Introduction
There is a particular kind of spiritual counterfeit that is more dangerous than outright atheism, because it wears the face of the sacred while evacuating its substance. It uses the vocabulary of transcendence — grace, covenant, justice, redemption — but in service of something far more earthly: the consolidation of identity, the sanctification of power, and the management of anxiety through tribal belonging.
This is not a new phenomenon. Every age has produced its version of the temple turned marketplace. But the contemporary moment has given us something unusually refined: two mirror-image ideological systems, one on the cultural right and one on the cultural left, both of which have colonized the architecture of Christian faith, replaced its transcendent center with a political program, and then defended that program with the ferocity that only the sacred can inspire.
The mystics called this idolatry — not in the crude sense of bowing to statues, but in the subtler sense of worshipping a thing of our own making in the place where God should be. Meister Eckhart warned that the God we can fully name and deploy is not God at all, but an image we have fashioned for our own purposes. Thomas Merton, writing from his hermitage at Gethsemani, saw clearly that the greatest spiritual danger of the modern age was not unbelief but the domestication of the divine — making God a mascot for our preferred civilization. Simone Weil, that strange genius who lived at the threshold between Christianity and refusal, said that the great temptation of religion is to use God as force rather than to submit to God as love.
What follows is not a partisan indictment. It is a contemplative diagnosis — an attempt to see, with as clear an eye as we can manage, what happens to a tradition when ideology takes the throne that belongs to Mystery.
I. The Architecture of the Counterfeit
What does a faith look like when its center has been replaced?
Genuine Christian mysticism has always been oriented around kenosis — the self-emptying at the heart of the Incarnation, the Cross as the ultimate inversion of worldly power. The kingdom proclaimed in the Beatitudes is structurally paradoxical: the meek inherit, the mourners are comforted, the peacemakers are called children of God. This is not a political platform. It is a description of a different order of reality entirely, one that cannot be captured by any human ideology because it perpetually exceeds and subverts every human system.
When ideology colonizes this space, the first thing it does is resolve the paradox. It takes the irreducible tension of the Gospel — its simultaneous yes to the world and no to the world’s terms — and flattens it into a legible program. The Cross becomes a symbol of ethnic heritage or revolutionary solidarity, depending on which tribe is doing the flattening. Grace becomes a warrant for the righteous rather than a gift to the undeserving. The Kingdom becomes a political destination to be achieved through the correct application of power.
The apophatic tradition — the via negativa, which insists that God is always beyond our categories, that every theological statement must ultimately be unsaid — is the first casualty of this operation. An ideology needs a God who speaks clearly, endorses specifically, and sanctions decisively. Apophasis, with its insistence that the divine exceeds every human formulation, is not useful to a movement. It is, in fact, its undoing.
II. The God of the Right: Sacred Nation, Cleansed Blood
What does Christian Nationalism worship in the place where Christ stood?
The fusion of Christian faith with nationalist identity is not unique to America, but America has produced its most elaborate contemporary specimen. Christian Nationalism, in its various forms, makes a set of interlocking theological claims: that the nation was founded as a Christian covenant; that its cultural and ethnic heritage is divinely sanctioned; that the loss of Christian dominance in public life is a kind of spiritual catastrophe requiring political remedy; and that the restoration of that dominance is a sacred mission.
What is striking, from the standpoint of Christian mysticism, is how few of these claims have any genuine root in the Gospel tradition. The God of the Beatitudes is not a national deity. The Christ of the Cross is not a cultural hero. The kingdom announced in the Sermon on the Mount is explicitly not of this world — not because it is otherworldly in the dismissive sense, but because it operates by a logic that no nation-state, however virtuous, can embody.
Christian Nationalism requires, for its coherence, a God who is particular in the tribal sense — who favors this people, this land, this civilization. But the God of the mystical tradition is particular in a radically different sense: particular in the way that love is particular, addressing each person in their own irreducible depth, precisely not reducible to ethnic or national containers. The universalism of the mystics — Eckhart’s Godhead beyond God, Julian’s all shall be well, Paul’s “neither Jew nor Greek” — is not the universalism of ideology (which erases difference) but the universalism of love, which holds difference without hierarchy.
What Christian Nationalism worships is not difficult to identify if we follow Weil’s method and ask: what does it refuse to relinquish? The answer is force — the force of cultural dominance, legal imposition, demographic majority, and the comfort of a society organized around one’s own image. The kenotic Christ, who relinquished all of that willingly, is an embarrassment to this project. He must be quietly replaced by a Christ of triumph — muscular, national, a warrant for sovereignty rather than a call to self-emptying.
This is the idol. And the mystics knew that idols, however sincere the devotion they attract, cannot ultimately satisfy, because they are too small. The ache they promise to resolve is genuine — the human longing for sacred meaning, for a world that coheres, for belonging that goes all the way down. But the solution they offer is a cage made of human categories in the place where the infinite was supposed to dwell.
III. The God of the Left: Justice Sanctified, Virtue Performed
What does Progressive Christianity worship in the place where mystery stood?
The mirror image is subtler, and in some ways harder to see precisely because it wears a more compassionate face. Progressive Christianity — or more precisely, the secular ideology that has in many communities displaced it — takes genuinely important moral intuitions (concern for the marginalized, critique of structural injustice, attention to suffering) and elevates them to the status of ultimate claims, with the theological vocabulary of the tradition serving as ceremonial ratification.
The tell is not in the content of the concerns — the prophetic tradition of Israel is, in fact, saturated with precisely these concerns — but in the structure of the certainty and the function of the faith. When a theological community becomes primarily organized around the enforcement of ideological purity, when the language of sin and redemption migrates entirely from the vertical to the horizontal axis, when contemplative practice atrophies and is replaced by political activism as the primary spiritual discipline, something has shifted that is not merely a matter of emphasis.
Merton saw this coming. He loved the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement with all his heart, and said so clearly. But he also warned, with equal clarity, that the activist who loses the contemplative center becomes — despite the best intentions — a carrier of the very violence they oppose. The ego, however enlightened its politics, remains the ego. Social transformation that does not pass through self-transformation tends to reproduce, in the new arrangement, the dynamics it displaced.
The apophatic warning applies here with equal force. A God who is primarily a sanction for our political program — however that program is framed — is not the God of the mystics. The God of the mystics is not useful. The God of Julian of Norwich, who says all shall be well in the midst of her showings of Christ’s passion, is not offering a policy position. The God of the Sufi poets is not a warrant for any human arrangement. The fana of the Sufis — the annihilation of the self in God — does not leave a politically empowered subject behind. It leaves someone far more dangerous to every ideology: a person whose deepest loyalty is no longer to any human tribe.
This is what progressive ideology, when it colonizes faith, cannot tolerate: a God who is not ultimately on anyone’s side in the way that human coalitions require. A God who loves the oppressor as genuinely as the oppressed — not by erasing the moral distinction between them, but by exceeding it — is not a useful God for a movement. He must be replaced by a God who is, at bottom, the ultimate endorsement of the correct politics.
IV. The Cross as the Undoing of Every Ideology
What does the kenotic center of Christianity actually demand?
Paul’s kenosis hymn in Philippians does not describe a Christ who seizes power and wields it for the righteous. It describes one who, being in the form of God, emptied himself — took the form of a servant, became obedient to death, even the death of a criminal. The resurrection does not undo this logic; it vindicates it. It says that this is how the divine actually works — not by domination but by the willingness to go all the way down.
This is structurally incompatible with every ideology, left or right, because every ideology is ultimately in the business of ascending: securing power, building coalitions, winning arguments, dominating space. The Cross refuses ascent. It insists, with a consistency that has always made it scandalous, that the path through is down.
Eckhart’s sermons return obsessively to this point. Gelassenheit — letting go, releasement, the willingness to be dispossessed — is not a spiritual luxury for the advanced practitioner. It is the foundational movement of Christian life. And it applies, he insists, not only to possessions and status, but to our most cherished spiritual concepts and identities. We must be willing to release even our image of God, because the God we have fully captured in concept is not God.
This is devastating to every ideological Christianity, precisely because ideology is in the business of not letting go. It requires a stable enemy, a clear program, a God who stays in his lane and validates the project. The mystics offer instead a God who is always already ahead of the project, calling it into question, inviting a deeper surrender than any ideology can accommodate.
V. The Longing Beneath the Ideology
What does the soul actually want that ideology promises and cannot deliver?
It would be a mistake — and a kind of spiritual arrogance — to dismiss the longing that drives people into these ideological forms of faith. Behind Christian Nationalism is a genuine ache: for coherence, for a world that holds together, for sacred meaning in an age of dissolution, for belonging that goes deeper than consumer preference. These are not contemptible desires. They are the soul’s own hunger, misdirected.
Behind progressive ideological faith is an equally genuine ache: for justice, for the suffering of the marginalized to matter cosmically and not merely politically, for a world that reflects the dignity of every human being, for the arc of history to bend toward something real. These too are not contemptible. They are, in their root, the prophetic cry — let justice roll down like waters — which is among the most authentically sacred utterances in the tradition.
The tragedy is not the longing but the container. Ideology offers the hunger a meal it cannot actually provide, because the hunger is ultimately for something that exceeds every political arrangement. The soul that is genuinely seeking the sacred — that wants, underneath all its tribal allegiances, to be known in the way that only the divine can know — will not finally be satisfied by a God who is the mascot of its team, however sincerely it believes otherwise.
This is the contemplative contribution to the current moment. Not a third political position — not a “centrist Christianity” that is simply ideology with better manners — but a recovery of the apophatic center: the willingness to sit in the presence of a God who exceeds our categories, who will not be recruited, who loves beyond our capacity to map that love onto our preferred arrangements of the world.
The tears that come in the presence of genuine sacred music are not politically inflected. They do not know which side they are on. They arise from a place beneath the ideological sorting — from the part of the soul that has never forgotten what it is actually longing for, and recognizes it when it hears it, however briefly, in the unguarded moment of genuine contact with the Real.
Addendum: A Note on Discernment
The question that follows from this essay is practical as well as contemplative: how does one discern, within one’s own faith community and within oneself, when genuine devotion has shaded into ideological capture?
Several markers are worth attending to. The first is the capacity for genuine self-examination across tribal lines — whether one can acknowledge the log in one’s own eye with the same clarity brought to the speck in the eye of the political other. The second is the quality of certainty: the mystics are not uncertain about God, but they are profoundly humble about their own formulations of God. When religious certainty produces contempt rather than compassion, something has shifted. The third is the test of the Cross itself: does one’s faith ask anything of the self, or does it primarily ask things of others? Kenosis is not a comfortable doctrine. A faith that costs nothing — that confirms rather than disrupts the self’s arrangements — should be examined carefully.
None of this is to suggest that faith should be politically inert. The prophets were not apolitical. The mystics were not quietists in the dismissive sense. Meister Eckhart was a social revolutionary in the idiom of his age. But the political dimension of genuine faith flows from the contemplative center, not in place of it. Justice that has passed through kenosis looks different from justice that is merely ideology with a theological vocabulary borrowed for the occasion.
Epilogue
The throne at the center of every human system waits to be filled. We fill it with whatever we most fear to lose — nation, cause, certainty, belonging.
The mystics say: leave it empty. Not because nothing is real, but because what is most real cannot be seated there.
It moves. It exceeds. It empties itself even of itself, and in that emptying something is held that no ideology can touch, and no collapse can take.
This is the Christ the tradition keeps half-forgetting — not the mascot of our arrangements, but the one who walked out of every tomb we tried to seal him in.
Sources & References
- Meister Eckhart — Sermons and Treatises (c. 1300s); concept of Gelassenheit and the Godhead beyond God
- Thomas Merton — Contemplation in a World of Action (1971); The Sign of Jonas (1953)
- Simone Weil — Waiting for God (1951); The Need for Roots (1952)
- Julian of Norwich — Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1395)
- Philippians 2:6–11 — the kenosis hymn
- Matthew 5:3–12 — the Beatitudes
- Amos 5:24 — “let justice roll down like waters”
- Galatians 3:28 — “neither Jew nor Greek”
- Andrew Whitehead & Samuel Perry — Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (2020)
- Philip Gorski & Samuel Perry — The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (2022)
- Diana Butler Bass — Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence(2021)
- Dorothee Sölle — The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (2001)
Numinous Waves 