In many ways I’m grateful I’m an American. There are many opportunities, freedoms, and comforts that are afforded to me because I am. Though I have a sense of gratitude for the country of which I am a citizen, I must also speak to the fact that it is not all good.
Many American Christians believe that America is God’s nation. As scholar Lanta Davis puts it, this belief transforms Jesus Christ into “the American Warrior Jesus”—a mascot in red, white, and blue who “inspired the founding fathers, holds the Constitution, defends gun rights, and wields his cross as a weapon. Whether he’s on posters, T-shirts, or bumper stickers, American Warrior Jesus is on America’s side!”
However, no nation since the resurrection of Jesus can ever be God’s nation.
Through Jesus, God instituted a new covenant no longer defined by any national or ethnic identity (Matthew 28:18–20; Romans 3–4). Unfortunately, many American Christians are often subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) assimilated toward Christian nationalism and secular culture in matters of militarism, violence, civic engagement, and self-preservation that veer from a biblical and historical vision of two-kingdom theology, Christian nonviolence, active peacemaking, and enemy-love. In many churches throughout the country there are Christians who insist that America is God’s nation and that it was founded on Christian principles.
Of course this dynamic is not exclusive to America, as many countries and empires have claimed special favor with God. Since the beginning of Christendom in the fourth century, there has been a symbiotic relationship between church and state and Christianity and culture in the West. Though this is not exclusively an American issue, it is specifically an American one. As a Kenyan pastor said of those who consider themselves American Christians, “As a Christian you are my brother. As an American you want to be my master.”
These nationalistic ideologies and propaganda have seeped deeply into the psyche, identity, and politics of Christians throughout America. For instance, in Colorado Springs, considered to be the capital of American evangelicalism, the US Air Force Academy includes the most visited humanmade tourist attraction in all of Colorado (before its closure for renovations), the Cadet Chapel. The Cadet Chapel is a Christian chapel originally built in the 1960s (though now it is a house of worship for all faiths) that boasts a seventeen-spire exterior that resembles fighter jets, along with an interior cross hanging from the ceiling that is the shape of a giant sword.
New Testament scholar and theologian Preston Sprinkle says that “a large portion of the American evangelical church has been seduced, whether knowingly or not, by nationalistic militarism. Yet our inspired Word of God aggressively critiques this very thing.” Germinating in the time of Constantine, sprouting through the Crusades and Inquisitions of the Middle Ages, and flowering in the British Empire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christian nationalism has flourished in the fertile soil of violence that has been watered with blood throughout church history. Today, Christian nationalism has become an invasive kudzu vine, choking out the truth of the gospel in America, and continues to thrive by the persistent myth that America is a Christian nation.
I believe there are many incredible things about America, and many ways that it brings about good. But Christian nationalism is more than a sense of patriotism or gratitude for one’s nation, but the explicit amalgamation of church and state operating as one. It is a cultural framework—a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems—that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with civic life. In the United States, it includes assumptions that America has been and should always be distinctively Christian in its identity, values, laws, and policies. In other words, Christian nationalism in America is the vision for a theocratic America with Christianity as the national faith that is tied to the state. It is a worldview that becomes “a movement where one’s God-given theological imagination is hijacked by political power.”
Scholars Christopher Hays and C. L. Crouch define it more colorfully, saying that Christian nationalism is “a bastard stepchild that does not require people to think about their neighbors as human beings, or to consider their neighbors’ health and flourishing,” most especially when those neighbors don’t look like us. This ideology is propagated by politicians, media, and a cultural narrative that uses a civil religion to justify empire. Georgetown political professor Paul Miller says that “much of American evangelicalism is acting more like a cultural tribe, an ethnoreligious sect advocating for its own power and protection, rather than a people from every tribe and nation advocating for universal principles of justice, flourishing, and the common good.”
From the nation’s inception of European settlers and colonists there has been a belief that the budding nation was a chosen people of God. “Colonial preachers routinely compared New England to ancient Israel, suggesting that God had chosen the colonies for victory over Great Britain,” writes scholar Richard Hughes. Even the founders embraced the myth that the new American nation represented God’s chosen people, a kind of new Israel for these latter days. When Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to design a seal for the United States, Franklin suggested a seal portraying Moses lifting his hand and the Red Sea dividing, with Pharaoh and his chariot being overwhelmed by the waters, and with the motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” Jefferson made a similar suggestion: “a representation of the children of Israel, in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night.”
From the very beginning, America was wrongly thought to be a chosen nation of God.
The cultural narrative of Christian nationalism was infused in ideas like Manifest Destiny, bringing the so-called light of European settlers in the East to the wild frontiers of the West. The allegorical 1872 painting American Progress by John Gast represents the Eurocentric modernization of the new West. In the painting, Gast personifies the United States as a floating blonde-haired white woman named “Columbia” who is leading civilization westward with American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a schoolbook, and ushering in different stages of economic and agricultural activity, along with evolving forms of transportation such as the steam engine. On the left, fearful and dismayed Native Americans, along with animals, flee from her—displaced from their homelands.
The Doctrine of Discovery, a set of legal principles that provided justification for European colonial powers to claim sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples, was incorporated into the US legal system by the Supreme Court in the 1823 case Johnson vs. McIntosh. This “doctrine” persists to this day, even in my own public-school education, where I was taught that European settlers “discovered” the land and had been given divine right to it. This doctrine, along with a particular understanding of the Scriptures, fueled much of the conquest of the Americas by White Europeans in the name of Jesus.
For example, Puritan preachers such as Cotton Mather portrayed White colonists as “the chosen people” who had a divine claim on American soil, and Indigenous peoples as disposable and despicable “Canaanites,” similar to the conquest narratives in Deuteronomy 20:17. Today, tragic stories continue to come to light about church-run residential schools where sexual and physical abuse, forced labor, and cultural genocide occurred toward Indigenous children in the United States and Canada. The American self-image as a “chosen people” has provided the rhetoric to mystify and justify domination, particularly over Blacks, Latine, Native Americans, and women.
Many American Christians today still believe the narrative that America is God’s country, and this belief obligates many of them to fight for the preservation and promotion of Christian culture and political influence. Kristin Kobes Du Mez says that the belief that America is God’s chosen nation—and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians.
Christian nationalism has pervaded American identity from the nation’s origins, nourishing concepts like Manifest Destiny, which was not a specific or single law, but a powerful national ideology that blended religious fervor, white supremacy, and political idealism to justify the displacement of Indigenous peoples and the annexation of their territories. It continues to nourish practices today like the Oath of Enlistment required for all American military recruits:
I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
I respect many who serve in uniform, and I personally benefit from living in arguably the safest and most prosperous nation on earth, especially as a White man relatively free from danger and harm wherever I go. However, you don’t have to be a biblical scholar to see how this enlistment oath clearly contradicts the teachings of Jesus.
It is not hard to see how the past has shaped the nation’s heritage as it blends God and country together into the vision of a single kingdom. Professor Mark Weldon Whitten writes that claiming America to be founded on Christian principles would “be at best, a monstrous oversimplification, and is in actuality a falsehood . . . to assert that the Founding Fathers were acting specifically as Christians in their efforts to found our nation, and that their intent was to create a ‘Christian nation’ through their efforts . . . is plainly a false-story myth of our national origins.” Yet this plainly-false-story-myth continues, nonetheless. I have had numerous pastoral sessions with members of my own congregation as they sat on my couch proclaiming that “America is God’s chosen nation!”
Excerpted from The Unarmed Truth: Following the Prince of Peace in a World of Violence (Herald Press, 2026). All rights reserved. Used with permission.
