The Identifying Markers of Christian Supremacy

An excerpt from my forthcoming book, Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists.

[My new book, Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists, will be published on October 6th. You can preorder it now! Here I’m sharing an excerpt from the Introduction. One of the central arguments of the book is that we are currently seeing the rapid spread of movements and ideologies of Christian supremacy across many theological and liturgical traditions. In this section, I describe the characteristics of Christian supremacy and why it is so counter to the way of Jesus and the early church.]

I’m certain that by now a sizable fraction of you are skimming along with one eyebrow raised. Christian supremacy, really? You might be thinking, OK, sure, some Christians are a little power hungry. They might say some borderline racist or xenophobic things. They might let their politics get out of hand. They might vote for politicians who delight in cruelty in Christ’s name. But they’re not like white supremacists. They’re not like Islamic terrorists or something. Let’s not

get carried away.

I get that response a lot. We live in hyperbolic times when commentary is cheap and it’s easy to disclaim experts you disagree with as “politically motivated” or “just someone who hates Christianity.” But as a religion researcher, whose job is keeping track of the thorny and fast-growing theologies behind extreme religious ideas, I can tell you that there is cause for alarm.

My day job involves monitoring the constantly morphing, real-time growth of Christian supremacy. What has shocked me, as I’ve both observed my own Protestant garden bed and peeked over the hedgerows into my Catholic and Orthodox neighbors’ plots, is the accelerating and out-of-control spread of Christian supremacy among Christians around the globe. I have seen the rising face of Christian evil. So what constitutes Christian supremacy, and why is it so dangerous?

Christian supremacy, at its most basic, is the idea that Christians are entitled to power over other people. It is represented by an ever-growing array of species and forms. Christian supremacy can appear, at first bloom, as a sort of fear and paranoia: an exaggeration of one’s enemies and the peril they pose. In their own minds, Christian supremacists are always the good guys or the victims, even when they are the ones inflicting harm and abuse, so they must exaggerate and caricature their opponents and lie about their own real-world victims to make them all seem truly evil.

Even if it wears a “loving” face, Christian supremacy seeks to coerce and dominate––including, frequently, people who bear the Christians no ill will. Jesus paradigmatically taught us to be humble, generous neighbors and to love our enemies. But a signal attribute of Christian supremacy is a sense of innate superiority over enemy and non-Christian neighbor alike. Christian supremacists persecute and aim to destroy and eradicate their enemies.

Politically today, Christian supremacists are the shock troops detonating democracy for the sake of building new authoritarian states. They are magnetized to dictatorial leaders because they need a path to power and they know their agenda is unpopular and would almost certainly never be voted in freely by a majority in a functioning democracy. Christian supremacists are closely tied to Christian nationalists—those who believe that their nation is especially Christian—and often work shoulder to shoulder with them. But Christian supremacy is a global domination scheme. It aims for nothing less than a whole-world conquest by Christianity.

If that sounds far-fetched to you, I’d recommend you read my previous book, The Violent Take It by Force, in which I track a set of these global leaders and show how they were radicalized, including some of them at that seminary I attended. Christian supremacists want to impose their strict moral code on their neighbors—even if they themselves frequently violate that moral code with impunity. They are fond of citing a selective set of biblical passages that fit their agenda of restricting their neighbors’ freedoms and rights. But their hermeneutic avoids, with surgical precision, Jesus’s essential teachings about power and its abuses. It skirts around the earliest Christians’ revolutionary practices of human equality, radical hospitality, and voluntary self-denial.

Christian supremacists preach obedience to tyrants. If no tyrant is immediately available, they counsel a political mobilization—and, if need be, a conspiracy to overthrow an insufficiently Christian government—all to make society Christian at any cost. When society is dominated by Christianity, they promise, all will be at peace and all abuses of power will cease. They paper over the sickening history of Christian tyrants, Christian empires, and Christian holy wars.

Christian supremacists are characteristically proud of—even zealous for—Christianity and will go to great lengths to preserve, protect, and expand Christianity’s privileged place in society. But they tend to hold in contempt actual Christians, at least those who don’t belong to their particular clan. Christianity is their ideal, their cause, their absolute. Actual Christians are the messy, inconvenient, imperfect, embodied reality, so Christian supremacists surgically sculpt and present an idealized, muscular Christianity. In the process, they make all but invisible the foul side of Christian history and the bodies left in Christian supremacy’s wake.

It’s easy to look at this problem and imagine it to be primarily political, just human beings selfish for more power. If this were true, then it would merely need to be resisted in the political realm as a political force. But make no mistake: Christian supremacy is also profoundly theological. Many humans are attracted to power and embrace the will to dominate for many reasons. In fact, what makes Christian supremacy distinct, among all the varied, nasty supremacies of our modern world, is its theological nature. It is precisely Christian supremacy’s theological toxicity that makes interventions like this book and other jeremiads, books, and sermons necessary. We must resist it both in the public square and in our churches.

Because one must first have power to abuse it, Christian supremacists tend to find their way into leadership. They deftly climb the structures of the church, rising to positions of prominence and respect. Many of them become youth leaders, worship leaders, elders, deacons, pastors, revival preachers, priests, teachers, bishops, activists, apostles, prophets, and politicians. They

are celebrated for their knowledge, their piety, their innovative preaching, their ready biblical quotations. They grace the stages of the major Christian conferences and write bestselling Christian books and record bestselling Christian albums. But, to borrow from Jesus’s wise imagination, big-time Christianity is like a whitewashed tomb: pleasant enough on the outside,

yes, but on the inside full of revolting stenches and buried skeletons.

Christian supremacists don’t make up a majority of the church—God be praised!—but they do wield an outsized influence on Christianity. They are motivated to claim and steer and build Christianity, frequently at the expense of a lot of real-world Christians and almost always in rebellion against Jesus’s explicit teachings.

As we’ve already noted, different species of Christian supremacy plague different host habitats, attaching themselves to different forms of Christianity. Hyperactive Christian nationalism is a sort of brash, chauvinistic version, blending a blood-and-soil nativism with a cultural holy war. Some Catholics have named their aberrant, invasive power-species “integralism” or “radical traditionalism,” a vision that is literally medieval in how it calibrates the relationship of church and state. It is termed phyletism among the Orthodox: the elevation of a select set of Christians to premier status. Some Protestants call it dominion theology or dominionism––a hope for Christian power over the whole globe. Others talk of Christians as the ruling Ekklesia and “conquering the Seven Mountains” (family, government, religion, education, arts

and entertainment, media, business) in every society. Still others call it theonomy: the ambition for Christians to use biblical law to restructure modern nations. These are all variations on a theme of Christian empowerment and Christian entitlement.

If, as you are reading these descriptions of Christian supremacy, you are calling to mind some celebrity Christians you know, some dynamic and provocative leaders you have a half interest in, then you’re someone they want to enlist in their militant Christianity. They will say they want to empower you, to strengthen Christianity, to battle immorality—awful, decadent, caricatured in its wickedness—because good Christians can’t tolerate such heathen ways. They will offer you theologies that promise prosperity, protection from the wicked world, power for you and your community, maybe even a way for you to climb the ladder. They will offer you a government that will empower Christians, a government that mouths solemn pieties while trampling your enemies. They will promise you all the kingdoms of this world.

But that was always a devil’s bargain (Matthew 4:5–7, Luke 4:5–8). Jesus did not teach his followers to abuse power. Quite the opposite. Jesus instructed his followers to deny themselves and not to seek coercive power over others, and the New Testament churches’ cardinal values were centered on living counterculturally sacrificial and generous lives.

In fact, the building of hierarchies of human value and power was a major topic and theme for Jesus and the New Testament churches, existing as they did in the profoundly tyrannical culture of the Roman Empire. In concepts and phrases that they memorialized in the gospels, epistles, and apocalyptic literature (passages that we so easily recite, trivialize, and take for granted two millennia hence), the New Testament communities staked out a radical and counterintuitive vision of a world stripped of hierarchies of human value and dignity. The early church anticipated and endeavored to live out the idea that “the last shall be first”: that the weak, powerless, and distressed victims of a brutal empire will be lifted up. They also claimed that “the first shall be last”: the rich and politically powerful will be brought lower.

Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about Jesus and the church of the first century was their stalwart opposition to the authoritarianism of their day. Jesus himself died the death of a political dissident against Roman tyranny on the cross, and the model of Jesus put some steel in the spine of Jesus’s followers to resist the coercive persecution of the Roman Empire.

Instead of a mad scramble for more power, the early churches catechized and taught people not to seek self-promotion but instead to pursue what one writer calls “the renunciation of status.” They talked about how God, the one, high God, had descended not merely to become human but to assume the lowest position of the subjugated and colonized victim of empire in order to overthrow all the empires of this world. While Caesar may dominate your body, they preached, Jesus can liberate you from Caesar’s whole system.

If anything, it was the New Testament churches’ practice of defying tyrants––of refusing to conform to Roman conceptions of power––that got the early Christians in so much trouble. Theology, done rightly, can be the most subversive activity on earth.

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A note on why I share this:

The passage above is from my forthcoming book, Defying Tyrants (Broadleaf Books, October 6), and I’ll be posting excerpts here at Reckonings through the fall.

Writing like this rests on years of research — reading, archival digging, keeping track of extreme Christian leaders’ real-time activities and mutations, and the slow work of turning dense scholarship into language clear enough to matter. I keep most of it free, because this conversation is too urgent to lock behind a paywall. But I can only keep doing it with the help of readers who choose to carry some of the cost.

If this work is worth something to you, I’d be grateful if you’d become a paid subscriber. It’s the most direct way to sustain independent scholarship that answers to the truth rather than to power.