There is an ongoing debate about what it means to be an American, and whether or not the United States is, or ever was, a Christian nation. Below are 2 articles addressing these notions. Enjoy.
A Christian Nation If You Can Keep It
The Trump administration acknowledges the important role religion plays in American life and history.
BY: Charles J. Russo, The American Thinker (January 2, 2026).
When discussing the nature of the fledgling United States in 1787, Elizabeth Willing Powel, an influential socialite in Philadelphia, asked Benjamin Franklin “[w]ell, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin famously responded that the United States is “a republic, if you can keep it.”
At the dawn of 2026, a similar question lingers amid controversy over the nation’s religious status following recent remarks by President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. More specifically, it thus seems fair to ask, without putting too much emphasis on Christmas, whether the United States is a Christian nation. We can respond enthusiastically “yes, if we can keep it.”
At the same time, I must hasten to add that the recognition and acceptance of the United States as a Christian nation, a notion with which most American Christians agree, does not mean other faiths are, or should be, excluded because all religions are welcome in our democratic republic. Rather, my position is that an acknowledgement that even in the increasingly religiously pluralistic United States, a nation founded at least in part on an imperfect notion of freedom of religion typically reserved for members of the dominant Christian traditions in the American colonies, religious freedom remains a fundamental right, a first among equals.
Vice-President J.D. Vance made the first of the two statements that generated controversy about religion on December 20, 2025, in a speech at Turning Point’s USA’s AmFest in Phoenix, Arizona. Vance declared “we have been, and by the grace of God, we always will be, a Christian nation,” adding fuel to the controversy over the status of Christianity in the United States.
A week later, reacting to President Trump’s religious Christmas greetings, on December 27 the woke editors of the Washington Post published a column, “Trump aides’ official religious messages for Christmas draw objections.” The Post decried Trump’s words as a departure from recent government practices such as under the faux Roman Catholic Joseph Biden who openly violated many key the teachings of his professed Church, especially on matters involving sexuality, and nominal Christian Barack Obama, who had an ornament of Mao Zedong, hardly a supporter of Christian or any other religious values or freedom, disgracefully displayed on White House Christmas tree in 2009.
The Post preferred the secular, non-Christian messages of the previous administrations which typically focused on seasonal joy, peace, or Santa Claus imagery. The Post’s editors apparently refuse to celebrate December 25, the day on which Christians, representing 62% of the American population, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center report, celebrate Christmas Day, a federal holiday, honoring the birth of Jesus Christ.
Responding to the Post’s baseless criticisms, President Trump retorted that “[t]he First Lady and I send our warmest wishes to all Americans as we share in the joy of Christmas Day and celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” Along with President Trump’s commemorating Christmas, officials at the Department of Homeland Security posted salutations on X proclaiming “Christ is Born!” and “We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior,” along with religious images such as a manger scene and crosses on its website.
Not surprisingly, the prejudice of woke anti-Christian media outlets exemplified by the Post and/or the unfounded fears of others on the Left warning that the attitude and actions of the Trump administration will lead to an unclearly defined “Christian nationalism,” to the exclusion of other faiths aside, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, this manufactured controversy is about how critics at the Post and elsewhere ignore religious freedom and Christianity’s contributions to American life.
The Trump administration’s respectful, positive attitude toward Christianity calls to mind philosopher George Santayana’s prescient observation that “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” In other words, because the American Founders were at least partially motivated by the need to escape the tyranny of state-imposed religion, most notably in England, in pursuit of religious freedom, they adopted the First Amendment, according to which “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Among the many times the Supreme Court recognized the importance of religion is 1952’s Zorach v. Clauson. Justices William O. Douglas’ opinion upheld the practice of New York City officials who allowed public school students to leave class early to attend sessions provided by educators from the faiths of their parents to receive religious instruction. The Court reasoned that “[w]e are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”
Critics who oppose mentions of religion in American public, especially Christianity, rely on the repudiated so-called wall of separation between Church and State. Often credited to Thomas Jeffersons 1803 “Letter to the Danburry Baptist Convention,” this metaphor was actually created in 1644 by Roger Williams, a Puritan pastor in Massachusetts. The Supreme Court first used this metaphor in 1878’s Reynolds v. United States in upholding a federal statute banning polygamy in the then Utah Territory, explaining that while people are free to practice their faiths, those beliefs must comply with American law.
The Supreme Court did not use the wall metaphor again until 1947 when Justice Hugo Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, introduced it in Everson v. Board of Education as a Trojan Horse of sorts in allowing New Jersey to provide publicly funded transportation for students in faith-based, largely Roman Catholic schools. However, the wall morphed into a Trojan House because the Court used it for decades to deny most aid to religious schools, often displaying anti-Catholic animus.
In 2016 the Supreme Court repudiated the wall’s anti-religious discrimination, granting equal treatment to faith-based institutions and individuals. At the heart of its judgment, writing for the Supreme Court in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer, Chief Justice Roberts emphasized that “the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran Church from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution all the same, and cannot stand.”
Consequently, the Court, and the Trump administration independently acknowledged the important role religion plays in American life and history.
Moving forward, hopefully people of good will accept that neither the Constitution nor the Supreme Court forbid Christianity from playing, and continuing to have, an important place in American life as long as all religions are treated fairly and equally. To this end, in 1968’s Epperson v. Arkansas, invalidating a law from Arkansas mandating the teaching of the Genesis account of creation in all of the state’s public educational institutions, Justice Abe Fortas, author of the majority opinion, noted that “[t]he First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.”
In light of Fortas’ comment, the objections of the Washington Post notwithstanding, it is hard to see how Trump’s wishing Christmas cheer or Vance’s remark could be viewed as violating the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom. Rather, Trump’s warm words merely displayed courtesy and good cheer of the Christmas season to others, qualities sorely lacking in our public discourse, while Vance’s reflected lived reality in the United States.
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A Nation of Englishmen, Actually
A woke new thesis claiming that the U.S. is a blank slate of origins and defined by different ethnic groups, is nonsense.
BY: Matt O’Brien, The American Thinker (December 30, 2025).
Politico recently published an article titled, “Immigrants Once Avoided Some Regions of America: That’s A Big Reason We’re So Divided” by Colin Woodard, the director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center of International Relations and Public Policy. And like many academics before him, Woodard asserts that he has figured out why Americans are polarized on the immigration issue.
For a variety of reasons, however, the good professor has completely missed the boat.
Woodard argues that America actually consists of nine distinct “nations,” that were “built on massive differences in ideas about freedom, identity and belonging that go back to rivalries between this continent’s competing colonial projects that date back three and four centuries.”
According to Woodard, “Those colonial projects had different experiences with immigrants and immigration,” and that has created a polarized debate about immigration policy.
He further contends that, “On one side are ethnonationalists who assert that only the people with the right lineage and faith can belong to America. On the other is the civic nationalist tradition where anyone who shares the universal ideas about human freedom in the Declaration of Independence is a potential American.”
At first glance, Professor Woodard’s approach may seem novel.
In reality, it is neither novel nor even particularly creative. He simply throws a new coat of paint on the same tired tack taken by countless others, reducing any concerns about assimilation or the soundness of mass migration policies to mere racism. And to reach this foregone conclusion, he emphasizes insignificant divisions while ignoring profound unifying factors.
The “nations” that Woodard contends are the products of diverse influences actually share more commonalities than differences. They are all inheritors of the Western moral, political, legal, intellectual, and religious traditions. Western culture, as noted by Christopher Dawson in his Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, is a product of Judeo-Christian thinking.
The majority of Woodard’s groupings are also distinctly English in nature. Thus, Woodard errs grievously when he classifies Puritans, Quakers, and English gentry as distinct “colonial projects” giving rise to regional cultures so divergent that they must be considered “separate nations.” English Puritans, Quakers and Anglican members of the gentry emigrated under the same comprehensive British plan to settle North America. And the societies they built, while displaying minor, regional variations, were based on shared moral, social and civic traditions. Colonial Boston and Savannah had more in common with each other than they did with colonial Montreal.
In short, American culture is the product of overwhelming English influences, a thesis persuasively argued by historian Russell Kirk in America’s British Culture. And the United States is nothing, if not the product of English political thought, the Common Law and Anglican moral theology.
According to Kirk, “So dominant has British culture been in America, north of the Rio Grande, from the seventeenth century to the present, that if somehow the British elements could be eliminated from all the cultural patterns of the United States — why, Americans would be left with no coherent culture in public or in private life.”
And therein lies the fundamental flaw in Woodard’s thesis. It depends on the notion that the United States, in its best incarnation, is a blank cultural slate whose defining political ideal is a color-blind, civic nationalism that is not tied to the political, social, moral, or religious ideals of any particular forebear. According to Woodard, this concept of America is laid out in the “universalist” principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence.
But that is utter nonsense. The Declaration of Independence, far from being a statement of universalist political thought is a uniquely English document. Its core political tenets are drawn from the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights. Its legal justifications are purely common law. And its moral principles are primarily Anglican. Rather than being a statement of some novel political philosophy, it was an affirmation that the Thirteen Colonies intended to govern themselves according to the moral, social, legal and political principles understood throughout the English-speaking world.
Throughout most of its history, the United States proudly embraced its identity as a Western nation of English origin. And the American commitment to English social, civic, political, legal, and spiritual ideals led to the exceptional levels of success and prosperity experienced by the United States through the end of the Cold War.
As Dr. Kirk observed, the internal coherence of the United States has always been dependent on the fact that “many millions of newcomers to the United States have accepted integration into the British-descended American culture with little protest, and often with great willingness.”
By contrast, America began to stumble only when she began throwing open her borders both to large numbers of foreign nationals and foreign ideas. Thus, America’s debate about immigration is not one taking place between the forces of racist ethnonationalism and color-blind civic nationalism.
Rather, it is a dispute between those who understand that a nation that welcomes migrants in large numbers can only survive if it requires new arrivals to assimilate into the common culture that binds the polity – and those who do not.
The United States has recently found itself mulling over whether Spanish may be used to document official acts, and whether Sharia law may be applied in U.S. courts. Faced with that kind of existential shift, it is not racist, but eminently reasonable to ask if we should be importing fewer migrants from alien cultures and more from countries that are culturally, politically, and economically similar to our own.
Rather than nine divergent nations, America has always been one nation, under God and indivisible. If it wishes to remain that way, it will reject baseless theories like those of Dr. Woodard and unabashedly embrace the British traditions that made it what it is today.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 