Damned Christians

[Fake Messiah]

This isn’t the first time Christians have tried to claim the United States as their own

In May 2026, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other prominent officials participated in a prayer service in Washington, D.C. Johnson proclaimed, “We hereby rededicate the United States of America as one nation under God.” Though planners invoked the nation’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage, most religious leaders at the event came from the evangelical Christian tradition. In a prerecorded video, President Donald Trump read from the New Testament book of 2 Corinthians.

At first glance, these expressions might seem triumphalist declarations that link the nation’s success over the past 250 years with Christian faith. As a historian of U.S. Christianity, however, I recognize expressions like these often arise when Christian Americans are feeling anything but triumphant.

As the U.S. plunged into Civil War in 1861, both the Union and Confederacy sought to link their side to God. The preamble of the Confederate constitution noted a desire for “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” for their new government.

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In the North, the Pennsylvania clergyman M.R. Watkinson successfully lobbied for a reference to God to be added to coins. Watkinson believed the nation was guilty of “disowning God” and urged the treasury secretary to make declarations of religiosity. This would “place us openly under the divine protection,” he noted.

Three years later, as war dragged on, a group comprising members of the North’s major Protestant denominations urged a change to the preamble of the U.S. Constitution. Its members sought to declare that Americans recognized “Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government” and desired “to constitute a Christian government.”

The amendment was not ratified during the Civil War, but the efforts in both the North and South revealed how an existential political crisis pushed language of God into government.

Soon after the Civil War, Protestant Christians in the U.S. perceived a new threat. Beginning in the 1870s, atheism and indifference to religion became popular, especially among younger intellectuals. Rising numbers of Catholic and Jewish immigrants brought greater religious diversity.

Fearing a loss of their significant clout and influence, devout Protestants revived the earlier campaign to write their faith commitments into the Constitution.

In addition to placing references to God and Jesus in the Constitution, their proposed amendment declared the Bible “the supreme rule for the conduct of nations.”

The Christian amendment ultimately failed, largely because not all Protestants supported it. But anxieties about growing diversity and rising indifference had convinced many Americans of the need to enshrine Christianity in the Constitution.

Anxieties in the aftermath of World War II and the dawn of the Cold War brought another rise of Christian rhetoric in U.S. civic life.

In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill adding the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. The president’s signing statement noted that the phrase represented a “reaffirming” of “the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future.”

More often than not, the insistence that the U.S. is “one nation under God” is not a triumphant statement of success.

This fear was evident in the response of an attendee at the “Rededicate 250” prayer service in May. When interviewed by PBS, this attendee declared, “American is built on the Christian faith,” and added, “if we lose this faith, the whole country will collapse.”

Throughout the nation’s history, that existential fear has inspired efforts to declare the U.S. a Christian nation.

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https://www.salon.com/2026/06/29/this-is...n-partner/