The most recent and perhaps most disturbing event that has shocked the nation is the political assassination of conservative pundit and activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk was shot during a debate at Utah Valley University, the opening event of a planned debate cycle across American campuses in which he engaged students on religious, economic, and political issues. While addressing the pressing topic of transgender violence, he was struck down by a single sniper’s bullet fired from 200 yards away. The perpetrator, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old student from Utah, has since been apprehended. Robinson, however, did not act in a vacuum. He was radicalized through exposure to far-left ideology and emboldened by defamatory narratives in the “progressive” ideology, which repeatedly portrayed Kirk as a Nazi, racist, and bigot. Significantly, Robinson’s path toward extremism unfolded in spite of his conservative upbringing—a fact that underscores the pervasive and corrosive power of ideological indoctrination.

One would ask what is radical and what is political in radical political theology? Three decades ago, Milbank published his theological masterpiece in which he reclaimed the theology back to the tradition of the Church, back to its historical roots, where it belongs. Milbank famously wrote: “Once, there was no ‘secular’”, where I might add, once there was no identity politics, virtue signaling, or progressive Christianity (because otherwise Christianity would not persist). What was considered radical in Milbank's theological process was the return to original theological sources as a hermeneutical key for discerning society, culture, and politics. I’m using the term in a similar sense, which is pleonastic since theology in its foundations is radical and conservative.

Christian Nationalism is a term coined and often used by far-left or left-leaning sociologists and political scientists to discredit, label, and denounce policies or ideas that aim to interpret our political reality from a perspective of Christian tradition and exercise it within the constitutional limits. It is a derogatory term often used to generalize and categorize Conservative Christianity as inherently biased, bigoted, racist, intolerant, theocratic, ideological, and ultimately totalitarian.

Dostoevsky's genius reaches its pinnacle in the poem of the Grand Inquisitor. This ecstatic and prophetic moment of socio-political analysis of the saeculum obscurum of the Roman Catholic Church dramatically polarizes the unadulterated Christianity represented by the prisoner Jesus—an illustration of the marginalized, disenfranchised, and enslaved human being—against the institution of power, embodied by the authoritarian theocratic dictatorship and the politicization of religion in the person of the Grand Inquisitor.

My entire theological opus was devoted to deconstructing the political authoritarianism, populism, false victimological narratives, nationalism, power dynamics, and Anti-Western / Anti-American sentiment in the Western Balkans, predominantly Serbia. Living here, I found myself eye-to-eye with an emerging threat of radical left authoritarianism dangerously lurking behind state policies and what’s called modern American progressivism, a euphemism for the radical-left political agenda. It was a shocking and sobering moment that requires no less than a radical shift in theological reflection. I decided to entitle such a dialectical approach as a Radical Political Theology.

A common stereotype perceives a politician as a person with low moral standards, inclined to political bargaining to keep their election seat. We often hear remarks on politics as depraved, dishonest, and corrupt. However, some honest people keep their promises and hold on to their moral values.