The Many Views of Christian America

President Trump’s Easter message contained an endorsement of Christian America. While American presidents have traditionally given an address to Christians for Easter, Trump described a nation whose identity stems from the Gospel and whose history has been guided by Christ’s love.

Shortly after the Easter event, the organization Christians Engaged launched America Reads the Bible, which ran from April 19 to April 25. Grounded in the view that America is a Christian nation rooted in the Puritan idea of covenant, the purpose of the event was to read through the Bible in a single week “to call our nation back to its spiritual foundations.” Trump read 2 Chronicles 7:11-22 from the Oval Office. No doubt Trump’s reading was an intentionally veiled reference to Lincoln’s paraphrase of the text in his proclamation for a national day of prayer and humiliation.

Bunni Pounds was the driving force behind the event. The daughter of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, she grew up under the ministry of James Robison. Like Robison, she flows easily between Baptist and Charismatic worlds. She represents the new evangelicalism with its Baptist and Pentecostal-Charismatic wings.

On May 17, Trump will host the National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving on the National Mall to rededicate the country as “One Nation Under God.” The White House has already issued a booklet on prayers and proclamations in American history, which includes Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation. Its purpose is to encourage Americans to devote regular time to prayer.

All three events endorse the connection between Christianity and America. In doing so, they tapped into one of the main themes of evangelical Protestantism, triggering those who view this belief in a Christian America as Christian nationalism. Some think that this connection is all there is to Christian nationalism, but the reality is far more nuanced.

The new cottage industry around Christian nationalism rarely acknowledges the complex history and debate about what “Christian America” means to the people promoting it. Most current analyses skip over secular liberal journalist Michelle Goldberg, who was the first to use the term Christian nationalism to describe the George W. Bush administration in 2006. She was one of several journalists that year who stretched the bounds of credulity in denouncing the administration as an American theocracy, American fascists, Christocrats, and Christian nationalists.

Goldberg understood the rhetorical power of the phrase. After talking to a dissident Iranian in Paris, she drew a comparison between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Bush administration. Both were fundamentalist. Both were theocratic forms of nationalism. She forced Bush’s compassionate conservatism onto the procrustean bed of Islamic radicalism. It’s one of those delicious ironies of American history that radical Islamicists align more today with the secular left than they do the evangelical right.

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The new cottage industry around Christian nationalism rarely acknowledges the complex history and debate about what “Christian America” means to the people promoting it.

There is a complex history to the question of Christian America, especially within evangelicalism. The debate erupted at the bicentennial celebration of the nation. In the early seventies, church membership still hovered around 70 percent. The religiously disaffiliated were barely a blip on the polling radar. Yet the cultural forces of secularization were in full swing, and evangelicals were joining with Catholics to push back. While secular forces were a minority, they leveraged the courts, government, new media, and educational institutions to impose a consensus. Understanding this debate and its recent history offers insight into our current moment.

The evangelical view of Christian America stems from the Protestant push to Christianize the nation. As the historian Robert Handy noted in A Christian America, “From the beginning American Protestants entertained a lively hope that some day the civilization of the country would be fully Christian.” Handy taught at Union Theological Seminary from 1950 to 1986. Just ten years older than Martin E. Marty, he was part of a post-WWII generation of mainline Protestant historians.

Handy was not alone in his observation. Yale historian Sydney Ahlstrom, who acknowledged that he was writing American religious history in the post-Protestant era, concluded, “Basic to the effective fulfillment of all these aims is the recognition of the degree to which American civilization is a New World extension of Christendom.” To buttress his claim, he began A Religious History of the American People with a large section on the “European Prologue” in which he combined late medieval Catholic and Reformation history. He titled the subsequent section “The Protestant Empire Founded” before turning to address the influence of Enlightenment ideas on American history. The implication was clear.

Ahlstrom understood that, at the end of the turbulent sixties (the title of his final chapter), any religious history of the nation must take account of the new challenges emerging from that decade. While he never used the phrase “Christian America,” he saw the sixties as the final push into a post-Puritan America. Ahlstrom published his history in 1972, the year after Handy had published A Christian America. Standing on the precipice of the seventies, both historians knew the future would be different—the very proposition evangelicals resisted.

Just over a decade later, one of Ahlstrom’s most famous students, George Marsden, wrote an article for Eternity Magazine on the crusade for Christian America. That article would become a chapter in a book Marsden co-wrote with Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch, The Search for Christian America.

It sparked an intense debate within evangelicalism over what it means to claim that America is Christian. Does it mean that most Americans are Christians? Does it mean that the founding fathers all espoused some version of Christianity? Does it mean that the Christian vision of life undergirded the new nation as it did for the entirety of the West? Does it mean that Christianity is the most significant influence in the shaping of American life and culture?

While Marsden, Noll, and Hatch recognized that the bicentennial anniversary reminded evangelicals of the significant impact of Christianity upon the life of the nation, they argued on theological grounds that America could never be fully Christian. American culture would always fall short of the ideals in scripture. To claim that either America was or could be Christian was no different than the utopian vision the Social-Gospel advocates offered.

They added that, historically, the idea of a Christian nation was ambiguous at best and led the church to compromise its witness at worst. Even if Christianity played a large role in the founding of the nation, it was not the only influence. The system of checks and balances at the local, state, and national levels required the very compromises that ensured no Christian vision could endure, even when most Americans attended church.

The book took aim at the evangelicals and fundamentalists of the new religious right. On the evangelical side were theologian Francis Schaeffer, Reagan’s surgeon general C. Everett Koop, John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, and theologian Harold O. J. Brown (also one of the architects of the modern pro-life movement). Not being a historian, Schaeffer relied primarily on the arguments of Whitehead and Brown. Brown had the most nuanced view. While he agreed with Marsden, Noll, and Hatch’s assessment of the founding, he rejected their theological argument. Instead, he claimed that Christianity had shaped American life and history the most, stating,

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If by “Christian” nation we mean that the most pervasive religious, cultural, and ethical influence in the country is and has been that of Christianity, or that Christianity affects the hearts and minds of Americans at least as much as Marxism does that of Russians, then it is clearly correct to think of America as “Christian” and to speak of a “Christian heritage.”

Schaeffer was not as clear or nuanced. On the one hand, he claimed that even Enlightenment rationalists and deists among the founding fathers understood that there was a Judeo-Christian view of life behind their positions. This is close to the argument British historian Tom Holland makes about Christianity being the water in which the West swims. On the other hand, he dismissed Brown’s point that the U.S. Constitution was fundamentally a secular document. Schaeffer was convinced that, unlike the French revolutionaries, America’s founders endorsed rather than rejected Christianity.

What united Brown, Schaeffer, and Whitehead was their view that the Judeo-Christian inheritance undergirded the American experiment. This inheritance was being attacked under the guise of the separation of church and state. They all embraced an institutional separation of church and state, but wanted some acknowledgement that the basis for American society was the common biblical heritage for Jews and Christians.

Fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye, on the other hand, operated within a historical narrative that viewed Christianity as the root of the nation rather than the water that grew it. This root began with the Puritans and the Baptists, produced the nation before turning to the revivalism of the nineteenth century, and then split into fundamentalists and modernists. The Protestant history of America was its core identity. They were at war with Protestant liberalism and its secular humanist offspring. They also espoused a providential view of history, seeing God as having raised up America.

One can see this fundamentalist perspective in conservative activist David Barton’s claim that “a Christian nation is a nation founded on Christian and biblical principles, whose society and institutions have been largely shaped, molded, and influenced by those principles.” It’s not simply that Christianity had a large influence on America; it was explicitly founded as a Christian nation. Much of Barton’s work has sought to establish that stronger claim, and students of Marsden like Thomas Kidd or evangelical historians like John Fea, have criticized and tried to debunk it.

These views not only bubbled up from the evangelical masses, they seeped back in, fertilizing the ground from which they came. The sociologist Christian Smith published a study of evangelical views of Christian America during the election that ushered George W. Bush into the presidency. Smith found that even though Christian America was the common evangelical view, there were at least six different ways evangelicals understood America as Christian. These spanned from a generic view about the primacy of religious liberty, to simple factual statements about the majority of Americans being Christian, to America being founded on Christian principles. A small minority of evangelicals denied that America was Christian in any significant sense. It was by no means a monolithic approach.

Underneath this diversity, however, there were some common themes.

The first is the view that Judeo-Christian consensus undergirds American identity—the common biblical inheritance of Jews and Christians grounded American society. While evangelicals had embraced the new pluralism of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, fundamentalists incorporated Jews into their argument because of their Christian Zionism. In Listen, America!, Falwell included an entire chapter on “That Miracle Called Israel.” In Falwell’s mind, “Every nation that has ever persecuted the Jews has felt the hard hand of God on them,” while God has blessed nations that blessed the Jews. Baptists such as Mike Huckabee and Pentecostals like John Hagee embrace this perspective. Commitment to America as “Christian” was a commitment to a pluralism guided by Judeo-Christian principles, especially religious freedom.

Evangelicals and fundamentalists also thought these principles were under assault by “secular humanism.” This term was an umbrella description of beliefs that placed human autonomy at its center. It usually entailed four beliefs: (1) the universe was a product of impersonal chance; (2) humans had to build their own morality without respect to tradition or religion; (3) human choice must be maximized for human flourishing; and (4) government needed to be expanded to solve the major issues of life.

In other words, naturalistic evolution, Marxist communism or socialism, and an existentialist humanism that privileged unfettered choice as the path to self-actualization. This is what evangelicals fought against. These days they invoke categories like expressive individualism, cultural Marxism, or “wokeness,” but the basic ideas remain.

In practice, evangelicals and fundamentalists saw secular humanism as the culprits behind a rigid interpretation of the separation of church and state. They agreed with Anton Scalia’s argument in the seventies that the judiciary had become imperial. Scalia was one of many conservatives who decried what the editors at First Things later called “the judicial usurpation of politics.”

In the introduction to their symposium on the topic, First Things editors noted a crucial issue: “Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality. Indeed, as explained below, morality—especially traditional morality, and most especially morality associated with religion—has been declared legally suspect and a threat to the public order.”

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In practice, evangelicals and fundamentalists saw secular humanism as the culprits behind a rigid interpretation of the separation of church and state.

Between 1980 and 1995, evangelicals created multiple legal organizations to fight against the strict separation of church and state, seeing it as a way to strip morality from government. Some of the most well-known are the Rutherford Institute, the American Center for Law and Justice, and the Alliance Defense Fund (now Alliance Defending Freedom). These organizations stood with Catholic institutes like the Becket Fund to fight for religious freedom, which is one reason why some evangelicals equated Christian America with that basic freedom.

Evangelicals and fundamentalists also resisted the expansion of social programs under Johnson’s Great Society. Combined with court decisions like Roe v. Wade, they saw this expansionist liberalism as a totalitarian revolution of social engineering. They were part of a reactive wave that observers in the seventies referred to as “post-liberalism.”

In the early seventies, post-liberalism meant a rejection of F.D.R.’s New Deal and L.B.J.’s Great Society. In the words of a 1973 editorial: “We have today a phenomenon that a reader described as a ‘post-Liberal.’ This is a type of individual who retains the intensely compassionate nature of the classical Liberal, but who now understands that he cannot continue on the Liberal path without becoming a confirmed Totalitarian."

Protestant postliberals, Catholic conservatives, Jewish neoconservatives, and the new Religious Right all saw the liberal war on poverty as detrimental to the family. The sexual revolution and the Great Society were two sides of the same push to destroy the family.

Writing in First Things about his own conversion to the Reagan revolution, the Lutheran scholar James Nuechterlein noted that “the most important reason for the success of modern American conservatism is the failure of modern American liberalism.” Neuchterlein went on to observe that the Great Society made America’s social ills worse, not better. It accelerated urban decay, soured race relations, and developed a paternalistic bureaucracy that trapped the poor in cycles of poverty. Neuchterlein wrote those words in 1991, when a young JD Vance was living with the effects of these policies on Appalachia.

These same sentiments fueled Christianity Today editor Marvin Olasky’s criticisms of the war on poverty. As a result, Olasky rehabilitated an older approach to poverty which he called “compassionate conservatism” in 2000. It was grounded on the use of voluntary associations as mediating institutions.

In the nineteenth century, Protestants had transformed American society through these mediating structures. Future First Things founder Richard John Neuhaus and sociologist Peter Berger appealed to this history in their 1977 book, To Empower People, which advocated for institutions that mediated between the individual and government. Mediating institutions such as churches, charities, and social clubs curb the totalitarian tendency in government. Olasky wanted to reduce government welfare by moving toward public-private partnerships in which local charities became a frontline for dealing with social ills.

Olasky’s compassionate conservatism brings us full circle in the evangelical debate over Christian America. George W. Bush first implemented Olasky’s ideas in Texas and then tried to take them national. After assuming the presidency, Bush established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships. The purpose of the new office was to direct federal dollars to private charities and NGOs, many of which were Christian. When secular journalists saw these moves, they cried “theocracy” and “Christian nationalism.” What secularists saw as a violation of church and state, evangelicals viewed as a return to an earlier collaboration within a broader institutional separation.

The debate over Christian America is not about a theocratic takeover of America, but whether Christianity will return to its place in the public square. It is also a debate about the historic role of Christianity in America over and against attempts to secularize American society. Labeling these concerns as Christian nationalism in the Trump era, let alone white Christian nationalism, is a losing strategy. It conceals the genuine concerns evangelicals have had over the past five decades, and how those concerns have fueled their political engagement.

A lot of evangelicals will show up for Trump’s rededication of America in May. They will do so because they believe in the Christian mission to transform culture, and they know Christianity has had a significant influence on America, for good and ill. None of this means that they want to impose Christianity upon Americans. To be sure, there are versions of Christian nationalism within Protestantism. But that’s not where most evangelicals are.