The claim by JD Vance and other MAGA Republicans that the United States is a “Christian nation” is historically false and constitutionally unsound. Christian nationalists have long argued this point, but the First Amendment explicitly rejects religious establishment while protecting free exercise. As Steve Benen notes, the Founding Fathers were clear: the U.S. was built on a secular Constitution. Thomas Jefferson described a “wall of separation between church and state,” and John Adams affirmed that the government was not founded on Christianity. Declaring otherwise promotes unconstitutional discrimination against religious minorities and the nonreligious.