Instead of enriching the world’s wealthiest, we choose to strengthen the places and people that make our communities whole. We choose local businesses struggling to survive, nonprofits caring for the vulnerable, and neighbors in need of compassion.

The invitation I’m offering in Liturgies for Resisting Empire is to identify those overarching themes of imperial thinking – like dominance and power, dualistic thinking, structures of hierarchy – that have taken root in all of us, to understand the history and processes of how they came to be, and to make intentional choices that act counter to that and lead us towards communal healing.

Throughout history, powerful Christians have understood Daniel 7 to show them that God has chosen them to be divinely appointed world rulers––but then behave more like the beasts than the “nobodies” that God actually chooses to rule. From Constantine’s theologians claiming to establish the kingdom of the saints, to Charlemagne’s biographer describing his kingdom as the renewed fourth empire, to American notions of manifest destiny that drew on the language of Daniel 7: empire after empire has claimed what they think is Daniel’s promise of eternal global domination. Those claiming to be the holy ones became the beast, speaking arrogant words and making war on the vulnerable communities who suffer under systems of domination.