Romans Was Written to the Capital of an Empire. America Should Read It Again

An ancient letter about political power, expelled populations, moral hypocrisy, disputed dinner menus, and the people who actually hold a society together has some disturbingly specific things to say about the United States.

The Book of Romans was written nearly two thousand years ago, addressed to people living at the center of the most powerful empire in the Mediterranean world.

That alone makes it an interesting document to place over the United States in 2026.

But the surprising parallels are not the obvious ones. Rome had armies; America has armies. Rome collected taxes; America collects taxes. Rome believed itself exceptional; America often does too.

Those comparisons are easy, and relatively shallow.

The stranger discoveries appear when we examine the actual circumstances of Paul's letter, the order of its arguments, and the oddly specific problems he thought were important enough to address.

A government had expelled members of a minority population. Religious communities were struggling with who belonged and whose traditions should dominate. People were condemning behavior in others that they excused in themselves. The government possessed the authority to use deadly force. Communities disagreed about what food could be eaten and which days mattered. Some regions were asked to support poorer people elsewhere.

And much of the work of maintaining the movement was being done by individuals who barely appear in the grand historical narratives.

There is a serious limitation to this comparison: Romans is a Christian theological letter about sin, faith, grace, Israel, and salvation through Jesus Christ. It is not a prediction of the United States or a disguised political constitution.

But a letter written to believers living inside an empire can reveal surprisingly durable features of human societies.

Especially when a modern society starts confusing its own power with its righteousness.

1. The original Roman Christians may have been dealing with the aftermath of an expulsion

Romans 9-11, 14-15

This is perhaps the most unexpectedly specific historical connection.

Around the middle of the first century, Emperor Claudius expelled at least some Jews from the city of Rome. The commonly proposed date is approximately AD 49, though the precise chronology and extent of the expulsion remain debated.

Jewish followers of Jesus were likely among those affected.

After Claudius died in AD 54, expelled Jews could return.

Now consider what might have happened inside the early Christian communities.

Jewish believers had helped establish the movement. During their absence, Gentile Christians may have become more influential, developed their own practices, and assumed leadership. When Jewish believers returned, they encountered communities that had changed.

Who now defined acceptable religious practice? Whose traditions were normal? Did the returning community have to assimilate to the newer majority?

This is one prominent scholarly reconstruction of the tensions behind Romans, not a proven account of every congregation. Paul never explicitly describes the expulsion in the letter.

Yet the possibility transforms how we read the text.

Romans repeatedly argues against Jewish and Gentile believers treating one another as religiously inferior. By chapter 15, Paul calls for mutual welcome.

The American parallel is not that modern immigration policy is identical to Claudius's expulsion. The legal systems, populations, and circumstances differ substantially.

It is the second-order effect.

When a government changes who may live somewhere, it also changes who gets to define the culture of that place.

Even when the excluded population returns, the institutions it helped create may have developed without it.

American arguments about immigration, citizenship, demographic change, historical belonging, and cultural assimilation often concentrate on the people entering or leaving.

Romans invites another question: What happens to a community's identity when political power changes its membership?

And who gets to claim that the resulting culture was always theirs?

2. Romans 1 and Romans 2 form a trap for people who believe they are morally superior

Romans 1:18-32; 2:1-11

This may be the most relevant feature of the entire letter to American political culture.

Romans 1 describes serious human wrongdoing: idolatry, distorted desire, envy, greed, deceit, violence, arrogance, and other failures.

For centuries, readers have used that chapter to identify what they believe is wrong with other people.

But Paul does something remarkably important at the beginning of chapter 2.

He turns toward the person doing the judging.

The person who condemns another while practicing comparable wrongs is also implicated.

The rhetorical movement matters.

First, Paul offers the reader behavior to condemn.

Then he warns that the act of condemnation does not place the reader outside the problem.

It is almost a built-in safeguard against the misuse of the preceding chapter.

Now consider the machinery of American political commentary.

A politician's deception is unforgivable when committed by the opposing party, but strategically necessary when committed by an ally.

The same exercise of executive power becomes either an emergency or an act of leadership depending on who occupies the office.

The same billionaire can be described as a dangerous oligarch or a courageous innovator depending on political alignment.

People maintain different standards for their own coalition and everyone else.

The unsettling alignment is not that modern Americans are uniquely hypocritical.

It is that Romans anticipates the tendency to turn moral judgment into evidence of one's own innocence.

Paul's response is more radical than asking the two sides to be nicer.

Neither side gets to appoint itself the morally uncontaminated observer.

Romans 3 extends the argument: all are under sin, and righteousness is not secured by belonging to the correct group.

An American political movement built around exposing everyone else's moral failures would find this a difficult foundation.

3. Paul describes a government with a sword. America has turned that sword into a technological system

Romans 12:17-21; 13:1-7

Romans 13 is famous for instructing believers to be subject to governing authorities.

But its placement immediately after Romans 12 is particularly interesting.

In chapter 12, Paul tells individual believers not to retaliate or pursue personal vengeance. Instead, they are to overcome evil with good.

Then, in chapter 13, Paul describes governing authority as possessing the sword and exercising punishment against wrongdoing.

The sword is not merely symbolic decoration. It refers to the state's capacity for coercive punishment, including deadly force.

There is a distinction between what an individual may do in revenge and what legitimate public authority may do in administering justice.

Today, the American government possesses an extraordinary apparatus of physical force: police, prisons, military aircraft, missiles, surveillance systems, cyber capabilities, and nuclear weapons.

A modern citizen can own firearms while remaining vastly less powerful than the government in any direct confrontation.

The original metaphor has changed scale almost beyond recognition.

Yet the fundamental problem remains:

Who controls the sword, what gives them the right to wield it, and how can ordinary people hold them accountable?

The technological element makes the comparison stranger.

In Paul's world, the sword was a physical object that required a person to wield it. Modern force increasingly depends on chains of software, intelligence, communications, remote sensing, and automated decision support.

Control over force now includes control over information systems that determine what can be seen, targeted, authorized, or disabled.

Romans does not supply rules for drones, nuclear deterrence, or artificial intelligence. Nor is Romans 13 universally interpreted as requiring unconditional obedience to every act of government.

Its relevance is more foundational.

It recognizes the tremendous moral significance of concentrated coercive power.

And it refuses to make personal retaliation the foundation of a just community.

For a country whose political mythology places enormous emphasis on armed individual liberty, the distance between the individual's weapon and the government's sword is an especially consequential modern tension.

4. Paul warns about worshiping created things. America now manufactures things that can influence the people who created them

Romans 1:21-25

In Romans 1, Paul describes humanity redirecting devotion from the Creator toward created things.

Originally, the argument concerns idolatry and humanity's relationship with God.

The modern application should not pretend that Paul was secretly writing about artificial intelligence.

But the underlying reversal is provocative.

Human beings create institutions, technologies, markets, currencies, brands, and digital systems to serve human purposes.

Over time, those systems can become objects around which human lives are organized.

A social platform is created to connect people. Eventually, people may alter their behavior to satisfy the platform's ranking system.

An economy is created to organize production and exchange. Eventually, people may defend the economy's growth even when they cannot explain how that growth improves human well-being.

An artificial intelligence system is created as an instrument of human capability. Eventually, important decisions may be delegated to systems whose operations individual users cannot independently understand.

None of this makes those systems inherently evil, nor is their use equivalent to religious worship.

The analogy concerns a reversal of authority.

The tool stops being evaluated primarily by what it does for people. People begin evaluating themselves by what the tool rewards.

The modern equivalent of idolatry need not involve kneeling before a statue.

It can begin when a measurable output becomes more sacred than the human purpose the measurement was supposed to serve.

5. Romans 14 is an ancient dispute over food and calendars, and a surprisingly sophisticated theory of pluralism

Romans 14:1-23; 15:1-7

Here is one of the oddest details.

Paul devotes substantial attention to what people are eating.

Some believers will eat anything. Others abstain from certain foods. Some regard particular days as special. Others do not make the same distinctions.

These disagreements probably involved Jewish dietary practices and religious observances within communities that also included Gentile believers.

It is easy to dismiss this as an obsolete religious argument.

But consider the actual social problem.

Two people believe they belong to the same community, yet an ordinary shared meal can become an expression of conflicting identities.

What one person considers freedom, another considers a violation of conscience.

Paul does not resolve the conflict by demanding that everyone adopt the same diet.

He opposes mutual contempt and judgment. He also places responsibility on those who enjoy greater freedom not to use it carelessly at someone else's expense.

That is more sophisticated than merely tolerating disagreement.

It suggests that a person's entitlement to do something does not automatically settle whether doing it is considerate, beneficial, or destructive to a shared community.

Modern America has remarkably similar disputes about ordinary practices that symbolize larger beliefs.

What people eat. What schools serve. Which holidays institutions acknowledge. Which public expressions indicate religious loyalty, political identity, or cultural inclusion.

The subjects do not carry identical theological significance, and Paul's tolerance of particular dietary disputes cannot simply be extended to every modern moral disagreement.

But the social mechanism is recognizable.

A community can become so absorbed in proving who has the right to act that it forgets to ask whether its members can still sit together.

Romans 14 is not an argument that nobody should have convictions. It is an argument against turning every conviction into a test of someone else's belonging.

6. The olive tree passage is unusually uncomfortable for Christian nationalism

Romans 11:17-24

Paul uses an olive tree to explain the relationship between Israel and Gentile believers.

Some branches are described as broken off, and wild branches grafted in.

But the warning to the newcomers is unusually direct: they must not become arrogant toward the original branches.

The newcomers do not support the root. The root supports them.

The immediate subject is theological: the relationship of Israel, Jewish people, Gentiles, faith, and God's promises. It should not be flattened into a statement about modern immigration.

Yet the image is powerful when applied to a nation that sometimes treats its religious inheritance as proof of its own exceptional status.

Christianity emerged from Jewish religious traditions and historical circumstances.

The faith did not originate in America, nor did its foundation depend on American political institutions.

This becomes particularly relevant when Christians argue that America possesses a uniquely divine national role.

A Pew Research Center survey in April 2026 found that 17% of American adults wanted the federal government to declare Christianity the nation's official religion.

The overwhelming majority did not support that proposal. But the minority is large enough to represent a meaningful political constituency.

Romans 11 raises a question that this kind of argument can overlook.

If the Christian message explicitly warns Gentile believers not to elevate themselves above the tradition into which they were grafted, what theological justification exists for making one modern nation a privileged owner of that message?

The warning against religious arrogance was part of the text long before the United States existed.

7. Romans 12 offers almost the opposite incentive system from social media

Romans 12:9-21

Paul describes a community whose members should actively honor one another, associate with people of low status, respond to persecution without cursing, and refuse to return evil for evil.

That is an unusual set of instructions to place beside America's modern attention economy.

Online political culture frequently rewards behavior that Romans 12 attempts to restrain.

The sharpest humiliation travels farther than a quiet act of reconciliation.

Mockery can establish status within a group.

An enemy's misfortune becomes entertainment.

The public defeat of another person is treated as a meaningful accomplishment.

Paul's alternative is strange because it makes restraint an expression of strength.

In particular, he asks believers to provide food or drink to an enemy in need.

Not merely to refrain from harming an enemy.

To affirm the enemy's humanity through a useful action.

An online platform designed around that principle would behave very differently from one that optimizes for immediate reaction.

It might measure successful interactions by resolved disagreements, genuine assistance, or durable relationships rather than engagement alone.

We cannot infer that Paul anticipated social media.

But we can identify a conflict between two models of human interaction: one in which hostility can produce social rewards and another in which refusing hostility is itself a moral accomplishment.

8. Paul's solution to a divided empire includes an international financial transfer

Romans 15:25-27

Near the end of Romans, Paul discusses something surprisingly practical.

He is transporting contributions from believers in Macedonia and Achaia to poorer believers in Jerusalem.

This was a voluntary collection, not a state tax or comprehensive economic redistribution system.

But Paul's reasoning matters.

Gentile Christians have received spiritual blessings connected to the Jewish people. He argues that they therefore have material obligations in return.

It is a form of cross-community reciprocity.

Benefits received from another community create responsibilities that extend beyond expressions of gratitude.

That is a difficult concept for a wealthy modern society that often celebrates the sources of its prosperity while disagreeing over what it owes to the people who contributed to it.

Consider arguments over who built America's infrastructure, who performed its labor, who contributed its intellectual traditions, or who bore the costs of its economic development.

Historical benefit does not automatically establish a specific modern payment or policy. Such obligations require further argument.

Yet Paul refuses to separate spiritual solidarity from material responsibility.

The letter does not finish with theology alone.

It includes the movement of actual resources to actual people in need.

That specificity is important.

A society's claims of unity become more meaningful when they can survive an encounter with its budget.

9. Romans 16 reveals a distributed human network beneath the empire, and even beneath the famous author

Romans 16:1-23

The last chapter may be the most revealing of all.

It is largely a collection of greetings, names, and acknowledgments.

Readers sometimes pass over it because it appears less philosophically significant than the earlier chapters.

But look at who appears.

Phoebe is a minister of the church at Cenchreae and a benefactor to Paul and others. Scholars widely regard her as the likely carrier of the letter to Rome.

Prisca and Aquila host a church in their home.

Junia appears alongside Andronicus, and Paul describes them both as prominent among the apostles, although the exact interpretation of their apostolic status has been debated.

Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis are recognized for their work.

Gaius provides hospitality.

Erastus is identified as a city treasurer.

And Tertius explicitly identifies himself as the person who wrote down the letter.

Think about that last detail.

The Book of Romans is among the most influential theological documents in history.

Yet the person who physically wrote the text identifies himself near its conclusion.

The letter's production and circulation depended on several kinds of labor: authorship, transcription, transportation, hospitality, financial support, community leadership, and reception.

It was not simply a celebrated man broadcasting truth to anonymous followers.

It was a network.

That is particularly interesting in modern America, where power is so often explained through presidents, billionaires, celebrity founders, and visible executives.

A company may be associated with one individual while thousands of engineers, technicians, operators, administrators, and support workers make its existence possible.

A political movement may be identified with a single leader while neighborhood organizers, donors, volunteers, and institutions sustain it.

Romans 16 exposes the people behind the institution.

And there is a deeper irony: the Roman Empire's formal hierarchies of wealth, status, citizenship, and gender were not the same as the network of people Paul chose to honor.

The empire told one story about who mattered.

The letter preserved another.

The modern question is whether our historical records, organizational hierarchies, and digital systems recognize the people who actually make things work.

10. Romans 8 describes a world whose physical environment suffers alongside its inhabitants

Romans 8:18-25

Paul writes of creation groaning, awaiting liberation from corruption and decay.

The passage is fundamentally eschatological. It is about suffering, hope, and the redemption of creation, not a scientific forecast of climate change.

Yet the imagery becomes striking when placed over modern American environmental reality.

The natural world is not merely scenery in which human history occurs.

Its condition directly shapes human suffering.

Wildfire smoke enters homes hundreds of miles from the fires. Flooding affects housing and insurance. Changes in heat and weather conditions affect agriculture, infrastructure, and human health.

Americans can debate the best policies and disagree about tradeoffs while still recognizing that human life is embedded in a vulnerable physical world.

Romans 8 offers an unusual corrective to the idea that human salvation or success can be considered entirely separately from the condition of creation.

The world is not simply a warehouse of materials for human consumption.

In Paul's theology, its fate is bound up with the wider story of redemption.

11. The most disturbing resemblance is the temptation to believe power proves moral rightness

The deepest connection between Romans and modern America emerges when the preceding themes are considered together.

Romans addresses questions of authority, judgment, identity, status, power, and belonging.

But it does not offer the Roman Empire as the highest moral institution.

Nor does it suggest that proximity to the empire's capital makes someone spiritually superior.

Paul wrote to believers living in Rome, not to the Roman state as a request for an official national religion.

This distinction matters enormously.

According to Pew's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, 62% of American adults identified as Christian.

Christianity remains the country's largest religious affiliation, though identification and actual religious practice vary considerably.

The same 2026 Pew survey found that 79% of Americans believed churches and other houses of worship should not endorse political candidates.

America therefore combines widespread Christian identification, intense arguments about Christianity's proper relationship to government, and substantial support for keeping religious institutions out of direct electoral endorsements.

That is not the same situation Paul faced.

The earliest Christians in Rome did not command the empire. American Christians, collectively, participate in the political majority and occupy positions throughout government and society, even while different Christian groups experience power and marginalization differently.

This is where the comparison becomes most challenging.

It is easy for an American Christian to imagine being a first-century believer resisting Rome.

It is harder to ask whether, in some contexts, American Christians have become participants in the political and cultural power from which those earlier believers were comparatively excluded.

The central question changes from how to remain faithful under an empire to how to remain faithful when one has influence over an empire.

Romans does not provide an easy escape from that responsibility.

The American reading of Romans

There is no defensible basis for claiming that Paul secretly foresaw American elections, political parties, artificial intelligence, or the modern military.

The parallels are neither exact nor necessarily unique to the United States.

Rome was an ancient empire with an emperor, slavery, and sharply unequal legal statuses. America is a constitutional republic with elections, a different religious landscape, and a vastly different technological economy.

But the specificity of Romans makes it valuable as a comparison.

An expulsion can reshape who belongs to a community.

Moral condemnation can become a mechanism of self-exemption.

Government power requires ethical limits.

Communities can fracture over everyday expressions of identity.

Inherited traditions can be appropriated by people who forget where they came from.

Financial obligations can reveal the strength or weakness of professed solidarity.

And the functioning of an enormous civilization can depend on people almost entirely absent from its official stories.

The most interesting thing about reading Romans over America is not discovering that the two societies are identical.

It is discovering how many of the same human problems survive even after the institutions, weapons, technologies, populations, and political systems have changed.

Two thousand years ago, Paul wrote to people living inside the most powerful political system they knew, asking them not to confuse human authority, social status, religious identity, and moral judgment with righteousness.

Modern America possesses forms of power that would have been almost unimaginable to those readers.

Whether it has become correspondingly better at exercising moral judgment is another question.

And perhaps that is the most unsettling alignment of all.

Our systems have advanced almost beyond comparison. The human beings operating them remain remarkably recognizable.

Interpretive note: The historical reconstruction involving Claudius's expulsion is a scholarly hypothesis, not an explicit claim made in Romans. Modern comparisons throughout this article are analytical analogies, not assertions of prophecy or equivalence between the ancient Roman Empire and the United States.

Research references: The Book of Romans, chapters 1-16; Yale Bible Study's introduction and discussion of Roman house churches; scholarship on Claudius's expulsions, Phoebe and the delivery of Romans, and Romans 13-15; Pew Research Center's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study and April 2026 survey on religion in American public life.