White Christian Nationalism: When Nation Becomes a Theological Category

White Theology and White Power X

The theology of the oppressor does not ordinarily announce itself as a theology of domination. As we have seen, power can shape interpretation by making its own location appear normal, universal, or invisible. White Christian nationalism presents a particularly important contemporary example because the theological problem extends beyond using Christianity to support a political agenda. The deeper problem begins when the nation itself acquires theological meaning.

Christian nationalism is often discussed as if the term were self-explanatory. It is not. Christians can love their country, serve in government, vote according to moral convictions, honor military sacrifice, believe that religious ideas contributed significantly to American history, and bring explicitly Christian arguments into public life without embracing Christian nationalism. The term is most useful when it describes an ideology that treats Christianity as constitutive of national identity and seeks a privileged relationship between a particular Christian cultural order and the state.[1]

Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry define Christian nationalism as a cultural framework of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and values that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life. Their research matters because it distinguishes Christian nationalism from ordinary religious devotion. A person can be theologically conservative and reject Christian nationalism; another can embrace Christian-nationalist assumptions without being especially observant.[2]

That distinction directs attention toward sacralization. A nation is sacralized when categories ordinarily used to interpret God’s purposes begin to organize the meaning of the nation itself. Its history becomes providential history. Its success becomes evidence of divine favor. Its national mission acquires redemptive significance. Its enemies can become enemies of righteousness, and its political setbacks can appear as spiritual defeats. At that point, the nation has become more than a political community. It has begun to function as a theological category.

Reinhold Niebuhr understood the danger of national moral self-deception. In The Irony of American History, he challenged the tendency of Americans to confuse national virtue with innocence and national power with moral entitlement. Nations have interests, fears, ambitions, and capacities for self-justification. Theological language becomes especially dangerous when it removes those realities from moral scrutiny rather than exposing them to it.[3]

The biblical language of chosenness is particularly vulnerable to appropriation. In the Hebrew Bible, Israel’s election is inseparable from covenantal responsibility. Israel is not chosen because it earned divine favoritism, nor does election grant immunity from judgment. The prophets repeatedly make the opposite point. Amos states it clearly: “You only have I chosen of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your sins” (Amos 3:2, NIV). Chosenness intensifies accountability.

Election is not a divine permission slip. Covenant does not transform national interest into God’s interest. The prophets condemn rulers, economic exploitation, corrupt worship, mistreatment of the poor, and national arrogance precisely within the covenantal relationship. When Americans borrow the language of chosenness while leaving behind this structure of accountability, election can become congratulatory rather than demanding. The nation becomes evidence of divine favor instead of an object of theological judgment.

There is also a problem within Christian theology that deserves attention. Christians have historically been capable of appropriating Israel’s covenantal identity while simultaneously displacing the Jewish people from it. Supersessionism, in its classical form, holds that the Church has replaced Israel as the people of God’s covenant. American national narratives can extend the problem still further when biblical language associated with Israel is transferred not merely to the Church but to the United States itself: a new Israel, a chosen people, a nation possessing a distinctive divine mission.[4]

The issue is not that Christians may never see providence at work in history. The danger lies in moving from the claim that God may act within a nation’s history to the much stronger claim that the nation occupies a privileged position within God’s redemptive purposes. American history contains multiple versions of this temptation. Puritan covenantal thought, the language of a “city upon a hill,” Manifest Destiny, providential interpretations of territorial expansion, American civil religion, Cold War opposition to atheistic communism, and contemporary evangelical politics arose in different circumstances and should not be collapsed into one continuous ideology. What connects them is a recurring theological possibility: national history can be narrated as sacred history.

That distinction also explains why all forms of American civil religion are not identical to Christian nationalism. Religious language has sometimes been used to call the nation toward judgment rather than place it beyond judgment. Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, for example, contemplated the possibility that the Civil War represented divine judgment upon North and South alike for the national sin of slavery. The difference is profound. One form of religious nationalism assumes that God validates the nation; a more chastened public theology asks whether the nation itself stands under judgment.

Race complicates the American story further. The adjective white should not be used carelessly. American Christian nationalism developed within a society in which citizenship, naturalization, voting, property ownership, immigration, education, and political power were historically racialized. White Christian institutions frequently participated in those arrangements, defended them, or accommodated themselves to them. Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry use white Christian nationalism to describe a historically significant fusion of Christian identity, national chosenness, racial hierarchy, and particular understandings of freedom and social order.[5]

Contemporary research requires an important qualification. Black Christians and white Christians can both affirm statements about America having a special relationship with God without those statements carrying identical social meanings. Recent research by Samuel Perry and Joshua Grubbs found that Christian nationalism is positively associated with racial solidarity among white Americans in ways that do not simply reproduce themselves among Black respondents.[6] The same words can emerge from different histories.

For a Black Christian congregation that has understood America simultaneously as a land of promise and a nation under judgment for slavery and segregation, the claim that God has purposes for America may carry a very different meaning from a theology that equates authentic American identity with white Christian cultural dominance. Social location affects not only what people believe but what they mean when they use the same theological language.

That complexity strengthens the central question. The issue is not whether every person who calls the United States a Christian nation is racist. Nor should Christian nationalism become a label applied indiscriminately to Christians with conservative political positions. The strongest case made by many Christians who resist the label deserves a fair hearing. They may believe American culture has become unnecessarily hostile to Christianity. They may want stronger protections for religious liberty, oppose abortion because they believe unborn life possesses human dignity, defend parental authority in education or traditional accounts of marriage and family, or believe public institutions minimize Christianity’s influence on American history. None of those positions, standing alone, establishes Christian nationalism.

The dividing line appears when moral advocacy becomes a claim about who properly possesses the nation. Several questions help expose that boundary:

• Are Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, and other non-Christians fully equal members of the political community, or are they effectively guests within someone else’s Christian nation?
• Can citizens reject Christian theological claims without their loyalty to the United States becoming suspect?
• Does government protect the free exercise of many faiths, or privilege one theological tradition?
• Can Christians participate vigorously in democratic politics while recognizing that citizens who do not share Christian premises possess equal political authority?
• And perhaps most revealingly, can Christians lose an election and still regard the resulting government as legitimate?

That final question exposes an important distinction. Christians participating democratically may believe passionately that their position is morally right, campaign vigorously, lose, continue arguing their case, and try again at the next election. Political defeat may be disappointing or even morally troubling, but it does not mean that authority has been stolen from the people to whom God properly assigned it. Christian nationalism makes that distinction harder to sustain. If Christians understand themselves as the rightful custodians of a divinely ordered nation, losing political power can be interpreted as something more than losing an election. It can feel like dispossession.

January 6, 2021, provides an unusually visible illustration of the danger, although it should not be treated as proof that every Christian nationalist endorses violence. Christian symbols appeared alongside American flags, political banners, and other nationalist symbols among participants in the attack on the Capitol. Gorski and Perry open The Flag and the Cross with these images because the event made visible a fusion otherwise easy to describe only abstractly: religious identity, national identity, political grievance, and claims of moral legitimacy within the same symbolic world.[7]

The lesson should be drawn carefully. Christianity did not cause everyone who entered the Capitol to do so, and Christian political conservatism cannot be reduced to January 6. The theological issue is narrower and more important: when political conflict acquires sacred meaning, compromise becomes more difficult because opponents are no longer merely wrong. They can become enemies of a divinely ordered national future.

This is where Christian nationalism must be distinguished from public theology. Christianity has generated public moral arguments throughout American history. Abolitionists appealed explicitly to Christian convictions against slavery. Black churches brought biblical language into the civil-rights struggle. Catholic social teaching has addressed labor, poverty, human dignity, and economic justice. Christians have appealed to their faith in arguments about war, immigration, abortion, capital punishment, environmental stewardship, and racial justice. A democracy that required religious citizens to translate every moral conviction into secular language before entering public debate would not be religiously neutral.

The problem, therefore, is not that Christians bring Christianity into politics. Christianity may inform what Christians argue for in a democracy. It does not give Christians a theological title to the democracy itself. A Christian should be able to say that a law is unjust because it violates Christian convictions. That Christian must nevertheless recognize that political authority does not belong to Christians by divine right. Persuasion, coalition building, voting, organizing, litigation, protest, and public argument are legitimate forms of democratic participation. The claim that Christians are entitled to rule because America properly belongs to Christianity is categorically different.

The contemporary networks often described under the heading of the New Apostolic Reformation, along with versions of the Seven Mountain Mandate, make this distinction especially important. These movements are decentralized and should not be treated as a single denomination or as representative of evangelical Christianity generally. Seven Mountain teaching identifies major spheres of culture—commonly government, education, media, business, family, religion, and arts or entertainment—as arenas of Christian influence. Some advocates describe this as faithful cultural engagement; critics see in stronger formulations a theology of Christian dominion.[8]

The question is therefore not whether Christians seek influence. Every political movement does. The question is what kind of influence is being sought and on what theological grounds. Does Christian engagement seek to persuade fellow citizens while accepting their equal standing? Or does it seek authority over institutions because Christians are believed to possess a divinely mandated right to govern them? That is the line between participation and dominion.

The deepest theological danger of Christian nationalism, then, is not simply that Christianity becomes political. Christianity has always had political consequences because claims about human dignity, justice, violence, wealth, authority, and obligation inevitably affect public life. The danger arises when the nation acquires theological attributes:

• National history becomes sacred history.
• National success becomes evidence of providence.
• National identity becomes a form of election.
• Political power becomes evidence of divine favor.
• Political opponents become spiritual enemies.
• National innocence becomes an article of faith.
• Criticism of the nation begins to resemble betrayal.

As these assumptions accumulate, the distinction between the purposes of God and the interests of the nation becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

At that point, the nation does more than receive theological interpretation. It begins to discipline theology itself. Scripture can be read through national mythology. Prophetic criticism can sound unpatriotic. Historical wrongdoing can threaten a sacred national story. Political defeat can become evidence of spiritual warfare. The nation has begun to determine what Christians believe they are permitted to see.

That brings us back to the central question of the theology of the oppressor: Can power become visible to itself? A Christian theology capable of judging every nation except its own has failed that test, as has a theology capable of recognizing idolatry everywhere except in patriotism.

Christian faith does not require contempt for one’s country. It requires something more demanding: refusing to give the country what belongs to God.

The next essay turns to one of the places where that boundary is being contested most explicitly—the New Apostolic Reformation, the Seven Mountain Mandate, and the theological difference between Christian influence and Christian dominion.

Notes

[1] Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

[2] Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God.

[3] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952).

[4] Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996); R. Kendall Soulen, Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Unity of the Christian Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).

[5] Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022); Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God.

[6] Samuel L. Perry and Joshua B. Grubbs, “The Religion of White Identity Politics: Christian Nationalism and White Racial Solidarity,” Social Forces 104, no. 2 (December 2025): 453–475.

[7] Gorski and Perry, The Flag and the Cross.

[8] On the New Apostolic Reformation, charismatic dominionism, and the Seven Mountain Mandate, see recent scholarship in Politics and Religion and Religions.