Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.”—Howard Thurman, theologian and civil rights activist
Every Christmas, Christians commemorate the birth of a child born into oppression—an occupied land, a climate of political fear, and a government quick to crush anything that threatened its authority.
Two thousand years later, the parallels are striking.
If Jesus were born in modern America, under a government obsessed with surveillance, crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, religious nationalism, and absolute obedience to a head-of-state rather than the rule of law, would he survive long enough to preach about love, forgiveness, and salvation? Would his message of peace, mercy, and resistance to empire be labeled as extremism?
As familiar as the Christmas story of the baby born in a manger might be, it also serves as a cautionary tale for our time.
The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. Unable to find room at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.
But what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?
What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born in the present day? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family receive? Would we acknowledge the humanity of the Christ child, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family had to escape violence in their homeland and seek refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we provide for them?
A select number of churches across the nation have pondered these questions in recent times, and their conclusions were depicted with unsettling accuracy by nativity scenes showing Jesus and his family separated, segregated, and caged in individual chain-link enclosures, topped with barbed wire.
These nativity scenes were a poignant reminder to the modern world that the narrative of Jesus’ birth speaks on multiple levels to a society that has allowed the life, teachings, and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism, and war, all driven by a manipulative shadow government known as the Deep State.
The contemporary church has largely refrained from applying Jesus’ teachings to current issues like war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who have asked themselves and the world: what would Jesus do?
What would Jesus—the infant born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his time (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do about the injustices of our modern era?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer pondered what Jesus would have done about the atrocities committed by Hitler and his henchmen. The answer: Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler for attempting to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wondered what Jesus would have done about the soul-crushing gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out against government oppression and brutality.
Martin Luther King Jr. contemplated what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: proclaiming “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation as well as his life when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.
Their lives demonstrate that the question “What would Jesus do?” is never theoretical. It is always political, always perilous, and always costly.
Even now, there exists a dissonance in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.”
Nevertheless, this is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on various matters, including charity, compassion, war, tyranny, and love.
After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical, and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the escalating threat of the American police state.
Jesus was not born into luxury or safety. He was born destitute, without a roof over his head, in an occupied land governed by force and fear, under the watchful gaze of a government fixated on control, compliance, and the eradication of perceived threats. His parents were politically impotent. His birthplace was makeshift. His early days were shaped by apprehension of state violence.
When Herod learned of the Messiah’s birth, he did not respond with humility or reflection, but with paranoia. Fearing the mere prospect of a rival authority, Herod resorted to brute force. The lesson is timeless: this is the modus operandi of tyranny. Unchecked authority, when gripped by insecurity, will always seek to quash dissent rather than confront its own corruption.
Modern governments, including our own, cloaked in the language of security and “law and order,” behave no differently. Any challenge to centralized power is viewed as a threat to be extinguished. In such an environment, speaking truth to power is perilous. Opposing imperial authority invites reprisal.
From his birth, Jesus posed a threat—not because he employed violence or political might, but because his life and message laid bare the ethical bankruptcy of empire and offered an alternative grounded in justice, mercy, and truth.
As Jesus matured, he articulated profound, potent truths—ideas that would alter our perception of people, concepts that contested everything empire upheld. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and radical teachings.
When confronted by authority figures, Jesus did not retreat from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings subverted the political and religious establishment of his era. This cost him his life. Ultimately, he was crucified as a cautionary tale to dissuade others from challenging the powers-that-be.
Can you envision what Jesus’ existence would have entailed if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had entered the American police state?
Consider the following.
If Jesus had been born during the era of the American police state, his parents would not have journeyed to Bethlehem for a census. Instead, they would have been ensnared in an expansive web of government databases—flagged, categorized, scored, and evaluated by algorithms they could not see or dispute. Present-day censuses are no longer merely headcounts; rather, they are part of a data-collection system that supplies artificial intelligence programs, predictive policing initiatives, immigration enforcement, and national security watchlists.
Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. However, instead of wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, the baby’s parents may have had to repel visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth.
If Jesus had been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been extracted without his parents’ knowledge or consent and placed in a government biobank. While most states mandate newborn screening, an increasing number are retaining that genetic material long-term for research, analysis, and undisclosed purposes.
If Jesus’ parents were undocumented immigrants, they and their newborn child might have been swept up in an early-morning ICE raid, detained without meaningful due process, processed through a profit-driven, private prison, and deported under the cover of darkness to a detention camp in a third-world country.
From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been indoctrinated in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little—if anything—about his own rights. If he dared to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that penalizes minor infractions as severely as more serious offenses.
If Jesus had gone missing for a few hours, let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested, and jailed for parental negligence. Across the country, parents have been arrested for minor “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard unsupervised.
Instead of vanishing from historical records from his early teenage years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored, and filed by government agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Shockingly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.
From the moment Jesus encountered an “extremist” like John the Baptist, he would have been marked for surveillance due to his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively conducted surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a wide range of activist groups, from animal rights organizations to poverty relief, anti-war groups, and other such “extremist” entities.
Jesus’ anti-government perspectives would likely have led to him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being instructed to recognize signs of anti-government extremism when interacting with potential extremists who hold a “belief in the impending collapse of government and the economy.”
While journeying from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government authorities as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” initiatives. Numerous states are equipping individuals with mobile apps that enable them to capture photos of suspicious activity and report it to their state Intelligence Center, where the reports are reviewed and forwarded to law enforcement agencies.
Instead of being allowed to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have been threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleep outdoors. In fact, the quantity of cities that have chosen to criminalize homelessness by enacting prohibitions on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering, and begging in public has doubled.
Jesus’ teachings—his refusal to pledge allegiance to empire, his admonitions about wealth and power, his assertion that obedience to God at times necessitates resistance to unjust authority—would almost certainly be construed today as indications of ideological extremism. In an era where dissent is increasingly portrayed as a threat to public order, Jesus would not need to commit violence to be branded hazardous. His words alone would suffice.
Perceived by the government as a dissident and a potential menace to its dominance, Jesus might have had government informants infiltrate his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. These modern-day Judases—known as informants—often receive substantial sums from the government for their treachery.
If Jesus had utilized the internet to disseminate his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies seeking to undermine his credibility, discredit him, or plant incriminating information online about him. His website would likely have been hacked, and his emails monitored at the very least.
If Jesus had attempted to feed large crowds of individuals, he would have faced threats of arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit.
If Jesus had publicly discussed his forty days in the wilderness, his visions, or his battles with evil, he might have been classified as mentally unstable and subjected to an involuntary psychiatric hold—detained not for what he had done, but for what authorities feared he might do. Increasingly, expressions of distress, spiritual conviction, or nonconformity are pathologized and viewed as grounds for confinement, particularly when paired with homelessness or poverty.
Without a doubt, if Jesus had attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rail against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. Over 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws in place.
If someone had reported Jesus to the police as potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers who, at any hint of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a scowl), would shoot first and ask questions later.
Instead of having armed guards seize Jesus in a public setting, government officials would have instructed a SWAT team to conduct a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military gear. There are more than 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out annually, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government intruders, even when the raids are conducted erroneously.
Instead of being detained by Roman soldiers, Jesus might have been made to “vanish” into a clandestine government detention facility where he would have been interrogated, tortured, and subjected to a variety of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a covert, off-the-books interrogation facility at Homan Square.
Accused of treason and branded a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to life imprisonment in a private prison where he would have been compelled to provide forced labor for corporations or