Trump, the Trickster, and Resisting the Powers (Essay)

Estimated reading time: 38 minutes

Donald Trump has, for better or worse, made himself someone that history will remember. But his bizarre and dangerous rise to power did not come from nowhere. Trump is both the cause and the consequence of a culture. He is an embodiment of the Trickster. A person who both forms and is informed by the Powers and Principalities of this world. 

This is true not only of Trump, but populist and nationalist leaders more generally. It is also not limited to leaders on the right of politics. We are seeing the rise of the Trickster in politics. But from a theological perspective, we are dealing with something far deeper and more dangerous than just a Trickster. 

We are seeing the Powers and Principalities of this world being exposed for what they are. The curtain is being torn away to reveal the systemic and structural sins which have created the context within which this can take place.

The Emergence of the Trickster 

Every so often, a figure emerges who doesn’t simply participate in a culture. Nor are they solely formed by it. Instead, they expose it. 

They become a kind of mirror for society. A mirror that is sometimes comic and sometimes grotesque. Society sees its own face in that mirror. Even if they want to pretend it isn’t true. Trump is one of those figures.

But this isn’t about Trump. Not really. This isn’t about something more insidious, more powerful, and much more destructive. 

It is about what Walter Wink calls the Powers, Marx calls material conditions, and Scripture calls the Powers and Principalities. In this process, we see the spiritual atmosphere of a nation becoming visible in a single human life. 

Jürgen Moltmann, writing about doing political theology after Auschwitz, saw what was going on. Moltmann, who had been conscripted by the Nazis at the end of the war while still only a teenager, had grown up in an environment where the Powers had been given their freedom. He wrote in A Broad Place that when Nazism was terrorising Germany:

“Only a very few Christians protested; most retreated into the sphere of their private lives.” 

He saw something that many still do not realise. When Christianity is focused on personal piety rather than the reality of the Kingdom, it allows evil to flourish. But not just any evil. The kind of evil that goes unnoticed until it is too late. 

Möltmann’s New Political Theology was born out of that failure.

Trump Didn’t Create The Society That Elected Him But He has Helped to Form It

Trump didn’t simply create the culture and society that elected him. Although he definitely contributed to it! It is too easy, too simple, and ultimately too naïve to only blame him for what is happening. He didn’t make people vote for him; he didn’t create the division between race, education, and economic status that is tearing apart a nation. He was born from it. 

However, he is a symptom of that culture. Precisely because he understands that culture, how to draw from it and inflame it, he has been able to gain power. His election, capacity to act unrestrained by the legislation, and to be able to say and do things that at any other time in history would have caused an enormous scandal, are not because of him. They reveal the reality of the nation that elected him. He is revealing the signs of the times. 

And, more importantly, he is not alone. 

That is why this issue is about more than simple political commentary on the US. Crucially, this is not just a political or social problem. It is a theological one. 

Therefore, this article is a theological engagement on the broader spiritual crisis facing our world. 

It’s about modern idolatry.

The same dynamic is unfolding in Brazil, Hungary, India, and the United Kingdom. The populist figures that are dominating our politics, whether to the left or the right of the political spectrum, are not random aberrations. They are symptoms of something bigger than themselves. They reveal the Powers at play. 

1. The Material Conditions That Made Trump Possible

When Economic Pain Goes Looking for a Target

Nothing in this world comes from nothing. There is no such thing as neutrality. 

Modernity has a habit of seeing the world through the perspectives of “great men” (and they are inevitably men) who shape history. We tell our histories through the lens of people like Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, George Washington, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Thatcher, Reagan and now Trump and Putin. 

But the world is not like that. Great people do not exist in a vacuum; they play a significant role in shaping the world. They exist within a wider context which enables them to gain power in the first place. 

We can use the tools of the Marxist understanding of history and world forces, even if we disagree with the ideology, to help us understand the historical and economic contexts that shape our reality. 

A Marxist reading begins with the world as it is, not as we imagine it. It understands that social and economic forces beyond the individual shape our world. 

These forces are often (but not always) greater than the impact of any one individual. 

Trump emerges from:

• Decades of deindustrialisation and the minimisation of the value of labour 
• The collapse of working-class security 
• Neoliberal capitalism that treats people as disposable
• A culture industry that turns politics into entertainment
• White grievance weaponised to redirect economic anger towards minority scapegoats.

The Impact of Material Conditions

Culture and society are shaped by material conditions. They do not exist independently of their broader historical and economic context. Everything is shaped by the wider realities of life. The day-to-day experiences of life can be considered the foam at the top of the wave. It is the most readily visible, but it contains very little power. 

Trump’s rise is not an interruption of American exceptionalism, expansionism, and capitalism. It is its logical expression in human form. Trump is the radical expression of a culture that has been developing since 1619. He has simply weaponised that underlying culture for his own power. 

This is a really important point to grasp. 

Trump and populist figures like him around the world have not created the conditions that allowed them to be elected. They are riding the wave of material conditions that are forming and shaping our cultures. But, importantly,  they did exacerbate those conditions for their own benefit. This is why we can talk about them as Tricksters. 

Peter McLaren, writing about Paulo Freire, identifies this dynamic within the MAGA movement. McLaren writes that the Make America Great Again slogan:

“Prefigures a mythical past of an ideal society where white men were in control of all aspects of their lives.” 

MAGA borrows the structure of utopian hope and corrupts it. They say, “There was once a past when everyone was like you, and everything was good.” 

The myth of a better past is fundamental to extreme forms of social and economic conservatism. In the same way, the myth of a utopian future drives extreme forms of liberal and left-leaning ideologies. 

Myths and Symbols of Domination

The slogans and rhetoric deployed by Trump and the MAGA cult is used in the service of domination. 

For many members, this is an unconscious act. As we will see later, they have given up their responsibility and are not thinking for themselves. For Trump, and for similar Tricksters around the world, it is intentional.

The slogan “Make America Great Again” functions as ideology, and pure and simple ideology at that. It is a nostalgic myth that masks the real causes of suffering. 

The twisted hope of MAGA, and the populist nationalism that is coming to define so much of our modern political spectrum, promises a return to a past that never existed for everyone. Only for those who benefited from racial hierarchy and economic domination. 

It depends on anger and isolation to function.

Trump did not create the desire, but he does sell it very well.

Populism: Naming Idolatry for What it is

Populism is all the rage at the moment. Politics has shifted, culture changed, and the anger of the masses against the few has been weaponised by shamans of chaos and hatred. 

But what do we actually mean by Populism? 

Cas Mudde defines populism as a “thin-centred ideology” that sets a “pure people” against a “corrupt elite.” It finds its strength by pitting one group against another. Populism always needs an enemy, often multiple enemies, to build its ideological power. 

Populism is not a programme but a performance. It takes the genuine suffering of real people and redirects it toward scapegoats rather than the people and systems that caused it. That is why populism and Nationalism often go so closely together. 

But where populism isn’t joined to nationalism, such as with ideological populism as seen with the modern version of the Green Party in the UK, the same principle applies. There is an enemy, and everyone on your team is the good guys fighting against that enemy. 

The Lie of Populism

Populism is a sleight-of-hand trick. It’s fiction; a narrative designed to create hate. The populist says “look over there” rather than actually pointing people at the real issue. In a strange way, this also helps to maintain the status quo. People are more willing to stay poor and disenfranchised when they have someone who is different to them who is worse off than they are. 

To put it bluntly, for many people, it is ok to be poor and white as long as black and brown people are poorer than you. For this form of populism, equality for everyone doesn’t mean equality for them; it means a loss. Because their privilege is dependent on inequality. 

Populists want and need you to hate the person who is different to you rather than the person who is actually responsible for your situation. 

If you are a working-class white man struggling to get by, you would be right to understand that your struggle is down to the rise of the super wealthy and rampant financialised capitalism. 

However, that is dangerous for the actual capitalists. So instead, they get up to look the other way. They want you to blame someone closer to home. 

For the left and liberal populists, it is easy to blame big corporations, the banks, international mega-brands, and billionaires. They want you to blame someone further away from home. Then you won’t have to realise that your failure to love your neighbour, to exercise control over your consumerism, and to accept genuine community is also part of the problem. 

The Populist Trickster Targets the Outsider 

So instead, we see the rise of the populist. The populist says no; it’s the outsider’s fault. Target them instead. And so the actual issue is avoided, and the vulnerable are scapegoated. 

Because it’s ok to be poor as long as the people who are different from you are worse off. The danger becomes that those people’s equality becomes a loss of privilege. 

Whatever you do, don’t look at the CEOs, politicians, and financiers. Look at the immigrants, the refugees, and the outsiders instead. 

Neoliberalism Breeds Populism

Populism, like everything else, does not emerge in a vacuum. The rise of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism has created the conditions for populism to become uniquely powerful. 

This doesn’t mean that populism is a uniquely modern affair. One reason the Roman senators hated Julius Caesar so much was that he was a Populist. Caesar understood the same truth that modern populists have recognised. If you cannot gain power through the currently existing systems, you can gain power through the support of the great mass of the populace.

When populism gains power, it depends on the dictatorship of the majority to continue. And the way to maintain the support of the disenfranchised majority is to give them someone to hate to explain why their lives are hard. 

This explains why a populist can still maintain control even after breaking all their promises.

Populists Get To Lie

Populism preys on the brokenness and isolation that neoliberal societies create. Mike Aitken notes that neoliberalism actively… 

“…seeks to privatise public goods and common land, outsource welfare services and introduce competitiveness deeper into every aspect of our lives.” 

The more isolated people become, the more vulnerable they are to the populist promise that a strongman can restore what was lost. 

Capitalism thrives on individualism. 

Populism is individualism’s political expression wearing the mask of community. It is where people are brought together by what they fear and whom they hate. 

Populism is a weak and pathetic ideology that doesn’t have the courage to learn to love in the way that Christ loves.

What Is Political Theology? Political theology is not theology that tells politicians what to do. It is the theological discipline that examines how religious ideas and political power shape each other. Political theology exposes where the two have been corruptly fused. Jürgen Moltmann defines the task as “critical correction of the privatisation of modern religion.” This is the refusal to let Christian faith retreat into the purely personal while injustice happens in the streets. As Moltmann writes: “After Auschwitz, Christian faith is no longer a private matter in Germany, and theology belongs in the realm of the public discussion of political freedom, social justice, and the future of the earth.” The same is true for us now.

2. Walter Wink: Trump as a Manifestation of the Powers

The Spiritual Reality Behind Political Systems

Walter Wink’s theology of the Powers helps us see that systems have an inner spiritual reality that shapes and is shaped by their behaviour and culture. These spiritual realities can be understood as the Powers. They are quasi-personal spiritual forces that inform and are informed by the systems and structures of human existence. 

I’ve drawn from Walter Wink in quite a few articles. You can see an example here: https://mytheologycorner.com/2025/06/05/understanding-spiritual-warfare/ 

For Wink, the Powers were created for human flourishing. Unfortunately, they have fallen and are now bent toward domination. However, they are ultimately redeemable through the power of the cross. Salvation is not just about us as individuals. It is about all of reality. 

Wink argues in Naming the Powers (1984) that every institution and social structure has both an outer, visible form and an inner spiritual reality. Trump is not the Power. He is the personification of what happens when the spiritual inner life of the American empire ceases to pretend to be respectable.

The Myth That Violence Saves

Wink’s understanding of the “myth of redemptive violence” was developed fully in “Engaging the Powers (1992). It describes the deep cultural belief that enough force in the right hands will ultimately make things right. 

This myth sits at the very heart of American civil religion. Trump didn’t invent it. He simply stripped away its polite veneer. The reality is, most of the Western world is deeply rooted in the myths of scarcity and redemptive violence. It is not just an American problem. Although it has been uniquely adopted by the USA.

Protection for the flag, extreme idolatry of the gun and its culture, and the fixation on a border wall are not merely policy positions. They are sacraments of the myth of redemptive violence, offering salvation through strength and purification through exclusion. 

Moltmann identifies every empire’s need for a “political religion.” This is a sacred narrative that legitimates its power. When that legitimation comes in Christian dress, it becomes Christian nationalism. When it is stripped bare by a trickster figure, it becomes visible for what it is.

3. The Trickster: Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

An Ancient Archetype, Newly Visible

The trickster is one of the oldest figures in human culture. Anthropologist Paul Radin wrote about the archetype in The Trickster (1956), drawing on Native American storytelling traditions. Lewis Hyde, in Trickster Makes This World (1998), expanded this into a broad cultural and philosophical analysis.

Theologian Miguel De La Torre, in his work on disruptive trickster ethics, develops the theological significance of the trickster. The trickster operates from the margins, dismantles the pretensions of power, and forces the centre to confront what it would rather ignore. 

De La Torre argues that the trickster’s disruption is not nihilistic. Instead, it is prophetic. The trickster exposes the shadow side of a culture by refusing to participate in its polite fictions. This is what is really going on when people start saying, “he says what we are all thinking.” 

Trickster figures appear across traditions. Examples include Coyote in Native American stories, Anansi in West African tradition, and Loki in Norse mythology. All share the same essential function. They say out loud what everyone already knows but refuses to admit. Their voice and actions give others permission to act out their worst selves. 

Disclosure as Apocalypse

Trump’s trickster qualities are obvious. He violates norms of civility, mocks institutions, and exposes hypocrisy by refusing to participate. Trump says what many already believe but would not say aloud. His rhetoric about race, gender, nation, and violence does not create new prejudices. It unmasks old ones.

In biblical terms, this is apokalypsis. What we might call an apocalypse. Not in the sense of end-times speculation, but in the literal Greek sense of an unveiling. The trickster forces disclosure. We see this in scripture:

“For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light.”

Luke 8:17, NRSV

The trickster says the quiet part out loud. The question is what we do once we have heard it.

4. A Global Pattern: The Trickster Is Not Unique to America

The Same Crisis in Different Languages

If Trump were simply an American aberration, we could treat him as a personality problem. The fact that similar figures have emerged in country after country strips away that opinion. It is not only a problem for the right wing of politics. 

Jair Bolsonaro served as the Trump of the Global South. He was known for mocking the vulnerable, celebrating violence, and weaponising evangelical Christianity for political domination in Brazil. 

Viktor Orbán built what he called “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, dismantling independent courts, free press, and academic freedom while wrapping authoritarian power in the language of Christian civilisation. 

In India, the Hindutva political movement has fused religious nationalism with majoritarian politics in ways that have had severe consequences for religious minorities. This is a structural observation about a political ideology, not a judgment on the faith of individual people within that context. 

In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage exploited the same populist playbook, promising a mythical Britain that never quite existed.

Liminality: Threshold, Danger, and Possibility

The concept of liminality, developed by anthropologist Victor Turner, helps name what these trickster-populist moments represent. 

Liminality describes the condition of being “between and betwixt.” It is the threshold state in which the old order has broken down, and the new one has not yet been established. It is a time when “normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination, construction and destruction.”

Our present moment is profoundly liminal. 

The old certainties of Western liberal democracy, of progressive inevitability, and of institutional Christian privilege have crumbled or are crumbling. The trickster-populists have emerged from this threshold space. The question is whether the church will enter this liminal space as a prophetic community or simply choose one side of the collapsing order.

The Kairos Moment Kairos — a Greek word for the right or opportune moment; a time of crisis that is also a time of decision. In 1985, South African theologians produced the Kairos Document, which called on the church to take sides in the struggle against apartheid. It drew a sharp distinction between “state theology.” The uncritical blessing of the existing order, and “prophetic theology,” the bold declaration of God’s justice against oppression. A church that aligns itself with populist nationalism and wraps the cross in the national flag has chosen state theology over prophetic theology. Our Kairos moment calls for the same clarity.

5. Bonhoeffer: Who Stands Firm?

Written from Prison, Written for Us

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay “After Ten Years” was written at Christmas 1942 as a letter to his co-conspirators in the resistance against Hitler. Mark Brocker’s study of Bonhoeffer’s resistance reveals the personal cost. 

When France fell in June 1940, and the crowd in a café stood to sing Deutschland über alles, Bonhoeffer raised his arm in the Hitler salute and whispered to his horrified friend Eberhard Bethge: “Raise your arm! Are you crazy?” Then, a moment later: “We shall have to run risks for very different things now, but not for that salute!”

That exchange reflects the whole of Bonhoeffer’s political theology. The calculation, made at enormous personal cost, and what faithful responsibility in a time of evil actually demands.

“Who stands firm? Only the one whose ultimate standard is not his reason, his principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue; only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these when, in faith and in relationship to God alone, he is called to obedient and responsible action.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” Letters and Papers from Prison (1951)

The Failure of the Man of Duty

The person of duty, Bonhoeffer writes, will eventually “do his duty also to the devil.” Because duty without moral consciousness becomes the very mechanism of evil’s operation. The bureaucrat who enforces the deportation order. The politician who enables the strongman. The pastor who preaches nationalism. None can be accused of malice, only of duty, of obedience, of going along with what everyone else is doing.

On Civil Courage

“He safeguarded his freedom… by seeking to free himself from self-will in order to serve the whole… However, in doing so he misjudged the world; he did not reckon with the fact that the readiness to subordinate and commit his life to the commission could be misused in the service of evil.”

Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years”

Civil courage, Bonhoeffer insists, “can grow only from the free responsibility of the free man.” It is Salvationism’s Distinctive 8, the Audible Salvationist, lived at full volume.

6. Bonhoeffer on Stupidity and the Way Through

A Sociological Problem, Not an Intellectual One

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice… Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” Letters and Papers from Prison (1951)

Bonhoeffer is not describing a lack of intelligence. He is describing the voluntary surrender of independent thought to a power greater than oneself:

“Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity… Under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances… Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”

Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years”

The Power of the One Needs the Stupidity of the Other

Bonhoeffer wrote: 

“The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.” 

The strongman does not create stupidity. The strongman exploits and accelerates it. Trump’s movement, Orbán’s movement, Bolsonaro’s movement; none invented the grievances they weaponised. They found people who had already, for understandable reasons, begun to surrender their inner independence to a narrative that made the pain comprehensible.

The Only Way Through

“Only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity… The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.”

Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years”

This is where Bonhoeffer and Freire converge. Liberation theology calls this conscientização, or conscientisation. This is the awakening of critical consciousness. 

Paulo Freire developed this through his literacy work with Brazil’s rural poor in the 1960s. For Freire, critical consciousness and Christian consciousness were inseparable. Both Bonhoeffer and Freire agree that facts cannot liberate a person who has surrendered their inner independence. Only an encounter with the truth of God, with the reality of the neighbour’s face, can break the spell. 

This is why the Salvation Army’s Mercy Seat matters: not as a piece of furniture, but as a site of encounter where the inner liberation Bonhoeffer describes can actually begin.

7. Merton, Arendt, and the Guilty Bystander

We Begin with Confession

Before naming the bystander as an external failure, we need to name the bystander in ourselves.

Bonnie Thurston opens her study of Merton by writing: 

“We are all guilty bystanders; all implicated in systemic evil; all beneficiaries of unjust economic systems. Many of us live far from the epicentres of human suffering. We aspire to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ, but none of us is guiltless.”

The bystander is not simply someone else, the complacent neighbour, the compliant bureaucrat, or the nationalist pastor. The bystander is also the person reading this article. Trump’s rise did not happen despite Christians. It happened, in significant part, because of the choices and the silences of Christians. The same is true for many populists. 

Thomas Merton and the Conjectures

Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1965) is the primary source for his analysis of bystander complicity. 

Merton wrote it from his monastery in rural Kentucky, watching from the margins as the country, in the words of Merton scholar Lawrence Cunningham, was “having a collective nervous breakdown.” 

In his Calcutta lecture of October 1968, Merton defined what it meant to be marginal: 

“The monk is essentially outside of all establishments. He does not belong to an establishment. He is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening the fundamental human experience.”

Merton extended this definition beyond vowed religious life to encompass “all marginal persons.” The monk, the displaced person, and the prisoner all have “absolutely no established status whatever.” It is from this position that genuine moral vision becomes possible.

The Guilty Bystander Sees Clearly

Merton draws on the Desert Fathers to explain why voluntary marginality is not escape but witness. 

The Coptic hermits who went to the desert “did not merely intend to save themselves. They knew that they were helpless to do any good for others as long as they floundered about in the wreckage. But once they got a foothold on solid ground, they had not only the power but… the obligation to pull the whole world to safety after them.” 

They went to the desert, Merton insists, “not because they hated the world, but, paradoxically, because they loved it.”

Thurston describes the gift of marginality. He wrote that persons on the margins “can serve as its conscience because, from that perspective, they can see society more clearly.” 

The Corps positioned outside the corridors of power, the Officer who refuses to baptise the nation’s agenda, these are not politically naïve acts. They are theologically strategic ones. 

Joel Halldorf’s research on desert spirituality and the Holiness movement identifies the same longing across a century and a half. We can see that what the desert fathers called “an undivided heart” is what Salvationist holiness calls entire sanctification.

The Two Gifts of the Guilty Bystander

Thurston identifies two gifts Merton models and teaches: marginality and hospitality.

Marginality is the gift of the clear eye. Merton calls it “this silence, this listening, this questioning, this humble and courageous exposure to what the world ignores about itself — both good and evil.” 

The guilty bystander can say, “The emperor has no clothes on.” They can say that the Church has climbed into bed with the strongman. The guilty bystander can say that what is being done in the name of Christianity is not Christianity.

But marginality without hospitality becomes mere critique. 

Merton wrote in Conjectures: “Love means an interior and spiritual identification with one’s brother so that he is not regarded as an ‘object’ to ‘which’ one ‘does good’.” 

This is the foundation. Luke Bretherton’s study, Hospitality as Holiness, develops the same insight through a different lens. He argues that radical Christian hospitality, extended across the lines of moral diversity and social difference, is itself a form of witness and a practice of holy living. 

Hospitality is not a programme. It is holiness made visible.

Most powerfully, Merton’s Louisville vision entirely breaks through the passive/active divide. Standing at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, he writes: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun… There are no strangers!” 

Merton and the Tyranny of Untruth

Merton’s diagnosis of his moment in Conjectures maps onto mine. 

Ann Gelsheimer shows how Merton saw his era as one of “profound spiritual crisis” in which “all the inner force of man is boiling and bursting out, the good together with the evil, the good poisoned by evil and fighting it, the evil pretending to be good and revealing itself in the most dreadful crimes, justified and rationalised by the purest and most innocent intentions.”

The mechanism Merton identifies is what he calls “the tyranny of untruth.” This is a collective commitment to partial truths that justify prejudice, limitation, and selfishness. And crucially, Merton quotes Bonhoeffer in Conjectures, identifying 

“a time of confirmed liars who tell the truth in the interest of what they themselves are — liars… a time of evil which is so evil that it can do good without prejudice to its own iniquity — it is no longer threatened by goodness.”

The Bystander Effect: Why Good People Do Nothing

Gelsheimer brings social psychology into conversation with Merton, and the results are illuminating. The original bystander effect research, prompted by the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese while 38 neighbours watched, established a counter-intuitive finding. The more bystanders present, the less likely any one of them is to help. 

The mechanism is diffusion of responsibility: “as the number of people present in a situation increases, each individual feels less compelled or responsible to help.”

This is Bonhoeffer’s stupidity described in the language of social psychology. Empathy avoidance goes deeper still. People actively avoid making eye contact with those in need to avoid feeling compelled to help. 

This is why Merton’s Louisville vision matters: once you see that the person in front of you is shining like the sun, you cannot look away. The guilty bystander’s gift of hospitality is, at its root, the willingness to hold the gaze.

Moral disengagement, particularly as articulated in Bandura’s framework, completes the picture. Reconstructing conduct (“this is actually necessary”), obscuring personal agency (“I’m not responsible”), misrepresenting consequences (“no real harm was done”), and dehumanising the victim (“they brought it on themselves”). 

Gelsheimer applies these directly to the comfortable church’s tolerance of suffering, and they apply equally to its tolerance of nationalist politics.

Merton’s Challenge to Comfortable Christianity

“Gestures of conformity such as attending church do not make anyone a Christian, and when one’s actual conduct obviously belies the whole meaning of the gesture, it is an objective statement that one’s Christianity has lost its meaning.”

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1965)

Merton is clear about what love requires in a political context: “In such a context, political action itself is a kind of spiritual action, an expression of spiritual responsibility, and a witness to Christ.” 

We do not engage in politics despite being Salvationists. We act politically because we are Salvationists.

The Ordinary Face of Evil: Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) runs parallel to Merton’s analysis. Adolf Eichmann appeared in court as “medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes.” Psychiatrists certified him as normal. One reportedly said he was “more normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him.”

For Arendt, the key to Eichmann’s evil was not hatred. It was thoughtlessness. 

Arendt wrote that “the longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” 

His conscience, she observed, “spoke with a ‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of respectable society around him.” He did what was done. He fulfilled his duties.

Banal evil is still evil. Its ordinariness does not make it less destructive. In fact, it makes it more so because it is so much harder to see and name.

8. Christian Nationalism — When the Church Baptises the Trickster

A Counterfeit Gospel

Sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, in Taking America Back for God (2020), define Christian nationalism as a cultural framework that fuses Christian identity with American civic identity. 

Their research demonstrates that the strongest predictor of Christian nationalist views is not church attendance or personal piety. It is a desire for a social hierarchy organised around race, gender, and religion.

Christian nationalism weaponises the language of faith to serve the myth of redemptive violence. It declares that the nation’s greatness is God’s blessing. It frames the outsider as the threat to divine order. This is what Wink describes when he speaks of the Powers turning toward domination and the church becoming complicit in that domination.

Freire’s Three Types of Church

Paulo Freire described three types of church: the traditionalist, the modernising, and the prophetic. 

The traditionalist church preserves the existing order and offers its blessing to the powerful. 

The prophetic church “feels with” the oppressed, stands in solidarity with them, and refuses to make peace with the powers of domination. 

Christian nationalism is the traditionalist church with a megaphone. Salvationism is called to be the prophetic church.

Shaw Clifton’s analysis of Salvationism’s Nine Distinctives names this danger. Among the greatest internal threats to Salvationism, Clifton identifies identity uncertainty and the secularisation of mission. 

The Corps that aligns itself with nationalist power has not merely made a political error. It has made a theological one as well, confusing the flag with the cross and the nation with the kingdom.

The church that stands with the powerful betrays Christ. The church that stands with the poor bears witness to the cross.

LIBERATION LENS The preferential option for the poor is a foundational principle of liberation theology, associated with Gustavo Gutiérrez, which holds that God’s revelation and redemptive activity are encountered most fully among the poor and oppressed. Christian nationalism, with its alliance to wealth, national power, and racial dominance, is structurally incapable of embodying this principle. When the church blesses the strongman, it turns away from God’s face.

9. Salvation Army Theology: Holiness Against the Powers

Doctrine 10 and the Social Demands of Sanctification

The Salvation Army has always insisted that holiness is social as well as personal. 

Doctrine 10, entire sanctification, is the most theologically distinctive element of Salvationism. Samuel Logan Brengle, the Army’s greatest holiness teacher, wrote simply: “Do you want to know what holiness is? It is pure love.” 

His own experience of sanctification was intensely social in its expression. He was walking over Boston Common, weeping for joy, loving “the sparrows, the dogs, the horses, the little urchins on the streets, the strangers who hurried past me, the heathen — I loved the whole world.”

Holiness is not a private achievement. It is a transformation of the heart that makes neighbour-love possible and makes systemic injustice intolerable. Terence Hale’s study of pragmatic holiness in the early Salvation Army establishes that the Army’s founders understood holiness precisely as action. Specifically, they saw it as covenantal living, militant peacemaking, and community. 

These are not optional applications of holiness. They are its content.

The Holy Spirit “breaks the strength and power of the remaining sin in our lives. It takes hold of the fear, anger, and shame that often separate us from our fellow humans.” Sanctification is the exorcism of the inner Powers. The casting out of the spiritual forces of self-interest, fear, and domination that make us complicit in the outer Powers.

The Distinctives Under Pressure

Distinctive 4, Compassionate, demands not merely charitable service but the preferential option for the poor, the prophetic voice for the voiceless, social action rather than social service alone. 

Distinctive 8, Audible, insists that advocates are raised up against injustice. Silent Salvationism, Clifton warns, is no Salvationism at all. 

Distinctive 9, Vulnerable, names the dangers of the present moment. We see, then, the neglect of holiness teaching, identity uncertainty, the secularisation of staff and mission, and the erosion of Officership.

Those dangers are what Christian nationalism exploits. 

A Corps uncertain of its holiness identity, focused only on charitable service rather than structural transformation, becomes easy prey for the spirituality of empire.

The Sacrament of Good Samaritan

William Booth urged soldiers “to observe continually the sacrament of the Good Samaritan.” The ongoing, lived act of crossing every boundary of race, class, and respectability to bind up the wounds of the robbed and the forgotten. It is the sacrament of liberation, where the love of God flows through the disciple, taking responsibility for their neighbour. The way we love one another becomes a means of grace. 

This is not a metaphor. It is sacramental realism. Grace flows wherever the oppressed are liberated, the hungry are fed, and the poor are served. 

Frederick Coutts, in his study of the Doctrine of Holiness, reminds us that the trajectory of holiness in Scripture moves away from separation and toward embrace, from the Temple’s “keep out” to the cross’s “come in.” 

The Salvation Army’s refusal to make grace the property of an institution is its most prophetic act.

REFLECTION SPACE — The View from Below Bonhoeffer wrote from prison: “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled.”  Before you read the call to action, pause. Where are you standing as you read this? From which vantage point do you see these events? Who is not in the room where you usually have these conversations? Lord, give us the courage to move from where we are comfortable to where you are present. Give us eyes to see from below. Break in us what needs breaking. Restore in us what needs restoring. Make us responsible before you and before our neighbour.

10. What Trump Reveals About Us

The Mirror We Would Rather Not See

Trump reveals the fragility of democratic norms, the persistence of white supremacy as a structuring force in American life, the seduction of authoritarianism when people feel unseen and unheard, the spiritual emptiness of consumer capitalism, the vulnerability of the church to nationalist capture, and the deep human hunger for belonging in a fragmented and atomised society.

But crucially, he does not reveal these things solely as an American phenomenon. His behaviour and the successes he has enjoyed have revealed those same structural, destructive and dominating forces in other countries around the world. Not because these were hidden before. But because people were more willing to own it after his rise to power. 

Bonhoeffer ends “After Ten Years” with a passage called “The View from Below.” He writes that the experience of those years had taught his circle “to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled.” He adds that this “perspective from below must not lead us to become advocates for those who are perpetually dissatisfied. Rather, out of a higher satisfaction, which in its essence is grounded beyond what is below and above, we do justice to life in all its dimensions and in this way affirm it.”

Offering an Alternative to the Bystander

This is the theological corrective to both the bystander and the revolutionary. We do not retreat into passivity or surrender to anger. Instead, we see from below and act from grace. We resist out of Christ’s holiness and are always living and acting in a provisional sense. This means we can recognise that we are working for something that will only be completed in the age to come. For the moment, we seek to make the Kingdom of God a lived reality in our everyday existence. 

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly…”

1 Corinthians 13:12, NRSV

The question is whether we are willing to look and to keep looking even when what we see is painful. We need to look long enough to move from diagnosis to repentance, and from repentance to action. It is not enough simply to understand the problem or to feel bad about it. The line of guilt runs through us because we are all bystanders to evil and inhumanity. We all tacitly endorse it with our commercialism, our intentional ignorance, and our rejection of responsibility for the people we see each day.

We are called to see, and then to act. 

11. Communities of Resistance: Becoming Revolutionary Disciples

The Central Problem

The populist strongman has succeeded largely because the church has stopped being dangerous.

As I argued in https://mytheologycorner.com/2024/11/21/communities-of-resistance-creating-covenantal-communities-in-reclaimed-spaces/, the church in the West has become “institutionalised, established, respectable… safe and fluffy and weak.” It has too often climbed into bed with powers and principalities it should have had nothing to do with. The church lost its teeth. The revolutionary power of the cross was domesticated.

For many Christians, their Christianity just isn’t that important. The average voter, as Dominic Sandbrook’s analysis of Trump’s 2024 victory made clear, does not think that much about anything other than the most local or the most vocal kinds of politics. They were thinking about groceries, blame, and being heard. The same reality is true for most Christians. Their faith des not have an impact on their day-to-day lives beyond a sense of identity, belonging, and vague morality. And the church, for the most part, had no compelling alternative story to offer them. It had forgotten how to be revolutionary.

What Resistance Actually Looks Like

Resistance does not only mean political activism, though it may include it. Communities of resistance, as Themrise Khan defines them, are “those who organise themselves for civil disobedience to fight for their rights against the state without any external support.” They have a long history in the fight for civil rights across the world. Especially amongst oppressed and dispossessed peoples. But at a deeper level, the most potent form of resistance is not simply confrontation with power but the creation of an alternative to it. 

The Church has to offer something different. 

Mike Aitken identifies activist practices such as community organising, reciprocal working, commoning, and conviviality that “build spaces for relationships and learning” and “offer ways of doing and thinking differently.” He warns that these spaces of resistance can be co-opted by dominating power. The revolution always leads to the need for another revolution because each revolution only emerges from the wreckage of the previous order. 

The answer to that risk is not passivity but deeper rootedness. We need the kind of rootedness found in holiness, which fosters mutual reliance, responsibility, and sacred solidarity. The revolution of Christianity does not come to an end. It is a permanent revolution. The Church is always in a state of reformation, because we must always find our neighbours afresh in each generation. Without the permanent reformation, our churches will calcify and give in to the Powers and Principalities. 

The Gift Economy as Counter-Testimony

One of the most theologically rich insights from secular voices on community is what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “the gift economy.” 

In a gift economy, there is a spirit of reciprocity. Giving and receiving become ongoing acts of care and connection. A hunter in the Brazilian rainforest asked why he held a feast for his neighbours after killing a deer rather than storing the meat, replied: “I store meat in the belly of my brother.”

This is not a new insight. It is the insight of the early church, and of the Salvation Army’s slum sisters, who gave bread to the hungry not as charity but as communion. Building community is a deeply counter-cultural act. In a world ravaged by the exploitation of capitalism, performative liberalism, populist socialism, and the constant drive to consume and control, we must believe in another way forward.

12. The Simple Way and the Finkenwalde Tradition

What a Community of Resistance Looks Like in Practice

In 1995, a group of homeless families occupied an abandoned Catholic church in North Philadelphia. The Archdiocese told them they had forty-eight hours to leave or face arrest. They hung a banner on the building that read: “How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday, and ignore one on Monday?”

That moment was the seed of The Simple Way, now rooted in the Kensington neighbourhood of Philadelphia, one of America’s most impoverished urban communities. 

The Simple Way describes itself as “inspired by the early church in the book of Acts, where the Bible says the early Christians shared all their possessions in common, gave freely to those in need, and met in each other’s homes for worship. The Gospel was lived out of dinner tables and living rooms.” Its mission is simple: “Our work is rooted in genuine love for each other.” That is the source and the method. Not a programme. Not a project. Love.

Bonhoeffer’s Finkenwalde

This model is not new. Bonhoeffer understood it in the 1930s. When he was called to lead one of the Confessing Church’s illegal seminaries, he built a community. Brocker highlights the disciplines of daily psalm singing, Bible reading, prayer, meditation, fasting, and mutual confession that made this community possible. Bonhoeffer told his students to call him “Brother Dietrich.” The structure was brotherhood, not hierarchy. 

Community does not happen just because we want it. Especially communities of resistance. It takes time and effort. It requires that we give ourselves to each other. 

Bonhoeffer believed that “the immense power of the Nazi regime could be resisted only through the cultivation of small, faithful, highly disciplined Christian communities.” 

The seminary was not simply a protest against the state. That would be far too small. It was a counter-community to the state, a living argument that another way of being human was possible. Think of the ‘Occupy’ movements. They were clear about what they were protesting against. But not so clear about what alternative they were offering. The Church cannot simply be a protest movement. It must point towards something greater.  

The Corps as Community of Resistance

The Salvation Army Corps, at its best, is exactly this kind of community. When the Corps feeds the hungry, it is not only running a charitable service. It is enacting a different economy. It is demonstrating the reality that the Kingdom of Heaven is bringing into being. When the Corps stands with the addict, the homeless person, the immigrant, it is not just doing social work. It is making a theological declaration about where God is to be found. The corps becomes a locus of the sacred solidarity built through the reality of Christ in the world. 

The revolutionary truth of the Gospel is not soft or comfortable. 

“The Church needs to know itself not as invading or occupying power, not as another competing ideology amongst others, but as a subversive infiltration seeking to establish a new way of life. King Jesus has launched a revolution. The Church is the network that will bring about that revolution. Disciples are agents of the revolution, working in cells and networks and communities to spread the good news of Jesus.” (https://mytheologycorner.com/2024/11/21/communities-of-resistance-creating-covenantal-communities-in-reclaimed-spaces/) 

13. A Salvationist-Liberationist Call to Action

See–Judge–Act

If Trump is a trickster-like revelation of the Powers, then the unveiling itself is a moment of grace. The task is not to fixate on the man. It is to confront what he has exposed and to build the alternative. The See–Judge–Act cycle is the Pastoral Cycle of liberation theology and a fundamental discipline of Salvationist practice. We have done the Seeing. Now comes the Judging and the Acting.

Resisting the Myth

We resist the myth of redemptive violence by refusing to equate strength with righteousness or national power with divine blessing. As Moltmann writes: “Those who believe in the glory of the crucified one see the divine glory on the face of Christ and no longer in the face of the politically powerful.” The Mercy Seat has always been the Salvation Army’s answer to the myth of redemptive violence.

Building Alternative Community

Building community and embracing a gift economy are radical acts of resistance. We build Corps that are communities of justice, mercy, and holiness; places where the stranger is welcomed as a sibling, where the hungry are fed as a sacramental act, and where the Powers are named and refused. There are no perfect conditions. We build now, here, in the neighbourhood where God has placed us.

Cultivating Conscientisation

We cultivate conscientisation by creating communities of critical consciousness where questions can be asked, and the culture of silence can be broken. Liberation theology’s base ecclesial communities offer a model of small groups that read Scripture together, reflect on their lived experience in light of Scripture, and act.

Accompaniment as Sacrament

We stand with the oppressed through Accompaniment (ah-KUM-pan-ee-ment) — walking alongside those who suffer, not as expert helpers dispensing charity, but as fellow pilgrims sharing the risk; a core practice of liberationist and Salvationist praxis. This is not social work. It is sacramental theology lived out. When we stand with the person in need, we encounter the living Christ in them.

The Shape of a Revolutionary Disciple

Bonhoeffer asked, at the end of “After Ten Years”: “Are we still of any use?” His answer: “We will not need geniuses, cynics, people who have contempt for others, or cunning tacticians, but simple, uncomplicated, and honest human beings.”

This is the calling of the Corps. Not for the brilliant. Or for the powerful. It is for the responsible, the honest, the prayerful, and the faithful. The person who bakes bread for the neighbours they haven’t met yet. Whoever walks alongside the addict for the fifteenth time. Or the person who refuses to look away from what the trickster has revealed.

Sanctification is the divine power that casts out the Powers from within us, so that we become capable of resisting them in the world around us. Only sanctification can break the chains. Only the revolution of holiness is permanent, because only holiness transforms the heart.

Key Sources

Primary Sources

Bonhoeffer, D. (1951). Letters and Papers from Prison (includes “After Ten Years”). SCM Press.

Arendt, H. (1963; revised 1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury.

Merton, T. (1965). Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Doubleday.

Brengle, S. L. (1896). Helps to Holiness. The Salvation Army.

Secondary Sources

Bretherton, L. (2006). Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity. Ashgate.

Brocker, M. S. (2018). For love of the world: Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Hitler and the Nazis. Word & World, 38(4), 363–374.

Coutts, F. (1955). The Doctrine of Holiness. Salvationist Publishing.

De La Torre, M. A. Disruptive trickster ethics. [In: Dunn, J. & Day, C. (2025). Prophetic prospects for awkward neurodivergent liberation theology.]

Gelsheimer, A. The bystander effect: Thomas Merton and social psychology. Merton Society of Canada.

Hale, T. (2018). Pragmatic holiness in the early Salvation Army: A theology of holiness as action. [MA thesis, University of Western Ontario.]

Halldorf, J. Yearning for an undivided heart: Desert spirituality and the 19th century holiness movement.

Hyde, L. (1998). Trickster Makes This World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Khan, T. (2024). Communities of resistance — why we need more of them. CDA Collaborative.

McLaren, P. & Jandrıć, P. (2018). Paulo Freire and liberation theology. Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 94(2), 246–264.

Moltmann, J. (2015). European political theology. In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Political Theology. Cambridge UP.

Mudde, C. & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP.

Myers, B. (2014). The cloister and the barracks: Bonhoeffer and Christian community. Australian Army Chaplaincy Journal.

Radin, P. (1956). The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. Philosophical Library.

The Simple Way (2025). About us. thesimpleway.org/about

Thurston, B. B. Thomas Merton on the gifts of a guilty bystander. Merton Society paper.

Whitehead, A. & Perry, S. (2020). Taking America Back for God. Oxford UP.

Wink, W. (1984). Naming the Powers. Fortress Press.

Wink, W. (1992). Engaging the Powers. Fortress Press.

Clifton, S. (2010). New Love: Thinking Aloud About Practical Holiness. Crest Books.

Kairos Document (1985). Challenge to the Church. Kairos Theologians.