Kingdom over Nation, executively edited by Min Shermara Hoyte, is an ecumenical resource born out of a growing concern that the church must recover its capacity to disciple faithfully in an age of political polarisation, competing loyalties, and ideological formation.
It brings together theologians, senior church leaders, and public thinkers from across the breadth of the church to help Christians, and in particular Christian leaders, think biblically, pastorally, and prophetically about identity, allegiance, discipleship, and public witness in an increasingly polarised age.
It features contributions from Rt Rev Dr Anderson Jeremiah, Rev Dr Helen Paynter, Rev Dr Callan Slipper, Sr Dr Gemma Simmonds CJ, Chine McDonald, Richard Bradbury, Doral Hayes, Bishop Mike Royal and Min Shermara Hoyte. It was also co-edited by Rev Dr Ben Aldous and Sarah Ball.
Read more about the Kingdom over Nation authors.
Min Shermara Hoyte writes…
This resource emerged from a shared concern, but it’s origins can also be traced to a particular journey.
Kingdom over Nation was inspired by an invitation to speak at a regional Churches Together gathering of church leaders.
As I travelled, I began to notice the lampposts draped with flags, street after street. It was the kind of display that can read as cultural pride or as warning depending on how long you look. I looked long enough to read both.
There was patriotism there, and to be clear, patriotism can be a profoundly good thing. There was a genuine affection for place, community, history, and belonging; a gratitude for the people and stories that shaped that local community. Christians should not be afraid of that. Loving where we come from, seeking the good of our communities, the welfare of the city, and celebrating the best of our national life can be an expression of neighbourly love and responsible citizenship.
Yet I could not ignore that threaded through it was also something else. A harder edge of exclusion and a subtle hierarchy of belonging. I found myself wondering whether legitimate social and economic anxieties were being harnessed by political actors who were skilled at naming people’s fears while remaining invested in many of the systems that produced them.
The reality was that these were real people facing genuine pressures such as rising living costs, economic insecurity, declining trust in institutions, and rapid social change. Their concerns deserved to be taken seriously. Yet too often, I had to question whether their pain was being translated into political capital. Whether public anger was being redirected towards convenient cultural, ethnic, or ideological targets, while the deeper structural drivers of inequality, economic exclusion, and concentrated power remained largely untouched. In this sense, the rhetoric offered not so much a remedy as a diversion: acknowledging the symptoms of social distress while protecting many of the conditions that produced it.
As I reflected on those flags, I found myself asking a deeper question: where does patriotism end and political nationalism begin? Were other’s feeling the same? How do Christians ensure that love of nation never eclipses our primary allegiance to the Kingdom of God? Or worst still that the nation doesn’t become our golden calf.
When I arrived at the meeting, I found a room full of leaders carrying a weight I immediately recognised. Not the weight of ideology, but of pastoral responsibility. These were shepherds trying to guide congregations increasingly divided. Sitting in their pews on any given Sunday were people who had arrived at radically different conclusions about the world, about immigration, identity, belonging, and who gets to count as “us”. They were all looking to their leaders for guidance, and many of those leaders were not sure they had the theological space, language, or resources to respond adequately.
I left carrying the same weight.
‘The failure to disciple is never neutral’
What stayed with me was not simply the complexity of the questions, but the danger of the vacuum being filled if the church remained silent or absent. If the leaders of God’s church do not disciple people, something else will. Social media algorithms are discipling people. Political tribes are discipling people. Online outrage and clickbait are discipling people. Cultural narratives are discipling people. The failure to disciple is never neutral.
As Christians, Scripture should not simply be read by us, it should read us. If we allow, it should examine our loyalties, our fears, our assumptions, and our understanding of who belongs. It should challenge every ideology, every allegiance, and every worldview and examine if it seeks to rival the Kingdom of God.
That conviction lies at the heart of this resource and at its heart stands a simple but urgent question: Are we being shaped more by the Kingdom of God, or by the ideologies of our culture?
Before going further, it is important to be clear about what this resource is and what it is not.
Kingdom Over Nation does not tell people what to think or how to vote. What it does and what it invites every reader to do is to ask a more searching question: Where do my convictions come from?
Not simply what do I believe? but what has formed me?
Has my political identity been shaped primarily by Scripture, prayer, and the community of faith across time and tradition? Should it be? Or has it been shaped, perhaps more than we have realised, by the algorithm, the newspaper, the party and the tribe?
That question is not aimed at one wing of the Church. It is aimed at all of us.
It would also be a misreading of this resource to assume that challenging Christian nationalism, or the co-option of Christian identity by the far right, is the same as questioning the sincerity of Christians who hold conservative political views. It is not. Christians have disagreed politically for over two thousand years while worshipping at the same table, and Kingdom Over Nation stands firmly within that tradition. The issue has never been whether someone votes left or right. The issue is whether political commitments remain subject to Christ or whether they have quietly become competitors to Him.
Patriotism and Nationalism
One of the tasks this resource wants to encourage after engagement is to distinguish patriotism from nationalism, because they are not the same thing.
Patriotism is fundamentally an expression of love: affection, gratitude, and responsibility towards one’s country and community. At its best, it inspires service, sacrifice, and civic virtue. In that sense, patriotism can be compared to the particular love a parent has for their own child. A parent may rightly have special responsibilities, affection, and concern for their child, but that does not mean they believe their child possesses greater worth or dignity than every other child. In the same way, love for one’s nation need not imply contempt for others, nor a belief that one’s own people are inherently superior. Properly understood, patriotism is a form of particular love that remains compatible with the equal value of all people before God.
Nationalism, however, can become something more demanding. It elevates national identity from something valuable to something ultimate. In its more dangerous forms, it sacralises the nation, blending political loyalty with religious devotion and presenting national interests as though they were synonymous with the purposes of God.
That is where discernment becomes urgent.
The witness of Scripture consistently points beyond national supremacy towards God’s purposes for all peoples. Israel’s election was never an end in itself but a means through which all nations would be blessed. In Jesus Christ, that vision reaches its fulfilment. The Kingdom He proclaimed is not bound to one ethnicity, one culture, one language, or one nation. It gathers people from every tribe, language, people, and nation into a new community under His lordship.
Jesus Himself refused to sanctify political tribalism. He loved His people deeply, wept over Jerusalem, and sought the flourishing of His community. Yet He consistently resisted every attempt to turn that love into a theology of supremacy and prophesied its destruction. The Kingdom He announced was larger than every political project and deeper than every national identity.
That conviction became all the more real for me shortly after this resource was released.
Real-world consequences
The week following its publication, I was physically and verbally attacked by a racist man at Westminster Station. I share this not for effect, but because it reminds us that these questions are not abstract. The co-option of Christianity by political nationalist ideologies, the distortion of faith in service of supremacy, and the weaponisation of identity have real-world consequences with embodied costs. They are not distant theological concerns; they are present realities.
The prophets were often accused of being political when they spoke. Yet Isaiah, Amos, Micah, John the Baptist, and Jesus himself were not serving a political tribe, they were serving the Kingdom of God. That Kingdom has always had the disconcerting habit of offending both left and right because it refuses to be captured by either. Jesus was crucified by the politics of his age, not elected by one.
This resource is not an attempt to make the Church more partisan. It is an invitation to make the Church more faithful.
We release Kingdom over Nation to you with hope.
Design and illustration: Piero Regnante | Rogfog Creative | rogfog.co.uk