Editor’s Note: An edited, shorter version of this essay was published in The American Conservative on April 17, 2023. Read it here (paywall). I highly recommend The American Conservative; it’s well worth the subscription.
On February 8, I attended an event at the Brookings Institution about a survey on Christian nationalism conducted jointly by Brookings and the Public Religion Research Institute. The survey, called the PPRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey, purports to measure what percentage of Americans subscribe to CN as well as to identify other beliefs correlated with adherence to CN. The survey, however, has a number of flaws, which have been exacerbated by problematic interpretations offered by the researchers overseeing the project. They inflate the number of so-called Christian nationalists, exaggerate the danger these people pose, and downplay data that contradict their intended political message. While the recent growth of Christian nationalism deserves careful consideration, this survey exposes the Left’s inability to engage fairly with conservative ideas that fall outside a narrow range of “acceptable” opposition.
Mis-Identifying Christian Nationalists
The primary failing of the Brookings/PPRI survey methodology is that it misidentifies many normal Christians as Christian nationalists. Christian nationalism is often portrayed as a theocratic attempt to impose Christianity on Americans at sword point. While this depiction is a caricature, many self-described Christian nationalists do favor a closer union between church and state. Yet, inexplicably, the survey failed to ask about these core issues.
Here are the questions used to measure adherence to Christian nationalism:
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.
Only Question 1 identifies support for a formal religious establishment—and even here, the “establishment” is purely rhetorical. The survey does not ask about public funding for churches, state punishment of heresy and blasphemy, or even prayer in school.
The rest of the questions can be answered affirmatively by traditionalist Christians who do not favor a state establishment. Consider Question 2. What Christian would deny that Christian “values” should inform the law? To make matters worse, the survey never defines Christian “values.” Most Christians number love and racial reconciliation among their values. Martin Luther King Jr., who is never labelled a “Christian nationalist,” used biblical arguments and imagery to oppose racial segregation. By contrast, social conservatives are regularly dismissed as theocrats, even when they frame their opposition to, say, abortion or same-sex marriage in terms of natural law.
Question 5 likewise represents a Christian truism compatible with America’s constitutional regime. The Bible exhorts Christians to bring “every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5) and to “make disciples of all the nations … teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you” (Mathew 28:20). These tasks have religious, social, and ethical dimensions, but they need not be interpreted as theocratic or nationalistic. Both instantiating values into law and exercising dominion can be accomplished without coercing or punishing belief.
Questions 3 and 4 are fuzzy. Many Americans believe that Christianity benefits the American nation and has been crucial to its history and identity. These people exemplify the God-and-country, “God bless America” patriotism that prevailed for most of American history. I know people like this—especially among older, white Christians in the South. Sometimes they make me cringe, but they are harmless. They may want to bring prayer back to the public schools, but they have no intention of recreating Puritan New England.
A later question (which was not used to code adherence to Christian nationalism) asked how strongly respondents agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “I would prefer the U.S. to be a nation primarily made up of people who follow the Christian faith.” Unsurprisingly, most people favorable to Christian nationalism agreed with this statement, which was then interpreted as a rejection of “pluralism” and an implicit threat to other faiths. Apparently, the survey designers forgot that Christianity is a proselytizing faith.
To illustrate the folly of measuring Christian nationalism with these questions, it is worth noting that adherents of other ideologies would likely affirm similar questions about their beliefs. How many members of the Black Lives Matter movement would disagree that “U.S. laws should be based on antiracist values?” Feminists likewise want feminist values to inform the law. Presumably, both “antiracist” activists and feminists presumably would “prefer the U.S. to be a nation primarily made up of people who follow” those ideologies.
In reality, very few Americans want to make Christianity the official religion of the nation, to the exclusion or punishment of other faiths. The PPRI/Brookings research team repeatedly conflates a belief in the social implications of the Christian gospel with a desire for theocracy.
A unintentionally humorous exchange at the February 8th event revealed the extent of this misunderstanding. During the Q&A, a presenter revealed that, in the survey, most Christian nationalists endorsed the separation of church and state. Convinced that Christian nationalists are essentially theocrats, he portrayed such people as hopelessly confused. Unsurprisingly, the question about church-state separation was excluded from the presentation and the published results, presumably because it would complicate the narrative on offer.
Christian Nationalism and Race
The failure to understand conservative Christians was compounded by an insistence on painting Christian nationalism as the latest reskin of white supremacy. At the event, I noticed that “Christian nationalism” quickly morphed into “white Christian nationalism.” Several panelists cited the Ku Klux Klan as a previous manifestation of this ideology. During the Q&A, one questioner repeatedly asserted—with no pushback—that white men were angry about competing with non-whites for jobs.
The survey responses failed to support these racial theories. Virtually equal percentages of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and multiracial respondents were coded as “adherents” of Christian nationalism. (Only Asians, who are less likely to be Christian at all, scored much lower than whites.) At the event, the only black speaker, Dr. Jemar Tisby, devoted much of his talk to explaining away non-white support for Christian nationalism. He pointed out that American blacks are highly religious—implicitly admitting that the survey conflates ordinary religiosity with whatever the surveyors think they are measuring—but then dismissed black support for Christian nationalism by referencing the “trope” of the “Uncle Tom.” On his view, a segment of the oppressed black community supports the oppressors as a way to gain power within an unjust system.
In case this line of argument failed to convince, several questions were interpreted to show that white Christian nationalists are particularly racist or xenophobic compared to their non-white peers. These questions, however, presuppose biased ideological presuppositions.
For instance, respondents got labelled as “anti-Black racists” for disagreeing (or agreeing, for #2) with the following statements:
“Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for many Black Americans to work their way out of the lower class.”
“Today, discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities.”
“A Black person is more likely to receive the death penalty for the same crime.”
“White supremacy is still a major problem.”
Yet one’s perceptions of whether “White supremacy” is a “major problem” depends on how one defines those terms. Arguably, white supremacy exists, but only as a marginal phenomenon without systemic effects. Contra critical race theory, we do not live in a white supremacist society. And one can make a persuasive case that affirmative action policies do at least as much to impede career advancement for whites as racism does for blacks. Even a casual inspection reveals that most employers actively seek to hire non-white applicants.
Some of the questions about immigration are similarly flawed. Disagreement with the statement, “the growing number of newcomers from other countries strengthens American society,” indicated “anti-immigrant attitudes.” But a wealth of social scientific research shows just that: as ethnic diversity increases, people become less trustful and form fewer and shallower interpersonal bonds. Another question asked whether immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Again—leaving aside the loaded reference to “invasion”—it is indisputable that the nation’s ethnic mix is changing rapidly, and that mass immigration causes cultural disruption. The survey’s creators seem to think that acknowledging these facts is tantamount to disapproving them, which itself is tantamount to hating immigrants.
The worst set of race questions may have been the one measuring “antisemitism.” Apparently, it is antisemitic to agree that “Jewish people stick together more than other Americans.” This question can be interpreted in different ways, but tight-knit Orthodox Jewish communities undeniably stand out in an increasingly atomistic and disconnected society. It was labelled antisemitic both to believe that “American Christians love Israel more than most American Jews do” and to believe that “Jewish people are more loyal to Israel than America.” Which is it? Finally, the survey assumes that only antisemites believe that “Jewish people hold too many positions of power.” However, this statement is true—at least if one adheres to the leftist concept of “equity,” according to which each group ought to be represented in positions of power in proportion to its share of the population. After all, Jews compose only 2.4% of the U.S. population but hold a much higher percentage of positions of power. I guess Americans are not supposed to recognize this disparity as an inequity. (In any event, non-white adherents of Christian nationalism were more likely than white adherents to hold “antisemitic” opinions—a finding largely ignored at the February 8th event.)
It should give us pause to find that so many non-white respondents, including in many cases majorities of non-white Christian nationalists, gave the “racist” answer to questions on race. Given the ideological bias of these questions, it is clear that they measure the ability to adopt trendy theories of race, not adherence to “white supremacy.” According to these metrics, Christian nationalists are indeed “racist,” but the term has lost most of its meaning.
Class and Aggressive Behavior
The survey team’s discussion of Christian nationalists’ “violent” tendencies represents a further example of bias. According to the survey, “adherents” of Christian nationalism were more likely than “rejecters” to have engaged in several aggressive acts against another person in the past year: pushing, grabbing, or shoving (9% vs. 5%), hitting or kicking (9% vs. 4%), and threatening with a gun or knife (7% vs. 2%). The surveyors seized upon this finding to paint Christian nationalists as dangerous extremists who might, at any time, stage an insurrection. They clearly believe that an intolerant religious ideology is the driving factor behind these findings.
There is, however, a likelier explanation: class cleavages. Their own data reveals that Christian nationalism “adherents” and “sympathizers are much less educated, and presumably less wealthy, than “skeptics” and “rejecters.” From other analyses, we know that evangelicals of all races and Trump supporters belong disproportionately to the non-elite class. (They are also more like to own guns.) Every social scientist also knows that aggressive and violent behavior correlates strongly with education, wealth, and class—although the causal mechanisms are debated. Poor and uneducated Americans, in short, are more likely to act in violent ways. Violence is especially common in the unruly “Scots-Irish Appalachian” culture that David Hackett Fischer identified in his famous book Albion’s Seed. But this culture is also disproportionately Christian and pro-Trump.
It is likely that class, not religion, explains the higher levels of violent behavior among Christian nationalists. But these competing hypotheses cannot be adjudicated unless the research team deploy a statistical tool, such as multivariate regression, to tease out the relative effects of religious versus cultural or other factors. As of now, they have done nothing to prove a connection between Christian nationalism and violence. By ignoring class, the panelists ironically have exposed their own privilege as members of the progressive elite. (Moreover, the measure for violence included respondents who had performed violent actions but stated that doing so was the wrong decision. These people hardly seem to be principled advocates of violence.)
In a similar vein, the survey found that 17% of respondents agreed that “America is a white Christian nation, and I am willing to fight to keep it that way.” Predictably, the panelists inferred that these people are poised to engage in revolutionary action. But politicians and political commentators regularly use war-inspired rhetoric to describe political behavior. (An attempt to win political office, for instance, is called a “campaign.”) For nearly all respondents, “fighting” means little more than voting or posting incendiary comments on social media.
Conclusion
The speakers at the February 8th Brookings event gave the impression that Americans ought to be terrified by Christian nationalism. Despite the fact that only 10% of Americans are “adherents” of Christian nationalism, several people asserted that 10% is still “a lot,” both because violence can be committed by small groups and because minorities can overthrow the government. As possible staging grounds for the imminent Christian nationalist insurgency, they cited “non-majoritarian” institutions, like federal courts or the electoral college, and conservative state and local officials. In the most comically clueless remark at the event, someone in the crowd asserted that the Religious Right controls the policy and strategy of the Republican Party.
This response is overblown. Few Americans want a state church, and far fewer will engage in violence to accomplish this end. Civil dialogue is hindered, not helped, by caricaturing so-called “Christian nationalists” as mindless bigots itching to slaughter their fellow citizens in the name of theocratic Caesarism.
Nevertheless, it is legitimate to have reservations about Christian nationalism. Stephen Wolfe, the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, supports disenfranchising women and on Twitter has appeared to endorse the jailing of transgender advocates. Positions like these are unconventional, to say the least; many conservative Christians will reject Wolfe’s claim that they emerge logically from traditional Protestant theology. This is the kind of conversation that would be worth having.
“Show me the Christian, and I’ll show you the crime”
A white Christian is already a crime against Leftism in an of themself
A black Christian who isnt racist against whites is a crime against his fellow black people
A native american Christian is a crime against Leftism for siding with the colonizers
An asian Christian is just the asian face of white supremacy
A Christian who supports borders is a crime against their “global neighbors”
A Christian who supports police is supporting systemic oppression
A Christian who supports the Electoral College wants “minority rule fascism”
A Christian who wants out of foreign wars is a “backwards pranoid isolationist”
The Regime is retarded, all they do is lie for a living, their surveys are biased, theyre workers of iniquity, they hate God and God’s people and all that is good. The Satanic Leftist Regime embodies Isaiah 5:20 to a tee. Most importantly theyre retarded and their surveys are too. Pray for them that God might reach out and save souls from the dark abyss of Leftism, Academia, Bureaucracy, and every other perverse ideology and wicked world system. Pray earnestly for our enemies, even as they shoot arrows in the dark at the upright of heart (Psalm 11).
Rejoice at being slandered.
Embrace being a proud Christian Nationalist, dont disdain the term but instead wear it with pride because Jesus Christ is the Lord of All, including politics and my voice and my vote. Jesus deserves this nation, land, and government just as He deserves all things in Heaven and on Earth, as the rightful King of the Universe.
Thank you Jesus and might we evoke even more slander from your enemies en route to delivering unto you this state and all its wealth and potential.
Just be a proud Christian