Essay
Whose kingdom, whose glory?
In 325, the Roman emperor Constantine invited the bishops assembled at Nicaea to a banquet celebrating twenty years of his reign. The Church had suffered persecution under earlier emperors; now its leaders were honored guests at the imperial table. The appeal of that welcome is easy to understand. A ruler’s protection could make a profound difference to the life of a Christian community. It also raises a question the Church still faces: how do we receive a ruler’s help without teaching ourselves to treat that ruler’s success as a sign of Christian fulfillment?
Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea and a historian of the Church, gives a revealing account of the occasion in his later Life of Constantine. He describes the bishops passing without fear through an entrance guarded by soldiers with drawn swords, and suggests that one might have seen “a picture of Christ’s kingdom” in the banquet that followed. His language gives the emperor’s hospitality a place within Christian hope (Life of Constantine, III.15–16).
Political protection and access offer practical advantages, but their usefulness does not settle what they mean for the Church’s calling. When welcome at a ruler’s table becomes part of our picture of Christian fulfillment, we have begun to make a further judgment. The language used to thank a benefactor also says something about the good their patronage represents. Christian praise can teach a community to associate its hope with the person who has secured its place.
The danger concerns what the Church learns to love, defend, and proclaim. When a political movement’s success becomes part of our account of Christian flourishing, that allegiance can begin to govern the teaching and conduct by which we make Christ known.
What Christian praise gives a ruler
Eusebius develops the connection between divine and imperial rule in his Oration in Praise of Constantine, delivered for the emperor’s thirtieth anniversary in 336. This is ceremonial praise, a form capable of setting an ideal before its recipient as well as celebrating him. In chapters 1–3, Constantine’s government is presented as an earthly imitation of divine sovereignty. His authority receives its pattern and purpose from above (Oration, 1–3).
The same work places demands upon rulers. In chapter 5, Eusebius insists upon virtue and self-command, condemns cruelty and disordered desire, and presents earthly sovereignty as temporary and slight beside the heavenly Kingdom. Constantine, in his telling, understands this distinction and directs his hope beyond his present rule. We should therefore resist the convenient accusation that Eusebius simply identified the Roman Empire with the Kingdom of God.[1]
The difficulty lies in his confidence that Constantine embodies the ideal. The language that could test imperial conduct becomes an assurance of this emperor’s exceptional fitness to rule. Christian teaching supplies both the standard and the commendation; in the commendation, the distance between the ruler and the standard becomes remarkably small.
We can recognize a danger here without claiming to know Eusebius’s private motives. Sincere gratitude, theological conviction, and a desire to encourage better government can all animate praise. They do not settle whether the praise is proportionate. A Christian leader may intend to remind a ruler of their obligations while also lending that ruler more religious authority than their conduct warrants.
When the Church repeatedly interprets a benefactor’s rise through the language of divine favor, it gives its people a way to understand their political attachments. If that account becomes central to their religious identity, correction may feel like disloyalty to something greater than a politician. The alliance has acquired a theological significance that makes its claims harder to examine.
The cost to the Church
Political cooperation brings responsibilities that Christians cannot avoid merely by refusing office or influence. Laws affect our neighbors, and governments can restrain wrongdoing, protect communities, and provide conditions in which families live and churches worship. The question is how we assess a relationship that offers those possibilities, including what it asks us to excuse or surrender.
The first danger is a narrowing of the Church’s freedom to critique the conduct of a ruler it has praised. To describe a ruler’s rise as a sign of divine favor gives Christians a reason to defend that success as something more than a political preference. Correction remains possible, but it must contend with the assurance our own words have given. We should therefore ask whether we still hold allies to the standards we apply to opponents.
A second danger concerns the measure of the Church’s flourishing. Invitations, favorable policies, and electoral victories are visible and readily counted. Faithfulness is harder to measure. An institution may gain room to operate while becoming less willing to tell the truth about those who protect it. Its practical advantages can conceal a diminished freedom to fulfill its calling.
These changes bear upon the Church’s witness: its proclamation of Christ through worship, teaching, conduct, and public relationships. A neighbor who hears Christian leaders celebrate a political project has reason to ask what that endorsement means for the Church’s obligations toward those the project places at risk. The answer must include what Christians actually do when those obligations become costly.
This concern cannot be settled by public approval. Christians may be criticized precisely because they remain faithful. Unpopularity, embarrassment, or declining attendance would not by themselves establish a failure of witness. The relevant test concerns the teaching or practice being compromised. In Mark 10:42–45[2], Jesus directs his disciples away from domination and toward service, grounding their calling in his own self-giving. This is a demand upon the Church’s exercise of authority, though it does not by itself supply a complete design for government. Where Christian influence depends upon treating people as instruments of our security, that demand gives us grounds for judgment even if the arrangement remains popular.
The loves that form a people
Augustine helps us consider what lies beneath these failures. The City of God took shape in response to accusations against Christianity following Rome’s sack in 410. Its argument ranges far beyond that occasion, examining the ends toward which human communities are directed. He describes two cities—the earthly city and the city of God—as communities formed by different loves. The work is not a reply to Eusebius, and these cities cannot simply be mapped onto Church and state.
In Book XIV, chapter 28, Augustine distinguishes them by their governing loves. The earthly city exalts itself to the point of contempt for God; the heavenly city loves God above its own exaltation. Their different orientations become visible in the pursuit of glory and the use of authority: domination in one, mutual service in the other. The issue is the place we give ourselves in relation to God, rather than the mere fact that we care about our lives or communities.
This distinction reaches inside ecclesiastical life. Augustine describes the cities as intermingled during history, and warns that participation in the Church’s sacraments does not permit us to identify everyone’s final belonging (Book I, chapter 35). A Christian name, clerical office, or theological education cannot certify the purity of our political desires. We may defend the Church while seeking the satisfaction of seeing our own people prevail.
Heavenly citizenship nevertheless gives direction to earthly responsibility. In Book XIX, chapter 17, Augustine’s pilgrim community gathers people across nations and languages, makes use of earthly peace, and cooperates in the arrangements necessary for mortal life. Such cooperation remains subject to faithfulness in worship. This is no modern theory of religious neutrality, but it does distinguish the community’s ultimate end from the temporary arrangements that sustain it.
St Paul writes that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20–21[3], NRSV). The passage immediately directs our expectation toward the Savior who will transform our bodies. Heavenly hope concerns the fulfillment of embodied life, and cannot justify indifference toward bodies exposed to hunger, fear, or violence.
Our application, then, must ask what good our political allegiance seeks. Are we working for conditions in which our neighbors can live, including those who share neither our faith nor our party? Or has the restoration of our group’s power become a religious end in itself? Our motives will often be mixed. Recognizing that mixture gives us reason for repentance and correction, rather than permission to leave it unexamined. The hope we receive from Christ should make us more capable of serving people whose welfare brings our coalition no advantage.
A guide who shares the difficulty
Augustine cannot, however, serve as an uncomplicated alternative to Christian imperial ambition. In Book V, chapters 24–26, he measures Christian rulers by justice, humility, restraint, and mercy, refusing to make longevity or military success the measure of their happiness. Yet he also commends the use of royal power to extend the worship of God, and praises Constantine and Theodosius. His insistence that earthly success is no promise of salvation coexists with a substantial place for Christian imperial rule.
More troublingly, Augustine defended coercion against Donatist Christians, a rival communion in North Africa. In Letter 93 to Vincentius, he argues that legal pressure and the fear it produces can break habits that obstruct a person’s reception of religious truth. He joins this pressure to instruction, and understands its purpose as healing and restored communion. He does not imagine that a command can mechanically produce inward faith. Nevertheless, Christians’ exposure to coercive power becomes, in his account, a means by which the Church may seek their good.
If the Church describes coercion as love, it must account for what it authorizes others to suffer. Its conviction that it possesses the truth does not establish that every means of bringing people into communion is faithful to the Lord whose body it claims to be. The need for such an account becomes especially urgent where spiritual authority can enlist the state’s power to enforce its judgments.
Here I am drawing upon Augustine’s account of love while questioning a practice he defended. He did not leave us a ready-made resolution of the problem. The difficulty belongs within the tradition we have received, and requires us to reason about its claims under the authority of Christ. Theological intelligence and sincere concern for the Church do not, by themselves, keep the desire for its good from becoming a justification for domination.
Christian witness and American public life
The alliance between Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and prominent Christian supporters brings these questions into our own public life.[4] Christian nationalism can fuse Christian and national identity, treat Christians as possessing a privileged claim to national belonging, and give a political project sacred significance. The question here is more particular: what do Christian leaders teach their communities when they praise a ruler’s rise? The comparison with Eusebius concerns Christian speech across very different settings; it requires neither a direct historical genealogy nor an equation of Trump with Constantine.
Franklin Graham’s public words show why the question extends beyond presidential self-description. Writing on 1 January 2025, Graham described Trump’s election as a rejection of an agenda he considered hostile to Christian values. He connected Trump’s survival of the assassination attempt and return to office with divine providence: “I think God saved him for a very special job.” The endorsement appeared within an exhortation to Christian prayer, carrying the religious authority of Graham’s ministry.
At the inauguration on 20 January, Graham thanked God for saving Trump’s life and having “raised him up with strength and power”. In his own inaugural address, Trump declared: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” The claim attached divine purpose to the political promise on which he had campaigned.
Graham’s qualifications deserve the same attention as Eusebius’s. His prayer asked for wisdom and guidance, directed attention toward God, and placed ultimate sovereignty in Jesus Christ. His earlier article likewise insisted that hope rests in God. These words do not authorize us to claim that he approved every subsequent policy. They do, however, accompany a confident interpretation of Trump’s rise that gives religious weight to his promise of national renewal.
Prayer for rulers is a Christian obligation. 1 Timothy 2:1–2[5] connects such intercession with the possibility of a peaceful and godly common life. A Christian can therefore pray earnestly for Trump while opposing his decisions. God’s providence over an event does not establish the goodness of the political ends attached to it. In the context of an election Graham welcomed as a rejection of an agenda hostile to Christian values, his claim about Trump’s particular task presents survival and political return as a favorable divine calling. In my judgment, that assurance about a ruler’s rise gives religious weight to a political mission the Church must remain free to critique. Thankfulness for a life spared cannot establish the sacred significance of its owner’s political program.
The next day brought a different use of Christian speech in the president’s presence. At Washington National Cathedral, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Church appealed for mercy toward frightened people. Trump subsequently demanded an apology (Episcopal News Service, 22 January 2025). His response cannot stand in for the views of his Christian supporters; it does make the need for an independent Christian witness especially clear.
Budde’s appeal directs attention to people whose welfare must enter Christian discernment about national renewal. Recognizing that obligation requires no blanket endorsement of her theology or policy preferences. Christians can disagree over immigration policy or sexual ethics while insisting that fear and vulnerability deserve a response governed by mercy. Any religious account of a ruler’s mission must leave that obligation fully intact, including when honoring it frustrates the ruler’s ambitions.
Choosing among imperfect candidates is unavoidable, and Christians may support conservative policies for serious reasons. Such judgments remain open to argument and correction. The Church incurs a different responsibility when its ministers confer sacred significance upon a coalition’s success. Our teaching must retain authority to critique that coalition, our service must extend to those outside it, and our willingness to acknowledge wrongdoing must survive the possibility that doing so will help its opponents. Otherwise, political allegiance has begun to determine what our public Christianity permits us to say.
Receiving the Kingdom, recovering our witness
Anglicans have particular reason to undertake this examination without imagining ourselves above it. Article XXXVII[6], in its English royal-supremacy form, assigns the monarch chief government over both ecclesiastical and civil estates, while withholding the ministry of Word and Sacraments. Our received formularies bear the marks of a Church whose life has been bound to political authority. Establishment and modern Christian nationalism are distinct, but that distinction leaves us with an inheritance to examine, rather than a position of innocence from which to examine everyone else.
The Church receives its life and calling from Christ. Its political relationships must be measured against the obligations already given with that life. We should apply consistent moral standards to allies and opponents, hear the testimony of neighbors beyond our coalition, and name and repair harms where they can be established. Christian leaders must be willing to lose invitations, influence, and favorable treatment when keeping them requires silence about wrongdoing. A relationship that cannot survive truthful correction has acquired a claim upon the Church that it should never have been given.
These habits need formation in the Church’s ordinary life. Confession requires us to name sins we would prefer to explain away. Catechesis should equip Christians to recognize the claims of Christ when party loyalty makes them inconvenient. In Baptism and the Eucharist, we receive a belonging that no national movement can bestow and learn obligations toward people whom political convenience might teach us to disregard. Worship and sacramental participation require accountable conduct; ecclesiastical language cannot certify that our loves are rightly ordered.
Eusebius’s banquet remains an arresting scene because welcome can be so persuasive. The question that follows us from that table concerns the good toward which our fellowship is directed, and the account of Christ our public relationships communicate. We may receive help from earthly rulers with gratitude. We must also remain prepared to give up their advantages when faithfulness requires it. The Church’s task is to make Christ recognizable through a life ordered toward his Kingdom. We receive that calling from the Lord who gave himself for the world.
Christopher Bonura argues against readings that identify Constantine’s empire with the fulfillment of Eusebius’s heavenly hope, attending to the rhetorical setting and his continuing expectation of Christ’s return. See “Eusebius of Caesarea, the Roman Empire, and the Fulfillment of Biblical Prophecy: Reassessing Byzantine Imperial Eschatology in the Age of Constantine”, Church History 90, no. 3 (2021), 509–536. That correction informs the reading here; the judgment about the risks of religious praise is this essay’s own argument. ↩︎
Pew’s validated-voter analysis found that 81% of white evangelical Protestant voters supported Trump in 2024. This establishes a voting pattern, not a common motive, endorsement of every action, or identification as Christian nationalists. ↩︎
Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
Article XXXVII. Of the Civil Magistrates
The King’s Majesty hath the chief power in this Realm of England, and other his Dominions, unto whom the chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign Jurisdiction.
Where we attribute to the King’s Majesty the chief government, by which Titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folks to be offended; we give not to our Princes the ministering either of God’s Word, or of the Sacraments, the which thing the Injunctions also lately set forth by Elizabeth our Queen do most plainly testify; but that only prerogative, which we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in Holy Scriptures by God himself; that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers.The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.
The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences.
It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.