How Power Corrupted the Church

One of the bloodiest seasons in Church history might be the root of all Christian hypocrisy.

It tells me everything I need to know about politicized churches today.

A decided shift happened when Constantine brought an end to the Roman persecution of the Church. His mother had become a Christian, and while he might have had wider political diplomacy in mind, her faith can hardly be irrelevant. In the Edict of Milan, 313, he declared this pivot for the Empire “so that whatever Divine being is up there in heaven might be kind to us.” You want to cover all your bets.

So at the first open council of Christians, the Council of Nicaea (325), it’s said that the Christian leaders bore scars of the persecution on their bodies. Some were missing an eye. Some had thick scar tissue across their hands where they had been made to hold red-hot iron. Some could not walk because the muscles in their legs had been severed. The Church crawled and hobbled out of its persecution.

By 380, orthodox Christians were overtly persecuting their rivals, the Arians, a splinter sect. The homes of the Arians were taken away from them and given to Christians. They were banned from free speech and worship. The Church sought to stamp them out of existence.

One lifetime after their own persecution, the Christians started persecuting others.

This is the story of how power ruined Christianity. And it has everything to do with what’s happening in politicized churches today.

I pastor a church. I don’t preach politics. There are churches in my neighborhood doing the exact opposite, and their numbers are swelling. They represent the greatest current existential threat to modern American Christianity.

Peak corruption and grisly practices

I hardly need to recount the corruption of the Church through the Middle Ages. There was a string of popes in the 9th and 10th centuries, each of whom had assassinated his predecessor so as to get his job. Pope Stephen VI had the corpse of his predecessor exhumed and put on trial in the famous Cadaver Synod. Pope John XII was killed by a woman’s husband in her bed. Sound like stories out of Game of Thrones? That’s because most of the worst of GOT was taken from Church history.

Clerical celibacy became strictly enforced in the 12th century (married priests were forced to leave their wives). The reason wasn’t purity; it was designed to stop priests from giving church land to their own children. The Church wasn’t trying to guard its holiness, it was trying to hold onto its money. Around that same time, the Church tried to put an end to bishops giving official appointments to wealthy lords for the right price.

In all this, Christendom was admittedly a mixed bag. It spread literacy, education, and medicine wherever it went. Charlemagne had made it law that every church had to offer care for the poor for free and schools for children.

But the ethics of Jesus — love your neighbor, your enemy, and the stranger within your gates — largely rode on the back of a corrupt Church like a butterfly on the back of a charging rhino.

How the Church lost power, and the results

In 1804, in Notre Dame Cathedral, Napoleon took the crown out of the hands of Pope Pius VII and put it on his own head.

This symbol captured the religio-social pivot of the age. The Church, in its thirst for power, had finally lost power. Its decline in Europe would take another couple of centuries, but it was decided. A few thinkers would have to drive the coffin nails:

• Forty years later, Karl Marx wrote in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Religion is the opiate of the people.”

• Fifteen years after that, Darwin would drop the anthropological bomb that took humanity out of the center of the history of the universe, launching a new wave of atheist delight from philosophers like Thomas Huxley.

• Twenty five years later, Nietzsche would write that “God is dead.”

• Twenty year later, Freud would argue that religion was an infantile fantasy.

  
  

On the heels of all of this disenchanting, demythologizing materialism were two great wars and a century that witnessed the brutal murders of a hundred million people at the hands of explicitly atheistic governments. Social Darwinism and scientific elites argued that certain races were simply more advanced than others, claiming scientifically (and without need of God) that colonization and imperialism were wholly justified. Humanity, it turns out, was no better without religion than with it.

Because the common thread in the history of corrupt power is not divine nature; it’s human nature.

Back to religion

In this brief tour of power, I have skipped over one crown. Humanity in power is always abusive. We are so brazen that we would willfully execute God. Rather than bringing sovereign power to bear on the rebellion, God, in his humility, would simply lie down and surrender to it.

The Father who could not turn his children good would give in to their mutiny so as to give them what they wanted — patricide. But in giving us the power to kill him, God claimed a power greater than force, the power of substitution.

Jesus would die both at our hands and in our place. We would save ourselves by killing him, because our illusion of victory was his victory in reality. God brought an end to the tyranny of human power by giving in to it, rendering the cross the ultimate sign of divine power.

So we can chastise Christians for their hypocrisy all we want, and perhaps rightly so. But they are us. They are only a microcosm of all of humanity. As a species, we are vengeant, spiteful, snarling at the world through clenched teeth, looking at every angle for our own advantages while climbing over the bodies of our peers. Christians are just another page of the same story.

Because power is an addictive anesthetic, it grips us and numbs us at the same time. Which proves that humanity is lost without a savior.

© 2026 Guest Writer James W. Miller. First published in Faith Seeking Wonder on Medium.

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