Christian Nationalism: Complexities to Discuss

[Last October, I posted a rush article entitled "Fragments Related to Christian Nationalism" (CN). It included a promise to revise and resubmit, and to do so alongside another more general piece on CN I was writing at the same time. I had promised a study group that I would post both of these for us to discuss, but hit a wall before either was ready. Since then, I haven't written much about CN. Rather I've been observing, trying to get a handle on how fractions of Trump's regime are shaping up and where CN fits within its ongoing circus that Steve Bannon calls "flooding the zone with shit." However, when I revisited my rush job, it seemed worth polishing a bit and putting back out. Good riddance to the ancestor draft! This improved version is still rather odd and rambling since it is structured by a list of topics that were fresh in last October's news cycle. However, it is now far better, so I decided to republish rather than let it fade away.

For months I've been starting, not finishing, re-starting, and still not finishing, essays about Christian Nationalism (CN). More precisely, I have been fretting about the mixed blessings of liberal media critiques of CN, which often strike me as taking two steps backward for every three steps forward. My not finishing is related, in part, to worries about getting off-message from the one net step forward, and also to my puzzlement about how to intervene concisely and effectively.

How should we think about CN in the first place?—allowing us to assess claims about "its" supposed rapid growth? How should we understand its blend of the "same old" and emergent? How dangerous is it? Since no one denies that some parts are dangerous, how should we respond? And how should we handle two implications hidden in that latter question—that some things deemed CN may not be all that dangerous, while some of the dangerous parts are mixed up with complex layers of good intentions and plausible fears.

There are risks for critics of CN if they swing too wildly and demonize only the worst things that fall under none-to-precise definitions of CN, without pondering why people might be drawn to stronger parts. Think about comparing apples and oranges: us versus "those bad people" who support the orange candidate. Anyone can valorize the tastiest apples over the most rotten oranges and vice-versa—this is boring and it creates resentments from whichever fruit is targeted as the rotten one. What about comparing less-than-perfect apples to halfway good oranges with passably good intentions, who are bone tired of people accusing them of being rotten to the core? FOX News is skilled at channeling such resentment against real and imagined "liberal elites," and despite FOX's capacity to set up lose-lose choices (I don't want to say nothing simply because FOX will twist my words!) still I'm wary of taking the bait.

I don't own the copyright but I own the T-shirt (from Redbubble) and it gets far more compliments than any other shirt I've owned. Can we learn from this?

The Genesis of a Multi-layered Post

I have been studying and teaching about these things for decades and I have a lot to say about it. So I agreed to help facilitate a study group about it. I hoped to channel my preparation into some concise talking points—shared with the group and others here—along the lines of "Christian Nationalism in 1000 Words or Less." I also imagined gathering miscellaneous other pieces drawn from the current news cycle and/or my past books and lectures, which could be useful as background resources or fodder for discussion.

The result? A growing pile of drafts for the concise essay, none successful yet, which ate all my time for organizing the miscellaneous parts.

Now I'm up against a deadline. If I want our group to read any part of this reflection for an upcoming discussion, I need to post this URL...right now! But I nurse the hope to finish the "1000 words or less" piece to link here later. [Update: Since the election, I've switched to a watching/waiting mode, trying to understand what is going on in Trump's coalition and where CN fits. There are many moving targets, but it seems clear that a key bloc of swing voters hated/feared Democrats more than they hated/feared Trumpism.]

I did finish this poem about asking questions with messy complexities instead of shooting fish in a barrel. Does it help at all?

Let's flag two previous essays that help set a context for discussion. Here's one about the legacy of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Since there is some continuity between today's CN and an older "New Christian Right," this helps provide a baseline against which to explore what is emerging.

Here's one about big-shot never-Trump evangelicals who make the same arguments that David French and Tim Alberta have been trumpeting lately in the news cycle, as well as pundits to their left who attack them. Such folks, many of them quite conservative, want to rebrand evangelicalism to distance it from Trump. Rehabilitating center-right evangelicals is a mixed blessing, but the election can focus us on part of the mix: how many swing voters do these guys speak for, really? As I explain, we can't answer this question by trotting out the well-known 80% support for Trump from self-declared white evangelicals. We also need to inquire about formerly self-declared evangelicals—the latter no longer showing up, either in the 80% or 20% fractions of a 100% that has been shrinking. The rebranding that never-Trumpers advocate is very much about stopping prospective ex-evangelicals from defecting. Meanwhile the 80% figure is much lower for non-white evangelicals. This makes "evangelical" a slippery moving target. But if we want to find swing voters, this is a key place to look for them.

Unreliable Polling Numbers

I have long pressed questions about polling numbers we should not trust. [Update: here's a recent example.]  I presented on my doubts about reported numbers for all things "CN" and/or "evangelical" for the discussion group, and this is also a big theme in my CN 101 essay, so I won't unpack that now.

I will note, though, that the media yesterday offered a jaw-dropping case study in this problem. It touched on an anti-Kamala-Harris rally by a group that is claimed to be paradigmatic for CN. This rally attracted—watch for it!—between 400,000 and "several hundred" participants. Yes, you read that right, it's a one-thousand-fold margin of error! The details are fascinating. Regarding the neo-Pentecostal network that organized this rally, we could speculate about its proportion of hardcore Trumpers—the types who might storm the Capitol and set up a gallows for Mike Pence—compared to "average oranges" from their local churches whom its hardcore people lobby but meanwhile they are fairly apolitical and/or wondering if they should leave (as many of their compatriots already have.) The gap between these two tendencies is surely large. But is 10-fold? 500-fold? We really don't know. And do we actually care? In this media cycle it's all cherry-picking all the time. That's rotten cherry picking, where one flashily rotten exemplar gets a full 1000 times more attention, compared to average church-members. No one even notices that this is a journalistic travesty because it's just a normal news day.

Why Nationalism? What Kind of Nationalism?

I have been invited to a huge number of CN conscious-raising symposia over the past few years. Their themes repeat a great deal, albeit with fascinatingly mismatched bed-fellows jumbled in the mix. Often these events take a form similar to evangelical exhortation, where ninety-nine people in the audience are reinforcing their past conversions for every one new convert. If I, with my unusually large appetite for observing subtleties and doing comparative meta-analysis, am exhausted by such preaching, I wonder how much more annoyed and/or tuned out some of the "average oranges" who are targeted for conversion have become by now.

Anyway, when I found this symposium, it stood out as the best in breed—the one I wanted to build on in our group study. This was primarily because of the interventions by my esteemed colleague Gary Dorrien. He distinguishes three senses of "nationalism," each of which takes Christian forms.

• "Civic nationalism." Its strongest versions evoke what sociologist Robert Bellah championed as needful for a common good and what public theologian Reinhold Niebuhr promoted as a "vital center" of New Deal liberalism. Each of these scholars comes with baggage, and other civic nationalists shade off from them toward the center-right. Nevertheless, if we're prepared to ponder a lesser evil calculus—and if you plan to vote for Harris you are already doing that!—let's be clear that Bellah and Niebuhr were intensely anti-fascist, with political goals far to the left from Harris.

• "Revolutionary anti-colonial nationalisms." These include black power and red power forms, the Sandinista movement, Nelson Mandela, and so on. In their strongest versions these overlap with the strongest liberation theologies.

• Right-wing ethno-nationalisms, often stressing "anti-globalist" and anti-immigrant policies. Not all members of this family are Christian—we can compare right-wing Zionism, Hindutva, and so on—but Trumpist CN is roughly the US version.

(Are you asking "where are the evangelicals?" They are split between the first and third camps, with a handful in the second. But is that the best question? Did you forget Catholics? Mainline Protestants? Black and/or Latinx Christians who may or may not be lumped with other categories? "Others" and "nones" who can flock with any of the three camps?)

This way of setting up definitions leads into valuable comments by Dorrien and others on the panel. I won't summarize this, except to underline how most do not traffic in a rhetoric of "you are not really Christian if you are CN." The logic is "yeah, of course you are Christian—but can we talk about what kinds of Christianity are persuasive and constructive?"

If we use a stipulated definition—that the "nationalism" in CN is restricted to Dorrien's third meaning—we can get some traction for making sense of liberal media discourse. This might help us be less confused about what they are trying to say, and the comparative framing might help us remember the Catholic parts. A lot of the media discourse slides right into such restriction, assuming "we all know" there is no other relevant kind of Christian than a conservative one. However I understand many claims that are wrong and this is one of them.

Meanwhile, even if we flow within the stipulated narrowing for the sake of grasping a flawed train of thought, I am contrarian enough to ask whether it is a good rule of thumb to conflate Trumpism with Dorrien's third CN (ethno-nationalism). Sometimes that's useful as shorthand. However, mainly I run with scholars who try to define CN and Trumpism independently, then analyze both how they overlap in Trump's base, but also how they come apart. There are distinct parts of Trump's coalition, including Elon Musk's post-humanist Nietzschean vitalism. The assemblage of factions includes many people (maybe including Trump?) who don't care much about CN and might even be hostile since, for example, they consider cruelty to be a virtue and empathy to be a vice.

Have you concluded I must be soft on ethno-nationalisms? I don't think so! (Would you like it if I suggested that you must be soft on it if you don't care enough to think hard about its strengths and weaknesses?) I think I'm trying to gauge the degree to which it is actually true that ethno-nationalism is what "an average CN person"—or, more precisely, different components of a range of people who are lumped under a CN umbrella—actually cares about.

It's understandable why some on the left move toward simplified foci, settling for partially warranted generalizations, in light of the clear and present dangers of Trumpism. But this introduces a lot of slippage and confusion since the vernacular meanings of both "nation" and "Christian" are murky. This confusion does not always help the left. For example:

• Should human rights be considered a Christian value? Should schools support human rights, truth-telling, the common good, and the principle of going to war only as a last resort? I've framed leading questions for you, generating "yes" (that is, "hell no, I'm not CN") answers from liberals. Now let's compare queries which pollsters use to generate answers they count as "yes, I'm a moderate CN." Liberals are supposed to presuppose that the right answer to "do you want Christian values taught in public schools?" is "of course not." But what if peace-making and human rights are Christian values in someone's mind-- and let's posit that this someone is Jewish or Buddhist and also supports these as Jewish or Buddhist values? Like me, they want public schools (the ones they defend against right-wing Christian schools!) to teach kids such things. Maybe they also want Medicare for All as national policy partly on Christian grounds. Even if not one single person besides me gets cranky at this point—everyone else grasps the code and I'm perversely slow on the uptake—still I'm not OK with reifying the background common sense in play: that of course "Christian values in public policy" implies right-wing (probably racist and/or fascist). I insist that "who speaks for Christians?" is a robust debate that we should put front and center.

• What about evangelicals who fall in Dorrien's "civic" category and repudiate ethno-nationalism—at least in their self-understandings which some leftists may suspect as false consciousness, but it's a place to start. What if they, too, are self-consciously anti-fascist, even if lacking Niebuhr's left-of-center track record? What if they have long-running internationalist commitments to missionary humanitarian aid? (Not that this is all good or all bad, but shouldn't this matter?) Moreover, what if they can be triggered by FOX if liberals call them Christo-fascists pure and simple?

  
  

• What about poor confused people like me, pondering whether I want to think of Trumpism as a whole as ethno-nationalist, or whether I want to analyze how the various fractions that coalesce in Trumpism are independent variables—two of these being ethno-nationalism and right-wing Christianity. What if these come together and come part, alongside other fractions that are neither Christian nor robustly nationalist? What if a priority for the left should be understanding and widening such fault lines?

  
  

Why Valorize Nationalism At All?

Literally as I typed the last section, an esteemed friend who knows I'm thinking about these things emailed to ask me—"why valorize nationalism"? She knew this would hit me where it hurts, since she's read my articles that attack Niebuhr, Bellah, and kindred civic nationalists for (among other problems) thinking too much from a national standpoint. This can become like a bright moon blotting out our ability to see other things in the sky.

The question is this: if we are serious about addressing poverty, racism, sexism, empire, or climate change, doesn't this presuppose a different frame than the national? Shouldn't we think, first, about subgroups of nations (such as racial groups and poor people) in conflict with other subgroups and, second, about transnational trends such as decolonialism and climate change that cut across nations?

Yes we should! I've often written to insist on this exact point and I'm not taking it back. I just want, alongside this premise that we must not forget that race/empire/etc. cut across nations or that national frames often set up minorities to fail-- also to remember how nations are a non-trivial factor along with the others. Policies at a national level are one place where we fight battles about race, or taxing billionaires, or whether impoverished women have decent healthcare, and so on.

If I ask us to zero in for a minute on such "nationalism" (as one layer among others) is this "valorizing"? Maybe not. Probably not! But is this layering approach clear every time someone launches a sweeping attack on "nationalism," or a sweeping valorization for that matter? I don't think so.

Christian Nationalism, the Family, and Conspiracy Thinking

I've also been thinking recently about this interview with Talia Lavin, which I hope our discussion group can talk about. It's from the Know Your Enemy podcast, which deserves the support of all well-meaning seekers of truth! I love this conversation for nailing its nuance so well. Lavin talks with exemplary insight and compassion about concrete people who grew up within the right, yet not without unleashing her righteous anger against the suffering that such (often well-intentioned) teaching may cause.

Part of the rightwing Christian ecosystem is that people are taught to describe the everyday realities of temptation and evil using a language about demons. By no means does this always come in ways liberals can easily mock. More often than not, people who teach their kids to think this way—and who, as Lavin discusses, often discipline their children harshly—are starting from concrete and warranted worries about how to be good parents in a world where this not easy. Starting there, it is not a given that evangelicals will be swept into authoritarian mindsets or conspiracy thinking. However, it is a sure thing that their mindsets will intersect with whatever they hope and fear related to race, economics, and so on. All of this will be inflected by FOX-type reporting.

This interview points us toward an essential book about today's configuration on the right, Naomi Klein's Doppleganger. We could discuss it at great length; the book has many layers that coalesce into a highly insightful analysis, starting from Klein's inquiry about how/why another famous writer named "Naomi"—formerly on the left and sometimes confused with her-—was drawn into the orbit of Steve Bannon.

For the many who have come to use Klein's work as a benchmark, this Lavin interview adds fresh insight about distinctively Christian aspects of the sort of right-wing mindset that Klein diagnoses, which are not highly developed in Doppelganger. [Update: recently she has written more about Christian end-times sensibilities as part of her analysis.]

The Conversation (Non)-Starter: "How Racist Are You Anyway?"

Are we sure we understand what makes the Christian Right tick when we throw around a term like "CN"? Are we sure this is, in most cases, primarily bound up with anti-immigrant racism, as so many pundits who attack CN have been stressing lately? Let's be clear, I have no doubt that there is much racism in the mix; I've been saying this for decades, since long before it became cool. But my question presupposes what the left calls "intersectionality" and asks, once again—are we sure we know what makes this group (or groups?) tick? Have we thought hard enough about consequences that flow, as we move from case to case, from accusing every conservative of being driven by racism, pure and simple, especially if one of our priorities is to persuade upcoming generations to rethink toxic forms of evangelicalism?  

There is so much to say as background! For decades scholars and pundits didn't talk enough about race as a driving factor for the Christian right. Analyses in different decades centered on evolution, or doctrine, or anti-feminist backlash, or anti-communism, or consumerism, or end-times thought—such that race needed far more attention. Today this pendulum swings toward race as a controlling factor. A few of the 99 already-converted people at our liberal CN-bashing symposia may need to hear the news about evangelical racism, but most probably don't. Meanwhile, many of them do need to think harder about how immensely complicated "race" and anti-racist strategies (with a "s"!) can be, as well as more about how intersectionality matters from case to case. This is a key thing I've been writing about in my general CN piece, so at this place the current post has an odd aspect, awaiting a later link to a still-hypothetical post, but meanwhile functioning like a cart before a horse.

For today, let's flag how my query resonates with this piece from the New York Times. It concerns people of color who say they support Trump because they care more about economic hardship than racial identity. Many of them have likely been socialized into an American Dream that is equidistant from Trump and Harris. (Yes! we should problematize this dream-- maybe some white liberals should even tell these black folks that they are dreaming a "white dream," if they dare! And yes, we could go down warranted rabbit holes of worry about how the Times frames the "economic," so bring your own analysis.) [Update: this mirrors how the Times handled what they called "inflation/the economy" in a terrible post-mortem analysis of the election that I critique here.]  I bring this up mainly to note that, although the article doesn't focus on it, many of these non-white Trump voters are evangelicals or Latinx Catholics. The rally I mentioned earlier drew a significant contingent of such people. This complicates a boiled down root image of CN (white!) versus everyone else (racialized, but with a carve out for white people who virtue-signal enough.)

Here we circle back toward the polling problems with the outrageous margins of error. What percentage of the media's "growing CN danger" (by implication mainly white and likely racist) is actually made up of people of color who mainly worry about affordable housing or jobs paying a living wage? Clearly that's not a majority of Trump's base—but it's not trivial, and we might well bulk it up with white people who also worry most about jobs and a living wage. [Update: when I wrote this, I didn't know how much Trump's victory would be powered by Latinx people swinging his way. To repeat: we can ask how much of this was inflected by white racism—basically false consciousness—but it's a blunt analytical tool.]

"Colorblind" For and Against CN

After this, suppose we notice that most white evangelicals are actually trying to be "colorblind." Admittedly that's a low bar to pass: in many contexts it's the lamest way to be anti-racist or the most pernicious way to be racist. Still: is aspiring to colorblindness more a CN attribute, or more a standard trope for civic nationalists to use against ethno-nationalism? Doesn't this swing both ways, not solely as ideological cover for Trump (which certainly happens) but also in tension with his project? Probably more evangelicals want to recruit immigrants into their churches and support their families, than want to deport them and leave the kids orphaned. Yes they could passively err toward the "CN" side on both of these counts. But so also could our "imperfect apple" liberals. If we are serious about widening fractures in a Trump coalition, this is an excellent place to start with our wedges.

Backlash Against Liberal Condescension

I opened this piece noting how I've been having trouble finishing my aspirational "CN in 1000 words or less" piece, while also wanting to flag CN topics of interest from the recent news cycle. Perhaps by now we can better understand i why I keep blasting past my 1000 word target, as well as how this post gained its structure.

But it is past time to draw to a close. Let's stipulate that I've said enough about muddled CN categories with their muddled numbers and their partly-true-but-partly-false background assumptions.

Let's circle back, however, to a fear I stated at the top of this rambling beast—that wild-swinging left critiques of CN sometimes do more harm than good to an anti-Trump cause. The article just noted—the one flagging black and Latinx Trump voters—also zeroed in on widespread perception of "white liberal elitism" that returns us to my opening thought.

Of course, this "widespread perception" is not something to take for granted as unproblematic and natural. It is fomented and sometimes outright manufactured by incessant and very well funded repetition of FOX talking points. But let's note a couple of things: First, FOX (and kindred social media algorithms) didn't make all of this up. Second, some people on the left made it too easy for them.

For many decades, since long before FOX and Twitter existed, related claims about evangelicals being disrespected cultural underdogs have been heavily stressed by evangelicals of many races and flavors. Resentment about persecution—from case to case either imagined or real, fairly trivial or substantial—are extremely important to the cultural identity of all kinds of evangelicalism, and also (in different ways) for key parts of US Catholicism.

Although we need to think about it case by case, this sense of US Christians being put-upon by "liberals" has been largely unwarranted, especially during the last few decades. Frequently it is blown out of proportion and linked to unexamined assumptions about white Christian privilege. However, this dynamic does need to be factored into our working definitions, along with factors like race, as we try to understand what makes CN tick.

We need to understand clearly that some forms of liberal critique of CN will deepen this persecution/resentment discourse, and remember how FOX will try to use this as rocket fuel against the liberal cause. Insofar as we want to widen cracks with the Trump coalition, this can even function as two steps forward with three back! Here is where maximizing the nuance and empathy in left critiques of CN is important. That should not mean pulling back from a great deal of warranted criticism, but it does require less complacency and far more precision.