Did Liberal Protestantism Create Christian Nationalism?

The mainline churches abandoned the gospel and the public square at the same time. Others rushed in to fill the vacancy, and too many brought the wrong gospel with them.

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org  November 8, 2026

Would Christian nationalism exist if the mainline churches had not traded the gospel for a parade of progressive causes that has slowly but surely emptied their pews?

The question is rarely asked. Christian nationalism is routinely blamed on Donald Trump and MAGA, as though it sprang fully formed from a rally in 2016. It did not. Movements do not arise in a vacuum. They arise in a vacancy. And the vacancy in American public religion was left by the very churches that once filled it.

The Old Establishment

Older readers will remember when mainline Protestantism was America's unofficial established church. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists and Lutherans supplied the presidents, senators, judges and university presidents. Reinhold Niebuhr made the cover of Time. Dwight Eisenhower laid the cornerstone of the Interchurch Center on Riverside Drive, the "God Box," in 1958. When the nation needed a moral vocabulary, it borrowed the mainline's.

That establishment had its faults, not least a comfortable civil religion that blurred the line between church and country. But it drew on a theology of public life worked out over centuries since the Reformation. And it knew, at least in principle, that the church stands under God's judgment before it stands beside the nation.

The Abdication

Then came the long retreat. From the 1960s on, mainline leaders swapped the authority of Scripture for the authority of the zeitgeist. Sin became systemic, salvation became social, and the creeds became optional. In the past two decades whole denominations tore themselves apart over sexuality and emptied faster than yesterday's coffee filters. The Episcopal Church has lost some 1.9 million members since its peak in the 1960s, more than half its membership. The mainline as a whole now claims roughly one American in ten.

Here is the irony few have noticed. As the mainline lost its gospel, it did not lose its appetite for politics. Quite the reverse. The National Council of Churches and the denominational offices in Washington became lobbying shops for every progressive cause going. Bishops issued statements on climate, immigration, gun control and the federal budget while their congregations aged and their buildings went up for sale. The mainline taught America that the church's real business was winning arguments in Washington.

Evangelicals were watching. They learned the lesson. They just drew the opposite conclusions.

The Vacancy Filled

Evangelicals believe, with some reason, that the country is going to hell in a handbasket. They see abortion on demand, the redefinition of marriage, a gender ideology that would reshape children's bodies, transhumanist fantasies of remaking human nature, and a political class that bends over backwards to accommodate Islam while treating biblical Christianity as a hate crime. They believe a nation that turns its back on God invites His judgment, as Israel did and as other godless nations have.

The argument has a certain legitimacy. When the mainline churches, the traditional keepers of the nation's conscience, blessed the very revolution evangelicals feared, there was no one left in the old pulpits to say no. If the mainline would not stand against the culture, evangelicals reasoned, they must.

So roughly eight in ten white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Even after this week's midterms, in which Democrats swept both houses of Congress, few expect that base to desert him.

But evangelicals inherited the mainline's public role without its intellectual inheritance. Revivalist, populist, suspicious of institutions and thin on ecclesiology, much of American evangelicalism had no developed theology of church and state to fall back on. It had grievance, numbers and a candidate. Into that gap stepped Christian nationalism.

The Gamble

Evangelicals made a wager: get close to power and you can rescue America from hedonism, socialism and cultural Marxism. It is the same wager the mainline made fifty years earlier from the other side, and it will end the same way.

A distinction must be made here. Not every evangelical who votes Republican is a Christian nationalist. Many hold their noses and vote on the narrow grounds of the unborn and religious liberty. Christian nationalism is something else: the conviction that America is, or must be made, a Christian nation by political means, and that the fortunes of the faith rise and fall with those of a party and its leader.

That is where the gospel ends and idolatry begins. Too many of the movement's loudest voices know little of the faith they claim to defend. Their crosses are printed on flags, not carried on shoulders. Borders, national greatness and enemies to be defeated may be legitimate political concerns, but they are not the Great Commission. No one was ever saved by a border wall.

A Kingdom Not of This World

Jesus told Pilate His kingdom was not of this world. He did not form a party to drive out the Romans. He disappointed the Zealots who wanted Him to. He commanded His followers to make disciples of all nations, not to make one nation Christian by statute.

The apostles turned the world upside down without a vote, a lobby or an alliance with Caesar, and most of them died ugly deaths rather than compromise. Peter wrote to the churches as "sojourners and exiles." They were shaped by the Sermon on the Mount, not by a manifesto.

Dean Inge warned that whoever marries the spirit of the age will find himself a widower in the next. The German Christians of the 1930s married the spirit of their age and ended up blessing a Führer. The mainline married the spirit of ours and is left with empty cathedrals. Christian nationalists are now standing at the altar with the same bride.

The Better Way

None of this means Christians must retreat from public life. I was at Lausanne in 1974 when John Stott and others hammered out a Covenant that affirmed Christian social responsibility while insisting that, in the church's mission, evangelism is primary. Wilberforce fought the slave trade from Parliament. Bonhoeffer resisted Hitler. Christians are called to be salt and light, and salt has to touch the meat.

The question is not whether Christians engage in politics but whether politics swallows the gospel. Christians may vote, run for office, lobby and argue. What they may not do is confuse the kingdom of God with any party, any nation or any man. The moment the cross becomes a campaign logo, it has stopped being the cross.

Who Is to Blame?

So did liberal Protestantism create Christian nationalism? Not single-handedly. Evangelicals answer for their own choices, and the mainline's sins do not excuse them. But the mainline cleared the ground. It abandoned the gospel. It abandoned the public conscience it once held in trust. And it showed a whole generation that the church's business is political victory. Evangelicals filled the vacancy it left, and too many filled it with the same mistake.

A church that preaches progressive politics in place of the gospel and a church that preaches nationalist politics in place of the gospel have made one error from opposite ends.

The remedy for both is the same. Preach Christ crucified. Make disciples. Build the church. And remember that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, perhaps never more than when it is wielded in the name of God.

David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder, editor and publisher of VirtueOnline, the voice for global orthodox Anglicanism. His website can be accessed here: www.virtueonline.org He also writes on the Middle East. His Substack can be located here: davidvirtue2.substack.com