For Western Christians, Holy Week—the most important time of the church calendar—just finished. Like many other Christians, it is a powerful and challenging time of the year. We are meant to reflect on how we are self-assured in our devotion to Jesus’ teachings one minute and turn on Him the next, seeing ourselves in the disciples who abandoned him. We are supposed to meditate on the simultaneous horrors and hope in His crucifixion. And we spent the weekend waiting for His resurrection (although I admit I rarely make it to the Saturday vigil).

But this year was extra difficult to stay focused on the meaning of Holy Week thanks to the misuse of and downright insults to our faith by the US administration. While I was observing Maundy Thursday (the night Jesus was betrayed), US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was calling for Christians to pray for US victory in its war of choice against Iran. While I was preparing for Good Friday (the day of Jesus’ death), news came out that Hegseth was holding prayer services for Protestants only. And while I was celebrating Easter, and watching my kids sing in the choir, I was trying to pretend I hadn’t read Trump’s profanity-filled Easter message calling for death and destruction.

Some will say this is inevitable when you mix religion with politics. Others may say it’s uniquely American Christian, a product of its ties with white privilege and domination. But to me this is what happens when religious nationalism takes over a government, and the only solution is a faith that rejects it.

The sacred and the profane

While my work focuses on the ties between religion and state and the uses of religion as an ideology, my training was broader. I studied at Georgetown University, so I was exposed to rigorous Jesuit theological thinking. I took classes with scholars like Jose Casanova, and read grand sociological and anthropological theorizing on religion. And as a person of faith I often think about what it means on an individual level.

To me, the original function of religion in society was to distinguish between the sacred and the profane. The former involves things coming from or dedicated to the divine. The latter can be things that are forbidden or actively threatening to the divine. As modernity emerged so did the secular, a realm where people could live their lives free of the sacred/profane dichotomy. Most religions came to accommodate the secular, allowing both to thrive.

Christian nationalism, ignoring its stated objectives, has the faith serving the state.

Of course, the religious and the secular are constantly in tension. There is pressure on religions to adopt secular values to stay “up to date.” And religions exert value claims on the secular world, for good or ill.

Religious nationalism is a desire to re-enchant the world, to borrow a phrase from one of my Georgetown Professors who has, maybe ironically/maybe appropriately, become active in the “American Greatness” intellectual movement. Religious nationalism wants both society and the state to be in line with what its advocates see as the “true” foundation of a country.

I experienced this in a non-political sense when I attended a non-denominational evangelical church as a kid. The demands of the church were not just weekly attendance and sometimes a Wednesday gathering. Your entire life were supposed to revolve around their definition of Christianity. Activities, literature, entertainment all had to be “Christian.” I still remember our youth pastor playing a clip of Billy Kreutzmann—drummer of the Grateful Dead—talking about how he enjoyed music as it was like a party, contrasted with a Christian singer who said their goal is to praise God. I credit that youth pastor with my disillusionment with that tradition; if I couldn’t be a Christian and Deadhead—according to their definition of the former—then I’d look elsewhere.

Religious nationalism, if I can condense a broad and complicated subject to a tagline, is the application of this impulse to politics.

Enter Trump

So those of us who followed religion and politics in the US weren’t surprised by the role of evangelical faith in the Bush Administration and later Republican politics. But Trump caught us off guard. I remember when I worked for a survey organization that rhymes with Mew during the Republican primary fight for the 2016 election. They found evangelicals strongly backing Trump despite the religious bona fides of other candidates. Some commentators objected, arguing the polls weren’t really capturing “true” evangelical Christians. But that finding has held up over the past ten years.

As a progressive Christian, it was tempting to dismiss pro-Trump Christians as lacking in faith. But I knew that wasn’t true. The people I grew up with took their faith seriously; they just drew different conclusions from the texts that I read. And the lack of a liturgy and established tradition with its parameters for individual interpretation allowed for idiosyncratic expressions of faith.

I grew frustrated as I saw principled religious advocates for things like religious freedom flock to Trump despite his administration’s lack of serious effort on that issue.

And as Trump’s second administration approach, many people warned that this wasn’t just George W. Bush being inspired by and counting on evangelical faith. It was a fusion of conservative Christian faith and politics: Christian nationalism.

The manner of engagement that used to work with conservative Christians—appealing to and debating Scripture on contemporary issues—didn’t matter because people just argued what they wanted and said it was religious.

I attempted the former to counter Christian defenses of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy, but people just said Trump was a “man of God” and had God’s blessing. How do you counter that?

Religious alternatives to Christian nationalism establish a check on the state’s ability to harm, not the imposition of sectarian values. They allow for the pluralism religious nationalism does not.

I tried engaging with people in Facebook replies about ICE actions [I know, that was stupid] but I’d get variations of “defending the country is sacred” or “ICE agents deserve our love too” (they do, of course, but that doesn’t mean we can’t oppose their actions).

This is because of Christian nationalism, not despite it. Christian nationalism, ignoring its stated objectives, has the faith serving the state. In this case, that means serving Trump. So there is no apparent tension when an administration that claims to be defending Christians from bias and promoting religious freedom excludes Roman Catholics (who have been an essential part of the religious freedom fight). There is no apparent tension when a President who is supposed to be on a holy mission can’t even send a respectful message on Easter.

The end result of Christian—or all religious—nationalism is clear: the profane becomes sacred. I think this is what Olivier Roy was going for in Holy Ignorance, his warning about the end state of religious fundamentalism.

A better alternative is out there

So obviously one option is to banish religion from politics or even all public life. If this is what happens when religion and politics mix, then don’t let them mix. This was the impulse behind some of the aggressive secularizing projects in the 19th and 20th centuries, however. The lessons from them aren’t very encouraging.

I’d argue there is a better way, one that simultaneously respect pluralism and the religious values of millions around the world. We can see it in the Holy Week messages of Pope Leo XIV, the leader of the Roman Catholic church. Arguing against Hegseth, he said the prayers of those waging wars of aggression do not reach God and that the true faith rejects the “desire for domination.”

Similar calls came from other faith leaders. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA—the US branch of the Anglican Communion—held a Palm Sunday vigil calling for peace. The Union for Reform Judaism noted the need to address the Iranian regime’s actions, but raised concerns about the fact that the war was progressing without clear diplomatic efforts, ending with references to sacred calls for peace. Muslim leaders have expressed a desire for a “miracle and hoping negotiations” begin, while contrasting the war with Ramadan’s spirit of “reflection and prayer.”

These represent a middle ground between accepting and endorsing the actions of the powerful and removing faith from politics. As I’ve written elsewhere, Christian scripture provides different models for engaging with politics, including prophetic denunciations of evil and accommodation when possible. These exist similarly in other traditions. And, most importantly, they do not impose sectarian values on society. Instead, they establish a check on the state’s ability to harm, not the imposition of sectarian values. They allow for the pluralism religious nationalism does not.

So there is reason to be discouraged during this season. But there is also reason for optimism, and a call for action for privileged people of faith. In my area, local clergy were involved in protests against an ICE raid. They weren’t able to convince the ICE officers to abandon their job or turn their hearts towards a loving relationship with the community. But they served as a physical and spiritual barrier between the power of the state and the innocent. That is how true faith can fight religious nationalism.