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Reinstituting American Christian nationalism as a lodestar of U.S. public policy was one of the guiding principles of Project 2025, and it continues to lead the Trump administration in 2026. It also forms the backbone of much of the decisionmaking of the conservative justices on the Roberts court. The latter project has actually been decades in the making at the high court, long before it was manifest in the administration hosting sectarian speeches at the Pentagon.

On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, about the rise of Christian nationalism as a core American political value, at the Supreme Court and now increasingly as a central domestic and geopolitical project inside the federal government itself.

Dahlia Lithwick: It would be incredibly helpful to root us in the history of this movement. Can you take us back to where this idea that America is a Christian country, and that the spoils from civil rights to education to citizenship should all be directed toward a certain religious group of Americans, first crops up?

Rachel Laser: Unfortunately, this has a longer history in our country than many are aware of. Right now we’re seeing this surge of Christian nationalism, rooted in the lie that America was a country that was established for Christians, and that our laws and policies should perpetuate that privilege. But Christian nationalism reared its ugly head in the McCarthy era, when, in the 1950s, there was a series of civic religious advances that really laid the foundation for what we’re seeing now. That’s when the words under God were added to the Pledge of Allegiance, and when In God We Trust became the national motto instead of E Pluribus Unum (“From Many, One”). It was also when In God We Trust was added to money. All that happened in response to [the fear of] “Godless communism” during the Red Scare. What we’re seeing right now is in reaction to massive demographic and social changes that have been happening in this country. As Robbie Jones wrote in the book The End of White Christian America, the white Christian majority ended back in 2014 in this country. That’s a long time ago, and that’s a big change. We’ve seen the advent of marriage equality, the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement—there’s just been a lot of change afoot, and we’re seeing a real backlash to that. So it’s not that Christian nationalism is brand-new, but it is strong, and it is raging.

In that moment in the 1950s when you really saw it start to tick up, it was grafted onto political ideas, yes, but Christian nationalism also gets bolted to economic ideas, to ideas about geopolitics, and to ideas about war. So it’s not just religion qua religion, or religion and law; it’s really bolted onto ideas of capitalism and the economy and dominion of the world.

Yes, absolutely. And we’re really seeing that come through today as Christian nationalism is infusing every branch of government. I think maybe it’s most vivid with the so-called Department of War, where we’re seeing the secretary with a Christian crusade tattoo on his body, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, initiating prayer services and inviting his pastor, Doug Wilson, to lead prayer services that are broadcast across the department. Pastor Wilson, by the way, believes that women shouldn’t have the right to vote anymore. You’re seeing it in this idea of fighting holy wars. There are many Christians who really wouldn’t even call it Christian. That’s why I think using the phrase Christian nationalist is really important because it’s just one narrow version of Christianity. At Americans United, we work every day with Christian leaders who are getting angrier and angrier that their religion is being misused to advance what is really a political agenda.

In many ways, the Roberts court is the proving ground for a lot of this, right? Long before we had the Heritage Foundation and Kevin Roberts and Project 2025, before Hegseth and his pastor praying at the Pentagon, the religious right wing of the Supreme Court was way ahead of all of this with its work with Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop and in cases concerning COVID mitigation and worship. This is a decadeslong project at the court that finds its way into the pages of Project 2025. But help me understand why those cases are the inflection points.

Many of us who care about church–state separation are frustrated because so many of the chess pieces have been carefully set up against us. Even if you look all the way back to cases like Marsh v. Chambers, which is a case from 1983 in which an atheist member of Nebraska’s Legislature sued to challenge Nebraska’s policy of having chaplains—who are paid by taxpayers—say prayers. Even there, we saw the beginnings of this “history and tradition” test, this idea that these prayers have been a part of the practice and “fabric” of our society. Then there’s the continuation of Marsh v. Chambers in Town of Greece v. Galloway, a similar case from 2014, and then Trinity Lutheran, which was a really important case for religious extremists in 2017. In Trinity Lutheran, a Missouri religious group wanted to take advantage of a state grant for its playground flooring. Sounds so harmless, right? Others are getting this play surface, so why can’t they get it too? It’s just for the kids! What the court said there is, You can’t exclude a group based on its religious identity, and that at first glance seems harmless, right? No discrimination against religious people sounds like a good thing, until you think about the first 16 words of the First Amendment, which is a foundational part of our pluralistic democracy, which says you have to separate church and state. That’s critical to religious freedom in this pluralistic nation, where we have to be able to co-exist with so many people who are different from us and when we value religious freedom as a human right.

So government funding of religion actually should be in a different category. It should be prohibited—that’s in our founding, and the founders were really clear about that. But the minute the court started in 2017, almost 10 years ago now, to say that that distinction about government funding of religion was discrimination, the Supreme Court started leading us down this path. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said something really important about Trinity Lutheran a few years later, in 2022, in her dissent in Carson v. Makin, in which she says, essentially, what a difference five years makes: “I feared that the court was leading us to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment. Today, the court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.”

You have to back up to the two clauses in the First Amendment: the free exercise clause and the nonestablishment clause, and they work together to promise religious freedom. You have free exercise until your fist is right up against the tip of someone else’s nose, and then you can’t swing it into it, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg used to point out, because then you would take away their free exercise. That’s where the nonestablishment clause puts a cap, and it says our government can’t favor one religion over any other, or religion over nonreligion. As much as it is pro–religious freedom, it protects religion from being co-opted by the government. For a long time now, we’ve been heading to a place where the government is calling it religious discrimination to protect religion.

Those two clauses are, in some sense, in opposition, or at least in contention with one another. And yet, over many decades, the court has tried to calibrate a really delicate balance where everybody has the right to exercise their religion freely, and part of that guarantee is that the state doesn’t create a state religion. It doesn’t seem as if it’s that hard, and yet, as you are noting, that has been entirely upended to mean that any individual who doesn’t get to exercise her religion to the fullest, maximalist extent of her personal feelings about religion is now seen as being burdened by the state, and that’s the flip you’re describing. 

We like to say that religious freedom is the freedom to believe as you choose so long as you don’t harm others, because if you’re harming others, you’re forcing them to bear the cost of your religion—the state is doing that. The other way we like to describe religious freedom is the freedom to live as yourself, and not just believe as you choose, but also live as yourself. In this pluralistic society, where my freedom to live as myself as a Jewish woman means I have to have an abortion if my life or health is at risk, it means that someone else can’t impose their views on abortion on me, because that takes away my religious freedom.

How did these ideas and these intensely felt grievances get so rooted in the minds and the imaginations and the sensibility of this Roberts court majority?

It’s easy to say that this is just a super Catholic court, but we’ve had Catholics on the court before, and in fact, we’ve had Catholics on the court who are very, very committed to principles of religious freedom and nonestablishment. So it’s not as simple as that. Do you have a theory for how it is that we simply have the most religious secular court in the world?

We currently have a Catholic serving on the court who believes in church–state separation, and her name is Justice Sonia Sotomayor. So you can be religious. I love being a Jew and a Reform Jew, and I also believe profoundly in the separation of church and state.

Our plaintiffs in our multiple lawsuits challenging these Ten Commandments mandates in public schools around the country, at least half of them are religious, including Christians. So this isn’t just about the fact that the justices on the court have a religion, because there are a lot of people who have a religion who believe profoundly in the separation of church and state. In fact, Americans United was founded by Christian pastors in my hometown of Chicago. Our original name many years ago was “Protestants and other Americans for separation of church and state.” In this country, we’ve let this Christian nationalist movement co-opt the religion space in our minds. One of the things that Americans United is fighting back hard against is there are a huge number of religious Americans who really want separation of church and state.

We have seen a decadeslong project and an investment of ungodly amounts of money to get the court to be this way. In effect, what we’re seeing is decisions that really aren’t where the people are, that don’t reflect where the people are, decisions that needed to be bought to be achieved. This includes Leonard Leo and the amount of money that he’s put toward this Federalist Society machine that’s been around for so long; Alliance Defending Freedom, that for decades has also been running their Christian legal program; the Blackstone program. These are just a couple of examples.

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There has been a moneyed, bought-and-paid-for machine that has been working to place these very justices on the court. Add to that the fact that Donald Trump got to appoint so many justices in such a short time, three justices in four years, and two of them, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, were replacing justices who usually ruled on the side of religious freedom: Anthony Kennedy and Ginsburg.

I started this conversation by noting the overtly sectarian symbolism and rhetoric infusing America’s conduct of and communication about this war, and it feels like one of those Overton moments, when something that was already shifting swings wide open. But I want you to sketch out how radically things have changed, in terms of the laundry list of Project 2025 that is now popping up all over the federal government. What we have seen is one unlawful and thorough violation of the establishment clause after another—despite jurisprudence that was codified over decades. What has shifted?

Something has absolutely shifted. There is an emboldening behind Christian nationalists that many of us in our lifetimes have never seen before. I mean, what about the fact that at Christmas time we had all these federal agencies saying “One Nation, One Savior.” You know that there are prayer services, Christian prayer services, that open with the Lord’s Prayer. And by the way, funnily enough, different versions of them: Apparently there’s a Catholic one at the Department of Labor and the Protestant version at the Department of War, but that’s happening in our federal agencies. There’s actually so much more. I just wanted to list some of it, then I want to talk about why it’s happening.

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So, you know, right away, this president issued an executive order creating this “anti-Christian bias” task force, right? It’s not your family’s religion or that federal park rangers should feel free to join their troops in prayer when they’re leading these groups. There was a Department of Labor request for information for how religious groups applying for grants and the like to work with the department are being unfairly treated.

There was the Department of Education guidance that came out in February on prayer and religious expression in public schools that invites teachers to pray with their students. We’re seeing that because right now the Supreme Court is making advances for religious extremists that are pretty unprecedented, and that’s really empowering for religious extremists. The Trump administration came to the table with their act together on this and ready to implement real policy change throughout, and they are on a roll. And I think it’s reversible, I really do. But it’s a very bad moment for true religious freedom.

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