The separation of church and state, though under attack from the right, is still ingrained in our national psyche. Who’s best positioned to keep it there?

The private building that’s closest to the U.S. Capitol—indeed, the only nongovernmental building on Capitol Hill proper—belongs to the United Methodist Church. The corner lot—near where the Supreme Court now resides—was a muddy hole when the Reverend Clarence True Wilson spotted it, in 1917, and decided it would be the ideal location for the denomination’s political efforts, especially its campaign for Prohibition. By 1922, built with donations as small as fifteen cents from churchgoers across the country, the five-story Italian Renaissance structure, made of Indiana limestone, was christened as the headquarters for Methodism’s Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals.

We’re used to thinking of Prohibition as a regressive failure, an attempt to legislate morals. It was a failure, and it was an attempt to legislate morals, but it wasn’t regressive. It was led, in large part, by women demanding a better life for their sisters in a country where domestic violence, usually linked to alcohol, was a scourge. The educator and reformer Frances Willard was the president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union for nearly twenty years, and also a leading campaigner for women’s suffrage; her object, she said, was “to secure for all women above the age of twenty-one years the ballot as one means for the protection of their homes from the devastation caused by the legalized traffic in strong drink.” A Methodist and a socialist, she thought that men and women should have equal political power, because “God sets male and female side by side throughout His realm of law.”

She was no anomaly. Methodism, then the largest Protestant denomination in the country, adopted its Social Creed in 1908, the year that President Theodore Roosevelt addressed its annual conference. The creed called for the abolition of child labor, the end of sweatshops, “the gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practical point, with work for all,” a “living wage in every industry,” and the “highest wage that each industry can afford, and for the most equitable division of the products of industry that can ultimately be devised.” These were radical goals then, and some of them still are. Similar ideas continued to be part of the denomination’s official ideology throughout the twentieth century: in 1956, the Methodist General Conference endorsed birth control; in 1960, it urged “complete disarmament”; in 1964, the Methodist bishops declared that “prejudice against any person because of color or social status is a sin.” Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s 1963 March on Washington was planned, in part, in the meeting rooms of the Methodist building on Capitol Hill. In 1966, at a four-day celebration of Methodism’s bicentennial, President Lyndon Johnson said that the Social Creed was “a perfect description of the American ideal,” in that it called “for social justice for all human beings.”

Though it makes me happy, as a Methodist, to recount this history, I don’t do it for recruiting purposes. Methodism was far from perfect; having split regionally over slavery, it trafficked, in the South, with segregation, and it has yet to come fully to terms with gay rights. Nor was it, in its basic social liberalism, an outlier. I could have given a somewhat similar pocket history of the Presbyterian Church (in which I was baptized), or the Congregational Church (in which I was confirmed), or of Episcopalianism, or of Lutheranism—the other constituents of the so-called mainline Protestant Church, which dominated American religious life in the twentieth century. In 1958, according to the religious historian Mark Silk, “52 out of every 100 Americans were affiliated with a mainline Protestant denomination.” That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower, who had been baptized as a Presbyterian less than two weeks after taking office, laid the cornerstone for the Interchurch Center in Manhattan, not far from Grant’s Tomb. The center became home to the headquarters of many of these denominations and to their joint National Council of Churches—it’s known as the God Box. The United States, Eisenhower said, was politically free because it was religiously free, in contrast to its Cold War opponents, adding that without this “firm foundation, national morality could not be maintained.” Protestantism—in its modernist, as opposed to its fundamentalist, guise—was, for most of the century, a key part of the group project to make America a fairer, more humane, and more equal nation. It was bipartisan (almost every President in the twentieth century except John F. Kennedy came from a Protestant denomination), it was often shallow (if you’re half the population, you’re essentially baptizing the status quo), but it was real.

The reason to tell this history now is to complicate the idea of Christian nationalism that’s currently gripping sectors of the right. A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that around a third of Americans are adherents of or are sympathetic to a political creed that holds that the government should declare this a Christian nation, that “being a Christian is an important part of being truly American,” and that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” Moreover, more than half of Republicans support such ideas.

These attitudes reflect, among other things, a much more personalized religious sense, one in which individual salvation is the main or only goal and social reform an unwanted distraction. In the same era that the God Box was built, the evangelical leader Billy Graham was insisting that “my one purpose in life is to help people find a personal relationship with God, which, I believe, comes through knowing Christ.” That more self-focussed Christianity proved immensely popular; decades later, it merged with the more personalized economics of the Reagan era to produce the New Right. (Graham himself was not a Christian nationalist in this modern sense, and he would doubtless be regarded as a squishy globalist liberal by many of its adherents, given that, for example, he visited Mikhail Gorbachev in the company of ten Vatican officials, and spent his life a registered Democrat.) But his oldest son, the Reverend Franklin Graham, is an exemplar of the new belief system. After ten House Republicans joined the Democrats to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting the insurrection at the Capitol, Graham said, “It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal.”

You can see the personalized roots of the new nationalism pretty easily. In the P.R.R.I. study, more than two-thirds of white Christian-nationalist sympathizers and adherents reject the notion that “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for many Black Americans to work their way out of the lower class,” insisting instead that “discrimination against white Americans is as big of a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities.” More than four-fifths of this group think that immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background”—the core tenet of what’s called replacement theory. Two-thirds think that “society as a whole has become too soft and feminine,” and half that “we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.” (More worrisome, almost sixty per cent of the people whom the P.R.R.I. counts as QAnon believers—that is, people who agree with such statements as “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation”—are also identified Christian nationalists.)

Not surprisingly, leaders have risen to cater to this need, a notable example being Trump: in 2020, white evangelicals were eight times as likely to say that he had helped their cause than hurt it, even though they recognized that his behavior was less than godly. But Trump is clearly tone-deaf to the tropes of evangelicalism, unwilling to perform its rituals of public piety. He explained once that he’d never repented of any sins, saying, “I like to be good. I don’t like to have to ask for forgiveness. And I am good. I don’t do a lot of things that are bad. I try to do nothing that is bad.” (And, on the fringes, Trump has repeatedly failed to denounce QAnon conspiracy theories.) Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, though a Catholic, is far better at this show. A recent analysis by the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times found that he is “increasingly using Biblical references in speeches and . . . flirting with those who embrace nationalist ideas that see the true identity of the nation as Christian.” That “flirting” is an understatement—last September, at the evangelically and politically important Hillsdale College, in Michigan, as the papers reported, the Governor instructed his audience to “put on the full armor of God” to fight not the Devil, the original enemy in the passage from Ephesians, where that image originates, but “the left’s schemes.” He told them, “You will face flaming arrows, but if you have the shield of faith you will overcome them, and in Florida we walk the line here.” Then, last November, just before the gubernatorial election (in which he won a second term, by almost twenty points), he released a black-and-white campaign ad in which, over a montage of photographs of DeSantis and his family and supporters, a voice declares that, on “the eighth day,” God “looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

DeSantis’s antics seem a bit silly, but looking around the world this combination of nationalism and fundamentalism is fairly common. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has used Hindu nationalism to tighten his control on a nation that is about to become the world’s most populous. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has managed to turn the secular nationalism of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk into an Islamic force, modelled on the Ottoman Empire. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel is now torn apart by strife and operationally in the grip of Jewish nationalists, whose understanding of their faith excludes even many Americans who thought they were co-religionists. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has made the defense of Orthodoxy a bulwark of his politics; at Orthodox Christmas, he said that the Church had prioritized “supporting our warriors taking part in the special military operation” in Ukraine. His annual address to the Russian parliament, in February, included remarks that could have been delivered by some MAGA politicians in this country:

Look at the holy scripture and the main books of other world religions. They say it all, including that family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned. Reportedly, the Anglican Church is planning to, just planning to, explore the idea of gender-neutral God. What is there to say? Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Such rhetoric still feels foreign to most Americans—the separation of church and state is ingrained in our national psyche. In fact, atheists, agnostics, and others in the category that religion scholars call Nones are the fastest-growing part of the American population, especially among young people. Almost by definition, though, they’re not organized—American Atheists, the group founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, has just some seven thousand members. Who, then, might take a lead in preventing religion from further encroaching on government? The mainline Protestants who, in the nineteen-sixties, made up more than half of Americans don’t have anything like that kind of influence now, but they haven’t disappeared. According to the P.R.R.I.’s religion census for 2020, white mainline Protestants still make up about sixteen per cent of the population, and their numbers have grown very slightly in recent years, including among younger Americans. That’s closing in on fifty million people in this country. They’re not all liberal—being white, they may tilt Republican in elections. But only seven per cent meet the criteria as adherents of Christian nationalism. And their leadership—their clergy, their seminarians—is more progressive: a 2009 study from Public Religion Research found that more than seventy-five per cent of mainline Protestant ministers wanted government to do more to solve the poverty and housing crises, two-thirds wanted to outlaw capital punishment, four in five thought that gay people deserve equal treatment, and nearly seventy per cent wanted more governmental measures to protect the environment.

To be clear, this leadership group is not primarily involved in partisan politics. Its members are primarily involved in running churches—preaching, visiting sick people, making sure that the stewardship drive raises enough money to fix the roof. (I’ve been a lay leader of a small Methodist congregation; it’s all storm windows and insurance coverage for the parsonage.) And most involve themselves in the larger world through good works, from stocking the church free-food pantry to allying with national efforts, such as the Reverend William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign, which fights effectively for state and national legislation, or the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which has become the largest faith-based resettlement nonprofit in the country. (I’m on the service’s advisory council.) Often, what political instincts these leaders have are channelled into denominational work, passing resolutions—over time, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has adopted motions favoring restorative justice, opposing Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands, supporting “just globalization,” and calling racism a public-health issue. But we no longer live in an era when the mainline churches have enough power to make such resolutions more than words on paper; I served for some years on my Methodist conference’s Board of Church and Society, and I’m afraid that we sometimes referred to ourselves as Bored with Church and Society.

Still, these mainline leaders do have unique credibility for a different task: taking on Christian nationalism from a Christian perspective—acting, in a sense, as the Lincoln Project and Liz Cheney have acted in relation to the Republican Party. They are insiders who can say that the current incarnation of Christian power is not, in fact, particularly Christian—who can, among other things, scoff at their brethren’s sense of victimization and point out that they are not, in fact, the targets of discrimination.

Such a move wouldn’t be easy, for a variety of mostly temperamental reasons. Not only do many mainline leaders value consensus and avoid conflict, often knowing that the people in the pews are more moderate than they are, but they’d be particularly likely to do so in interreligious disputes. Ecumenicism, especially since the Second World War, has been one of the calling cards of this group—there’s a humility that discourages declaring your form of faith as better than another person’s. (My grandfather was born in China, the son of missionaries, so this humility strikes me as entirely appropriate, and a welcome development.) But one needn’t call Christian nationalists fake Christians. Though some are secular, and just using the Christian tag, the P.R.R.I. data make it clear that most are not “Christian in name only. They are significantly more likely to be connected to churches and to say religion is important to their lives.” Instead, it seems imperative to say that these people have been sold a fake Christianity.

This is not a charge that secular critics of Christian nationalism would be able, or would want, to make—and it’s at least as powerful to argue that we are a diverse country where no religion should exercise authority, which is clearly what the Founders intended. But the task should be important to mainline Protestants (and to progressive Catholics) for two reasons. First, the social goals that they believe in—all those Presbyterian resolutions (and all the recommendations from Pope Francis’s encyclicals on poverty and the environment)—would be a dead letter in a Christian-nationalist America. Second, Christian nationalists are well along in the process of subverting the popular understanding of Christianity.

In fact, Christ—the central focus of Christianity—is not a king, and not a fighter, but an advocate for the downtrodden. His ministry has no apparent interest in nationalism—indeed, welcoming strangers is one of its hallmarks. He is insistently nonviolent, and almost every gesture he makes is one of compassion. (His crime policy states that if someone takes your shirt, you should also give him your cloak.) His chief commandment is to love your neighbor. The four gospels are radical, rich, and deep, but they’re not complicated. If you read them and come away saying, “I’d like an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle,” you’ve read them wrong.

You can tell from this précis that I am not a theologian. I have written a book on the Book of Job, and I’ve occasionally taught the Bible at Middlebury College, where I mostly lecture on the environment, and I’ve preached in some of the world’s nicer pulpits. But mostly I’ve absorbed the messages of the great preachers of my lifetime—men such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., (and what a lot of Protestantism is in that name) and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr. Nor am I convinced of the superiority of my religion. (My two great political heroes are the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi and his greatest associate, the Muslim Abdul Ghaffar Khan.) But I am convinced of the worth of my religion, and so it maddens me to see it hijacked in favor of a nationalist reading that can be supported only by bad-faith cherry-picking (or, as theology students would have it, “proof-texting”).

Some good-faith Christians are beginning to rise to the challenge. Not long ago, William Barber told an interviewer, “When you have some people calling themselves Christian nationalists, you never hear them say, ‘Jesus said this.’ They say, ‘I’m a Christian, and I say it.’ But that’s not good enough. If it doesn’t line up with the founder, then it’s flawed.” And a Baptist layperson named Amanda Tyler, having watched insurrectionists storm the Capitol on January 6th carrying crosses, heads a group called Christians Against Christian Nationalism, which circulated a petition stating that “Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy.” The group has also developed a curriculum for churches, and, last December, Tyler testified at congressional hearings on extremism. Voices and projects like these need to grow louder and more numerous. The American experiment in pluralism is endangered, and so is public understanding of one of the world’s great faiths. It’s a perilous moment, but a teachable one.