Bow Not to the Golden Screen
Resisting Empire and Idolatry in an Age of Spectacle
Recently, an AI-generated video surfaced depicting golden statues of the President towering over Gaza. It was an eerie image that recalls the long history of empires using spectacle to command allegiance. These kinds of images are not new. Nebuchadnezzar did the same in Babylon, erecting a golden statue and demanding people bow before it (Daniel 3). The Roman Empire followed, using grand imagery, monuments, and emperor worship to assert its divine authority. The imperial cult of Rome required not just political allegiance but religious devotion, with emperors being honored as gods, their images displayed in temples, and sacrifices made in their name. Revelation warns of a future where people are deceived by an image of the beast (Revelation 13:14-15), a symbol of the empire’s power to captivate the eyes and hearts of the people.
Empire has always sought to control reality through worship as spectacle. Whether through golden statues, massive parades, or now, digital propaganda, the goal remains the same: to fix the people’s eyes on the empire, to make them watch instead of live. Unfortunately, Christian faith in America has muddied the waters by taking the "spectacle-over-substance" approach to worship and discipleship. Nothing evidences this more than the highly produced, streaming virtual worship experiences that are ubiquitous on social media. Faith risks becoming just another form of passive consumption rather than embodied participation.
“In two decades you will not go to church in person, and your avatar will go in your place.”
Leonard Sweet, 2001
The Shift to Virtual Worship
In 2001, I heard Leonard Sweet speak to a group of Pentecostals at a conference on the emerging church. His topic was the future of the church. He took the stage and said, "In two decades you will not go to church in person, and your avatar will go in your place." At the time, I thought it was hyperbole—provocative, but unrealistic. Yet here we are. Church services are streamed like content, fellowship happens in comment sections, and some people genuinely believe that virtual worship is a sufficient substitute for the gathered body of Christ.
Twenty years later, I had lunch with a pastor during the early days of COVID when churches were forced to shift to online worship and programming. He asked me what I thought the effects of this shift would mean for the church. I told him, “People will stay home more and consume their worship services on a screen. Churches will invest more in creating good streaming content to compete with other media and give Christian consumers what they want. Then, the greatest challenge the church will face is keeping Christianity an incarnational faith—a faith of blood, sweat, and tears. A faith that eats the body of the Lord Jesus, washes one another's feet, anoints and lays hands on the sick, comforts the mourning, rejoices with the joyful, and acts as though Christians are the physical hands and feet of Jesus in their communities."
When I moved to the mountains as a young minister, there were still a few faith healers active in the area. Many of my older church members had been healed in tent revivals and would tell me about the miraculous things they had seen. I asked an older minister if there were any recordings of those services, and he said there were very few. I told him I wished there were more so we could see them. His response surprised me: “I don’t believe that stuff was meant to be recorded. It was for that moment and for those people. Not for us to gawk at.”
I realize it makes me sound old-fashioned, but I am increasingly not a fan of recorded and streamed worship services. In my head I hear the lyrics, "It always feels like, somebody's watching me." I have attended churches where the camera crews weaved in and out of the congregation, putting their cameras directly in the faces of sincere worshipers, tears streaming down their faces, just to capture the emotion of the moment. These are moments of vulnerability, sacred encounters where people lay their souls bare before God. They are not performances. I can’t imagine being a young person in church today, knowing my most intense moments of spiritual transformation might be watched by strangers on the internet. Worship should be a sanctuary from the world, not another form of content to be consumed.
When everything is mediated through a screen, we lose something sacred. The church is not meant to be an endless stream of content, a performance to be consumed at our convenience. It is meant to be lived, to be experienced in flesh and blood. The more we allow the spectacle to shape our faith, the more we risk losing the unmediated sacred—the kind of presence that cannot be digitized, only encountered.
Faithful Resistance in an Age of Illusion
Daniel and his friends refused to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, and Revelation warns against bowing to the beast’s image. The temptation has always been the same—fix your eyes on the empire, let it define your reality, and conform to its illusions. But Scripture also provides a model for resisting the pull of empire and reclaiming an embodied, faithful witness.
Faithful resistance begins with where we fix our eyes. Daniel prayed daily facing Jerusalem, not Babylon (Daniel 6:10). His worship was not dictated by the empire’s expectations but by his covenant with God. The early Christians in Revelation’s time faced a similar challenge—Rome demanded their attention, their loyalty, their very worship. Yet John’s vision revealed an alternative reality: the Lamb on the throne, not the empire, held true authority. The faithful were those who did not give their allegiance to the beast’s spectacle but instead held to the testimony of Jesus (Revelation 14:12).
Jesus himself modeled an embodied faith that resisted the illusions of power and performance. He touched the untouchable, healed through physical presence, and broke bread with his followers rather than offering distant words. His kingdom was not mediated through images or spectacle but through presence, community, and love. His resistance to empire was not in seizing control of Rome’s platforms but in living a counter-witness of proximity and incarnational ministry.
Christian resistance today must follow these examples. To resist the empire of spectacle and digital illusions, we must prioritize embodied faith over mediated experiences. This means:
Gathering in real spaces, where the Spirit moves in the midst of people who pray, worship, and break bread together.
Committing to community, refusing to allow algorithms and curated feeds to replace flesh-and-blood relationships.
Practicing a faith that cannot be consumed, rejecting the commodification of worship and instead embracing sacramental, participatory worship.
Following the example of Christ and the saints, from Daniel to the early martyrs to MLK and Bonhoeffer, who resisted the empire’s illusions by living fully in the reality of God’s kingdom.
Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazi regime was rooted in his belief that Christianity could not survive as a private or abstract idea—it had to be lived in real discipleship, with real people, in real presence. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement was fueled by the belief that faith must be embodied in justice, in gathering, in bearing witness with physical presence. Both understood that to bow to the illusion of empire—whether through political spectacle or disembodied faith—was to betray the Gospel itself.
To remain faithful in an age of illusion, we must recover a theology of presence. We must choose to gather when it would be easier to stay home, choose to engage in community when it would be simpler to scroll, choose to resist the spectacle when it would be effortless to consume. We must insist that faith is not a broadcast but a life lived in communion with God and others.
Reclaiming Embodied Worship
The Body of Christ is not a collection of viewers; it is a gathered people. This means we must:
Be physically present—The Spirit moves in real places, among real people, in real time. Virtual connection can never replace the sacramental mystery of shared presence.
Engage in participatory worship—Church is not a performance to watch but a community to join. Singing, praying, laying hands, breaking bread—these require presence.
Refuse to let convenience dictate our discipleship—The cross was not convenient. Discipleship has always required sacrifice, proximity, and commitment.
In an era where screens dominate our attention, resisting the empire of illusion means refusing to let virtual reality replace embodied faith. It means prioritizing the real over the spectacle, presence over performance, worship over watching. The church’s power has never been in its ability to produce an engaging broadcast. It has always been in the Spirit’s power moving among a gathered people.
If we are to resist the slow drift into digital disembodiment, we must reclaim the incarnational nature of our faith. We must be present. We must prioritize embodied worship over convenience, participation over observation, and communion over consumption.
The world tells us we can exist as avatars. But Christ tells us we must be the Body. And bodies need to be together. Because in the end, salvation was never meant to be downloaded. It was meant to be lived.. The temptation has always been the same—fix your eyes on the empire, let it define your reality, and conform to its illusions.