“Christian Nationalism” splashes across headlines regularly. But there is no clear definition of it. Is it just an epithet? A concept used for partisan manipulation? A real trend in socio-religious thought in America? Mark David Hall, Miles Smith IV, and Daniel K. Williams offer different definitions, consider which ideas might be lumped into the category, and debate how it relates to American pluralism, historical Protestant political ideas, and contemporary populism.

Related Links

Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism by Mark David Hall
Religion and Republic by Miles Smith IV
The Politics of the Cross by Daniel K. Williams

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello, you are listening to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m James Patterson, a contributing editor at Law & Liberty.

Today we have a panel of guests to talk about whether Christian nationalism is in the past or if the subject matter still remains relevant, as well as to discuss what exactly the ideas of Christian nationalism are and how dangerous they are, if at all.

And our first guest is assistant professor of History at Hillsdale College, Miles Smith IV, recently published, Religion and the Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War. It’s also a 2025 finalist for the Herbert J. Storing book prize.

Our second guest is Mark David Hall, professor of government at Regent University. He just published not too long ago, Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism: Why Christian Nationalism Is Not an Existential Threat to America or the Church, so he gave away his position already.

And of course, our third guest, Daniel K. Williams, visiting assistant professor at Ashland University and senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center. He’s written on the subject of the religious right. There’s God’s Own Party in 2010, The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade in 2016, and The Election of the Evangelical: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and the Presidential Contest of 1976. What’s your most recent one? The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship. 

These are people who have a very deep knowledge of this subject matter, starting with the founding through the Civil War, up to the present. With that long introduction out of the way. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Miles Smith IV:

Thanks, James.

James Patterson:

All right. I’ll start with a very basic question, but one that still seems to be difficult for people to answer. And I’ll start with Miles and then have Daniel and Mark chip in, which is what is Christian nationalist?

Miles Smith IV:

I don’t think it exists. I really don’t. I think that it’s a polemic that really has a lot more to do with partisan politics and any meaningful movement on the ground. And there’s a wonderful book about it written by one of my scholarly big brothers who I’m looking at right now, Mark Hall, who I think gives a good explanation of what it actually is. I think that if there is a big unitary idea of Christian nationalism, it doesn’t exist. I think there are people who claim the title for sure, but their views are really disparate. For example, you’ll have neo-Establishmentarian Calvinists claim the label.

At the same time you’ll have some revivalist Pentecostals who have a completely different conception of church and state from those self-same Calvinists claim the title. And so it’s a bit like one of those words that’s gotten so big is to be essentially meaningless. And so I think it’s actually a useless definer. If eight different people who have eight pretty disparate visions of politics and call themselves something, I doubt it’s a useful term. I think a better term might be religious illiberals. And my friend Jerome Copulsky has written a very good book about this, and Jerome has, I think tapped into a better way of understanding what people are seeing than the myriad numbers of breathless books about Christian nationalism.

James Patterson:

We just had Jerome as a guest with Mark Noll, so we’re on the same page here. Sorry, Daniel and Mark.

Daniel K. Williams:

And I like that book too by Jerome Copulsky, American Heretics. I think it’s well worth reading. I’ll push back a little bit against Miles’s statement. I think that I do understand that this has been used very much as a pejorative term, a term of abuse, that’s its origins. And so anytime we see a term like that, we definitely need to be suspicious of it. And it has been used more to write people out of the conversation than to try to understand their point of view, so with all those caveats, which I think Miles’s statement reflects and that I would endorse, nevertheless, I would say that if we’re going to understand what people mean by Christian nationalism, I would want to try to understand what the people writing against it have said. And I think that we could say that broadly speaking, the Christian nationalist label has been applied to any group of people who see a Christian founding of the United States and want to return to that founding.

Now, that of course encompasses a wide variety of perspectives. And as Miles pointed out correctly, I think in his own recent book, for most of the early nineteenth century before the Civil War, this was not a particularly controversial idea among most Protestants, that is most Protestants believed in church disestablishment. At the same time, they believed in a generically Protestant-based moral foundation for public virtue that should inform public life. And I think that most of what has been labeled Christian nationalism in the last 20 years is more akin to an attempt to revive something along those lines than to impose a true theocratic regime or even a Christian reconstructionist regime. And that said, the people who have openly embraced the label Christian nationalism as a protest have as Miles suggested, maybe moved beyond that early nineteenth century conception to something that is more akin to a category in Jerome Copulsky’s book of people who are rejecting the liberal order.

But originally this idea of Christian nationalism as something to be feared, originated among people who had accepted the premise of a secular pluralism. That is they believed that in order to preserve a religiously diverse nation and a strong place for nonbelievers in that nation, that one had to separate all forms of religion from the state. And when they saw what they believed as a blurring of that very strong wall of separation idea, they labeled it as Christian nationalism. Since then, I think a number of progressive Christians, I would say, especially progressive evangelicals, have also begun using the term Christian nationalism as a way to push back against a particular conservative style of evangelical politics that they disagree with on the grounds that they would say, this is idolatry. That’s a common critique saying that Christian nationalists are people who have confused the kingdom of God with the United States of America, and they are therefore guilty of exalting the flag above Jesus or making Jesus into an American conservative. All those things have been expressed.

Does the term have value? I think it definitely has had a place in public discourse over the last few years and even to a certain extent over the last 20 years, so I think it’s imperative for us to try to understand the various ways it’s been used. And if we don’t necessarily use the term ourselves all of the time, we can nevertheless try to make sense of the particular critiques and the presuppositions for which those critiques are proceeding that are expressed in this use of the term Christian nationalists to label other people.

Mark David Hall:

I’ll jump in if I may. I think it’s important to recognize that literally no one in America is using the phrase Christian nationalism until about 2006 when a steady stream of books started coming out by Michelle Goldberg, Katherine Stewart and Andrew Seidel and others. And they were describing a complete toxic mix, a mess. It’s Christians who want to take over America for Christ and favor white Christians above all others, so we want to bring back Jim Crow, we want to have religious illiberalism, we want women to be in the house and barefoot. And it’s literally that’s what book after book says, and these are mostly, I call them the polemical critics, often journalists or activists, but when we get academics involved, someone like a Whitehead and Perry define Christian nationalism as an ideology that idolizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christianian culture that includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism and on and on they go.

These are two academics that are purporting to measure this phenomenon they call Christian nationalism. And lo and behold, 5