Kingdoms of This World
How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions
By Philip Jenkins
Baylor University Press, 350 pages, $42.99
As Americans embarked on the yearlong countdown to the country’s semiquincentennial celebration next July 4, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe published an op-ed reflecting on what he described as the Episcopal Church’s “complicated” relationship with the United States: “We were once the church of the Founding Fathers and presidents—34 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of what became our church after the Revolution, and 11 presidents, including George Washington, have professed our faith. Today, however, we are known less for the powerful people in our pews than for our resistance to the rising tide of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism emanating from Washington, D.C.”
One can understand the rhetorical attraction of the prelate’s contrast between being the closest thing that America ever had to the Church of England’s status as the “Established Church” and now leading “the resistance” against the current U.S. administration, the relationship between religion and power is much more nuanced.
An especially helpful contextual guide to debates about politics and religion is the latest book from Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University. Kingdoms of This World is the logical capstone to two of the prolific author’s earlier volumes, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (2010) and A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World (2023). It expands the aperture beyond historic Christianity to include other global religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam. “Empires are an inescapable component in the making, remaking, and rethinking of the world’s faiths,” he writes. “To varying degrees, all those religions exist in what we might call a postimperial environment.” Moreover, Jenkins argues that even minority creeds have been shaped by imperial realities.
An “empire” for Jenkins consists of “one society extending its power over others, diversity of populations and territories, and geographical scope,” a definition that is elastic enough to not only cover historical empires built through military conquest, but also the contemporary world’s commercial empires forged by trade and finance in which economic sanctions are the tools used to enforce conformity with the preferences of its elites.
A key lesson is that while imperial ideologies matter, empires, both ancient and modern, almost never succeed in enforcing anything approaching absolute control in the sphere of religion. Not only did the network of roads and sailing routes created by the Pax Romana help the missionary journeys of St. Paul and other early preachers of what would become Christianity, but the new faith flourished despite the efforts of the empire to crush it. More recently, Britain’s “empire on which the sun never set” may have opened the way for the spread of Christianity, both of the Established Church and of other denominations, “but it also promoted the worldwide dissemination of other faiths, including Judaism and Hinduism.” Moreover, throughout history the dominant religions of empires inexorably were changed through contextualization.
While he does not shy from confronting the sad history of religious violence and political oppression, Jenkins is too learned a scholar to engage in the facile demonization of religions and empires habitually proffered by revisionists who dominate the modern academy. Although he acknowledges that Christian missions have at times not only been coopted by, but even actively built and extended imperial projects, they have also undermined empires in other instances.
Jenkins recalls Baptist minister John Chilembwe, who led an anti-colonial uprising in what is now Malawi, an event that “has come to be seen as key in the making of modern independent Africa.” Jenkins, an Episcopalian, also cites the towering example of the Anglo-Catholic Bishop of Zanzibar, Frank Weston, whose 1920 pamphlet The Serfs of Great Britain the historian described as “a noble monument of anti-colonial protest.”
Of interest to future scholars is the question of how “imperial maps often survive the loss of actual rule.” Jenkins singles out recent controversies that “well illustrate the persistent religious impacts of empire and their paradoxes” within the Anglican Communion, which “reproduces the contours of the British Empire,” albeit with “the balance of regional power almost precisely inverted” as “old-stock Christian believers in the metropolitan nations find their assumptions increasingly challenged by a surging faith in the old colonial possessions.”
In pursuit of their interests, empires have, Jenkins argues, “vastly expanded the world’s religious diversity, bringing once-localized faiths literally to the other side of the world. In the process, they sometimes force those religious systems to detach themselves from a landscape and cultural setting, making them more open and translatable to wider contexts. Religions actually do learn to sing in strange lands, sometimes in new tongues.”
This, it seems to me, is a perspective more conducive not only to promising new fields of inquiry for scholars of religion but, ultimately, to more fruitful engagement between faith and politics than forced efforts to reduce the rich tapestry of human history and the experience of believers of all kinds through the ages to hackneyed morality tales about “speaking truth to power.”
The Rev. Canon Dr. J. Peter Pham is priest associate at St. Paul’s, K Street, in Washington, D.C. From 2018 to 2021 he served in the U.S. Department of State as Special Envoy for the Great Lakes and Sahel Regions of Africa, with the personal rank of Ambassador.
