Two takes on Christian nationalism

Maybe I'd have warmed to this book more if I hadn't just come off a long election campaign when I read it. Election campaigns are binary -- votes say up or down, "yes" or "no" -- to candidates and their policies. And in last fall's election, the issue of Donald Trump, "yes" or "no," was also a proxy for Christian nationalism, "yes" or "no." And for the moment, "no" won and the democracy gets to live to fight another day.

Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States by sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, as befits the conventions of their discipline, makes discussion of who is a Christian nationalist murky and complex. Christian nationalists are human (in addition to being dangerous toxins in the body politic) so naturally there are complexities in their relationship to their repressive ideal. But I'm really only interested in stomping out their influence.

The Whitehead and Perry paradigm for overcomplicating our understanding of Christian (mostly white) nationalism is an approach, borrowed from the marketing world, which is called in its arena of origin, "psychobehavioral segmentation." That is, they analyze surveys of a lot of people on a lot of questions and use the responses to divide the U.S. population into groups in relation to Christian nationalism. This particular effort creates four such groups.

Rejectors, Resisters, Accommodators, Ambassadors

The result is a spectrum in which a majority falls between two extremes. From the label, can you guess which of these groups are the extremes?  ... I wasn't so certain either.

Ambassadors on the extreme right are the full-on Christian nationalists. As is implied by the structure of Whitehead and Perry's model, it turns out most people don't live at the extremes and are sometimes confused by those who do.

These authors want us to know that not all Christian nationalists are evangelicals, and vice versa. Nor is religiosity and personal piety in and of itself predictive of Christian nationalism. Islamophobia, homophobia, sexism, gender rigidity, racism, and the like are entwined with Christian nationalism, though not exactly co-extensive. Yes, people are complicated.

The backdrop of any investigation of Christian nationalism needs to be the insight these folks lost the culture (and so many of their own kids) years ago; this painful loss drives them to be so dangerous. They would rather tear the country up than share. And events since January 6 show they've got an entire Republican party at their back.

Whitehead and Perry understand where their investigation takes them, though they sure go through a lot of rigamarole to get there:

... strong support for Christian nationalism is -- without a doubt -- a threat to a pluralistic democratic society. ... Christian nationalist ideology is fundamentally focused on gaining and maintaining access to power. ... Because the embrace of Christian nationalism fuses national and religious symbols and identities, it is able to legitimate its desires for the country in the will of the Christian God, bringing the transcendent to bear on everyday realities. ...There is no room for disagreement.

For all the human complexities of its adherents, Christian nationalism can't be understood or dialogued out of existence -- it must be resisted in all its shapes -- and rendered powerless.

• • •

Elizabeth Neumann is a former civil servant in the Trump Department of Homeland Security, a lapsed Republican; she resigned after she had named violence from "rightwing extremism" as an emerging threat. Her description of how Christian nationalism fed the January 6 is simple and clear.

... It’s subtle: Like, you had the Christian flag and the American flag at the front of the church, and if you went to a Christian school, you pledged allegiance to the Christian flag and the American flag. There was this merger that was always there when I was growing up. And it was really there for the generation ahead of me, in the ’50s and ’60s. Some people interpreted it as: Love of country and love of our faith are the same thing. And for others, there’s an actual explicit theology.

There was this whole movement in the ’90s and 2000s among conservatives to explain how amazing [America’s] founding was: Our founding was inspired by God, and there’s no explanation for how we won the Revolutionary War except God, and, by the way, did you know that the founders made this covenant with God? It’s American exceptionalism but goes beyond that. It says that we are the next version of Israel from the Old Testament, that we are God’s chosen nation, and that is a special covenant — a two-way agreement with God. We can’t break it, and if we do, what happened to Israel will happen to us: We will be overrun by whatever the next Babylon is, taken into captivity, and He will remove His blessing from us. 

What [threatens] that covenant? The moment we started taking prayer out of [public] schools and allowing various changes in our culture — [the legalization of] abortion is one of those moments; gay marriage is another. They see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us. They view the last 50 years of moral decline as us breaking our covenant, and that because of that, God’s going to remove His blessing. When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.

This is what the resisters are up against.