Americans Should Stop Using the Term Christian Nationalism

In 1932, a group of religious leaders gathered in Indianapolis to advance their long-standing project, a plan to fundamentally “Christianize” American society. The meeting had been convened by the Federal Council of Churches, then the dominant voice of American Protestantism. The organization ratified a platform declaring that “the total abolition of poverty” was “entirely consistent with the ideal which Jesus and all His true disciples have taught and realized.” FCC delegates supported “a planned economic system” and called on leaders in government and across society to make that system “more rational, more productive, more humane, more righteous.”

For a time, the strategy worked. The FCC’s friends ascended to high places. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, cast the New Deal as “the carrying out of the social philosophy of the founder of Christianity.” Labor Secretary Frances Perkins poured her energies into the expansion of the American welfare state because her faith demanded nothing less. She collaborated behind the scenes with Christian leaders to advance landmark legislation, including the Social Security and Fair Labor Standards Acts, both of which she refined while on retreat at a convent in Maryland.

The concept of Christian nationalism has captured the nation’s attention in the past decade, as scholars and journalists alike have sounded the alarm about “power worshipping” believers dead set on “taking America back for God.” Yet amid the deluge of headlines and podcasts and books about the major role of religion in American politics, one barely finds mention of this vibrant world of New Deal–era social gospelers. Why? After all, these were people who longed to weave their religious values into the nation’s legal fabric. They would have scored high on some of the measures used to define Christian nationalism today, including the conviction that “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.” And they have serious heirs in current politics, including James Talarico, a seminarian who won a close Democratic primary in a U.S. Senate contest in Texas this past week.

Progressive white Christians from the past are not the only ones left out of today’s discourse. On some recent surveys, Black Christians scored the highest on scales measuring Christian nationalism. But scholars who study the phenomenon rarely dwell on the ways that Black believers mix faith and politics. These experts often add the qualifier white in an attempt to zero in on the Christian worlds that actually concern them: namely, those aligned with the MAGA movement. Media coverage has helped to cement the association of Christian nationalist and Donald Trump–supporting Christian in the popular imagination. Little wonder that, in left-of-center circles, the label can be more derogatory than descriptive: a shorthand for believers whose politics are beyond the pale.

The narrowness of the current conversation about Christian nationalism is driven home by an important new book. Matthew Avery Sutton’s Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity argues convincingly that the quest for Christian America is a perennial national obsession, one that has taken radically different shapes over time. As Sutton writes, “Christian nationalism has influenced activists across the political and religious spectrum, Black and White, left and right, for centuries. Americans have never really separated church from state, nor have they truly championed the free exercise of religion. Christian activists from Frederick Douglass to Jerry Falwell used the Bible to try to impose their values and beliefs on the nation.”

Sutton offers copious evidence for these claims. His story begins in the 15th century, with the “Christian invasion” of the Americas, and extends all the way to the present day. Drawing on an avalanche of recent scholarship as well as his own extensive research, Sutton illustrates why mainstream U.S. historians have finally begun to take the political significance of American Christianity more seriously. In short, Christian ideals, individuals, and institutions have always exerted enormous power on the country’s development. “The history of the United States is the history of American Christianity, and the history of American Christianity is the history of the United States,” he boldly declares.

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A bit too boldly: People of other faiths, and those with none whatsoever, have left an indelible mark on the nation. But there is no doubting Christianity’s centrality to U.S. history, for better and for worse.

Sutton doesn’t flinch from the worse. In pursuit of Christian America, believers have too often provided theological justifications and material support for chattel slavery, Jim Crow, Indigenous displacement, and other stains on the American conscience. But as Sutton also shows, dreams of a more Christian society have animated movements for workers’ rights, women’s liberation, and Black freedom. Throughout American history, Christian nationalisms have bent in different and often contradictory directions.

Historians will find plenty with which to argue in Sutton’s epic tale. One big quibble: He casts the rise of the New Deal state as a major blow to the “already-reeling protestant establishment,” arguing, “Churches no longer competed just against each other; they now competed against the federal government for the loyalty of the American people.” There is something to this. The Great Depression did overwhelm older systems of Christian charity. But for the activists and preachers at that Indianapolis meeting in 1932, the Roosevelt administration offered new heights of power and privilege. Americans today may not associate their Social Security checks with religious reformers, but the ongoing life of such programs testifies in part to the long-lasting impact of an earlier and more economically egalitarian vision of Christian America.

The history unearthed in Chosen Land has important implications for those seeking to understand religion and politics in the present moment. Sutton’s story might help readers put a finger on an ambiguity that runs through many contemporary condemnations of Christian nationalism. Are the MAGA faithful at fault for using political structures to advance Christian values? Or does the problem lie, rather, in the specific content of their values, some of which contravene a foundational democratic commitment to pluralism?

During a recent appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which was aired only on YouTube after threats from the Federal Communications Commission, Talarico indicted the religious right as above all “a political movement.” He told Colbert that “there is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism. It is the worship of power in the name of Christ. It is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Talarico’s critique verges on irony. Given his own campaign for Senate, one presumes he is not opposed to the pursuit of power by avowed Christians. In fact, in that same interview, he outlined a more biblical approach to politics, citing the Gospel of Matthew on the measure by which believers will be judged: “by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger—nothing about going to church, nothing about voting Republican. It was all about how you treat other people.”

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Talarico and his allies should be clearer with their critique: The issue is not that Christian nationalists are building a political movement around their Christian values; it is that those values are not Christian enough. In one 2023 sermon, Talarico suggested that if the United States were actually a Christian nation, then it would embrace all of the policies for which he is fighting: student-loan forgiveness, universal health care, gay rights, and basic support for the poor.

Talarico would fit snugly into the tradition, traced in Sutton’s book, of progressive Christians who have sought, across generations, to enshrine their religious convictions in the law. Not all that long ago—in the decades stretching from the rise of the New Deal to the civil-rights era—liberal and liberationist Christians wielded tremendous power in this country. As Sutton illustrates, the remarkable breakthroughs they won sprang not only from the courageous leadership of well-known figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., but also from the work of thousands of “everyday activists” whose names have been lost to history, even as their legacy quietly persists.

Sutton hews closely to the historical record, but his book invites present-day progressives to consider the counterintuitive possibility that success might lie in an appeal for more, rather than for less, religion in public life. In some Democratic circles, the rise of MAGA-aligned Christianity has heightened an ongoing squeamishness about public-facing faith. But standing resolute behind the formal separation of Church and state does not require, as people sometimes imagine, that we evacuate religion from politics altogether. That project is a fool’s errand in any case.

As Sutton shows, most Americans, past and present, have not drawn hard lines between their religious and political convictions, let alone checked their faith at the entrance to the voting booth. Back in 2006, a presidential hopeful named Barack Obama made an argument that now belongs to a different political era. In a campaign speech, from which Sutton quotes, Obama declared, “Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—indeed, the majority of the great reformers in American history—were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.”

In the 20 years since Obama gave that speech, the ranks of religiously unaffiliated Americans have expanded at a historic pace. Yet Christianity has remained a political juggernaut, one largely benefiting the political right. Christians played a pivotal role in both of Trump’s electoral victories. If his opponents are to fare better in the future, one small but meaningful step could be to retire the label Christian nationalist as a term of political combat. The phrase has no stable referent in the wider scope of American history, and its dismissive edge may do more to inflame resentments than to check them—let alone change anyone’s mind.

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An honest accounting requires acknowledging that reactionaries are not the only ones who have followed Jesus into the public square. Many left-of-center folks have done the same—and are doing so even today, as underscored by widespread scenes of church-based activism in the Twin Cities during the recent ICE operation there. This acknowledgement might push progressives to lay aside the unpersuasive critique that the MAGA agenda is too religious, and to focus, instead, on the specific values and policies that they believe deserve serious theological critique and concerted political confrontation.

In 1995, the historian Michael Kazin made an analogous argument about another term that tends to be overused today. In The Populist Persuasion, he notes that although populism is everywhere in U.S. history, not all populisms are created equal. Some forms are readily compatible with pluralistic democracy, but others corrode it. As Chosen Land makes eminently clear, the same is true of Christian nationalisms.

With the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding approaching, the time is right to reflect on the far-reaching ways that fights over “Christian America” have influenced the nation’s past. Sutton’s book could spur such reflection, even though it does not offer easy answers about what comes next. The question is almost certainly not whether Christianity will shape the country of tomorrow, but rather which Christian vision of a more perfect union will gain traction in American political and cultural life. Sutton stops short of making predictions. He closes the book, instead, with a stirring reminder: What happens next is up to us.