Why Christian Nationalism Is a Threat to Christianity Itself
The movement that claims to defend the faith is quietly destroying it.
There’s a cruel irony happening in America right now.
The loudest people claiming to protect Christianity are the same ones doing the most damage to it. Not because they’re too religious. But because they’ve confused Christianity with something else entirely — and that something else is power.
Christian Nationalism is less about the religion it’s supposed to be inspired by and more a political ideology that has borrowed the language, the symbols, and the emotional weight of Christianity to serve goals that Jesus — by every account we have of him — would have found repulsive.
First, Let’s Define What We’re Talking About
Christian Nationalism is the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation, that it should be governed according to Christian principles, and that Christians — specifically a certain kind of conservative, white, Protestant Christian — should hold privileged status in law, culture, and politics.
It shows up in school board meetings demanding prayer be put back in classrooms. It shows up in politicians who wave Bibles at rallies and then vote against feeding hungry children. It shows up in the idea that America’s decline is God’s punishment for tolerating gay people, immigrants, or the wrong political party.
This is not a fringe movement. It has real political power. And it is not the same thing as being a devout Christian who participates in politics. That’s a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to do.
The difference is this: a Christian in politics lets their faith inform their values. A Christian Nationalist demands that the state enforce those values on everyone, believer or not.
That distinction matters more than most people realize.
It Trades the Gospel for Grievance
The actual message of the New Testament — whatever your theological interpretation — centers on things like loving your enemies, caring for the poor, welcoming strangers, humility, forgiveness, and the rejection of worldly power.
Christian Nationalism preaches almost none of that.
What it preaches is grievance. It tells its followers that Christianity is under attack. That true believers are being persecuted. That America has been stolen. That the enemy — liberals, atheists, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Democrats — must be defeated for God’s kingdom to be restored.
This is a gospel of resentment. And it is addictive in the way all resentment is addictive. It gives people an enemy to blame, a tribe to belong to, and a cause to fight for. It feels righteous. It feels holy.
But it is not Christianity. Not even close.
Jesus told his followers to love people they disagreed with. Christian Nationalism teaches followers to fear them, loathe them, and politically crush them. These are not compatible ideas dressed in different clothes. They are opposite ideas — one of them just happens to be wearing a cross.
It Corrupts the Church’s Actual Mission
Here’s a practical problem that gets overlooked in all the political noise: Christian Nationalism is driving people away from Christianity at historic rates.
Young Americans are leaving the church faster than any generation before them. When researchers ask why, one of the most common answers is that the church feels too political, too focused on power, too judgmental, and too entangled with a specific political party.
And they’re not wrong. When your local megachurch pastor is sharing Trump memes and telling the congregation that voting Democrat is a sin, you’ve stopped being a church and started being a political action committee with tax-exempt status.
When people can no longer tell the difference between following Jesus and voting Republican, they make a logical choice: if Christianity is just conservatism with hymns, I’ll skip both.
This is devastating for the long-term health of Christianity as a living, breathing community of faith. The church is supposed to be a place that transcends political division — a place where people across every background find something bigger than politics. Christian Nationalism has turned it into a partisan bunker.
And the people running that bunker don’t seem to notice or care that it’s getting emptier every year.
It Worships Power — Which Christianity Explicitly Warned Against
The New Testament has a lot to say about power. Almost none of it is flattering.
Jesus turned down political power when it was offered. He washed his disciples’ feet. He died on a cross between two criminals. His entire ministry was conducted among society’s rejects — the sick, the poor, the morally compromised, the foreigners. He had virtually nothing to say to the powerful except: watch yourself.
Christian Nationalism does the exact opposite. It is obsessed with power. It wants Christian influence embedded in every branch of government. It wants judges who will rule according to “biblical law.” It wants the state to enforce Christian moral standards on people who never agreed to live by them.
This is not a minor theological footnote. This is a fundamental betrayal of what Christianity claimed to be about.
When a movement that calls itself Christian throws its full weight behind authoritarian politicians, celebrates dominance over political enemies, and treats humility as weakness, it has not found a new way to express the faith. It has abandoned the faith and glued a cross to something else entirely.
Power corrupts. The New Testament says it better than that, but the principle is there. When a church grabs for political dominance, it stops being able to speak truth to the powerful — because it has become the powerful. And history is full of examples of what happens next: corruption, abuse, scandal, and the slow moral death of an institution that forgot what it was supposed to be for.
It Rewrites History to Justify Itself
One of Christian Nationalism’s core claims is historical: America was founded as a Christian nation, and we need to return to those Christian roots.
This is mostly false, and the people promoting it know it’s mostly false.
The founding fathers were a mixed group theologically. Some were devout Christians. Others were Deists who believed in a creator God but rejected organized religion and miracles. Thomas Jefferson literally cut the miracles out of his Bible with a razor blade. The Constitution does not mention Jesus or Christianity. The First Amendment specifically prohibits the establishment of a state religion — not because the founders hated religion, but because they’d seen what state-sponsored religion did to Europe and wanted no part of it.
When Christian Nationalists insist America was founded as a Christian theocracy that must be reclaimed, they’re not doing history. They’re writing myth. And they’re using that myth to justify something the actual founders explicitly feared: a government that uses religion to control people.
The myth is necessary because without it, the whole project falls apart. If America was never a Christian nation in the theocratic sense, then restoring it to that status isn’t recovery — it’s conquest. And that’s a much harder sell.
It Makes Christianity Synonymous With One Political Party
This is perhaps the most strategically catastrophic thing Christian Nationalism has done to the faith it claims to love.
It has made Christianity — in the minds of millions of Americans — indistinguishable from the Republican Party.
That means every time a Republican politician does something corrupt, cruel, or embarrassing, it is now also a black eye for Christianity. Every time the GOP takes a position that most Americans find repugnant, it’s Christianity’s reputation on the line, too.
More importantly, it means that roughly half of America that leans left now views Christianity as the religious wing of the political opposition. Not as a source of meaning, community, or spiritual truth — but as the enemy team’s jersey.
This is a catastrophic narrowing of Christianity’s potential reach and influence. Not influence in the political sense — but in the actual sense the church is supposed to care about: the influence of ideas about how to live, how to treat others, how to find meaning in a confusing world.
You cannot be a light to all nations when you’ve become the mascot of one political party in one country.
What Are Christian Values Anyway?
Before anyone demands “Christian government,” we need to ask a simple question:
Which Christianity?
There isn’t one agreed-upon version. Catholics disagree with Baptists. Evangelicals disagree with mainline Protestants. Orthodox Christians disagree with both. Even the earliest Christians argued fiercely about doctrine, authority, and practice. If Christianity spoke with one clear political voice, there wouldn’t be thousands of denominations.
And even if there were a single unified Christianity, which principles are we enforcing?
For most of its history, Christianity accepted slavery. The New Testament tells slaves to obey their masters. Churches defended the system for centuries. At the same time, other Christians fought to abolish it. Which “Christian value” goes into law — the one that chained people or the one that freed them?
Christian societies also operated under strict patriarchy. Women were expected to be under the authority of fathers or husbands. They were barred from leadership and public power. Is that the biblical order the state should restore?
The phrase “Christian values” sounds noble. But once you ask for specifics, it becomes selective memory.
If a movement wants the state to enforce Christianity, it owes the public two honest answers:
Which Christianity?
And which parts?
So, What’s Going on?
If you’re a Christian who actually care about the long-term health and integrity of your faith, Christian Nationalism should terrify you. Not because it’s too Christian, but because it’s become an ideology that barely has anything to do with religion in any meaningful sense.
It’s using the cross as a battering ram, selling political ambition as religion, and driving people away from the church by the millions while convincing itself it’s doing God’s work.
Secularism — the strict separation of church and state — wasn’t invented to make sure atheists live a happy life, but to protect Christianity from politicians who are ready to exploit it in any way they can.
Do you really think politicians who start handing out the Ten Commandments in classrooms, pose with Bibles they can’t quote, promise to “restore Christian America” at campaign rallies, or suddenly discover prayer when cameras are rolling do it because they’re deeply spiritual? Or because they know it plays well with a certain voting bloc?
Today, Christianity needs secularism now more than ever.
I can agree with everything you say here. I will add a couple of details. While there has always been a strong conservative current in American Christianity, it wasn't always strongly political, and associated with only one party. The linkage became firmly established in the late 70s when a group of Republican strategists pushed abortion, which was then seen as "that Catholic issue", as THE issue which could energize what became the Religious Right. Evangelicals swung hard against Carter and for Reagan for this reason primarily. So they rejected a truly religious man in favor of a man who was only a play acting Christian. That is when they completely sold their soul. In the 1980s they added anti-Gay to the mix.
The other thing I wanted to emphasize is that there are quite a few Christians who are disgusted with Christian Nationalism. The problem is their voices are drowned out by those of the fanatics.