Should we be talking ‘civil religion’ rather than ‘Christian nationalism’?

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Should we be talking ‘civil religion’ rather than ‘Christian nationalism’?

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Sojourners published a fascinating interview this week with the authors of a new book on Christian nationalism in America. This is largely not a topic on which I’m reading these days; much like the (closely related) Trump-evangelicals conversation, I think it’s pretty played out. Almost no one has new ideas here, and even fewer people are changing their minds.

I’m not sure how much more Trump-evangelicals conversation there is to be had

But I read the Sojourners piece because the interviewees, Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood, are the authors of a recent book about Christian nationalism among mainline Protestants, not evangelicals. Their book opens, notes Sojourners’ Mitchell Atencio, with an anecdote of Episcopalian Bishop Michael B. Curry praying at a “service hosted by congressional Democrats” at the U.S. Capitol in 2022:

“[The] whole service had included nothing more than two hymns from the Christian Nationalism hymnbook, a prayer from a Christian minister blessing the country as ‘one nation under God,’ and a moment of silence led by a Christian politician,” Kaylor and Underwood write. “If that service had been exactly the same but we switched out the leaders with conservative evangelical figures, it would have quickly been criticized by many as Christian Nationalism.”

That strikes me as accurate and, along with the headline (“Are you accidentally a Christian nationalist?”) sold me on reading the piece.

There’s a lot there I could discuss, not least how the authors define heresy and how they speak of Christian nationalism as something American Christians can’t really escape, only suppress or foster within ourselves. Maybe I’ll come back to some of that in a future post, but for now I want to focus on the part about civil religion—and the question it raised for me about whether “Christian nationalism” is the best term available for the discussions we’ve been having these last few years.

I wrote about civil religion in relation to the modern right pretty early in the Trump era. Then-candidate Donald Trump was just turning the corner to being the presumptive GOP nominee when my piece, “The idolatry of the Donald,” ran at The American Conservative. I was a little nervous to reread it nearly a decade later, but I think it largely holds up. (I can’t say I’d write exactly the same article today, but most differences would be stylistic—I doubt I could muster that much intensity and verve in a Trump article anymore. Things that felt clever then feel tired now.)