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Heretic Adjacent | April 16, 2026
I grew up inside Christendom. I just didn’t know that’s what it was called.
Grand Rapids, Michigan. The publishing center for much of the white evangelical world. My dad was an acquisitions editor, so we had popular Christian books. All the books. I was hip deep in Christendom.
Christianity was the juice where I grew up. It was just the way things worked. The church sat at the center of much of life. The other parochial high school in my hometown was Calvin High School (“John” not “Klein”).
Christianity wasn’t something you believed; it was atmospheric, the air we breathed.
I’m telling you this because I don’t want to sound like somebody pointing fingers from outside the tent. And because when J.D. Vance stood on a stage in Budapest recently and called on Hungarians to defend “the God of our fathers” and the cause of “Western civilization,” I recognized it as something familiar.
He doesn’t actually say it, but the word J.D. Vance keeps flirting with is Christendom. It sounds like Christianity, doesn’t it? (It’s supposed to.) But Christendom and Christianity aren’t the same thing. They never have been. And that’s what makes confusing the two so dangerous.
Christianity is a faith that begins with a wandering rabbi executed by the empire for threatening its authority. It centers on the scandalous claim that God showed up not as a king but as a vulnerable infant, born in poverty, surrounded by animals, his family chased out of his hometown.
The gospel is the story of power relinquished rather than power seized.
Christendom, on the other hand, is what happened when the church decided it’d rather be the empire than confront it. It’s the social, cultural, and political order in which Christianity doesn’t just exist within a society, but feels responsible for helping organize it. Constantine’s bargain clinched the sale: “We’ll give you legitimacy if you give us the sword. Easy-peasy.”
The Crusades are an example of Christendom. So are the Doctrine of Discovery and “Manifest Destiny.” Christendom isn’t “the faith once delivered for all.” Instead, it’s what happens when the faith gets hijacked by the state.
And J.D. Vance wasn’t pretending to be subtle about which one he’s after. He flew to Hungary to campaign for Viktor Orbán, a man who gutted judicial independence, suppressed the press, and batted his eyelashes at Vladimir Putin. You know, like a dictator, or whatever.
Vance’s justification for this coziness?
That Hungary and the United States share a commitment to “Christian civilization.”
Wait, what? The vice president of the United States is telling us that the bond between our country and a corrupt authoritarian government is Jesus? That the thing holding this aspirationally despotic concordat together is the cross?
If that doesn’t make you want to projectile vomit your Grape-Nuts, you haven’t been reading the Gospels carefully enough.
On April 12th, the Hungarians voted. They ended Orbán’s 16-year grip on power in a landslide, handing his challenger a supermajority.
The vice president of the United States had flown to Hungary to campaign in person for the flagship example of “Christian civilization” in action. And the people who’d actually been living under it replied, “Um, no, thank you.”
There’s something pretty revealing in that. J.D. Vance stood on a Hungarian stage invoking the God of their forbears, and the Hungarians, who knew what that actually cost them for the last 16 years, weren’t buying it.
But before we start getting too comfortable that a nationalist autocrat got biffed with a karmic piledriver, we ought to think carefully before declaring epochal shifts too early.
The ideology doesn’t live or die with Orbán. The vision Vance articulated in Budapest, a federation of Christian nationalist states united less by democratic values than by authoritarian instincts and a willingness to use state power to enforce a particular version of Christian identity, that vision is still very much alive. It’ll find new champions. It always does.
But here’s where I have to be honest about the tradition I’ve been a part of for over 35 years. Mainline Protestants like me don’t get to act shocked by this, not entirely, anyway. We built our own mid-century Christendom-inspired split-level with a pool, too.
Mainline Protestants like me don’t get to act shocked by this, not entirely, anyway. We built our own mid-century Christendom-inspired split-level with a pool, too.
We ran the culture. We built the beautiful buildings, and assumed our pews would always be full because being Christian and being American, if you squinted just right, were pretty much the same thing. We liked the privilege of knowing the world was designed by us ... for us. We took for granted that Christendom was our birthright.
But here’s the thing: The difference between what J.D. Vance was proposing and what mainline Protestants once assumed as their inheritance isn’t a difference in kind, but a difference in ambition. We assumed cultural dominance, fine. Maybe we didn’t think through the implications and unintended consequences of assuming it, but we would never call it “cultural dominance” right out in front of God and everybody.
J.D. Vance and his allies? Yeah, they’re not shy about it. They’ve pulled out the megaphone, started waving “We’re #1” foam fingers, and desperately want to build an international coalition to enforce it.
That’s new. And it should scare the crap out of us.
Because what Vance described in Budapest is a vision for theocracy. Not just in America, but across a federation of nations united by their willingness to use the power of the state to enforce a particular version of Christian identity.
Scholars tracking this aren’t shy about calling it out. The idea is a network of Christian nationalist states, connected less by shared democratic values than by shared authoritarian instincts. Instincts like which groups that harass immigrants and LGBTQIA+ people the hardest to make the sign of the cross over.
Jesus had a word for this kind of thing. Well, several, actually.
When the devil took him to a high place and offered him all the kingdoms of the world in exchange for worship, Jesus said no. Every kingdom. Every flag. Every empire. Turned all of it down. The whole thing was a temptation, and that’s how he dealt with it ... as a threat, rather than a political opportunity.
Franklin Graham’s protests to the contrary notwithstanding, the reign of God that Jesus talked about doesn’t map onto any nation’s borders. The world God desires for us doesn’t need a military to defend it. And it certainly doesn’t require controlling the press or locking up dissenters.
This new realm shows up in bread shared with strangers, in the forgiveness of debts, and in the continual insistence that the people the empire steps on or throws away are the ones God shows up for first.
Christendom is the opposite of all of that. Christendom is the cross denuded of its scandal and reduced to a logo. To put a finer point on it, it’s Jesus with all the inconvenient parts edited out.
I don’t know how to say this gently, so I won’t pretend: When the vice president of the United States flies to Budapest to campaign for a dictator’s reelection and frames it as a defense of Christianity, we’re watching idolatry in real time.
I don’t know how to say this gently, so I won’t pretend: When the vice president of the United States flies to Budapest to campaign for a dictator’s reelection and frames it as a defense of Christianity, we’re watching idolatry in real time.
And the fact that it’s wrapped in the language of faith doesn’t make it any less dangerous. It makes it more. Because this is how the cross gets turned into a flagpole. Not all at once, of course. But word by word. Speech by speech. Alliance by alliance. Until the Jesus who emptied himself of power has been replaced by a Jesus who exists to be the mascot for a team that suits up in heavy-duty battle rattle.
That Orbán lost doesn’t change the sermon Vance preached in Budapest. It just means the congregation he was preaching to had already heard that sermon up close, lived inside it for sixteen years, and decided they’d heard enough.
The question for the rest of us is whether we’re willing to learn from people who paid full tuition for those lessons so we don’t have to. Because this isn’t a new story. We’ve seen it before, so we know how it ends.
The question is whether we’ve learned enough to say so out loud while there’s still time.
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
he Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Churchin Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from his Substack blog, Heretic Adjacent. Click here to read the rest of his Substack .