One Nation Under Whose God? What Catholic(Christian) Social Teaching Really Says About Christian Nationalism
If you are watching the news, reading about what is happening, we see the rise of Christian Nationalism being woven into our government, one department by one department at a time. Think about what we have been seeing coming out of the Defense Department lately. There’s a question that keeps surfacing in churches, on social media, and around dinner tables across the country: Can you be both a faithful Christian and a Christian nationalist? For many Catholics, the answer feels complicated. We hear Pope Leo and his statement, and we see and hear the opposite all too often in many American Catholic churches. Because patriotism is good, faith in public life is good, and the desire for a more moral society is understandable. But Catholic Social Teaching draws a clear and important line. The problem isn’t loving your country. The problem is what happens when one religious identity becomes the measure of who truly belongs.
Starting with the Person
Everything in Catholic Social Teaching begins with a single, radical conviction: every human being — without exception — is made in the image of God. That’s not a platitude. It’s the foundation of the entire tradition. And it’s the first thing Christian nationalism puts at risk.
When a political movement — even one draped in Christian language — starts sorting people into more American and less American, into those whose religion earns them a seat at the table and those who must earn their place by conforming, it has already departed from the Gospel. Dignity isn’t conditional. It doesn’t depend on your faith, race, origin, or politics. When religion is used to rank people rather than to serve them, faith is being misused — full stop.
The Common Good Isn’t “Our Side Winning”
Catholic Social Teaching uses a phrase that sounds almost old-fashioned: the common good. But the idea is sharp and demanding. The common good isn’t the sum of individual interests, and it certainly isn’t the victory of one group dressed up as the good of the nation. It’s the set of conditions that allow all people and all communities to flourish — together.
Christian nationalism narrows that vision dramatically. It privileges one community’s understanding of what America should look like and quietly turns neighbors into outsiders. Catholic teaching insists that public life must be ordered toward justice and peace for everyone — not the domination of some by others, however righteously that domination is framed.
Solidarity: The Opposite of “Us vs. Them”
One of the most misunderstood words in Catholic Social Teaching is solidarity. It doesn’t just mean feeling sympathy for people who are struggling. It means recognizing that we are, in a deep and binding sense, responsible for one another. It means seeing the person across the political or cultural divide not as a threat but as a brother or sister.
Christian nationalism tends to run in exactly the opposite direction. It draws circles — insiders and outsiders, the faithful and the foreign — and builds its identity on those distinctions. Catholic Social Teaching pushes back hard: toward encounter, toward mutual responsibility, toward a love that doesn’t stop at the border of the familiar.
The people most likely to be excluded or scapegoated by nationalist movements are precisely the people solidarity requires us to stand with.
Religious Freedom Is for Everyone — or It’s for No One
Here’s something Catholics in America sometimes forget: the Church has extensive experience being on the outside of the dominant culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholics were the suspicious foreigners, the ones whose loyalty to Rome was considered incompatible with American citizenship. That history should make Catholics especially alert to the dangers of any movement that seeks to grant one faith tradition privileged status in law or public life.
Catholic Social Teaching defends religious freedom — not as a perk for the powerful, but as a fundamental human right. That freedom belongs to Christians, yes — but also to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, and everyone else. The moment a government begins favoring one religious tradition over others, religious freedom for all is in jeopardy. You cannot build a genuinely free society on a foundation of religious favoritism.
Power Is for Sharing, Not Seizing
Subsidiarity — another cornerstone of Catholic Social Teaching — holds that decisions should be made as close to the people affected as possible, with real respect for the dignity and agency of persons and communities. It’s about dispersing power, not concentrating it.
But subsidiarity is not a license for local majorities or religious blocs to impose their will on everyone else. And Christian nationalism, whatever its stated intentions, tends toward exactly that kind of imposition: the idea that a “godly” faction should hold the reins of power and steer the nation toward its particular vision of the good.
Catholic teaching favors genuine democratic participation — institutions that protect everyone's rights, accountability that runs in multiple directions, and a deep skepticism toward any movement that treats electoral or cultural power as something to be seized rather than shared.
The Gospel Test: See~Judge~Act
Underneath the political and philosophical arguments, there’s a simpler question — and it’s the one that cuts deepest.
Does this movement look like Jesus?
The Christ of the Gospels did not build a movement of religious triumphalism. He did not gather a coalition of the powerful to impose righteousness on the unwilling. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. He touched lepers. He stopped for the person everyone else had stepped around. He told his followers that whatever they did to “the least of these,” they did to him.
Any politics that forgets the poor, that excludes the stranger, that wraps cruelty or contempt in the flag of faith — that politics stands far from the heart of the Gospel. The question isn’t whether a movement uses Christian language. The question is whether it embodies Christian love.
So What Should Catholics Actually Do?
The answer isn’t panic or withdrawal. It’s fidelity — to the tradition, to the teaching, and to the person of Christ.
That means recommitting, in concrete and practical ways, to the dignity of every person, regardless of where they were born or what they believe. It means defending religious freedom not just for ourselves but for everyone, including those whose faith looks nothing like ours. It means resisting racism and nativism wherever they appear, including when they appear in our own communities. It means showing up for democratic life — voting, organizing, advocating — with a genuine commitment to justice for all rather than advantage for some. And it means practicing solidarity with those who are most at risk, most marginalized, most likely to be left out of the story we tell about who this country is for.
Christian faith is at its best when it serves the neighbor. It is at its worst when it seeks control.
Catholic Social Teaching has spent more than a century building an alternative vision: a public life shaped by dignity, solidarity, justice, and peace. That vision is more urgently needed now than ever.
Questions to Sit With
Where is the line between healthy patriotism and the kind of nationalism Catholic Social Teaching warns against — and how do you know when you’ve crossed it?
Whose flourishing does your political vision actually include? Who gets left out, and why?
If religious freedom is a universal right, how should Catholics respond when the rights of minority religious communities — Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, or nonreligious — are threatened, even by Christians?
What would it look like, in your own community, to practice solidarity with people who are most vulnerable to exclusion or scapegoating?
Does the movement — any movement, including ones you sympathize with — pass the Gospel test? Does it look like Jesus?
How does the Church’s own history of marginalization in America — the anti-Catholic prejudice of earlier centuries — shape how Catholics should respond to movements that seek to privilege one faith tradition over others today?