The Dangers of Christian Nationalism

We live in an hour when a significant minority in the US Church—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—increasingly believes that the way to save both the American Church and America itself is to embrace Christian nationalism. Many American conservative Christians, feeling themselves threatened and even victimized by something called “secularism,” seek a champion who will defend them from it and give them power to fight it and whatever else they believe threatens our Christian heritage. The thinking goes that the Gospel calls us to bring Christ to the world as Lord, so let’s have an America controlled by Christians and make the state impose that even (and perhaps especially) on those who do not acknowledge the Gospel. To question that is to exalt godlessness over God. People who subscribe to this thinking believe that if we will only give the state the power to impose “Christian values” on what they perceive to be an increasingly godless society, then all will be well, and America will be great again. 

Accompanying this is typically a notion of America as being somehow “chosen” by God in such a way as to set it above and against other nations. This seemingly justifies our right to protect our border from an alleged “invasion” by desperate refugees as well as to purify the nation from so-called enemies within. 

The promise, to many, seems to be simplicity itself. Once upon a time, America was full of prosperous, hard-working Christians who reverenced family values. Then the sexual revolution, the welfare state, scary minorities who kneel at the national anthem and say their lives matter, and godless liberals took over and America lost its greatness. All that can be restored if we make the state the protector of Christians and weaponize it against the forces of godlessness. 

The Roots of Christian Nationalism 

It is not a new idea. At the outset of Jesus’ ministry, he deliberately went into the wilderness to face exactly this temptation to impose the kingdom by law, blood, iron, force, and fear. As Matthew reports: 

“Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, and he said to him, ‘All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.’ At this, Jesus said to him, ‘Get away, Satan! It is written: The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve’” (Mt 4:8–10). 

Several factors contribute to the confusion that leads many Christians to fall for Christian nationalism. 

The first, as is always the case with false teaching, is that it exploits and exaggerates real Catholic teaching (just as the devil did when he quoted Scripture in the effort to get Jesus to sin during the temptation in the wilderness). 

Specifically, it exploits and exaggerates the second greatest commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” We may well ask, “What could possibly be wrong with loving your neighbor as yourself?” 

Nothing—as long as we clearly understand what is meant by “neighbor.” Because one of the temptations we face is to limit “neighbor” to a particular category of persons. And if we give that idea its head, we can (and have many times in history) come to the dark spiritual place where a particular class of neighbor becomes the only class that matters, while others are categorized as outsiders, foreigners, enemies, and even subhuman vermin fit only for extermination. “Love your neighbor” gets whittled down to “Love your kind,” and loving your kind becomes the pretext for oppressing, jailing, exploiting, enslaving, and even exterminating those who are not our kind. 

This is why the command to love one’s neighbor is the second, not the first, greatest commandment. The love of neighbor must be subordinated to the love of God, precisely because God commands us not merely to love those we call neighbor, but those he calls our neighbor: namely, everyone, including even our enemies. 

This is not to deny the legitimacy of loving one’s own kind. The Church teaches us that the love of family is perfectly legitimate. Indeed, it teaches us that the family is the “‘the domestic church,’ a community of grace and prayer, a school of human virtues and of Christian charity” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1666). The Church has long insisted that the union and fruitfulness of marital love are a sacramental image of and participation in the life of the Holy Trinity and that the family is the basic building block of civilization. 

But here’s the thing: Building blocks are for building. Specifically, they are for building the kingdom of God. And so Jesus, living in a culture that takes for granted the primacy of family ties, national pride, and blood relationship, shockingly declares: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). 

He does not, of course, mean that we are to wish harm and damnation on our family or ourselves. Rather, he means that nothing, not even the love of one’s own kind, is to take priority over the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God takes priority over the family, and the family exists as a kind of preschool for the kingdom. Disobedience to God on this point can be seen in such things as clan warfare in Romeo and Juliet, in bloody gang struggles on the streets of Los Angeles, and in slaughter between the Hatfields and the McCoys. 

A Healthy Patriotism 

The Church likewise commends the virtue of patriotism, the love of one’s people, native land, and culture (which is simply the love of family extended). This particular species of the love of neighbor is also normal and healthy and can engender all sorts of virtues as it teaches us to be grateful, not only for our family and loved ones, but also for the enormous gifts of love we have received from our community and our ancestors, who gave us everything from a state of ordered liberty instead of chaos or tyranny to an infrastructure we could never have invented ourselves that provides us with everything from pencils to penicillin, water to waffles, literacy to lettuce.

To be grateful for and loving toward those who have, by their pains and sacrifices, given our country so much, whom we can never repay except with thanks, is perfectly fitting. Such love is right and proper and honors God as well as family and country. 

But such patriotism is the dead opposite of nationalism. For nationalism is to healthy patriotism in a people what the satanic sin of pride is to the virtue of healthy self-love in a person. The command is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Pride is the will to exalt yourself as you despise your neighbor, which in the end is to exalt yourself as you despise God. And multiplied by millions of hearts and minds and endowed with billions of dollars and the force of arms, it can and has resulted in some of the most immense bloodbaths in human history.

Not unrelatedly, as White Christian nationalism was germinating in the years after 9/11, one of the arguments many conservative Christians made was that America was facing something called “demographic winter.” The claim was that Muslims were outbreeding the godless sexually libertine West. So it was essential that those who reverence “Judeo-Christian values” boost their numbers in America or be swamped by a tide of Islam. 

But then, suddenly, the argument shifted. At about the same moment, a Black Christian with a foreign-sounding name was elected president under the completely false accusation that he was not a real American citizen and a Muslim to boot. The discourse shifted sharply among conservative Christians to the supposed deadly peril of refugees “invading” America’s southern border. 

Virtually all these refugees were Christians, seeking only a chance to work, to raise their families, and to practice their faith—the very stuff that Christian nationalists said would restore our country’s greatness. But they were Black and Brown, speaking languages that made Christian nationalists uncomfortable. And so the lie was revealed: The issue was not that they wanted more Christians, but more Whites. The goal was not to “defend the Gospel” but to defend White privilege. 

More on Monday.