This week’s reflection is by The Rev. Ellis Crum, a United Methodist pastor and Cornelius Corps Board member. It is the fourth and final article in his series called “The Limits of Our Love” posted on the third week of the month. In the previous posts in this series, Rev. Crum focused on the concepts of Neighbor, Belonging, and Formation. The finale of the series focuses on Community. Please take the time to read and reflect on Rev. Crum’s deep insights into how what we love forms our community in ways that can limit our relationships or transform them in the Way of Jesus. The video posted below the article is from the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
Peace – Jim Melson, Executive Director
What Our Loves Build
Nothing we love stays private for long. What we love shapes what we protect, what we’re willing
to lose sleep over, and who gets access to us. Given enough time, those private loves develop into
shared ones, and shared loves become community. What a family cherishes becomes a tradition.
What a tradition protects becomes an unspoken standard. The longer a standard goes unspoken,
the more invisibly it draws the line between who feels at home in the room and who doesn’t. We
rarely notice the line being drawn while it’s happening. We just notice, one day, that the room has
a shape, and some people fit it and some don’t.
That is why white Christian nationalism is not primarily a political category. It is a particular set
of loves, national belonging, cultural inheritance, racial identity, and religious legitimacy, that
stop functioning as separate commitments and start reinforcing one another until they read as a
single, self-evident truth: this is what America has always been, and this is what must be
defended for America to remain itself. Power isn’t a fifth love in that list; it’s what the other four
spend once they’ve fused, the means by which the collective identity gets preserved. Take power
out of the equation and you still have people with strong loves and a common story. Put it back
in, and those loves start deciding who gets to belong.
This series has been circling one question since the first article: what happens when a shared
identity begins drawing the boundary of who counts as neighbor? This final piece asks where
that boundary, left unexamined long enough, actually leads.
The Unbeloved Community
It leads to what I call the Unbeloved Community. This name needs some explanation before it
can be useful. It does not mean unloved by God, nor past redemption. And it is not permission to
write anyone off. It names something narrower and, honestly, more common than most of us
would like to admit: a community whose way of organizing belonging has gradually lost the
capacity to love people who are genuinely different from it.
This isn’t a community that lacks love. That would be simpler to spot. These are people who
show up for each other’s funerals, who feed whoever walks in hungry, who mean every word
when they say they love their neighbor. The failure isn’t love’s absence, it’s what that love is
willing to survive contact with.
There is a rule that governs an Unbeloved Community, and it is rarely spoken out loud: you are
welcome but don’t try to change us. Difference gets tolerated right up to the point where it asks the
center to move. A newcomer can be embraced, admired even, as long as embracing them costs
the community nothing about itself. That is not belonging, it is permission to stand near
belonging without being let inside it.
Watch how ordinary that logic sounds once you listen for it. A congregation debates on changing
its language around a hard topic, and the debate is framed as a threat to who “we’ve always been.”
A community’s demographics shift and it’s called it decline rather than change. A
company discreetly retires a value it used to hold dear, not because the value stopped mattering,
but because the cost to keep it is something the company isn’t willing to pay. None of this
requires malice. People can say, sincerely, I don’t hate anyone, and still belong to a “we” that was
never built to be entered, only approached.
What makes this particular formation dangerous is the use of sacred language. Holding onto
power gets called stewardship. Refusing to change gets called faithfulness. Losing cultural
dominance gets called persecution. None of that language is dishonest. It’s worse. It’s insidious,
because using the right words has never been proof of the right spiritual formation.
The Discipleship Question
Here is the question underneath the politics, and it is the one this series has been building toward
all along: Which is doing the discipling, your loyalty to Christ or your loyalty to what you’re
afraid of losing? A faith that never touches how we handle power or difference isn’t faithful, it’s
just private. What’s in dispute is whether a specific racial and cultural order has imperceptibly
become the thing your faithfulness is actually protecting, while Christ gets invoked as its
justification rather than its judge.
The litmus test is not whether a community has an open door. It is what happens once someone
walks through it and their presence starts costing the room something. Whose dignity still holds
when honoring it is expensive. Whether your own history gets told straight, or gets deftly
avoided, when the truth complicates the version you’d rather keep. Whether another person’s full
belonging registers, in your gut, as gain or as loss. Those questions don’t have comfortable
answers on the first pass. Sit with that discomfort instead of resolving it too quickly. It’s doing
something.
Toward Beloved Community
None of this is where the gospel leaves us, and it can’t be, because Christian faith was never built
to end on diagnosis. If our loves can bend toward preservation, they can also be bent back.
Scripture has a word for that turning: repentance. Not shame, not groveling, but the honest work
of noticing what has steadily claimed more of our loyalty than Christ was ever given, and
handing that loyalty back.
What repentance opens onto is not a softer version of the Unbeloved Community. It’s not more
tolerance bolted onto the same protected center. It’s what the philosopher Josiah Royce and the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., calls the Beloved Community: a way of belonging together that
doesn’t ask anyone to disappear into sameness and doesn’t let anyone hide behind difference.
Dignity gets shared without requiring everyone to look alike. Power gets shared without anyone
mistaking someone else’s arrival for their own eviction. Identity stays real and specific without
functioning as the entry fee for belonging.
This is the resolution the whole series has been earning, not a decoration added at the end of it.
Neighbor asked who counts. Belonging asked what it costs to include someone fully. Formation
asked what’s actually shaping us while we weren’t watching. And Community, this last word, is
what all three questions were pointing toward from the start, because none of what we love stays
private. It becomes something we build together, whether we mean it to or not.
So don’t ask yourself whether the label “nationalist” fits. Labels are easy to take on or shrug off.
Ask instead what your loves are quietly forming you to become, and what kind of community
those loves are helping you build, right now, with the people in front of you. That question
doesn’t close when the article ends. It’s the one the Beloved Community keeps asking, for as long
as it takes.