If you know who D. G. Hart is then this link falls into the "no surprise at all" idiom.
I actually have his book A Secular Faith in my reading backlog, though, and have actually enjoyed some of his books over the years. His observation that conservatives should've realized the Reagan coalition of anti-communist hawks, libertarians and social conservatives that barely held together during The Gipper's two terms unraveled as soon as Bush Sr. got to the Oval Office seemed like a reasonable assessment.
Having read some of Martin Marty's work over the last couple of decades, yeah, Hart kind of has a point that Marty was more even-keeled than some newer scholars in seeing that Christian nationalist impulses across the spectrum have always been a mixed bag.
Then again, had John Neville Figgis' warning about the prominence of the UK having become both a secular state and a pluralist state by 1911 gotten more traction among some Christian scholars ... Christians might not have the same level of panic about "taking back America" these days in some circles as some secularists have about the not entirely surprising persistence of American civic religious impulses in red state regions leaning on Christian tropes.
Walter McDougall's schematic of promised land/crusader state seemed on point highlighting how "everyone" in the U. S. takes the crusader state paradigm for granted since roughly Woodrow Wilson. The fights seem to be less over whether the United States ought to be a crusader state than what crusade the crusader state should be fighting.
But obviously I've digressed.
