CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM
Christian Nationalism Is Dangerous
In his article for Time (7/28/22) “Faith Is Powerful. That’s Why Christian Nationalism Is So Dangerous,", Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove begins “At a Turning Point USA summit in Florida on 6/23/22, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene declared, “I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.” Whether she is repeating QAnon conspiracies or spreading misinformation about COVID-19, Greene has made a name for herself by defying fact-based journalism and conventional norms to play to the MAGA base. But when it comes to her embrace of Christian Nationalism, she is simply parroting the narrative of the religious right for decades. Since the late 1970s, a right-wing movement responding to the civil and women’s rights movements has used the language of “biblical values” to recruit people of faith. As a white Christian who grew up in the rural South, Wilson-Hartgrove knows Rep. Greene is preaching to a crowd that has been prepped to respond with a hearty “amen.” The prevalence of Christian nationalism as an ideology makes it the greatest threat to democracy in America today.
Growing up in the Southern Baptist church, Wilson-Hartgrove learned this story well: America was special because it was founded as a Christian nation. Our enemies were liberals who did not respect “traditional, biblical values” and threatened the moral order by embracing feminism. By demonizing liberals and trading on fear that their policy decisions would lead us toward cultural collapse, the religious right convinced many in his community that the GOP was God’s Own Party. As a young person, he got involved in Republican politics and paged for Senator Strom Thurmond because Wilson-Hartgrove embraced this narrative.
But Christian nationalism was not the only story Wilson-Hartgrove's people taught him. He also memorized the words of Jesus in Sunday school and knew the Bible’s concern for the poor, the immigrant, the sick, and the downtrodden. The biblical prophets clearly articulated the dangers of religious nationalism and decried the political leaders who devoured their people while religious leaders whitewashed their evil deeds. In the late ‘90s, Wilson-Hartgrove had a crisis of faith where he realized that he had to choose between the teachings of Jesus and the lies that Christian nationalism had told him. He did what his Sunday school teachers had taught him to do: He chose Jesus.
But it took him a while to find the community of Jesus followers who rejected Christian nationalism. As it turns out, this was by design. In her book Shadow Network, Anne Nelson has chronicled how Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the religious right in the 1970s, also helped established the Council for National Policy, a roundtable of leaders of the Republican Party, leaders of the religious right, the NRA, churches, nonprofits, and family foundations. The CNP worked with independent media companies and talk radio to coordinate what Nelson calls the “wallpaper effect” in which the Christian nationalist narrative was repeated and reinforced. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in promoting this narrative in communities like the one where he grew up. For its own political purposes, this network conspired to hijack his people’s faith.
Forty years later, when people outside of this cultural world ask how fellow Americans can vote for Donald Trump or repeat obvious lies about a global pandemic or the 2020 election, it is clear to Wilson-Hartgrove how wide the web of Christian nationalism has been cast. Rep. Greene is not taking any risks when she declares herself a Christian nationalist. She is playing to the base that turned out more Republican voters for Donald Trump than have ever voted for any Republican candidate in U.S. history.
Though he knows the power of Christian nationalism firsthand, he also know it is a minority movement with a diminishing base. Politicians like Greene are compelled to shout the quiet part out loud because a growing majority of Americans realize the con of religious right. The so-called “pro-life” movement played on imagined concern for the unborn to empower justices who lied in their confirmation hearings, overturned Roe v. Wade, and stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to save lives by mitigating the climate crisis. The same politicians who claim to care about life from the moment of conception refused to extend a child tax credit, and nearly 4 million American children fell into poverty after its expiration. Most Americans reject theocracy by judicial decree, with 6 in 10 opposing the Dobbs decision. What’s more, a recent Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) poll found that most religious Americans also oppose this crowning achievement of the religious right. The only outliers are the religious communities most directly targeted by efforts to promote Christian nationalism: white evangelical Protestants and Latter-day Saints.
The reactionary forces that targeted my faith community 40 years ago would have never invested the time and resources they did to hijack Christianity if they did not understand its power. Our faith tells us who we are and gives us courage to sacrifice and endure incredible suffering for what we believe is right. Christian nationalism has built a base that is ready and willing to subvert the will of the American people. But Christians who join with Americans of other faiths and of no faith can practice our faith in a way that defends democracy and promotes the common good. If we do not, people like Rep. Greene, who claim to speak for all Christians, will impose their will on all Americans.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is author of Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good.
(https://time.com/6201483/christian-nationalism-threat-democracy/)
Bad Faith
In his article for the Sonoma Index-Tribune (2024) “Coyote Eager to Discuss ‘Bad Faith”, (5/24/24) Daniel Johnson interviews the activist Peter Coyote who will be a speaker at the screening of Stephen Ujlaki’s documentary “Bad Faith” on Christian Nationalism. “Evangelicals are a legitimate Christian expression, don’t get me wrong,” Coyote said. “But Christian ‘nationalism’ is not really nationalism. It’s really fascism hiding behind Jesus’ robes. Its followers have always been around and always have been bullies. Whenever I see them, I’m ready to go to war.”
He says the power of these followers waned in the 1960s, but has been gaining considerable momentum recently. “In the 1960s, they all had to keep their mouths shut because it (the movement) was unpopular: It was seen for what it was,” Coyote said. “But it has reemerged with (President Donald) Trump. He gave them permission to crawl out from under the rocks. “When the president of the United States comes out and starts treating Brownshirts like they’re Boy Scouts, it gives them permission.”
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White Evangelicals Must Choose
In his article for Time (3/1/21) I, Too, Was Once a Soldier of the Apocalypse: Why White Evangelicals Must Choose Between Reform and American Extremism, professor Charles King, starts, “In my small Pentecostal church, we all expected the guillotine to be set up in the parking lot, probably by the One World Government.” It was Arkansas in the early 1980s, and to his youth group, certain truths were known because they had been repeated by friends and adults, long before Twitter or Gab.
Procter & Gamble products should be shunned because there was a hidden 666, the mark of the beast, inside the company logo. If you played certain rock songs backwards, you would hear entreaties to smoke marijuana. A movie screened in the church sanctuary, “A Distant Thunder,” showed what would happen when the United Nations was given free rein during the coming Tribulation, as forecast in the Book of Revelation. The global government would lop off the heads of those who honored Jesus and refused to bow to state tyranny. Better to be ready for the Rapture.
On Jan. 6, when he saw crosses, “Jesus Saves” signs, and the Christian flag among the crowds storming the U.S. Capitol, his stomach seized. It was a reminder that he, too, once thought of himself as a foot soldier in a divine cause.
The story they told themselves was all bravery and justice. A devil-serving elite was arrayed against them, so they geared up for battle against “the world,” the term for everyone else. The boys would go to the woods to shoot guns, dressed in the khaki uniforms of their church’s alternative to the too-secular Boy Scouts. The girls did macramé. they knew a few Italian Catholics, had heard of Jews (misguided, we believed, but mysteriously favored by God), and might have spoken once or twice to a Black person from a neighboring town. But they assumed that when Christ returned and set up his kingdom, people like them—white and righteous—would be first in line at his heavenly palace.
Despite important statements by some evangelical leaders in the weeks since Jan. 6, versions of these ideas still swirl around pulpits and Sunday school classrooms every week. For the United States to reckon fully with Donald Trump and his legacy, white evangelical leaders and their communities must lead a deep process of inward-looking discernment. It is beyond time for a new Reformation inside evangelical Christianity, one that will reject the holy war against liberals, journalists, scientists, non-believers, and other actual human beings. Without it, this form of faith, despite its glories and intimate truths, will remain the official ideology of America’s white tribalism.
There is, of course, no such thing as “an evangelical.” American Christians who might describe themselves with that label share a broad set of commitments and experiences, among them a personal story of salvation, belief in the authority of scripture, and a charge to propagate the good news of Jesus Christ. The differences, however, are stark, even from congregation to congregation. Some, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination, have long courted political power. Others, such as the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal group—with its openness to ecstatic worship and present-day miracles—have tended to avoid it. Unaffiliated, interdenominational, and multisite churches, such as the international Hillsong franchise or Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, add further complexity to the American evangelical landscape.
However, some of the most committed supporters of Trump share a worldview that might be described as radical Christianism, an outlook on politics and culture that has remained largely unchanged for decades. It traffics in conspiracy and encourages distrusting one’s own eyes and ears. It substitutes idiosyncratic interpretations of ancient texts for questioning engagement guided by real experts in languages and history. It is beholden to charismatic leaders who combine consumerism, celebrity culture, and stadium-level entertainment, a mix pioneered by Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1930s and exploited by Jimmy Swaggart and others in the 1980s.
Its leaders have long been early-adopters of new technology to build their fan base, from radio to television and beyond. They have stoked a conspicuous identity politics that in recent years has fueled a boom in self-affirming consumption. Retail stores such as Altar’d States and Hobby Lobby, whose owners financed the grand Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, offer faith-based fashion and home décor. The blockbuster Left Behind books and films brought the end times to a mass audience in the 2000s. They primed the market for a new mainstream genre, Christian movies, that includes Miracles from Heaven with Jennifer Garner and The Trump Prophecy, the story of an Orlando firefighter’s vision that Donald Trump would become president if, incongruously, enough Christians blew a shofar.
In all these ways, the most zealous followers of Trump and his successors are less like the supporters of an autocrat and more like the adherents of televangelists such as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. At the height of their PTL Club in the 1980s, the Bakkers solicited money from the rural poor, courted middle-class suburbanites, and even built a theme park before splitting up—Jim to become a convicted felon and hawker of fake coronavirus cures, Tammy Faye to become a gay icon. In fact, it would not be surprising if Trump’s next move were to start a church. His base and the Bakkers’—older Americans susceptible to cultish hucksters and QAnon—are dispiritingly similar.
Today, Christian leaders who once took Islam to task for its alleged role in fomenting terrorism among a small group of extremists should now look in the mirror. When religion fuses with grievance and existential struggle, it can be a powerful motivator for action. When it gets a whiff of power, from fundamentalist Hinduism in India to violent Buddhism in Myanmar, the results are more dangerous still. Without hard work right now, evangelical Christianity will cement its place as the church of narrow American nativism.
There are pathways to healing. Church leaders can organize de-radicalization programs modeled on those used successfully by some mosques. They can break the God-and-guns nexus that twists legitimate sporting equipment into a holy relic. Internet literacy classes and addiction recovery groups can help older Christians use online information and social media responsibly. Ministers can speak openly about conspiracy theories and the sin of white nationalism. Preaching along these lines is not “being political.” It is speaking directly to the burdens and temptations that are harming the people sitting in the pews.
To help pull themselves out of the quicksand of tribal Christianity, white evangelicals also have a powerful tool right in their midst: their own teenagers. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, evangelical youth mirror their parents in some ways. They are more likely than other Christian teens to say that religion is very important in their lives, for example, and two-thirds report believing that only one religion is true. But a generational gap is already apparent. According to other research, compared to their elders, evangelical youth are more world-aware, more likely to have friends from different racial or ethnic backgrounds, and more comfortable with cultural difference. They are already more at home in the America of the near future, one where white people can no longer assume demographic dominance or easily insist that the United States is a “Christian nation.” Young people have a pent-up talent for loving acceptance, unless they are scared out of it by the adults in charge.
“Don’t let the liberal professors change you,” a church leader told King when he went off to college, the first in his family to leave the farm in the Ozarks. They did, and he even became one. Yet he still thinks of himself as a Pentecostal, despite it all. As with secular Jews and cultural Muslims, Christians who were born into being born-again can find in their own tradition things that go beyond strict doctrine and orthodox belief. To King, this form of religion is like a native language, the comfortable grammar of his encounters with ultimate things.
Interpreted with openness and self-awareness, the many types of evangelical Christianity can be heart-stoppingly profound—mysterious and assured, grounded, and soaring, practiced in the diagnostics of human pain. To remake the church, white evangelical leaders just need to do the one thing King wished more of his mentors had managed: to stop teaching their young people how not to love.
King, a professor at Georgetown University, is the author most recently “Gods of the Upper Air,” winner of the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in nonfiction. (https://time.com/5942445/reform-evangelical-christianity/)
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The Unmaking of the White Christian Worldview
9/29/21
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As I came of age in Woodville Heights Baptist Church, on the white working-class side of Jackson, Miss., I internalized a cycle of sin, confession and repentance as a daily part of my life. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, this was a double inheritance. Beneath this seemingly icy surface of guilt and culpability flowed a deeper current of innocence and entitlement. Individually, I was a sinner, but collectively, I was part of a special tribe. Whatever our humble social stations might be, we white Christians were God’s chosen instruments of spreading salvation and civilization to the world.
The power and sheer cultural dominance of white Christianity in America historically bound these contradictory sensibilities together. But today we are witnessing the unmaking of this white Christian worldview, and it has unleashed remarkably destructive forces into American life.
Understanding this dissolution is the key to deciphering one of the most vexing puzzles in our politics: how a purportedly sober Christian worldview has become a volatile cocktail of fealty to Donald Trump, wild-eyed rants about vaccines, faith in QAnon conspiracies and hysteria over critical race theory.
Recent surveys by PRRI, an organization I lead, reveal disturbing realities among white evangelical Protestants today: 61% believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. And the idea of patriotism has taken a troubling turn: 68% believe Trump is a “true patriot,” and one in three believe that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” More than seven in ten deny that the history of slavery and discrimination in the U.S. has any bearing on economic inequalities between white and Black Americans today. White evangelicals are the religious group most likely to refuse COVID-19 vaccines and object to mask mandates. One in four are QAnon conspiracy believers.
Understanding how we got here requires entering the white evangelical cultural world, one in which I grew up. As was common, my initiation rites started early. I accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and savior and was baptized at age 6. As I approached adolescence, I was encouraged to cultivate an identity as a disciple of Christ. I was taught to develop my own daily “quiet time,” about 30 minutes dedicated to scripture reading, journaling and prayer.
There were also communal rituals. During informal Sunday evening services, members often “gave their testimony.” Sometimes it was spontaneous, a member rising to break the prayerful silence. But the practice was also built into the liturgy (although we would never have used that suspect word, which belonged more to the Episcopalians on the other side of town). These scheduled talks were marked “Testimony” in the bifold church bulletin, with the name of the recruited witness indicated on the right margin.
Critically, what stitched these private and public practices together was an emphasis on personal sin. Common themes were failures in roles and priorities. The grown-ups promised to be more honest in their business dealings and to be more godly parents and spouses—husbands better leaders and wives more pliant to that leadership. When youth were invited to testify, we were often given guidance about how to be honest but appropriate—typically an expression of regret coupled with a promise to reform from running with the wrong crowd.
But like a torch held too near the eyes in a dark room, these acts of intense discipleship illuminated little beyond our insular community. Nothing outside our intimate lives, not even (or particularly) major racial upheavals in our community, were perceptible objects of Christian concern.
When Black kids finally showed up in my third-grade classroom in the 1975-76 school year—a full two decades after Brown v. Board of Education—my white Sunday school teachers and pastor remained silent about this transformation of our daily social lives. When Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign with a speech emphasizing “states’ rights” in Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers had been murdered during Freedom Summer, Mississippi’s white Christians responded by consummating their marriage to the Republican Party, one that remains strong today.
When Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted in 1994 for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, there were no discussions in my Southern Baptist seminary about the silence and complicity of white Christian churches during those murderous days or since—even though De La Beckwith had been a member in good standing at a white Christian church and Evers’s last act had been organizing an unsuccessful campaign to integrate Jackson’s influential First Baptist Church.
Looking back on it now, it’s clear that this intense preoccupation with personal sin, by design, kept our field of vision shallow and allowed us to sit, Sunday after Sunday, “silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it so devastatingly in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
But now the bulwark of white Christian America is crumbling. We are no longer, demographically speaking, a white Christian nation. White evangelical Protestants—the once self-proclaimed “moral majority”—have fallen from nearly a quarter of Americans just over a decade ago to 14.5% of the public today. And Southern Baptists, who grew to be the largest Protestant denomination of all by the mid-20th century, have lost more than 2 million members across the same period.
As the shadow cast by white Christian churches and institutions is shortening, we’re witnessing in real time the anomie this contraction is producing among many of its adherents. Many are responding by abandoning the ranks. The increasingly desperate remainder are screaming defiantly from the ramparts, determined, to the last man, to defend the breached walls.
James Baldwin wrote, with anger and pity, about the Black experience of seeing white people as “the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.” He understood whites, and white Christians in particular, to be trapped in a kind of self-induced psychosis, stemming from the strain of sustaining a conception of themselves as repentant sinners while living lives of indifference and violence toward their fellow Black and brown citizens.
In these twilight years of white Christian America, for those still within the veil, the strain of holding these contradictions can lead to a dissociative state, where self-reflection becomes treasonous and self-delusion a necessity. The fruits of this spirit are abundant. Empathy signals weakness, and disdain strength. Prophets are shunned, and authoritarians embraced. Truth is exchanged for a lie.
We can puzzle over these phenomena separately, but they are best understood together as symptoms of collective ill health. The willingness of so many white Christians to embrace little lies everywhere stems from the necessity of protecting the big lie that is everything.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote movingly about the double-consciousness that Black children have thrust upon them in America as their sense of self is distorted and refracted back at them through white eyes. He vividly described the struggle for the Black American “to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”
The problem today for white Americans, particularly we white Christians, is the opposite. Having grown up with the comforting illusion that sinfulness and innocence, humility and dominion can coexist in a single consciousness, it is increasingly evident that this amalgamation is a sign of deep moral, spiritual and political malaise. Rather than holding these warring selves together, we must banish one.
The first step toward recovery is to separate being white from being Christian. Practically, we must reject what have, for too long, been three articles of our faith: that the Bible is a blueprint for a white Christian America; that Jesus, the son of God, is a white savior; and that the church is a sanctuary of white innocence. Most fundamentally, we must confess that whatever the personal sins of white people, in the past and present, they pale in comparison to the systemic ways we have built and blessed a society that reflects a conviction that, to us and to God, our lives matter more.
The only path to health, for both our faith and our democracy, is for white Christians to embrace a terrifying but saving truth: what we have taken to be the bedrock of our faith and a biblical worldview—that we alone are God’s chosen people to bring salvation and civilization to the world—is not an eternal truth grounded in the Bible but rather a self-serving lie rooted in white supremacy.
BY ROBERT P. JONES; https://time.com/6102117/white-christian-americans-sins/
Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the New York Times bestselling author of the The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future as well as White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award. He writes a weekly newsletter at https://www.whitetoolong.net/ .
White Supremacy
In his article for Time, (5/23/22) It’s Time to Stop Giving Christianity a Pass on White Supremacy and Violence, Robert P. Jones states, “In the wake of the massacre in Buffalo, we have all, naturally, tried to understand what could have caused someone to commit such a horrific act of violence. This young white man linked his motivations to fears about demographic and cultural changes in the U.S., dynamics that he believed were resulting in the replacement of “the white race.”
The shooting has spurred a national discussion about the mainstreaming of these concerns, often summarized under the term “replacement theory.” Most of the attention has been given to the demographic component of this theory, while the cultural aspects have been overlooked.
But the fear of cultural replacement has an unambiguous lineage that gives it specific content. At the center of the “great replacement” logic, there is—and has always been—a desperate desire to preserve some version of western European Christendom. Far too many contemporary analysts, and even the Department of Justice, have not seen clearly that the prize being protected is not just the racial composition of the country but the dominance of a racial and religious identity. If we fail to grasp the power of this ethno-religious appeal, we will misconstrue the nature of, and underestimate the power of, the threat before us.
In a 180-page racist screed, the Buffalo shooter wrote that he was particularly inspired by the man behind the 2019 massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which claimed 51 lives. The Christchurch shooter also left a manifesto entitled “The Great Replacement,” which talked at length about “the Muslim invasion of Europe.” So, the incident that most inspired the Buffalo shooter was a man of European descent murdering Muslims praying in mosques located in a city pointedly named “Christchurch.”
The Christchurch shooter in turn took particular inspiration from the ideology of a terrorist who killed nearly 100 people at a youth camp on Utøya island in Norway in 2011. The Utøya shooter also published a manifesto, which contains clear white Christian nationalist appeals throughout. He asked God to help him succeed in his mission to expel all Muslims from Europe, and he decried the way multiculturalism was deconstructing European culture and “European Christendom.” Toward the end of the document, he proclaimed, “Onward Christian soldiers! Celebrate us, the martyrs of the conservative revolution, for we will soon dine in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
In the U.S., this drive to preserve white Christian dominance undergirded the worldview of the Ku Klux Klan when it reemerged in the early part of the 20th century. We rightly remember the terrorism aimed at Black Americans, but the KKK was also explicitly anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic; it existed to protect the dominance of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America. In 1960, in my home state of Mississippi, Governor Ross Barnett regularly blended his Christian identity with talk about the threat of “white genocide.” Off the campaign trail, Barnett also served as head of the large men’s Sunday school program at the most influential church in the state, First Baptist Church. After his successful segregationist campaign, FBC blessed him with a consecration service and a gift of a pulpit Bible in recognition of his protection of their white and Christian supremacist worldview.
Why are we seeing the rise in white supremacist violence over the last decade? In short, in the U.S. context, the election, and re-election, of our first Black President coincided with the sea change of no longer being a majority white Christian nation (as I noted in my book The End of White Christian America, white Christians went from 54% to 47% in that period, down to 44% today). These twin shocks to centuries of white Christian dominance set the stage for Donald Trump.
Trump’s “Make American Great Again” formula—the stoking of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Black sentiment while making nativist appeals to the Christian right—contains all the tropes of the old replacement theory. The nostalgic appeal of “again” harkens back to a 1950s America, when white Christian churches were full and white Christians comprised a supermajority of the U.S. population; a period when we added “under God” to the pledge of allegiance and “In God We Trust” to our currency.
These fears about the “great replacement” are not fringe among conservative subgroups today, according to recent data from Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). While only 29% of Americans agree, for example, that “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” that number rises to dangerous levels among a range of groups comprising the conservative base in U.S. politics: 67% among those who say they most trust Fox News; 65% among QAnon believers; 60% among Republicans; 50% among white evangelical Protestants, and 43% among white American without a college degree.
Moreover, among white Americans, there is high (two-thirds) overlap between beliefs in Christian nationalism and replacement theory. And both views are associated with higher support for political violence among whites:
White Americans who agree that “God intended America to be a promised land for European Christians” are four times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (43% vs. 10%).
White Americans who believe that “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” are nearly six times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (45% vs. 8%).
The Department of Homeland Security has declared that white supremacists “remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.” President Joe Biden, importantly, became the first U.S. President to use the words “white supremacy” in his inaugural address; and in the wake of the massacre in Buffalo, he called white supremacy a “poison…running through our body politic.” But while each identified white supremacy and dangerous “ideologies,” there is no acknowledgment of the documented ways right-wing Christianity has nourished these views.
There is a troubling religious double standard in the U.S.—one which threatens our safety and our democracy. If these same kinds of appeals and violent actions were being made and committed by Muslims, for example, most white Americans would be demanding actions to eradicate a domestic threat from “radical Islamic terrorism,” a term we heard relentlessly during the Trump era. But because Christianity is the dominant religion in this country, its role in supporting domestic terrorism has been literally unspeakable.
The clear historical record, and contemporary attitudinal data, merit an urgent discussion of white Christian nationalism as a serious and growing threat to our democracy. if we are to understand the danger in which we find ourselves today, we will have to be able to use the words white Christian nationalism and domestic terrorism in the same sentence.
https://time.com/6179886/christianity-white-supremacy-buffalo/
Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future as well as White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award. He writes a weekly newsletter at https://www.whitetoolong.net/ .
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Why White Christian Nationalism Isn’t Going Away
11/13/22
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The midterm elections were hardly a shot of confidence for Christian nationalist politicians. True, Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene in highly gerrymandered districts cruised to victory. But candidates like Doug Mastriano, Dan Cox, and Darren Bailey lost their elections handily, and others like Lauren Boebert, Kari Lake, and Mark Finchem were all in hotly contested races.
What is the likelihood that Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalism take these results as a referendum against their movement? We think that’s highly doubtful. That’s because white Christian nationalists systematically over-estimate their strength in numbers. And they will almost certainly do so in the future.
Christian nationalism is currently a minority position in the United States. Most Americans don’t believe that America has a special relationship with God, or that the federal government should declare the U.S. a “Christian nation,” or that being a Christian is important to being truly American. And most Americans want a separation of church and state. Moreover, tracking such views over decades shows they are slowly declining, not growing. But that’s not what white Christian nationalists believe. In fact, we find white Christian nationalists are uniquely confident about their prevalence and the growth of their own views.
In our recent national survey, we asked Americans how much they agreed with statements like “My views on the role of religion in government represent the views of most Americans” and “The percentage of Americans who share my views on the role of religion in government is growing.” Empirically speaking, neither statement is true for Christian nationalists. Yet, the more that white Americans subscribe to Christian nationalist ideology, the more they believe most Americans share their views on religion in government and the more they think that percentage is growing.
For example, among white Americans who disagree with the statement “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation,” less than 25 percent believe most Americans share their views on religion in government. Under 30 percent believe that percentage is growing. In contrast, among those who strongly agree that the government should formally recognizing Christianity as the national religion, nearly half (46 percent) believe most Americans share their views and that this percentage is growing. Less than a quarter disagreed with either statement. And we see nearly identical patterns for other indicators of Christian nationalism.
Given what we know about the slow decline of Christian nationalist beliefs, and the inconsistent results Christian nationalist candidates experienced last Tuesday, how could white Americans who subscribe to that ideology believe most Americans back their views in growing numbers? Where does such confidence come from? One reason is what social scientists call the “false consensus effect.” The false consensus effect is when people tend to wrongly think their own views are held by the majority. This happens most often when people are surrounded only by those who agree with them. That is certainly likely to be the case among right-wing leaders and groups who trust few media sources beyond those catering to their views.
Another more theological reason lies in various assurances all Christians cling to: that victory is in God’s hands and thus is assured. And in an even more nuanced versions of this theology, some outspoken Christian nationalists like the antisemitic founder of Gab Andrew Torba explicitly preach a “theology of victory.” They believe Jesus Christ is already ruling and all his followers must do is claim dominion over the nations on his behalf. Still another answer transcends Christian theology and helps make sense of a curious paradox. In other studies, we’ve shown that white Christian nationalists tend to believe that whites and Christians are the most persecuted group in the country. Yet here we’ve shown they also believe they represent the growing majority. This paradox—believing they are the majority but are also oppressed—reflects the populist, anti-elite character of white Christian nationalism.
Americans who subscribe to white Christian nationalism see themselves as representing “the nation,” and “the real Americans” over and against a corrupt “regime” of elites who would take away their rights and plunge the nation further into decadence. This should sound familiar. White Christian nationalists see themselves as a “moral majority,” who only need to be mobilized to thwart the “Luciferian” agenda of globalism, socialism, secularism, rampant crime, and sexual deviance.
Regardless of the reasons for their confidence, what is clear is that white Christian nationalist leaders and those who follow them are unlikely to be dissuaded from their mission when confronted with the reality of their shrinking numbers or the struggles of candidates like Mastriano or Boebert.
If the results of 2020 and the ensuing embrace of the “Big Lie” are any indication, empirical reality is unlikely to change the narrative in their minds.
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BY Samuel L. Perry and Andrew Whitehead, 11/13/22, https://time.com/6233438/white-christian-nationalism-isnt-going-away/
Perry (@profsamperry) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. He is among the nation’s leading experts on conservative Christianity in American politics, race, sexuality, and families. His most recent books include the award-winning Taking America Back for God (with Andrew Whitehead) and The Flag and the Cross (with Philip Gorski).
Whitehead (@ndrewwhitehead) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at IUPUI and author of the forthcoming book, American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church. He is co-author (with Samuel Perry) of the award-winning book Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States.
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