The Dangers of a ‘Christian Nation’

ALMOST HALF OF Americans believe the United States should be a “Christian nation,” according to a survey this fall, and a significant percentage say that the Bible should have more sway than the will of the people in shaping U.S. laws when the two conflict. The opinions expressed in the October survey by the Pew Research Center break along party lines, with three-quarters of Republicans (and less than half of Democrats) saying the founders intended for the country to be a Christian nation, and 4 in 10 Republicans (compared to 16 percent of Democrats) believing that the Bible, rather than majority rule, should be the source of the nation’s laws. (A similar percentage of Republicans — 39 percent — surveyed by the American Enterprise Institute in 2021 said that political violence may be necessary to “protect America.”) This summer, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene declared that “We need to be the party of nationalism, and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”

While it may seem that a portion of one of the country’s two main parties has wandered off to never-never land, the survey doesn’t mean the country is heading toward theocracy — yet. Most of the respondents who say the U.S. should be a Christian nation, according to Pew, “are thinking of some definition of the term other than a government-imposed theocracy.” (A small minority, in the words of one respondent, view Christian nationalism as a way “to use the government to impose an extreme, fringe version of Christianity on everyone in the nation, regardless of others’ religious views. They are no different than al-Qaida or the Taliban.”)

The entanglement of church and state, of course, is more the norm than the exception in the history of Christendom, according to Mennonite historian Gene Miller, from the Roman emperor Constantine through the Holy Roman Empire and up to today. “Christianity has for a long time been intertwined with questions of state and statehood,” Miller told Sojourners. “The last attempt at founding an explicitly Christian nation on these shores was undertaken by the Confederate States of America, the preamble to whose constitution explicitly invokes the ‘favor and guidance of Almighty God’ in the establishment of the new nation,” Miller said. “And the writers, enactors, and ratifiers meant the white God of Southern Protestantism here rather than the all-too-vague deistic ‘Creator’ of that other constitution.”

When those survey respondents say the U.S. should be a Christian nation, it’s unfortunately safe to assume that most of them weren’t thinking of the beatitudes, that the nation should be transformed into merciful peacemakers, hungering and thirsting for justice. The danger is that, instead, the findings reflect a hankering — in the face of demographic change — for a return to the mythical “good old days” of white Christian ascendancy. As Miller put it, “In recent years, the resurgence of this term [Christian nationalism] ... is serving as a boundary marker, a tribal delimiter. It’s being used sociologically more than theologically.” In some ways, this reflects a resistance to the so-called “other” — immigrants, minorities (soon to be the majority), non-Christians — and as such is an outwardly innocuous version of “They will not replace us.” And that’s the scary thing.