Sophie Bjork-James on the Similarities Between White Nationalists and Christian Nationalists
Dr. Sophie Bjork-James is an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University. She is a specialist in race, gender, and religion with a focus on White nationalism and White evangelicalism. One of her recent projects is a close reading of the Left Behind series and the Turner Diaries, the latter many consider the Bible of the White supremacy movement. Reading these two texts together reveals the stunning similarities in White nationalism and Christian nationalism, including their belief that violence is justified to achieve their political goals, their fear of global organizations such as NATO and WHO, and their willingness to trample democracy if it means they can stay in power.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California Santa Barbara.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I'm joined today by Dr. Sophie Bjork-James, who's an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University.
Dr. Bjork-James is assistant professor there and is the co-editor of Beyond Populism, Angry Politics, and The Twilight of Neoliberalism, and our conversation today is going to center on her chapter from that text.
Also the author of the forthcoming The Divine Institution, White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family.
And that'll be out next year from Rutgers University Press, and I hope I can coax you into coming back to talk about the book as soon as it is out.
And so, you are a specialist in things related to race, things related to gender, things related to religion, especially white evangelicalism, so I'm so glad to have you, and thanks for joining me, Sophie.
I'm really grateful.
Thank you so much!
I'm really happy to be here.
So we have just entered a situation where it looks like the official sort of levers of the peaceful transition of power will take place.
And I think all of us are still reeling from just what turned out to be election season, not election day or election week.
And that's taken its toll.
One of the things that we continue to do, and I just feel like needs to be a priority of our show, is to continue to try to contextualize and understand The alliance that has formed, actually has been present for a long time, but has really sort of come into public view, this alliance between white nationalists and Christian nationalists.
And last week I interviewed Sarah Posner, a journalist on this topic who's written extensively on it.
And I want to kind of sort of continue talking about that with you.
You just co-edited this book, Beyond Populism, and you and your fellow editor and all of the authors in that book are trying to sort of contextualize some of this resentment and rage and anger that is being manifest in politics all over the globe.
I want to talk about how that's working here, specifically with conservative white Christians and white nationalists.
So I guess my first question is just, it's easy to trace this alliance, right, to racism and xenophobia.
We could just say, well, These are white folks.
They're racist.
That's how it goes.
That's the answer.
Let's go home and have lunch and no need to have an hour long conversation about this.
But I think there's more to it.
And I'd really like folks to maybe to get an idea of how that works.
So can you help us understand the underlying group issues that fuel that kind of shared fear of and anger toward racial minorities, immigrants and liberals on the parts of both white nationalists and Christian nationalists?
It's a really, really important question with a really long history.
And I think to begin to understand these two movements, we have to think about the way that historically Christianity, whiteness, and the concept of being civilized were all co-articulated and really embodied in and the concept of being civilized were all co-articulated and really embodied in ideas about the nuclear family, gender, kind of normative gender roles, patriarchal gender
But that really was the dominant culture in the United States was this invocation of both Christianity, whiteness, and racial supremacy historically.
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan became kind of one of the main driving political forces in the country.
In most parts of the United States, in order to get elected into office, people had to be members of the Klan.
And the Klan was, we think of it today as solely about racism, but it was really, it was about white Christian nationalism in that it was focused on Protestantism.
So in the 1920s, one of the popular ways the Klan would work to try to recruit new people was they would have these public events where they would bring in supposedly an ex-nun who could talk about the depravities of Catholicism and how much she was saved from leaving Catholicism and becoming a Protestant.
So Protestantism, Christianity, and nationalism were all really combined in the historical clan, which really shaped a kind of dominant identity.
What happens in the post-civil rights period United States is you have this fracturing of the white right.
So on the one hand you have people who are still identified with overt white supremacy, so we still have a, there still is a clan movement in the United States in the
1980s and early 1990s, several former Klan leaders decided that given that racism was now a negative term, that they would never be able to achieve the kinds of political goals they wanted under the moniker of the Klan or racism, so they reinvented their movement under the banner of white nationalism.
Using language from the civil rights movement, To try to talk about the need for white power and kind of white, white racial identity as a, as a positive, as a positive thing.
So there's that movement, which has been organizing online and there's some, some parts of it are Christian identity.
So still influenced around Protestantism, but some, some parts of that movement are pagan and see Christian, some of them see Christianity as actually a, Like Jewish, like an imposition of Jewish culture into like a pure, what should be a pure Aryan heritage.
But there's that, that tradition of has linked back to like the earlier history of the kind of white Christian nationalism has shaped this white nationalist movement, which is overtly focused on race.
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