The American experiment has always been tethered to religion, whether it’s “In God We Trust,” or the principle of religious freedom. But, under the Trump White House, religion — Christianity, in particular — has perhaps never been so front and center.
President Trump has received massive support from the Evangelical Christian community since his first run for president, and there is now a White House Faith Office and a Religious Liberty Commission. Trump has significantly expanded the influence of conservative Christians in the White House and declared he’s “bringing back religion in our country.”
The funeral of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, held at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, was chock-full of Trump administration officials. Trump himself called it “an old-time revival” more than a funeral.
John Carlson is the director of the Center for Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. He said these instances are examples of the rise of Christian Nationalism in America, and it raises questions about the role of religion in our government today.
The Show began by asking Carlson if America had ever been here before. He said not for a long time.
JOHN CARLSON: This is not the kind of phenomenon that we’ve seen Since World War II in the 20th century, the kind of very easy coalescence between many on the Christian right and in this administration, including people in this administration who aren’t necessarily even Christian. It does kind of blend and fuse together in a way that I think most people are not at all used to.
And that’s not really in keeping with what has been the tradition of past administrations, both Republican and Democrat in the past.
LAUREN GILGER: So what’s that looked like traditionally? Like, I think every president we’ve had has been religious. right? Christian of some kind, but not as explicit, not as willing to kind of cross that line, that unspoken line between church and state.
CARLSON: Yes, I think that’s very fair to say. And I mean, the United States is pretty unique in that it’s always had a very strong religious history that has continued up to this day. And even as religious membership or identity has declined in certain places, there’s still a very strong heritage that’s brought in and sometimes incorporated into what’s called the civil religion. So presidents who use the “God Bless America” that George H.W. bush famously prayed in his very first words in his first act as president. Many presidents have done that, actually, Eisenhower too.
And there’s always been media coverage of presidents attending church, or sitting in a certain pew or things of that nature. So none of that is new.
In fact, you don’t actually see that very much with Donald Trump. It’s a very different understanding and use, if you will, of religion. So, yes, I think this is very much unprecedented and very new and very, for a lot of people, it’s very concerning and disarming.
GILGER: Yeah. Yeah. So how are we seeing this, in your opinion, kind of manifest itself? Like, watching the Charlie Kirk funeral on television, which was so overtly Christian and evangelical, I think, was an eye opener to a lot of America. But are there policies? Is it affecting the government and the way the government’s actually functioning, you think?
CARLSON: This is a great question. There’s a lot of different pieces of this. So I think that what you saw surrounding the Charlie Kirk assassination and then his memorial service was very much in keeping with what a lot of people recognize that are called Christian nationalist instincts, which is a kind of very robust fusing between religious ideas, generally of the Christian right, and political ideas, also of the political right.
And that is something that past government officials or presidents may have held those views privately or even talked about them publicly. George Bush famously said Jesus was his favorite political philosopher, right? We remember that.
That’s, however, different than this kind of fusing of this narrative, particularly in a memorial service, where Charlie Kirk is cast equally as a Christian martyr as he is a martyr of America.
And those who might have some objection to how Charlie Kirk is being remembered or how he’s being honored are deemed sort of un-American, and in some cases they’re having even their rights stripped away. So that’s a very different kind of look to how you manage religious and political views.
And so it starts to take form in policies, and so that’s a concern for a lot of us.
GILGER: Is this Christian nationalism? Is that what we’re watching happen?
CARLSON: I think that’s a form or a manifestation of Christian nationalism, yes. The idea that you can display this, embrace this in and as part of your official duties as a government official, whether that’s Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth saying the Lord’s Prayer in a public gathering; or wearing his religion on his sleeve, so to speak, in his official capacity; or whether it’s all of the staffers — I was on a plane flying from D.C. to Phoenix the day before Charlie Kirk’s funeral, and that was filled with staffers and federal officials and very high ranking ones who were all coming out for the service.
That kind of thing is an overt manifestation and shows that it’s not just a sort of, you know, someone who might think a certain way or have some certain ideas about being a good Christian means being a good American and vice versa, that they’re more or less the same.
And an administration who’s avidly embracing that as part of its policy approach.
GILGER: OK, so then we have to talk about the implications of that, right? Because this is a country that, I think for a lot of folks, we’ve assumed there is a separation of church and state and also a celebration of diversity of religion, of freedom of religion, right? Like, you can be Muslim in this country and practice that faith freely. You can be Christian in this country and practice that faith freely. Will we lose that? Are we in danger of that, you think?
CARLSON: Well, it’s possible. I mean, there’s a number of different reasons for opposing Christian nationalism, one of which would be from a kind of strict constitutionalist point of view, which is to say anything that smacks of an established religion within the government is inherently unconstitutional. That’s not what the framers set out for. Now, you’d have to actually test that in the courts, because the separation of church and state, as it’s sometimes called, is really a legal battle that’s fought and waged case by case.
There’s a very different set of questions, however, when you get to start to thinking about, well, should religion be fused and intermingled so freely — certainly a particular kind of religion, like Christian nationalism — with political life? And for those who are not Christian, they might say, “No, absolutely not. This is exclusionary,” or, “What about me? I serve in the military as well. You’re speaking as if you’re representing all of us, but you don’t.”
And then there’s the other point of view, which is for a lot of Christians, Christian nationalism is not very Christian. It is not what they understand to be Christianity. They may say it’s idolatrous. This puts the nation over God. You can’t reconcile some of the claims and teachings of Jesus with what Christian nationalists argue.
GILGER: That’s really interesting, pushback on both ends there. So let me ask you lastly, John, about where we go from here, in your opinion. Like, how do we find a place we can all live and work together and kind of have some kind of semblance of fundamental equality when it comes to religion, if in fact we are in this moment in which the government is more and more explicitly religious and one kind?
CARLSON: Well, one of the things that I would say that is a great attribute of the United States is that we have this kind of long standing — I’ll call it a democratic faith. Maybe others call it a civil religion. You can think of it in different ways. But whether it’s “In God We Trust” on our coins, or the inaugural prayers or words of a president as he or she is assuming the office, there’s a long, long history.
So there’s a way in which this kind of deep democratic faith, I mean faith in its full, rich sense of the term, is deeply American, goes back to the beginning and has always been part of us. And interestingly, as Christian nationalism suffuses the current administration, civil religion has receded in that.
And why that’s important is civil religion is a lot more inclusive and encompassing. It makes room for new voices to emerge. But to join a religion that can unite, or a civic creed that can unite, that’s not nationalistic. That’s actually, instead of closing down the borders or closing down the categories of who belongs — you know, sort of says … “It’s not about those other features of who you are, including what party you are. It’s about what you believe.”
And that’s, I think, really where religion and politics have a potential and a role to play in our current environment.