Dreams of American Christendom: White Evangelicals’ Political Pursuit of a Christian Order without Christ

Abstract

Religion has become an increasingly pronounced force in American politics, most notably among White evangelicals, nearly two-thirds of whom identify with Christian nationalism. This group contends that conservative, biblically rooted Christian values should determine the social and cultural landscape of our society and seeks to pass laws that help actualize this goal. This article explores the fundamental beliefs that enable White evangelicalism’s compatibility with Christian nationalism. More specifically, it considers how the myth of America’s Christian origins prompts a yearning for Christendom that—when coupled with a theological shift from a strict non-interventionist two kingdoms doctrine to a more fluid conception of kingdoms and laws—allows White evangelicals to cordon off Jesus’s life and teachings from their political activities. This relegation of Jesus to the Christian’s spiritual life enables White evangelicals to pursue a Christian ordering of society that is estranged from the person of Christ.

1. White Evangelicalism’s Christian Nationalism Problem

From Louisiana’s Ten Commandments Law and debates over abortion and IVF to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and talk of Donald Trump as a Christ-like figure, suffering as Jesus suffered and protected by God for a higher purpose, religion has become increasingly pronounced in American politics. This trend is perhaps most notable among White evangelicals, who are five times more likely than non-evangelical Christians to hold Christian nationalist views (PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey 2023, p. 7).1 Of course not all evangelicals believe that the laws and policies of the U.S. government should be used to reshape American values into conservative Christian values. However, a surprising number—nearly two-thirds—of White Americans who self-identify as “evangelical” or “born again” do, including Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (Contreras 2024; PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey 2023, pp. 5–6).

In an interview conducted shortly after stepping into leadership as Speaker, Johnson noted that if anyone wants to know what he thinks about a political issue, they need only read the Bible. “That’s my worldview”, he said. “That’s what I believe” (Broadwater 2023). Johnson’s social perspective and political agenda are shaped by his Christian faith (Yousef 2023). In this way, he is not so different from any other Christian. White evangelicals are not the only ones whose perspectives and priorities are informed by their religious commitments, nor are they alone in their acknowledgement of the Bible’s authority.2 What sets Johnson and likeminded White evangelicals apart is their desire to re-Christianize the country through political intervention.3 What sets them apart is their support for Christian nationalism—a position rejected by the majority of mainline Protestants in the United States (PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey 2023, p. 6). What is it that enables and perhaps even encourages this affinity between White evangelicalism and Christian nationalism?

Considering the modern history of White evangelical political engagement in the United States as well as statements and writings by some of its most prominent leaders, this article seeks to identify the fundamental beliefs undergirding White evangelicalism’s dominant political posture. More specifically, it considers how acceptance of the narrative that America was founded as a Christian nation has prompted theocratic aspirations among a number of White evangelicals. This vision of an American Christendom is coupled with a theological shift among evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell from an insulated, non-interventionist view of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man to a more fluid conception of kingdoms and laws. This change in theology coincides with the galvanization of White evangelical political action, one that is cordoned off from the life and teachings of Jesus and, as such, pursues a Christian ordering of society apart from the person of Christ.

2. The Promise of American Christendom: Past and Present

White evangelicals were not always associated with Christian nationalism, nor were they always bastions of conservative social change through political action. In fact, prior to the mid-1970s most White evangelical Protestants were relatively uninterested in American politics. They saw it as an irrelevant distraction from their spiritual pursuits (Haberman 2018). For example, conservative Christians did not consider abortion the clarion call that they do today. At a 1968 medical conference on abortion organized by the evangelical flagship publication Christianity Today, twenty-six evangelical theologians debated the ethics of abortion and, in a joint statement, published their findings. In it, they acknowledged their inability to come to a consensus on whether or not abortion constituted a sin, but they concluded, “the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord” (Balmer 2022). Fellow conservatives at the Southern Baptist Convention went a step further, passing a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion in 1971, which they then reaffirmed in 1974 and 1976. According to Randall Balmer, it was not until “born-again” Christian Jimmy Carter began his presidential bid that White evangelicals changed their tune on abortion (Balmer 2022).

As a “deeply committed evangelical Christian” who not only spoke openly about his faith, but belonged to the Southern Baptist Convention and was actively involved in the local church, one would imagine that White evangelicals would have been thrilled to have Carter in the White House. As one 1976 New York Times headline put it, “Carter’s Evangelism Putting Religion Into Politics for First Time Since ‘60” (Briggs 1976). However, Carter’s more progressive social positions left many evangelicals unhappy (Balmer 2022).4 It was in response to Carter and the country’s perceived liberal drift that Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority to defend conservative Christian family values and helped galvanize the religious right as a powerful voting bloc. It was this coalition of religious conservatives that many credit with Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over Carter in 1980 (Falwell 1997, pp. 8–9).

Reagan was not immediately popular among White evangelicals. After all, he was a Presbyterian and a divorcé. However, with the endorsement of leaders like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham, White evangelicals ultimately rallied around him, inspired by the theopolitical picture that he painted. In his campaign speeches, Reagan spoke of the possibility of a different America, of America as a Christian nation (Balmer 2022). He spoke of the country’s Christian origins, claiming that Christianity was written into America’s DNA, essential to her fundamental identity.5 This narrative of America’s past was then tied to the promise of her future. A country of pro-life judges and prayer in schools—Reagan offered a vision of a nation properly aligned with the will of God. He offered a vision of the restoration of American Christendom.

To arrive at this Promised Land, however, White evangelicals had to do more than show up at the polls. They had to engage in grassroots political action (Haberman 2018). In Reagan’s speech at the 1983 Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Florida, he urged the evangelicals gathered there to get involved and make themselves heard. Referring to the demon from C.S. Lewis’s evangelical classic The Screwtape Letters, Reagan said to the crowd, “You know, I’ve always believed that old Screwtape reserved his best efforts for those of you in the church. I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourself above it all and label both sides equally at fault… and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil” (Reagan 1983). Reagan encouraged evangelicals to recognize their political involvement not as antithetical to the life of faith, but as fundamental to it. The future of America’s Christian identity depended on it. This was a battle between good and evil. In this way, Reagan presented political participation as more than a civic duty; it was an act of Christian courage and faithfulness.

Neither Christendom’s allure nor the framing of political participation as a struggle between good and evil has dissipated in the intervening decades. The same logic continues to be used to encourage political action. In a campaign speech given at a 2024 Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, Donald Trump warned, “The radical left is trying to shame Christians. Silence you. Demoralize you. And they want to keep you out of politics”. He went on to urge his Christian audience that they cannot “afford to sit on the sidelines. If Joe Biden gets back in, Christianity will not be safe in a nation with no boarders, no laws, no freedom, no future. You’re not going to be safe. You’re not going to be safe as a person. And your religion certainly will be in tatters” (Trump 2024b). He then pivoted to the religious persecution that would take place unless he wins in November. As is so often the case, the promise of Christendom is undergirded by a message of fear and loss. Unless White evangelicals act politically, their religion, their place in society, and America’s Christian identity will be lost, and chaos will ensue.

3. Threat of Disorder

3.1. Middle Ages

This tension between the promise of Christendom and the threat of its loss is a common narrative within the religious state, whether real or imagined. This is because Christendom is, by definition, a society marked by God’s divine economy (oikonomia). It follows that those who constitute Christendom, its citizenry, must live in accordance with this holy order. For this reason, medieval Christian society demonstrated great care for the spiritual condition of its people. Their internal spiritual order was thought to have an impact on every aspect of their life. Their spiritual condition was believed to determine not only their moral behavior, but also their intellectual capacity, the physical state of their body, as well as their social and political tendencies. As such, a citizen’s spiritual condition was seen as imperative to the health of the Christian state.

This was not only true in a positive sense. Protecting against the spiritual corruption of its citizens was also taken seriously. According to medieval thought, those who failed to conform to God’s divine order embodied a kind of counter-order, what one might call a demonic disorderliness. Whether Jews, Moors, women, or iconoclasts, those considered to be spiritually disordered posed a threat to the proper order of Christian society with their immorality, intellectual deficiency, and unruly social and political tendencies (Wong 2021, pp. 37–48). What’s more, the danger of their condition extended beyond themselves. Their disorderliness was believed to be contagious, passed from one person to another.

This is why, during the Middle Ages, contact with those deemed disordered was often guarded against.6 This is why the Jews were run out of Medieval Europe in 1290. And blood purity laws were passed in Spain in the mid-fifteenth century, along with the forced-conversions and expulsions of Muslims and Jews. Each of these episodes offers an example of the way that Christian society attempts to protect against disordered peoples, thereby safeguarding itself from corruption and degradation. Its very existence depends on it.

3.2. Twentieth Century

A similar observation can be made of U.S. immigration policy at the turn of the twentieth century. During this time, racially informed immigration laws were passed for the purpose of preventing what President Theodore Roosevelt and leading social scientists understood to be the spiritual, moral, and intellectual corruption of the White American population by non-White immigrants (Jacobson 2001, pp. 191–92, 201; Swinton 1870, pp. 1, 5). The problem boiled down to pollution. It was not only non-Christians, with their spiritual waywardness, who posed a threat to Western Christian society. Those who were not “White” were also believed to pollute the lifeblood of Western Christian nations, for they carried and communicated qualities and practices thought to be out of step with Western civilization.

One finds this manner of racial-religious thinking in the popular writing of John Swinton at the turn of the century. Swinton posited that White European men were naturally oriented toward the Christian faith and its values, but that this was not the case with other races.7 The Mongolian (yellow and red) peoples had a “depraved and debased blood” that rendered them spiritually corrupt (Swinton 1870, p. 6). Chinese immigrants were inherently idolatrous; they were pagan by nature.8 Moreover, their “propensity toward idolatry” resulted in “the proliferation of virulent diseases” that corrupted their bodies, weakened their minds, and threatened the well-being of civilized society (Swinton 1870, p. 14). In this way, a people’s spiritual corruption gives way to their physical and mental degradation, resulting in societal endangerment. Because of their natural inclination toward idolatry and away from the Christian faith, the Chinese were, as a whole, ill-suited to become American citizens.

The popularity of these beliefs about race, religion, and biologically determined character contributed to a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States at this time. This, in turn, led to more restrictive immigration policies, including the 1924 Immigration Act, which implemented quotas based upon a person’s nation of origin and enforced existing bans on non-White immigrants.

3.3. Twenty-First Century

It is notable that Swinton’s racially and religiously infused political vision is never fully excised from America’s social imaginary. Evangelicalism’s strong belief in America’s Christian identity, with its properly ordered Christian society, exacerbates its fear of the corrupting presence of disordered peoples. It is this fear that finds a home in Christian nationalism’s conviction that immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” (PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey 2023, p. 18).9 Given the prevalence of these views among White evangelical Protestants, nearly half of whom believe in replacement theory, it should come as no surprise that the majority of White evangelicals see safeguarding the racial-religious purity of America’s stock as a sacred responsibility. While on its face, replacement theory’s anti-immigrant sentiment appears to be a struggle between American vs. non-American or Western vs. non-Western culture, the history of America’s Western identity is itself bound up with concepts of White superiority and a divinely ordained societal, cultural, and political economy (McLaren 1997, pp. 16–17).10 The belief that non-Euro-American immigrants pose a threat to America’s (White, Western) holy order helps explain White evangelicalism’s resistance to racial integration in the 1980s as well as the appeal of Christian nationalism’s anti-immigrant position today.

White evangelicalism’s hope in American Christendom and its natural investment in the sacredness of whiteness serves to reinforce an established way of imagining various races, ethnicities, and nationalities along pure and impure lines. “The international boundary between Mexico and the United States,” for example, is often imagined “as a border that separates a pure from an impure body, a virtuous body from a sinful one, a monogamous conjugal body regulated by the law of marriage from a criminal body given to fornication, adultery, prostitution, bestiality, and sodomy” (Gutiérrez 1996, pp. 255–56). This imaginative way of ordering the world associates “Mexicans with dirt, filth, and unnatural acts, while symbolically constructing Euro-American citizens as pure, law-abiding, and living in harmony with God’s natural law” (McLaren 1997, p. 19). More than a racial, national, or cultural distinction, this is treated as a struggle between order and disorder, good and evil (Wong 2021, pp. 1–3). It is a struggle for the soul of the nation and, in this way, for its very future. Those deemed impure—those assumed to hold beliefs, values, or ways of life that are inconsistent with America’s White, Western, Christian identity—pose a serious threat to the country’s social, political, and spiritual wellbeing. Mexican immigrants are not only “rapists”, “murders”, and “drug dealers”, they are “poisoning the blood of our country” (Gibson 2023).

Of course, it is not only Mexican immigrants who are seen as a threat to the country’s proper, law-abiding, God-ordained order. Racial-religious policies like Executive Order 13769, more colloquially known as the “Muslim Ban”, which was popular among White evangelicals in the United States at the time, and Trump’s proposed Muslim registry are both means of restricting non-White, non-Christian immigration (Smith 2017). As in the twentieth century, these immigrant groups continue to be treated as an existential threat to the country’s social, political, and religious character.

In addition to the threat posed by immigrants, America is also under threat from the “radical left”, Americans who hate their country and secretly desire her demise. At his 2024 speech for the National Religious Broadcasters’ International Christian Media Convention, Donald Trump called attention to the insidious and oppressive work of the left to damage the country’s Christian identity and values (Gold 2024). Repeating his standard message for evangelical audiences, he warned that the left was “trying to shame Christians”, and that they couldn’t “afford to sit on the sidelines in this fight” (Trump 2024a). After all, Christianity—the “soul of our country”—is at stake (Trump 2024a).

This deep-seated fear of America losing her Christian identity has created the perfect environment to galvanize White evangelicals to act. Christians must fight back however they can, whether that be through state constitutional amendments, Supreme Court decisions, or school board rulings. Everything is at stake. As Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker once put it, “When judges don’t rule in the fear of the Lord, everything’s falling apart” (Rojas 2024). Not only is America losing her Christian identity, but this loss of identity is producing societal, national, and even global disaster. “The whole world is coming unglued” (Rojas 2024). And the only viable response is to reassert the proper Christian order of things.

4. Shifting Theology to Save America

According to prominent voices in the White evangelical movement, including members of the Falwell and Graham dynasties, the realization of a Christian societal order requires evangelicals to vote according to “biblical… and godly principles”, according to what is in keeping with the order of God (Blinder 2016). More than going to the polls once every four years, active political engagement means participation in grassroots efforts.11

Of course, this current position on the importance of political involvement differs radically from the generally apolitical posture that White evangelicals maintained prior to the 1970s. In Jerry Falwell’s (1965) sermon “Ministers and Marches”, in which he addresses the question of the Church’s responsibility in regard to societal ills, he writes:

Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals. We are not told to wage wars against bootleggers, liquor stores, gamblers, murderers, prostitutes, racketeers, prejudiced persons or institutions, or any other existing evil as such. Our ministry is not reformation but transformation. The gospel does not clean up the outside but rather regenerates the inside…. We pay our taxes, cast our votes as a responsibility of citizenship, obey the laws of the land, and other things demanded of us by the society in which we live. But, at the same time, we are cognizant that our only purpose on this earth is to know Christ and to make Him known. Believing the Bible as I do, I find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ, and begin doing anything else—including fighting communism, or participating in civil rights reforms. As a God-called preacher, I find there is no time left after I give the proper time and attention to winning people to Christ. Preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners.

(Baker 2021, p. 37)

At this time, Falwell’s evangelical premillennialist dispensationalist theology disinclines him toward political organizing for social change (Baker 2021, p. 34). This apolitical posture coincides with the essential evangelical belief that all people need transformation, but that true transformation requires spiritual conversion (Noll et al. 2019, p. 6). This evangelical tenet is given even more of a socio-political dimension through premillennialist dispensationalism’s pessimistic stance on society—the sentiment being that Christians should not spend time trying to fix something that is already lost and that will eventually be swept away (Georgianna 1989, p. 5). Given the fallenness of people and, in turn, society and the need to be “born again” in order for change to occur, any attempt to transform the socio-political world through human effort is pointless (Baker 2021, p. 35). Thus, the true duty of the evangelical Christian is not to organize toward political action, but to spread the Good News of the Gospel. The call is to evangelize (Baker 2021, p. 36).

What changes for Falwell? While some point to the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe (Baker 2021, p. 39), others to the racially integrative progressive politics of people like Jimmy Carter (Balmer 2022), and others still to Carter’s position on Israel and the Palestinian homeland (Chapman 2015, p. 433), what is clear is that a shift does take place, and this shift is reflected in Falwell’s theology. Evidence of this change can be found in the two very different ways in which Falwell interprets Matthew 22:15–22.

In his earlier “Ministers and Marches” sermon, Falwell understands Jesus’s call to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” to mean “pay your taxes, forget politics, and serve Me with all your heart” (Chapman 2015, p. 433). This reading suggests that there is a clear distinction between the kingdom of God and the Roman Empire (i.e., the kingdom of man). Falwell goes on to explain that Jesus is “not here to reform the Roman Empire” (Chapman 2015, p. 433). His role is not to change society. Likewise, Falwell concludes that the role of the church is not to reform society through political or social action. The role of the church is to evangelize the lost (Baker 2021, p. 37).

But, five years later, Falwell’s reading of Matthew 22 shifts. He still recognizes the two kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man, which he identifies as being governed by different laws or modes of being (Baker 2021, p. 39). However, unlike Augustine’s and, presumably, his own earlier two kingdoms’ doctrine, wherein these two realms have two distinct sets of laws that apply to two district citizenries, with Christians being ruled by the kingdom and laws of God and non-Christians by the kingdom and laws of man, Falwell now suggests dual modes of being, perhaps even two sets of rules, governing the same Christians (Baker 2021, 32n.10). When dealing with spiritual things, Christians are ruled by the ways of God, but when dealing with the things of this world, it is appropriate for Christians to take on the ways of the world. Falwell’s son offers this idea in even starker terms in a 2018 interview with the Washington Post. “There’s two kingdoms”, Jerry Falwell Jr. explains, “There’s the earthly kingdom and the heavenly kingdom”.

In the heavenly kingdom the responsibility is to treat others as you’d like to be treated. In the earthly kingdom, the responsibility is to choose leaders who will do what’s best for your country…. It’s such a distortion of the teachings of Jesus to say that what he taught us to do personally—to love our neighbors as ourselves, help the poor—can somehow be imputed on a nation. Jesus never told Caesar how to run Rome. He went out of his way to say that’s the earthly kingdom, I’m about the heavenly kingdom and I’m here to teach you how to treat others, how to help others, but when it comes to serving your country, you render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.

(Heim 2018)

According to this Falwellian two kingdoms doctrine, Christians are no longer living as people in the world, but not of the world. Instead, they are trading back and forth between worlds, values, and ways of being. This idea that Christians live under two rules of law explains how Jerry Falwell Jr. can cordon off the ways of Jesus from evangelical political action and still recognize that action as faithful. Within the political realm, Christians are subject to the laws of man, not the laws of God. The life of Jesus is inconsequential when it comes to how one engages in politics. “I don’t look to the teachings of Jesus for what my political beliefs should be”, Falwell Jr. admits, “I don’t think he wanted us to” (Haberman 2018). When it comes to politics, Christ-likeness is of no concern. “It’s not our job to choose the best Sunday school teacher, like Jimmy Carter was” (Wing and Wilkie 2016). In order to save America’s Christian identity and, in turn, its soul, “we need somebody tough, we need somebody who has the right position on the issues” (Haberman 2018). That is what really matters.

This utilitarian political posture is not exclusive to Jerry Falwell Jr. In a 2024 interview on Christian nationalism and political engagement, his brother Jonathan Falwell encouraged evangelical Christians to focus on biblically based societal issues when voting. Notably absent in the interview was any discussion of Christian character (Klett 2024). Franklin Graham offered a similar message in his 2016 Decision America Tour. “I’m not going to tell people how to vote”, Graham said, “but I’m going to encourage them to vote and as they vote, to look at biblical principles and godly principles that these candidates might support” (Blinder 2016). For these prominent evangelicals, how one votes should not be based upon the candidate’s character or affinity to the life and teachings of Jesus, but on the policies that they promise to enact. What matters is shaping American society in accordance with conservative biblical principles and, in this sense, with God’s holy order (Salama 2024). What matters is the desired end goal, not the means by which that goal is achieved.

5. Pursing American Christendom without Christ

The problem with approaching societal transformation with an eye to biblical principles and divine order apart from the ways of Jesus and his teachings is that, without Christ, our sense of God’s proper order quickly loses its shape. Without Jesus’s life as the lens through which we understand what is true, good, and beautiful, or how justice should always be accompanied by mercy, or how family and allegiance extend beyond blood and country, it is all too easy to slip into the idolatrous practice of elevating our own sense of right order and attributing it to God. Theologians have long cautioned against this temptation. Karl Barth warned liberal theologians against placing too much trust in general revelation, namely, in the human experience as a means of knowing God (Barth 2010, vol. 1.2, §17). In Nazi Germany, this practice opened up space for the confusion of human culture and national ambition with divine will. Barth believed that it was only by looking to Christ as the true revelation of God and, in this manner, encountering God’s divine order, that we could possibly hope to avoid the idolatrous projection of nationalist desires.

Four decades later, James Cone took a similar position in God of the Oppressed, where he argued that Christians must center Jesus—not simply the spiritual idea of Jesus, but the Jesus described in the gospels (Cone 1997, pp. 106–7). Without this grounding of belief in the reality of Christ, we inevitably project our own hopes, desires, and sense of order and justice onto God. As Martin Luther King Jr. warned in his sermon following the murder of Emmitt Till, Christians have the capacity to perpetrate “many of the greatest evils in our society” not because they are inauthentic in their faith or their worship, but because “they worship Christ emotionally, not morally” (King 1955). They worship the idea of Christ as spiritual savior and champion of love without taking into account the moral reality of Jesus’s life and, in turn, the specific contours of the divine order into which God calls the Christian disciple.

6. Conclusions

God’s holy order is not found in the isolationism born of Christendom’s fear of contamination or loss. It is not found in the pursuit of purity that seeks to exclude those deemed fallen, polluted, or disordered. It is found in the God who tears down the walls that divide us. It is found in the Word made flesh, in the one who embodies the order of God because, as the second person of the Trinity, he is the order of God.12

When White evangelical leaders reduce Jesus to a spiritual idea and encourage Christians to separate his life and teachings from their political action, they denude the Bible of its power, making it little more than a means of justifying their own desires, conceptions of beauty, ideas of purity, and sense of justice. Without the concrete reality of Christ anchoring Christians to the order of God, even those who claim the Bible as the foundation for their social and political positions are left with a conception of proper order that is no longer centered on the living embodiment of the divine, but on themselves and their own vision of righteousness and purity.13 Without Christ at the center of the pursuit of holy order, such endeavors cannot help but become idolatrous and inclined toward death.

It is no coincidence that as Jerry Falwell Sr. wades deeper and deeper into American politics throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he speaks less and less about the gospel or the Christian call to witness to the Good News of Jesus Christ (Baker 2021, pp. 47–48). What makes White evangelicals ready to embrace Christian nationalism is not their religiously rooted understanding of proper order or their desire to see such order manifest in society. What makes this affinity between White evangelicalism and Christian nationalism possible is a willingness to separate the life and teachings of Jesus from how Christians engage in society and politics, as though the ways of Jesus only apply to one’s spiritual life. It is this bifurcation that allows Jerry Falwell Jr. to claim that Christians should not look to Jesus when discerning their political decisions. And it is this separation of Jesus’s life and teachings from their political engagement that makes it possible for White evangelicals to pursue a Christian ordering of American society divorced from the ways of Christ.