Exiles, Not Chaplains: The Christ-Shaped Life Beyond Politics and Purity
There’s a question I keep circling back to, especially when I speak with guests like Brian Zahnd: What does it really mean to belong to Christ? Not in the sense of doctrinal allegiance, denominational team, or theological accuracy—but at the level of being: what sort of person, what kind of community, what kind of presence are we meant to become in this world?
For Brian, as for me, the answer is clearer now than it was decades ago. And it doesn’t boil down to the fine print of orthodoxy, or the correct attitude toward Caesar, or even the urgent project of “changing the world.” Instead, it’s about union—about what Christ has shown us of the Father, and the enduring call to become people through whom the love of God flows, in ways the world cannot control or even fully comprehend.
Not Chaplains to Empire—But Exiles in Babylon
Brian’s journey (as chronicled in Postcards from Babylon and the wrenching costs he shared with me) is in many ways the story of American Christendom in miniature. As a young minister in a fast-growing church, measuring success by numbers and influence, he once held a view of faith in which allegiance to God ran neatly alongside loyalty to America and its unchallenged privilege. But in midlife, propelled by hunger for deeper theology—and a growing weariness with “easy, cheesy, cotton candy Christianity”—he found himself awakening to something ancient and subversive: the New Testament’s vision of a church that is always, first and last, a community-in-exile.
The early Christians upended the Roman world not by grasping for the levers of Caesar’s power, but by quietly, stubbornly refusing to call anyone but Jesus “Lord.” They lived in Babylon, but their hearts belonged elsewhere. Their witness was dangerous, precisely because it could not be enlisted by empire, or seduced by the politics of influence, or flattened into a program for worldly success. When the church agreed to become the empire’s chaplain rather than its heart, Brian argues, the gospel was tamed—and Jesus demoted to “secretary of afterlife affairs.”
It’s a warning as fresh today as it was under Constantine: when Christians serve as the mascot for a political party or worldview, tossing around a few Jesus words to bless the culture war’s latest crusade, we gain the world and lose our soul.
The God Who Looks Like Jesus
The radical turn in Brian’s life, and the turn I find myself taking over and over, is discovering (or remembering) that God is not simply a projection of our aspirations or a blank check for our anxieties. The “God” Jesus reveals is not warlike, retributive, or obsessed with making the right people win and the wrong people lose. Instead, as Brian thundered and then whispered: “God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There has never been a time when God wasn’t like Jesus. We just haven’t always known it—but now we do.”
It took him a costly, vulnerable journey (including the loss of more than a thousand church members, and a season of spiritual PTSD) to live out this discovery. But what’s at stake is nothing less than the integrity of the Christian witness—not as a set of ideas, but as a living, breathing way to be human.
Judged by Love—Not by “Who’s In, Who’s Out”
In a world eager to sort, banish, schism, and shame, the question returns: Do I measure my worth (or yours) by doctrinal precision or political alignment? Is the true Christian the one who signs the “right” statement, blasts the “other side,” or gets the theology of the Trinity, atonement, or revelation exactly right?
Or is it, as Jesus so plainly put it, “By this all people will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”? (John 13:35) The difference between the sheep and the goats isn’t theological acumen or denominational subscription. It’s the radical, uncalculating, un-selfconscious compassion for “the least”—those in need, those we’d rather not notice, those who cannot pay us back.
Brian (and the earliest church) would insist that our place in God’s story is revealed not by which team we join, but by whether God’s love has begun to flow through us—whether we become little “Christs,” refusing both the world’s lust for power and religion’s pride in purity.
Being in the World—But Not Of It
And this is the real mark of exile. To be “in the world, but not of it” is not to withdraw or to imitate a harmless purity culture. Nor is it to baptize Caesar and his ways in the name of some Americanized orthodoxy. The Jesus-shaped life is a life poured out: not to judge, but to serve; not to conquer, but to heal; not to dominate, but to love, wholly and indiscriminately.
It is the long, hard work of refusing the roles Empire hands out: mascot, chaplain, culture warrior. Instead, it is learning to see Christ—and to let Him be seen in us—when we choose forgiveness over vengeance, mercy over tribal boundary-drawing, honest repentance over hypocrisy, and unspectacular neighbor-love over all the world’s calls to take sides. It is surrendering the need to “be right” and allowing the Father’s heart to be revealed, just as Jesus washed feet—without checking party ID, tribe, or doctrinal purity.
The Invitation: A Life That Glows with Love
I am more convinced than ever, especially after sitting with Brian’s testimony, that the most urgent thing Christians can do now is to become living proof (not just professors) that love—real, inconvenient, enemy-embracing, sacrificial love—is possible, because God has done it first.
Let “Jesus is Lord”—not a motto for our political ambitions, not a passcode for our purity codes, but a living current that makes us exiles, pilgrims, and hope-bringers in every empire, every Babylon. Let the world see, as the Romans once did to their surprise and confusion, that what is most unique about us is not “our stand” for this or that, but Whose life is beginning to flow through us.
It is not about being the “right” kind of Christian, but about being a new kind of human—a person in whom the love and humility of Jesus make visible, tangible the unending goodness of God.
You are created in the image of God. And God loves His creation.
—with hope for the witness of exiles,
Wade
