Over the past year, The Dartmouth has devoted significant attention to New Hampshire’s changing election laws. The paper has covered new voter identification requirements, changes to absentee voting, lawsuits over voter registration rules and, most recently, a warning from U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon ’89 that state election officials face criminal liability for knowingly allowing noncitizens to remain on state voter rolls.
Taken individually, each story is about legislation or litigation, mostly pertaining to the Granite State. Together, however, they suggest something larger. They reflect a country arguing not just over who gets to vote and how elections should be conducted, but over who belongs in the political community, how citizenship should be defined and the kind of democracy Americans want.
Those underlying arguments are not always spoken aloud in the polite language of New Hampshire politics. In my home of Central Washington, however, they are often amplified through loudspeakers.
Last month, over Father’s Day weekend, thousands of men — and only men — gathered at one of the country’s premier concert venues, the Gorge Amphitheatre, for Freedom Con. The two-day conference was organized by Wenatchee, Washington’s Grace City Church and its affiliated ministry, Stronger Man Nation — organizations whose ambitions extend far beyond Central Washington.
Through the Stronger Man Nation podcast and collaborations with other national conservative religious figures, Grace City Pastor Josh McPherson has built a national audience around his message of “biblical manhood” and the promotion of “Christian statesmanship.” McPherson has also made multiple visits to the White House to meet with President Donald Trump and senior administration officials.
At Freedom Con, while there was worship music, prayers and sermons, the conference did not end with an emphasis on personal faith. Organizers called the event an “American Congress of Christian Men” and urged attendees to become “Christian statesmen” by working to influence their local, state and federal governments as well as their communities and school boards. The message was that political leadership itself should become an expression of Christian discipleship. As one attendee told the New York Times, “Everyone shows up to vote for president, but no one shows up to vote for dogcatcher. I want a biblical dogcatcher.”
The remark was notable because it captured how participants understood the conference’s purpose: not simply to influence national politics, but to shape every level of American government, from school boards and county commissions to state legislatures and Congress.
Freedom Con did not advertise itself as a Christian nationalist conference. It did not have to. The language of “Christian statesmanship” and restoring America’s Christian foundations reflects ideas central to the movement.
Christian nationalism, it should be noted, is not synonymous with Christianity. Millions of Americans rightly allow their faith to shape their civic participation, and our constitutional tradition protects that freedom. Christian nationalism puts forward a different claim: that the United States possesses a distinctly Christian identity that government should actively preserve or restore, blurring the line between religious conviction and civic authority. That definition can sound abstract; the movement’s own rhetoric makes it considerably more concrete.
At Freedom Con, McPherson urged attendees “to action and statesmanship,” calling on men to undertake the “sacred work of public reformation.” Those ideas do not necessarily lead to the rejection of traditional American values of democratic equality. Yet, some influential thinkers associated with the broader movement have gone considerably further, explicitly denouncing those values.
Doug Wilson, an influential Christian nationalist leader whom U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth follows and personally invited to preach at the Pentagon, advocates for barring non-Christians from public office and restricting public spaces to Christian activities. Wilson also recently defended repealing the Nineteenth Amendment during an interview with National Public Radio.
Christian nationalism is not confined to church auditoriums or West Coast amphitheaters. Dhillon’s warning to New Hampshire officials is worth reading alongside her other federal role. As head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, she also sits on the Trump administration’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, established by executive order in February 2025, and has redirected the division’s enforcement priorities toward what she calls anti-Christian bias and “woke ideology.”
The same office scrutinizing New Hampshire’s voter rolls is also working under a director dedicated to elevating Christian identity as a protected federal category.
When the official responsible for enforcing federal election law also sits on a task force to protect Christian identity in government, it helps explain why debates over voting increasingly become debates over who belongs in the political community. Statutes restricting absentee ballots, narrowing voter ID rules or challenging voter rolls are rarely drawn up in isolation; they are the practical machinery that turns abstract claims about “who belongs” into law.
Seen through that lens, The Dartmouth’s election coverage begins to look less like a series of unrelated policy disputes and more like local windows into a broader national struggle over citizenship, political authority and constitutional identity.
To be sure, not every voter identification law, absentee ballot restriction or dispute over voter rolls stems from Christian nationalism. Many supporters advance those policies out of genuine, if inflated, concerns about election security or public confidence. Those arguments deserve to be evaluated on their own merits.
Further, we should not reflexively dismiss movements we disagree with or caricature those who participate in them. We should instead try to understand and appraise their claims honestly.
Ideas matter because they shape the questions we ask and the policies we ultimately pursue. When influential movements begin redefining who belongs in the American political community, who should exercise authority and what relationship religion should have to government, routine debates over election administration inevitably become debates over the meaning of citizenship itself.
That is why The Dartmouth’s election coverage has been about more than state statutes and litigation. Whether intentional or not, that coverage has been documenting one local front in a national argument over who governs, who counts as a full member of the political community and what kind of nation we hope to preserve.
From the statehouse all the way down to the local dogcatcher, the rules of our democracy are shaped by who we believe citizens and voters should be.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
