by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, has very recently been published. In February we will have a rightingamerica Q and A with Kennedy about this book.
The church is called as faithful witness in the age of empire. By empire I mean the unholy coalition of MAGA evangelicals and authoritarian politicians (previously known as the Republican Party).
I borrow my theme from Harold S. Bender’s 1944 “The Anabaptist Vision,” an essay exploring the faith of the original Anabaptists. Bender believed in returning to and recovering an old faith. He outlined three basic components of the Anabaptist vision: discipleship, brotherhood, and nonviolence.
According to Bender (1897-1962) – a Mennonite historian – discipleship was central to the understanding of the Anabaptist movement: “The great word of the Anabaptists was not ‘faith’ as it was with the reformers, but ‘following’ (Nachfolge Christi).”
I too believe in returning to and recovering an old faith – the faith of the early Christian church in Acts. Make no mistake, I am not promoting a literal restoration of the early church (a la the Campbellites). Instead, I promote what James W. McClendon calls the baptist vision: “The church now is the primitive church and the church on judgment day.”
Progressives are not trying to create an idolatry of some imagined golden age of the church. We are attempting to recover our “first love” and act it out in bodily ways.
The results of the 2024 election traumatized me. One of my colleagues said to me, “We’re all in mourning here, too. Our country has betrayed us.”
Everything I had written and warned about Trump seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. As a student of presidential rhetoric and a preacher of the gospel I felt all my convictions were threatened. I took a deep breath and decided to do what I do – write my way to a new vision of the future.
Three critical traditions offer an alternative vision to Empire. The first is the early church practice of parrhesia (risky truth-telling). The second is the prophetic imagination rooted in the Hebrew prophets and the Black Christian experience. The third is the political imagination of Jesus: social gospel, social justice, and the gospel for the poor.
Risky Truth-telling
That a congenital liar could win the presidential election threw me back into the well-worn pages of my copy of Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech, a series of lectures about parrhesia. The term is usually translated in English as “free speech.” The French translation, franc-parler, suggests that the meaning is “frank speech.”
An age embracing lies so huge as to become believable needs to be checked by a new emphasis on truth. Foucault says, “Parrhesiaxesthai means ‘to tell the truth.’ …. To my mind, the parrhesiastes says what is true because he knows that it is true; and he knows that it is true because it is really true.”
The speaker risks his life because he sees truth-telling a duty to help others, especially those in power. There is a recognition of the tension between truth and power. The speaker chooses the risk of death instead of security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of moral apathy. This positive meaning of parrhesia shows up most often in the New Testament book of Acts as a characteristic of the followers of Jesus.
New Testament professor, C. Kavin Rowe, refers to Acts as “a highly charged and theologically sophisticated political document that aims at nothing less than the construction of an alternative total way of life.” The early church offers a model for dealing with the power of Empire.
Luke shows the early church as a people with no interest in taking or dominating the state. In Acts, according to Rowe, “Christians do not want to replace the Emperor, nor do they want a Christian to be the Emperor. That would be a far too conservative politics.” The witness of the early church determined to “turn the world upside down.”
Here’s the prayer that needs to be on the lips of every progressive preacher:
- “And now, Lord, look at their threats, and grant to your servants to speak your word with all boldness” (Acts 4:29).
Here’s the scene that should unfold in every progressive church:
- “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31).
Here are the actions that should identify every progressive preacher:
- “So he went in and out among them in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord” (Acts 9:28); “So they remained for a long time speaking boldly for the Lord, who testified to the word of his grace by granting signs and wonders to be done through them” (Acts 14:3); “He entered the synagogue and for three months spoke out boldly and argued persuasively about the kingdom of God” (Acts 19:8).
And here is how progressive preachers should be remembered:
- “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:31).
In Acts, the witness of Stephen suggests that he qualifies as a primary “truth-teller,” as a saint for the progressive church. Stephen gives bodily, fleshly reality to the word witness. The empire, of course, was “enraged” at the message of Stephen and “ground their teeth”:
- “They covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul’ (Acts 7:57 – 58).
Speaking truth can contest a culture dominated by hyperbole, untruthful claims, lies, and threats. Speaking truth can restore the conviction that words matter, reasons matter, and rational deliberation matters in how we make decisions.
The Prophetic Imagination
MAGA evangelicals now occupy a position as defenders of the status quo of power. They traffic in established truth told by an Empire built on lies. Official truth is now carried by evangelical voices taking directions from Empire officials. They are allied with secular political parties, a sort of modern version of Pharisees mixed with Herodians and Sadducees. The MAGA god of nationalism has polluted the evangelical church.
The progressive task – assume the role of the prophet. The Christian Nationalists, the MAGA evangelicals, the network of independent Pentecostals in the place of power have the role of Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, declaring, “O progressives, go, flee away, and prophesy somewhere else; but never again prophesy in [D. C.] for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”
We have an even more immediate prophetic resource at our disposal in the Black prophetic tradition. “The Black prophetic tradition has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf,” Cornel West claims. “What has kept American democracy from going fascist or authoritarian or autocratic has been the legacy of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Martin King, Fannie Lou Hamer. This is not because Black people have a monopoly on truth, goodness or beauty. It is because the Black freedom movement puts pressure on the American empire in the name of integrity, decency, honesty and virtue.”
Those who speak the truth will last because the truth never dies. The courage to be prophetic gives us a vision for moving forward.
The Social Gospel
Nothing enrages MAGA evangelicals like the social gospel of Jesus. In Luke 4, Jesus lays out his radical politics of a social gospel of neighbor and hospitality. He insists God loves foreigners. “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.”
Evangelicals have dominated Christian thought in America with an individual gospel of personal salvation. The stage is set for a vision of salvation as the practices capable of saving us from what Stanley Hauerwas calls “those powers that would rule our lives making it impossible for us to worship God.”
One glaring goal of Empire we can resist: The deportation of 11,000,000 migrants. Here we are on solid biblical ground: “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19:34).
One question can be thrown at the feet of the MAGA prophets: Who is our neighbor? Our best neighbors may turn out to be non-American brown refugees in search of a better life. A progressive church will insist on a good neighbor approach, a place of refuge for immigrants.
During his 2024 campaign Donald Trump claimed, “Remember …. They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags,” Trump added. “But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.” The irony: The cross is not antithetical to social justice flags. The American flag is antithetical to the cross.
Asserting the politics of Jesus as the social gospel of “good news for the poor” here and now is the most powerful statement we can make in the face of the new outburst of Empire in America. There is no better way for progressives to respond than to present Christianity as a body always prepared to give hospitality to strangers.
Given the teaching of Jesus about the rich and the poor, I am fearful for the billionaires falling over one another in the new Trump administration. “Blessed are the poor,” says Jesus. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation,” says Jesus. “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:23 – 24).
Jesus tells horror stories about the fate of the rich. The rich man who failed to be neighbor to Lazarus, “lifted up his eyes in hell to beg for a cup of water.” The rich man who was going to build bigger and more barns was told, “This night is your soul required of you.” Jesus is clear: If you are rich or desire to be rich, you have an immense problem. And now we think “riches” will save us and billionaires will rescue us.
A More Particular Word about Walter Rauschenbusch
If Baptists had a calendar of saints, Walter Rauschenbusch would be the first one admitted. Baptists have produced so few great theologians. Anabaptist theologian, James W. McClendon, in Ethics (vol. 1 of his systematic theology) wryly observes, “That there are few baptist theologies of merit will be granted by most observers.” And then he adds: Walter Rauschenbusch (1861– 1918) alone has attained cosmopolitan stature— and significantly, his starting point was ethics. For Rauschenbusch, salvation was fleshly, bodily, and material. He was not a Gnostic Baptist with all those layers of spiritualization and individual salvation.
His most important book, A Theology for the Social Gospel, was published in 1917. This was at the beginning of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in America. Rauschenbusch insisted the church adjust its theology to include a growing social consciousness.
Rauschenbusch still takes shots from conservative critics. Theologically, there’s Rauschenbusch living rent-free in conservative minds; politically, there’s FDR. One preached the Social Gospel, the other attempted to make it official U. S. government policy.
Rauschenbusch’s great-grandson, Walter Rauschenbusch, in Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classic That Woke Up the Church, includes a series of essays from well-known scholars: Phyllis Trible, Tony Campolo, Joan Chittister, Stanley Hauerwas, Cornel West, Jim Wallis, and Richard Rorty.
Even in this volume the criticisms of Rauschenbusch are included, particularly, criticisms of Rauschenbusch’s alleged lack of evangelical faith. I haven’t the space to refute these criticisms of Rauschenbusch, so I turn the arguments back on his critics. Why not take the evangelical faith and add the social gospel? Why not preach both individual and corporate salvation? A progressive preacher knows that the two belong together.
I agree with Stanley Hauerwas: “After Rauschenbusch, there is no gospel that is not ‘the social gospel.’ We are permanently in his debt.”
These are three powerful visions aiding our dissent from Empire – parrhesia (truth-telling), prophetic tradition, social gospel – that offer progressives a rock-solid foundation. Progressives offer a form of life that insinuates a thoroughgoing antagonism to the present powers.
The progressive alternative is a clear vision: “With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him” (Romans 12:1, J. B. Phillips New Testament).