As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, old questions about religion and national identity have returned with renewed force. Debates over public schools, religious liberty, Christian nationalism, patriotic ritual, and the meaning of the founding have made clear that the country is still arguing over what kind of republic it has been, and what kind of republic it wants to become. The legal separation of church and state remains central to American constitutional life. But legal separation has never meant cultural separation. The United States has always been a secular republic with a deeply Christian memory.

This talk will examine the United States’ enduring entanglement of religion and national identity, questioning the assumption that the separation of church and state ever produced a purely secular public sphere. This talk will invite the audience to reconsider what it has meant (and continues to mean) to call the United States both a secular republic and a culturally Christian nation.

Rather than arguing for or against the Christian tradition, Sam Martin looks to interrogate how its persistence reveals something fundamental about American political culture. When nationalism takes the form of legal or partisan conflict, it misreads the deeper story. The real tension, then, is not between belief and unbelief, but between two competing inheritances. Traditional faith, written into the nation’s historical imagination, and secular humanism, written into its constitutional design.