The nation has reached a “now or never” moment with Christian nationalism that requires sacrificial action to defend democracy and religious pluralism, author and researcher Robert P. Jones said on a podcast focused on faith and public life.
“I do think we’re actually at a hinge point in history that is different than anything I’ve lived through,” said Jones, president of Public Religion Research Institute and author of Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and A Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, due for release in September.
Robert P. Jones
“I’ve seen churches I’ve spoken at with a new urgency and a new kind of awareness that this is not business as usual, this is not just the crisis of the day. But there’s a sort of a bigger zeitgeist happening here and it’s our moment to step into the gap,” he said.
Hosts Josh Burtram and Will Wright stepped into that gap this summer with “Church and State: 250+ Years of Faith in America,” a special project of the popular “Faithful Politics” podcast they launched in 2020.
The podcast examines the convergence of faith and politics as Burtram, an evangelical pastor and Republican, and Wright, a liberal Democrat and former atheist, engage in dialogue with a range of experts on matters of faith and politics.
Will Wright
“Over the years, we’ve tried to build the show around serious conversations that are accessible to people who may not already be exposed to either world and want a deeper understanding,” Wright explained.
But the nation’s 250th anniversary coming at a time of intense national divisions inspired the “Church and State” project, a deep dive into religion’s role in America’s founding, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, white Christian nationalism, myths about the founding and the rise of the Religious Right and Christian nationalism.
The timing also was driven by “the narrow religious story” presented at Rededicate 250, the Christian nationalist worship and prayer festival organized by the Trump administration in May, Wright said.
“Our project is designed to ask a different set of questions: Whose faith gets remembered? Whose faith gets erased? How has Christianity shaped power in America? And what happens when religious liberty becomes a political weapon instead of a shared civic principle?”
Josh Burtram
The project features conversations with an array of historians, journalists, legal scholars, public thinkers, sociologists and theologians. In addition to Jones, the lineup includes experts such as Kristin Du Mez, Katharine Gerbner, Brian Kaylor, Leah Payne, Andrew Seidel, Warren Throckmorton, Jemar Tisby, Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead.
“We are not producing this as a partisan project,” Wright explained. “We are producing it as a public resource for listeners, educators, churches, civic groups and anyone trying to understand how religion has shaped American identity and public life.”
Another goal is to challenge listeners’ beliefs about the role religion played in the nation’s founding and to examine any notions about America as an expressly Christian nation, said Burtram, pastor of River City Underground, a nondenominational congregation in Richmond, Va. “In my wildest dreams, this project will help people to take a critical look at and be honest about the past, about the Christian past in America, to go beyond convenient truths and embrace inconvenient truths.”
The project pushes Christians to look at how Christians have acted in the past and at the things they have done in the name of Jesus, said Burtram, who identifies as a conservative evangelical. “I would hope some people, even Christian nationalists, will be able to open their minds, because it is possible to be honest about ourselves and our past and keep our convictions and values.”
The question of whether the U.S. is a Christian nation is “extremely complicated” as most colonists were Christian and most of the colonies had established religions, he said. “But the idea that the United States is in a covenant with the Christian God and the idea we are an explicitly Christian nation, the Constitution itself militates against that. The fact it does not allow a religious test for office and that the First Amendment leaves no room for an established religion, all militates against that.”
“Church and State” takes a nuanced approach to its discussion of the country’s religious history in part because it reflects the personalities and perspectives of the hosts, Wright said.
“Even Josh and I are not necessarily partisan. We claim we’re Democrat or Republican, but we wouldn’t necessarily define ourselves as being far right or far left. I primarily vote Democrat, but I’m a gun owner and I believe in strong immigration (policy), and my partner believes in some things that would not necessarily be coded as Republican.”
But one thing most can agree on is that religion has played a significant role in U.S. history and that Americans are experiencing high levels of stress on the issue, Burtram said.
“I definitely feel overwhelmed. People have wished death upon me and all sorts of different things for just merely questioning some of this stuff. It’s extremely concerning that we would be at that level of vitriol, including from Christians I had trusted to act like Jesus.”