I read my Bible as anti-empire. The Exodus is liberation from an imperial slave state. The prophets indict Israel and Judah for the same crimes of exploitation and injustice they indict other nations for. Jesus proclaims a kingdom that isn’t Caesar’s and blesses the people Caesar’s kingdom grinds down. Revelation names Rome as the beast. The Bible reads concentrated power as beastliness. Christian nationalism takes the thing scripture most consistently condemns and baptises it.
Now, I want to be clear here, because “Christian nationalism” has become one of those terms that means whatever the speaker needs it to mean. Let me define it the way the scholarship defines it. Christian nationalism fuses Christian identity with national identity so that the nation’s military and economic power gets read as an instrument of God’s purposes. The nation becomes the vehicle of divine will. Its enemies become God’s enemies, and its prosperity reads as proof of favour. That’s what the biblical texts are warning against. It’s just wearing a cross now.
A former pastor of mine, Ben Lindsay, who led a church I was part of (Emmanuel London, a Newfrontiers church in Greenwich, with a branch in New Cross) once put it this way: “If your favourite Christian leader or Christian politician has a harsher tone for the poor and oppressed than for those in power, they are not of Christ.”
Ben wasn’t talking about Christian nationalism specifically when he said that. He said it in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, talking about the kind of Christianity that spends more energy policing the vulnerable than confronting the powerful. He was right. But apply his test to Christian nationalism and the maths gets uncomfortable fast. The people Jesus was gentle with (the poor, the hungry, the outcast, the foreigner) are the people Christian nationalism treats as threats. The people Jesus was sharp with (the wealthy and the religious gatekeepers who had made their peace with the empire) are the people Christian nationalism defers to. A movement whose rhetoric is gentle toward power and harsh toward the vulnerable has inverted the actual Christlike pattern, no matter how orthodox its creed reads.
The Black queer womanist theologian Ciarra Jones said: “White Christians created white supremacy, then called it God.” That’s diagnosis. Christian nationalism is the political form of that theology: a system that sanctifies a racial hierarchy and calls it orthodoxy. She quotes Kelly Brown Douglas on manifest destiny: how white Christians read it as God acting through American history, when it was actually colonial violence. And the white theology she calls “incredibly disembodied” doesn’t care about black and brown bodies, because the bodies don’t matter to it.
Revelation makes the biblical argument explicit, and the book has been hijacked by the very thing it condemns. Most scholars date Revelation to around 95 CE under the emperor Domitian. The beast is Rome. So is Babylon. 666 is a Hebrew gematria cipher for “Nero Caesar.” The call to “come out of her, my people” is a demand addressed to the present. Revelation is political resistance literature, a reading I met through Brian Blount on Bible for Normal People. It reads empire and calls it beastly. And yet the dominant Christian reading, particularly in the American evangelicalism that fuels Christian nationalism, turns it into a prediction chart. A timeline. A puzzle to be solved by matching current events to ancient symbols. The thing Revelation was actually doing (telling oppressed communities that the empire crushing them was not God’s and would not last) gets buried under a system of interpretation that reassures the empire’s beneficiaries that they’re the ones under threat. That’s the reversal of the text’s own political imagination. The people who should hear themselves in the beast hear themselves in the persecuted church instead.
The Matthew 25 test is the simplest tool I know. “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” It doesn’t have a footnote for theological correctness. It asks one question: what did you do for the people who needed you? Applied to the people currently building the machinery of Christian nationalism, the maths is unambiguous.
Elon Musk. Over $700 billion. X ownership stripped content moderation protecting marginalised users while amplifying far-right content. DOGE cut services to people who needed them while government money kept flowing to defence contractors, including his own SpaceX. He endorsed the AfD in Germany, backed Reform in the UK. Immigrants (people like me, living on a visa in a country that isn’t mine) became the target of the rhetoric he amplified.
Peter Thiel. Understood René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism with precision (the way communities produce unity by locating disorder in a victim) and then built Palantir’s ImmigrationOS, a surveillance infrastructure that targets the exact people the Gospels protect. Named his surveillance company after Sauron’s seeing stones. Named his weapons company after the reforged sword of the returning king. Reads the same books I do and builds the opposite world.
These are people whose relationship to power is legible through the Matthew 25 lens without interpretation. The question Jesus asks has an answer.
So what does the alternative look like? Because critique without a counter-vision is just complaining, and I’ve done enough of that.
The church at its best has never been the church in power. It’s been the church as underdog: feeding people the empire forgot, visiting prisoners the state abandoned. The early church didn’t lobby Caesar for favourable legislation. It built a parallel economy of care that made the empire’s neglect visible by contrast. That’s a politics of its own, one where power is measured by who you serve, not who serves you.
I think seeking the kingdom looks like that, applied locally. Knowing the names of the people on your street who are struggling, and doing something about it before the government gets around to it. A church that spends less on the sound system and more on rent relief. And Christians known in their neighbourhoods for showing up, not for being right. The person in front of you matters more than the abstract principle you’re defending. Your primary political witness is how your community treats its most vulnerable members, and your vote comes a distant second.
None of this is new. It’s just the Sermon on the Mount, taken seriously, at ground level. And it’s the exact opposite of Christian nationalism, which takes the Sermon on the Mount and turns it into a foreign policy.
I’m a Christian, a feminist, increasingly socialist, always anti-fascist. I name that because it’s better to be clear about where you stand. I should also name that I spent years inside the kind of Christianity that baptised power and called it piety, sharing it with others and receiving the same from them. The political theology I was trained in didn’t use the phrase “Christian nationalism,” but it taught me to see my nation’s prosperity as evidence of God’s favour and my nation’s enemies as threats to faithfulness. I am not exempt from the thing I’m critiquing. I’m trying to unlearn it in public.
The politics-of-love position I’ve been building in this project is a claim about what the Gospels produce when you read them honestly. Redistribution, because the Beatitudes are an economic document before they’re a spiritual one. Anti-authoritarianism, because Jesus preached a kingdom that wasn’t Caesar’s. Matthew 25 is the test and it has no theology section, which is why solidarity with the vulnerable comes first. And fear is the political tool Christian nationalism runs on, and perfect love drives it out. The tradition has spent enormous energy on creedal precision and precious little on the structural conditions under which people actually flourish or suffer. The politics of love says that ordering is backwards.
I think this connects to something deeper. The agricultural transition (the shift from hunter-gatherer to settled farming) didn’t just change how we eat. It changed how we relate. It created surplus and property, and with them the need to defend what we’d accumulated against everyone else. Empire is what happens when surplus funds armies. Christian nationalism is what happens when empire baptises itself. The Bible, read honestly, is the long record of a people trying to find their way back toward a future that remembers the garden without pretending we can go back to it.
This isn’t for anyone already committed to the project I’m critiquing. It’s for the people in the middle, the ones who sense something is wrong with what Christianity has become in public life but can’t quite name it, who read the Gospels and feel the gap between what Jesus says and what the church does with power. If you’re wondering whether the problem is you or the thing you’re being asked to affirm, it might be neither.
