Is America a Christian Nation? A Pastor's Answer

7‑minute read · July 5, 2026

On July 4, 2026, the United States turned 250 years old. A milestone like that reopens an old argument that never really goes away: is America a Christian nation? One side treats the phrase as a birthright; the other treats it as a threat. This past Sunday - the weekend of the nation's Semiquincentennial - Pastor Kent Keller stood in the pulpit at Christchurch Miami and gave an answer more careful, and more freeing, than either side tends to offer. His text was the book of Acts, where a riot breaks out in a Greek city over a strange and dangerous rumor: that the Christians were loyal to a different throne.

"And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, 'These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also… and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.'"

- Acts 17:6-7

Love your country - without worshiping it

Kent began where a faithful answer has to begin: with an honest disclaimer about his own loyalties. "I love my God. I love my country," he said. "I worship my God. I do not worship my country." The distinction is the whole ballgame. God, he reminded us in the language of the Westminster Catechism, is "infinite, eternal, and unchangeable" - perfect in being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. A nation is none of those things. "Great people make great mistakes," he said. "Great countries make great mistakes. We have in the past. So has every nation."

That is where the conversation about Christian nationalism usually goes off the rails. Plain nationalism, Kent noted, is really just patriotism - the ordinary love of one's country. You can see it in any World Cup crowd waving flags and singing anthems; it is a good and human thing. Christian nationalism is something else. It is the impulse "to conflate his Christianity with his patriotism and wrap the cross up in the flag" - to assume that being a good Christian and being a good American are the same thing. Scripture will not let us collapse the two.

Does that mean a Christian shouldn't love their country? Not at all. God is the one who places us in our nations (Acts 17:26). Even in exile, God told His people through Jeremiah to "seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you… for in its welfare you will find your welfare" (Jeremiah 29:7) - and that city was pagan Babylon. Pray for your country. Be a good citizen. Just don't set your allegiance to it on the same level as your allegiance to Christ.

The case that America was founded Christian

Kent has spent the better part of two decades studying early American history, and he was candid: there is a mountain of evidence that the people who settled and framed this country intended it to be built on the Bible. He offered only a sampling. The Mayflower Compact (1620) opens "In the name of God, amen," and describes the voyage as undertaken "for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith." Governor John Winthrop, aboard the Arbella in 1630, cast the new colony as "a city upon a hill" - borrowing Jesus' own words from the Sermon on the Mount - and closed his address by quoting Moses in Deuteronomy 30: "I have set before you life and death… therefore choose life."

The settlers saw themselves, Kent explained, as a kind of new Israel - leaving the old world behind, crossing the sea, and planting the kingdom of God in the wilderness. Even Benjamin Franklin, hardly the most orthodox of the founders, proposed that the national seal depict Moses parting the Red Sea. Nearly every Ivy League school was founded to train ministers of the gospel. Patrick Henry wrote that "this great nation was founded… on the gospel of Jesus Christ." Supreme Court opinions well into the twentieth century described America as "a Christian people." And the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville, after nine months criss-crossing the young republic, concluded that Americans "combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other."

"Case closed," Kent said with a smile. "Drop the mic. We are a Christian nation, right?" And then, borrowing from the college-football broadcaster Lee Corso: "Not so fast."

Why the founders still said "no king but Jesus"

Here is where Kent's answer earns its nuance. If "Christian nation" means a nation settled and shaped by Christians living on biblical principles, then yes - that is simply history, and "anybody who argues that is either ignorant or lying." At the founding, the country was overwhelmingly Protestant and deeply shaped by Scripture. But if "Christian nation" means a nation that established Christianity by law, an official state church written into its charter, then the answer is a firm no. The founders did that on purpose.

They had come from an old world full of state churches, and they had seen what happens when altar and throne are fused together. "When you align the church and the government too closely," Kent warned, "either the government runs the church" until it becomes "feckless and basically a joke," or the church seizes the power of the state - "and as Lord Acton says, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." So they refused to make America Christian by charter. Would Kent, a conservative, Bible-believing Presbyterian pastor, want it any other way? "Absolutely not," he said. "You can force people to submit, but you can't force them to believe. The power of the gospel is the power of moral and spiritual persuasion, not coercion."

That is the deep point beneath the whole debate. The North Star the founders steered by was not Christianity as law but Christ as Lord - "we owe our highest allegiance to God. We have no king but Jesus." It is the very thing the Thessalonian believers were dragged into court for saying, and the confession the church has made for two thousand years. Kent gave it to us through the author Os Guinness: "Keep God above America and you'll keep America. Lose America under God, and you lose God and America."

Which is why, on the morning of the nation's 250th birthday, the service did not end at the flag but at the Lord's Table. There Kent read the words Paul wrote to the Galatians: "For freedom Christ has set us free" (Galatians 5:1). The freedoms won by the founders are worth gratitude. But the freedom worth building a life on is deeper - freedom from sin, from shame, from the grip of death itself. "If the Son sets you free," Jesus promised, "you are free indeed" (John 8:36). That is a citizenship no election can grant and no empire can revoke.

If this question - who is really King? - is stirring something in you this July, we'd love to help you take a next step. You can watch the full message and dig into this week's devotionals and study guide, find a Community Group to keep the conversation going, or simply plan a visit and join us this Sunday at 11 AM in Kendall. You can also read Pastor James Drake's companion Field Devotion, True Freedom: The Cross and the Declaration. There is another King - and His welcome is open to you.

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