The Dangerous Marriage of Christianity and Nationalism

About sixteen months ago I wrote about a movement in the United States which calls itself Christian nationalism. I defined Christian nationalism as “the belief that the United States is, and should be, a Christian nation, and that our laws should reflect and enforce Christian values.”

We have seen this before, this attempted marriage of Christianity and nationalism. And it did not end well for true Christians.

In 1932 Ludwig Müller and others started a movement in Germany that called itself the “German Christians.” By 1933 the German Christians had seized control of the German Evangelical Church, the Lutheran denomination to which most non-Catholic Christians in Germany belonged.

The German Christians were strong supporters of Adolf Hitler and the cause of National Socialism, also known as Nazism. The German Christians promoted racism against members of the Jewish community, painting Jesus as an Aryan^[1] and an anti-Semite (based on such verses as John 8:44: “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father”) and editing large portions of the Bible to exclude anything which seemed favorable toward Jews.

The German Christians failed to remold the German government or German society according to Christian values, and instead remade Christianity in conformance with Nazi values—posting Swastikas in churches, expelling pastors who refused to swear allegiance to Hitler, and expelling Christians of Jewish heritage from the church.

Christian pastors who opposed these beliefs and practices as antithetical to the teachings of Jesus formed an alternative church which they named the “Confessing Church.” One of these opposition pastors was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, about whom I wrote in Chapter 28 of my book, Christ’s Faithful Servants. (You can read a short excerpt from Chapter 28 here.) The German Christians and the Nazi government persecuted and eventually outlawed the Confessing Church. Christian pastors and other Christians who refused to accept the Nazi ideal—that is, those who remained loyal to Christ rather than Hitler—were often confined in concentration camps, imprisoned, or executed.

As I pointed out in October, 2022, Christian nationalism is all about power—the power to force others to conform to the values of those in power. But are those who crave such power really interested in Christian values?

The overriding Christian value is love. We are to love God with our whole being and love others as much as we love ourselves.[2] Indeed, we are to love even our enemies.[3] And we are to treat others like we would like to be treated.[4] Jesus also told us not to judge others,[5] but to be merciful and forgiving.[6] I submit that these are not the values the Christian nationalists are promoting.

Worldly power is not what Christianity is all about. Worldly power was not what Jesus was interested in. If he had wanted that, he could have had it when Satan offered it to him in the wilderness.[7] Instead, one of his final instructions to his disciples was to “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to follow all that I commanded you.”[8]

I fear that those who seek worldly power in order to force others to conform to their beliefs are damaging and discrediting real Christianity in the eyes of many unbelievers. They are doing exactly what the scribes and Pharisees did in Jesus’ time, about which he said:

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven in front of people; for you do not enter it yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.[9]

[1]. In Nazi ideology, an “Aryan” referred to non-Jewish Caucasians of northern European descent, especially those with blonde hair and blue eyes. In practice, the Nazis mostly used the term to mean non-Jewish Germans.

[2]. Matthew 22:36-40, Luke 10:25-28

[3]. Matthew 5:43-47, Luke 6:27-28, Luke 6:32-35

[4]. Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31

[5]. Matthew 7:1-5, 6:37

[6]. Matthew 5:7, 6:12, 6:14-15, 18:21-35; Mark 11:25; Luke 6:36, 11:4, 173-4

[7]. Matthew 4:8-10, Luke 4:5-8

[8]. Matthew 28:19-20

[9]. Matthew 23:13-15; see also Luke 11:46 and 11:52