They aren’t about promoting religion, they’re about reclaiming power

By Herbert Rothschild

I published a column on Christian nationalism on Feb. 2 of this year. Since then, this movement to fuse Christian and U.S. identity has received increasing attention. Its adherents are sure to deliver a major bloc of presidential votes for former President Donald Trump, whom they have improbably chosen as their champion to take America back for God.

That last phrase is close to the title of Andrew Whitehead and Scott Perry’s excellent study of Christian nationalism. In “Taking America Back for God,” the authors use extensive sociological data to analyze the movements and its adherents.

A majority of Americans share one or more tenets of Christian nationalism, such as affirming that our laws are based on Judeo-Christian values.

But Whitehead and Perry use the term “Ambassadors” for those who accept the whole package: using political power to enshrine Christianity as an identity adopted and favored by the state. Ambassadors constitute just under 20% of our adult population. The other three groups Whitehead and Perry sort us into based on our attitudes toward a “Christian America” are Accommodators (32.1%), Resisters (26.6%), and Rejectors (21.5%).

Here are the characteristics of the Ambassadors: Their average age is 54. Racially, 70% are white, 11% are Black, and 11% are Hispanic. Women make up a larger share of Ambassadors than of the other groups. Ambassadors rank lowest of the three by formal education and the percentage of high earners.

 Only 16% of Ambassadors live in cities; two-thirds live in towns or rural areas. Almost half of Ambassadors live in the South. As for religious affiliation, 55% identify as evangelical Protestant, 19% as Catholic, and 6% as having no affiliation with Christianity. A majority (56%) identify as Republicans, 24% as independents, and 20% as Democrats.

That Christian nationalists are concentrated in the South isn’t surprising. As Whitehead and Perry note, there is a high correlation between adherence to Christian nationalism and the belief that whites are being discriminated against. What these people experience as discrimination is really the erosion of both white and Christian power and privilege. Both started at about the same time — the early 1960s. Just as racial segregation of public schools was ending under federal court orders, the U.S. Supreme Court also ruled that officially sponsored prayers and Bible readings in public schools violated the non-establishment of religion clause in the First Amendment.

Both white supremacists and Christian supremacists are motivated by real threats — legal, cultural and demographic — to their hegemony. Christian nationalists aren’t about promoting religion; they are about reclaiming power. And that power is tribal power. They ignore the witness and teachings of Jesus, which contradict their animus toward those outside their tribe. They relate America to ancient Israel, a tribal nation with a tribal God. Like Israel, the U.S. will triumph if it obeys God’s commands and will fall into ruin if it doesn’t. In sum, Christian nationalists worship an idol — a nation-state that proclaims Christ as its Lord and Savior.

How much human sacrifice are Christian nationalists prepared to make to that idol? We might start from the baseline that most of us have made our country into an idol and are constantly sacrificing our young men and women to it by sending them to kill men, women and children in other countries. Christian nationalists have built on that and on its corollary, also widely shared, that God chose the U.S. to be a light to the world, which they understand as global dominance. They have tightly fused uncritical patriotism and dogmatic religion into a militant ideology that is as ready to fight the Other within as the Other without. It’s not very different from McCarthyism, which claimed that we were fighting “godless communism.” That was when “under God” was added to our Pledge of Allegiance.

So, if Trump wins and gives scope to Christian nationalists — as they have every reason to expect he will — I think we’ll experience something like what we experienced in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This time, though, the cultural pressure will have an explicitly religious face.

We’ll become even more aggressive abroad, beginning with a war against Iran. Domestically, perhaps a pledge to obey God’s laws will be added to the loyalty oaths public employees were required to sign in the McCarthy era. Perhaps employer discrimination against non-Christian applicants, especially Muslims, will get a pass from the U.S. Department of Justice. More tax money will be funneled to religious schools. And there certainly will be attempts to reinstate mandatory prayers and Bible readings in the schools with the expectation that this Supreme Court will repudiate Engel v. Vitale and Abington v. Schempp as it did Roe v. Wade. Oklahoma has already mandated Bible reading in its public schools with that expectation. 

For what a more insistent and violent imposition of religious nationalism on a multicultural country looks like, the India of Navendra Modi and his Indian People’s Party (BJP) provides a current example. The BJP’s official ideology, Hindutva, defines Indian culture in terms of Hindu values. The party’s manifesto and leadership promote India as a Hindu nation, though they maintain that they support equality for all religions.

They don’t. For example, in 2019 India’s Citizenship Act was amended to exclude from citizenship Muslims entering the country while retaining access to citizenship for Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains and Parsis. Several Indian states under BJP control have passed “anti-conversion” laws with criminal penalties. For example, in Uttar Pradesh, individuals must seek government permission 60 days before they wish to convert. Karnataka prohibits conversion by “misrepresentation, force, fraud, allurement or marriage.” Gujarat expanded the definition of “allurement” to include promises of divine blessings or a better lifestyle.

Worse yet is the violence against Muslims that Modi’s Hindu nationalism has abetted. In 2002, when he was chief minister of Gujarat state, there was a three-day period of inter-communal violence following a train accident that killed 58 Hindu pilgrims. Muslims were accused of causing the accident. At least 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in the riots. Modi was slow to stop the violence, and police and government officials were alleged to have directed the rioters and given them lists of Muslim-owned properties.

Violent attacks on Muslims have become frequent. Multiple states have reported incidents of mob violence centered on allegations of cow slaughter or beef possession. In the 2020 Delhi riots, mobs of Hindus attacked Muslims. Two-thirds of the 53 people killed were Muslims. Four mosques and Muslim-owned properties were burned. In the aftermath, many Muslims left their homes, fearing life in Delhi was unsafe.

Back home, some racists already have taken Trump’s rhetoric as permission for violence, although incidents of it have been isolated. The rhetoric of prominent Christian nationalists is much more heated, fueled by their certainty that they are mobilizing Christ’s soldiers to tear down any walls separating church and state in the U.S.

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected].