To What Will I Compare This Generation?

“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,

‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
    we wailed, and you did not mourn.’

For John [the Baptist] came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”
(Matthew 11:16-19, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Empire has many ways of defending itself—even against the prophetic imagination.

A few weeks back, two members of the Fox News team got to talking on the air about the late Fred Rogers, the longtime host of the children’s television program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. One of them declared that “you’ve got to wonder” whether Rogers, widely recognized for the kindness and empathy of his TV persona, was actually “a creep” in real life. “I think there’s probably skeletons,” she said, while her colleague grinned. 

That fellow came back later, after a viewer had contacted the network—even before the show had ended—to describe Rogers as “a minister” and “a very good person.” He did not take well to the correction. “Well, if you think he was a good person, he must have been a good person,” he said, smirking. “And I have no reason to doubt you or Mister Rogers.” He sighed dismissively, then shook his head and laughed: “What am I talking about?”

Mister Rogers may have kept his role as a Presbyterian minister in the background, rarely speaking in explicitly theological terms. Yet the example he set for how to live in a blessed community still challenges Empire’s viziers, even twenty-three years after his death, and puts them on the defensive. They feel compelled to tear him down in order to justify and normalize their own failures to love their neighbors. 

So, too, with anyone else who exposes their rejection of God’s proffered covenant. We’ve seen the president of the United States and his flunkies repeatedly attack and insult Pope Leo XIV, simply because he reminds the world that “war is never worthy of humanity, and it is never blessed by God,” a message that undermines the American regime’s desire to dominate other nations by brute force and kill those who stand in its way.

Jesus recognized this behavior and called it out.

Deep down, even if only on a subconscious level, Empire comprehends the illegitimacy of its position—thus the need to discredit prophetic messengers, by any means necessary, rather than engage their critiques directly. John the Baptist’s attacks on Judea’s relationship of complicity with Rome rankled the kingdom’s ruling classes, especially Herod Antipas. As a hermit and an ascetic, however, John had no obvious vices, so they had to resort to suggesting “a demon” made him say such things. That strategy still flourishes, even if mental illness has replaced demons as an explanation for why someone could possibly find fault with this, the best of all possible worlds.

Jesus… Jesus they could attack more easily, as “a glutton and a drunkard,” because he chose to bring his ministry to the sinners most in need of repentance, including the tax collectors. (Why would the ruling classes go after their own tax collectors, you might ask? Simple: Empire succeeds by appealing to people’s greed, even as it takes as much as it can from them to feed its own unceasing growth. By scapegoating tax collectors, the ruling class deflects people’s attention from its own machinations. Think of how your government’s representatives speak about their departments of taxation and finance, and you’ll quickly see what I mean.)

No matter how you choose to challenge the gods of this world, Jesus told his followers, their principalities and powers will accuse you of failing to fit in. They’ll make you out as the bad guy—and, sad to say, many people will not hesitate to accept that verdict, because you’ve challenged their comfort and complacency.

Ultimately, “wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

Jesus encouraged his followers to have faith that truth would win out, that loving God and loving their neighbors had the power to transform the entire world. He assured them that all earthly manifestations of Empire would fall eventually—and, so far, that’s held true, even if new manifestations have usually come to take their place. In the spaces between all that rising and falling, however, fragments of a more blessed community have sometimes come together, and have sometimes endured.

You can look at the Religious Society of Friends in, ahem, that light. You can remember that they got the name “Quaker” through the British government’s mockery of their spiritual passion, which I’d suggest proves Jesus’s point rather neatly. Over the last four centuries, however, our commitment has become largely unquestionable—which means that modern society shows Quakerism a modicum of respect, even when it dismisses Friends as a fringe group of naive idealists or impossibly pure moralists. Our record speaks for itself, though, and while it does have its share of blemishes, on the whole our moral arc continues to bend toward justice. Who knows? The powers that be may soon start flailing as desperately at us as they have been at the pope and Mister Rogers.