I’ve been hearing a certain word a lot lately. Not “Christian nationalism” — we’ve talked about that. This one is older, and in some ways, that makes it more dangerous.
The word is Christendom.
Last week, Vice President JD Vance traveled to Hungary and stood at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, explicitly invoking “Christian civilization and Christian values” as the moral foundation of their alliance. He wasn’t talking about missions or mercy. He wasn’t talking about feeding the poor or welcoming the stranger. According to Slate he articulated one primary reason for the visit: to fight for Christendom.
And I had to sit with that for a minute, because I knew what that word meant, and I don’t think everyone listening did.
So let’s break it down.
What Actually Is Christendom?
Christendom is not just a fancy word for Christianity. It is not simply a lot of Christians living in a place. Most dictionaries will tell you Christendom simply means the part of the world where Christianity is the dominant faith. But that barely scratches the surface. Historically, it goes much deeper than geography.
The earliest vision of Christendom was a vision of a Christian theocracy, a government founded upon and upholding Christian values, whose institutions incorporated Christian doctrine. During this era, members of the Christian clergy wielded political authority.
At its height, Christendom wasn’t just a cultural description — it was a political arrangement. Clergy held government power. Church doctrine shaped law. The faith and the state weren’t just friendly neighbors; they were the same institution wearing two different hats. (For more of the history go here)
We’re not talking about Christians voting their values. We’re talking about a system where the church and the government are one.
GraceInTheMargins.com
What is Christendom?
Think about that. We’re not talking about Christians voting their values. We’re talking about a system where the church and the government are one. Where religious leaders hold political power, and where the whole of society is organized around one faith tradition. Here’s a way to hold the distinction: Christianity is the faith. Christians are the people who follow it. Christendom is what happens when that faith gets handed the keys to government and tells everyone else to fall in line.
It was Constantine who founded Christendom, not Christ. That distinction matters enormously and should make us pause.
The Word Nobody Is Defining
Here’s what concerns me. When politicians use a word with a 1,700-year history of theocratic governance, they are not just reaching for a pretty-sounding phrase. They are reaching for something very specific.
Scholars who study this movement point out that Christendom isn’t just threatening to people of other faiths — though it absolutely is. The deeper problem is structural. When you organize an entire society around one religion’s authority, including the government, you have by definition created a system where not everyone’s voice counts equally. That’s an anti-democratic idea, theocracy wrapped up in a marketing campaign.
For Christian conservatives like Vance, Hungary offers a vision of the world in which the United States would be one of a host of North American and European countries promoting a global Christian civilization. Hungary under Orbán has become something of a model — both critics and supporters have described his government as a kind of laboratory for illiberalism: politics that reject pluralism and see the government’s responsibility as creating a healthy society built on traditional values, rather than protecting minority rights and individual liberties.
I’ve written before about Christian nationalism and what it actually looks like compared to Jesus. Christendom is that same impulse with a medieval European costume on. And just like nationalism, it gets sold to ordinary Christians as a way to protect the faith. But what it actually does is use the faith to protect power.
Underneath the talk of Christian civilization, is where the truth lies. The real conversation happening is how to create power and hang on to it so it cannot be wrested away.
This Is Not What Jesus Built
I want to be really honest with you here, because I’ve spent a lot of years in ministry and I’ve seen how language like this lands in church communities. It sounds holy. It sounds like we’re finally fighting back. It sounds like somebody cares about our values.
But when I look at how Christendom actually functioned in history — the Crusades, the Inquisition, the way indigenous peoples were colonized in the name of “Christianizing” the world — I cannot reconcile any of that with the Jesus I meet in the Gospels.
I’ve written about the call to defy unjust authority, and I want to name this plainly. A system that organizes government around one religious tradition and uses state power to impose those values on everyone else is an unjust authority, regardless of whether it calls itself Christian.
John Leland, a Baptist preacher who helped fight for the First Amendment during the founding of our nation, understood this better than most. In his 1804 essay “The Government of Christ a Christocracy,” he wrote:
“The fondness of magistrates to foster Christianity has done it more harm than all the persecutions ever did. Persecution, like a lion, tears the saints to death, but leaves Christianity pure: state establishment of religion, like a bear, hugs the saints, but corrupts Christianity, and reduces it to a level with state policy.”
When the faith becomes the policy, both suffer. Always.
Enter the Quakers
Now here’s where I want to take a detour, because sometimes the best antidote to a bad theology is a better one — and this one is personal for me.
I’m a descendant of Quakers. My family came to America on a ship called Friend, and I’ve been sitting with that heritage more and more over the last few years, learning what it actually means, what these people actually believed, what drove them to cross an ocean. Honestly, the more I learn about Quaker theology, the more I understand why my ancestors got on that boat.
Because in a moment when certain Christians are talking about building a global Christian civilization with political borders and government authority, the Quakers offer a completely different answer.
George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement, wrote from a prison cell in 1656:
“Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people … then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.”
That’s the pull-out quote. That’s the whole thing. That’s what I want my faith to look like.
The Quakers built everything on one conviction: that God’s light lives inside every single person. Not just Christians. Not just the devout. Everyone. And if that’s true — if every human being carries something of God within them — then how you treat people isn’t just a social question. It’s a theological one.
This is not soft, vague spirituality. It has radical political implications. This wasn’t passive spirituality. From the very beginning, Quakers insisted that what you believe has to show up in how you live and what you build. A society should actually reflect the equal worth of every person in it. They were among the earliest abolitionists. They negotiated treaties with indigenous peoples as equals. They worked for prison reform, women’s equality, peace. The Religious Society of Friends was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 in recognition of their work caring for those devastated by two world wars.
But they did all of that not by seizing government power — by embodying a way of life.
For Quakers, a testimony isn’t a statement you recite — it’s a life you live. It grows out of that core conviction that God is present in every person, that we are all genuinely equal, and that we cannot separate how we treat each other from how we love God.
That is a stunning contrast to a vision of Christendom where the whole of society is reorganized around one group’s expression of the faith. The Quakers looked at the same conviction — God is real, God is present, God made people — and arrived not at dominance, but at service. Not at Christendom, but at friendship.
Maybe that’s why the ship was called Friend.
The Imago Dei the World Keeps Forgetting
This isn’t just Quaker theology. This goes all the way back to Genesis.
The imago Dei — the image of God — means that human dignity isn’t something you earn or accumulate. It isn’t granted by citizenship or achievement or religious affiliation. God stamped his image on humanity at creation, and that’s not something any government or political project gets to revoke.
I’ve written a whole piece about the image of God and what it means for human dignity — because I believe this is the foundation for everything. When we truly believe that every person bears the image of God, we cannot build systems designed to lord over them. We cannot construct political projects where some people’s dignity is subordinated to others’ religious preferences.
The imago Dei does not say some humans reflect God’s image. It does not say Christians more than non-Christians, or Americans more than Hungarians, or the powerful more than the marginalized. Every person. The immigrant and the citizen. The imprisoned and the free. The believer and the skeptic. The insider and the one the system has pushed to the margins. All of them equally bear the image of God.
A political project called Christendom — one that, by definition, organizes society around one religion — cannot hold that conviction and stay consistent. At some point, the people who are not inside the Christian civilization become less. They become a problem to be managed, a threat to be contained, a group whose rights are secondary to the project.
That is not the Gospel. That is the opposite of it.
The Peace We Were Always Supposed to Carry
I keep coming back to something I explored in Beyond Peace Through Strength — the idea that real Christian witness has never been about acquiring power. It’s been about relinquishing it.
Jesus washed feet. He ate with tax collectors. He spoke to Samaritan women at wells. He touched lepers. He healed on the Sabbath when the religious authorities told him not to. He died on a Roman cross without calling down legions of angels to rescue him.
There is not a single moment in the Gospels where Jesus attempts to reorganize society around himself through political force. Not once.
The Quakers saw that. They built their whole witness around it — and then they walked cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone they met. My ancestors got on a boat called Friendship and carried that conviction across an ocean.
I want to be a person who does that. I want to be part of a church that does that.
And I want us to be honest enough to name it clearly when the language being used in the public square — words like Christendom, Christian civilization, taking the country back for Christ — is not actually about Jesus at all. It’s about how to create power and hang on to it so it cannot be wrested away.
That is not the kingdom of God. And it is not what we were made for.
We were made to bear the image of the God who stooped down and served.
That changes everything. It has to.
Have you been hearing the word “Christendom” in political conversations? I’d love to know what questions it’s raising for you. Leave a comment below — and if this resonated, share it with someone who’s wrestling with the same things.