Is Jesus A Christian Nationalist

Luke 4:14-21

Is Jesus a Christian Nationalist?

This image captures is often used to communicate the White Christian Nationalist movement.

Taken during the January 6th insurrection, we see a solitary white man, his head pressed in prayer against a massive wooden cross, facing the US Capitol building.

This guy is part of an insurgent religious movement that is storming the halls of American power.

What’s unsettling, for some, about this photo four years later is that much of the religious zeal that fed the insurrection is no longer outside the gates of power.

Many of the movement’s followers are now on the inside.

Over the next four years, Christian Nationalists will have unprecedented access to the power of the federal government.

Many people sit watching with bewilderment, scratching their heads and wondering how this could happen and what it all means for the future.

And some of us may be wondering what, exactly is Christian Nationalism?

This theological and political ideology has been around for a long time and has taken many forms.

Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants in the United States described themselves as sympathizers or adherents to Christian nationalism in a February 2023 survey.

So, let’s define Christian Nationalism and see if it does or doesn’t align with the message of Jesus and the Person of Jesus—what Jesus taught, His Mission Statement as its laid out in this morning’s Gospel lesson from Luke 4 and how Jesus calls us to live.

A good place to start is to talk about Nationalism.

Nationalism is an intense allegiance to one’s nation and one’s national identity.

And that by itself is not necessarily bad.

That can look like patriotism or national pride and can be good, but Nationalism takes it a step further and finds itself identifying the nation not by a geography or all the people living in a country, but really by a certain identity within the country.

What do I mean by that?

Nationalism is sometimes defined by a particular race, sometimes by a particular religion and it’s defined by a particular political ideology.

And when it’s defined by any of these things there are a lot of people who are excluded.

And those who are excluded sometimes become Second Class Citizens or worse—sometimes they are oppressed because they don’t fit the correct identity.

Sometimes they’ve even been killed.

The most extreme example of Nationalism in the last hundred years is Nazi Germany.

The Nazi party was a nationalist party and in this party there was one particular identity among the German people that was lifted up.

It was the Aryan race and they were considered to be the master race, and German national identity was really about being a particular race and a particular religion and everyone else was-- at first-- considered second class and then they became thought of as subhuman and then they needed to be exterminated.

We know the story of these people.

They were people of color, they were Slavic, Roma or what used to be called gypsies.

They were gay and lesbian people, disabled people and mainly the Jewish people.

Hitler, in 1928, made it clear, and I’m quoting him “Our movement is Christian.”

But the people closest to him knew he hated the Christian Church except when it was convenient for him.

And he would use the Church as a way of drawing people in or giving a sort of legitimacy to his ideas.

And the end result was that 6 million Jewish people were murdered along with many others.

That is Christian Nationalism taken to it’s extreme.

The danger of Christian Nationalism starts with idolatry.

We find that in the 10 Commandments, the first commandment is not to worship or have any other idols above God, but this is what happens with Christian Nationalism regardless of what your faith is.

The nation becomes, for many people, god and so when you are yoking together religion and nationalism what you are going to find is that nationalism becomes number one and the religion becomes the servant of the primary god which is the nation.

So, in America, right now, Christian Nationalism is an ideology that unites a certain kind of Christianity with nationalism.

The last three political campaigns, have been infused with White Christian National imagery and rhetoric—with the promise to root out “anti-Christian bias” and restore Christian Power in America while giving access to a group our New Leader calls: “my beautiful Christians.”

Our new President won the support of about 8 in 10 White evangelical voters in November’s election.

Scholars have called Christian Nationalism an “imposter Christianity” whose adherents use religious language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-white immigrants in a quest to create a White Christian America.

According to Kristen Du Mez, historian and author of the New York Times bestseller, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation” Christian Nationalism is ultimately incompatible with American democracy and certainly with the character, the teachings and the life exemplified by Jesus Christ.