The Tent of His Kingdom

This is the first of three parts. It follows a parish study group, a challenging word, and an election that won’t wait.

Come back each Wednesday for the next two weeks to follow the story as it unfolds, one part at a time.

In early April 1962, a congressman named Frank Kowalski, worried about the nuclear arms race, wrote to a monk in Kentucky and asked him for a prayer. The monk wrote one. On 18 April 1962, the House of Representatives read it aloud.

Eight days later, the monk’s abbot handed him a letter. It had come from Rome in January, and the abbot had held it for three months. Dom Gabriel Sortais, Abbot General of the Trappists, ordered Father Louis to stop publishing on war and peace. Father Louis’s book, Peace in the Post-Christian Era, would not appear in his lifetime.

Father Louis was Thomas Merton. He obeyed. He did not stop thinking. Since October 1961, he had been writing to friends about war, fear, and the Christian conscience. Now he typed those letters onto stencils and mailed mimeographed copies to a few hundred readers, each marked not for publication. He called them the Cold War Letters. By October 1962, there were 111 of them.

The ban did not silence him. It changed his world. Instead of speaking to the nation, he began reaching out to individuals, one by one.

That is how small groups work, and that’s how this story will be told.

The cast of a cold library

This is a three-part story. St. Anselm’s, a Catholic parish in the river town of Corbett’s Landing, is fictional, as are the six people who meet in its cold library. The documents they study are real, and I source every quote. In the middle of their table is an essay I published on 15 October 2026, “Christian Nationalism Beyond the US Border.”

• Lois Breuer, 71, a retired high school English teacher, widowed three years ago. She has read Merton since college and is fairly sure she is not qualified to lead anything.
• Doug Steyer, 62, owns the hardware store. Army veteran, American Legion post commander, Methodist. He flies the flag on every holiday and bristles at the word nationalist.
• Ruth Lindgren, 76, is a retired county clerk and a Lutheran who attends Easter and funerals. She forwards every alarming email she receives.
• Chidi Okafor, 36, a pharmacist at the drugstore on Front Street, a naturalized citizen from Nigeria, and a Catholic convert. He is the only one in the room who has taken a citizenship oath.
• Tessa Blome, 24, a nursing student raised in the big, nondenominational church out by the highway. She loves its people and is troubled by its politics. She found Merton in a college course.
• Fr. Bill Gerl, 61, the pastor, lends them the room and worries aloud that the parish will be drawn into anyone’s campaign.

A tent always has an entrance.

The bulletin on 11 October announced: “Reading Thomas Merton: six Tuesday evenings, parish library, 7 p.m. All welcome.” On 27 October, just a week before the midterm election, five people showed up. Lois thought it was a miracle.

For the first twenty minutes, the conversation drifted away from Merton. Doug brought up a candidate forum at the big evangelical church. Ruth said Christian nationalists were taking over everything. Tessa argued they were just a small group, and the media made them seem bigger. Chidi listened quietly. Fr. Bill looked in, considered joining, then left.

Lois let it run. Then she opened the Rule of St. Benedict, the Rule Merton lived under for twenty-seven years as a Trappist, a Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani. She read from the Prologue: “If we want to dwell in the tent of his Kingdom, we can never reach it unless we run there by doing good works.”

“Not a fortress,” she said. “Not a compound. A tent is a thing with an entrance.”

Next, she read from Merton’s “The Root of War Is Fear,” because she felt the group needed it. Merton said the root of war is “the fear they have of everything,” and he explained what that fear creates. When we focus on evil in others, we look for someone to blame until we have “created for ourselves a suitable enemy, a scapegoat.”

The essay at the center of the table

Tessa asked to share something. Her aunt had sent her an essay about Christian nationalism, though not the American kind: Britain, Canada, Australia. She read its definition aloud. Christian nationalism is “the act of fusing national identity with the Christian religion such that the nation, by definition, is Christian.” Nick Spencer of the British think tank Theos reduces it to a single test: you have to be Christian to be truly British, or truly American.

She read one passage twice. The movement has become more visible, “but this does not mean it is growing larger.” The essay says that exaggerated coverage makes it seem like the movement is growing, even though the actual numbers stay the same.

Doug sat back. “So it’s all hype.”

“No,” Lois said. “The essay makes two points. It’s not as widespread as it seems, but we shouldn’t ignore it. That’s why we read it closely.”

So far, they’d only looked. That’s the first step in the method Joseph Cardijn, a Belgian priest, taught young workers a hundred years ago: see, judge, act. John XXIII made it official in Mater et Magistra (§236). The Second Vatican Council had already supported this approach. The Church must keep “scrutinizing the signs of the times and interpreting them in the light of the Gospel” (Gaudium et Spes §4).

Their assignment for the week was a media examen. Pick one story about religion and politics. Track every time it comes up, and note if it reports facts or stirs feelings. Then have three conversations with real neighbors, focusing on listening rather than persuading.

Phones in the basket

The second Tuesday was 3 November, Election Day. Lois suggested they meet anyway and put their phones in a basket by the door after 7:30. “The country will vote whether we watch or not,” she said. “Tonight, we practice reading the news without letting it control us.”

The assigned reading was the essay’s definition, and the evening became a seminar on one sentence: the term “does not refer to how a Christian votes, lobbies, or runs for office.” Caring for your country does not make you a Christian nationalist. The fusion does. The claim that the nation is Christian by definition, that Christianity deserves a special place in public life, and that drifting from it threatens the nation itself.

Doug had spent the weekend driving around with yard signs for candidates from both parties in his truck. He pushed back. “So now loving your country is suspect?”

“No,” said Chidi, his first real words of the series. “That is the opposite of the essay’s point. It protects your patriotism from being hijacked.” Then, more quietly: “When I took my citizenship oath, no one asked what I believe. I have thought about that a great deal since I became a Catholic. No one asked.”

Lois had Chapter 2 of the Rule ready. Benedict tells the abbot not to distinguish between people in the monastery: “Whether slave or free, we are all one in Christ.” “Benedict still respects office and seniority,” she said. “But no one’s birth or background gives them rank. That was radical in the sixth century, and it’s still radical now.”

Merton offered advice for election night. He wrote that politics is “an inextricable tangle of good and evil motives,” but we should keep hoping for whatever good remains.

Fr. Bill came by at 7:45, stayed for twenty minutes, and left them with a line he keeps taped inside his breviary. The Church “is not identified in any way with the political community nor bound to any political system” (Gaudium et Spes §76). “The Church is not America,” he said, “and America is not the Church. Both facts are good news for both of them.”

At eight o’clock, no one picked up their phone. To everyone’s surprise, Ruth suggested they pray. Lois opened Night Prayer on the parish tablet. Five Christians from four traditions, each with their own opinions, prayed the psalms while the country counted its votes.

An index card for your own table

1. See. Track one religion-and-politics story for a week. Count its appearances. Mark each one as fact or feeling.
2. Listen. Hold three conversations with neighbors about this moment. Ask; do not argue.
3. Judge. Ask where your own faith works as a border, telling you who is fully one of us.
4. Act. Finish this sentence and test it against one real event: “For me, loving my country as a Christian means ___, and it stops being love when ___.”
5. Check. Could a Christian in another party, or another country, say your sentence too?

Merton’s mimeographed letters went out to a few hundred people, one envelope at a time. They didn’t stop a war. But they kept a few hundred people thinking during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they taught a monk, who had to obey, how to keep speaking honestly in a small room.

Five people in a cold parish library are trying the same thing. After all, a tent always has an entrance.

It can hold more than you might think.

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Next week, Part Two: “Wooden Crosses.” The group travels across the Atlantic, and Ruth sees herself in a British poll.

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Sources. Thomas Merton, “The Root of War Is Fear,” in New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961). Merton, Cold War Letters (Orbis, 2006). Jim Forest, foreword to Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Orbis, 2004). Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue and Chapter 2, Saint Meinrad translation. John XXIII, Mater et Magistra §236. Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes §§4, 76. Richard Pütz, “Christian Nationalism Beyond the US Border,” The Jesus Seminar and Beyond, 15 October 2026.