'Christian nationalism' already failed America once

By Mikale Olson, Op-ed contributor Thursday, September 03, 2026

It is easy to look around America today and feel like something vital is slipping away. Families feel fragmented, institutions look hollowed out, and an aggressive anti-Christian “secularism” seems determined to scrub every trace of faith from public life. For millions of Americans who love this country and hold fast to their Christian faith, the natural reaction is frustration, and a burning urge to fight back.

In that pressure cooker, a “new” idea has been gaining real steam on the political Right: “Christian nationalism.”

Its sales pitch sounds tempting at first: If progressives are going to use the power of the federal government to push their worldview, why shouldn't Christians take the wheel and use that same power (even expand it further) to enforce a Christian order? Why not declare America a Christian nation by law, put the Christian religion at the center of the state, and let the civil magistrate enforce the “highest good”?

It sounds reasonable. It sounds like a strong defense against cultural decay. But if you dig into history, you discover that this path isn't actually new at all. It’s an old road, and one that conservative Christians, above all people, should be deeply wary of traveling.

Christian-on-Christian Persecution in the Colonies

Long before 1776, the American colonies were a living test-tube for state-enforced Christianity. Conservatives today often romanticize colonial America as a unified, pious, Christian utopia, but the reality on the ground was defined by severe, legally mandated religious tyranny. The primary victims of state-enforced Christianity were not secular atheists; they were other devout Christians who dared to worship outside state-sanctioned orthodoxy.

The Puritans and the tragedy of Roger Williams

In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritans set up an explicit “holy commonwealth.” They believed the civil magistrate (the government) was ordained by God to enforce the First Table of the Ten Commandments (laws governing blasphemy, Sabbath observance, personal belief and doctrine).

In 1631, a minister named Roger Williams arrived in Boston. Williams was a devout Separatist Puritan, but he held a radical insight at the time: when the civil state is given power over the conscience, it corrupts the witness of the Church and turns the state into a tyrant wrapped in the cross. He argued that forcing unregenerate people to attend church or pray was “forced worship,” which he famously declared “stinks in God's nostrils.” Furthermore, he insisted that civil authorities had no biblical mandate to punish spiritual offenses.

The Massachusetts authorities saw Williams's idea of religious liberty as treasonous. In the dead of winter in 1635, the high court ordered him banished. Williams was forced to flee his home and trudge through deep snow in freezing woods, surviving only through the hospitality of the Narragansett tribe, before founding Rhode Island — a colony explicitly built on full liberty of conscience (an idea that took root nationwide over a hundred years later). 

Williams coined the phrase a “wall of separation” to describe the barrier needed to protect the “garden of the Church” from the “wilderness of the world.” He recognized that whenever the civil magistrate tries to “tend the garden, he tramples the flowers.”

The Boston martyrs and colonial coercion

Massachusetts did not stop at banishing Roger Williams. When members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) entered the colony to preach, the state responded with iron-fisted brutality. Quakers were whipped, had their ears cropped, were branded with hot irons, and were banished to die.

When four Quakers, including a courageous mother named Mary Dyer, returned to Boston to test the law, the Puritan government hanged them from a gallows on Boston Common between 1659 and 1661. They were killed by fellow Christians for refusing to accept the state’s fake “theological authority.”

Down in Virginia, the state-established Anglican Church wielded civil authority to crush dissenters as well. Attendance at Anglican services was mandatory by law, and dissenters were taxed to pay the salaries of Anglican ministers. In the 1760s and 1770s, non-Anglican ministers (predominantly Baptist preachers) were routinely dragged from their pulpits, beaten by mobs, and thrown into jail simply for preaching without a government license.

The Founders' fight against state religion

The men who gathered to design the American republic were not distant theorists; they were eyewitnesses to this religious coercion. They understood that if the new nation attempted to establish a “Christian state,” it would instantly reignite the sectarian warfare that had plagued Europe and the colonies.

James Madison: Seeing the bars of Fredericksburg

Years later, a young James Madison stood outside a jailhouse in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and watched jailed Baptist preachers speak to their congregations through the iron bars of their cells. The memory enraged him and shaped his lifelong campaign for religious freedom.

In 1785, when Patrick Henry introduced a popular bill in Virginia to collect a state tax to support “teachers of the Christian religion,” Madison wrote his masterpiece, the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. He argued that using state power to fund or enforce Christianity was a direct threat to the faith itself:

“Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

Madison saw clearly that a government given the power to enforce Christianity could easily decide which denomination was allowed to exist: “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, to the exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, to the exclusion of all other Sects?”

Thomas Jefferson: The Lesson of European bloodshed

Thomas Jefferson spent years studying European history and watching the failure of state-enforced religion. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he pointed out that coercion had never produced true unity — only violence and hypocrisy:

“Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”

Jefferson authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786, which severed the link between civil citizenship and religious belief, declaring that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion.”

How history informed the Constitution

When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, the Founders applied these painful historical lessons directly to the blueprint of the federal government. They made a deliberate decision to construct a constitutionally neutral state architecture.         

1. Article VI, Clause 3: The Founders inserted a dramatic prohibition: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” In an era when almost every nation on earth required oaths of theological allegiance to hold office, the American Constitution broke entirely with tradition, ensuring that civil power could never be restricted to a favored religious class.

2. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment:“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...” This stripped the federal government of any power to create a national church, collect religious taxes, or dictate religious doctrine.

3. The Treaty of Tripoli (1796): Initiated by George Washington, unanimously ratified by the Senate, and signed into law by John Adams, Article 11 famously stated to the world: “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion...” It was a clear signal that the American state was a neutral republic, not a theological crusader nation.

It’s important to note that this secular state architecture was not an attempt to create an atheistic society. The Founders made a vital distinction that modern debates often blur: The state machine is procedural and neutral, but the culture is moral and religious.

The Founders knew that while the state must not enforce religion, the republic could not survive without a virtuous populace grounded in faith (the key difference). 

John Adams famously wrote:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

They designed a system where the culture (families, churches, local communities, voluntary associations) generates moral character, while the state remains a limited, neutral referee protecting the freedom of those institutions to operate.

In other words, to the Founders, stating that constitutional self-government requires a moral citizenry was not a contradiction to a “secular/religiously neutral” state, but its required prerequisite. 

The catch: Who gets to decide?

The fundamental flaw in modern Christian nationalism, like in old, isn't its desire for a virtuous culture — it's its trust in state power.

If we give the government the authority to enforce a “Christian state,” the immediate question is: Which Christianity?

Will it be Roman Catholic, Baptist, Reformed Presbyterian, Lutheran, or Pentecostal? A Reformed magistrate might enforce laws that a Baptist finds unconscionable. A Catholic framework looks very different from a non-denominational one. History proves that whenever state power is handed to a specific theological camp, every other Christian group is suddenly on the outside looking in.

Worse yet, Christian Nationalists forget how elections work. If you build a massive government apparatus capable of dictating public morality, what happens when progressives win the next election? You have hand-delivered a turnkey machine of state coercion directly to people who may despise your values.

Protecting the culture without corrupting the state

The Founders offered a far better way — one that preserves a Christian moral culture without falling into the trap of state-enforced religion.

They designed a system where faith thrives in the private sphere, the family, the local community, and the pulpit. The Church doesn't need the sword of the state to do its job; it needs the freedom to preach, build, and persuade. The state's job is simply to keep the peace, protect individual rights, and stay out of the way of the human soul.

As Benjamin Franklin wisely observed: “When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself ... so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

The answer to modern cultural decline isn't to abandon the Founders' classical liberal framework in favor of state-sanctioned religion. The answer is to use the freedom they bequeathed us to win hearts, raise strong families, build faithful churches, and lead by example.

The American Founding didn't fail Christianity. It gave it the greatest sanctuary of religious freedom the world has ever known. It’s up to us to keep it that way.