This year, America celebrates our 250th anniversary of declaring independence from our colonial overlords. As an American history nerd, the Fourth of July has always been one of my favorite holidays to celebrate.
The semiquincentennial celebration will be massive; but as the milestone approaches, we must prepare ourselves. We’re obliged to fight lies with the truth in this climate of disinformation, which will worsen as we near the big day. More importantly, if we hope to achieve some of the aspirations written into our founding documents, we must unite behind our shared values and recommit to separating church and state.
Fighting Christian Nationalist lies
As we get closer to the Fourth of July, the floodgates of Christian Nationalist disinformation are going to open. A biblical deluge, meant to drown you in claims that America was founded as a white Christian nation, will surge toward us. Disinformation used to justify policies and judicial decisions will take us back to that nonexistent past.
Christian Nationalism is an entire identity based on disinformation. There is no scholarly debate about the central claim of Christian Nationalism. Most — nearly all — serious historians agree that America was not founded as a Christian nation in any meaningful legal, philosophical, or constitutional sense. Christian Nationalism is not a scholarly debate about our history. It’s a sinister, exclusionary movement that seeks to redefine America according to the Christian Nationalist disinformation and then reshape our law accordingly.
You’ve heard the disinformation that makes up this identity. Many times:
- “We’re ‘one nation, under God!’”
- “In God we trust!”
- “The Declaration of Independence invokes our Christian God four times!”
- “The Founding Fathers prayed at the Constitutional Convention!”
- “Our Declaration/Constitution is based on the Ten Commandments!”
None of that is true. It’s propaganda. Oft-repeated, never substantiated.
These lies — and that’s what they are — are also an opportunity. Without their origin myths, the Christian Nationalist identity withers. Their entire political and ideological reality is incredibly weak and vulnerable because it is based on historical distortions and lies. Accurate facts and history amidst the Christian Nationalist disinformation (and AI slop) will be hard to come by. You need to be ready. Equip yourself with facts, history, reality, and insightful books. In forthcoming issues of Church & State, as we near the 250th, we’ll help prepare you with the facts to debunk these lies.
Not just the facts, because we need more than facts to fight back — we need better arguments. If facts were all that mattered, propaganda wouldn’t work. We need arguments that are visceral, emotional, as well as factual. That’s why I wrote The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, to give you those arguments. Because I’ve had these arguments in and out of court for 15 years. I know what works and what doesn’t when confronting this un-American political ideology.
And yes, we can beat Christian Nationalist disinformation. We can beat it with the truth. I know there’s some despair about this, but as Thomas Paine explained in 1782 amid our struggle for independence, “the mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.” Often, the enlightened become some of the fiercest opponents of Christian Nationalism. We may not convince the most committed Christian Nationalists, but we don’t have to. We need to convince those in the middle, the fellow travelers, the lukewarm folks, and people who simply don’t know better.
Uniting behind shared values
While the colonies declared independence and would experiment with various forms of government until settling upon and ratifying a Constitution and Bill of Rights some 15 years after declaring that independence, freedom did not include everyone. The self-evident truths in the Declaration were not universal. When “We the People” was written, it did not mean everyone. Many folks in our history were simply left out.
Recognizing this truth as we celebrate 250 years of freedom is important — not just to refute Christian Nationalist disinformation, but to recognize that even after 250 years, we still have a lot of work to do to realize those aspirational values.
We have yet to fully realize the values in founding phrases “We the People,” “all men are created equal,” “equal justice under law,” and other founding maxims — in no small part because white Christian Nationalism is fundamentally opposed to these values. These aspirational values are what we fight for every day at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. These are the values Christian Nationalists fight against. Christian Nationalists are not just wrong about what America is and how it was founded, their beliefs and identity run counter to the ideals on which this nation was founded; they are un-American.
If we are to realize these values in our next 250 years, we’ll only do so together. Writer, exvangelical, and scholar Chrissy Stroop put it perfectly when she said that “shared values matter more than shared beliefs.” We must center this truth as we confront the existential threat of white Christian Nationalism. And this is an existential crisis: America will never be a Christian nation because the moment it becomes a Christian nation, it will cease to be America.
Those of us who share values like equality and justice and truth and fairness and self-determination must come together to stop Christian Nationalism. This means Christians and atheists, Muslims and Jews, Black, brown, and white, young and old, able-bodied and not, and people from all across the political spectrum coming together. None of us — no single individual or group — can do this alone.
We must unite — ”join or die,” to borrow from a famous Ben Franklin slogan — behind these shared values if we are ever going to realize the aspirations written into poetic phrases of our founding.
We can beat Christian Nationalism. We can relegate it back to the fringe whence it came. That means fighting the disinformation and historical myths bred by this threatening, exclusionary ideology.
It also means, above all, that we as a nation recommit to the separation of state and church. That we fully and unequivocally embrace this founding principle as our north star for our next 250 years — that we believe in and achieve “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Not just because the separation of state and church is the cure for the Christian Nationalism that plagues our body politic, but because that separation is the basis of religious freedom and freedom of thought.
That principle is also the bedrock for true equality; for if a government that draws its power from all the people writes one religion into its law, we are not equal. This American ideal is also the basis for self-government and democracy. Shielding our shared laws from any religion’s influence frees us to come together as equals and build a stronger democracy. Our democracy, our freedom, our country depend on this separation.
That’s my vision for our next 250 years and that’s what we’re fighting for at Americans United. Happy 250th, America. Gird your loins