Everywhere you look, Christians are thinking about power. 

This Wednesday, Joseph Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, marking the end of an exceptionally turbulent transfer of power. This transfer of power has particular implications for American Christians. White conservative Christians, largely allied with outgoing president Trump, now face a stark loss of power in national policymaking. Liberal Christians, on the other hand, have some reason for optimism – albeit less than their conservative counterparts did in 2016. Biden’s campaign did not court religious voters with the regularity or fervor as Trump, and the religious left has generally not held the same massive influence over the Democratic party that the religious right has over the GOP. Those religious voices that align with leftist, and not merely liberal, politics are likely to be particularly frustrated by Biden’s constant overtures of compromise and middle-of-the-road policymaking. Still other Christians have been so marginalized that they have no hope that the new administration will result in any real liberation for them. And across the globe, the rise of authoritarian regimes is giving Christians of all nationalities cause to think about power. What is it? Who has it? Most crucially of all, what attitude are Christians called to take to worldly power in all its forms: social, political, and economic?

The answers that Christians give to these questions are almost as diverse as Christians themselves. Yet there are certain patterns of thought that recur with astonishing regularity across time and space. This article attempts to analyze a few common responses to the problem of power, and to find in what they offer and what they lack some clues about how we might move forward in the public square. 

One typical reaction to worldly power is to distrust it and avoid acquiring it. It is a commonplace among Christians of all political affiliations to bemoan Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the Roman Empire’s official state religion. You have probably heard this litany before: by making Christianity not only legal, but respectable, Constantine flung open the doors of a pure, morally demanding movement of Jesus-followers to untold millions of self-interested social climbers and lukewarm crowd-followers. In so doing, Constantine made a mockery of Jesus’ witness and diluted the power of the Gospel by filling churches with people indifferent – or even opposed – to its message. And so it has been every time spiritual and political power have aligned, from the horrors of medieval inquisitions to church-condoned chattel slavery to colonialism thinly veiled under the guise of missionary work. Power corrupts the church by making it attractive to people who care only about power, not about Christian love. The only Christian response to social, economic, and political power is to reject it. 

There is a good deal of truth in this idea, as even a cursory glance at history reveals. And yet it is not the whole story. One of the reasons that Christianity proliferated throughout the Roman Empire, even before Constantine, was due to its appeal to elites, especially high-class women who used their social standing to spread their faith. Power of some kind – social status, monetary support, or even just a powerful story well-told – has always been necessary to do something as difficult as spreading the Gospel. Nor is organized religion’s use of political power always heinous. Much of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States understood itself as an organized expression of Christian faith in the public sphere. Nor can we forget the role that nonconforming and evangelical Christians played in the abolition of the slave trade. 

Facing these complex realities, some Christians have taken a different relationship to power. Perhaps Christians can seek the complexities of power and influence while trusting in their incorruptible God to preserve them from power’s excesses and temptations. This position, known as Christian Realism and associated with the great mid-century thinker Reinhold Niebuhr, assumes that public life is always messy and fraught with compromise between an ideal Gospel and a sinful world. For example, Jesus commands us to turn the other cheek when attacked (Matthew 5:38-40). A nation that eliminates all military spending, though, is likely to be annihilated by its less pious neighbors. God does not desire that kinder and gentler nations perish at the hands of their more sinful neighbors; therefore, a nation ought to retain its military capacity to resist evil even though this seems to flaunt the Gospel premise of nonviolent resistance. A Christian leader’s duty is to make these sorts of necessary compromises with sinful reality, while relying on God’s grace to preserve them from the ever-present temptation to accede too much ground to realpolitik. 

Christian realism has been heavily discussed in the past half-century, and I cannot hope to do it justice here. However, I do wish to point out two particularly striking critiques of it. The first is that it is not always clear what difference Christianity makes to this political realism. If a Christian leader sees use of military power, exploitative trade deals, or self-serving international policies as legitimate tools of governance so long as they are effective and necessary, how exactly do they differ from a wise non-Christian leader who also resorts to these forms of realpolitik when they are useful? Indeed, sometimes Christian realism’s acceptance of worldly political realities can become tragic blindness. As the black liberation theologian James Cone points out, Niebhur himself was sympathetic to the plight of oppressed black Americans, but repeatedly counseled accommodationist approaches to racism rather than the bold prophetic actions that would characterize the Civil Rights Movement. He had so resigned himself to the inevitability of evil that he missed an opportunity for a profound victory over it. The second problem is that no stark division between individual and communal ethics is really possible when individuals must carry out the state’s actions. It is all fine and well to say that nations may resist their enemies while individuals should not – until an individual soldier is ordered to start shooting bullets. An unjust trade agreement is not signed by disembodied nations, but by flesh-and-blood people, who know that their pen strokes will enrich some and impoverish others. Christian realism must allow that in some cases, for some reasons, the believer can do things that Christ explicitly condemns. Christian realism has a hard time avoiding the implication, in other words, that Christ’s commands are ultimately not very realistic. 

I have labored over the deficiencies in each of these views to show why I think they are insufficient. But I do not want to leave the impression that there is nothing of value in them. Quite the opposite, in fact. Observing the ways that Christianity has been corrupted by its uncritical wielding of worldly power should make us wary of relying overmuch on temporal power to attain spiritual ends. It should also give us a healthy respect for democratic norms, especially the separation of church and state. Yet Christians are commanded to act in the public sphere nonetheless. Christian realism can instill in us a healthy respect for the complexities of politics and the unique moral ambiguities that leaders face. 

All of these realizations are important parts of a healthy relationship to power. But there is even more. Christianity has at least one more gift to offer us: the realization that our power has limits. Whatever else one makes of Christianity’s notoriously obtuse and beguiling apocalyptic scriptures, they are clear that “fixing” the world is a task that only God can accomplish. No amount of political campaigning or social prestige will call the New Jerusalem down from heaven. Our brightest and best human accomplishments are but an infinitesimal foretaste of that glorious future. The Christian’s actions in the public sphere are less like warfare and more like worship: they announce and rejoice in God’s desire for the world, and in so doing make the world reflect the glory of its Creator just a bit more. They are apocalyptic, in the old sense of the word. That is, they reveal secret truths about how the world is meant to be and how it will one day be again. 

If we can break free of the delusion that our power will bring about this new world, then we can save ourselves from pessimism, distrust, and theocratic arrogance. Even more important, we will be more free to follow Jesus, whose own relationship with power was complex and ever-changing: attracting and repulsing crowds in equal measure, holding all the fullness of God but emptying himself into the form of a slave, throwing out demons and being unceremoniously dragged out of his hometown, first terrifying Roman occupiers and then being trampled underfoot by them. After all, it is in the paradox of Christ, the power and wisdom of God, that all our wrestlings with earthly power receive their final answer. In the end, we can do no more than swing out into the world on that hope.