On Dec. 21, 2025, Vice President JD Vance, speaking at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, declared: “More than any time I can recount, people are talking about American identity and figuring out what it is that unites us. But I want to say something here. The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God, we always will be, a Christian nation.”
Then he added: “Now, I want to be explicit because, of course, the fake news media will twist everything that I say. I’m not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American. I’m saying something simpler and truer. Christianity is America’s creed. The shared moral language from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond. Across that history, our country’s major debates have always centered on how we could best, as a people, please God.”
Bill Leonard
Not to “twist” what he says, but … “from the Revolution to the Civil War” there was no uniformly “shared moral language,” especially not among professing Christians whose enduring dispute was about what kind of Christianity would be normative in American culture. That debate got Quaker preacher Mary Dyer hanged for preaching in Boston in 1660, an action approved by the Puritan commonwealth’s general court.
The absence of a “shared moral language” regarding human slavery was a major source of the American Civil War, when Southerners insisted both biblical testaments revealed God’s approval for slaveholding and said Northerners’ appeal to the “Golden Rule” as biblical authority for abolition was a contradiction of the biblical mandate: “Slaves, obey your masters with fear and trembling as unto the Lord.”
Where politics and religion are concerned, perhaps the real “anchor of the United States of America” rests in these words from the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Evangelical leader Franklin Graham exercised that right on Dec. 17, 2025, at a Pentagon worship service allegedly celebrating the birth of the “Prince of Peace,” but where he told the gathered military leaders: “We know that God loves. But did you know that God also hates? Do you know that God also is a God of war? Many people don’t want to think about that or forget that.”
“But, Franklin, that is so hard; that’s not the God I believe in.’ Well, you had better believe in him.”
Graham then cited Exodus 15, where God and Moses assist the Egypt-fleeing Hebrew people to successfully hold off the militant Amalekites. Graham then jumped 400 years to I Samuel 15, in which the prophet Nathan informs King Saul: “Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
Graham told his listeners: “So Samuel gave the instructions for the mission. Now, people will say, ‘But, Franklin, that is so hard; that’s not the God I believe in.’ Well, you had better believe in him.”
A week before Christmas Day, 2025, a son of Billy Graham preached at the center of the U.S. military-industrial complex by recounting a 3,000-year-old story in which the God of king and prophet commands genocide. At no point does he mention that the first Christmas included angels who sang, “And on earth PEACE.” Was he implying to the gathered Pentagon military personnel that divinely sanctioned genocide might still be permissible?
Such Christmas-season commentary by American religio-political leaders sent me back to Revivalism and Social Reform, published in 1957 and written by Johns Hopkins professor and Church of the Nazarene elder Timothy L. Smith. Its opening sentence declares: “Evangelical Protestantism reached the summit of its influence in America during the last half of the 19th century.”
Smith says American evangelicals of that period were moving “from the frontier to dominate the urban religious scene,” noting that “a widespread aspiration for Christian perfection complemented in many ways the social idealism which endeavored to reform the drunkard, free the slaves, elevate womankind and banish poverty and vice from the country. Exuberant churchmen rededicated themselves to the dream of making America a Christian nation.”
Fletcher Harper
He then cites Fletcher Harper, founder of a “flourishing young magazine” who wrote in 1854, “There can be no doubt that the tendency at the present day is to magnify the political, the social, the secular or what may be called the worldly-humanitarian aspects (of) professedly religious movements.” Yet Harper challenged the idea that this supposed Christian nationalism would become an American reality through political efforts and become, in his words, “a sort of politico-religious golden age.”
Smith cautioned: “If these aspects of religion continued to be presented as the chief ground of its support, Christianity would cease to serve the republic. Instead of the church evangelizing the world, the world would secularize the church.”
Smith’s commentary sent me directly to Fletcher’s original article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, a warning that was at once harsh and prophetic, then and now. Please read carefully Fletcher’s assessment of his (and our current) situation:
Now in all this it is doubtless supposed that the State and statesmen are made subservient to the spiritual kingdom; and yet there may be room for a doubt, at least, whether the real effect may not be directly the reverse. Through the continued dwelling upon the secular benefits — either by politicians directly, on such occasions, or by clergymen out of a conciliating deference to the politician — the worldly side of all these questions becomes predominant, the spiritual power is lost, and thus there is eventually a failure even in that secular good which might have been secured had it only been kept in its subordinate place.
“Religion will cease to be politically useful when its political utility is presented as the true or pretended ground of its support.”
Religion will cease to be politically useful when its political utility is presented as the true or pretended ground of its support. In other words, it will no longer be religion, but a base and far from harmless counterfeit. The best things, when debased, are ever the source of the direst mischiefs. This is the peril at which we hold those priceless gifts — the Christian Revelation and the Christian Church.
Written 172 years ago, Harper’s words retain the uncanny ability to describe American politics and religion “in the year of our Lord” 2026. Is it possible that while Vance, Graham and others in their ideological camp believe they are saving Christian faith, in reality they are secularizing the gospel out of it?
Nor did Fletcher Harper spare the reverends of his era and ours, writing:
The clergyman — honest and pious man — does doubtless fancy that he is doing great service to the cause of religion. He is filled with hope and triumph, perhaps, at the thought of the worldly powers thus seeking aid of the spiritual kingdom.
But alas, it all contributes to the movement of which we have been speaking. The spoil-hunting faction has felt the need of no divine guidance, has cared for no but another step has been taken in that movement which would make the spiritual subservient to the secular, and the chief value of the church to consist in its political utility.
No clergyman should ever officiate clerically in such a caucus, until he has some reason to believe that its after-scenes will not be in most direct contrast with its religious initiation.
In this new year, let’s consider dropping the words “Christian nation” as far too generic to describe all Christian people and communions in the land of the free and the home of the increasingly hungry and uninsured. Instead, let’s call the movement what it is: “Evangelical nation, secularized, 2026.”
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce.