When Faith Divides: The Complex Role of Christianity in American Society

I’m going to tell you something that isn’t really a secret, but it feels like one when I say it out loud. My sister and I are both devout Christian women, deeply rooted in our faith, but the way we live that faith could not be more different. I, Jessica, have always been the skeptical and the curious one, the laid-back believer. In high school I practically lived at church. Four days a week you could find me in a pew or chair at Catholic mass with my family, an evangelical Bible study on Wednesdays, Young Life on Thursday nights, and Mass and Life Teen back at St. Ann’s my home church on Sunday. When I got my drivers license, I started driving myself to different churches just to see what they were about my quest was to go to every single denomination of church and even attending a Mormon dance as that was as close as I was getting to temple. Looking back, it sounds obsessive, but at the time I was just a church girl searching for answers.

Why so many denominations? Why did my mom stay Catholic while my dad chose a non-denominational church? Why did every congregation insist their way was the only way? In Texas, having a home church is like choosing your favorite grocery store Tom Thumb, Kroger, Food Lion, or my personal favorite, Albertson’s. It becomes part of your language, part of your identity. God isn’t just in the sanctuary, God is stitched into every conversation: “I’ve been praying about that,” “I’ll put you on my list,” “The Lord is leading me this way.” That was the rhythm of my childhood.

Even when I went to college, the pattern didn’t stop. I started at a Catholic university where mass on Sundays was non-negotiable. Later, when I transferred to the state school, I led children’s liturgy every other Sunday and still attended mass weekly. It didn’t matter if I was out until three in the morning…come Sunday, you would find me in church. For much of that time, I had a Catholic boyfriend, which made it even easier to stay consistent. Church was just part of my rhythm, as essential as breathing.

My sister’s path has been different. She was a devout Catholic all through childhood and high school, never missing a service, and that devotion followed her into college. Even as she explored different churches along the way, she never stopped showing up. To this day she is the one who goes to church in person and does not like to miss. On the rare occasion she can’t be there, she watches the service online. She also carries her own curiosity, testing out different congregations over the years, and now calls a non-denominational church her home. What has never wavered is her commitment she does not miss a single Sunday. Even baptizing her kids as Catholic and also dedicating them in a non-denominational church.

Here’s what I didn’t see back then: the facade. One by one, pastors who preached purity and truth were exposed for affairs, abuse, or worse. The very places that once felt like home turned out to be full of shadows. The same people who prayed beside me became the ones I trusted the least. For two years I attended a Baptist church, and I will never forget a moment in Sunday school. We were discussing a topic I cannot even remember now, and I spoke up to say, “That’s not realistic, that’s not how life actually works.” The teacher looked at me and said, “Jessica, not everyone has a hard life. Sometimes these girls don’t need to know the truth about life yet.” I remember staring back at her, confused. Hard life? Because of her assumption, I realized she looked at me, a Black girl in a town that was only three percent Black, and decided I must have been poor or struggling. Meanwhile, I was driving to church in a brand-new Firebird my parents had just bought me. Life for us was far from hard. What struck me most was that she used her assumption about me based entirely on race as a reason to withhold honesty during Bible study. That moment forced me to confront a truth I never wanted to name: religion in America, as much as it can heal and inspire, has also been used to control, to manipulate, and to harm.

Now, with Christian nationalism on the rise, the divide feels sharper than ever. Those of us who love Jesus, who know the Bible, and who embrace the gray areas are left watching scripture get cherry-picked to justify hate. It makes walking into a church feel less like sanctuary and more like conflict. I still pray, I still believe, but I have become what my mom would call her worst nightmare a Chris-East-Ash churchgoer. My husband is basically agnostic at this point, and I cannot fault him for resisting Sunday mornings when religion has become the spearhead of so many of the world’s ugliest battles.

Is Christianity a European Religion?

We need to start from the beginning, we know the stories, but how old is Christianity? So much of what we’ve been taught, especially when it comes to faith, comes through a filtered lens. Just like the algorithms that shape what we see online, history and religion have often been filtered too. And one of the biggest misconceptions is the idea that Christianity began in Europe. It didn’t.

Long before colonization, before European missionaries reinterpreted it to fit systems of power and control, there was Ethiopia. Ethiopia was one of the first nations to adopt Christianity, and the Ethiopian Bible is actually the oldest and most complete Bible in existence, older than the King James Version and even older than the Codex Sinaiticus, which Europeans often point to as the earliest Christian text.

Ethiopia has never been colonized, and because of that, it has preserved a version of Christianity untouched by Western influence. The Ethiopian Bible includes books that were removed from Western versions, and its traditions remain deeply connected to African spirituality, community, and ancestry. To me, that matters. Because so much of what we see now, especially in Christian nationalism, is a distorted, politicized version of faith that was never meant to look like this.

So when people say Christianity is a “European religion,” it’s just not true. The roots are African. The faith existed and thrived long before colonization ever touched the continent. And maybe remembering that helps us understand that what we’ve been taught in this country isn’t the full picture. It’s a filtered one, just like the algorithm we scroll every day.

You may ask, why does this matter? It matters because of the self-righteousness that has taken over so much of American Christianity to the point where we’ve painted Jesus with blue eyes, white skin, and silky brown hair. My husband and I joke that our first question when we meet other Christians is, “Which Jesus do you follow, the white Jesus or the brown Jesus?” Because that usually tells us what kind of Christianity we’re dealing with.

American History and the Half Told Truth

What I was told growing up in school was only half the truth when it came to American history. Yes, the Puritans escaped religious persecution in England, but what they really wanted was to purify the Church of England. They thought the church was not pure enough. They came to America because they believed the Church of England needed to be made stricter and more biblical.

There were two groups. The Puritans, also called nonseparatists, stayed with the Church of England at first, hoping to reform it from the inside. Then there were the Separatists, who became the Pilgrims, who believed the church was beyond reform and left entirely. Both groups claimed they wanted the freedom to worship in their way, not to build a society where everyone could believe as they wanted.

Maybe now you see why so many of the same foundations are still here today. These groups were not arguing for religious pluralism. They pushed their version of Christianity. If you disagreed whether you were a Quaker, Catholic, or Indigenous person you could be banished, fined, or even executed. So when you hear growing up that the Pilgrims came for religious freedom, understand what kind of freedom they meant. It meant freedom for them, not for everyone. They did not believe in the choice of how each person might worship.

John Winthrop, in his 1630 sermon A Model of Christian Charity, talked about building a strict moral society that modeled what they believed God wanted, not a society built to tolerate differences. If this feels confusing, that is okay. Part of the problem is that we are given a clean version of history and rarely taught to dig into the parts that are messy. We are essentially given propaganda, and narrative that fits the story of American greatness.

I didn’t really learn how to investigate history until college, when I was finally paying to be taught the full story instead of the filtered version we got growing up. It made me realize how much of our history gets lost simply because people don’t know how to access it. I honestly think part of why cursive has disappeared from schools is connected to that. If you can’t read old deeds, land grants, or census records, then whole parts of our history stay hidden. I’ve met landowners who still hold original grants passed down for generations, physical proof of stories that never make it into textbooks. Without the skills to research and read those records, the truth slowly fades away.

If you look closely at the facts, Christian nationalism isn’t a wave we are caught in. It is the water we have been swimming in all along.

White Supremacy, Plain and Simple

Growing up, the word “white supremacy” seemed like a big, menacing phrase reserved for history books or old news footage. But the truth is, white supremacy isn’t just about Klan hoods or Nazi rallies. It’s about a framework that has quietly woven itself into everyday life, impacting who has power and who doesn’t, who gets to feel comfortable and who doesn’t, and even who’s seen as a “real American” and who isn’t.

Think about it: white supremacy thrives in environments where people don’t have to think about the experiences of others. It’s in the way people assume things about me or think I’m “other,” as if my presence is somehow novel or surprising. It’s the mindset that made my elementary school classmates assume I must “like or date” the only other Black kid around. It’s the same mentality that allowed a four-year-old boy, cuddled into me for a bedtime story, to ask why God made my skin an “ugly color,” confused about why he liked me.

White supremacy isn’t just an overt hatred; it’s in the comfort of not having to question the status quo, of seeing your experience as the “normal” one, the “right” one. For so many in the U.S., especially in conservative Christian communities, this status quo is often unchallenged. It becomes a cycle, passed down from one generation to the next, where no one stops to say, “Hey, why do we think this way?”

I grew up in Coppell, Texas, where you’d see Confederate flags flying and people would shrug and say it’s “heritage, not hate.” But heritage without history is hollow. The so-called “states’ rights” argument was always deeply tied to slavery. Southern states claimed they had the right to govern themselves, but what they really meant was the right to own people, to keep an economy built on forced labor, and to resist any federal interference with that system. The North didn’t just go to war to punish the South; they went to dismantle the economic power that slavery gave it. In the South, the Confederate flag wasn’t just a symbol of regional pride; it was a banner defending a system of human bondage. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, said it plainly in his 1861 “Cornerstone Speech”:

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”

When I grew up amid those flags, nobody stopped to consider what that symbol actually meant to the people who were enslaved or what it said about who we claim to be now. That same selective memory, that rewriting of history to make oppression sound like pride, is part of what fuels Christian nationalism today. As those same people who flew those flags would sit next to me in church and call me their christian sister. It’s the same mindset that takes something rooted in power and control and disguises it as faith and patriotism.

How This Connects to Christian Nationalism

Here’s where it gets a little more layered. In towns like mine, where white, conservative Christianity was the backdrop to every major life event, Christianity wasn’t just about faith—it was a cultural identity. It was the invisible standard by which everything was judged. But over time, in some places, this blend of Christianity and white culture began morphing into something much more exclusive and, honestly, divisive.

Enter Christian nationalism: the belief that America is a fundamentally Christian nation, meant to uphold “Christian values,” even if it means marginalizing anyone who doesn’t fit into that mold. For many Christian nationalists, God and country are inseparable, and this goes beyond mere patriotism. It’s an ideology that insists America should be ruled by biblical principles (or at least their version of them) and that it should stay a white Christian nation.

But here’s the kicker: these “values” often get warped. Rather than aligning with love, compassion, and humility—the kind of teachings that are actually in the Bible—Christian nationalism tends to focus on power, control, and purity. It’s about “us” versus “them.” And that “us” isn’t just Christians; it’s specifically white Christians. The rest of us are outsiders, the ones who need to assimilate or be pushed out of sight.

Voting for “God’s Chosen,” Even If He’s Broken All the Rules

This brings us to a question I know a lot of people—especially white Christians—are grappling with: how did we get to a place where people are so committed to voting for “God’s choice” even when that person openly contradicts core biblical principles? How did we get to where lying, cheating, hatred, and vengeance are overlooked or justified in the name of a “greater purpose”?

It’s no secret that Christian nationalism has found a political ally in recent years. Political leaders who promote Christian nationalist ideals are often the same ones who actively support policies that reinforce white supremacy, even if it’s in subtle ways. They talk about “defending Christian values,” but these “values” often look like taking away people’s rights, shutting down conversations about race, or keeping America “great” (i.e., safe and comfortable for white Christians, less so for everyone else).

But here’s the hard truth: the leaders who proclaim themselves to be God’s chosen are sometimes the ones who’ve done the most harm to those very values. They break commandments left and right. They lie, cheat, steal, and put themselves above others. They talk about loving thy neighbor while creating policies that hurt the vulnerable. They say they’re “pro-life” but have no problem enacting policies that endanger lives in other ways.

And yet, despite all of this, there’s a movement of people who will look past these contradictions because they’ve been told this person is God’s anointed, the one who will protect their identity, their culture, their place in society.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

The real issue here is that Christian nationalism and white supremacy aren’t just hurting people who look like me. They’re hurting the very fabric of our communities. They’re hurting the country as a whole. When we prop up leaders who have no respect for the basic tenets of truth and decency, we’re compromising what this country is supposed to stand for. When white supremacy goes unchallenged, it doesn’t just harm people of color; it creates an environment of fear, exclusion, and division.

The church I grew up around taught me values like honesty, humility, and love for all people. But I’m seeing that many people who hold these beliefs are having to confront a painful reality: the leaders they were told to support aren’t embodying those values. They’re embodying the opposite.

It’s hard to see your faith manipulated, your beliefs twisted. It’s hard to feel like everything you were taught is being used to prop up something so far from God’s love. But sometimes, we have to look at the facts and say, “Enough.” Faith isn’t about power; it’s about compassion. Patriotism isn’t about exclusion; it’s about unity. And leadership isn’t about control; it’s about service.

The Algorithm, the Irony, and the Forgotten Roots of Faith

We can all say with a certain certainty that the thing that has changed society the most in the last ten years is social media. I’ll have the joy of telling my kids that I was alive before Google and that I was a junior in college when Facebook was invented. When I look back at some of my posts from those early days, I realize how deep, thoughtful, and quirky they honestly were. We would put things like where we were at the time—“at the grocery store”—or leave a message on a friend’s wall saying, “Hey, call me when you get back home.”

Social media, just like email, started with the purest of intentions. But especially after the pandemic, it’s never been the same. Now it’s about chasing an algorithm or companies trying to keep you on the app as long as possible before you switch to another one. That constant pull has caused a real decline in the quality of what we all see online. Two people can sit right next to each other when a major event happens and their algorithms will show them two completely different, biased versions of the same story to fit their reality to keep them on the app longer.

I’ve tried to beat the algorithm by using my different Instagram accounts so that each one shows me something different. This became most obvious during the CK shooting. My personal Instagram is filled with Church of Christ and conservative-leaning content because most of my friends are from Texas, and I’ve trained the algorithm to show me what they’d be interested in. You would have thought the man who was murdered was a saint based on what I was seeing. It never showed the other side or it shows claims that his words were taken out of context.

But on my Well Hello Sister and Well Hello Cookie accounts, I make sure I see the perspectives missing from my personal one. I actually knew CK for years. I still work with college kids now through my internships, and one day I hope to be back teaching on a university campus again. That age group, 18 to 22, has always been my favorite to work with. It’s such a raw, developing timewhen you’re trying to figure out who you are and how complex the world really is. Which is exactly what makes it such a perfect breeding ground for organizations like Turning Point USA to plant their values and thought processes while those young frontal lobes are still developing.

It always felt unsettling to me that a grown man would keep returning to that space to debate and challenge people whose minds are still forming. And so many of the things he said were directed at people like me, Black women, immigrants, and anyone he could remind of their supposed “place” in the world. The irony now is that his wife, who holds multiple degrees, beauty pageant titles, and was a college athlete, is now the CEO of Turning Point USA. She was on a podcast less than a week after his funeral and is now leading the movement he built. I find it both ironic and contradictory, because if her husband were still alive, I doubt anyone in that circle would be saying her place was behind a desk or holding a microphone. It’s a reflection of something I’ve always seen in Christian nationalism—the rule for you is not the rule for me.

Why Mourning CK Reveals the Divide in Christianity

I feel like I can’t write this blog without addressing current events. I actually started drafting it back on December 26, 2024, but never got around to finishing it. The reality is, we are living in a moment where Christian nationalism is moving to the forefront. And with the recent assassination of one of its most visible leaders, we’re now watching the divided Christian response play out. The differences I’m seeing between the South and the Northeast have been striking, and that’s where I want to begin.

I’ve had friends up here ask me why people are crashing out over CK. They’re shocked and in disbelief about friends who are truly in mourning, taking part in the sanitization of his legacy. He has become a martyr for faith instead of being remembered for the hate speech he participated in. And people who don’t understand why he is being equated to a disciple don’t recognize the psychology behind it. I found a perfect clip that really explains the thought process of those who are having this visceral reaction to what happened to him.

Here’s why I understand. I am a Black woman from the South, deeply rooted in my Nigerian culture. Because of my household, everything was focused on Nigerian traditions. I was learning about Black American history and their current struggle at the same time as many of my white peers.

I too had internalized biases from growing up with Nigerian parents who allowed colonization to dictate how we viewed Black Americans. The same stereotypes I picked up in my upper-middle-class white upbringing were the stereotypes and internalized biases I had to actively confront and dismantle when I began learning about the Black American experience.

For a long time, I was actually uncomfortable in rooms full of Black Americans—not because of them, but because of what I had absorbed growing up. Once I started learning history, listening deeply, and making real friendships, that changed. And now I say with my whole chest: Black Americans are literally walking miracles after listening to what they have had to sruvive in this country.

I’ve realized that many white people who know me tend to forget I’m Black because of the way I talk and the comfort they feel around me. I grew up in a predominantly white suburb, so my vernacular reflects the culture and language I was surrounded by. I’m used to living in a complex, almost threefold experience. Externally, people who don’t know me assume I’m a Black American, yet I am deeply rooted in my Nigerian culture. Because of how I grew up, I can feel comfortable in nearly any room. The one space I had to truly learn to feel at home in was among Black Americans, a community I didn’t have the chance to be part of until college, and I am grateful for that journey.

When your race becomes invisible to people—when they see you as “one of them”—they sometimes say the quiet parts out loud. And when I correct them, they scramble with “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean that.” But the truth is, they did. Because those comments flow directly from internal bias.

I remember hosting a sip-and-see for my twins. My son came out basically white—blue eyes, pale skin. My daughter came out light brown, with light brown eyes and almost reddish hair. People would look at them and say, “She’s going to be so jealous of her brother because he’s so light.” I’d stop them and say, “So what does that mean for their mom, who is Black?” They’d backpedal: “Oh, that’s not what I meant.” But it is what they meant. It revealed the internalized belief that the lighter the skin, the more beautiful a person is.

Now, how does this connect to CK? CK said the quiet part out loud. And people ignored the hate in his speech because it mirrored the biases they already carried. If they see a Black pilot, they too wonder if it’s a “diversity hire,” because they’ve been told all their lives that only white men belong in those roles. It becomes easy to excuse the hate in exchange for the faith he professed.

In my opinion, he perverted the word of God. But what people latched onto was his presentation as a Christian man who believed in the sanctity of marriage, who preached that women should be submissive to their husbands. They conveniently forgot the part of scripture that says submission is mutual and that a husband should love his wife as Christ loved the church. Don’t let me go too deep down that rabbit hole.

Now, I don’t want to make it seem like hate speech was the only thing he said, because it wasn’t. But the reality is that he participated in a lot of speech that tore people down, especially when it came to marginalized groups. What also disturbed me was the way he went about it. He would go to college campuses and debate 18-year-olds whose frontal lobes aren’t even fully developed, just so he could grab a sensational clip for social media. Those clips weren’t about meaningful dialogue — they were about clickbait, about money, and about reinforcing a persona.

There’s an element here we cannot ignore: this was also a business model. Attention brought in money, and large donors supported it because it served their own goals. Many of those goals aligned with pushing a Christian nationalist agenda that, as a Christian woman, I fundamentally cannot agree with.

What makes this even more complicated is the way everything gets wrapped in the language of “free speech.” We no longer seem to have the space for real free speech in America, because the loudest voices are the ones amplified by money, platforms, and outrage. And when free speech is treated as a shield for hate speech, the conversation isn’t free anymore — it’s controlled. It is shaped by whoever benefits from keeping people divided.

I know some people are simply offering condolences and aren’t consciously endorsing hate speech. I want to be honest with you, the reality is if you sanitize his legacy, even unintentionally, you are sending a message that the hate speech he spread wasn’t serious enough to outweigh your comfort. That is how complicity works. It tells the people around you that their pain doesn’t count.

But this is how Christian nationalism works. You go to a memorial because you want to celebrate the life of someone you thought was a pillar of faith, maybe because you didn’t have all the information. Then you hear another speech, and another speech, and before you know it, you’re cheering along for words that were originally given decades ago, in a completely different context in a speech from 1930s Germany.

This is where Christian nationalism hides behind faith with the intent of promoting nationalism. Without even realizing it, you start supporting things that the Bible itself would call hypocritical. Suddenly, you find yourself on the wrong side of history. And the deeper you go, the more it feels like you’re drowning.

You want to believe that others don’t understand, that all you are doing is expressing your Christian faith and belief in God. You are constantly told that Christianity is under attack, but I have never felt that. I have always been able to practice my faith freely. Yet when algorithms and messages constantly warn of a war on Christmas or Jesus, it can make you wonder where this supposed attack is even coming from.

Some people defended CK by saying he stood for freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not the same as hate speech. Those are two different things. I can hold compassion for the loss of life and still refuse to sanitize the harm he caused. That is not a celebration of death; it is accountability.

And here is the wild part: many of the same people accusing others of celebrating his death were the ones who shared memes mocking George Floyd’s murder, saying he had been “sober for five years.” That double standard reveals how deep the hostility runs.

But even deeper than that, there was an imagined war and threat, and it was always blamed on the radical left. There always has to be an enemy in Christian nationalism. HBCUs went on lockdown because of credible threats. The LGBTQIA+ community was immediately scapegoated, with people rushing to pin it on a trans person. Out of the outcry came another narrative: “They tried to silence him. They did this because of his faith.” The attack somehow became about Christianity itself when it had nothing to do with Christianity.

It was surreal watching creators say they lost followers simply for being Christian because they had also mentioned CK. What I see is people twisting faith into a shield for their own hostility. And to be honest, I am probably the least judgmental Christian I know, outside of my sister.

As an observer, what strikes me most is that there seems to be no room left for gray. Every conversation turns into one side shouting that the other is brainwashed, and the other side shouting it back. I truly don’t understand why there is no middle.

I know it can be uncomfortable to live in the gray or even in neutrality. For those who are mourning CK, you can mourn. But for those of us who are not, that does not mean we are celebrating someone’s death. It just means we are neutral. We can have compassion for the loss of life without feeling that we need to grieve the life lost.

Living in the gray is where we foster humanity. It is where we foster love and understanding, where you realize that someone may not look like you, act like you, or believe what you believe. By living in the gray, you can finally see that multiple truths can exist at the same time.

Where Do We Go From Here…

If you’re reading this and feeling a little uncomfortable, that’s okay. We’re all learning, and we’re all in this together. I know that change is hard, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. I know it’s difficult to question things you’ve grown up with, especially when they’re tied to faith, family, and identity. But now, more than ever, we need to challenge those things that don’t align with love, truth, and justice.

We need to stand up and speak out—not just for the sake of people like me but for everyone. Because at the end of the day, white supremacy and Christian nationalism don’t just harm people of color. They chip away at the core of who we’re supposed to be as a community, as a country, and as people of faith.

So, if you’re willing to take this journey with me, know that you’re not alone. We can build a better world together, one that truly values all people. But it starts with honesty, with confronting hard truths, and with refusing to let our faith be twisted in the name of power. And trust me, that’s a journey worth taking. Thank you for being here.