Via New Yorker Daily \\\ Why American Christianity Ended Up Like This

Sunday, June 14, 2026

 

Michael Luo Executive editor, who writes regularly on politics and religion

One of the more discordant moments that I’ve encountered as a reporter came on the Fourth of July weekend in 2007, when I attended an evangelical church service in central Iowa. I was covering the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses and had come to interview congregants. When I settled into my pew and stood for worship, I was expecting the usual fare of contemporary praise or hymns. Instead, the congregants began belting out a medley of patriotic songs, including “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “America the Beautiful.” I’m a regular churchgoer and had covered the religion beat on the metro desk at the Times, but I’d never experienced such an unapologetic mingling of God and country during a Sunday service.

Illustration by Tyler Comrie

Today, of course, much attention is being paid to Christian nationalism, a river of belief closely tied to the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, and again in 2024, which eludes strict definition. It is less a coherent ideology and more a collection of attitudes and impulses, rooted in nativism and racial intolerance, that has seeped into white evangelicalism. Its muscular approach to faith and politics now holds sway over much of the country. How did this happen? How did American Christianity end up this way? For a piece in this week’s issue, I went all the way back to the nation’s founding, in search of answers.

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