Churchly enterprises ... are vainglorious about reputation, status, prosperity, success; they are eager to conform, solicitous of patronage from the … - William Stringfellow

The moral pretenses of Imperial Rome, the millennial claims of Nazism, the arrogance of Marxist dogma, the anxious insistence that America be "number one" among nations are all versions of Babylon's idolatry. All share in this grandiose view of the nation by which the principality assumes the place of God in the world.

The mark of the Christian is, simply, that he is a matured and freed human being. The direct political implication of this risen character of the Christian is that ... the Christian is an incessant revolutionary. He is always, everywhere in revolt—not for himself but for humanity.

Kierkegaard cautioned that the crisis for biblical faith concerning conformity to the world, in one form or another, occurs wherever the anomaly of an established church appears. In the United States, the Constantinian Accommodation has been marvelously proliferated. Practically all churches and sects are, in effect, established and, in turn, conformed to the dominant social philosophy or secular ideology or civic religion. Biblical faith, here, in consequence, is strenuously distorted and persistently ridiculed—in the name of God, of course.