Christian Nationalism is a kind of religious extremism that aspires to become religious oppression. It is an attempt to impose a narrow, uncommon, and almost comically moralistic version of “Christian” ideas on everyone, Christian or not. It is closely related to fascism, adopting the same modes of political engagement:

• occupying the meaning of patriotism

• othering and exclusion; threats and violence, starting with the those least able to fight back

• using religious ideas and language to bamboozle ordinary people into supporting policies that are not for their own good or the country’s but rather for the private benefit of a few very powerful people.

The current manifestation of Christian Nationalism in the US in the 2020s has long roots, through televangelists, right-wing big money, secretive organizations, lobbying, foreign agents, propaganda campaigns, the capture of a major political party in the twentieth century, and going all the way back to before the Declaration of Independence. My interest here is not to outline these causes and this history, but to discuss how to fight the current menace. If you are interested in the history and sociology of Christian Nationalism, there are many good books: Kruse, Gorski and Perry, Stewart, Sexton, Seidel, and Onishi, to name just a few which illuminate various aspects of this problem and how we got here. (These are affiliate links: If you purchase through those links, I’ll get a small contribution to help support this site.)

As I pointed out in a previous post, Christian Nationalism is Based on Lies—lies about patriotism, religion, morality, history, government, and more.

As we get into more details, it is worth distinguishing these four things:

1. The “official” doctrines of a religion or religious text

2. The traditional interpretations of that theology

3. The practices of the officers and members of the religion

4. The assertions made non-officially in the name of a religion.

I mention this because the official doctrines and traditional theological interpretations of Christianity are non-nationalistic and non-authoritarian. It is only a twisted version of Christianity that can lead to Christian Nationalism. This is why it is so important for other Christians to forcefully engage on this topic and make it clear that Christian Nationalism is anti-Christian.

The bigger problems with Christian Nationalism, however, are not with its unchristian nature. They are that it is a form of authoritarianist extremism; that it is trying to deny freedoms to others and to oppress people it arbitrarily defines as a bad; and that it is trying to take over governments and legal systems at every level from the local to the federal. They’ve had some success already, from school boards to mayors’ and governors’ offices, to state legislatures and Congress, and even the Supreme Court. Left unchecked, Christian Nationalists will continue to re-write American laws to deny facts, freedoms, and fundamental rights.

There are many cases throughout history and around the world of the “weaponizing” of religion for political purposes, using religion to persecute, harm, kill, and exterminate others. (Boko Harem in Nigeria, Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, Nazism in Germany, ISIS in the Middle East, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the list goes on.)

Wibisono and co-authors, “A multidimensional analysis of religious extremism” (Frontiers in Psychology, 2019), makes the point that a given example of religious extremism may be extreme on some theological, ritual, social, and political dimensions but moderate on others. So, religious extremism is not just about violence.

That said, US White Christian Nationalists have been using religious violence for many years as a weapon of social control and oppression. Think of

• KKK cross burnings and lynchings

• Bombings of government and medical facilities

• Ugly protests at soldiers’ funerals and outside abortion facilities

• Police violence against minorities

• Murders of people they see as enemies, like abortion doctors.

This is bullying on a mass scale, to intimidate and control others who disagree with them. In other words: terrorism in the name of religion.

It used to be, not very long ago, that U.S. conservatives pointed to Islamic religious extremism as the prime example of what is evil in the world. Today, they are instead emulating the same messages and tactics: Misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, and old-fashioned racism; preachers, politicians, propaganda, and political violence. There is really not much difference between the kinds of laws and policies designed to quash women’s rights implemented by the Taliban in Afghanistan since the US withdrawal there and the kinds of moralizing laws and policies Christian Nationalists now want to impose in the US. It used to be that the boogeyman of “Sharia Law” was a core concept in anti-Islamic sentiment among US conservatives. Now it seems to be an aspirational ideal since they are trying to impose their religious doctrines on the whole country. Ironically, and tragically, conservatives in the US are becoming the sort of theocratic extremists they so vehemently disparaged in the 2000s.

Some read the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution as allowing or even requiring citizens to overthrow an unjust government, violently if necessary. Terrorists often use the same kind of rhetorical justifications for their activities, saying it is the only way to rid the world of injustice, and that they are doing so in the name of some god.

The people fomenting Christian Nationalism are buying into and using a pair of narratives: (1) Christians are the Chosen Ones, and (2) America is an exceptional country, backed by God. As Gorski and Perry put it,

White Christian nationalism (WCN) is, first of all, a story about America. It says: America was founded as a Christian nation, by (white) Christians; and its laws and institutions are based on “Biblical” (that is, Protestant) Christianity. This much is certain, though: America is divinely favored. Whence its enormous wealth and power. In exchange for these blessings, America has been given a mission: to spread religion, freedom, and civilization—by force, if necessary. But that mission is endangered by the growing presence of non-whites, non-Christians, and non-Americans on American soil. White Christians must therefore “take back the country,” their country. (Phillip Gorski 2021, “White Christian Nationalism: The Deep Story Behind the Capitol Insurrection.”)

This story about America is, of course, a myth. It gets many facts wrong, interprets other facts incorrectly, and ignores many realities.

What can we do about Christian Nationalism? I have already mentioned the special role Christians must take in fighting it, exposing it as both bad theology and bad politics. Fortunately, some evangelical leaders renounce WCN; hopefully, this will become a groundswell.

Christians should care about the truth, including facts of history, the fundamental principles of their religion, the truth about election outcomes, and the truth about justice. Christians should repudiate “winning by any means necessary” and should stop using violence and forms of “cheating” like propaganda, intimidation, gerrymandering, voter manipulation, restricting access to voting, etc. Some people who claim to speak for Christianity assert that these ugly, immoral means are justified by the goal they hope to achieve, a Christian state. This must be challenged every time we encounter it.

Besides the Christians, all Americans, regardless of their religious preferences, need to get active against this threat. The first and most obvious thing is to vote Christian Nationalists out of office.

How can we vote out such a politically powerful group? The good news is that they remain a minority of voters. About 27% of all voting age Americans embrace Christian nationalism, roughly a total of about 68 million people out of the more than 250 million who are eligible to vote. That’s a lot, but it is not a majority. They can be easily defeated in elections (nationally, at least) if other groups get out and vote. We cannot let them take over simply because they are better organized.

There’s still more hopeful news: of the 27% of Americans who embrace Christian Nationalism, two-thirds of them are merely sympathetic to those ideas, not completely bought in. This suggests it may be possible to change their minds. (The 2023 PRRI poll has a lot of interesting data relevant to the demographics of the support for Christian Nationalism.)

The threat of Christian nationalism is buried within the seemingly harmless language of “heritage,” “culture,” and “values.” But within this language is an implicit understanding of civic belonging and relative worth. Study after study shows Christian nationalism is strongly associated with attitudes concerning proper social hierarchies by religion, race, and nativity. These views naturally extend to whom Americans think should have the right to participate in the political process and whether everyone should have equal access to voting. (Andrew Whitehead, “The Growing Anti-Democratic Threat of Christian Nationalism in the U.S.,” Time Magazine May 27, 2021.)

We can also push back in the public discourse, in the news, on social media, in public, and around the family dinner table. Christian nationalists have recently been repeating the phrase, “The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution.” This is a distortion at best, possibly just a misunderstanding but more likely a deliberate attempt to manipulate. The First Amendment to the Constitution does not contain the exact words “separation of church and state,” but it does contain language that expressly forbids government supporting or preferring any religion over others, that bans the creation of a state religion, that bars having a religious purity test for public office, etc. There is a long history of legal precedent backing this up. On top of this, we have various writings from the Founders that tell us what they intended about the relation between the government and religion.

The Founders did NOT intend the US to be a specifically Christian nation. They were mostly officially Protestant (Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Quaker, Lutheran and Dutch Reformed); three were born Roman Catholic. Whatever religions they were born into, many of them were, in fact, Deists. (This includes George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams—by some estimates, a majority of the Founders were Deists.)

Anyway, the US is not based on what some special people personally believed at some magical point in history. Rather, it is a country based on what is contained in its founding documents and the law, and those things are deliberately and explicitly for freedom of religion (including freedom FROM religion), and against the government favoring any religion over others (including none). It is true that, as with any legal document, there are questions of interpretation: Comments from the people who wrote these documents can make their intended meanings clearer, but since those comments do not have the force of law, they do not give us definitive truth.

There are some things that people sometimes cite as evidence that the US is and originally was a Christian Nation, that simply aren’t evidence of that. For example, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that certain lawmakers, influenced by or peddling Christian Nationalism, did things like adding “In God We Trust” to the money (1955) and “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance (1954). And they did it quite clearly against Constitutional principles, but with a significant groundswell of Cold War era anti-communist and therefore anti-atheist feeling in the country, so they got away with it even at the Supreme Court. They and their followers also lie about those very governmental religious utterances, claiming they involve merely a bare and abstract conception of divine influence and protection on the country, not an endorsement of any particular religion. This sort of claim is mere sophistry. You would be hard pressed to find someone who wanted the government to make such religious pronouncements who was not a Christian. In contrast, Deists in particular have no interest in the government making such pronouncements since all they believe is that there was a supernatural creator or divine force who started the universe then let it run, remaining distant and uninterested in how it all turns out. Since, according to Deism, the Creator is uninterested in us as individuals or as a country, there is no reason to suppose Deists would think America has, or Americans have, any special divine favor or protection.

In short, Christian Nationalism is racist, imperialist, fascist and fundamentally anti-Christian. Christian Nationalism is a kind of religious extremism that aspires to become religious oppression. Christian Nationalism is anti-democratic, theocratic, and based on falsehoods: It is fundamentally anti-American. Christian Nationalism is a dangerous movement that we need to stop. We can stop it.