This week’s reflection is the third in a series by the Rev. Ellis Crum, a United Methodist pastor and Cornelius Corps board member. The series called “The Limits of Our Love” appears on the third week of the month. In this offering, Rev. Crum exposes how Christian Nationalism is the result of distorted spiritual formation. The alternative is not more church activity but discipleship based on formation in the Spirit and Way of Jesus. Following the written reflection, Rev. Crum includes a video that offers a glimpse into a positive way forward. Please take time to read the reflection and watch the video.
Peace – Jim Melson, Executive Director
Full Church – Empty Souls
A Cornelius Corps Reflection — Series: “The Limits of Our Love”
A church can be full every Sunday and still be starving.
Its sanctuary can echo with hymns. Its congregation can know Scripture by heart. Its members can serve faithfully, give generously, and speak passionately about God. Yet another force may be shaping their imaginations, fears, and loyalties.
The question is not whether people attend church, but what kind of people the church is producing.
This is the deeper concern behind Christian nationalism. It is not a political problem, it is a discipleship problem.
This series has been asking what nationalism does to belonging. This third piece turns to what happens when religious identity fuses with national identity.
What happens when national identity acquires theological legitimacy, when citizenship and discipleship become so intertwined that Christ and country are no longer distinguishable?
The concern is not Christian participation in public life, which Scripture calls for, or patriotism, rightly understood as stewardship. It begins when Christianity stops transforming citizens and starts guarding the nation’s identity.
At that point, faith no longer challenges power, it sanctifies it.
Scripture records this exact failure. The Pharisees perfected religious performance while missing the heart of God entirely, their rituals intact the whole time, which is exactly what made it so easy to miss. God did not call that worship incomplete. God rejected it. ‘These people honor me with their lips,’ Jesus said, ‘but their hearts are far from me.’
Religious activity can continue long after spiritual formation has stalled, a church growing numerically while its discipleship grows shallow, success measured by attendance and influence instead of the internal work of becoming like Christ. The language stays Christian. The formation stops being Christian. The sanctuary fills. The soul empties. And almost no one inside can tell you when it happened, because nothing about Sunday looked any different.
Every one of us is being formed by something. Whatever repeatedly interprets the world for you, tells you what to fear and whom to trust and what victory should feel like, is doing the work of formation, whether or not they ever use that word.
Some of us spend more time with cable news, podcasts, and political commentary than we spend with Scripture. That is not a confession about media habits, but about what is forming us, because attention is not neutral. Whatever consistently earns our attention eventually earns our imagination. Political media runs every mechanism religion has always used to form people. It just never calls them that. Its catechisms are talking points and confessions are hashtags.
None of this claims to be a rival gospel, but it has become familiar enough that we’ve stop asking where it came from.
Fear almost always fuels this type of formation. Fear narrows compassion, simplifies what is actually complicated, and makes control feel like responsibility. Israel asked for a king because it feared vulnerability. None of that fear was irrational. It was just louder than faith.
Christian nationalism is fluent in preservation language. We must save what is ours and reclaim what has been lost. Beneath that is one question still to be asked: who are we actually willing to save, and who have we quietly decided isn’t ours to save? Because love and fear can sound identical coming out of the same mouth, the honest answer does not show up in what we say. It shows up in what we are willing to do for people who will never vote the way we do.
The test is whether our political instincts are starting to reveal who has actually been shaping us, and whether we are willing to hear the answer.
The cross is the clearest evidence that faithfulness was never the same thing as winning. By any measure available on that Friday, it was total defeat. The one who claimed to be King was executed by the actual power in charge. Nothing changed politically that week. If faithfulness required a political win to be validated, the story would have ended there. It didn’t, and what came after was not a political victory either. No empire fell. No law changed. People who had locked themselves behind closed doors out of fear became convinced that death had been overcome, and that conviction, not conquest, is what spread.
So ask the question plainly, because it will not ask itself gently. What voices have been shaping me? What loyalties have quietly become ultimate? Is my faith making me more like Christ, or is it mostly making me more certain of my politics?
Those are not accusations. They are an invitation, the same invitation every generation of disciples has had to answer. Citizenship matters. Public life matters. Justice matters. None of them can carry the weight of ultimate allegiance. Only Christ can carry that. When that order holds, faithful disciples make better citizens. When it reverses, both faith and public life suffer, and a full sanctuary quietly becomes the last place anyone thinks to look for an empty soul.