Katie Couric: “Uh I would love to get your take on the rise of Christian nationalism in this country and around the world.
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst recently released a poll that shows how Americans are feeling about the 250th [anniversary] of our country; and there’s a huge divide between Democrats and Republicans on the extent to which the U.S. should be a Christian country. Nearly 80% of Republicans believe the US was founded as a Christian nation, 72% believe the government should advocate Christian values, 54% believe the US should be declared a Christian nation, and I thought this was really disturbing. Another Public Religion Research Institute poll found that 56% of Republicans qualify as either adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism. What’s going on here?”
Timothy Snyder: “So, Katie, you’ve called me professor three times already and I’m going to take that as a license to make a really incredibly boring academic point which is that, or maybe it’s not so boring, maybe it’s more fundamental — you also can’t do democracy without history. So those views that people hold, some of them are views about the past, and they’re wrong. The United States was not — I mean there are issues on which you can be right and wrong, and this is one where you can be wrong — the United States was not in fact founded on Christian principles in any sense. It’s simply not true. And if more people had more classes in the first year of university about US history they would know that, or if more states allowed more teachers to teach the history of our country freely without restriction more young people would know that, and that would be…and if there were fewer schools that were posting the Ten Commandments — yeah which is, yeah, violates the First Amendment of our Constitution — then then these numbers would be lower, right? So, part of it, I mean I deeply believe that part of it is the success of attempt to blot out what US history actually is.”
Snyder goes on more briefly about people preferring a founding story convenient to themselves and why metaphysical nationalist claims are dangerous to democracy.
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Snyder stated that “the United States was not in fact founded on Christian principles in any sense. It’s simply not true,” linking the prevalence of contrary beliefs to incomplete or restricted history education and efforts to “blot out what US history actually is.”
Christian nationalists argue that U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and exert a confessional identity in which Christianity defines the nation’s essence, believing that law should promote “true religion,” and pluralism is a problem to be overcome. However, the Founders deliberately designed for multiplicity of sects and disestablishment as institutional safeguards against religious or any particular religious domination (see Madison’s Federalist No. 10 and No. 51).
Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) frames religious liberty as an inalienable natural right, not a revocable toleration. Colonial religious diversity (Congregational, Anglican, Quaker, Catholic, etc.) and Enlightenment influences made uniformity impossible and pressured disestablishment. The First Amendment and state-level disestablishments operationalized this. Christianity could support public morality, and many Founders held theistic or Christian-influenced views, but the constitutional order treated religion as a matter of private conscience and the state as a neutral arbiter of civic responsibility. The republican ideal prioritized freedom from arbitrary power including ecclesiastical tyranny over any fusion of national identity with a single religious tradition.
In this framing, Christian nationalism whether charismatic dominionism, Calvinist magisterial Protestant nationalism as in Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, Catholic integralism as associated with Adrian Vermeule’s common-good constitutionalism, or Reconstructionism drawing on R.J. Rushdoony inverts the Founders’ design. It subordinates pluralism to confessional authority, treats citizenship as religiously defined, and risks recreating the domination the republic was structured to prevent. This will explain any peculiar and clever pivot these thinkers attempt to make or influence people with, whether they use immigration, evoke nativist sentiment and other means to exploit the insecurities and vulnerabilities of the people.
However, I do disagree with Snyder’s absolute phrasing of “not in any sense.” Christianity did have cultural and moral influence and that the republican tradition itself functioned as a kind of civic religion of liberty with its own virtues, heroes, and sources in classical and early modern thought. The problem is the attempt to make Christianity the political essence or to replace institutional multiplicity with religious homogeneity or hierarchical direction of the common good by confessional authorities.
Snyder does not explain that the rise of Christian nationalism partly fills a vacuum created by the atrophy of classical civic republican education, virtue cultivation, and positive visions of ordered liberty. Thin procedural liberalism or pure secularism has left people without a robust alternative language of non-domination and shared civic purpose, making confessional-nationalist projects more attractive.
The U.S. constitutional founding was not a project of establishing Christian principles as the national identity, and we can no longer afford to ignore the longer civic-republican tradition that values pluralism and multiplicity as active protections for liberty.
