Note: This is not a post about the 2024 presidential election. At least not directly.
Rome, Baghdad, Istanbul, London, Washington, New York, Beijing, Moscow, and San Franscisco could each, in their own way, be considered imperial cities. Fewer people would likely think of Amman. Yet the Jordanian capital ranks among the top monuments to imperial power in the modern world. Its language and faith come from the interior of Arabia. Its economy and military are inextricably dependent on America. Its people walk daily among Roman ruins, none grander than the downtown amphitheater. And beneath the surface, from street design to national symbols to legal codes to educational curricula, Amman is nothing if not a former imperial possession of the United Kingdom.
Living there, in my last great attempt at self-education before grad school, inspired me to read the 5-volume Oxford history of the British Empire to try to better understand what my American mind had not fully grasped. Like many who grew up in the United States, I had envisioned empires coming with colorful standing armies and overbearing monarchs in outdated wigs whose political outlook differed little from the autocracies of Mussolini’s Italy or Hussein’s Iraq. What I realized in my time living in Amman and reading this history, however, was that empires are much more complicated, modern, and subtle than I had assumed.
It was with this experience in mind that I reacted to the latest horrific news out of Sudan, where the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces are battling to overthrow the semi-dictatorial government in a war that has leveled Khartoum, ransacked centers of culture, and led to mass rapes, death, and famine. Across the Horn of Africa, meanwhile, tensions are growing between Ethiopia and Somalia, which is now backed by Egyptian forces displeased with Ethiopian damming of the Nile River, over Ethiopia’s diplomatic recognition of the breakaway Somali territory of Puntland in exchange for the Puntland government granting Ethiopia access to the Red Sea. All of this is, of course, occurring in the shadow of the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza (not to mention direct conflict between Israel and Iran) that has drawn in Iranian-backed proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon as well as multiple U.S. carrier groups, potentially complicating the U.S. military posture vis-à-vis China regarding Taiwan, the Philippines, and other potential flashpoints of superpower conflict between Washington and Beijing, all as Americans head to the polls to elect a new president.
These events testify to the decay of the unipolar moment, the era beginning roughly in 1990 in which the United States possessed total military hegemony on a global scale. That era was characterized by extensive U.S. engagements in faraway places like the Balkans, Somalia, and Iraq (anyone remember the No Fly Zones?) to prevent exactly the sorts of violence unfolding in Sudan. In its place, at least in the Horn of Africa, has emerged a complex competition for power and influence among leaders in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Qatar, Russia, China, and the UAE. In other words, the demise of U.S. hegemony in Sudan has opened the door for a renewed imperial contest among rising powers eager to construct their own empires of client states, natural resource access, and political influence on the world stage.
Beyond the Horn of Africa, examples abound of a creeping imperial era in geopolitics. Rwandan soldiers are currently fighting in the Congo, a country with a sizable Russian mercenary presence alongside UAE, Swiss, and Chinese owned mines. Iran-backed militias wield military power across Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, threatening to escalate the Israel-Hamas War beyond Gaza. Azerbaijan recently conquered and ethnically cleansed a region of Armenia. China has embarked on even more menacing confrontations over Taiwan, in the South China Sea and East China Sea, to say nothing of its vast economic investments worldwide. Venezuela threatens war with Guyana. And, of course, the Russian war in Ukraine drags on as the casualty count creeps closer to one million lives (if it has not reached that mark already). Though the colors on the map may not officially change, as the Pax Americana recedes these conflicts and the imperial projects they represent advance.
Even more, the United States behaves like a rival imperial power on the world stage by enlisting new allies with each passing year. Of course, as Ross Douthat points out, there have always been three senses of the American empire: (1) the federal government’s control of the vast territory that comprises the continental United States and its immediate environs, (2) the far-flung network of U.S. military outposts around the world, and (3) and an empire of ideas “which exists spiritually wherever our commercial and cultural power reaches.” While in some ways the first and third senses of an American empire are stronger than ever, it is the second sense that is being tested by revanchist powers and is catalyzing more and more nations that previously prospered under the U.S.-underwritten neoliberal global order to secure their own networks of influence and resource access as American military power (not necessarily economic power) relative to its rivals takes a step back.
Christianity has thrived in past eras of imperialism, of course, and we should remain firm in trusting God’s providential guidance of world affairs. All the same, this resurgence of imperialism matters for Christians because there are generally distinct forms that national and imperial politics take, as Yoram Hazony argues in The Virtue of Nationalism. While Hazony’s framework is overly simplistic and has major blind spots, he correctly notes that imperialism and nationalism operate as discrete logics of political order with divergent organizational principles.
Consequently, if we are to live wisely as we seek to preserve and share the Christian faith, we ought to be mindful of the ways in which an imperial political order will likely generate new tensions and points of conflicts for Christian communities. To take a step toward anticipating those challenges in the hopes of better preparing churches to withstand the pressures of a new imperial age, I highlight four key axes that distinguish an imperial political system from one that normatively assumes the nation-state.
Like Rome, Tokyo, or Moscow, empires are typically characterized by an imperial center that functions as the locus of political, economic, and cultural power. This dynamic creates an imbalanced dialectic between the metropole and the provinces, which can suffer from brain drain, political invisibility, and a regional version of the resource curse akin to the extractive nature of Panem’s economic relationships between the capital and the districts. Sometimes larger empires replicate the metropolitan-provincial dynamic on a regional scale, such as in Alexandria’s domination of Egypt under Rome or Mexico City’s relationship to New Spain after the conquistadors. These imbalances can easily create resentment among the provinces. Yet it can also be difficult for a metropolitan center to effectively redistribute prosperity or political representation to imperial peripheries without damaging the unity and viability of the empire.
These dynamics are visible to some extent in the United States, as anyone living in the rust belt or flyover country will certainly know. Sometimes state-funded institutions in such places, like universities or military bases, can feel more like outposts of imperial economic and ideological control rather than genuine stakeholders in the local community. If the world is indeed moving in an imperial direction, then Christian leaders ought to prepare for even more growing divides between prosperous metropolitan centers and provincial backwater regions.
This means learning to negotiate the divides between “somewheres” and “anywheres” within our churches and among denominational stakeholders, perhaps even extending to a generous model of resource redistribution from wealthier, urban congregations to poorer, rural ones (note: those resources are financial and intellectual). It means recognizing that populism is not going away as a political force in western societies. And it means being mindful of the cultural blinders that living in a dynamic urban core or inhabiting metropolitan-facing institutions can generate. If we are to follow the commands of 1 Corinthians 12, then we must be mindful as to the structural reasons why a member of the body of Christ may be tempted to say to another “I don’t need you!” in the present age.
Empires deal with peoples, not individuals. Because they cover vast territories, they contain diverse peoples and cultures within them. The Persian Empire during the time of Daniel, Nehemiah, Esther, and Ezra provides an apt example. Ruling from Egypt to India, the Persians designed a system to allow conquered peoples to maintain many of their cultural and religious traditions. This generally involved creating governing structures through which the imperial court interacted with the leaders of peoples within the empire who represented their ethnic class, which in turn meant that the rights one possessed and the legal code one followed were determined less by universal standards of citizenship binding across all populations of the empire and more by the particular norms and structures established by one’s people group within the limits set by the capital and in coordination with the local satrap (i.e. Jews were free to rebuild the temple and Jerusalem’s walls, but they were not allowed to reestablish the monarchy). If one lived within the Persian Empire, one’s political identity was defined by one’s membership to an ethnic, regional, or political class.
This pattern of empires dealing with populations on the people group level rather than as individuals is a characteristic pattern of empires across many historical contexts. The Roman Empire, as the Gospel accounts exhibit, allowed for Jewish authorities to regulate and administer civil law within the province of Judaea under the Roman governor. The Umayyad Caliphate did much the same, organizing peoples according to their ethnicity and faith for the purposes of levying differential tax rates and imposing obligations for military service. Most European empires from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries denied citizenship rights to the non-European populations under their control, instead creating provincial governance entities or alternative legal statuses for conquered peoples. The Ottoman Empire offers perhaps the best example of this imperial tendency, as it organized its entire military around skills taught to different peoples within the empire in accordance with the millet system.
By contrast, individuals living within modern nation-states are (almost always) citizens of their country of origin or naturalized citizens. This norm of republican citizenship in which all individuals in a given polity are granted universal citizenship rights and are governed under a common civil and criminal law code no matter their ethnicity, faith, or heritage is a characteristic feature of the modern world created by British and American power since the 1700s. It has echoes in places like Jordan or Israel, which have different civil law codes for different religious communities while possessing a shared criminal law. While imperfectly realized, the ideal of republican citizenship foundationally informs contemporary political organization. Even in undemocratic regimes, the norm of universal citizenship is well established. This is why antimodern revolutionary movements such as the Islamic State burn passports, because they’re trying to deconstruct the trappings of a corrupt modernity that includes the category of modern citizenship.
Yet the decay of citizenship in favor of class-based governance is perceptible in the United States, as anyone who has lived through the “great awokening” well knows. Americans are increasingly spurred to think of themselves in identitarian terms rather than as coequal members of a shared national project, and U.S. governance steadily resembles a system of economic patronage networks run by professionals rather than by citizens. This shift signals the rise of a domestic imperial framework to mirror the extensions of U.S. military power abroad, one that sets up a centralized authority that adjudicates disputes among diverse population groups within national borders in a manner not fully unlike empires of the past.
Such a situation presents two key challenges for Christian leaders. First, it may become more difficult to build connections and be one in Christ Jesus if membership in various racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic classes becomes even more legally and politically salient. Second, under such conditions it will be tempting for churches to tone down criticism of the state or cozy up to a political party for fear of being ostracized, censored, or literally demolished.
In an imperial system, to go against the central authority is to invite repression, which is why Christians in autocratic societies often cultivate an uber-patriotic public presence even if the regime in question is officially anti-Christian. A broader cultural shift toward imperial politics will confront Christian leaders with an unappealing choice between risking mistreatment and congregational persecution or giving in to the temptation to be, in Richard Wurmbrand’s words, “Caesar’s bootlicker” and accommodating public desecration of Christianity.
Public debate is a cornerstone of liberal democracy, which is why free speech is the foundational right upon which other rights rest in the U.S. constitutional order. From Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Samuel Gompers, Frederick Douglass to Cesar Chavez, MLK to modern-day advocates for life, those outside the halls of power have turned to public arguments to make their case for issues of justice, fairness, and the common good. Similarly, political leaders have historically been obligated to offer reasons for their policies and choices to the public as a means of electoral accountability.
Yet, as I have written before, the norm of adjudicating political conflicts through public debate is weakening. In its place have arisen movements that emphasize shaming, coercion, and cancelling to mobilize tribal constituencies that engage in disciplinary action against those that offend them. Since public debate requires good faith engagement on both sides of an issue, the emergence of these movements has heralded the decay of public argumentation and corresponding decline in democratic norms in favor of increased demagoguery.
Political disagreements still must be settled somehow, though. Instead of public debate, decisions happen behind closed doors, in enclaves. Enclaves are defined by Sarah Florini as discursive networks characterized by “technological functionalities that create barriers, formal and informal, to outsider participation.” In contrast to public discourse, which is visible and (theoretically) accessible to participants across sociopolitical hierarchies, enclaved discourse remains hidden from mainstream members of a society. In an imperial system, it is the conflict, or agonism, within these spaces that determines what decisions are made that guide the body politic.
For example, while public opinion in Rome itself sometimes influenced the selection of emperors, most citizens (much less subjects) of Rome had zero input into the policymaking process; even modern empires like the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgs limited true decision making power to a handful of spaces. Enclaved agonism is a characteristic feature of imperial systems.
It also serves as an accurate label for the removal of Joe Biden from the Democratic Party presidential nomination and a host of other major political decisions made in the United States in recent years. For Christian leaders, this shift away from public debate toward enclaved agonism means several things. On a macro level, it means the societal ability to externalize one’s reasoning and handle public dialogue will shrink. It will almost certainly increase institutional mistrust in line with Gen Z attitudes. I suspect this shift will also mean that the skills needed to navigate public disagreement in good faith will wither. Although it will look different in each locality, church leaders should prepare to encounter a citizenry trained by very different norms of political discourse than in times past.
War is almost never popular. However, the maintenance of imperial networks requires constant military violence to police actors who would disrupt metropolitan access to far flung resources or otherwise threaten the political balance necessary to maintain an empire’s geopolitical security. This requirement typically spurs innovation in military technology and infrastructure. Rome’s roads facilitated the rapid movement of military power to address threats, for instance, and British warplanes did the same in Iraq. The U.S. war against Salafi-Jihadi terrorism since 9/11 mirrors these dynamics, with the military using technological innovations like drones and cyberattacks to fight enemies from Mindanao to Mali while also deploying forces against drug cartels in Latin America and preparing for a great power war by arming Taiwan and Ukraine. To be fair, the United States fought in military conflicts across the world during McKinley’s presidency and Cold War as well. But at no moment in U.S. history has there been this degree of constant military engagement worldwide, all without a declaration of war or even public awareness of all the places U.S. troops are fighting. This state of affairs echoes the imperial policing of Britain and other empires, as Josh Rovner pointed out nearly a decade ago.
Given the Pentagon’s resistance to scaling back these U.S. military commitments, it seems unlikely that military conflict will return to being an exceptional state for American politics. In many ways U.S. society has already internalized the costs of these “forever wars,” but it is still worth pointing out that those doing the fighting and those enjoying the benefits of these military conflicts often come from different regions and socioeconomic classes in American society. Still, the disconnect between those with military service and those without can be vast; veterans comprise about 1 percent of the country but over 10 percent of the homeless population. Christian leaders ought to be mindful that it is these sorts of disparities that fuel populist discontent. They should also be aware of the propaganda tactics that work to legitimize U.S. involvement in military conflicts in faraway lands. War brings pressure on democratic systems; unending wars contort democratic politics beyond recognition. As with other national states of emergency, church leaders must especially be wise about the extent to which they allow the federal government a voice in shaping the messages parishioners hear from the pulpit. No matter who wins this November, Christians will face a presidential administration tempted by the allure of a “Red Caesar” or an epistemological tyranny, which presumably will only serve to continue these trends.
Perhaps I am wrong, and a revival of republican citizenship and “normal” politics will soon take root in the United States and sweep across the world. I hope I am. But if not, then we should pray as we prepare for a new, imperial era of geopolitical conflict.