Is the Christian Nationalist Movement in the USA rooted in the Old Testament?

10 August 2025 4 510 Report

Key concepts of the Old Testament that coincide with Christian Nationalism:

The economy was designed to support continuous warfare. This was done to unify the population through battle which was used to acquire wealth (land, agricultural products, livestock, bullion, men, women, children, and slaves) all added to the centralized treasury. After 1945, the US intervened in over 200 countries to maintain global dominance and wealth (see Footnote 1).

Murder of a fellow clansman was a sin according to the commandments, but murder during war was a social virtue. King David (of David and Goliath) was praised for having killed thousands of Philistines and for having torched their cities (e.g., the United States burned Vietnamese cities with napalm and exterminated up to six million people between 1960 and 1975).

To maintain group cohesion, one God who could never be questioned reigned supreme for he was omnipotent (e.g., many US Congressmen declare their allegiance to God).

A priestly class supported God, and this top echelon was not part of the regular economy, and they were guaranteed an inheritance into perpetuity (e.g., bureaucratic and political elites in the US are supported by government funds and they have some of the best public healthcare which is denied to the public).

Making sacrifices to God was managed by the priestly class (e.g., attending church and making contributions is a weekly affair for devout Christian Nationalists, particularly those of the lower classes).

Patriarchy was enforced and women and homosexuals were expected to occupy an inferior place in society, and in the case of women procreation was enforced. And if a woman was not fertile, she was replaced (e.g., Elon Musk a renowned Christian Nationalist is very concerned about the birth rate of ‘indigenous’ American women, especially those of the white race).

Population growth and ancestry was an obsession: all ‘philistines’ were expelled from the population (e.g., Trump’s mass deportations of undocumented immigrants).

If sexual relations with non-relatives was impossible, then incest was permitted. It is known that some elites historically have engaged in incest so that their inheritance would not be partitioned, a way of maintaining maximal disparity between the rich and the poor (e.g., Donald Trump is being investigated by the media for having made incestuous remarks about his daughter, Ivanka)

Christian Nationalism, therefore, is not a new idea but an old idea introduced into the present. Here is a short list of modern-day Christian Nationalists: Stephen Bannon, James David Vance, Peter Theil, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump, but officials like Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi and so on are just expendable sycophants participating in the moment.

Footnote 1: Donald Trump managed to win the election by promising that he would not be invading countries to secure America’s hegemony, but so far there is no evidence of this given his failed efforts to stop the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Also, he is terrorizing the world with his tariffs in a futile attempt to have manufacturing return to the United States to recover the working class, and he is actively intervening in the government affairs of foreign countries such as trying to get his buddy Jair Bolsonaro pardoned for having provoked a coup in Brazil and having the International Criminal Court suspend the war-crimes charge against his other buddy Benjamin Netanyahu.

William Mayor

Christian Nationalism is rooted in the Old Testament as it is rooted in human nature. Human nature will find any available excuse to support what it wants, and a religious source provides a godlike cover. That it is abusing the source it uses for cover is immaterial.

Now you have cited the parts of the Old Testament that are used by Christian Nationalists, but in so doing you ignore the majority of the Old Testament that does not provide this cover. This approach likewise ignores the best available scholarship on the Old Testament, its writing and its purpose, but again, such are of no use when one wants to support Christian Nationalism. It is far easier to turn off one's brain and simply blindly follow what a leader proclaims to be true,

Paul Kuei-chi Tseng

Dear Edward, In the Old Testament, state and Judaism is keenly unified. The Jews' concept of apartheid and discrimination can be seen as a kind of nationalism. Even in today's war in the Middle East, Israel still holds the notion of nationalism to engage in the genocide.

Dear Edward, Concerning the rise and fall of the Israeli kingdoms, you are advised to read of the book of Samuel in the Old Testament.

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