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By Kevin DeYoung - Posted at Clearly Reformed:
Published December 1, 2025
Celebrating our Christian heritage, promoting Christian ideas in the public square, and having elected officials who are committed to historic Christianity and eager to see Christian churches protected and flourish—if that’s Christian Nationalism, most evangelicals in this country would be for it. And so would I.I am not a Christian Nationalist, but I almost could be.
In my 2021 article, “What to Do With Christian Nationalism,” I argued that there were two problems with Christian Nationalism.
First, no one agrees on what Christian Nationalism is. I cited Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, who summarized Christian Nationalist beliefs in six statements: The federal government should (1) declare the United States a Christian nation, (2) advocate Christian values, (3) not enforce the strict separation of church and state, (4) allow religious symbols in public spaces, and (5) allow prayer in public schools. (6) The success of the United States is part of God's plan. By that definition, a majority of Americans believe one or more tenets of Christian Nationalism. I could almost support all six of those statements, depending on what is meant by words like “declare,” “advocate,” “success,” and “strict separation.” The Whitehead-Perry definition never stuck. There is still a wide range of views on what people mean by Christian Nationalism.
The second problem I identified was that no one was actually arguing for something called Christian Nationalism. If that was generally true in 2021 (and, in hindsight, I’m sure I missed some early voices embracing the term), it is no longer the case. In the last four years, there have been many people—in books, in blogs, on podcasts, in speeches, on X, and in personal conversation—eager to own the label Christian Nationalist and, in many places, argue strenuously for it.
For my part, while I never liked the term, I was (and still am) in favor of certain principles that some people may call Christian Nationalism. In April 2022, I wrote another article on Christian Nationalism, this time commending what Presbyterian pastor and Princeton Seminary professor Samuel Miller (1769–1850) called “enlightened patriotism.” Miller had no patience for newer voices of “infidel fanaticism” that wanted to reject the religion of Christ and throw off the restraints of a religious and moral code. Miller insisted that without sound doctrine, Americans could not truly be moral, and without morality they would be miserable. The duty of Christians, therefore, was “to labor unceasingly to impart sound doctrine to all classes of people for the sake of our beloved country.”