Christian Nationalism and the Cross on the Flag

Today's Scripture

Exodus 20:3 — "You shall have no other gods before me."

Psalm 20:7 — "Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God."

Philippians 3:20 — "But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ."

The Big Idea

Christian nationalism is what happens when the loyalty that belongs to Christ alone gets transferred — even partly — to a nation, a flag, a party, or a tribe. Loving your country is allowed. Worshiping it is not. The first commandment is the test, and every generation of the church has to take that test again.

Reflection

An old temptation with a new name

Long before anyone put a cross on a flag, Israel walked into this exact trap. The elders came to the prophet Samuel and said, "appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations" (1 Samuel 8:5). Listen to the reason: like all the nations. They wanted what the surrounding superpowers had — a throne, an army, a brand. They said it outright a few verses later: "that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles" (1 Samuel 8:19-20).

God's verdict is chilling. "They have not rejected you," he tells Samuel, "but they have rejected me from being king over them" (1 Samuel 8:7). Wanting national power like everyone else was not a neutral political preference. It was a quiet firing of God.

The Psalms name the same temptation in one line. Psalm 20:7 — "Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God." Chariots were the fighter jets of the ancient world. The question is never whether a nation has them. The question is where your deepest confidence sleeps at night.

And when Joshua, on the eve of battle, meets a mysterious warrior and asks the question every nation at war wants answered — "Are you for us, or for our adversaries?" — the commander of the Lord's army gives a one-word reply: "No" (Joshua 5:13-14). God does not enlist. He is not the mascot of anyone's army. The only question on offer is whether we are for him.

Constantine's shields and Hitler's churches

In the year 312, the Roman general Constantine painted Christian symbols on his soldiers' shields before the battle that made him emperor. He won, and within a generation the empire that had crucified Jesus and fed Christians to lions was officially Christian. Some of what followed was good. But something else was smuggled in with it: the idea that the empire's wars were Christ's wars, that the kingdom of God had a capital city and an army.

Sixteen centuries later, that idea produced its most horrifying version. In the 1930s, a movement called the "German Christians" embraced Hitler as a gift from God to the German people. They did not stop going to church. They hung swastikas next to crosses. They were often sincere. They were also committing idolatry — idolatry being the Bible's word for giving anything God's place. Tim Keller's definition is the clearest one available:

"What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give." — Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods

A nation can absolutely be that. In 1934, a brave minority of German pastors and theologians met in the town of Barmen and drew a line. Their declaration, drafted mainly by Karl Barth, did not even need to mention Hitler. It just said who the church's one Lord is:

"Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death." — Karl Barth, The Barmen Declaration

One Word. Not one Word plus the Führer. Not one Word plus the fatherland — or, for us, plus the flag, plus the party, plus the movement. Many who signed it were arrested. Bonhoeffer, whom we met two days ago, was hanged. Revelation 13:11 had warned the church about this counterfeit long before: John sees a second beast that "had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon." The most dangerous idols do not look like dragons. They look almost like the Lamb.

How to spot the counterfeit in your own heart

It is easy to shake our heads at 1930s Germany. It is harder to take the first commandment's test ourselves. Exodus 20:3 — "You shall have no other gods before me." Here are some honest diagnostics.

Think about how a sports fan watches a game. A foul by the other team is an outrage; the identical foul by his own team is "just good, physical play." He is not lying, exactly. His loyalty has quietly taken over his eyesight. Now ask: do I read news about my country, my party, my side, the way a fan watches his team? When loyalty starts editing what we are able to see, it has stopped being love and started becoming worship.

When Jesus was asked the trick question about paying taxes to Caesar, he asked whose image was on the coin, then said: "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mark 12:17). The coin bears Caesar's image — give it to him. But you bear God's image. Caesar may have your taxes. He may not have your soul. So ask: is there anything my nation or my party could do that I would refuse to defend? If the answer is no, Caesar has crossed into God's column.

C.S. Lewis put this diagnostic in the mouth of a senior demon coaching a junior one. The strategy for ruining a Christian, Screwtape explains, is not to attack his faith but to make it useful to a cause:

"Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing." — C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Read that twice, because it is even-handed. Any worldly end will do — right-wing or left-wing, national greatness or political revolution. The moment faith becomes the engine and the cause becomes the destination, the idol has won. G.K. Chesterton skewered the slogan version of it a century ago:

"'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" — G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant

Real love — of a mother or a country — wants the beloved to be good, and grieves when she is not. Flattery is not loyalty. Augustine traced the whole thing to its root: every society is finally organized around a love.

"Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self." — Augustine, The City of God

Every nation, even the best, belongs to the first city. The church belongs to the second. Confuse them, and you will end up baptizing self-love and calling it faith. This was the exact temptation Satan offered Jesus in the wilderness: "All these I will give you" — all the kingdoms of the world — "if you will fall down and worship me." Jesus answered, "You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve" (Matthew 4:8-10). The kingdoms of the world, offered as a package deal, in exchange for worship. Jesus said no. Christian nationalism, in every era, is the church saying yes.

Citizens of a better country

So what is a Christian's actual relationship to her nation? Not hatred. Not worship. Something stranger: grateful residence with a foreign passport. Philippians 3:20 — "But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ." Peter stacks up the titles Israel once carried and hands them to the church scattered across many empires: "you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation" — and then, in the same breath, "sojourners and exiles" (1 Peter 2:9-11). The church is the only "holy nation" there is, and it has no borders, no army, and members in every country on earth — including the ones your country fears.

A short letter from the second century, written to a curious pagan named Diognetus, described how the earliest Christians lived this out:

"They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners... Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers." — The Epistle to Diognetus

At home everywhere; fully owned nowhere. That is why Jesus told Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting" (John 18:36). His kingdom is real and it is political — it has a King, a people, a law of love — but it does not run on the world's fuel. It advances by witness, not by weapons. Stanley Hauerwas has spent a career pressing this point on American Christians:

"The church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic." — Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom

In plain words: the church's first political job is not to capture the nation. It is to be a different kind of nation in plain sight — a community where enemies are prayed for, the weak are honored, and the flag hangs lower than the cross.

And here is the gospel underneath it all. You do not need your country to be God's country, because you already belong to a King who won his throne without a single sword — by dying for his enemies and rising again. He does not need your nation's power, and he is not threatened by its decline. Held by him, you are free to love your country honestly: to celebrate what is good in it, mourn what is evil in it, and serve it best by refusing to worship it.

Going Deeper

Take the first-commandment test this week. Notice one moment when nation, party, or tribe asks for a worship-shaped response — outrage on command, hatred of the other side, defending something you know is wrong. Just notice it. Then pray Psalm 20:7 over that exact moment: "Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God." If you are able, tell one friend what you noticed. Idols lose power when they are named out loud.