S1.Ep.5 (Re-release): White Evangelicalism, Nationalism, and Populism
An episode from Season 1 where Brad and Dan discuss nationalism and populism in the White Evangelical subculture. This is a nice primer for understanding what we now call Christian nationalism and its pervasiveness in American politics.
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Axis Mundy Welcome to Straight Wide American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am Associate Professor at Skidmore College and I'm here with my co-host Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor at Landmark College and Chair of the Liberal Studies Department there.
We're recording today, as usual, from Skidmore up here in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Today we want to talk about white evangelicalism and nationalism.
And you might have Ask yourself at some point, you know, listening to a campaign speech or, you know, Christian support for Trump and wondered, why do white evangelicals get to name themselves the kind of true Americans?
Like, what gives them the claim or the privilege of being the real people of this country?
And today we want to kind of explore that question, this marriage of white evangelicalism and American nationalism, through what we kind of take to be a three-headed monster of white identity, American nationalism, and evangelicalism.
Dan, you've been talking a lot about this in various venues.
You've been writing about it.
And for you, it seems like we have this contemporary moment where there's a perfect storm of the Republican Party cultivating what you call an ethno-nationalist kind of ethos with the vehement support of white evangelicals.
And first things first, I'm sure many of our listeners are like, well, what the heck is ethno-nationalism?
That sounds like a kind of academic buzzword.
What are you guys talking about?
So, what are we talking about?
Yeah, so first I'll define that buzzword with another buzzword.
We use this phrase ethno-nationalism.
It's a form of what we maybe call a xenophobic populism, right?
But most people have this conception of xenophobia, right?
This fear of outsiders, usually racially tinged.
Obviously in the American context it is.
Whether they're south of the border or whether they're asylum seekers, they're almost always figured to be people of People who are not white, who are somehow a threat.
But this term populism is sort of stickier.
It's a buzzword in the media.
We hear it all the time.
We hear it about Trump.
We hear it about Bernie Sanders.
But it's hard to define and some political theorists actually think maybe there's not a good definition.
But I actually think that there is.
And just as you indicated with this question of why do they get to be the real people, the term populism, the key idea is the notion of the people.
The Latin word populus is where we get the word popular and populism and people.
And so it's about defining who the people are, right?
And of course in the American context, where we are framed around this concept of we the people, that's a really central question.
So there are sort of two elements to the people as a populist will conceive of it.
The first is that the people are sort of anti-establishment or anti-elitist.
The people, the real people, are somehow separate from the establishment or the elitist.
And so we know right now in American society we're clearly in this kind of anti-establishment moment.
And so that's a piece of populism.
But the other piece about defining the people is That there's a pure or authentic or real people, right?
The people are not the same thing as everybody who lives in a place or even everybody who's a citizen of the place.
So what makes populism, populism is really about defining the scope of the people and excluding others from that.
All right, so let's just stop for a minute and make sure we got two things straight.
So ethno-nationalism is really a movement that says ethno, meaning a certain people, are the real citizens and the real sort of constitutive group of a country.
So it's ethno-people, nationalism.
And so ethnonationalism is really a movement to say, we are the real people of this country.
And that leads into the definition of populism you gave there.
And populism being anti-elite and this sort of idea of we are the real people.
So it's easy to see how ethnonationalism and populism could go together, right?
One group saying we, in this case white Christians, are the real people of the country.
And we are not only against the elites, but we are against anyone, or we're at least sort of privileged over anyone who is not part of that group.
This is, I think, really helpful right off the bat because it leads us past the idea that's been tread so many places about economic anxiety.
And concern on the part of rural white voters.
If you're talking about populism as being a certain definition of we the people, then it's very easy to see that white evangelicals and many others who support Trump are not motivated simply by economic concerns or economic displacement.
That there's much more going on if we actually talk about ethnonationalism and together with populism.
Yeah, and we've seen that, right?
Survey after survey after survey show that it's not so-called economic anxiety that was the main driver.
Sometimes it's euphemistically called cultural anxiety, right?
Other times it's more overtly called racial anxiety, right?
It's this notion of a loss of authentic American identity, right?
But American here isn't everybody, right?
Real Americans are the right kind of American.
So they're people who are Christians, and even within that, the right kinds of Christians, right?
They're not talking about Unitarians and Congregationalists.
They're talking about Evangelicals.
They're white.
They're straight.
They're cisgender.
They are male, or if they're not male, they accept a certain kind of gendered structure of society.
They're English-speaking, right?
Anybody who falls outside of those parameters is not part of, within a populist framework, we the people.
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