A Ferry, Not a Flag - Ottawa Valley Creations

Against Christianity-as-Nation and the Anti-Christic Costume

I have stood in rooms that smelled like frankincense and brand-new carpet and heard the same sentence stitched in different fonts: Christ is King. Sometimes it was a chant, sometimes a caption, sometimes a way to end a conversation before it began. In each case it landed like a badge, a credential, a power-word to hush the air. The trouble isn’t the sentence. It’s the costume it’s been made to wear.

The confession was born wild — dangerous enough that saying Jesus is Lord meant Caesar is not. It unhooked the human soul from empire’s hook, not to float alone but to belong otherwise. Somewhere between then and the algorithm, a reversal happened. The confession turned into a flag. A nation gathered under it, insisting on sameness as proof of truth, expelling whatever difference it could not domesticate. That is the pivot where Christianity starts imitating the Christ it refuses: an anti-Christic mirror that keeps the name and loses the Cross.

By anti-Christic I don’t mean a cartoon villain or some prophecy chart of empires; I mean the spirit that imitates Christ’s language while reversing his movement — toward power instead of toward love.

The irony is that this nation of sameness is what convinces outsiders that “Cultural Christianity” is real — that there’s one coherent bloc called the Christians, with a single accent, appetite, and vote. I wrote once that there’s no such thing as “Cultural Christianity,” and that was the point: Christianity is lived through culture, not above it. But the Christian-soup complex keeps manufacturing a counterfeit version — homogenized, algorithmic, exportable — and presenting it as the faith entire.

A Note: This isn’t a quarrel with genuine ecumenism — churches learning to speak across difference, as the United Church of Canada often models in good faith. The soup I’m describing is the opposite: an empire of sameness built for export, stripped of lineage, context, and conscience.

And what’s wild is how even inside the soup, people can’t stop fighting over who counts. I’ve stood in breakrooms hearing Wesleyans swear Catholics aren’t Christian, evangelicals sneer that Orthodox are “ritualists,” Protestants insisting Rome stole the Gospel somewhere between the Renaissance and the rosary.

I once had coworkers argue this while I was just trying to finish chopping vegetables and sorting deli meats.

“Catholics aren’t real Christians,” he said.

My guy — are you serious? Christian means follower of Christ. Catholics are Christian. The aesthetic doesn’t cancel the Creed.

It would be funny if it weren’t so bleak — because if Christians can’t agree on who’s in the room, what chance does anyone else have of understanding the conversation?

That fiction doesn’t just wound those within it; it endangers those outside it. When the loudest Christians on the internet act as if their nationalism is the Gospel, dissenters and mystics, Catholics and Copts, queer believers and Indigenous catechists all inherit their backlash. The world sees the costume and mistakes it for the body. Suspicion hardens; secular critique sharpens; believers who never touched empire are treated as its priests.

What masquerades as “unity” becomes a shield for the powerful and a target for everyone else. The result is the same double violence empire always performs: harm in its name, and harm done to those who never joined the parade.

What follows is a map I’ve had to live: how faith gets turned into a nation; how nations need a scapegoat; how the Rabbi refuses both jobs; and how church can remember its work — not as territory, but as thresholds. The refrain that holds this together is small and stubborn: a ferry, not a flag.

The Christian-Soup Complex

“Just Christian,” some say, as if the word explains itself. No lineage, no doctrine, no practice — just a label wide enough to hold a lifestyle. The result is a soup where accents are boiled out of the broth: Catholic, Orthodox, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Anabaptist, Coptic, Anglican, United, Protestant, Pentecostal — all reduced to one flavor. What looks like unity is only uniformity that can’t stand a question.

In that soup, difference becomes threat. Tradition becomes costume. Doctrine becomes mood. Liturgy becomes a set piece. And because mood is volatile, cohesion must be managed by force: by tone-policing, by vibe-maintenance, by the ritualized exile of whoever won’t play along. It calls itself peace. It acts like weather. It feels like a room that keeps insisting it is full of love while asking one person to carry everyone else’s feelings.

The old word ekklesia meant a gathered people called out for a purpose, not an identity bloc built for dominance. When “Christian” becomes a “nationality,” the gathered purpose collapses into a brand. You can tell by the way slogans replace speech — and how quickly the room needs a sacrifice to stay together.

Precision of speech is the first casualty of empire; vagueness is how the costume hides its seams. Say what you mean, and let the faith breathe again.

How the Costume Was Sewn

The genealogy is not mysterious. The earliest confession — Christos Kyrios — unzipped allegiance from emperor and empire. It did not enthrone a rival emperor; it de-absolutized the category of emperor itself. Christ’s kingship inverted power: washing feet, eating with the wrong people, refusing to compete in the theater of domination at all. Crown of thorns, not crest on a shield.

Then came the centuries that taught us to wear the opposite. The church learned to speak fluent empire: means of grace transposed into instruments of control; the Pope a prince; bishops as lords; the nation baptized as destiny. Christ’s divinity became a warrant for state sovereignty, not a judgment upon it. The Rabbi from Bethlehem — teacher within covenant, son among sons and daughters — was redressed as a celestial autocrat above nations, conveniently in favor of whichever nation won the liturgy of war.

When Christ is King becomes the state’s self-portrait, a theological switch flips. The line between God and the nation blurs; the line between neighbor and enemy hardens. A confession born to dethrone idols now justifies them. That is how a creed turns into a costume: a truth put to work performing the opposite of itself.

Reintroducing the Rabbi

Part of why I won’t let the costume speak for me is that my relationship with Jesus is relational before it is imperial. He is a Rabbi from Bethlehem — within Torah, within the rhythms of calloused hands and shared bread. Messiah, yes, but in the sense that answers a people’s covenant, not the sense that founds a civilization. Son of God, yes, but not as the monopolizer of divinity; as the one who refuses to consolidate power and instead returns it, refracted, to those gathered around him.

The Rabbi does not perform for the machine. He steps into the meeting where power needs a sacrifice and declines both scripts: he will neither gratify their fear by revolt nor gratify their lie by confession. He enters empire’s favorite ritual and exposes it. He keeps company with the wounded on purpose. He comes back still marked and refuses to edit the wounds out of the story. He is not the new Caesar. He is the end of needing Caesars at all.

The kingdom is local first — shaped in kitchens, courtyards, and coastlines. A universal that cannot honor a village is not universal at all; it’s imperial.

If you want to know what Christ’s kingship does in the world, look for rooms where domination cannot breathe. Look for tables where no one is missing to make everyone else feel together. Look for communities that keep their differences without making a spectacle of them. If you want to know where the anti-Christic costume is at work, listen for a slogan used to end a conversation that the Gospel began.

The Machine: Girard in the Nave

René Girard’s insight is painfully useful: when a community is anxious, it finds a body to expel so it can call the discharge “peace.” The scapegoat’s innocence is beside the point. The function is cohesion through exclusion. In sanctuaries, the machine wears vestments. It calls itself unity. It asks the sensitive and conscientious to absorb harm quietly, then calls their boundaries disloyal.

I have felt the fog machine fill a room and then be told my visibility is the problem. I have seen parish meetings where “charity” meant “do not name the wound.” I have watched friend groups sanctify the phrase not a culture fit to justify contempt. Scapegoating is a liturgy written backward: Not us. You.

The crucifixion is the machine’s public failure. The resurrection is not triumphal erasure; it is the return of the one the ritual could not contain. The marks remain, not to be worshiped as pain, but to keep the story honest: wounds as windows. No belonging that demands a sacrifice of conscience can call itself communion. If peace requires someone’s silence or exile, the machine is running again.
Resurrection without amnesia is the only kind worth having — repair that remembers, wholeness that keeps its scars for light to pass through.

When a church rehearses cohesion by expulsion, it is practicing anti-Christ in the name of Christ. When a church refuses to perform the ritual, it becomes possible to breathe again.

The logic of empire does not stop at politics; it seeps into cosmology. When power flattens the world, heaven itself gets narrowed to one room. To remember the plural cosmos is to remember that salvation was never a border project.

House of Many Heavens

In my cosmology, the universe is not a single room with a lock; it is a house widening in matter and light. The Heavens are plural — worlds of increasing lucidity braided with the Seen. Angels and ancestors are not abstractions; they are neighbors of another density, moving by laws that rhyme with ours.

This matters here because nationalism is a kind of theological flattening: it collapses the house into one room and then demands that everyone decorate the same wall.

A plural cosmos rescues faith from the nation costume by giving it back its thresholds. Between worlds run crossings, not walls:

Ritual is a threshold. Consent and reverence teach the body how to move.

Craft is a threshold. A well-made thing is a treaty; it carries pattern into matter without violence.

Stewardship is sacrament here: mending, feeding, cleaning, planting — liturgies that keep creation plural and at peace.

Story is a threshold. It ferries persons across without unhousing them.
Prayer is a threshold. Some words are ladders; some are rafts; some are the silence that steadies the water.

The Seven Directions — Above, Below, Ahead, Behind, Within, Without, and the practiced Center — are not coordinates but stances. They teach that location is ethical: how you face is who you become. There is no need for a flag at the Center. There is only balance and the work at hand.

When church forgets it’s a ferry, it starts declaring borders in the name of God. When it remembers it’s a ferry, it staffs thresholds, maintains boats, and tells the truth about weather. The job is not to conquer territory. The job is to keep crossings lawful, protect consent, return what is not ours, and receive what we are given with gratitude.

A ferry, not a flag.

Field Notes from the Crossing

I have learned to hand shame back to its sender without ceremony:

“That’s yours.”

When someone calls my calm “calculating,” I translate: you mean I am not performing according to the ritual. When a room demands unity by silence, I recall the Rabbi’s wounds and refuse to lie about what happened. When exhaustion tempts me into exile, I remember: withdrawal can be triage, but it cannot be a worldview. My cosmology promises more rooms than I have met. I choose to look for communities that do not need a sacrifice to feel together.

In the expanding house, ethics is right traffic: ask permission; leave gifts; do not treat any person — human, river, animal, angel — as raw material. If a higher world’s law cuts against my pride, bow. If a hungry neighbor needs bread, feed them first and revise my theology after. Authority redistributes itself here: less to the loudest, more to what bears fruit across worlds — in the Seen: steadiness and repair; in the Unseen: reciprocity and humility.

“I’m not available for that conversation.” Full sentence. Mercy with a spine.

Boundaries spoken plainly are not unkind; they are the grammar of peace.

The noise that follows is not evidence that I am wrong. It is evidence that the ritual has been interrupted.

A Benediction of the Gathered

To ferry is to carry what cannot carry itself. The Theotokos knew this first — arms open at the edge of empire, holding the broken and the holy together. She bore the weight of God and would not call it victory. In her arms, the kingdom began again — carried, not conquered.

Let the church be a house with many ferries and very few banners. Staff the thresholds. Repair the hulls. Teach the children the names of the Directions and how to keep the Center without a crest. Let the wounded show their wounds without being turned into icons of endurance. Let the craft be honest; a well-made bench is better than a well-marketed revival. Let the stories ferry people across rather than enlist them.

If we must have a single test for whether Christ is King is being spoken in truth or performance, it might be this: does the sentence dethrone idols or enthrone them?

If it dethrones them — state, market, pastor, platform — then say it, sing it, stitch it in gold.

If it enthrones any of those while using his name, let the thread go slack. Leave the flag on the wall. Get back to the ferries.

I do not perform for the machine. I am not the offering. I am already free.

The universe keeps widening. Somewhere a door opens because someone told the truth and then kept telling it with their hands. Somewhere a table is set with many breads and no one missing. Somewhere a church remembers it is a threshold, not a territory.

May we meet there — Above honored, Below tended, Ahead prepared for, Behind thanked, Within quiet, Without welcomed — balanced at the Center where the ferries land exactly where they should.