Christian Patriotism vs. Christian Nationalism
When the cross gets wrapped in the flag, the flag usually wins.
Someone very close to me could not tell me the difference between a Christian nationalist and a Christian patriot. This is a believer. This is someone who loves this country. And when I asked for the difference between the two, the answer never came. That conversation is the reason I am writing this.
The words patriotism and nationalism can appear to be synonyms to the casual observer. American culture is steeped in patriotic gestures and rituals. When I was a boy, we saluted the flag every day in school. Every morning, before a single lesson, we stood beside our desks, put our hands over our hearts, and recited the pledge of allegiance. Nobody sat us down and explained it. You just did it, the way you learned to do everything else that mattered. That is where a patriot is made. Not in an argument, in a ritual you repeat until it becomes part of you. At our sporting events we still stand for a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. We even place American flags in our church sanctuaries. That qualifies us to be called Christian patriots.
These are symbols we proudly display, just as citizens of countries around the world profess love and loyalty to the country of their birth and citizenship. And Black Americans have demonstrated a level of loyalty that some would call irrational in light of the manner in which America has exposed us to the most inhumanely sustained oppression known to the human experience.
So patriotism means loyalty to a nation that may not have been loyal to the patriot.
But although they sound like the same reality, nationalism, especially Christian nationalism in America, is a very different reality.
Patriotism is love of country. It is gratitude for a particular place and people, affection for home, loyalty to the land that raised you. A Christian patriot keeps God above country, which means he or she can love America and still tell the truth about her.
Christian nationalism moves the country up a rung. It fuses national identity and Christian identity until they cannot be pulled apart, and it treats the nation as divinely chosen, founded as a Christian nation, meant to be governed as one. Patriotism loves a country. Nationalism sacralizes it.
The old story in the third chapter of Daniel draws the line better than any definition I could write. Nebuchadnezzar built a golden image and commanded everyone to bow when the music played. The image was an idol. To bow to it was to set it in the place of the God of creation, to make a thing the people had built into a god. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego would not do it. They were loyal subjects. They served in the king’s own government. But they had been raised to worship God and God alone, and they knew the difference between honoring a king and bowing to an idol. They were willing to walk into the furnace to keep that difference clear. A patriot honors the nation. A nationalist bows to it. Christian nationalism takes the country and makes it the golden image. That is the whole matter in one scene.
That difference shows up in a few concrete places. First is the posture toward a flawed nation. Christian patriotism can love and criticize in the same breath. Christian nationalism tends to defend and sanctify, so that criticism starts to feel like betrayal.
Second is the question of who belongs. Christian patriotism can include everybody inside the borders. Christian nationalism ties full belonging to a religious identity, and in this country that religious identity has usually carried a racial one alongside it.
Third is power. Christian nationalism wants the machinery of the state to enforce its vision. Christian nationalists are the Christian version of the Taliban, which wants Islamic theocracy instead of democracy. Theocracy is anti-democratic whether it is Islamic or Christian. Patriotism does not require government to enforce its religious values.
And fourth is what happens to the gospel itself. When the cross gets wrapped in the flag, the flag usually wins, and the gospel ends up serving the political project instead of judging it. Germany already showed us how that ends. In the 1930s a movement called the German Christians stitched the cross and the swastika together and told the church that Hitler was doing God’s work. A smaller group, the Confessing Church, said no. One of them was a young pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he paid for that no with his life. When the flag and the cross were sewn onto the same banner, the flag won. It always does.
The Black church has practiced a patriotism that was critical and invested at the same time, and it did so precisely because it experienced the nation’s failures in its own body. Frederick Douglass asking what the Fourth of July meant to the slave is patriotism, not contempt. It is love that refuses to let the country off the hook. Jackie Robinson wrote near the end of his life that he could not stand and sing the anthem, that he could not salute the flag, because he knew he was a black man in a white world. That is not a man who hated his country. That is a man who loved it enough to name what it had done to him. The Black church tradition never confused America with the Kingdom of God, because it never had the luxury of believing the nation was already holy. Folks who loved a country that did not love them back learned a patriotism that is structurally immune to nationalism. They knew the difference between honoring a nation’s ideals and worshiping the nation.
There are those who wonder why there is such concern about Christian nationalism, because it sounds so much like patriotic Christians. But there is such an epidemic of ignorance among people who do not read books and do not listen carefully that many people think Christian nationalism is the equivalent of Christian patriotism. The two are not synonyms. Christian patriotism inspires churches to have American flags inside their sanctuaries. Christian patriotism causes Christian leaders to encourage their followers to abide by the rule of law. Christian patriotism is loyalty to the American experiment, which values religious freedom and pluralism. Christian patriotism is patriotic Christians who love their country and strive to live out the teachings of Jesus in America.
Christian nationalism asserts that America was founded to be a Christian country, and therefore anything non-Christian is considered anti-American. Christian nationalists believe that America must be led by people whose values align with their view of a biblical worldview, and that view is a very narrow interpretation of scripture. Christian nationalism represents a modern version of the Crusades, where the war uses political campaigns as its weapon of choice. Christian nationalism has racial views that emerge from a biblical hermeneutic built on the erroneous teaching concerning the curse of Ham. The story sits in the ninth chapter of Genesis, where Noah, waking from his own drunkenness, curses Ham’s son. For centuries white Christians took that curse, hung it on the dark-skinned descendants of Ham, and used it to bless the auction block. The racial injustice committed by the hands of Christianity is largely justified by this so-called curse.
We do not have to reach back centuries to see it. On the sixth of January in 2021, a crowd came up the steps of the Capitol carrying wooden crosses and signs that read Jesus Saves, and they carried them past a set of gallows they had built in the same yard. The cross and the noose in the same photograph. That is the whole argument of this essay standing on the Capitol lawn.
When thinking about Christian patriotism, think about the men and women who died fighting for colonial America to achieve their freedom from a British despot. When thinking about Christian nationalism, think about a Christian Taliban wanting for this country what the Islamic fundamentalists want in the Middle East.
The American experiment is certainly founded on principles that reside in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the dominant theme of America is that we would learn to be E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. One nation made of different people from different places who hold different beliefs. And so we strive toward that goal.
Pastor, once again spot on. Your inspirational message on Christian patriotism is one for the record books. Stay well and may God continue to bless you and your ministry.