Did America “Fall Away from God?”

The argument that America "lost its way" by removing religion from the public square is built on a fallacy of anachronistic myth-making. It mourns the loss of religious symbols and rituals while conveniently whitewashing a past defined not by Christian values, but by White Settler Nationalism, Jim Crow, and systemic brutality.

To claim the country was "walking with Christ" during an era of state-sanctioned dehumanization requires a disingenuous erasure of history and the "egregious sins" that defined it. Ultimately, this narrative doesn't reflect a lost spiritual era; it reaches for a fictionalized "Golden Age" to avoid the uncomfortable reality that the moral past they are reaching for never actually existed.

There may have been more public religion in the past, but that certainly didn’t mean there were more Christlike virtues in public and private life.

The real Christlike virtues of the past were not found in the proponents of Christian nationalism, but in the prophetic martyrs of resistance. While nationalists were busy using faith as a veneer for White Settler Nationalism and systemic oppression, it was the dissenters—many of them deeply people of faith—who actually embodied the Gospel by challenging the state's "egregious sins."

To celebrate a "Christian" past while ignoring these martyrs is to favor a comfortable myth over the radical, sacrificial faith that actually stood against the status quo.

If your version of a 'Christian' past requires the erasure of systemic injustice to stay standing, then it isn't a spiritual heritage you're defending—it's a political cover story.

Stop confusing the loss of religious hegemony with a loss of faith. The Gospel was never found in the school board mandates of the 1950s; it was found in the streets, where the martyrs of resistance were bleeding to make the 'Christian' establishment act like Christians.