To the Ones Who Are Afraid We're Losing

by

Perspectives

My dear ones,

Jesus died humiliated and virtually alone. Why do his followers think their place is the National Mall?

I want to try something that might not work. I’d like to speak to Christian nationalists. I’m not looking to throw out a few zingers, just to dunk on people.

The reason I wanted to say something is that I think what’s driving events like yesterday’s “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” isn’t arrogance, exactly.

There’s a word for what’s going on in contemporary usage. “Thirsty.” As in, trying too hard. You know, the need for approval is so visible that it becomes its own kind of cringe-inducing vulnerability.

You don’t get this desperate for validation unless you’re genuinely afraid you’re losing something. White evangelical Christianity has seen a real decline in influence for decades now. The cultural dominance that once felt like the natural order of things isn’t guaranteed anymore. That fear’s real. And real fear produces real anxiety.

I understand the anxiety. I mean, I know what it feels like to want to be taken seriously, to have the world confirm that what I believe is worth believing.

Which is why I point to name something I see in that nine-hour rally, because I think it’s unhealthy to act like it wasn’t there: The thirst is showing.

Let’s just get this out of the way: Jesus didn’t die on a cross so his followers could have a nine-hour rally with Marco Rubio.

The homecoming queen candidate who papers every hallway with posters and makes every conversation about the election isn’t the candidate who’s sure she’ll win. That kind of campaigning is what you do when you’re afraid the outcome is leaning away from you. And a God who holds the cosmos together doesn’t need Pete Hegseth to show up to offer confirmation.

The thing is, the spectacle reveals a fear that can never be camouflaged by enough red, white, and blue. The volume set always to 11 is prima facie evidence of the insecurity.

But here’s the theological problem nobody on that stage seemed willing to address: The person this event is claiming to honor died humiliated.

Executed publicly as a criminal, outside the city walls, stripped of his clothes, mocked by the crowd. His disciples scattered. One had sold him out. Another acted for all the world as if he’d never heard Jesus’s name. At the end, only a handful of women and one disciple were even present, watching from a distance, making sure their ball caps were pulled down around their eyes.

That’s the founding story at the center of the whole tradition. So I keep wondering: Between the bloody garbage heap at Golgotha and the National Mall, what happened to us?

Let’s just get this out of the way: Jesus didn’t die on a cross so his followers could have a nine-hour rally with Marco Rubio.

He never said, “Blessed are the powerful” or “The first shall remain first.”

Jesus said that the reign of God isn’t something you can point to on a stage and say, “Look, there it is. ” He said things like “whoever wants to save their life will lose it,” and “the last shall be first,” and “the least of these.” Lunatic stuff like that.

Moreover, he didn’t spend his ministry lobbying for a seat at Caesar’s table. He spent it in the places Rome never bothered to look. Among the sick. Sitting at a Waffle House in a group of the ritually unclean. Hanging out with tax collectors whom respectable people crossed the street to avoid catching cooties.

If you want to see Jesus, there’s no point wasting all your time kissing up to the movers and shakers. You’re going to need to head down the back alleys, where respectable folks rarely venture.

What I see in Christian nationalism is a movement that has borrowed the empire’s model of what faithfulness looks like and slapped a Jesus fish on the bumper. But the tradition it claims to represent was born in resistance to exactly that misrepresentation of faith. The early church didn’t grow because it had Caesar’s endorsement. It grew because it kept showing up in the places Caesar didn’t care about, doing the things the empire found beneath its dignity.

Here’s what I need to say: “We don’t need the National Mall to be faithful. We need the back alleys.”

The faith of Jesus has never required the world’s approval to be true. It was true when nobody approved at all, when its founder was hanging on a cross, the crowd was laughing, and the disciples were checking on Airbnbs in Cozumel.

If your faith needs a nine-hour government-sponsored rally to feel real, well, let’s just say that’s not a ringing endorsement of your inherent vigor.

And I say that not as someone who has his self-assurance all ironed out, but as someone who knows what it’s like to want the world to confirm that what I believe is important. I know what it’s like to not want to be picked last, to have someone with a microphone say yes, you, you belong here.

But, careful here, because nothing else matters if we don’t get this right: We follow someone who wasn’t picked. We follow someone who was, in fact, emphatically unpicked. But who went on to say that, somehow, pulling up in last place has always been the way of the thing.

Maybe the question isn’t how to get a better seat at the table, but whether we’re willing to show up in the places that don’t even have tables yet.

Be gentle and brave,

Derek

The 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 .