Eichenberger: Christian Nationalism
by Dan Eichenberger, MD, MBA
“Christian Nationalism” has become one of the most abused phrases in American political debate. Once an academic term, it is now routinely deployed to delegitimize citizens who believe America’s Judeo-Christian moral inheritance should continue to inform public life. The phrase is rarely defined with precision and seldom applied consistently. Its modern function is not descriptive but exclusionary — to push Christian viewpoints outside the bounds of acceptable democratic participation.
Critics frame Christian Nationalism as an effort to merge Christianity with state authority, implying that ordinary believers harbor theocratic ambitions. Nothing in American constitutional law — or in the stated goals of mainstream Christian organizations — supports that claim. Advocacy for religious liberty, the protection of unborn life, marriage, or immigration enforcement does not threaten constitutional order; it operates fully within it. These positions reflect moral convictions that shaped the American founding, when public virtue was widely understood as necessary for republican self-government. None of this argues for government establishment of religion or theological coercion — only for the equal constitutional right of Christians to bring their moral reasoning into public debate alongside every other worldview.
The founding record reinforces this point. The Declaration of Independence affirms that rights are derived from a Creator rather than bestowed by the state. Early American law reflected longstanding moral prohibitions against violence and theft. The Constitution’s restraint on religion was not a mandate for secularism but a safeguard against federal control of churches, leaving religious life to the people and the states. Even Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was meant to prevent government interference with religion — not to banish Christianity from public life.
Yet the charge of Christian Nationalism is now routinely used to foreclose debate rather than answer it. Opposition to abortion policy, radical gender ideology in schools or lax border enforcement is dismissed not on constitutional grounds but by attaching a morally radioactive label. Polls purporting to measure the ideology rely on loaded questions and then conflate mainstream Christian belief with fringe extremism. Christianity does not seek to rule the state; it seeks the freedom to argue, persuade, and participate as an equal citizen in public life.
Here, the double standard becomes impossible to ignore. While Christian moral reasoning is depicted as dangerous, a competing secular worldview is increasingly enforced through courts, schools and administrative power. It advances rigid moral claims about identity, life and human nature, often with little tolerance for dissent. These doctrines are not presented as beliefs but as neutral facts, even as they are imposed through law, regulation, and professional sanction. This is not neutrality; it is moral establishment by another name — one that enjoys cultural and institutional privilege while denying the same legitimacy to Christian conviction.
This distortion does real harm. It falsely associates Christianity with authoritarianism while demanding its exclusion from public reasoning. America was never a theocracy—but neither was it designed to treat its Christian inheritance as a threat. Recasting heritage as heresy does not defend constitutional order; it abandons historical honesty and weakens the moral foundations that made that order possible.
Dan Eichenberger, M.D., is an Indiana native with 30 years experience as a primary care physician, physician executive and healthcare consultant. He is the recipient of the Indiana University Southeast Chancellors Medallion.
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