Christian Nationalism: Before 1940

The theological foundation for Christian nationalism was laid long before the Religious Right gave it a political infrastructure. The Puritan vision of America as a 'city upon a hill' — a covenanted nation with a special divine commission — entered evangelical identity as myth and stayed as politics. By the nineteenth century, Protestant ministers were routinely describing American democratic institutions as the outworking of Christian civilization, and any threat to those institutions as a threat to God's design. The fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s accelerated this fusion. When liberal Protestantism accommodated Darwinism, higher biblical criticism, and the Social Gospel, conservative evangelicals did not simply retreat to the churches — they organized. The founding of Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929 and the formation of separatist evangelical institutions in the 1930s created a parallel intellectual infrastructure that later shaped thinkers such as Cornelius Van Til and R.J. Rushdoony. The Scopes trial of 1925 was not merely a legal event; it was experienced as a declaration of war on Christian civilization by secular elites. By 1940, white evangelical Protestantism had already developed the core claims that would later define Christian nationalism: that America was founded on explicitly Christian principles, that secular liberalism was an existential threat to the nation's identity, and that faithful Christians had not just a right but a duty to exercise political power in defense of that identity. The machinery for translating those claims into votes was still being built. The theology was already in place.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism

Connections from Christian Nationalism: Before 1940

• influenced → David Barton (1988) — John Fea's 'Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?' traces how Americans, especially between 1789 and 1865, understood the country as a Christian nation, then follows the idea to its present-day advocates. Fea argues that David Barton's version rests on documents taken out of context, a providential reading of history, and a view of professional historians as 'revisionist.'
• influenced → The Family / C Street (Fellowship Foundation) (1935) — Kevin Kruse argues that 'Christian America' was built in the 1930s and '40s by businessmen and ministers fighting the New Deal. In his account, the groundwork laid by James Fifield's Spiritual Mobilization (1935) prepared the way for Abraham Vereide's prayer breakfasts, which began in Seattle in 1935 and grew into the Fellowship and the National Prayer Breakfast.

Sources

• One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America — Kevin Kruse (2015)
• The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America — Frances FitzGerald (2017)
• Taking America Back for God — Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry (2020)