Christian Nationalism Is Not the Only Story Christians Can Tell
An invitation to rediscover the Jesus Way—and imagine a more courageous, compassionate,
& credible public witness in a fractured world.
Something is happening to Christianity in America. Or perhaps something that has long been present is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The language of Christian faith is being enlisted in the service of political power. Crosses appear alongside nationalist symbols. Jesus is invoked to justify exclusion, domination, and sometimes violence. Fear of losing cultural influence is mistaken for faithfulness. Love of country becomes entangled with devotion to G-d, until the two are nearly indistinguishable.
And for many of us who love Jesus and the church, this is profoundly troubling.
Some are angry. Some are grieving. Some are bewildered by friends, family members, pastors, and congregations whose expressions of Christianity seem increasingly difficult to reconcile with the life and teachings of Jesus.
Others have grown exhausted by the seemingly endless arguments about what Christianity means, who gets to claim it, and whether it has anything life-giving left to offer our neighbors. I understand something of that exhaustion. But I also carry a stubborn hope.
Christian nationalism is not the only story Christians can tell. And it is certainly not the only way Christians can live.
Indeed, there is another story—one that stretches back through centuries of Christian history, through communities of resistance, practices of hospitality, courageous acts of neighbor-love, and ordinary people who discovered that following Jesus sometimes meant refusing the demands of empire.
It is a story worth remembering. More importantly, it is a way worth practicing.
The Question Beneath the Crisis
I am a practical theologian. For more than two decades, I have had the privilege of teaching at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, where much of my work explores the intersections of faith, culture, power, place, and public life.
I am also an immigrant to the United States. I was born in southern Manitoba, formed within the Anabaptist peace tradition, and came to the United States in 1991. My own experiences of migration, belonging, citizenship, and national identity have made questions of allegiance deeply personal.
- What does it mean to belong to a nation without allowing that nation to determine the boundaries of our love?
- How do we honor the places and communities that have shaped us without making idols of them?
- And what happens when the demands of nation, party, ethnicity, or political power conflict with the way of Jesus?
These are not merely political questions. They are profoundly theological and formational questions. Because beneath the arguments about Christian nationalism lies a question I believe every follower of Jesus must wrestle with:
What kind of people are we becoming?
What is happening to our capacity for compassion? To our imagination for peace? To our willingness to love strangers and enemies? To our ability to recognize the image of G-d in people whose lives, beliefs, and politics differ from our own? And perhaps most importantly, what would it look like to follow Jesus faithfully in this particular historical moment?
The Jesus Way Has Always Offered Another Possibility
The earliest Christians inhabited a world saturated with imperial claims. Rome promised peace through military superiority. It secured order through domination. It celebrated power, hierarchy, conquest, and the glory of the emperor. Into that world came Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus announced the Kin-dom of G-d.
Jesus blessed peacemakers. Jesus welcomed strangers. Jesus touched those deemed untouchable. Jesus crossed boundaries of ethnicity, religion, class, and social respectability. Jesus taught his followers to love their enemies, forgive debts, share their possessions, and refuse the intoxicating logic of domination.
Jesus did not merely offer a different set of religious beliefs.
Jesus embodied another way of being human together. The Jesus Way was—and remains—a profoundly public way of life. It asks not simply what we believe about G-d, but how those beliefs become visible in our relationships, our neighborhoods, our economies, our institutions, and our political imaginations.
Across Christian history, women and men, congregations and movements have rediscovered this way, often at considerable cost. Some refused to participate in violence. Others welcomed people their societies had rejected. Some challenged racial hierarchies, defended the dignity of workers, sheltered refugees, accompanied the poor, or stood against oppressive governments.
Their stories are neither uncomplicated nor uniformly heroic. Christian history contains profound complicity with empire alongside courageous resistance to it.
We need the honesty to acknowledge both. But we also need to remember that the Christian tradition contains resources for confronting nationalism without surrendering Christianity to it.
We have ancestors in faith who can help us imagine what faithfulness might look like now.
Beyond Denunciation: Toward a Credible Public Witness
There is an understandable temptation to make Christian nationalism the center of our attention. To study it. Expose it. Debate it. Condemn it. Some of that work is necessary. We must be willing to name the ways Christianity has been distorted in service of exclusion, racial hierarchy, authoritarianism, and violence.
But I worry that if our only response is denunciation, Christian nationalism will still have succeeded in defining the boundaries of our imagination.
We will know what we oppose without knowing what we are called to embody.
We may become skilled at identifying what is wrong with other Christians while remaining uncertain about how to love our actual neighbors.
We may win arguments while losing our capacity for relationship.
The Jesus Way calls us toward something more.
What if our most compelling response to Christian nationalism were communities whose shared lives made another possibility visible?
What if our neighborhoods encountered Christians known less for their appetite for political control and more for their generosity, courage, hospitality, peacemaking, and commitment to justice?
What if our public witness began not with a campaign to reclaim cultural dominance, but with a renewed commitment to be present—to listen deeply, accompany those who suffer, repair what has been broken, and seek the flourishing of people and places?
What if we understood public theology not primarily as saying religious things in public, but as participating in the life of G-d’s shalom in ways our neighbors could actually recognize as good news?
These questions animate a new course I have been developing.
An Invitation: Public Theology in an Age of Christian Nationalism
Public Theology in an Age of Christian Nationalism is a new continuing education course offered through The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
It has grown out of years of theological reflection, pastoral conversations, neighborhood organizing, multifaith engagement, and increasingly urgent questions from people trying to follow Jesus amid the resurgence of Christian nationalism.
The course is not designed to tell participants which political party to support or to supply more ammunition for arguments with relatives, neighbors, or fellow Christians.
Nor is it an invitation to retreat into private spirituality while the world suffers.
Rather, it is an invitation to deepen our understanding, examine our allegiances, recover neglected resources within the Christian tradition, and cultivate practices of courageous, compassionate public witness.
Together, we will explore four interconnected movements:
Remembering. We will locate ourselves within the long and complicated history of Christianity’s relationship with nationalism, empire, and political power. We will encounter followers of Jesus who accommodated empire and others who resisted its claims.
Reorienting. We will return to the life and teachings of Jesus, asking how the Jesus Way might reshape our everyday habits, relationships, loyalties, and understandings of power.
Relating. We will explore ways of engaging people across profound differences—not to win arguments, but to cultivate the courage, compassion, curiosity, and connection necessary for genuine conversation.
Witnessing. We will move toward concrete practices of public theology in our own contexts. What might it look like to welcome, befriend, accompany, repair, confess, or faithfully disobey when the demands of power contradict the way of Jesus?
The course unfolds across five asynchronous lessons, allowing participants to engage the material at their own pace. Each includes teaching, reflection, and opportunities to imagine practices relevant to one’s own life and community.
I have also included optional daily reflections drawn from what I call the Jesus Way Lineage—stories of people and communities throughout Christian history whose commitment to Jesus led them to challenge or subvert the powers of their day.
And on Tuesday, November 17, at 4:30 p.m. Pacific, we will gather for a live online conversation to listen, reflect, and learn together.
My hope is that participants will leave not merely better informed about Christian nationalism, but more deeply rooted in Jesus, more capable of loving across differences, and more prepared to embody a credible public witness wherever they live.
Who Is This For?
Perhaps you are a pastor or congregational leader wondering how to respond to Christian nationalism without further fracturing your community.
Perhaps you are a Christian who feels increasingly estranged from the public expressions of your faith.
Perhaps you are trying to maintain relationships with family members or friends whose political and theological commitments differ profoundly from your own.
Perhaps you are a community organizer, spiritual director, educator, chaplain, or neighbor who longs for more constructive ways of engaging this moment.
Or perhaps you simply find yourself asking whether Christianity can still be a source of liberation, reconciliation, peace, and flourishing in our world.
You do not need to arrive with settled answers.
You do not need to be an expert in theology or politics.
You do not need to have figured out exactly where you stand.
I hope this course will be a place where honest questions are welcomed, complexity is taken seriously, and we practice the kind of humility and courage that our moment requires.
A Small, Stubborn Hope for Shalom
I often return to the Hebrew word shalom. It is frequently translated as peace, but its meaning is much richer than the absence of conflict. Shalom evokes right relationship, justice, wholeness, belonging, healing, and the flourishing of life in all its beautiful interdependence. Shalom is a vision of people, communities, and creation becoming more fully alive together. I believe G-d’s shalom is the horizon toward which the Jesus Way invites us.
And I believe that even now—perhaps especially now—we are being invited to participate in that shalomic imagination.
Not someday, when the political climate improves.
Not after we have persuaded everyone to agree with us.
Not once we have acquired enough power to impose our preferred version of the good.
But here.
In our neighborhoods.
Around our tables.
Within our congregations.
Across the divides that have become so familiar.
In the courageous refusal to dehumanize.
In the costly work of repair.
In the small acts of hospitality and solidarity that make another world imaginable.
I do not imagine this course will resolve the crisis of Christian nationalism. The forces shaping our moment are too complex, too deeply rooted, and too consequential for that.
But I do believe that formation matters.
Imagination matters.
Relationships matter.
And the seemingly small practices through which we learn to love our neighbors and enemies matter far more than we often realize.
Christian nationalism may be one of the defining challenges facing American Christianity today.
It need not define our response.
What if, instead, this moment became an invitation to rediscover the beauty, courage, and public significance of the Jesus Way?
What if we became known not by the power we seek to wield, but by the love we are willing to embody?
What if, together, we learned to become credible signs of G-d’s shalom for all and everything?
That is the invitation.
And I would be delighted to have you join us.
Join the Course
Public Theology in an Age of Christian Nationalism
The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology
Five self-paced online lessons, with an optional live gathering on November 17, 2026, at 4:30 p.m. Pacific.
Come with your questions, your grief, your curiosity, your hope, and your longing for a more faithful way forward.
Learn more & register for the course
And if someone comes to mind as you read this—a pastor, friend, colleague, family member, or fellow traveler who might benefit from this conversation—I hope you will share this invitation with them.
May we become people whose lives make the peace, justice, generosity, and liberating love of Jesus increasingly believable in our world.
Peace, dwight
