A judge citing the Bible and referring to God dozens of times in a court decision that limits reproductive health care. A nonbinary teenager dead after months of bullying in a state where public officials are advancing anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Public school boards agreeing to hire religious chaplains in place of mental health counsellors. A nationally televised prayer service sponsored by members of Congress, attended by the President of the United States, and held in the seat of American government. 

All these incidents happened recently and within the space of about a month in different locations across the United States. They may seem unrelated, but all serve as potent examples of how white Christian Nationalism is ascendant in the U.S.

White Christian Nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework rooted in the dangerous belief that America is—and must remain—a Christian nation founded for its white Christian inhabitants, and that our laws and policies must codify that privilege. Christian Nationalists deny the separation of church and state promised by the U.S. Constitution. They oppose equality for Black and Brown people, women, LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities, and the nonreligious because their goal is to retain traditional power structures and turn back America’s steady progress toward her goal of equality. Through a well-funded shadow network of organizations, allied politicians and judges, and other political power brokers, Christian Nationalists are marshalling the power of the state to impose their beliefs on all Americans.

Take reproductive freedom. In February, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a theology-infused opinion that human life begins at conception and therefore frozen embryos harvested for in vitro fertilization should have the same legal rights as living, breathing children. The court’s chief justice went a step further by writing a 22-page concurring opinion in which he cited the Bible five times and mentioned God or “the creator” nearly 50 times.

It was far from the first time that public officials have cited religion to justify the restriction of reproductive rights. In Missouri, legislators repeatedly voiced their religious beliefs when they passed the state’s current abortion ban; they even wrote religion into the law itself, proclaiming, ‘Almighty God is the author of life.’ My organization, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, along with the National Women’s Law Center, is in court on behalf of 14 clergy from seven different faith denominations challenging Missouri’s ban, which went into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative bloc abolished the nationwide right to abortion in 2022. During the oral argument before the Supreme Court in that case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called out Mississippi lawmakers’ religious impetus for banning abortion: ‘How is your interest anything but a religious view?’

Christian Nationalism is also behind much of the vile persecution of LGBTQ+ people. Americans United and its allies have demanded the ouster of a religious extremist state politician who is pushing his anti-LGBTQ+, Christian Nationalist policies to the extreme. Ryan Walters, the superintendent of public instruction for Oklahoma, is on a crusade to infuse religion into the state’s public schools, from personally praying to a classroom of elementary school students to writing a suggested prayer for all of the state’s schools to supporting the creation of what would be the nation’s first religious public school (Americans United is also challenging that school in court).

Walters also advocates the teaching of a whitewashed version of American history and demonizes LGBTQ+ people. It was in this toxic atmosphere that a 16-year-old nonbinary student named Nex Benedict died. Nex, who was of Native American heritage, died on 8 February after being beaten in their Oklahoma high school restroom by other students. This came after months of bullying. Nex’s death was ruled a suicide; state and federal officials continue to investigate the circumstances around their death. But what is clear is that Walters created the environment that drove this child—whom he was supposed to protect—to a place of hopelessness and despair. After Nex’s death, Walters doubled down on his anti-trans rhetoric: In a New York Times interview, he said: ‘There’s not multiple genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us.’

The attack on public schools and students that Walters is waging in Oklahoma is a microcosm of what we are seeing across the country. Christian Nationalists are on a crusade to impose their religious beliefs on public school students even as they continue to divert ever more public funding to private religious schools. Right now, Americans United is tracking more than 1,300 bills in states across the country that impact church-state separation; nearly half of them involve public education.

Following in the path of Texas, at least 14 state legislatures have proposed bills that would allow public schools to replace qualified counsellors with religious chaplains. Lawmakers in various states have also proposed bills that would require public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, allow public school teachers to pray in front of and even with students, and allow for the teaching of the Bible or intelligent design creationism in public schools. At the same time, religious extremists are advancing schemes that force taxpayers to fund tuition at private, religious schools that can indoctrinate and discriminate; last year alone at least 17 states expanded or created new private school voucher programs.

There are so many other examples I could give of how Christian Nationalism is invading our lives and threatening our rights and freedoms. One vivid example was, while waving the Christian flag and ‘Jesus saves’ banners, Christian Nationalists drove the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021, as election deniers sought to keep former president Donald Trump in power.

Recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that about 30% of Americans are adherents to or sympathizers of Christian Nationalism; a majority of Republicans and a supermajority of white evangelical Protestants espouse these views. PRRI also found that Christian Nationalists are more likely to have racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and patriarchal views. And the survey not surprisingly found a correlation between Christian Nationalism and a penchant for personal and political violence and authoritarianism.

This is not the first time the U.S. has experienced a resurgence of Christian Nationalism. In the 1950s amid the Cold War, Christian Nationalists were behind Congress creating the National Prayer Breakfast, adding ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance that schoolchildren recite every morning, and establishing ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto. They were also behind the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s and 1980s, as religious conservatives opposed to the desegregation of Christian universities coalesced into an anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ rights, anti-feminism political movement.

America’s changing demographics and the fear this is engendering are spurring the current rise in white Christian Nationalism. In 2014, white Christians ceased being the majority in America. As their numbers have declined, the number of religiously unaffiliated people (the ‘nones’) has grown to about 26% of the population, according to PRRI. The U.S. has elected the first Black president and the first multiracial and female vice president. Same-sex couples now have the right to marry nationwide. There have been great strides in the movements for racial justice, women’s rights, and LGBTQ+ equality.

Now we are seeing the backlash: White Christian Nationalists are raging against the dying of their privilege. They were emboldened by Trump, who tapped into their insecurity and gave them unprecedented access to the White House and influence over federal policies. The Trump administration weaponized religious freedom as a license to discriminate in social services, health care, employment, education, and other aspects of American life.

During a 2018 state dinner at the White House with prominent evangelical Christians, Trump bragged: ‘The support you’ve given me has been incredible, but I really don’t feel guilty because I have given you a lot back—just about everything I promised. And, as one of our great pastors just said, ‘Actually, you’ve given us much more, sir, than you’ve promised,’ and I think that’s true in many respects.’

Through a shadow network of organizations and political allies working to pack the courts, lobby politicians to rewrite laws, and empower book-banning, curriculum-scrubbing school boards, white Christian Nationalists are wielding outsized power. And they are taking a wrecking ball to the wall that separates church and state. They know church-state separation is the antidote to white Christian Nationalism. They know that this bedrock principle, an American original enshrined in our Constitution, protects freedom and equality for all of us. They know that it is foundational to our democracy. And they know that it is incompatible with their agenda of securing power and privilege for a select few.

The good news is that America has faced waves of white Christian Nationalism before and battled it back. That, combined with the reality that we have the power of the people and the American Constitution on our side, gives me hope for the future. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been around for 77 years and the organization is thriving. Every day, we are bringing together growing numbers of religious and nonreligious Americans to fight in the courts, in Congress, across state legislatures, and in the public square for freedom without favour and equality without exception. What could be more American than that?

Further reading

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

Faith Watch, February 2024 and Faith Watch, March 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

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The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to abolish reproductive freedom. A leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization would overturn the two precedents, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which recognised the right to an abortion in the US Constitution. 

Underlying the opinion is a case about a Mississippi law that banned all abortions after 15 weeks’ gestational age. The finer points of the law are irrelevant – it was passed as a direct challenge to Roe and Casey.

The leak itself is unprecedented, but trivial next to the court’s reversing of five decades of law to abolish a crucial right. Every other time the Supreme Court has overturned major precedent, it has done so to expand human rights – to end racial segregation, for instance. But now, the conservative bloc on the court is set to drag America back half a century. Even if the leaked draft is diluted for the final opinion, it will send shockwaves through America’s understanding of its Constitution.

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom

Abortion bans are an attack on religious freedom. They attempt to impose one religious viewpoint on all of us. Religious freedom demands the right to an abortion so people can make their own decisions according to their own principles. The First Amendment to our Constitution prohibits the government from imposing one set of religious beliefs, or religion at all, on others, but that is undeniably what these bans do. 

‘How is your interest,’ Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked the lawyer for the state of Mississippi, ‘anything but a religious view? … when you say [abortion] is the only right that takes away from the state the ability to protect a life, that’s a religious view, isn’t it?’

The attorney struggled to answer Sotomayor’s question, because she is correct. Legislation and legal briefs and opinions are scrubbed of religious language – Alito’s leaked opinion begins and ends with the camouflage, saying abortion presents a ‘moral issue’ and ‘moral question’ – but the lightest scratch rips through that thin veneer. Our organisation, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, explained the underlying religious impetus to the Supreme Court in our friend-of-the-court brief, using the legislators’ own words.

The sponsor of the Mississippi law in this very case justified the measure in part by declaring that ‘children are a gift from God.’ When the law was challenged in court, she asked her followers to ‘pray that these judges know that at three months of life these babies feel pain and deserve the life that God has given them.’ When Alabama’s Governor signed a similar anti-choice bill into law, she declared that the law ‘stands as a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious and that every life is a sacred gift from God.’ The sponsor of a near-total ban on abortions in Arkansas justified the measure in the state Senate by arguing that ‘there’s six things God hates, and one of those is people who shed innocent blood.’ When Oklahoma enacted its ban, the president pro tempore of the state Senate enthused, ‘all life is precious and a gift from God,’ while other legislators said things like, ‘God values life and so do I,’ and ‘we thank the Lord for the team of people that worked together to help make this happen, and the multitudes who have prayed for years about this. We also thank the Lord for answered prayer. To God be the glory!’

Justice Alito’s draft opinion employs similar beliefs, always masked, to justify the destruction of Roe and reproductive freedom. Throughout his draft opinion Alito suggests that abortion is a special case because it ends a life. He tries to argue that ‘abortion is fundamentally different’ from freedoms such as ‘intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage.’ Why? ‘Because it destroys what [Roe and Casey] called “fetal life” and what the law now before us describes as an “unborn human being.”‘ In other words, like the legislators, Alito premised his opinion on a religious belief. 

Wielding that religious belief to abolish reproductive freedom is unpopular: around two-thirds of Americans support keeping Roe v. Wade in place and that number is growing. Imposing religion through the law is also unpopular: only 13 percent of Americans think the government should ‘advocate Christian values’. And while there is some disagreement on abortion, it was not, for most of American history, a deeply divisive religious issue. 

Anti-abortion then

Roe v. Wade was not controversial at the time it was decided. As Rachel Laser explained in her speech before the Supreme Court when this case was first argued: ‘When Roe v. Wade first came down, even the Southern Baptist Convention celebrated the decision as one that advanced religious freedom.’ In 1973, the Baptist Press concluded a story on the decision with this: ‘Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.’

So what happened? How did a religious denomination go from ‘religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced’, to passing resolutions for ‘abolishing abortion immediately, without exception or compromise’ and likening reproductive freedom to a ‘holocaust’, as the SBC has done?

Abortion was chosen as a political wedge issue by a group of white, conservative Christian men in 1979 as the issue that could divide the electorate and secure political power. Andrew Seidel retells the story in his new book, American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom.

Paul Weyrich, a Catholic who founded the Heritage Foundation with money from the Coors brewing empire, along with Jerry Falwell, a Southern Baptist mega-preacher and founder of Liberty University, and others, deliberately sought to unite segregationists, racists, conservative politicians, white politicians, southern politicians, and conservative Christians in a political mission. Bringing together their mailing lists, media streams, and access, they forged a new alliance in the fires of racism with the aim of maintaining segregation. Later, they would choose abortion as their wedge issue, not for its moral dimension, but for its power to motivate and unite followers under a religious banner that could not be questioned. The Religious Right and the ‘Moral Majority’, Weyrich’s term that Falwell latched on to, were born.

Why did these men meet in the first place? Not because of abortion, but because of segregation. When the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, segregationists responded by opening private religious schools that remained racially segregated. Growth of those schools exploded and undermined desegregation efforts to the point that the government began questioning the tax-exempt status of these ‘segregation academies’. The government correctly observed that segregation is not charitable work and therefore not eligible for the tax exemption extended to charitable organisations. So the men gathered that day were not just fighting for segregation, but for segregation free of consequences, including taxes. They were battling a demographic wave and the steady march of equality, and chose abortion as the tool to retain and reclaim conservative white Christian privilege because it was more palatable than racism.

Anti-abortion now

When the dominant demographic feels its status threatened, it turns to ever more extreme measures to retain that status. This is known in academic circles as ‘Dominant Group Status Threat’. And the American dominant caste has been on the wane lately. According to PRRI, ‘as recently as 1996, almost two-thirds of Americans (65%) identified as white and Christian’ but by 2017, that number ‘was down to 43%’. Some experts predict that whites will no longer be the majority around 2045. We have had our first black president, and a woman of colour is now vice president. And over the last 50 years women and LGBTQ people have asserted their equality. 

Then, as now, members of this formerly dominant group are raging against the dying of their privilege. Reeling from the first black president, marriage equality, the #MeToo movement, and changing demographics, their desperation has grown and they have turned to ever more anti-democratic and authoritarian ‘saviours’: Trump and white Christian nationalism. We saw this desperation boil over on the insurrection of January 6, 2021, in which Christian nationalism played a major role. 

It is no coincidence that the rise of Christian nationalism over the last few decades coincided with the attacks on abortion rights. Abortion was a wedge, one that turned personal issues in shades of grey into articles of faith that were not just black or white, but life or death. The more religion was mixed with politics to increase that political wedge, the more Americans began to identify with Christian nationalism. 

Nowadays, anti-abortion views and white Christian nationalism substantially overlap. Sociologists Sam Perry and Phil Gorski recently explained this connection in their op-ed about the racist who murdered ten people at a grocery store in Buffalo NY: ‘The majority of those [White Americans] with the strongest antiabortion views also want to impose their vision of a Christian nation on other Americans.’ Or, as they wrote elsewhere in that piece, ‘for a segment of Christians, the battle over abortion is just one front in a wider war to make America Christian again — by any means necessary. They are not pro-life so much as pro-control.’ The flip side of that need for control is a fear of loss: loss of status, loss of privilege. That breeds the racism inherent in white Christian nationalism. For instance, Perry and Gorski point out that the murderer’s manifesto regurgitated a racial replacement theory: ‘Combined with a menacing “invasion” of non-White immigrants, low White fertility rates, he warns, “will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement” of Whites.’

White Christian nationalism will not be satisfied with abolishing reproductive freedom, precisely because its ultimate aim is not to protect the sanctity of life, but rather to establish by law a special favoured class and turn everyone else into lesser citizens. 

Alito’s draft opinion reads like a hit list for other critical rights. The opinion itself also amounts to a method of execution for those other rights. Christian nationalists will use the opinion as written to restrict and abolish personal liberties, including racial justice, LGBTQ rights, and contraception. Even if Alito’s final opinion is amended, the draft opinion lays out the conservative justices’ thinking on those other rights, and religious extremists will use it to justify new laws and litigate cases. They will give Alito another chance to make his draft a reality.

The question is not whether they will do this, but how far they will go. Overturning Roe is a major milestone on Christian nationalists’ decades-long crusade to impose their will on every American. But that crusade has shown itself ready to take lives and topple our democracy in the pursuit of power. In this sense, the end of Roe is also just the beginning. 

America needs a national recommitment to the separation of church and state

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom. This draft opinion flouts the separation between religion and government demanded in the US Constitution. That separation prevents religious extremists from realising their Christian nationalist dream and has been a major roadblock for opponents of reproductive rights.

America promises everyone the freedom to believe as they want, but our laws cannot allow anyone to use their religious beliefs to harm others. That is why Americans United for Separation of Church and State brings together people of all religions and none to fight in the courts, legislatures, and the public square for freedom without favour and equality without exception.

Justice Sotomayor asked another question during oral argument that has stayed with us, a question about the court itself: ‘Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?’

It is a question that Americans need to confront, because this court is dragging our country closer to the white Christian nation some religious extremists so desperately desire. But we at Americans United for Separation of Church and State will fight not only to defend the wall of separation, but to rebuild it. And we will never give up. 

In lieu of payment for this article and as requested by the authors, the Freethinker has made a donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds.

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