In the 2020 election, 15% of white evangelical voters supported Joe Biden and 84%Â supported the loser. To understand why, we need to understand white Christian nationalism.
Linda Greenhouse covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times for 30 years. She is the author of “Victimhood and Vengeance”, a long article for the New York Review of Books. You could say the first part of the article deals with victimhood. Later she deals with vengeance. I’ll share some of the vengeance part in my next post.
We tend to think of Christian nationalism, the political ideology based on the belief that the countryâs authentic identity lies in its Christian roots and in the perpetuation of Christian privilege, as having burst upon the scene to accompany and facilitate the rise of [the former president]. But as Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry explain in The Flag and the Cross, Christian nationalismâwhite Christian nationalism, to be more accurate, since the ideology has no place for nonwhitesâis âone of the oldest and most powerful currents in American politics.â They trace it back to the New England Puritansâ wars against the indigenous groups who dared to stand in the way of the claim by self-described chosen people to their new Promised Land, and follow it through the Lost Cause of a postâCivil War South destined to ârise againââa Christological narrative of crucifixion and redemption âcrucial to understanding contemporary claims of Christian victimhood and vengeance among white Christian nationalists.â The drive for western expansion, aptly known as Manifest Destiny, was widely understood as part of a divine plan handed to those who would âcivilizeâ an entire continent.
According to a recent Pew Research poll, 60 percent of Americans believe the country was founded to be a Christian nation, and nearly half (including 81 percent of white evangelicals) think it should be one today. Whether that has changed over the course of US history is beside the point: whatâs new is the contemporary political and social salience of Christian nationalism. As mainline Protestantism has faded, David Hollinger observes in Christianityâs American Fate,
Christianity has become an instrument for the most politically, culturally, and theologically reactionary Americans. White evangelical Protestants were an indispensable foundation for [the previous] presidency and have become the core of the Republican Partyâs electoral strength. They are the most conspicuous advocates of âChristian nationalism.ââŠMost of Christianityâs symbolic capital has been seized by a segment of the population committed to ideas about the Bible, the family, and civics that most other Americans reject.
How did this happen? [The authors] agree that the answer lies in white evangelicalsâ response to the profound cultural changes the country experienced during the second half of the twentieth century. That may sound obvious, but with varied approaches, these … books offer insights that are both illuminating and alarming.
The Flag and the Cross deals most directly with white Christian nationalism as a political force. The authors are sociologists…. Their conclusions are based largely on data from surveys they devised and conducted from 2019 through 2021. At the heart of their analysis is a âChristian nationalism scaleâ based on respondentsâ level of agreement with seven statements that include âThe success of the United States is part of Godâs planâ and âThe federal government should advocate Christian values.â
This scale is one axis on a series of charts showing how Christian nationalist beliefs correlate with attitudes about life in todayâs United States. For example, Gorski and Perry asked people to estimate âhow much discriminationâ whites and Blacks would experience in the coming year. Black respondents, no matter where they fell on the Christian nationalism scale, offered similar predictions: low for whites and high for Blacks. For white respondents, the results were dramatically different: the higher on the Christian nationalist scale they were, the greater their expectation of antiwhite discrimination and a correspondingly lower expectation of discrimination against Blacks. âWhite Christian nationalists sincerely believe that whites and Christians are the most persecuted groups in America,â the authors conclude. This is a belief, they emphasize, with political consequences: âWhite Christian nationalism is a âdeep storyâ about Americaâs past and a vision of its future. It includes cherished assumptions about what America was and is, but also what it should be.â
The data also demonstrate the sometimes surprising results of the merging of religious and political identities. To take one example: nearly 80 percent of white evangelicals adhere to an âoriginalistâ interpretation of the Constitutionâthe belief that the Constitution must be interpreted according to how its framersâ words would have been understood in their time, which David Cole in these pages recently called a âcharade.â
Why nonlawyers should have any fixed notion of how to interpret the Constitution might seem puzzling, but the data explain it. Seventy percent of white evangelicals believe the Constitution to be divinely inspired; constitutional and biblical literalism thus go hand in hand. This finding helps illuminate why obeisance to âoriginalismâ has been demanded of Republican judicial nominees ever since this distinctly unoriginal doctrine was invented during the Reagan era. The current Supreme Court majority used it (inconsistently) to justify its reasoning in last yearâs abortion and Second Amendment decisions.
Gorski and Perry offer a portrait of the Tea Party movementâwhich dominated Republican politics during the early Obama years with a platform of tax cuts, âliberty,â and opposition to the Affordable Care Actâto show that when religious and political identities merge, politics takes precedence. Of those who identified with the Tea Party, which reached its peak in 2011â2012 and has now been largely subsumed into [the]Â MAGAÂ movement, more than half believe that America âis currently and has always been a Christian nation.â Yet on measures of individual religious behavior such as church attendance, this group scored notably lower than other elements of the religious right. âIn other words, the myth of a Christian nation was far more important to them than Christianity itself,â the authors observe. ââChristianâ instead functions as a cultural identity marker, one that separates âusâ from âthem.ââ
And who are âthemâ? They are âoutsiders who wish to take whatâs rightfully ours,â whether by asserting rights to equal citizenship, arriving from a foreign country, impugning the countryâs history, or just voting. âChristian nationalism is the strongest predictor that white Americans believe we already make it too easy to vote in this country,â Gorski and Perry find. It may seem simplistic to interpret Republican hysteria over voter âfraudâ as a dog whistle about too many of the wrong people voting, yet itâs nearly impossible to interpret it any other way.
The Flag and the Cross deciphers other white Christian nationalist beliefs in which race is deeply embedded in a way that is thoroughly obscure to outsiders. With echoes of the Tea Party movement, half the members of which identified as evangelical, these include a fervent belief in free market capitalism and a deep suspicion of anything that might lead to âcollectivism.â As Gorski and Perry explain it, this economic view âpresumes that oneâs lot in life is a result of oneâs personal choicesâand only those choices. Historical and social contexts are irrelevant,â meaning among other things that the legacy of slavery has no claim on the privileges of whites, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a danger to the countryâs authentic identity. In a 2021 survey, the authors asked people to identify the groups or ideas they found most threatening. The response given by those who scored highest on the white Christian nationalism scale was unexpected: they saw the greatest threat as coming not from atheists or Muslims but from âsocialists.â
[The previous president] understands the dog-whistle power of âsocialism.â At [a rally for evangelicals] in January 2020, he warned that âthe extreme left in America is trying to replace religion with government and replace God with socialism.â He promised the crowd that âAmerica will never be a socialist country, ever,â because âAmerica was not built by religion-hating socialists.â The union of politics and religion was complete. Almost exactly a year later, insurrectionists festooned with Christian nationalist symbols stormed the Capitol.
You must be logged in to post a comment.