Christian Nationalism and the Cross on the Flag

Today's Reading

Read Exodus 20:3, the first commandment: "You shall have no other gods before me." This is the test that exposes every counterfeit.

Read Mark 12:13-17, where Jesus is asked about taxes to Caesar. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." Notice what Caesar is given (taxes, his image on the coin) and what only God is given (worship, ultimate loyalty).

Read John 18:36, where Jesus tells Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting." A kingdom not of this world is not the same as a kingdom that has nothing to do with this world — but it is also not a kingdom that runs on this world's fuel.

Read Revelation 13:11-18, where the second beast — the false prophet — uses religious authority to compel worship of the political beast. The text is a warning about exactly the temptation we face today.

Reflection

In the year 312, on the eve of the battle at the Milvian Bridge that would make him master of the Roman Empire, Constantine is said to have seen a vision of a cross above the sun, with the words In hoc signo vinces — "In this sign you will conquer." He had his soldiers paint the chi-rho — the first two letters of Christos in Greek — on their shields. He won the battle. Within a generation, the empire that had crucified the Lord and martyred the apostles became, officially, Christian.

It is impossible to overstate how much this changed and complicated everything we have been talking about in this plan. Before Constantine, the question of how a Christian could be a soldier was largely answered by not being one. After Constantine, the question of how a Christian could be the emperor — the question Augustine wrestled with a century later — became unavoidable. The just-war tradition emerged in part because this question demanded an answer.

But there was another, deeper temptation introduced at that same moment: the temptation to fuse the kingdom of God with the kingdoms of men. The cross on Constantine's shields was not just a religious image. It was a claim. It said that the empire's wars were fought under Christ's banner — that the empire was, in some sense, the visible body of the kingdom of God on earth.

This is the temptation we now call Christian nationalism. It is older than that name. It has many forms. It is also, of all the temptations in our plan, the one that has done the most damage to the church's witness across history.

The mechanism of Christian nationalism is theologically simple. It takes the loyalty Christians owe to Christ alone — the loyalty of the heart, of worship, of ultimate commitment — and transfers some portion of it to a nation, an ethnicity, a culture, or a political project. It says: God is on our side. Our nation is, in some special way, his nation. Our wars are his wars. Our enemies are his enemies. The flag and the cross are not the same thing, but they are flown together because (we tell ourselves) what they stand for is the same.

The first commandment is the test that exposes this. "You shall have no other gods before me." If your loyalty to your nation operates as a competitor to your loyalty to Christ, you have a problem. If your willingness to defend your nation's actions exceeds your willingness to defend Christ's commands, you have a problem. If you would lie for your country but not for the gospel, you have a problem. If you would die for your country before you would die for the church, you have a problem.

The clearest case study in our era's memory is the German Christian movement under Hitler — the Deutsche Christen, who in the 1930s embraced the Nazi regime as the political fulfillment of God's purposes for the German people. They did not see themselves as betraying Christianity. They saw themselves as recovering it — as freeing it from "Jewish" elements, as binding it to the German Volk, as celebrating Hitler as the leader God had given. They wore church robes. They sang hymns. They preached sermons. They were heretics.

In response, in May 1934, a smaller group of pastors and theologians met in the city of Barmen and produced one of the great confessional documents of the modern church. The Barmen Declaration, drafted primarily by Karl Barth, did not directly address Hitler or the Nazi state by name. It addressed the deeper error: the idea that any source — any nation, any leader, any ideology — could share the church's allegiance with Christ. "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." Anything else competing for that loyalty is rejected. The Confessing Church paid a high price for that confession. Many pastors were arrested; some were killed. Bonhoeffer was one of them.

Bonhoeffer's analysis of what had gone wrong with the German church is sharp and worth remembering. The German Christians did not stop being religious. They became more religious — religious about the wrong things. They did not abandon worship. They redirected it. The cross was not removed from their churches. It was joined, on the same wall, with the swastika. The fusion is the danger, because the fusion looks like piety.

American civil religion — the soft, ambient idea that the United States has a special covenantal relationship with God, that its history is providentially Christian, that its wars are fought under heaven's blessing — is not a different species from the German error. It is a milder variant. It does not currently demand the worship of a Führer. It does demand a kind of loyalty that the gospel does not authorize. The Christian who can sing "God Bless America" without complication, recite the pledge without flinching, vote a straight ticket without examining whether the ticket aligns with Christ's commands, has not yet faced the question Barmen pressed.

This is not a partisan point. The fusion of Christ with the nation operates on every part of the political spectrum. There is a left-wing Christian nationalism that baptizes a progressive political project as the kingdom of God. There is a right-wing Christian nationalism that does the same with a conservative one. Both are idolatries. Both fail the first commandment. The test is not which party you support but whether your loyalty to that party, that nation, that movement, exceeds your loyalty to Christ — whether you will accept its compromises, defend its sins, fight its wars, hate its enemies, on the basis of a tribal allegiance the gospel does not authorize.

Stanley Hauerwas, more than perhaps any modern American theologian, has been relentless on this point. The church, Hauerwas argues, is not a department of the nation. It is a colony of the kingdom of God within whatever nation it finds itself. Its first task is not to bless American foreign policy or shape American legislation; its first task is to be the kind of community that embodies — visibly, publicly — the politics of Jesus. "The first task of the church is to be the church," Hauerwas wrote in The Peaceable Kingdom. The church that has forgotten this is a church that has nothing to say to the nation that does not already echo what the nation says about itself.

Bonhoeffer made the same point in a different key. The German church's catastrophic failure under Hitler was not that it embraced a particularly bad politics. It was that it had already, for generations, allowed the nation's purposes to define its own. By 1933, the church had been so thoroughly nationalized that resisting Hitler required resisting the church's own habits. Confessing Christ as Lord became a political act because the political had been smuggled into the place where Christ should have been alone.

What does the Christian do with all this?

The first instinct is right: render to Caesar what is Caesar's. The Christian is not an anarchist. Pay your taxes. Obey the law (in things not contrary to God's command). Vote thoughtfully. Serve in civic offices when called. Love your country, with the realistic, eyes-open love that does not flatter and does not despise. Christians can do all of these things.

The second discipline is harder: do not give to Caesar what belongs to God. Your worship belongs to God. Your ultimate loyalty belongs to God. Your willingness to kill, to lie, to hate — these belong to God's command, not to your nation's politics. If your country tells you to do something Christ forbids, you obey God rather than men. If your party asks you to celebrate a sin, you do not celebrate. If your tribe asks you to hate, you do not hate. The flag is not the cross. The anthem is not the doxology. The cause of your nation, however good, is not the cause of Christ — though sometimes they overlap.

The church's job in our time is, in part, to be a community where this distinction is preserved. Where Americans and non-Americans, citizens of warring nations, sit at the same table because they belong to a kingdom older and deeper than any of their countries. Where the symbols of the nation do not crowd out the symbols of the gospel. Where the prayer for the nation is the prayer the apostles prayed for Rome — not the celebration of empire, but the petition for justice and the reminder that the emperor is not God.

Tomorrow we turn from the temptation of nationalism to the harder discipline of loving the actual enemy in real time.

Going Deeper

Read the first article of the Barmen Declaration. Then read Exodus 20:3. Walk through your week and ask: where, in concrete and small ways, did I give to my nation, my party, my tribe, the kind of loyalty that Christ alone can claim? Where did I assume my side was God's side? Confess. Then ask what one practice — what one Sunday morning prayer, what one sermon, what one conversation — would help your church teach this distinction more clearly.