This week The Rev. Ellis Crum, a United Methodist pastor and Cornelius Corps board member, offers the second in his three part series called “The Limits of Our Love.” The first article was our Weekly Reflection on May 21. In this article, Rev. Crum addresses the limits of our love posed by White nationalism. This is especially timely in light of this week’s commemoration of Juneteenth and our nation’s upcoming 250th birthday on July 4. Please take the time to read and reflect on the dangers of White nationalism for our democracy, the soul of our nation, and our spiritual formation as followers of Jesus.
Peace – Jim
When Sameness Becomes Sacred
In the first article of this series, we asked: who is my neighbor? The answer revealed something about the moral imagination of a nation, about who we have learned to stop for and who to pass by. This article asks what happens when that moral imagination begins to narrow. When sameness becomes sacred.
I know a man who can walk you through how his town became unrecognizable to him. His grandfather helped build the church on the corner. Four generations of his family are buried in the cemetery behind that church.
The congregation is down to half its size. The school holds parent nights in three languages. The people moving in do not know his family’s name nor share their history. He feels like a stranger in the place where he was raised. He “knows” who is responsible. It is the people who moved in and started replacing what was built here, changing his town without his consent.
That feeling, unnamed and never honestly challenged, is exactly where white nationalism finds its recruits. Not in hatred, but in fear and grief over what has changed. In a real love of heritage, memory, and community that has been slowly eroded into the protection of sameness.
And when a people begin protecting sameness more than they practice neighborliness, something has gone wrong at the level of the soul.
Not all love of heritage is nationalism. Every community carries something forward. Black, Brown, immigrant, Indigenous, and European-descended communities all do this. That love is not automatically an act of exclusion.
The problem is not in the love of heritage; it is when heritage becomes the basis for hierarchy. When cultural identity becomes the rubric for determining whose belonging is fully connected or provisional.
Ethnic nationalism claims that ancestry should determine political belonging. You belong because of who came before you. Racial nationalism goes further: race itself becomes the organizing principle. And once race becomes sacred, hierarchy becomes inevitable.
In the American context, these fuse into the belief that America’s identity, power, and future should be preserved primarily for white people, and that demographic change is an existential threat. This fusion happens quietly. The language of ethnicity is the socially acceptable surface. The logic of race operates beneath it. And when you press on what specifically is being lost, the answer is not a set of values. It is a set of faces.
In 1676 Virginia, poor whites and enslaved Africans worked and organized together. That terrified colonial planters. After Bacon’s Rebellion, whiteness was codified as a legal category that separated poor whites from enslaved Africans. Rights and protections were offered in exchange for a new identity: not neighbor, but superior.
This manufactured whiteness began as visible legal separation but eventually became so normalized that people started seeing it as natural. It stopped being a designation and became a way of being.
When Reconstruction sought to extend citizenship and power to formerly enslaved people, white nationalism found a new mythology: the Lost Cause. It transformed defeat into virtue, slavery into benevolence, and the antebellum South into a lost golden age.
None of this is historically true. But it is theologically powerful. The Lost Cause allows people to grieve what was lost without confronting what was stolen. It requires memory rather than repentance. And memory alone never asks us to become someone new.
White nationalism survived not because of its arguments. It survived because of what it formed people to become. This matters for Christians because nationalism does not only organize politics. It disciples desire.
At Babel, humanity sought security through uniformity. God interrupted it, not because community is wrong, but because uniformity often becomes control. At Pentecost, every tribe and tongue heard the good news in its own voice. The miracle was not sameness but understanding. The Kingdom of God is built not on uniformity, but on reconciled humanity.
White nationalism is theologically incompatible with that vision. When sameness becomes sacred, everything that differs becomes a threat. The moral imagination narrows and the category of neighbor contracts. People do not arrive at this condition suddenly. They are formed into it by the stories they repeat, the fears they rehearse, and the communities that affirm anxiety rather than challenge it.
You cannot separate what you protect from what you become. If you protect sameness long enough, you will eventually become a person who cannot tolerate difference. The soul narrows to the size of the circle you defended.
The question is never only what you believe about race or national belonging. The question is what those beliefs are forming in you. Whether they are expanding your capacity for love or administering its steady reduction.
The man in our opening story loves something real. His grief is real. But that grief is costing him something he may not yet see. It is costing him his neighbor.
A community that has made sameness sacred has made an idol. Dismantling that idol requires the courage to ask what we have become. And the honesty to sit with the answer long enough to be transformed by it.
The nation keeps driving past wounded neighbors. The question is whether we will.
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