Apostasy, Now!

A Call to Revolt in an Age of Crisis

May 12, 2025

About the author: Rev. Dr. Jared Stacy (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is a theologian and ethicist whose work centers on political extremisms and evangelical theology in America. Alongside serving as a hospice chaplain, his work has been featured on platforms like TIME, BBC, and Seen and Unseen, an outlet for the Centre for Cultural Witness for the Anglican Church. He resides with his wife and children near Washington, D.C.

Barth’s theology of crisis was fit for a time of radical upheaval.

Pressed from without and within, the Church of his time was tempted to ally itself with political saviors or evacuate into affluence and automation. Are not these the very same temptations standing before us now? To trust promises of aspiring authoritarians or evacuate into bourgeois enclaves?

Churches in America can opt for survival strategies, to be sure. We can endeavor to present ourselves as the “right kind” of Christian, or we can sanction and support State-policed “anti-Christian” bias.

We can hide ourselves, too, retreating to institutional security, and denying the fact that the sanctuary of Christian community exists, in the words of Pope Leo XIV, as a “bridge to the world.”

And yet, we must be on guard. Ours is a faith which rides the currents of history, but it is not a faith fueled by crude historical analogy. 2025 is not 1968, is not 1933, is not 1861. But crisis presents in every age.

And in these crises, we must become apostates. In every crisis, a choice—again and always—confronts the churches. The idolatry of political power allures the Church of every age with hard security; the idolatry of mammon numbs the Church of every age. Mammon is the soft persecution of luxury experienced through automation and affluence.

Authoritarianism takes root in the churches through greed just as easily as it does hard power. Both promote fear. Both trade in scarcity. Both demand a vigilance that contains a militancy which betrays faith. And when faith allies itself with these temptations, it cancels itself. Renewal requires apostasy.

For the Church under God’s call, there can only be what Barth calls revolt. We might think of revolt more dynamically and radically. This revolt is apostasy. This is not apostasy from the faith, but the apostasy of the faith. The faith of Jesus Christ is a faith of dynamic disturbance of our settled securities.

In The Christian Life, Barth depicts revolt emerging from the “precedence” of the Word over and beyond all other “factors” which give shape to our lives.1 He locates this revolt in the practice of prayer. It is distinct from activisms and causes in the name of human progress without denying the possibility of common participation in human history.

In essence, in prayer, we participated in a revolt, an apostasy, symbolized by baptism, an initiation into the life shaped by and in anticipation of its preeminent expectation: “Hallowed be thy Name.” It is a revolt of the reverent Life, the Word which esteems the Name of God above all rogue words.2

So it is not enough to simply prescribe “prayer” as rote religious observance (as Hank Spaulding’s recent piece so eloquently reminds us). We practice anticipatory prayer that is more essentially participatory in the Spirit who enacts the divine sabotage of our securities and the divine siege of our totalities, or the realities we construct from the semblance of “the facts.”

The Word assaults the seemingly unassailable “fact” of the State or the market, and the violence practiced in their defense. The Word reveals them to be part and parcel of what Barth calls the “regime of vacillation,” a “twilight” marked by “the confusion and distress of the division which desecrates God’s name and which consists in the fact that the one, true, and living God is both known and [simultaneously] unknown…”3

This “regime of vacillation”—which consists in God’s Name being both known and unknown—was revealed in all its ugly contradiction during a recent worship gathering at the White House. Clergy gathered to pray in Jesus’ name and “influence” the government, but did so only after posting photo shoots in front of Teslas. This regime of vacillation is a regime of paranoia, a split mind, divided between the Name of God and lesser lords.

And so it is not enough to “pray” or to “worship.” The spectacles of religious acts have never once distracted God’s attention away from the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable. These spectacles have the “appearance of godliness but deny its power” (2 Tim. 3:5).

Believing this as we do, with a desire for revolt and apostasy, we must admit this revolt is not without peril for Jesus’ disciples. This peril, this danger, is visible in the distinction between initiation and imitation. Barth warns,

If we want to take the hallowing of God’s name into our own hands, speaking and acting in a divine manner in God’s place, then, quite apart from the fact that this is an impossible enterprise foredoomed to failure, it would in fact result in a further desecration of the name of God.4

And it is here where the path of revolt becomes clear in our time. To make this revolt, to pray “Hallowed Be Thy Name” is to rise up against taking God’s Name in vain.

This is a Christianity that demands apostasy. It occurs to me that, in our time as in times past, a great many efforts to reinforce the regime of vacillation emerge from a Christianity which itself does not participate in revolt, but orients itself to the maintenance of the regime of vacillation.

No better example of this disorientation exists than the recent news that the State in America now aspires to combat “anti-Christian bias” by enlisting State employees to police supposed bias against Christians.

This culture of policing presupposes that the State possesses primal knowledge of what it means to be and makes for “Christian.” So, at base, this initiative dangerously claims that the State knows what makes for a “Christian”—even a “good” Christian. This is transgressive knowledge for the State, as Barmen recognized:

We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the State should and could become the sole and total order of human life and so fulfill the vocation of the Church as well.5

The State’s transgressive knowledge is epistemological totalitarianism, the kind that exists to justify authoritarian action. Any State that claims to know a “good” Christian will inevitably define “good” as collaboration with the State itself. In other words, the State can only ever imagine a “good” Christian as a sympathizer to its own agenda and telos.

It is plainly obvious that the Church’s primal confession, “Jesus is Lord,” contradicts the State’s claim. But what happens as the State wields this transgressive knowledge in the face of Christian opposition to its aims and agenda? What happens when those whom the State deems “bad” Christians resist the State?

The State in America has primed itself to code Christian opposition to the State according to the same logic underwriting the State’s apparent and actual unilateral actions against dissenting individuals like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Mahmoud Kalil, Mohsen Madawi, and Rümeysa Öztürk. Such logic also frames the State’s spectacle of El Salvadorian concentration camps.

This logic is fueled by the totalitarian claim to knowledge, a tautology in which what the State claims is true, good, and beautiful is not subject to any accountability beyond the state of exception the State claims for itself.

Constitutional lawyers can debate and advocate by the law of the land. But Christians would do well to recall Ernst Käsemann’s recollections on the authoritarian capture of Germany's democracy:

The deportation of Jews, the persecution of communists, socialists, and [Romanii], and also of radical Christians, were naïvely or resignedly accepted as conditions accompanying the birth of a new epoch, though the inhumanity of the system clearly came to light along with it.6

The revolt of Christian faith in our time must apostatize from Christianities that take the Name in vain. We must become apostates. We must become particular kinds of atheists, in order to preserve the faith once for all delivered to the Saints. As J. Kameron Carter observes, “I’m calling for a Christianity that no longer provides religious sanction or the cloak of righteousness to the political project of U.S. sovereignty and its vision of who is normal (and in the right place) and who is abnormal (and thus out of place).”

A faith borne of apostasy, now, is a faith prepared to enter the common life of the world—one that involves Christians and non-Christians. Such a faith revolts against the threats and ragings of an ascendant, vain Christianity where the label “Christian” is sold for political capital and signifies other baptisms: into the party, the market, and the myth of the nation. Apostate faith draws its life from the life to which baptism points and prefigures.

Revolt which emerges from esteem for the Name will invariably make an apostasy from this vain Christianity, as an act of obedient, faithful repentance—the kind which reflects the ongoing Spirit-borne work of “re-cognizing” our mind as how Romans 12:1-2 envisions.

This is not merely a turning away but a turning towards. A re-cognizing of our minds which also binds up the wounds of those who are downtrodden by this vain Christianity.

Apostasy, Now!

A Call to Revolt in an Age of Crisis

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