Seven years ago, during the Republican Presidential primary, Donald Trump appeared onstage at Dordt University, a Christian institution in Iowa, and made a confession of faith. “I’m a true believer,” he said, and he conducted an impromptu poll. “Is everybody a true believer, in this room?” He was scarcely the first Presidential candidate to make a religious appeal, but he might have been the first one to address Christian voters so explicitly as a special interest. . . . . He made his audience a promise. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power,” he said. “You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well.”
By the time Trump reluctantly left office, in 2021, his relationship with evangelical Christians was one of the most powerful alliances in American politics. (According to one survey, he won eighty-four per cent of the white evangelical vote in 2020.) On January 6th, when his supporters gathered in Washington to protest the election results, one person brought along a placard depicting Jesus wearing a MAGA hat
The events of January 6th bolstered a growing belief that the alliance between Trump and his Christian supporters had become something more like a movement, a pro-Trump uprising with a distinctive ideology. This ideology is sometimes called “Christian nationalism,” a description that often functions as a diagnosis. . . . . seventy per cent of Christian nationalists don’t know that they’re Christian nationalists,” he said. “They’re just, like, ‘This is normal Christianity, from the time of Jesus.’ ”
In contemporary America, though, the practice of Christianity is starting to seem abnormal. Measures of religious observance in America have shown a steep decrease over the past quarter century. In 1999, Gallup found that seventy per cent of Americans belonged to a church, a synagogue, or a mosque. In 2020, the number was forty-seven per cent—for the first time in nearly a hundred years of polling, worshippers were the minority.
There is no canonical manifesto of Christian nationalism, and no single definition of it. In search of rigor, a pair of sociologists, Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, examined data from various surveys and tracked the replies to six propositions . . . . Whitehead and Perry published the results in a book called “Taking America Back for God,” in which they predicted a growing schism. “Christian nationalism gives divine sanction to ethnocentrism and nativism,” they wrote, noting that a number of respondents doubted that immigrants or non-English speakers could ever be “truly American.” Christian nationalism was, they argued, a divisive creed; its adherents were more likely than other groups to believe “that Muslims and Atheists hold morally inferior values.”
Gorski and Perry argue that in American politics Christian nationalism has often served as a white-identity movement. They note, for instance, that white Americans who support Christian nationalism are likelier to evince disapproval of immigration and concern about anti-white discrimination. And they worry that “white Christian nationalism is working just beneath the surface” of American politics, ready to trigger an outburst, as it did on January 6th. “There will be another eruption—and soon,” they write.
Gorski and Perry warn that a second Trump Administration might lead to “Jim Crow 2.0,” with “non-white, undocumented immigrants” singled out for “mass deportations on an unprecedented scale.” But they also note that the white Christian nationalists in their survey expressed the most hostility not toward immigrants or toward Muslims but toward socialists.
Africans and their descendants were sometimes held to be heathens of a peculiar sort, because they were considered to be both a Biblical people and a cursed one: descendants of Canaan, the son of Ham and grandson of Noah. In the Bible, Ham has an ambiguous encounter with a drunk and naked Noah, and is punished with a generational affliction: “Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
Judging from church-membership figures, the nineteen-fifties may have been the most pious period in American history; it was the decade when the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance (1954), and when “In God we trust” was adopted as the country’s official motto (1956). By then, politicians were talking less about heathenism and more about a new adversary . . . a final, all-out battle between Communistic atheism and Christianity.” In America, Christianity works best as an organizing principle when there is a strong non-Christian force to organize against.
In “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” Stephen Wolfe, a political philosopher and faithful Presbyterian, advances a series of syllogisms . . . He has firm opinions on whether non-Christians are “entitled to political equality” (no), whether “political atheism” should be excluded from the bounds of “acceptable opinion” (yes), and whether “arch-heretics” can justifiably be put to death (yes). In Wolfe’s view, Christians are too quick to dismiss the virtue of tribalism—the notion that people are drawn to others who share their “ethnicity,” . . . Wolfe’s book avoids explicit claims about race, but after its publication, in November, a shadow was cast over it by an investigation that Alastair Roberts, an English theologian, conducted into the public writing of one of Wolfe’s close friends and collaborators, Thomas Achord.
Achord, under a pseudonym, had been posting online in support of what he called “robust race realist white nationalism.” Roberts pointed to a Twitter account that had responded to a post from the American Jewish Committee by writing, “OK jew,” and referred to Representative Cori Bush, of Missouri, as a “Ngress.” In response to a discussion of white supremacy by Jemar Tisby, a prominent Black historian of Christianity, the account posted, “Please leave soon. —Sincerely, All White Peoples.”
The presidency of George W. Bush was a high-water mark for Christian politics. Bush launched initiatives to support “faith-based organizations,” and brought a missionary’s fervor to the promotion of democracy in the Middle East and, much more successfully, AIDS treatment in Africa. By contrast, Trump was perhaps the least Christian President in modern times; although he kept his promise to anti-abortion Christian voters by appointing three Supreme Court Justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, he seemed to view this not as a moral triumph but as a favor for a special interest.
America may now be following the trajectory of Europe, where Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, talks about the importance of “Christian roots,” even though fewer than twenty per cent of Hungarians attend church regularly. If the rise of Christian nationalism in America reflects the decline of Christianity, that is bittersweet news for secular liberals, because it means that they might expect to see more and more of it as the country grows less pious.
How did this decline happen? No one seems to know. Sociologists such as Gorski and Perry can tell us that Christian-nationalist beliefs reflect a tribal or partisan identity, but they can’t tell us why so many self-identified Christians seem uninterested in the religion itself.
The strangest thing about the debate over Christian nationalism is the assumption shared by many of the participants. The sociologists see a fearful tribe, resentful of a country that won’t stop changing. . . . the underlying idea is that recent trends will continue: that churches will keep emptying out, and that Christianity will become an ever more tribal identity. The secular country that emerges might be increasingly free, anxious, and unpredictable—less prayer in schools, more shamans in the Capitol.
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