Christian Nationalism and American Identity

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Christian Nationalism and American Identity

Christian nationalism has become an important subject in research about religion, politics, citizenship, and national identity in the United States. The term generally refers to ideas that connect American national identity with Christianity and, in some forms, favor a privileged public or governmental role for Christianity. Researchers differ in how they conceptualize and measure the phenomenon, and Christian nationalism should not be treated as synonymous with Christianity, religious conservatism, patriotism, or Christian participation in politics.

The research collected here examines Christian nationalism as part of a broader debate over what it means to be American. Studies explore how religion interacts with citizenship, race, immigration, political ideology, regional culture, and perceptions of social change. The literature also shows that American identity has never been defined solely by legal citizenship. Cultural ideas concerning religion, ancestry, language, race, political values, and national traditions have also influenced perceptions of who belongs within the nation.

Christianity and the Boundaries of American Identity

Christianity has played a major historical role in American culture, but researchers distinguish Christianity as a religion from the use of Christianity as a symbolic marker of national identity. Studies of Christian nationalism examine situations in which being Christian is treated as one characteristic of being considered authentically American.

Research on national identity describes such ideas as social boundaries separating those perceived as belonging fully to the national community from those perceived as outsiders. Religion can operate alongside race, ethnicity, citizenship, language, and political values in forming these boundaries.

Studies examining changes in American attitudes over several decades suggest that the relationship between Christianity and American identity is neither fixed nor uniform. Different groups assign different levels of importance to religion when defining national belonging.

This distinction is important because millions of Christians participate in American civic and political life without embracing a nationalist conception of Christianity. Christian political participation can include voting, advocacy, charitable activity, community organizing, public service, and activism across a wide range of political perspectives.

Geographic and Demographic Variation

Large national surveys have allowed researchers to compare Christian-nationalist attitudes across all 50 states. These studies find substantial geographic differences rather than a single nationwide pattern.

Regional religious traditions, political cultures, demographic composition, education, age, and patterns of religious participation are among the factors examined in explaining these differences. State-level research is particularly useful because national averages can conceal significant variation within the country.

Recent survey research has also divided respondents into categories ranging from stronger acceptance to stronger rejection of Christian-nationalist statements. These classifications are analytical tools rather than religious identities or formal political organizations.

The geographic evidence therefore suggests that Christian nationalism is better understood as a spectrum of attitudes distributed unevenly across American society rather than as a uniform movement supported or rejected in the same way everywhere.

Religion, Race, and National Belonging

Race is an important part of scholarship concerning Christian nationalism and American identity. Historically, ideas about Christianity, whiteness, citizenship, and national belonging have sometimes overlapped, although relationships among these concepts have changed considerably across time and communities.

Research comparing racial groups indicates that similar statements about America being a Christian nation may carry different meanings depending on social and historical context. Consequently, scholars caution against assuming that every person expressing Christian-nationalist ideas understands them in precisely the same way.

Studies of racial inequality also examine how Christian-nationalist beliefs interact with explanations for disparities between racial groups. This literature places religious nationalism within the larger history of racial classification and changing definitions of American citizenship.

The research demonstrates why race and religion are often studied together when examining national boundaries. American identity has developed through overlapping religious, racial, civic, and political traditions rather than through a single definition of belonging.

Immigration and the Meaning of Being American

Immigration provides another major setting in which competing definitions of American identity become visible. Research has examined whether national belonging is understood primarily through citizenship and civic principles or through cultural characteristics such as religion, ancestry, language, and inherited traditions.

Several studies in this collection investigate relationships between Christian-nationalist beliefs and attitudes toward immigrants. These studies examine questions involving borders, demographic change, cultural continuity, citizenship, and perceptions of who qualifies as authentically American.

Religion can influence immigration attitudes in more than one direction. Religious teachings may encourage hospitality toward immigrants and outsiders, while religious identity can also become part of a cultural boundary distinguishing insiders from outsiders. Consequently, researchers distinguish the effects of religious practice from those of religious nationalism rather than treating religion itself as a single explanatory factor.

Immigration therefore illustrates a central question running through the literature: whether American identity should be primarily civic and open to people from different cultural and religious backgrounds or whether particular religious and cultural traditions should occupy a privileged position within national identity.

Muslims and Religious Inclusion

Attitudes toward Muslim Americans provide researchers with another way of studying the boundaries of national belonging. Scholarship on Islam in the United States examines the interaction of religion, race, ethnicity, immigration, citizenship, and national identity.

Several studies find that perceptions of Muslims cannot be explained exclusively by theological differences. Muslims may also be perceived through racialized or cultural categories, particularly when Islam is portrayed as foreign to American identity.

This scholarship examines how longstanding associations between Christianity and Americanness can affect the inclusion of religious minorities. Muslim Americans provide an especially important case because they illustrate the distinction between legal citizenship and cultural perceptions of belonging.

At the same time, American civic traditions include strong principles of religious liberty and pluralism. The resulting tension between inclusive and exclusionary definitions of national identity is a recurring subject in studies of American civil religion and Christian nationalism.

Christian Nationalism and American Civil Religion

Christian nationalism is related to, but distinct from, the concept of American civil religion. Civil religion refers to the use of shared national symbols, rituals, historical narratives, and references to God that give political life a quasi-religious dimension.

American presidents, public ceremonies, national holidays, monuments, founding documents, and expressions such as appeals to divine providence have frequently contributed to this tradition. Civil religion can be interpreted inclusively, emphasizing universal ideals such as liberty, equality, sacrifice, citizenship, and national responsibility.

It can also take more particularistic forms in which American identity is closely connected with a specific religious heritage. Scholars therefore examine the boundary between a broadly inclusive civil religion and forms of nationalism that give Christianity a preferred position in defining the nation.

Research involving Muslim Americans and other religious minorities highlights the practical importance of this distinction. A civil religion that allows citizens of many faiths or no faith to participate in a common national identity differs substantially from an understanding of citizenship in which Christianity functions as a requirement for full cultural belonging.

Religious Traditionalism and Christian Statism

Not all scholarship treats Christian nationalism as a single ideology. One important line of research distinguishes between religious traditionalism and Christian statism.

Religious traditionalism emphasizes the importance of Christian values, institutions, families, congregations, and moral influence within civil society. People holding these views may want Christianity to influence American culture while maintaining institutional distinctions between religious organizations and government.

Christian statism, by contrast, places greater emphasis on governmental power and the formal political privilege of Christianity. This distinction helps explain why two individuals who both describe the United States as a Christian nation may nevertheless have very different views about government authority.

The distinction also cautions against automatically classifying conventional religious conservatism as Christian nationalism. Religious belief, political participation, cultural traditionalism, and advocacy for explicitly Christian governmental power are related concepts but are not identical.

Political Authority and Authoritarianism

Another part of the literature examines statistical relationships between Christian-nationalist attitudes and views about political authority. Researchers have compared measures of Christian nationalism with established measures of authoritarian attitudes, democratic norms, political violence, cultural change, gender roles, and perceptions of national threat.

These studies describe associations between sets of beliefs rather than demonstrating that every person categorized as a Christian nationalist holds authoritarian views. Survey categories represent probabilities and group-level patterns, not descriptions that apply uniformly to every individual.

Researchers have also investigated whether perceptions of cultural displacement or rapid social change contribute to support for stronger political leadership. Questions concerning authority therefore intersect with broader debates over demographic change, immigration, religious decline, gender roles, and the perceived loss of traditional social arrangements.

This research has become particularly important in discussions about the relationship between nationalism and democratic institutions. It raises questions about how religious identity, political authority, majority rule, minority rights, and constitutional limits interact within a pluralistic society.

Competing Visions of American Identity

The broader literature suggests that debates surrounding Christian nationalism reflect competing visions of the United States.

One vision emphasizes a historically Christian cultural inheritance and argues that Christian ideas have played an important role in shaping American institutions and values. Within this perspective, preserving Christian influence may be viewed as protecting an important part of national heritage.

Another emphasizes constitutional citizenship, religious pluralism, and the inclusion of Americans from many religious and cultural traditions. From this perspective, Christianity may remain historically and culturally important without determining who qualifies as fully American.

These positions also contain substantial internal variation. Americans may simultaneously value the country's Christian heritage, support religious liberty, favor separation between religious institutions and government, and disagree about the proper role of religion in public life.

For this reason, research increasingly examines specific beliefs rather than relying only on broad ideological labels.

Measuring Christian Nationalism

The growing research literature also raises methodological questions about how Christian nationalism should be measured. Survey researchers commonly ask respondents whether they agree with statements connecting Christianity, government, national identity, divine authority, and American society.

Researchers then combine responses to create scales or categories. Such measures make large-scale comparisons possible, including comparisons among states, religious traditions, political affiliations, age groups, educational levels, and racial or ethnic groups.

However, scholars continue to debate what these measures capture. A statement about America's Christian heritage may reflect historical interpretation for one respondent, cultural traditionalism for another, and support for explicitly Christian government for a third.

The distinction between religious traditionalism and Christian statism illustrates this methodological problem. Research therefore continues to refine definitions and measurements to distinguish related but different attitudes.

A Changing American Religious Landscape

Debates over Christian nationalism occur within a changing religious environment. The United States has become increasingly religiously diverse, while the number of Americans who identify with no religion has grown substantially over recent decades.

These changes affect discussions about national identity because cultural assumptions that once connected Christianity with mainstream American life coexist with a society containing many religious traditions and a large nonreligious population.

Migration has also expanded the religious diversity of the country. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jews, Christians from many global traditions, members of other faiths, and people without religious affiliation all participate in American civic life.

Christian nationalism can therefore be studied partly as a debate over how an historically Christian-majority society understands itself under conditions of increasing religious and cultural pluralism.

Conclusion

Research on Christian nationalism shows that the subject involves more than a dispute over religion. It touches fundamental questions about national identity, citizenship, race, immigration, political authority, religious freedom, and the boundaries of belonging.

The literature also demonstrates the importance of distinguishing several concepts that are sometimes treated as interchangeable. Christianity, Christian political participation, religious conservatism, American civil religion, cultural traditionalism, Christian nationalism, and Christian statism overlap in some contexts but describe different phenomena.

State-level surveys show considerable geographic and demographic variation, while sociological research reveals that ideas about a Christian America can have different meanings among different groups. Studies of immigration, Muslims, race, and civil religion further show how debates over religion are connected with broader questions about who is understood to belong within the American national community.

Christian nationalism is therefore most usefully examined as part of the continuing contest over the meaning of American identity. Studying its different forms, historical roots, measurements, and social consequences provides a clearer understanding of how religion and nationalism interact in a diverse constitutional democracy.

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State-Level Mapping, Public Opinion, and American Identity

• [How Americans’ Views of the Term Christian Nationalism Are Shaped | PRRI Staff | Public Religion Research Institute | May 15, 2026]

Examines how Americans understand the phrase Christian nationalism and how religious affiliation, politics, demographics, and competing definitions shape reactions to the term.

• [Mapping Christian Nationalism Across the 50 States: Insights from PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas | PRRI Staff | Public Religion Research Institute | February 17, 2026]

Maps Christian nationalism across the United States and examines how support varies by state, religion, party identification, race, age, education, and other characteristics.

• [Fact Sheet: A Closer Look at Christian Nationalism in Nine States | PRRI Staff | Public Religion Research Institute | February 17, 2026]

Provides detailed state-level snapshots showing how Christian-nationalist attitudes vary geographically and how local religious and political cultures relate to American identity.

• [Christian Nationalism Across All 50 States: Insights from PRRI’s 2024 American Values Atlas | PRRI Staff | Public Religion Research Institute | February 4, 2025]

Examines state-by-state attitudes toward Christian nationalism and connects those attitudes with competing ideas about American identity, religion, citizenship, and national culture.

• [Resistance to Christian Nationalism in All 50 States: A PRRI-Meanings of Democracy Lab Report | PRRI Staff | Public Religion Research Institute | October 30, 2024]

Focuses on Americans who reject Christian nationalism and explores their attitudes toward democracy, pluralism, religious diversity, and the meaning of American citizenship.

• [Support for Christian Nationalism in All 50 States: Findings from PRRI’s 2023 American Values Atlas | PRRI Staff | Public Religion Research Institute | February 28, 2024]

Presents nationwide survey findings on Christian nationalism and shows how attitudes differ across states and demographic, religious, and political groups.

• [A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture | PRRI Staff | Public Religion Research Institute | February 8, 2023]

Examines beliefs about whether the United States should be explicitly Christian and considers how those beliefs intersect with race, immigration, political authority, and American culture.

Authoritarianism, State Power, and Political Order

• [Inside the Authoritarian-Christian Nationalism Link: Exploring Key Drivers | PRRI Staff | Public Religion Research Institute | November 7, 2025]

Investigates factors associated with both Christian nationalism and authoritarian attitudes, including cultural threat, social change, religious identity, and perceptions of the nation.

• [One Leader Under God: The Connection Between Authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism in America | PRRI Staff | Public Religion Research Institute | September 10, 2024]

Explores statistical relationships between Christian-nationalist beliefs and support for authoritarian leadership, political violence, cultural traditionalism, and particular conceptions of national identity.

• [The Duality of American Christian Nationalism: Religious Traditionalism versus Christian Statism | Ruiqian Li and Paul Froese | Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion | August 2, 2023]

Argues that commonly used Christian-nationalism measures contain two distinguishable orientations: religious traditionalism in civil society and support for explicitly Christian state power.

Immigration, Muslims, and National Belonging

• [How Christian Nationalism Affects Views on Immigration | PRRI Staff | Public Religion Research Institute | March 30, 2026]

Studies the relationship between Christian-nationalist beliefs and views of immigration, national borders, belonging, demographic change, and who is perceived as authentically American.

• [Between Theory and Practice: American Muslims and the Limits of American Civil Religion | Mesut Düzce | Review of Politics | 2025]

Examines American civil religion from the perspective of Muslim inclusion and contrasts pluralistic civil religion with more exclusionary forms of Christian nationalism.

• [From Nearly White to Brown: Nation, Identity, and the Racialization of Muslim Americans | Multiple Authors | Culture and Religion | 2022]

Explores how Muslim Americans have been racialized and how longstanding associations among Christianity, whiteness, and Americanness can constrain national inclusion.

• [Racial, Religious, and Civic Dimensions of Anti-Muslim Sentiment in America | Penny Edgell, Evan Stewart, Jack Delehanty and others | Social Problems | 2020]

Examines how racial, religious, and civic boundaries combine in perceptions of Muslims and their place within American national belonging.

• [Religious Nationalism and Perceptions of Muslims and Islam | Allyson F. Shortle and Ronald Keith Gaddie | Politics and Religion | 2015]

Studies links among evangelical identity, Christian-nationalist beliefs, attitudes toward Islam, and perceptions of Muslims within American society.

• [Divine Boundaries: How Religion Shapes Citizens’ Attitudes Toward Immigrants | Eric Leon McDaniel, Irfan Nooruddin and Allyson Faith Shortle | American Politics Research | 2011]

Examines Christian nationalism as a religiously informed interpretation of American identity and its relationship with attitudes toward immigrants.

Race, Christianity, and the Boundaries of American Identity

• [Christian America in Black and White: Racial Identity, Religious-National Group Boundaries, and Explanations for Racial Inequality | Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead | Sociology of Religion | 2019]

Investigates how racial identity changes the relationship between Christian-nationalist understandings of America and explanations of racial inequality.

• [We the (Christian) People: Christianity and American Identity from 1996 to 2014 | Andrew L. Whitehead and Christopher P. Scheitle | Social Currents | 2018]

Examines how Christianity has functioned as a symbolic boundary of American identity and how its importance in defining who counts as American changed between 1996 and 2014.

Civil Religion, Citizenship, and National Identity

• [Boundaries of American Identity: Evolving Understandings of “Us” | Deborah J. Schildkraut | Annual Review of Political Science | 2014]

Reviews research on how Americans define national identity, including the roles of religion, race, immigration, patriotism, citizenship, and social-group boundaries.

• [Civil Religion and the Cultural Politics of National Identity in Obama’s America | Rhys H. Williams | Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion | 2013]

Examines how American civil religion can contain both universalistic ideals and more particular assumptions linking white, Christian, and American identities.