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Has the external form of the Christian Church long been taken over by dark forces?
This is the provocative suggestion made by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, himself a Christian, in his 1984 book La subversion du Christianisme.
He warns: “There exists a demonic and infernal power which seeks to annihilate creation. Death”. [1]
He notes that in the modern world any such notion tends to be dismissed as ridiculous, but adds: “We should always remember the dictum that the devil’s greatest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist”. [2]
And he quotes St Paul’s statement in Ephesians that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”. [3]
Ellul (pictured) explains that he sees the various dark forces involved as not being physically real in themselves.
“They are certainly powers ‘in the heavenly places’ but they have no existence other than in their relation to humans”. [4]
He sets out his belief that although evil has already – and eternally – been defeated by Jesus Christ on the spiritual level, it persists in our world and tries to prevent God’s love from being present here.
“What these defeated powers can still do is to dramatise the situation on Earth, to make human life intolerable, to destroy faith and people’s confidence in each other, to make them suffer, to kill love, to prevent hope from being born.
“In other words, what seems to me to be biblically certain is that the evil powers are turning Earth into a Hell”. [5]
One of these dark forces is named in the Bible as Mammon. Ellul says that Mammon corrupted the Christian Church (of all denominations) by making it focus on its finances at the expense of its faith.
“It was really this demonic power that lent to money a power such as that all that should have been grace, gratuity and facility became bitter conquest, possession and obsession”. [6]
“Mammon established its law in the Church exclusively to the extent that this Church lost its relationship to Jesus Christ”. [7]
The same applies to the evil force known in the Bible as “the prince of this world”, according to Ellul. “No expression of power and domination is, or can be, willed by the God of Jesus Christ”. [8]
While Christ himself refused the devil’s offer of power over all the kingdoms of the world – which were evidently already in the latter’s possession! – the Church succumbed to this temptation.
“The subversion of Christianity has consisted of it allowing itself to be penetrated, seduced and led by the prince of the world”. [9]
Alongside money and power, the Church has also been infected by the malevolence of lies, accusations and division, Ellul argues.
“Wherever there is division, conflict, rupture, competition, combat, discord, disharmony, divorce, exclusion, maladaptation (and we have to take each of these words in all its scope, and completely seriously), there is the devil”. [10]
“There is no head of state inspired by the Holy Spirit. There is no capitalist who gains success through the Holy Spirit. There is no development of science and Technik guided by the Holy Spirit”. [11]
He asks: “How is it that the development of Christian society and the Church has given birth to a society, a civilization and a culture that are the complete opposite of what we read about in the Bible?” [12]
“There is not just drift, but a radical and essential contradiction – a real subversion“. [13]
Ellul gives the label “X” to the original pure Christian faith, of Jesus and St Paul.
This still lives on in the heart of the Church, he says, and is periodically renewed in different forms and places.
But organised Christianity lost its way very early on, when it allowed itself to become an institution and a systematic philosophy rather than a revelation often based on paradox. [14]
It became separated, in many ways, from what he regards as the essence of X.
“X is subversive in every direction and Christianity became conservative and anti-subversive. X is subversive against all kinds of power”. [15]
Ellul insists that the original X faith was anti-state, anti-political and anti-ideological. [16]
It even points us to “an ‘anarchism’ (so long as this word does not designate the anarchist doctrine of the 19th century)”. [17]
But once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it formed part of the structures it originally rejected.
Its legitimacy was boosted by the backing of the state, and the state in turn derived supposed moral legitimacy from the support of the Church.
As more and more people, in Rome and beyond, converted to Christianity, it became a victim of its own success.
Although these people came to the Church with honest intentions, they brought with them the assumptions and outlooks from their previous (pagan) beliefs.
As well as absorbing many of these outlooks, the Church felt it had to set out rules and guidelines about what being a Christian should involve, thus further betraying its anarchic roots.
I was interested to see that Ellul tackles the question of desacralisation – the theme of my latest book, Our Sacred World. [18]
This was a part of what he calls “the struggle of Christianity against the traditional structures of societies”. [19]
He observes that Christian preaching “destroyed old beliefs and religions, often leaving people rudderless, without tradition and roots”. [20]
I agree with him that Christian desacralisation can be traced back to the idea of a totally transcendent deity, which dispatched all sacredness up into the sky, leaving none on the Earth. [21]
Ellul writes that it seems people feel a need for sacredness in the world and find it difficult to live without it – whenever there is an increase in desacralisation, there is a reaction in the form of a different kind of sacredness coming to the fore.
The Church’s attempts to desacralise the pagan world thus only resulted in its own institutions and practices instead becoming seen as sacred.
Ellul regards this as part of the subversion of the pure faith of X.
He says: “Original Christian thought and, before that, Biblical Jewish thought, were not initially religions forming part of pre-ordained sacredness, but on the contrary were phenomena that were terribly critical with regard to the whole sacred pagan universe.
“It has been stressed that there was no kind of religious rivalry, for instance, but rather a will to destroy the religious per se and a negation of all sacredness”. [22]
“When, within the Church, people sought to return to its ‘origins’, such as at the time of the Protestant Reformation, this manifested as a violent movement of desacralisation.
“The struggle of the Reformation was almost entirely centred on the will to destroy the ‘sacred’ that had invaded the Roman Catholic Church”. [23]
Ellul is quite clear about the theological inspiration behind this war on the sacred.
He reminds us that, for the Jewish faith, “God is absent from the world”. [24]
“Everyone knows that in the Jewish Bible, in the Pentateuch and Prophets, there is a violent attack on religions.
“We too often interpret this in the most elementary manner by considering this to be a question of a conflict between religions.
“This is not at all the case. In reality, the struggle was waged against the sacred.
“The gods who were refused and rejected were the gods of Nature. It was the Moon goddess, the god of reproduction, the god of thunder and so on.
“It is thus a question of considering the things or forces of nature, as things and forces which are not in the least bit sacred”. [25]
“The conflict was initially waged against the sacred of the Canaanites and the Chaldeans and to a lesser and more distant extent against the sacred of the Egyptians.
“The most important struggle was not of ‘monotheism’ against polytheism (although that was part of it, of course!) but the idea, the concept, of creation as set out in Genesis I and II.
“Everything is purely and simply Creation. In other words an object, a thing, which has issued from the Creator but contains none of its divine origin, which involves no mystery, which carries no hidden power.
“A wood is a wood and not the home of a Pan, or of goddesses. Water, in a spring or an ocean, is just water. The Moon is a light fixture showing the passing of time… The Biblical creation is totally desacralising”. [26]
Ellul, that famous critic of technocracy, [27] is well aware of where this Hebrew “struggle against the sacralisation of natural forces” [28] was to lead.
He writes: “God is really outside the world and this world is brought to its mystery-free reality.
“It is thus delivered into the hands of man, who can use it without being worried about offending some sacred force or other”. [29]
The desacralisation agenda was passed on from Protestant Christianity to the “scientific” outlook pioneered by the Invisible College of 17th century England as a necessary prelude to the Industrial Revolution. [30]
Ellul notes this connection to “science and Technik”, adding: “Since things were only things, nothing more, since there was neither divinity hidden within, nor mysterious power, one could simultaneously try to know them absolutely and also to put them to unlimited use”. [31]
I would say that our need to live in a meaningful and sacred world, as acknowledged by Ellul, forms part of our innate yearning for what is good and natural.
But for Ellul, the Christian Revelation is about challenging what naturally seems right to humanity, not reflecting it.
“What the New Testament understands by being Christian is precisely what is most contrary to man”. [32]
He regards it as a perversion of Christianity – “an enormous deviation of Christian thought and theology” [33] – that it was influenced by the Islamic view that its faith “conformed perfectly to nature”. [34]
Ellul also condemns the mysticism that he suspects was introduced into Christianity via Islam, insisting, in a rather severe tone: “There is, as I have often written, no ascent, no possible access to God”. [35]
The only possible communication, he maintains, is a top-down one, involving the descent of God to speak his Word to humankind.
I remain baffled by the way that some Christians accept and bolster the arrogant and supremacist self-mythologising of a non-Christian people.
Ellul, for instance, insists: “In the Diaspora or in Israel, the chosen people remains the chosen people, because God is loyal”. [36]
The Divine that I personally recognise has no favourites, but is made of love for all humankind and indeed for the whole of the sacred living world of which we are part.
Despite such differences, I can see and feel the light that shines through authentic Christian belief such as Ellul’s.
And I share, in a manner that transcends specific beliefs, his conviction that the dark forces currently dominating the world and the Church will be defeated by the power of good.
Having painted the grim picture with which we began this article, he writes: “And yet the cross planted at the heart of history cannot be ripped out.
“And yet Christ resurrected is with us until the end of the world.
“And yet the Holy Spirit acts secretly but with infinite patience”. [37]
[1] Jacques Ellul, La subversion du christianisme (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2018), p. 298. All subsequent page references are to this work and all translations are my own.
[2] p. 269.
[3] Ibid.
[4] p. 270.
[5] p. 272.
[6] p. 273.
[7] p. 274.
[8] p. 275.
[9] p. 276.
[10] p. 283.
[11] p. 291.
[12] p. 9.
[13] Ibid.
[14] p. 71
[15] p. 25.
[16] p. 180
[17] p. 180.
[18] Paul Cudenec, Our Sacred World: Enjoyed, denied and found again, (2025) https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/our-sacred-worldonline.pdf
[19] p. 138.
[20] Ibid.
[21] p. 74.
[22] p. 87.
[23] Ibid.
[24] p. 91.
[25] p. 88.
[26] p. 89.
[27] https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/jacques-ellul/
[28] p. 89.
[29] p. 90.
[30] Cudenec, ‘The Invisible College and the plan for our enslavement’, Our Sacred World, pp. 81-100.
[31] p. 96.
[32] p. 237.
[33] p. 158.
[34] p. 157.
[35] p. 164.
[36] p. 302.
[37] p. 292.
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