On the Run with Christ: Christian Fugitivity in an Age of Nationalism

What to do in the face of Christian nationalism? This is a question that has become increasingly urgent as we live in the shadow of crosses held up at far-right rallies and marches on both sides of the Atlantic. Anti-fascist Christians worldwide have a range of responses to choose from now that governments are openly appeasing and embracing Christian nationalism in their onward shift towards authoritarian methods of ruling. One of these responses can be drawn from the prison breaks in the book of Acts.

Acts 12 opens with scenes of repression. King Herod has been arresting Jesus’ followers left and right, has just martyred St. James and, emboldened by public approval for his actions, imprisoned Peter, commanding that he be guarded by no fewer than sixteen soldiers. The night before Peter’s trial, as the church is “earnestly praying to God for him”, an angel appears in his cell. The angel removes Peter’s chains and guides him safely passed his guards, out of prison, and into the city.

When I first read this passage, my mind immediately turned to another prison escape that took place almost two thousand years later. In 1979, Assata Shakur, a black revolutionary, escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey, USA with the help of members of the Black Liberation Army. Having experienced years of state repression against herself and other revolutionaries for their communist, anti-racist activities, she was ultimately falsely accused of murdering a New Jersey state trooper and imprisoned. Following her escape, she lived her life in exile in Cuba until her recent death last month.

What connected her and Peter for me was the fact that, in Shakur’s autobiography, she provides no details of how her escape took place – she simply states that it happened. I was initially disappointed when I read this, but then I realised it made sense; sharing the details would undermine any future efforts by her comrades to free others and carry on their work more generally. I was reminded that nearly 150 years prior, Frederick Douglass, a leading abolitionist, deliberately withheld information about his own escape from slavery in Maryland for the same reasons.

There is, of course, no reason to not believe that the events in Acts 12 took place exactly as described. A God that can defeat death can just as easily send an angel to carry out a mystical prison break. But I can’t help but wonder if the early church didn’t adopt a similar, albeit spiritualised, tactic as Shakur and Douglass. Christ famously has no body but ours, no hands or feet on earth but ours. God’s mission is continuously carried out through human action. And Peter’s community was also faced with constant violence at the hands of the state. So, it strikes me as equally plausible that Peter was rescued by fellow church-members who, in order to prevent the state from thwarting their future efforts, publicly credited an angel.

There is value in an interpretation like this in our present times because it provides us with one response to the Christian nationalism question: Christian fugitivity. Unlike Christian nationalists committed to capturing governmental power, a Christian fugitive is always on the run from the state and therefore always against the state. Because many states use racist forms of nationalism to shore up their power – with consequences that bleed outside of their own borders – the Christian fugitive is also against such forms of nationalism. And given that the state itself is nothing more than a tool to preserve capitalism (at least if you’re a Marxist), then the Christian fugitive is irrevocably anti-capitalist.

To choose fugitivity is to recognise that the state is not as powerful as it appears. Herod waited until he was certain public opinion was on his side before arresting Peter and even then assigned him over a dozen guards. This is fear disguised as might. It is ultimately shaky ground and a fugitive Christianity shimmies into the cracks of this foundation. It works alongside other Christian responses and is concerned with seizing all opportunities to overturn violent power structures, regardless of where they come from. It is ambivalent; a Christian fugitive might allow themselves to be imprisoned out of self-preservation, or principles of non-violence, or both, but they need not respect prison walls once inside them.

Christian fugitivity is contemplative. The soundtrack to the action in Acts 12 is unbroken prayer. A Christian fugitive can be inexhaustibly on the run because they always carry their home with them, because their home is in Christ to whom they unceasingly return.

And unlike Christian nationalism and the governments it emboldens Christian fugitivity acts out of faith, not fear. We see this clearly in another prison break, this time Paul’s in Acts 16. After an earthquake unchains Paul and his fellow prisoners and flings the prison doors open, Paul welcomes his weeping jailer into his faith community, baptising him and his entire family. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, both writers within the black radical tradition, have argued, black world-building must be “unconditional – the door swings open for refuge even though it may let in police agents and destruction”. We see this put in practice in modern history by a peasant community in Solentiname, Nicaragua, who gathered during the height of the Cold War and under the Somoza dictatorship to engage in socialist readings of the gospels. Accounts of their discussions in “The Gospel in Solentiname” include references to spies amongst them who were doubtless sent as the community grew in public notoriety. But while these suspected spies were wryly mentioned, they were not barred from participation. This foolish commitment is embraced, with wisdom and discernment, by the Christian fugitive – the stranger is welcomed even when they might pose a threat because it’s for God to dictate what can be made of them, not us.

The watchfulness Jesus calls us to in Luke – that we keep our lamps burning – is often reduced to waiting for some sort of rapture. But what if what Jesus was talking about was actually more akin to Harriet Tubman’s unexpected whisper in the night, “Are you ready to go? Now, right now?” The kin-dom of God which is here now, which is love, whose promise might be spatially rather than temporally near, cloaked and fugitive, breathing quietly beneath the delicate surface of capitalist reality, whispering to us using the religious and secular voices of its revolutionaries, calling us to freedom and all of its sacrifices. Are we vigilant for its call to action that will never be convenient, that will require you to drop whatever precious thing is currently in your hands, to not go into your bedroom to gather some belongings but to join the body of Christ on the run now, right now? It doesn’t surprise me that there are people who stayed at Tubman’s whisper, chose remaining in enslavement over the unknowable danger of pursuing freedom. I see the potential of that in myself, particularly as someone who is in many ways rich and full and laughing at present. But through a continuous commitment to prayer and community I’m trying to become someone – a true Christian fugitive – who would drop everything and go.