God, Nation and Power: Christian Nationalism in the USA and Influence on Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
[Original Article in Arabic in Al-Jazeera Net]
By Azza Karam
Christian nationalism is reshaping more than electoral politics in the United States. It brings together established religious-right organizations, newer charismatic networks, advocates of biblical law, Catholic proponents of a confessional public order, and politically active local churches. This article maps these varied actors, identifies the ideas that unite them, and examines how their growing influence may affect American democracy, diplomacy, relations with non-Christian nations, support for Israel, and the war on Iran.
Christian nationalism is neither a single organization nor a unified theology. It is an ideological ecosystem whose participants share the conviction that America is—or ought to be—a distinctively Christian nation and that its laws, institutions and public identity should reflect a preferred interpretation of Christianity.
This is not synonymous with Christianity, Christian political engagement or even religious conservatism. Christians have participated in movements ranging from abolitionism and civil rights to anti-war activism and campaigns for economic justice. Christian nationalism begins when Christianity becomes more than a source of personal conscience: it becomes a criterion for determining who represents the “real” America, whose values government should privilege, and who fully belongs.
The movement is not entirely new. Its ancestry includes Puritan ideas of a chosen nation, the religious language of Manifest Destiny, biblical defences of racial segregation and the religious right of the late twentieth century. What is new is its institutional diversity and the speed with which its ideas now move among churches, campaigns, digital platforms, school boards and government.
From the Religious Right to a Wider Ecosystem
The most familiar face remains the conservative evangelical establishment that became a formidable political force in the late 1970s and 1980s. Organizations such as the Family Research Council and the Faith and Freedom Coalition mobilize voters around abortion, sexuality, gender, education and religious-liberty claims. Yet conservative evangelicals are not a monolithic bloc. The dividing line appears when advocacy for particular policies becomes a claim that the United States possesses an essentially Christian identity that government must officially defend.
The older religious right relied heavily on national organizations, lobbying, voter registration and Republican Party alliances. The newer ecosystem also includes independent ministries, local political groups, media entrepreneurs, homeschooling networks, legal advocates and social-media influencers, many operating without traditional denominational oversight. Scholarship increasingly treats these as several “Christian nationalisms”: different theological currents capable of converging politically.
Charismatic Dominionism and the Seven Mountains
One expanding current arises from independent charismatic and Pentecostal networks emphasizing prophecy, spiritual warfare, divine healing and God’s direct intervention in politics. Authority may rest less with denominations than with influential pastors, apostles, prophets and digitally connected ministries.
Within parts of this world, the Seven Mountain Mandate teaches that Christians should influence—or, in stronger versions, dominate—seven spheres: government, education, media, business, family, religion, and arts and entertainment. This goes beyond encouraging civic participation. Elections, school-board contests and media campaigns become theatres of spiritual conflict, and political opponents may be viewed not as fellow citizens with different judgments but as enemies of God’s purposes. If an objective is divinely commanded, compromise can appear as disobedience and electoral defeat as persecution or corruption.
Calvinist Nationalism and Christian Reconstructionism
A second current emerges from sections of the Reformed tradition. Its most uncompromising form—Christian Reconstructionism or theonomy—holds that all life, including civil government, is subject to divine law. Associated historically with Rousas John Rushdoony, it offers a systematic argument for reorganizing public institutions according to biblical law.
Most Calvinists and Reformed Christians reject reconstructionism. Yet some of its arguments—that religious neutrality is impossible, liberal pluralism privileges secularism, and Christians must reclaim national institutions—now circulate more broadly. Charismatic dominionists speak of prophecy and spiritual warfare; Calvinist nationalists more often invoke order, covenant, hierarchy and law. Their routes differ, but both can envisage a state protecting one form of Christianity and restricting practices considered contrary to its moral order.
Catholic Advocates of a Religiously Ordered State
A third face appears among a small but intellectually influential community of Catholic thinkers—often called integralists—who advocate a confessional public order. They reject the assumption that political authority should remain religiously neutral and argue that public institutions should uphold Catholic moral and religious truth, with temporal authority ordered in some respects toward spiritual authority.
They do not represent Catholicism as a whole; many Catholics remain committed to constitutional pluralism, religious freedom and institutional separation between church and state. This current is distinctive because it questions whether liberal democracy, with its commitments to religious neutrality and individual autonomy, can sustain the common good. Although it differs profoundly from charismatic Protestantism, the two can cooperate in opposing secularism, abortion, gender and sexual rights, and expansive accounts of individual liberty.
The Local Church as a Political Machine
Perhaps the most consequential new face is the locally rooted church functioning simultaneously as worshipping community, media producer, cultural centre and political network. Rachel Monroe’s 2026 account of Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth illustrates the model. Its political arm, For Liberty & Justice, supports candidates committed to a religiously infused vision of government and, according to The New Yorker, has helped more than one hundred candidates win office.
Here worship creates communal identity, preaching supplies political interpretation, digital media distributes the message, and affiliated organizations recruit and support candidates. The church becomes an alternative civic infrastructure in which political participation is framed as religious duty.
The legal boundary remains contested. The Johnson Amendment prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from endorsing or opposing candidates. In 2025 the Internal Revenue Service proposed treating certain endorsements during religious services as protected internal communications, but a federal judge declined to approve the settlement in March 2026. The law remains in force, although limited enforcement and political pressure have weakened its deterrent effect.
The Ideas Holding the Movement Together
Despite their differences, these movements share several commitments. First is a story of national origins: America was founded as a Christian nation whose authentic purpose has been obscured or stolen. The founders’ religious diversity, constitutional rejection of religious establishment, Indigenous dispossession, slavery and contested citizenship are subordinated to a story of lost Christian purpose.
Second is a politics of cultural boundaries. “Real Americans” are associated with conservative Christianity, traditional gender roles, heterosexual family structures and a particular account of Western civilization. Jews, Muslims, nonbelievers, progressive Christians, immigrants and other minorities may possess formal citizenship while remaining peripheral to the imagined moral nation.
Third is populist grievance. Loss of cultural dominance is presented as persecution by secular elites, universities, media, immigrants or sexual minorities. Anxiety becomes collective purpose, and recovering power becomes religious restoration.
Fourth is the fusion of religious authority with state power. The objective is not simply freedom to practise and advocate Christianity, but preferential authority to define national identity and embed one moral vision in law, education and administration. Finally, these currents often embrace providential leadership: a leader’s conduct matters less than the belief that God has chosen or used him to restore the nation. This helps explain political loyalty that survives behaviour conflicting with the movement’s professed moral standards.
Mapping Power, Not Merely Belief
Surveys such as PRRI’s American Values Atlas measure how many Americans embrace, accommodate, resist or reject Christian nationalism. Polling, however, cannot reveal its full reach. Mapping power requires asking who trains candidates, funds litigation, produces media, controls educational materials, advises officials and turns theology into policy. A highly organized minority can exercise influence far beyond its numbers.
Attention must also extend beyond prominent personalities to school-board appointments, curricula, voting rules, judicial strategies, and efforts to expand religious exemptions from generally applicable healthcare, employment or anti-discrimination requirements. Religious accommodation is an important protection for conscience and minority faiths. The concern arises when it is extended to permit institutions to impose the consequences of their beliefs upon employees, patients or the public.
The democratic question is therefore not whether religious citizens should participate in politics; they should, as equals in a plural society. It is whether one community should acquire a privileged right to define belonging and command state power.
The theological question is equally serious: when Christianity becomes an instrument of political dominance, witness can give way to coercion and faith to collective identity. Some of Christian nationalism’s strongest critics are Christians who consider this fusion a corruption—even an idolatry—of the Gospel. Christian clergy, theologians and lay movements defending pluralism are therefore part of the map as well.
When Christian Nationalism Shapes Foreign Policy
Christian nationalism’s influence does not stop at America’s borders. As it determines belonging at home, it also shapes which countries appear to be natural allies, which populations are viewed with suspicion, and which conflicts are treated as political disputes rather than struggles between good and evil.
It does not produce one predictable foreign policy. One strand encourages intervention by an exceptional nation entrusted with defending freedom; another supports “America First,” distrusting alliances, international organizations and foreign obligations. Both assume that America occupies a special place in history and should retain unusual freedom to decide how, and under which rules, it uses power.
Matthew McCullough’s The Cross of War: Christian Nationalism and U.S. Expansion in the Spanish-American War offers a historical warning. He shows how Christian leaders portrayed the 1898 intervention as national self-sacrifice: America was not seeking power, they argued, but serving the oppressed. McCullough calls this “messianic interventionism”—the belief that America can and should intervene altruistically for other nations. A war justified as liberating Cuba nevertheless ended with the United States governing overseas territories, most consequentially the Philippines. Religious confidence helped present national interest, military power and territorial expansion as selfless service.
This history does not prove that contemporary Christian nationalism will repeat that outcome. It shows the danger of presenting military action as divine mission: civilian suffering, strategic failure and self-interest become easier to disregard; diplomacy can look like weakness, compromise like appeasement, and dissent like resistance to righteousness.
These scenarios are not far from current rhetoric by the current US Secretary of War, Peter Hegseth, and discourses across the US political spectra taking place as we write this.
Paul D. Miller offers a related warning in The Religion of American Greatness. He describes a “proprietary attitude” in which Christians regard themselves as America’s principal architects and guardians and therefore as entitled to determine its future. Elsewhere, he contrasts America defined by shared political principles with America defined by cultural and religious inheritance. The latter tends toward zero-sum competition and suspicion of alliances, international cooperation and multilateral institutions.
Miller’s framework raises a diplomatic question rather than furnishing a tested conclusion: if religious affinity becomes a measure of belonging at home, might it influence which nations are trusted abroad? Supposedly “Judeo-Christian” countries could be treated as members of a common civilization while Muslim-majority societies are approached chiefly as threats. Effective diplomacy requires recognizing other nations’ histories, interests and moral agency; religious nationalism risks dividing the world between those inside America’s preferred order and those outside it.
Research by Andrew Whitehead, Samuel Perry and Joseph Baker strengthens the concern. Support for Christian nationalism is associated with greater suspicion of Muslims, immigrants and Middle Eastern refugees. Individual attitudes cannot simply be projected onto government policy, but they may shape public support for policies that interpret Muslim-majority nations through the lenses of extremism, cultural incompatibility and permanent danger.
Israel, Iran and the Sacralization of Conflict
America’s relationship with Israel requires particular care. The works considered here do not establish a direct causal line from Christian nationalism to US policy. They do prompt us to ask what happens when Israel is viewed not only as a strategic ally and a state entitled to security, but as part of a sacred Christian history. Support for an Israeli government can then become a religious obligation and criticism appear theologically suspect. The modern state may be conflated with biblical Israel, while Palestinians—including Palestinian Christians—and their rights become secondary to a predetermined sacred narrative.
Miller’s own position provides a contrast. He regards Iran and its allies as a serious threat and has described the Israel–Palestine conflict as a proxy confrontation between Israel and Iran. Yet he also insists that Israel be held to the requirements of justice in war and that peace include both a “sovereign, secure, independent Israel” and a “sovereign, secure, independent Palestine.” Supporting an ally does not remove the duty to scrutinize its use of force, or the settlement it seeks.
The war on Iran makes the danger more urgent. These authors do not provide a collective explanation of the war, but their work helps expose the risk of casting a geopolitical conflict as a religious struggle among a Christian America, a biblically significant Israel and an Islamic enemy. Within an apocalyptic or providential narrative, negotiation becomes betrayal, restraint a failure to confront evil, and escalation obedience to a higher purpose. Iran’s government, complex society and diverse population disappear behind an undifferentiated religious threat.
The gravest international consequence of Christian nationalism may be its ability to make political choices appear divinely ordained. Wars are human decisions. Alliances require moral scrutiny. Enemies remain human beings. No nation—not even one convinced of its exceptional purpose—is immune from the corruptions and illusions of power.