ICE hasn’t been abolished. The pipelines keep getting built. We’re going to have more corrupt, violent, and abusive people put in power. We’re going to witness and experience horrible and devastating things due to climate change. This is our material reality and it’s scary.

As many of us know, voting isn’t enough to change these things. What we see in this administration is horrible, soul-crushing, but it’s the same game all our racist, classist, imperialist presidents played. Those scared that democracy is dying are missing the point. It was never alive on stolen land.

We can’t afford to keep bumping into political crises, expressing and performing outrage, and then moving on to the next thing. With capitalism collapsing on society through climate change, we really don’t have the privilege to continue playing this game. Things need to change and it won’t be through peaceful marches and a queer-friendly imperialist in charge. We don’t have time for incremental change, and that wasn’t ever going to work anyway. We need to tear this whole rotten, god-forsaken system down. It’s the right thing to do. We need to commit to building a revolutionary movement.

And our churches need to know that. Our fellowship needs to be convinced of that, and also fighting for a new world.

There’s a tendency among some Christian leftists of keeping their faith and politics separate. Understandably, as many are recovering from religious systems that are deeply political, and harmful. Many hold their desire to follow Jesus, the slain lamb, the peace-maker, in tension with their conviction that a revolutionary movement is needed to abolish capitalism.

But if our sense of empathy, our love for others, has led us to our political convictions, then this is a theological, spiritual matter. This is same conviction that led Christ into his ministry, as well as to the cross. If being a revolutionary is the right thing to do, our experience of Christ needs to form us into committed revolutionaries. Our politics ought to be the result of the revelation of Christ’s love unfolding on our lives.

All that to say, Jesus passed on to us a vision of God’s kin-dom. It gives us hope but also a living reality. A way to be together, a way to live in this world as a people. Providing for one another, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick. Turning over tables, chasing and whipping oppressive forces. Standing up to empire, defying power. Laying our lives down for one another and, like Jesus, for folks like the insurrectionist Barabbas, fellow travelers that enact God’s transformative judgment in this world. We listen to the seasons to know when it’s time to turn plowshares into swords, and then swords into plowshares. This is our revolutionary Christianity.

When we came into the saving knowledge of Christ, we were saved to be part of such a Church. Let’s not settle for anything less. This is not a call to abandon your churches that fall short, but a call to find or build fellowship that can be such a church. A church that you deserve, and a church that Christ deserves.