Chapter 7: Christian Nationalism — Power in the Clothes of Piety

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Let me start with a definition, because “Christian nationalism” gets used in ways that make this conversation harder than it needs to be. Amanda Tyler, of the Baptist Joint Committee, offers the cleanest one: the belief that America is defined by Christianity and that the government should keep it that way. That is a claim about power. It is dressed in the language of faith, but its content is political—who gets to define the nation, and who gets excluded from full membership in it.

This episode is careful about the distinction, because what I’m writing against is not the faith of my neighbors. The affirming congregations, the Black churches that have been the spine of every freedom struggle, the synagogues organizing for immigrants—those are partners, not targets. Drawing on Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne and Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers, I show how a warrior Christ was constructed, and how a well-funded network has worked for decades to place its people in power.

I make the case that Donald Trump is not an aberration in this movement but a perfect fit—a man whose product is emotional certainty, sold to people genuinely frightened by a complex, changing world. The real problem isn’t Trump. It’s the gap between the world as it is and the world as we wish it were. He found that gap and built a career inside it.

I walk through Project 2025, the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, a 2024 sermon that recycles the exact argument J. Edgar Hoover used against Dr. King, and the institutional abuse scandals that show what happens when no one can tell an institution it is wrong. I close on strategy—deep canvassing, and what Adam Grant calls confident humility. Their certainty gap is their strength. Confident humility is ours.