America often imagines itself as a Christian nation. From the podiums of each president, it’s shouted to the masses like an affirmation. Christian language saturates the national myth. Dear reader, do you take Christian teaching seriously regarding ideals such as humility, mercy, and solidarity with the poor? In that case, America does not live up to those ideals. The United States has long used Christianity not as a guide for justice but as a convenient cloak for capitalism, empire, and white supremacy. The roots reach back to the Puritans. Fleeing religious persecution, they sought their 'city upon a hill' as a beacon of God’s kingdom on Earth. Yet their Christianity was fused with conquest. The same sermons that spoke of godly discipline were used to justify the seizing of occupied land, the slaughter of Indigenous people, and the creation of a colonial hierarchy. From the very beginning, Christianity in America was yoked to a project of domination, its radical ethic of equality under God twisted into a weapon of exclusion.
That same contradiction structured the age of slavery. The word of God was again being perverted to enable horrors as southern farmers draped themselves in scripture to defend bondage, wielding passages about servants obeying masters as divine permission to brutalize millions. One of the most cited justifications came from Genesis 9:20–27, where Noah curses his son Ham’s descendants to be 'servants.' Pro-slavery and later segregationist preachers twisted this into the claim that Africans were Ham’s descendants and thus destined by God for subjugation. Meanwhile, abolitionists—often drawing from the very same Bible—argued that slavery mocked Christ’s teachings. What won out, at least for centuries, was not the Christianity of mercy but the Christianity of profit. The plantation was America’s actual cathedral, and cotton its sacrament.
Christianity in the United States was reshaped after emancipation to continually fit the needs of capital. The 'Social Gospel' movement at the turn of the 20th century briefly revived the radical Jesus, calling for labor rights, welfare, and social reform. This was met with the rise of the 'prosperity gospel.' The script flipped once more. Preachers from Norman Vincent Peale to today’s televangelists promised that wealth itself was a sign of God’s favor. In this telling, Christ’s warning about the rich was not a curse but an endorsement: capitalism became divine providence. The poor were not victims of exploitation but evidence of their own lack of faith.
American Christianity has only twisted further. Women’s suffrage in the 19th and early 20th centuries cited scripture like Ephesians 5:22 ('Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands') to claim that women were divinely ordained to be under male authority, in the modern era. America treats mass incarceration as justice when the Gospels teach forgiveness. It sends drones to annihilate strangers overseas, while scripture commands love for the enemy. It locks healthcare to profit, even though Christ healed the sick without charge. It militarizes its borders against migrants, ignoring the command to welcome the stranger. America practices a politics of crucifixion—worshiping the cross not as a symbol of sacrifice but as an ornament of power.
To call such a system 'Christian' is to drain the word of meaning. What America offers is a capitalist religion that borrows Christian imagery while hollowing out its content, bending it into the service of capital, empire, and hierarchy. If Christianity means humility, loving thy neighbor, and liberation. In that case, America has constructed its opposite: a 'Christian nation' that would not only fail to follow Christ but, in all likelihood, nail him to the cross again.
