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Reinstituting American Christian nationalism as a lodestar of U.S. public policy was one of the guiding principles of Project 2025, and it continues to lead the Trump administration in 2026. It also forms the backbone of much of the decisionmaking of the conservative justices on the Roberts court. The latter project has actually been decades in the making at the high court, long before it was manifest in the administration hosting sectarian speeches at the Pentagon.

On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, about the rise of Christian nationalism as a core American political value, at the Supreme Court and now increasingly as a central domestic and geopolitical project inside the federal government itself.

Dahlia Lithwick: It would be incredibly helpful to root us in the history of this movement. Can you take us back to where this idea that America is a Christian country, and that the spoils from civil rights to education to citizenship should all be directed toward a certain religious group of Americans, first crops up?

Rachel Laser: Unfortunately, this has a longer history in our country than many are aware of. Right now we’re seeing this surge of Christian nationalism, rooted in the lie that America was a country that was established for Christians, and that our laws and policies should perpetuate that privilege. But Christian nationalism reared its ugly head in the McCarthy era, when, in the 1950s, there was a series of civic religious advances that really laid the foundation for what we’re seeing now. That’s when the words under God were added to the Pledge of Allegiance, and when In God We Trust became the national motto instead of E Pluribus Unum (“From Many, One”). It was also when In God We Trust was added to money. All that happened in response to [the fear of] “Godless communism” during the Red Scare. What we’re seeing right now is in reaction to massive demographic and social changes that have been happening in this country. As Robbie Jones wrote in the book The End of White Christian America, the white Christian majority ended back in 2014 in this country. That’s a long time ago, and that’s a big change. We’ve seen the advent of marriage equality, the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement—there’s just been a lot of change afoot, and we’re seeing a real backlash to that. So it’s not that Christian nationalism is brand-new, but it is strong, and it is raging.

In that moment in the 1950s when you really saw it start to tick up, it was grafted onto political ideas, yes, but Christian nationalism also gets bolted to economic ideas, to ideas about geopolitics, and to ideas about war. So it’s not just religion qua religion, or religion and law; it’s really bolted onto ideas of capitalism and the economy and dominion of the world.

Yes, absolutely. And we’re really seeing that come through today as Christian nationalism is infusing every branch of government. I think maybe it’s most vivid with the so-called Department of War, where we’re seeing the secretary with a Christian crusade tattoo on his body, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, initiating prayer services and inviting his pastor, Doug Wilson, to lead prayer services that are broadcast across the department. Pastor Wilson, by the way, believes that women shouldn’t have the right to vote anymore. You’re seeing it in this idea of........

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