I didn’t grow up in liturgical churches, and for years, I dismissed their traditions as empty rituals unthinkingly observed by people who stand when they’re told to stand and kneel when they’re told to kneel. Since joining a liturgical church, I admit that sometimes the pomp and circumstance still strike me as ancient and stuffy. But I’ve learned these rituals are not empty—and some aren’t even ancient.
Take this coming Sunday, November 24. In many liturgical traditions, it’s Christ the King Sunday, the last day of the church calendar. Until a few weeks ago, I assumed it had been marked by the church for hundreds of years. But in fact, it’s a relatively new observance, instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925.
In a tumultuous time of upheaval, shortly after the First World War, worldly leaders promised earthly security and peace to people hungry for stability. Christ the King Sunday was introduced to make a contrasting offer: to call the church back to its first love, setting apart a day for Christians to remember that Christ must reign in our minds, wills, hearts, and bodies. This Sunday is a yearly reminder that Christ is our only King—and that while governments rise and fall, Christ is King Eternal.
Over the years, the practice was picked up by other traditions, including Presbyterian churches like mine. According to The Worship Sourcebook, used by our Presbyterian congregation, Christ the King Sunday invites Christians to proclaim that “everything in creation and culture must submit to Christ.” Its placement at the end of the liturgical year makes it the final word on what it means to follow Christ.
But since the year is a cycle, it also comes right before Advent, a time when we prepare for Christ to come. This timing should remind us of the steep call of our discipleship: that in welcoming that little baby Jesus into our hearts and homes, we receive something far more unruly than the gentle beauty our manger scenes suggest. We receive our one true Lord, the sovereign Christ who came to be the world’s Prince of Peace. He is a servant-king who disrupts our comfortable lives with his call to take up our crosses and follow him.
I realize that writing an article for a Christian magazine to argue that Jesus is our only King may seem like an exercise in stating the obvious. And it maybe would be if we weren’t all cut from the same cloth as the apostle Peter, who denied Jesus mere hours after confessing his unwavering loyalty (Luke 22:33, 57).
We need Christ the King Sunday because we are so prone to forget what it means to have a Lord over our lives—so quick to trade him for promises of security and power and privilege and cultural esteem. It’s a tale as old as time (1 Sam. 8), as visible today as in 1925.
Less than a decade after Christ the King Sunday was introduced, in May of 1934, a small band of German evangelicals gathered in Wuppertal, Germany, to sound the alarm to their fellow believers. This was about a year and a half after Adolf Hitler had ascended to power and begun consolidating the support of German church leaders in service of his social and political agenda.
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The group in Wuppertal spoke to Christians who “took the union of Christianity, nationalism, and militarism for granted, and [for whom] patriotic sentiments were equated with Christian truth,” and they crafted the Barmen Declaration. The statement contained six theses, rooted in Scripture, which rejected doctrines and practices that made the majority of the German church subservient to the government, such as introducing Nazi ideology to congregations and flying the swastika in sanctuaries.
It’s easy to sit on this side of history and see the failures of those German Christians, to sit in judgement of the millions who apparently did not see the danger of giving loyalty due only to Christ to a worldly leader. But are we so very different?
At a basic human level, we have the same tendency as those German Christians, a tendency embodied for me by a flag in my neighborhood. It’s a few blocks from my house, wind tattered and idolatrous. “The world needs Jesus,” it says. “America needs Trump.”
To be clear, I am not comparing President-elect Donald Trump to Hitler. My point is not about the object of Christian idolatry but the practice of it—not about him but about us.
Indeed, the problem with the flag has very little to do with Trump himself. Criticisms of evangelical support for Trump often focus too much on his persona, as though the degree of enthusiasm this flag represents would be fine if Trump happened to be a nicer guy, a more faithful husband, a more honest businessman.
Those matters of personal character and morality are important, of course. But none of that changes the basic problem with what that flag expresses. The danger of misplaced loyalty is neither diluted nor exasperated by the nature of its object. It doesn’t matter whether our idol is saint or sinner. Substitute Trump’s name on that flag with the name of any worldly leader, and the idolatry remains. This kind of trust in any human is a failure to make Jesus Lord and King of our lives.
That flag is the most egregious example of this phenomenon in my everyday life, but it’s by no means unique. The same tendency exists on the political left as well.
The American left’s current idolatry is not about a single politician, like Trump. It’s about their own political self-conception as good and virtuous people. Some Christians in this group imagine themselves as “The Resistance,” deliberately echoing the name of anti-Nazi groups like the Christians who produced the Barmen Declaration, even as they go along with the whims of secular culture, particularly on gender and sexuality.
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Like the Pharisee in Luke 18:11, their moral certitude—that at least they are not like those MAGA sinners—rings of self-righteous hubris. They’re blind to their own compromises, failing to see how their polished words and empty actions make them more like whitewashed tombs (Matt. 23:27) than messengers of Good News to a world hungry for hope.
The failure to keep Christ as King is a besetting sin to which followers of Jesus with any political leaning or place in history can be tempted. But for conservative evangelicals in this moment of the American experiment, with incoming Republican control across the federal government, I do see an especially severe temptation on the political right. In my deep red community and among the American right more broadly, I see an almost religious fervor right now, a sense that Trump’s reelection is ordained by God to bring a band of misfit Avengers to save the day in Washington and set all things right again.
Of course, I don’t know what’s in the hearts of my neighbors with the flags—or of everyone in my acquaintance sharing memes on Facebook that compare Trump to divinely upheld biblical leaders like David and Moses. But without making assumptions about any individual voter, the overall posture of near-messianic honor for Trump is impossible to miss.
And some have matched their posture to their words. Trump’s “mission, his goals and objectives—whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word,” Rep. Troy Nehls, a Republican Protestant from Texas, told reporters this month. “If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads, and that’s it.”
Embrace it. All of it. Every single word.
Nehls might argue he’s merely speaking of party discipline in Congress. But “the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45), and for Christians, there’s only one figure in all of human history to whom we are called to thus submit, only one figure whose every word deserves our full embrace, only one for whom we should have this unquestioning willingness to jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That is King Jesus.
History shows us how serious it is to be insufficiently serious about our allegiance to Jesus alone. Yes, we should be good citizens and respectful of authorities—but at the same time, we ought to be a little ungovernable. We obey our rulers for the sake of God, not for their own sake (1 Pet. 2:13), and when God and our rulers come into conflict, “We must obey God rather than human beings!” (Acts 5:29).
Caeser gets our respect, but Jesus gets our hearts. And we must keep this order clear even when we are thrilled with political outcomes. As Philip Yancey said in Rumors of Another World, “Perhaps the Christian’s most important role in modern times is to insist on a divided loyalty, for as history shows, the city of this world greedily seeks a monopoly on loyalty.”
The world does need Jesus, and America needs him too. America also needs Christians on the right and left alike who do not put our hope in political idols—whether politicians or ourselves and our allies—but in Christ alone. This is the antidote to the despair churning on the left, and this is the necessary check to the right’s growing sense that might equals right. Faithful Christians can prefer the policies and culture of the Republican Party and even be pleased with the 2024 election’s red wave without succumbing to the temptation of allegiance misplaced. We can be politically conservative and still insist that Christ alone is King. In fact, we must.
Christmas is just around the corner. Jesus is coming, tender and mild. But first, Christ the King Sunday reminds us of a different day in the life of Christ: the day he hung on the cross with a sign nailed above his head proclaiming him “King of the Jews” (Matt. 27:37).
It’s easy enough to proclaim our love for the baby in the manger, but loyalty to this King on the cross—to this Prince of Peace—upends all the ways of the world. Loyalty to this King upends our very lives and comes with no promise of earthly comfort, wealth, or power in return.
This is a difficult call to heed, but it is also a path Christ himself trod. Jesus used his power to cast out demons and calm storms, to heal the sick and raise the dead. But he didn’t use his power to take himself off the cross. He is the King of an upside-down kingdom who “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Phil. 2:7), who uses “the foolish things of the world to shame the wise” and “the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27).
This past summer, my church did a series on the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3–12), with sermons accompanied by watercolor paintings from artist Hannah Hammond. She painted a series of upside-down trees, one to accompany each beatitude, and wrote a blessing to remind us that Jesus upended our expectations of what it means to have a good life and our expectations of who will receive his kingdom.
These trees are rooted in the kingdom of heaven, Hannah wrote in her artist statement. “Instead of growth as an endless race to the top,” she said, “Christ invites us to grow down in humility, generosity, and self-sacrificial love.” Our tender roots are exposed—even imperiled—by this way of growth. It is risky to thus reach for the heavens, to follow Jesus in his humility, generosity, and self-sacrifice, to be loyal to no one but Christ our King. And yet it is the call of Christ, echoing throughout Scripture.
Embrace it. All of it. Every single word.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
