American Christian Nationalism: A Case of Misplaced Loyalties

American Christian Nationalism: A Case of Misplaced Loyalties

by Harold Netland

Why do you call me, “Lord, Lord,” and do not do what I say?

Luke 6:46

“What do you think about nationalism?” The question from a Japanese university student caught me by surprise. My wife and I were serving as missionary educators in Japan, where I had been born and raised, the son of missionaries. Now working alongside Japanese churches and pastors, I was well aware of the tragic path down which militant Shinto nationalism had led the Japanese in the early twentieth century, culminating in the horrors of World War II. But I had not really thought much about nationalism itself. Stumbling through some kind of answer to the student, I made a mental note to explore the subject further at some point.

In the years to come my Japanese colleagues in ministry helped me to appreciate the significance of the issues surrounding Christianity and nationalism. Having suffered greatly under Shinto nationalism, Japanese Christians are acutely aware of how easy it is for love of country to lapse into idolatry and persecution of others. But idolatrous nationalism can be a problem for Christians anywhere, including the United States. My Japanese friends helped me to become more sensitive to ways in which American Christians also compromise the gospel through too close an association with aspects of American culture and politics.

Christian nationalism is part of a broader global phenomenon attracting attention since the late twentieth century – the growing significance of populism and religious nationalism. It is the blending of Christian symbolism with the ideology of nationalism that produces Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism has a long history in Europe but, in varying forms, it is today also a significant force in parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia.[i] Remarkably, under President Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Kirill, Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, Russia has seen a resurgence of Christian nationalism.[ii] Although cases of Christian nationalism have some things in common wherever they appear, they also take on distinctive characteristics in different countries, depending upon the particular ethnic, religious and political contexts. In this essay our concern is with Christian nationalism in the United States.

It is tempting to think that Christian nationalism in America is a recent phenomenon inspired by Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016. But although many who supported Trump for president in 2016, 2020, and 2024 were Christian nationalists, Christian nationalism itself can be traced back to the founding of the American republic. Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry state, “White Christian nationalism is one of the oldest and most powerful currents in American politics. But until the insurrection [on January 6, 2021], it was invisible to most Americans.”[iii] Donald Trump skillfully read the mood of conservative white[iv] Christians and advanced himself as their champion, cultivating their sense of grievance and promising to restore the country they felt had been taken from them. But the commitments of Christian nationalism were present long before Trump emerged on the political scene.

In Taking America Back for God, one of the more influential analyses of the subject, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry characterize American Christian nationalism as “an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture.”[v] It is a way of thinking about what it means to be an American that is based upon the following convictions: (1) America was intentionally founded as a Christian nation; (2) America has been chosen by God for his special purposes and thus is exceptional among the nations; (3) The federal government should recognize the United States as a Christian nation and give Christianity preferential treatment in the public sector; (4) Throughout its history America has, for the most part, exemplified Christian values and principles; and (5) In light of the current attack upon Christianity by secularists, American Christians should pursue political and cultural power in order to restore a Christian America.[vi] While not necessarily a defining trait of American Christian nationalism, the commitments of white supremacy have also been concomitant throughout its history.[vii]

Christians, Disciples of Jesus, and Evangelicals

The word “Christian” is ambiguous and is used in different ways. It often is used to denote anyone who self identifies as a Christian, regardless of their level of understanding of Christian teachings or involvement in church. Others use it in a more restrictive sense to refer to those who are informed and committed followers of Jesus Christ. In order to avoid confusion, I will use “disciples of Jesus” when speaking of those who are committed followers of Jesus as this is understood in the New Testament; the term “Christian” will be used to refer to anyone who claims to be a Christian, however this is understood.

A disciple is a committed follower of Jesus who intentionally strives to live in accordance with Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament. The term can be used broadly to include anyone who tries to live according to Jesus’ teachings. But it also has a more restricted meaning, referring to those who, through a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, are spiritually reborn (John 3:3-8, 16; Titus 3:3-7), justified (Rom. 5:1-2), and become a new creation in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17-19). Christ’s disciples, in this restricted sense, are children of God (John 1:12-13; 1 John 3:1-2) and are empowered for holy living through the work of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8; Gal. 5:13-26).

Disciples of Jesus have been redeemed from the realm of darkness and evil and delivered into Christ’s Kingdom (Col.1:13). God’s Kingdom is broader than the Church, although the global Christian community is central to the Kingdom. As Johannes Verkuyl observes, “The Church, the believing and active community in Christ, is raised up by God among all nations to share in the salvation and suffering services of the Kingdom. The Church consists of those whom God has called to stand at His side to act out with Him the drama of the revelation of the Kingdom come and coming.”[viii] Disciples of Jesus should have the Kingdom of God – God’s righteous and just reign — as their highest priority; they are to “seek first [God’s] kingdom and his righteousness” (Mt 6:33).

Those who are genuinely Christ’s disciples gain a new identity as part of a new humanity that transcends and takes priority over typical identity markers. The idea that Gentiles, in addition to Jews, can become part of the redeemed community was revolutionary for the early disciples, who were overwhelmingly Jewish. But in Christ, Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slave and free – all are “fellow citizens” and “members of [God’s] household.” (Eph. 2: 19) Disciples of Jesus, whatever their ethnic or national background, together comprise “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession.”[ix] (1 Peter 2:9)

Christ’s disciples are to live in such a way that their lives manifest the values, attitudes, and actions called for in Jesus’ teaching. Much of the Gospel of Matthew — including the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of the Kingdom – portrays for us how Christ’s disciples are to live. Jesus’ disciples are to be “salt and light” in the surrounding world, so that the moral quality of their lives is noticeably different from people around them. As they let their “light shine,” others will see their “good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Mt 5:16). People outside the Church should be attracted to the community of believers by the distinctive moral quality of Christ’s disciples.

Three commands in the Gospel of Matthew are especially significant. In Mt. 7:12 we have the so-called Golden Rule: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” This basic moral principle has significant implications not only for interpersonal relationships but also public policy in a diverse and polarized society. The Great Commandment in Mt 22:35-40 sums up concisely the disciples’ responsibilities with respect to God and others. Upon being asked which is the greatest commandment, Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”[x]

In Mt. 5:43-45, Jesus calls his disciples to a higher standard than is found in other moral teachings; his followers are actually to love their enemies. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” In other words, love is to be the distinguishing mark of Christ’s disciples – their love for God and for others, including even their enemies. Moreover, when Christ’s disciples are treated improperly or persecuted, they are not to seek revenge or repay evil with evil (Mt. 5:10-12; Rom. 12:14-21; 1 Pet. 2:11-12, 15; 3:9-17). Rather, they are to “overcome evil with good.” (Rom. 12:21).

The Church today includes believers on six continents and in over 230 countries. Despite their many different ethnicities, cultures, social classes, and nationalities, all believers are united as members of Christ’s Body. Following Christ involves both continuities and discontinuities with one’s past. One’s ethnic, cultural, and national identities remain, and yet there is always a turning from, or rejection of, some aspects of the past. Even though ethnic and national identities remain, they are relativized in light of one’s primary identity in Christ and his Church. Disciples of Jesus are first and foremost members of God’s Kingdom, and their highest priority should be his Kingdom and what it represents.

Christian nationalism in America today is closely identified with evangelicals, so we need to clarify what we mean by this term. The meanings of words change with time, and this is certainly the case with “evangelical.” Broadly, we can distinguish two ways in which the term is understood. The first is a theological definition, such that evangelicals are those who affirm the supreme authority of Scripture as a source of knowledge about God and guide for holy living; the centrality of Jesus Christ and his atoning work on the cross for salvation; the need for personal conversion and holy living; and the priority of evangelism.[xi] Thomas Kidd concisely defines evangelicals as “born-again Protestants who cherish the Bible as the Word of God and who emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.”[xii]

But “evangelical” is also used in a sociological sense to refer to those who self-identify as evangelicals. In this sense, evangelicals are not monolithic, and many who adopt the label might not be aware of, let alone committed to, the theological distinctives noted above. American evangelicalism has roots in the Protestant Reformation, Pietism, the awakenings and revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it emerged as a distinctive movement out of the conflicts between fundamentalism and modernism in the early twentieth century. Identified primarily with Billy Graham in the 1950s and ‘60s, it became increasingly fragmented, with a substantial segment of the movement becoming associated with the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s and ‘90s, culminating in the close alignment of many evangelicals with the Republican Party today.

The increased cultural and political activism of white evangelicals in particular, and their support of Donald Trump and the Republican Party agenda, has resulted in the term “evangelical” being understood popularly as referring to conservative Republican supporters of Trumpism. Sociologist Ryan Burge notes that “what it means to be evangelical is being radically remade.”[xiii] Drawing on research from the Pew Research Center, he observes that “Instead of theological affinity for Jesus Christ, millions of Americans are being drawn to the evangelical label because of its association with the [Republican Party].” Many who embrace the evangelical identity hardly ever attend religious services, and in recent years there has been an increasing number of those with no attachment to Protestant Christianity – including Hindus, Muslims, and Mormons – who use the label. Joel Looper observes that “becoming ‘evangelical’ no longer needs to involve regular church attendance, and saying the sinner’s prayer or having a personal relationship with Jesus is strictly optional. Instead, the word has morphed into a synonym for Republican or cultural conservative.”[xiv] Although I happily identify as an evangelical in the theological sense of the term, I am dismayed by the direction that many evangelicals have taken in recent decades in mixing together Christian identity with a particular understanding of what it means to be American.

Nationalism

Although “nationalism” and “patriotism” are sometimes used as synonyms, it is important to distinguish the terms. Patriotism is an appropriate love for, or pride in, one’s nation, but it is fully compatible with being critical of aspects of the nation’s past or present. As an American patriot, I love my country and am proud to be an American. At its best, the United States has been an instrument for much good, both domestically and abroad, and the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution have been an inspiration for many around the globe. While acknowledging this, however, I am also well aware of America’s many faults and failures, and I am critical of parts of its history and current policies.

Nationalism, by contrast, involves an inappropriate, in some sense, attachment or devotion to a nation or to an imagined view of the nation. What makes nationalism inappropriate might be an excessive commitment to an idealized view of the nation, which is inaccurate, or the elevation of a particular group – usually ethnic or religious – as defining the essence of the nation and therefore to be privileged. Paul Miller observes, “Most political tribes throughout history picked a shared characteristic like race, ethnicity, heritage, or religion, which is the defining trait of nationalism.”[xv] With nationalism, the nation as a political unit is tied to a particular group in such a way that the traditions and heritage of this group are privileged and protected.

Tobias Cremer observes that nationalist movements worldwide are often associated with right-wing populism, “a political movement that prioritizes national identity and culture and that claims that the ‘pure and homogenous’ people are threatened by a neglectful, contemptuous and corrupt liberal elite on the one hand, and by the mass immigration of culturally different, external ‘others’ on the other.”[xvi] Western populism is typically saturated with Christian symbolism. “From Washington to Warsaw and from Reykjavik to Rome, far-right politicians are evoking their countries’ Christian identity, displaying Christian symbols, debating the role of religion in public and presenting themselves as defenders of the Christian West.”[xvii] But the Christian symbolism does not necessarily indicate any real understanding of or even commitment to traditional Christian teachings. Such populists often portray themselves as defenders of the “Christian West” without embracing traditional Christian beliefs or values. Christianity becomes “an ethno-cultural identifier of the nation” that is “independent of Christian practice, beliefs and the institution of the church.”[xviii] The cultural appropriation of Christian symbols detached from their historical moorings in theology and the church is also apparent in aspects of American Christian nationalism.

Christian Nationalism in America

According to Paul Miller, American Christian nationalists “want to re-create the imagined culture of American greatness, usually envisioned as the era of the 1950s White, middle-class, Protestant America – the greatness of America as a ‘Christian nation’.”[xix] There is a long history of Americans merging their Christian faith with American identity.

In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Americans regularly described the United States as a “new Israel;” in the twentieth century, as a “Christian nation.” When they do so they are expressing a collection of beliefs: that to be a faithful Christian in America, one must be loyal to the American nation; that the American nation is defined in part by Christian values and Christian culture; that it is, in some sense, the outworking of Christianity in political form; that it may enjoy a special relationship with God; and that American Christians should ensure their government keeps Christianity as the predominant ordering framework for our public life… Americans are the people called by God’s name, and the United States is the nation whose God is the Lord.[xx]

Christianity has indeed played a significant role in American history, and not just any acknowledgement of the significance of Christianity in shaping America qualifies as Christian nationalism. Nor is just any attempt to influence society with Christian values an instance of Christian nationalism; Christ’s disciples should seek, in appropriate ways, to shape the broader culture according to Christian moral principles. But it is the attempt to define America as a Christian nation, specially chosen by God, with the expectation that the government should recognize it as such and provide it with preferential treatment, that constitutes American Christian nationalism.

To this point, we have spoken of Christian nationalism without explicit reference to race. But issues of race are unavoidable in this discussion, and many scholars make this connection explicit by using the locution “white Christian nationalism.” Gorski and Perry claim that, “White Christian nationalism’s ‘deep story’ goes something like this: America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were ‘traditional’ Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on ‘Christian principles.’ The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful, and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity.”[xxi] Andrew Whitehead also explicitly links Christian nationalism with white Americans:

White Christian nationalism is a cultural framework asserting that civic life in the United States should be organized according to a particular form of conservative Christianity…. It centers and privileges the white Christian experience because it essentially teaches that this country was founded by white, conservative Christian men for the benefit of white, conservative Christian citizens…. Christian nationalism in the United States is inextricably tied to race. Over the centuries, the deep story of white Christian nationalism in the Americas formed around identifying who was in and who was out primarily along racial and ethnic lines.[xxii]

Michael Emerson and Glenn Bracey characterize white Christian nationalism as “a political ideology and a cultural framework that idealizes and advocates a fusion of symbols of Christianity with American civic life, including nativism, white supremacy, divine sanctions for authoritarian control and militarism, and allegiance to a national – read white racial – identity.”[xxiii]

Christian nationalism involves a complex web of interlocking beliefs, values, and commitments concerning America’s past history and present identity. It maintains that the United States has a special relationship to God, unlike that of other nations, and that federal and state governments should acknowledge this by privileging Christianity over secular and other religious perspectives. Moreover, white Americans have historically been at the center of this cultural and political system, and many Christian nationalists hold that it is right that they continue to retain positions of power and privilege in society. Although I do not think that white supremacy is a necessary feature of American Christian nationalism (not all Christian nationalists are white supremacists), it is true that most Christian nationalists in America have been white and that Christian nationalism has often been used to justify immoral and discriminatory treatment of non-white groups. The relation between race and Christian nationalism will be discussed further below.

Whitehead and Perry use the following six statements taken from the 2017 Baylor Religion Survey to measure degrees of agreement or disagreement with some central tenets of Christian nationalism:[xxiv]

• The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.
• The federal government should advocate Christian values.
• The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.
• The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces.
• The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.
• The federal government should allow prayer in public schools.

People will undoubtedly respond with varying degrees of agreement or disagreement to any single statement above. One might, for example, strongly affirm (2) while being more ambivalent about (1). But taken collectively, support for these statements indicates some level of commitment to Christian nationalism.[xxv] Based upon responses to these statements, Whitehead and Perry distinguish four categories of perspectives on Christian nationalism: Rejecters, Resisters, Accommodators, and Ambassadors.

Roughly 21% of Americans are Rejecters; that is, they disagree or strongly disagree with each of the six statements. “Rejecters oppose declaring the United States a Christian nation or favoring Christian values in public policy.”[xxvi] Interestingly, one-third of Rejecters identify with a Christian tradition, and three-quarters are white.

Resisters, who “lean toward opposing Christian nationalism,” comprise 27% of Americans. Whites make up 61% of Resisters and “more than two-thirds of Resisters identify with a Christian religious tradition, with over 30 percent of Resisters being Catholic and 18 percent affiliating with an evangelical Protestant denomination.”[xxvii]

Almost one-third of Americans (32%) are Accommodators. “This group is generally comfortable with the idea of America’s Christian foundations, and is amenable to the idea of a society where Christianity is conspicuous. They stop short, however, of fully and completely favoring Christianity alone in the public sphere.” Significantly, “A third of Accommodators affiliate with evangelical Protestantism.”[xxviii]

Ambassadors make up only about 19% of the population, but they “espouse Christian nationalist views most fervently.” Ambassadors are “wholly supportive of Christian nationalism.”[xxix] They are convinced that “the United States has a special relationship with God, and thus, the federal government should formally declare the United States a Christian nation and advocate for Christian values.”[xxx] Ambassadors are 70 percent white, and over half of Ambassadors identify as evangelical Protestant.

Fifty-one percent of respondents fall into the Accommodators or Ambassadors categories. In other words, one half of Americans indicate that they are moderately or strongly supportive of Christian nationalism. The responses indicate differences in party affiliation when it comes to support for Christian nationalism. “Republicans are clearly much more supportive of Christian nationalism [than Democrats or Independents], with four out of five being either Ambassadors or Accommodators.”[xxxi]

Nevertheless, Whitehead and Perry remind us that it is not accurate to assume that all white evangelicals support Christian nationalism.[xxxii] Christian nationalism cannot simply be equated with orthodox Christianity or evangelicalism or even white evangelicalism. There are secular versions of Christian nationalism that use Christian language in the defense of “Western Culture” or “Judeo-Christian civilization.” Some Americans who never attend church or read the Bible nevertheless embrace the core tenets of Christian nationalism. Somewhat surprisingly, advocates of Christian nationalism also include some African Americans and those from other minority groups. And yet, white Christians — especially white evangelicals — are most likely to espouse Christian nationalism.[xxxiii]

Christian Nationalism and Donald Trump

American Christian nationalism became an especially urgent issue after the January 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington, D.C. by supporters of President Donald Trump.[xxxiv] People around the world were shocked by images showing mobs of angry Americans violently attacking the Capitol police and breaking into the United States Capitol. The raw violence of the insurrection, intended to thwart the certification of the 2020 election and transfer of power to the newly elected president, Joe Biden, was bad enough. But what was even more troubling to many was the prevalence of Christian symbolism among those attacking the Capitol. Signs proclaiming “Jesus Saves” or “Jesus Matters” or “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President,” or insurrectionists carrying crosses and Bibles, or the Proud Boys kneeling to pray before assaulting the Capitol – Christian symbolism was everywhere.

While many factors were involved in the events of that day, clearly, there was some connection between the insurrectionists and Christian nationalism. As Andrew Whitehead notes, “While there is no single explanation for the attack on the Capitol that day, it is impossible to ignore the influence of Christian nationalism.”[xxxv] Were these pious Christians simply trying to live out their faith in the public sector? Or had the sacred symbols of the Christian faith been usurped by those with little understanding of the gospel? Russell Moore expresses the outrage of many Christians: “The sight of ‘Jesus Saves’ and ‘God Bless America’ signs by those violently storming the Capitol is about more than just inconsistency. It is about a picture of Jesus Christ and his gospel that is satanic.”[xxxvi] These are strong words, but I think he is correct.

Although it was present in American culture long before the rise of Donald Trump in 2016, the strong level of support for Trump by Christians revealed a new dimension to Christian nationalism. Trump has few of the qualities that Christians have traditionally insisted on in a President. A twice-divorced, formerly pro-choice real estate tycoon who publicly boasted about forcing himself sexually upon women, Trump was a highly unlikely candidate to gain the enthusiastic support of evangelicals. As Cremer remarks, “In terms of public commitments to Christianity, President Trump has stood out for his often-blatant public disregard for civil religious traditions and Christian ethics.” The problem is not that he often displayed surprising unfamiliarity with Christian teachings and practices. “Rather, it is that on several occasions he directly voiced his lack of interest in traditional Christian virtues in public life… [A]t the 2020 National Prayer Breakfast, President Trump not only failed to use civil religious language during his speech, but, after the keynote speaker Arthur Brooks called for politicians to remember Christ’s commandment to ‘love your enemies,’ Trump replied, ‘Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you on that.’”[xxxvii] Trump’s vulgarity and coarse language, womanizing, blatant lying, bullying, and degrading of ethnic minorities reveal character traits that at one time would have been disqualifying for evangelicals.

But within just five years, evangelical views on the necessity of moral character in a politician had changed dramatically. Research by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that whereas in 2011 only 30% of American white evangelical Protestants agreed that an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still fulfill their duties in their public and professional life, by 2016 72% of white evangelicals affirmed this statement.[xxxviii] This was a far higher percentage than was found in any other demographic group. In the 2016 election, 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and their support for him increased between 2016 and the 2020 election.[xxxix] Remarkably, white evangelical support for Trump remained strong in 2024, with eight in ten white evangelicals again voting for him despite the fact that by then he had been convicted of 34 felony counts in one case and faced criminal indictments in other cases for election interference, attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and mishandling classified documents after leaving the presidency.[xl] How can this be?

Trump’s 2016 promise to appoint pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court was undoubtedly a significant factor in that election. But many observers also point to the impact of Christian nationalism on white evangelicals. Whitehead and Perry state, “The high levels of support Trump enjoys among white Christians are due to the higher than average levels of Christian nationalism among white Christians… When we break down white evangelicals by their adherence to Christian nationalism, it is the Ambassadors and Accommodators who overwhelmingly support Trump, not the Rejecters or Resisters.”[xli]

Furthermore, Trump was attractive because he skillfully utilized the grievance and anger driving Christian nationalism in the early twenty-first century. He was seen as a powerful public figure who strikes back at the liberal elites who are eroding Christian influence in America. Peter Wehner, a Christian who served in three Republican administrations, insists that Trump’s success with white evangelicals has been “more a question of cultural identity rather than faith.” Trump’s popularity among whites was fueled by “the idea of lost cultural power and privilege: that feeling that for demographic and other reasons, … the country is changing. And Trump particularly tapped into this because he played anti-Muslim and anti-immigration cards so often.”[xlii] Trump stood up for evangelicals, many of whom are convinced that the secular elite are systematically removing religious liberties and persecuting Christians. Tony Perkins, former head of the Family Research Council, said that he and other evangelicals were giving Trump a “mulligan” on his past sins. Why? “[Conservative Christians] were tired of getting kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that here’s somebody on the playground who is willing to punch the bully.” What about Jesus’ teaching on turning the other cheek? “You know, we only have two cheeks. Look, Christianity is not all about being a welcome mat which people can just stomp their feet on.”[xliii] Whitehead and Perry observe, “For Ambassadors and Accommodators, if Trump (or other politicians) can espouse Christian nationalist rhetoric and signal their willingness to restore conservative Christian influence in American cultural and political life, personal piety is of little concern. For Christian nationalists, the ends justify the means.”[xliv]

But race was also a factor in the white Christian support of Trump. Robert Jones states,

“While Trump has been an unconventional president in many respects, one clear through line of his candidacy and presidency has been his wink-and-nod encouragement of the alt-right white supremacist movement in the United States.”[xlv] Trump played upon the “powerful fears about the loss of white Christian dominance amid a rapidly changing environment.”[xlvi]

This is a very different understanding of what it means to be a Christian than we find in Jesus’ expectations of his disciples. This point is poignantly expressed in the sharp contrast Peter Wehner draws between Jesus’ teachings in Scripture and what we find with Christian nationalism:

Unlike in the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan – unlike Jesus’ barrier-breaking encounters with prostitutes and Roman collaborators, with the lowly, and despised, with the unclean and those on the wrong side of the “holiness code,” with the wounded souls whom he healed on the Sabbath – many Christians today see the world divided between us and them, the children of light and the children of darkness. Blessed are the politically powerful, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the culture warriors, for they will be called children of God. For many of us who have made Christianity central to our lives, the pain of this moment is watching those who claim to follow Jesus do so much to distort who he really was…. Something has gone amiss; pastors know it as well as anyone and better than most. The Jesus of the Gospels – the Jesus who won their hearts, and who long ago won mine – needs to be reclaimed.[xlvii]   

Assessing American Christian Nationalism

How should disciples of Jesus Christ evaluate American Christian nationalism? Although it can be criticized on various grounds — including the fact that its central tenets are incompatible with the principles of democracy and the U.S. Constitution — I will focus on one of its central affirmations: the claim that America is a Christian nation and should be acknowledged as such. This belief involves historical claims about America’s past and presupposes that there is a meaningful sense in which we can speak of America as a Christian nation. I will argue that the historical claims are problematic at best and that there really is no significant sense in which we can affirm that America is a Christian nation. But what exactly is being claimed in the assertion that America is a Christian nation?

Just a Matter of Demographics?

One possibility is that in calling America a Christian nation, all that is meant is that the majority of Americans self-identify as Christians. This claim has the advantage of being readily measurable, but it reduces Christian identity to a matter of simple demographics. Furthermore, when Christian nationalists insist that the United States is a Christian nation, they intend more than merely to make an observation about demographics. Their point is that in some significant sense America itself – the nation, or American culture, or what America stands for – is distinctively Christian. Finally, even if we understand “Christian nation” strictly in these terms, it is important to see that the number of American Christians has been declining since the late twentieth century. Even in a demographic sense, it is difficult to maintain that the United States today is majority Christian.

Christian nationalism presupposes a picture of a devout and pious Christian America that only recently became religiously diverse. But this is misleading. It is true that the early English colonists were overwhelmingly Protestant Christians, and, according to one historian, nineteenth-century America was roughly 95 percent Protestant.[xlviii] This changed, however, as immigration brought large numbers of Roman Catholics to America. Moreover, there is also a long history of eclectic new religious movements in America, including Transcendentalism, Mormonism, Unitarianism, Reform Judaism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and various other eclectic traditions.[xlix]

Some scholars, such as Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, contend that the percentage of “churched” Americans was actually higher in the mid-twentieth century than in the eighteenth century. “On the eve of the Revolution, only about 17 percent of Americans were churched. By the start of the Civil War, this proportion had risen dramatically, to 37 percent.” The rate was steady at about 35 percent until the beginning of the twentieth century, reaching 56 percent by 1926 and 62 percent by 1980.[l]

But more recent studies show a decline in church membership and the percentage of Christians since roughly the mid-twentieth century. According to Gallup, “U.S. church membership was 73% when Gallup first measured it in 1937 and remained near 70% for the next six decades, before beginning a steady decline around the turn of the 21^st century.” In 2000, roughly 73% of religious Americans belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque, but in 2020, Americans’ membership in houses of worship dropped below 50% for the first time, to 47%.[li] The percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has also declined. Cremer reports that according to the General Social Science Survey and the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, “Protestants, traditionally the dominant religious group in the USA, lost almost a third of their share in the population (down from 61 per cent in the 1990s to 43 per cent by 2019), and became a minority for the first time in US history.”[lii] According to the PRRI’s 2022 Census of American Religion, “The proportion of white evangelical Protestants in the population steadily declined starting in 2006 (when they made up 23% of the population) before settling at about 14% over the past few years.”[liii] Ronald Inglehart summarizes the trend by stating that since 2007 the United States “has been secularizing at a more rapid rate than any other country for which data is [sic] available.”[liv]

This decline is due in part to the dramatic rise of the “nones” – those who claim no religious affiliation or identification. In 2024, the Pew Research Center reported that “about 28% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated, describing themselves as atheists, agnostics or ‘nothing in particular’ when asked about their religion.”[lv] With changes like these, it is difficult to maintain that the United States is a Christian nation even in a strictly demographic sense.

There are many factors involved in these significant changes, but observers have noted the correlation between the rise of the “nones” and the increasing prominence of Christian nationalism and the Religious Right. Christian nationalism seems to be driving people away from Christianity. Ryan Burge, for example, points out that every major study indicates that something significant happened in the early 1990s.

While the nones were slowly trending upward to this point, their rise accelerated dramatically around 1995. The biggest religious trend occurring at that moment was the rise of evangelicalism and the religious right. Recall that evangelicals hit their high-water mark in 1993, when they were 29.9 percent of the population. It doesn’t take a huge causal leap to believe that as the loudest and most numerous voices in Protestant Christianity became more theologically and politically conservative, that drove off a lot of moderates. To make matters worse, evangelicals have continued to drift to the right side of politics since the 1990s.[lvi]

Andrew Whitehead expresses the problem concisely: “The result of the Christian Right’s commitment to culture-warring was that while we were trying to convince those outside the church that we loved them, our commitment to white Christian nationalism ensured that they perceived that narrative as a lie.”[lvii]

America as a City on a Hill?

A popular narrative has it that America was settled by pious, persecuted pilgrims who simply desired a place where they could quietly worship God as they pleased. There is certainly some truth to this, but the reality is more complex. In addition to pious pilgrims there were also those seeking gold and wealth, Jews fleeing persecution, and adventurers curious about the new world.  “It was an eclectic cast of characters, some in search of God, others on the prowl for mammon.”[lviii]

Nevertheless, the early colonists, and the Puritans in particular, understood their endeavor in the New World in terms of divine providence and commissioning: they were the New Israel, the chosen people of God entrusted with a special errand in the wilderness. “One of America’s most powerful and enduring myths is that of God’s choosing the American wilderness as the site of a special outpouring of grace… Massachusetts was nothing less than the New Israel, a chosen people with whom God had entered into a covenant that promised his blessings as long as the people obeyed his commandments.”[lix]

Philip Gorski helpfully distinguishes two aspects of this discourse of divine appointment. According to the covenant narrative, the Puritans understood their story as that of a new Israel, specially chosen by God. The Puritans believed that they had entered into a covenant with God, pledging themselves to uphold God’s laws so that if they were successful, God would bless them. If not, God would punish them. But alongside the covenant narrative, there is also the conquest narrative, which is “governed by the metaphor of blood.” It embraces the language of conquest and “summons the nation to purify its ranks, gird up its loins, cross the Jordan, and conquer the Promised Land.” This narrative appeals to the providential mission given to the Puritans. “The covenant narrative is one root of America’s civil religion – the prophetic one – while the conquest story is one root of its religious nationalism.”[lx]

Both narratives come together in the language of America as “a city on a hill,” or a moral beacon for the rest of the world. The image itself, of course, comes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:14-16, where Jesus tells his disciples, “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden… In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

The metaphor was first used of Americans by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in a 1630 sermon in which he challenged the new Puritan community to covenant together to live according to biblical principles. In so doing “we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people [will be] upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”[lxi] Jon Meacham notes that Winthrop’s allusion to the city on a hill “is one of the most oft-cited images of the United States as a kind of Promised Land that the early New England settlers, playing the part of the ancient Israelites, reached after an exodus of peril and crisis.”[lxii]

With the Puritans, such biblical imagery was somewhat tempered by an acute awareness of human sinfulness and accountability to God. In time, however, the language of being chosen by God and commissioned to conquer and civilize the wilderness became detached from biblical moorings and served to justify an expanding sense of American exceptionalism. By the late seventeenth century, Puritan influence was in decline. But, as George McKenna notes, even with the fading of Puritanism, “this sense of biblical errand survived and worked its way deeply into even the most (seemingly) secular undertakings… The very definition of America is thus bound up with the biblical paradigm of a people, like the ancient Hebrews, given a holy mission in a new land.”[lxiii]

This sense of America as a nation specially commissioned by God finds expression in the notion of Manifest Destiny, which served to justify the nineteenth-century westward expansion by white Protestants, forcing the removal of Native American tribes and confiscation of their land. It also played a role in the annexation of Texas and the conquest of much of northern Mexico, as well as the expansion into Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890s. “From Indian removal at home to imperial adventures abroad, there have been few dark episodes in American history that have not found defenders ready to put them in terms of America’s ‘errand into the wilderness.’”[lxiv]

What are we to make of such imagery? We should note several things. First, we must distinguish between the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony and the United States as a nation after 1789. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a religious and civil entity composed of those who entered voluntarily into a “covenant” with each other and God to live according to biblical principles. With the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, however, the United States became a republic explicitly committed to the disestablishment of religion.

Furthermore, if the language of America as a city on a hill is strictly aspirational, setting out certain moral ideals which Americans are to strive to attain, that is one thing. Not only would this be appropriate for Americans, but any other nation could also adopt such language. But it is an entirely different matter to claim that a nation or community has in fact achieved these ideals. Too often, the claim that America is a city on a hill equivocates, moving easily from aspirational ideals to implicit claims about America’s exceptional moral status.

Finally, there is simply no biblical justification for identifying America as the “New Israel” or for claiming that God has established a special relationship with the American people unavailable to others. Nowhere does Scripture suggest that other nations should understand themselves to be in a covenant relation with God like that of the Israelites. It is one thing to draw lessons from God’s dealings with the Israelites, which can be applied to particular societies or nations. But it is a very different matter to identify a nation or particular ethnic group with the Israelites and to claim for this group a special relationship with God like that of ancient Israel. Miller correctly states, “The Bible nowhere even slightly hints that any other people are ever considered a chosen people or have a divine mission like Israel. When nationalists claim their nation is chosen, a ‘new Israel,’ or has a divine commission to accomplish God’s purposes in the world, they are reading their secular polities into the biblical narrative, substituting their nation for God’s people, a frank admission that nationalism is a religion.”[lxv] Or, as Looper observes, “When politicians today speak of America as a city on a hill, what they’re doing, whether they realize it or not, is having the United States take on the church’s role in the world.”[lxvi]

Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

Christian nationalists insist that America was founded as a Christian nation, and therefore, calls today for officially acknowledging its Christian identity are merely appeals for the nation to return to its roots. According to a 2022 report from the Pew Research Center, “Eight-in-ten White evangelical Protestants (81%) say the country’s founders intended it to be a Christian nation, making them the Christian group most heavily inclined towards this view.”[lxvii] A 2016 report from a University of Maryland poll revealed that 61 percent of Republicans said that they would support a formal declaration by the United States that America is a Christian nation; 78 percent of evangelicals supported such a declaration.[lxviii] But in considering this, two questions need to be distinguished: (1) Were the founders[lxix] themselves Christians? and (2) Did the founders intend that the United States be a Christian nation?

Were the founders explicitly Christian? It depends upon what one means by “Christian” and which founders we consider. According to Meacham, “America’s early years were neither a golden age of religion nor a glowing hour of Enlightenment reason. Life was shaped by evangelical fervor and ambitious clergy, anxious politicians, and determined secularists. Some Christians wanted to impose their beliefs on the rest of the country; other equally committed believers thought faith should steer clear of public life.”[lxx] Nevertheless, Protestant Christianity did exert considerable influence on American culture through at least the nineteenth century. John Fea observes, “If the United States was ever a ‘Christian nation,’ it was so during the period between the ratification of the Constitution (1789) and the start of the Civil War (1861). While the Constitution made it clear that there would be no official or established religion in America, and the states were gradually removing religious requirements for officeholders, Christianity, and particularly Protestant evangelicalism, defined the culture.”[lxxi]

Some of the founders were devout and orthodox Christians. John Witherspoon, for example, was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Fea calls Witherspoon “a man of deep Christian piety and orthodox Christian faith.”[lxxii] John Jay, a prominent New York lawyer and delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, and first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, was also an orthodox Christian. “Jay affirmed the idea that America was a Christian nation. He believed that the United States should privilege Christianity (which Jay understood as Protestantism) over other religions.”[lxxiii] Other leaders at the time with strong orthodox Christian commitments include Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and Roger Sherman.

But the views of central figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin are less easy to categorize. All were familiar with biblical teaching and Christian doctrine and believed in a deity of some sort who exercised providential guidance over human affairs. All saw morality as central to religion and believed that religious commitments could enhance the moral conduct of individuals and societies. Yet each was skeptical of traditional orthodox doctrines and suspicious of the dangers of sectarianism.

Benjamin Franklin, for example, flirted with deism and was a sharp critic of institutional Christianity as a young man. But he also expressed confidence in divine providence. Those who claim Franklin as a Christian often appeal to the moment at the 1778 Constitutional Convention when the delegates seemed to be hopelessly deadlocked and Franklin suggested that they pause for prayer. He recalled how Congress had sought divine assistance during the Revolution and had seen their prayers answered. Franklin then said to George Washington, the Constitutional Convention chairman: “I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth–that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?”[lxxiv]

The incident does indicate Franklin’s belief, as an older man, in divine providence and the efficacy, in some sense, of prayer. But it provides little support for the view that the founders intended to establish a Christian nation. As Steven Waldman notes, the Constitutional Convention did not approve Franklin’s motion for public prayer. “Most likely, they figured that the process of drafting such a prayer, or finding a clergyman to lead it, would prove too difficult, perhaps even stirring more discord rather than ending it. The delegates belonged to eight different Christian denominations.”[lxxv] In a 1790 letter to Yale president Ezra Stiles, Franklin, who was eighty-three at the time, describes his religious views:

Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His Providence. That He ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we render to Him is doing good to His other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life, respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.

As to Jesus of Nazareth … I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.[lxxvi]

Franklin’s views reflect a moral theism common among intellectuals in England and America at the time.

George Washington did not say much publicly about his personal faith, although he did speak about the role of divine providence in human affairs. Fea concludes, “Based on the evidence we have, he was not an evangelical Christian, as some have suggested… The available evidence points to a man who did not seem particularly interested in the divinity of Jesus Christ or his salvific death for humankind. He tried to live by the Golden Rule and did a pretty good job of it, despite some rather blatant shortcomings.[lxxvii]

Thomas Jefferson spoke frequently about religion and was a member of the Anglican Church. He claimed to be a follower of Jesus but, for him, this was primarily a matter of emulating Jesus’ moral teachings. He was hardly an orthodox Christian. According to Fea, “If you measure Jefferson’s beliefs against the history of orthodox teaching, he falls well short… Indeed, he was probably the most skeptical of all the founders.”[lxxviii] Meacham observes that, although accused by his critics of being an atheist, “Jefferson believed in the existence of a creator God and in an afterlife. Most significantly, he defended the moral lessons of the life and teachings of Jesus, whose divinity Jefferson rejected but whose words and example he embraced.”[lxxix]

The founders were certainly not secular atheists who sought to eradicate religion from American society. But neither were they, in many cases, orthodox trinitarian Christians. But even if all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the Constitution had been devout and orthodox Christians, it would not necessarily follow that they intended the United States to be officially a Christian nation. That is a separate issue.

Did the founders intend that the United States be a Christian nation? In what at the time was a radical step, the Constitution explicitly rules out the establishment of a national religion and guarantees the free exercise of religion. The First Amendment to the Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”[lxxx] Both clauses – the establishment clause and the free exercise clause – are significant.  Had the founders intended that the United States be a Christian nation, they had ample opportunity to make this clear. They did not. But neither did they wish to eliminate or even restrict religious belief or practice. As Lambert observes, “The Constitution virtually ignored religion, and made no acknowledgement that the United States was a Protestant, or even a Christian nation. Fearing sectarian strife and church-state oppression, the delegates granted Congress no powers regarding religion.”[lxxxi]

Interestingly, there have been repeated efforts to modify the Constitution by adding a Christian amendment. For example, in 1863, during the Civil War, the National Reform Association proposed revising the preamble to the Constitution so that it acknowledges “Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government” and “the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, his revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government…”[lxxxii] Their efforts failed. In 1947 and 1954, during the Cold War, the newly formed National Association of Evangelicals sponsored a “Christian Amendment” which would add the following to the Constitution: “This nation divinely recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of Nations through whom we are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”[lxxxiii] These efforts also failed.

What has persisted from the time of the founding of the nation is a kind of civil or public religion, a broadly theistic religious commitment that can be compatible with diverse religious and nonreligious traditions. According to Meacham, “The God of public religion made all human beings in his own image and endowed them, as Jefferson wrote, with sacred rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[lxxxiv] More recently, especially after Robert Bellah’s influential article, the term “civil religion” has replaced “public religion”.[lxxxv]

America’s civil religion initially was a broad moral theism, influenced by Protestantism but without the specific doctrinal commitments of orthodox Christianity. In the 1960s, during the Cold War, civil religion expanded to include Roman Catholics and Jews, and was used to contrast a theistic America with the atheistic Soviet Union. President Dwight Eisenhower was a key figure in giving expression to civil religion. It was, for example, during the Eisenhower administration that Congress added the phrase “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” to the American paper currency. In 1956, “In God We Trust” replaced “E Pluribus Unum” as the national motto. Waldman states, “Eisenhower began his cabinet meetings with a moment of prayer. He initiated the ‘Prayer Breakfast,’ a tradition that persists to this day.”[lxxxvi]  But Eisenhower did not see such moves as part of an effort to make the United States an explicitly Christian nation. “He spoke broadly of God and faith, not Christ.” Eisenhower famously remarked, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.”[lxxxvii] Eisenhower’s statement captures nicely what is central to American civil religion – a broad moral theism that avoids sectarian or doctrinal specificity. But this is hardly orthodox Christianity.

White American Christians and Race

The claim that America is a Christian nation often includes the belief that in its conduct it manifests Christian values and ideals to a greater degree than do other nations – America is exceptional, a shining city on a hill. If this were the case, then we should expect that an impartial appraisal of American history would show that the values defining Christ’s Kingdom – love, mercy, justice, righteousness – are clearly evident in government policy and the conduct of most Americans. Is this the case?

A comprehensive examination is impossible here, but I will focus briefly on one issue that runs throughout American history, the intractable problem of race and American Christianity. I think that a candid look at this issue alone makes it implausible to maintain that America has lived out Christian principles in an exemplary manner. It is true that America has championed what is just and good, and has given eloquent expression to the ideal of human equality. But as Jon Meacham observes, “Our finest hours – the Revolutionary War, abolition, the expansion of the rights of women, fights against terror and tyranny, the battle against Jim Crow – can partly be traced to religious ideas about liberty, justice, and charity. Yet theology and scripture have also been used to justify our worst hours – from enslaving black people to persecuting Native Americans to treating women as second-class citizens.”[lxxxviii]

What follows is, of necessity, highly selective. I will not, for example, address the tragic persecution of Native American peoples, including their forced removal from their lands, or the discrimination against immigrant groups such as the Italian and Irish Catholics, or the Chinese, Japanese, and Latin Americans. Our focus is on some aspects of black-only slavery and race relations between whites and blacks. Moreover, in what follows, I emphasize the negative aspect of the record of white Christians regarding race. I do not, for example, speak of the positive contributions many white Christians made to the abolitionist movement or the later civil rights movements. I emphasize the negative dimension because this is a part of American history that many white Christians continue to ignore or deny, and yet acknowledging this past makes it implausible to claim that America has lived out Christian principles in an exemplary manner.

Although blessed with an excellent education, I had a misleading and highly sanitized understanding of race relations in America until I began to explore the issues more deeply as an adult. What I encountered is a complex and ugly history. I am convinced that many white American Christians have absorbed a revisionist narrative about slavery, the causes of the Civil War, and the struggle over civil rights in the twentieth century. For example, it is not unusual to hear today that the Civil War was not about slavery but rather about states’ rights and preserving the Southern way of life. There is some truth to this, but this explanation leaves out a key element. While states’ rights and the preservation of the Southern plantation system were involved, this was because chattel slavery was central to preserving the Southern way of life, and affirming states’ rights was the way for the South to prevent federal interference with this system.

Sadly, the legacy of white supremacy and racism, which drove slavery, did not end with the conclusion of the Civil War. In somewhat altered form, it continues into the twenty-first century. Writing in 2024, Emerson and Bracey state, “Race has always been central to the American story. For centurie,s it has remained the central fault line along which American society is divided. And while many have fervently hoped that racism and racial injustice would recede from American life, the events of the past few years have dealt a near-fatal blow to such hopes.”[lxxxix] Historian Douglas Sweeney says, “While evangelicals did not invent the sins of racism or ethnocentrism, the slave trade, segregation, discrimination, or religious hate groups, literally millions of white evangelicals have either participated in or sanctioned one or more of these things, distorting their common witness to the gospel.”[xc] Robert Jones, who was raised a Southern Baptist in Mississippi and is the founding director of Public Religion Research Institute, rightly challenges white Christians to acknowledge the realities of the past and present:

It is time – indeed, well beyond time – for white Christians in the United States to reckon with the racism of our past and the willful amnesia of our present. Underneath the glossy, self-congratulatory histories that white Christian churches have written about themselves is a thinly veiled, deeply troubling reality: White Christian churches have not just been complacent; they have not only been complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power in America, they have been responsible for constructing and sustaining a project to protect white supremacy and resist black equality. This project has framed the entire American story.[xci]

Slavery was not some kind of aberration or anomaly in American history. Ira Berlin reminds us that “American history cannot be understood without slavery. Slavery shaped America’s economy, politics, culture, and fundamental principles.”[xcii]  With the development of the plantation economy in colonial North America, enslaved Africans were introduced to meet the growing demands for labor. Although in 1700 there were only 23,000 enslaved Africans in English North America, by 1763 the number had exceeded 300,000.[xciii] The slave trade was abolished in the United States in 1807, although the ban was not strictly enforced, and Africans continued to be smuggled into the colonies from South America and the Caribbean.

The slave economy of the United States was transformed after Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793. As a result, annual cotton output rose from 3,000 bales in 1793 to over three million in the 1850s. Slave labor was essential to the growth of the textile industry and the ensuing transformation of the American economy. By the time of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, there were over four million slaves in the United States.[xciv] According to Berlin, “The American economy was founded upon the production of slave-grown crops, the great staples of tobacco, rice, sugar, and finally cotton, which slave owners sold on the international market to bring capital into the colonies and the young Republic. That capital eventually funded the creation of an infrastructure upon which rests three centuries of American economic success.”[xcv] Americans today are the beneficiaries of that infrastructure established by enslaved Africans.

Between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War, the majority of presidents, justices of the Supreme Court, and members of Congress in the United States were slaveholders.[xcvi] There is a profound inconsistency between the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence of 1776 concerning the equality of “all men” and the realities in the American colonies at the time. Many of the founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, were slaveholders. “How could the author of the Declaration of Independence keep hundreds of human beings in bondage?” asks historian Thomas Kidd. “How could he carry on a long-standing sexual relationship with one of his bondspeople, who was also his dead wife’s half-sister?”[xcvii] Jefferson himself was bothered by the glaring gap between the ideals he so eloquently expressed and his conduct, on one occasion commenting, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”[xcviii]

A half century later, the American Civil War took the lives of over 700,000 soldiers from the Union and the Confederacy. In his second inaugural address, delivered just a month before his assassination in April 1865, President Abraham Lincoln unambiguously identified the cause of the war as slavery. “One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it,” he said. “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this was, somehow, the cause of the war.” Lincoln then noted the tragic irony of this for American Christianity, North and South: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other… The prayers of both could not be answered: that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”[xcix] The judgment that Jefferson feared was delivered in the carnage of the Civil War.

And yet the sin of white supremacy, which sustained slavery, was not eliminated with the defeat of the Confederacy. We must distinguish the institution of chattel slavery from the racist beliefs of white supremacy; slavery was abolished in 1865 with the defeat of the Confederacy and the ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution, but white supremacy as an ideology persists today. Moreover, many white progressives who led the assault on slavery nevertheless regarded whites as inherently superior to blacks. Henry Wilson, a leading Radical Republican and opponent of slavery, declared, “So far as mental or physical equality is concerned, I believe the African race inferior to the white race.”[c]

The tragic reality is that Christians and churches were deeply involved in defending slavery and propagating white supremacist views. In the colonial era, Christian leaders such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield owned slaves, and Whitefield worked for the legalization of slavery in Georgia.[ci] Prominent nineteenth-century Christian leaders who defended slavery include Charles Hodge, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, and Basil Manley, Sr. In an influential 1836 essay, “Slavery,” Hodge, a Presbyterian theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, argued that there is no biblical prohibition against slavery and thus that slavery as an institution is justifiable. He kept several domestic slaves prior to the Civil War. Allen Guelzo comments, “Nothing has more severely compromised Hodge’s moral standing in the intellectual history of the American nineteenth century than his well-known and persistent refusal to condemn the exploitation of human beings as slaves, and his insistence from his first published writings on slavery in 1836 until the very eve of military emancipation during the Civil War that slavery was justifiable and abolition unjustifiable.”[cii]

Benjamin Morgan Palmer, long-time pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, declared in an 1860 Thanksgiving sermon that the South had been given “a divine trust” which obligated them “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing.”[ciii] Palmer justified slavery on the basis of the inherent inferiority of the “black race.”  “We know better than others that every attribute of their [blacks’] character fits them for dependence and servitude. By nature, the most affectionate and loyal of all races beneath the sun, they are also the most helpless; and no calamity can befall them greater than the loss of that protection they enjoy under this patriarchal system.”[civ]

Another influential Christian defender of slavery was Basil Manly, Sr., a pastor who was instrumental in establishing the Southern Baptist Convention and who, according to Robert Jones, was “widely recognized as the leading theological apologist for slavery in his day.” Manly staunchly defended white supremacy, “arguing that slavery was not an unfortunate necessity but rather part of the divinely ordained hierarchical order of Christian society.”[cv] Manly was the founding president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s board of trustees. The four founding faculty of Southern Seminary were, in the words of a 2018 report commissioned by President Al Mohler of Southern, “deeply involved in slavery and deeply complicit in the defense of slavery.” The report goes on to acknowledge that “Many of their successors on this faculty, throughout the period of Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century, advocated segregation, the inferiority of African Americans, and openly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause of southern slavery.”[cvi]

Robert Lewis Dabney, a distinguished Southern Presbyterian pastor and theologian, Confederate army chaplain, and chief of staff to General Stonewall Jackson, argued passionately in a speech in 1867 against the ordination of blacks because of their inferiority to whites. “I oppose the entrusting of the destinies of our Church, in any degree, whatever, to black rulers, because that race is not trustworthy for such a position… Now, who that knows the negro, does not know that his is a subservient race; that he is made to follow, and not to lead; and his temperament, idiosyncrasy, and social relation, make him untrustworthy as a depositary of power?”[cvii]

Many leading Christian theologians and pastors maintained that Scripture teaches the inferiority of Africans and their perpetual servitude in Gen. 9:25, the “curse of Ham.” David Goldenberg states, “This biblical story has been the single greatest justification for Black slavery for more than a thousand years.”[cviii] According to Anthea Butler, “Nineteenth-century expositors generally regarded ‘Canaan’ as Africa and interpreted Ham as representing Black peoples. They considered that Noah’s curse relegated Black peoples to chattel slavery. The name ‘Ham’ was interpreted erroneously to mean ‘dark’ or ‘black.’ This scripture became the foundation of the biblical justification for slavery for many southern slaveholders in the United States as well as for northerners who supported slavery.”[cix] Even those who rejected slavery as such nevertheless accepted assumptions of white supremacy and the natural servitude of blacks because of Noah’s curse. The Evangelical Free Church missionary Titus Johnson, for example, who was instrumental in establishing the Free Church mission in the Congo, wrote in a 1931 article that “there is only one race that has ever been subjected to permanent slavery – the Hamites, the black people of the earth.” This is because “the curse made them servants.”[cx]

But the appeal to the curse of Ham in Genesis 9 as justification for the subjugation of Africans and blacks is simply a bad misreading of the text. Old Testament scholar John Goldingay tersely rejects this interpretation: “There is no basis for linking Canaan’s being a servant to the enslavement of black people in the Americas. The theory of race is ‘constructed on’ rather than ‘constructed from’ Genesis.”[cxi]

After Reconstruction, from 1865 to roughly 1877, there was a powerful backlash against the integration of blacks into American society and accepting them as full and equal citizens. Jim Crow laws — state and local laws that enforced racial segregation and restricted the freedom and rights of blacks — were enacted. They remained in force until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, although their effects are still felt today. Brutal violence against blacks was carried out by the Ku Klux Klan, originally formed in 1866 in Tennessee by Confederate veterans and then restructured in 1915 by a former Methodist minister, William Simmons. The Klan grew rapidly, not only throughout the South but also in the Midwest. The Klan of the 1920s presented itself as a white Christian organization, explicitly committed to the supremacy of the white race and opposed to Jews, Roman Catholics, communists, immigrants, and especially blacks.[cxii]  Not only were many churches and pastors active members of the Klan, but membership was restricted to white Protestants. In the mid-twentieth century, the Klan engaged in bombings and the murder of blacks involved in the Civil Rights Movement.

A particularly gruesome form of violence enacted upon blacks from the time of Reconstruction until well into the twentieth century was lynching. Anthea Butler states, “According to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2017, there were over 4,400 lynchings of Black people in America from 1877 to 1950 – a figure that includes 800 more lynchings than had previously been recognized.” Butler reminds us that “Evangelical Christians and churches engaged in lynchings, attending and cheering brutal spectacles of murder enacted upon Black bodies.”[cxiii]

But lynching was not just a phenomenon in the South. Robert Jones reports an incident in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1920, “one hundred years before George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis,” in which “an enraged white mob of approximately ten thousand people lynched three Black men.”[cxiv] A nineteen-year-old white girl accused six black circus workers, who were in Duluth with the circus, of raping her. An angry mob quickly formed and grabbed three of the black men and, with law enforcement and clergy observing, brutally murdered them.

The 1960s produced widespread social and cultural transformations, including the remarkable changes brought about by the Civil Rights Movement. African American Christians, and some white Roman Catholics and theologically liberal Protestants, led the movements, but, with a few notable exceptions, white evangelicals were absent. “White evangelical responses to civil rights ranged from cautious support to staunch opposition. Some white evangelicals expressed sympathy but worried about radical influences in the civil rights movement. Many remained silent, or reminded fellow whites about the spiritual nature of the church and the necessity of sticking to the gospel… Overall, most white evangelicals did nothing to assist the civil rights movement.”[cxv]

It was not simply that white evangelicals failed to advocate for civil rights. Many actively resisted a society in which blacks and whites could live together freely as equals. We conclude this section with a quick look at white Christian opposition to the integration of public schools mandated by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the impact of this upon the rise of the Religious Right.  Brown, for example, resulted in a dramatic increase in private Christian schools throughout the South. Russell Hawkins argues that these new schools “represented another bastion of religiously motivated resistance to racial equality”[cxvi] Two weeks after Brown, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a report from the Christian Life Commission urging all Baptists to accept the new reality as consistent with biblical principles and to act in a manner that would not “hinder the progress of justice and brotherly love.”[cxvii] But not all were willing to embrace the new path, and prior to the adoption of the resolution, there was vigorous debate on the floor. Pastor W. M. Nevins spoke for many when he stated, “I do not believe the Bible teaches, and I do not believe that God approves amalgamation of the races.” He mentioned a recent conversation with a woman who thought that blacks should be welcomed into white homes and churches.

I looked down and saw that she had two little girls who were growing up. I said, “Sister, when these girls get old enough to have company, how would you like for a Negro man to date them and come home with them and sit in your parlor and court them and possibly marry them?” And she said, “Oh, that’s a different question.” I said, “I beg your pardon, it’s exactly the same question.” And brethren, that’s what we’re coming to if we amalgamate these races. I don’t believe the Bible endorses it; I don’t believe God approves it; if we’re going to eat with them and go to school with them and go to church with them, the time is going to come … when some of you that sit in this audience today will have grandchildren with negro blood.[cxviii]

This was the real fear — that the “purity” of the white race would be polluted by black blood. Evangelical antipathy toward desegregation was rooted in a long-standing fear of interracial marriage, which only deepened with the 1967 Supreme Court ruling against miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia.[cxix]

In South Carolina, opposition to the integration of public schools prompted the rise of the private Christian school movement. “Between 1964 and 1972, when the majority of school desegregation in South Carolina occurred, white South Carolinians formed 111 new private schools.”[cxx] There was even talk of abolishing public education altogether. “By 1974, twenty years after the Supreme Court handed down its Brown decision, education experts estimated that between three and four thousand private schools had been established in southern states whose roots could be found in the desegregation of public schools.”[cxxi]

Desegregation was also a major factor in mobilizing the Religious Right in the late 1970s. There is a popular narrative that the Christian Right became an active political force in response to the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion. But this is at best misleading. Recent scholars have shown that what really motivated conservative white Christians to form the Moral Majority and other activist groups was the Internal Revenue Service’s removal of Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status because of the university’s discrimination against blacks. Butler states, “In fact, it was the stripping of tax-exempt status from Bob Jones University following its loss of a civil rights case brought by African American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, in May 1969 that was the catalyst for full-throated evangelical engagement in the political realm.”[cxxii]

Randall Balmer argues persuasively that throughout the 1960s and much of the ‘70s, evangelicals were actually ambivalent on abortion. Even after Roe, for example, W. A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, said, “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”[cxxiii] Balmer comments, “The overwhelming response to Roe v. Wade on the part of evangelicals was silence, and the voices that spoke on the matter were ambivalent. Two successive editors of Christianity Today, Carl F. H. Henry and Harold Lindsell, equivocated on abortion.”[cxxiv] Ed Dobson, Jerry Falwell’s assistant at the Moral Majority, commented in 1990 that “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion. I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”[cxxv]

The Supreme Court had determined in 1971 in Green v. Connally that any organization – including Christian schools – that “engaged in segregation or racial discrimination was not by definition a charitable institution, and therefore it had no claims on tax-exempt status.”[cxxvi] After years of wrangling with the university, in 1976 the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University for its policies of discrimination against blacks. This caused alarm among conservative white Christians. When Elmer Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, was pressed about the role of abortion in the rise of the Religious Right, he responded, “No, no, that wasn’t the issue. This wasn’t an anti-abortion movement per se. That was one of the issues we were interested in. I’m sure some people pointed to Roe v. Wade, but that’s not what got us going. For me, it was government intrusion into private education.”[cxxvii]

Highlighting the role of integration of schools in the emergence of the Religious Right in no way detracts from the moral significance of abortion and the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision, but it does underscore the importance of race and desegregation as motivating factors in the politicization of conservative white evangelicals. Some thought that with the election of an African American, Barack Obama, as president in 2008, America had moved beyond its racist past. Sadly, this was not the case. Since the election of Donald Trump, white supremacists have been emboldened, and racial bigotry and anger have become even more overt.

Our purpose in exploring slavery, race, and white supremacism was to ask whether the historical record supports the claim that America has manifested Christian values and principles to such an extent that we can call it a Christian nation. But given the long and sordid history of racism in American society, including among white Christians, it is simply implausible to maintain that America has exemplified Christian values sufficiently to justify this claim. Much more could be said, both on this point and on many other evils that have plagued American society over the years. But this issue alone should disabuse us of the notion of America as a Christian nation. This is simply not what we would expect from a genuinely Christian nation. But without the conviction that America is a Christian nation, Christian nationalism loses one of its core commitments.

A Better Way

Over the years, I have been privileged to live in several countries and to visit many more. But I am always glad to arrive back in the United States, my home. I am proud to be an American, and I am grateful for the many ways in which God has blessed this nation. Furthermore, American disciples of Jesus have not only the right but also an obligation to work in appropriate ways for change so that American culture is increasingly shaped by the values and principles of Scripture. We should strive for a just and righteous society rooted in sound moral principles.

But the ways in which we work for this change must be based upon biblical principles and appropriate to the American context. The United States is a democratic republic which explicitly rules out the establishment of a state religion and which guarantees the free exercise of religion (or no religion). Although American society has been influenced by Christian principles and until recently the majority of citizens have claimed to be Christian in some sense, it has also embraced some profoundly unbiblical values and practices. Despite the fact that Protestants were dominant through much of its history, America is increasingly characterized today by non-religious citizens (the “nones,” atheists, and agnostics) as well as adherents of non-Christian religious traditions. American society today is highly polarized, with deep tensions reflecting sharp divisions along ethnic, cultural, class, ethical, and religious lines. Rightly or wrongly, American evangelicals are widely perceived as hypocritical, obsessed with gaining cultural and political power, and tightly aligned with the Republican Party and “right-wing” agendas. Evangelical Christians in particular are perceived as staunchly resistant to our increasingly diverse society. It is within this context that we must assess American Christian nationalism.

In his review of Whitehead and Perry’s Taking America Back for God, Tim Keller takes us to the heart of the problem with American Christian nationalism:

We must recognize that Christian Nationalism in its most pure form is indeed idolatrous. It looks to political power as the thing that will truly save us. It identifies a particular set of social policies as the Christian view – all others are not just mistaken, but evil heresies. It assumes that America has now replaced Israel as the chosen people and the world’s “Redeemer-Nation.” It is true that these ideas are not usually stated out loud, but they dominate the movement as often unspoken assumptions, as unquestionable “givens.” And they must be rejected as unbiblical and idolatrous.[cxxviii]

American Christian nationalism is unacceptable on historical, theological, and missiological grounds. The claim that the United States is a Christian nation cannot be sustained except in the demographic sense that most Americans, since the arrival of the early settlers, have identified themselves as Christians. But given the increased diversity of American society and the declining numbers of Christians today, even this is changing. With the adoption of the Constitution, the United States rejected the idea that Christianity is the official religion of the new republic, and subsequent attempts to modify the Constitution so that it acknowledges that this is a Christian nation have failed. Moreover, the claim that throughout its history America has manifest Christian values and principles sufficiently so that we can call it a Christian nation is implausible in light of the enduring scourge of slavery, racism, and white supremacy.

But American Christian nationalism is also untenable theologically. America, whether during colonial times or later as a nation, is not the new Israel, and the United States does not stand in a special covenant relation with God. As disciples of Jesus, our ultimate loyalty is to Christ and his Kingdom, and only secondarily to the United States. To equate the two is idolatry. Markers of identity, such as nationality or ethnicity, are important and should be respected, but they are secondary to our identity as followers of Jesus. Christian nationalism, especially white Christian nationalism, inverts this relationship in an idolatrous manner, giving priority to ethnicity and nationality.

Furthermore, the white supremacy with which American Christian nationalism is linked is a betrayal of Jesus’ gospel and biblical teaching. All people, regardless of ethnicity or nationality, have been created in God’s image and deserve full dignity and equality as God’s creatures. White supremacy denies this basic truth and is an idolatrous insult to the Creator as well as an affront to our fellow human beings. To the extent that American Christian nationalism elevates white Christians over other groups because of some presumed superiority of whites, it must be rejected as a sinful distortion of the biblical teaching of creation.

Finally, we should note that American Christian nationalism has negative effects on Christian witness, not only in the United States but globally.[cxxix] The political activism of the Religious Right and its association with Christian nationalism have been a factor in people leaving the church. Keller comments, “Christian Nationalism, to the degree it is influential, means the death of Christian witness…. The motivation of witness – a desire to see all people come to know Christ – has been completely eradicated in Christian Nationalism, which proves that it is not ultimately a religious movement at all, just one more political movement using the power of religious language.”[cxxx]

There is a better way. American disciples of Jesus can be appropriately patriotic and grateful for the many ways in which God has blessed America without embracing Christian nationalism. As we live out the values and principles called for by Jesus – loving others, treating them with dignity, respect, and integrity, and promoting the common good as responsible citizens — American Christians can be winsome and effective witnesses to the beauty and truth of the gospel. Rather than looking upon the United States as a Christian nation which has been somehow hijacked by liberal secularists, disciples of Jesus should regard America today as a secular, and in many ways a pagan, society desperately in need of the redemptive gospel of Jesus Christ. In other words, we should think of America as a mission field and approach it accordingly. What if American evangelicals were to regard American culture as we expect missionaries to approach the other cultures to which they go?

Effective missionaries expect that the culture they encounter will be mixed – there will be much that is evil or against biblical teachings, but there will also be much that is good and that can be accepted. Missionaries build upon what is good while also challenging, in appropriate ways, what is evil. They take time to learn about the culture and society, to study its history, its structure, its values, and religious traditions. They work to earn the right to speak and build bridges toward those outside the Church. They present the gospel clearly and without compromise, but they also avoid getting caught up in peripheral issues that detract from the centrality of the gospel. Since they are being observed carefully by others, missionaries must conduct themselves with integrity and moral virtue so that they are above reproach. Effective missionaries work to reduce any unnecessary obstacles to the gospel and act so as not to alienate those they are seeking to influence. They realize that although the message of the cross is always a stumbling block to unbelievers (1 Cor. 1:18), too often it is not the cross itself but other extraneous things that present obstacles to belief.

What if American Christians were to approach American culture in this manner? Perhaps the Church would then serve as light in a dark and confused culture — even as a city on a hill — and as others observe the conduct and demeanor of Jesus’ disciples, they would glorify our Father in heaven (Mt. 5:16).

Recommended Reading

• Austin, Michael W. American Christian Nationalism: Neither American Nor Christian (Grand Eerdmans, 2024).  This is an excellent introduction to American Christian nationalism by a leading evangelical philosopher which argues that its central tenets are inconsistent with the principles of American democracy as well as with biblical teachings.
• Fea, John. Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Louisville: WestminsterJohnKnox, 2011). Fea, an evangelical historian, provides a balanced and carefully argued historical exploration of the issues surrounding the claim that America was founded as a  Christian nation.
• Miller, Paul D. The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism? (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2022). Miller is an orthodox Christian and a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University who has served in various government posts, including in the George W. Bush administration. As a theological and political conservative, Miller provides an incisive analysis and critique of American Christian nationalism.
• Whitehead, Andrew L. and Samuel L. Perry. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Written by two distinguished sociologists and drawing upon many sociological studies, this book provides a rich profile of those who, in varying degrees, embrace the tenets of American Christian nationalism.

 

[i] See Jeffrey Haynes, “Is Christian Nationalism a Threat to Democracy in Africa?” https://democracyinafrica.org/is-christian-nationalism-a-threat-to-democracy-in-africa/; Kristin Du Mez, “The Christian Right in Europe: A Conversation with Gionathan Lo Mascolo,” https://kristindumez.substack.com/p/the-christian-right-in-europe; Martyn Whittock, “Why the Rise of Christian Nationalism Around the World is Deeply Concerning,” https://www.premierchristianity.com/features/why-the-rise-of-christian-narionalism-around-the-world-is-deeply-concerning/1470.article; Nilay Saiya, “Christian Nationalism’s Threat to Global Democracy,” The Review of Faith and International Affairs vol. 22 issue 1 (2024) 102-107; and Tobias Cremer, The Godless Crusade: Religion, Populism and Right-Wing Politics in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

[ii] Joel Looper, Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024) chapter 4.

[iii] Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) 1.

[iv] There is no uniform practice on whether “white” or “black” should be capitalized. I will not capitalize either word, except when directly quoting someone who does.

[v] Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) ix-x.

[vi] Michael W. Austin, American Christian Nationalism: Neither American Nor Christian (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024) chapter 1.

[vii] Given the limitations of this essay, I do not interact directly with writings by Christian nationalists; instead, I focus upon the central tenets of the perspective itself. One of the most influential defenses of American Christian nationalism is Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2022). Helpful critiques of Wolfe’s claims can be found in Looper, Another Gospel, 56-65, 67-68; Austin, American Christian Nationalism, passim; and Kevin De Young, “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism: A Review of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism,” The Gospel Coalition, https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/02195248/The-Rise-of-Right-Wing-Wokeism.pdf.

[viii] Johannes Verkuyl, “The Biblical Notion of Kingdom”, in The Good News of the Kingdom, eds. Charles Van Engen, Dean S. Gilliland, and Paul Pierson (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993) 73.

[ix] See Steven M. Bryan, Cultural Identity and the Purposes of God: A Biblical Theology of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race (Wheaton: Crossway, 2022).

[x] The Apostle Paul uses similar language in Gal. 5:14 – “For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

[xi] For helpful discussions see David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) 2-17; Mark Noll, “What Is ‘Evangelical’?” in The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, ed. Gerald McDermott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) 19-32; and Alister McGrath, Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Pres, 1995) 55-56.

[xii] Thomas Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) 4.

[xiii] Ryan Burge, “Why ‘Evangelical’ Is Becoming Another Word for ‘Republican’,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/evangelical-republican.html.

[xiv] Looper, Another Gospel, 19.

[xv] Paul Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong With Christian Nationalism (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2022) 28.

[xvi] Cremer, The Godless Crusade, 2.

[xvii] Ibid., 2.

[xviii] Ibid., 6, 7.

[xix] Miller, The Religion of American Greatness, xvi.

[xx] Ibid., 3.

[xxi] Gorski and Perry, The Flag and the Cross, 4.

[xxii] Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2023) 15, 29-30.

[xxiii] Michael O. Emerson and Glenn E. Bracey II, The Religion of Whiteness: How Racism Distorts Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024) 51.

[xxiv] Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God, 7-8.

[xxv] Statement (3) is an anomaly, as it does not fit the pattern of the other statements. Presumably it is disagreement with (3) that is understood to indicate some measure support for Christian nationalism.

[xxvi] Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God, 26-27.

[xxvii] Ibid., 25-26, 31-32.

[xxviii] Ibid., 34.

[xxix] Ibid., 26, 35.

[xxx] Ibid., 36-37.

[xxxi] Ibid., 43.

[xxxii] Ibid., 44.

[xxxiii] Whitehead, American Idolatry, 34, 36.

[xxxiv] See the essays in Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection. Released February 9, 2022 by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. https://bjconline.org/jan6report.

[xxxv] Whitehead, American Idolatry, 25.

[xxxvi] Ibid., 25.

[xxxvii] Cremer, The Godless Crusade, 216.

[xxxviii] Joanna Piacenza and Robert P. Jones, “A Look Back: 2016 PRRI Findings that Will Shape Politics in 20-17,” Public Religion Research Institute, December 30, 2016.   https://www.prri.org/spotlight/2016-prri-findings-will-shape-politics-2017.

[xxxix] Gorski and Perry, The Flag and the Cross, 10; Ryan P. Burge, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021) 49.

[xl] “Religion in the 2024 Presidential Election,” PRRI. https://www.prri.org/spotlight/religion-and-the-2024-presidential-election; and David Graham, “The Cases Against Trump: A Guide,” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/donald-trump-legal-cases-charges/675531.

[xli] Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God, 83, 67.

[xlii] As quoted in Cremer, The Godless Crusade, 201.

[xliii] As quoted in Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God, 66-67.

[xliv] Ibid., 67.

[xlv] Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020) 14.

[xlvi] Ibid., 15.

[xlvii] Peter Wehner, “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart,” The Atlantic. October 24, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469. Emphasis in original.

[xlviii] William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) 7.

[xlix] Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

[l] Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America 1776-1990 (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1992) 15.

[li] Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time,” Gallup. March 29, 2021. https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx.

[lii] Cremer, The Godless Crusade, 196-197.

[liii] “PRRI 2022 Census of American Religion: Religious Affiliation Updates and Trends,” Public Religion Research Institute. February 24, 2023. https://www.prri.org/spotlight/prri-2022-american-values-atlas-religious-affiliation-updates-and-trends.

[liv] Ronald Inglehart, Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing It and What Comes Next? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021) 83.

[lv] Gregory A. Smith, et al. “Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe,” Pew Research Center. January 24, 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe.

[lvi] Burge, The Nones, 66.

[lvii] Whitehead, American Idolatry, 20.

[lviii] Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2006) 40-41.

[lix] Frank Lambert, Religion in American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) 17.

[lx] Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) 38-39.

[lxi] Meacham, American Gospel, 46-47.

[lxii] Ibid., 47.

[lxiii] George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) 7.

[lxiv] Ibid., 14.

[lxv] Miller, The Religion of American Greatness, 124.

[lxvi] Looper, Another Gospel, 34.

[lxvii] Gregory A. Smith, Michael Rotolo, and Patricia Tevington, “Views of the U.S. as a ‘Christian Nation’ Opinions About ‘Christian Nationalism.” Pew Research Center. October 27, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/10/27/views-of-the-u-s-as-a-christian-nation-and-opinions-about-christian-nationalism.

[lxviii] Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (New York: HarperCollins, 2023) 258.

[lxix] I am referring here to the generation of political leaders instrumental in the American Revolution and the writing of the Constitution of the United States.

[lxx] Jon Meacham, American Gospel, 6.

[lxxi] John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Louisville: WestminsterJohnKnox Press, 2011) 4.

[lxxii] Ibid., 228.

[lxxiii] Ibid., 235.

[lxxiv] Steven Waldman, Sacred Liberty: America’s Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom (New York: HarperOne, 2019) 33.

[lxxv] Ibid.

[lxxvi] Frank Donovan. The Benjamin Franklin Papers (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1962) 295-96.

[lxxvii] Fea Was America, 189, 190.

[lxxviii] Ibid., 204.

[lxxix] Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2012) 471.

[lxxx] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript. On the First Amendment see Andrew Koppelman, Defending American Religious Neutrality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

[lxxxi] Lambert, Religion in American Politics, 15.

[lxxxii] Gorski, American Covenant, 97-98.

[lxxxiii] Fea, Was America, 44.

[lxxxiv] Meacham, American Gospel, 22.

[lxxxv] Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus, 96:1 (Winter 1967) 1-21.

[lxxxvi] Waldman, Sacred Liberty, 190.

[lxxxvii] Ibid.

[lxxxviii] Meacham, American Gospel, 16.

[lxxxix] Emerson and Bracey, The Religion of Whiteness, 1.

[xc] Douglas A. Sweeney, The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005) 108.

[xci] Jones, White Too Long, 6.

[xcii] Ira Berlin, “Coming to Terms with Slavery in Twenty-First-Century America,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, eds. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006) 2.

[xciii] Jeremy Black, Slavery: A New Global History (London: Constable & Robinson, 2011) 88, 122.

[xciv] Ibid., 205.

[xcv] Berlin, “Coming to Terms with Slavery in Twenty-First-Century America,” 2.

[xcvi] Ibid.

[xcvii] Thomas S. Kidd, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022) 1.

[xcviii] Ibid., 56.

[xcix] “Abraham Lincoln: Second Inaugural Address (1865),” in American Religion, American Politics: An Anthology, ed. Joseph Kip Kosek (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) 53.

[c] Jon Meacham, And There was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle (New York: Random House, 2022) xxix.

[ci] Sean McGever, Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2024).

[cii] Allen Guelzo, “Charles Hodge’s Antislavery Moment,” in Charles Hodge: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work, eds. James W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002) 300.

[ciii] B. M. Palmer, Thanksgiving Sermon (New York: George Nesbitt and Co, 1861) 7. Emphasis in original.

[civ] Ibid., 9.

[cv] Jones, White Too Long, 34.

[cvi] Ibid., 57. See Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Seminary. https://www.sbts.edu/history/southern-project.

[cvii] Robert L. Dabney, Ecclesiastical Relation of Negroes (Richmond, VA: Printed at the Office of the “Boys and Girls Monthly,” 1868) 6.

[cviii] David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 2003) 1.

[cix] Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carlina Press, 2021) 17-18. See Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[cx] Titus Johnson, “Simon the Black Cross-bearer: A Message in Behalf of the Black Man,” in The Evangelical Beacon, volume 1 (November 3, 1931) 7.

[cxi] John Goldingay, Genesis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020) 171.

[cxii] Timothy Eagan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (New York: Viking, 2023) xv.

[cxiii] Butler, White Evangelical Racism, 29-30.

[cxiv] Robert P. Jones, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023) 142.

[cxv] Kidd, Who Is An Evangelical? 101.

[cxvi] J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021) 12.

[cxvii] Ibid., 20.

[cxviii] Ibid., 20-21.

[cxix] Butler, White Evangelical Racism, 63, 67.

[cxx] Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So, 144.

[cxxi] Ibid., 146.

[cxxii] Butler, White Evangelical Racism, 66-66.

[cxxiii] Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021) 34.

[cxxiv] Ibid., 35.

[cxxv] Ibid., 45-46.

[cxxvi] Ibid., 38.

[cxxvii] Ibid., 46-47.

[cxxviii] Timothy Keller, “A Book Review on the Topic of Christian Nationalism,” Life in the Gospel (Spring 2021) Gospel-Changed Minds. https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/book-review-on-the-topic-of-christian-nationalism.

[cxxix] See Morgan Lee, “How American Evangelicals Lost Credibility with the Global Church, Christianity Today, January 27, 2021. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/january-web-only/global-church-american-evangelicals-trump-trust-podcast.html., and Morgan Lee, “How American Politics Complicates Evangelicalism in the UK,” Christianity Today. February 2, 2021. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/february-web-only/evangelical-alliance-uk-trump-british-church-brexit-covid.html.

[cxxx] Keller, “A Book Review on the Topic of Christian Nationalism.”