Whose Christianity? Whose America?

Reflections on Christian Nationalism, Political Identity, and the Church

There is something peculiar about the contemporary debate over Christian nationalism. Christians argue about whether America is, or ought to be, a Christian nation. Politicians invoke Christianity as a source of national identity. Religious leaders warn against the identification of the gospel with political power. And much of the argument unfolds not in churches, seminaries, or theological journals, but in electoral campaigns, legislative chambers, television studios, and social media.

What, exactly, are we arguing about?

One possibility is that Christian nationalism represents a theological controversy conducted through electoral politics. Christians disagree about the nature of Christianity, the meaning of Christian discipleship, and the proper relationship between the church and political authority. Those disagreements find expression in competing visions of American public life.

Another possibility reverses the relationship. Perhaps Christian nationalism is principally a political controversy conducted through theology. Political movements, already committed to particular understandings of national identity, social order, and political power, enlist Christianity to legitimate their objectives. Religion becomes a useful instrument in a struggle whose origins lie elsewhere.

But perhaps neither account is sufficient.

Perhaps Christian nationalism is better understood as a struggle over the meaning of American identity in which Christianity serves simultaneously as an inherited religious tradition, a cultural symbol, a source of moral authority, and an instrument of political mobilization.

If so, the controversy is not simply about the relationship between Christianity and the state. It concerns the ways Americans understand themselves, the stories they tell about their national history, and the authority they claim for those stories.

And somewhere within that struggle stands the church, whose identity may be considerably less secure than either its defenders or its critics imagine.

The Argument Beneath the Argument

Christianity has never offered a single, uncontested account of its relationship to political authority.

The Hebrew Scriptures preserve competing perspectives on kingship, covenant, justice, and national identity. The prophets hold rulers accountable to divine judgment, sometimes challenging the very institutions through which political order is maintained. The New Testament announces the kingdom of God while describing communities whose allegiance to Christ places them in a complicated relationship with imperial power.

Christian history has multiplied rather than eliminated these tensions.

The Constantinian settlement, Augustine’s City of God, medieval Christendom, the Protestant Reformation, established national churches, and modern experiments in religious liberty represent different attempts to negotiate the relationship between Christian faith and political community.

Even Anglicanism, with its historical entanglement of church and crown, reminds us that the distinction between ecclesiastical and political authority has never been simple.

The Episcopal Church inherits that history while inhabiting a constitutional republic in which no church possesses the authority of national establishment.

We should therefore be cautious about imagining that the present controversy pits an authentically apolitical Christianity against a novel political distortion. Christianity has always had political implications, and Christians have long disagreed about them.

The deeper question concerns the kind of political community Christianity creates and the relationship of that community to the political societies in which Christians live.

For some Christians, the faith provides a moral and cultural foundation upon which a nation may legitimately order its common life. Christianity has shaped institutions, laws, customs, and public understandings of human flourishing. Preserving that inheritance can appear to be an act of religious fidelity.

For others, Christianity constitutes a community whose identity necessarily transcends national boundaries. The church gathers people from every nation, language, and people. Its allegiance to Christ relativizes every political loyalty. Identifying Christianity with a particular nation risks confusing the kingdom of God with one of the kingdoms of this world.

These positions are not simply competing political preferences. They represent different understandings of Christianity itself.

Yet when the disagreement enters electoral politics, something happens to it.

The question of what constitutes faithful Christianity becomes entangled with the question of which political coalition should govern the United States.

And elections, whatever else they accomplish, cannot settle theological disputes.

When Politics Becomes the Interpreter

The American political system requires coalitions. Coalitions require compromises, and compromises assemble convictions that do not necessarily belong together intellectually or theologically.

Christianity, meanwhile, contains traditions of pacifism and just war, communal responsibility and private property, religious establishment and religious liberty, prophetic resistance and institutional accommodation.

These traditions do not arrange themselves neatly into the platforms of contemporary political parties.

A Christian might oppose abortion and capital punishment, support economic redistribution, defend religious liberty, and advocate generous immigration policies. Such a combination may emerge from coherent theological reflection while finding no comfortable home in either major political coalition.

Electoral politics nevertheless encourages Christians to organize their convictions according to the available partisan alternatives.

Over time, the relationship between theology and politics may begin to reverse.

Instead of Christian convictions informing political judgment, political allegiance begins to determine which Christian convictions receive attention.

Biblical texts are selected, moral concerns emphasized, and theological authorities invoked in ways that correspond to already established political commitments.

This possibility is not limited to those who identify with Christian nationalism. Christians who oppose it may also discover that their political commitments have become the organizing principles of their theological reasoning.

The question is not whether Christians should participate in political life. Nor is it whether Christian faith should influence public judgment.

The question is whether Christianity retains the capacity to criticize the political purposes for which it is invoked.

A tradition functions as an authority when it can correct those who claim allegiance to it. It functions as an instrument when it is permitted only to confirm what they already believe.

That distinction may be more revealing than the sincerity of any particular politician or religious leader.

A person can sincerely believe in Christianity and nevertheless employ it instrumentally. Indeed, the instrumentalization of religion may be most difficult to recognize when it is accompanied by genuine religious conviction.

Christianity and the American Imagination

There is another dimension to this controversy that cannot be adequately understood through theology alone.

Christianity is not merely a set of beliefs held by individual Americans. It is also part of the nation’s historical imagination.

Christian language appears in public ceremonies, political speeches, monuments, commemorations, and accounts of American origins. Biblical imagery has helped Americans interpret their national experience through narratives of covenant, wilderness, deliverance, sacrifice, and providential destiny.

Robert Bellah described something of this phenomenon in his influential account of American civil religion.

Bellah recognized that American public life possesses a religious vocabulary that is not identical with the theology of any particular church. The nation interprets its history and collective purposes through symbols that draw upon religious traditions while acquiring meanings of their own.

The distinction is important.

Christianity as a living religious tradition is not identical with Christianity as an element of American civil religion.

The former is sustained through Scripture, worship, sacrament, theological interpretation, and communal practices. The latter operates through public memory, national mythology, political rhetoric, and shared cultural symbols.

They overlap, of course. But they need not agree.

Indeed, the same biblical image can perform quite different functions in the two settings.

The Exodus can become a narrative of national liberation, a justification for territorial expansion, or a summons to solidarity with the oppressed. The language of covenant can encourage public responsibility or suggest that a particular nation enjoys an exceptional relationship with divine providence.

The question is not simply whether these symbols are religious. It is how they are interpreted, by whom, and toward what ends.

Christian nationalism may be understood, at least in part, as an effort to resolve an ambiguity within American civil religion.

Is Christianity one religious tradition among others contributing to the moral and cultural life of the nation? Or does Christianity possess a privileged relationship to American identity, such that the nation cannot properly understand itself apart from that inheritance?

This is a political argument, certainly. But it is also a contest over historical memory and collective identity.

Who gets to tell the American story?

And whose Christianity will supply its religious vocabulary?

The Church as a Political Community

Stanley Hauerwas would likely regard much of this debate with suspicion.

Not because Christianity is irrelevant to politics, but because the debate assumes that the political significance of Christianity must be established through its relationship to the American state.

For Hauerwas, the church does not become political when Christians vote, organize, lobby, or seek public office.

The church is already a political community.

Through baptism, Eucharist, discipleship, forgiveness, reconciliation, and the practices of common life, Christians are formed into a people whose existence bears witness to a different understanding of human community.

The church’s political significance is not exhausted by its ability to influence legislation or secure cultural recognition.

Its political significance begins with the kind of people its practices make possible.

This is the force of Hauerwas’s longstanding criticism of Constantinian Christianity: the accommodation of Christian identity to the interests and authority of the state.

The danger is not merely that political actors might use Christianity for their own purposes.

It is that Christians might willingly surrender the distinctive character of their tradition in exchange for political influence.

The church may come to measure its success by the recognition it receives from the nation, the policies it secures, or the electoral victories it helps produce.

Christianity becomes politically visible while its ecclesial identity becomes increasingly indistinct.

Hauerwas would likely challenge Christians on both sides of the contemporary controversy.

Those seeking a more explicitly Christian nation may have confused the church’s mission with the preservation of a particular national culture.

But Christians who define their public responsibility primarily through opposition to Christian nationalism may also allow the American political order to establish the terms of their theological imagination.

The church’s first responsibility is not to establish its preferred account of America.

It is to be the church.

That sounds simple, perhaps even evasive, until we consider what it demands.

What would it mean for a congregation to embody reconciliation in a society increasingly organized around antagonism? What would it mean to practice truthfulness when political success rewards exaggeration? What would it mean to welcome strangers when national belonging is contested? What would it mean to sustain relationships across political differences without pretending that every moral position is equally compatible with Christian discipleship?

These are political questions, though they may not initially appear on a ballot.

And they cannot be answered simply by winning elections.

A Conflict of Interpretations

Paul Ricoeur offers another way of approaching the problem.

Human communities understand themselves through narratives. We inherit stories that locate us within histories, establish patterns of belonging, and shape our expectations about the future.

These stories are not merely descriptions of identities that already exist. They participate in forming those identities.

Americans tell competing stories about America.

Some emphasize a nation founded upon religious convictions and sustained by a shared moral inheritance. Others emphasize a constitutional experiment in pluralism, in which religious liberty protects the freedom of different communities to pursue their understandings of the good. Still others interpret American history through the tension between proclaimed ideals and the experiences of those excluded from their benefits.

These narratives are not mutually exclusive in every respect. But they organize historical memory differently, and they produce different understandings of national identity.

Christianity appears within each narrative, though its role changes.

It may function as the nation’s moral foundation, as a source of prophetic criticism, as an instrument historically employed to justify exclusion, or as a tradition that has inspired resistance to injustice.

Often it has served several of these purposes simultaneously.

Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative identity helps explain why disagreements about Christian nationalism become so intense.

When a political controversy threatens the narrative through which a community understands itself, the controversy may be experienced as a threat to the community’s very identity.

People are not merely defending policies. They are defending accounts of who they are, where they have come from, and what their future ought to be.

But Ricoeur also reminds us that interpretation involves the possibility of critical distance.

We are not simply prisoners of the stories we inherit. We can examine them, question their adequacy, and encounter possibilities that our established narratives have obscured.

This is particularly important for Christians.

The Christian story is not identical with the American story.

The biblical narratives through which the church understands itself can challenge the national narratives Christians have come to regard as self-evident.

Indeed, the capacity to subject inherited political identities to theological criticism may be one of the church’s most important contributions to public life.

What Happens When the Church Forgets?

We return, then, to the question with which we began.

Is Christian nationalism a theological controversy conducted through politics, or a political controversy conducted through theology?

Perhaps it is both.

Perhaps it is also a struggle over American identity in which Christianity functions simultaneously as religious tradition, cultural inheritance, moral authority, and political instrument.

These functions cannot always be disentangled.

A politician may invoke Christianity sincerely and strategically. A congregation may defend a political position because of its theological convictions while also discovering that the position reinforces its cultural identity. A Christian critic of nationalism may appeal to the gospel while remaining insufficiently attentive to the influence of partisan assumptions upon that appeal.

None of this means that theological claims are merely disguises for political interests.

It means that the relationship between religion and politics requires continuing interpretation and criticism.

But I wonder whether the contemporary controversy reveals something more troubling about the condition of the churches themselves.

Have Christian communities become less capable of sustaining serious theological disagreement within their own institutions?

Have we allowed political parties, media organizations, and electoral movements to become the places where competing interpretations of Christianity acquire their public identities?

If so, we may be witnessing something more consequential than the politicization of religion.

We may be witnessing the transfer of interpretive authority from the church to the political culture.

Theological disputes that might once have been worked through in preaching, teaching, worship, councils, and the patient practices of communal discernment are increasingly organized through partisan affiliation.

The result is a peculiar reversal.

Christians enter political life intending to bring their faith to bear upon the world. Yet the political world may increasingly determine how they understand their faith.

Christianity becomes more visible as a political identity while becoming less authoritative as a theological tradition.

There is something deeply ironic about this.

The Christian nationalist may seek to defend Christianity against the secularization of American society. Yet the very effort to establish Christianity’s political authority may subject Christian identity to the secular mechanisms of electoral competition.

Christianity becomes something to be won, possessed, represented, and deployed.

And its meaning becomes increasingly dependent upon political outcomes.

Perhaps this is where Hauerwas’s insistence that the church must be the church acquires its greatest significance.

The church does not need to pretend that politics is unimportant. It cannot avoid the responsibilities of citizenship or the moral consequences of public policy.

But it must remember that its identity is not bestowed by the nation, confirmed by electoral victories, or extinguished by political defeats.

Its identity is received through a story that begins before America and extends beyond it.

At the Eucharistic table, Christians do not gather because they share a national identity or have agreed upon a political platform. They gather because they have been incorporated into a communion that precedes those allegiances and calls them into question.

That communion does not eliminate disagreement. It creates the possibility of encountering disagreement within a form of belonging that is not established by political victory.

And perhaps that is precisely what contemporary American Christianity has difficulty imagining.

We have become accustomed to thinking that political power establishes the conditions under which our communities can flourish.

The gospel invites us to consider whether the church might instead become a community capable of judging political power without needing to possess it.

The question, then, is not merely whether America is a Christian nation.

Nor is it simply whether Christianity has become a pawn in American politics.

The more unsettling question is whether Christians have come to depend upon the political struggle to tell them who they are.

And if they have, what would it take for the church to recover the capacity to tell its own story?