Among evangelical and Presbyterian-leaning Protestants, the first iteration of Christian nationalism came with Francis Schaeffer’s transformation from the philosophical guru at a small Christian study center in Switzerland into the public intellectual behind the New Christian Right. His documentary series and book, “How Shall We Then Live?”, alerted evangelicals to the dangers of secularization and moral relativism that drove many social ills, chief among them abortion. Embedded in Schaeffer’s outlook was the idea that America had a Christian founding that depended on ideas and institutions from the Protestant Reformation. Schaeffer inspired Jerry Falwell’s political activism in the short-lived Moral Majority (1979-1987). Schaeffer also inspired a group of young evangelical historians, George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Nathan Hatch to write a book, The Search for Christian America, that pushed back at least on Schaeffer’s historical claims about America’s Christian character. Ironically, those historians, while dubious about the United States’ Christian origins, left room for those who desired a Christian nation. In the book’s conclusion, the authors wrote that “Christians still must labor without ceasing for truth and morality in the midst of our own age.” That message may not have necessarily included approval of the Moral Majority’s politics, but it still added legitimacy to Christians who wanted American society to reflect Christian ideals.
At roughly the same time that Schaeffer was tapping Christian nationalist sentiments, Chuck Colson and Richard John Neuhaus were teaming up to rally Protestants and Roman Catholics in an informal alliance against secularism. Neuhaus’s book, The Naked Public Square (1984) was a thoughtful version of Schaeffer’s critique that resonated with Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict (1987), a book that popularized worldview thinking, or the idea that a person’s basic beliefs influence his or her perspective on all aspects of life. That particular understanding of belief as a controlling principle in human experience added momentum to the idea that secular government was a myth. Neutrality was impossible. Government would inevitably be religious in some way, either positively or negatively. This understanding of society and the role of religion received even greater plausibility when James Davison Hunter, then a young sociologist at the University of Virginia, wrote Culture Wars (1991), a widely read book about the religious divide in the United States between theologically orthodox and progressive Americans. What was notable about the 1980s and 1990s version of a religious, if not per se Christian nationalism, was its inter-faith character. Hunter envisioned a set of policy matters that united conservative Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews, and Mormons while Neuhaus and Colson initiated the pan-Christian conferences, “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.”
The culmination of such cooperative efforts was one factor in the election of George W. Bush, arguably the most evangelical of any Republican president since World War II. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” was the title of a book by the conservative evangelical and current editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Marvin Olasky, who taught journalism at the University of Texas and was an advisor to Bush while governor of Texas. The hope among many Christian conservatives, especially in the Neuhaus and Colson orbit, was that Bush as president would add vigor to a faith-based set of policies and reduce the secular outlook that had dominated American politics since the 1960s. The 9/11 terror attacks, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Great Recession of 2007-2008 knocked Compassionate Conservatism off the Bush administration’s list of priorities. The challenges of the war in Iraq, in turn, were too much for some evangelical leaders (academic and ministry) who experienced Bush-fatigue and left the world of conservative politics. Read more»
D. G. Hart | “Why Christian Nationalism, and Why Now?” | Providence | February 3, 2026
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I think Hart’s basic idea not only makes sense, I think a parallel set of developments have happened within the “religious left” or the liberal post-Rawlsian mainline.
This may only make sense to people already familiar with the names but I take Hart’s chart of the trajectory of Americanist Christian Nationalism to open up some potential comparisons.
Francis Schaeffer ====> Reformed/fundamentalist===>conservative====> W
Walter Wink ========> Methodist/mainline=========>progressive====> Clintons
If the paths, so to speak, led to Bush and Trump on the one hand and Clintons on the other then both paths seem bad enough to spare badness to everyone all around.
In fairness to Schaeffer, he was doing cultural apologetics, not history of dogma, and his underlying worry — that the West renegotiated the relation of faith and reason in a way that eventually cut reason loose — isn’t foolish. The mechanism he postulates (pinning it on Aquinas’s anthropology) may be debatable, but his instinct was spot on.
Adam,
I doubt that Schaeffer ever read Aquinas for himself. He took what he heard from Van Til (whom I love but who was, as I’ve learned recently, depending on 19th-century surveys of Thomas and not Thomas himself) and elaborated on it. Schaeffer grossly misunderstood and misrepresented Thomas in a way that is beyond the pale. I realize now that the fundamentalists gave themselves permission to say things about Aquinas and Anselm et al. on the basis of implicit faith and idealism. They put implicit faith that those who told them (e.g., CVT) about Aquinas et al were right and that if Thomas believed x (as reported) then he must also have believed y and thus elaborated a story that has no relation to the truth at all.
I’m not saying that Schaeffer was wrong about everything but he was wrong about a very important claim about the history of theology (and philosophy) and that he deduced things from a false premise that were also important to his narrative.
The narrative, therefore, needs to be critically (in the best sense) re-evaluated in light of a renewed reading of primary sources. This is what happens in a renaissance: we go back to sources and we re-evaluate what we were told. The medieval church relied for centuries on sentences, collections of quotations and narratives that were developed around them. The Reformation returned to sources, read them in their original languages, paying attention to context, original intent etc. and criticized some of the long-received narratives.
That’s what we do. That’s how we recovered really important truths, e.g., sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia etc.
E.g., How I Changed My Mind About Thomas Aquinas.
Could you specify the false premise you believe Schaeffer assumes?
Michael,
I described it in the comments above at some length.
So, the false premise is Schaeffer’s claim that Aquinas introduced a faith-reason dualism which became a turning point in Western intellectual history? If not, what specific claim about Aquinas do you believe Schaeffer got wrong?
His entire account of Aquinas was wrong. The premise that Aquinas is the source of all evil is wrong.
The point of quoting Hart on Schaeffer is well illustrated by this passage:
This argument is central to the Christian nationalist program. Schaeffer made it 40 before Wolfe et al.
It is flawed because it fails to distinguish between epistemological political neutrality.
That confusion rests on bad assumptions about the relation of nature and Grace, which is rooted in his misunderstanding of Thomas.
Dear RSD, Agreed, but as a young, shallow Christian, I belive Dr. Schaeffer was just what I needed, in order to take theology and sources and ideas seriously. If his story about the history of doctrine was inadequate, I learned to love doctrine and to take it seriously. In his treatment of nature and grace, I was clueless, but I am still learning. In the Lord’s good providence, I have been given good scholarship, good preaching, good sources, and way too many good books. It could have been worse.
Thank you and your colleagues for the Heidel-varieties. I am looking forward to following the series on covenant theology, another category new to me, a category introduced to me on the Heidelblog.
Much as I admire D. G. Hart, I think this attempt at locating the “proximate roots” in Francis Schaeffer is not only off the mark, but also attribution Schaeffer doesn’t deserve. I saw and still see no insularity, certainly no kinism, no misunderstanding of the two kingdoms, in Schaeffer’s impassioned exhortation to see Jesus Christ as Lord of all of life and to contend for the truth. I have just re-read Death in the Citiy after decades of leaving it on the shelf for more contemporary discussions, and I find Schaeffer’s admonition to submit to the Word of God, to inform my desire to live a godly life to the glory of God in all of life, valuable in shaping my growth in grace and knowledge. My true home is eternal, but I am still a sojourner as a citizen and Christian in the United States. Whatever Falwell and Wilson and the errant kinists and Christian Nationalists of our day claim and practice is, to my mind, on them, not on Francis Schaeffer. They have taken the Word and run with it into dark and dreadful places. As Schaeffer demonstrates in Death and the City, they should read the book of Jeremiah, and Romans for good measure.
Lola,
I don’t think that Darryl is attributing to Schaeffer everything that the some/most of the Christian Nationalists are saying today. Schaeffer wasn’t a racist, Kinist, neo-Nazi. In fact, Darryl was himself much affected by L’Abri and Schaeffer. If memory serves, Darryl made a pilgrimage to L’Abri.
It is also true that Schaeffer’s roots were in fundamentalism (e.g., he left WTS after his first (“Junior”) year to take his Middler and Senior years at Faith Seminary with the Bible Presbyterians) and when he returned to the USA from L’Abri his work arguably did begin to tack back in that direction. He did make common cause with some of the Reconstructionists. They were much taken with How Then… and his Christian Manifesto.
We can appreciate Schaeffer (as I do) and still think critically about aspects of his work. He was very helpful to this young Christian in college (I remember reading Schaeffer as I walked across campus—the Lord was merciful and I didn’t hit anything!) and yet I’ve come to see that his story about the history of Christian doctrine was not very accurate and I think I disagree with his approach to nature and grace.