Picture this scene from Mark's Gospel: Three terrified disciples on a mountain, watching their teacher transformed before their eyes, glowing with unearthly radiance while conversing with Moses and Elijah—figures from centuries past who suddenly appear in brilliant splendor. Peter, in that profoundly human way of responding to divine mystery with mundane practicality, suggests building three commemorative shelters. Then a cloud envelops them (because apparently transfiguration wasn't dramatic enough), and a voice thunders: "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" (Mark 9:7)
And they are, as Mark carefully notes, "terrified." (Mark 9:6)
Not mildly concerned. Not reverently awed. Terrified. This wasn't the pleasant warmth of a worship service or the gentle affirmation of a prayer meeting. This was pure, primal fear—the kind that arises when finite creatures encounter the infinite, when human categories collapse before divine reality. This was what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the overwhelming mystery that simultaneously attracts and repels, that draws us close while making us acutely aware of our radical otherness.
Now consider how we speak of religious experience today:
"God told me to vote for Senator So-and-So"
"The Holy Spirit confirmed that my identity group represents authentic divine concern"
"Jesus clearly endorses our specific political platform"
Something profound has been lost in translation. The divine mystery that made Peter babble incoherently and left the disciples speechless has been reduced to a kind of supernatural polling service, validating our predetermined positions and affirming our existing commitments.
When Divine Presence Becomes Political Property
Here's what authentic religious experience looks like in scripture:
Moses encounters the burning bush and must remove his sandals, overwhelmed by holy ground (Exodus 3:1-6)
Isaiah sees the Lord "high and lifted up" and cries out in recognition of his unworthiness (Isaiah 6:1-5)
The disciples witness the transfigured Christ and lose all coherent speech (Mark 9:2-6)
Notice the pattern? Divine encounters consistently produce:
Recognition of radical inadequacy before transcendent reality
Simultaneous attraction and fear that defies rationalization
Transformation beyond human planning or control
Redirection toward previously unimagined purposes
Nowhere in scripture does God appear to affirm political platforms, validate identity categories, or endorse cultural preferences. Instead, divine presence consistently disrupts human agendas, transcends political divisions, and reorients human desire toward divine purposes that exceed partisan imagination.
The Collapse of Transcendence: How God Becomes Our Political Mascot
Modern American Christianity has accomplished something remarkable—perhaps even unprecedented in religious history. We've managed to reduce the Creator of the universe to a mascot for our political teams, transforming divine transcendence into a kind of supernatural endorsement service for cultural warfare.
David Bentley Hart describes this collapse with devastating precision: "The analogical interval between God and creatures is what makes possible both genuine divine transcendence and authentic divine immanence. When this interval collapses into univocal identity of being, God becomes either a being among beings (and thus not God) or an absence that leaves the world to its own devices."¹
Let me translate that from theologian to everyday English: When we forget that God exists on a fundamentally different plane than creation, we inevitably turn God into either a bigger version of ourselves or a meaningless abstraction. Either way, we lose authentic divine encounter.
Gods of Legitimation: The Quest for Ultimate Authority
What's particularly fascinating is how our society keeps searching for sources of ultimate authority, even as traditional religious frameworks recede from public life. As political philosopher Ivan Krastev observes, "Science was as important for the modern state as God was for the monarchical states of the past. The legitimacy of the state was coming from science."¹³
This insight reveals a pattern: human communities consistently seek transcendent sources of legitimacy. When traditional religious authority wanes, scientific authority often takes its place—not merely as practical guidance but as a source of ultimate validation. The COVID pandemic revealed the limitations of this arrangement, as Krastev notes: "Science functions because scientists disagree with each other... science—even though it was successful... delegitimized the state by the very way it works: through disagreement and constantly-changing hypotheses."¹³
The result? A society increasingly skeptical of all sources of transcendent authority, whether religious or scientific. This vacuum of trusted authority creates fertile ground for both political mutations we'll explore.
Dominative Christianism: Divine Power as Political Control
In Dominative Christianism, divine presence mutates into a display of power—the spiritual equivalent of revving motorcycle engines at traffic lights. God becomes the ultimate enforcer for nationalist dreams, the cosmic guarantor of American exceptionalism. Consider how this mutation transforms religious practice:
Worship services increasingly resemble political rallies, complete with nationalist symbols and partisan rhetoric. The cross transforms from a symbol of self-sacrificial love into a weapon for cultural dominance. Prayer shifts from vulnerable dialogue with the divine to declarations of spiritual warfare against political opponents. The eucharist—that profound mystery of divine presence—becomes a boundary marker between political allies and enemies.
As Timothy Cunningham observes in his analysis of Christian nationalism: "Christian nationalists often interpret patriotic texts in ways that sacralize American identity, much as they approach sacred scripture." The divine mystery that should expand our vision becomes confined to national boundaries, serving political agendas rather than transcending them.
This represents what Charles Taylor calls "excarnation"—the disembodiment of spiritual reality into abstract principles.³ Rather than encountering the living God who transcends our categories, worshippers experience a domesticated deity who confirms their political convictions.
What's particularly intriguing about the Trump-era expression of this tendency is its profound shift away from American exceptionalism itself. As Krastev notes: "Trump was the last one to say that American exceptionalism is not America's strength—it's America's vulnerability... America is the victim of its exceptionalism. America is the victim of its idealism. America is the victim of the American Dream."¹³
This creates a strange paradox: a religious nationalism that increasingly defines itself against traditional American ideals rather than through them. The result is what Yascha Mounk characterizes as a movement where "the least based thing is to have a kind of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington naïve view of American ideals."¹⁴ The sacred story no longer points toward fulfilling America's promise, but toward rejecting the very idea that America has a universal promise to fulfill.
Providential Identitarianism: Divine Presence as Therapeutic Validation
Providential Identitarianism commits the same fundamental error from the opposite direction. Here, God becomes the cosmic therapist who exists primarily to validate our feelings and affirm our chosen identities. Divine presence gets reduced to whatever makes us feel comfortable and confirmed in our existing commitments.
This mutation manifests in parallel distortions:
Emotional comfort becomes equated with divine presence—if it feels affirming, it must be of God
Personal validation becomes the primary mode of spiritual experience
Prophetic challenge that might disturb our sensibilities gets eliminated
The God who wounds in order to heal becomes the therapist who only soothes
As Christian Smith notes in his research on American religious life: "The therapeutic model transforms God from the transcendent Lord who calls us to transformation into the cosmic therapist who validates our existing desires."⁶ The divine otherness that should expand our horizons instead becomes a mirror reflecting our own preferences.
This pattern parallels what Krastev identifies as a fundamental shift in state legitimation: "The classical trusted state of the 1930s in America under Roosevelt—or of the 1950s and 60s in Europe—was based on the idea that it responded to and took care of human needs. But today, it must take care of human desires."¹³ The state can no longer merely provide universal necessities; it must validate individual uniqueness.
The result? A theology that mirrors this consumerist logic: "I want the state to treat me as a very specific personality—but the state, in order to be fair, must treat me like everybody else. We're no longer ready to live with that."¹³ Similarly, the God of Providential Identitarianism must validate everyone's unique identity while somehow maintaining universality—an impossible theological demand that inevitably collapses into incoherence.
The Shared Metaphysical Disaster: Flattening the Infinite
Despite their political opposition, both mutations share a common metaphysical framework—what philosophers call "univocity." This technical term describes the assumption that God exists on the same ontological plane as everything else, just bigger and better. It's like thinking the Pacific Ocean is merely a very large bathtub, missing the qualitative difference that makes it an ocean rather than just big bath water.
Stanley Hauerwas captures this problem with characteristic clarity: "The God of Christian faith is not a 'meaning' that we can control through our theological systems or political projects. Rather, this God is the disruptive presence who continually calls into question our attempts to secure our own existence through our religiosity."⁶
Both Dominative Christianism and Providential Identitarianism fail precisely because they try to harness divine power for their predetermined projects. They share what Hauerwas calls "the desperate need to have a god that underwrites our causes rather than a God who judges them."
This shared framework produces characteristic distortions across the political spectrum:
Divine action becomes reduced to natural causation, whether political power or social progress
Mystery gets eliminated in favor of ideological certainty
Revelation collapses into confirmation of existing beliefs
Grace transforms from gift into technique for achieving partisan goals
Digital Idolatry: When the Algorithm Becomes Divine
Social media accelerates these mutations by transforming religious experience into commodified content. Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" helps explain how digital mediation fundamentally alters religious encounter:
Algorithmic curation creates echo chambers where we encounter only views that reinforce existing commitments. Instant feedback loops reward performative spirituality designed for maximum engagement rather than genuine encounter. Disembodied interaction enables ideological extremism by removing the moderating influence of face-to-face community. Visual dominance replaces contemplative depth, reducing religious experience to shareable moments.
Byung-Chul Han calls this "the digital swarm"—isolated individuals who experience pseudo-community through technological mediation.¹⁰ Religious experience becomes content to be consumed rather than mystery to be encountered. God's voice gets filtered through our carefully curated feeds, speaking only what we already want to hear.
This algorithmic curation parallels what Krastev identifies as a fundamental challenge of modern democracy: "Suddenly, you're being asked to have opinions about things you've never experienced and cannot experience. And this created a kind of trust–mistrust game. As a result, democracy became the management of mistrust."¹³ Similarly, algorithmic religion asks us to have confident positions on divine matters far beyond our experience, substituting digital certainty for lived encounter.
Recovering the Analogical Interval: A Path Beyond Political Idolatry
The way forward requires recovering what classical theology calls the "analogical interval"—the metaphysical space that enables genuine relationship between Creator and creation precisely by maintaining their fundamental difference.
Hauerwas helps us understand why this matters for contemporary discipleship: "To be a disciple is to learn to be dispossessed, to be freed from the presumption that we can secure our lives against God's lordship through our theological systems or political arrangements."¹¹ The analogical interval teaches us that God is not simply a bigger version of what we already know, but the One who transforms our knowing itself.
This recovery begins with several crucial recognitions:
First, we must acknowledge divine transcendence not as distance but as the condition for genuine intimacy. Just as human relationships require distinct persons to achieve true communion, divine-human relationship requires the analogical difference that enables authentic encounter without collapse into identity.
Second, we must embrace mystery without surrendering clarity. The God who reveals is the same God who remains hidden. This isn't contradiction but the necessary structure of infinite-finite relationship. We can know truly without knowing exhaustively.
Third, we must cultivate patience before divine hiddenness. As Samuel Wells wisely notes: "The Church does not make things happen; it invites people to allow things to happen to them—to have their feet washed, to realize they are hungry, to find food in unlikely forms, to be transformed and consumed."² The compulsion to manufacture religious experience through political validation or therapeutic affirmation betrays a refusal to wait upon God's self-revelation in God's own time and manner.
Finally, we must resist premature closure of theological questions. The divine mystery invites ongoing exploration rather than ideological certainty. Authentic faith remains open to being surprised by grace.
Liturgical Resistance: Practices Beyond Political Capture
Recovery requires liturgical practices that resist ideological capture and create space for authentic divine encounter. These aren't techniques for manufacturing religious experience but disciplines that open us to transformative presence:
Eucharistic celebration transcends political division by gathering diverse people around Christ's table. Here, we don't merely remember but participate in divine self-giving that refuses partisan categories. The bread broken and shared becomes a sign of unity that precedes and exceeds political alignment.
Contemplative prayer embraces divine mystery rather than seeking to control divine power. In silence, we learn to wait upon God's initiative rather than projecting our agendas onto divine reality. This creates what Sarah Coakley calls "practices of un-mastery"—spiritual disciplines that open us to divine transformation rather than confirming our existing commitments.¹²
Scriptural meditation allows texts to challenge our preconceptions rather than confirming our biases. Rather than mining scripture for proof-texts, we allow sacred words to interrogate our assumptions, expose our limitations, and redirect our desires toward divine purposes that exceed partisan imagination.
Corporate confession acknowledges shared brokenness rather than projecting evil onto others. Here we recognize that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, preventing the demonization of political opponents that characterizes both mutations.
Prophetic Presence: Neither Red Nor Blue but Kingdom-Shaped
Authentic religious experience enables prophetic witness that transcends partisan alignment. Like the Hebrew prophets who challenged both royal power and popular religion, contemporary prophetic presence refuses conscription into ideological armies while maintaining fierce commitment to divine justice.
The prophetic voice emerges from genuine encounter with divine presence that refuses domestication. It speaks truth to all forms of power, whether political or religious, conservative or progressive. It maintains critical distance from all ideologies while embracing solidarity with the marginalized regardless of political categorization. Most importantly, it witnesses to transcendent hope that cannot be reduced to any political program or social movement.
Willie James Jennings captures this dynamic: "When the nation becomes the primary site of divine revelation, the church loses its capacity to witness against national idolatry. The prophetic voice is silenced by the siren song of civil religion."⁴ True prophetic witness recovers this capacity by grounding itself in divine otherness rather than partisan identity.
The Comedy of Divine Freedom: God Who Refuses to Be Contained
Here's the profound irony that both mutations fail to grasp: The God we've been trying to recruit for our culture wars refuses to stay in the boxes we build. While Dominative Christianism seeks a deity who blesses nationalist dreams and Providential Identitarianism desires a God who validates progressive credentials, the actual divine presence keeps showing up in unexpected places—among the poor and marginalized, within communities that defy political categorization, through encounters that transform rather than confirm.
The divine comedy plays out when our carefully constructed religious systems encounter the living God who transcends them all. It's like watching someone try to capture the ocean in a fishbowl—the categories we construct for divine presence consistently prove inadequate to the reality we encounter.
This isn't merely theological abstraction. Consider how often scripture shows God working through unexpected people: Gentile widows rather than Israelite priests (1 Kings 17:8-24), tax collectors rather than Pharisees (Luke 18:9-14), crucified criminals rather than religious authorities (Luke 23:39-43). The divine pattern consistently subverts our expectations of where and how God appears.
Transfiguration Revisited: The Model of Authentic Encounter
Returning to the Transfiguration narrative, we see how authentic divine encounter resists both mutations we've examined. The disciples experience overwhelming presence that disrupts their agendas rather than confirming them. They encounter mystery that exceeds their comprehension rather than validating their understanding. They receive a command to listen rather than speak, to be transformed rather than to transform. Most significantly, their experience precedes understanding rather than confirming preexisting categories.
The voice from the cloud—"This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" (Mark 9:7)—redirects attention from human projects to divine revelation. It doesn't endorse their political preferences or validate their social identities. Instead, it invites participation in divine life that transcends all partisan divisions. This divine word reveals a presence that transforms rather than affirms, challenges rather than comforts, and calls beyond rather than confirms.
Conclusion: Beyond Political Idolatry
Recovery of authentic religious experience requires a profound shift in how we approach divine presence. We must allow the God of biblical revelation to interrupt our ideological certainties, whether they lean right or left. Only then can we experience the God who is truly Other yet intimately present—the God who transforms rather than merely affirms, who calls us beyond ourselves rather than confirming our existing commitments.
This God cannot be reduced to a weapon in our culture wars or a validator of our identities. This God remains free, sovereign, and loving—inviting us into relationship that transforms rather than possession that controls. The prophet Hosea captures this divine freedom: "I am God and not a human being, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath." (Hosea 11:9) The God who refuses political domestication remains the God of transforming love.
The path forward isn't about finding better ways to enlist God in our causes. It's about recovering the capacity for authentic divine encounter that transforms our causes themselves. As we allow divine presence to disrupt our partisan certainties and challenge our tribal loyalties, we may discover that the God we've been trying to recruit has been seeking to transform us all along.
The voice from the cloud still speaks: "This is my Son. Listen to him!"
Perhaps our most faithful response is neither to explain nor to translate but simply to obey: to listen, to be transformed, and to follow wherever divine presence leads—even when it disrupts our carefully maintained political categories and theological systems.
Key Terms
Dominative Christianism: A theological mutation that transforms Christianity from a faith centered on cruciform love into a system for exercising social and political control. Full entry →
Providential Identitarianism: A theological mutation that secularizes reformed protestant frameworks while maintaining structural logic through identity-based categories. Full entry →
Analogical Interval: The metaphysical space between Creator and creation that enables genuine relationship without collapsing difference. Full entry →(Coming Soon)
Univocity: The modern metaphysical assumption that being is predicated in the same way of God and creatures. Full entry →(Coming soon)
Participatory Presence: Understanding divine presence as participation in divine life rather than possession of divine power. Full entry →(Coming soon)
Related Content
Monday: Introduction to Dominative Christianism (Part 1) →
Monday: The Trinitarian Foundation of Christian Identity →
Wednesday: Bullshit: Truth as Foundation →
Thursday: Four Migrations, Four Worlds →
Notes
[1] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 127.
[2] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1973), 26.
[3] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 554.
[4] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 289.
[5] Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 246.
[6] Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 44.
[7] Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 121.
[8] Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 198.
[9] Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 157.
[10] Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, trans. Erik Butler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 12.
[11] Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 259.
[12] Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), xv.
[13] Ivan Krastev, interviewed by Yascha Mounk, "Ivan Krastev on American Decline," The Good Fight podcast, Persuasion, April 23, 2025.
[14] Yascha Mounk, conversation with Ivan Krastev, "Ivan Krastev on American Decline," The Good Fight podcast, Persuasion, April 23, 2025.
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