JUST ten per cent of Americans view “Christian nationalism” favourably, a new survey from the Pew Research Center suggests. A minority — 17 per cent — want the government to declare Christianity the official religion of the United States.
Pew’s report, How Americans Feel About Religion’s Influence in Government and Public Life, published last week, draws on a survey carried out in April with a panel of 3592 randomly selected adults.
It was published shortly before the Rededicate 250 gathering on Sunday — billed as a “rededication of our country as one nation under God” — which took place in the National Mall in Washington, DC. It was organised by a White House task force established to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence and was addressed by several members of the Cabinet.
The Pew survey found that the share of its panel who expressed a desire for the government to stop enforcing the separation between Church and State had declined from 19 per cent in 2021 to 13 per cent in 2026. Two-thirds expressed the belief that churches and other places of worship should “keep out of political matters”.
Asked whether they had heard or read about Christian nationalism, 59 per cent responded “a little” — up from 45 per cent two years ago. Almost one third (31 per cent) said that they held an unfavourable view of it, while ten per cent regarded it positively. The majority (59 per cent) said that they had either never heard of Christian nationalism (40 per cent), did not know enough to express an opinion (11 per cent), or had neither a favourable nor an unfavourable view (eight per cent).
Most continued to reject the idea that Christianity should be the nation’s official religion. The most popular response was that the government should “promote Christian moral values without making Christianity the official religion” (43 per cent), or that the government should “neither establish an official religion nor promote Christian values” (38 per cent).
Last year, the British think tank Theos announced a two-year research project exploring the global rise of Christian nationalism. This month, it published the preliminary results of an online poll commissioned from Potentia. This found that, of 1765 British adults polled, 37 agreed that “the government should formally state that Britain is a Christian country.”
The sociologist Dr Andrew Whitehead, the author of Taking America Back for God (OUP, 2020), told Theos’s podcast Reading Our Times this month that, in the US, the number of people who strongly embraced Christian nationalism had declined.
“What has increased is: Christian nationalism and its rhetoric, the narratives, have increased in the social discourse,” Dr Whitehead said. “We have really powerful people in the White House or key seats in Congress who embrace Christian nationalism.”
For the declining minority of Americans who embraced it, Christian nationalism had become increasingly important, he suggested. They regarded themselves as “a remnant”.
Dr Whitehead defined Christian nationalism as “an ideology that idealises and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular sense of Christian identity and culture”. In the US, it came with “cultural baggage”, including “a desire for traditional social hierarchy”. It was to be found primarily on the political Right and among Evangelicals, and was associated with frequent churchgoing.
Last year, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Dr Sean Rowe, suggested that “extremist Christian nationalism . . . appears to have played a significant role” in motivating the assassination of the Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, Mark (News, 20 June 2025).
“This kind of distortion of the gospel message is all around us in public life — in dehumanising attacks on transgender people, in fomenting fear of migrants, and in increasing anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry,” he said. “It is urgent that we strengthen our capacity to offer a different vision of God’s Kingdom.”