Confusing Freedom with Faith
Over the summer, I printed off a copy of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. My kids and I have been reading through them together, one amendment each day. My six-year-old drew an enthusiastic but wildly inaccurate American flag on the cover. My nine- and eleven-year-olds are full of questions about freedom, fairness, and who the rules really protect.
They’ve also started noticing how often the news doesn’t match what they’ve been learning. In the news, we heard about a two-year-old U.S. citizen deported to Honduras with her family. My oldest jumped in first: “That’s unconstitutional!” Another added, “Cruel and unusual punishment!” Then one of them, full of righteous outrage, shouted, “We should deport Trump to Honduras!”
I didn’t endorse that plan, but I did stay in the moment with them. We talked about what it means when we say “liberty and justice for all.” When we say “all,” do we really mean everyone?
As a pastor who preaches the liberating gospel of Jesus, and as a citizen who still believes in the promises of democracy, I’m learning right alongside them. “Securing the blessings of liberty” isn’t just the work of government — it’s the work of all of us.
Why I’m Writing About This
Dr. Brian Kaylor speaks to Great Plains clergy at the 2025 Orders & Fellowship gathering in Kearney, Nebraska, exploring how Christian nationalism distorts faith and confuses the call to love God with the pursuit of power.
I’m writing this reflection while sitting in Kearney, Nebraska, gathered with clergy from across the Great Plains Conference for Orders & Fellowship — our annual time of worship, renewal, and connection. This year’s focus is on Christian nationalism and how the attempt to merge a certain kind of American identity with Christianity can lead us toward idolatry.
Our conference theme for 2025 is “Loving God.” Together, we’re wrestling with what it means to love God fully while still loving our country faithfully — without confusing the two. In the Wesleyan tradition, we believe God’s love is transformative and open to all people, transcending every national border and political boundary.
That conviction has been growing in me since earlier this year when I took a seminary course called Democracy in Peril with Dr. Hal Knight at Saint Paul School of Theology. The class explored how democracies falter — not all at once, but gradually — when truth, trust, and compassion erode.
We read How Democracies Die (Levitsky & Ziblatt), Jesus and the Powers (N.T. Wright & Michael Bird), and Healing the Heart of Democracy (Parker Palmer). Each author reminded me that democracy’s survival depends on something deeply spiritual: our capacity to see one another’s humanity and act with courage, humility, and hope.
Reinhold Niebuhr captured it perfectly:
“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
Those words have stayed with me — because the danger to democracy is also a danger to faith. What happens when Christians start confusing love of God with love of power?
Democracy as a Daily Practice
Democracy isn’t something we inherit once and for all. It’s something we practice — the same way faith is something we live, not just believe.
To defend democracy, we have to do democracy. That means showing up, voting, paying attention, and refusing to let resentment harden our hearts.
But lately, our political life has been poisoned by polarization. We’ve stopped seeing each other as people and started treating disagreement like war. The loudest voices are often the angriest ones.
Parker Palmer says citizenship is “a way of being in the world rooted in the knowledge that I am a member of a vast community.” I love that. It reminds me that democracy depends on relationship — not perfection, but connection.
When we forget that, we start chasing a myth of what it means to be “real Americans.” And that’s where faith and freedom start to blur in dangerous ways.
What Christian Nationalism Really Is
Brian Kaylor calls Christian nationalism “an ideology that fuses and confuses American and Christian identities.”¹ It’s the idea that being a good Christian and being a good American are basically the same thing — or worse, that one proves the other.
Most of us have seen it, even in small ways. A flag standing in the sanctuary. A “God and Country” service on the Fourth of July. Political prayers that sound more like campaign speeches. These things may seem harmless, but over time, they teach us that God and government are meant to share the same stage.
Kaylor and his co-author, Beau Underwood, trace how this confusion started long before our current political moment — with the rise of “civil religion.” Things like adding “under God” to the Pledge, printing “In God We Trust” on money, or hiring congressional chaplains to pray in Jesus’ name.³ ⁴
It felt like unity. But it built a habit of baptizing our national identity in religious language.
And as Kaylor points out, that habit has deep racial roots. The “Christian nation” imagined by early politicians and clergy was a white Christian nation.² Its story began with genocide and enslavement — a story that still shapes who gets seen as fully American, and who doesn’t.
When Faith Turns Exclusive
In both democracy and the church, dehumanization is where decline begins.
When we stop listening, stop learning, and stop seeing the image of God in one another, faith loses its humanity — and democracy loses its soul.
Christian nationalism sanctifies exclusion. It draws a circle around the “good Christians” and casts out everyone else. It turns God’s love into a loyalty test.
That’s not what Jesus taught. And it’s not how liberty works, either.
Faithful Citizenship
Democracy asks us to show up. So does Jesus. Both call us into communities that depend on participation, humility, and care for one another.
Practicing faith and practicing democracy look a lot alike. They both require curiosity, compassion, and courage. They both demand we remember that the story of “we the people” — and the story of the gospel — are big enough for everyone.
To secure the blessings of liberty, we have to let go of the myth of a Christian nation and return to the truth of a human one.
Bibliography
Atencio, Mitchell. “Are You Accidentally a Christian Nationalist?” Sojourners (The Reconstruct). June 17, 2024.
Garrett, Greg. “Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Brian Kaylor.” Baptist News Global. September 3, 2024.
Kaylor, Brian, and Beau Underwood. “Baptizing America: How America’s practice of ‘civil religion’ and its endorsement by mainline Protestants paved the way for Christian Nationalism.” Church & State Magazine (Americans United). May 29, 2024.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Broadway Books, 2019.
Palmer, Parker. Healing the Heart of Democracy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011.
Wright, N.T., and Michael F. Byrd. Jesus and the Powers. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2024.
In keeping with transparency, this post was developed with the help of AI editing tools. These tools support the creative process but do not replace human reflection, discernment, or authorship.
