I want to say something I mean very precisely, so I'm going to say it up front and then spend the rest of this post earning it: my problem has never been with the people in the pews. I grew up among those people. My grandmother was one. My aunt Deb still is, in the best possible sense. She reads her Bible, loves her neighbors, grows tomatoes and gives half of them away, and has never once tried to make her faith into a weapon pointed at someone else. She's the reason I took so long to admit that something had gone deeply wrong with the institution, because for a long time I kept seeing her face whenever someone said "Christian." I still do. That face is real and it is not what I'm writing about today.
What I'm writing about is something that has colonized the word "Christian" and is now wearing it like a costume while doing things that would have horrified Jesus of Nazareth. The actual historical person described in the actual Gospels, not the blue-eyed Aryan Viking who shows up on certain flags and merch tables. Christian nationalism. And yes, I'll say it plainly: it is not Christianity. It is a political power project that uses Christian iconography the way a counterfeiter uses a watermark, to pass as something it isn't.
I've been wrestling with a song that touches this territory as I work through the record I'm making, and writing it has forced me to get sharp about the distinction. So here's where I've landed.
What Christian Nationalism Actually Is
Christian nationalism is the belief that the United States was founded as, or should be transformed into, a Christian nation. Christian law, Christian governance, Christian cultural dominance. And that this is both politically achievable and divinely ordained. That last part is crucial. It's not just a preference. It's a mandate. God wants this, the argument goes, and therefore whoever opposes it is opposing God.
This is a significant theological and historical claim and it falls apart quickly under examination. The founding documents of the United States are conspicuously secular. The Constitution does not mention God or Jesus. The First Amendment explicitly prohibits the establishment of religion. Thomas Jefferson, whose document the Declaration of Independence is, was a deist who literally cut up the New Testament with scissors and removed all the miracles. This is not a secret, you can look up the Jefferson Bible, it's in the Smithsonian. These are not the documents of a nation founded to be theocratic.
But beyond the historical revisionism, there's the deeper theological problem: the Jesus described in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John was almost entirely uninterested in political power. When the Pharisees tried to trap him on the question of taxes ("render unto Caesar" is Matthew 22:21) he deflected. When the crowd wanted to make him king after the feeding of the five thousand (John 6:15), he slipped away. His famous Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 through 7 is a consistent articulation of a kingdom that operates by inversion: the humble inherit, the meek are exalted, the persecuted are blessed. None of this maps onto "acquire political dominance and impose our moral framework by law." None of it.
You can disagree with Christian theology all you want. I have my reasons for where I've landed. But if you are going to invoke the name of Christ, you are at minimum obligated to grapple with what the text actually says he said. And what it says is not "put my flag in sanctuaries and gerrymander districts in my name."
The Flags in the Sanctuary
There's an image I can't get out of my head and it's from a church I visited in my early twenties. Not my home church, a different one, bigger, newer, with a production budget and a pastor who wore sneakers onstage. They had American flags flanking the pulpit. Full-sized, on poles, positioned like guardians. And I remember having a thought I immediately suppressed because it felt dangerous: these are the same people who would tell me I couldn't have a picture of a boy band in my room because it was "idolatry," but this is fine?
I suppressed it because I'd been trained to suppress it. But I was right. The flags in the sanctuary are a conflation, a theological error with real-world consequences. When you equate love of God with love of nation, you've created a framework where criticizing national policy is an act of apostasy. Where the political and the sacred become indistinguishable. Where the pastor and the precinct captain are the same character.
The early church (the actual first-century church, the one the book of Acts describes) met in houses. Illegally. Under Roman occupation. They had no state sanction, no flags, no political alignment. The whole point of the early Christian identity was that it was not a national identity. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free" is Galatians 3:28. The first Christians were specifically articulating something that cut across national and ethnic lines. You can agree or disagree with their theology. But the flags-in-the-sanctuary crowd is not following that tradition. They're following a completely different one, one that has more in common with nationalist movements in general than with anything in the first century.
The Verse-Quote Politicians
Let's talk about the politicians. Not any one of them by name, I don't need to. You know the type. They quote Scripture in campaign ads. They get photographed at prayer breakfasts. They invoke God's will when describing their policy platform. And then they vote against programs that feed hungry children. They defend wars that kill civilians. They support policies that keep poor families in poverty. They look at Leviticus 19:34 ("The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt") and they apparently just... skip it.
The selective Scripture quoting is the tell. Because the Bible (even granting it's a complex, contradictory, multiply-authored ancient text) is absolutely saturated with concern for the poor, the stranger, the widow, the orphan. Amos, Isaiah, Micah, the entire prophetic tradition: over and over the accusation is that Israel's sin was not primarily sexual immorality but economic exploitation and neglect of the vulnerable. Amos 5:24 is "let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." The Christian nationalist political movement has inverted the actual moral weight of the texts it claims to follow.
When I read the Bible cover to cover (not with the apologetics filter, just straight through) one of the things I found genuinely shocking was how much of it is about economic justice. The Jubilee laws in Leviticus 25 mandated debt cancellation every fifty years. The gleaning laws in Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 24 required farmers to deliberately leave part of their harvest unharvested so the poor could collect it. These are not fringe ideas buried in obscure passages. They're structural provisions written into the law itself. You'd never know it from the sermons I grew up hearing, which spent a lot more time on sexual ethics and almost none on the extensive biblical case for structural economic protections for the poor.
why this matters to me as an ex-believer
What I want to say to the people who are still inside the faith: I left, and I'm not trying to convince you to leave with me. That's not this. What I want to say is that Christian nationalism is also bad for you. It is bad for Christianity. Not because I have a stake in the health of the institution (I genuinely don't) but because what it does is colonize the language of faith and use it as a crowbar for political power, and that crowbar breaks the thing it's prying with.
When faith becomes politically weaponized, it becomes something else. It becomes a tribal marker, an in-group identifier, a performance of belonging rather than a genuine interior thing. The people who are most hurt by that are the ones who take their faith seriously. Who are trying to actually live what they believe, who actually read the text, who actually engage with the hard parts. They're getting drowned out by a much louder faction that uses their tradition as a flag (literally and figuratively) while gutting what it means.
I say this as someone who was a true believer. I know what it felt like to take it seriously. I know the difference between that and the performance. And what I see from the Christian nationalist movement is almost entirely performance. Political theater dressed in sanctified language, designed to consolidate power while claiming divine mandate.
The Grift Has a Shape
The financial side of this is worth naming plainly. Christian nationalism is enormously profitable. The organizations that promote it raise hundreds of millions of dollars. The pastors who preach it live in houses that would make most of their congregations' jaws drop. The books, the conferences, the merch. There is a massive commercial apparatus running underneath the religious language, and it runs on the fear and loyalty of people who genuinely believe they're doing God's work.
The prosperity gospel is the theological wing of this same project: the idea that financial success is evidence of divine favor. It is an extraordinarily convenient theology if you are a wealthy pastor. It is a cruel theology if you are a poor person trying to understand why God hasn't rewarded your faithfulness. And it also has essentially no biblical support. The Sermon on the Mount, again, is exactly backward from this framework. "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (Matthew 5:3) and "woe to you who are rich" (Luke 6:24) are not prosperity gospel texts. They're the opposite.
The grift requires the conflation: if following this political program is following God, then questioning the political program is questioning God, and questioning God makes you the enemy. It's a closed loop designed to be immune to criticism. that's not theology. That's a control system.
My problem is the pulpit, not the pew. Always has been. The people in the seats, trying to figure out how to live a good life, I have nothing but love for them, including and especially the ones who disagree with everything I've become. The people at the front of the room who've turned faith into a franchise? That's a different conversation.
And it's one I'm not done having.