Merton, McLuhan, and Bonhoeffer on the pathologies of Christian nationalism
On Wednesday, 1 February 1933, two days after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, a twenty-six-year-old Lutheran lecturer sat down before a microphone at the Berlin radio station on Potsdamer Straße. His subject was leadership.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke with careful conviction. He understood why young Germans wanted a leader. But he warned that a leader who answers to no higher authority becomes an idol, and an idol soon misleads the people who made it. In German, the words for leader and seducer, Führer and Verführer, differ by a single prefix.
The broadcast ended before he could finish. His closing lines, which warned that leaders who “set themselves up as gods” mock God, never went out over the air.
Historians still disagree about why. The new regime may have cut the transmission, or Bonhoeffer and the station may simply have misjudged the timing. The record does not settle it.
So he did what writers do. He had the full text copied and mailed it to friends and family, with a note explaining that the ending had not been broadcast.
That broadcast holds the whole argument in miniature.
A national leader becomes an idol. A new technology carries one voice into thousands of homes. The church must choose between silence and speech. Three twentieth-century thinkers each saw one part of this picture: Thomas Merton saw the idol, Marshall McLuhan saw the medium, and Bonhoeffer saw the church. Bonhoeffer paid for what he saw with his life. The SS hanged him at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945.
None of the three wrote about Christian nationalism in the United States as it exists today. Merton came closest, and he died in 1968. This essay uses their ideas to compare mechanisms, not to claim the situations are the same. The United States in 2026 is not Germany in 1933. There is no one-party dictatorship, no state church, no campaign of genocide, and nothing like the Nuremberg Laws. Ignoring those differences would make for bad history and a weak argument.
The essay keeps three kinds of claims apart: what each thinker wrote, what historians and pollsters have found, and what this analysis concludes.
A Definition with Edges
Christian nationalism is the belief that Christianity, usually in a conservative Protestant form, should define American identity and political legitimacy and should hold a privileged place in public life. Patriotism means loving your country. Christian nationalism claims the country belongs, in a special and exclusive way, to Christians.
The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) measures it with five statements. Respondents say whether they completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or completely disagree with each one:
“The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.“
“U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.“
“If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.“
“Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.“
“God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.“
PRRI combines the answers into a single score from 0 to 1 and sorts respondents into four groups: Adherents, Sympathizers, Skeptics, and Rejecters. Only those who completely disagree with all five statements count as Rejecters. The scale does not capture every Christian voter, every appeal to heritage, or every effort to shape the law. It describes one specific set of attitudes.
The Monk Who Named the God
Merton, a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, turned in the late 1950s and the 1960s to nuclear war, racism, and Vietnam. In October 1964 he read Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, filled notebooks with it, and reviewed it in Commonweal that December. He later gathered his social essays in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968).
He begins with theology, not politics. The root problem is idolatry: putting something finite where only God belongs. Practiced by a nation, idolatry produces a “Christianity” with its loyalties turned upside down.
He said so plainly. A “Christian nationalist,” he wrote, is one whose “Christianity takes second place, and serves to justify a patriotism in whose eyes the nation can do no wrong.” For such a person, Christian heroism means renouncing protest and obeying the nation without question, on the assurance that “the Government knows best.“
Merton did not oppose patriotism. What troubled him was an order of loyalties that set conscience to serve the nation rather than to judge it.
He saw the technology, too. In “A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra Concerning Giants,” written in 1961 and collected in Emblems of a Season of Fury (New Directions, 1963), he cast the two Cold War superpowers as the biblical giants Gog and Magog. Gog loves power; Magog is absorbed by money. Merton wrote as a citizen of Magog, the United States, and he called the religion that grew there “an electronic Christianity of loudspeakers and parades.“
In context, the phrase carries three charges at once: a Christ remade because he is profitable, a faith broadcast by media that gather crowds rather than form communities of conscience, and a prophetic edge dulled into noise.
Merton’s limits matter. He offers no theory of media, so he cannot explain how the myth spreads. His remedy is contemplative truthfulness and nonviolent refusal, a discipline for the conscience, not a plan for institutions.
The Fish and the Water
McLuhan, a Canadian literary scholar, supplies the missing piece. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) and elsewhere, he argues that media reshape how people perceive the world and relate to one another, whatever content they carry.
In his March 1969 interview with Eric Norden in Playboy, he described electronic media pulling people out of print-made individualism and into intense, participatory groups bound by myth and shared feeling. He called the process “retribalization.” Inside the tribe, he said, myths are no longer debunked. They are studied with religious devotion.
He tied the idea directly to politics. The new political showman, he said, must put on his audience as he would a suit of clothes and become a “corporate tribal image,” as Mussolini, Hitler, and Franklin Roosevelt did with radio and John F. Kennedy did with television. Of Hitler, he added that had the man delivered botany lectures instead, some other demagogue would have used radio the same way.
His most useful idea here comes from Understanding Media: “Narcissus narcosis,” the numbness that keeps people from noticing what their own media do to them. Fish do not notice water. An environment that surrounds us completely disappears from view. In a media world saturated with national and sacred images, the fusion simply looks like reality. For thirty-five years I helped build the systems I now ask questions about. The people inside them rarely notice the water either.
The cautions matter as much as the insight. McLuhan was not a moralist. In the same interview he insisted that he neither approved nor disapproved; he wanted only to understand. He was ambivalent about retribalization. His claim about Hitler and radio is interpretation, not settled history, and historians of Nazi broadcasting have shown that listeners could, and did, tune out. Applying his ideas to algorithms and social media goes beyond anything he wrote.
The Price of Grace
Bonhoeffer is the institutional witness, and his story continues in the year of the broadcast.
On 7 April 1933, the Nazi government issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which excluded “non-Aryans” from public employment. The German Christians, a pro-Nazi faction inside the Protestant church, wanted the same rule applied to pastors. Their 1932 guidelines described race, people, and nation as “orders of existence granted and entrusted to us by God.” That is blood-and-soil theology. It turns exclusion into an act of obedience.
That April, Bonhoeffer wrote “The Church and the Jewish Question.” It named three things a church can do when a state fails: question the state about the legitimacy of its actions, serve the state’s victims even when they are not Christians, and, at the extreme, “put a spoke in the wheel itself.“
In August 1933 he helped draft the Bethel Confession, which others watered down until he refused to sign it. On 5 September 1933 the Prussian General Synod adopted the Aryan paragraph anyway. Bonhoeffer treated that vote as a status confessionis, a moment when a church either confesses its Lord or betrays him. A church that bars Jewish Christians from its ministry, he argued, has written a racial law into the terms of belonging.
On 21 September 1933 he helped Martin Niemöller launch the Pastors’ Emergency League. By the end of that month, 2,036 of Germany’s 18,842 Protestant pastors had joined, each signing a rejection of the Aryan paragraph. Within weeks Bonhoeffer was serving German congregations in London. From 1935 he directed the Confessing Church seminary that settled at Finkenwalde, which the Gestapo closed in September 1937. In November 1937 he published Nachfolge, known in English as Discipleship or The Cost of Discipleship.
That book gave the problem its name: cheap grace. It is forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, and communion without confession. It is “grace without discipleship.” A church that preaches it keeps the vocabulary of grace and drops the demands, then uses the vocabulary to bless whatever the surrounding society already wants.
The Barmen Declaration of May 1934, drafted mainly by Karl Barth, drew the theological line. It rejects any claim that the church may recognize other events, powers, figures, or truths as God’s revelation alongside Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer was in London and had no hand in writing it, but he supported it.
The limits need stating. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that most Confessing Church leaders avoided political criticism of the regime and that, with few exceptions, the church “remained silent about the persecution of German Jews.” Bonhoeffer was among the most outspoken, yet his 1933 essay still carried the anti-Judaic theology he inherited. Portraying him as a simple hero erases both his courage and his failures.
Nor is costly grace a call to activism. It is a claim about what discipleship is. His resistance followed from that claim. It was not its definition.
A Cycle, Offered as a Model
The three diagnoses fit together. Merton names the substance, McLuhan describes the conditions, and Bonhoeffer supplies the test. Together they suggest a cycle. This essay builds that cycle; none of the three described it.
A sacred national identity intensifies belonging and threat. Media amplify both. Religious language then excuses the nation from accountability, dissent gets silenced, and the silence deepens the sacralization.
Sacralization. The nation is cast as God’s chosen, its destiny guaranteed. Merton’s “Christian nationalist” lives here.
Amplification. Participatory media harden the group’s sense of reality and of threat. This is McLuhan’s territory.
Exemption. Criticism of the nation becomes an attack on God’s plan, and cheap grace supplies the religious excuse.
Silencing. Dissent is branded betrayal of both nation and God, and the system loses its ability to correct its mistakes.
Hardening. If nothing interrupts it, the myth sets.
Each step marks a possible reinforcement, not an inevitable one. The model describes a pattern; it does not predict an outcome.
Set beside 1933, the cycle compares mechanisms, not situations. The mechanisms rhyme. The situations, and the moral stakes, differ in both scale and kind.
What the Numbers Say, and Do Not
PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas interviewed 22,111 adults online between 28 February and 8 December 2025, with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.87 percentage points. About one-third of Americans qualify as Adherents (11 percent) or Sympathizers (21 percent). Nearly two-thirds qualify as Skeptics (37 percent) or Rejecters (27 percent); the remaining 4 percent could not be scored. The share of Adherents and Sympathizers has held steady since PRRI began asking in late 2022, while Rejecters slipped from a peak of 32 percent in June 2023 to 26 percent by the end of 2025.
Who holds these views matters. White evangelical Protestants (67 percent combined: 29 percent Adherents, 38 percent Sympathizers) and Hispanic Protestants (54 percent) are the only major religious groups with majorities. Among Americans who attend services weekly or more, 54 percent qualify. Among Republicans the figure is 56 percent; among Democrats, 17 percent. Among those who most trust far-right news outlets it is 65 percent, and among those who most trust Fox News, 55 percent. Those numbers point to something uncomfortable for a purely religious reading: the scale tracks party and media habits at least as closely as it tracks faith.
On authoritarian attitudes, PRRI’s 2025 American Values Survey finds that 79 percent of Adherents score high or very high on its right-wing authoritarianism scale, while 7 percent score low. Among Rejecters, 78 percent score low.
The question about political violence needs the most care.
The item reads: “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.” Across 2025, 30 percent of Adherents agreed, nearly three times the 11 percent of Rejecters. Still, 66 percent of Adherents disagreed, and so did 74 percent of Sympathizers. In the December 2025 wave, the gap narrowed to 28 percent against 17 percent, as agreement among Rejecters rose to match the Skeptics. Agreement among Adherents ran between 38 and 43 percent under the Biden administration and fell to 32 percent after Trump’s reelection. The item moves with the political weather.
Four cautions apply. These are attitudes, not actions. Correlation is not causation, and partisanship and media habits may explain much of the pattern. The scale does not measure the sincerity or depth of anyone’s faith. And most Adherents and Sympathizers reject political violence.
Read through the three lenses, the pattern fits the cycle. Fitting is not proof.
The Best Case for the Other Side
The strongest version of the opposing argument runs like this. Christians have always carried their convictions into public life, and the results include abolition and the civil rights movement. Asking that laws reflect Christian values may simply mean giving moral conviction a hearing in a pluralist democracy, as every other tradition expects; the political scientist Mark David Hall points out that Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day might well have completely agreed with that statement. An appeal to Christian heritage can claim history rather than membership. The PRRI scale bundles five statements and counts as Rejecters only those who completely disagree with all five, while Adherents may merely mostly agree, an asymmetry Hall and other critics have noted. The violence numbers swing with the political moment. And Merton and Bonhoeffer themselves pressed their faith into politics, one through protest and the other through conspiracy.
Each of those points is partly true. None of them overturns the conclusion. The real test is not whether Christians take part in politics; both men insisted they should. The test is whether a movement places the nation under God’s judgment or above it, whether it treats criticism as betrayal, and whether those it leaves out have anyone to speak for them.
Most American Christians do not fit the nationalist description. PRRI’s September 2026 report with the Meanings of Democracy Lab at Johns Hopkins University found that majorities of Hispanic Catholics (71 percent), white Catholics (62 percent), white mainline and non-evangelical Protestants (61 percent), and Orthodox Christians (60 percent) qualify as Skeptics or Rejecters. White evangelical Protestants remain the exception, at 30 percent. PRRI’s chief executive, Melissa Deckman, put the point directly: the struggle over Christian nationalism is not a contest between the religious and the secular.
Four Practices for an Index Card
The three correctives are not interchangeable. Merton’s contemplation, without Bonhoeffer’s sense of responsibility, can drift into quietism. Bonhoeffer’s costly discipleship, without Merton’s humility, can harden into a certainty that mistakes one’s own politics for God’s will. McLuhan offers a method of analysis, not a set of values. They work only together.
They also map onto the See-Judge-Act method of Joseph Cardijn, with one practice added:
See the environment. Name the medium before arguing with the message. Ask what it rewards: belonging, threat, or signaling.
Judge the loyalty. Ask what the national story exempts from judgment. If the answer is “us,” the God in the story is not the God of Jesus.
Act on the cost. Ask whom the story excludes and what the church owes them. Cheap grace asks nothing. Costly grace answers.
Start with your own side. Put the same three questions to your own camp before you put them to anyone else’s.
Christian nationalism is not Christianity applied to politics. It is Christianity replaced by a national myth that keeps the Christian words and loses their meaning.
The Ending
The microphone went dead before Bonhoeffer reached his last lines. A voice can be cut off in a studio. A typed page passed from hand to hand is much harder to stop.
He sent the ending himself.
That is what wisdom looks like in practice.
Sources
PRRI, “Mapping Christian Nationalism Across the 50 States: Insights from PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas,” 17 February 2026.
PRRI and the Meanings of Democracy Lab, SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University, “Survey: New Report Analyzes the Two-Thirds of Americans Who Resist Christian Nationalism,” 24 September 2026, and the full report, “Resistance to Christian Nationalism in All 50 States.”
PRRI and Brookings, “A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture,” February 2023.
Mark David Hall, “How Many Americans Are Christian Nationalists?,” Discourse (Mercatus Center), a critique of the PRRI scale.
Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 203–204, as quoted by the Center for Action and Contemplation, 25 November 2020.
Thomas Merton, Emblems of a Season of Fury (New Directions, 1963); on the Cuadra letter, Małgorzata Poks, The Merton Annual20 (2007), pp. 225–242.
Eric Norden, “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy, March 1969, with McLuhan’s quotations compiled by the Estate of Marshall McLuhan.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man(McGraw-Hill, 1964).
On Bonhoeffer’s 1933 radio address: Faith Gateway, and excerpts of the text at the Acton Institute.
“Radical Resistance,” Christian History, on the Aryan paragraph, Bethel, and the Prussian synod.
“Pfarrernotbund,” Wikipedia, on the Pastors’ Emergency League and its membership.
Bonhoeffer Timeline, Luther Memorial Church.
On the three possible actions of the church, America, quoting Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question” (1933).
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Nicholas Scott-Blakely, “The Legacy of Anti-Judaism in the Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Jewish-Christian Relations, 1 May 2022.