Preaching God’s Reign under the Shadow of Christian Nationalism

Preaching God’s Reign under the Shadow of Christian Nationalism

January 2024 – Ongoing in 2026

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Introduction

Throughout 2024 the rise of Christian Nationalism began to build momentum toward Election Day, and then the election results brought the prospect of installing it — all openly telegraphed through the Project 2025 manifesto of the Heritage Foundation. From the beginning of 2024, under the shadow of rising Christian Nationalism, I have felt compelled to preach the Good News of God’s reign coming into the world through Jesus the Messiah as something very different than Nationalism.

Here’s the bottom line. Jesus of Nazareth was an indigenous man living on the margins of the Roman Empire. His people, the Jews, had been an indigenous people in other people’s nations and empires for more than six centuries. The biblical account of their history, climaxing with the Christian scriptures, can be best understood from the perspective of indigenous people enduring the suffering and oppression of nationalistic empires. To not recover that perspective — largely lost over 16 centuries of Christendom, the alliance of the church with Empire — is to betray the truth of the Judeo-Scriptures and to turn our backs on our responsibility to speak out at a crucial moment in history. The rise of a so-called Christian Nationalism — simply another imperialistic movement in the millennia of human history — must be met with bold proclamation of the Gospel and with acts of resistance to the reality of nationalistic political agendas.

The first thing to understand contra to Christian Nationalism, from the perspective of the indigenous Messiah Jesus, is that all nationalisms are about dividing the world into good and evil, who’s in and who’s out, along markers of difference such as ethnicity, religion, patriotism, gender, class, and race. The ingroup then rules in a pyramid of power with those at the top dominating over those below — fundamentally inequitable and oppressive. Over the past six centuries for those of European descent, Nationalism has generally been paired with white supremacist racism. Jesus’s proclamation of the coming of God’s reign, on the other hand, is about healing all those divisions which keep humankind in conflict: “that Messiah Jesus might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace” (Eph 2:15). God’s politics and economics are about establishing true justice in the sense of equity for all God’s children — and our earth home with all its creatures — so that everyone might have a fair chance of flourishing. It is about mutual service among equals, never servitude of the weak by the strong.

A second point of opposition to Christian Nationalism is that God’s reign is not even itself “Christian” in the usual sense of being about a new religion called “Christianity.” So God’s reign is never about elevating one religion above others. Rather, the reign of God coming into the world brings with it alternative politics and economics that offer a whole new way of being human. In other words, God’s reign is not about an exclusive demand to conversion to an ascendant religion called “Christianity,” but rather an inclusive invitation to a better way of being human.

A third thing to say up-front is that a fundamental difference between nationalisms of all varieties and the reign of God has to do with violence. At the heart of Nationalism is a faith in sanctioned violence to contain (in both senses of the word) or combat unsanctioned violence. The gods of empire sanction those in power to use violence to rule over others. At the heart of the faith which Jesus the Messiah came to reveal to us is a God who is completely nonviolent. God is love. Full stop. God even teaches us to love our enemies.

Since Christianity as a religion allied itself with empire, an arrangement often referred to as “Christendom,” members of churches have tended to mix the gods — gods of violence with the God of nonviolence — which allows for violence in God and thus betrays the fundamental revelation of Jesus the Messiah that God is completely nonviolent. I believe that the key to an effective preaching of God’s reign under the shadow of Christian Nationalism is to unmix the gods. Above all else, followers of the Way of being human set by Jesus the Messiah must remain faithful to the nonviolent God of love.

Here, then, is a chart of the differing values between God’s Reign and Nationalism which are explored throughout the following sermons:

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