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August In many ways, it's been a key to their agenda since the days of the "Moral Majority" in the 1960s in reaction to civil and human rights movements and victories for those who challenged the prejudices of the times. They've even rewritten their own American history to claim that the country was founded to be a "Christian nation" by its Deistic, Transcendentalist, and other more liberal Christian founders. That compulsion became popular over generations through a political program pushing for what at the end of the last century came to be called federal "faith-based initiatives" with both political parties playing to the right-wing religionists for their support. For those politicians who were into privatizing social programs, it fit well with their goal of moving those programs away from a secular sense of inclusion that meant including those who weren't acceptable to the right-wing and placing money in the hands of sectarian religious charities that were initially only covertly allowed to discriminate. As White Evangelical churches turned from a rejection of the culture around them that was their stance through the 1950s to battling what they called "culture wars," which meant attempting to recreate the dominant culture in their own image of what their Christianity began to preach it should be, they turned more and more toward relying on government as the solution. They portrayed their own position as being victims of everything happening around them that challenged their perceived comfort and talked more of their "persecuted" status. They saw, and thereby created in their minds, enemies around them - feminists, LGBTQ+ people, secularists, and others who seemed to be treated as equally worthy as them. And their solution was to fight back by relying more and more on government as their Savior. These faith-based people used to believe that there was some good, righteous, powerful, higher power who would see to it that the truth would win out no matter what. This god wasn't dependent upon kings or emperors for success. And they trusted that god to accomplish that even if it required all kinds of theories they fought over among themselves about the end times, raptures, millennia, tribulations, and second comings. Every detail about the coming retribution and victory of the theories they relied on divided their churches into numerous denominations and non-denominational splinter groups. It was, they hoped, these "faith-based initiatives" that would make government the guarantor and co-signer of the success of their religion. But as was predictable. the insecurity in their faith and the unbelief behind what they'd expected these initiatives to cure, still couldn't convince them enough that their god was trustable. Even those federal programs didn't bolster their faith. This government salvation no longer did what they hoped when the initiatives were implemented and they still couldn't trust their god to work in the world even through their government sponsored "good works." God needed even more approval and help from governmental authorities. They needed that more because they weren't feeling that God or the Spirit were making things work out the way they needed it to - government will have to further enforce their beliefs. Their god was in desperate need of that authority of those kings and emperors down through history after all. They needed government to punish their enemies, to convince themselves they are right after all, and to contradict their feelings that their god was a loser and, even worse, that faith in their loser god might be a losing proposition that made them losers for trusting in such a god. Full "Christian Nationalism" would be the next hope for their worries. Of course, that didn't mean "Christian" in the sense of the beliefs of everyone who identifies with that term. It only meant "Christian" as their particular sectarian views understood it. Everyone else was just wrong, evil, or demonic. It was THEIR kind of faith that needed government subsidies, that government stamp of approval, and government enforcement of their faith on everyone. Unbelief, like misery, loves company to convince itself it's right. Isn't it obvious, then? What the drive to enforce so-called "Christian Nationalism" on the country makes clear is that those who push it have very little faith in their god, in themselves, or in the power of their own good works to change the world. In other words, they've given up the real proofs that they have faith at all. In fact, when they call for government to be in bed with their religion, their unbelief actually infects their faith more and affirms their unbelief. This is no new idea. It was no less than a well-known 18th century Baptist minister, John Leland, an important figure in the struggle for religious liberty in the United States and friend of James Madison, who warned that such things as "Christian Nationalism" would actually destroy one's faith: "Experience…has informed us that the fondness of magistrates to foster Christianity, has done it more harm than all the persecutions ever did. Persecution, like a lion, tears the saints to death, but leaves Christianity pure; state establishment of religion, like a bear, hugs the saints, but corrupts Christianity, and reduces it to a level with state policy." © 2026 Robert N. Minor Other Issues, Books, Resources
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus at the University of Kansas, is author of When Religion Is an Addiction; Scared Straight: Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It’s So Hard to Be Human; and Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society. Contact him at www.FairnessProject.org
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