The Betrayal of Love
Breaking Faith’s Imperial Chains. A Call for a New Ground up Faith, Part 2
When asked the greatest commandment, Jesus answered:
Love God with all your heart, mind, and spirit.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
All else, he said, hangs on these two. But the Imperial Church has abandoned them.
For centuries, the Imperial Church enshrined slavery, declaring Black people subhuman, and its influence lingers in social structures and biases today. It founded movements on political ambition, not spiritual awakening. It silenced abuse survivors, policed bodies, and forged doctrines of obedience over liberation.
When faith aligns with empire, oppression follows, revealing how empire-driven theologies depart from Jesus’ radical call to serve, heal, uplift, and liberate. While many of its activities of open for anyone to see, it moves subtly. It changes its theology, gaslighting people that nothing has changed. It shapes its words to maintain power, through selective scripture reading and dogma that demands submission.
This betrayal of love is easy to see in the prosperity preachers ignoring the poor; churches shielding predators; doctrines stripping autonomy in the name of divine will.
Unclean Spirits: Recognizing the Infections of Empire
Jesus typically called demons "unclean spirits." For Jesus, people taken on their own were as clean as God had made Adam and Eve. If a person became unclean or impure, that was not because of contact with exterior objects. Instead, impurity was a disturbance within that person's own Spirit, the "unclean spirit" that made him or her want to be impure, and even inflict self-harm. The description of the man with a legion of demons (see Mark 5:1-20) precisely captures the sense of a person turned against himself as a result of a compulsion that took over the control that rightly should have been exercised by his own mind.
Bruce Chilton, The Way of Jesus: To Repair and Renew the World (p. 81).
This same uncleanliness happened to the soul of the church itself. The early waves of persecution left a deep wounds on the church’s soul.
It began with the first trauma of the church, the crucifixion of Jesus. This created a conflict in the heart of the early church about:
if Jesus was God
if Jesus had a material body
if Jesus and/or God could suffer
why did Jesus die
how was Jesus resurrected
did or could Jesus die
These debates lead to many divisions within the early church that mixed and merged with later traumas to give rise to further unclean spirits. This is where the church’s skepticism about the material world was born as well as the need to define the nature of Jesus.
Next came the persecution of the Wayist movement by the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. These are remembered in the Book of Acts and the letters of Paul and include the stoning of Stephen and launched a campaign of arrests, sowing fear and distrust even among believers. Whether these persecutions were real or imagined, they add to the distrust of Jews who were not a part of the Wayist movement, and supported the anti-Semitism of the empire.
Then, under Nero around 64 CE, Christians in Rome were blamed for the Great Fire, enduring gruesome martyrdoms like those of Peter and Paul. This public violence bore trauma and shame that echoed through the community.
Finally, in Decius’s empire-wide edict of 249–251 CE, every Christian was forced to sacrifice to Roman gods or face execution; this not only fractured unity but also opened the door to apostasy, schism, and a lingering spirit of compromise and guilt.
In the wake of Decius’s persecution, the church fractured over what to do with the lapsi, those who had sacrificed to idols to save their lives. Novatian, a Roman presbyter, stood firm: if you lapsed, the Church had no right to readmit you, for idolatry was unforgivable on earth and only God could pardon such a sin . Cornelius (soon Pope) and Cyprian of Carthage took a different path: they believed lapsed believers could return, but only through sincere repentance, structured penance, and the authority of the bishop. The disagreement deepened when Novatian consecrated himself as rival bishop in 251 CE, leading to his excommunication by a synod convened in Rome in October of that year and triggering a short-lived schism that echoed for generations . This schism entrenched loyalty to the bishops and the power of the church, rather than God to forgive sins.
These are only some of the unclean spirits that arose in the early church and dominated it to this day. This new Legion became the god of the Imperial Church. They bowed before the Unholy Trinity: the Father of Lies, the Christ of the Powerful, and the Unholy Spirit of Empire. Around them gather hierarchies of fallen angels, each dedicated to a vice of empire: slavery, oppression, greed, racism, sexism, queerphobia, and violence. At the root of it all is a love withdrawn and replaced with fear.
The heart of the Jesus Movement was love, compassion, or empathy as expressed through the Greek concept of Agape. If the empire was going to co-opt the Jesus Movement, it had to destroy their empathy.
In my work with the defendants I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
Captain G. M. Gilbert. Nuremberg Miniseries1
Though often attributed to Captain Gilbert, this line is not a direct quote from his published works but a dramatized synthesis of his psychological conclusions, especially from The Psychology of Dictatorship. It captures a vital truth: the root of evil is the inability, or refusal, to feel with another. Through his interviews with the Nazis leading up to the Nuremberg trials chronicled in his Nuremberg Diary and professional writing in The Psychology of Dictatorship, Gilbert found this lack of empathy in all of them.
Empires have to eradicate empathy if they are going to successfully conquer, steal, and kill to grow and continue their existence.
In the same way the empire crushed empathy in the provinces, the Imperial Church asphyxiated empathy in itself as it persecuted "heretics," pagans, and Jews.
So if love is so foundational, why do we struggle to practice it?
Jesus taught that harmful influences, these “unclean spirits,” can lodge themselves in the soul, disrupting our capacity to love both God and neighbor. These spirits manifest not as monstrous intrusions but as quiet infections: shame that silences, pride that blinds, fear that severs our empathy.
How did they accomplish this?
The corruption begins with the letters of Pseudo-Paul. First Timothy introduces misogyny and strict gender roles to ensure male power and drive the female apostles and deacons out of the movement (2:9–15). Pseudo-Paul institutes a new and novel structure on the church to create a priesthood (3:1–13). It even restricts which widows count as real widows and which ones should be forced to remarry (5:3–16). It reinforces the institution of slavery (6:1–2).
Second Timothy starts the false doctrine of bibilcal inerrancy when it proclaims that all scripture is inspired (2 Timothy 3:16–17). A bold statement for someone writing in the same of someone else.
Titus doubles down on the new structure of the Imperial Church (1:5-16). It continues changing the gender roles within the church (2:4-8).
Tertullian crafted anti-Semitism into the heart of the Imperial Church in his book, Adversus Iudaeos. He attacked women in De virginibus velandis. He prefigured Augustine when he said all women are responsible for the sins of Eve (De Cultu Feminarum).
Augustine of Hippo introduced the idea of Original Sin into the church to conform it the Manichaean Dualism he believed in. He denigrated the creation that, according to Scripture (Job 12:7-9, Psalm 19, 104), is good and teaches us the nature and glory of God. Through this doctrine, he also tied faith to misogyny, since he blamed Eve for this corruption of the world that he himself brought into the Church.
Jerome helped the demon of misogyny grow when he said that women are not saved through Christ, but through having children (Against Jovinianus, Book 1, §27).
John Chrysostom crystalized anti-Semitism into the Imperial Church with his book, Adversus Judaeos. In his fourth homily on Romans, he turned up the volume on homophobia in the Imperial Church when he said same-sex relations were worse than murder. He planted the seeds of idolatry in his Homily on Matthew 1.6, where he denied the obvious disagreements within the scriptures. This is one of the first steps toward turning the Bible into an idol in the place of God.
Skipping forward, Martin Luther and John Calvin reinforced all of these lies into their new branches of the Imperial Church.
The Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law in 1667 that denied recognition of conversion to Christianity to enslaved Africans, and the Imperial Church supported the move. They condoned the legalization of murdering enslaved Africans in 1669. By 1680, they did nothing when laws were passed to prevent enslaved Africans from owning weapons or raising hands against "Christians."
In the 1850s and 1860s, the Presbyterian and Baptist churches cleaved into northern and southern churches over slavery. Not over doctrine. Not over spirit. Over the right to buy, sell, and brutalize other human beings. The Body of Christ was sundered so that empire could preserve its blood-soaked economy. That alone should have been enough to send every pulpit into mourning. Instead, it revealed what had long been true: many churches had already bent the knee to Caesar.
And yet the disease deepened. In the early 20th century, the same imperial spirits that once baptized chains in the name of Christ began to root themselves even more deeply in American Protestantism. This time, the battlefield was not only moral but epistemological. How do we know what is true? Who decides?
The Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy was born of this question. On the surface, it appeared to be a theological debate, but in truth it was a campaign for control. On one side stood the Modernists, who dared to imagine a living faith. A faith that could walk hand-in-hand with scientific discovery, historical inquiry, and the growing cries for justice. They saw metaphor and myth as holy things, and held space for uncertainty, paradox, and grace.
On the other side, the Fundamentalists sought to entomb truth inside doctrine. They crafted a rigid creed built around five so-called “Fundamentals,” declaring these to be the immovable pillars of the faith: the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection, and the reality of miracles. This was not a return to Christ, but a retreat into fear. It was a declaration of theological martial law.
It was in this spirit that J. Gresham Machen, a conservative theologian at Princeton, launched a counterattack against the Modernist wing of the Presbyterian Church. His book, Christianity and Liberalism, claimed the two were not merely different interpretations but entirely different religions. The path forward, for Machen, was separation: purity through division.
This “purity” birthed new seminaries, new denominations, and a new flavor of zealotry. The Presbyterian Church fragmented. So did the Baptists, the Methodists, and many others. The Empire, like Rome before it, did not collapse, it metastasized.
The 1920s saw charismatic preachers fill the airwaves with anti-intellectual fire. , who dared to suggest that tolerance and humility might be spiritual virtues, was driven from his pulpit. He asked, “Shall the Fundamentalists win?”and in many ways, they did.
The spirit of idolatry took the form of the Bible in 1978 in The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. There, the imperial impulse revealed its truest form. Scripture was not seen as sacred because it bore witness to the Living Word. It was declared sacred in itself, untouchable, unchallengeable, unmovable. It became a golden calf of paper and ink, enthroned above the Living Christ.
This statement was not about defending faith, but protecting power. It rejected nuance, dismissed mystery, and enshrined a version of Christianity that could be weaponized to control bodies, deny science, erase queer lives, and uphold the status quo. It sanctified the Empire in the name of Jesus.
And so, the Imperial Church marched forward.
It marched into schools, demanding creationism be taught as science.
It marched into politics, forging unholy alliances with white supremacy and corporate greed.
It marched into the bedrooms of strangers, dictating love and identity in the name of “morality.”
It marched into seminaries, silencing liberation theologians, feminists, mystics, and seekers.
It marched into pulpits, turning the gospel of love into a gospel of dominion.
Today, these unclean spirits linger in the breath of the Imperial Church. They quote scripture without understanding. They build megachurches while the poor starve. They scream about sin while ignoring the cry of the earth. They still wear the cross, but they no longer carry it.
But the Spirit of God has never been confined to their sanctuaries.
It moves in the groves. It dances in protest. It burns in the hearts of the wounded and the wandering. It calls us still to remember, to rise, and to root ourselves again in love, justice, and holy wildness.
A spirit of elitism convinces us to judge others’ faith. A spirit of greed tempts us to ignore the poor. A spirit of control calls us to silence the abused rather than seek justice. Each of these is a symptom of infected love, disfigured by power.
But Jesus was not afraid of these spirits. He cast them out.
In Jesus' perspective, uncleanness arrived not from material contagion at all, but from the disturbed desire people conceive to pollute and do harm to themselves. Uncleanness had to be dealt with in the inward, spiritual personality of those afflicted. Jesus believed that God's Spirit was a far more vital force than the unclean spirits that disturbed humanity. Against demonic infection a greater counter-contagion could prevail, the positive energy of God's purity.
Bruce Chilton, The Way of Jesus: To Repair and Renew the World (p. 81).
We are not powerless. The Spirit of God is stronger than the infection of empire. The purity of God is not sterile; it is wild and healing. It doesn't demand separation or purity codes. It invites reconciliation, restoration, and wholeness.
Love is the antidote. We are not talking about the saccharine love of slogans and platitudes. The love of Christ is a fierce, liberating love that casts out fear and burns away the lies of empire. It is a love that shares grace, seeks justice, offers mercy, and builds communion. The love that dares to heal.
We don't have to live with these unclean spirits and we don't have to accept them in our churches and homes. We can start with exorcising these unclean spirits from out hearts, minds, and spirits.
A Self-Exorcism of the Unclean Spirits
In the presence of the One Life, in the Name of Jesus Christ, and in the Power of the Holy Spirit, I name the seven unclean spirits born from the Imperial Church that cling to the hearts of too many believers: not as shame, but as wounds ready to be healed.
The First is Darkness.
I name the void within, the shadow that hides truth. I bring it into the Light flowing from the Living Word of God. May the Radiance of Holy One scatter the shadow that clouds our souls, because the Darkness cannot overcome the Light.
The Second is Desire.
Not sacred longing, but the hunger that consumes. The desire for power, glory, control, and dominion. I name the craving that chokes compassion. May holy love satisfy the ache that empire stirs and drive it from the soul.
The Third is Ignorance.
The refusal to know, to see, to change. I name the blindness we have worn like armor. May wisdom open our eyes and soften our hearts.
The Fourth is the Excitement of Death.
The morbid fascination with power over life. I name the thrill that clings to destruction and spectacle. May awe in the Living God restore our reverence for life.
The Fifth is the Kingdom of the Flesh.
Not the holy body, but the empire’s idol of dominance, consumption, and hierarchy. I name the systems that seduce through flesh but leaves only chains. May we return to the sacred body as temple, not throne.
The Sixth is the Foolish Wisdom of the Flesh.
The lie that power equals truth, that strength is always right. I name the clever-sounding cruelty we once called insight. May true wisdom uproot the cleverness of empire.
The Seventh is the Wrathful Wisdom.
That which justifies hatred in the name of righteousness. I name the fury that disguises itself as justice but only sows ruin. May mercy and discernment temper our fire and turn it toward healing.
May Christ cast these spirits out: not into others, but into the fire of the Spirit who purifies.
I reclaim the temple of my soul.
I breathe in the Spirit of Love, the Spirit of Liberation.
I am made whole again. Amen.
It was difficult tracking down the origin of this quote. The first time I saw it, I thought it was almost too perfect to be real. As I searched for its origins so I could site it properly, I immediately ran into red flags. Depending on where I found the quote, the only thing I had in common was its attribution to Gustav Gilbert. Most didn't name a source, while others attributed it to either his book Nuremberg Diaries or his other book, The Psychology of Dictatorship. One specifically cited the 1970s printing of the Nuremberg Diaries. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to examine and read many editions of his books, including that 1970s edition of the book. From what I have been able to find, the quote originated in the 2000 TV Miniseries, Nuremberg starring Alec Baldwin. Gustav Gilbert is in the movie played by Matt Craven, with the quote appearing in the second episode. It is a good summary of the ideas in Psychology of Dictatorship, so I am using it for that purpose.