ABOUT
Reclaiming
Christianity:
A national movement to reclaim
the authentic teachings of Jesus
We live in a time of unmatched polarization. In many Christian
churches, Jesus's message of compassion and peace has been replaced
by fear, exclusion, and the pursuit of power — a gospel of division
standing where a gospel of love once stood. Congregations have been
turned into battlegrounds. Scripture has been weaponized to justify
contempt for the stranger, the immigrant, the poor, and anyone who
worships, votes, or loves differently. Somewhere along the way,
"love your neighbor" became conditional, and "love your enemy"
became unthinkable.
National Unity Day exists to change
that.
We are calling Christians of every denomination —
and people of every faith, or no faith at all — back to the radical
simplicity at the center of Jesus's teaching: compassion without
conditions, forgiveness without limit, and a table wide enough for
everyone. This is not about politics. It is about remembering that
before Christianity became an institution, it was a movement of the
marginalized, led by a man who ate with outcasts, healed without
asking who deserved it, and taught that the truest measure of faith
is how we treat the least among us.
On National Unity Day,
April 4th, we invite churches, families, and communities across the
country to set aside the arguments that divide us and return to the
questions that unite us: How do we love better? How do we forgive
more freely? How do we build a country — and a faith — that reflects
mercy instead of fear? This is not a reclaiming of doctrine. It is a
reclaiming of heart.
Each year a major feature film
will be released to coincide with National Unity Day, beginning with
Thomas Merton's Dream — a film that carries his lifelong plea for
unity across religious and cultural lines to a generation hungry for
exactly that message. Merton spent his life discovering that the
walls we build between "us" and "them" were never real; this film,
and those that follow it each year, exist to help the rest of us
discover the same thing.
The Film
Thomas Merton's Dream
Directed by Gary Lundgren · Starring
James Twyman
On the eve of his final journey, Thomas Merton —
Trappist monk, bestselling author, and one of the twentieth
century's most influential spiritual voices — steps out of the pages
of his own famous autobiography to tell the audience the story he
never finished writing: what happened after the
mountain.
After decades of tension with his abbot, Dom James
Fox — a friction born of two stubborn, devoted men who wanted the
same holiness by opposite roads — Merton finally received what he
had spent half his monastic life asking for: a small hermitage in
the woods above the monastery, a place to live out his vow of
solitude in something closer to the silence he had always imagined.
But the freedom he'd fought so hard to win did not empty him out the
way he expected. It filled him instead — with the ache of an
ordinary man still learning, even in his fifties, that solitude does
not erase the heart, and that the vows he'd kept for a quarter
century could still be tested by something as human as falling in
love.
While in his hermitage, Marton began writing against
the machinery of war, against the bomb, against the easy silence
that lets good men do terrible things one committee meeting at a
time — and he began reaching outward, past the walls of his own
tradition, into correspondence and friendship with Zen masters, Sufi
poets, and teachers he would never meet in person but recognized
instantly as walking the same road in different robes. The hermit
who had gone into the woods to disappear became, instead, one of the
most urgent American voices in a time very similar to our
own.
In the fall of 1968, with his new abbot's blessing,
Merton set out for Asia — first to India, where he visited with the
Dalai Lama, two monks from opposite ends of the earth discovering,
mostly through laughter, that they had been circling the same
silence their whole lives. Then on to Bangkok, for a gathering of
Christian monastics wrestling with what their vows meant in a
century of revolution — the very question Merton had been living out
since the day he first knelt on a cold floor in Kentucky.
On
the afternoon of December 10, 1968, the day of his scheduled talk,
Merton died suddenly in his cottage in Bangkok — the exact
circumstances still unresolved to this day, a final open door in a
life defined by the courage to keep opening them. He left the stage,
and the world, still mid-sentence: still asking, still reaching,
still certain — as he tells the audience one last time before the
candles go dark — that none of us, whatever wall we think divides us
from one another, were ever really alone.
