I recently read Lamb by Christopher Moore. It's a comedic retelling — blasphemous if you lack a sense of humor — of Jesus’s “lost years” from the perspective of his childhood best friend named Biff. To be completely honest, I found the premise a little better than the execution, but there was one line that stayed with me:
“A messiah has to bring change. Change comes through action. There’s no such thing as a conservative hero.”
Conservative hero.
It’s almost as if the two words refuse to sit together comfortably. In the depths of the stories we tell ourselves, we know that heroes defy and disrupt. They steal fire from the gods, refuse to bow to the emperor, flip tables and drive folks out with a whip.
A hero who keeps everything exactly as it is hasn’t done anything yet.
To be precise, there is a version of conserving that is heroic: protecting the vulnerable from harm, preserving hard-won rights, keeping the library open when the government is trying hard to pull back resources. But that isn’t the conservatism I’m referring to. I’m referring to the compulsion to enshrine current power structures and treat the status quo as sacred.
It’s the difference between a shield and a cage.
The irony of religious history is that every single messiah’s followers end up becoming conservatives in this exact sense, desperate to preserve the snapshot of the disruption exactly as it was. The radical becomes the orthodoxy becomes the obstacle.
messiah as job description
Here’s what I think Moore was ultimately pointing to: messiah is not a title; it is a job description.
And the job is movement.
We spend centuries arguing over abstract questions — who Jesus was, what divine nature he possessed, which creeds correctly capture his essence. But if we look at this through the lens of history and anthropology, we have to ask: what did the role functionally do?
It disrupted.
If we accept the consensus of modern critical scholarship, the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, and he was under the impression that the current age was ending and a new one was breaking in: the “Kingdom.” It's literally impossible to be “conservative” if you believe the world is about to be turned upside down.
You don’t try to preserve the architecture of a building you believe is about to collapse.
The historical Jesus lived in a world of Roman occupation and rigid Jewish Temple hierarchy. He welcomed the stranger, dined with tax collectors (collaborators) and sex workers (social outcasts), touched lepers (ritually unclean), and declared sins forgiven without priestly permission (bypassing the temple system).
The people who had him executed were stabilizers, not some fictionalized cartoon villains with malicious intent. Under occupation, the local elites become risk managers, and their job is to keep the temperature just low enough so that the empire doesn’t respond with steel — or crosses.
The Sadducees and the Temple authorities were just trying to preserve the peace — peace they felt they spent a lot of time building — with Rome. They were figuring out exactly how much they had to bend to keep the legions from burning Jerusalem to the ground.
Jesus was like, “dawg, I’ll flip all this shit over.”
They were trying to keep the nation afloat, doing exactly what institutions do when faced with a shock to the system: they shut it down to maintain stability.
the routinization of charisma
This brings us to the uncomfortable part of the timeline, in which for German Sociologist Max Weber coined a term: the routinization of charisma.
The cycle goes like this: A charismatic leader emerges with radical authority that challenges tradition, but charisma is unstable, usually wild and chaotic.
Most importantly, it typically dies with the leader. So, if the followers want the movement to survive past the first generation, they have to transform the wild and unpredictable energy into rational, legal, and/or traditional structures.
Within a few centuries, the movement Jesus sparked had moved from house churches to basilicas, shifted from charismatic wandering prophets to establishing bishops, popes and other clerical hierarchy, and transitioned from an ethic of loving enemies to using state power to enforce theological conformity.
The radical becomes the orthodoxy becomes the obstacle.
The disruption became the thing that needed preserving. And, well, those who challenged the new status quo?
Well, they become labeled as heretics and apostates, names given to those who threaten the new orthodoxy.
This is why the Bible itself is a bit of a paradox, in my opinion. The New Testament is the crater, not the explosion. It acts as the debris field left behind by the impact of the disruption. The earliest followers didn’t prioritize writing histories or building seminaries because they lived on the edge of the end of the world.
Why?
Because you don’t focus on durability and longevity when you believe the horizon is closing in on you. You only start writing things down, codifying rules, and establishing hierarchies when you realize the apocalypse isn’t coming and you have to buckle up for the long haul.
We commonly mistake the text (the debris) for the event (the fire).
the guard at the museum
I think about this often when looking at the American religious landscape. If the historical Jesus — a Middle Eastern, apocalyptic, peasant Jewish prophet — showed up in most contemporary American churches, what would happen?
The most “conservative” Christians today, those most invested in preservation, would likely find him deeply destabilizing, because they are doing what followers always eventually do: they are protecting the institution that formed around the disruption.
This is complicated by the fact that American Conservatism, the political identity, has consecrated this “small-c” conservative behavior. It has taken the natural human impulse for status-quo maintenance and wrapped it in the language of so-called moral virtue: tradition, “law and order,” and stability.
In this worldview, disruption is seldom viewed as moral progress; it is framed as social contagion, and it needs to be quarantined. The stabilizer becomes the ideal citizen, and the highest virtue shifts from transformation to containment.
The danger here is that the platform stops being for anything and becomes purely inhibitory, offering no vision of flourishing, just a permanent hand on the brake.
And when you look at who gets blocked and who gets protected, the architecture starts to reveal itself.
We see the mechanism whenever a new question arises: the immediate pivot to boundary maintenance, the policing of language, the circling of wagons to protect the deposit of faith from drift.
They have effectively become the security guards of the museum built to honor the man who set it on fire.
Sadly, this isn’t unique to Christianity, but the predictable arc of every single human institution, from political parties to art movements.
But it is uniquely pointed in religion because the central figure was executed by status-quo managers for being too disruptive, and his followers now position themselves as the defenders of tradition against the so-called “dangerous” change.
after the asterisk
I’m not arguing that disruption is always good or that preservation is always bad. If we lived in a state of constant revolution, we’d probably starve. The tragedy is that the impulse which calcifies the movement is often the same impulse that kept it alive long enough to become a movement.
We need libraries and laws and guards to survive, but survival is not the same thing as redemption.
Moore’s phrase, “there is no such thing as a conservative hero,” reveals that the narratives that survive across centuries almost always feature someone who crosses boundaries, challenges authority, and risks everything for a new thing — burn down to rebuild.
But the moment we try to freeze that disruption, to preserve the exact shape of the revolution, we’ve already betrayed it. We’ve started building the institution that the next disruptor will need to overturn.
The messiah’s job is movement. Trying to preserve it is like building a statue of the wind. And once the movement stops, it’s no longer messianic.
The cruel part is that the ones who fell in love with the fire are usually the first to reach for the glass case.