Amid celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary, assertions of the country’s religious, and specifically Christian, character have grown louder in political discourse.

In May 2026, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other prominent officials participated in a prayer service in Washington, D.C. Johnson proclaimed, “We hereby rededicate the United States of America as one nation under God.” Though planners invoked the nation’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage, most religious leaders at the event came from the evangelical Christian tradition. In a prerecorded video, President Donald Trump read from the New Testament book of 2 Corinthians.

Many ordinary Americans who attended the prayer service seemed to recognize the desire to link the United States with Christianity. One told a reporter that the U.S. was “founded on a Christian doctrine,” while another insisted it was “an important thing for our nation, just to put Christ back first.”

These ideas weren’t limited to this one-time gathering. In speeches and prayers at public events, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth proclaimed the U.S. to be “one nation under God.” In February 2026, at a Christian broadcasters convention, he declared that “Christ is King” and claimed “a direct through line from the Old and New Testament Christian gospels to the development of Western civilization and the United States of America.”

At first glance, these expressions might seem triumphalist declarations that link the nation’s success over the past 250 years with Christian faith. As a historian of U.S. Christianity, however, I recognize expressions like these often arise when Christian Americans are feeling anything but triumphant.

Civil war and........

© The Conversation