantine, before the Crusades, before culture wars, the earliest followers of Jesus lived under Roman occupation. They weren’t defending power; they were enduring persecution. They weren’t writing theology in ivory towers; they were improvising courage under legions.

Because that’s what the Jesus movement was at its birth: not a chaplaincy to empire, but a strand of Jewish resistance literature within the Second Temple period. These were communities anticipating apocalypses—not the rapture fantasies of our modern age, but a conviction that God would soon end Rome’s domination and inaugurate an age of justice. In the prophets’ vision, Torah would be inscribed on human hearts. And Torah means instruction: a path of justice, mercy, and care.

Jesus stood inside that tradition, not outside it. He wasn’t a “fulfillment” of the prophets in the way conservative Christians like to claim, as though the Hebrew Bible were a checklist pointing straight to him. Rather, the earliest gospel writers—beginning with Mark, and followed by Matthew and Luke drawing on Mark and other sources—framed him through the Jewish apocalyptic and prophetic traditions they knew best. In the wake of his life and execution, scribes and community leaders interpreted him as embodying the call to justice and deliverance that already ran through their scriptures.

In that sense, Jesus was remembered not as the founder of something brand new, but as a Jewish teacher trained in Torah, shaped by the eschatological hope of his time, perhaps even influenced by John the Baptist—another apocalyptic preacher executed by Rome. His death at the empire’s hands only heightened the resonance: here was yet another Jew killed for daring to proclaim that God’s justice would overturn empire’s grasp. The gospel writers preserved that memory in their own idioms, but always within the apocalyptic frame of the Second Temple world.

Rome was the militarized empire of the first century, the one that met every spark of resistance with crucifixion, legions, and blood in the streets. And yet out of that crucible came texts—plural, contradictory, unstable—that we now call Scripture. When politicians insist on hanging the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, which version do they mean? The truth is, there isn’t just one. The Decalogue appears in Exodus 20 and again in Deuteronomy 5—two versions shaped by different source traditions and different moments in Israel’s history. Even Leviticus offers parallel laws in its holiness code, carrying the same ethical weight but with its own emphases. These weren’t texts handed down once for all; they were revised and reinterpreted over centuries, redacted in the crucible of exile and empire. That’s not a flaw—it’s the story. The multiplicity of versions shows a people wrestling with their circumstances, negotiating justice, and insisting on meaning in the face of domination.

So if you are going to church today, are you wrestling with that same multiplicity of views in the pursuit of justice against domination? Is your spiritual leader challenging you to accept the difficult work of justice, or do they align with the empire—align with power—and tell you only what is comfortable and easy? From what we know, that is neither the way of Second Temple Judaism, nor the way of Jesus born from that tradition.

Ancient salvation was not about the redemption of individual sin or the enforcement of a prescribed belief set. It was a communal vision of collective liberation. Even Paul—the Pharisee so often conscripted into anti-Jewish readings—channeled the universalism of Jewish apocalyptic hope when he wrote that there is no Jew nor Greek, no enslaved person nor free, for all are one. That is not a slogan of private spirituality; it is the language of a messianic banquet, where all nations would turn toward the God of Israel and sit down at the same table.

The salvation Christians have been taught in modern pews often distorts this inheritance. What began as resistance to Rome has been repackaged as personal escape from sin, as if faith were about managing guilt instead of transforming the world. But the earliest hope was for a community freed from empire, living in nonviolence and abundance. Where is that vision now? Where is that in Trump’s Bible, or in the whitewashed Jesus brandished to defend his politics?

Christian nationalism tells its followers that Christianity is under assault. But persecution is not what happens when empire loses dominance; persecution is what happens when empire meets resistance. Crucifixion is not the fear of falling from power—it is the punishment of those who refuse to bow. Early Christians knew this. Jews under Rome knew it even longer. The price of integrity was often paid in blood, not in poll numbers or election setbacks.

And here is the bitter irony: the same movement that was once hounded by empire has become empire’s chaplain. Christian nationalism in our time does not stand in the tradition of persecuted faith—it stands in the line of Pharaoh, of Rome, of Constantine. When Trump deploys federal troops into American cities where communities cry for justice, he doesn’t stand with the prophets; he marches with the legions.

The mistake Christian nationalists make is not new. From the fourth century on, the story of Christianity has been rewritten by empire. Constantine fused faith with power and retroactively declared dissent “heresy.” Multiplicity was erased. Orthodoxy wasn’t discovered; it was enforced.

But before empire took the pen, Christianities were plural, just as Judaisms were plural. First-century Jesus-followers were one contested branch of Jewish life under Rome. Paul himself argued like a Pharisee inside Judaism, not like the first “Christian” inventing a new faith. The rift didn’t come from Jesus—it came later, when Rome demanded one story. That’s what empire does: it flattens dissent.

Which is why today’s claims of persecution ring so hollow. Losing cultural dominance is not the same as standing against power. Hanging a monument is not the same as living by its ethic. And mistaking backlash for crucifixion is not martyrdom; it is self-pity dressed as faith.

The Bible’s authors knew better. They wrote from the underside of history: Assyria’s destruction, Babylon’s exile, Seleucid and Roman occupation. Scripture is not the literature of the powerful but of the marginalized. Its deepest theme is justice—a God who hears the cries of slaves, a prophet who confronts kings, a teacher who blesses the poor. If the Bible has authority at all, it is this: not control, but care; not domination, but deliverance.

Last week, I wrote about taking accountability for oneself. Let me extend that here. Your engagement with the traditions of Israel demands discomfort in the pursuit of justice. These texts were never meant to coddle us; they were forged in exile, sharpened in oppression, and carried forward by people who risked their lives to name truth against empire. If your faith never unsettles you, it is not faith but convenience.

And let’s be plain: your disagreement with those who push you toward that discomfort is not a sign of discernment. It is a sign of cowardice—a refusal to step into the hard, necessary work of justice. The prophets did not soothe their audiences; they confronted them. Jesus did not align with comfort; he aligned with the marginalized. To inherit these traditions is to inherit the call to risk, to wrestle, to live unsettled for the sake of justice.

Even the gospels themselves refuse an easy narrative. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” Matthew has Jesus say, echoing the prophets before him. That line has been twisted into license for violence, but its real meaning is no less disruptive: fidelity to justice will divide households, unsettle families, strain loyalties. To follow Torah inscribed on the heart is to choose justice over comfort, even when it cuts close to home.

So the choice before us is the same as it was in Judea two thousand years ago. Will we align with Pharaoh’s hardened heart, with Rome’s legions, with MAGA’s empire? Or will we take up the harder path—risking discomfort, choosing justice, and joining the long tradition of those who resisted empire’s grasp?