The Fake & Fraudulent Prophets Around the President
September 4, 2026 |
Daniel Henderson
Is the United States a Christian Nation? Well, everyone seems to have an opinion on this, especially my Christian Supremacist friends who believe that somehow God chose the US out of all the nations in the world for a special blessing and mission. Because of that supposed American exceptionalism, they get to impose their cultural values on the country through political coercion, regardless of being in the minority.
However, the issue of whether the US is a “Christian Nation” depends…
Is the US a Christian Nation? Well, this may surprise you, but my answer is….it depends! That is the typical answer from someone who studies statistics and it usually infruiates their listeners. That answer means either they don’t know, or that the answer is complicated and nuanced depending on how you define it.
I’ll go with the second explanation. I believe the question is far too nuanced and complicated to answer with a simple “yes” or “no.” So let me start with the “depends” issue.
If you mean that the United States is a Christian nation in the Christian Supremacist version that would mean you believe that laws and government should be based on Biblical principles…whatever those might be.
The problem with this notion is that not all Christians agree on what those principles are, and it then comes down to numbers. Well, how many people in the nation are Christians? I’ll come back to the numbers. That is where the statistics come in.
Additionally, if you mean the Christian Supremacist dream of declaring in law that the United States is a Christian nation, then of course the answer is no.
The United States by virtue of the First Amendment “Establishment Clause” and the Constitution’s “no religious test clause” make it clear that the government of the United States cannot establish a religion, nor can it require any religious test for officeholders.
So, in this instance, the answer is “no” the US does not have a Christian government. If the founders wanted the government to be based on the Bible or some religious beliefs, guess what? They would have said so. But they didn’t. In fact, when the wrote the Constitution, they said clearly, “We the people of the United States….” And not, “We the Christians of the United States…”
However, another “depends” is the cultural-demographic element. If you want to claim that the United States is a “Christian nation” because the culture and the demographics support that claim, then that is a different answer. Unlike the political lens, cultures change…the Constitution doesn’t. (Well, that depends…sorry, I don’t mean to infuriate you)
During the founding period, the US was clearly a Christian nation, culturally. Around 98 to 99 percent of Americans identified as Christian, and more specifically, Protestant. It is interesting to note however, that even though most people identified as Christian, church attendance was below 15%, far lower than it is today. Within the category of Christian, however, there was a wide variety of denominations. Catholics at the time were a small population comparatively.
With a 99% Christian population it is not wrong to say that the US was a Christian nation culturally. Even within my lifetime, that number only dropped to around 85% in the decade I was born. Okay…it was the 1950s….if you must know. So, were we still a Christian nation? Decidedly so.
However, claiming to be a Christian nation culturally doesn’t define the status or privilege of those who claim that identity. What does it mean? Do Christians get to decide that stores are closed on Sunday? Do Christians get to decide what religious symbols can be displayed in public? Do Christians get to decide what is appropriate for television? Do Christians get to decide…whatever? Culture is a nebulous area where it isn’t clear because culture doesn’t dictate the rules, but it reflects the norms and values of those within the culture. Culture works through persuasion and influence, not through law.
And to make this more complicated and nuance, that culture isn’t uniform throughout the nation. Some parts of the country are extremely Christian while others are much more divergent and less Christian.
Culture is about influence, not law. It is non-governmental; therefore, it can be whatever reflects the way of life of those people who call themselves Americans. But as we have seen, culture isn’t uniform. It was diverse even in the founding period, and it is much more so today. And it is constantly changing.
That brings us to consider some statistics that help us see where we are today in terms of religious affiliation and culture. PEW Research Center gives us great insight into this. They recently published the 2024 Religious Landscape Study (RLS). This analysis includes findings from a survey of 36,908 U.S. adults. The survey was conducted from July 17, 2023-March 4, 2024, and the survey’s overall margin of error is plus or minus 0.8 percentage points making it quite reliable.
The title of the article publishing the findings is, “If the U.S. had 100 people: Charting Americans’ religious affiliations.” It is an interesting profile of the religious make-up of the United States and tells us much about current trends and changes.
The idea behind the study was to reduce the population of the United States to a hypothetical town of 100 people, making the statistical breakdown easy to understand. What is more intriguing is that the mythical town can also be broken down by age, race & ethnicity, and region. (The gender breakdown was of interest but varied less than the other filters so I don’t include those results).
Being the data geek that I am, I thought it would be useful to describe our typical US town in four ways: overall religious affiliation, affiliation by age, affiliation by race/ethnicity and affiliation by region. I think this analysis will show just how nuanced the question of a Christian nation really is.
Okay, if the United States were a town of 100 people, overall, here is what the religious affiliation would look like. First, 62 of the 100 people in our town would be Christian. This corresponds to other survey data that shows that the number of Americans identifying as Christian has been falling for the past 20 or 30 years.
Seven people in our town would be a religion other than Christian, such as Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim or something else.
Those who identify as “nothing” or none, would have 29 people in their category. This again sustains other data studies that show the “nones” to be between 28 to 30 percent of the American population.
To make this easier to see and read, I turned the data into a pie chart. Here is what our town of 100 people looks like in the US today.
You will notice the numbers do not add up to 100. That is due to rounding, and some people out of the 100 didn’t respond to the question. (You could add them to the “none” category, however, that would be premature.)
It is safe to say however, that 36 people in our town, just over one-third are something other than Christian. This represents a major break culturally from the historical pattern.
Taking the Christian category and breaking it down by religious denomination is useful to see how our town looks. Here is the breakdown of 62 Christians:
This becomes our baseline to compare our town to the three categories by age, race/ethnicity and region.
In our town of 100, there is a large difference between generations in regard to religious affiliation. In the study, they used four age categories. For this post, I grouped the age into two categories: 18-50 and over 50. I will also only focus on the Christian and None or unaffiliated. This simplifies our view, even though it might obscure a few nuances of age difference.
Here is a chart that compares the two age groups by Christian and unaffiliated:
In this comparison a few things are clear. Older Americans are more religiously affiliated than those under the age of 50. The starkest data point comes in the None category. For those under 50 there are twenty who are not affiliated while for those over 50 it is only eight people. Younger generations of Americans seem to be less interested in religion.
Also, of note for this comparison is that the “Protestant” category includes both evangelical and mainline Christian. Typically, there are more evangelicals than mainline Christians in that broader category. The category of “Protestant” also collapses the “Black Protestant” into the larger group.
If these numbers hold for the next generation, and there is no guarantee that they will, the United States will become less religious into the future. Those who identify as Christian will continue to drop and those who identify as “none” or “unaffiliated” will continue to grow.
This is likely the cause of a great deal of angst among those who identify as Christian, especially the Christian Supremacists. They sense and can see their cultural influence declining if only by sheer numbers. The demographic changes happening in the US over the next 25 years will certainly accelerate the trend and increase their anxiety.
Among the 100 people, 25 would be White and Protestant, and 19 would be White and religiously unaffiliated. Seven would be Black and Protestant, including some Black Protestants who identify with evangelical or mainline denominations. Another seven would be Hispanic Catholics.
What stands out again is the religiously unaffiliated. White people make up most of the unaffiliated with smaller numbers in the other ethnic categories. However, these numbers are likely to change in the next 25 years as the proportion of white people continues to decline in relation to other races and ethnic groups. It only adds to the anxiety felt by white Christian Supremacists.
If the U.S. had 100 people, there would be about as many Protestants living in the South (20) as in all other parts of the country combined. There would be nine Protestants in the Midwest, seven in the West and five in the Northeast.
The nation’s Catholics would be pretty evenly spread out across the Northeast (5), West (5), South (5) and Midwest (4).
Once again, the category of unaffiliated may be the most interesting.
Surprisingly, the largest number of unaffiliated are in the South with 10 while the Northeast and Midwest have five and six respectively. The South is even more unaffiliated than the West with eight, which culturally is even more liberal. It will be important and interesting to see how this trend develops over the next two decades.
Back to our original question then. Is the United States a Christian Nation? When it comes to culture and demographics, well it depends. Some age groups are more Christian than others, while some ethnic groups are more Christian than others, and some regions of the country are more Christian than others.
However, the changing demographics and its impact on culture are giving the Christian Supremacists nightmares and indigestion. They can see and sense the changing landscape of religion and as they feel their influence slipping away, they are trying to substitute government fiat to retain their cultural influence. It means they are trying to impose their view of “Christian values” from a minority position, bypassing democratic processes. It won’t work in the long run.
The question of a Christian nation is way more complicated than a binary answer can provide. What is clear however, is that over time and into the future two things will happen. The United States will become less white and less Christian. At some point, the question of whether the US is a Christian nation will become moot.
