Religious Liberty vs Christian Nationalism
The May Day Presidential Order
Jun 09, 2025
Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a Lutheran pastor and emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union. His single volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in the 3rd edition.
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During our Substack kerfuffle over OPA’s “We Belong, Not to Ourselves, but to Christ,” I have contended that Christian Nationalism (CN) plays at most a tiny role in the current Washington cataclysm. We miss the mark when we blame the nation’s calamities on a non-existent alliance of the 47th US president with CN. This alleged alliance is a conspiracy theory that misleads us.
Recall that during the 2024 campaign the Republican platform ran on Religious Liberty (RL), not CN. Project 2025 also stipulated that RL is cardinal. This commitment to RL was reiterated in a US Presidential Order of February 6, 2025 aiming “to protect the religious freedoms of Americans and end the anti-Christian weaponization of government.” RL and CN are incompatible opposites. What POTUS intends is to provide protection of anti-abortion evangelical and Roman Catholic Christians within the umbrella category of RL.
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National Day of Prayer Presidential Order
An event taking place May 1, 2025, confirms my assessment, I think. It was the National Day of Prayer. The 47th US president listened to an ad hoc choir singing praise songs. Gathered around him were individual evangelicals, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Jews. Then he signed an executive order establishing the Religious Liberty Commission. It will be a 13-member commission charged with creating a report on the “foundations of religious liberty in America” and the impact of religious liberty on American culture. The report is also intended to detail “current threats to domestic religious liberty” and create programs to celebrate religious pluralism. The commission will expire July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence. This according to Religious News Service (RNS).
It is possible that clandestine CNers will hide under the umbrella of RL and demand that hegemony is the way Christians exercise their liberty. Sneaky, eh? But this would contradict the alleged goal of CN, namely, to make the US a Christian nation. “Christian Nationalism undermines religious liberty rights” says Brian Kaylor writing for A Public Witness. In short, RL would prevent the success of CN.
In his series of four column posts, Fritz Lampe provided us with a historical and anthropological outline of Christian Nationalism in large strokes. Despite his erudite treatment which included the influence of CN on specific US government officials such as Russell Vought in the US Office of Management and Budget, Lampe gave the vague impression that CN is thundering down upon all of us with a repressive deluge.
I certainly agree that the dike has been breached and Americans are about to be deluged by tyranny. But that tyranny does not come from CN. Rather, it comes from the White House which has its own motivations. CNers along with their evangelical Protestant friends are merely manipulated pawns in a much larger political chess game.
Is it Christian Nationalism or White Christian Nationalism?
Anti-Christian Nationalists frequently play the race card so as to make CN appear to harbor bigotry as part of its definition. If this were the case, then only white people would be CNers. But, this does not square with the facts.
Here is Anthea Butler’s take in her recent book, White Evangelical Racism.
“Evangelicalism is not simply a religious group at all. Rather, it is a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others” (Butler, 2021, p. 137).
Note that Butler is describing “evangelicalism,” not CN. My hypothesis, recall, is that anti-Cners like what Butler says, because anti-CNers are actually targeting evangelicals. Adding the adjective, ‘white’, makes the accusation more portentious.
So, let us ask: is it possible to be an African American and also a Black Christian Nationalist? Yes indeed. Though only a relatively small movement, a group claiming the name, Black Christian Nationalism (BCN), emerged out of the Church of the Black Madonna in Detroit. “Jesus, born of a Black Madonna, makes Christianity a Black man’s religion relevant to the Black man’s struggle for liberation in today’s world,” writes a self-identified BCNer (McIntosh, 2021, pp. 12-13). As I mentioned in an earlier post, this brand of BCN is not likely to identify with White CN. America should have effected equality and liberty. But it failed. In an aspirational vision, BCN anticipates a future America where racial equality and liberty obtain.
What about African American Christians in general? Might they be sympathetic to CN ideas and ideals, even if they are not themselves card-carrying CNers? Yes indeed, Ansley Quiros reports. Quiros draws on the 2024 PRRI American Values Atlas. PRRI tells us that Black Americans are more likely to hold Christian nationalist beliefs, at 34%, than other groups of Americans (including 30% of white Americans, 28% of both multiracial and Hispanic Americans, and 21% of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders). To what does BCN aspire? “The call for a more inclusive democracy that fought for racial and economic justice was rooted in Black theology and demanded a more active role for government to assert those goals,” concludes Quiros.
The significance of a large group of BCN sympathizers suggests strongly that White CN is not the way anti-CNers describe it. Perhaps Anti-CNers hide behind a smokescreen. Beyond the smoke screen, I suggest, is the actual target of liberal and progressive ire, namely, white evangelical Christianity.
White Evangelicals are the real nemesis
I have contended for a few years now that liberal and progressive Christians should tell us transparently whom they are actually targeting, namely, white evangelicals. Anti-CNers should stop wasting their time excoriating the minnow that is CN. Rather, the menacing selachian is actually the three quarters of white evangelicals who voted with the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. And MAGA evangelicals continue to support the president despite the gargantus display of cockeyed incompetence and miserly malignity. “We’re living in a moment now where truth, decency, and courage are being drowned out by propaganda, apathy, and unchecked criminality,” is the way Michael Cohen describes our political storm.
Again, the thundering threat does not come from CN. It comes from the White House. According to Anne Applebaum writing in the Atlantic, America is being turned into an autocracy and keptocracy.
We are living through a revolutionary change, a broad shift away from the transparency and accountability mandated by most modern democracies, and toward the opaque habits and corrupt practices of the autocratic world. For the past decade, American government and business alike have slowly begun to adopt the kleptocratic model pioneered by countries such as Russia and China, where the rulers’ conflicts of interest are simply part of the fabric of the system.
How does the public feel about corruption at the highest level? Critically! According to Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the majority of Americans agree that the current US president is “A Dangerous Dictator Whose Power Should be Limited.” But white evangelical Christians do not belong to this majority. White evangelicals have acquiesced to crime and cruelty. [For PRRI poll details, click here.]
Bob Smietana at RNS reports how nearly three-quarters (72%) of evangelicals indicated they approve of the new president’s job performance as well as his actions on DEI programs (75%) and cuts to federal agencies (75%). About two-thirds (67%) approve of his tariff policies. Herein lies the confusion for Christian progressives to contend with.
Here is my main point: what is terrorizing the country is the White House, not CN. White House terror is exacerbated because it is baptized by three out of four of our evangelical neighbors. If anti-Christian Nationalists wish to be good stewards of our time and effort, then target the White House with resistance and try to persuade our evangelical neighbors to join us in the resistance.
The cultural anxiety of MAGA evangelicals
Here is another important point I wish to stress: make certain that this indictment applies only to some white evangelicals, not all. Certainly not Sojourner’s Jim Wallis or Amanda Tyler at Christians Against Christian Nationalism let alone Baylor systematic theologian, Roger E. Olson. I reported previously how Olson tries to get us to understand that evangelical support for MAGA grows out of cultural anxieties.
…anxieties created among evangelicals, especially white American evangelicals, a very strong “us versus them” mentality that persists. “They” are foreigners who might change American culture (“more of them, less of us”) for the worse and Americans who embrace internationalism, multiculturalism, and who lean into anything that threatens evangelicalism’s perceived status as America’s baseline religion.
Note how in our “We Belong…” series that Larry Ball and Brenda Denzler exhibit and describe the very characteristics Olson adumbrates.
Actually, it’s more complicated
Actually, it’s more complicated. “Evangelicals have more often been foot soldiers than generals in the march toward government takeover—and destruction,” writes Katherine Kelaidis in the April 2025 issue of Sojourners.
Kelaidis, a research associate of Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge UK, traces the movement of exvangelicals, a term coined by Blake Chastain as a Twitter hashtag in 2016. Many exvangelicals are millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Generation Z (1997 to 2012) who egressed evangelicalism and ingressed Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The result is a mixture of simplistic Americanist evangelical spirituality stirred into a complexly layered and nuanced classical tradition. The result? A minority within Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy have invented their own idiosyncratic brands of Christian politics.
Conclusion
Let’s get it straight. The current political storm is due to a hurricane in the White House, not Christian Nationalism. We can watch our confused evangelical neighbors swirling within the debris. What is getting battered and broken are cultural ideals such as justice, compassion, and the rule of law.
Within the chaos of wind and flood, the OPA theologians have also issued a weather report that an idolatrous tyranny has been spotted coming our direction. Stuart Delony, writing a Progressive Christian column at Patheos, provides an emergency alert.
Let’s just say the quiet part out loud: nationalism and Christianity are not friends. They aren’t teammates. They’re not holding hands on a unity walk. They are fundamentally opposed forces—serving two very different masters.
The temptation to serve a master Führer who appears to be the powerful head of state arises out of anxiety [Fritz Lampe called it “fear”]. Within the cyclone, anxiety and fear grip the psyche of the nation.
So, I ask the OPA authors of “We Belong…” to pause for a moment. What might be our pastoral responsibility to such anxiety within the white evangelical camp? Anxiety — for those in the heritage of Reinhold Niebuhr — we know is the garden within which sin and violence grow. Could we head off sin before it rears its ugly head?
Well, that’s too late. It’s already ugly. It’s also cruel and destructive. Even so, simply firing imperious arrows at a CN simulacrum misses the target. Is it too late for pastoral listening to that segment of America’s population already on the brink of mob violence?
References
Butler, A. (2021). White Evangelical Racism. Chapel Hill NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
McIntosh, S. (2021). Memoirs of a Black Christian Nationalist: Seeds of Liberation. New York: Merill Publishing.