The birth of Christian nationalism: ‘I’ll teach them how to hate’

Editor’s note: This presentation was made to a gathering of the Forum on the Military Chaplaincy held at Brite Divinity School at TCU on Monday, Oct. 19. It has been edited only slightly for context.

 

On a July evening in 2024, the National Conservatism Conference was held in a Hilton near the U.S. Capitol. At this event, speakers focused on topics like the national feminization of American men, the so-called decline of American white children and the demand for the Ten Commandments to be on every classroom wall.

A mishmash of white supremacist, male supremacist and ultranationalist talking points spewed from the mouths of notable persons like Stephen Miller, who droned on about an epidemic of military-aged men from foreign countries sneaking across our border to prey on American white women. The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, was in attendance, claiming we’re in the second American Revolution, arguing if the Left were to have their way we’d “cease to be a nation at all” and become ​“subservient to a religion without God, in a land without hope.”

The keynote speech of this prestigious event was given by the Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, in which he waxed poetic about St. Augustine of Hippo. Here’s a quote from this speech because I think it’s important to hear how this is being articulated to political audience:

While Augustine said all nations are constituted by what they love, his philosophizing actually described an entirely new idea of the nation unknown to the ancient world: a new kind of nationalism, if you like — a Christian nationalism organized around Christian ideals. A nationalism driven not by conquest but by common purpose; united not by fear but by common love; a nation made not for the rich or for the strong, but for the “poor in spirit,” the common man.

We are a nation forged from Augustine’s vision. A nation defined by the dignity of the common man, as given to us in the Christian religion; a nation held together by the homely affections articulated in the Christian faith — love for God, love for family, love for neighbor, home and country.

And some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. Is there any other kind worth having?”

This meeting was not made up of the Capitol-storming, red-hat-wearing MAGA crowds. They were the men and women who sat in rooms and constructed Project 2025, planning out their political trajectories within the second Trump administration. These are the men and women who blurred pseudo-Christian theology with fascist strategy to create a nation forged in their vision. The new Augustine of Trump’s court. Not for love of God, or family, or home and neighbor, as Hawley claimed, but for an exclusionary, bordered nation, predicated on the consolidation of wealth, strengthened by racial, gender and sexual politics for a base that is being fed fear and the promise of power.

Not a new struggle

Our country is currently being motivated by starkly conflicting visions for our nation’s future, bolstered on one side by a rejection of historical accountability. However, this is not a new struggle. This moral conflict has existed on this soil since the first European colonists landed.

For generations, folks have asked: Is America a divinely ordained promised land for European Christians or is it a pluralistic democracy striving for equal rights for its citizens? Most Americans still embrace the latter vision, but an aggressive vocal minority continues to cling to an imagined past with the hope of transforming the future.

“An aggressive vocal minority continues to cling to an imagined past with the hope of transforming the future.”

The term “white Christian nationalism” recently emerged as a shorthand way of describing a set of overlapping theological and political ideologies, articulating a subsection of a larger authoritarian, fascist movement. In 2016, when I was a graduate student, I oriented my research around a question I kept hearing: “How did we get here”

It’s not an easy question. But, if we’re honest enough about the sins of our past, we might grasp at the beginnings of an answer.

Doctrine of Discovery

In 1493, Columbus returned to Spain, bringing with him about 25 enslaved natives and a plan for the conquest of the new world. The start of what would be known as the post-Columbus era in the Americas began with what is called the Doctrine of Discovery.

Established as a series of 15th century papal bulls (official edicts that carried papal authority), the Doctrine establishes a supremacy for European civilization and Western Christianity allowing for the subjugation and domination of all other races, cultures and religions, supporting the continued domination of those peoples and their lands. From this premise the colonization, ethnic and cultural genocide and enslavement become moral tools for the lofty goals of Western nations.

The Doctrine of Discovery merged the interests of European imperialism, including the African slave trade, with Christian missionary expansion. The initial edict laid the theological and political foundations for the Doctrine, explicitly granted Portuguese King Alfonso V the following rights:

To invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens (Muslims) and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.

This papal decree, and others that extended and developed its principles, provided the moral and religious justification for an unfettered European colonial race for “undiscovered lands” and fertilized the blossoming African slave trade.

We should understand the Doctrine of Discovery as a lens through which we grapple with the lineage of American white Christian nationalism. Its values were imported with the same colonizers that were mobilized by its politics.

Historian Robert P. Jones, who wrote White Too Long, argues the Doctrine of Discovery furnished the foundational lie behind white Americans’ entitlement of the land and its history.

This sense of entitlement never left but has in recent years grown in force. PRRI and the Brookings Institution conducted a survey in 2023 that asked, “Do you agree or disagree that ‘God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians to create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world?’”

The survey found that while only three in 10 Americans agreed with this statement, the majority of Republicans (52%) and white evangelical Protestants (56%) affirmed it.

“The crimes of our past are so monstrous it is no wonder that there is an impulse to turn away to something glossier and easier to swallow.”

The United States struggles with its past. A past marred with grotesque cruelty of inhumane actions done in the name of conquest. At times, the crimes of our past are so monstrous it is no wonder that there is an impulse to turn away to something glossier and easier to swallow.

It’s human nature to want to feel pride or at least comfort in where we come from — that nature is and will continue to be very hard to combat. But simultaneously there also is an intentional whitewashing happening in our nation that has become increasingly loud in recent years. It has swept through our streets, our pews, our classrooms and our congressional halls. The only way to stop this is to be just as intentional.

So let’s continue to dig into this history with the next stage, the advent of evangelicalism.

Evangelicalism

On Sept. 1, 1689, a Boston preacher named Cotton Mather III gave a sermon titled “Souldiers Counselled and Comforted” in which he extolled King William’s war against Northern and Eastern Native American tribes as a War of the Lord against the forces of the antichrist — namely the Catholic French and Native Americans.

Some of you might know Mather’s name from a more notorious moment in history, the Salem Witch Trials. While Mather had nothing to do with legal proceedings, he has been described by Nathaniel Hawthorne as “the chief agent of the mischief” at Salem for his role in drumming up and sustaining the witch hysteria. Mather apparently has been given many titles over his career, because he’s also been referred to as the “first American evangelical.”

His work reveals the natural evolution of the Doctrine of Discovery — a legal and theological flashpoint in the expansion of imperial power into the new world. In his 1702 historical manifesto of America, Mather argued that God intended for New England to become a holy, radiant city of God or “New Jerusalem” and framed the displacement and warfare against Native Americans not as secular land grabs, but as a spiritual conflict between God and the devil, asserting that Anglo-Americans were a chosen people clearing territory held by demonic forces.

While the term “Manifest Destiny” wouldn’t arise until the 1840s, Mather’s merging of national identity, divine providence and territorial expansion provided the foundational mythos that later justified U.S. expansion across the continent.

This expansion required both the removal of Indigenous populations and a massive workforce. By 1860, the enslaved population in the U.S. reached about 4 million people, making it a multi-billion-dollar economic engine that generated half of all U.S. exports and financed American industrialization.

Christian nationalists at that time circulated the myth of the Curse of Ham to excuse continued enslavement after the Doctrine of Discovery failed to create a compelling justification for generational enslavement of what were at that point English-speaking Christian families.

After the Civil War, white evangelicals embarked on a reform campaign to establish segregation and a racial legal system, founding powerful advocacy organizations like the American Economic Association and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to, in the words of one reformer, “bring to pass here a kingdom of righteousness.”

The era of Jim Crow emerged. In 1894, Frederick Douglass noted that although lynch mobs subverted the judicial system, they also functioned as an extension of it because lynchers operated with tacit approval of local public and religious leaders. Lynching drew on the idea of “blood sacrifice” central to white evangelical Christianity. Christian nationalists viewed their nation as under attack both from within and without.

“Lynching drew on the idea of ‘blood sacrifice’ central to white evangelical Christianity.”

In 2024, JD Vance explained that his goal of dramatically restricting U.S. immigration was grounded in the “Christian idea that you owe the strongest duty to your family.” This articulation of the family — as a stand-in for the nation — is drawn directly from Jim Crow-era arguments and anti-immigration rhetoric of the late 19th century.

Laws at the state and national level during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, meant to counter waves of Catholic, Jewish, and Asian migration and to suppress Black suffrage, sought to wed Christianity and white supremacy to the state.

20th century

From the anti-New Deal efforts to tether Christian identity to capitalism to the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War era, Christian nationalism thrived in this century. Supreme Court rulings banning mandatory school prayer and Bible reading in the early 1960s, alongside the rise of civil rights and social movements, catalyzed conservative Christian activism. It was an era of radical change, but it also was an era of emerging leaders who drew from the history we’ve already laid out.

In the early 1900s, leaders of a new Christian Right emerged. Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith, an American Disciples of Christ minister and populist organizer, is a good representation of the interwar era of Christian nationalism. While Hitler and his policy makers used American Jim Crow-era laws as a legal and ideological model to craft their own racist policies, specifically the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, Americans like Smith drew on our own history in adjacent ways.

If anyone has been to the Ozarks before you might have seen a rather large representation of Smith’s work. A 7-foot tall Jesus statue, as well as a Bible museum and passion play venue stand as a physical icon of his impact on the United States. Fun fact, he’s buried at the base of the statue.

Before Barry Goldwater or Jerry Falwell were spreading their particular brands of Christian nationalism across the country, there was Gerald L.K. Smith, who in 1943 founded the America First Party, becoming its president in 1944. Known for his grotesque antisemitic propaganda, he has been called “the most infamous American fascist.” Originally aligned with Huey Long, Smith shifted fascist in the pre-war period, campaigning in Georgia for white supremacist Gov. Eugene Talmadge, and before he turned deeply anti-Catholic he also worked closely with another notorious fascist voice, Father Charles Coughlin.

After many failed political campaigns, he became a member of William Dudley Pelley’s fascist Silver Legion of America, patterned after Hitler’s Brown Shirts. He also founded The Cross and the Flag, a Christian nationalist/fascist magazine, using it to spew his ideologies to the masses.

His political career didn’t go well. He ran for president three times. In his first run, he received only 1,781 votes; the second time 48 votes; and the third only eight. In 1947, speaking at a sparsely attended rally at the Washington Monument, Smith announced a new party name, the Christian Nationalist Party, to replace the America First Party, showcasing the shift in his branding, if not his ideologies.

For a time, he was deeply influential in fascist and Christian nationalist circles, but after World War II, his influence began to wane. And yet, his rhetoric was eerily similar to others who came next.

Here’s a quick rundown of what else happened in this century:

• In the 1960s, Barry Goldwater and others began linking Christian nationalism directly to conservative political identity through strategic messaging.
• By the 1970s, fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity emerged as a major political force, shifting the party alignment in the South.
• In 1979, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a powerhouse lobbying group that organized white evangelical voters around “family values” anti-abortion platforms and more.
• Simultaneously, the 1970s saw the formation of the the Seven Mountain Mandate, also known as Seven Mountain Dominionism, founded by Bill Bright and Loren Cunningham.
• Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, organizations like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition transitioned Christian nationalist sentiments from a cultural backdrop into a structured voting bloc and cornerstone of the modern American conservative movement.

That brings us to today.

Christian nationalism today

The term recently has emerged in the media as a way of describing a worldview that has exploded under Trumpism and the MAGA movement. Today, on its surface it’s a toxic blend of ethno-religious identity politics that utilizes symbols, phrases and popular culture to grease the wheels of the antidemocracy movement, leading to actions like the January 6 coup.

It has become a central identifier for some of the most caustic MAGA politicians, including leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, whose explicit endorsement of the ideology pairs with their disdain of the constitutional separation of church and state. It has shown up in only slightly quieter ways with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Vice President JD Vance, who both have vocally opposed the separation of church and state and promoted Christian nationalist policies.

And of course this isn’t just about politicians. Others in the movement are more on the ground. The Seven Mountains Mandate is still alive and well today. Televangelist Lance Wallnau, a pastor, was pivotal in drumming up support for Trump in his first campaign.

There also is the podcast and influencer sphere. Figures like Stew Peters, Andrew Torba, the late Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes are common names in these conversations. And I haven’t even touched yet on Pete Hegseth.

A quick rundown of Hegseth’s recent actions can give us a scope of what militarized Christian nationalism looks like and the threat that we are facing today:

• He launched an Office of Religious Affairs to directly oversee chaplains who would then report to him.
• He pledged to overhaul the military chaplain corps, transforming it to his version of Christianity, making it into a vehicle for Christian nationalism
• He has enacted a transgender ban.
• He’s eliminated DEI programming across the DOD.
• He initiated formal reviews and pushback regarding women serving in combat and leadership roles.
• He instituted monthly Christian worship services inside the Pentagon, displayed Bible verses alongside official military promotional materials and utilized explicitly religious or crusade-themed language during military operations

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Hegseth’s church network, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, preaches a patriarchal form of Christianity where women cannot serve in leadership and pastors argue that homosexuality should be criminalized. Hegseth reposted a video in which a CREC pastor opposed women’s right to vote. Wilson, its most prominent leader, identifies as a Christian nationalist and preached at the Pentagon in February at Hegseth’s invitation.

“We now have an avid Christian nationalist in charge of the most powerful military in the world.”

To put it bluntly, we now have an avid Christian nationalist in charge of the most powerful military in the world.

My story

I come from a very small town on the shores of Lake Michigan. My community wasn’t oriented by big politics or lofty ideals. It had roots in military service, blue collar work and a struggling agricultural economy.

When I graduated high school, I moved to Tulsa, Okla., to attend an evangelical Christian college. It didn’t give me an educational experience in the traditional sense, but it gave me a different lens to understand the world through. I saw an attempt to coopt the identities of the people I grew up around, to create a salt-of-the-earth personage to leverage an elitist, materialist, Scripture-laced nationalism on the backs of the working class.

This is the foundation on which Trumpism was able to arise. This is one part of the answer, but it’s not the whole answer because it doesn’t explain how so many people, good people, were sucked in by this.

I want to return to Gerald Smith and read a short quote by him from one of his publications in which he lays his strategy bare:

Religion and patriotism, keep going on that. It’s the only way you can really get them heated up. … Certain nerve centers in the population will begin to twitch — and the people will start fomenting and fermenting, and then a fellow like myself … will have the people (with) him, hook, line and sinker. I’ll teach them how to hate!

White Christian nationalism is both a political vision and a story of America told through a skewed lens that favors a fantastical past, present and future. It’s a ravenous beast that mobilizes fascist tendencies, authoritarianism and autocracy. It’s the grease on the wheels of antidemocracy in the United States.

When you boil it down to its very epicenter, to what maybe we can call pure Christian nationalism, it is a voice in our past — echoing through the halls of our Congress and being shouted at us from our pulpits — saying, “I will teach them how to hate.”

As Hegseth and many before him have shown, the veneer of patriotism and the military remain quintessential in any American story being written. They know that to change military policy into white Christian nationalist policy is to change America into a white Christian nation.

That is why democracy work will be so pivotal in the coming years. No matter what happens in the midterms, there are things that have been deeply broken and things that never have been built — all of which are going to need our voices.

 

Hanah Stiverson serves as director of policy for The Chamberlain Network. She is a seasoned policy director with more than a decade of experience in democracy advocacy and extremism research. She is the author of two books, Racist Zoombombing and Banal Fascism Online. She earned a Ph.D. in American cultures from the University of Michigan.