How Christian Nationalism Is Quietly Dismantling American Public Health

A Public Health Agency Transformed by Religious Ideology

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stepped into his role as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in February 2025, he delivered a message that caught many observers off guard. Rather than focusing on disease prevention, vaccination policy, or the nation's chronic illness burden, Kennedy opened with a diagnosis of a different kind — America, he declared, was suffering from a "spiritual malaise."

In his first address to HHS employees, Kennedy argued that "spiritual and physical maladies thrive on one another," and that healing the country required confronting questions of personal responsibility and moral fortitude. The solution, in his framing, was not rooted in evidence-based medicine. It was a matter of the soul.

Within weeks, the White House announced sweeping cuts across the very agency Kennedy now leads — eliminating more than 20,500 jobs from the department responsible for safeguarding public health.

Spiritual Warfare at the Helm of Public Health

Kennedy's rhetoric has only intensified since those early days. As the United States confronted its most severe measles outbreak in 34 years this past March — a crisis Kennedy has largely sidestepped — he stood before an audience of medical trainees and urged them to combat "malevolent forces" through "spiritual warfare." His prescribed remedy: the "sacred ritual" of sharing family dinners.

Over the course of his tenure, Kennedy has championed a range of pseudoscientific or insufficiently tested treatments, including vitamin A as a measles intervention, peptides as longevity boosters, and raw milk as a nutritional powerhouse. At the same time, he has persistently undermined public confidence in vaccine safety and efficacy.

On the surface, Kennedy's language can seem harmless — the kind of holistic, nature-forward vernacular associated with wellness culture rather than hard-right ideology. His background as an environmental advocate lends him a kind of granola credibility that softens the edges of his messaging.

But health policy experts and former members of conservative religious movements argue that his repeated invocations of spiritual forces carry a far more specific — and dangerous — meaning.

A Dog Whistle for Christian Nationalism

"The 'warfare' thing is a dog whistle to stoke Christian nationalist ideology," says Savannah Tate, who grew up as the daughter of a megachurch pastor before leaving the faith in her early twenties. Now 32 and holding a doctorate in psychology, Tate speaks publicly about her experience inside one of America's most powerful religious-political movements.

Christian nationalism is not a single organization but a broad and interconnected ecosystem of networks and factions united by one core ambition: reshaping American governance to reflect a specifically Christian moral and legal framework. This project would blur — or erase — the constitutional separation of church and state, subordinate democratic pluralism to biblical authority, and position Christianity as the nation's singular guiding force.

Some of the most influential figures in the current administration openly align themselves with this vision. Russell Vought, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget and a principal architect of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, has made no secret of his ideological commitments. That document has effectively become a governing blueprint for the administration.

Terms like "spiritual warfare" and "spiritual attack," Tate explains, are not casual metaphors within these circles. They are the movement's native vocabulary — a binary, combat-oriented framework designed to cast opponents as not merely wrong, but cosmically evil.

Dominionism and the Drive for Institutional Control

The strand of Christian nationalism currently influencing the Trump administration is dominionist in character, meaning its adherents believe Christian authority should extend over all major cultural, governmental, and social institutions. This is not a passive or traditionalist faith — it is an actively expansionist political project.

President Trump himself has framed his second term as "a war from within" against what he calls "anti-Christian bias." Vice President JD Vance has advanced the historically inaccurate claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, using that myth to court followers within conservative Christian networks like Turning Point.

The Rev. Dr. Gary Gunderson, a Baptist minister and professor of public health science at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, does not shy away from strong language when describing what is unfolding.

"I do think the term 'Christofascist' is appropriate — both theologically and politically," he says of the current administration's direction.

Gunderson argues that what distinguishes this movement from conventional religious conservatism is its singular focus on power rather than the teachings of Jesus. "What we're seeing in the US today is the attempt to use religion and Christian nationalism to erode a scientifically based social contract of trust between government and the people, and replace it with a more authoritarian relationship," he adds.

Why Science Becomes the Enemy

Researchers who have studied the Christian nationalist movement — including sociologists Joseph Baker, Stephen Perry, and Andrew Whitehead — have found that institutional science poses a particular threat to the movement's worldview. Because science offers an independent source of moral authority grounded in evidence rather than divine revelation, it is perceived as a challenge to Christian supremacy. Public health, which serves all people regardless of race, religion, or gender, is especially threatening to a hierarchical moral order that places devout Christians at the top.

Tate frames this tension in psychological terms. "It's a lot about fear of losing power overall," she says. "Fear that the more medicine we figure out, and the more we're able to help people from getting sick, the less people will depend on God."

Targeting Scientific Experts from Within

The ideological campaign being waged inside the HHS is not limited to language. It has real and measurable human targets.

Calley Means, the political strategist who helped engineer the alliance between Kennedy and Trump and now serves as Kennedy's senior adviser, took to social media to claim that Trump and Kennedy were "quite litterally fighting demonic forces to return the CDC to real science." His target was Demetre Daskalakis, then director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — a Harvard-educated epidemiologist and openly gay public health official.

Means publicly labeled Daskalakis a "proud satanist" based on Instagram posts showing he has a pentagram tattoo — a symbol he has said represents his journey through childhood bullying — and that he has worn a leather harness featuring a similar design.

The Poynter Institute investigated the claim and found it to be false. Daskalakis himself has stated he is not a satanist. He was, in fact, raised Greek Orthodox — and has a significantly larger tattoo of Jesus.

The smear campaign, however, was not about accuracy. It was strategic. Russell Vought articulated the underlying goal plainly in a private 2023 speech: "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains."

Daskalakis resigned in protest last summer, following Kennedy's unilateral decision to dismiss all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

The Erosion of a Shared Public Health Reality

What emerges from these combined forces — the religious rhetoric, the institutional dismantling, the targeted harassment of scientists — is something more corrosive than any single policy failure. It is the deliberate erosion of the shared, evidence-based foundation upon which public health depends.

When a government agency responsible for protecting the health of 330 million people begins framing disease prevention as a spiritual battle and casting its own experts as demonic adversaries, the consequences extend far beyond politics. They reach into hospitals, clinics, schools, and communities — anywhere Americans turn for reliable health guidance and trust that their government is acting in their interest.

That trust, once broken, is not easily rebuilt.