This week the Rev. Ellis Crum offers a reflection on both the dangers of fear based exclusion and a call to develop our moral imagination. While religious nationalism is an example of the former, practicing the Way of Jesus provides an alternative that leads to the latter. Please take the time to read and reflect on Rev. Ellis’ insightful words. There are two supporting videos posted below the reflection.
Peace – Jim Melson
There was no warning before the engine died. One moment I was moving steadily down the interstate, the next, the dashboard lit up and the car drifted toward the shoulder. I coasted to a stop as eighteen-wheelers thundered past. I made the calls. Then I waited. Cars kept passing. Most never slowed. The first one that did, I recognized—someone from my church who I’d eaten with, worshiped with, and even prayed with. We made eye contact. I raised my hand. They shook their head and kept driving. A tow truck slowed. The driver looked at the car, looked at me, and decided it wasn’t worth stopping. Then an old pickup truck pulled over. The man who stepped out looked like he hadn’t slept in a while. His truck rattled. But he stayed. He helped push the car farther from the traffic. When the service vehicle finally arrived, he told them to take good care of me. Then he handed me his number and said, call me if you need anything else. Then he left. I have thought about that moment more times than I can count. Not because someone was kind. But because the roadside reveals something about us. It exposes who we stop for. Who we notice. Who we decide belongs inside our circle of concern. And who we have already learned to pass by. That is not merely a personal question. It is a national one.
Every nation runs on some answer to the question: who counts? Who counts when resources are distributed? Who counts when someone is stranded, and the institutions that were supposed to stop keep driving? Nationalism is one framework societies use to answer this question. Every functioning society requires some sense of shared identity—and that is not inherently sinister. But nationalism takes different forms, and those forms are not morally equivalent. Civic nationalism roots belonging in shared institutions and participation in them. Ethnic and racial nationalism tie it to ancestry and race—the latter exclusionary by design. Religious nationalism places it in faith, suggesting those outside it are outside the nation’s fullest belonging. History reminds us that some things are lawful, yet unjust. Here is what matters: the deeper issue is not which form nationalism takes. The deeper issue is what nationalism does to the moral imagination—to a nation’s capacity to see, to stop, and to concern itself with the least, the lost, the left behind, and the looked over. Long before laws are passed, loves are shaped. The policies a nation eventually produces are downstream of the moral imagination already forming inside its people. Before the legislation, there is the formation. Before the law decides who counts, the culture has already been teaching people how to answer that question. This is where nationalism becomes spiritually significant. Not merely as a political ideology. But as a formation system.
When people feel their way of life is threatened, the moral imagination does not naturally expand. It contracts. The circle of concern grows smaller. The definition of neighbor narrows. Those who were once tolerated become threats. And slowly, entire populations fall outside the range of what the nation—and its people—are willing to stop for. This process rarely announces itself. It does not begin with overt hatred. It begins with selective empathy—a willingness to feel deeply for some while remaining unmoved by others. And selective empathy, practiced long enough and normalized widely enough, becomes moral blindness. It is what happens when a congregation member can look a brother in the eye on the side of the road and keep driving. A people can become incapable of stopping—not out of malice, but out of a formation that has taught them not to see certain people as candidates for their concern. This is the spiritual danger nationalism poses. It does not merely change the law. It changes the person.
And this is precisely what the oldest story about belonging understood. A legal expert asks a teacher: who is my neighbor? He is not asking an innocent question. He wants to know where the obligation ends. He wants the category small enough to fulfill without disrupting his existing loyalties. The teacher does not answer the question asked. The teacher tells a story. And the answer is not a new list of who qualifies as neighbor. The answer is a different question entirely. Not: who is my neighbor? But: who became neighbor? The one who stopped. The one who, by the logic of his world, had every reason not to. The one who crossed that boundary and stopped anyway. Go and do likewise. But this is not about doing. This is about becoming. Every system and narrative we inhabit is training our instincts about who deserves urgency, who deserves protection, and who can remain stranded while we look away. The measure of a nation is not how loudly it celebrates freedom. The measure of a nation is who it refuses to leave stranded. And the measure of a disciple is not which side they are on. The measure of a disciple is whether love has remained wide enough to stop—for the person they expected, and for the person they did not.