[Note: This is Part 1 of “Exiles and Citizens,” a three-part series examining America’s 250th anniversary through the lens of the Gospel.]

The trucks started rolling in January. Fifty Freedom 250 vehicles, commissioned by the White House, fanned out across all 48 contiguous states with a message about a “new Golden Age” — a nation returning to what it was always meant to be.^[1] On July 4, 2026, the country will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence with celebrations at a scale never attempted before: a Great American State Fair on the National Mall, fireworks on both coasts, and a coordinated wave of patriotic events stretching from the planning commission’s founding statement to every town square willing to participate. “America’s 250th anniversary,” said Rosie Rios, chair of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, “is about more than reflecting on our past. It’s about honoring the contributions of individuals who built this country… and imagining what the next 250 years might look like.”^[2]

For many churches, the Sunday nearest July 4 will include something familiar: flags on the platform, hymns beside national anthems, and a sermon tracing this nation’s founding to its Christian roots. The invitation, spoken or implied, will be to celebrate the heritage and to grieve its departure — to recover what was once ours and could be ours again.

This is not an ignoble impulse. Love of country is not sin. Gratitude for genuine good is not idolatry. There are real strands of Christian influence woven through the American story, and they deserve honest acknowledgment.

But beneath the celebration presses a question that these services rarely stop to ask: What does it actually mean that this nation was founded on “Christian principles”? And what happens to our faith when we build it on a story that cannot bear the weight we are placing on it?

The Christian Nation Myth and the Historical Record

The Christian nation myth — the claim that America was founded as a specifically Christian nation, submitted to Christ’s rule, and shaped by a unified biblical vision — is not a historical accident. It is a theological assertion, and it deserves to be examined theologically, not just politically.

The entanglement of the American church with this narrative has deepened considerably since 2020. Evangelical leaders have gathered repeatedly in the Oval Office to lay hands on the President in prayer, in gatherings organized by the White House Faith Office and publicized as expressions of divine blessing on the administration.^[3] Churches and Christian broadcasters have pressed the courts — with the active cooperation of the administration — to dismantle the longstanding prohibition on pastoral candidate endorsements from the pulpit.^[4] What had long been a persistent temptation has become, by America’s 250th anniversary, something closer to a defining posture. The story feels settled, obvious, and beyond question. It is none of those things.

Begin with the founders themselves. The range of religious conviction among the men who shaped the founding documents is far more diverse than the standard narrative admits. Thomas Jefferson produced his own version of the Gospels by physically cutting out every miracle, resurrection, and supernatural claim — leaving a Jesus who was an admirable moral teacher and nothing more. John Adams, who signed both the Declaration and the Constitution, was a Unitarian who rejected the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. Benjamin Franklin expressed admiration for Jesus’ moral teachings at the Constitutional Convention while remaining genuinely skeptical of the theological claims that follow from them. George Washington’s faith was real in some respects but deliberately vague on specifically Christian doctrine — his public addresses relied almost entirely on the language of “Providence” rather than the name of Christ.

Alexander Hamilton is often cited as a counter-example, and fairly. He did profess genuine Christian faith near the end of his life. But this exception only sharpens the point: Hamilton’s Christian commitments came late, were personal, and were not the theological framework he brought to the founding documents.

What the founders shared was not Christian faith in any unified sense. What they shared was deep immersion in Enlightenment political philosophy alongside a broad Protestant cultural inheritance. They knew the Bible — many of them knew it well — and they drew on its moral vocabulary. But historians who have examined this question carefully, including Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden in their landmark study The Search for Christian America, have concluded that the “Christian nation” claim dramatically overstates the evidence.^[5] Historian Steven Green has further argued that the narrative of a Christian founding was largely constructed after the fact — that Americans in later generations, facing cultural anxiety, invented a founding mythology more Christian than the founding itself.^[6]

The Christian nation myth, in other words, is not merely an exaggeration. It is a category error. It confuses cultural influence with theological identity.

The Difference Between Roots and Lordship

Here is what the historical record does support: Christian moral categories — the dignity of persons, the importance of conscience, the sense of human accountability before God — genuinely shaped the founding culture. Protestant habits of self-governance and institutional accountability influenced the framers’ political imagination. Biblical concepts of law, covenant, and justice echo throughout the founding documents, even when the authors themselves did not hold orthodox Christian beliefs.

None of this is nothing. We should acknowledge it honestly.

But “Judeo-Christian roots” is a cultural and ethical claim — not a theological one. And the “Christian nation” argument makes a theological claim: that this nation was, in some meaningful sense, submitted to Christ’s rule.

The founders themselves foreclosed this option. Article VI of the Constitution explicitly prohibits religious tests for public office^[7] — a principled statement that national identity and theological identity are distinct. The First Amendment established a political order in which no religion holds official status. These were not oversights. They were commitments, shaped in part by founders who understood that a secular constitutional order was the best protection for genuine religious liberty.

Jesus drew the relevant distinction himself. When asked whether Israel should pay tribute to Rome, he replied with a question of his own: “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” (Matthew 22:20). The coin bore Caesar’s image. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (v. 21). The distinction between civil authority and divine authority is not a modern political invention. It is embedded in Christ’s own teaching.

Standing before Pilate, he made the same distinction more directly: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). The Kingdom of Christ does not advance through founding documents or the faith commitments of political leaders. It advances through the proclamation of a crucified and risen King whose rule transcends every earthly government.

This is why the “Christian nation” claim is not merely historically imprecise. It is theologically dangerous. It asks the Gospel to need something the Gospel does not need: America’s founding mythology.

Why the Story Persists — and What It Costs

If the narrative is historically and theologically problematic, why does it endure? Because it is extraordinarily useful.

The claim provides religious legitimacy for political power. If America was founded as a Christian nation, then those who challenge America are, in some sense, challenging God. This is a deeply convenient conflation — one that has served political interests across generations and across party lines. It makes cultural dominance feel like divine favor. It converts nostalgia into theology. It lends the language of righteousness to the language of national restoration.

Isaiah confronted this kind of national self-inflation long before America existed. Speaking the word of God to the most powerful empires of the ancient world, he announced: “Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales” (Isaiah 40:15). From God’s vantage point, the language of “the greatest political journey in human history”^[8] reads differently than it does from a commemorative truck.

The apostle Paul, standing in Athens, declared that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:26-27). God governs nations — not so that any particular nation can claim his exclusive favor, but so that all peoples might find their way to him. National history is not the story of divine favoritism. It is the story of God’s patient pursuit of every people group on earth.

When the church invests in the “Christian nation myth”, it pays a steep price. It begins to defend America’s sins rather than confess them. It treats challenges to national mythology as attacks on faith itself. It demands a kind of selective memory — celebrating what inspires, looking away from what does not. And it ultimately, without quite meaning to, subordinates Christ to America rather than America to Christ. A church whose theology has been shaped around a national story will find it very difficult to speak prophetically to that nation. Its voice has already been spent.

What We Can Rightly Celebrate

None of this means the story of America deserves only critique.

The ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence — that all persons are created equal, that human dignity demands political expression, that self-governance is worth attempting — were remarkable for their time, even when the men who wrote them did not live up to them. The American experiment in ordered liberty, however incomplete, has been a genuine contribution to human flourishing. The influence of Christian citizens in shaping the nation’s cultural and moral life across two and a half centuries is real and worth naming. These are goods, and we can receive them as such.

Jeremiah wrote to the exiles in Babylon — people living as foreigners in a nation that was not their own, under a government that did not share their faith: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7). Faithful citizenship does not require a founding mythology. It requires genuine investment in the good of the place where God has planted us.

We can love this country — its people, its ideals, its remarkable and unfinished experiment — without needing it to have been something it never quite was. The difference between grateful citizenship and idolatrous nationalism is not complicated: grateful citizenship holds the nation’s goods and failures together honestly; idolatrous nationalism demands we defend the mythology even when the facts push back.

The church does not need the Christian nation myth to be faithful. The Gospel has never depended on America’s founding story. Christ’s lordship does not rise or fall with the theological commitments of men who died two and a half centuries ago.

What releasing this myth costs us is the comfort of a story in which God is simply on our side. What it gives us is something more valuable: the freedom to love our country honestly — to celebrate what is genuinely worth celebrating, to grieve what genuinely deserves grief, and to point beyond both to a Kingdom that will outlast every republic.

But if we cannot be honest about the myth, we cannot be honest about the history. And there is history we have not yet told. That is where this series goes next.

Questions for Reflection

• Where have you uncritically accepted the “Christian nation” narrative, and what has it cost your ability to engage American history honestly?
• What would it mean for your faith if America was never a Christian nation in any theologically precise sense — does the Gospel require this to be true?
• How does the distinction between “cultural Christian influence” and “submission to Christ’s lordship” change the way you think about the church’s relationship to political power?
• In what ways has the conflation of national identity and Christian identity made it harder to apply Scripture consistently across political lines?
• What would “faithful citizenship” look like for you if it did not depend on defending the nation as God’s specially chosen instrument?

Prayer Points

• For Historical Honesty: Pray that the church would find the courage to hold American history with both gratitude for genuine goods and grief over genuine failures — refusing the selective memory that national mythology demands.
• For Gospel Clarity: Pray that believers would see, with fresh eyes, that Christ’s lordship does not depend on any nation’s founding story, and that this freedom would produce deeper confidence in the Gospel rather than anxiety.
• For Watchfulness Against Idolatry: Pray for discernment to recognize when national celebration crosses into the worship of something other than God — and for courage to name that boundary with grace rather than contempt.
• For Faithful Witness: Pray that the church in America would become a community capable of loving this country well — neither baptizing its mythology nor abandoning its people — and that our citizenship would be shaped more by Jeremiah 29 than by civil religion.

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^[1]“Freedom 250,” The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/freedom250/.

^[2]“America Gears Up for a Landmark Year in 2026,” International Inbound Travel Association, https://www.inboundtravel.org/news/america-gears-up-for-a-landmark-year-in-2026.

^[3] “Faith Leaders Pray Over President Trump at the White House,” The Presidential Prayer Team, March 20, 2025, https://www.presidentialprayerteam.org/2025/03/20/faith-leaders-pray-over-president-trump-at-the-white-house/.

^[4] Lois Uttley, “Judge rejects Johnson Amendment settlement, keeping ban on pastors endorsing candidates,” Episcopal News Service, April 1, 2026, https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2026/04/01/judge-rejects-johnson-amendment-settlement-keeping-ban-on-pastors-endorsing-candidates/.

^[5]Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1989), Chapter 1.

^[6]Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), Chapter 7.

^[7] Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution states: “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” See https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-6/clause-3/.

^[8]“US 250th Anniversary: 2026 dates, events and celebrations,” Newsweek, December 29, 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/us-250th-anniversary-2026-dates-events-and-celebrations-11192393.