Let me start this episode with a definition, because the phrase Christian nationalism is being used — on all sides — in ways that make the conversation harder than it needs to be.

Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, has offered what I think is the cleanest working definition. Christian nationalism is “the belief that America is defined by Christianity and that the government should keep it that way.”

What makes this definition useful is what it implies about the nature of the claim. It is not a claim about the private religious convictions of American citizens. It is a claim about the proper relationship between government and religion. It is a claim that government should use its power to maintain a particular religious identity for the nation as a whole, regardless of the religious diversity of its actual citizens.

This is a claim about power. It is dressed in the language of faith. But its content is political. Who gets to define the nation’s identity, and who gets excluded from full membership in it.

Tyler is careful about the language. “The Christian in Christian nationalism,” she says, “is more about identity than religion, and carries with it assumptions about nativism, white supremacy, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and militarism.” That distinction is essential. Christian nationalism is not a religious movement that has gotten mixed up in politics. It is a political movement that uses Christian identity as its vehicle. Understanding this is the precondition for confronting it without being accused of bigotry against Christians — many of whom, in fact, are some of its most clear-eyed critics.

That distinction matters because what I am writing against is not the Christian faith of my neighbors. The UCC congregations that affirm LGBTQ families. The Black churches that have been the spine of every freedom struggle in this country. The Catholic nuns who run homeless shelters. The Jewish synagogues that fight for immigrant rights. These are not the target. They are, in many cases, partners in the coalition I am trying to describe. My argument is with a specific political movement that has clothed itself in Christian language, and whose actual agenda is the reorganization of American democracy around the certainties of one tribe.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in her book *Jesus and John Wayne*, has done the work of tracing how we got here. She documents how decades of evangelical cultural production — the books, the music, the conferences, the parenting advice, the models of masculinity — worked to construct a version of Christianity centered on power, dominance, and the subordination of women that bears little resemblance to the Sermon on the Mount. The Jesus that emerged from this process was, as Du Mez describes, a gun-slinging, kick-ass Christ. Less Prince of Peace than warrior king. As Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House, has put it from a pulpit: “We serve the Lion of Judah, not some namby-pamby little king.” That is the iconography. That is the theology.

Katherine Stewart, in *The Power Worshippers*, provides the organizational anatomy of the movement. A worldwide network of evangelical and like-minded religious organizations, funded by a dark web of extraordinarily wealthy conservative families, operating through hundreds of think tanks, legal organizations, lobbying groups, and media operations. This network has been working for decades to place its people in positions of power at every level of American government. Not as a byproduct of political engagement, but as the explicit, documented goal. Stewart calls it “a political operation masquerading as a religious organization.”

More than half of Republicans now openly identify as Christian nationalists. The movement includes card-carrying white nationalists, but it extends well beyond them. Most of its members are, in their daily lives, perfectly ordinary people. Churchgoing. Family-oriented. Genuinely motivated by the desire to live according to their faith. What the movement offers them is what the fear-of-uncertainty framework predicts they would most need. A clear and absolute certainty about who they are, who belongs to their community, and what the world ought to look like. The anxiety of living in a rapidly changing, demographically transforming, economically precarious America is real. The certainty on offer is potent.

Donald Trump is, in this context, not an aberration. He is a perfect fit. Trump’s genius — and it is a form of genius, however malign — is his complete indifference to the truth, combined with his utter mastery of emotional certainty. His followers do not love him because they believe every claim he makes. Many of them know perfectly well that he lies constantly. They love him because in a world of disorienting ambiguity, he speaks with absolute conviction. His certainty is a product. And his base buys it because they need it. Because the alternative — accepting the complexity of a pluralistic, changing world — is genuinely frightening to them.

This is not moral condescension. The fear is real. The question is whether the false certainty Trump offers actually makes anything better. Or whether it simply redirects the anxiety outward — onto immigrants, transgender people, Black Americans, scientists, anyone who can be cast as the source of the problem. The historical record on that question is clear. Manufactured certainty about the source of social anxiety has never resolved the anxiety. It has only provided license for violence.

I see Trump at a rally and I think — he is not actually the problem. He is a symptom. The problem is the gap. The enormous, exhausting gap between the world as it is — complex, uncertain, demanding — and the world as we wish it were — simple, certain, easy. He found that gap. He climbed into it. He built his entire political career inside it. The tragedy is not Trump. The tragedy is the size of the gap. We have, as a society, done such a poor job of making uncertainty livable that a significant portion of the electorate is willing to pay almost any price for someone who will take it away. Even a price that includes the people the false certainty scapegoats.

Project 2025, the thousand-page Heritage Foundation transition plan, represents the most explicit roadmap yet published for what a fully Christian nationalist American government would look like. It proposes replacing fifty thousand career civil servants with political loyalists. Removing independence from the Department of Justice. Eliminating the Department of Education. Withdrawing from international climate agreements. Rolling back civil rights protections for LGBTQ Americans. Banning gender-affirming care at the federal level. And effectively weaponizing the executive branch against the organizations that support democratic pluralism.

Kevin Roberts, the Heritage president, wrote in the foreword: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” That is not the language of democratic governance. That is the language of religious nationalism. And the condition for bloodlessness is placed on the people being revolutionized against, not on the people doing the revolutionizing. That is the grammar of a coup.

There is a 2024 sermon Trump gave at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville that I want you to hear, because it should ring familiar to anyone who has studied the civil rights era. Trump said, “Every communist regime throughout history has tried to stamp out the churches, just like every fascist regime has tried to co-opt them and control them. And in America, the radical left is trying to do both. They want to tear down crosses where they can and cover them up with social justice flags. But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.”

This is not a new argument. It is the precise argument that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover deployed against Martin Luther King Jr. The conflation of social justice with communism, used to discredit, neutralize, and ultimately destroy the leaders of movements that threatened the existing order. After King’s assassination, Coretta Scott King devoted the rest of her life to insisting on the connection Hoover had tried to destroy. The connection between the social gospel and full human equality. Including, explicitly, equality for the LGBTQ community. She stood alongside John Lewis, Bayard Rustin, Julian Bond at the Atlanta Pride Festival and the Lambda Legal Defense Fund. Because she understood what her husband understood. The principle does not yield at the edge of any group’s comfort.

It is telling that today’s conservative leaders have reached for the same instrument. The man at the pulpit telling a convention crowd that liberals want to tear down the cross is using the same playbook against transgender children, climate scientists, and voting rights advocates that Hoover used against King. The target changes with each generation. The weapon does not.

The consequences of this rhetoric are not rhetorical. Violence against transgender and Black communities rises as white Christian nationalist language intensifies. Transgender individuals — particularly Black and Native American trans women — experience violence at rates four times that of the cisgender population. We have seen what happens. The white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. The mass murder targeting Black shoppers in Buffalo. The lynching of Rasheem Carter in Mississippi. The coordinated bomb-threat campaign against Boston Children’s Hospital’s gender-affirming care program.

And the radicalization is being directed at the next generation. Turning Point USA, founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, has devolved from a conventional conservative campus organizing effort into something that more closely resembles a white Christian nationalist youth party. After the murder of George Floyd, Kirk publicly condemned Floyd as a “scumbag” who did not deserve the attention being paid to his death. He has openly attacked Dr. King, falsely accusing the civil rights leader of promoting violence and endorsing the conspiracy theory that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a covert attempt by Black Americans to subvert the Constitution. Jack Posobiec, a Turning Point activist and conservative commentator, appeared at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference and said, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.” He received applause.

These are not fringe actors. They are the mainstream of a movement that controls one of the two major political parties in the United States.

And the institutions that claim the highest religious authority on these questions — the institutions that tell transgender children they are disordered, that tell women their bodies are not their own — have, repeatedly, demonstrated that they are incapable of holding themselves accountable to the most basic moral standard. The protection of the vulnerable from the powerful. The Catholic abuse crisis, exhaustively documented by the Boston Globe Spotlight team. The 2022 Guidepost Solutions report on the Southern Baptist Convention, documenting hundreds of leaders and members guilty or accused of abuse over two decades. The pattern is not coincidental. It is structural. When a theology grants leaders the authority of God, you have built an institution in which accountability has no purchase.

This is what manufactured certainty does. It makes institutions immune to the evidence of their own failure. And it is precisely why faith cannot be fact in governance. Not because the people of faith are bad. Because the institutions that claim to speak for God have shown us, time and again, what happens when no one can tell them they are wrong.

Let me end on a note about strategy, because the temptation in this fight is to treat everyone who votes for a Christian nationalist candidate as a villain. That is analytically lazy and strategically ruinous. The committed ideologue who has examined the evidence and rejected it is a different conversation than the uncertain voter who has not yet had access to honest information. Treating them as the same is counterproductive.

There is research, by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, on a practice called deep canvassing. Single, thoughtful, non-judgmental conversations with voters about transgender rights — conversations in which the canvasser invites the voter to share their own story and listens without arguing — produce durable shifts in attitudes that persist for months. The effect size is larger than almost any intervention in political science literature. It works because it doesn’t try to beat the certainty. It invites the voter into a different relationship with the question.

Adam Grant has written about what he calls confident humility. The combination of firm commitment to one’s values with genuine openness to being wrong about one’s analysis. That combination, Grant argues, is what distinguishes effective leaders from charismatic con men. It is also what distinguishes the religious tradition at its best from the religious tradition at its worst. Confident humility is what the prophets were doing. Confident certainty is what the priests supporting the king were doing. There has always been a difference. The current movement has forgotten it.

The certainty gap is their strength. Confident humility is ours. Let’s use it.

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