And just like in Jesus’ day, political leaders defend this arrangement while religious leaders bless it. As the French writer Frédéric Bastiat warned, “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” That was true in first-century Jerusalem. It remains true today.

Since the 1980s, movements like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, and more recently, the New Apostolic Reformation, have not challenged the empire but rather sought to commandeer it. The Seven Mountain Mandate urges Christians to seize control of key sectors of society, including government, business, education and media. This is not a movement seeking to interrogate or challenge the injustice of empire. Quite the opposite. It is an ideology — a hunger for power and dominion — cloaked in pious language and baptized in the logic of empire. This is Christian nationalism in a nutshell.

Remember, Rome did not begin as an empire; it began as a republic. But over time, it ceded power to the few, tolerating cruelty, corruption and the consolidation of control, so long as it came wrapped in the promise of peace and prosperity. The emperor became both ruler and redeemer, venerated not for moral clarity but for the illusion of restored national greatness.

The false promise offered to both Romans and the people they conquered was that Caesar was divine — a chosen one, a lord. Today, Donald Trump is often cast in eerily similar terms by Christian nationalists: not as a moral leader, but as a figure who will deliver prosperity, protection, and cultural dominance, at least for a select few. To defy him, in this worldview, is not just to reject a man, but to reject a kind of sacred order. That impulse is not new. It is as old as Pilate’s procession.

But Jesus never sought to replace Caesar with a Christian Caesar. He came to dismantle the very logic of Caesar: the belief that might makes right, peace comes through violence and politics is best wielded through fear, coercion and control. Instead, he inaugurated a counter-kingdom that aspires to loving kindness, radical welcome, mercy and justice — a kingdom where the vulnerable and the poor are lifted up, and the idols of empire are exposed as frauds.