Scrutinizing Christian Nationalism The Law & Liberty podcast

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Scrutinizing Christian Nationalism

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“Christian Nationalism” splashes across headlines regularly. But there is no clear definition of it. Is it just an epithet? A concept used for partisan manipulation? A real trend in socio-religious thought in America? Mark David Hall, Miles Smith IV, and Daniel K. Williams offer different definitions, consider which ideas might be lumped into the category, and debate how it relates to American pluralism, historical Protestant political ideas, and contemporary populism.

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello, you are listening to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m James Patterson, a contributing editor at Law & Liberty.

Today we have a panel of guests to talk about whether Christian nationalism is in the past or if the subject matter still remains relevant, as well as to discuss what exactly the ideas of Christian nationalism are and how dangerous they are, if at all.

And our first guest is assistant professor of History at Hillsdale College, Miles Smith IV, recently published, Religion and the Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War. It’s also a 2025 finalist for the Herbert J. Storing book prize.

Our second guest is Mark David Hall, professor of government at Regent University. He just published not too long ago, Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism: Why Christian Nationalism Is Not an Existential Threat to America or the Church, so he gave away his position already.

And of course, our third guest, Daniel K. Williams, visiting assistant professor at Ashland University and senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center. He’s written on the subject of the religious right. There’s God’s Own Party in 2010, The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade in 2016, and The Election of the Evangelical: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and the Presidential Contest of 1976. What’s your most recent one? The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.

These are people who have a very deep knowledge of this subject matter, starting with the founding through the Civil War, up to the present. With that long introduction out of the way. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Miles Smith IV:

Thanks, James.

James Patterson:

All right. I’ll start with a very basic question, but one that still seems to be difficult for people to answer. And I’ll start with Miles and then have Daniel and Mark chip in, which is what is Christian nationalist?

Miles Smith IV:

I don’t think it exists. I really don’t. I think that it’s a polemic that really has a lot more to do with partisan politics and any meaningful movement on the ground. And there’s a wonderful book about it written by one of my scholarly big brothers who I’m looking at right now, Mark Hall, who I think gives a good explanation of what it actually is. I think that if there is a big unitary idea of Christian nationalism, it doesn’t exist. I think there are people who claim the title for sure, but their views are really disparate. For example, you’ll have neo-Establishmentarian Calvinists claim the label.

At the same time you’ll have some revivalist Pentecostals who have a completely different conception of church and state from those self-same Calvinists claim the title. And so it’s a bit like one of those words that’s gotten so big is to be essentially meaningless. And so I think it’s actually a useless definer. If eight different people who have eight pretty disparate visions of politics and call themselves something, I doubt it’s a useful term. I think a better term might be religious illiberals. And my friend Jerome Copulsky has written a very good book about this, and Jerome has, I think tapped into a better way of understanding what people are seeing than the myriad numbers of breathless books about Christian nationalism.

James Patterson:

We just had Jerome as a guest with Mark Noll, so we’re on the same page here. Sorry, Daniel and Mark.

Daniel K. Williams:

And I like that book too by Jerome Copulsky, American Heretics. I think it’s well worth reading. I’ll push back a little bit against Miles’s statement. I think that I do understand that this has been used very much as a pejorative term, a term of abuse, that’s its origins. And so anytime we see a term like that, we definitely need to be suspicious of it. And it has been used more to write people out of the conversation than to try to understand their point of view, so with all those caveats, which I think Miles’s statement reflects and that I would endorse, nevertheless, I would say that if we’re going to understand what people mean by Christian nationalism, I would want to try to understand what the people writing against it have said. And I think that we could say that broadly speaking, the Christian nationalist label has been applied to any group of people who see a Christian founding of the United States and want to return to that founding.

Now, that of course encompasses a wide variety of perspectives. And as Miles pointed out correctly, I think in his own recent book, for most of the early nineteenth century before the Civil War, this was not a particularly controversial idea among most Protestants, that is most Protestants believed in church disestablishment. At the same time, they believed in a generically Protestant-based moral foundation for public virtue that should inform public life. And I think that most of what has been labeled Christian nationalism in the last 20 years is more akin to an attempt to revive something along those lines than to impose a true theocratic regime or even a Christian reconstructionist regime. And that said, the people who have openly embraced the label Christian nationalism as a protest have as Miles suggested, maybe moved beyond that early nineteenth century conception to something that is more akin to a category in Jerome Copulsky’s book of people who are rejecting the liberal order.

But originally this idea of Christian nationalism as something to be feared, originated among people who had accepted the premise of a secular pluralism. That is they believed that in order to preserve a religiously diverse nation and a strong place for nonbelievers in that nation, that one had to separate all forms of religion from the state. And when they saw what they believed as a blurring of that very strong wall of separation idea, they labeled it as Christian nationalism. Since then, I think a number of progressive Christians, I would say, especially progressive evangelicals, have also begun using the term Christian nationalism as a way to push back against a particular conservative style of evangelical politics that they disagree with on the grounds that they would say, this is idolatry. That’s a common critique saying that Christian nationalists are people who have confused the kingdom of God with the United States of America, and they are therefore guilty of exalting the flag above Jesus or making Jesus into an American conservative. All those things have been expressed.

Does the term have value? I think it definitely has had a place in public discourse over the last few years and even to a certain extent over the last 20 years, so I think it’s imperative for us to try to understand the various ways it’s been used. And if we don’t necessarily use the term ourselves all of the time, we can nevertheless try to make sense of the particular critiques and the presuppositions for which those critiques are proceeding that are expressed in this use of the term Christian nationalists to label other people.

Mark David Hall:

I’ll jump in if I may. I think it’s important to recognize that literally no one in America is using the phrase Christian nationalism until about 2006 when a steady stream of books started coming out by Michelle Goldberg, Katherine Stewart and Andrew Seidel and others. And they were describing a complete toxic mix, a mess. It’s Christians who want to take over America for Christ and favor white Christians above all others, so we want to bring back Jim Crow, we want to have religious illiberalism, we want women to be in the house and barefoot. And it’s literally that’s what book after book says, and these are mostly, I call them the polemical critics, often journalists or activists, but when we get academics involved, someone like a Whitehead and Perry define Christian nationalism as an ideology that idolizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christianian culture that includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism and on and on they go.

These are two academics that are purporting to measure this phenomenon they call Christian nationalism. And lo and behold, 51.9 percent of Americans fully or partially embrace this racist, sexist, toxic stew. And so I think the way in which it is so often used is just ridiculous. Now, Christians never cease to amaze me, and I’m a Christian myself. After Christian nationalism has been used in this way for almost 15 years, 2022, for the first time, you get people saying, “Oh, yeah. I’m a Christian Nationalist.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, Stephen Wolf, Torba and Isker, what a dumb decision. Why embrace this label that is simply a negative thing? One of the ironies of this is none of those academic type advocates actually are nationalists, they’re all localists. They don’t see any hope for the United States of America. And so I think the term is generally so misused that it’s almost useless. But I do want to agree with Daniel.

In my book, I come up with what I think is a responsible definition of Christian nationalism, and I define in the American context, a Christian nationalist is one who believes that America was founded as a Christian nation and today that governments, state governments and the national government should favor Christianity above other religions. We should do things like have distinctively Christian prayers in public schools. Congress should formally declare America to be a Christian nation. They certainly support having a God we trust in their coins and things of that nature. And if this is what we mean by Christian nationalism, about 20 percent of Americans are Christian nationalists. And I’m against all those things I just mentioned, but let me point out that they have nothing to do with racism, sexism, militarism, and that sort of thing.

James Patterson:

We have a bit of a dispute over whether Christian nationalism even exists, but to the extent it exists, it doesn’t seem to be the primary mover behind what we might call Orthodox Protestantism broadly understood in politics. And we get a sense more of what that looks like and each of your works, Miles from the early Republic, Daniel and more contemporary activists and the alternatives that Mark David Hall puts forward. What is the kind of politics, if it’s not Christian nationalism? And I’ll start again with Miles because he has this tempting phrase about, was it religious institutionalism?

Miles Smith IV:

Yeah, I say Christian institutionalism. I think that I’ve got … Davenant and I are going to do another book to continue off this, but on the military is what the next one’s going to be on, Christian soldiers.

James Patterson:

Just for a second, could you say what Davenant is for the people at home?

Miles Smith IV:

Yeah, it’s The Davenant Institute, a Protestant think tank that I’ve been fortunate, we’ve done good stuff together. And so I published my work with their press and the cover was really pretty. The book may have been poo, but the cover was really pretty. But I think that one of the things that’s lost in this conversation, James has hinted at it, is the extent to which we associate religion and the church together. One of the things I liked about Mark’s last definition there is it’s really, there’s a desire … In as much as Christian nationalism is a thing, I think there’s a desire for a churchly nationalism that some of these folks are looking at. There’s this sensationalist pastor in Tennessee, his name’s Greg Locke, and a lot of the folks who look at this stuff zoom in on him because I think he has some sizable Pentecostal church that he pastors. But he one time said, “There’s no reason why the church shouldn’t govern America.” And I think that’s actually what people are seeing.

There’s this implicit understanding that when people hear Christian nationalism … For example, if I were to say that, well, Christians naturally govern the United States, that might sound sensational, but in as much as I think somewhere in the order of 65 to 70 percent of the country identifies as Christians, it’s actually not that strange for me to say, well, Christians will probably govern the United States. When I change that to the Catholic Church should govern the United States, or the Presbyterian church should govern the United States, or the Baptist Church should govern the United States, that becomes a very different proposition. And so I think the churchliness of this conversation is something that gets missed. And I think it gets missed because for so many evangelicals, the church, an older understanding of the church gets blurred with what they do socially as religion and the nation broadly. And so I know that’s not necessarily answering your question, James, but I think it gets to at least why there’s confusion on it.

And I think that what people are actually wanting for most of the people who would may flirt with Christian nationalism probably actually aren’t wanting the church to govern. They want some sort of Christian socio-moral order that they think is just normal society.

Mark David Hall:

I know almost no one who actually articulate this idea that the church should govern and not even our advocates of Christian nationalism think, I’m thinking of people like Stephen Wolf, Torba and Isker. They aren’t arguing for the church to govern. They clearly embrace an ocean of having a civic authority, maybe a Christian Prince who will rule over the church. The Christian Prince will be able to call church synods and judge their outcome and punish the lazy minister and that sort of thing. Ideas that I think are just horrific.

To get at what you’re getting at though, Miles, I do think a lot of people respond affirmatively to this statement, “The federal government should advocate Christian values.” That’s one of the six statements that Whitehead and Perry used to measure Christian nationalism. And I think the vast majority of Christians would say yes, but they might mean different things by it. I cannot imagine that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn’t say yes to that statement, but of course you would be thinking about civil rights legislation. I would say yes to that statement, and I’m thinking about the protection of innocent unborn babies and religious liberty. And so I think a lot of people have no problem with the government acting to legislate Christian values, but they probably have … Well, we know what they have, very different understandings of what those values are.

Daniel K. Williams:

About two years ago I was asked to write a short piece in an encyclopedic handbook article on Protestant politics in American history. And I was trying to think, okay, in just a few thousand words, how do I cover all of Protestant politics for more than two centuries and do this justice? And so in reflecting on this, I thought I’ll start out with a couple paragraphs that first of all, acknowledge the great diversity of Protestant politics in the US and also note that most politics in the US period for most of American history have in some way been Protestant politics or Protestant-influenced politics, so we’re really covering most American political history. But then I began to think, okay, are there certain beliefs that are generally typical of Protestantism in the American context that would more or less unite the left and the right?

And I think so. I think that one of those I argue that has been characteristic of almost every Protestant-influenced political movement or Protestant thinker from people like Martin Luther King to Jerry Falwell, to William Jennings Bryan, to any number of others, is that they do believe that religion plays, Christianity in particular plays a vital role in moral thinking, thinking about morality. And that politics should it take a stance on moral questions at some level, that there are moral imperatives that should influence the type of legislation that we advocate for, whether it’s socially progressive legislation or whether it’s legislation that’s viewed as very conservative. It’s all in that broadly based category of morality. And secondly, the vast majority of Protestants, especially over the last two centuries, but to a certain extent even in the colonial era, believed very strongly in some sort of separation between church and state. That’s even true of the Puritans in the seventeenth century, and that has generally characterized Protestantism in the United States.

And so I would hope, or I wish that people who would write these screeds on Christian nationalism as Mark mentioned, would take into account both of those things. And I think so often when people scream Christian nationalism, there’s a conflation of Christian-influenced morality, which has been true of both the Left and the Right, that that’s just a pervasive theme in American political history influenced by Protestantism with the idea of theocracy, which the vast majority of Protestants would resist at some level. The challenge I think in recent years that has made this more challenging I think, is that as we have moved away from what seemed as late as the 1960s, as late as the early-1960s to be more or less a given in the United States, that there were certain shared values that maybe there were deep points of disagreement as Martin Luther King would be the first to acknowledge on very important issues like race and other things.

There was nevertheless a shared set of values that you could appeal to in making a reasoned argument in the public square that did not appear to be Christian nationalist, even though it was drawing on a shared language of Christian-inspired morality. And as the perception has been, whether real or not, and to a certain extent, I think it is real, that we have become more fragmented as a country in terms of our ability to engage in a shared moral language, a shared moral reasoning. I think that has heightened demands among certain people or willingness on the part of certain people to embrace things that would’ve been mostly unthinkable just a couple of generations ago that is maybe we need a more overt Christian influence or on the Left, maybe we need even a more radical purging of all Christian language from the public square.

And I think that has contributed not only to polarization, but also to these charges of Christian nationalist ideology labeling your opponents to Christian nationalism or at the extreme on the Right people even embracing this saying, actually, I do believe that there should be this much closer relationship not only between moral principles in the state, but maybe even of Christian faith principles themselves, the point where traditionally so many American Protestants in the United States have been afraid to go and have been very wary about movements that try to push for that.

Miles Smith IV:

This is a good point and I agree with everything that Daniel just said. I think the only thing I might, it’s not disagreement, but add is I think it’s maybe even more recent than the 1960s where all this has changed. I was thinking about when I went to … I was a kid and first time I went to New York City in the 90s, it was still very much the New York City of the late John Cardinal O’Connor, who was not by any means a Republican partisan, but New York in the 1990s was not Left coded. And I think there’s a tendency on the Right to just look at our major cities and be like, well, they’ve always been these liberal hellscapes or something like that. But I was thinking about the way the Catholic Church effectively police neighborhoods in New York, and it was very much a reality in the 1990s even.

And so this is I think far more recent. And I think that thinking about in the 1990s, the Mayor of New York pitched a fit over a painting that was perceived to be disrespectful of the Virgin Mary. And so I think this is far more recent and I think because it’s more recent, the intensity prompted a backlash that we saw really beginning in the decade of the second Obama administration. I think what people maybe have mistaken is one, the longevity of the craziness, and two, because the intensity of a lot of the excess ideology was so intense, I think the answering intensity on the right tended to be very acute as well. And I think that my thought is that Trump’s election will probably take a lot of the juice out of a lot of the post-liberalism on the Right because there’s just no need for it, especially as a branding tool. There’s just doesn’t seem to be the need for it in 2025 like there was in 2017 or 2018 or even 2020.

James Patterson:

Funny you brought up how late we can actually chart this. Where I thought you were going to go with New York was when Sinead O’Connor said, “Fight the real enemy.”

Miles Smith IV:

Of course.

James Patterson:

And tore up Pope John Paul II’s picture, and then Joe Pesci comes on the next week.

Miles Smith IV:

Yeah, that’s right. To wild applause.

James Patterson:

To overwhelm the SNL audience. Not exactly who you’d normally associate with big fans of the Pope. This actually, when you guys were talking about this, the other thing it made me think of was in the days after the inauguration of Donald Trump to the Presidency, we also had this mini-story of the bishop at the National Cathedral, a woman named Mariann Budde who gave an impassioned plea for LGBT children and racial minorities. And in a way, we’ve got this national Cathedral, it’s not an established religion, but it’s a calling back to a period in which the first among equals was really an Episcopalian church. And something significant about Budde is that I think her diocese is all of Washington and there’s only … I think there’s fewer than 40,000 people who belong to it.

Miles Smith IV:

About 38,000.

James Patterson:

And so there’s this rump of the old mainline Protestants who still wish to hold this position as being the caretakers of a national religious consensus, but seem to have been marginalized from it. Is what they do christian nationalism?

Daniel K. Williams:

What I would say is that what they’re doing is very much a continuation of what Gene Zubovich wrote about in his book Before the Religious Right. There was a mid-twentieth-century liberal consensus of sorts that was very much a direct political imprint of mainline Protestantism. And I think that gave rise to decisions like Brown versus Ward. I would say it also gave rise to decisions like Roe v. Wade, all of that was part of a particular reading of American history, of the American Constitution, of American Christianity. And the view was that human rights are very much at the center of this, that originally in the 1940s, the view among most was that the rights are rooted in Christianity, that you will lose a foundation for the human rights that give rise to the Democratic project. And in some ways you’ll lose a basis for democracy itself if you lose that Christian foundation interpreted through liberal lenses.

I think now there’s probably among a lot of the liberal Protestants, more emphasis on religious pluralism than there would be on the Christian specificity. But that’s a change I think that started really in earnest in the 1960s and I’ll concede something to Miles and say maybe it played out over the course of time and by 1970 we couldn’t say everything had changed, but you could definitely see the seeds of a growing shift among at least the more progressive liberal Protestants in the late 1960s towards something that was arguably more pluralistic than traditional Christian liberalism had been. But I think even in that most progressive form, as long as it was still proclaimed in churches or in the setting of say Christian Century magazine or the equivalent that it never entirely lost its religious roots. And I think that it has played the role of a civil religion.

And while civil religion is drawn on a number of different strands, I think by far the greatest contributor to American civil religion from the Cold War era onward was mainline Protestantism. I think there have been some who have wanted to say maybe we should call this Christian nationalism. Obviously most adherence to this liberal Christian ideal would strongly resist that notion. But there was definitely this historic belief in the mid-twentieth century that in order to preserve the values of the nation, you needed to trace the historic grounding and the actual philosophical grounding to some sort of liberal Christian consensus, however generically it might’ve been presented.

Mark David Hall:

Christianity and politics have definitely been interwoven from the early colonies to the present day and how exactly they should be interwoven or influential is a subject to great debate. On the Christian nationalism though Pew asked a simple question in 2022 and 2024, “Have you even heard of the phrase Christian nationalism?” Half of Americans hadn’t. Of those who had something like 20 percent of Americans, that is of all Americans had a negative view of it. Only 5 percent of Americans have a positive view of it, so I don’t think there’s much of a constituency out there actually advocating for Christian nationalism and a handful of people actually writing books, your Torba and Isker, Stephen Wolf, Doug Wilson, this represents a very tiny slice of American Christianity. It’s an idiosyncratic, reformed post-millennial Calvinism that almost no Americans and certainly not most evangelicals don’t adhere to. Let me change the perspective a little bit and suggest that maybe something like the phenomenon we’re talking about is here to stay.

If instead of talking about Christian nationalism, we talk about religious populism these movements seem to be gaining speed in places like France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Turkey, and I think you could argue for something like that in America. There’s a German scholar I really like Tobias Cremer who has a book, The Godless Crusade. And so what he points to is if you look at the religious populist parties of far-right parties in France, in Germany, and throughout most of Europe, the people running them are not particularly religious at all, and yet they claim part of what it means to be a Frenchman is to be Catholic. And that’s very important to them, even though they themselves are not practicing Catholics. And when Tobias looks at America, one of the things he points out is that in 2016, Trump’s most active supporters were non-religious Americans. Evangelicals were going for anyone other than Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz.

It was only after Trump got the nomination that they shifted over and of course eventually ended up voting for him. There’s no question about that. But even so looking at … Thinking Whitehead and Perry show this, The Everyday Crusade, the authors of that book show this as well. Many people that indicate they have some interest in Christian nationalism in America aren’t themselves actively religious. They don’t go to church, they don’t read their Bible. And so I think what we’re talking about is something more of a conflation of God and country into some sort of blood and soil nationalism that doesn’t really have anything to do with the lived faith of Christianity.

Miles Smith IV:

I just want to, and not purposely complicate things, but I think that one of the things that strikes me is the term evangelicals and politics a lot of times means Southern Baptists. I just want to asterisk that for a minute. But this speech made by the so-called Bishop, I think that one of the things that’s worth thinking about is the degree to which … We have this idea there was a liberal consensus, and my thought is that liberal consensus wasn’t very long. We treat it as this like it lasted eons. And it’s not that long. And even within that liberal consensus, it’s interesting to me that the single most listened to radio figure in the 1950s and 60s is Carl McIntire, who is very much not a figure in the liberal consensus. We say liberal consensus because we’re academics. How much of a liberal consensus was there for people on the ground in churches in the 1950s? How much are they participating in the liberal consensus? That’s one thing to think about.

I think we’ve overstated the durability and the influence of the liberal consensus outside relatively elite academic circles. The other thing too is, it’s pretty clear to me that something like the Episcopal Church is not so much religious as it is just a wing of the state. I don’t want to use the term regime politics because that’s very coded, but it is basically an institution that views itself as primarily responsible for propping up a socio-political regime. How often do prominent bishops when they get to get in front of presidents talk about the sacrament or baptism? No, they’re talking about politics and so in as much as they participate in the life of the nation, they’re participating politically, not sacramentally and not in a churchly fashion. I hesitate to think of what they’re doing as even liberal Protestantism, because in my mind, Protestantism should be reserved for some sort of civilizational or churchly action, and not necessarily a political one. In as much as politics means elections and partisanship in the United States, certainly in a democratic order.

James Patterson:

And Miles, in your book you bring up, there’s a kind of interpretation of church history in the United States that is prominent among Baptists other more evangelical or low church style that seems to overlap with a more secular understanding of the American founding. And I had this funny idea in my head of David Barton and Martha Nussbaum together because of course, this view of religious liberty and rights of conscience often flows through certain figures of the more religious side. You have people like Roger Williams on whom Martha Nussbaum’s written, but also people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. What is it about that period that they miss? Or what is it that they maybe exaggerate?

Miles Smith IV:

That’s a great question. I think that one of the fundamental commitments of Protestant, Dan alluded to this earlier, but one of the fundamental commitments of the Protestant reformation was to actually get the church out of politics. You have Martin Luther is complaining about the popes and interfering with the Holy Roman emperors and something. And so there is a sort of, I don’t want to say latent Caesarism because that carries it a bit too far, but there is a certain sense in which Protestants want the state to be able to do what the state does without any churchly impositions on it. And so I think for evangelicals, they want the state to be a little churchy. We want the socio-moral configurations that you use in church life to inform the state. And I think that’s the evangelical meets broad liberal tie you’re talking about. We want the state to be a particular type of religious actor. And I think that it’s important to know that for a lot of Protestants, they actually did not want the state to be a religious actor. They want the state to not do religion at all.

The state can go order the temporal realm. The church should order the spiritual realm. My colleague Darrell Hart has written on this. There’s a sizable number of Protestants and influential Protestant intellectuals who actually want maybe even more space than mere non-theocracy. They want church and state and particularly religious politics to go away. And the idea is that nature is really, what can order politics more effectively than the church? And so I think that in a lot of, especially Protestant and particularly high church Protestants of the era who are worried about the state imposing particular religious expressions on them, they go down this road. I think the early Catholic Church in the United States is very comfortable with this establishment precisely because we don’t want the American government telling us what to do with church, neither do these Dutch reform guys or Lutherans or anything because impose a particular Bible on us, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I think there’s in a lot of, at least Protestant intellectual life, a much more capacious place for separation, even as that separation is a Protestant cause. There’s something particularly Protestant about this type of separation of church and state I’m talking about.

Mark David Hall:

I’ll highlight that in a fun fact that a lot of people aren’t aware of. If you go to early Massachusetts Bay, clergy are banned from holding civil office and excommunication does not affect a civic office holder. The Puritans did excommunicate people, but if you were the governor of Massachusetts Bay and were executed, you’re still governor. And so there’s a separation of church and state, which in some ways is greater than what we have today. We have no problem basically with the clergy, or at least many of us don’t have a problem with clergy running for and be elected to office. Some states tried to ban that for a while in the founding era, but most of those bans were of course repealed in the nineteenth century. So there is a separation. On the other hand, I think there is an expectation that the state will support Christianity. Sometimes it’s made its way into an established church. In all cases, it made its way into laws banning vice and encouraging virtue. Every state had those and still has many of them to the present day.

Daniel K. Williams:

It’s interesting to me when we talk about church-state separation, that the way that most people use that term actually doesn’t have very much to do with church because for most American Christians today, church is a very weak institution and they’re not necessarily trying to make it stronger. I suppose there might be some Catholics that would have a different framework for this. But among most American Protestants today, first of all, a near probably record number of evangelicals since at least in the last century, maybe there were times in the nineteenth century that were similar to this, but a record number of people placed in the evangelical category don’t attend church very regularly. And secondly, the largest contingent of Protestants now is non-denominational. Non-denominational has surpassed the Southern Baptist Convention as the nation’s largest “denomination” in quotes. While non-denominational churches of course vary quite a bit, and they may have some similar worship styles and maybe similar expectations about the pastor, though even that can vary.

There is no church hierarchy, there is no traditional denominational lobbying office. You cannot have the equivalent of the United Methodist Church political arm located across from the Supreme Court building, which existed for several decades in the late twentieth century. Suffice it to say there is no structure in American Protestantism today to have the true church-based theocracy that maybe some people fear in what, Miles, I think maybe some of your comments were trying to address to a certain extent. But most of the people writing about what in the early two thousands, go back to what you said, Mark, were called Christian fascists or Christian nationalists as terms were sometimes used interchangeably at the time, were now people fearing the evangelicals who supported Trump. What they’re fearing is more of a movement outside of church. When people talk about the church-state divide, they don’t really mean church as an institution, but more of church as an idea.

And as I’m sorting through this in my mind, I am returning to what you said just a few minutes ago, Mark, about the Christian identity movements in Europe in recent years. And I’m reminded of a Ross Douthat column, which I really like from I think it was December 2015 when there was still some doubt as to who would win the Republican primary, presidential primary. And he said that it would … The various contenders represented different political visions and that Trump represented something that was much more akin to European far-right conservatism, so the Christian identity movements, the French anti-emigration parties, that’s what Trump represented. And one of the things that characterizes those movements is unlike the Christian right, it was not based on a particular set of moral policy objectives. In other words, it was not based on the idea that we have to make abortion illegal or at the very least, overturn Roe v. Wade.

And we have to defend traditional marriage or things that they characterize the Christian right, but rather an assertion of an identity. And I think the current Trump coalition is a hybrid of sorts. There were people who did sign onto this because they had particular policy aims, but there was a much larger group perhaps that signed on because they had certain identity concerns. They wanted to reassert the identity of Christianity, however vaguely that was defined in American life. And so I know James, you had convened this panel partly to answer the question of where we go from here. And my answer to that would be I think there’s a tension between the traditional moral aims of the Christian right, which for some people could be defended on grounds other than Christian identity and a Christian identity movement. And I’m not entirely sure how that will play out, but right now I see the Christian identity wing of this uneasy coalition in the ascendancy being stronger than those traditional policy objectives.

Mark David Hall:

It’s striking that Donald Trump pretty much came out and said abortion should be left up to the states, and if California wants to have abortion up to the minute before the birth, it can do so. And evangelicals still flock to him in 2024, so I think there’s a lot of truth to what you’re saying.

Miles Smith IV:

I’m glad Dan brought up where do we go from here thing. I’m not sure we go anywhere because … And this, I don’t mean to say that Trump isn’t novel, but I think there’s been a little bit of a forgetting, again, to go back to the politics of the 90s, I think there’s been a little bit of a forgetting of what type of men were in public office in the 80s and 90s. I’m from North Carolina, one of my senators was Jesse Helms. Forgive me if I’ve never been quite convinced. Oh my gosh, we’ve got a real revolution next door where I went to college was Strom Thurmond. And so I think there’s, especially in the type of folks who are involved in the historiography of conservative religion, I think this is just something to be honest about. People adjacent to Wheaton or institutions in places like Grand Rapids, Michigan or suburban Chicago or what, where I’m sure Republican politics did reflect an almost semi-pietist kind of, dare I say Yankee, that’ll be my mean word for the day, Yankee Puritan pietism.

But that wasn’t the case for Republicans, certainly in the Post, really not just post-war, but the post-1920s south, you have Republicans begin to have some relational conflation with what you can call fundamentalist religion. I’m not even sure if that’s useful, but none of this is as new as advertised. And so I think that what’s perhaps happened is less so much has been a change on the Right and more that there’s been a similar institutional weakening on the Left. I think about the loss of Catholic constituencies in the Democratic Party. That’s a big deal I don’t think we talk about. I remember growing up, my first … I grew up in the South, I remember our first state senator who was a Republican, and my parents were surprised because she was a Catholic and a Republican. And even this is something that’s really new.

I think we tend to … Because a certain, especially for academics, there’s a certain exoticism to evangelicals, they’re weird. They do low churchy stuff, they pray over you, but I think so much of the energies turn there and there’s all these other things moving that perhaps shape the relationship between politics and religion as much. But for whatever reason, evangelicals tend to interest our academic class. And I think some of that’s geography and some of its culture. People trained in places like Harvard and Yale are probably not used to seeing Southern Baptist or political Southern Baptist. And so I think there’s a novelty there that means we just focus on this and we haven’t focused on, for example, the Democratic Party hemorrhaging Catholics for the last 30 years.

James Patterson:

That is a very good point about the aesthetics of praying over Trump, which I saw people flip out over, and I’m Catholic, but I grew up in Texas, and I saw that all the time. And honestly, there was a fairly large contingent of primarily Latin American charismatic Catholics, and they were about that as much as anyone else. And so-

Miles Smith IV:

Tony Barrett who is-

James Patterson:

That’s right.

Miles Smith IV:

… not a Catholic.

James Patterson:

To me that’s very normal. And it speaks to the kind of parochialism of what people like to consider cosmopolitanism, which is that we like cosmopolitanism, which means we like the same things we can get in New York to be in places like Tokyo and London.

Miles Smith IV:

There’s just a Park Slope nationalism-

James Patterson:

Oh, no.

Miles Smith IV:

… that exists that I think is as much of a show as Christian nationalism. And so you really have two equal and opposite things here, not just one show.

James Patterson:

The phrase Park Slope nationalism is going to haunt my nightmares. We have to do one last question. I cannot pick one very easily because on the one hand I want to talk about the curious outlier of Black church discussions here because you brought up Catholics. They have a odd position in this story. I do a lot of work on Catholic integralism, but one of the things about them is they’re not terribly interested in nationalism. But there’s also the other thing, which is that there’s some discussion of what kinds of policies Christian nationalists want and whether they’re actually policies that are really terrible. We have ideas of Sunday closure laws and school choice. And the third thing I want to ask about is why is Christian nationalism such a problem given that the rate of church attendance is going down? It seems like you’re kicking a religion in its decline. I just decided to ask all of them and decided to let you guys figure out what you wanted to say before we close.

Mark David Hall:

I would say Christian nationalism, as I define it, that is someone who believes that America was founded as a Christian nation and who wants governments to favor Christianity above other religions. I would say that it is a problem and I’m very critical of even that version of Christian nationalism in my book. But if that gained the ascendancy, I think in effect it would return America to where we were in the 1950s minus the racism and minus the sexism. You might have prayer in public school, you might have Congress declaring America to be a Christian nation, in God we trust gets put on our money and under God gets put in the pledge. Again, these are things I can make good prudential biblical and other arguments, constitutional arguments against, but it’s hardly an existential threat to our country. And that’s what people like Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead go around saying that Christian nationalism is an existential threat to our constitutional order and to the Christian Church. And that’s where it just becomes ridiculous. It’s claiming that something is a big, huge, scary monster when in fact it’s just problematic, in my humble opinion.

Miles Smith IV:

I think that I agree with everything Mark said. One thing that strikes me, is you mentioned kicking a … James, you mentioned kicking a religion in its decline. I think there’s something to this, and I think that one of the things that’s interesting is a lot of the energy about this, I admit I’m part of the energy perhaps, is coming from the humanities, a field that’s into the decline. Is this something that mentally historians or politics people or religious scholars have done precisely because our fields are in decline? No one really cares about what we’re up to anymore. And so guess what? The constant threat of religious nationalism is something that actually we can make our fields relevant again. We can be useful again. And so I wonder is … You’re right, is religion in decline and is it because the academy’s in decline that we’ve taken on this relatively … I think Mark’s statistics are probably correct. And so I’m not sure there’s any existential threat here. It doesn’t mean you have to like it, but I think that fundamentally most religious people are rather boring.

And most of religious life is rather boring and it’s meant to be that way. If you can make religion something that is so powerful in the history of our planet, if you can turn that into something spicy, you can get people’s attention about it, to read on it again. And we’ve all benefited from that spiciness. But I think there’s a lot of different things coming together. I’m not sure actually, religion and politics or even the primary show, because I keep wondering how much has American politics really changed? Is there a significant difference in the type of people who were hired into high office in the United States? It seems like the Ivies still just send their kids into government and a few people from State U … I just don’t know how much has changed.

I don’t even know, so let me put it this way. If Trump is the victory for Christian nationalists, I don’t know what they changed. And so where is the Christian nationalism? Is it getting rid of USAID? I don’t know. Let me put it this way. I’m going to need to get help on figuring out where the Christian nationalism is because it’s very sneaky and I can’t find it.

Daniel K. Williams:

I guess my answer to the question about, is Christian nationalism a problem would be to say that we are in the last few years, the last decade especially, but to a certain extent the last two decades, we have seen increasing partisan polarization in the United States by multiple measures. And to the extent that Christian nationalism exists, it is I think both a sign and an exacerbating factor in that polarization.

Miles Smith IV:

Can I ask, I’m not meaning to be contentious, but is politics polarized more now than it was 10 or 15 years ago? Trump’s election was the most diverse racial coalition, I think in 60 or 70 years. By what standard are we saying things are polarized?

Daniel K. Williams:

There are a couple measures I would say. One is that if you ask people their opinion of the other party, Democrats are much less likely to have favorable views of Republicans than they were 20 plus years ago and vice versa, that is they’re more likely to object to their child marrying a member of the other party. In fact, they object to that more than the person marrying someone of another religion.

Miles Smith IV:

Is that polarization or is that that now you have epistemological commitments that mac bond to parties?

Daniel K. Williams:

Well, the two are related, I would say, that politics has become a moral identity. Partisanship has become a moral identity for people in a way that was not as true 30 years ago as it is today. The other measure I would say is that if you look at crossover votes in Congress, there is significantly less of that than there was 30 years ago. 30 years, and especially 40 years ago, 40 years ago the most conservative Democrat was not only more conservative than a great number of other Republicans. The most conservative Democrat was arguably more conservative than almost all Republicans. Larry McDonald of Georgia was the most conservative person in Congress in the early 1980s. And conversely, Jacob Javits of New York was pretty close to the most liberal, even though he was a Republican. Both parties spanned a huge ideology.

And at a certain point in the early twenty-first century, I forget the exact year, but at a certain point we got to the point where even the most liberal Republican who I think may have been Susan Collins at the time in the Senator or someone like Susan Collins, but I think it was Susan Collins, was still more conservative than the most conservative Democrat. And that was a new phenomenon that had not been true in many decades, so I think the parties changed. Now, there are other phenomenon that you’re looking at. I would argue that what we’ve seen with Trump is a complete remaking of the Republican Party, so it has become much more of an anti-establishment party. And it’s therefore losing people who are pro-establishment people like David Brooks, for example, very much endorsing the Democratic candidate because they’re pro-establishment and bringing in a significant number of more working-class voters, less likely to have a college degree or certainly a graduate degree.

And many of those people for the first time in 2024 are not white, unlike what we’ve traditionally seen from Republicans in recent years, so the parties are being remade, but those current parties are still very much at odds with each other that we are experiencing a polarization that I think could contribute to the continued cultural fragmentation of the United States. My final plea would be to find a way to work together, to find a way to understand other people. I think the greatest concerns that people have had about Christian nationalism, who are strong critics of it is this fear that it’s anti-pluralist. And so if we believe in a place for Christian-influenced thinking in public life, we need to find a way to talk about that in ways that will affirm the pluralistic country that we are. If we don’t do that, and if we say we don’t need to do that, then I think it increases the fear among those who don’t fit into this, that if this other party gains power, it’s all or nothing.

And that’s why I think we saw such apocalyptic warnings on both sides in 2024. If the other party takes power or if the other party keeps power, it’s all over for the United States. And there are a significant number of Americans, I’m not sure what number, I’m not sure that they’re a majority, but certainly a significant number who really do believe that there’s a sizable group of people out there, largely associated with the other party who are going to destroy America and leave it so changed that we will have no recourse through the Democratic process to fix it. That’s a serious problem.

James Patterson:

Well, this has been a wonderful discussion, and I’m sorry, it almost feels like I’m cutting off the discussion just as it gets started, but unfortunately, we have run out of time today. I want to thank our guests, Mark David Hall, his book, Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism, Miles Smith, Religion and the Republic, and Daniel Williams, God’s Own Party, Defenders of the Unborn, The Politics of the Cross, among others. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Mark David Hall:

Thank you.

Daniel K. Williams:

Thanks.

Miles Smith IV:

Thanks, James.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.

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