The Vacant Throne: Advanced Reading

On not dethroning God, and on the throne nobody mentioned

Not long ago I published an article called The Vacant Throne. A reader wrote in after the piece went up, and it’s worth answering properly rather than in a comment thread, because the objection is a good one and deserves more than a reply box.

The reader is a Christian who rejects neoliberal capitalism. They point out that a Christian economics could be built on God-given human dignity, that Marx’s own language about human nature runs along similar lines, and that both testaments are full of social and economic justice. Their conclusion: there’s no need to “dethrone” God at all. They close with something sharper, that too many Christians today serve Mammon, the god of wealth and power, and his “orange anti-Christ acolyte,” and that this makes the actual work harder than it should be.

That deserves a real answer, in two parts.

A Quick Map, Before Going Further

This piece leans on a handful of stages from Clare Graves’s developmental model, popularized later under a color scheme by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan. Worth a brief map before using the colors, since the main essay used Graves’s own letter codes and this one will lean on the more familiar names instead.

Each stage exists because the one before it stopped working, ran into a problem its own worldview couldn’t solve, and something new had to develop to handle it. Red is raw, egocentric power: the world as a contest of strength, loyalty flowing to whoever’s winning, no law above the strongest will in the room. Red’s own crisis is that unchecked power is unstable and exhausting to live under, capricious, unpredictable, impossible to plan a life around, precisely the material conditions the current administration seems to be producing, which creates the hunger for Blue: absolute order, one right way, a single source of truth and authority that depersonalizes power into a fixed code everyone, even the strong, has to answer to. Sacrifice and discipline now, salvation or restoration guaranteed later.

Blue’s own crisis is that total order eventually suffocates anyone capable enough to want to apply their own judgment, take their own risks, and keep what they earn from taking them, which produces Orange: individualist, achievement-driven, competitive, pragmatic, getting and having and winning by personal effort rather than by submission to anyone. Orange’s crisis, in turn, is that relentless competition produces burnout, isolation, and inequality, a hunger for belonging that winning alone never satisfies, which produces Green: communitarian, consensus-driven, egalitarian, oriented around inclusion and fairness rather than hierarchy or competition.

Green’s own crisis is that flattening every hierarchy and treating every view as equally valid eventually makes it hard to decide anything or rank any claim over another, which opens the door to Yellow: a stage that can hold individual excellence and collective concern together rather than trading one off against the other, comfortable with a natural hierarchy of competence without sliding back into domination.

With that in hand, back to the reader’s comment.

Part One: The Throne Was Never Asking for God Specifically

Start with what the essay actually claimed, since it’s easy to misread “the throne should be left empty” as “God in particular needs to go.” That was never the argument. The argument was about a process, not a particular occupant: a person or a movement reaching for some single, total, externally-guaranteed answer because they can’t tolerate an unresolved question, then defending that answer with the same intensity, the same intolerance for doubt, regardless of what the answer happens to be. Stalin reached for dialectical materialism. Lenin reached for it against Bogdanov with the same fervor a heresy hunt brings against a heretic. The content varies. The grip doesn’t.

A Christian who holds their faith with the same posture the essay’s own diagnostic test asks of anyone, comfortable saying “we don’t fully understand this, and that’s all right,” isn’t automatically off the hook the way I first put it, and the equation deserves a second look.

A scientist’s “we don’t know yet” anticipates resolution in principle, evidence could in time bear on it, inquiry stays open to being settled. The foundational commitment faith asks for isn’t that. It’s closer to what Kierkegaard meant by the leap, a commitment made precisely because the question was never going to be settled by evidence, not a placeholder while waiting for more of it. Those are two different relationships to uncertainty, and they don’t deserve the same sentence just because both can be phrased as “I don’t fully know.”

People can be unsure about real things. What happens after someone dies? Does it mean heaven, judgment, something else, or nothing? What does God want on questions scripture never answers clearly? Whether a hardship someone goes through means something, or just happened, that’s an open question too.

People can hold all of that open. But underneath those questions sits one decision: that God exists at all. Nobody proves that. No new evidence will settle it either way.

That’s where the rigidity lives. It doesn’t live in the questions people leave open. It lives in that one decision, the one nobody can prove, when it gets treated as the only thing nobody’s allowed to question.

That’s also the real difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2 thinking. Tier 1 needs the god-question settled before it can engage with any tradition. Tier 2 can read, study, and practice what many faiths actually offer, while staying genuinely fine with the possibility that there’s no god at all. Whether God is real or just a metaphor stops being a question worth losing sleep over.

The essay’s actual quarrel still isn’t with theism as such. It’s with the demand that the founding commitment be treated as beyond question, the same demand dialectical materialism makes of its own founding commitments. What’s changed is locating more precisely where that demand bites, since it isn’t where the easier version of this argument put it.

Part Two: Species-Being and Imago Dei Are Doing the Same Job, and That’s Worth Sitting With

The reader’s instinct that Marx’s own language runs parallel to Christian dignity-talk is sharper than it might look at first. Marx’s early concept of species-being, the idea that humans are properly defined by free, conscious, creative activity rather than bare survival, and that capitalism alienates workers from exactly that capacity, is doing precisely the same job Christian anthropology does when it grounds human dignity in being made in the image of God. Both are saying: a person’s worth isn’t set by the market, and exploitation isn’t just inefficient, it’s wrong, because it violates something prior to economics.

Here’s the part worth being honest about, on both sides. Historical materialism, taken strictly, has no internal resources to generate a claim like that. It’s supposed to be a descriptive theory of how value systems shift with material conditions, not a source of moral obligation.

Marx needed species-being to make his critique of capitalism land as a wrong rather than a neutral fact about a mode of production, and he borrowed it, knowingly or not, from outside the system he was building, ultimately from Feuerbach, who built it out of an explicitly theological inheritance in the first place.

Christian economics doesn’t have that particular problem, because it never pretended to be a value-free descriptive science. It says outright that human dignity comes from God, and builds the ethics on that ground honestly, rather than smuggling the ground in while claiming not to need one.

That’s a real point in its favor, and it’s worth a materialist admitting it rather than waving it off. Worth keeping in mind, though, that being honest about resting on a ground you can’t prove is a different virtue from being honest about resting on a ground you can, and this is the first kind, not the second.

Where the convergence actually lands, in the terms this whole project has been using, is interesting: a Christian economic justice tradition, real wages, debt forgiveness, care for the widow and the stranger, the prophetic critique of those who “grind the faces of the poor,” genuinely describes communitarian, justice-oriented content. But it’s worth being precise about which God is doing the grounding, because transcendence and immanence aren’t two equally-throne-shaped options here.

A transcendent God, the classical monotheistic sense most of that prophetic tradition actually invokes, an authority outside creation, administering judgment and salvation from beyond it, is throne-shaped by definition, not by how anyone happens to hold the belief. The authority-slot is built into the structure itself. What varies by practice is whether that slot gets gripped with the same intolerance for doubt the essay has been describing all along, or held with real humility about the parts that stay unresolved, but the slot is there regardless, and pretending otherwise undersells how much real theological weight a transcendent claim is actually carrying.

An immanent conception, ground of being rather than authority above it, presence within the world rather than a separate administrator handing down verdicts on it, doesn’t have that slot at all. There’s no external guarantor issuing the answer, so there’s no throne in the sense this piece means by the word, independent of temperament or practice.

Immanent believers are not automatically more humble people though I have seen much greater humility overall among imanently oriented people than the trancendent crowd. However, the structure the imanent crowd is working with was never built with an authority-throne in the first place, which sidesteps the whole question rather than answering it gently.

Part Three: Mammon, Cyrus, and the Color Orange

Now the sharper part of the comment, the one about Mammon and the “orange anti-Christ acolyte.” This deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved off as a partisan jab, because there’s real structural content underneath the joke, and it connects directly to Clare Graves’s developmental model, which this whole project has leaned on throughout.

Graves’s stage after the sacrificial one, Orange, is the individualist, achievement-driven, materialist stage: getting, having, competing, winning and losing as the basic measure of a life well lived. Later popularizers gave each of Graves’s stages a color, and this one got the color orange, entirely independent of any politician’s skin tone or branding.

That it’s also become a tabloid nickname for a specific modern figure is coincidence. What isn’t coincidence is how well the content of his actual political appeal maps onto Orange’s content: winners and losers as the organizing frame for nearly everything, wealth as the visible proof of worth, gold as the literal aesthetic, deal-making and dominance as the measure of competence, and open hostility to anything that reads as a constraint on competitive accumulation, regulation, redistribution, collective restraint of any kind.

What makes the reader’s “Mammon” framing sharper than a slur is that part of the religious right has built an actual theological structure for fusing that Orange content with Blue’s sacrificial authority-worship, and it’s worth naming specifically rather than gesturing at.

Since 2015, a wing of charismatic evangelical leaders, Lance Wallnau chief among them, has promoted the idea that Trump is a modern King Cyrus, the pagan Persian ruler in the Book of Isaiah whom God used to free the Jewish exiles despite Cyrus never worshipping that God himself. The entire theological appeal of the comparison is that it doesn’t require the anointed figure to hold any of the virtues being asked of ordinary believers.

Wallnau has said it plainly: Trump doesn’t need to be a Christian to be God’s instrument, only useful to God’s purposes. Wallnau has sold a gold coin stamped with both Cyrus and Trump’s faces on a televangelist’s broadcast, which is about as literal an image of Mammon wearing the vestments of God as you could ask for.

Push on the analogy itself, though, and it starts working against the people using it. Cyrus’s actual role in Isaiah is conqueror of Babylon, the empire holding God’s people captive, and liberator of the exiles he frees from it. If Trump is Cyrus, something has to occupy Babylon’s role, the power being broken, not the people being restored. Wallnau’s own framing quietly assumes America is the Jerusalem being rebuilt. The text doesn’t actually grant that for free.

There’s a second Babylon worth bringing in here, a better structural fit than the first one, and it’s worth letting it speak in its own words rather than mine. The Babylon of Revelation 17 and 18 isn’t a captor empire holding anyone in exile. It’s an empire of commerce and self-glorification, and the angel who announces its fall doesn’t lead with sin, he leads with a market report: “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen… For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies” (Revelation 18:2–3).

What follows is one of the strangest passages in the whole book, an actual itemized inventory of everything that made her rich: “gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet… and cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men” (18:12–13), the list running straight from jewelry and silk into livestock and human cargo without so much as a pause, as if the text wants you to notice that a system built entirely on what sells eventually starts selling people too.

The merchants who grew rich on that list don’t weep over the city’s cruelty when it falls. They weep because “no man buyeth their merchandise any more” (18:11), and the shipmasters cry “Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate” (18:19), mourning a lost market, not a lost soul.

Most scholars read this Babylon as coded language for Rome, the actual dominant commercial empire of the writer’s own day, which means the label was never meant to stay fixed to one historical city. It was built to be reapplied to whichever empire’s wealth and self-regard next earned it.

Measured against that Babylon rather than Cyrus’s, the gold coin, the branding, the towers, and the deal-making aesthetic read less like the conqueror’s portrait and more like a fairly precise entry in the catalog being judged. And Revelation’s own prescribed response to that Babylon isn’t to anoint whoever happens to rule at its center. It’s separation, come out of her, so as not to share in what she’s actually trading in. That instruction sits oddly next to a gold coin sold on a televangelist’s broadcast.

It also sits oddly next to a conversation I had a while back with a revolutionary communist, on the other side of this whole piece’s argument entirely, that’s worth telling here because it’s the same instruction failing to be followed for a different, mirror-image reason. I asked him directly how production should actually be organized after the revolution he was working toward. He paused for a long time and struggled with it, then suggested I read Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, which is, among other things, an account of how the one large-scale attempt at exactly this curdled into bureaucratic degeneration. That’s not really an answer. It’s a reading assignment standing in for one.

He told me his own stance was to keep working a day job, manage his position inside the capitalist hierarchy he considers illegitimate, hold an explicitly amoral posture about doing so, and spend his actual effort educating people who might one day seize the factories and need to know how to run them.

I found myself wondering afterward whether revolutionary Marxists, as a movement, have any real experience actually running production outside the system they intend to seize. “Come out of her” was never just a religious instruction. It’s the basic move any total system, whichever throne it’s defending, conspicuously avoids asking of its own members while asking everyone else to make exactly that leap on faith.

Go back to the Cyrus framing itself, since that’s the actual mechanism worth naming, not just the failure to apply it consistently. It isn’t that wealth and dominance got relabeled as virtues. It’s that a Blue religious structure, anointing, divine selection, spiritual warfare against unbelievers, got built around a figure whose actual operative content is pure Orange, with the religious framing supplying legitimacy the content could never generate on its own.

Compare it to the essay’s earlier point about Howard Bloom’s cosmology, which dresses Orange exuberance in borrowed cosmic, systemic language to make individual accumulation sound like universal law. This is the same move with a different costume. Cyrus’s anointing does for the religious right what physics and biology do for Bloom: it makes Orange sound like it’s something other than what it actually is.

This is also, worth saying plainly, the cleanest possible illustration of what Mammon has always meant theologically. Mammon was never just “money.” It’s wealth treated as a god, an object of ultimate loyalty competing directly with the one the tradition actually claims to worship. “You cannot serve both God and Mammon” is not a vague warning. It’s a direct statement that wealth-as-ultimate-value and God-as-ultimate-value occupy the same throne, and only one of them can actually sit on it.

There’s a further wrinkle worth adding, because the MAGA coalition built around this figure isn’t drawing on one stage’s appeal, it’s drawing on two, and they aren’t the same psychological need wearing different clothes. The Cyrus-anointing wing of MAGA is Blue’s appeal exactly as described above: submission to a chosen authority restoring a moral order, absolute truth, sacrifice and discipline now in exchange for restoration later.

But a different part of the same coalition isn’t drawn by anything moral at all. It’s drawn the way Red is drawn, raw loyalty to strength, the pleasure of watching opponents dominated and humiliated, tribal attachment to whoever’s winning with no higher truth-claim attached to the winning itself. That’s not a smaller version of Blue’s religious fervor. It’s an entirely earlier stage, present and fully active, organized around dominance rather than doctrine.

The wealth, the branding, the deal-making vocabulary that Donald Trump uses, are genuinely Orange’s currency. But the actual operating pattern underneath that vocabulary, contempt for any rule that constrains him, loyalty valued over rule-bound competence, every relationship read as dominance or submission rather than fair competition, indifference to truth whenever truth costs the win, isn’t Orange’s process at all.

It’s Red’s, and it isn’t recent. It’s present decades before any current pressure could have caused a collapse into it, which means it isn’t stress-regression from a more developed position, it’s Trump’s center of gravity. Red, fluent enough in Orange’s scorekeeping to rise to the top of an Orange-coded system without ever buying into the values that system claims to run on, because Orange’s reward signal, the number going up, doesn’t actually distinguish wealth built through rule-bound risk from wealth built through intimidation and brand bullying. Both register as the same win.

That reframing changes what the Red wing of the coalition is actually doing. They aren’t projecting anything. They’re recognizing one of their own, fluent in the same language of dominance and loyalty they already speak, no theory of mind required.

The Blue wing is the one doing the real throne-work, and it’s failing on its own terms in a way worth sitting with. Blue’s entire reason for existing is escape from Red’s instability, unchecked power is capricious and exhausting to live under, impossible to plan a life around, which is exactly why Blue offers a fixed code even the strong have to answer to.

But the figure Blue has anointed isn’t bound by that code or any other. What the Cyrus framing actually delivers to the people drawn to it for predictability and restoration is Red’s capriciousness again, just relabeled as providence. The packaging is Blue. The lived experience underneath it is the very instability Blue was invented to solve.

Part Four: A Question Worth Leaving Open

There’s a further question sitting underneath all of this, and it’s worth raising precisely because the honest answer is that I don’t know, and I’d rather say that than force a tidy one.

Orange’s reward system runs on accumulation and competitive achievement. Green’s emerging politics, equity demands, stakeholder constraints, collective bargaining framed around fairness rather than just wages, costs Orange capital something real, directly, in dollars. Blue’s politics, order, hierarchy, deference, a moral framework asking people to sacrifice now rather than organize and demand more now, costs capital comparatively little and tends to suppress the kind of organizing Green produces. So there’s a structural question worth asking: when capital backs cultural politics that cultivates Blue’s deference over Green’s demands, what’s actually driving that.

One answer needs nothing exotic at all. Ordinary management self-interest, noticing that an ordered, deferential workforce is cheaper and less disruptive than one making collective fairness claims, produces exactly this pattern without any theory behind it, the same way water finds the lower path without understanding hydraulics. A second answer is close to identical in mechanism but emphasizes the absence of intent even further: cultural backlash against Green’s perceived overreach can simply happen, an old, well-documented pattern of economic grievance getting redirected into identity and order, with capital benefiting as a byproduct rather than as an author.

A third possibility is stranger, and I want to state it plainly before I do anything else with it. Some people who study this model talk about Tier 2, Yellow and Turquoise, as comfortable moving through every stage below it as the situation calls for, including Red’s dominance tactics and Orange’s accumulation, deployed deliberately rather than believed in. The theory, stated fully, is this: what looks like crude Red-and-Orange backlash from underneath might actually be Tier 2 operators running a long, deliberately layered strategy, playing something like Go while the rest of us are still watching what looks like chess, herding cultural energy toward an end none of us can see yet from where we’re standing.

Before going any further with that, one correction needs to happen, and I’d rather make it myself than have it made for me. Tier 2 names an advance in cognitive complexity, the capacity to hold systems, paradox, and multiple stages at once. It names nothing about morality, and treating the two as the same thing is exactly the error Graves’s own students have warned against, people mistaking integrative complexity for spiritual or ethical superiority when the model itself makes no such promise.

Sam Altman is a clean, documented case of why that correction matters. In a 2017 essay called “The Merge,” he wrote that humanity will be the first species to design its own descendants, and guessed that the choice comes down to being “the biological bootloader for digital intelligence” before fading into an evolutionary side branch, or finding a successful merge instead. He called a merge “probably our best-case scenario.”

That’s genuinely systemic, long-horizon, species-level thinking, comfortable holding human extinction as one live branch of the decision tree rather than flinching from it. It’s also, on any ordinary human accounting, a deeply alarming place for that reasoning to arrive. Sophisticated complexity got him to a sentence about humanity fading into an evolutionary tree branch as an acceptable outcome. Nothing about reaching that level of analysis made the conclusion trustworthy, let alone good.

So if Tier 2 strategic play really is operating anywhere in the culture-war funding question from Part Three, that fact alone says nothing about whether the end it’s working toward deserves anyone’s trust. Complexity is a description of how someone is thinking. It was never a substitute for asking what they’re thinking toward.

I can’t verify this. I am naming it and holding it open as an uncollapsed quantum possibility. The box is closed for the moment and we don’t know whether Schrödinger’s cat is a corpse or licking its paws. That is how Tier 2 thinking works.

Iris DeMent wrote a song about something close to this thirty years ago. In that song she presents her own views on the question of god. “Let the Mystery Be” isn’t faith holding doubt gently alongside itself. Listened to closely, it’s two separate moves that don’t need each other.

One is straightforward agnosticism about the metaphysical questions themselves, heaven, reincarnation, what happens when the whole thing’s done, held genuinely open rather than resolved either way. The other is a freestanding ethical commitment, to live guided by love, that doesn’t actually depend on settling the first question at all.

She declines the founding leap and keeps the commitment anyway. That’s a cleaner illustration of this piece’s actual point than “faith that includes doubt” ever was: you don’t need to fill the throne first to have something worth living by. This is something that many atheists will tell you, though I doubt that they would try to make the argument using dialectical materialism.

She came at that from inside a Pentecostal upbringing, not from outside one, which is what gives the refusal its weight. Worth listening to, not just reading about.

Closing the Loop

So my reader’s two instincts turn out to be more connected than they might have seemed writing the comment. There’s no need to dethrone God, because the essay was never asking for that, only for the same honesty about unresolved questions that any tradition, including a materialist one, should be willing to practice.

The Cyrus-anointing structure is a real throne, Blue’s architecture, submit to God’s chosen instrument, await restoration, no different in shape from the vanguard party’s claim on history. But neither Red nor Orange was ever throne-shaped to begin with, for different reasons that both land in the same place. Red precedes the very idea of submission to a total authority, it’s the stage before Blue invents that concept at all. Orange has the concept and has already walked away from it, choosing individual achievement over submission to anyone.

Whichever one the actual figure being anointed is read as, center of gravity in one, fluent in the other’s currency, there’s no authority above the self anywhere in the mix for Blue’s submission to actually land on. So this isn’t two failures running in different directions around the same kind of throne. It’s a throne being rebuilt, prophecy, anointing, spiritual warfare, around someone structurally incapable of receiving the submission it’s built to deliver, and using the leftover machinery of submission to dress up the fact that nothing is actually being submitted to.

That’s a stranger arrangement than the Marxist case, not the same one. The vanguard party’s Blue process at least claims to be in service of something beyond itself, a future it can’t yet deliver. The Cyrus framing doesn’t even make that claim. It sacralizes the absence of any goal beyond personal accumulation, which is closer to what Mammon has always meant theologically: not a rival god who unseats the real one, but what fills the space the moment people stop asking whether anything outside the self deserves their loyalty at all.

The throne, in that picture, was never occupied by Mammon. It was emptied out, and the reverence kept running anyway, now aimed at nothing in particular except whoever benefits from the reverence continuing.