Brad speaks with Dr. Philip Gorski, Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University. They preview his new co-authored book (with Sam Perry) on the history and future of Christian nationalism in the United States. Professor Gorski illuminates how White Christian nationalism has been part of the American fabric since the Puritans. One of the reasons it is hard to combat is that its threads have become so embedded in our national narratives that we often don't see them. However, the Trump presidency created a situation where they could no longer be ignored. Yet that doesn't mean that the threats of authoritarianism, xenophobia, and racism they pose have been thwarted. One possible future, according to Gorski, is a Heerenvolk autocracy . . . listen to the conversation to learn what that is and why it could be our next national chapter.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and today I have a distinct pleasure, and that is the chance to talk with Dr. Philip Gorski, who is professor of sociology and religious studies at Yale University.
Professor Gorski is a distinguished sociologist of religion.
Doing this show is a pleasure on so many fronts.
I get to have Conversations with colleagues and peers and a lot of folks who I probably wouldn't get to talk to normally.
And every once in a while you get to sort of interview someone who is kind of in the ranks of a distinguished scholar that you never had an excuse to talk to before and now you have one and that's the case today.
So, Dr. Gorski's work has been overwhelmingly influential for A generation of folks working on American religion, American sociology of religion, the history of American religion, and so on.
He is the author of many works, but I'll just mention a couple.
One is American Babylon, Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump, which came out in 2020.
Another work is American Covenant, a history of civil religion from Puritans to the present, and that is from 2019, and the list goes on and on.
I'm here today to talk to him about a new book that he is writing with Sam Perry, who I know many of you know from his work on white Christian nationalism, and they're writing a book together.
Which is tentatively titled, Flag and Cross, White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.
That title may change, but that's what they're going with, and it'll be out next year from Oxford University Press.
So, before I go on, Dr. Gorski, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, thanks for having me on the show, Brad.
As you know, I'm a huge fan, so it's really fun to be here to talk with you.
I didn't know you and Sam were writing a book together, and when I found out, I was Delighted for those of you out there who don't know that the analogy I'll make is if you remember when LeBron James went to Miami and they play and he played alongside Dwayne Wade, you know, it was kind of like two Superstars teaming up.
Well, that is what we have here.
Sam Perry and Philip Gorski together is like LeBron James and Dwayne Wade of American Sociology of Religion.
That's how it works.
So the book is going to be amazing.
You have provided me with a kind of sneak peek, and I'm really excited to talk to you about it.
So let me start by asking you this.
We've talked a lot about Christian nationalism on our show.
We've sort of followed Sam and Andrew Whitehead and their definition of it.
We've really drawn on it in significant ways.
One of the things I really love about what you're bringing to this new book is a deep historical dimension.
And you talk about how white Christian nationalism on this continent really started quite a long time ago.
You call it a deep story as it relates to the United States.
So let me just ask, when in your mind did white Christian nationalism start here, and what makes it what you call a deep story?
Yeah, great question.
You know, white Christian nationalism is something that is more and more, you know, being discussed first in academic circles, now increasingly Out in the wider public, and I think it's something that people oftentimes think is something that's new.
They think maybe it's the same thing as the religious right, or maybe it's similar to evangelicalism, so they go, you know, it formed in the 80s, or it formed in the 50s, or maybe they think it's just something that kind of, you know, popped out of the, dropped out of the sky on January 6th, of this year, and so one of the things that we're trying to do in this book is say, no, I mean, this is something that is as old as the history of American settler colonialism.
It didn't form in 1990 or 1950, it formed more like in 1650 or 1690, though 1690 is the date that I give really is one where you really see it and it's kind of Full-blown form for the first time.
And call it a deep story for a couple of reasons.
One is that it has historical depth, but also because it has cultural and psychological depth.
So there are, of course, folks out there who are Explicitly developing a Christian nationalist narrative about the United States that, you know, people like David Barton, you know, and this is also something that finds its way into a lot of Christian homeschooling and Christian Academy history textbooks.
But, you know, it's also just deep in the sense that it's, I think, just pervasive to the point of almost invisible.
In many parts of the evangelical subculture, and it's also psychologically deep in the sense that I think even people who've never heard of David Barton, who weren't Christian homeschooled, just absorb some of its fundamental ideas out of the subculture so that it structures the way that they think about the United States, the way that they think about American politics, the way that they think of themselves and their place in the world.
In a way that they may not even really be fully conscious of.
And that's really where the concept comes from.
It comes from another sociologist, Arlie Hochschild, who wrote a book called Strangers in Their Own Land that came out around the time when Trump was first elected.
He was trying to understand how it could be that a bunch of relatively less affluent rural folks in Louisiana could Nonetheless, be politically conservative and pro-business.
And so that's really where we first got this notion of the deep story that we're using to structure part of the narrative of the book.
One of the ways that you describe the kind of structure of this deep story is through sort of little mini narratives, or mini might be the wrong word, but embedded narratives.
And those narratives are the promised land story, the end time story, and the racial curse story.
And as I was reading the sneak peek of the book that you gave me, it became very apparent to me that As you just said, these narratives are so embedded within American culture that even those who are not necessarily saturated with evangelical cultures or spaces end up adopting these stories as sort of just the standard, as sort of just kind of normal.
And I'm wondering if you could take us through those.
You know, let's start with the Promised Land story.
How does the Promised Land ideal work in the white Christian nationalist mind?
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