What the Heck is a Christian Nationalist?!

The question used to feel abstract. It doesn’t anymore.

Senior government leaders are praying with military generals before briefings. A small group of church networks are shaping the convictions of cabinet-level officials. The language of divine mandate, anointing, and spiritual warfare now appears frequently in communications from leaders. 

Indeed, Christian nationalism is no longer a fringe phenomenon being studied by academics. It has a seat at the table and in some rooms, it’s running the meeting.

So when David French sat down with Curtis Chang on the Good Faith Podcast to answer the question what the heck is a Christian nationalist, they weren’t doing theological archaeology. Rather, they were trying to name something that is actively reshaping American Christianity, American politics, and American public life right now, in real time.

Here’s what they found: the hardest thing about Christian nationalism isn’t identifying it. It’s that it resists clean definition precisely because it is, at its core, a feeling before it is a theology.

Historian Thomas Kidd, whose work French draws on extensively, puts it plainly: Christian nationalism is more of a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance. Consider a yard sign that reads “Make Faith Great Again — Trump 2020.” No theology there. No argument. Just a deep gut-level sense that faith and flag belong together, that something is under threat, and that power is the answer.

That gut-level quality is exactly what makes it so difficult to address … and so important to name.

Perhaps the most useful shorthand for this phenomena: us versus them. “Them” is out to get us. And “us” must get power. As a result, the movement’s engine is not doctrine but grievance; not systematic theology but a spiritualized sense of siege.

And the siege is, in large part, about history. French traces the fury over certain history curricula, the allergic reaction to reckoning with Jim Crow, the contempt for any honest accounting of America’s failures, back to something deeper than politics. When you have spiritualized the American story — when you’ve woven it into your identity as a people uniquely chosen by God — an honest accounting of the nation’s failures doesn’t feel like a history lesson. It feels like an assault on your soul. This is why those arguments get so hot, so fast. You’re not just challenging someone’s patriotism: you are threatening their theology.

The more theologically developed strand of the movement goes further still. Seven-mountain dominionism — the conviction that Christians are called to seize control over government, media, education, entertainment, and every other sphere of cultural influence — provides the ideological scaffolding for what the visceral version only feels. This is not mainstream Southern Baptist theology but it is a lived religious reality for a significant and growing number of Americans and it has found its way into the highest levels of government.

What Christian nationalism does theologically, Chang argues, is invert the deepest claim of the gospel: that in Christ, the dividing walls between us and them have been demolished. The original and most durable contribution Christianity made to the American founding was a universal “us”, a people made in the image of God and endowed with inalienable dignity. Christian nationalism trades that inheritance for a tribal one, draws the circle of us ever tighter, and arms it.

This matters not just civically but spiritually because a church that has organized itself around threat, grievance, and the pursuit of power is a church that has quietly swapped its mission. You cannot, as Tim Alberta’s once told us, evangelize those you demonize. And a movement built on the logic of us versus them is, by design, always in the process of producing new thems.

C.S. Lewis, writing in The Four Loves, identified a love of home as one of the most natural and good of human affections but he also identified the point at which it curdles: when love of home requires the home to be greatest, when it cannot survive honest reckoning with its own failures, and when it hardens into the conviction that my nation holds a unique divine glory that your nation simply does not.

The question Christian nationalism forces on the church, therefore, is not whether to love your country. It’s whether you can love it the way you love a family member (with clear eyes, without needing it to be perfect, without needing it to be supreme) and still call that love real.

The answer the gospel offers is a resounding yes. But it requires something Christian nationalism, by its very nature, cannot provide: the willingness to sit with the whole story.

Intrigued? 

Here are three questions to help you think deeply and reflect wisely on our recent conversation with David French:

1. When you encounter the phrase “Christian nationalist,” is your first instinct to distance yourself from it or to examine whether any of its assumptions have quietly shaped how you think about faith and country?
2. What about Christian Nationalism intrigues you? Where do you find yourself nodding along? Conversely, what elements of the ideology stir something more negative in you? How do you reconcile these two feelings?
3. David French describes Christian nationalism as built on us versus them. Where in your own community do you recognize this logic at work?
4. C.S. Lewis argues that real love of home produces understanding and even affection for those who love their homes. What would it cost you, practically and socially, to insist on a universal us, made in the image of God, and is that a cost the gospel asks you to pay?

Listen to the episode here.