If your Christianity needs a flag to feel powerful, it might not be following Him.
Right now in America, “Christian nationalism” is having a moment—waving Bibles at rallies, wrapping crosses in red, white, and blue, talking like Jesus personally wrote the Constitution. It sounds holy. It feels patriotic.
But if we hold it up next to the actual teachings of Jesus, the whole thing starts to fall apart.
Christian nationalism imagines Jesus as the chaplain of the empire—blessing its borders, endorsing its wars, rubber-stamping its laws. But in the Gospels, Jesus stands under empire, not over it.
He is born under occupation (Luke 2:1). His parents flee as refugees from state violence (Matthew 2:13–15). He grows up in a backwater region that polite society mocks (John 1:46). He is eventually executed by the state as a threat to “law and order” (Mark 15:1–15).
When the devil offers Him “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” if He will bow down and worship (Matthew 4:8–10), Jesus refuses. When Pilate asks if He is a king, Jesus replies, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).
Christian nationalism, by contrast, craves that offer—political power, cultural dominance, control. It wants “Christian” laws, “Christian” identity, “Christian” control of institutions. PRRI’s survey items show this clearly: supporters tend to agree that the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation, that laws should be based on “Christian values,” and that God has called Christians to exercise “dominion over all areas of American society.”
In other words, Christian nationalism wants the thing Jesus turned down in the desert.
If our version of Christianity needs enemies to hold it together, it’s not the Gospel. It’s just tribalism with a few Bible verses stapled on. Christian nationalism loves to talk about “returning to our Christian roots,” but it usually means nostalgia, not repentance. Jesus doesn’t call us back to the 1950s. He calls us forward into a kingdom where the last are first (Matthew 20:16).
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