There’s a better way. It involves loving America without worshiping it, serving Christ without confusing his kingdom with any nation-state, and building for the long term rather than grasping for power in the moment. It’s less seductive than the Christian Nationalist alternative. But it has the significant advantage of being true, sustainable, and genuinely Christian.

In 1921, an Egyptologist named Margaret Murray accidentally invented a religion.

Murray wrote a book and an Encyclopaedia Britannica entry that claimed the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries had targeted real witches, a surviving pre-Christian fertility cult who worshiped a horned god. Historians who actually studied the trials thoroughly debunked the theory.

Yet people who believed Murray’s invented history started acting as if this spiritual movement was real. The British occultist Gerald Gardner even claimed he was initiated into just such an ancient coven. What he actually did was build a new religion from Freemasonry, ceremonial magic, and Murray’s fabrications. He called it witchcraft. We call it Wicca.

As sociologist Gabriel Rossman explains in a recent review, Murray’s theory became “performative”: It wasn’t true when she wrote it, but people who believed it made it true by acting as if it were.

We see something similar happening today with Christian Nationalism.

Inventing a Christian Nation

Just as Gardner drew on Murray’s debunked scholarship to create Wicca, many Christian Nationalists draw on equally dubious historical claims to construct their vision of America’s past. The most prominent example is David Barton, whose work has been so thoroughly discredited that his Christian publisher, Thomas Nelson, withdrew his book The Jefferson Lies in 2012 after historians—including conservative evangelical historians—documented its errors.

Barton’s narrative is that the founders were devout Christians who intended America to be an explicitly Christian nation, and that we’ve simply fallen away from their vision. If we can return to that original design, we can restore Christian America.

The problem, of course, is that version of America never existed. The key founders’ actual beliefs were often far from orthodox Christianity. Jefferson famously produced his own Bible by cutting out all the miracles. Franklin, in his autobiography, admitted that while he believed in God, he “seldom attended any public worship.” Washington, despite his public religiosity, conspicuously avoided taking Communion and never explicitly affirmed Christ’s divinity.

This isn’t to say America was secular in the modern sense. The culture was thoroughly Protestant up until the late 1960s. Christianity shaped the assumptions, informed the moral reasoning, and provided the language used to talk about civic life. As Kevin DeYoung helpfully distinguishes: America was “demonstrably Christian” without being “officially Christian.” Naturally, we should prefer a nation where genuine gospel-centered Christianity is influential and allowed to flourish freely. But that isn’t the same as a nation where the state enforces Christianity.

Like the neo-pagans who adopted Murray’s imagined past as their own, many Christian Nationalists are now trying to “restore” an America that exists primarily in their imagination. And in so doing, they’re creating something genuinely new that smuggles in much that’s harmful about nationalism while discarding what makes Christianity beautiful.

Strange Birth of a Label

It might be difficult for younger people to grasp, but until roughly 2013, virtually no one in America self-identified as a “Christian Nationalist.” The term existed primarily as an academic category and was often used (and still is used) as a pejorative by sociologists and critics.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the Greatest Generation (those who were born from 1901 to 1927 and fought in the world wars) had to die off before the label could be adopted. The generation of Americans who’d fought against actual nationalist movements would have been as discouraged to hear their children and grandchildren calling themselves “nationalists” as they’d be to hear they’d become “fascists.”

As DeYoung notes, until recently, “no one was actually arguing for something called Christian Nationalism.” Whatever one might have called the constellation of beliefs about Christianity and American politics, it wasn’t that. The label was adopted from critics and then embraced, like wearing an insult as a badge of honor. It’s similar to how many people, around the same time, embraced the related designation of “socialist.”

The reason the label matters is that “nationalism” isn’t a neutral term. It refers to a specific political ideology that emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries, shaped by Marxism and ethnic and racial conflicts. Nationalism requires a story of “Us” and “Not-Us.” The two most common framings are the Marxist “oppressor and oppressed” model (with nationalists seeing themselves as the oppressed) and the Nazi Carl Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” distinction. In these views, a political community exists only insofar as it can distinguish its friends/oppressed (us) from its enemies/oppressors (them).

One of the most significant problems with nationalism is that it requires subsuming other loyalties (such as family, church, and local communities) to allegiance to the nation. As political theorist David Koyzis has documented extensively, nationalism in this technical sense makes the nation an object of ultimate loyalty. The nation becomes a functional idol that demands sacrifice and devotion.

When Christians casually adopt the “nationalist” label without understanding its ideological content, they’re signing up for a package deal they may not realize they’re buying.

Why Nationalism Contradicts Christianity

The fundamental problem with nationalism—in its precise ideological sense—is that it divides humanity along lines the gospel erases. The apostle Paul declared that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Gal. 3:28). The church is explicitly transnational and multiethnic, drawn from “every nation, tribe, people and language” (Rev. 7:9, NIV).

Read More