Expecting the kingdom of God

“Oh, I’m a communist,” said the 18-year-old, a little sheepishly.

This young man was wearing a button with a symbol I didn’t recognize, and that was his response when I asked him about it.

I had been sitting in the park with some friends. People were stopping by with supplies for those experiencing homelessness who had set up tents in the park. It was Powderhorn Park in south Minneapolis, at the time one of the most actively political places in a progressive and activist city.

That there were self-proclaimed communists, however few, was a sign to me that we were living, once again, in a time when it was not unusual for people to express their expectations that some sort of brand-new social order is just over the horizon.

This was the summer of 2020. Minneapolis was the center of unrest following the death of George Floyd. Donald Trump and Joe Biden were in the middle of controversial and politically polarized election campaigns, and COVID-19 protocols and debates were continuing. The world had a sort of apocalyptic, anything-could-happen feeling.

That feeling has not completely gone away. Even five years later, it seems the political rhetoric about what is at stake, especially if the “wrong side” wins, gets more extreme. I’ve heard stories of people on both the right and the left who have made plans — real, serious plans like buying houses and seeking citizenship — to move to foreign countries anticipating either a socialist or a fascist revolution.

I raise these trends for two reasons.

First, because in coming months I am going to highlight the way that Jesus, too, was calling for a regime change in his own day. And it wasn’t just a religious or a spiritual change either, not just a change that was to take place in the heart. It was a historical, material, social change, every bit as wide-ranging and this-worldly (however much it transcended this world) as our current movements today. Some people are calling for an alternative way of living, and Jesus was doing nothing less.

Second, I raise it because Christians increasingly feel compelled to take sides, precisely because they rightly think that their faith should make a difference, even a radical difference, at that level. As we’ll see, I won’t be suggesting that we should directly politicize the faith in the conventional sense of what usually passes for politics today, nor that we should create, as has sometimes been tried, a Catholic Party in hopes of gaining access to the levers of power.

But what we have too often not recognized is that the Gospels are the story of the founding of a real historical social movement, one you likely have already joined: the Church. Jesus called this new community “the kingdom of God.”

We are used, however, to saying that by this he meant a spiritual kingdom. I’ll come back to that.

Last month, I ended a long arch giving a pretty bleak evaluation of our technological society. I ended that column by saying that, if what I had written was anywhere near the mark, the only remedy could be something like a new society, a new economic vision, a whole new world that could be an alternative to the one we live in. And it would indeed have to be not just spiritual, but it would have to have a set of common practices, an economic, a social and even a political vision as practical, quotidian and all-encompassing as the technological society and its radical monopolies. We would have to have some sort of counter-cultural community to join.

It would have to be so much more, that is, than a spiritual kingdom.

Yes indeed, and the plan for coming columns is to show how this is exactly what Jesus was up to when he walked into Galilee and announced, “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel.” It’s exactly that alternative community that he initiated, in other words, when he founded the Church.

Miller is the director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at Assumption in St. Paul. He is the author of “We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement,” published by Ave Maria Press.