Solidarity by Fiat: A Response to Melissa Florer Bixler
Melissa Florer-Bixler's latest for Christian Century, "Citizenship by Fiat," tells a story well. In December 2025 she became eligible for Canadian citizenship through a grandmother she never met, in a country she has never lived in, by an act of Parliament she had no hand in. She finds this "unnerving" — the discovery that a government can, as she puts it, "truly create citizens with the stroke of a pen." From there she moves to Psaul's letter to the Philippians, a military community, where politeuma in heaven relativizes the citizenships of earth, and lands on a conclusion: our national belonging is not natural or sacred, it is a contingent legal structure, subject to unilateral revision by the powers that drew it up.
I want to concede the word she reached for, because she reached for the right one. Fiat is Latin for "let it be done," the sovereign speech-act that requires no argument and no collateral. The word names a form of power that doesn't think it has to justify itself, only declare itself, and reality complies. She's right that the state does this. What she doesn't notice is that she does it too, in the very essay where she names it.
The move she makes on herself
Watch the actual argument. She establishes her understanding of citizenship as legally constructed rather than natural; no state owes itself to blood (jus sanguinis) or soil (jus soli), only to the decisions of whoever currently holds said pen. Then she treats that as though it settles a second and much larger question: whether people owe their polis anything in return. But contingency is not the same claim as illegitimacy; a vow can be a human construction and still bind the person who made it. Psaul knew this because he took vows (Acts 18:18) and assisted others who took them (Acts 21:26).
Bixler, however, glosses over any theological substance social contract theory may otherwise call for. Two paragraphs later, heavenly citizenship becomes the only membership that finally matters, a move she interprets for the military families of Philippi as "myth-breaking" that exposes the fairy tale of earthly belonging. As someone whose own blood-stained vow co-locates me with the community of Philippi (and which underwrote our freedom of speech), I share neither her conclusion nor her misomythism.
By assuming the social location of a community she has made no effort to understand, Bixler recreates the same logical fallacy she criticizes in democratic statehood. Her claims are not cleanly argued conclusion; she diagnoses fiat power in the state and then exercises it herself, undeclared, in the same piece.
Whose exile is doing the work
The essay needs weight Bixler doesn't bring on her own, so she borrows that weight from people who may never have agreed to lend it, as with Philippians. She reaches for the Rohingya — 600,000 people rendered stateless, unable to own property, educate their children, or travel. She reaches for her "Palestinian friends in East Jerusalem," permanent residents denied passports under discriminatory law. These are real losses, catastrophic ones. Her own story is the opposite: an unearned windfall, a second citizenship she never sought and has no history with. Her association with the poor may pass as solidarity, but it is 'intellectual' through and through, she assumes the mere mention of their plight is enough to satisfy the conscience of her readers. It is solidarity by statement, by fiat, not by experience and accompaniment.
There's a further irony here Bixler doesn't seem to see. Rejecting political sovereignty as beneath a Christian's real citizenship doesn't produce the communal ecclesiology her own Anabaptist tradition has always claimed as its alternative to the state. It produces something closer to what that tradition has historically rejected: an individualized, private righteousness, answerable to no polis and no ethnos, that looks less like the believers' church and more like the liberal conscience she'd otherwise say she's arguing against.
Two citizenships, one chapter
Her essay never leaves Philippians. It should have made one more stop where Psaul is about to be flogged and is spared because of his citizenship, in Acts 22. The tribune commanding the cohort, Claudius Lysias, tells the apostle he acquired that same legal status — Greek politeia, kin to the word from Philippians — for a large sum of money (v.28). Psaul's answer is one clause: he was born to it.
Two men in the same chapter hold the same legal status by two entirely different roads. The foreigner paid for it — in money, but also in blood, sweat and tears. The "Christian" was simply born to it, and never once, in the text, weighs what that difference means before he uses the unearned version to save his own back from the whip. To be clear, I don't fault him for not examining his own privilege. Not only did that language not exist in the first century, I was told by my first noncommissioned officer in the Army to "play the game before it plays you." Use what privilege you have, don't pretend you don't have any.
Here's the sentence her essay is missing: in that scene, Psaul isn't a citizen discovering the fragility of his political identity — he's a Christ follower who knows its market value precisely, and cashes it in the moment the cost would otherwise land on him instead of someone else. The relativizing move — heavenly citizenship exposing earthly citizenship as subordinate thereto — shows up much later, in a letter to people who knew from experience, not conjecture, that politeia has a price. Psaul knew he wasn't the one who had to sow and reap for his own freedom, the same fact Lysias could not ignore if he wanted to.
That's not a case against Psaul. It's a description of what Bixler's unearned privilege looks like inside scripture's own hands, and a warning against building a doctrine out of half his record while leaving the other half unread.
Three fiats, not one
The executive order Bixler cites that tried to end birthright citizenship by presidential decree is fiat aimed at material power, and it's instructive precisely because it had to survive contact with something. It went to the Supreme Court. It lost. Executive fiat, ugly as it is, still has to clear a separate but equal Judicial mechanism that can stop it. Bixler's fiat clears nothing. "Citizenship in heaven" is never cross-examined, never enforced against her, never required to produce papers.
And there's a third register worth naming, since it's the one that decided to publish this piece: Christian Century has its own documented pattern of editorial fiat, deciding by institutional decree — not argument on the merits — whose critique of pacifist theology gets to stand. I know this one from the inside. In 2021 a Century editor solicited exactly this kind of critique from me, encouraged it for months, then had it rejected by the wider board not for its exegesis but for refusing to defer to the civilian scholars the editors weren't willing to see challenged. The feedback that followed was about "tone," not content. The full record, correspondence included, is at loganmartinisaac.com/archiving-christian-century for anyone who wants it before deciding how much weight to put on this outlet's judgment here.
Three fiats, one family resemblance: power that only has to be declared, never defended. The state's version at least has to go to court. The other two don't even have to do that, they can maintain their market share by claiming contrasting voices simply aren't a fit for their audience. But that's branding, not community.
What I'd put in its place
I don't think the answer to fiat citizenship is an even more "heavenly" fiat. I think the answer is patior ergo possumus (I suffer, therefore we can); a few may suffer but the many must not ignore the cost. Not relativizing the political community's claims away from a position of comfort and safety, as Bixler does, but staying inside those claims and bearing what they actually cost, as military families must.
The poor and underprivileged don't get to discover, mid-essay, that their citizenship was only ever a legal fiction the moment it becomes inconvenient. They find out what it costs by paying it. That's not a lesser theology of belonging than Psaul's. It might be closer to what he was actually pointing at — a man who used his citizenship when it mattered, and never once pretended it was beneath him to hold.