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.

In the fall of 2023, Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, 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.

Tyler speaks from the Baptist tradition, and that matters. The Baptists were among the most vigorous advocates for the separation of church and state in colonial America, precisely because they had experienced what state churches do to dissenting faith.

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. And it did not come from a straightforward reading of the New Testament.

The Jesus of the Gospels consistently prioritizes the vulnerable over the powerful and refuses the role of political messiah even when it is pressed on him. The warrior Christ is a construction.

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.

My son is among those people. He is seventeen, and he knows it with a clarity that is, to me, both admirable and devastating.

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. Rolling back civil rights protections for LGBTQ Americans. Banning gender-affirming care at the federal level.

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. 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.

And we have already seen what this looks like when it takes institutional form. In Trump’s first administration, the Department of Health and Human Services created something called the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, run by an appointee named Roger Severino. Its stated purpose was to protect medical providers who object, on religious grounds, to providing certain procedures. In practice, it functioned as an instrument for rescinding federal protections for transgender patients.

Severino’s attacks on gender-affirming care espoused claims that directly contradict the recommendations of every major medical organization in the country. It is the same strategy of manufactured pseudoscience that segregationists once used to argue for the biological inferiority of Black Americans — dressed in the language of conscience rather than the language of science.

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, and 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.

This is the strategy Paul Weyrich named at the founding of the Moral Majority: mobilize white evangelical voters with the language of religious freedom to defend a racial and social hierarchy. The organizational sophistication increases. The underlying certainty — about who belongs, who threatens, and who can be sacrificed to hold the line — does not change.

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. Kirk publicly condemned George Floyd as a “scumbag” and attacked Dr. King as a promoter of violence — not a fringe position within the organization but its line.

At the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference, the Turning Point activist Jack Posobiec told the crowd: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely.” 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.

The theological arm of this radicalization operates through churches like Mercy Culture, one of the fastest-growing congregations in the country, whose explicit mission is to build what its leaders call the Christian American Kingdom — a world, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Stephanie McCrummen’s description, of “two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education,” and laws curtailing LGBTQ rights. Congregants are taught that they are engaged in spiritual warfare against demonic forces — forces represented, in practice, by liberals, scientists, and LGBTQ people. This is not a metaphor to them. And it is a framing that makes ordinary democratic disagreement feel like surrender to evil.

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.

When Jason Berry of the National Catholic Reporter first published his investigation into the systemic sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church, he expected outrage that would end the atrocities. Instead, it died quietly, and the abuse continued for another fifteen years — until the Boston Globe Spotlight team finally forced the magnitude of the crime into public consciousness. The Southern Baptist Convention followed the same pattern: a 2022 Guidepost Solutions report documented hundreds of leaders and members guilty or accused of abuse over two decades. A confidential settlement involving the long-standing SBC power broker Paul Pressler later confirmed that his misconduct had been known — and actively ignored — by the Republican lawyer Jared Woodfill. The same Woodfill who designed the anti-trans bathroom panic campaign in Houston. The pattern is not coincidental. It is structural.

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.

I want to be careful not to say that from above it. I sat in those pews for years after my own agnosticism was settled, and I did not ask the institution a single hard question until the institution came for my son. The evidence of what it had done was a matter of public record the whole time. I simply had no reason of my own to read it. That is not a defense. It is the confession of someone who looked late.

And here is what that late looking has shown me since. I have sat in rooms with teachers who are quietly furious. They have spent whole careers learning what their students need, and now they are calculating whether a mention of a gay figure in a civil rights lesson could cost them their job. Librarians are second-guessing every book they shelve. Educators and administrators are caught in the middle when it comes to advising transgender students about their identities at school. More and more, “parental rights” legislation requires them to out students to potentially unsupportive parents.

And transgender students are the ones who ultimately pay the price. No specific law has to be enforced. The threat is enough to change what feels safe to say, safe to teach, safe to be. But that teacher’s fury is not a problem to be managed. It is evidence — the evidence of a professional community being told that the doubt of people who have never set foot in their classroom outranks their expertise. And it is a resource.

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. And I’ll say plainly: this charitable reading does not come naturally to me. The anger, when it comes to people who have worked to erase my son’s right to medical care, is real. But I have come to believe, on the basis of evidence, that the strategy of treating those voters as irredeemable simply does not work.

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 the political science literature. It works because it does not 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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