Christian nationalism

Christian nationalism, ideology that seeks to create or maintain a legal fusion of Christian religion with a nation’s character. Advocates of Christian nationalism consider their view of Christianity to be an integral part of their country’s identity and want the government to promote—or even enforce—the religion’s position within it.

Description and criticism

Given the diversity of Christian beliefs worldwide, it comes as no surprise that there is no established set of beliefs among Christian nationalists as to the extent to which the state should support Christianity. The Christian nationalist vision varies not only by country—an American Christian nationalist, for example, will likely not desire a state church, whereas an English Christian nationalist might—but often by individual. Among the government policies a Christian nationalist might desire are the display of Christian symbols on public property, the dedication of time for prayer in public schools, government funding for religious institutions, a Christian interpretation of history in public-school curricula, the outlawing of abortion, restrictions on non-Christian immigration, and the policing of what some Christians consider to be immoral behaviour, which almost always includes the suppression of LGBTQ+ people. Regardless of the policy, the goal is to privilege Christianity in the public square.

Those who oppose Christian nationalism point out that the ideology is fundamentally at odds with a pluralistic society, because to define a country as Christian is necessarily to marginalize its non-Christian population. Theologically, traditional creedal Christianity is understood to transcend all ideologies, including ethnonational identity, and thus many Christians reject Christian nationalism as a harmful and limited misconstruction of the faith. At its most extreme, Christian nationalism can lead to violence against religious and nonreligious minorities and is antidemocratic. Since Christian nationalism is an ideology predominantly held by white people in many countries, including the United States and a number of European countries, its ramifications are not only religious but also racial and ethnic. This connection is not lost on white supremacist organizations, who frequently point to the protection of their country’s Christian heritage as a reason to discriminate against minorities.

History and examples

The term Christian nationalism itself is relatively new, but the phenomenon it names is historically common. In Ireland, Roman Catholicism was a defining and constitutional element of national identity from the late 19th century until the state’s legal secularization in the late 20th century. As leaders of Korea’s independence movement against Japanese occupation, Korean Christians forged a connection between Korean national identity and Christianity that still exists today. In the 1950s and early ’60s, South Vietnamese Pres. Ngo Dinh Diem gave the Roman Catholic Church a privileged position in his country while repressing the Buddhist population there, which ultimately precipitated his downfall.

In 2010 the political party of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly, allowing the party to pass a new constitution in 2011. That constitution included recognition of “the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood” and a need for “spiritual and intellectual renewal.” During the Syrian refugee crisis, Orbán’s government opposed the resettlement of asylum seekers in Europe, in part on the basis of religion, writing in a 2015 op-ed in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, “Most [refugees] are not Christian, but Muslim.” In December 2020 an anti-LGBTQ+ amendment to the Hungarian constitution was passed that restricted adoptions to heterosexual couples and mandated that children be raised with “values based on our Christian culture.”

The United States has a long history of Christian nationalism, despite the Founding Fathers’ dedication to the separation of church and state (see also The Founding Fathers, Deism, and Christianity). The First Amendment (1791) to the U.S. Constitution further clarified the ideological pluralism of the young country by prohibiting the establishment of religion and guaranteeing its free exercise. The mythology of the United States as “a Christian nation” has likely always been a part of the American fabric. This narrative burgeoned in the years after George Washington’s death, having been promoted by Evangelical historians and pundits as a means to sacralize the nation’s founding. Christian nationalism experienced a resurgence in the 1930s with a push from anti-New Deal business interests that wanted to link American capitalism to Christianity. In 1956, during the Cold War, the U.S. Congress adopted the religiously vague but galvanizing “In God We Trust” as the national motto and added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.

The rise of televangelism in the United States beginning in the 1960s ushered in a new era of politically charged Christianity and Christian nationalism. In 1979 televangelist and religious leader Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a civic organization that crusaded against what it viewed as negative cultural trends, especially the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and legalized abortion (see also Roe v. Wade). It also lobbied for prayer in public schools, increased defense spending, a strong anticommunist foreign policy, and continued U.S. support for the State of Israel. The Moral Majority led a new generation of Christian fundamentalists and Christian nationalists—the Christian Right—beyond simply denouncing cultural trends and back to an engagement with contemporary life in the political arena. The organization, which quickly grew to several million members, was credited with playing an important role in the election of Republican Ronald Reagan as U.S. president in 1980. Reagan’s fusion of Evangelicalism with his vision of American exceptionalism helped further cement the union between Evangelicals and the Republican Party, creating a channel through which Christian nationalists might achieve their aims. Conservative televangelist Pat Robertson, who ran for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, founded the influential Christian Coalition in 1989, which succeeded the Moral Majority and continued to impel Christian political action.

Christian nationalism in the United States reached new levels in the first quarter of the 21st century. Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election in part by becoming an overt champion of Christian nationalism. He repaid his supporters by nominating three socially conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, who in turn ended federally guaranteed access to abortion for women in the U.S. (see also Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). After Trump lost reelection in 2020, many Christian nationalists were among his supporters who participated in the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack in an attempt to stop the election’s certification. Although such extreme Christian nationalism was roundly denounced in the following months, the term was soon positively appropriated by some Republican figures, such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. According to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution whose results were published in February 2023, more than half of all Republicans either identified themselves as Christian nationalists or sympathized with Christian nationalist views.