The concept of “Christian” nationalism has been in the news lately. That’s understandable given how often and how much certain groups are pushing the belief that America is a Christian nation and even that it should be an exclusively Christian nation. At least, that’s what they say on their external packaging.
“Christian” nationalism is a convenient term for both advocates and detractors, but like most convenient terms, it is not very accurate. The movement so labeled is advancing a belief system that isn’t so much a religion as it is a chauvinist political movement.
There Is No “Christian” nationalism
The reality is that there is no such thing as “Christian” nationalism and not just because Christianity is the opposite of nationalism. The apostle Paul wrote in Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28) By every other conceivable measure, these “god, guns, and country” people are not Christian. These people are nationalists, but the type of nationalist that they are is important.
The “god, guns, and country” people are American nationalists. They are devotees of the myth of American exceptionalism. Their movement dates back to the 1840s if not earlier. Their god is the false idol of America as a shining city on a hill, a nation superior to all others. Their false god is a capricious and vengeful deity—a projection of their own fears and prejudices, and the exact opposite of Christianity’s God of love.
N.B. – The rest of this article is excerpted from the book, Why Trump? written by the author.
The politically reactionary and exclusionary nature of “Christian” nationalism is not Christian, not by any reasonable measure. It is American nationalism—distinctly American and thoroughly jingoistic. It is a form of identity politics, asserting that its version of American identity is morally superior and deserving of greater power in society and government. The movement is, as Katherine Stewart has dubbed it, power worshippers who are engaging in an organized quest for power.[1] As with all right-wing movements, this movement is a quest for greater concentration of power—their worship of power turning them into unthinking zombies filled with ressentiment and jingoism susceptible to conspiracy theories and those who can manipulate their fears.
The power worshippers wrap their nationalism in a caricature of Jesus just as they wrap their bigotry in the American flag. They have locked Jesus and Christianity in a gilded cage of American nationalism, having fabricated and erected their own White Jesus–a distinctly American version of the Northern European White Jesus. American nationalism created its own religion—a distinctly American version of Calvinism that hijacked terms like “fundamentalism” and “evangelical” to refer only to their religious ideology.
American Nationalism
We need to differentiate causes from symptoms, and in each expression of “Christian” nationalism, the “Christian” symbolism is rhetoric to justify American nationalism more than it is an expression of any biblically based teaching of Christian doctrine.
By whatever name, this movement has at its core the worldview of American exceptionalism—the idea that America is distinct, and, of course, superior to other countries. What makes American nationalism “Christian” is its claim that American superiority is divinely established. It also posits that only Christians (of a certain ideology) are “true Americans.” It is reactionary in wanting to “take back” the United States for their God, which overlaps with the MAGA movement’s embrace of Trump.
The basic American nationalist worldview is that the good can be achieved and maintained only by a hierarchical structure of concentrated power. The movement is inherently reactionist, no matter how much power it gains. Its Calvinist dualism defines the world in terms of a circle of ethical consideration. We all view the world and people in it in that way—we all have ethical blind spots that exclude some, and perhaps many, people from recognition of their worth. What American nationalism does is canonize and dogmatize the circle of ethical consideration to include white evangelical Americans and exclude others.
Since I keep referring back to the Calvinist version of the Christian religion, why am I also continually differentiating American nationalism from Christianity? The movement can be considered religious in the broad sense of the term, but nationalism in the United States is secular Calvinism—a civil religion. Some background will help explain why.
American nationalism has a long history, arguably as old as the United States itself. In 1967, Robert N. Bellah identified America’s civil religion. It is, he argued, a national faith that exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches and synagogues and that “has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does.”[2]
Bellah showed that the American civil religion is patterned at every point after biblical archetypes—Americans are the chosen people brought out of the Old World into the promised land. But, he says, it is genuinely American and genuinely new with its own prophets and martyrs, sacred events and sacred places, brought together with its own solemn rituals and symbols. However, it is a religion that, he says, “has often been used and is being used today as a cloak for petty interests and ugly passions.”[3]
Leilah Danielson argues that Bellah’s concept of “civil religion” should be called “nationalism,” offering similar arguments to what I have made here. However, Danielson unfairly accused Bellah of “inventing [with his idea of civil religion] a past that did not really exist, or that had existed only for white Protestants.”[4]
But that’s the point that we need to take from American history. That past of solemn rituals and symbols didn’t include many other Americas, as Danielson states, but it did exist in the minds of white Protestants. Bellah and Danielson each grasp part of the historical reality. America does have a civil religion, and, yes, it is biased in its whiteness and its Calvinism, but it is real and deeply formative for the attitudes of American nationalism.
The power structure of secular Calvinism is dualistic in its division between “real” Americans and the “others.” That this power structure with its value delusions, petty interests, and ugly passions has long excluded Americans is central to American history. Yes, as Danielson says, we should tell the rest of the many stories of real Americans marginalized by secular Calvinism, but to explain the American right wing, we need to tell the story of its civil religion. Telling it is not endorsing it.
American nationalism is history, a history that is part selective memory by white Protestants but importantly also part the driving force of America’s discrimination and exclusion. We can use the concept of civil religion today not as something to which we should aspire as the right wing uses it but as the ressentiment-fueled reactionism that has long spurred right-wing political action.
The American Myth
The myth of the United States as a shining city on a hill divinely established for white Calvinists was a story that evolved over many decades. The nationalist catechism taught children about America’s prophets, most notably George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It also taught the story of America’s Manifest Destiny. God had led the chosen people out of Northern Europe to the “empty” wilderness to set the white man free in the promised land.
But the myth was more about the nation being for white people, the myth evolving over time as to who was white. The indigenous people were never white; they were savages who didn’t deserve the land that they had failed to develop properly.[5] The African people who were captured, forcibly repatriated, and enslaved were never white and never could be. The Irish were not fully white until they weren’t as undesirable as the Italians and Eastern Europeans who were not fully white until they weren’t as undesirable as the Hispanics, and so on. The conception of who was undesirable changed, but what remained constant was the reality of the two-tiered society. America was for the white man—especially the white business man who could capitalize on the natural resources and cheap immigrant labor, applying the Calvinist worldview to secular matters.
The United States being on the winning side of multiple wars, including the two world wars, added weight to the myth of American moral and power superiority. It expanded the myth to now include the notion that the United States was the leader of the free world. The rest of the world needed the help and protection of the United States and its superior culture. That World War II was fought to defeat white nationalism was completely lost on believers in America’s white nationalism.
After World War II, America practiced a sly form of settler colonialism throughout the world—extending American interests under the label of spreading democracy. America was great, and the rest of the world either looked up to America or hated its freedom.
Then the myth began to crumble. American nationalists had always grumbled about immigrants and minorities. It had always violently oppressed Black people. But after the legal victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the ascendancy of subcultures and intersectional feelings of the 1960s, the grumblings began to become rumblings.
Believers in the myth of America being for white people were now confronted with legal and social demands to treat others as equals. After President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal destroyed the myth of presidential inviolability and the loss of the Vietnam War destroyed the myth of the invincibility of American power, conservatives and American nationalists knew it was time for radical action.
We have to grant to the right wing that they possess the virtues of patience and planning to a much greater degree than those on the left wing. Conservatives drew up plans on how to reassert the myths of America’s civil religion, especially those aspects that favored the interests of the wealthy. The conservative Heritage Foundation was created in 1973 and the libertarian Cato Institute in 1974, both to advance business interests under the banner of returning to traditional American values. Also notable were the founding of the Conservative Caucus in 1974, the Eagle Forum in 1972, and the Moral Majority in 1979, each also devoted to promoting traditional American values. Dozens of other advocacy groups followed, and all with the long-term goal of reasserting American exceptionalism and nationalism. Their efforts have been influential to US politics, government, and the public sphere to this day.
All of these right-wing political groups share in common the desire for a two-tiered society in which power is concentrated in a particular segment of society. Concentration of power is the motivation for right-wing political action as I detailed in my previous book.[6] The right wing is not against large government or an intrusive government if that large and/or intrusive government is enforcing their value delusions. The right wing—religious and secular—seeks a two-tiered society that concentrates power in the tier in which they reside and that grants them the benefits of the power structure. Whether the division in society is made along secular or religious lines is ultimately unimportant.
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[1] Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022).
[2] Bellah, 1.
[3] Bellah 19.
[4] Leilah Danielson, “Civil Religion as Myth, Not History,” Religions (2019) 10(6), 374. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/6/374.
[5] Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Manifest Destiny and Indian Removal,” February 2015, https://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Manifest-Destiny-and-Indian-Removal.pdf.
[6] Giles, Left Wing, Right Wing, 55f.