Refusing the Counterfeit: Thomas Merton and Christian Resistance Today

Using the See-Judge-Act method

I may watch too much of the evening news. But I want to talk with you about what Christian resistance looks like in our moment—not resistance for its own sake, but resistance in the Spirit of Thomas Merton: contemplative, nonviolent, and grounded in truth-telling discipleship.

What We’re Up Against

Let me be direct: Christian nationalism and MAGA ideology represent a spiritual counterfeit that we must name clearly. This isn’t about partisan politics—it’s about what happens when the Gospel gets fused with national identity, when Jesus becomes a tribal mascot for power rather than the crucified Lord who calls us to love enemies and serve the least among us.

Christian nationalism treats the nation, a particular “way of life,” and often a dominant racial or cultural group, as sacred objects to be defended at all costs. It frames immigrants, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people, political opponents, and even dissenting Christians not as neighbors to love but as threats to subdue. It uses historical symbols—the cross, the Bible, Christian language—to bless strongman politics, justify punitive policies, and sacralize moves that undermine democratic norms.

This ideology tells a story about a mythic white Western Christendom under siege, a “once-great civilization” that must be reclaimed. And it runs on fear—fear of demographic change, cultural loss, and declining status.

Merton’s Gift to Us

Thomas Merton understood something essential: true Christian resistance must be contemplative before it can be active. His “monastic resistance” linked deep prayer with concrete opposition to racism, nuclear war, and Cold War absolutism. He saw these as spiritual diseases rooted in fear and collective self-deception.

Merton insisted that Christian resistance must be nonviolent, grounded in the truth that every person bears the image of God, and deeply suspicious of any attempt to baptize national projects with gospel language. He was willing to be marginal, misunderstood, even silenced by his own institution, rather than cooperate with violence or lies.

From Merton, we learn several marks of authentic resistance:

First, contemplation that unmasks our own fears and self-righteousness. Before we point fingers, we need to look honestly at how fear lives in our own hearts—fear of loss, fear of irrelevance, fear of change.

Second, preferential attention to victims. We pay attention to those harmed by policy and rhetoric, not to the prestige or comfort of our churches.

Third, willingness to be marginal. We accept that faithful witness might cost us influence, respectability, or institutional approval.

What Does Resistance Actually Look Like?

Let me offer you a framework that brings Merton’s Spirit together with a classic method enhanced by Joseph Cardijn, and is the heart of Catholic social action: See–Judge–Act.

See: Face What’s Happening

We start by looking honestly at what’s in front of us. Christian symbols at partisan rallies. Prophetic language is used to bless authoritarian leaders. Hostility toward migrants is framed as a Christian duty. Racialized rhetoric claiming biblical warrant. Threats to democratic norms are justified with scripture.

And we ask: Whose lives are concretely affected? Immigrants living in fear. People of color are facing intensified racism. Religious minorities targeted for exclusion. LGBTQ+ persons are treated as existential threats. Election workers are receiving death threats. Christians who dissent are being pressured into silence.

We also look at ourselves: Where does this touch my own church, my family, my heart? What fears are stirring in me?

Judge: Discern in the Light of Christ

Next, we bring what we’ve seen into dialogue with the Gospel. We reread the Beatitudes. We sit with Jesus’ command to love enemies. We remember the Good Samaritan—how he crossed boundaries to help someone his community despised.

We consult Catholic social teaching on human dignity, the common good, solidarity, and subsidiarity. We recall the church’s warnings about idolizing the nation or race.

And we use Merton’s insights to unmask the spiritual dynamics at work: the “false self” of a church seeking security in power rather than faithfulness in service. The temptation to identify Christianity with a nation. The way fear and propaganda deform our consciences.

We ask: Where is the Spirit of Christ present in this situation, and where is the Spirit being resisted? Which attitudes and structures reflect the Gospel, and which are idolatrous or violent? What would it mean here to stand with the vulnerable, as our tradition calls us to do?

Act: Respond with Contemplative Courage

Finally, we act—but our action must be rooted in prayer and nonviolence, not partisan hatred or reactive anger.

Concrete forms this might take:

Contemplative unmasking. Regular practices of silence, examination of conscience, and prayerful scripture reading that let the Spirit expose how fear drives nationalist narratives and how those same fears live in us.

Public, nonviolent dissent. Refusing to let Christian symbols be co-opted without protest. This means signing clear statements against Christian nationalism, preaching and teaching against its distortions, and visibly separating church witness from partisan rallies and personality cults.

Costly solidarity. Organizing faith-based accompaniment for immigrants. Holding vigils at detention centers. Providing legal and pastoral support for targeted communities. Standing with those threatened by authoritarian policies.

Strategic non-cooperation. Discerned refusal to collaborate with unjust actions—through sanctuary practices, conscientious objection, or refusing contracts with entities enabling oppression. Done transparently and nonviolently as expressions of faith.

Re-telling the story. Teaching and preaching that de-centers whiteness and national myth, re-centering the crucified and risen Middle Eastern Jesus and the global, multiethnic body of Christ as our primary community.

Guarding democracy as neighbor-love. Defending voting rights, the rule of law, and pluralism not as partisan moves but as acts of love for vulnerable neighbors, remembering the devastation that authoritarian Christian projects have produced in other times and places.

Already Happening

This isn’t hypothetical. Christians are already doing this work:

Clergy using liturgy and public letters to denounce attempts to overturn elections and normalize political violence—explicitly as offenses against both Gospel and democratic neighbor-love.

Faith communities organizing prayerful public rituals: rosary walks, vigils at immigration courts, lament liturgies at sites of racist violence. These embody both intercession and visible, nonviolent refusal.

Networks like Christians Against Christian Nationalism are educating churches, producing theological resources, and equipping pastors and lay people to identify and resist this ideology in their own congregations and local politics.

Scholars, activists, and everyday believers choose institutional marginality rather than baptizing lies with their silence.

The Call Before Us

Here’s what I want you to See-Discern and Act, and think of this as an exercise of innovation, education and colaboration: The call in Merton’s Spirit is to cultivate communities where contemplation deepens courage, where Eucharist and common prayer nourish nonviolent, sacrificial solidarity, and where the church quietly but firmly refuses every attempt to make Jesus a tribal mascot for authoritarian power.

This is not quietism. This is not a withdrawal. This is a rooted, prayerful refusal to cooperate—spiritually, socially, economically, and politically—with idolatrous forms of “Christian” power.

The See–Judge–Act method becomes our pastoral engine: a repeated cycle where contemplative seeing, evangelical discernment, and courageous acting help us resist the counterfeit and embody the costly love of Christ in public life.

OK, I need to stop. I know- so here is my Conclusion: The Courage to Be Marginal

Let me close with this: Merton knew something that we’re being invited to learn again in our time. The church is most faithful not when it’s at the center of power, blessing the empire and enjoying cultural dominance, but when it’s at the margins, standing with those the empire excludes, speaking truth that the powerful find inconvenient.

Christian nationalism promises us relevance, influence, and a seat at the table of power. It promises to make America Christian again, to restore what’s been lost, to win the culture war.

But that promise is a devil’s bargain. It requires us to remake Jesus in the image of Caesar. It demands that we treat neighbors as threats and enemies as less than human. It asks us to trade the way of the cross for the way of domination.

Merton’s way—the gospel way—calls us to something more complex and more beautiful: to be a people so rooted in prayer that we cannot be moved by fear, so grounded in Christ’s love that we refuse to see any human being as disposable, so committed to truth that we will not cooperate with lies even when lies are expedient.

This will cost us. It may cost us influence in our institutions. It may cost us comfort in our pews. It may cost us relationships with fellow Christians who have chosen the counterfeit over the real thing.

But here’s what we gain: our souls. Our integrity. Our faithfulness to the one who said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and meant it.

So, I’m asking you: Will you resist? Will you see clearly, judge truthfully, and act courageously? Will you choose the margins with Jesus over the center with the empire?

The Spirit is already at work among us. The question is whether we’ll join in.

Let’s pray together, and then let’s get to work.

Joseph Cardijn and Thomas Louis Merton, pray for us to see, discern, and act as you did with your time on this planet.