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Wrestling with Imperial Christianity: Biblical Anti-domination and Anti-imperial Strategies for Liberation, Justice and Peace in our Fallen World
By Mukti Barton
Darton, Longman and Todd, 2025, £16.99
Rarely have I come across a book that profoundly changes the way I see things. In writing this rigorously argued, closely exegeted work, Mukti Barton has done just that. Her contribution to the debate about Imperial Christianity, white supremacy and patriarchal church shows exactly how wrongly Western theology has interpreted the Bible for centuries.
Beginning with her own racially motivated unjust welcome to Britain at Heathrow Airport in 1975, Barton explores what divides humanity and separates from God. What has traditionally been called the story of ‘the Fall’ in Genesis is presented as a divide between life and death, worship of God and worship of self. Jesus’ teaching that we cannot worship both God and mammon is meticulously applied to unpack other parts of the Bible and to explain our contemporary ecclesiastical and political climate. The sin that broke humanity’s relationship with God was self-deification, turning our back on the ‘tree of life Wisdom/Jesus [that] removes planet wrecking hierarchy, inequality, injustice, exploitation, oppression and violence, giving eternal life’ (p.57).
Having firmly established her thesis, Barton shows how the choice of mammon, has led to patriarchal understandings of God, and presents us with God’s ‘womb-love’ (a more accurate translation of the Hebrew word usually rendered mercy, Barton says) and God’s ‘breast love’ (usually interpreted ‘almighty’). It is imperialism that seeks to render God as almighty conqueror, where the Hebrew Bible presents a God of womb and breast. Barton extends the well-known saying of Mary Daly, ‘if God is White male emperor, then the White male emperor is God.’
Next Barton critiques the unhelpful Eurocentricity of Christianity before looking at some biblical texts, including the Book of Ruth, the Gospels and some of Paul’s writing. Through it all Barton argues carefully that the central issue is justice, the desire to serve mammon instead of God. The inclusion of Ruth in Jesus’ genealogy, Barton says, shows that when ‘suffering people stand up for their rights, Jesus is born through them.’ Where salvation in the Bible can be represented as an outcry against oppression and liberation coming from God, the Hellenisation of Christianity means salvation has come to mean the avoidance of hell and an eternity in heaven.
Mammonic thinking has come to see forgiveness as a right, and fails to recognise the interconnectedness of all people. For justice to come, Jesus gives his followers the power to bind mammon so that all creation can be freed.
Barton remains challenging – and chilling – to the end. In her conclusion she points out that a Jesuit, Raymund Harris, claimed that ownership of slaves was the sacred right of White people, and two-time governor of South Carolina Cole Blease, claimed lynching as a divine right of Caucasian races. As many as 10 to 20,000 people would attend a lynching, women and children were often given the first opportunities to torture the victims. ‘How many of those children, now grown up people, have been walking the streets of the USA, possibly, running churches and civic and other institutions and influencing global matters’ asks Barton. If for no other reason than this, it is essential that preachers read this book and contemplate its implications.
In concluding, Barton writes, ‘if humanity is called to be wisdom warriors, we have no choice, but to raise the alarm. I offer my book as a fire alarm. Even if only a few people find new biblical insights that empower them to resist oppression and injustices in our world to save it from mammonic annihilation, I will consider my book a success.’
Personally, I pray that this book will be read by many preachers, and will cause them too to begin sounding the alarm.
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