Why Christian Nationalism Doesn’t Allow You To Grieve.

My friends, if you’ve noticed that your grief and lament over the state of the world is constantly minimized, dismissed, or even mocked, you are not imagining things and you are not alone.

This hostile posture towards grief and lament is an inherent feature of authoritarian regimes and ideologies like Christian nationalism. Why? Because to grieve and lament you have to tell the truth about what is happening in the world and authoritarianism cannot allow the truth because it would erode the intentional propaganda and lies it has constructed to preserve its power. So it demands conformity and celebration to its definition of success.

This reminds us that there is a deeper violence than oppression itself that authoritarians thrive on. It is the insistence that what is broken is not broken. That suffering is exaggerated. That loss is imagined. That grief is weakness. That lament is disloyalty.

This is the work of every empire. It must silence lament because lament tells the truth. Within Christian nationalism, this silence has becomes sacred and habitual. We are told there are griefs that faithful people must not carry.

Do not grieve the cruelty and corruption that have been baptized as strength, or you will be called unpatriotic. Do not grieve the forests burned, the waters poisoned, the air thickened, or the poor who bear the heaviest burden of a wounded creation, because creation itself has become another casualty of denial. Do not lament the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples or the chains of human slavery and the wounds they still leave upon us, because remembering is branded as subversion or shaming. Do not mourn the loss of human dignity, equality, diversity, and freedom because social justice has been rebranded as “Marxist.” Do not mourn the hungry, the sick, the refugee, or the vulnerable when aid is stripped away, because mercy has been renamed weakness and compassion dismissed as “communism” or “socialism.” We can’t grieve discrimination against LGBT people because it’s framed as “condoning sin .”

The expectation is always the same: Do not weep. Do not remember. Do not tell the truth. Just smile. Just celebrate. Just move on.

The Biblical narrative opposes this posture of authoritarianism.

Israel sang songs of exile before it ever sang songs of restoration. The prophets stood in the public square and gave language to grief that kings refused to hear. Jesus wept over the city that mistook its violence for peace. He stood before a friend’s grave and did not explain death away. He entered fully into sorrow because love always does.

As I have always said, lament is not the opposite of faith. Lament is what faith sounds like when love refuses to lie.

This is why lament is so feared. Once we dare to speak truthfully about suffering, the illusions begin to crack. The myths that protect power begin to tremble. The idols that promised security are revealed to have no breath in them.

Empires require amnesia. The gospel requires remembrance. Empires mock tears because tears soften hearts that empire needs to harden. The gospel blesses those who mourn because mourning is where hearts remain alive.

And so many of us are weary. Not only because cruelty continues to unfold before our eyes, but because those who bear the name of Jesus so often mock those who dare to grieve it. We find ourselves pleading for the obvious that truth matters, that compassion matters, that the suffering of our neighbors matters and are met with ridicule instead of repentance.

That kind of loneliness can hollow the soul. But we have to remember that this is not the first generation to discover that faithfulness feels like exile.

There have always been prophets whose voices were unwelcome, disciples who loved truth more than acceptance, saints who refused to baptize the ambitions of empire. They walked forward without applause. They planted seeds whose harvest they would never see. They believed that obedience was more important than success.

So our calling is not to win every argument. It is simply to refuse the lie and to keep naming what is wounded. It is to keep mourning what God mourns. It is to keep loving those whom power has forgotten. It is to keep believing that truth, however buried, still belongs to God and that love with have the last word.

Hope is not uncritical optimism. Hope is what remains after every illusion has collapsed. Hope is the stubborn conviction that death will never have the final word.

So let them mock lament if they must. We will grieve anyway. We will tell the truth anyway. We will practice mercy anyway. We will seek justice anyway.

Because we belong, not to the kingdoms built on denial, but to the Kingdom of the One who still weeps over the world he loves and who is even now making all things new.