FAITH & JUSTICE~BOOK REVIEW & COMMENTARY
Reclaiming the Revolution Jesus started.
FAITH & JUSTICE · BOOK REVIEW & COMMENTARY
Reclaiming the Revolution
A Christian Response to Modern Nationalism — Drawing on Merton, Adler, and Bonhoeffer
See · Judge · Act
On what organizers have called No Kings Day — a national day of protest against executive overreach — marches are echoing across the country. The headlines, the political rhetoric, and the blueprints laid out in documents such as Project 2025 all point toward a troubling surge in Christian Nationalism: an ideology that trades the radical, subversive love of Jesus for the familiar, oppressive allure of empire, hierarchy, and patriarchy.
If you are wrestling with how to remain faithful to the Gospel in an era of cruelty and division, two books worth serious attention are The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg. This text has shaped a generation of historical Christian thinkers. Also gaining attention is a book I have just finished reading: Jesus and Justice: Organizing for God’s Reign on Earth Then and Now, by Crossan and pastoral organizer Michael Okinczyc-Cruz, which applies that scholarship to congregational action, think Praxis. For faith leaders or group facilitators, these books can serve as foundational texts for small group study or adult education sessions.
Leaders might introduce The Last Week as a Lenten reading, paired with weekly discussions on how Jesus’s final days challenge and inspire Gospel-centered resistance. Jesus and Justice provides practical frameworks for organizing action; a community could assign chapters and gather to reflect on how its historical insights translate into concrete steps toward Justice in its own context. Including guided questions or brief summaries before each meeting can help participants connect the material directly to daily discipleship and community engagement.
Jesus and Justice: Organizing for God’s Reign on Earth Then and Now ~ John Dominic Crossan & Michael Okinczyc-Cruz — This book does not merely offer history; it offers an urgent confrontation with the present. Crossan’s historical-Jesus scholarship is wedded here to practical community organizing, asking what discipleship looks like in the streets, not only in the sanctuary.
To navigate our current moment, I have applied the classic See–Judge–Act pastoral framework — developed by Belgian Joseph Cardinal Cardijn in the early twentieth century and adopted widely in liberation theology and Catholic Social Teaching — drawing inspiration from three giants of Christian intellectual and spiritual life: Thomas Merton, Mortimer Adler, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
SEE
Awakening to Reality
Drawing from Thomas Merton (1915–1968) — Trappist monk, poet, and social critic — taught that contemplation is never an escape from the world but a deeper penetration of it. He was not content to sit in the monastery while Birmingham burned. The first movement of faithful action, he insisted, is seeing: we cannot transform a world we refuse to look at honestly.
In New Seeds of Contemplation (1961), Merton wrote that the person who has found their true self in God no longer needs to project fear onto others or defend an identity built on domination. “The person who is not afraid,” he argued, “is free to love.” This is directly subversive of nationalism’s core anxiety — the need to secure identity through exclusion. Merton’s later work, particularly Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966), applied this mystical anthropology to political commentary with remarkable sharpness.
When we look at the rise of Christian Nationalism — through the voices of those who advocate for its power structures — we encounter a disturbing mirror of the Roman Imperial cult that executed Jesus. It is a system built on exclusion and domination.
Merton’s insight is that genuine awakening dissolves the illusion that people can be sorted into the worthy and the unworthy, allies and enemies, citizens and threats.
To see clearly today is to recognize that the early titles given to Jesus — Son of God, Savior, Lord, Prince of Peace, bringer of Good News — were not invented by Christians. They were titles of Caesar Augustus, stamped on coins and carved into imperial stone. The early Gospel writers applied them to a peasant carpenter from Galilee as a deliberate act of political counter-proclamation. Christian Nationalism, in co-opting the Gospel to serve national power, inverts this original subversive meaning entirely.
“If I had a message to contemplatives, it is… be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man, for it is the image of God.” ~ Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable, 1966
JUDGE
The Discipline of Understanding
Drawing from Mortimer Adler (1902–2001) — philosopher, author, educator, and architect of the Great Books of the Western World curriculum — championed what he called the “great conversation”: the ongoing, demanding encounter with the best thinking humanity has produced across centuries. Adler was not naive about power; he understood that ideas have consequences, and that sloppy reading produces sloppy citizens.
Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940, revised 1972), one of my favorites, remains one of the finest manuals for critical engagement ever written. He distinguished between reading for information and reading for understanding. To “judge,” in Adler’s sense, is to ask not merely what a text says, but whether it is true, consistent, and complete. This is precisely the discipline required when encountering political theology: we must read the Gospels as rigorously as we read any manifesto — and hold each accountable to the same standard of coherence and evidence.
We must ask honestly: Does the message of current political movements align with the historical Jesus, who challenged the imperial power structures of his day? Crossan’s decades of historical-Jesus scholarship — grounded in archaeology, social history, and textual criticism — demonstrate that Jesus operated within a specific first-century Jewish peasant context of Roman colonial violence. He was not apolitical; he was directly counter-political.
Adler would push us further: examine the premises. Christian Nationalism typically rests on the premise that the United States has a unique covenant relationship with God analogous to biblical Israel — a claim with no exegetical grounding in the New Testament and a history deeply entangled with the displacement of Indigenous peoples and the justification of slavery. Rigorously judged, it does not hold.
“The person who says they know what they think but cannot express it usually does not know what they think.”— Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book, 1940
(A Note on Attribution: It is worth noting that the See–Judge–Act method originates with Joseph Cardijn (1882–1967), the Belgian priest who founded the Young Christian Workers movement, and was formally embraced in Catholic Social Teaching. The framework was developed extensively in Latin American liberation theology by figures such as Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Medellín Conference (1968). Acknowledging these roots deepens rather than diminishes the conversation.)
ACT
The Cost of Discipleship
Drawing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) — Lutheran pastor, theologian, and conspirator against Hitler — did not write about resistance from a comfortable distance. He wrote from prison, awaiting execution. His witness is among the most costly in Christian history, and his warning about “cheap grace” is among its most clarifying concepts.
The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Bonhoeffer defined cheap grace as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession… grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.” Costly grace, by contrast, is “the treasure hidden in the field” — worth everything, demanding everything, transforming everything. It is grace that calls us to follow, not merely to believe.
Crucially, Bonhoeffer’s later writing in Letters and Papers from Prison (1953, posthumous) gestures toward a “religionless Christianity” — a faith stripped of its collusion with power and cultural privilege, available to all precisely because it serves the vulnerable rather than the comfortable. This is the Bonhoeffer most relevant to our current crisis.
Christian Nationalism is a form of cheap grace — it wraps imperial ambition in sacred language, asks nothing of the powerful, and extracts everything from the vulnerable. It offers belonging without the cross, identity without kenosis (self-emptying), and nation without the Kingdom.
Bonhoeffer’s life insists that faithfulness has a cost. He did not arrive at resistance easily — he wrestled deeply with pacifism, with Romans 13, with the limits of Christian political engagement. His ultimate choices were anguished, not triumphalist. That honesty is itself instructive: faithful action in dark times is rarely clean or simple.
What does costly discipleship look like in practice? Drawing on the Crossan/Okinczyc-Cruz framework and the broader tradition of nonviolent organizing, it includes:
- Hosting educational forums or book discussions on topics like Christian Nationalism and Gospel-centered resistance, creating space for honest conversation and critical engagement.
- Organizing service projects that connect the congregation directly with marginalized communities in your area, making concrete the call to solidarity and Justice.
- Facilitating letter-writing or advocacy campaigns on local justice issues, inviting members to raise their voices as citizens informed by faith.
- Establishing a justice and peace working group within your congregation to coordinate ongoing action, prayer, and learning.
- Partnering with other faith communities to build networks of support and accountability for sustained nonviolent action.
Embracing Principled Nonviolence. Following the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., Oscar Romero, Dolores Huerta, and the broader nonviolent resistance movement, our resistance must be rooted in love — including for those we oppose. This is not passivity; it is the most demanding form of engagement.
The Path Forward
The life of the historical Jesus is a revolutionary story — and it has been buried before. The institutional church buried it under Constantine. European colonialism buried it under conquest. Christian Nationalism is burying it again, this time under flags and electoral maps.
The work of reclamation is not nostalgic; it is urgent. Merton teaches us to see without flinching. Adler teaches us to judge without sentimentality. Bonhoeffer teaches us to act without counting the cost. Together, they form a complete posture for faithfulness in a dangerous time.
We are not called to build an earthly kingdom or empire of power. We are called to be agents of what the Gospels call the Basileia tou Theou, the Reign of God. This Reign is a vision of radical equality before the law and before each other, nonviolent resistance to systems of domination, and transformative love that refuses to sort human beings by their usefulness to power. In our contemporary context, this means connecting faith with real justice issues unfolding in our own neighborhoods and communities. Whether confronting the impacts of discriminatory policing and immigration enforcement, advocating for fair housing, responding to the struggles of the unhoused, or supporting those harmed by unjust labor practices, the call of the Reign of God asks us to discern how Gospel values can directly address the divisions and injustices we see around us. By relating Jesus’ message to tangible concerns, faith communities can make discipleship visible and relevant amid the challenges of their local context.
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
That is the revolution worth reclaiming—and it begins with you. Take this vision into your community, speak up for Justice, and embody these values where you live and work. The time to reclaim the radical message of the Gospels is now.
Stand up. Organize. Act.
Start the Conversation in Your Community
Are you part of a local congregation, study group, or faith community? A structured discussion guide, drawing on Jesus and Justice, the See–Judge–Act framework, and the insights of Merton, Adler, and Bonhoeffer, can help your group engage these questions with both intellectual honesty and pastoral care.