The Bad Roman: Christian Politics for Modern Times

Tyler Boyd used to say the Pledge of Allegiance without thinking much about it. Then one word started bothering him: “indivisible.”

At first, he simply stopped saying that word. Eventually, a bigger question followed: If Christians already confess Jesus as King, what exactly are they promising when they pledge allegiance to a nation?

Craig sits down with Tyler, co-creator and writer at The Christian Exile, to discuss his article, “The Case Against Christians Saying the Pledge of Allegiance.”

Together they wrestle with the meaning of faith, loyalty, obedience, and allegiance—from the Greek word pistis and “Jesus is Lord” to Romans 13, competing loyalties, patriotic rituals, and the witness of early Christians like Polycarp and Speratus.

Can Christians respect earthly governments without pledging allegiance to them? And when we say No King but Christ, what does that actually demand of our loyalty?

Listen and consider the words for yourself.

Inside this conversation:

 📖 For Full Show Notes: https://thebadroman.com/show-notes/episode-170

🤝 Connect with Tyler Boyd🤝

Other Resources Mentioned: 

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Stay Bad Romans! No King but Jesus.

The State of Arkansas told Brenda “Granny” Smith to stop attending births.

She wadded up the cease-and-desist letter and threw it away.

Brenda had already spent years helping mothers when she found herself facing state scrutiny, an arrest warrant, legal bills, and what she says were eight years of Facebook screenshots collected as evidence.

Why keep going?

Because Brenda believed God had called her to stand beside women who needed help, and she was not willing to let fear of the state become more important than obedience to Christ.

That lived experience eventually helped her recognize something about herself: the Christian faith she already practiced fit naturally with anarchy built on consent and non-aggression.

Her challenge is simple: “If your faith doesn’t require something difficult of you, why are you even doing it?”

In this episode, Craig and Brenda dig into:

👶 Home birth, midwifery, and informed choice

📖 For Full Show Notes: https://thebadroman.com/show-notes/episode-169

🤝 Connect with Brenda 'Granny' Smith 🤝

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100% of donations above production costs go to local Memphis charities: https://thebadroman.com/donate

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Send this episode to someone and ask: When does obedience become compliance? What should a Christian do when the state commands something that conflicts with conscience? If faith never costs us anything, how much does it actually shape us?

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Adam Stump asked two congregations if they knew Christians lived in Iran. Not one hand went up.

We hear plenty about Iran as an enemy, a government, or a military target. But how often do American Christians think about the people living beneath those labels, including fellow Christians?

Adam joins Craig to talk about Christians in the Middle East, Iranian converts worshiping in underground churches, and what happens when nationalism teaches us who our enemies are before Jesus teaches us how to love them.

Adam puts it simply: “We have tried bombs and bullets and it doesn’t work. Why don’t we try love?”

So Craig asks the question hanging over the whole conversation: Have we actually tried Jesus?

They dig into:

📖 For Full Show Notes:

🤝 Connect with Adam Stump:

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If this conversation with Adam helped you see the people behind the politics, and question whether bombs, borders, and nationalism belong in the way of Jesus, help us keep conversations like this going.

Support The Bad Roman Project at:

100% of donations above production costs go to local Memphis charities.

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FREE: Share & Start a Conversation

Send this episode to a friend and ask: Do we know any of the people we call our enemies? Can Christians be Kingdom people first if national loyalty tells us who to fear? If bombs and political power keep failing us, have we actually tried Jesus?

Meet people. Listen well. Love the person behind the label.

No King but Christ.

🔗 How to Get Involved with the Project 🔗

Does questioning your theology mean you're losing your faith, or could it mean you're finally taking faith seriously?

Craig sits down with Jon Kinder of The Geeky Preacher to talk about Christian deconstruction, church hurt, political allegiance, Christian nationalism, pacifism, hell, the rapture, and what happens when inherited beliefs stop looking like Jesus.

Jon's deconstruction began in two places: politics and a hospital bed.

Growing up in rural Christian culture, Republican politics and Christianity seemed almost inseparable. Then books like Greg Boyd's The Myth of a Christian Nation challenged Jon to judge political power by the teachings of Christ rather than by party loyalty.

A few years later, Jon was hospitalized with stage-three lymphoma. While lying in bed, he heard a television preacher claim that sick people were sick because they did not have enough faith. 

That hit differently when Jon was the person with cancer.

Instead of abandoning Christianity, he began taking his theology apart one question at a time.

His picture of deconstruction is not a wrecking ball. It is a home renovation:

Christ stays as the foundation. The rooms get examined.

Craig and Jon explore:

One line may sum up the whole conversation:

“If anything is true, it's gonna survive scrutiny, it's gonna survive questions.”

Maybe deconstruction is not about destroying faith.

Maybe it is about finding out what was actually built on Jesus.

🤝Connect with Jon Kinder / The Geeky Preacher🤝

📖 Full Show Notes: https://thebadroman.com/show-notes/episode-167

🔗 How to Get Involved with the Project 🔗

When the U.S. wages war in the Middle East that American Christians support, do we remember that some of the people beneath those bombs are fellow Christians? And even when they are not Christians, how can we forget that Jesus calls us to love our neighbor and enemy alike?

Mennonite pastor, writer, screenwriter, and activist Nathan Perrin joins Craig for a conversation about the people Western headlines often leave out. Nathan has spent nearly a decade working alongside Assyrians, Kurds, Palestinians, and other Middle Eastern communities through local organizing and visits to northern Iraq.

He recounts visiting an Assyrian church that had been rebuilt again and again after attempts to destroy it. A cross in its courtyard covered in bullet holes. Yet when new bombardments began, Christian and Muslim neighbors exchanged keys to their homes so each family would have a place of safety.

That act of neighbor-love stands in sharp contrast to the fear often preached in American churches.

Craig and Nathan explore why the word evangelical carries painful baggage in parts of the Middle East. Ancient Christian communities have sometimes been treated as mission targets, while humanitarian aid has been tied to conversion. Nathan challenges us to consider whether people abroad encounter Jesus through Western Christianity, or the pressure of empire.

The conversation also covers:

Nathan reminds listeners that ordinary Muslims he has met often describe Christians in simple terms: “Christians are our neighbors.”

What would change if the Western church began there?

🤝 Connect with Nathan Perrin

📚 Resources Mentioned

📚Full show notes: https://www.thebadroman.com/show-notes/episode-166

Support the project by visiting Spot Fund or grabbing a jar of salsa at https://badromansalsa.com/. All funds received above production costs support charities in Memphis, Tennessee.

Read the Gospels. Meet your neighbors. Refuse to whitewash war.

Key Moments:

(00:00) The Christians missing from our maps

(04:20) A bullet-marked cross and shared house keys

(08:15) Why “evangelical” carries painful baggage

(12:40) Middle Eastern Christians and the cost of intervention

(19:45) Dispensationalism, Zionism, and prophecy politics

(24:45) A Ramadan meal breaks through fear

(32:06) “Christians are our neighbors”

(36:36) Assyrians, Yazidis, and Mandaeans

(41:30) A political issue and a theological issue

(46:23) What remains after Trump

(50:55) Learning to see the people behind the war

(54:18) Nathan’s writing and peace work

🔗 How to Get Involved with the Project 🔗

Ancap Tim returns to discuss his new album, It’s Not Left vs. Right, and the story behind the song inspired by the phrase, “Sometimes being a good Christian means being a bad Roman.”

Drawing from his life as a musician, homesteader, homeschooling father, and Christian anarchist, Tim explains why allegiance to Jesus must come before allegiance to government, party, or nation.

This is not a call to become more anti-government. It is a call to become more like Christ.

They dig into:

Can Christians seek power over their neighbors while following a King who knelt to wash feet? Can love be commanded, enforced, or legislated? What does “Not so with you” mean in a church shaped by political fear and tribal loyalty? Let’s talk about it.

🤝Connect with Ancap Tim🤝

Starting Points and Key Moments:

(00:00) Ancap Tim returns with a new album

(11:42) The salsa table and the song that started it all

(17:18) The law of love versus the logic of coercion

(27:41) When party loyalty overrides Jesus

(35:33) “But I'm Extreme” — who decided what counts as extreme?

(40:16) An AI choir, Rothbard, and Scott Horton

(52:51) The Iran war, Hormuz, and a tragedy neither side can spin away

(1:02:19) The new album, the road, and where to find Tim

📖 For Full Show Notes: thebadroman.com/show-notes/episode-165

Support the Show

💕 Feed the Feed 💕

You can donate to the project at thebadroman.com/donate. Every sized donation helps, and anything beyond production costs is given to charities in Memphis, Tennessee.

🌶️ SALSA THE LOVE 🌶️

Want to support the project another way?

🔗 How to Get Involved with the Project 🔗

When did we start believing that someone has to be in charge?

Maybe it's one of the oldest stories we tell ourselves. If the right people hold power, everything will be okay. If the wrong people do, everything falls apart.

But what if Jesus was inviting us into a completely different way of living?

In this special bonus episode, Craig catches up with longtime friends of the show Larken Rose and Amanda Rose ahead of Approaching Humanity, an upcoming gathering in Sedona. What begins as a conversation about an event quickly becomes something much deeper. Together they explore why people from very different backgrounds keep arriving at the same uncomfortable questions about authority, conscience, and what it means to love our neighbors without trying to rule them.

This isn't a debate about politics. It's a conversation about becoming more fully human, and whether the Kingdom Jesus announced has been offering another way all along.

They dig into:

📖 For full show notes: https://thebadroman.com/show-notes/episode-bonus

The Rose Channel: therosechannel.com

Larken Rose's personal site: larkenrose.com

Candles in the Dark seminar: attendcandles.com

Larken on X: x.com/larken_rose

Larken on YouTube: youtube.com/user/LarkenRose

Approaching Humanity event tickets: therosechannel.com/humanity

Approaching Humanity pre-order the book: therosechannel.com/humanitybook

Sheriff David Hathaway: Sheriff of Santa Cruz County, Arizona; previously featured on The Bad Roman Podcast, Episode 53, “Love at the Border with Sheriff David Hathaway”

Jason Bassler: co-founder of The Free Thought Project and founder of Police the Police

Patrick Smith: host of Disenthrall

Mark Maresca: host of The White Pillbox

Carey Wedler: voluntaryist content creator; former editor-in-chief of Anti-Media

Derrick Broze:  journalist, author, and founder of The Conscious Resistance Network

James Corbett: independent journalist, The Corbett Report, joining remotely from Japan

Rebecca Anzini: speaker on the hidden dangers inside “freedom-minded” intentional communities

Brittany: homeschooling mother, comedian, and past cast member of The Jones Plantation

Key Moments:

(00:00) Announcing Approaching Humanity

(02:02) Who Actually Shows Up

(05:27) Faith, Atheism, and Getting Shut Out

(09:24) The Core Challenge

(13:10) Renaming the Book

(15:30) Rereading “Give Unto Caesar”

(18:52) The God Nobody Names

(23:06) Candles in the Dark

(25:55) Why Approaching Humanity Brings Together So Many Beliefs

(33:22) Meet More of the Speakers

(36:30) Even More Speakers

(41:04) Why the Event Won't Hand the Ring Back

(48:45) Getting to Sedona

3 Ways You Can Support the Show

💕 Feed the Feed 💕

You can donate to the project at thebadroman.com/donate. Everything beyond production costs is sent to charities in Memphis, Tennessee.

🌶️ SALSA THE LOVE 🌶️

Or simply share the show for free!

🔗 How to Get Involved with the Project 🔗

Jesus over empire. Mercy over shame. No King but Christ.

What if the biggest political threat facing the church is not opposition, but formation?

Brian Drinkwine returns to The Bad Roman Podcast to discuss his new book, Kingdom Over Empire: Recovering the Gospel from Political Captivity.

Drawing from his own journey through conservative evangelical politics, Brian explains how empire shapes what Christians fear, whom they treat as enemies, and where they place their hope.

This is not a call to switch parties. It is a call to recover undivided allegiance to Jesus.

They dig into:

Can Christians defend cruelty because their side gets results? Can the Kingdom of a crucified King be advanced through domination, fear, and coercion? Let's talk about it.

📖 For Full Show Notes: thebadroman.com/show-notes/episode-164

🤝Connect with Brian🤝

Kingdom Over Empire: Recovering the Gospel from Political Captivity

Also available through Amazon and other book retailers

Email: [email protected]

Website: https://briandrinkwine.com/

Linkedin

X

Facebook

Instagram 

Ministry at Breakthrough Church

Key Moments:

(00:00) Introducing Kingdom Over Empire

(05:30) A Crisis of Hope and Identity

(09:30) How Empire Disciples Us

(18:50) Enemy-Love and the Way of the Cross

(24:30) Winning, Certainty, and Control

(28:45) When Party Loyalty Overrides Jesus

(36:30) Remembering the Poor and the Marginalized

(43:49) The Cost of Leaving Political Identity

(49:30) Image-Bearers Over Political Categories

(53:25) Constantine and the Co-opted Cross

(57:45) When the Church Gains Power

(1:01:10) Seven Mountains, Cyrus, and Political Power

(1:05:25) Nebuchadnezzar and Assimilation into Babylon

(1:07:45) Assimilation and the Subtle Loss of Identity

(1:09:40) Finding and Sharing the Book

Support the Show

💕 Feed the Feed 💕

You can donate to the project at thebadroman.com/donate. Every sized donation helps, and anything beyond production costs is sent to charities in Memphis, Tennessee.

🌶️ SALSA THE LOVE 🌶️

Want to support the project another way?

🔗 How to Get Involved with the Project 🔗

Jesus over empire. Mercy over shame. No King but Christ.

What happens when the faith you inherited no longer looks like Jesus?

Josif Wright joins Craig to talk about leaving Christian nationalism, questioning the flag-and-cross mixture, and learning to trust Christ instead of political power. Josif is a teacher, coach, hospice chaplain, church speaker, and author of The War Within: My Story.

The conversation later turns toward his son Ryan’s decade-long struggle with addiction. Craig also shares memories of his brother TJ, whose battle with alcohol ended in 2020. Together, they ask what families and churches can do when control fails, shame makes things worse, and love is the only faithful path left.

They dig into:

📖 For Full Show Notes: thebadroman.com/show-notes/episode-163

🤝Connect with Josif🤝

Josif also invites people who cannot afford a copy to email him. His stated goal is not sales, but helping families and people who are struggling.

Key Moments:

00:00 Leaving Christian nationalism

04:20 “Don’t trust the government and be kind”

08:30 God is pro-people

21:40 Flags, pastors, legalism, and fear

25:18 Can Christians pledge to two masters?

29:10 Voting and political identity

34:53 The War Within and Craig’s brother TJ

40:00 A family living on emotional life support

44:05 “Step back. Let God be God”

47:10 Recovery, grace, and new identity

53:40 Why people are more than their addiction

Support the Show

💕 Feed the Feed 💕

Support the show at thebadroman.com/donate. Every gift helps, and everything beyond production costs goes to local charities in Memphis, Tennessee.

🌶️ SALSA THE LOVE 🌶️

Want to support the project another way?

🔗 Stay Connected with the Project 🔗

Jesus over empire. Mercy over shame. No King but Christ.

What does it mean to follow Jesus when governments demand your allegiance, your silence, or your fear?

In this episode of The Bad Roman Project, Craig sits down with Ara Torosian, an Iranian-born Armenian pastor who grew up under the Islamic Republic of Iran, served in the underground church, and now pastors Iranian Christians in Los Angeles.

Ara shares his journey from reading the Bible in Farsi as a teenager to smuggling Bibles, enduring house arrest, and witnessing the explosive growth of Christianity in Iran. He explains why many Western Christians misunderstand both Iran and the Iranian people, and why the underground church continues to thrive despite decades of persecution.

The conversation also turns to the present. Ara discusses Iranian Christian asylum seekers detained by ICE, the challenges facing refugees fleeing persecution, and the responsibility Christians have to speak for those who have no voice.

Along the way, Craig and Ara wrestle with difficult questions about war, government power, national loyalty, and what it means to follow Jesus when political solutions seem inadequate.

At the heart of the discussion is a reminder that the Christian's ultimate citizenship is not found in America, Iran, or any earthly nation, but in the Kingdom of God.

“I'm proud US citizen, but most important, I'm a heaven citizen.” — Ara Torosian

Whether discussing persecution abroad or immigration policy at home, this episode calls listeners back to a simple but challenging truth:

Jesus is King.

📖 For Full Show Notes: http://thebadroman.com/show-notes/episode-162

Key Moments:

(00:00) Government oppression and Iranian Christians

(00:37) Meeting Ara

(02:01) Ara’s background

(03:32) Discovering the Bible in Farsi

(04:06) Childhood under government propaganda

(07:00) Pressure on Christians in Iran

(10:17) Following Jesus when it costs

(11:28) Smuggling Bibles into Iran and house arrest

(12:43) The underground church grows

(15:03) People versus regimes

(17:10) War, freedom, and mixed Iranian views

(30:57) Craig presses the Jesus question

(33:32) Ara’s struggle with war and peace

(34:46) Presenting, not protesting

(35:37) Government worship in churches

(37:03) Politics inside the church

(48:38) ICE arrests and asylum seekers

(52:03) Masked agents and trauma

(54:00) Broken immigration system

(55:44) Children praying for their dad

(56:08) Speaking because he can

(58:00) What Christians should show

(59:36) Silence and complicity

(01:01:03) Life belongs to Jesus

(01:03:11) Bad Roman Salsa break

(01:03:54) How many Christians in Iran?

(01:05:30) Where to find Ara

(01:07:14) Lakers, Luka, and closing

🔗 Ways to Get Involved in the Project 🔗