The wall of separation between church and state in the United States has often been breached. Now the White Christian nationalism at the core of the MAGA movement threatens to dismantle it.

When I was growing up in rural central Illinois in the 1960s, White Christian nationalism was not just a well-trodden path, it was a highway paved with impenetrable concrete and all of us were on it. At the time, it just seemed natural to me that the United States had always been, could only be, and would always be a White Christian nation.

Every school day of my childhood started with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Every Sunday, at church, we recited the Lord’s Prayer. The link between the two recitations was unmistakable. Christian faith went with American patriotism like bread went with butter.

By the age of five or six, I had made the pledge and said the prayer so often I could do them on auto-pilot. I was a quiet and bookish kid with an overactive imagination. While reciting, I let my mind wander.

As a small child, I didn’t fully comprehend all the words I recited. No adult ever explained to me what the language of the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer actually meant. My stream of thought would catch and eddy around words and phrases I only half understood.

In church, I made mental movies of what it might look like to “trespass” or to “trespass against” someone. In school, when a kid substituted “invisible” for “indivisible” I assumed they just couldn’t wrap their minds around the bigger, stranger word and my thoughts would flit between images of a ghostly deity — the one I imagined was in the head of my not so bright schoolmate — and musing over what kind of nation might be impervious to division.
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