Wooden Crosses

This is Part Two of three. The study group travels across the Atlantic, heads north and south, and ends up in the middle of someone else’s poll.

On the Saturday evening before Palm Sunday 1937, an employee of a German print shop went to the Gestapo with a tip. Something was being printed for the Catholic churches, something from Rome.

He was right, but his warning came too late.

Pius XI dated the letter 14 March 1937, Passion Sunday. He wrote it in German instead of the usual Latin. The Vatican sent copies to Berlin in a diplomatic pouch. The bishop of Berlin gave them to secret couriers, who carried them to every diocese in the Reich. Twelve printers produced the text under the nose of the Gestapo, and several bishops ordered hundreds of thousands of copies. They sent the stacks to parish priests, chaplains, and convents.

On 21 March 1937, Palm Sunday and one of the busiest Sundays of the Church’s year, priests across Germany read Mit brennender Sorge, “With Burning Concern,” from their pulpits. The next day the Gestapo raided churches to seize every copy it could find. The state closed the presses that had printed it.

People remember the pope, but the printers are mostly forgotten. These ordinary tradespeople lost their presses for printing a letter that carried this sentence: “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion.”

The idea of a national God is one of the oldest temptations for any nation. Eighty-eight years later, it marched through London carrying wooden crosses, and the group at St. Anselm’s was about to meet it.

A hundred and ten thousand

The third Tuesday was 10 November. To be cautious, and remembering the essay’s point that America is not the whole world, they skipped the election results and began in London.

On 13 September 2025, the Metropolitan Police counted about 110,000 people at the “Unite the Kingdom” march organized by Tommy Robinson, whose legal name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Other estimates ran as high as 150,000. Many marchers carried wooden crosses. Preachers spoke from the stage, a worship band played, and a cleric led the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer. Ten days later, the presidents of Churches Together in England answered that some at the rally had used the symbols and words of the faith to support views opposed to the Christian message of unconditional love for every human being. Cardinal Vincent Nichols, one of those presidents, signed the statement.

Then the numbers. On 11 October 2026, the Christian think tank Theos published a survey of 1,765 UK adults. The group closest to Christian nationalism, which Theos calls “Identity Integrationists,” makes up 11 percent of UK adults. Within it:

• Affiliation. 81 percent claim a Christian affiliation.
• Practice. 13 percent attend church weekly, barely above the 11 percent of the whole sample.
• Outlook. 82 percent agree with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the claim that Europe’s white population is being deliberately replaced through immigration. Across the whole sample, 37 percent agree.

When comparisons can be made, nominal Christians are a bit more likely to mix Christianity and British identity than regular churchgoers. The essay summed this up clearly: “culture matters more than belief.”

Not everyone reads the table that way. Humanists UK points out that Identity Integrationists are still more Christian than the general population on every religious measure in the report. It also notes that 66 percent of the most observant group, the Belief Integrationists, agree with the Great Replacement claim too.

There was a brief silence. Then Ruth followed the method and shared her own experience.

“I haven’t been inside a church since Easter, except for funerals,” she said. “I’m a Lutheran because my mother was. If you asked me what I believe, I’d have to think about it. But ask me if I’m a Christian, and I’d say yes without hesitating. That poll is describing me.”

Tessa saw things differently. Her home church was very political this year, but also full of people who truly pray. “So we’re both in the numbers,” she said. “Ruth is the cultural Christian. My church is the practicing kind that fuses it anyway. Two roads to the same place.”

“Careful with each other,” Lois said. “The essay keeps three things apart: affiliation, practice, and support for nationalist ideas. Nobody here gets a label from their attendance record. Ruth is not a Christian nationalist. She is the reason the question is interesting. The fusion can live in a culture without belief, and it can live in a pew.”

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Eichmann’s sanity

Lois read two lines from Benedict’s tools of good works in Chapter 4: “To make yourself a foreigner to the ways of the world,” and “To prefer nothing to the love of Christ.”

Next came the Merton essay they had all been dreading, “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann.” A psychiatrist at the trial had examined Eichmann and pronounced him sane, and Merton found that the most disturbing fact of all. Eichmann was obedient, loyal, and devoted to duty, a faithful officer of a powerful state. Then Merton turned to his own readers. Christians, too, can “cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into a Totalist ideology.”

“That’s like the London march,” Doug said slowly. “It’s not the same as Eichmann, and not the same century. But it’s the same mechanism. Faith being used to cover something else.”

“Read it as self-examination, not diagnosis,” Lois said. “Merton wrote it to make his readers question their own conformity. The real question isn’t which neighbor is like Eichmann. It’s what kind of conformity you and I might show when our group’s story expects it.”

To set a standard, she turned to the letter the printers had risked so much to print. “Pius XI wasn’t talking about anyone we know,” she said. “He was describing what happens when a nation’s politics become a religion, and that warning applies everywhere.” Whoever raises race, the people, or the state “to an idolatrous level,” he wrote, distorts the order God created (Mit brennender Sorge §8). God is “King and Legislator of all nations” (§11).

Ruth’s answer was quiet and precise. “I am instituting a twenty-four-hour rule,” she declared. “Nothing gets forwarded until it’s a day old and I’ve checked it.” She also resolved to attend Advent services at her mother’s Lutheran church, where she had lately gone only for Easter and funerals.

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A northern accent

On 17 November, they reached the essay’s final section, and for the first time, the group laughed. Doug read the essay’s verdict on Canada: “It is not American Christian nationalism with a northern accent.”

“So we’re the original?”

Canada brought some relief, but also a warning. In March 2025, the Angus Reid Institute and Cardus surveyed five thousand adults in each country and found that 18 percent of Canadians are religiously committed, compared with 37 percent of Americans. That measures devotion, not nationalism, but it means a smaller pool for any movement to draw on. Canadian Christian nationalism mostly stays outside party politics. During the 2022 Freedom Convoy, the biblical scholar Christine Mitchell spotted, in a photograph from Ottawa, a banner carrying the promise of 2 Chronicles 7:14 to “heal their land.” She judged the group behind it small but real, one strand in a larger protest. Alberta’s debates over parental rights and schooling show some overlap with Christian conservatism. A 2008 study in the Canadian Journal of Sociology found that rank-and-file Canadian evangelicals, unlike their American counterparts, tend not to bind religious morality to national identity.

Australia challenged the group’s categories. Its organized Christian right is real, connected, and active in elections. Still, the idea that Australia is Christian by definition is weak and fading. When Australians call their nation Christian, the political scientist David Smith found, they usually mean “heritage, rituals, holidays and census numbers,” not a sense of being chosen by God or bound to God by a sacred covenant.

“Heritage, holidays, and census numbers,” Chidi repeated. “That’s Ruth.”

“Thank you, dear,” said Ruth.

Lois picked Chapter 53 of the Rule, which is about guests: “Let all the guests at their arrival be received as Christ.” “We’ve been welcoming other countries all month,” she said. “Treat the essay the way Benedict treats a guest. It brings something you can’t create on your own.”

Merton offered a line from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, and Chidi read it twice: keep “cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers,” because underneath them is the human side that politics claims to control.

The Church had made the same point from two directions. Nostra Aetate (§5): we cannot call on God as Father of all if we refuse to treat any person as a brother or sister. Pacem in Terris (§98): civil authority exists “not to confine men within the frontiers of their own nations” but to protect a common good that cannot be divorced from the good of the whole human family.

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An index card for your own table

1. See. Name one place where Christianity as culture (hymn, heritage, holiday) has quietly replaced Christianity as practice in your own life: one place, not a category.
2. Judge. Inventory one practice: if Christ were not real, would you still do it? Answer honestly.
3. Act. Adopt Ruth’s twenty-four-hour rule for a week. Don’t share anything religious or political until it is a day old and checked.
4. Widen. Read one non-US source on religion and politics for a week. Bring one story that was covered differently there.
5. Check. Did your week enlarge your “we,” or merely relocate your “them”?

The tradespeople who printed Mit brennender Sorge never preached from a pulpit. They worked through the night, their hands stained with ink, only for the state to seize their presses by Monday morning. What they printed was not a slogan for one nation over another. It was a sentence against every national God, even one that might someday wear their own country’s colors.

Eighty-nine years later, in a cold parish library, a retired county clerk paused and decided to wait a day before forwarding an email.

That, too, is a press stop.

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Next week, Part Three: “Who Counts.” A petition reaches Corbett’s Landing, Doug signs it, and Chidi is told he may not be the kind of neighbor it has in mind.

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Sources. Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge (14 March 1937) §§8, 11. “The Encyclical That Infuriated Hitler,” EWTN. Thomas Merton, “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann,” in Raids on the Unspeakable (New Directions, 1966). Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday, 1966), p. 66. Rule of St. Benedict, Chapters 4 and 53, Saint Meinrad translation. Vatican II, Nostra Aetate §5. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris §98. David Campanale, “Crosses and Bible verses dominated the Tommy Robinson rally,” Premier Christianity, September 2025. Churches Together in England, presidents’ statement on the “Unite the Kingdom” rally (23 September 2025). Theos, Beyond “Christian Nationalism”: Measuring Attitudes to Christianity and Britishness Today (11 October 2026). Humanists UK, “We can’t tackle Christian nationalism by pretending it isn’t Christian,” 12 October 2026. Ray Pennings and Lynn E. Swaner, Religion for the Common Good: Canada and the United States in 2025 (Cardus, November 2025). Christine Mitchell, “How white Christian nationalism is part of the ‘freedom convoy’ protests,” The Conversation, February 2022. Lydia Bean, Marco Gonzalez, and Jason Kaufman, “Why Doesn’t Canada Have an American-Style Christian Right?” Canadian Journal of Sociology 33, no. 4 (2008). David Smith, “A ‘Christian nation’ no longer: why Australia’s religious right loses policy battles even when it wins elections,” The Conversation, 2021. Richard Pütz, “Christian Nationalism Beyond the US Border,” The Jesus Seminar and Beyond, 15 October 2026.