Christian Nationalism and the Bible: What Scripture Says

Almost nobody claims the label.

That is the strangest fact about this whole argument. A 2023 survey by Neighborly Faith found that while roughly 30% of Americans held the beliefs researchers classify as Christian nationalism, only about 5% would describe themselves that way. Some respondents who scored highest said plainly that they had never heard the phrase. One answered, “I do not even know what that means.”

So this is not an article about a group of people who have named themselves and raised a flag. It is about something quieter and far more common: an arrangement of loyalties that most of us have never held up to the light.

The question is not whether you love your country. Love it. The question is what happens to your faith when the two loves stop being two.

TL;DR: Christian nationalism is the fusion of Christian identity with national identity into a single allegiance. Scripture consistently refuses that fusion: Jesus declined the kingdoms of the world when they were offered to Him (Matthew 4:8-10), located His kingdom outside this world’s power structures (John 18:36), and Peter names the church itself, not any country, as the holy nation (1 Peter 2:9). Patriotism is love of home. The problem is a second master, and Matthew 6:24 says a second master will not hold.

What Is Christian Nationalism?

Christian nationalism is the fusion of Christian identity with national identity into a single allegiance. The most widely used definition comes from sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, who describe it as “a cultural framework, a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems, that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life” (Taking America Back for God, Oxford University Press, 2020). The load-bearing word is fusion. Whitehead and Perry are careful to add that this framework is not the same thing as evangelicalism and not the same thing as Christian orthodoxy. It is an Americanized arrangement organized around national identity rather than around doctrine or around Christ.

That distinction matters more than anything else in this article, so it is worth slowing down on.

Paul D. Miller, professor at Georgetown University and author of The Religion of American Greatness, puts it plainly. Speaking with the National Association of Evangelicals in 2024, Miller said, “Patriotism is the love of our country and our home. I think patriotism is actually a positive virtue.” He is not hedging. Gratitude for the place that raised you, the people who built it, the soil you were given: that is a good and Christian thing to feel.

What Miller names as the different thing is a movement that “seeks to defend one specific identity, a cultural identity, that we must follow a certain kind of tribal template.” And he offers the sharpest test I have found for telling them apart: “Are we out for Christian principles or Christian power? Christian principle is defending religious freedom for all people.”

Principles or power. Hold onto that.

The Public Religion Research Institute measures the belief through five statements, one of which is that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” In PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas, built from 22,111 respondents across all fifty states, 11% qualified as Adherents and 21% as Sympathizers, figures that have held nearly flat since 2022.

Dominion over all areas. That is not a policy preference. It is a totalizing claim, and a totalizing claim is exactly what Jesus addressed when He said no one can serve two masters.

What Did Jesus Say About His Kingdom and Earthly Power?

Jesus was offered every nation on earth and turned it down. In Matthew 4:8-10, the tempter takes Him to a high mountain, shows Him “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory,” and offers the whole inventory on one condition: worship. Jesus refuses, quoting Deuteronomy: “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.” The offer was not counterfeit. The kingdoms were genuinely available. What made it a temptation rather than a gift was the exchange rate, because political dominion and redirected worship came bundled together.

Later, standing before Pilate with His life in the balance, Jesus says, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting” (John 18:36). He is not describing a kingdom with no bearing on earth. He is describing one that does not run on earthly power.

Read those two scenes together and the pattern is hard to unsee. A Savior declining national power when it is handed to Him for free, then explaining at the moment national power would have saved His life why His kingdom does not operate that way. In between are three years of people trying to make Him king by force and Jesus withdrawing every time.

Then there is the coin. Asked whose image is on the denarius, Jesus hears “Caesar’s” and says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). We read that as a tidy division of labor. It is sharper than that. The coin bears Caesar’s image, so give it back to him. You bear God’s image, so give yourself to God. Caesar gets the currency. He does not get the person.

That is not a verse about staying out of politics. It is a verse about who owns you.

Where Does the Bible Locate a Christian’s Citizenship?

Scripture places the Christian’s primary citizenship in heaven and describes believers on earth as resident foreigners. Paul writes, “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20). He wrote that to the church at Philippi, a Roman colony whose residents held prized Roman citizenship, so the comparison would have landed hard. Peter goes further, applying Israel’s covenant titles directly to the church: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (1 Peter 2:9). Two verses later he calls his readers “sojourners and exiles.” Hebrews describes the patriarchs as people who “acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth,” seeking “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:13-16).

Sit with 1 Peter 2:9 for a moment, because it does something the fusion cannot absorb.

Peter takes the language God used for Israel at Sinai and hands it to a scattered, powerless, multiethnic group of believers across Asia Minor. They controlled no territory. They had no army, no capital, no flag. And Peter calls them a holy nation.

If the church is already the holy nation, no country on earth is competing for that title, because the position is filled. A nation can be just or unjust, free or tyrannical, worth defending or worth reforming. What it cannot be is holy in the sense Peter means, because that word has already been spent on the body of Christ.

This is why the exile language runs through the whole New Testament. Sojourners. Strangers. Ambassadors. An ambassador can love the country they are posted to, serve it, learn its language, pray for its peace, grieve when it suffers. What they cannot do is forget which government they represent.

What Happened When God’s People Demanded National Power?

Israel already ran this experiment, and Scripture records the result as a rejection of God. In 1 Samuel 8, the elders ask Samuel for a king “like all the nations.” God’s response reframes the entire request: “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Samuel 8:7). God then has Samuel spell out the price. The king will take their sons for his armies, their daughters for his household, the best of their fields and vineyards, and a tenth of everything else. “And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves.” The people hear all of it and answer, “No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations.”

That last line is the confession. They did not want a king because they had studied governance. They wanted to be like everyone else. They wanted a faith with a visible throne behind it.

God gave them what they asked for, which is its own kind of judgment, and the monarchy delivered exactly what Samuel promised: conscription, taxation, seized land, and eventually a divided kingdom and exile.

The pattern is not that political structures are evil. Scripture has good things to say about just rulers. The pattern is what happens when the people of God decide His rule is insufficiently impressive and go looking for something with more visible strength standing behind it. That instinct has not aged out. It changed costumes.

Why Is Christian Nationalism a Two-Masters Problem?

It becomes a two-masters problem the moment the nation acquires the authority to overrule Scripture, or Scripture becomes a tool for national ends, because at that point two things are competing for final say. The data suggests this is not hypothetical. Pew Research Center found in 2024 that 28% of U.S. adults say the Bible should have influence over U.S. laws and that it should take priority over the will of the people when the two conflict. More striking is Lifeway Research, which in 2026 found that 30% of Protestant pastors agree their congregation’s “love for America sometimes seems greater than their love for God.” That is not an outside critic’s assessment. That is pastors describing the people they preach to every Sunday.

Thirty percent. Nearly one in three.

To Lifeway’s credit, they report the trend honestly, and the trend is downward: 53% of pastors said this in 2016, 38% in 2021, 30% in 2026. So this is not a surge. It is something arguably more concerning than a surge, which is a settled condition, stable enough that we have stopped noticing it. The same study found pastors genuinely split on the visible symbols, with 45% saying patriotic elements belong in worship around the Fourth of July, down from 61% a decade earlier.

Underneath the symbols is a quieter arrangement that almost nobody examines. Pew found in 2026 that 43% of Americans want the federal government to promote Christian values without declaring Christianity the official religion. That is the largest single group, considerably larger than the 17% who want formal establishment.

That middle position feels moderate, and it rarely gets challenged from a pulpit. It is also precisely where the fusion lives, because it asks the state to carry what the church was commissioned to carry. When the government becomes the engine of Christian moral formation, the church has handed off its own assignment to a partner it cannot control.

Here is the mechanism in the plainest terms I can put it. A master is whatever gets the final word. When Scripture and national interest agree, you learn nothing about which one is yours. The test arrives only when they diverge. When the nation does something Scripture condemns, does your theology bend to accommodate it, or does your politics bend to accommodate Scripture? Whichever one bends is the servant.

This is the same fracture behind what it means to be double-minded, where the Greek word James uses, dipsychos, means two-souled. And it is the same dynamic behind Matthew 6:24 and the two masters. Jesus did not say serving two masters is difficult, or unwise, or inefficient. He said it cannot be done. One will get your devotion and the other your contempt, and you do not get to pick which.

One more finding is worth sitting with. Pew’s 2022 research found that Americans who support the idea of a Christian nation and those who oppose it are largely not describing the same thing. Supporters described it as the general guidance of Christian beliefs and values 48% of the time, compared to 23% of opponents, while opponents described it as Christian-based laws and governance 30% of the time, compared to just 6% of supporters.

Two groups, one phrase, two different conversations, both convinced the other side is the problem. Which is one more reason to describe the belief carefully and refuse to hang the label on anyone.

What Faithful Citizenship Looks Like

Scripture gives Christians a clear and active civic assignment, and it is neither withdrawal nor conquest. Jeremiah told the exiles in Babylon, a regime that had destroyed their temple, to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7). Paul instructed Timothy to make “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings” for kings and all in high positions (1 Timothy 2:1-2). Peter, writing under an emperor who would later kill him, said to honor the emperor. The command is engagement without absorption: work for the good of the place you live, pray for those who govern it, and hold it with an open hand.

In practice, holding it with an open hand looks like a few ordinary things.

It looks like being able to say, out loud and without flinching, that your country was wrong about something. If that sentence catches in your throat, the loyalty has gone deeper than it should.

It looks like Miller’s test applied honestly. Would you extend the same religious freedom to your neighbor that you claim for yourself, including the neighbor whose beliefs you think are false? Principle protects everyone. Power protects only the group holding it.

It looks like a faith that political defeat cannot touch. If an election result can shake it, it was resting on something other than the risen Christ.

And it looks like a church whose identity would survive intact in any country on earth. The gospel that is true in America is true in Nigeria, in China, in Brazil. A version of Christianity that cannot be exported without its host nation attached has stopped being the faith once delivered to the saints. That is the same posture I described in the church choosing faithfulness over comfort: not louder, not angrier, just clear about who gets the final word.

None of this requires loving your country less. It requires loving it in its proper order, second and not first, which is the only position from which any created thing can be loved without being ruined.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is patriotism the same thing as Christian nationalism?

No. Paul D. Miller of Georgetown University, writing from within evangelicalism, calls patriotism “the love of our country and our home” and “actually a positive virtue” (National Association of Evangelicals, 2024). He distinguishes it from a movement that defends one cultural identity as a tribal template. Patriotism loves a place. The fusion under discussion merges two identities into one allegiance.

What nation does the Bible call holy?

The church. In 1 Peter 2:9, Peter applies Israel’s covenant language to scattered believers across Asia Minor: “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession.” That group held no territory, army, or government. Two verses later he calls them “sojourners and exiles,” making the point unmistakable: the holy nation is a people, not a country.

How many Americans hold Christian nationalist beliefs?

PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas, drawn from 22,111 respondents in all fifty states, classified 11% as Christian nationalism Adherents and 21% as Sympathizers, with 37% Skeptics and 27% Rejecters. Those figures have stayed nearly flat since 2022. Notably, a 2023 Neighborly Faith survey found only about 5% of Americans would accept the label for themselves.

Does the Bible tell Christians to stay out of politics?

No. Jeremiah 29:7 commands exiles to seek the welfare of the city and pray for it. 1 Timothy 2:1-2 commands prayer for kings and all in authority. Scripture calls for active engagement in the good of the place you live. What it withholds is ultimate allegiance, which belongs to Christ alone and cannot be shared with any government.

Did Jesus ever have the chance to take political power?

Yes, and He declined it. In Matthew 4:8-10 the tempter offered Him “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” in exchange for worship, and Jesus refused. Before Pilate, when earthly power would have spared His life, He said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). The offer was real. He turned it down.

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There is a version of this conversation that is mostly about winning an argument, and I have no interest in that one.

Here is what is actually at stake. A faith fused to a nation rises and falls with that nation. It gets anxious when the country gets anxious. It celebrates when the polls are good and despairs when they are not. It hands the culture a remote control to your peace.

An undivided allegiance does not work that way. It has already settled the question of who reigns, so no election can unsettle it. It can love a country honestly, criticize it honestly, work for its good, and grieve its failures, all without needing that country to be something it was never able to be. That question of who gets the final word is the one I spend an entire book on in You Can’t Serve Two Masters.

Jesus was offered every nation on earth. He said no, and then went to a cross and built something that has outlived every empire that has tried to absorb it.

That kingdom is still the one worth belonging to first. I work through what that looks like week to week in The Remnant, for readers who want the longer conversation.