Ask most Americans what it takes to get ahead, and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: work hard, stay disciplined, take responsibility for yourself. It’s a story we tell so often we barely notice we’re telling it. Success is earned. Failure is, at least partly, deserved. The Ayn Rand story, and most people have no idea who she was in life.

That story feels like common sense we say to ourselves. But it is also a moral and religious story, and it deserves a sharper question: where does it come from, and does it align with what Jesus taught?

In recent years, researchers have given a name to a related set of beliefs: Christian nationalism — the conviction that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and must remain that way to remain blessed by God. This is not just a political position. It also shapes ideas about fairness, success, and who deserves what.

Survey research has found a pattern worth noticing: Americans who hold strong Christian nationalist views are also more likely to credit hard work as the reason people get ahead, while downplaying inherited wealth, family connections, race, or gender. Belief in a nation specially favored by God tends to go hand in hand with a strong belief in pure meritocracy — the idea that the system rewards effort, full stop.

That pairing raises an uncomfortable question for anyone trying to follow Jesus: Does this match what he actually taught?

See: What’s Actually Going On

Look at the Gospels, and a much messier, less tidy picture of success shows up. Jesus doesn’t bless the industrious or the upwardly mobile. Instead, in Luke’s account of the Beatitudes, it’s the poor, the hungry, and the grieving who are called blessed — not the accomplished. In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the landowner pays everyone the same wage regardless of how many hours they worked, which makes no sense as economic policy and isn’t supposed to. It’s a picture of grace, not a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

Jesus spends an unusual amount of time with people the merit system had already written off — tax collectors, people labeled “sinners,” widows, and the poor. And he keeps saying the kingdom of God runs backward from how we’d expect: the last will be first, and the first will be last.

The early Church kept wrestling with this. Basil the Great, one of the fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers, didn’t treat wealth as a reward for virtue — he treated it as a kind of test, and often a failure. He’s remembered for saying something close to: the extra bread sitting in your pantry already belongs to someone who’s hungry. Surplus, in his view, isn’t neutral. It’s theft if it isn’t shared.

His contemporary Gregory of Nyssa pushed even further, rejecting the idea that social rank reflects God’s design. If every person carries the image of God, he argued, then no hierarchy — rich over poor, free over enslaved — can be justified as natural or deserved. Dignity isn’t something people earn. It’s something they’re given, period.

Put the data next to the theology, and the point becomes clearer: the link between Christian nationalist belief and strict meritocratic thinking is most evident among middle- and higher-income Americans. That matters because it suggests this belief is not floating free of self-interest — it tends to show up most among people who already have something to credit their own effort for.

Judge: What Do We Make of This?

Here’s the tension, named plainly: when “I earned what I have” becomes the whole story, two things quietly follow. First, other people’s privilege doesn’t need to be examined — if you got there by hard work, so can anyone, and there’s nothing uncomfortable to ask about how you got your head start. Second, other people’s struggles don’t need explaining either — if you’re behind, you probably didn’t try hard enough.

That’s a tidy story. It’s also, according to the Gospel, not a true one, at least not the whole truth. Hard work matters. Nobody serious is arguing otherwise. But the Gospel keeps insisting that contingency, community, and grace matter at least as much: who your parents were, what neighborhood you grew up in, who opened a door for you, and yes, sometimes plain luck.

There’s also a specific danger in fusing national pride with divine favor. Loving your country isn’t a problem. But history is full of examples — including in early Christianity — of what happens when “God blessed this nation” turns into “God endorses everything this nation does.” The early Church, including the Cappadocians, generally saw itself as something bigger than any empire: a community whose first loyalty was to the kingdom of God, not to Rome or any other earthly power. That makes for a useful check against turning patriotism into theology.

None of this means meritocracy is a lie or that effort does not count. It means meritocracy is a poor substitute for the Gospel when it is used to decide who deserves compassion and who does not.

Act: What Does This Ask of Us?

If the Gospel is right that whatever we have is received rather than purely earned, that changes what’s asked of us. It doesn’t cancel hard work — it relocates the point of it. So the aim becomes less about proving we deserve what we have and more about using it well, especially toward people the system has left behind.

That might look like asking honest questions about how much of your own success came from circumstances you didn’t choose. It might also mean gently but clearly pushing back on language in your own church or community that quietly equates wealth with virtue or poverty with laziness. And it means paying attention to who shows up in the stories Jesus tells as the ones worth noticing — and asking who that would be today.

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Questions for Discussion

These are meant for people doing real work for a living — not theologians — to sit with, ideally in a small group or over coffee with someone willing to disagree with you.

1. When you think about your own life, how much of where you are right now feels earned through your own effort, and how much feels like it came from things you didn’t choose — family, geography, timing, people who helped you along the way?
2. Have you ever heard someone (maybe even yourself) explain another person’s struggles by saying they just didn’t work hard enough? Looking back, was that the whole story?
3. What’s the difference between being grateful for your country and believing your country has special divine favor over other nations? Does that distinction matter to you, and why?
4. Jesus tells a parable about workers who are paid the same wage regardless of how many hours they work. Does that story sit comfortably with you, or does it bother you? What does that reaction tell you about how you think fairness should work?
5. Christian nationalism is controversial partly because it links national identity to religious identity. Where do you think that line should be — what’s healthy patriotism, and where does it start to become something else?
6. If “the last will be first, and the first will be last” is actually true, who in your own town, workplace, or church might that be talking about? Does that question make you uncomfortable — and if so, why?
7. What would change in your daily life, your spending, or how you talk about people who are struggling, if you took seriously the idea that what you have was given to you rather than earned by you?