Christian Nationalism Is a Spectrum. Here's Why That Matters.

From "God Bless America" sentimentalism to Christian supremacy — and why conflating them is a mistake

[This is the first of what I anticipate will be several posts about how to think about the landscape of and the tensions and fissures within what is generically called “Christian nationalism.” These are themes and ideas that I’ve been talking about in speaking engagements and in interviews with reporters over the past few months, but I haven’t had time to write about them. That was mostly because I was finishing my book – Defying Tyrants, coming October 2026, available for pre-order now!]

We hear talk all around us about Christian nationalism. Some have attempted to label James Talarico as a “liberal” Christian nationalist; other Christians on the right have embraced the label Christian nationalist, arguing there’s nothing wrong with that title; still others have recently suggested that we stop using the term altogether, because it’s causing confusion. Since the publication of Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead’s book Taking America Back for God in 2020, this phrase has been caught like a bone sideways in the nation’s throat.

I must confess, as someone who did a PhD in theology, comparative religion, and extremist movements, I find this whole debate somewhat baffling and disturbingly United States-centric. Religious nationalism is a well-documented and widely studied phenomenon, across many religious traditions, nationalities, and circumstances. To call someone a Christian nationalist isn’t a pejorative: it’s an analytical description.

As nations morph and shift in culture and character, religious majorities often react negatively. And religions don’t stand still either: they are dynamic, perpetually morphing and shifting. So basically every nation in the world has had to grapple politically with the way that their––we have to admit, often haphazard––modern boundaries contain some number of people of various religious identities. Usually there’s a clear religious majority, and inevitably, no matter how secular the state, religious majorities assert some impact on the culture and the politics.

Religious nationalisms, to offer a simple definition, are the organized efforts by religious actors to exert influence over the government and sacralize the state through enacting their agenda. It’s no more pejorative to call some American Christians “Christian nationalists” than it is to call Indian Hindutva activists “Hindu nationalists” or pro-Erdoğan Turkish Islamists “Islamic nationalists.” And I find that many of the arguments against this terminology smack of an American exceptionalism mindset.

What also gets left out of this manic too-American debate about the phrase Christian nationalism and its applicability is that Christian nationalism is not one monolithic thing. Christian nationalism isn’t a movement; it’s a habit of mind. It’s not a harmonized narrative about American history like what you’ll sometimes find in textbook definitions of the term; it’s a cacophony of different theologies, different appropriated patriotisms, different regional and theological dialects.

I would argue that the best way to broadly conceptualize American Christian nationalism is to think of it as a spectrum: there are mild forms, which are mostly benign, and there are more extreme forms that are quite dangerous. We see this in basically every survey that’s been done on the subject. Whitehead and Perry distinguish between Christian nationalist “Ambassadors” (roughly 20% of the country) who are somewhat interested in sanctifying the nation and Christian nationalist “Adherents” (11%), true believers who are strongly committed to the project. The Public Religion Research Institute has used a similar delineation, except they adopted the more helpful word “Sympathizers” (21% of the country vs. 11% “Adherents”) instead of Whitehead and Perry’s “Ambassadors.”

On the softer, gentler “Sympathizer” side of the Christian nationalism spectrum is what I like to call the “God Bless America” Christian nationalists. They like a little divine blessing seasoning on their patriotism; it feels right to them––like praying before a Thanksgiving meal. They like having an American flag in their church sanctuary. They appreciate that the Pledge of Allegiance says “one nation under God.” They’re proud that our money says “In God We Trust.” If you ask them in a survey, “Should the United States be a Christian nation?”, 45% of the country is going to say Yes. But when you keep asking follow-up questions you discover that the majority of these people just mean something like: America should be moral or we like that our leaders pray. It’s not exactly an active agenda.

I’ll be honest with you: this Christian nationalism-lite stuff doesn’t really concern me that much. As a Christian myself, it’s not my cup of tea––I’d rather not sacralize the state in any way. I also fear that “God Bless America” masks a certain entitlement. I want God to bless humanity, bless the world, to shed love abroad in all our hearts as in Romans 5:5. Patriotism is all fine and good, but I don’t want it altering my understanding of the character of God one iota.

But this form of God Bless America Christian nationalism doesn’t keep me up at night. Most people who hold this mild style of Christian nationalism still try to love their neighbors, including the migrant family next door, because they’re neighbors.

God Bless America Christian nationalism is mostly sentiment and civil religion and saccharine patriotism. If you want to wear a t-shirt that says “God and Country” or “God Bless the USA,” more power to you. It’s still a free country. For now. But it won’t be if the people we talk about next get their way.

It’s the other side of that spectrum that I worry about: what the sociologists call the Adherents. Indeed, knowing this world as I do, I think “Adherents” sounds much too tame. That’s the segment of society that I track and I study in my research. We could meaningfully think of this as the world of Christian extremism: where sentiment becomes anti-democratic Christian nationalist politics, activism, and even violence. It’s hard to get firm numbers on it, but I’d estimate that it’s roughly 10-15% of the US population and growing rapidly.

Unlike the soft-touch God Bless America kind of Christian nationalism, these hardline Christian extremists do not have an idle attachment to patriotic feelings. They are part of what is sometimes talked about as the “far right,” that segment of the right wing of American politics that has functionally given up on democracy and wants to get rid of things like free speech and the rule of law. This segment of the population is dead set on truly Christianizing the nation by hook or by crook. These people are ideologues—driven to refashion our beloved, complicated, pluralistic America into their preferred Christian authoritarian state.

I know that might sound a little unhinged, but I am dead serious. Go listen to my podcast “Charismatic Revival Fury” or read my book The Violent Take It by Force. There I really try to bring listeners/readers inside the theology of one movement of these Christian extremists to truly understand its leaders’ ambition for Christian dominion over the whole world. It’s a network called the New Apostolic Reformation.

Ironically, much of what separates the God Bless America Christian nationalists from the hardline Christian extremist adherents is theology: the extremists’ Christian nationalism is more theological. For the God Bless America crowd, their attachment to the idea of a Christian America is mostly sentimental and self-congratulatory. For the Christian extremists, their commitment to the cause of Christianizing the nation is spurred by and fueled by a theological vision. Sometimes this theological vision is particularly about America, and it’s wrapped in the national symbols. Sometimes this theological vision is more transnational: a dream of global colonization for Jesus.

These theologies of the Christian extremists, the hardline adherents to Christian nationalism, are what I call theologies (ideologies) of Christian supremacy. Christian supremacy is the idea that Christians are better than other people and are therefore entitled to power over them. It has various currents and strands and species. Christian supremacy is the theological fuel that drives the Christian nationalist activism to take over society: it tells Christians that they are entitled to coercive power over their neighbors, even though Jesus taught us the opposite. That’s what my new book, Defying Tyrants is about: How do we Christians who want to remain faithful to the way of Jesus refute these terrible theologies of Christian supremacy?

But for now, I want to close by observing something: we often use the term radicalization in conjunction with Islam and Muslims. Radicalization can happen within any religious tradition. Extremism is prevalent across a whole range of religions and ideologies. I think when we speak of radicalization in regards to American Christianity, what we’re actually talking about is people moving along the spectrum from these garden-variety, generically patriotic styles of Christian nationalism into embracing hardline Christian extremism and Christian supremacy.

I’ll end with the scary part—the real reason I don’t sleep well at night. I try to keep track of the foremost leaders in Christian extremism and Christian supremacy in America: that’s what I monitor and research. Radicalization within the American Christian community is occurring at emergency rates right now. The MAGA movement has inflamed a whole host of Christian supremacist theologies, which are actively drawing millions of Christians deeper into the bleak ideological movements of Christian extremism.

In fact, there are today thousands of Christian supremacist activists who are presently pushing on open doors with Christian politicians to Christianize their state or locality. Today there are thousands of Christian supremacist ideologues becoming local and state politicians or who are already elected to our congress or Senate. They have been appointed to Trump’s cabinet and peppered throughout every agency of the second Trump administration. They are daily and monthly making progress on their efforts to dismantle American democratic safeguards.

That’s what I want to cover in my next post: the three major American brands of Christian supremacy and the tensions among them. Stay tuned.