Hey Rebel

Photo by Lucas Alexander on Unsplash

You believe America was founded as a Christian nation. You believe God has a special plan for this country. You believe the Bible should inform our laws, that marriage has one definition, that the border needs to be sealed, and that somewhere along the way, we lost our values and need to get them back. You believe Donald Trump, for all his flaws, was the man God raised up to fight for those values. You'd never openly call yourself a Christian Nationalist. In your own mind you're just a Christian. Here's the reality, if you believe the points mentioned above, you are by definition and Christian Nationalist.

So what is Christian Nationalism? It is the belief that a nation's identity, laws, and culture should be defined by and organized around a specific expression of Christianity, and that this faith should hold a privileged position in public life over all other religions and over secularism. It is not simply being a Christian who loves their country. It is the insistence that the country itself belongs to Christians, was made for Christians, and should be governed according to Christian principles as interpreted by a specific political movement.

According to PRRI's 2025 American Values Atlas, a survey of more than 22,000 adults across all 50 states, one-third of Americans qualify as Christian Nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers. Among Republicans, that number is 56%. Among white evangelicals, 67%, the only major religious group where a clear majority holds Christian Nationalist beliefs. Christian Nationalism Adherents score overwhelmingly high on PRRI's Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale, 79% score high or very high, and 30% agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”

And this is not a new idea. The 20th century is full of nations that tried it.

In South Africa, the Afrikaner National Party built the entire apartheid system on what they explicitly called “Christian Nationalism.” The Dutch Reformed Church provided the theological justification for racial hierarchy, arguing that God had created separate nations and intended them to remain separate. Future Prime Minister B.J. Vorster declared in 1942 that Christian Nationalism was an ally of fascism — what he called “an anti-democratic principle.” To be clear, the anti-democratic principle Vorster was refering to was liberal democracy. Specifically its emphasis on individual rights, universal suffrage, and the equality of all citizens. Through Christian Nationalism Vorster was in favor of an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist state. He wasn't confused about what he was building. He was naming it.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán's party won a supermajority in 2010 and used it to pass a new constitution anchoring Hungarian identity in Christianity, a framework he has used to consolidate authoritarian control, crack down on immigration, and suppress LGBTQ+ rights under the banner of defending “Christian civilization.” Between the World Wars, Hungary's earlier governments had pursued a nearly identical “nationalist Christian” policy, exalting heroism and faith while despising liberal and socialist thought. That experiment ended with fascists in power by 1944.

The pattern is consistent: Christian Nationalism fuses faith with state power, positions one ethnic or cultural group as God's chosen people within that nation, and treats everyone outside that group, whether by race, religion, or politics, as a threat to the divine order. It always promises to protect the faithful. It always ends up serving the powerful.

This is not a fringe position. It is the dominant theology of one of America's two political parties. And most of the people who hold these beliefs have never examined where they come from — or what they require you to accept.

But what if the Christ you're following isn't Jesus of Nazareth — the Jewish peasant who told a rich man to sell everything, healed on the Sabbath to make a point, and got executed by the state for threatening the social order? What if the Christ you're following is a Christ built by empire, refined by colonizers, and sold back to you by billionaires and politicians who need your faith to function as a voter turnout machine?

This piece is a mirror. If the beliefs below sound like yours, I'm not here to insult you. I'm here to show you where they actually come from — because it's not the Sermon on the Mount.

God Gave Us This Land

If you believe America was created for Christians, the next belief follows naturally: God gave us this land. The settlers weren't invaders, they were fulfilling a divine mandate. The westward expansion wasn't conquest, it was providence. The land was promised, and the people who were already on it were simply in the way.

This is Manifest Destiny, and it didn't die in the 19th century. It just stopped announcing itself by name.

The theological scaffolding for this belief predates the American founding by centuries. In 1452 and 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued a series of papal bulls, the Doctrine of Discovery, that declared any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be claimed, conquered, and exploited by European powers. The church didn't bless colonization after the fact. It authorized it in advance. When Columbus made landfall in 1492, he carried that authorization with him.

The cross and the sword traveled together because theologically, they were the same instrument.

In North America, this logic produced the Indian boarding school system — institutions funded by the federal government and run predominantly by Christian denominations, explicitly designed, in the words of architect Richard Henry Pratt, to “kill the Indian and save the man.” To be saved meant to be made white, English-speaking, and Christian. The three were functionally synonymous. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz documented in An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, the missionary impulse and the colonial impulse were never separate projects. They were the same project with two names.

That theology is still breathing. PRRI found that many Christian Nationalism Adherents believe America was founded as a “Promised Land” for white European Christians. Think about what that belief requires.

If God promised you this land, then the genocide of indigenous peoples wasn't a crime — it was a cost of fulfilling the covenant.

If God gave this continent to European Christians, then everyone who was here before them was a squatter on God's property. That's not history. That's theology in service of erasure.

And it doesn't stop at the founding. The same logic that justified taking land from indigenous peoples now justifies sealing the border. If America is God's gift to a specific group of people, then anyone who doesn't belong to that group is a trespasser — not just legally, but spiritually. PRRI's data bears this out: 67% of Christian Nationalism Adherents believe that immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” That's not immigration policy. That's Promised Land theology applied to the southern border.

The divine right of settlers didn't expire. It just evolved.

God Protects America

There's a belief that runs through American Christianity like a load-bearing wall: the idea that the United States has a special covenant with God. That divine favor explains American power. That God has blessed this nation above all others, and that as long as we remain faithful, as long as we hold the line on the right values, that blessing will continue.

Within the Bible belt its common to see homes with yard signs of 2 Chronicles 7:14,

if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

This is American exceptionalism as theology. And it does more political work than almost any other belief in the Christian Nationalist toolkit.

If God protects America, then American military power is righteous by definition. It’s God’s will for the military industrial complex to exist. It’s even God’s desire that America has an unhealthy obsession with guns and military might.

Every war becomes a holy war, or at least a justified one. Every foreign intervention is providence in action. You don't need to wrestle with the morality of drone strikes or the civilian body count of a twenty-year occupation if you believe the nation conducting it is operating under divine mandate. The flag and the cross fuse into a single symbol, and questioning one feels like betraying the other.

But the real damage this belief does is economic, not military.

If God blesses America, then America's economic system must be part of that blessing. Capitalism becomes sacred — not just a way of organizing markets but a reflection of divine order. The rich are rich because God favored them. The poor are poor because something went wrong in their relationship with God — not enough faith, not enough discipline, not enough bootstraps. Prosperity theology is just “God protects America” applied to your bank account.

I've written about this before. In Why I'm Anti-Capitalist and The Master, The Lord, The Boss, I traced how capitalism requires an exploited underclass — how the master became the lord became the boss, but the fundamental relationship between owners and workers never changed. Christian Nationalism provides the theological cover for that relationship. It sanctifies the hierarchy. If God ordained this nation and blessed its systems, then the systems must be good — and anyone who challenges them isn't just wrong, they're ungodly.

This is why Christian Nationalism and class politics are inseparable. The belief that God protects America functions as the invisible fence around economic critique. You can't question capitalism if you believe God built it. You can't challenge the billionaire class if you believe wealth is a sign of divine favor. You can't demand a living wage if you believe poverty is a spiritual problem rather than a structural one.

And the data confirms how tightly these beliefs cluster together. Christian Nationalism Adherents don't just score high on authoritarianism and support political violence — they are overwhelmingly aligned with the political party that fights minimum wage increases, guts labor protections, and hands tax cuts to corporations while telling working people to pray harder. The theology and the economics aren't separate. They never were. “God protects America” is the story the ruling class tells so you'll protect them instead.

Christian Values Should Be Embedded in Government

Of all the beliefs on this list, this one sounds the most reasonable. Who wouldn't want values in government? Who wouldn't want leaders guided by something deeper than poll numbers and donor lists?

But “Christian values in government” is doing a very specific kind of work. It doesn't mean love your neighbor. It doesn't mean welcome the stranger. It doesn't mean blessed are the poor. It means one expression of one religion gets to write the rules for everyone else. For adherents to that religion it also means anyone who resists is an enemy of the state and God.

In practice, “Christian values in government” means banning books from school libraries. It means posting the Ten Commandments in public classrooms. It means criminalizing reproductive healthcare. It means defining marriage for people whose marriages are none of your business. It means building a legal architecture that privileges a conservative Protestant worldview while calling it “freedom.”

And none of this is happening by accident. It's being organized, funded, and scaled.

Kyle Spencer documented this machinery in Raising Them Right. What she found was a tightly organized, heavily funded ultraconservative initiative to transform American culture from the ground up — not through grassroots belief but through billionaire-backed organizations using social media, celebrity influencers, and campus activism to radicalize young people into the far-right fold. Figures like Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA, started with economics and small government but evolved into full-throated Christian Nationalism — opposing reproductive rights, rejecting marriage equality, championing “traditional values,” and insisting Christianity should lead the country.

Spencer found that conservative donors spend more than three times as much on youth activism and education every year as their liberal counterparts.

This isn't a movement rising organically from the pews. It's propaganda disguised in Bible verses being spewed from the pulpit.

The beliefs get preached in churches. The funding comes from billionaires. The legislation gets written by think tanks. And the voters who carry it to the ballot box believe they’re doing good Christian work.

PRRI's data shows what this machinery produces. Christian Nationalism Adherents don't just hold theological beliefs — they hold political ones that cluster together with striking consistency. Majorities believe immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Majorities support deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process. Majorities support stripping U.S. citizens of their citizenship if they're “determined to be a threat.” Nearly 80% score high on right-wing authoritarianism scales. These aren't prayer requests. They're policy positions — ones that would be at home in Orbán's Hungary or apartheid South Africa.

“Christian values in government” is the most dangerous belief on this list because it's the one that sounds the most like common sense. But when you trace what it actually produces — who funds it, who benefits from it, and what it does to the people on the wrong side of it — it's not values at all. It's a theocratic project dressed in the language of faith, and the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount would not recognize a single thing about it.

A Faith Made for Power, Not People

Every belief examined in this piece follows the same pattern. “America was created for Christians” serves the myth of a chosen people. “God gave us this land” sanctifies conquest. “God protects America” baptizes capitalism. “Christian values should be embedded in government” builds the theocratic infrastructure to enforce it all. Each belief sounds like faith. Each one functions as politics. And none of them — not a single one — comes from the mouth of the Jewish peasant who said blessed are the poor, who told his followers to sell their possessions and give to the needy.

If these are your beliefs, your religion is rooted in empire, capitalism, and whiteness, not Jesus. To be fair, Christianity is a religion of empire, America didn’t create Christian Nationalism, we simply remade it in our image. We wrapped it in stadium-style worship, energetic preaching, and a call to biblical fidelity.

This isn't a conclusion I reached from the outside. I spent fifteen years as an evangelical pastor. I preached these systems. I built my life inside them. I defended the Christ of empire because I didn't know there was another one. When I finally couldn't reconcile what I was preaching with what I was reading in the Gospels, I didn't just leave a church. I left the entire tradition.

And here's the irony that still hits me: to actually live the values of the Sermon on the Mount — nonviolence, radical generosity, suspicion of wealth and power, solidarity with the marginalized — I had to walk away from Christianity altogether. I found those values in Zen, which teaches direct experience over doctrine and has no interest in converting anyone. I found them in Taoism, which distrusts hierarchy and institutional authority by design. I found them in anarchism, which insists that no one — no state, no church, no ruling class — has the right to dominate another person's life. Every one of these traditions is anti-dogma, anti-hierarchy, and opposed to the logic of conquest. The Sermon on the Mount would fit comfortably in any of them. It has never fit comfortably in the Christianity of church history.

Christian Nationalism is not a corruption of the faith. As I argued in From Constantine to Trump, it is the faith, the one that was actually built, not the one that Christianity likes to advertise. The revolutionary Jesus was always the cover story. The institution was always the product.

The question isn't whether you're a Christian Nationalist. The data suggests that if you're an evangelical in America, you have conformed and are most comfortable in white culture, you vote Republican, and your treatment of any outside group shows your fidelity to ‘make America great again.’

The question is whether you're willing to look at the beliefs you hold, trace where they actually come from, and decide if the Christ you're following is the one who taught the Sermon on the Mount, or the one the empire built to make sure no one ever took that sermon seriously.