Tripp Fuller
Home / features / Empire Goes All the Way Down: Joerg Rieger on What “Christian Nationalism” Misses

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This is the first live Q&A for the new class, and Joerg Rieger came ready. Christ and Empire came out during my last year of div school, and that’s why I was so excited to try to study with him, until Joerg promptly went on sabbatical. So this whole class is, in a sense, twenty years of making that up. The argument is not that empire won. It’s that across two thousand years, empire could never take over. There was always resistance, always alternatives, always a surplus that couldn’t be contained. This hour ran through what “empire” lets us see that “Christian nationalism” alone misses, why the German translation of one word cracked open the whole project, why Paul is neither conservative nor liberal, what happens to the middle when the right keeps moving right, and what a confessing moment would actually look like here and now. Next week we go to Nicaea. Those of you who are creedally allergic have been warned — and Joerg says there’s a surplus in Constantine’s creed next week too.

The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep is running now. Sign up at homebrewedclasses.com — you don’t have to donate anything. You’ll get access to all the lectures, you can send in questions by replying to any class email (that’s where every question in this Q&A came from), and you’ll be connected to the online community working through the material together.

 

Highlights from the conversation

  • Empire goes all the way down. Mark’s question: what does “empire” as conglomerates of power seeking to control all of life let us see that “Christian nationalism” by itself misses? Joerg’s answer starts with the empire cults. He was taught they were a thin religious veneer on top of the political order — Constantine faking it. He doesn’t think that’s true. The imperial cults were ways of life, defining how people lived all the way to the core. Which means Christian nationalism isn’t just a belief system either, and it shapes you whether you subscribe to it or not. Tripp’s addition, via Jan-Olav Henriksen: the engine of religion is orientation and transformation, and the theology is just the tip of the iceberg. Our Reformation inheritance keeps assuming that if we fix the ideas, the material relations follow. They don’t.
  • The German word that clarified the whole project. Devon asked about the translation problem, and it’s the best window into the book. German offers two options for surplus: Überfluss, abundance, and Mehrwert, the surplus value produced by working people. Joerg’s translator asked which one. Choosing the second changes everything. Nobody eats food that falls from the sky — there’s labor in it. So why do we assume theology drops from above, or from some great theologian’s mind for everyone else to copy? The theological surplus is a question about production: where are alternative theological ideas actually made? Which means the gaze goes down and around instead of up. Burning bush, not a voice from the sky. Jesus born to a construction day-laborer. The incarnation isn’t up there. It’s here.
  • Paul is not a conservative. He is also not a liberal. Harold’s question, and the sharpest exchange of the hour. The liberal move would have been picking a safer title than Lord — finding terms that don’t ruffle feathers, making distinctions about religion so it doesn’t get offensive. That wasn’t Paul’s world, where a modern separation of religion and politics wouldn’t have parsed. And the cost of the evasion isn’t irrelevance, though the church is seeing plenty of that. It’s worse: by trying to stay out of it, you get pulled in. You become part of what drives the problem. Joerg’s related read on the ambiguity inside the New Testament itself — Galatians, then Ephesians softening, then the Pastorals fully reinstating the Roman household structure — is the same slippery slope that took Methodism from Wesley naming exactly why poor people are poor to buying organs and becoming respectable within a generation of his death.
  • What happens to the middle when the right keeps moving right. Tamika, from a self-described progressive mainline church, asked where “surely we can all get along” lands if there are only two flows of power. Joerg’s answer is geometric and brutal. When the book was written, people were alarmed about empire under George W. Bush. That was child’s play. If the right keeps moving right, the middle moves with it — and people who think of themselves as moderates end up somewhere a European observer wouldn’t recognize as moderate at all. His closing example, as a German Methodist: staying neutral and hanging in the middle is exactly what the German Methodist Church thought it was doing between 1933 and 1945, and it discovered afterward that it had become part of the problem.
  • Logic, not morality — and what that does to Bonhoeffer. Kenny asked what changes if the problem is Rome’s logic rather than Rome’s morality. Three things: you develop a systemic analysis, you stop demonizing individual bad actors, and — critically — you stop waiting for the upstanding moral hero. Joerg’s line for his students: if you speak truth to power, the problem is you may well have the truth, but they still have the power. Which reframes Bonhoeffer. Not as a failure, but as someone who got into the logic and stayed too aloof — a product of the Bildungsbürgertum, killed before forty, never able to move fully into solidarity with working people. Tripp’s addition from After Ten Years: the shift right at the end, when the relational hermeneutic finally gets its material side, and Christ is found standing alongside the least of these. Joerg pushes it one notch further: not church forothers, but church with others. That small preposition is exactly the move from morality to logic — because solidarity pushed by morality burns people out.
  • Essential workers, and the recognition that didn’t survive. Lucas noticed the line from the lecture: the pandemic gave us a phrase very close to Paul’s indispensable members, and the phrase outlived the recognition. Joerg’s read is that this is not forgetfulness. It’s active. When Paul insisted on the invisible members of the body, he had to make a big point precisely because the system was working to make them more invisible. Same now. Churches went to grocery stores and applauded and handed out little presents — and almost nothing came of the deeper realization, which is that a CEO can CEO all day and nothing appears on the shelves, while without the food and agricultural and grocery workers the shelves are empty and so is your stomach. There are always more of us who work for a living than of them who don’t.

Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. For three decades, he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses relations of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His interest is in movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. Several of his 24 authored and edited books address the topics of this course, including No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future; Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (with Jin Young Choi). www.joergrieger.com

Previous Episodes w/ Joerg

JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep

Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing newclothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.

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