A Nuanced, Informed Conversation About Our Reality
A Feature Review of
Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism: Political and Cultural Reflections on the Church
Barry Harvey
Hardcover: Baylor University Press, 2025
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Reviewed by Tommy Preson Phillips
In the final days of the Roman Empire, the Christian philosopher Boethius (524 CE) described humanity as those who have forgotten what they are and therefore do not know what they ought to do; made for communion with God, yet allowing themselves to be ruled by circumstance and fortune. For the American church, a similar amnesia seems to have taken hold. After generations of donning the sacred vestments of capitalism, democracy, and militarized empire, the order of our Christianity has made us subservient to the nations in which we live. We no longer ask whether the order in which we live is the true order of things or whether we have interrupted the work of God with the systems we have designed. But mostly, our energies are spent trying to argue which of our political inventions are the ones most approved by God. Like a tree with its limbs tied back so that it will grow into the shape which best fits the palace gardens, so the church conforms to the symmetry of the state.
Toni Morrison used the image of a city to reveal the delusions of freedom that people live with. We are “free” to move wherever we please so long as we keep to the roads and sidewalks that the authorities have established for us. The Christian religion that was once free and wild –bucking hierarchy, unable to be contained, growing, changing, and challenging the systems and powers– has become moldable by the powers it once challenged. And the church, having taken interest in these modern structures, must now fit within them if it is to continue to exist. The problem, however, is that the anarchy inherent in the church from its inception is naturally both allergic to –and disruptive of, the rule of empire. Yet somehow the Christian must make a home, build a life, be immersed in culture, and live and work in connection with the citizens of these empires.
This raises questions: How can the world create a politic with a people (the church) who see themselves as a surrogate government all by themselves? How does one rule over a people who already have a king and see themselves as citizens of his kingdom? How do we tell our counter-story to the Empire while still living at peace among them? Christianity is a group project, but the group has grown divided on many fronts and, unsure of both our identity and our role in the cosmos; we are failing the project.
These are a few of the questions with which Dr. Barry Harvey engages in his latest book, Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism: Political and Cultural Reflections on the Church. It is a collection of essays that work together to explore how the church—a people from nowhere, who live everywhere, who are disloyal to kings yet devoted to the welfare of their neighbors—is called to live as a separate people in a world violently devoted to its own rulers. The author brings the voices of disciples throughout the ages to be our conversation partners, as we wrestle with these ideas. Harvey pulls from hundreds of sources, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Wendell Berry, and spans church history from the ancient writings of Augustine to the works of contemporary thought leaders like Jemar Tisby. As Professor of Theology in the Honors College at Baylor University, Harvey has done much to help the church see itself, not as a religious arm of the state, but as a community that embodies the alternative politic of the Kingdom of God. His previous works, including Another City: An Ecclesiological Primer for a Post-Christian World, reveal a sustained concern for the church’s role as a counter-community to the nation-state.
For the American church the recent decade has laid bare the puzzling relationship between the church and the governing authorities. As the pastor of a local church for over two decades and under four presidential administrations, I have watched with dismay as the church in America continues its steady trajectory towards alignment with the powers of the state. Many have been caught up, captured, and assimilated by the empire. And now, perhaps having realized too late that the ground we built upon is soft, we recognize that very little foundational work has been done to root us in a counter-story to the nations. Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism reads like an academic work with pastoral sense; it places the counter-story of Christ at the center of the conversation, daring the disciple to be disrupted by it, immersed in it, and to embody it.
Harvey reaches across both culture and time, arguing (and often with much back and forth) that the church must learn once again to embrace a vocation of “not belonging,” a vocation that, as Harvey argues, “will require imagination, because women and men can only live in a world they can envision.” This is not to say that we ought to follow the desert Fathers into isolation, shunning society. Instead, Harvey offers the distinct challenge to the American church to “resist the inertia of a social order whose time is past, and to embrace the call not to separate ourselves from the rest of the world in an imaginary realm of moral and doctrinal purity, but to cultivate a distinct presence and difficult witness that the world lacks on its own.”
While it is true that many pastors and theologians have been calling for a greater allegiance to the Christ in our time, the attention of the parishioners remains mostly focused on the mechanisms of government –which people and party are pulling the levers— rather than asking deeper questions about the way that things are, versus the way things ought to be. Harvey reminds us also that it is not our ought, but rather, Christ’s ought; that we may be unknowingly defending something that was never legitimized by Christ in the first place. The church stands to benefit immensely from a nuanced and informed conversation about the true reality of things, theologically speaking, and that is what Dr. Harvey has given us here. I’m confident that ideas gathered in Madness can help the church to find its eschatological imagination once again and accept that “the current modus vivendi,” as Harvey refers to it, is merely our temporary interruption to the world that God is building.
Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism would complement the syllabus of any good Christian Theo-political course, but in my discontentedness with the Theo-political conversations thus far, I have also found it to be a much-welcomed resource for pastoring disciples through this moment. I recommend this book to lay Christians, students, and clergy alike. It is a demanding read, but a deeply rewarding one. Well worth the journey.
Tommy Preson Phillips
Tommy Preson Phillips is a pastor, songwriter, and author, who writes about the New Testament, Faith Deconstruction, and the dissident Christian life. He is the co-author, with Scot McKnight of Invisible Jesus. Find him on Substack: https://tommypresonphillips.substack.com/
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