When the Cross Becomes Synonymous with the Flag: Thomas Merton's Warning for the American Church Today

A Trappist monk who died in 1968, Thomas Merton offers a crucial warning for the American Church: the dangerous mingling of Christianity with nationalism threatens the integrity of faith today. This article explores how Merton’s insights diagnose our present crisis and what practical steps can renew authentic faith.

In the summer of 1966, Thomas Merton sat in his hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He wrote something that, with uncomfortable precision, seems to describe American Christianity today.

Merton was not envisioning the future, but diagnosing his present. The illness he named—the fusion of religious identity with national pride, the intoxication of power wrapped in sacred language, and the slow death of faith under ideology—remains and has only intensified.

“Christian Nationalism” was barely used in Merton’s day. Yet, he understood the deeper issue of Christianity serving political dominance and cultural exclusion—seeing through such illusions after years of contemplation.

“The great danger is the absurd overestimation of the moral perfection, the wisdom, and the providential mission of one’s own people, nation, or class.” ~ THOMAS MERTON, CONJECTURES OF A GUILTY BYSTANDER

That sentence was written sixty years ago. Sit with it for a moment.

What We’re Actually Talking About

Christian Nationalism is not simply the belief that faith should inform public life. That, in itself, is an ancient and legitimate theological conversation. Rather, Christian Nationalism is a specific ideology that claims America was founded as, and must remain, a Christian nation. At its core, Christian Nationalism seeks to privilege Christian identity over all others. It fuses religious devotion with political loyalty and uses Christian symbols—such as the cross—as banners for achieving political power. In this context,

Christian Nationalism refers to the belief that citizenship or belonging in America requires conformity to a particular vision of Christianity, often at the expense of pluralism or equality for people of other faiths or none.

Its roots run deep: from the Spanish conquistadors with their swords and crosses, to Manifest Destiny, theological support for slavery and Jim Crow, and most recently, Christian symbols joining Confederate flags at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

This recurring dynamic is neither new nor an aberration. It has always been fueled by what Merton called collective illusion—the shared fantasy that God favors our side, sanctifies national power, and opposes those who disturb our dominance.

“The biggest problem is the immense power of collective illusion. The danger is that people begin to love the lie.”~THOMAS MERTON, DISPUTED QUESTIONS

The Monk Who Saw Through the Myth

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) is usually remembered as a mystic — a man who sought silence, who explored Eastern meditation, who wrote lyrically about the inner life. And he was all of that. But he was also one of the sharpest social critics of the twentieth century, a man for whom contemplation and confrontation were inseparable.

From inside his monastery, Merton wrote passionately against the Vietnam War at a time when many American churches were blessing it. He corresponded with Martin Luther King Jr. and declared racism a spiritual emergency. He saw nuclear weapons as an expression of a civilization that had lost its soul. And he identified, with remarkable precision, the spiritual mechanism that made all of these atrocities possible: the construction of what he called the “false self” — not just in individuals, but in nations.

Nations, Merton argued, create false selves as individuals do. They build myths of divine election, project evil onto enemies, dress power as God’s will, and draw even good people into uncritical worship of the nation.

“He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions.” ~ THOMAS MERTON, CONTEMPLATION IN A WORLD OF ACTION

This is not abstract theology. Instead, it serves as a warning and a diagnosis—aimed squarely at the activist, the reformer, and the well-meaning Christian who has not done the interior work. You cannot bring clarity to the world if you have not first found it within yourself.

Fear Is the Root of the Problem

What drives Christian Nationalism? Merton would say: fear of change, fear of the other, and fear of losing security—all of which can become religiously charged.

“The root of war is fear... the fact that I am afraid of you, afraid that you have what I lack, afraid that you threaten what I possess. The only way to end war is to conquer the fear within.” ~ THOMAS MERTON, NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION

Fear-driven religion is tribal religion. It draws tight circles of belonging and labels everyone outside as a threat. It mistakes security for faithfulness and dominance for blessing. It forgets — or never really knew — the God who told Abraham to leave what was familiar and go to a land he did not know; the God whose son said, “My kingdom is not of this world”; the God who, at Pentecost, spoke every language at once, not just one.

The Gospel has always been cosmopolitan, porous, and boundary-breaking. Christian Nationalism is none of these things. It is, at its core, a failure of theological nerve — a retreat from the terrifying openness of genuine faith into the manageable certainties of group identity.

What Authentic Faith Looks Like

Merton did not leave us only with the diagnosis. He also pointed toward the cure — and it begins, characteristically, not with politics but with prayer.

Authentic faith, for Merton, is contemplative before it is anything else. It involves the radical willingness to be still, to let go of the ego’s agenda — including the collective ego of the nation or the tribe — and to encounter reality as it actually is, not as we have been told it should be. This is what he called “pure prayer,” and it is not a luxury for monks. It is the foundation of any genuinely prophetic public life.

From that contemplative center, the faithful person becomes capable of what Merton called “nonviolent resistance” — not just as a tactic but as a way of being. You resist domination not by seizing power but by refusing to be hypnotized by it. You resist the lie not by shouting louder than the liars but by inhabiting a different kind of truth.

“The contemplative is not one who has fiery visions... but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust.” ~ THOMAS MERTON, NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION

This vision of faithful action — rooted in interior transformation, expressed in nonviolent witness, oriented toward universal rather than tribal love — is Merton’s gift to our moment. It is not naive. It is not quietist. It is, in fact, the most demanding form of resistance.

A Word About the Church’s Responsibility

Merton deeply believed in the Church, and precisely because he did, he was willing to criticize it. He understood that institutions, including religious ones, are always tempted to trade prophetic witness for social acceptance, to become chaplains to power rather than voices crying in the wilderness.

When the Church baptizes nationalism — when it blesses military adventures, sanctifies racial hierarchies, or provides sacred cover for the powerful — it does not merely fail politically. It fails theologically. It becomes, in Merton’s resonant phrase, “too much at home in the world, too tame, too predictable.” It loses the very thing that makes it the Church.

But the reverse is also possible. Communities of faith that refuse the seduction of power, that stand with those on the margins, that practice the hard discipline of welcoming the stranger — these are signs that the Gospel is still alive and working in the world. They are, as Merton might say, little islands of clarity in a sea of collective illusion.

So how do we move from insight to action?

The method is deceptively simple: see what is actually happening, without flinching and without illusion. Judge it in the light of genuine faith, not tribal loyalty. Then act — not from rage or ideology, but from the deep place in yourself that Merton spent his life trying to reach.

These three verbs were given to us by Joseph Cardijn, a Belgian priest who developed them for young workers navigating the injustices of the early twentieth century. They have since become a cornerstone of Catholic social teaching and liberation theology worldwide. And they are, we believe, exactly the right framework for encountering this moment.

STEP ONE

See

Name what is actually happening — in our churches, our media, our politics — without denial or deflection.

STEP TWO

Judge

Bring the light of the Gospel and Merton’s contemplative theology into dialogue with what we observe.

STEP THREE

Act

Move from awareness and discernment to concrete, grounded, nonviolent action — personal and communal.

The process is uncomfortable and demands clear vision, honest judgment, and faithful action. It takes courage to confront our own communities and assumptions, and to act differently when the culture flows in another direction. Yet, as Merton shows, this is the vital path forward—a way beyond illusion and fear, toward truth and transformative faith. The times demand this clarity and courage from us now.

Merton would not have called it courage, exactly. He would have called it contemplation in action. The kind of action that is possible when you have stopped being afraid of the truth.

One Last Word from Merton

There is a prayer that Thomas Merton wrote near the end of his life that, for many readers, has become the most honest thing they have ever heard a religious person say. It begins: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me.”

It is not a prayer of certainty. It is a prayer of trust — trust that the desire to be faithful, even in the dark, even without a map, is itself a kind of faithfulness. Merton did not promise that following God would be clear, comfortable, or politically advantageous. He promised only that it would be true.

In a moment when so many are trading truth for power, comfort for clarity, and love for loyalty to the tribe, that prayer strikes us as exactly what we need.

“We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves. And we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.” ~ THOMAS MERTON, THE SIGN OF JONAS