Naming and Unmasking the Powers

A Spiritual Practice for Contested Times

If you're just joining me
Welcome. This space is rooted in a longing for faithful resistance in an age of rising authoritarianism. You might start with this first post, where I share the heart behind it all.

“From the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred…” I Chron. 12:32

“Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”

—Karl Barth (Primary author of the Barmen Declaration)

“Of all the principalities—whether of class, race, commerce, ideology, or whatever—none in America or other countries is more persevering and grandiose in its demands upon the Church than the nation… The essential claim with which the principality of the nation addressed the Church in America is, simply, that the Church stand ready to serve the national self-interest at any given time.”

—William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience, p. 84

“One way, in America, in which the churches have accommodated themselves to the nation is by their acquiescence to the very popular notion that religion is supposed to have only to do with ‘religion,’ not with the great issues of public life…”

—William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience, p. 84-85

When Theology Moves into the Streets: The Witness of William Stringfellow

William Stringfellow was not your typical theologian. He was a lawyer by training, a street-level advocate by vocation, and a prophetic witness to the powers that deform our world. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he chose not to work among the elite in Manhattan but to live in Black and Brown East Harlem in a rat-infested one-bedroom apartment, representing the poor and confronting systems that dehumanized. For Stringfellow, theology wasn’t something you wrote from an ivory tower—it was something you lived, on the ground, in the contested space between life and death.

His central conviction was this: that the church’s faithfulness requires us to recognize, name, and resist what the Bible calls the principalities and powers, those spiritual realities that work through images, institutions, and ideologies to demand allegiance and perpetuate death. In short, they are imposters of God.

The Powers Are Not Out There – They Are Embodied Realities

The Powers rarely present themselves as overtly evil; more often, they masquerade as good. They are social structures, cultural narratives, public personas, ideologies, and institutions. Stringfellow saw the principalities not as abstract metaphors, but as real, created entities, fallen, but powerful. Their original vocation was to serve life and glorify God. But in the Fall, they turned inward, seeking to dominate humanity rather than serve it.

What’s incredibly deceptive is that the principalities often work through the very things we’re told to trust: our workplaces, our nation, our religious institutions, and even our image. When we surrender our identity, security, or significance to these things, we surrender ourselves to something that cannot give life. The principalities are not neutral. They compete for our worship.

The Demonic Tactics of the Powers

Stringfellow didn’t shy away from the word demonic, though he used it differently than many might expect. For him, the demonic was not a cartoonish devil or a convenient scapegoat, it was the real and recognizable presence of death in the world: wherever truth is distorted, justice denied, or human dignity crushed.

For a deeper dive into the distinctions between Satan, the demonic, and the principalities and powers, and the contested question of whether the latter can be redeemed, I explore this further in The Scandal of Leadership.

According to Stringfellow, one of the demonic's primary tactics is the denial of truth. The principalities operate through deception. They don’t just tell lies, they construct entire worlds of untruth, replacing reality with propaganda. They don’t just doctor the truth; they seek to claim that truth is fiction.

The tactics of demonic powers tend to be verbal—babel—representing Babylon. Stringfellow names their tactics: doublespeak, euphemisms, slogans, coded language, and manipulation of meaning. “War is peace,” “freedom is slavery, ” “ignorance is strength”, we’ve heard these before. They shape the way we see the world.

But the problem isn’t just what is said, it’s how often. The Powers rely on what Stringfellow called overtalk, a relentless flood of language that overwhelms our ability to think clearly. When deception is repeated loudly and constantly, people start to believe it. Truth becomes relative, and reality becomes negotiable.

Sound familiar?

We see this tactic in political rhetoric, corporate spin, and media cycles that numb more than inform. We see it in the growing rejection of shared facts and the ease with which conspiracy theories capture the imagination. The tactic is to wear people down, confuse them, and reshape their consciousness. Tragically, the church is not immune.

This is why Stringfellow insisted that naming the Powers is not just social critique, it’s spiritual resistance. Unmasking the lies and speaking the truth plainly is to participate in liberating people from demonic control.

Setting the Stage: The Rise of Authoritarianism

As we’ve seen, the Powers are always at work, but they become more visible and violent in some seasons. We are living in one of those seasons now. Across the globe, and increasingly here in the U.S., we’re witnessing a resurgence of authoritarianism: strongmen politics, cults of personality, state-sponsored lies, the erosion of democratic norms, and the reassertion of control through fear and force.

Authoritarianism is not just a political trend. It is a principality.

It combines image (the spectacle of the leader), institution (the machinery of the state), and ideology (a baptized nationalism) into a potent cocktail of idolatry. And when Christians bless it, whether by silence or outright support, they become servants of death rather than witnesses to life.

That’s why in my next post, I will name and unmask the principality of authoritarianism. I will explore how it functions, why it’s so seductive, and how the church is called not to protect or bless it, but to resist it, in the name and power of the risen Christ.

But for now, let us return to Stringfellow’s core insight: the Christian life is a form of resistance—not through violence, but through the freedom of resurrection.

Resurrection Is the Heart of Our Resistance

For Stringfellow, death is the reigning power in this world, and the principalities are its servants. But Jesus, by dying and rising again, disarmed the powers (Col. 2:15) and broke death’s hold on history. That doesn’t mean the Powers are gone, but it means they are exposed. Their bluff has been called. Their days are numbered.

To live in the power of the resurrection is to refuse to give ultimate allegiance to anything that isn’t God. It is to live sacramentally, seeing the ordinary things of life (money, meals, presence, protest) as acts of worship. It is to live politically, refusing to be silent when truth is under siege. It is to live communally, creating spaces of justice, peace, and mutuality that defy the logic of domination.

And it is to name the principalities.

Not just to critique them. Not just to reform them. But to expose them for what they are: fallen, seductive, death-dealing idols that pretend to be God.

Conclusion: Learn to Discern the Powers

So what does this mean for us today?

It means learning to see. It means naming what others are afraid to name. It means confronting the white nationalism that dresses up in religious language, often cloaked in appeals to heritage, security, or “Christian values”, but which betrays the gospel through its idolatry of race and power.

I won’t be able to explore white nationalism more fully here, but I hope to address its spiritual and political force in a coming reflection, drawing on the witness of Stringfellow and others who have unmasked racism as a principality in its own right.

It means resisting the ideologies that promise salvation through domination or political strength. It means recognizing that while we care deeply about what happens in America, our truest allegiance is to Christ, and from that place, we seek not to abandon our nation but to bear faithful witness within it. Even as the principalities are fallen, they are not beyond redemption. And so we resist them, not with hatred or despair, but with hope, truth, and the daring belief that even now, they can be transformed.

William Stringfellow never held public office. He never led a megachurch. But from a small apartment in East Harlem, he saw what many with power still cannot: that the real battle is not between left and right, but between life and death.

And the church must choose life.

Looking Ahead

This post continues a journey I began in my introductory reflection on faithful resistance in an age of AI, authoritarianism, and unraveling norms. If you haven’t had a chance to read that opening piece, you can find it here. In the weeks ahead, I’ll keep exploring what it means to follow Jesus in contested times, naming the principalities, resisting the seductive power of death, and discerning how we live, speak, and act in ways that embody hope. Our context is shifting rapidly, and the path may change, but the calling remains: to listen deeply for the Spirit’s guidance and walk in the Way of Jesus, no matter the cost.

• The Rise of Authoritarianism: Why Naming Matters Now

  A reflection on the unraveling of democratic norms in the U.S., naming the signs of rising authoritarianism with spiritual and moral clarity.

• Unmasking the Spirit of the Age – In the Grip of Foust

  A deeper dive into the currents beneath the chaos, engaging The Fourth Turning (Strauss and Howe), Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence, and the haunting cycles traced by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West.

• The Engine of Autocracy: Technocrats, Oligarchs, and the New Architecture of Control

  Behind the rise of autocracy lies a deeper system, where technocracy and oligarchy form a new architecture of control that demands spiritual discernment and faithful resistance.

• A Faithful Witness to the Reign of God Amid the Powers of Authoritarianism and Oligarchy

  A reflection on the life and witness of Óscar Romero, who stood with courage and compassion against the intertwined powers of state violence and elite control, offering a vision of faithful resistance rooted in the love of God and the dignity of the poor.

If these words resonate, I invite you to subscribe (if you haven’t), share them with others, and join the struggle to live humanly amid death. The principalities are fierce, but they are not ultimate. Christ is risen, and in that resurrection, our hope endures. We resist not alone, but together, bearing witness to the life that cannot die.

Not just exposure, but embodiment.

Not just defiance, but discipleship.

Not just critique, but cruciform hope.