Why Christianity Is About the Corporate Empire We Live in Today

Deconstructing Christianity: Jesus' teaching is relevant because the empire he lived under was not so different from the corporate empire under which we live.

I am deeply troubled by many of the ideas bandied about on the political, cultural, or intellectual Right. At the same time, the very real feelings of alienation that people experience—feelings that are not wrong even as they are effectively manipulated by demagogues—are sometimes accurately accounted for when given as reasons why certain terrible ideas should be implemented. This is particularly true of some heterodox thinkers who are less politically aligned and more analytical in their approach.

In a New York Times opinion piece from August 19, 2024, about Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy entitled “The Senator Warning Democrats of a Crisis Unfolding Beneath Their Noses,” author James Pogue quotes Julius Krein, founder of the quarterly American Affairs. Krein says that our postwar neoliberal economy “became one based on extracting rents rather than building things.” Per Pogue: “It rewards those who invent clever ways to squeeze money out of government and regular people. This is the simple explanation why so many jobs feel soulless and so many Americans feel harried and troubled amid the vast material wealth our country produces.”

The opinion piece quotes a Substack post by Senator Murphy about offering “real policies to address the hellscape of our cold, efficiency-obsessed, virtue-barren ‘new world.’” It also mentions a bill introduced “to fight the epidemic of loneliness that...has been driven by the pervasive communications technology and malignant commercialization of American life.” And it refers to “the complex military and financial systems that critics on both sides often refer to as the American Empire.”

Meaningless work, constant surveillance, immersive advertisement, and economic consumption for its own sake are all corrosive to the human soul. They are based on profit for the ownership class as being the highest good. Against the statistical extent that U.S. Americans identify as Christian, this ultimate value directly contradicts the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, even as it serves as the guiding concept for our entire society.

A meaningful term for this state of affairs is corporate triumph. An empire involves military might and far-reaching administrative controls, but in the end, these are only means that serve an end: the economic interests of a multinational elite class. Corporate triumph is the core objective of the very real empire under which we live.

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Under these circumstances, it is vitally important that Christians today understand something about Christianity: Jesus and his apostles spread teachings about an inward spiritual empire as an alternative to the temporal empire under which they lived. Everything about Jesus’ teaching as depicted in the gospels and reflected in epistles made direct reference to that empire: an emphasis on unconditional love for a spiritual Father and the people around us, an orientation away from material wealth, a practice of nonviolent passive resistance, all explained in part with appropriated imperial terms and concepts like empire itself (unfortunately translated kingdom), gospel, savior, lord, faith, and son of god—all observably ubiquitous ideological terms associated with Caesar and the Roman empire.

Over the centuries since, Christianity has lost sight of this context, and amassed layer upon layer of novel concepts concerning the significance of Jesus’ execution, Jesus himself, sin, atonement, damnation, and political, economic, and/or cultural dominion. These ideas have all been systematically underpinned by scripture taken out of context, reinterpreted, and retrofitted to support them. They are relevant to certain historical contexts, but they have rendered Christianity largely irrelevant in our postmodern context. That is one reason people are starting to abandon it in droves.

Christianity will die in the postmodern world unless it changes and adapts once again, this time to the context in which we live today. The core teachings of Jesus are deeply relevant to that context, because for all the epochal changes that have come and gone since then, Jesus’ imperial context is strikingly little different from ours. Christianity has a chance to reignite with vibrance and renewal. To accomplish that it must: 1) dispense with doctrinal accretions concerning sin and salvation; 2) reorient itself toward the actual core teachings of Jesus; and, 3) reconnect to the long-lost thread of prayer as a meditative practice for cultivating the basic skills of spiritual life in this alternate reality.