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It’s helpful to begin with a definition. I would tentatively define Christendom as the era in which institutional Christianity exercised a profound degree of cultural hegemony, geo-political power, socio-economic control, and even military might. At the risk of oversimplifying a supremely complicated historical story, it largely began in the 4th century with Emperor Constantine and mostly came to an end by the 20th. Of course, its influence continues to one degree or another in such places as the American Bible Belt, especially with Christian nationalism‘s rebirth of late.
I’ve become convinced that the primary watershed among Christians today isn’t what most people presume. This watershed isn’t along some point of the ideological spectrum between conservatism and liberalism, but between those who are pro-Christendom and those who are post-Christendom. The former decry the secularization of government and gaze longingly toward the time in which the Church wielded the levers of wealth, power, and prestige. The latter are characterized by a mourning of early Christianity’s idolatrous Romanization in the first place.
In his book, Adding Cross to Crown: The Political Significance of Christ’s Passion, Mark Noll makes an astute observation. In juxtaposing the metaphors of the cross (Christ’s suffering) and the crown (Christ’s reign), he notes that all throughout Church history Christians have emphasized the cross when we’ve been the persecuted minority but, almost miraculously and without fail, we emphasize the crown when we become the controlling majority. Whad’ya know? Christian culture only values pluralistic tolerance and epistemological humility when it’s disempowered.
Our faith is at its best when it reflects The Way of Jesus. That is, when Christians are a humble minority who are serving rather than dominating others. The “cross” is marked by an emphasis on heaven, forgiveness, humility, temperance, and hope; the “crown” is marked by an emphasis on hell, condemnation, pride, indulgence, and fear for the future. We need to emphatically jettison Christian culture’s Constantinian obsession with the crown and return to the very early Church’s emphasis upon the cross. Quite honestly, that’s the only way to faithfully follow Jesus.
The original beatniks valued non-conformity. Theirs was a subversive ethos that consciously questioned and intentionally challenged all of society’s beliefs, presuppositions, and values that they thought sucked. The thing is, isn’t that pretty much exactly what Jesus did with the Pharisees in the first century? He didn’t try to slowly work within the established order to incrementally bring about reform. Jesus upended the system with a radically countercultural vision for the Kingdom of God. That’s also what the beats did via conversations and poetry readings.
