Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor

by Caleb E. Campbell

For me one of the most painful revelations of 2020 was that many within the American church were not placing their ultimate hope in Jesus but were instead buying the false promises of Christian nationalism—a movement that calls Christian followers to take government power at all costs to advance their preferred way of being in the world.

About one hundred years after Jesus’ resurrection, a letter was written to the Roman leader Diognetus. The letter describes the cultures and customs of the early Christians living in the Roman Empire. In one section the letter shows that Jesus’ followers “dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.”

If a nation is an identifiable people group, what then is nationalism? Nationalism elevates my people’s concerns over the concerns of others, often at the expense of those who are not “my people.” In today’s world it often includes a belief that the state (government) should work to protect and promote my people’s interests. In the modern era nationalism has frequently been posited as an alternative to globalism, an ideology that promotes cooperation of countries around the world and focuses on the concerns of the international community.

While many American Christian nationalist organizations center their messaging on certain conservative and nationalistic political ideologies, their true power comes from cultivating anxiety in their audience to grow their influence. Operating like a cult, they promise to quell the anxiety and rage they produce by offering safety, belonging, and purpose to those inside the community.

The Scripture tells us that people are not totally good or totally bad but, as Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”