I worked at a big fat church for a few years once.
For about five minutes of those few years, the staff was charged to "live in the republic of ideas." I wrote what follows after a thought experiment about how much destruction power-elites in the West are willing to initiate in the pursuit of personal goals, but as a Christian, as an advocate for justice, and, as a pastor, it also strikes me as getting toward the difference between the Kingdom of God's raison d'etre and the raison d'etat so many churches live and ultimately die by:
It occurs to me that our use of terms like "industrial" or "industrialized" nation reveals rather efficiently the willingness of our power elites (political and economic) to sacrifice most of us for personal gain; to spiritually, emotionally, and economically destroy the creative, academic, merchant and truly small-business class (let's call it the bourgeoisie) right along with the cynically styled "working class." We bourgeoisie and/or proletarians freely mingle, and not-so-freely mimic the choices of the power elites (be they Clintons or Romneys) with what we're told are consumer "choices" but are really the gasping acts of hanging-on desperately performed by human agents too exhausted from surviving to enact true human agency. This is purely diabolical; if there is a God in heaven, that God must not endorse this system. Surely, the central Christian image of God not in heaven but on a cross is in reaction to the system that enslaved Judea, that murdered John the Baptizer, that found Jesus guilty of blasphemy and sedition. That Christ's message -- God is for the margin and not for the power structures we worship -- brought about his death at the hands of those power structures isn't only a sort of proto-theological poetry, it is the essential Christian fact, the essential Christian witness, the essential Christian claim about the nature and person of God. That Jesus spoke of a kingdom different from those of the Sanhedrin and Rome and Washington and Wall Street and Seattle isn't some spiritual-only conceit. What Christ called the Kingdom of God is not so-called Christendom, not the so-called Church; it is a physical network of willing rebellion.