Easter Reflections on the Insufficient Gospel of Christian Nationalism

How the gospel of Americanized Christianity and Christian nationalism fails to embrace the fullness of who Jesus was and what he accomplished.

Pietà (Michelangelo)

What is the gospel?¹ Growing up, I would have defined it as recognizing that

• I was born a sinner separated from God,

• The wages of sin were death and eternal punishment,

• I was in need of Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross to pay my debt,

• Accepting by faith Jesus’s sacrifice would save me from the punishment I deserved and promise me eternal life, and

• I was now at peace with God in a personal relationship with Jesus.

This may look familiar to fellow Christians or reflect your current definition of the gospel.

Today, I believe this picture of the gospel is an important foundation yet incomplete. It reflects only one aspect of the gospel, what my philosopher friend Scott Coley suggests we might label the doxastic gospel. Think of the doxastic gospel as a set of theological claims that we either believe or do not believe, such as the death and resurrection of Jesus, the nature of atonement, and the work of the church.

The doxastic gospel focuses mainly on me and my relationship with God and whether I believe the right things. However, as theologian

Kat Armas

says, “Spirituality includes all the dimensions of human, personal, and societal living that combine to make human life human—the measure of the fullness of God’s gift.”² When Christians only apply the gospel to our personal lives and cherry-pick Bible verses in support, we miss the clear theme of justice throughout the Bible and ignore the broader work of God in the world.

We Christians must embrace the second aspect of the gospel, what we can label the practical gospel—practices that flow from the doxastic gospel, such as loving one’s neighbor, seeking justice for the oppressed, and caring for orphans and widows. Throughout the Bible the doxastic gospel is inextricable from the practical gospel. The book of James and the Beatitudes are two clear examples of this. We can also see it in Jesus’s first public message.

Consider his claim in Luke 4:16–21. In a synagogue on the Sabbath, he stands up and reads a passage from Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (4:18–19)

In his first public sermon, Jesus does not emphasize the forgiveness of my individual sins. Instead, he points to how his project is liberating all of humanity from our enslavement to sin, including the ways sin is baked into the structures of our common life and harms our neighbors.

We Christians, like Jesus, cannot read the words of Isaiah and other prophets honestly and come away thinking God cares more about our personal salvation than how we treat other people, including through the social structures that oppress them. “The good news was both about the coming of the Kingdom of God and the character of that Kingdom,” writes

Lisa Sharon Harper

.³

This definition of the gospel reduces Christianity to the doxastic gospel, ignoring the practical aspect of it. This sheds light on why so often the gospel amounts only to person-to-person evangelism, getting people “saved.” This gospel limits the work of Jesus to each person’s spiritual condition. It has little to say about the political and social realities of our fellow humans.

We should ask ourselves, “What if I preached this gospel to someone enslaved in 1845 or someone being forcibly removed from their land in 1832? Would they receive this promise of future salvation that says nothing about their current suffering as ‘good news’?”

If you preached this gospel to Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a man the federal government acknowledges they wrongly abducted from his home and are currently hiding in a prison-camp in a foreign country and denying the due process promised by our Constitution to everyone in our country regardless of citizenship status—how could he receive it as “good news?” This incomplete gospel demands nothing regarding the justice he deserves, the freedom Jesus promised to prisoners, the work of setting the oppressed free.

Christians are to join God in the work of renewal that entails the flourishing of all, likewise proclaiming the Year of Jubilee that Jesus inaugurated that day in Nazareth. Jesus came “that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10)—not just spiritually but in our bodies, our relationships, and the social systems that organize our collective lives. “God’s redemptive plan throughout history has consistently concerned all of creation, and he repeatedly admonishes his people to seek the flourishing of the whole world.”⁴

Severing these two important aspects of the gospel obscures how Jesus proclaimed a fundamental realignment of the power structures of society in addition to personal spiritual salvation. It also ignores how Jesus understood his ministry and rescue mission to all of humanity as beginning here and now. Jesus was inaugurating God’s kingdom on earth, and this held political and social implications, for systems of power and individuals.

Those listening to Jesus in the shadow of oppressive empire understood this. Those marginalized in our society hear Jesus in this same way.

Indeed, much of the Christian tradition, from the time of the early church forward, has stressed that salvation itself is a communal reality that encompasses all of creation. Thus, if salvation is understood as a personal possession with no implications for how I fight the evil that hurts my neighbor, then not only is that a misunderstanding of the teaching of Jesus, but it is also a misunderstanding of the nature and scope of salvation itself.

And it is the broad acceptance of an incomplete view of the gospel—the doxastic aspect that focuses on individual salvation alone—that hinders many American Christians from seeing how Christian nationalism betrays the life and teachings of Jesus. White American Christians tend to ignore the practical aspect of the gospel, including justice for the oppressed, thinking that as long as we believe the correct theological claims and encourage others to embrace those theological claims as well that we are doing all we need to do.

Likely, this is because we are already free. We already enjoy so much in the here and now. What use do those of us who are white American Christians have for overturning systems of oppression when we have long benefited from those very systems?

Jesus realigned how we are to view power and called for a people whom the world would know by their sacrificial love—a love that leads to the disruption of oppression in the world. Part of our loving the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant is recognizing our own complicity in the systems of injustice that create and perpetuate their marginalization and suffering. This sacrificial love participates in God’s ongoing mission of disrupting sin and its destructive effects on human relationships.

Christians are to leverage their power, position, and privilege to the benefit of all rather than for their own self-interest. In the dozens of studies others and I have conducted in recent years, we find repeatedly that the practical fruit of Christian nationalism is certainly not love. It is power, control, domination, fear, and violence.

Once we see the gospel as good news for the present, good news for the marginalized, good news for the prisoner, good news for the poor, good news for the blind, and good news for the oppressed, we can begin to take the evidence that social science hands us about Christian nationalism and recognize this ideology as limiting—and in many cases outright opposing—the work Jesus claimed he came to do and commanded us to do likewise (Matt. 22:37–40).

We can work toward peace, justice, and care for all who live and work within the boundaries of our home country. We can collaborate with God and those around us to create a more loving and liberating country for all our neighbors. We can seek shalom—“a vision of a Kingdom that provides for all,” in Harper’s words.

Therefore, it is not a question of if we should engage in work to benefit those around us. It is a question of how broadly we define the “us” who benefits. The gospel can and does empower us to enter more deeply into our neighbors’ needs, serving them out of gratitude to God.

As Christians reflect upon the person and work of Jesus this Easter, I hope we recognize where and how an insufficient gospel focused only on our spiritual condition blinds us to the totality of the work and witness of Jesus’ ministry and sacrifice, and what we are called to as Christians—

to proclaim good news to the poor,

to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,

—and how to do this in the shadow of an empire hellbent on destroying the marginalized among us.

Portions of this content taken from American Idolatry by Andrew Whitehead ©2023. Used by permission of Brazos Press.

1. Much of this column comes from American Idolatry, pages 9-14.

2. Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2021), 35.

3. See Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2016): 7.

4. Kaitlyn Schiess, The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020): 57.