The Epiphany Season: By Another Road

Several years ago, I began an annual practice of giving my children a final gift on Epiphany. The purpose was to remind them that Christmas lasts more than one day, with the twelve days of Christmas occurring after December 25. Epiphany is also its own season, leading into Lent.

In their minds, this deeply theological practice simply means they get to open one more present before returning to school. The story of the Magi traveling from afar in Matthew 2 to bring gifts to the newborn king is often wrapped into the holiday magic of Christmas day, limiting its prophetic witness. 

Epiphany means “revealing” and is frequently depicted with quaint scenes of camels kneeling before a manger and gifts of incense and gold bestowed upon the lowly Holy Family. The biblical story, however, is introduced with explicit political framing.

“In the time of King Herod,” Matthew begins.

It is the story of Magi following a mysterious star. But it is also the story of a ruler, threatened by the whisper of a newborn rival, who commissions these travelers to discover—and disclose to him—the location of this political threat.

The revelation at the heart of Epiphany is certainly the revealing of the messiah to the Gentiles and to the whole world. But it is also the revealing to the wise men of Herod’s true plans and character.

“Having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road” (Matthew 2:12). The wise men, after meeting Jesus, the king, were able to recognize the tyrant who ruled the land.

Selective Memory

It has always struck me that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, took place on Epiphany. What should have been a day of revealing the true plans and character of a tyrant—and the depths of our political brokenness—for those Christians with ears to hear the stories of the Gospels is now a day that, much like Epiphany in our holiday calendars, is largely forgotten.

Nearly four years later, following Donald Trump’s victory speech late on election night 2024, a group gathered in the lobby outside the convention center ballroom and sang “How Great Thou Art.” This moment foreshadowed the many public cries of “God is good” and “God is in control” on social media and in churches after the election, suggesting that God had ordained this figure to “bring America back to God.” It also echoed the symbol of the cross carried by the crowd on January 6 as they sacked the Capitol.

All of this represents the growth of Christian nationalism—and more specifically, white Christian nationalism—over the course of the 21st century.

Christian nationalism has existed in some form throughout U.S. history. Pamela Cooper-White describes it as “a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives and value systems that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civil life.”

Yet it is easy for progressive Christians to name Christian nationalism as a fringe movement or an ideology confined to conservative evangelicals— something of which other Christians are guilty, but not ourselves. While more than 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump—a number virtually unchanged for the third straight presidential election—72% of all white Christians did, including Catholics and mainline Protestants.

Like so many other “-isms” (i.e. racism, sexism, ableism), it is easy to distance ourselves from Christian nationalism while allowing its existence in other forms of Christianity to buttress our own sense of moral superiority. This would be a mistake.

As with so many other collective sins, we are complicit. Progressives are not immune to the tendency to conflate faith with patriotism and our efforts to “other” conservative forms of nationalism only feed its growth and intensity. 

In fact, a recent report found that more than half of Americans who attend weekly religious services qualify as Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers. The mentality of grievance that fuels Christian nationalism is part of a vicious cycle in which progressives and conservatives alike participate.

A few months before the 2024 election, a reporter interviewed someone at a Trump rally who described the feeling of “love” present at such events. I questioned how love could be an appropriate description for a gathering where the dominant rhetoric centers on vengeance and the vilification of immigrants, the media and “radical leftists.”

But I realized the love this supporter felt was a sense of belonging—to a movement and to a community. While fears about the loss of political power and the cultural shifts associated with demographic change—such as the projection that by 2050 white Americans will no longer be a majority—fuel this movement, one underappreciated appeal is this sense of belonging.

Research shows, however, this belonging is rooted in grievance. Political philosopher Wendy Brown calls this phenomenon “wounded attachments” and “injured identities.” People become deeply invested in their own woundedness—real or imagined, experienced or anticipated—until marginalization and grievance become central to their sense of self.

Wounded attachments create a sense of collective grievance and even camaraderie within that grievance, so powerful that it limits a group’s ability to imagine a future bright enough to overcome its perceived injuries. In the case of MAGA Christian nationalists, anxieties about cultural and racial change converge with a sense of communion among those who share them.

Epiphany’s Lesson

Five years after January 6, the Epiphany season offers the sobering lesson that we may need to return home by another road. The path that has brought us to this point is not working. 

We must continue to call out injustice and remember that our faith is political. But we must also extend an invitation—to belong, to purpose and to a future bright enough to overcome injury and difference, if we are willing to work for it.

Sociologist James Davison Hunter asks what the counterexample to marginalization that produces “injured identity” might be and he points to the civil rights movement. Black Americans did not suffer injury in silence. Their marginalization galvanized a powerful collective identity—but one that propelled them toward action.

That action was not a nihilistic cycle of revenge or perpetual grievance. Instead, people gathered in houses of worship, civic institutions and schools to organize protests and civil disobedience, voter registration drives and mass meetings. They were guided by a vision of a brighter future for everyone.

Epiphany is a call to inclusion, to purpose and to the vision of such a future. 

The star shining in the darkness guides us to a king who rules because he humbled himself unto death (Philippians 2:5–11); who reigns as a lamb that was sacrificed (Revelation 5:6–7); who is proclaimed king even as he dies for the sake of the world (Mark 15:26). It points us toward a politics not organized around grievance, but around radical belonging—a kingdom that belongs to children, tax collectors and the destitute (Mark 10:14; Matthew 18:3; Matthew 21:31; Luke 18:16), not to the rich and powerful (Matthew 19:23; Mark 10:23; Luke 18:24–25), but to the poor (Luke 6:20). It requires sacrifice and commitment, but also the posture of a servant: “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them … but it shall not be so among you” (Matthew 20:25–26).

Like Epiphany, the anniversary of January 6 reveals who we are—as a nation, as Christians, and especially as white Christians prone toward nationalism and grievance. The baby king in a manger reveals another way, another road by which we might travel together—one that calls us to radical belonging and higher purpose, where our thriving is bound up with the thriving of all. 

We would be wise to follow that bright, guiding star.

This article contains adaptations from Norris’s new book, Liberating Jesus: Christian Ethics for Privileged People, available now from Bloomsbury Press.