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By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
Amid all the talk about the potential influence of Christian nationalism in a second Trump administration, and in the country as a whole, the phrase’s popularity has far outrun any coherent definition.
My colleague David French made an effort to remedy that issue in his column this week. I’m going to make my own attempt here, by suggesting four broad ways one could define a term like Christian nationalism:
Definition One: The belief that America should unite religion and politics in the same manner as the tribes of Israel in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (the more extreme case) or Puritan New England (the milder one) — with religious law enforced by the government, a theocratic or confessional state, an established form of Christianity, and non-Christian religions disfavored.
Definition Two: The belief that America is a chosen nation commissioned by God to bring about some form of radical transformation in the world — the spread of liberty, the triumph of democracy — and that both domestic and foreign policy should be shaped by this kind of providential aim.
Definition Three: The belief that American ideals make the most sense in the light of Christianity, that Christians should desire America to be more Christian rather than less and that American laws and policies should be informed by Christian principles to the extent possible given the realities of pluralism and the First Amendment.
Definition Four: Any kind of Christian politics that liberals find disagreeable or distasteful.
If I were referring to Christian nationalism, I would intend either the first or second definition. Over the years, when I’ve written on the subject, I’ve mostly focused on Definition Two — a style of politics in which Christianity is effectively subsumed into the American project, the universal church placed in the service of the universal nation.
In my book “Bad Religion,” published in 2012, I described this tendency as the “heresy of nationalism,” a “messianic Americanism” that makes liberal democracy into “a religion unto itself, capable of carrying out the kind of redemptive work that orthodoxy reserves for Christ and his church.” In this description, I had in mind everything from Manifest Destiny and progressive-era imperialism to Woodrow Wilson’s grand crusade and the utopianism of Great Society liberalism to the messianic aspects of both George W. Bush-era foreign policy and Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. But also the shadow side of this utopianism, the apocalyptic style — Glenn Beck was a key example back then — that comes in when the messianic promise fails or disappoints.
Understanding this kind of Christian nationalism is essential to understanding American history — especially our moments of destructive hubris — and it’s a worldview that clearly endures even under more secular conditions. When Tea Party conservatives treat the Constitution or the founding as a semi-divine revelation or optimistic liberals talk about history having an “arc” or a “side,” they are participating in the messianic side of this inheritance. Meanwhile both the Trumpist right and the anti-Trump left can manifest the apocalyptic side, the sense of an American Eden corrupted, a promised land betrayed.
But this isn’t how the term “Christian nationalism” is typically deployed these days. In my experience, the most common usage is by liberals who really intend Definition Four — they’re mostly looking for a way to critique religious conservatives, a label to slap on their ideological enemies. But they often express that antipathy by describing phenomena that belong in Definition Three as though they belong to Definition One, depicting even banal forms of religious conservatism as theocratic. This requires a pretense that any kind of politics motivated by conservative evangelicalism or Catholicism is a threat to the First Amendment, that the Republic of Gilead from “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a plausible dystopia and that references to natural law and God-given rights are somehow an alien and illiberal ideology impinging on our secular tradition.
I say “pretense” because there’s no way to apply this principle consistently without throwing out almost all of American history, including the parts that liberal Americans admire and celebrate. American ideals about endowed-by-their-creator equal rights really do make the most sense in the light of the biblical tradition and religious ideas about natural law and natural rights and human dignity. And you can’t fully understand many of the major movements in our history, from abolitionism to the social gospel era to the civil rights movement, if you can’t see that connection at work.
For this reason — and here, French and I agree — a kind of Christian politics, ecumenical, Protestant-inflected, not always especially orthodox but recognizably Christian all the same, is basically inseparable from American politics as we’ve known it: present in the founding era notwithstanding the influence of deism and skepticism, increasingly potent across the 19th century’s revivals, palpable throughout the Civil War (an intra-Protestant theological debate — with artillery), persistently influential through the arguments of the industrial era and, of course, given perhaps its most important expression in the religious rhetoric and strategy of Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s perfectly reasonable to look at this tradition and say that sometimes it yields good results and sometimes bad ones — to support abolitionism but oppose Prohibition, say, even though both movements found support in similar religious quarters.
Similarly, today, just because the pro-life movement is in continuity with the civil rights movement in its appeal to “created equal” premises on behalf of the unborn, or because today’s religious pro-natalists and marriage revivalists are in continuity with past religious reformers in their emphasis on the importance of home and hearth and family doesn’t mean that either group is necessarily correct. It’s not inconsistent to think that King was right about African American equality while thinking that anti-abortion activists are wrong about the humanity of embryos and fetuses, or to think that the nuclear family was a social and economic necessity in the past but now we’re better off liberated from its strictures.
But the continuity does mean that today’s religious conservatives are mostly just normal American Christians doing normal American Christian politics, not foot soldiers of incipient theocracy. Likewise, what you get in today’s clashes over sex education and public school curricula is just a very normally American clash between different moral worldviews that are both informed by essentially spiritual ideas about the human person — if you can’t see the Protestant roots of wokeness, you aren’t paying attention — not a battle between medieval obscurantism on the one hand and The Science on the other.
Now, what is true, and what drives some of the current wave of anxiety about Christian nationalism, is that for various reasons — the ideological turbulence of the populist era, the widespread disillusionment with end-of-history liberalism, the sense of failure and decline in mainstream Christian churches and the internet as an enabler of fringe ideologies — there are more notable characters nowadays making arguments that belong fully or partly to Definition One.
Twenty years ago, when worried liberals went looking for a representative theocrat, they usually had to cite someone like R.J. Rushdoony, a fascinating but extremely marginal character. Today they can point to a larger of number of writers and pastors, often either Calvinist or Pentecostalist, who openly identify as Christian nationalists, who call for a confessional if not a theocratic America and who present themselves as religious revolutionaries seeking not just reform but dominion.
French and I diverge somewhat on the issue of just how much of Trump-era religious conservatism participates in this mood and mentality: I think those Christians who have made an idol of Donald Trump himself are mostly subordinating their religion to the gospel of lib-owning, not trying to elevate Christianity above other faiths. (I also think that French sees a slightly cleaner line between religious participation in politics, which he applauds, and the exercise of religious power, which he fears, than actually exists in real-world politics and culture.)
But I agree with him that in certain ways, the hardest-core definition of Christian nationalism is more relevant in our own day than it was in the Bush era, that people who at least flirt with Definition One have a very-online influence that they lacked a generation earlier.
Still, it’s not clear to me that secular liberals should really fear Christian nationalism more today than in 2000 or 1980. If more radical figures have gained some increased influence, that’s mostly because of chaos and disillusionment and decline within Christianity writ large. And in the larger picture, the foundation for Christian politics of any kind, radical or moderate, is just much weaker than when Obama was president, or for that matter Ronald Reagan.
You can see this in the survey data cited by Christian nationalism’s would-be critics. I should note that some of these polls themselves participate in the conflation of Definition One and Definition Three. For instance, to chart the supposed reach of Christian nationalism, a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute asks respondents whether they agree with the formulation “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.” But someone who says yes might just be agreeing with King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” or the Declaration of Independence, not endorsing a legal code based on Deuteronomy.
Likewise, to draw from a Christian nationalism survey cited recently by Ryan Burge, a political scientist and religion data-cruncher, I don’t think that support for allowing “the display of religious symbols” in public spaces is a useful marker of Christian nationalism — unless you think that my hometown, New Haven, is one step removed from Calvin’s Geneva because in December there’s a crèche, a Christmas tree and a menorah on the city green.
But let’s stipulate that someone who agrees with the statement that “the federal government should advocate Christian values” is going to be more open to Definition One Christian nationalism than someone who disagrees, and someone who thinks the government “should declare the United States a Christian nation” more so. Well then, in Burge’s data, the share of Americans who either strongly or somewhat agree with the first statement dropped to 38 percent from 55 percent between 2007 and 2021, and the share agreeing with the second statement dropped to 22 percent from 27 percent. Implying, on the premise of these surveys, that America was much more primed for Christian nationalism when Obama was running for president than it is today.
This tracks with some obvious differences between then and now. In 2008, Obama felt a clear need to situate himself somewhere in the Definition Two and Definition Three territory — often campaigning in a preacher’s idiom, opposing same-sex marriage for putatively religious reasons, making political use of dialogue with figures like Rick Warren.
Whereas one of the notable stories of the 2024 campaign is the extent to which Trump, having delivered religious conservatives’ long-sought judicial goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, has relatively little enthusiasm for fighting further policy battles on their behalf. And that they in turn have little apparent public leverage over his rhetoric and commitments: Trump’s reported behind-the-scenes preference for abortion restrictions after 16 weeks is less notable than the fact that he’s cruising to the G.O.P. nomination without taking any clear position on abortion law at all. (The mad scramble this week by Republicans in deep-red Alabama to legislate around the State Supreme Court’s recent in vitro fertilization decision indicates the hard limits on religious-conservative politics, Christian nationalist or otherwise.)
This doesn’t mean religious conservatism wouldn’t influence a second Trump administration; of course it would. But it would be the influence of an important but weakening faction in a de-Christianizing country, not a movement poised to overthrow a secular liberalism whose real problems lie within.
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On Disney girl bosses and Disney adults.
The making of a Canadian moral panic.
Christopher McCaffery on the stories of Gene Wolfe.
Adam Smyth on what we desire from books.
Rod Dreher on the salvation of a marriage.
I will be speaking at Northwest Missouri State University, in Maryville, Mo., on Monday, March 4, at 7 p.m. The title of the talk is “The Decline and Rebirth of the American Empire: Why America Is Troubled Right Now but May Be Dominant Again Tomorrow.” The event is free and open to the public.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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