Pastor Corey Brooks, the “Rooftop Pastor” of Chicago’s South Side, wrote recently on Fox News that The War on America’s Judeo-Christian Roots Threatens Everything We Share. The piece was prompted by Jack Posobiec’s insistence that Abraham, Moses, and David “were Christian” — a move that erases Judaism from Christianity’s own roots. Brooks called it “the right-wing version of the 1619 Project” and was right to do so. But his own premise — “the United States is a Judeo-Christian nation” — is the same error wearing a different jacket, and it does to faith exactly what Posobiec’s revisionism does: it makes the nation the author of Christianity instead of its servant.
I’ll grant Brooks the strongest version of his argument first, because he has earned it. Posobiec’s move is real anti-Semitism, and Brooks’ description of it is sharp: “erase the Jews, center only the Christians, and call it faithfulness.” That is spiritual malpractice. And his community work through Project H.O.O.D. — job training, financial literacy, the Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center on 95th Street — is incarnational ministry of the kind that actually changes a life. I have more respect for one man on a rooftop in Woodlawn than for ten men on a stage telling the nation it was built on Christian bedrock.
But there is a deeper betrayal at work here, and Brooks commits it in his own opening line: “The United States is a Judeo-Christian nation. That is not sentiment; it is history.” It is not history. The founders were a mixture of orthodox Christians, deist rationalists, and gentlemen who wanted a republic, not a church — but the deeper point is not historical accident. A republic that grounds its authority in the consent of the governed cannot ground its identity in the revelation of Christ, because the two authorities belong to different orders — Caesar’s realm and God’s — and confusing them destroys both. Calling that inheritance “Judeo-Christian” is a claim about identity, not a fact about founding — and Brooks is too honest a man to mistake identity for history.
Søren Kierkegaard saw the difference a hundred and seventy years ago. He watched the state of Denmark call itself Christian, saw how comfortably everyone fit under the label, and named the result: Christendom — the death of real Christianity. Being born into a Christian nation, he argued, makes faith automatic, and faith that is automatic is faith that no longer exists. The crowd is untruth. A nation cannot be Christian. Only a person can, and only with difficulty — a venture made in fear and trembling, in crisis, in the silence after the last comfortable certainty has collapsed.
“The United States is a Judeo-Christian nation” is the same move Posobiec makes, aimed in a different direction. Posobiec erases Judaism to center Christianity; the “Judeo-Christian nation” claim erases the difficulty of faith to center the nation. Both make Christianity a tribal marker. Both replace the costly, inward, individual venture Kierkegaard described with a comfortable heritage you inherit with your birth certificate. And once faith becomes a national identity, you get to decide who is in and who is out — which version of Christianity counts, which interpretation governs, whose church the state honors and whose it ignores. That is the very revisionism Brooks says he opposes. He is building the cathedral and the trapdoor in the same paragraph.
The real trouble is the piece’s deepest confusion: it treats a national identity as a form of discipleship. “This is not an academic argument,” Brooks writes. “It is a discipleship problem.” He is right — but the discipleship problem is the premise, not the pushback against it. Christ did not found a nation. He founded a church — a thing of bread and wine, of cross and water, hunted for three centuries before Constantine made it safe — not a nation, not a constitution, not a flag. The moment you baptize the nation, you stop being the church and become a faction. Every form of Christian nationalism, whether Posobiec’s or Brooks’ softer version, makes this trade. You gain the comfort of a Christian country; you lose the gospel’s claim that the kingdom is not of this world. “All men are created equal” is a beautiful political principle. It is not the Nicene Creed.
I know what Brooks would say to all this, and his life answers better than most arguments. Project H.O.O.D. is subsidiarity in practice — a pastor and a church serving a neighborhood, building what neither the market nor the state would build. The Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center is what a mediating institution looks like when someone actually shows up for it. That work does not require a “Judeo-Christian nation.” It requires a parish, a neighborhood, a man willing to stand on a roof for 343 days. The national framework is the abstraction. The church on 95th Street is the real thing.
The answer to a nation that has forgotten its rooted institutions is not to legislate their memory into the Constitution. It is to build the next one. The co-op, the parish, the credit union, the mutual aid society, the community center — these are the institutions that do the work neither the corporation nor the centralized state will do, and they do it without requiring a theological claim about the founding. Faith is strongest precisely where the state has no jurisdiction. The universal destination of goods, the dignity of labor, the stranger welcomed as a matter of religious duty — these are not the founding principles of a nation. They are the obligations of a church, and they are best met by hands, not legislation.
Faith made automatic by the state is faith destroyed. The country was built by people who knew this. The church survives where the nation cannot, because it asks of its members what no republic can demand: everything, freely given, in fear and trembling, without a constitution to make it comfortable. Brooks’ rooftop held one man, one Bible, one neighborhood. That is the scale at which the gospel works — the parish, not the nation. Build the next rooftop. Leave the country to find its own soul.