Today, you are more likely to hear US Christians sympathetic to the ideas associated with Christian Nationalism claiming the Founding Fathers were all practicing evangelical Christians, not Enlightened deists. You will hear nostalgia for an American past marked by Judeo-Christian values. You won’t hear nuanced historical narratives like Sehat.
Much of this is diffused through culture today through the widely discredited work of pseudo-historian David Barton. Barton has been associated with right wing figures and politicians like Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck. His New York Times bestselling book on Thomas Jefferson was retracted by a Christian publisher for historical claims “not adequately supported.”
The theo-political claim that America ought to be a Christian nation today is fueled by the historical claim that it was a Christian nation. This history is complex. As are the theologies and corresponding politics which emerge from them. Though various political orders exist, how the church relates to the State is never a settled question.
In the US today, there are two main streams, two understandings of “Christian Nationalism” which are converging with great political force. I call these the covert and overt forms of Christian Nationalism.
Overt Christian Nationalism is most concentrated in the ideas and practices of the New Apostolic Reformation. This movement, though lacking institutions or hierarchal organization, is called by some of its advocates as a “Fourth House of Christendom”. It emerged from the teaching of C. Peter Wagner, who was one of the founding advocates of Church Growth techniques at Fuller Theological Seminary.
In the last stages of his career, Wagner used spiritual warfare paradigms and Pentecostal theology to both narrate the success of his church growth techniques in the past, and envision their expansion into the social and political world. Wagner’s ideas coalesced into a new expression of Dominion Theology married with the prosperity gospel. This theology fuels the Christian capture and control of what Lance Wallnau calls the “Seven Mountains of Influence”. Media, entertainment, business—these are all mountains of influence for the church to rightfully claim as it combats darkness in the world.
Covert Christian Nationalism is most concentrated today with Reformed, magisterial Protestants like Douglas Wilson and Stephen Wolfe. Both have recently published books advocating for, among other things, the construction of a Christian political and social order.
Historically, much of these ideas emerged from Christian Reconstructionist thought. What makes these ideas covert is the strategies used to realize their Christendom. And what is significant is the way disestablishment (religious liberty) is central to this strategy. Gary North, a key figure in the Religious Right best summarized covert Christian Nationalism in 1982:
“we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God. Murder, abortion, and pornography will be illegal. God’s law will be enforced. It will take time.”
Wilson, in line with the covert strategy, has created something of a moral enclave in Moscow, Idaho. It is Christendom in a microcosm, and harkens back to the Magisterial Protestantism that prefigured the modern State. The New Apostolic Reformation, through prosperity preachers like Kenneth Copeland and prophecy figures like Lance Wallnau seek Christendom in macrocosm. If covert Christian Nationalism builds moral enclaves, overt Christian Nationalism rides the waves of new media, it seeks wealth and purchases the inside access to Trump’s evangelical court.