God has spoken once, twice have I heard it, that power belongs to God. – Psalm 62

The limited exposure I had to Christianity in my youth had me quite convinced that what Christians had been called to in this world was a life of meek and timid passivity coupled with impersonal charity as a means of gaining merit. It seemed clear to me that in the Gospel that my Sunday school teachers and pastors had taught, that God had sent Jesus to this world to just tell everyone to calm down, relax, and be a little nicer. The world was so mean and so evil, the story goes, that they just couldn’t handle the gentleness of Jesus and his charitable do-goodedness, so they killed him. Christians, it was reasoned, were called to be just as timid, just as weak, as the Jesus whose niceness so confused the rest of the world that he had to die. If we could do that well, just maybe we could go to heaven too.

It wasn’t until I began to explore scripture myself that I discovered the real story. This nice-guy Jesus was a lie. A lie with a purpose.

It must first be said that, in my experience, this nice-guy Jesus is particular to white Christian spaces. You will not find the status-quo Jesus in the Black church. You will not find the too sweet to live Jesus in Latinx spaces. You will find a Jesus of liberation, a Jesus of solidarity, and a Jesus resplendent with power. But in white Christian spaces we have domesticated and erased the Jesus who proclaimed freedom to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and the liberation of the world’s oppressed people. Why?

Simple: A Jesus of liberation, a Jesus who embraces and understands how to organize power, ultimately condemns and threatens a world which has granted white folk, and white Christians in particular, wealth, dominating power, security, and status. A powerful Jesus, the one we actually read in the Gospels, calls white Christianity to divest of the coercive and exploitative power which we have been granted by the world. This isn’t just for the “bad” white Christians who have publicly linked themselves with white nationalism and bigotry, but also for the “good”, “liberal”, and “nice” white Christians. The Gospel, if we let ourselves really hear it, obliterates our passive acceptance of power and security rooted in whiteness and the nice-guy Jesus.

For white folks, this is a terrifying call. If we really allow ourselves to explore the implications of the Jesus we encounter in the Gospels, we will find ourselves challenged by our very way of life. We will have to examine the truth that our relative and often very real wealth has been built within an economic structure that exploits Black and Brown bodies. We’ll have to explore the power dynamics within our institutions and wonder, in the ELCA for example, how we ended up as the whitest denomination in the US. We’ll have to imagine ways in which we can spend the social capital we’ve been given by whiteness in solidarity with our neighbors of color. We will have to embrace a life devoid of the power we’ve grown accustomed to. And I think this is what scares us most. We are terrified of what will be left when the power of whiteness has been judged and crucified. We’ve constructed a definition of power that is a zero-sum game, and we imagine that if we aren’t the ones with power, we’re the ones being crushed by it.

Part of the nice-guy Jesus ideology is a total misrepresentation of the concept of power. I have found that in white Christian spaces we often speak about power as an evil and as something that Christians have been called to reject. We imagine power as we’ve seen it wielded by demagogues, tyrants, and corrupt politicians. We see power as the ability to crush others violently, or to protect corporate and institutional interests at the expense of others. And we’ve spun this myth as a church that we simply don’t have any of this kind of power. The nice-guy Jesus wouldn’t let us have that kind of power. He’s too nice.

But just scratching the surface of this tall tale reveals that as a church we absolutely have used power in those coercive and violent ways. We continue to do so, sometimes in more subtle and socially acceptable ways, but often enough with brutal and targeted force. So, let’s stop claiming innocence here. Furthermore, we use the image of the nice-guy Jesus and our attempt to mirror his niceness as a way of pretending that as a church, as a community, we simply don’t have any power, and are therefore unable to participate in the kinds of liberating practices that our neighbors do. We wish the world was different, but nice-guy Jesus said he’d take care of it, and we’d just hate to impose (while we continue to hoard wealth, elect leaders in bad faith, and disenfranchise people of color and indigenous peoples).

The church has power. God has called us to be powerful. The question is, what kind of powerful will we be?

I want us to reclaim the powerful Jesus. The liberating Jesus. The Jesus who rarely took shit and challenged every representative of structural power in his community. I want us to claim the power that God has imbued within the church. As we approach Pentecost, I want us to reclaim the ecstatic and charismatic expressions of the powerful God empowering God’s people to transform the world in the image of the Christ.

So how do we rid ourselves of the fairytale of the nice-guy Jesus? To get there, I believe we need to deconstruct our notions of power and articulate a clear and practical theological understanding of the concept. That is what I hope to do over the next few months on this blog. This is my introduction to a series I am committing to work on exploring the Christian understanding of power and a way forward for the church. I’m learning as I go and I hope you who read this will learn with me, hold me accountable, and challenge the arguments I make.

In his powerful work “Strength to Love”, Martin Luther King Jr. said:

“Millions of American Negroes, starving for the want of the bread of freedom, have knocked again and again on the door of so-called white churches, but they have usually been greeted by a cold indifference or a blatant hypocrisy. Even the white religious leaders, who have a heartfelt desire to open the door and provide the bread, are often more cautious than courageous and more prone to follow the expedient than the ethical path.”[1]

The decision to choose caution over courage continues today in white churches and among white church leaders and is rooted in our fear of losing the power and status we possess. We do not have a vision for a world where power does not crush the other or exploit those on the margins. We’ve accepted it as the natural way of the world. But with some honest reflection, some intentional theological examination, and by following the lead of our Black and Brown movement theologians, I believe we can rediscover the radical beauty of a God who builds power from the bottom up and the practices that can hold the forces of dominating power at bay.

[1] King Jr., Martin Luther. “Strength to Love”. Fortress Press. 2010 (1963).