Christianity and Politics in the United States: An OUT OF BALANCE Combination
What the data tells us PLUS my take on it all
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HEADS UP: This particular piece begins rather data heavy and concludes with my commentary.
The first clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof…
Yet in 2022, the Pew Research Center found that 60% of Americans believe the founders originally intended for the United States to be a Christian nation. Interesting…
That same survey found that 33% of Americans consider the United States to currently be a Christian nation and 45% believe the United States should be a Christian nation. Again, interesting…
Here’s the data breakdown of the those three ideas:
So what does a Christian nation look like? Again, the Pew Research Center in this same survey provides some answers to that question. The table below breaks that down in more detail. While there is no clear cut idea of what that looks like, the largest concentration of responses indicate that United States as a Christian nation means that the country is guided by Christian beliefs and values.
So that’s the idea of being a Christian nation. But is that the same as being a Christian Nationalist? The same Pew Research Center survey shows a distinction between the two. Though many of the respondents had never even heard of Christian nationalism, the ones that had some familiarity with the idea had an unfavorable view of it.
The most common description respondents gave of Christian nationalism involve Christianity playing a dominant and institutionalized role in society. Uh-oh you know how I feel about the need to be dominant. The table below breaks down the descriptions further.
So these descriptions are people’s thoughts on Christian nationalism and being a Christian nation. But what does an actual Christian nation look like? What countries are official Christian nation-states? Wikipedia tells us that a Christian state is a country that recognizes a form of Christianity as its official religion and often has a state church that supports the government and is supported by the government. Wikipedia goes on to list 20 countries identified as Christian nation-states.
What other countries are religious states? Of the 199 countries that the Pew Research Center analyzed, more than 80 countries favor a specific religion by an official endorsement or by preferential treatment over other faiths, with Islam as the most common government endorsed religion. The map below breaks down those 199 countries’ relationships with religion.
Now up to this point we’ve looked at what it means to be a Christian nation, how people feel about Christian nationalism and the makeup of religious states around the world. But a resounding question for me is how many people in the United States even consider themselves a Christian? According to the Public Religion Research Institute, nearly two-thirds (66.2%) identify themselves as Christian in some respect (essentially every category above the line in the pie chart below).
Alright, alright…the data dump is just about over. Interestingly enough, the data tells quite the story on its own. So much so that I don’t have to solely rely on emotion or my intuition to produce a compelling commentary.
I opened this piece with the first clause of the First Amendment because it renders the notion that the founders’ intent for the United States of America to be a Christian nation as completely unfounded. POINT BLANK. PERIOD. Yet in the data shared earlier, the majority of Americans believe it was the original intent. How could that be?
I’m careful in answering this question because, as plainly stated as the First Amendment is, many of us were taught otherwise in Christian churches, myself included. We were literally indoctrinated to believe all sorts of things. While some tenets have a scriptural basis, I’ve concluded that there has been an imbalance of certain precepts. There is an inordinate focus on Jesus as the answer for the world today, that we have fallen into an adversarial position to other faiths. Who’s heard this common riff?
It’s not Buddha; not Mohammed; not Krishna; not Allah; it’s JESUS!!
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