The biggest myth about White Christian nationalism

One summer night, a former Methodist minister gazed out of a window and said he saw “a mysterious apparition in the sky.” It was a group of airborne horsemen galloping across the horizon, with a rough outline of the United States materializing behind them. His name was William J. Simmons and that vision inspired him to build a religious organization that would transform America. It was 1915, and Simmons thought that the US had abandoned its Christian heritage. Political violence was surging, traditional Christianity seemed to be under attack, and waves of olive-skinned immigrants who were not considered fully White enough by many Americans were pouring into the country from distant lands.

Simmons’ group reacted by preaching a message of “America first.” Its members joined churches, elected thousands of members to state and federal offices and led a massive march on Washington. By 1920, they grew to more than 5 million members, including one future Supreme Court justice. They played a significant role in the passage of one of America’s most explicitly racist laws, which imposed racial immigration quotas to preserve the dominance of White, Anglo-Saxon Americans. The group eventually lost power, but many Americans recognize them today by their distinctive symbols: a white robe with a pointed hood, and a burning cross.

Though the Ku Klux Klan is no longer a political force, the group’s “ideological descendants” are still shaping America. They’re called White Christian nationalists, according to historian Kelly J. Baker and other scholars. “The 1920s Klan preached an earlier version of what we now call White Christian nationalism,” says Baker, author of “Gospel According to the Klan.” “It was their understanding of what they called ‘100 percent Americanism.’ They had a racial hierarchy in which White Protestant Christians came out on top and everyone else was underneath them.

They only wanted a nation for White Christians.” Five years ago this month, many Americans heard the term “White Christian nationalism” for the first time. Commentators used it when describing the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol while carrying crosses and portraits of Jesus. Since then, White Christian nationalism has become one of the most ferociously debated topics in America. Critics describe it as an “imposter Christianity” that perpetuates a false narrative about the founding of America.

Others say some progressives have turned the term into a smear against “any kind of Christian politics that liberals find disagreeable” — a way to “bundle” evils like White supremacy with standard conservative views on family and American history. But the biggest myth about White Christian nationalism is something that some of its critics and defenders have unwittingly perpetuated. It’s the belief that this ideology is something new — just another hotly debated political issue that emerged with the rise of Trump and was amplified by the events of January 6. Christian nationalism in America, though, is as old as stories about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree.

Various mutations tend to emerge during times of crisis in American history. And one can’t really understand the threat it poses unless one understands why it’s so durable and appealing to many people. Not all Christian nationalists are Republicans — or White That appeal is not limited to conservative White people. Some non-White people subscribe to Christian nationalist teachings, such as the belief that the US should be a Christian nation. And not every Christian nationalist is a conservative or a Republican. Some are Democrats and independents. It’s an ideology that exists on a spectrum, which includes everyone from sympathizers to hardcore believers.

Most Americans don’t know that, and you can’t blame them if you look at how White Christian nationalism has been covered. Many commentators have latched on to the term “White Christian nationalism” in recent years to describe the “distinctive ideology” of Trump’s White Christian supporters. Google the term and you’ll see a flood of January 6 images of the Capitol under siege. Many historians and journalists who write about the movement — including me — often use the Capitol attacks as their primary historical reference. What’s lost in much of this commentary is how White Christian nationalism has adapted over many decades to survive with the times.

Although the KKK once despised Catholics, for example, most contemporary White Christian nationalists have abandoned that form of bigotry because it’s no longer acceptable. And, of course, not all those who embrace Christian nationalist beliefs today support the KKK. Many contemporary White Christian nationalists do not promote violence against racial minorities. At least one of their leaders denounces racism. Yet many White Christian nationalists today share the same goals for America as the second incarnation of the KKK in the early 20th century: “a homogenous, White, Protestant nation, free from the corrupting influences of political, religious, and racial diversity,” Baker says.

“There’s something about the movement that certain White Christians in America find deeply appealing. It showcases a version of America that they want to get back to. And that vision keeps popping up again and again.” One self-described Christian nationalist leader argues the reason that vision endures is because it is rooted in a historical truth. From the founding of the 13 colonies up until World War II, the population was more homogenous, and virtually all Americans assumed they lived in a Christian nation, says Douglas Wilson, a theologian and prominent pastor who has found a sympathetic audience among powerful MAGA conservatives.

“We had not had the major waves of immigration that we’ve had in the last few decades from non-Christian parts of the world, so we were overwhelmingly Christian and we understood ourselves to be as such,” says Wilson, senior pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. He tells CNN the US was founded as a Christian nation — a claim disputed by historians. Wilson argues the country should become one again, adding: “There’s been a concerted effort to secularize our history and our legal understanding of ourselves over the course of the last 70 years.” How Christian nationalists want to ‘take dominion’ in America Despite all the media coverage of White Christian nationalism, it remains a mystery to many Americans.

A March 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 54% of US adults had heard or read “nothing at all” about it. White Christian nationalists though, have not been shy about sharing their beliefs. They say that the US should be led by principles “rooted in Scripture,” and that “Christ has commanded all civil authorities, Christian and non-Christian alike, to execute His will on the earth.” They envision an America where “Christian supremacy” rules the land, and laws are based on the Ten Commandments. Same-sex marriage is outlawed and women are largely subordinate. At least one Christian nationalist leader supports repealing the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.

In much of their literature, White Christian men are victims. The “governing virtues of America” are “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality,” writes Stephen Wolfe, author of “The Case for Christian Nationalism.” “New America is relentlessly hostile toward you,” Wolfe writes. “Every step is overcoming you. Ask yourself, ‘What sort of villain does each event of progress have in common?’ The straight white male. That is the chief out-group of New America, the embodiment of regression and oppression.” Defenders of White Christian nationalism argue that all law is based on some form of imposed morality and America’s laws should be based on Christian morality.

What critics get wrong about White Christian nationalists, they say, is implying that they want to create a Christian-fascist state. “The word ‘nationalism’ sets them off,” Wilson, the Idaho pastor, tells CNN. “They think of dictatorships, missile parades or making all the women wear red dresses. But Christian nationalism, implemented, would actually constitute a massive reduction of the size of the state.” White Christian nationalism’s bloody history What Christian nationalists often ignore in their public pronouncements, though, is the bloody history associated with their ideology.

An earlier version of White Christian nationalism led to the conquest and virtual genocide of Native Americans. As far back as the 17th century, White Christians settling in New York invoked their faith to murder and take land from native Americans. Subsequent versions of White Christian nationalism were also used to justify slavery, imperialism and Jim Crow racial segregation. Abraham Lincoln had to contend with White Christian nationalism during the Civil War, says Randall Balmer, a historian of religion in North America who teaches at Dartmouth College.

Ministers led a movement during the Civil War to designate the US as a Christian nation even though the Constitution contains no reference to God, the Bible or the Ten Commandments. They asked for Abraham Lincoln’s support, but he refused, Balmer tells CNN. But the Confederate States of America, which enslaved Black people and enshrined God in their constitution, boasted that they were a Christian nation.

“One of the Confederates’ criticisms of the Union was the lack of Christian language in the Constitution,” says Balmer, author of “America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State.” “The South took pains to declare the Confederate States of America a Christian enterprise.” A belief in racial hierarchies persists among many White Christian nationalists today. At least 87% of Christian nationalists believe God wanted America to be a promised land for European Christians, while 81% believe “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” according to a 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.

The history that Balmer alludes to is one reason why many scholars insist on adding “White” to the Christian nationalist label. They call it a “religion of Whiteness,” an ideology inextricably intertwined with White identity. Scholars also prefer to use “White” because there is another ideology called “Black Christian nationalism.” Wilson, the Idaho pastor, doesn’t duck some of this history. He acknowledges the KKK practiced an earlier form of White Christian nationalism. He described their version, though, as an abuse of Christian nationalist beliefs.

Wilson has denounced what he calls “ethnic vainglory and ethnic enmity.” He says God hates “ethnic sin”—someone who uses their membership in a group to justify malice toward a different group. “There have been some unsavory types who have used the phrase Christian nationalism,” he tells CNN. “But there have been unsavory types who have used the word America. You don’t judge someone’s position by what someone else did to abuse it.” Politics, not just race, has also driven the reemergence of Christian nationalism. That happened in the mid-20th century when some politicians warned during the Cold War that “Godless communists” would take over America.

A group of White evangelicals unsuccessfully pushed for a Constitutional amendment that would officially recognize the US as a Christian nation by inserting God and Jesus in the nation’s Constitution. Balmer tells CNN that each variation of Christian nationalism makes the same appeal. “The argument was that the nation was falling into moral decay because we have neglected our role as a Christian nation, and we need to return the nation to its Christian moorings,” he says. How White Christian nationalism clashes with the Founding Fathers’ vision All who say America should become a Christian nation again face a challenge: What type of Christianity do you want Americans to return to?

Colonial America was a place of many competing versions of Christianity. There were Puritans in New England, the Dutch Reformed Church in New York, Catholics in Maryland — and some of these groups despised one another. Though virtually every constitution in the 13 original colonies contained a reference to God or the divine, the Founding Fathers deliberately shunned that governing model. They established the First Amendment, which separates the church and state, because they recalled how wars over religion devastated Europe, Balmer says.

“The Founding Fathers said we really can’t designate one religion as the establishment church because there’s too much diversity in the colonies,” Balmer says. For more proof that the United States was founded as a secular nation, Balmer points to another document: the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli. An agreement between the US and a country in present-day Libya, it was ratified unanimously by a Senate still half-filled with signers of the Constitution. It declared, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on Christian religion.” Most of the Founding Fathers do not even fit what many White Christian nationalists today would call Christian.

They were a collection of atheists, Unitarians, Deists and liberal Protestants. “It is absolutely not true to identify people like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Frankin as evangelical Christians,” Balmer says. “One of Jeffersons’ projects was to literally go through the New Testament and excise every mention of a miracle or suggestion that Jesus was divine.” Why some say White Christian nationalism is anti-Jesus White Christian nationalism doesn’t just get history wrong, some religious scholars and pastors say. They get Christianity wrong, too. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” says historian Jonathan P.

Walton, author of “Beauty and Resistance: Spiritual Rhythms for Formation and Repair.” “If someone says to me they’re a Christian nationalist, they are confessing to me that they are not a follower of Jesus,” Walton says. “Every single writer of Scripture, from the Old and New Testament, was an enslaved person or a colonized person under oppression,” Walton tells CNN. “The idea that Jesus and nationalism are opposed to each other has been true since the beginning of the church.” Today’s White Christian nationalist movement also faces another challenge: America’s “civil religion.” The most revered documents and speeches in American history — the introduction to the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Rev.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech — do not describe a Christian nation. These civic scriptures describe a country where people of all races and beliefs — to borrow a line from King’s classic speech — can sit down “at the table of brotherhood” and be treated with equal dignity. This view of America commands majority support. A recent survey of adults in the US found that two-thirds of them wanted more ethnic, religious and racial diversity in America. Only a tiny percentage idealized a country that is ethnically or religiously homogenous. So how can America be both a Christian nation, and a democracy? It can’t, its critics say.

They argue that at its core, White Christian nationalism is anti-democratic. Philip Gorski, a historian, said that White Christian nationalism represents a grave threat to democracy because it defines “we the people” in a way that excludes many Americans. “The United States cannot be both a truly multiracial democracy – a people of people and a nation of nations – and a white Christian nation at the same time,” he wrote in his book “The Flag and the Cross.” “This is why white Christian nationalism has become a serious threat to American democracy, perhaps the most serious threat it now faces.” This is the claim that the KKK never bothered to address — and many White Christian nationalists still struggle to answer today.

John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”