Many Christians today struggle to know how to walk faithfully as disciples of Jesus. It simply seems harder than it used to be. In earlier posts I described the dangers of lukewarmness and suggested some ways we might begin to change it. But it may also help to ask why discipleship feels so difficult now. Is our moment really any different from the ones earlier generations faced?
I believe it is. The forces at work are not new in kind, but they have a new reach in our time, and understanding them begins with Babylon.
Babylon in Scripture
Historically, Babylon was the capital of the Babylonian Empire, which conquered the southern kingdom of Judah in the early sixth century BC, destroying Jerusalem and its temple in 586 BC and carrying its people into exile. Yet throughout Scripture, Babylon also stands for something larger than a city: evil organized on a national scale. The prophets return to it again and again. Isaiah portrays Babylon’s king as a figure of boundless pride who resolves to raise his throne above the stars of God (Isaiah 14), and pictures the city as a pampered queen, secure in her luxury, who tells herself that there is no one besides her (Isaiah 47). Jeremiah calls Babylon a golden cup in the Lord’s hand that made the whole earth drunk (Jeremiah 51:7). Habakkuk pronounces woe on an empire that heaps up what is not its own and builds its cities with bloodshed (Habakkuk 2). And Daniel shows Babylon demanding worship of a golden image and profaning the holy vessels of God’s temple at a drunken feast (Daniel 3; 5). Pride, self-sufficiency, violence, plunder, and false worship: these are the marks of Babylon.
Revelation gathers all of these threads together, using Babylon to represent the evil excesses of empire. For John’s first readers, that empire was almost certainly Rome, the city on seven hills (17:9). By then, Babylon had become the name for a pattern, and Rome was simply its newest instance. One of the clearest pictures comes in Revelation 18. After Babylon falls, the kings, merchants, and sea traders who grew rich through her stand at a distance and weep, not so much for the city as for their lost profits. The chapter catalogs her cargo: gold, silver, fine linen, spices, horses and chariots, and finally “slaves, that is, human souls” (18:13). Here Babylon represents the excess of an exploitative economic system, one in which everything, even people, can be bought and sold.
This is no passing theme. Much of Revelation is devoted to describing this system, warning the church not to take part in it, and showing how to respond faithfully. The warning begins in the letters to the seven churches (Revelation 2–3). Believers in Pergamum and Thyatira were tempted to eat food sacrificed to idols, a compromise likely tied to the trade guilds and civic life of their cities, where earning a living could require at least a nod to the gods. The church in Laodicea boasted that it was rich and needed nothing, unaware that it was in fact poor, blind, and naked (3:17). That boast sounds remarkably like Babylon’s own: “I sit as a queen… and mourning I shall never see” (18:7). By contrast, the church in Smyrna was materially poor, yet Jesus calls it rich (2:9). Later, the beast’s system makes economic life itself a test of allegiance, so that no one can buy or sell without its mark (13:17). Revelation’s answer is neither withdrawal nor despair, but faithful witness, patient endurance, and a refusal to compromise, even at great cost.
A Structural Change
All of this may sound like abstract theological detail. But I have come to believe it describes something central to what is happening around us today.
To see why, we can turn to recent history. Many observers have noticed that American institutions underwent a specific and identifiable change in the last decades of the twentieth century. One recent survey traces it across eight domains:
- Corporations. Milton Friedman’s 1970 argument that a business’s social responsibility is to increase its profits, followed by a shift to stock-based executive pay, made the share price the measure of success. Stock buybacks grew from about 4 percent of corporate net income in the early 1980s to over 60 percent by the late 2010s.
- Health care. The HMO Act of 1973 and Medicare’s 1983 move to fixed payment by diagnosis turned each hospital admission into a margin calculation, opening the door to investor-owned chains and later private equity. National health spending rose from about 7 percent of GDP in 1970 to nearly 20 percent in 2020.
- Politics. Buckley v. Valeo (1976) treated campaign spending as protected speech, and Citizens United (2010) and a companion case cleared the way for super PACs. Outside spending in federal elections grew from $310 million in 2010 to $4.2 billion in 2024.
- Criminal justice. Private prison companies emerged in the 1980s, and contracts that often guaranteed 90 percent occupancy gave them a financial stake in keeping beds full.
- Higher education. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 let universities patent and license federally funded research, while the share of public college revenue paid by students roughly doubled.
- Finance. A series of deregulatory decisions from the late 1970s through 2000 helped the financial sector grow from about 5 percent of GDP in 1980 to over 8 percent by 2006, as household debt doubled relative to the economy.
- Antitrust and labor. The courts narrowed competition law to a single test of consumer prices, while union membership fell from roughly a quarter of workers to about one in ten.
- Media. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (1987) and the Telecommunications Act (1996) moved broadcasting away from a public-interest standard and toward whatever captured attention and advertising dollars, even as roughly 3,300 local newspapers closed after 2005.
Others have documented the same pattern across different sets of institutions. Robert Kuttner’s Everything for Sale (1997) examined labor, medicine, banking, telecommunications, and electric power. Gerald Davis’s Managed by the Markets (2009) traced how financial markets came to shape corporations, employment, government, and household life. Steven Brill’s Tailspin (2018) followed the half-century from 1967 to 2017 through law, finance, labor, lobbying, and campaign finance. And Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian’s The Privatization of Everything (2021) documented how water systems, schools, prisons, health care, and more were turned over to private profit. Some of these changes addressed real problems, and their causes varied, but taken together they point in the same direction: something structural changed in American life.
Babylon in America
When economic forces move from being one part of life to being the measure of all of it, money begins to function like a religion. It becomes where we find our definition of success, where we place our trust for life’s needs, and even how we decide what is right and wrong. Such a deep focus naturally draws our desires toward it, and growing desire eventually becomes greed. In this way money can quietly take the place of God. There is a reason Scripture calls greed idolatry (Colossians 3:5), and a reason Jesus warned that no one can serve both God and money (Matthew 6:24).
Babylon’s evil runs in two directions. Outwardly, it exploits: Revelation’s list of cargo ends with human souls, people reduced to commodities. Inwardly, it seduces: its wealth draws hearts away from God until money itself is worshiped. The changes described above carry both dangers. Some, like prisons paid to stay full, plainly profit at others’ expense. But even where no one is obviously exploited, a society that makes money the measure of everything pulls our attention, trust, and devotion away from God. In both senses, the rise of these patterns can be understood as the rise of Babylon in America today. I think this is one reason faithful living feels so much more challenging now. Human life has always been full of difficulty and complexity, but this new focus bends those ordinary challenges into something different.
Babylon, then, is not a single city but a recurring pattern. It appeared in ancient Babylon, again in Rome, and very likely in other empires since, as the same human tendencies surface generation after generation. What we see in America is probably not the first instance or the last; it is simply the most recent, and the one closest to home. That is why Revelation still speaks so directly to us, and why rejecting the Babylonian perspective remains one of its central messages. It is summed up in 18:4, where God’s people are told to “come out of her,” a command that acknowledges both the danger of Babylonian thinking and the reality that the church is already entangled in it. Coming out does not mean fleeing society. It means withdrawing our trust, our allegiance, and our complicity from a system that competes with God for them.
Revelation is hardly the only place Scripture teaches this. From Babel to the exile, the Bible presents Babylon as the opposite of the kingdom of God. Babylon grasps and exalts itself; Christ emptied himself and humbled himself (Philippians 2:7–8). Babylon trades in human lives; Christ laid down his own.
If any of this is true of our day, what should our response be? I don’t think there is a single, simple answer. Our response almost certainly includes bearing witness to the truth of God, loving and serving others, and honestly examining where each of us may have compromised too much, whether by supporting “Babylon” or by enjoying its worldly rewards while ignoring the warnings of Scripture.
Coming Out
The difficulty so many of us feel in following Jesus is neither imagined nor simply a matter of personal weakness. Over the past half-century, American life has been reorganized around money to a degree earlier generations would hardly recognize, and that reorganization has shaped our institutions, our habits, and our hearts. Scripture has a name for this kind of system, and it has a word for God’s people living within it: come out. That call is addressed not to the world but to the church. If Babylon is rising around us, we cannot treat it as someone else’s problem or wait for better days. We must name it honestly, examine our own entanglement, and recover a way of life whose security, success, and sense of right and wrong come from God rather than from money. That is no small task, but it is the one Revelation sets before us, and it is how the church remains a faithful witness in Babylon without belonging to it.
