You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that one nation on earth has a special vocation to be a Christian nation as an example or sign for all other nations.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that God founded your nation as a superior nation among the nations to uniquely enact his will in the earth.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe the founding documents of your nation reflect the teachings of Scripture accurately, that God was involved in their creation as in the creation of Scripture, that the writers of those documents were primarily interested in expressing Christian principles, and that, like Scripture, they are timeless. [With my regards to Jim Eisenbraun]
You might be a Christian nationalist if your church removes the national flag of the nation in which it is located, and that removal makes you anxious or angry, or if its services fail to offer a venue for displays of national patriotism, and that absence disturbs or alarms you.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you have a low tolerance for an honest assessment of your country’s national sins, or when pastors do the difficult, necessary work of identifying those sins (for sin is personal, familial, and tribal) you refuse their humble discernments.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you’ve never questioned your nation’s offensive or defensive military operations or if you are tempted to trust in your nation’s temporal powers rather than God for salvation from enemies.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that God cares about the survival of your nation’s particular political order or “way of life” or economic status rather than the persons and living things within its borders, its language and culture, its natural treasures.
You might be a Christian nationalist if the prospect of your nation’s end unmoors your trust in providence.
You might be a Christian nationalist if the orienting realities of your life or your family’s life are not the apostles’ teaching, a table of bread and wine, fellowship with the poor, and the prayers but your partisan loyalties, and the so-called thought leaders of that loyalty.
You might be a Christian nationalist if you do not recognize that the gospel is pan-national, encompassing all peoples everywhere, all cultures, all languages, where all armaments become gardening tools, where the peace won by the weakness of the human God on the cross reigns.
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There was a lot of response to my original post about Christian nationalism. I wrote it because the definitions I’d seen on social media felt academic and abstract.
Christian nationalism is clearly something real and concrete (responses—not just here but elsewhere—prove this); and people have very strong feelings about it. One prominent leader in Charismatic circles rewrote the paragraphs to celebrate Christian nationalism!
The post was an urgent invitation to ponder what’s in our hearts and minds because I don’t think that all is well.
I do not consume mainstream media or listen to politicians so my choice of “Christian nationalism,” a phrase I have been using for years, has *nothing* whatsoever to do with its very recent apparent use in flogging conservatives (which I’m just learning about).
There is not a stitch of a problem in identifying with your country of origin or the one you are happy to be living in, as a citizen or émigré. After all, God loves the nations.
It’s a deeply tricky business, though, and I think the whole matter requires *a lot more* diligence, discernment, and care than too many Christians apply to their love of country.
There’s nothing wrong with celebrating what goodness lies within a political order and its people. Yet there are signs everywhere that this love has surpassed loyalty to the words and life of Jesus Christ.
The New Testament teaches that we are citizens of heaven. It’s indifferent at best about national citizenship. The gospel opposes empires not with swords but with its insistence that allegiance cannot be given to anyone other than Jesus Christ.
The martyrs died for this insistence.
The very existence of the kingdom of God challenges *all* political regimes, including the one where you live. If you are reading this in Russia right now, where the state and the church are together waging war for the idea of a greater Russia, I’m talking to you.
The echelon leaders of the Third Reich were into all sorts of evil, yet they manipulated a Christian population with dreams of a greater Germany. They appealed to their sense of exceptionalism and to their sense of victimhood, and the people they did this to were a majority Christian nation. They were able to do this because being German had become more important to them than being disciples of Jesus who attend to his great Sermon.
One further word: It seems to me that some people in my country trust that it is a better nation than any other, and that it’s providential to be born American, and while it’s true there are nations I would not wish to be born into, and while I love America, Christians ought to let God judge nations.
By what criteria are we judging?
Why do followers of Jesus visit and encounter the people, the natural beauty, the customs, the food, the arts, the clothes, the language, the sports—and that unnameable thing that makes a place and people good and lovely and true—then return home to critique and say things like “but America is [name your superlative].”
There’s zero problem with being glad to be “home” but Christians trust that God plays no favorites, makes no exceptions, when leading the nations. When we think we are exceptional or favored we lose touch with humility, with the very nature of God, and that should give us pause.
Thanks for your responses, challenges, and encouragements. It wasn’t worded perfectly. Nothing human ever is. I did make some changes to one paragraph about fear and someone else wrote one point better than mine so I swapped mine out for his. Much grace and peace.
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