Following Christ means passio passiva, suffering because we have to suffer. That is what Luther reckoned suffering among the marks of the true Church. No empire wants a crucified human being as its cultic figurehead.
Imperial peoples go in for eagles and the like.
In hoc signo cinces. And with a few conspicuous exceptions, Christianity has been glad enough to let them. But now the Church's honeymoon with Power is over. Kierkegaard saw the great divorce a hundred years in advance of the rest of us. His dissent had only a little to do with his bourgeois upbringing, and even less with his education in the high culture of Germanic tradition.