Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
I write to you as a fellow believer — one who shares your love for God’s truth, your grief over the moral decay of our nation, and your deep desire to see Christ honored in every corner of life. I do not write to you as an enemy, but as one who believes the very gospel we both cherish speaks with urgency and clarity to the vision you are pursuing.
You have looked at the ruins of a post-Christian culture and said: something must be done. That impulse is not wrong. The Bible does not call us to indifference toward the societies in which God has placed us. We are told to seek the welfare of the city where we live (Jeremiah 29:7), to pray for kings and all in authority (1 Timothy 2:1–2), and to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8). Responsible civic engagement is not a compromise — it is faithful stewardship.
But I must speak plainly, because the stakes are eternal.
The Temptation We All Face
What I want to lovingly but firmly contend is this: the Christian Nationalist project, whatever its varied forms, tends toward a fusion that the New Testament warns us against with unmistakable clarity. It joins the identity of Christ’s people to a particular nation, political movement, or cultural heritage so closely that the two begin to appear inseparable. And when that happens — when an American flag and a cross become visually, emotionally, and theologically indistinguishable — something has gone catastrophically wrong. Not because the flag is evil, but because the cross has been reduced.
Paul’s words to the Galatians cut to the heart of this. He writes to churches being pressured to fuse faith with ethnic and national identity. The Judaizers were, in essence, the first “Christian nationalists” — insisting that to be truly right with God, Gentile believers needed to take on Jewish national identity, circumcision, and the markers of a sanctified nation. Paul’s response was not mild disagreement. He said:
For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. (Galatians 2:19–20)
And later:
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation. (Galatians 6:15)
Paul did not say Jewish identity was worthless. He said it could not define the people of God. Only Christ does that.
What the Gospel Creates
The gospel does not recruit Gentiles into a sanctified version of Jewish nationalism. Nor — and this is the point I most need you to hear — does it create a new Gentile nation that replaces Israel as an earthly political people. What it creates is something the world had never seen before: a New Covenant community drawn from every tribe and tongue and nation, whose defining identity transcends every earthly boundary because its members are united to a crucified and risen Messiah.
Paul labors to make this unmistakable in Ephesians 2:14–19:
For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation… so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace… Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.
And John, caught up in worship, sees the culmination:
You are worthy… for You were slain, and have redeemed us to God by Your blood out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation, and have made us kings and priests to our God. (Revelation 5:9–10)
Notice what John sees in heaven. He does not see a sanctified nation. He sees a people gathered from the nations. Their unity is not a shared passport, a shared ancestry, a shared political platform, or a shared cultural heritage. Their unity is the blood of the Lamb.
The Relativizing of Every Allegiance
Now here is what must be said with both conviction and tenderness. This does not make Christians indifferent to the societies in which God has placed them. You are still Americans. You are still citizens. You still vote, serve, build, and contribute. None of that is taken from you.
But the lordship of Christ relativizes every earthly allegiance beneath it. That word — relativizes — is deliberate. It means that your national identity, your political convictions, your cultural heritage, and your love of country are all real, but none of them is ultimate. None of them sits on the throne of your heart. None of them defines the people of God in the place that belongs exclusively to Christ.
No national identity — not even the most liberty-loving, God-referencing, historically blessed nation on earth — can become a badge of superior Christian authenticity. No political citizenship can function as a boundary marker of the New Covenant people. Baptism, not birthright, marks the people of God. Faith, not flags, defines the household of God. The Lord’s Table, not any nation’s table, is where Christ’s covenant community is recognized and fed.
A Brother’s Appeal
I know that some of you will hear this and think: But surely you see what is happening to our country? Surely you understand that if we don’t act, everything will be lost?
Brothers and sisters, I do see. And I grieve with you. But I must ask you to consider whether the medicine you are reaching for is, in fact, a poison dressed as a cure. When the church binds herself to a nation’s political destiny, she does not exalt the nation — she diminishes herself. She trades her prophetic voice for political access. She trades her identity as the body of Christ for the role of chaplain to a political movement. And history — including our own Reformation history — testifies that whenever the church has sought worldly power to protect her witness, she has ended up losing both her power and her witness.
The early church conquered Rome not by seizing its government but by refusing to let Rome define them. They were crucified, thrown to lions, and burned as torches — and they sang hymns as they died. Their identity was not Roman. It was not counter-Roman. It was Christ. And that was enough to turn the world upside down.
It is still enough.
Christ alone is the identity of His people. May we be found faithful to that singular, glorious, sufficient identity — and may we never trade it, for any nation, for any cause, for any crown but His.
In Christ’s grace and truth,
Moe Bergeron
(moebergeron.com)
Moe Bergeron 
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