You can find the idea that America is a Christian nation stretching all the way back through American history in different guises.
You could go back to the American Puritans, right — or to the Puritans in the 17th century. You could — you could hear this kind of rhetoric throughout manifest destiny and so forth.
But what we’re looking at today really is a modern manifestation that is, in the postwar era, really linked with the rise of the Christian right, the idea that Americans have to preserve and actually restore a lost Christian heritage, the idea that something had gone wrong, particularly in the 1970s, that secular impulses, that feminism, or secular humanism, even in some cases the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement were seen as disruptive forces.
And so the idea was that Christians, conservative Christians, needed to unite and needed to restore Christian America, and to do that through voting, through policy and asserting their influence over the government.
President Trump was very clear that he wanted to privilege conservative white Christians. He wanted to protect Christianity and a particular type of Christianity. And he very much used this rhetoric of us vs. them. He was not the president of all Americans. He was the president of his base, and he was going to promote them and privilege their ideas.
And so, with that rhetoric, I think it became normalized and we started to hear that more in Christian spaces as well, more of a boldness to say that we have a right here.
It’s really important that we focus right now on the disconnect between Christian nationalism, particularly in its more extreme expressions, and our constitutional democracy, our commitment to democratic norms and institutions and to the constitutional rights of others.