The Desert Gives Us Shade

When the Roman Empire became Christianized in late antiquity, many people who were dissatisfied with this marriage of the empire to the faith fled to the Egyptian desert to find Christ. They felt that the church had been flooded with many who had joined it to advance socially in the Roman world. In the desert there was purity; there was simplicity: the noise of the empire was drowned out by the silence.  

This movement produced a culture, spiritual practices, and a body of wisdom called “The Sayings of the Fathers” that we can read today. It is enlightening for several reasons, but I feel the most poignant for modern Western Christians is that when the empire and the church, when the cross and the flag merge too much; a radical change is needed. Most of us cannot retreat to the desert to find Jesus, but we do live in the “desert of the real” as Morpheus from the Matrix famously said. The desert is the culture, the lack of rain in the dried-out wilderness that is the modern American nationalist church. We have to flee this mindset embodied in the apostacy of compromise. 

We need to run far from this nationalism; it is a theology and a spirituality born out of a thirst for power over the other: whatever that other is deemed to be by the political demagogues and overlords that have undue influence over Christ’s body. The desert in contrast is a place of lack, where the main sustenance is Christ Himself. The flesh starves in the desert; the pride that produces nationalism dies. The rage that is harnessed by politicians is rendered impotent by the cross of the wilderness. In its place is given the character of Jesus. But this comes with traveling under the shadow of death, into the light of the resurrection. It is classic Christian formation.  

The desert is hard but it is necessary. As the many that advised fleeing secularism, so the same should be towards nationalism. Both limit God. One denies Him and His power, the other denies His eschaton and that all will be well in His hands. One tries to throw God out of society, the other tries to deify the American cowboy and refashion the present order in its image. Both are proud, one denies the need for God; the other assumes God’s power and will for its own. We need the desert to discern the differences from these things compared to the actual historic Christian faith. Our main metric is our main weapon: the Sermon on the Mount. 

The Sermon is who Jesus calls His disciples to be. This isn’t a good moral lesson for Sunday School, it's for everyone at all times and cultures. Jesus Himself is the definition of Who God is. The Sermon is what this character looks like moving through time and space. To regulate this to a subordinate position to political strategy is death to the American Church’s soul.  

We need to repent by actively living lives that are the opposite of the current trends in the American church. We cannot compromise towards either extremes of secularism or nationalism. The desert is our ally, the Sermon on the mount is our weapon. Christ will meet us in the wilderness, let us run to Him quickly.