This column was original published by Sheila Kennedy on her blog, “A Jaundiced Look at the World We Live In.”
By Sheila Kennedy
July 6, 2026
It has taken a while, but genuinely religious folks are coming out to fight the neo-Nazis, racists and assorted nut cases who use the trappings of religion in service of some very ugly beliefs.
One of my favorite pastors, Phil Gulley, who writes the “Plain Speech” Substack blog, recently posted “God Save Us from Religious People,” an essay in which he shared his frustration with self-identified “religious” folks.
At the risk of alienating those readers who first met me via my theology books, I will nevertheless say I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with religion. Religion remains the last acceptable vestige of superstition and tribalism, making acceptable that which should never be accepted─the diminishment of intellectual progress, cultural growth, and global well-being. Wherever there is resistance to advancement, religion can be found, dragging us back to a darker, less enlightened era.
Gulley isn’t the only religious figure pushing back against religious appropriation. Christians Against Christian Nationalism was founded in 2019; Compassionate Conservative Revival is another organization combating Christian nationalism. There are others.
In The Contrarian, Robert P. Jones, Founder and President of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), attacked the hijacking of religion, writing that, as America turns 250, it’s time to celebrate “the pluralistic nation we have organically become instead of a mythical white Christian nation we have allegedly lost.”
Jones points to the increasingly obvious White supremacy at the heart of the Trump administration–pointing to the profoundly racist removal of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians while rolling out the welcome mat for White South African refugees. (Those “refugees” were evidently gifted with a PragerU children’s book highlighting the so-called reverse racism and white genocide of South Africa along with a document produced by Trump’s short-lived “1776 Commission” defending America’s founding on slavery.)
Jones accurately places the MAGA movement’s “true cultural power” on its embrace of Christian nationalism.
Trump tells his white Christian base that he is going to “bring back the churchgoer.” JD Vance’s language is more polished, but his appeals to “western civilization” and “Christian values” (made while campaigning for authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orbán) ultimately make the same claim—that both our past and our future lie in the reclaiming of our European Christian origins. That was certainly the vibe at the recent “Rededicate250” event, which I attended, on the National Mall. A cross between a white evangelical tent revival and a Trump rally, this publicly funded nine-hour extravaganza, which attracted a nearly all-white crowd, featured calls for the salvation of both individuals and the nation, not just through God but through “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
As Jones notes, these “pious” patriots focus on language in America’s constituent documents like “nature’s God,” while conveniently overlooking the fact that the founders wrote a governing document that “omitted references to God, secured religious liberty for all, and ensured that there would be no government-established religion or religious test for public office.” It was the Constitution of the Confederacy that used “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” to justify White supremacy and the institution of slavery.
Jones skewers the Christian nationalist’s insistence that the early American colonies were filled with churchgoing Christians. Historians tell us that only 10 percent of that population were actually members of a congregation, and even the inclusion of more loosely affiliated people only brings the number of religious folks to 17 percent. As he points out, Americans today are far more religiously engaged than at either the nation ‘s foundin or through our first 150 years.
So why the hysteria over “decline”? That narrative is only accurate if we focus on White Christianity. As Jones notes, “in 1976, roughly eight in ten (81 percent) Americans identified as White and identified with a Christian denomination, twice the percentage (40 percent) who identify as White and Christian today.”
The God conjured by MAGA is not the compassionate creator of an expansive universe but a vengeful tribal deity tailor-made for a white Christian ethno-religious state. In Trump’s brooding imagination, our collective task in 2026 is not to celebrate the pluralistic nation we have organically become — one that has flourished precisely because of the non-establishment protections in our Constitution — but to forcefully restore a white Christian nation we have allegedly lost.
Jones ends with some good news: PRRI’s most recent survey found that “two thirds of Americans embrace religious pluralism and repudiate the Christian nationalist worldview. And nearly six in ten (59 percent) Americans, including 65 percent of independents, now agree that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”
Those six in ten need to vote.
Sheila Suess Kennedy is Emerita Professor of Law and Public Policy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. As an attorney, she practiced real estate, administrative and business law in Indianapolis before becoming corporation counsel for the City of Indianapolis in 1977. In 1980, she was the Republican candidate for Indiana’s then 1th Congressional District and in 1992, she became executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana. She joined the faculty of the School of Public and Environment al Affairs in 1998.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
