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 and institutional infrastructure that would later anchor the Christian nationalist project. 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.

Documented themes

• Christian Nationalism

Connections from Christian Nationalism: Before 1940

• influenced → National Religious Broadcasters (1944) — The National Religious Broadcasters was founded on the assumption that Christian radio was not merely religious programming but a form of national stewardship — that America's identity as a Christian civilization depended on Christians controlling the airwaves. This premise was not invented in 1944. It was the direct application of a theological tradition that had been defining American Protestant identity since the Puritans.
• influenced → W.A. Criswell (1944) — W.A. Criswell's vision of the Southern Baptist pastor as a culture warrior — defending Christian civilization against secular liberalism — was not original to him. It was the expression of a pre-existing theological framework that had been building in American evangelical Protestantism for over a century, fusing national identity with Protestant Christian identity in ways that made any retreat from public life feel like abandonment of the faith.

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)