Trump Enshrines Evangelical Nationalism

Last updated on: August 12, 2025 at 8:48 am by Andrew Chesnut

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Trump Enshrines Evangelical Nationalism 2025-08-12T08:48:18-04:00 Andrew Chesnut

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From the outset of his return to office, President Donald Trump has moved with calculated precision to institute Evangelical priorities into federal policy. | Trump supporters Deana Hurd (left) and Sharon Hurd traveled to Washington from Tennessee to attend the inauguration, Jan. 20, 2017. (Photo: Yahya Ahmed – VOA Kurdish service) Image courtesy ofVoice of America, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Public Displays of Evangelical Nationalism

From the outset of his return to office, President Donald Trump has moved with calculated precision to institute Evangelical priorities into federal policy. The creation of the White House Faith Office, in February of this year, and the Religious Liberty Commission in May are far from neutral expansions of religious voice in government—they are institutional platforms to reward Trump’s Evangelical base. Both are spun as defending religious freedom for all, but their agendas are tailored to causes championed by conservative Evangelicals: school choice, parental rights framed in opposition to LGBTQ+ inclusion, and public displays of Evangelical Nationalism.

The Faith Office’s role inside the Domestic Policy Council is to coordinate “Centers for Faith” across agencies, a bureaucratic network that channels federal funding opportunities toward faith-based providers. While technically open to all religions, the infrastructure and political will behind it favor large Evangelical and conservative Christian networks that can scale quickly and align ideologically with Trump’s agenda. Smaller or politically disfavored traditions, such as progressive Christians, Muslims, and Jewish social justice groups, lack the same access and influence. This disparity is not accidental but rather reflects Trump’s calculation that political dividends come from bolstering the base rather than broadening the table.

Sidelined or Suspect

The July Office of Personnel Management memo on religious expression in federal workplaces is another example. While spun as a protection for all, its impact is imbalanced. In practice, it creates more space for Evangelical employees, in particular, to openly share their faith, even to proselytize, within public institutions. For religious minorities and Religious Nones, this feels more like coercion than freedom of faith, aggressively shifting the cultural norms of the once secular federal workplace toward a privileged faith identity. Over time, this could normalize a workplace culture where those who don’t conform to Evangelicalism feel sidelined or suspect.

Healthcare policy under Trump’s HHS further illustrates the point. By aggressively enforcing conscience protections, especially around gender-affirming care and reproductive health, the administration is effectively codifying Evangelical prejudices into healthcare delivery. As a result patients, especially LGBTQ+ individuals, may face reduced access to legal, medically recommended services when providers claim moral exemptions. In the name of religious liberty, the state is empowering institutions to deny services on the basis of warped Evangelical theology, with real-life consequences for vulnerable groups.

American National Heritage

Education policy dovetails with state-level Christian nationalist agendas. The Department of Education’s “neutral” guidance on prayer and religious expression now operates in an environment where states are attempting to mandate Ten Commandments displays and implement prayer times. Federal rhetoric reinforces these efforts, which courts are already finding constitutionally suspect. This synergy between federal cover and state-level activism is no accident—it’s part of a coordinated Evangelical project that frames Christian dominion as a restoration of American national heritage.

While couched in the language of free speech, the so-called “de-banking” executive order also appeals to the Evangelical conspiracy theory that Christian organizations are being financially persecuted. It mobilizes this imagined grievance to deliver policy wins to conservative causes under the banner of fairness, feeding into a persecution complex that rallies the base and keeps them politically engaged.

Separation of Church and State

This is by no means a faith-neutral project. It’s a deliberate alignment of policy levers—funding, workplace culture, regulatory enforcement, and symbolic politics—to consolidate and reward Trump’s Evangelical base. Trump is institutionalizing Evangelical influence in ways that will endure beyond his term, embedding it into the bureaucracy of government where it can shape policy for many years to come. These moves also set a perilous precedent as future administrations could adopt the same framework to privilege their own favored constituencies, further eroding the separation of church and state.

The danger is twofold: first, it undermines American religious pluralism by privileging one tradition’s theo-political agenda; second, it undermines the Establishment Clause’s guardrails, blurring the line between church and state in ways the Founders explicitly sought to prevent. In a religiously diverse and increasingly secular United States, liberty for all can’t mean freedom for some at the expense of the rights of others. Far from leveling the religious playing field, Trump’s faith-based policy push is tilting it steeply in favor of those already closest to power, cementing Evangelical influence in ways that could take decades to undo.

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About Andrew Chesnut

Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut earned his Ph.D degree in Latin American History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and joined the History Department faculty at the University of Houston in 1997. He quickly became an internationally recognized expert on Latin American religious history Professor Chesnut was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at VCU in 2008. The chair was established as the Most Rev. Walter F. Sullivan was nearing retirement as the 11th bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond to honor his nearly thirty years of service. For Professor Chesnut the chair became a unique opportunity to develop Catholic studies in a global context and at a large public university. Professor Chesnut’s early work, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (Rutgers University Press, 1997), traces the meteroric rise of Pentecostalism among the popular classes in Brazil following the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church. His second book, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford University Press, 2003) focuses on the three groups that have prospered most in the region’s pluralist landscape, Protestant Pentecostalism, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and African disasporic religions (e.g., Brazilian Candomble and Haitian Vodou). Professor Chesnut's most recent book is Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press, 2025). It is the first in-depth study of the Mexican folk saint in English and has received widespread media coverage. You can read more about the author here.

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