Black patriotism should not be mistaken for Christian nationalism

A recent PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute)/Brookings study of the Threat of Christian Nationalism in the United States has been getting a good amount of mainstream media coverage. There probably are as many as thirty percent of us who proclaim their adherence to Christianity (usually of the white evangelical Protestant variety and its offspring) and combine that belief/culture with aggressive nationalism. These folks are a menace to their neighbors and to our democracy.

But I felt drawn to dig a little into the methodology of the study. Researchers used the answers to a battery of five questions to identify "adherents" and "sympathizers" with Christian nationalism. Did respondents agree or disagree with the following questions?

• The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
• U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
• If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
• Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
• God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

I have to admit that I have some sympathy with the second of these statements. I believe U.S. laws should be based on Christian values -- and Jewish values, and Muslim values, and Hindu values, and Buddhist values, and Wiccan values, and all other historic sources of morals -- because I think all religious traditions lead to reverence for humanity and the earth, whatever culture they derive from.

But obviously, I'm not a Christian nationalist sympathizer. I'm not a nationalist at all. But I'm not ready to deny that religions have some good ideas that might inform how we structure our lives together. 

I find it easy to imagine that a goodly lot of people who might have some sympathy for these statements might be far more nationalist than Christian. Researchers have documented that plenty of Trump and Republican supporters who loudly proclaim their Christianity aren't regularly to be found in churches.

Washington Post data journalist Philip Bump asks what seem to me a relevant question about the PRRI study:

What isn’t clear from the research is the extent to which these religious views are the motivator for political or cultural views. Are these Americans centering their beliefs on religion, or do their views broadly lead them to agree with questions centered on the primacy of Christianity? To put it another way, if Christian nationalism is the chicken and right-wing politics the egg, which comes first?

PRRI and Brookings may simply be measuring the same right-wing group in another way. Of course, this doesn’t diminish how unsettling the findings might be in the least.

One of the oddities of these PRRI findings is that, on this survey's metrics, Black Americans are no less likely to be Christian nationalist "adherents" or "sympathizers" with Christian nationalism than white evangelicals. That simply seems wrong. 

To PRRI's credit, they addressed this discordant finding with a short talk at the study's public launch event by Jemar Tisby, president of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, where he writes about race, religion, and culture.  This is preaching to be savored ...

"White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the Church in the United States today.

"I define Christian nationalism as an ethnographic-cultural ideology that uses Christian symbolism to create a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control.

"Black Americans as a group are a highly religious group. Ninety-seven percent of Black Americans believe in God or a higher power. And the vast majority of those folks are Christians, Protestant at that. ... it wouldn't surprise us that this language of God and Country resonates with Black people. ..

"The difference is, what do we mean? ... I contrast white Christian nationalism with Black Christian patriotism. ... When you are talking about white Christian nationalism it tends toward a rigid, narrow, authoritarian politics. When you are talking bout Black Christian patriotism, you are talking about an expansive, flexible, inclusive politics ... White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to a multiracial inclusive democracy."