When the Government Calls You Anti-American: Reading Revelation as Dissident Discipleship

The past few days brought us a new National Security Directive—not quite an executive order, but close enough to make you pay attention. Its stated purpose? To "disrupt any individuals or groups that foment political violence, including before they result in violent political acts."

If you're thinking of Minority Report, you're on the right track. Here's what qualifies as potential political violence under this directive: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race, or gender, and hostility toward "traditional American views" on family, religion, or morality.

I looked at that list and thought: You could practically use these bullet points as our church's mission statement.

Who gets to decide what counts as anti-American? If I wear a shirt that says "I am not a citizen of this world, I am a citizen of the kingdom of heaven," does that qualify? If I critique economies that extract wealth from the poor and funnel it to the wealthiest 1%, am I anti-capitalist in a dangerous way? If I say that many churches have weaponized Jesus's name for political ends, am I anti-Christian? If I believe my undocumented neighbor deserves love and dignity, am I an extremist on migration?

This isn't new. It's never been new. The Original Anti-Americans

Here's how the Roman Empire described early Christians in the first, second, and third centuries: They were "a new and mischievous superstition." They were held responsible (falsely) for the great fire of Rome in AD 64. They practiced "degraded and shameful" rituals. They held to a "foreign and deadly superstition" and evidenced "antisocial tendencies." They were condemned for odium generis humanae—literally, "hatred of the human race." Christians were called atheists. Yes, atheists. Because their insistence on one God was so offensive to the Roman pantheon that they might as well believe in no gods at all. Jews received the same treatment.

The accusations continued: "They collect from the scum of the populace ignorant and credulous folk and make them fellow conspirators." Translation: They were gathering slaves, abandoned children, women, prostitutes, and outcasts into these subversive communities called ecclesias—churches. "They love each other almost before being acquainted. They are united by a religion of debauchery."

What was this debauchery? They called one another sister and brother. You have to understand the Roman mindset to grasp why this was scandalous. Romans didn't assume that all people were created equal. There were clear classes, rigid castes. To call a slave your brother, to call a child or a non-citizen your sister—that was debauchery. That was dangerous. That threatened the entire social order. And then there were the rumors about communion: "These wicked people greedily drink Christ's blood and unite themselves by sacrifice, binding each other to silence by complicity in the crime." They thought Christians were literal cannibals.

So these Christians needed to be dealt with—persecuted, economically excluded, or killed.

The book of Revelation speaks directly into this world. It's a letter written to communities being labeled as threats to the empire, to people watching their neighbors disappear, to churches trying to figure out how to be faithful when the cost keeps rising.

Not a Prophecy Decoder Ring

Let me be clear about how I read Revelation, because it matters. There are four main interpretive frameworks: The preterist view says Revelation was written by first-century people about first-century problems only—a time capsule, interesting historically but not directly applicable.

The historicist view treats Revelation as a sketch of church history from beginning to end. If you Google "seven church eras in Revelation," you'll find charts mapping each letter to a different period—early church, medieval church, modern church. The problem? It's embarrassingly Western-centric and ignores the entire history of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and beyond.

The futurist view is what most Americans absorbed just by existing in American culture. It reads Revelation as entirely about the future. John sees churches being persecuted and thinks, "You know what these first-century Christians need? Detailed information about what happens twenty centuries from now." The less cynical version says Revelation is about the consummation of God's kingdom and the end of evil, so our job is to speculate—decode which modern nation is the beast, which leader is the antichrist, which war fulfills which prophecy.

Then there's the idealist view, which is where I land. Revelation presents timeless images and truths about God, the church, empire, and resistance. There is always a Babylon. There is always a beast. There is always an empire bathing itself in violence, moving against communities of love.

"The mistake futurists make is thinking there's one final interpretation that consummates in the end of the world. The idealist view says yes, it's about the future, and it's about today, and it's about the past."

This is why every generation of Christians has read Revelation and thought, "This is about us right now." They weren't all wrong. A hundred years from now, people will read Revelation and recognize their own Babylon, their own beast, their own call to dissident faithfulness.

The idealist view can sound cynical—like history is just an endless cycle of violence and redemption, collapse and rebuilding, over and over until heat death. But Christians dare to believe history has a direction, a trajectory. We believe God is moving toward something, that one day God will set all things right.

And there's always a challenge to that hope. There are always empires and monsters and beasts saying, "Give up. Stop hoping."

Hope Is Work, Not Magic

Which brings me to something I keep saying that I apparently need to make into a t-shirt: Hope is not magic. Hope is work. Hope is gritty. Hope is not "the thing with feathers"—hope is the sewer rat. Matted and bloody, having seen some things, having snorted some questionable substances (that's from the poem, not me). Hope has been through it.

When we say Christians are people of hope, we don't mean we're sitting back waiting for a divine escape hatch while the world burns. That's escapism. That's the futurist perspective that treats Revelation like a rapture manual.

No—hope means we believe God's Spirit is active and moving in this world right now. So we put our bodies, our money, our time, our communities on the line for those who can't protect themselves. We work for a new dawn we might not live to see. We plant trees whose shade we'll never sit under.

Hope is Antonio's testimony about his sister Antoinette receiving a kidney transplant after more than a decade on dialysis. Hope is a Black woman receiving a life-saving organ in a medical system with documented racial disparities. Hope is a family that kept praying, kept showing up, kept doing the work of hope even when the waiting felt unbearable.

That testimony reminded us: Your God-history needs to become a string of monuments, reference points for the rest of your life. Not because God is a cosmic vending machine, but because remembering how God has shown up before gives us courage to keep working when the future looks bleak.

Two Ways of Conquering

The seven letters in Revelation chapters 2-3 aren't separate from the rest of the book—they're the foundation. Each letter follows a pattern: attributes of Jesus, commendation (usually), criticism (usually), a call to action, and a promise to "the one who conquers." That word "conquer" is key. In Greek, it's related to Nike—yes, like the shoe brand, from the goddess of victory. The Nicolaitans—one of the groups Jesus condemns—literally means "the people of conquering" or "the people of victory."

There's a whole school of thought the Johannine literature (Gospel of John, 1-2-3 John, Revelation) is pushing back against. It says: If you want to overcome, if you want to be victorious, you do it through violence. Through domination. Through oppression. If you're being oppressed, you oppress right back to get your way. Jesus says no.

Listen to Revelation 12:11—"They conquered him [the beast] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony." The blood of the Lamb refers to Jesus's crucifixion, his sacrificial death. The word of testimony means speaking truth about what God has done.

"There are two kinds of overcoming: victory through allegiance to the way of Jesus, or victory through the way of Babylon. You do it through sacrifice and testimony, or you do it through violence and domination."

This is dissident discipleship. We're called to conquer, yes—but in a way that looks like failure to Rome, that looks like weakness to empire, that looks like foolishness to the Nicolaitans. The same goes for "Jezebel" and "Balaam"—historical slurs Jesus uses in these letters. Jezebel was a queen who lured Israel away from Yahweh toward idol worship. Balaam was a prophet-for-hire who led Israel into sexual immorality and idolatry.

These aren't primarily about sexual ethics in the puritanical sense. When Revelation connects sexual immorality with idolatry, it's talking about the economic and religious fusion of empire—paying wealthy priests to participate in temple prostitution to ensure your business prospers. It's about tying your body and your wallet to systems of exploitation because that's how you get ahead.

So here's the question: Who are our modern Nicolaitans? Who's calling us toward a kind of victory that has nothing to do with Jesus? What systems are we tempted to blend our bodies and wallets with because that's just how things work?

A Letter to Progressive Churches

At the end of the sermon, I offered an imagined letter to our own community. It felt risky to preach, honestly, but necessary. Here's an excerpt: "These are the words of the one who is wounded for love, who calls you by name, who knows the pain that brought you here. I know your works, how you've created sanctuary for the spiritually homeless, how you've deconstructed toxic theology, how you've learned to name harm and speak truth. I see the courage it took to leave behind the faith that wounded you, to risk building something new. You have endured much.

But I have this against you: In your necessary work of tearing down false idols, you've become afraid to encounter the living God. Your deconstruction has been brave, but where is your reconstruction? You speak beautifully of justice and community, but when did you last allow yourself to be undone by mystery, to be surprised by grace? Your cynicism, though well-earned through pain, has become a wall that keeps out not just harmful religion, but transformative encounter. You've learned to critique worship but forgotten how to surrender in it. You analyze scripture but resist letting it analyze you."

This is the tension many of us live in. We've done hard, necessary work dismantling harmful theology. We've learned to spot manipulation, to question authority, to name abuse. That work was essential. It probably saved our faith—or our sanity, or both. But somewhere along the way, many of us became so good at deconstruction that we forgot how to build. We got so skilled at critique that we lost our capacity for wonder. We protected ourselves from spiritual manipulation so thoroughly that we also closed ourselves off from spiritual encounter.

Can you be both critically thinking and spiritually surrendered? Can you question everything and still fall on your knees? Can you deconstruct harmful theology while being constructed by divine love? I believe you can. I believe we must. Because the alternative is becoming a community that gathers beautifully around shared wounds but never gathers around shared wonder.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Here's what I know: Reading Revelation in our current moment isn't about speculation. It's not about matching current events to ancient symbols. It's about learning to be the kind of community that can resist empire without becoming what we resist.

It's about choosing the way of testimony over the way of violence. It's about doing the hard, gritty work of hope. It's about creating sanctuary while staying open to mystery. It's about deconstructing what needs to tear down and having the courage to rebuild.

The book of Revelation ends with New Jerusalem—a city where God dwells with people, where tears are wiped away, where justice finally makes its home. We're not there yet. We're in the letters to the churches. We're in the part where we figure out what faithfulness looks like when being faithful might get you labeled anti-American. So what would a letter to your community say? What are you being commended for? What's your call to action—repent, hold fast, wake up? And what does it mean for you to conquer, to overcome, in a Jesus-like way in your context, at this moment?

The empire wants you to give up hope or to hope passively while doing nothing. Revelation says: Hope actively. Work faithfully. Resist creatively. Build courageously. Remember that you conquer not through domination but through love that looks like foolishness until it turns out to be the only thing that lasts.