“One Nation Under God” Meets NSPM‑7: Bible Politics and the Security State

This week the White House quietly dropped two documents that, read together, sketch out the spiritual architecture of an emerging security regime.The first is Donald Trump’s “Presidential Message Commemorating 250 Years of the Bible in America”, praising the “America Reads the Bible” event at the Museum of the Bible and on the National Mall. In it, he promises that “together, we will honor Holy Scripture, renew our faith, usher in a historic resurgence of religion on American shores, and rededicate the United States as one Nation under God.”

The second, issued last fall but now coming into focus, is National Security Presidential Memorandum‑7 (NSPM‑7), blandly titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” It instructs the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) and federal agencies to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals” behind political violence and intimidation, including “networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions” that support them.

Those two documents live in different corners of the White House website—one in “Briefings & Statements,” the other in “Presidential Actions”—but they form a matched set. One tells you who the real nation is; the other lays out how the state will deal with those who don’t fit inside that story.

I want to walk through how these pieces fit together: the Bible, the badge, and the emerging category of “enemy within.”

The Bible as the Nation’s Operating System

The Bible message is not just a Hallmark card to believers; it’s a full-blown civil‑religious myth of origins and destiny.

It stitches a seamless story from Columbus and Jamestown to Winthrop’s “city upon a hill,” to 1776 and the Northwest Ordinance, to Washington kissing the Bible, Lincoln quoting Scripture, FDR’s radio prayers, and Reagan’s “Year of the Bible.” In this telling, the Bible has “indelibly woven itself into our national identity and way of life” and is “foundational” to America’s constitutional framework.

There is no mention of Indigenous people, enslaved people, religious minorities, or secular currents in the founding. The only characters who matter are European‑descended Christian men and the presidents who allegedly carried the torch.

The closing line is pure covenant language: “Together, we will honor Holy Scripture, renew our faith, usher in a historic resurgence of religion on American shores, and rededicate the United States as one Nation under God.”

This is textbook Christian nationalism as scholars define it: an ideology that fuses a particular expression of Christianity with American civic identity, and casts that fusion as the only legitimate foundation for law, culture, and belonging.

If you’re inside that story, this is comforting. If you’re outside it—if your sacred texts, if any, are not the Bible—it’s a polite way of saying: You live here. But this is not really about you.

Defining “Real America” and Everyone Else

Christian nationalism works by drawing an invisible circle around the “real” nation. This message does it through selective memory and ritual.

The circle includes “our” Bible, “our” Founders, “our” presidents who prayed on radio and proclaimed Bible years. These are held up as the authentic face of America.

It excludes, by silence, the long multireligious reality of the country—Native spiritualities, Black churches that didn’t line up with power, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, and agnostic Americans, and Christians who don’t want the state in their religion.

It then turns a one‑week public Bible reading into a kind of national liturgy: nearly 500 Americans reading every verse from Genesis to Revelation, in the nation’s capital, as a ritual of “rededication.”

From a distance, it’s just a ceremony. Up close, it’s a sorting mechanism. It tells you whose story is the story, and whose existence gets filed under “miscellaneous.”

This is Stage One of the ladder: establish the myth and the mandate. Decide who is “us” and who is merely “here.”

NSPM‑7: Giving the Myth a Police File

Now drop that story into NSPM‑7.

On September 25, 2025, Trump signed NSPM‑7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” On paper, it sounds like a crackdown on violence across the spectrum. In practice, it widens the funnel of who can be investigated, monitored, and disrupted.

A few key features:

Expanded scope of targets. NSPM‑7 tells JTTFs to investigate “all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies,” explicitly including “organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions.”

Nonprofits and donors in the crosshairs. The ACLU of DC points out that the memo explicitly re‑aims “domestic terrorism” tools at civil society: nonprofits, activists, and donors who are added to an “ever-growing list of what he calls the ‘enemy within.’”

Treasury and IRS as enforcement arms. Treasury and IRS are tasked with “identifying and disrupting financial networks that support domestic terrorism or fund political violence,” including scrutiny of tax-exempt status and grant flows.

And here’s the part that should make your hair stand up: the way NSPM‑7 and its companion fact sheet talk about the “threat environment.” They don’t just describe bombers or shooters.

They fold in “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as part of the ideological backdrop to political violence.

In other words: in the same ecosystem where the Bible is declared the nation’s sacred foundation, NSPM‑7 quietly suggests that hostility to “traditional” views on faith, gender, race, and the market is not just disagreement—it’s potential evidence of the threat.

That’s Stage Two: take the moral map from the Bible message and quietly staple it to a national security directive.

From Symbolism to Surveillance

The ACLU has been blunt: NSPM‑7 “uses already vague, overbroad, and abused federal ‘domestic terrorism’ powers” that grew out of the Patriot Act. The domestic terrorism definition in 18 U.S.C. § 2331(5) isn’t a separate crime; it’s an investigative lens agencies can use to justify broader surveillance.

We already know what JTTFs do with that lens in practice:

They have monitored Black Lives Matter activists, targeted Muslims and environmentalists for investigation, and conducted “door‑knock” visits to journalists and local organizers.

Then‑Attorney General Bill Barr used JTTFs against racial justice protests in 2020; NSPM‑7 formally re‑tools that infrastructure for a new round.

Now add the Bible message’s insistence that the real America is biblical, anti‑communist, and “one Nation under God.”

You end up with a state where:

Public Christian identity is presented as the default civic identity.

Challenges to that fusion—on immigration, race, gender, capitalism, or religious dominance—are ideologically adjacent to what the memo calls “political violence and intimidation.”

Investigations of “radicalization, recruitment, funding mechanisms, non-governmental organization involvement” become easier to justify when the people in charge think certain worldviews are inherently suspect.

That’s Stage Three: put dissent‑adjacent ideologies inside the line of sight, even when there’s no actual violence.

The COINTELPRO Vibes (Without Saying the Word)

NSPM‑7 doesn’t say “we will build camps.” It doesn’t need to. It focuses on disruption.

The White House fact sheet on NSPM‑7 talks about “investigat[ing] all participants,” “disrupt[ing] financial networks,” and using national security tools like FARA prosecutions and terrorism enhancements against people involved in “political violence and intimidation,” including “organized doxxing campaigns” and some property crimes.

The ACLU’s reading: this basically green‑lights a new COINTELPRO‑style environment, only this time with a domestic‑terror label slapped on anything officials can plausibly connect to “organized” unrest.

COINTELPRO didn’t need camps to be effective. It used:

surveillance

infiltration and informants

character assassination and leaks

selective prosecution

IRS and tax pressure

to break movements from the inside. NSPM‑7 plus the Bible civil religion is a 21st‑century upgrade.

Stage Four and Five on the ladder look less like jackboots and more like:

weird “friendly” FBI visits to organizers and donors;

grant money drying up;

tax audits for certain nonprofits;

a few high‑profile “domestic terrorism” prosecutions promoted as neutral law‑and‑order, but aimed at a very particular spectrum of dissent

You don’t need a camp when people are too scared to organize, fund, or speak.

Why the Camp Question Still Matters

You might say: okay, that’s bad, but it’s still a long way from “detention camps.” True. Legally and logistically, there are still real obstacles to openly detaining domestic political opponents en masse.

But there are at least three reasons your antennae are right to twitch.

The detention template already exists. The United States already runs a network of immigration detention centers—often privately operated, under‑regulated, and effectively warehousing people for long stretches with limited court access—under the label of “civil” rather than criminal confinement.

Christian nationalism is camp‑curious on immigration. Survey data from PRRI and others show that Americans who score high on Christian nationalism are far more likely to support internment‑style detention for undocumented immigrants, including holding them in camps until deportation and limiting their access to courts.

Crisis is always the wildcard. NSPM‑7 and the Bible message together build the moral and bureaucratic scaffolding. You don’t need camps now. You need them on the shelf—as an option—when the next “unifying” crisis arrives: a terror attack, large‑scale unrest, war, or a manufactured emergency.

If the public has already accepted that some groups are not really part of “one Nation under God,” and that “anti‑American, anti‑Christian” forces are “the enemy within,” then emergency detention of certain categories becomes a harder fight to stop.

We are not there yet. But we are laying the tracks.

So Where Are We on the Ladder?

Putting it all together, here’s my read of the current moment:

Stage 1–2: Myth and mandate. The Bible message and related pronouncements lock in a Christian‑nationalist narrative about who “we” are and who threatens us.

Stage 3: Doctrine. NSPM‑7 writes a new domestic‑terrorism strategy that explicitly turns existing powers onto “organized” political networks, nonprofits, and donors.

Stage 4: Surveillance and mapping. JTTFs are told to look at organizations, funding, and “predicate actions” behind unrest; Treasury and IRS are brought in to follow the money.

Stage 5: Instrumentalization. The real test is how aggressively this script gets used: who is investigated, who gets raided, whose donors get scared off, who ends up in the first wave of showcase prosecutions.

Stages 6–7—the truly open forms of detention and quasi‑camp structures aimed at domestic dissent—are not yet policy, and anyone who tells you it’s all signed and sealed is skipping steps.

But the danger is not imaginary. It’s incremental.

You don’t go from Bible rally to barbed wire overnight. You go from Bible rally to “enemy within,” to expanded surveillance, to chilled dissent, to a public that has been trained to see certain human beings as expendable for the sake of “one Nation under God.”

What We Do With This

I’m not writing this to panic you. I’m writing it so we stop letting these documents live in separate tabs.

One tab is a religious love letter to the nation’s soul. The other is a technical memo about who gets treated like a security problem.

They’re part of the same story.

If you sit in a church pew and love the Bible, this is not a call to abandon your faith. It’s a call to refuse to let your Scriptures be weaponized as a loyalty test while the state quietly rewires its definition of “terrorism” around your neighbors.

If you’re outside the Christian-nationalist circle, it’s a reminder that you are not imagining the pattern. The rhetoric about “rededicating” the country and the language about “anti‑Christian” threats aren’t random. They’re coordinates on the same map.

And the first line of defense is naming what’s actually being built, while we still have the bandwidth—and the legal space—to say no.