The Empire Has a Flag. Christians Have a Kingdom.
A Reflection on America's Semiquincentennial
On the occasion of our country’s 250th anniversary, it feels important to say something true about patriotism before the moment passes. There is a version of love for country that is honorable, and one I deeply embody: the earnest, costly, attentive to the common good, and the dream of freedom, liberty, equality, and prosperity for all. And there is a version that has become something else entirely.
Christian Nationalism is the idolatrous conflation of national identity with the kingdom of God. Patriotism is love of one’s country, its people, its history, its common good, without placing ultimate allegiance anywhere above Christ. The distinction sounds clean in a definition, but it gets murkier in practice. And the stakes are not abstract: a recent Pew survey found that 17% of Americans now favor the government declaring Christianity the official religion of the United States, the highest level ever recorded, up from 13% just two years ago. Among white evangelical Protestants, 67% express some sympathy with Christian Nationalist ideas.
The movement is narrowing and intensifying. Fewer Americans hold these views than did in 2007, but those who do hold them more fervently vote more cohesively, and exercise disproportionate political influence.
That is why Peter’s exhortation about Christian citizenship in 1 Peter is worth considering, both in this cultural moment and beyond it.
The Apostle Peter writes to exiles. The Christians he addresses in 1 and 2 Peter are scattered across Asia Minor, politically marginal, living inside an empire that regards them with suspicion at best and contempt at worst. They are resident aliens trying to figure out how to live with integrity to the cross and to the nation. Three things emerge from his first letter.
Your identity in Christ is spiritual, not national.
Peter reaches back into Exodus 19 and applies Israel’s covenant language directly to this scattered, multiethnic, politically marginal church. “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own possession.” Every title — chosen race, royal priesthood, holy nation — was Israel’s. Now it belongs to anyone in Christ. He ties none of these titles to a nation-state or an ethnicity, much less a political arrangement.
The church’s identity precedes a nation’s and outlasts the nation. It transcends every nation. The royal priesthood is drawn from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. Guard it from anyone who wants to shrink it.
Christian Nationalism shrinks it. The Presbyterian Church in America’s recent Ad Interim Committee on Christian Nationalism defines some under that banner who “advocate for the segregation of different ethnicities and cultures, and believe that the Bible teaches a view of ‘nations’ that treats cultural and ethnic pluralism as contrary to biblical teaching.” The committee did not treat this as a political disagreement. They called it incompatible with biblical Christianity. Wow. Peter’s church was multiethnic by design.
Your daily living and public activity are for the common good and gospel witness.
Here is where Peter gets political.
He tells them to submit to the emperor and his governors, to live honorably among people who may hate them, and to do good so that God gets the glory when their neighbors finally see it. Christians belong in civic life, fully and earnestly. The church as an institution, though, is the state’s partner in human flourishing, each with its own calling and lane. The Westminster Confession is clear: Synods and councils are not to meddle in civil affairs except in extraordinary cases of modest petitions or in an advisory capacity. The PCA report concurs: “The church is not called to direct the affairs of the state, nor the state the affairs of the Church.”
Jean Calvin saw in Peter’s text that the quality of Christian civic life is itself a testimony to the lordship of Christ. The command to silence critics through good conduct is, in Calvin’s framework, missional: exilic behavior shapes public witness.
That witness depends on the Spirit through the Word. Put not your trust in princes.
A Christian’s conduct refuses contempt.
Four imperatives in verse 17 of 1 Peter 2, short and blunt: honor everyone, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the emperor.
Honor everyone. People who share your heritage or your politics, and people who don’t. A Christianity that relies on the state to suppress its opponents produces Christians who treat those opponents with contempt. When the emperor handles the dissenters, verse 17 starts to feel optional. Peter does not make it optional.
Free people, whose identity is secured by God’s own possession of them, can afford to honor everyone. They carry an exile’s dignity, which proves more durable than a citizen’s privilege.
Peter is not giving us a political platform. He is giving us a character formation that makes Christian Nationalism theologically impossible. You cannot hold that your identity is spiritual rather than national, that your witness depends on the Spirit rather than the magistrate, that your conduct extends honor to everyone and simultaneously believe that God has called American Christians to exercise dominion over American society, or that ethnic and cultural pluralism contradicts biblical teaching. Peter forecloses it.
You are chosen exiles with a spiritual identity that no election can grant and no administration can revoke. You serve the common good and bear witness to Christ through the quality of your civic life. You honor everyone because free people, secure in God, have no need for contempt.
That is patriotism and Christian citizenship rightly ordered.
Questions worth sitting with: What would it look like to love your country the way you love a neighbor — earnestly, honestly, without idolizing them? Where does your civic anxiety signal that something other than God has your ultimate allegiance?
Dr Thorp, great article. I desire to see this as only a preamble for what the Bride of Christ can accomplish today. For centuries, followers of Christ have been domesticated. The majority seeing Jesus as Eternal damnation insurance and a powerful rabbits foot when needing safety or money.
In reality, when a human truly follows life, words and example of Jesus, earth and its culture is transformed.
Following and loving Jesus is also the ultimate relevant elevation of human possibilities. I pray brothers and sisters, break your coverings that hide your dominion. Enough weak little church members. Our God is as Aslan. He is dangerous. His love is kinetic and on the move.
Well said. I would add that, not only do Christian Nationalists misunderstand the church they love, they misunderstand the nation they love too. It was conceived in liberty 250 years ago, but it was not born until the ratification of the Constitution 13 years later in 1789. The former colonies had already joined together and formally called themselves the “United States of America” when they adopted the Articles of Confederation in 1781.
The America we know, however, was created by the Constitution. It defined the structure of our government, empowered it, and constrained its ability to interfere and meddle with the God-given freedoms of its citizens. I would argue that our national identity—diverse and tolerant, yet united in love of country—was formed by the Constitution and the ideas and beliefs that led to its creation. To love this America is to love both the document that created it and the principles that produced it. Both stand opposed to the dreams of Christian Nationalists.