The second-highest-ranking official in Indiana, Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, openly identifies as a Christian nationalist. This self-description has ignited a fierce debate across the state, from the pews to the Statehouse, forcing residents to confront a fundamental question: What is the proper role of faith in public life, and what does it mean for the future of a pluralistic state? This is not an abstract debate; it has manifested in direct legislative action, crystallized by a controversial resolution that put the state's competing visions on a collision course.
Our second story in this series will look at one researcher’s more theological approach to talking about Christian nationalism and the many ways different denominations of Christianity and non-Christians are reacting to its rise. It will also discuss one church that says the United States is one of the “beasts of prophecy” as laid out in the Book of Revelation.
The Underpinnings
As far as belief systems go, Christianity is about as far from a monolith as you can get. Exact numbers vary, but many sources say there are 45,000 different Christian denominations throughout the world.
That’s 45,000 different groups teaching their interpretation of what Christianity is, how followers should behave, and what type of deeds are to be done in communities to further the cause.
That’s why André Gagné, a professor and chair of the Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, tends to look toward the theological underpinnings of Christian nationalism.
One of those key underpinnings is the idea of dominion theology.
“It's the belief that Christians have been called by God to exercise their authority over all aspects of society, be they political, social, or cultural,” he said.
The belief comes from an interpretation of Genesis 1:26, which reads: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
“He's talking to humanity and giving them a kind of responsibility for governance, a well-rounded governance of creation,” Gagné said. “But for a lot of these people that embrace this idea of dominion theology, it's about Christians having that mandate.”
Dominion theology even has a roadmap for how Christians can fulfill their mandate.
In 1975, evangelicals Loren Cunningham, Bill Bright, and Francis Schaeffer said they received a message from God. The message ordered them to invade the “seven spheres” of society: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government.
“It is often referred to as the Seven Mountain Mandate,” Gagné said. “So the Seven Mountain Mandate is essentially the mobilization plan to bring about the dominion.”
This mandate would later fuse with evangelicalism and Pentecostalism to underlie the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a key force in the propagation of Christian nationalist beliefs.
Story continues below.
Coined by C. Peter Wagner, he called the NAR “the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation.”
Gagné was quoted in a 2022 article by New Republic saying “the NAR is inherently political, it’s in their DNA,” and that the movement is “dominionism in and of itself.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center characterized the NAR as “the greatest threat to American democracy that most people have never heard of."
Similar to the use of the label “Christian nationalist” Gagné said proponents of the Seven Mountain Mandate often try to make it seem more innocuous than he thinks it is.
“What they'll tell you is ‘yes, we believe in the Seven Mountain Mandate, but it's more as general influence,’” Gagné said. “Now in terms of influence, if you want to influence, you can influence… but it's when that mandate becomes hegemony as a project, that's an issue.”
For Gagné, the issue isn’t having Christian viewpoints in the public square.
“It's not so much as being able to sit at the table and bring your perspective,” he said. “It's being able to not try to impose a hegemonic view on everything else and everybody else you see and consider oneself as one of the many actors that compose society itself.”
Separation as a Shield
This rise in dominionist beliefs is causing rifts throughout Christianity.
Bob Whitaker, a senior pastor at Christ Community Church, previously called Evangelical Community Church, said the name changed in 2016 to avoid the negative connotations that come with being “evangelical.”
“I continue to call myself evangelical, but I never lead with that because it's become toxic,” he said. “In terms of conversation and dialogue.”
He calls this particular expression of Evangelism a “right-wing political perspective” of Christianity.
“My concern of this approach is that in my opinion, the whole idea of Christianity has always been that it is an international religion,” he said. “The notion of Christianity falling somewhere under the rubric of nationalism seems to be antithetical to the very theology of Jesus Christ.”
"The separation of church and state has existed for a long time for very important reasons." - Jamie Beran
Adrianne Meier, a senior pastor at St. Thomas Lutheran Church in Bloomington, has similar issues with Christian nationalism.
“From a scriptural and theological standpoint, religion offers the ability to be a check and a critique of power,” she said. “And when power, as in the state and religion, are too enmeshed, that critique gets silenced and normally to the detriment of people who are poor and marginalized.”
She said as a religious leader, she needs a gap between her faith and the laws of the nation in order for her to fulfill her religious obligations on her terms.
“If we only make laws that reflect my good, I am not acting as a Christian,” she said.
Meier also recognizes that untangling the issue is going to require understanding that people are complex and more than whatever label has been applied to them.
“We've decided that like ‘you are on this menu or you're on this menu and you have to take everything on the menu,’” she said.
In a sermon at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Bloomington about Christian nationalism, pastor Phil Amerson encouraged his congregation to speak up on the use of Christian symbols to push right-wing agendas. He cited the existence of the President Trump-endorsed God Bless the USA Bible.
“Enough. It's time to speak up with a clear no,” he said. “This is not who we as a nation were designed to be or who we are as a people of faith. All of the children of God are welcome.”
The non-Christian take
According to the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of Hoosiers identify as Christian, with 32 percent being evangelical protestants. Thirty-one percent of Hoosiers identify as “religiously unaffiliated.”
Three percent represent all the other religions of the world, with less than 1 percent of the state being Jewish or Muslim.
Micah Beckwith’s church, Life Church, as a member of Assemblies of God, also make up about 1 percent of the state.
Those numbers aren’t dissimilar to the rest of the country: 62 percent of Americans identify as Christian, 29 percent are unaffiliated, and 7 percent are Jewish, Muslim, or something else.
While there’s no definitive statistics on the makeup of the country during its founding, these numbers illustrate that the country is now far more pluralistic than the “almost exclusively Christian” image that many Christian nationalists have of America in the 1700s.
Mohamed Sayed, an Imam with the Islamic Center of Bloomington, immigrated to the U.S. 14 years ago from Egypt.
“This was, for me, one of the greatest successes in the modern era,” he said. “That you can create this kind of a melting pot where people live here, enjoying all those types of freedoms, regardless of any backgrounds.”
Since President Trump took office for his second term, Sayed’s opinion has soured.
“Right now I would say some people are trying to take this country back to the era before the Civil War,” he said.
Sayed views the rise of Christian nationalism as a threat to the foundations of the country.
“It is always dangerous when you play the card of religion and try to enforce certain types of beliefs,” he said. “Weaponizing religion against the nation is not something that has good ramifications over the history.”
In fact, Sayed said the movement is a threat to anyone that is deemed an “other,” including other Christians.
“I see it like a threat not only to Muslims, I see the threat to Jews and also people of color and people of different gender identities,” he said. “Anyone who is different from a white Christian, I would not think they would sympathize with Ukrainian Christians, for example or different denominations of Christianity who live in either Europe or in the Middle East, or Africa.”
Jamie Beran, CEO of Bend the Arc Jewish Action, an organization that focuses on domestic policy and advocacy work, sees it similarly.
“I think that all of these attacks on DEI and on what they're calling ‘wokeness’ is really about feeling threatened by the success and the brilliance and the evolution of people of all faiths and backgrounds and races,” she said.
She sees the movement as the complete opposite of what America is supposed to be.
“I think that if America is going to be the democracy that we claim to be, it can't be a country that is founded and focused on one set of religious beliefs,” she said. “I think it just is antithetical to the liberal democracy that we have been built to be.”
The most dangerous part of Christian nationalism in Beran’s view is the use of “Christian love” to appear helpful to all while actively pushing the idea that Christianity is to be elevated above all.
“They're saying that they're fighting anti-semitism, but in reality, they're covering their own anti-semitism, while at the same time, pushing the beliefs Christianity should be kind of the central belief of this country,” she said.
Beran said that America is a country for everyone thanks to the protections granted by the founders.
“This shouldn't be a Christian country,” she said. “It shouldn't be a Jewish country. It shouldn't be a Muslim country. The separation of church and state has existed for a long time for very important reasons.”
A different take
Robb Long, the ministerial and evangelism director with the Indiana Conference of Seventh Day Adventists, offered a nuanced take on what the Bible says about the relationship between church and state.
Long said when Jesus was asked about whether his followers should pay taxes to Rome in the Gospels, and he answered, “Render to Caeser the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
“He made a distinction between things that we owe to the government, whatever government we happen to be living under and benefiting from, and then the things we owe to God as a sovereign over our lives and especially our spiritual lives,” Long said.
He believes that the separation of church and state is key to the American experiment that allows for diversity of belief and opinion.
To Long, a Christian nationalist is someone who wishes to see Christianity established as the national religion of the United States, something he opposes heavily.
However, he does think the government has a responsibility to enforce some of the Ten Commandments, specifically the last six.
“The last six commandments express our duty to our fellow man, starting with our parents,” he said. “Honor your father and mother, don't kill, don't steal, don't bear false witness, don't commit adultery… but the government doesn't have any role in enforcing the first four Commandments.”
Long said it feels that Christians have been legislated against in recent years, citing prayer in schools and same-sex marriage, and that this rise in Christian nationalist ideas is a swing of the cultural pendulum.
“It would be nice if we had more laws that legislate morality in terms of the way we treat one another, relate to each other and make that more biblical,” he said. “But I think they go too far then and say along with that, let's legislate those first four commandments that deal with our duty to God.”
Long referred to a law in Indiana that bans the sale of vehicles on Sunday, saying that the state is in a sense dictating a day of worship.
“If a used car dealer, who owns the company, decides he wants to shut his business on Sunday, that's great, fine,” he said. “…But I don't think a car dealer that wants to be open on Sunday should be told that he can't because it's a law that they have to be closed on Sundays.”
For Long, even though he might agree with conservatives that the country could use a more Christian moral compass, the path that lays out leads to an oppressive future for people of all faiths.
“We just need to really be careful that we don't become oppressive or tyrannical in our treatment of people, especially in the area of their faith, and their particular belief in religion,” he said.
“I'd be happy to see everybody converted and become a Christian, but I don't think that can happen by using the state to do that or the government, but it's by preaching the gospel and changing people's hearts.”
