Chapultepec Castle, an old palace above Mexico City, once served as a seat of power and, in a darker hour, as a last redoubt. When I visited a few years ago, the grounds were kept with a ceremonial care, and the city opened beneath the balustrades in a way that could make a visitor forget that this was a place where poorly armed and unprepared boys made their last stand. Yet the castle refuses forgetfulness. It is a reminder that geopolitics is never merely policy. It is history made physical, forcing the conscience to reckon with what national narratives tend to smooth over.
Chapultepec’s story is told in Mexico with particular ache because it includes the cadets. In the Battle of Chapultepec, teenage cadets refused to retreat and died defending the position, later memorialized as the Niños Héroes. The details, like all national memory, are wrapped in lore and debate, but the core fact remains: when great powers collide, the cost is borne by people who did not write the speeches that later justify the conflict. Chapultepec does not resolve moral issues. It refuses to oversimplify them. It exposes the inadequacy of moral instincts that act too quickly, deciding too fast who must be defended and who must be condemned.
That inadequacy has reemerged in our political life. In January, the United States was seized by reports of a military operation in Venezuela that captured President Nicolás Maduro and transported him to the United States. The controversy centers on legality, congressional authorization, international law, and precedent. Those questions matter. But I am more struck by the speed with which side-taking arrived, almost as a reflex, as if the only Christian options were applause or disgust.
Within hours, some hailed the operation as long-delayed justice, the removal of a tyrant, and a righteous act on behalf of the oppressed. Others called it imperial arrogance, an act of unilateral violence that will inflame instability and invite retaliation. The administration’s own framing (an arrest and an assertion of control) only sharpened the moral panic. The habit is familiar. We do not deliberate. We signal. We do not ask what might be true. We rush to prove that we are the kind of people who would already know.
The Church is not immune. Many Christians act as if faithfulness were proven by rapid alignment, as if the Gospel were a set of instincts applied at speed. Scripture is conscripted, Providence invoked, and moral language turned into a weapon rather than tempered into wisdom. This is not only rhetorical but spiritual. It reveals how easily religion becomes subordinate to politics. Political urgency sets the cadence of our speech, and the Church follows.
Anglican theology has resources to resist this. We are schooled in a sacramental realism that refuses to treat public life as either ultimate or meaningless. God acts in history, but no historical outcome constrains God. The nations matter, but they do not constitute the Kingdom. Justice is real, but it is never exhausted by the humiliation of a particular ruler. To say this is not to retreat into abstraction but to insist that Christian speech about power must answer to a reality deeper than the headline.
Christians, therefore, need not be either outraged or cynical. Outrage can signal moral attention, but it often substitutes heat for judgment. Cynicism can guard against naïveté, but it can also refuse hope, deciding in advance that all actors are corrupt and all outcomes empty. Both postures are reactive, both easily manipulated, both reducing moral life to a performance of fury or superiority.
The capture of Maduro should not be viewed as a victory for “us.” It is a human and moral event whose aftermath will vary. In Venezuela, people are experiencing relief, chaos, vengeance, and perhaps something more gradual and bitter. In the United States, we will weave stories about what we did and why, and those stories will either lead us toward repentance and restraint or toward confidence that ends in coercion. Christians should care about that process. Nations learn to speak about power, and speech becomes habit, shaping character.
One reason Christians fall into instant side-taking is that we have allowed politics to become our primary catechist. Many have lost confidence that the Church honestly names us. We live as though political alignment establishes righteousness, as though the great drama of salvation unfolds in executive action and international retaliation. In that condition, the removal of a foreign leader becomes a kind of symbol for one side and a desecration for the other. Both are false. Both give ultimate weight to a finite act of state power.
The Church, by contrast, offers a different polity and a different time. When we pray for those in authority, we do not pray as though rulers were saviors or demons, but as those accountable to God, and never beyond judgment, never outside mercy. That prayer forms the mind. It trains Christians to speak of rulers without adulation or contempt. It teaches us to desire justice without worshiping force.
There is also a deeper discipline here: the discipline of not rushing to conclusions. Legal scholars have already questioned whether describing a military incursion as law enforcement makes sense, especially without congressional approval or international consent. That should make us slow down, not because legality is the only moral standard, but because the rush to moral certainty bypasses understanding. A Church that cannot slow down will not gain wisdom. It will only echo what the nation is already saying.
None of this means Christians should become indifferent. There is real evil in the world, absolute tyranny, real suffering. There are moments when force must be judged necessary or wicked. The point is not to dodge judgment but to purify it. The Sermon on the Mount forbids the kind of judgment that masks self-exemption (Matt. 7:1–5). Christian judgment begins with the recognition that our lives are disordered and that we are capable of blessing what serves us.
Chapultepec is not a lesson to be forgotten. It is a lesson in moral gravity. It reminds me of that. History is made not only by presidents and generals but also by children who die, by families who remember, by nations that learn to justify themselves. That is why the present moment matters spiritually. The question is not only whether the operation against Maduro was just or prudent, though those questions are urgent. The deeper one is what sort of Church we are becoming as we respond. Are we people who can speak about power in the presence of God, or only people who repeat the nation’s quarrels with religious decoration?
If we keep the nation’s frantic cadence as our own, we will become chaplains to whatever faction claims us, offering blessings and condemnations on demand. But if we recover a slower Christian time, the time of prayer, confession, and Eucharistic truth-telling, we may learn again to speak with a seriousness that neither flatters power nor despairs of the world. Then our allegiance to Christ will be weighty enough that we can look at Venezuela without glee or nihilism, remembering that the Judge of the nations is not the nation, and that God is not absent when the world is loud.
The Rev. Omar Cisneros is a Guest Writer. He is rector of Grace Church, Muskogee, Oklahoma.
