The Worst Book I've Read on Christian Nationalism

"Who's Afraid of Christian Nationalism" by Mark David Hall

I recently had two posts scheduled about Christian Nationalism, but upon verifying some claims I made in those posts, I stumbled upon a YouTube video that purported to contradict some of my assumptions. In that video, Mark David Hall made the assertion that left-leaning critics of Christian Nationalism (CN) defined CN in a way that rendered every species of conservative Christian politics “Christian Nationalism.”

This was a big claim! And if true, would shake my understanding of religious politics in America. My first impression was skepticism. I googled his name and Christian Nationalist-adjacent words just to see what kind of conversation he had provoked. The answer was pretty much none. In fact, the only thing I did see was a blog post by Americans United For the Separation of Church And State which actually affirmed some of Hall’s criticisms: it basically lumped together all of these mainstream conservative perspectives as CN.

To be clear: I disagree with those perspectives, and find many of them bad policies at best, and scary at worst. But to lump all of them under a scary label like “Christian Nationalism” would not be good scholarship.

This was a red flag to me, so I paused my scheduled posts and decided to read Hall’s book as well as two others, to make sure I got things right before proceeding.

Turns out: Hall wrote the worst book on Christian Nationalism I have ever read and he was wrong. The new paused posts will come out soon. In the meantime, here’s a review of Hall’s book.

What Hall Gets Right

Hall is correct about a few things. For one, many critics of CN overestimate the number of Christian Nationalists, estimating them at half the population. The number is likely closer to 20 percent, per the work of Jesse Smith and Gary J. Adler. He is also correct in pointing out that there are quite a few methodological flaws in the empirical scholarship studying Christian Nationalism, and that many of the popular books on Christian Nationalism are lazy and wrong on basic facts.

What’s more, it’s probably true that most of the leading intellectual proponents of Christian Nationalism are not that influential in mainstream Christianity or among the Christian Right.

Having said that, that’s pretty much all Hall gets right. His book is almost 200 pages and it says something that I can only summarize two paragraphs worth of concessions. This book was a difficult read, not because it laid down hard truths but because it was just wrong on too many things.

Factually Incorrect

Hall is factually incorrect on a few things including the “minimal presence” of Christian symbolism at the January 6th insurrection. On page 8, he basically says that there were only two Christian nationalist images at the capitol: a “Goth” with skeletal hands holding a Bible (even though I don’t think he actually knows what a Goth is) and a Revolutionary War-era flag.

This is absolutely silly and borderline Orwellian. Even if we dismiss the images he dismisses, I can google “Christian Nationalism on January 6th” and on the first page I see:

• A cross at the Capitol (not a mile away, per his claims)

• A Jesus/Trump flag skirmishing with Capitol Police

• A man holding a crucifix in the crowd on the steps of the Capitol

• A Jesus saves sign on the steps of the Capitol¹

• A Jesus flag in the foreground of someone shattering the windows of the capitol

• At least one cross

• A Holy Bible, raised fire-and-brimstone style in the Rotunda

• Someone holding up a photo of Jesus in a MAGA hat

• And much more

Again, this is just the first page of a google search of people’s signage at the insurrection, and not including other imagery he dismissed. This is also not a full report on the actual beliefs of the people attending, which Hall also waves away.

Prima Facie Propaganda

In this way, the biggest intellectual transgression Hall makes is that he insults his readers’ intelligence. This is because - and I reiterate that I hate being polemical - he is a propagandist, willfully omitting facts and obfuscating clear realities.

For instance: Though he rightfully points out that only about 20 percent of the population is Christian Nationalist, he assures us that it’s no big deal, because only half of them are active, pious Christians. This is silly for obvious reasons. If 20 percent of the country were socialists, and they voted to a degree where they had a stranglehold on the Democratic Party, would conservatives such as Hall be reassured that only half of them had read Marx? Of course not.

On another front, he dismisses the language of Christian conservatives advocating for dominion in media and culture as Christians wanting something equivalent to hegemony, in essence beating out the competition to market dominance. Again, this is silly: the word they use is dominion, which has the connotation of control, governance, and force, not hegemony or popularity, which has connotations of influence and voluntary subservience.

Why Do Secularists Hate Religious Nationalism?

Hall is critical of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) throughout the book, at one point saying “if they are principled, they would have to object to ministers who led the civil rights movement—a major goal of which was to encourage the federal government to pass laws to better protect the rights of all Americans.”

This is again, very silly. Secularist organizations like FFRF support allies like any advocacy group, even if they don’t endorse their allies’ reasoning. Civil Rights was a secular cause as much as it was a religious one because the rights they were advocating for were social and economic. That is, they were secular. African Americans wanted to be included in institutions and economic arrangements that racism (and conservative Christianity at the time) denied them access.

Hall speculates that “some critics of Christian Nationalism hope to discourage Christians from engaging in political advocacy for ends that they disfavor.” He’s not wrong, but on a basic level, this is the crux of secular-Christian disagreement in America in 2025: Christians don’t believe they are discriminating against people, when they objectively are.

Christian Conservatives like Hall think denying same sex couples goods and services is a moral and civil right akin to integration, when secularists think the opposite is true. The spirit of the secularist argument is the same as it was during the civil rights period: when you deny people business and access to institutions, you don’t just hurt their feelings, you hurt them materially.

Contra the religious conservatives, secular people, LGBTQ people, and feminists aren’t trying to extract moral concessions or to dominate religious conservatives. They know that religious conservatives pretty much hate them, even though that’s not what Jesus taught. What they’re seeking more freedom from religious conservatives.

They don’t want institutions evangelizing them, their tax dollars to go to religious institutions or to promote religious doctrine, or to be inconvenienced at work, in the market, or in interacting with government institutions over religious doctrine. The average gay couple doesn’t care about what Kim Davis thinks about them, they just want someone their marriage certified.

The fact is, Christian conservatives think that it’s a worse violation of their rights that they can’t continue these infringements on the rights of others.

The Absence of Donald Trump and the Erasure of Actual Christian Nationalism

Donald Trump is noticeably absent from this book. What’s also notably absent is social media and TikTok. How can any book about Christian Nationalism barely mention Donald Trump or the “red pill” manosphere that’s radicalizing people?

You can think the latter is catastrophizing, but when Hall says vanilla things about unpopular Christian Nationalist thinkers like: “Their patriarchal views are worrisome, and they must be rejected by anyone committed to the idea that men and women have equal rights in the civic and public square,” I have to ask, have you actually seen how unhinged some Christians are on social media? And how popular they are, given how unhinged they are?

Have you heard of complementarianism, and how mainstream it is? I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say Hall is out of touch with the evangelical culture he’s defending. Indeed, he seems more mad at figures like Andrew Seidel who point out that Christian Nationalism is a threat to democracy, than Donald Trump who tried to actually overthrow Democracy on January 6th.

He commits the classic No True Scotsman Fallacy by arguing that many Christian Nationalists aren’t actually Christian, again, as if that mitigates the threat they pose toward democracy or if they don’t in turn influence the rest of American Christianity.

Pedantic Academic Hair-Splitting

This tension between what people see on the news, in the pulpit, and on social media versus what academics said 40 years ago is a big tension in this book because Hall wants you to discard the former three while totally embracing the latter as the definition of Christian Nationalism. Hall is a comprehensive scholar of Christian politics of the last 30-50 years or so, so he’s at home talking about these debates, but it leads him to draw some weird conclusions that are falsified by a cursory survey of contemporary evangelical political discourse.

For instance, he makes the case that most Christian nationalists are postmillennialists, believing that the Kingdom of God is here, not premillennialists, who typically believe the rapture will come in the future, as most evangelicals believe. The problem with this is that most people that we would colloquially call Christian Nationalists supported Donald Trump would say they did so for something along the lines of “the world is going crazy and Christians need to elect someone tough to set it right.”

Admittedly, this isn’t explicitly a premillennialist sentiment, but many Christian Nationalists support Donald Trump and the coming tribulations. Do we really think militantly pro-Israel evangelicals aren’t also Christian Nationalists? As someone who has talked to at least one small town Baptist in my life, my only response is come on.

When people are concerned about Christian Nationalism, the people they are concerned about are not premillennialist Calvinists, which probably means that they’re not concerned about what Hall is talking about. And yet he commits an entire chapter to these obscure figures, but not Donald Trump or the weird relationship Trump has with Prosperity Gospel televangelists.

And this is a common argumentative tactic that Hall uses throughout his book: Discredit criticisms of a figure such as David Barton because the connection between him and other Christian Nationalist thinkers is nebulous as best, but ignore why people are concerned with David Barton in the first place.

Maybe it’s true that the more zealous critics of Christian Nationalism make bad arguments when they tie Barton to specific Calvinist Christian Nationalists, but that doesn’t bely fears of the ideology and bad propaganda and pseudo-history Barton himself perpetuates. This book is fixated on telling us that figures like Barton aren’t tied to the original CN figures, but not on telling us why he’s not a problem.

All of this seems weird from a purportedly objective evaluation of the threat of Christian Nationalism, but it makes perfect sense when you understand that Hall voted for Trump, thought he was a good president, and bragged about it with his whole chest in 2023. He doesn’t want you to be concerned or ask questions. He wants you to fall in line and let what’s happening continue to happen.

Doug Wilson is totally not popular or racist even though there’s evidence for both

Hall also goes on to say weird things about Douglas Wilson, a prominent Christian Nationalist. Indeed, Hall tries to deny that Wilson is prominent at all using contorted logic.²

Wilson helped found the Association of Classical Christian Schools. Hall assures us that this organization isn’t influential, but notes that he himself sat on the board of one of their schools and attended conferences to hear Wilson speak. I don’t know of anybody who’s denied the influence of an organization in one breath, while in another claiming how they’re influenced by it. That doesn’t mean Wilson is definitely influential because he’s influenced Hall, but it’s like me saying “The YIMBY movement isn’t influential, though I did volunteer for them for a few months.”

Wilson is influential in other ways, and Hall tries to raise the bar of what influential means to avoid this reality. Halls describes Wilson “intelligent and well-read, but he is a polemicist, not a careful, systematic scholar. His desire to provoke attracts attention, but it also gets him into trouble.” He also brushes aside Wilson’s books as influential, saying:

“These works have done well for books like these, but one wonders if they were mostly purchased by critics and by fans of Doug Wilson. In other words, there is little reason to believe they will have much impact beyond a handful of idiosyncratic Calvinists.”

What a weird argument! Apparently Wilson has to be a careful, systematic scholar to be an influential Christian (any student of history will tell you that’s the only kind of Christian thinker that has ever gotten popular!). And even if Wilson’s books sold a massive amount of copies, it really doesn’t matter, because the only people who may have bought them were his critics and fans.

In other words, if you don’t count the books he sold to people who agreed with him or to the people who disagreed with him, he didn’t sell that many books! I’ve never laughed at a non-fiction book trying to make a serious point until I read this.

What’s even weirder is Hall seemingly defend Wilson’s racism. Wilson wrote an entire book that was fond of slavery in the American South. Hall agrees that Wilson and his co-author minimize the evils and horrors of American slavery, but assures us that Wilson isn’t racist because he denounced hatred and bigotry. Per Hall, Wilson “has written imprudently on slavery, but there is no good reason to call him racist.”

I think there’s good reason to conclude Wilson is probably racist for the same reason there’s good reason to conclude that David Irving is antisemitic. Both pushed pseudohistorical “theories” to advance a political agenda that only made sense if one denies the mountains of evidence that affirmed historical consensus. One does not get in the mindset to deny such clear reality without having an axe to grind with the harmed group within the event.

I don’t see how you come to the conclusion that slavery was good for black people - and stick to it so strongly that you write a book - without having some sort of negative prejudice against black people. I don’t know for certain that Douglas is racist (I don’t want to be sued), but it’s not an unfair conclusion, given the evidence he has provided to the public.

I don’t think you need to be an iconoclastic social justice warrior to come to this conclusion. Hall’s defense of Wilson here is just odd.

Church-State Separation Cognitive Dissonance

Lastly, Hall has a strong cognitive dissonance when it comes to Church-State separation. He points out how every constitution in the United States has language that implies a creator and that everyone still enjoys religious liberty as a matter of law. He assures us that Christian Nationalist policies like school prayer were ubiquitous and benign in the 1950s, and so we shouldn’t worry if they return. Indeed, he believes if the Christian Nationalist agenda passes (like declaring the country a Christian nation) no one would be harmed in a material way, or that anyone would be denied their civil rights.

Now, these positions are not crazy on their face, but what makes Hall’s argument frustrating is that he spends a few pages describing the sectarian conflicts that happened in the 19th century over school prayer policies. At that time, Catholics immigrated to the United States in droves, and there was conflict over which version of the Lord’s Prayer should be said or which Bible should be read from in schools. It led to what can only be called pogroms: burned-down homes, convents, and churches, multiple deaths, and tarred and feathered priests.

The fact that he holds the idea in his head that sectarian violence over mundane institutionalized religious practices did happen in our nation’s history and that bringing back those practices wouldn’t harm anyone today is amazing. I expect this level of cognitive dissonance from a failing undergraduate, not a PhD professor.

He’s wrong on all counts. The first and 14th amendments are the reason why states’ constitutions citing a creator are inconsequential to their governance. In a bizarro world where the federal constitution didn’t apply to states, you’d almost certainly see many amend their constitution to take out religious language, not out of anti-Christian prejudice, but because that language could obviously be used to justify privileging one religion group over another. Unhinged lunatics would be able to sue to do it, and they would have a case.

This is the dynamic he underplays and is completely silent on: when Christian Nationalists propose these symbolic policies, they’re not doing them as an end in themselves, but as a means of grabbing more power for Christians over the long term. Because we have “One nation under God” in our pledge of allegiance and “In God We Trust” on our money, it makes it easier for unhinged Christian Nationalists to argue for other policies. If the CNs inculcate enough cultural ethos around the idea that America is a Christian Nation, they become more and more justified in advancing policies that aren’t grounded in the Constitution, but the Bible.

The reason why we have Church-State separation in many states is due to a history of anti-Catholicism, but also a prudential realization that state-sponsored religion stokes sectarian violence, as it did in the northeast in the 19th century. The reason why no one was materially harmed by Christian Nationalist policies in the 1950s is because over 90% of the population was Christian, and the states that had the most diverse religious populations watered down those policies. But today there are more non-Christians than ever as a proportion of the population. And Christianity, especially the public Christianity that is pushed by Nationalists, is inherently politicized to the point where many Christians object to these prayers.

Back in the 1940s, there was violence against Jehovah’s witnesses who wouldn’t say the pledge of allegiance. Do we really think there would be the same deference to the openly atheist, Muslim, Jewish, or progressive Christian kid who stands for the principles of his faith or philosophy? Do we think the Muslin population of Dearborn, Michigan would accept mandatory Christian prayer, without civil strife? Of course not.

Closing Thoughts

Mark David Hall is factually incorrect on many of the things he talks about in this book; when he’s not incorrect, he completely misses the point.

He misrepresents criticisms of Christian Nationalism because he doesn’t actually understand them. He doesn’t understand why opponents of Christian Nationalism love Martin Luther King Jr. but are cold on Jerry Falwell. He doesn’t pay attention to mainstream Christian Culture, or prominent niches within that culture, from the influence of prosperity gospel preachers on Christian Nationalism to pervasive complementarian culture.

For some reason, he thinks these are inconsequential to Christian Nationalism in the 2020s, while thinkers who died decades ago are more important. He obfuscates the influence of best-selling authors like Doug Wilson and downplays some of their vilest views.

I understand why hardline secularist organizations like FFRF advocate as they do (even if I sometimes disagree with their tactics), and why many of these polemical authors against Christian Nationalism write as they do (even if I think they sometimes catastrophize): Avoiding needless sectarian conflict by reducing the role of religion and religious nationalism in public institutions is a noble goal, and undermining that goal is bad.

So when I see someone like Hall argue against them, I’m genuinely puzzled. All of this in the service of what exactly? Tax cuts? Supreme Court Justices? Republican Congresses?

Even if Christian Nationalism doesn’t hurt people materially as Hall asserts, how does it help anyone other than Christian Conservative sensibilities? Why do we need to spend limited time and public resources debating whether we should put the 10 commandments in school or not?

In this way, one of the harms of Christian Nationalism is that it’s a tremendous waste of time. It advances no good and much bad, and only doesn’t come to pass because the people Hall disparages oppose it.

In this regard, I realize now why no one acknowledged Hall’s ideas or his constant “reply guy” behavior toward these critics on social media. It’s not because they wanted to suppress his inconvenient truth, but because he fundamentally misses the point on all important matters. To engage with him point by point would be to platform a propagandist. So that will be my last word on him.

1. As an aside, I live in the DMV and travel around the Capitol quite often. There’s no way this photo doesn’t reveal the sign-holder has breached the enclosure.

2. Between writing this essay and publishing, it came to my attention that uhhhh actually Trump’s Secretary of Defense is a Member of Doug Wilson’s Church denomination. MDH wrote this book in 2022 or so and man, everything he says just ages like milk. Keep that in mind when reading this section