The Myth of a Christian Empire

Adapted from a sermon preached January 11, 2026, at Vineyard Longmont.

I grew up on the western slope (what locals call the west side of the state) of Colorado in a very white community, listening to almost exclusively Christian music. Think Steven Curtis Chapman and Michael W. Smith. I was one of those kids who would genuinely question your Christianity if your playlist had anything secular on it, and I had been taught that gangster rap, especially, was something faithful people did not touch. I had since expanded my repertoire. But for some reason, hip-hop had still remained taboo in my mind. This brings us to the story I want to tell.

It was 2016. I was in Southern California visiting friends, and late one night we ended up at a little restaurant in downtown Pasadena. My friend was tired after dinner and asked me to drive home. I said sure, climbed into the driver’s seat of his Jeep. I should have been suspicious when both of my friends jumped in the back seat. I need you to picture this clearly — a white guy with a big beard, brand-new flat-brim baseball cap, sitting in a Jeep, two friends giggling in the back seat. At that moment, I couldn’t think of a more aggressively white combination of things.

We were stopped at a street corner when one my friends reached up from the back seat, plugged his phone into the USB port, knowing about my feelings about hip-hop, and blasted a track from the 1991 hit album Straight Outta Compton at full volume. I can’t name the song in polite company, but if you know, you know. The whole car was pounding. And right at that moment, my other friend reached between me and the door and rolled my window down.

I looked over, and there was a group of young racially ambiguous men on the corner, bobbing their heads to the music. They looked over at me. I have never seen a more confused look on anyone’s face in my life.

The story is funny. But it broke something open in me. Sitting there at that red light, with that music shaking the car, I realized there was an angst in those lyrics that I couldn’t relate to. And I didn’t know what to do with that. Was it a completely different world? Was it sin? Was it just cultural distance? I went home that night and did what I always do: I started researching. Background is everything to me. I can’t engage with something I don’t understand. First, I read everything online about NWA’s history. I still don’t trust Eazy-E. Then I read a stack of books on Race. Books like The Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. My eyes were opened.

The context I found changed me.

I didn’t relate to that music because I hadn’t lived the life it was describing. My experience and theirs were worlds apart, and I had been too sheltered, too comfortable, and too certain of my own categories to notice. That realization landed harder later that year when I found myself in a room with a group of Black church leaders, and they began to tell me what their experience in the broader church world had actually been. What they described was blatant, undeniable racism, and it was closer to home than I had ever let myself believe. It was something I had no framework for, because I had never been asked to see it.

God brought me to that moment. I’m sure of it. It was disorienting in the way that waking up from a deep nap is disorienting: you open your eyes, and for a moment you don’t know what year it is, where you are, or how long you’ve been asleep. Sometimes the moments God puts us in feel exactly like that. We wake up and discover we’ve been sleeping through something that mattered.

That was 2016. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Because we are living in a moment that keeps demanding the church wake up, and instead we keep reaching for the snooze button. This brings us to Romans 13.

The World Paul Was Writing Into

It seems Romans 13 has been making headlines lately. But with these references, we arrive at the text without any sense of where we are. The letter doesn’t open with this passage. When we open our Bibles to Romans 13, we land in the middle of a much longer argument, in the middle of a much larger story.

Here’s some of that story. The emperor Claudius, no stranger to cruelty, eventually expelled the Jewish population from the city of Rome entirely. Likely, among those expelled were some of the voices in the early church who argued that Gentile believers needed to be circumcised and follow the Law of Moses to be fully included. Those voices were gone. What remained was a Gentile church, largely poor, largely marginal, many of them slaves or freedpersons, trying to figure out what it meant to follow Jesus in the most powerful city on earth.

And then Claudius died, probably gruesomely. There was no peaceful transfer of power in Rome. Nero came to power. Initially, he looked like a savior: he invited the Jews back and seemed eager to make things better. But things didn’t stay that way. With the return of the Jewish people to the city of Rome came the Jewish Christians back to the Church. Tensions grew. The church began to fracture. People stopped seeing each other. They started demanding things of one another and stepping on each other’s toes. They stopped seeing each other as people.

Paul writes the Epistle to the Romans in that context. Not into a stable Christian empire with voting rights and religious freedom. Into a city where the church is fragile, divided, and closely watched. Participating in commerce required offering incense to Caesar. Every transaction in the meat market was entangled in the idolatry of empire. Loyalty to Jesus put people at economic and social risk every. single. day.

That is the world in which Paul says: Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.

That’s a really strange thing to say in the middle of a burning empire. I don’t know whether Paul wrote it before or after Nero “allegedly” lit Rome on fire and blamed Christians for it. I don’t know if he wrote it before or after Nero started stringing believers up to use as human torches for his garden parties. But he wrote it into a world where those things were possible, even imminent.

So what does it mean?

Pastoral Wisdom, Not Political Theory

What do Paul’s words in Romans 13 mean? It cannot mean that everything an empire does is godly. It cannot mean that the person with the most power gets to define what is right. It cannot mean that the dream of a Christian empire is a biblical one. It cannot mean there is no place for resistance to evil authority. If it were to mean that, what do we do with the Hebrew midwives who defied Pharaoh’s command to kill the firstborn sons? What do we do with the prophets who spoke directly against imperial power? What do we do with Nathan walking into the king’s chamber to say, You are the man? There is a long tradition in the Hebrew scriptures of exactly this kind of resistance, and Paul knew it.

In Reading While Black, Esau McCauley argues that Paul “has more in mind here than some flattened sub-biblical form of meekness.”1 The passage is not a blank endorsement of power. Paul is establishing “the sovereignty of God and the limits of human discernment,”2 which means the governing authorities are accountable to something above themselves — and so is any reading of this passage that tries to silence the church. No one in the Roman church was powerful. They were poor, they were marginal, they were at the edges of society. Paul is not speaking to senators or magistrates. He is writing to people who have to navigate empire every single day without being crushed by it or consumed by it. The question he is answering is not how should governments be organized but how do we remain visible without being erased? How do we stay faithful without confusing the gospel with rebellion?

This is faithful restraint for the sake of witness. It is not moral surrender, and it is not political endorsement of whoever happens to be in power.

There is also something quietly subversive happening in the text that we tend to miss. When Paul says there is no authority except from God, he is not flattering Nero. He is reminding Nero, and the church, that Nero’s power is derivative. He is subject to something higher than himself. N.T. Wright puts it plainly: “Romans 13 constitutes a severe demotion of arrogant and self-divinizing rulers. It is an undermining of totalitarianism, not a reinforcement of it.”3 The passage carries, Wright argues, “a hidden ‘nevertheless’ at its heart. Jesus is Lord; nevertheless, his followers must obey their earthly rulers. This is not because the rulers have somehow, in theory, already submitted to his lordship, but despite the fact that they have not done so.”4 Authority is real, but it is ordered. Honor does not equal worship, and submission does not cancel moral discernment.

The Frame That Changes Everything

To understand Romans 13, you have to back up to Romans 12:9, because Paul does not drop this passage into the letter in isolation. Beverly Roberts Gaventa’s commentary makes this point with force. Paul’s goal throughout chapter 12, she argues, “appears to be the strengthening of the vulnerable Roman communities of faith,” and the passage about governing authorities grows directly out of that pastoral concern.5 The governing authorities are installed by God and remain God’s servants — not the other way around. It is “the failure — sometimes willful failure — to recognize that way of prioritizing things,” Gaventa concludes, “that makes this passage perennially vulnerable to misuse.”6 Romans 13 cannot be detached from let love be genuine.

The passage that immediately precedes the instruction about governing authorities tells us to bless those who persecute us and not curse them. To rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. To live in harmony with one another and associate with the lowly. To not repay evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. To overcome evil with good.

THAT is the moral frame. Submission in Romans 13 is shaped and limited by the cruciform love described in Romans 12. James Dunn locates the passage squarely in Paul’s larger project of redefining the people of God. “The abruptness of the transition and the starkness of the command,” he writes, “can be properly appreciated only if we recognize the force of two factors. One is what we have described as Paul’s attempt to redraw the boundaries of the redefined people of God. The other is the political realities confronting the Christian groups in Rome.”7 Paul’s exhortations grow out of identity. These are descriptions of what it looks like to be a people already being reshaped by God’s mercy. Submission here is not passive compliance. It is disciplined love. Obedience that contradicts cruciform (cross-shaped) love would contradict the Gospel Paul has been proclaiming since chapter one.

But then Paul pivots. Romans 13:8 is the hinge: Owe no one anything, except to love one another. Every other obligation Paul names in this passage — taxes, revenue, respect, honor — has a limit. You pay what you owe, and the account is settled. Love is different. Love is the debt that is never discharged. Which means authority is never an end in itself, order is never ultimate, and submission is always evaluated by the standard of love for neighbor. Romans 13 does not subordinate love to authority. It subordinates every other obligation to love.

Paul lands the passage with an urgent call to wakefulness. You know what time it is. It is already the moment to wake from sleep. That isn’t a rhetorical flourish. The day is near. The night is far gone. Throw off the works of darkness. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ. This is eschatological urgency, and it governs the whole argument: the reason we don’t render unlimited allegiance to earthly powers is that we know whose future is coming.

What Kind of People Are We Becoming?

If we stop reading at verse 7, we become a compliant people. If we keep reading, we might become a people whose identity is formed and rooted in love above all. People awake to the time they’re living in, engaged with the world as it actually is, shaped by the mercy of God into something the empire has no category for.

Paul ends this section by quoting Jesus: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Paul sometimes gets criticized sometimes for not being connected enough to the teachings of Jesus. But here he quotes him directly. And it sends us back to where we need to end.

Imagine Jesus standing in the synagogue in Nazareth in Luke 4 and reading from Isaiah, a prophet who knew exactly what it meant to speak truth to power. He reads: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

This is not a metaphor. Jesus is not offering a spiritualized abstraction. He is announcing a mission. Let me be clear, a gospel that lacks that mission at its center is not Christian. A gospel that is not good news to the poor, that does not mean freedom for the captive, that does not move toward the oppressed, is not the gospel of Jesus.

Which means Romans 13 can never be used to silence that mission. If love is the one debt we always owe, then the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed are never optional concerns. They are the point. They are the people with names and stories that Paul’s whole argument is trying to form us to love.

Jesus came for them. Jesus came for us. We were once those people.

The question Romans 13 actually asks is not must I comply? It is: What kind of people are we becoming? Are we becoming people whose love is visible, whose engagement with power is disciplined, whose allegiance to Christ is unambiguous, even when that costs us comfort, approval, and the ease of looking away?

I’ll be honest: I came into this post with a heavy heart. The world is heavy. Rome is burning again, and it would probably be good for my blood pressure to turn off social media. But I can’t look away from what’s happening. I don’t think God is looking away either. The church was never supposed to.

Awake. Attentive. Active. Faithful. That is what we are called to be.

That is what the debt of love demands.

This post was originally posted on Substack.