Christian nationalism is a cultural framework that conflates American identity with an exclusive form of religious identity. It promotes the myth that our country was founded as a Christian nation and therefore, America enjoys special favor from God. Proponents seek to infuse religion into our civil life and how we are governed. Christian nationalism incorporates anti-democratic notions of white supremacy, nativism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism, and seeks to concentrate power in a select group.

Project 2025 reflects that Christian nationalist agenda, and seeks to reshape not only our federal administrative system of government, but our courts, laws, policies, cultural beliefs, and practices, and align these to reflect Christian conservative values and doctrine. That’s why critics contend that Project 2025 is a blueprint for a future theocracy, one that blurs the Constitutional separation of church and state and sometimes openly calls for eliminating it.

Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, notes that “because Christian nationalism is identified (or, more accurately, because it identifies itself) with a religion, the movement is often understood as a set of religious and/or theological positions.” But, she emphasizes, “Christian nationalism is, first and foremost, a political movement. Its principal goal, and the goal of its most active leaders, is power.” (i)

“It does not matter whether the United States is or ever was a Christian nation. What matters is that a significant number of Americans believe that it is.”

– Andrew L. Whitemead and Samuel P. Perry, Taking Back America for God

When “Americanness” is fused with an exclusive view of Christianity, non-Christians and even those who identify as Christians but don’t meet its qualifications are perpetually suspect. In practice, this ideology motivates laws and policies that undermine voting rights for marginalized groups, exclude diverse perspectives from public schools, withhold access to reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare, and more.

(This summary is adapted from A Concise Introduction to Christian Nationalism, by the Interfaith Alliance. WestEnd_TIA_Letter_0922.indd (interfaithalliance.org)

i Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty & Freedom From Religion Foundation, “Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection,” p. 10. (2022).