Uncovering the ungospel of Empire
In which Rebekah Mui connects Empire to colonialism to predators in our churches
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Gentle reader,
Today, I’m bringing you a thoughtful guest post from Rebekah Mui, in which she connects the Roman Empire to colonialism and abuse and asks us, instead, to give allegiance to the true gospel of Jesus Christ, who identifies with the weak and the suffering.
Rebekah Mui is a PhD student at Virginia Tech who researches Empire, gendered and sexual violences, and the desecration of the body from an Anabaptist, anarcho-pacifist, and Global South perspective. She is the editor of KingdomOutpost.org, writes at http://medium.com/rebekahmui and shares reflections about political theology and femininity on https://Twitter.com/muirebekah.
Content notes: this piece deals with colonialism, racism, control, violence, and abuse.
by Rebekah Mui
Uncovering the Ungospel of Empire
We talk about “gospel” as if it were a set of precepts and doctrines we must adhere to in order to be saved and forgiven of our sins, but gospel is “good news.” This definition is inherent in the Greek word evangelion.
In Luke, Jesus read from the Isaiah scroll to his assembled Nazarene peers. He proclaimed a gospel of good news for the poor, freedom for captives, and the throwing open of prison doors for those held within (Luke 4:12-13).
Yet, 1500 years later, a man named Columbus would erect a flag on a land he conquered and Christians would see this conquest as a proclamation of “gospel.” How much did Columbus’s proclamations and actions reflect glad tidings of good news, especially for the poor, the captive, and the bound? Do we continue to see the colonial project Columbus helped birth as a cause to be celebrated?
This essay is an examination of our notion of “gospel,” exploring our complacent inheritance of and failure to challenge “ungospels.” Ungospels are fables that spring forth from predators in sheep’s clothing, whose motive it is to devour. Ungospel evangelists operate in the way abusers do: by earning trust using deception. They groom their prey and those around them, convincing the world of their good intent. Their false gospel hinges on gaining control, on domination. That domination never proclaims itself as evil. A predator does not plant himself in a congregation and say, “I am here to find people I can abuse.”
What then, differentiates good news from evil tidings, the gospel of peace (Ephesians 6:15) from other gospels? To begin to identify ungospels around us, let’s look at three questions.
How did Jesus position the “Good News of the Kingdom of God” in relation to the Roman Empire? How did the early church construe this good news?
Did Columbus’s gospel stand up to the “Gospel of Peace” and “Gospel for the Poor?”
What does the colonial “ungospel” teach us about identifying other ungospels in the world today?
How did Jesus position the “Good News of the Kingdom of God” in relation to the Roman Empire? How did the early church construe this good news?
The Roman cross has stood as a symbol of Christianity for centuries, but we have forgotten what the cross symbolized to Roman subjects: imperial might and imperial terror. This is what we will do to those who dare rise up against us.
The Romans considered the desecration of the body as a grave humiliation and a literal representation of social standing. Roman leaders were considered “impenetrable penetrators”, which means that bodily integrity and inviolability was central to what made a man a True Man. According to Saller (1994), flogging was reserved for slaves and connoted slave-like status. This reflected the social understanding of slaves, regardless of sex, as subjects of bodily intrusion and sexual violation. Figueroa and Tombs (2019) note that crucifixion was reserved for the worst of criminals and insurrectionists, not for members of Roman society with standing. As such, Jesus’s subjection to crucifixion was in itself a declaration what kind of king he proclaimed himself to be and what kind of values would constitute his kingdom.
The Romans construed “Jesus of Nazareth” as a political dissident, and early Christians continued to be seen as trying to turn the world upside down in proclaiming Jesus as king (Acts 17:6). As such, the early Christian communion was a banquet celebration, like Roman celebrations of Caesar’s victory. The early Christians, rejecting the Roman social script, chose to write their own script in which the crucifixion of Jesus—his broken and pierced body—was a symbol of victory. Celsus’s accusation that Christianity was a religion of slaves and women was not unwarranted: the good news of a king who chose to identify with, suffer, and die as a slave (Philippians 2:6-8) was socially transgressive. Paul would describe the crucifixion as seeming weakness and foolishness, but unrivaled divine power in the eyes of the social nobodies who chose to believe.
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are. (1 Corinthians 1:26-28).
Rome proclaimed its own “good news,” one of “universal peace among people of different national and ethnic backgrounds” (Streett, 2013, p.83-84). Caesar, as king and lord, was endowed with a prophetic vision, a “manifest destiny” by the gods (p.84). Starting with Augustus, the Roman Caesars took the title “Pater Patriae,” father of the fatherland, as a symbol of their responsibility to “protect, discipline, and bless” their subjects (p.84). Rome kept the peace by promising prosperity and protection to those who submitted themselves to its rule. Imperial subjects were told that violence against those Caesar marked as savages and barbarians was ultimately for their welfare (Hardt and Negri, 2000).
The emperor guaranteed peace and security to all nations that submitted to his leadership, promising that the Roman military would protect their borders from invaders and maintain concord within their provincial boundaries. Those rejecting his unity plan were conquered militarily and subjected to Roman rule. The Pax Romana was the political goal of Roman domination. It was the good news that Rome offered to the world… Virgil, Aeneid, 6.850–853, writes in poetic form of Rome’s heavenly entitlement to rule the world and to “conquer and crush” all resistance (Streett, 2013, pp.83-84).
We see this raging vengeance in the destruction of Jerusalem, and Caesar’s victory was pictorially depicted as rape (Gnuse, 2015). Similarly, when Constantine defeated his enemy Maxentius, he paraded Maxentius’s desecrated body in the streets. This body was described by panegyrics as that of a slave girl (Elm, 2023), primarily because the Roman conception of the slave girl was that of an ignoble, desecrated subject . . . like the body of a crucified dissident.
The Disembarkation of Christopher Columbus with Companions on Three Launches, on Friday 12th October 1492, At Sunrise, on an American Island Named San Salvador by Him on the Very Same Day (1892) Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (Russian, 1817-1900), public domain via Artvee
Does Columbus’s gospel stand up to the “Gospel of Peace” and “Gospel for the Poor”?
Focus on the Family’s “Daily Citizen” has an article titled, “Go Ahead and Celebrate Christopher Columbus, Who Sought to Tell the New World About Jesus Christ.” The author cites Columbus’s belief that “It was the Lord who put into my mind (I could feel His hand upon me) the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies.” Columbus’s quest was inspired by Psalm 65:5, to do “awesome deeds,” such as plant a cross on the island he named “San Salvador,” “Holy Savior.” The article’s message is simple: Christian imagery and reference to Jesus shows us that colonization was a good thing. After all, it enabled the spread of the gospel.
The reality on the ground, however, was that the Spanish conquest was so viscerally violent and immoral that even Spanish records themselves bear testament to widespread use of torture, sexual violence, enslavement, and genocide. Hardin (2002, p.6) cites contemporary writings describing castration, evisceration, and other forms of mutilation.1
Columbus’s journal reveals that he began to articulate Spanish rule as “benevolent custodianship” (Zamora, 1990, p.139). Columbus viewed Arawak peoples as beast-like and intellectually deficient. His records show a pervasive attitude of “disdain” and “contempt” for an “inferior class” of human beings (pp.139-140). Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Columbus’s contemporary, would later use such arguments drawn from Aristotelian natural philosophy to defend enslavement and forced conversion. Note how the idea of benevolence obscures the reality of overt violence. Anything, it seems, can be justified when evildoers profess motives of love and care. Columbus’s ungospel was predicated on the placing of the “other” group of people in a subordinate position, arguing for ontological differences of intelligence and ability.
According to Aristotle the natural slave was a physically gifted but intellectually and morally deficient being. He argued that from birth all creatures are marked for either subjugation or domination, and that the rule of those deemed superior over those deemed inferior is both natural and expedient. (Zamora, 1990, p.140).
Authority, in this framework, takes on a specific mode: the creation of social hierarchies, the possession and desecration of subordinate bodies, and coercion of labor. Zamora also notes that slaves were not the only inferior class in Aristotle’s philosophy; women were, as well. When, in 1 Corinthians 1, Paul describes the early Christians as weak and foolish in social perception, he likely was referring to the same Greco-Roman notion of an inferior and irrational soul attributed to women, slaves, and other subjects of imperial and household rule (Berg, 2020).
Because the “ruling” and superior caste defined the system of authority and submission, they could claim even the most horrific actions as benevolent guardianship. Yet, the historical record shows us that there is no reality under which the Spanish conquistadors were “good news for the poor.” In fact, the conquistadors proclaimed an ungospel of captivity and enslavement. This can be seen in the Requerimento, a proclamation in 1517 issued in the name of the papal church and Spanish king and queen, which threatened those who did not bow to the authority of Church and the Spanish monarchy with the following:
… I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can… we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us.
What does the colonial “ungospel” teach us about identifying other ungospels in the world today?
I believe that there is a strong connection between how we view the gospel and how we respond to abuse. Tellingly, Shane Morris from the Gospel Coalition published a review of Zachary Wagner’s Non-Toxic Masculinity in which he sees Wagner as presenting a very different gospel than what Morris considers real theology:
Throughout his book, the vocabulary of “dehumanization,” “abuse,” “trauma,” and “health” conspicuously displaces the language of sin, obedience, chastity, and sanctification. It’s not that Wagner never uses these words. It’s that they’re not load-bearing for his argument… Wagner concludes that the real and “more urgent ethical imperative of our time… is how we can stem the ongoing epidemic of abuse and dehumanization in our churches” (58).
Morris argues that what he categorizes as “therapy language” fundamentally conflicts with “theology language.” Authentically theological language, Morris asserts, is about “sin, obedience, chastity, and sanctification.” Yet, we know from Roman history that the crucifixion itself was not alien from the question of domination and sexual abuse. We also know that Scripture proclaims sexual abuse as sin (1 Thessalonians 4:3-6), and the way of lust as incompatible with the Father’s way of love (1 John 2:16).
In the midst of polarizing controversies surrounding doctrinal orthodoxy, we have perhaps missed one of the fundamentals of the gospel itself: the Jesus who bore the likeness of a slave overcame, through the cross, an empire that desecrated and mocked the bodies of the enslaved. The gospel was, and will continue to be, a kind of “good news” that those invested in empire will see as weak, stupid, and pointless.
One of the ungospels we see at work in the world today is a system that emerged from “slaveholder” and imperial theology. This is a gospel of world domination, of war, and of conquest. This is a gospel predicated on fulfilling the lusts and desires of fallen flesh.
The fundamental premise of colonial modernity was that some are naturally born to be rulers (men, colonizers, masters) and some are naturally born to be ruled (women, the colonized, slaves). This is nothing new if we consider Greco-Roman history.
This ideology would later translate into the “greater burden” the so-called civilized West carried for the rest of the world, to steal, kill, destroy, eliminate, and indoctrinate in the name of “progress” and “modernity” as well as “evangelism.” Notice how the following assertions made by a 19th century British imperial ruler could well have been made by proponents of the Roman imperium:
We give peace where war was. We give justice where injustice ruled. We give law and order where the only law was the law of strength. We give Christianity, or a chance of it, where Paganism ruled. Whether the native looks on it in that light is another matter. I am afraid that possibly he doesn’t as yet truly appreciate his benefit.” (Baron Cranworth, cited by Parsons, 2010, p.1)
Jackman (1994) describes this kind of relationship—between rulers and their subjects, enslavers and enslaved, or men and women—as paternalism. Rulers derive a “satisfying feeling of benevolence” based on their supposed “fulfilment of… needs” of those under their control. Such a relationship is asymmetrical and fundamentally “unequal,” yet “swathed in a morality that identifies subordinates’ worth and value within the terms of that relationship… With affection comes the ability of those in command to shape the needs and aspirations of subordinates and to portray discriminatory arrangements as being in the best interests of all concerned.” In fact, apologists for antebellum slavery commonly characterize it as a deeply Christian system (see Wilson and Wilkins, Southern Slavery 1996, p.24), one marked by “kindly affection” on one hand and “wise subordination” on the other (Chesnutt, 1899).
Why pretend to be benevolent? Perhaps the more one advocates for hatred and violence, the more one has to make the inhuman human. The root motive of such a construct, according to Tourish and Wolforth (2001), is self-image.
…For many supremacists an acceptance of the term “racist” would jar with their self-image as a righteous and God-fearing people, creating dissonance. However, if they can avoid attaching racist labels to their belief system it becomes possible to maintain two objectively contradictory positions at once—a racist perspective, and a self-image as practicing Christians motivated by a love for humanity...
Ungospels, by nature, try to mimic good news. If we are on the watch for even the subtlest adulation of “power” language and power dynamics such as “authority and submission,” we can begin to identify theologies of paternalism disguised as mutually beneficial exchange. We can begin to identify the obvious and well-articulated links between those who advocate for benevolent paternalism and those deeply invested in projects of nationalism and empire.
“Watch out for a different gospel,” the apostles warned. Constantine’s defeat of Maxentius was seen by contemporaries as unusually violent, one marked by “extraordinary cruelty” (Elm, 2023, pp.350-351). Yet, Constantine identified his victory as proof of extraordinary “divine favor” (de Haan and Hekster, 2014, p.18). Constantine is said to have seen a vision the night before the decisive battle. He heard the words, “in this you shall conquer” and saw a cross. Since then, Christians who have embraced a gospel of imperial domination have similarly proclaimed the triumph of sword and emperor over the body of the symbolic slave girl.
The path to empire is strewn with desecrated bodies. Even the body of Jesus had to be altered, transformed from lowliness into the image of Caesar (American History Association, 2023). In such a framework, it is no wonder that the question of sexual abuse is cast aside in favor of mobilizing Christendom to amass power for itself once again.
The ungospel of Empire is an ungospel of lust.
Thanks again to Rebekah for sharing this important essay.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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“R. Laudonniere in his history on the Spanish presence in southern regions of North America, states that a Hispanolan ‘feared to fall into the hands of the Spaniards. Once before he had been taken by them and, as he showed us, they had cut out his genitalia’ (in Trexler, 1995, p. 64). Even Bartolome de Las Casas referred to this… ‘Horrors of the Conquest,’ Las Casas (1992b) mentioned where the cut came from that led to the loss of entrails: ‘And just as the young man came down, a Spaniard who was there drew a cutlass or half sword and gives him a cut through the loins, so that his intestines fall out’ (p. 26). To cut through the loins was to genitally mutilate the enemy. Las Casas also mentioned that ‘The Indians were disemboweled, were run through with swords and pikes, were cut to pieces’ (1992a, p. 124)... He also added that the ‘Spaniards invented new cruelties, new methods of torture to force the Indians to reveal and hand over their stores of gold’ (1992a, p. 48), and ‘the Spaniards have always continually increased and expanded their infernal acts and outrages’ (1992a, p.58).”
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Good post! BTW, Beth, can one contact you at bethfelkerjones.substack.com? I did.