When Sermons Fail: Protest, Power, and the Loss of Moral Vision
When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, many American Protestant ministers preached that “we had all killed Kennedy.” They meant that through our quiet faithlessness, our numbed habituation to violence, and our turning away from the stranger, Americans had helped create the conditions from which Lee Harvey Oswald emerged. In other words, we had cultivated the civic and spiritual decay in which the murder of an American president became possible. From the perspective of 2026, such an argument from the pulpit would be startling.
“To name and investigate our own participation in violence places us back into the world as actors rather than merely judges. We ask, as individuals and as institutions: How did I contribute to this?”
Today we are far more likely to say “we are all Renee Nicole Good” than to say we all killed Renee Good—or even that we are all Jonathan Ross, the agent who shot and killed her in Minneapolis. We are less inclined to claim responsibility and more inclined to assert our victimhood.
Not Victims but Accomplices
What difference do these perspectives make? How do they each imagine the role of the church differently? What if American Christians understood themselves not primarily as victims of violence but as accomplices in the world where violence occurs? What questions would we ask of ourselves, of the church, and of our common life?
To name and investigate our own participation in violence places us back into the world as actors rather than merely judges. We ask, as individuals and as institutions: How did I contribute to this? What did we misunderstand or neglect that made this violence possible? Instead of locating fault elsewhere, we acknowledge ourselves not just as bystanders or witnesses but as collaborators, responsible for the world we inhabit. We are reminded that the church is not simply a mirror of the world but a force that helps shape it. Christianity both makes and unmakes the world.
Many sermons after Renee Nicole Good’s death fell into one of two categories. Some progressive pastors invoked freedom of speech and assembly, warned against state overreach, and condemned state violence. Pastor Jon Hopkins of Concordia Lutheran Church in Concord, NH, declared, “We know that this shooting was inevitable, in some ways, that ICE was going to start shooting people who show up to protect their neighbors at some point. Part of this story is not a surprise, at least to those of us who have eyes to see what’s going on in our country.” These are protest sermons—echoes of the most common form of political response in recent decades and arguably the least effective. In If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (Hachette Book Group, 2023), Vincent Bevins examines the years 2010-2020, observing that never before had so many people taken to the streets in so many places—and achieved so little. Among the reasons he identifies are leaderless movements driven by consensus decision-making, the prioritization of visibility over strategy, and the failure to translate popular anger into durable institutional power. Visibility, he writes, was mistaken for victory.
A second type of sermon, more common among conservative preachers, emphasized obedience and the authority of law enforcement. Rev. Franklin Graham posted, “It is tragic that Renee Good was killed in Minneapolis yesterday. Pray for her family and loved ones. This incident serves as a strong reminder that everyone needs to obey law enforcement. If they tell you to raise your hands, raise your hands; if they tell you to get out of the car, get out of the car.” This approach risks turning Christianity—and the pulpit—into an instrument of the prevailing political order. These are sermons of alignment rather than discernment.
Into the ’70s
Beginning in the 1970s, many churches pursued political access and cultural relevance in the hope that the City of God might be realized through the practices of the City of Man. The postwar language of Christian realism associated with Reinhold Niebuhr often facilitated the moral compromises that churches believed necessary during the realpolitik of the Cold War. Yet access to power did not guarantee moral authority. Many churches today may have proximity to political influence but lack either genuine moral authority or theological autonomy. They are aligned with power rather than empowered to speak prophetically to it. And when they do defy the state, that access quickly disappears. Sanctuary movements, for example, now stand in sharp tension with state authority despite their deep theological roots.
There was a time when political leaders sought moral (and political) guidance from religious institutions rather than merely their endorsement. When Franklin D. Roosevelt considered entering World War II, he corresponded with religious leaders across the United States seeking their counsel and support. His wartime correspondence with Pope Pius XII is well known.
Given the limits of both protest sermons and orations of status quo political alignment, what might a more faithful sermon look like? Compounding the difficulty is the reality that Sunday morning remains one of the most segregated hours in American life—politically, racially, and economically. Most congregants already know what side they are on. The default position homiletically is simply to rehearse that. But doing so may evade a central demand present in the teaching of Jesus Christ: the cultivation of discernment.
City of God Revisited
In this respect, American Christianity may resemble Christianity in the time of Augustine of Hippo—an established religion wrestling with empire. Under Constantine the Great in the Fourth Century, political success was often interpreted as divine favor. Unity was enforced for the sake of order, and orthodoxy was supported by law. Constantine’s Christianity carried an implicit providentialism: the belief that God rewards correct belief with political success and that the empire itself serves as an instrument of divine will. Political power and stability became forms of theological confirmation. And political dissent became a dangerous heresy.
History reveals the dangers of this model. It confuses truth with success. Are we ensnared by the same delusion today? When we win, do we assume we are blessed? The Beatitudes—“Blessed are the meek … blessed are those who mourn … blessed are those who are persecuted”—sit uneasily within a culture that equates faith with influence. More fundamentally, what is the Christian answer to the logic of Thucydides’ famous Melian Dialogue—that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must? Do we, too, now assume that victory, prosperity, or dominance are signs of God’s favor?
Constantine transformed theology into ideology. This raises an uncomfortable question for our own time: do we know the difference between a theological sermon and an ideological one? Rather than asking which side we are on, perhaps we should ask a more demanding question drawn from Augustine: what does love of God require here? That question presses beyond what we claim to believe and forces us to confront what we actually love. For Augustine, moral life is not primarily about rules or intentions. It is about the ordering of our loves—what we desire, what we pursue, and what we ultimately serve. Moral failure is loving wrongly, not merely thinking poorly. Augustine contends that what can be taken away cannot possibly be the ultimate object of desire or love.
Robbers and Emperors
During Constantine’s reign, Augustine worried that moral insight was being displaced by political authority. He insisted instead that political power is always morally ambiguous. As he writes in The City of God, “Without justice, what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?” He illustrates the point with a story about Alexander the Great and a captured pirate. The pirate tells Alexander: “Because I do it with a small ship, I am called a robber; because you do it with a great fleet, you are called an emperor.” Augustine’s point is clear: power alone confers no moral legitimacy. Political authority must always be assessed by whether it serves justice—by whether it moves a person or a society toward God.
Specifically, Augustine worried that religion could become a form of political theatre and serve imperial power more than divine truth: the emperor decides and the church ratifies. Is this ancient danger a threat today? If so, then the question becomes: how might we cultivate the capacity to resist it? One modern thinker who wrestled deeply with this problem was Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany whose work was profoundly shaped by Augustine. In fact, Arendt’s doctoral dissertation—later published as Love and Saint Augustine (1929)—examined his understanding of love and the human will. After witnessing the moral collapse of modern bureaucratic society during the Third Reich, Arendt sought to understand how ordinary people could participate in extraordinary crimes. Her reflections culminated in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), where she famously described the “banality of evil”—the frightening reality that monstrous acts can arise not from hatred or fanaticism but from a failure to think.
An Enlarged Mentality
Arendt proposed several practices for resisting this kind of thoughtlessness. The first is an inner dialogue with oneself—what Augustine would call conscience. Thinking, she argued, is not merely the accumulation of information but a conversation of the self with itself. When we genuinely think, we interrogate our own actions. We ask questions that cannot be delegated to outside authority: Can I live with this action? What kind of person will I become if I conduct my life in this way? This inner dialogue establishes a boundary that bureaucratic systems cannot easily override.
Second, Arendt emphasized the importance of cultivating what she called an “enlarged mentality.” This means learning to view the world from the standpoint of others. The wisdom of the just (Luke 1:17) or moral discernment requires imagination: the ability to ask how a decision would appear to someone who stands outside our own position. Importantly, this is not merely an individual discipline. Churches can intentionally create spaces where such perspective-taking becomes communal practice—through dialogue with other congregations, across denominations, and even across religious traditions. When we encounter people who interpret the same situation differently, we begin to understand how they—as citizens, witnesses, or outsiders—might discern in another way the realities we take for granted.
Finally, Arendt pointed to storytelling and historical reflection as crucial tools for moral deliberation. Stories force us to examine concrete human actions rather than abstract principles. In this sense, her insight sounds remarkably biblical. For what did Jesus do but tell stories—parables that disrupt the easy binaries of his time and demand reflection from those who hear them? Narrative opens a space for moral imagination. It reminds us that human actions matter, that choices have consequences, and that the meaning of events must continually be interpreted and reinterpreted.
Storytelling also calls us to courage. As Arendt writes near the end of Eichmann in Jerusalem, even in the darkest circumstances there will always be someone left to tell the story. Thus, Augustine of Hippo, and later Hannah Arendt, offers a caution for our own moment. The City of Man can never become the City of God. The two remain entangled in history, but the judgment of one must never simply become synonymous with the judgment of the other. Christianity must learn—again and again—how to wield power without confusing itself with imperial power.
Disciplined Discernment
How do we cultivate the discernment necessary to distinguish what faithfulness demands of Christians from what partisan loyalty expects of Americans? Augustine’s answer is deceptively simple and endlessly demanding—to learn to love what God loves. What we love shapes what we see; what we desire determines what we defend. The Christian tradition has long tried to teach this difficult discipline. Like Beatrice guiding Dante Alighieri, it seeks to redirect our gaze—away from the seductions of power and extravagance and toward what is true and good.
Empires, Augustine reminds us, do not endure. The empire of Constantine the Great eventually passed away, like every empire before and since. Yet Christianity continued. The lesson is not that the church will always prevail politically, but that its task is never simply to prevail. Its task is to harness “the charioteer of virtues,” the capacity to apply divine wisdom to real-world situations—in Augustinian terms, to love rightly—even in the shadow of empire.
Melissa Matthes ’09 M.Div. is a full professor in the Department of Government at the United States Coast Guard Academy. She is the author most recently of When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter (Harvard, 2021). A graduate of Williams College, she holds a Ph.D. in political theory, cultural anthropology and feminist studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a member of the YDS Alumni Board.