In other words, “Babylon” is entirely made up. When Evangelicals refer to “a modern Babylon” it is another example of the exaggerated and figurative language they take as being literal, historical, and entirely factual despite being none of these things.
Remember, Kevin DeYoung of Ligonier Ministries wrote, “Babylon is a symbol of all that’s wrong in the world.” It is not a place, but a seduction. Bruce McConkie, a Mormon theologian, wrote that “Babylon is the almighty governmental power that takes the saints of God into captivity; it is the false churches that build false temples and worship false gods; it is every false philosophy… that leads men away from God and salvation.” And Mark A. Finley wrote that Babylon “was man-centered rather than God-centered… Modern Babylon is a system of religion which uses idols in its worship. Its statues, images and religious icons revive the idolatry of Ancient Babylon.”
Taken together, Babylon is akin to the thneed in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. The titular character appears out of a tree stump to protect the forests, the fictional truffula trees being cut down and processed into thneeds, a versatile product marketed to meet all kinds of perceived needs for consumers. In the text, a thneed is a “fine something that all people need”. The evil Onceler defends deforestation and pollution to the Lorax by explaining his product. Thneeds can take on a large variety of forms for different purposes: shirts, socks, gloves, hats, “but far beyond that.” How could the environmental destruction of his industry be a bad thing when his product met so many needs, he asks. After all, thneeds are
- Carpets
- Pillows
- Sheets
- Curtains
- Covers for bicycle seats
- Hammocks
- Toothbrush holders
- Canary nests
- Sweatshirts
- Thneedle Thoup that can cure chest and back pain
- Hair grooming products
- Carburated rust eliminator
- Sweaters
- Umbrella
- Towel
- Skirt
- Pants
- Sponge
- Scarf
- Tightrope
- (Butterfly) Net
- Wig
- Purse/Bag
- Suit
- Boxing Glove(s)
- Parachute
- Reusable diaper
- Runny nose wiper
- Slingshot
- Jump rope
- Food (Tastes like bread, but without the crust)
- Windshield Wiper
- Viper trap
- Mustache Brush
- Mop
- Kites
- Trampolines
- Sails
- Ties
- Vests
- Capes
- Robes
- Tablecloths
- Horse Saddles
- Rugs
- Tents
- Ponchos
- Hoodies
- Flags
- Earmuffs
- Sundresses
- Ball gowns
- Blankets
- Lampshades
- Basketball Hoops
- Ribbon Streamers
- Hair Scrunchie
- Batting cages
- Potato sacks
- Aprons
- Leggings
- Sport coats
In a similar way, “Babylon” is the thneed of Evangelical thought. It is whatever a preacher, minister, theologian, or congregant needs it to be. It is everything. It is religion, a worldview, a political system, a seducer, a mocker, an enslaver, and (sometimes) a really nice guy. Whatever damage is inflicted by bad theology, confusion on the part of the speaker, anachronistic depictions of characters and circumstances and people groups, the destruction of Evangelicalism defends itself by insisting the end justifies the means. They’re only trying to give people salvation, after all!
In Evangelical thought, Babylon is everything – a Babylon thneed for whatever they need!
As a result, Babylon is also nothing. It means nothing.
These two opposing ideas cannot be held in tension. The meaning has been too stretched, made too thin to mean anything anymore. Evangelicals claiming that the “Modern Babylon” is now, after all this time, embodied in public education shame themselves and their faith. Their description of Babylon, the one based off of John’s revelation (at best), is inconsistent with the way it was described by the Hebrew prophets and, strikingly, even by John the Revelator.
As Brueggemann explains in his Out of Babylon (2010), the “narrative construction” of Babylon in the Hebrew prophets
made theological sense and coherence out of a deeply incoherent historical experience. The story line offered by these Jews provided a theological case (punishment by YHWH) for Torah obedience, a task to practice Torah in a foreign land in order to maintain a holy people uncontaminated by alien context, and a hope for return home. The sequence of case, task, and hope is reflected in the tenacious insistence of Psalm 137, a song of the deportees (not King David, centuries earlier, but a later addition to the songs of the Jewish people) that keeps the energy of the community sharply focused on Jerusalem:
“By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion… If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.“
The song freely acknowledged life in an alien context, but refused to accommodate that life at all. In the end the psalm voices profound hostility against all things Babylonian, the violent rage that is voiced being a function of hope that is lodged in a distinct identity that refused any imperial accommodation:
“O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”
The Jewish writers, prophets and psalmists, are not confused about Babylon. They are not flailing for meaning, flailing to make every bad thing into a Babylonian Bogey. “It is this tenacity that gives Judaism such staying power. And it is the deep fissure of this sixth-century disaster that has given Judaism its primary form.”
Nevertheless, as Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner puts it in his Social Formations of Judaism (2004), the theme of exile and return became paradigmatic for all Jews for all time to come but
The vast majority of the nation did not undergo the experiences of exile and return. One part [ of the Jewish community] never left, the other never came back. That fact shows us the true character of Judaism that would predominate: it began by making a selection of facts to be deemed consequential, hence historical, and by ignoring, in the making of that selection, the experience of others who had a quite different appreciation of what had happened – and, for all we know, a different appreciation of the message. For, after all, the Judeans who did not go into exile also did not rebuild the temple and the ones in Babylonia did not try (31).
Babylon became a metaphor. For the Jew, it became a crucible. In no way does this minimize the impact of siege, cultural erasure, and the long process of finding a new identity. But it never became a dragon. Dragons today, like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, hoard wealth and destroy villages, the Mom & Pop shops of yesteryear. The symbolism of a dragon holds weight. But it was not one that the prophets created or perpetuated. It does not appear again until John’s revelation of the end of the world, a long expanse of hundreds of years when Jews collectively just… lost the thread?
Instead, Babylon became a critical turning point in the history of the Jewish religion, clarifying and correcting the Jewish experience. If the people of Israel and Judah were, at times, carried away with the idols and practices of their neighbors, Babylon was the excess. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we wept when we remembered Zion.” So if the claims about Babylon of moral corruption, initially expressed through seiges and war, were taken as factual and telling, it begs the question why Evangelicals, unlike their Jewish predecessors and neighbors, are so eager to support political ideologies, military activities, and regime changes when they are done in the name of America today. Why, if the Babylon of scripture and remembrance is taken seriously, are Evangelicals continually aligned with nationalism, extremism, “alternative facts” and conspiracies? Why, if Babylon is the excess of movies and music, do Evangelicals seek to copy their ways?
It is an irreconcilable truism that Evangelicals consistently choose the wrong side of history. Given the choice between what is moral and what is not, they will wholeheartedly choose the immoral. Evangelicals enthusiastically embody the nationalism, aspirations to empire, full-throated support for violence, and the bloat of greed and materialism that Babylon came to embody. Babylon, for Evangelicals, is meaningless because Evangelicals are Babylon.
Political columnist Stephen Kinzer helpfully reminds his readers in Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change (2006) that
The history of American overthrows of foreign governments can be divided into three parts. First came the imperial phase, when Americans deposed regimes more or less openly. None of the men who overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy tried to hide their involvement. The Spanish-American War was fought in full view of the world, and President Taft announced exactly what he was doing when he moved to overthrow the governments of Nicaragua and Honoduras. The men who directed these “regime change” operations may not have forthrightly explained why they were acting, but they took responsibility for their acts.
After World War II, with the world political situation infinitely more complex than it had been at the dawn of the century, American presidents found a new way to overthrow foreign governments. They could no longer simply demand that unfriendly foreign leaders accept the reality of American power and step down, nor could they send troops to land on foreign shores without worrying about the consequences. This was because for the first time, there was a force in the world that limited freedom of action: the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, any direct American intervention risked provoking a reaction from the Soviets, possibly a cataclysmic one. To adjust to this new reality, the United States began using a more subtle technique, the clandestine coup d’etat, to dispose foreign governments. In Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile, diplomats and intelligence agents replaced generals as the instruments of American intervention.
By the end of the twentieth century, it had become more difficult for Americans to stage coups because foreign leaders had learned how to resist them. Coups has also become unnecessary. The decline and collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the Red Army meant that there was no longer any military constraint on the United States. That left it free to return to its habit of landing troops on foreign shores.
Now, prohibited from outright war-like violence, cultural elimination, blatant racism, misogyny and oppression, and seizure of property from those they deem are undeserving “minorities”, Evangelicals are instead overtaking courts, police stations, and seats of government to legitimize their crimes. Evangelicals infiltrate football teams, podcasts, and streaming services, anywhere to spread their message of victimization and angry insistence that they “take ground for Christ” in pursuit of a corrupt faith.
Evangelicals celebrate imperialism with the same paternalistic attitude that they denounce in scripture. Only, their sins are “baptized” and “under the blood” of Jesus. Where is the blood of their victims accounted? It cries out from the ground around them and they, like Cain, claim they are the real victim of their own violence.
Evangelicals have twisted Babylon to ignore all of this. Babylon, for Evangelicals, becomes anything inconvenient, anything that demands reflection or accountability. Claiming Jesus “fulfilled the law” (without even differentiating between law, history, prophecy, and poetry), Evangelicals have abandoned, even denigrated the Hebrew Scriptures. They have collectively forsaken the correctives of the prophets, forsaken all meaning and the substance that Jesus came to fulfill, and perverted the teachings of Paul. In short, Evangelicals have set aside the mercy and forgiveness of Jesus, the ethics of Paul, the social justice of James, and the tolerance of Peter for the pursuit of whores and dragons. Theirs has become a mystical faith, bent toward violence, fascinated more with Babylon and harlotry than caring for the Earth and their neighbor.
Evangelicals insist, as they have for decades, that the salvation of Jesus was private. Jesus died to give each of us a private life, free from government, free from obligation, free from one another. They insist that the power of God is not found in holiness and mercy, but in the weaponization of political and legal power against one’s enemies – real or imagined.
Evangelicals celebrate greed and overlook the corruption and rot that it takes to achieve the accumulation and siloing of wealth. Evangelicals worship building, even if there is never a completed project. In these ways, Babylon in the Evangelical imagination is, turn by turn, the very thing that has come to define them.
Evangelicals are the only ones who remain confused by what Babel/Babylon means. Issue by issue, claim by claim, Evangelicals have made their understanding of Babylon a Rorschach test, seeing their own issues in the confusion. Rather than face the implications of what Babylon really is and means, how they are the embodiment of the ancient bogeyman – Sexual immorality! Communism! Education! Movies! Fashion! Government! Non-white cultures! Gender equality! Fair labor practices! – Evangelicals have wildly flailed for meaning. In the collection of biblical stories, behavior like this is embodied by Satan. The truth is somewhere else, and the tells at the periphery of the lie.
The Historical Babylon
Long before it became Babylon, the city of Babel was a place God deigned to visit. God was not offended by the city then, but by the people. If the story is read superficially, God objects to the Tower of Babel because humans may actually build something tall. By contemporary standards, the Tower of Babel looks small. There are apartment buildings far larger than what would have been possible thousands of years ago. If read superficially, God appears as an anxious figure. God is afraid that humans may reach the sky and visit Heaven. Yet this God, even in the story of Babel, freely roams the Earth. God walks in the Garden of Eden, God visits Babel, God journeys to see Abraham and his wife Sarah to casually comment on their sex life. God wrestles with Jacob. God walks among the nations, pulling them down. God even overshadows the virgin Mary and she conceives. God is an inhospitable guest, always visiting humans but never welcoming them to the heavenly domain.
Read from one perspective, God pre-emptively stops human ingenuity and collaboration. Is it because God is jealous of human ability and industry? Surely, human invention pales compared to the creator of ecosystems and galaxies. What challenge, what threat do the humans at Babel present to the God who is able to destroy worlds by flood and fire? In this reading, God appears and is shocked at what They find in this center of commerce, trade, and construction. Threatened and alarmed, God acts without thinking the matter through. In this reading, God is threatened. Intimidated, if not afraid. God is reactionary, able to create the world and its inhabitants, but not control them. God may feel, now controlled by fear and intimidation, that humans will come to replace the Heavenly Realm with corruptible matter. Time has not been kind to such a reading. Even in the ancient world, pyramids were not especially novel. Had God walked a different path that day, would the Egyptians have been similarly confused? In the ancient world, capricious and easily intimidated gods caused chaos. This is not the God of the Hebrews, but a lesser deity, one excitable and replaceable.
Read from another perspective, focusing on culture, God visits Babel. If we step away from the narrative to see it in its entirety, it might be noticed that God feels that the people are becoming too homogenous. Instead of a punishment, God gives humans the gift of diversity at Babel. This God is not threatened. They merely do not want humans to live in such a way that they work, live, play, and talk with one another to the erasure of difference. God “confuses” language because it is at the core of human understanding, but it should also be pointed out that this is not a punishment. God intervenes but trusts that humans will work it out, overcome their differences and come together in a new way – a way where work is not their central unifying activity. Here, we notice a disturbing of the capitalistic and Evangelical readings of culture, where one’s productivity and achievements are the measure of success.
From still another perspective, focusing on the purpose of language itself, we might note that God made some people unable to hear and understand one another correctly. If the issue were language itself, if the distinction of languages from one another was a form of divine punishment, it is one that was easily overcome. In fact, most scholars believe quite adamantly that Jesus spoke Aramaic but was fluent in Hebrew and Greek. The Apostle Paul was evidently fluent in the tongue of his people – the Jews – as well as those of the Mediterranean. Language was never the issue at Babel. Among the many alleged punishments of God, this is comparatively one of the lighter sentences.
The questions about Babel, even with the knowledge of what it will become, remain unanswered. Babel and Babylon are still unknown to the reader. We know it apophatically (knowledge obtained through negation; i.e. what Babel/Babylon is not) rather than cataphatic (that which is or can be affirmed).
Later, once the city has become a nation, the biblical prophets recall Babylon as a force for good. Their forces were harsh in destroying their temple, but this was divinely ordered. The Israelite prophets depict Babylon as harsh but a necessary corrective to purge idolatry from their people and ultimately reunify them. If Babylon’s great Destroying the temple brought the Israelites into a new way of life and brought them into cultural diversity. Hadn’t that been what God did in Babel(yon) previously?
When the Jews were enslaved by Nebuchadnezzar’s army, many remained behind. A new, purged community of the Jewish people began to develop. In Babylon, the Jewish community continued with their houses of learning and synagogues. Yet of the two Talmuds or commentaries on scripture that exist, the preferred has always been the Babylonian. During their time in Babylon, the Jewish community thrived, and Rabbinic Judaism flourished. The depth of insight in the Babylonian Talmud eclipses that of the Jerusalem counterpart. Scholastically, materially, and culturally, the Jewish people thrived during their captivity. By encountering other religions and cultures, the Jewish people thrived. Given the choice to leave, many remained because they recognized their conditions had improved.
When Cyrus ascends to power, he takes the surprising action of allowing the Jews who wish to return to Jerusalem to do so, and then incentivizing their return. He gives them the sacred vessels of the temple left abandoned in Jerusalem. Any arguments about Babylon’s moral and ethical impact on the Jewish people is specious. If Babylon was so wretchedly evil, so darkly sinister, such a hotbed for scum and villainy, then this did not extend to the Jewish religion. The train of kings in Babylon and their agents had kept the sacred vessels of Jerusalem secure, protecting rather than destroying, profaning, or even melting them to contribute toward the many construction projects of Babylon. More, Cyrus goes even further in supplying resources, goods, and funding for the restoration project of the temple. Yet even when Cyrus incentivized the Jewish people to return to their homeland in Israel, even then, many stayed behind.
The only argument that may have merit regarding the moral decline of Babylon and the disenfranchisement of the Jewish people is this: while Babylon may have taken hold of Israel with force, that force waned considerably. Apathy and disillusionment like that expressed by the prophet Ezekiel had accumulated among the centralized nations within Babylon. That was during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, however.
In 538 BC, there was a revolt in Southern Babylonia while the army of Cyrus entered the country from the north. In June of that year, the Babylonian army was completely defeated at Opis, and immediately afterward Sippara opened its gates to the conqueror. Gobryas (Ugbaru), the governor of Media, was then sent to Babylon, which surrendered “without fighting,” and the daily services in the temples continued without a break. In October, Cyrus arrived and proclaimed a general amnesty, which was communicated by Gobryas to “all the province of Babylon,” of which he had been made governor. Meanwhile, the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus was living in hiding. Unlike Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus did not need to have a show of force to disempower. When Nabondius was found and captured, Cyrus treated him honorably; and when Nabonidus’ wife died, Cambyses II, the son of Cyrus, conducted the funeral. Cyrus assumed the title of “king of Babylon” and placated the Babylonians by honoring their home cultures and religions with rich offerings to their respective temples and deities. Are these the activities of someone about to lead the nation in moral decline and abominations? Along with the displaced Israelites, Cyrus allowed the foreign populations who had been deported to Babylonia to return to their old homes, carrying with them the images of their gods. The Jews, who had no images, took with them the sacred vessels of the temple. There, they began the work of rebuilding their temple but the Jewish people were not the same.
Following the Achaemenid conquest of Babylon, Cyrus issued the Edict of Restoration, in which he authorized and encouraged the return of the Jewish people to what had been the Kingdom of Judah and Israel, officially ending the Babylonian captivity. He is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and left a lasting legacy on Judaism due to his role in facilitating the return to Zion, a migratory event in which the Jews returned to the Land of Israel following Cyrus’ establishment of Yehud Medinata and subsequently rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. According to Chapter 45:1 of the Book of Isaiah, Cyrus was anointed by the Jewish God for this task as a biblical messiah; he is the only non-Jewish figure to be revered in this capacity. It is a claim that is almost heretical but instead is dismissed. After all, it is Isaiah the prophet who makes such a claim, not a historian.
Babylon ended under Cyrus not with more war but with disinterest. The triumph of the conquering nation lasted only as long as it contributed to the betterment of the people. Under Cyrus, the Jewish people (no longer “Israelite”) experienced the benefits of life beyond the tribalisms that created the conditions in which they were allowed to be captured in the first place. Cyrus is recognized for his achievements in human rights, politics, and military strategy. The Achaemenid Empire’s prestige in the ancient world would eventually extend as far west as Athens, where upper-class Greeks adopted aspects of the culture of the ruling Persian class as their own. As Greece was assumed by Rome, life and culture changed but not remarkably for the Jewish people. Once they returned to Israel and began the rebuilding process, under Ezra and Nehemiah, they resumed the tribalism that had defined their ancestors. Perhaps it was all of this growth, shoved into the constraints of a religion their prophets kept saying was suffocating and isolationist, hypocritical and increasingly on the wrong side of history that created the conditions that John the Baptist, Jesus, the Apostles, and Paul would come to be known for challenging.
Babylon’s endpoint shows not that they were a military or political power, but an ideological one. Whatever the veracity of the details in the individual accounts of Babylon in the Bible, each with their own viewpoint – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel – all agree, often reluctantly, that Babylon sought the betterment of the nations.
The offense of Babylon is the same as Babel, the plurality and diversity of opinion on culture and religion, politics and the purpose of war, the future as well as the recollection of history are all sharing a sense of stability, safety, and equality. That Daniel, or the writings ascribed to him, are not given equal status to the Major Prophets is a testament to the isolated exclusivity of the Israelite. Even the rabbis of the Talmud indicate that Babylon was beneficial to Judaism. The interpretation of “Babylon” as a place of oppression and slavery, of cosmological harm, the interpretation seemingly created whole-cloth by John the Revelator and then recycled by the Evangelicals of today, is an interpretation not shared by the prophets. Rather, it is the narrative of those trying to rewrite history. It is the narrative of victims looking for an abuser. It is not a narrative supported by the prophets, by later generations, by objective historians, by scholars, or any other group. “Babylon as Oppressor” is unique only to those who perpetuate these ahistorical narratives of victimization. And when they no longer have support for their invalid claims, they scrabble for any foothold they can manage. Babylon is “carnality and wickedness.” It is “human system of religion.” It is education.
This view of Babylon is, to their detriment, how Evangelicalism sees much of the world. Whatever good can be found, Evangelicals twist and mangle to fit a unique narrative without foothold in the reality of the lived experience shared by the rest of the world. The Evangelical narrative of everyone who is not them is Babylon and, in their telling, Babylon is never just bad, but exaggerated and stretched to fit non-factual, non-historical readings of non-White, non-American, non-Evangelical cultures and politics, framing them with accounts of eternal evils, images of dragons and the whores who ride them, of “pornographic perversion.” The stories get more expansive the longer they are allowed to continue. There is a rejection of education that prevails and permeates everything now, the “Modern Babylon.” Despite all of the overwhelming evidence against their endless claims, Evangelicals are always the victim of their own minds. They never recognize the benefits that come with incultural exchange, fail to recognize the truth that might some day set them free. This activity is the panicked scrabble of the defeated.
Theology & the City 