The careless use of the term “Christian nationalism” has become a rhetorical shortcut—one that obscures more than it clarifies. In contemporary discourse, it is too often deployed as a catch-all epithet, flattening important distinctions in American constitutional thought and moral philosophy.
There is, in fact, a meaningful difference between invoking one’s faith as the moral predicate for political beliefs and imposing those beliefs through the machinery of the state. The American founding rests squarely on that distinction. The Constitution of 1787 prohibited religious tests for federal office (Article VI), and the First Amendment barred Congress from establishing a national church. Yet these provisions did not immediately dissolve religious expression from public life, nor did they eradicate religious establishments at the state level. Early America accommodated a spectrum of arrangements—from formal establishments to broad Protestant frameworks to expanding notions of religious liberty.
Even today, vestiges of this inheritance remain. Public officials may swear oaths to God; others, in keeping with traditions such as my Quaker grandparents, may affirm instead. These practices reflect not a fusion of church and state, but a longstanding accommodation of personal conscience within public duty.
This raises an unavoidable question: where the Founders themselves “Christian nationalists”? Are individuals who affirm an oath to God in the course of public service properly described by that term? The answer, if we are to be historically precise, must be no. The language of “separation of church and state,” though useful, can mislead when taken as an absolute. A more accurate description of the American design is one of institutional dissociation paired with cultural inheritance.
Consider the frequent assertion, such as that made by former Speaker Paul Ryan, that one’s faith informs every aspect of life, including politics. Such a statement reflects a moral anthropology, not a constitutional program. Similarly, when figures like Churchill and Roosevelt drew upon Christian moral vocabulary to articulate national purpose, they were not advocating theocracy; they were operating within a civilizational framework shaped by centuries of religious and philosophical development.
Indeed, the American founding cannot be understood apart from the broader Western tradition—from Athens and Rome to Magna Carta, from the turbulence of Cromwell’s England to the stabilizing influence of the Enlightenment. This inheritance, with roots in Judeo-Christian traditions, that matured in The Western Enlightenment, is neither narrow nor exclusionary in its historical development; it is the composite moral and intellectual foundation of the West.
C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, offers a useful lens. Patriotism, he argues, can be a genuine and even noble affection, but it must remain subordinate to higher moral truths. When love of country becomes idolatrous, it corrupts both faith and politics. But when properly ordered, it can sustain a healthy civic life.
The real danger lies not in acknowledging this inheritance, but in forgetting it. A society that loses sight of the moral and philosophical traditions that shaped its institutions becomes vulnerable—not only to external threats, but to internal fragmentation. The erosion of cultural continuity, visible in parts of Western Europe over recent decades, should serve as a cautionary example rather than a distant curiosity.
Horace’s observation that “captive Greece took captive her rude conqueror” reminds us that cultural influence often flows in unexpected directions. The question before us is whether we will remain stewards of our own inheritance or surrender it through neglect.
To equate this civilizational tradition with theocratic systems—whether historical or contemporary—is not only inaccurate but intellectually careless. The American experiment was never a project of religious domination; it was an exercise in ordered liberty, grounded in a moral vision but restrained by constitutional structure.
Precision in language matters. To invoke “Christian nationalism” without definition or historical context risks distorting both the past and the present. At best, it confuses legitimate moral discourse with coercive ideology. At worst, it creates a false equivalence between fundamentally different systems of thought and governance.
We would do better to recover clarity—to distinguish between faith as a source of moral reasoning and faith as an instrument of state power. The Founders understood that distinction. It would be wise for us to do the same.
