Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists

Summary

Christian fixation with political power is the theological emergency of our time, and in Defying Tyrants, Matthew D. Taylor traces the origins of Christian supremacy. Jesus directed his followers away from the race for power, but somewhere along the way, many Christians turned Jesus into a mascot for imperial domination. Where did it all go so wrong?

A trenchant reckoning with the murder, mayhem, and monsters of Christianity—from the early church and the Crusades to colonialism, slavery, and the Holocaust—Defying Tyrants demonstrates how imperialism has infected the body of Christ. With cogent argument and moral precision, Taylor excavates scriptural texts and unpacks the notion of Christian antichrists. When the term antichrist occurs in the Bible, it's frequently plural—not "The Antichrist" who populated the nightmares of fundamentalism's young people. Antichrists originate within the church and abuse people in the name of Christ. Christian antichrists justify harm and vengeance theologically, pointing people away from the God who entered humanity as a colonized peasant in the hinterlands of the Roman empire.

Both searing polemic and lyrical meditation, Defying Tyrants challenges us to put steel in the spine of Christian resistance to tyrants and reprimands the Christian leaders who bless them. It also spotlights a countertradition of Christians who have lived generous lives of sacrifice and stood up to authoritarians through the centuries. The gospel of Jesus pulls the rug out from under all human hierarchies, Taylor argues. In this brilliantly conceived and scrappy quarrel with Christian supremacy, he calls us to find in the teachings of Jesus and the witness of the early church a model of rebellion against tyrants. Because if Jesus is Lord, Caesar isn't.