Christian nationalists have received an outsized amount of attention from left-wing scholars, journalists, and activists for the last several years—most recently because Justice Alito displayed a flag at his vacation home that is sometimes associated with the ideology. Secular progressives are mistaken, however, if they view the rise of Christian nationalist voices as an indication that conservative Christians are an increasingly powerful force in American politics. Revanchist sentiments among Christians are driven by their political and cultural weakness. Calls for Christian nationalism are a sign of Christianity’s decline, not its growing strength. However, political efforts to reverse rising secularism will prove counterproductive, accelerating current trends.
Christian nationalism, broadly understood, can take many forms. Among those who offer a religious alternative to liberal democracy, we find little consensus. Catholic integralists and Protestant reconstructionists have very different visions for the country, to take two notable examples. A growing number of conservative influencers look toward historical European figures such as Francisco Franco for inspiration. Others praise leaders such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as a model culture warrior.
We do not need to critique each of these perspectives. It is sufficient to defend the American tradition of maintaining a reasonable separation between religion and electoral politics. Religion in America has flourished within a classical liberal context, in which religion and politics occupied different spheres. Conservative Christians should embrace this tradition.
Christian Nationalism as a Response to Decline
Christian nationalism does exist and has adherents. It is a problem that a sitting member of Congress declared herself a Christian nationalist, as has a US Senator. Journalist Tim Alberta’s book documenting the evangelical embrace of the MAGA mindset is also concerning. However, the notion that the United States is on the precipice of a fundamentalist theocracy is risible.
In terms of organization, the Christian Right is a shadow of its former self. In the 1990s, anyone with any political awareness could name prominent Christian Right leaders (Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, etc.). Who fills these roles today? I am furthermore persuaded by Christian writer Aaron Renn’s argument that Christianity no longer has a privileged place in American society, and traditional Christian beliefs and identities can now be a hindrance to social advancement—at least in elite circles.
Religious decline in the population is unquestionable. Disaffiliation has been occurring for decades, and it is hitting Roman Catholics and all the largest Protestant denominations. This is true for both evangelical and mainline Protestants. If present trends continue, the US will probably cease to be a majority Christian country within a few decades.
Yes, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe delighted many conservative Christians, but we should keep in mind that Dobbs did no more than return the issue to the normal democratic process. In those states where voters have weighed in on the issue, the pro-choice perspective has been consistently victorious.
The argument that America is experiencing a steep moral decline may seem intuitively correct, but it may also be historically myopic. Our current lack of virtuous political leaders seems obvious enough, but we should recall that many celebrated figures from early American history held unorthodox religious views and many private vices. Beyond political elites, however, most people take it for granted that the founding generation of the United States was intensely religious, or at least more religious than Americans today. This view may be mistaken.
Religious Liberty and Religious Vitality
In their seminal work, The Churching of America: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark suggested we need to think about religious growth and decline in a new way. There is no doubt that the founders of important colonies in British North America were driven by a powerful religious vision—especially in Puritan New England and Quaker Pennsylvania. Religious enthusiasm is hard to maintain over multiple generations, however, and British America in the 1770s was very different than it was in the 1620s and 1680s.
We unfortunately have few reliable empirical metrics to determine Americans’ religious commitments at the dawn of the American Revolution. Modern polling did not exist, and church records and other written works from the period are unreliable measures. We do know, however, how many churches existed in America at that time, as well as their seating capacity. With this knowledge, we can estimate how many Americans belonged to a church. As of 1776, it may have been as low as 17 percent—vastly lower than it is today.
This lackluster situation for American churches developed despite the overtly religious vision that inspired many colonies in British North America. Despite the best efforts of New England’s founders, Puritan theocracy proved unsustainable in the long term.
Scholars can debate exactly how committed the average American was to religion in 1776. Perhaps Finke and Stark underestimated religion in the revolutionary period. What we do know, definitively, is that the nation witnessed an explosion in religious observance in subsequent decades, and this is where their scholarship proves most helpful.
Christianity grew in America precisely because of the nation’s religious liberty. Across the country, we rejected religious monopolies, allowing a free market in religion to flourish. True believers, then and now, have sought government support for their preferred religious traditions. The reality is that Adam Smith was correct when he argued in The Wealth of Nations that state support robs clergy of their “exertion, their zeal and industry.”
After the American Revolution, the surge in church membership was largely thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Baptists and Methodists. Circuit riders embraced the hardships of the frontier, bringing religion to the unchurched. Those denominations that had once held such a high status in colonial America, such as the Congregationalists, who declined to compete for converts in this way, experienced catastrophic decline. More recently, it was a similar religious fervor, and a willingness to compete in the religious marketplace, that led to the evangelical revival in post-war America.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville made characteristically astute remarks about religion in American life, arguing that religion in the US was so strong precisely because religious leaders maintained a healthy distance from partisan politics.
The political arena is a nasty place, where animosity is the norm. Religion maintained its lofty status in the eyes of Americans across its partisan divisions throughout our history in large part because it remained comparatively aloof from the political process. Tocqueville was especially impressed by the discipline US clergy showed in refraining from political activity: “And when I came to inquire into the prevailing spirit of the clergy, I found that most of its members seemed to retire of their own accord from the exercise of power, and that they made it the pride of their profession to abstain from politics.” Tocqueville elaborated on why this was so important:
As long as a religion is sustained by those feelings, propensities, and passions which are found to occur under the same forms, at all the different periods of history, it may defy the efforts of time; or at least it can only be destroyed by another religion. But when religion clings to the interests of the world, it becomes almost as fragile a thing as the powers of earth. It is the only one of them all which can hope for immortality; but if it be connected with their ephemeral authority, it shares their fortunes, and may fall with those transient passions which supported them for a day.
One may argue that Tocqueville exaggerated the apolitical nature of American religion in the 1830s. There were major religious political divisions throughout US history, and many states continued to have religious litmus tests for officeholders far into the nineteenth century. However, there is other evidence that conservatism in religion and conservatism in politics were not always intimately connected.
Religious conservatives may lament that we can no longer take it for granted that the United States is an overwhelmingly Christian nation. To reverse these trends, the best option is to embrace the religious liberty that still exists in this country.
America’s most famous fundamentalist Christian in the early twentieth century was failed presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who saw no contradiction between his progressive politics and his religious identity and commitments. Bryan’s most acerbic critic during the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial” was the agnostic H. L. Mencken—very much a man of the right. J. Gresham Machen, one of the leading Presbyterian theologians of the 1920s, was a ferocious defender of traditional Christian doctrine and opponent of modernism in religion. He was also a committed anti-statist libertarian, and fervent believer that the church and the government should not overlap. Religion was always political, but for much of US history, the dividing lines and alliances were blurry.
A Failed Strategy
The Christian Right is a relative newcomer to the political scene, only becoming a powerful national movement in the late 1970s. In part, this was because, for many years, conservative evangelical leaders were hesitant to directly engage with partisan politics. In the 1960s, Jerry Falwell still warned preachers against becoming entangled with politics.
This hesitancy had a practical justification. As Historian Daniel K. Williams noted in his history of the Christian right, many prominent evangelists did not want to limit their audience to one side of the partisan spectrum. Televangelist Rex Humbard, for example, asked in the 1970s, “If I backed a Republican for President, what about all the Democrats in my audience?”
For Ronald Reagan, however, a critical mass of prominent evangelists dropped their pretense of partisan neutrality. Falwell’s decision to create the Moral Majority, with the assistance of “New Right” leaders such as Paul Weyrich, ushered in a new era of US partisan politics. Conservative Christians, especially evangelicals, recognized how much potential clout they had in the GOP thanks to their sheer numbers, and demanded a prominent seat at the political table.
The Christian Right’s growth unquestionably provided many benefits for the Republican Party. The rapid growth of conservative evangelicals as a political force is a testament to the organizational skills of political entrepreneurs such as Weyrich. Given the scale of Reagan’s victories in 1980 and 1984, it may not be fair to credit his success primarily to evangelical Christians, but their move to the Republican Party was an important factor. This shift, however, resulted in significant changes to the party that, from a political standpoint, were not entirely salutary. As conservative evangelical Christians became an important voting bloc in the GOP, Americans who did not share their religious commitments became alienated from the party.
The open embrace of Reagan’s Republican Party and conservative politics also led to shifts among evangelical leaders. The movement did not keep its focus on social issues, where the biblical arguments were more obvious. They increasingly made the entire conservative policy agenda their own.
This shift in evangelical thinking was displayed in Falwell’s 1980 manifesto, Listen, America. Historian D. G. Hart provided the best description of the book: “Designed to publicize and advance the Moral Majority’s program, the book began with the themes that had propelled the ascendancy of Reagan. According to Falwell, the United States faced three great crises: a weakening national defense, tax policy that enlarged government and hurt free enterprise, and a paucity of strong and virtuous statesmen.” In other words, the platform of the Christian Right became indistinguishable from the conservative movement’s policy agenda. There was always a danger the Christian Right would turn into just another fundraising operation for the Republican Party.
There is a strong secular case to be made for most of the conservative policy agenda. The empirical argument for economic liberty is strong, whatever one thinks about Christianity’s more distinctive claims. However, over the last several decades, we have been moving toward a scenario in which religious conservatism and political conservatism are viewed as an inseparable package, causing harm to both causes.
Many early Christian Right leaders were justifiably frustrated by the results of their efforts. They helped get many Republicans elected, but during Reagan’s time in office, few elements of their social agenda were implemented—Reagan was more interested in fighting the Cold War and pursuing his economic policies than implementing a traditionalist social program. Evangelist Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential run was a massive disappointment, and Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, scarcely gave the Christian Right even rhetorical nods. The Moral Majority shut down at the end of the decade. Pundits began writing the Christian Right’s obituary.
But these pronouncements proved premature. The movement enjoyed considerable success in electing its preferred candidates to office in the 1990s, in significant part due to the organizational acumen of Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition. With its renewed focus on local races, the Christian Right reached its peak of influence. Although Reagan would probably have won in 1980 without the Christian Right, the movement was unquestionably indispensable to President George W. Bush—who happened to share their views on most key issues.
Since that time, the number of lasting policy victories the Christian Right can claim is relatively scant. Prayer has not returned to public schools. The legal recognition of same-sex marriage was delayed, but it is now enshrined in law and there is little political will to reverse the Obergefell decision. As mentioned, abortion is once again determined at the state level, but the pro-life movement’s success in the legislative arena post Dobbs has been limited to extremely red states, and new abortion restrictions threaten to become a major albatross for the GOP. Although this is subjective, there is a strong case to be made that the time, treasure, and talent the Christian Right expended on Republican politics was a poor investment. Even worse, the Christian Right may have contributed to the very phenomenon they wanted to avoid: the decline of Christianity in America.
Through the last decades of the twentieth century, many observers took it for granted that the United States was immune to the secularizing trends that were taking hold throughout the Western world. Sure, decadent Europeans were abandoning Christianity, but the United States would hold fast to its religious traditions. This position is no longer tenable. Secularism in the US is clearly surging, and a clear-eyed look at the trend lines shows that it has been increasing since the early 1990s.
It took some time before scholars and the broader public noticed that religion was declining. For the first few years, it may have plausibly looked like a brief fluctuation. By the early 2000s, the trend was undeniable. The number of people who responded “none” when asked their religious identity grew every year.
Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer conducted some of the most important early work on this subject in their 2002 article, “Why Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations.” In this article, they considered multiple explanations for the phenomenon. After dismissing several plausible arguments as inconsistent with the data, they concluded the most likely explanation was that moderate and progressive Americans were abandoning Christianity because of their disgust with the Christian Right. As the Christian Right grew and became more assertive, it became associated with Christianity itself. And if being a Christian meant being a conservative Republican, then many people preferred not to be Christians. Hout and Fischer ultimately concluded:
The Christian decline appears to have political content: Organized religion linked itself to a conservative social agenda in the 1990s, and that led some political moderates and liberals who had previously identified with the religion of their youth or their spouse’s religion to declare that they have no religion. Had religion not become so politicized, these people would have gone on identifying as they had been and the percentage of Americans preferring no religion would have risen only 3 or 4 percentage points.
This study was not the final word on the subject. The data they examined was congruent with their hypothesis, but it did not conclusively demonstrate the causal relationship. Further analysis by other scholars has strengthened their argument.
Retreat from the Political Arena
Conservative Christians have many reasons to be alarmed by trends in American culture. Christian nationalism is not the answer, nor is a reinvigorated Christian Right focused primarily on electoral politics. An approach that ties the future of Christianity to a single political party—or worse, a single politician—will only further polarize American politics, and it will make religion even less appealing to a wide swath of the population.
Religious conservatives may lament that we can no longer take it for granted that the United States is an overwhelmingly Christian nation. To reverse these trends, however, the best option is to embrace the religious liberty that still exists in this country. Religious conservatives need to regain the energy of what Finke and Stark called “upstart sects”—which entails recognizing and embracing their status as just one group among many in the religious free market, pursuing “innovations in music, communication, religious education, preaching, revival, and organizational strategies.” There is no guarantee that such an approach will be successful, but it has worked in the past.
It is time for conservatives, including religious social conservatives, to rethink the connection between religion and partisanship. Whatever mutual benefit religious lobbies and the Republican Party once provided each other, the relationship may now be detrimental to both. Rather than push for Christian nationalism, which has no chance of success, it makes more long-term sense for religious leaders to retreat from aggressive partisan politics.
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