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Not everything is Christian nationalism.
I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle. You are reading a preview of a members-only Friday edition. To read it in full, you'll be asked to subscribe.
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Earlier this week, President Donald Trump participated in an event called “America Reads the Bible,” designed in honor of America’s 250th anniversary as “a spiritual celebration of our nation’s founding ideals and a call to rediscover the truth that still anchors us today.” The president read 12 verses from 2 Chronicles 7 in the Oval Office.
Trump’s participation in the event is another chapter in his long, complicated relationship with American Christianity — and it’s part of an ongoing movement within the Trump administration. In February this year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sparked a minor controversy when he invited pastor Doug Wilson to lead a worship service at the Pentagon. Hegseth’s open faith as Defense Secretary was already a source of controversy — particularly as he called for restoring Christianity as a central building block of U.S. military life and began taking action accordingly. But the invitation of Wilson to speak drew criticism for a new reason: Wilson is a self-described “Christian nationalist”; as he puts it, Wilson wants the American government to be explicitly founded on the “transcendent ground” of Christianity.
The specter of Christian nationalism, and discussion of American Christianity more broadly, has risen to the cultural forefront in recent months. Hegseth and Wilson advocate for a Protestant vision of America in the halls of the military. The majority-Catholic Supreme Court receives both praise and criticism for its handling of religious freedom and gay rights cases. The Trump administration (which has several prominent Catholic members, including the vice president) and the Vatican’s rocky relations famously came to a head just weeks ago when the president criticized the pope for opposing the war in Iran. And the rising star of Presbyterian seminarian and staunch progressive James Talarico in Texas has opened new conversations about Christian politics, including debates and divisions among other prominent Christians about how to receive him. In the background of all these recent examples is the ongoing debate about whether American Christianity is undergoing a revival — that is, whether a country that has long been on a decades-long shift away from Christianity is suddenly re-embracing faith.
Our nation has a long tradition with Christianity. However, it also has a long tradition of keeping Christianity (or any religion) outside of our government. For a lot of Americans who believe in the principled separation of church and state, Christian nationalism has become a primary concern — particularly among secular or non-Christian Americans. The prominence of Christianity in U.S. politics, and in right-wing politics in particular, is intimidating. That’s especially true when the precepts that underlie Christian political activity aren’t well understood, and when a wide variety of people claim to be working from the same religious principles but disagree on fundamental issues like abortion and welfare and marriage and immigration.
But not all Christian political activity is, in fact, Christian nationalism.