Publisher’s note: The Indiana Citizen covered the Hoosiers United event to which Sheila Kennedy refers in her column below. That story can be found here.
By Sheila Suess Kennedy
September 24, 2026
A few days ago, I participated in an event sponsored by the Fort Wayne chapter of Hoosiers United for Separation of Church and State. The keynote speaker was Randall Balmer. Balmer is probably America’s pre-eminent scholar of religious history–and an ordained Episcopalian minister– and the local members were justifiably excited to have secured him for the event.
Balmer has written copiously about religious liberty and Christian nationalism; his most recent book is “America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State.” It follows such other titles as “Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.” I have previously cited an important part of Balmer’s research showing that abortion had nothing to do with the rise of the political Right–that the “pro-life” movement was “developed” some six years after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade as a cover for the actual motive behind the encouragement of Evangelical political participation, the loss of tax-exemptions by the racist segregation academies that had sprung up in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.
In his lecture, Balmer took special aim at the intentional dishonesty of today’s so-called “originalists” who claim that the U.S. was intended to be a Christian nation. Because church-state separation has been a focus of my own scholarship, I was familiar with many of the examples he used to demolish that ahistorical belief–Notes on the State of Virginia, and other quotations from Jefferson, the unanimously endorsed Treaty of Tripoli (which began with the phrase that ” as the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,”) and several other examples that rather clearly show otherwise. But I was unfamiliar with several others: Isaac Backus, the Separatist Baptists of Massachusetts, and the Presbyterian Party of New York were all new to me.
Balmer also traced the origins of today’s Christian nationalists, and spent considerable time explaining the threat that politicized and unChristian movement poses to genuinely religious Americans–very much including authentic Christians.
I thought about that presentation a couple of days later, when I read a report from Talking Points Memo about a Hoosier (!) named Charles Haywood and a secretive, far-Right organization called the Society for American Civic Renewal, a men’s only, Christian-only group with “members that include the head of the Claremont Institute, venture capitalists, and GOP donors. It describes itself as aiming to place its members in influential positions in government and business.”
TPM cites to a piece by Eric Erickson that describes the organization as a group of white men (several in the “orbit” of Vice President JD Vance) who are “covertly inserting themselves into the conservative movement in order to propagate their white nationalist, anti-semitic, and Nazi sympathies.”
It’s hard not to wonder how many other secretive organizations exist–orginalizations not yet uncovered that may be working alongside the Society for American Civic Renewal (and the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front and several others) to redefine America and reject the clear language and philosophy of the country’s founding documents and the equally clear intent of the Founders who drafted those documents.
One of the important observations made by scholars like Balmer is the inextricable connection of White Christian nationalism with racism and other other assorted bigotries. Christian nationalists promote White supremacy in a variety of ways– not just by openly attacking minorities, but by insisting that White Americans are the “prototypical” Americans, and attributing positive traits like intelligence and hard work specifically to White Americans compared to other racial groups. (We can see how well that’s working out at Hegseth’s “Department of War.”)
Christian nationalists (mis)use religious language to drive partisan and racial solidarity among White Americans, and to promote White supremacy.
Among the groups identified by Wikipedia as White Supremacy organizations operating within the U.S. are several explicitly “Christian” ones, including the Christian Defense League, the Christian Nationalist Crusade, the Christian Patriot movement…(I hadn’t heard of these organizations, but somehow, I have the feeling that Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s Christian nationalist Lieutenant Governor, is intimately familiar with them…)
I think that ordinary Americans are beginning to awaken to the multiple dangers of White Christian nationalism. The robust turnout in Fort Wayne –and the frequent applause interrupting Balmer’s lecture and our subsequent “conversation”–are signs that real Americans, religious and not, are coming to recognize how profoundly unAmerican this movement is.
There’s a reason so many of these White “Christian” nationalist groups are secret.
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 11th 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.
This column was originally published by Sheila Kennedy on her blog, “A Jaundiced Look at the World We Live In.” 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.
