What is Christian Nationalism? (American Idols Ep. 1)
Brad is attending to the birth of his second child. So, enjoy the first episode of the new Axis Mundi series by Andrew Whitehead. In the opening episode, Andrew defines Christian nationalism, and uses his personal journey as a Christian to understand how it works on the ground in the religious lives of Americans, church spaces, and the public square.
Transcript here.
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Axis Mundi. - I don't remember ever learning that the United States is a Christian nation.
It always just was.
It wasn't something that was actively taught to me.
Like most Americans, it was something that we just knew deep down.
And just like fish surrounded by water, it's really hard to notice what is all around you.
And here's the thing about all-encompassing worldviews that everyone around you seems to share.
There's nobody there to contradict what you all believe.
So it isn't that I remember the exact moment when I was taught that the United States is a Christian nation, but I do remember those moments of my journey where the taken-for-granted nature of that belief began to show cracks.
I do remember when my youth group leader asked me whether Christians can in good conscience serve in the military to go to other parts of the world and take the lives of those people in defense of the interests of the United States who we might otherwise be interested in evangelizing as we send missionaries to that same country.
I remember sitting in a classroom as an undergraduate at Purdue University and having a history professor point out how the faith of the Founding Fathers really looked nothing like conservative evangelical Protestantism as it's practiced in the United States today.
I remember listening to the first song on the debut album of one of my favorite bands in high school, Five Iron Frenzy, and the song was about the slaughter of Native American people in the United States achieving its manifest destiny and wondering how a Christian nation could treat people in such a gruesome way.
People who we claim are created in the image of God.
And I remember wondering, if Christianity so profoundly shaped our founding fathers, our nation, its identity, and its founding documents, then why were people with darker skin color enslaved and denied liberty, human rights, and equality?
It was these and other questions that really began to spur me on to investigate what I would later understand was Christian nationalism, and what it meant not only to my understanding of what it means to be an American and a Christian, but to our nation's history and Christianity.
You see, it's the questions that really began to reveal the contours of this belief of the United States as a Christian nation.
What questions were allowed?
How were they answered?
And which questions were deemed out of bounds, dangerous, or even heretical?
The boundaries of our group and its identity, who we are, what we stood for, and where we're going, were marked by questions, not answers.
The questions all revealed where those lines were.
It was kind of like being able to see the shape of something by looking at its shadow.
This is a podcast sharing some of what I've learned on this journey as both a person of faith and a professor who studies that faith.
After over a decade of studying Christian nationalism and three decades practicing the Christian faith, I'm convinced that Christian nationalism is a very real threat to American democracy, it betrays the Christian gospel, and threatens the American Christian Church.
We'll be blessed by God.
The nation that rejects God will be rejected by God.
The church is supposed to direct the government.
The government is not supposed to direct the church.
That is not how our founding fathers intended it.
And we have the left routinely speaking of me and of others as Christian nationalists, as if we're supposed to be running from that.
We need to be the party of nationalism.
And I'm a Christian and I say it proudly.
We should be Christian nationalists.
And by the way, Christianity will have power without having to form.
Because if I'm there, you're gonna have plenty of power.
You don't need anybody else.
You're gonna have somebody representing you very, very well.
Now remember that. - Welcome to American Idols, a podcast series produced by Axis Moody Media.
Sound production and design by Scott Okamoto, who also provided the series' original music.
American Idols was written and created by Dr. Andrew Whitehead and produced by me, Bradley Onishi.
I know I'm not alone in asking these types of questions.
There are many of us who are on similar journeys in reckoning with the role of Christianity in the United States.
Now, I grew up in a white, conservative, evangelical, Protestant megachurch.
I was really involved in the youth group, and I loved going to church on Wednesday nights, Sunday mornings, and Sunday nights.
In high school I experienced a number of difficulties in my home life and so church was a place that I felt accepted and supported and important.
Now my town was your standard small farming community in the Midwest so we celebrated a yearly maple syrup festival when the maple tree sap was flowing and we only had a couple stoplights.
Three if you counted the blinking red light on the way out of town.
And at Christmas there was always a large tree placed in the middle of the intersection at the center of town There was a strong sense of community that still exists to this day.
It was here that I learned what it meant to be a neighbor and to be a friend.
And I trust that even today, if I reached out to those in my community, many of them would still offer a helping hand.
So it wasn't that Christian nationalism was explicitly taught, but really it was caught.
We loved Jesus, we loved the Bible, we loved our churches, and we loved our nation.
And to be a good Christian was to accept the correct beliefs, to care for those around you, do what's right, and be sure that you represented your Christian convictions in the public square.
This is what it meant to be a good Christian and to be a good American.
We saw families as the cornerstone of society.
We believed our faith always worked for the good of those around us and for our nation.
We knew which political issues we should support and those that we should oppose.
So we were worried about the rise of secularism and the decline of true Christians like us in the nation.
And this shift in the religious demographics in the United States is a key part of our broader story.
The proportion of Christians has been declining for decades.
Meanwhile, the proportion of Americans who do not affiliate with a religious faith has been growing and now accounts for between a quarter and a third of the American population.
My friend and colleague Joseph Baker, he's a professor at East Tennessee State University, wrote the book called American Secularism, which is a key text exploring this topic, and he describes the change in the religious demographics in the United States this way.
And from 1972 until 1990, roughly 5% to 8% of Americans said they had no religion.
It was fairly consistent with...
It wasn't going up, unlike it was in some other, say, Western countries, like European countries, where you had seen an increase in non-religion.
Pretty stable in the United States.
But then, starting in the early 90s, you started to see that number tick up.
So, starting at about 8% in 1990, and then moving up just steadily and consistently year over year, Until today, it's about 30% of Americans would be outside of organized religion.
Of course, it matters how you measure this, but a good estimate is that between a quarter and a third of people in the United States are non-religious.
They're outside of organized religion.
So in my lifetime, religious Americans, and especially Christian Americans, were forced to see themselves more and more as one piece of a religiously pluralistic society.
Natural heritage is a strength, not a weakness.
We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.
We are shaped by every language and culture.
And this changed the tenor of what it meant to be a Christian in the public sphere.
So unlike my experience growing up, most Christians are now confronted with questions concerning what we all believe and why.
So why we vote a certain way, why we support a particular policy and ignore others.
Sociologists have a really useful concept that helps illustrate this change that I described.
Plausibility structures.
Peter Berger coined the term, and he describes plausibility structures as the social arrangements that support meaning and belief systems.
Plausibility structures are the relationships within which our view of the world is supported and maintained.
So you can imagine yourself at the center of a broad web where you're connected to all of your friends, family, acquaintances, and even strangers by a small strand of connective tissue.
All your beliefs and values are in some way the result of these connective tissues.
If all those at the end of those strands believe and value the same things as you, the web is strong.
You're unlikely to let go of those beliefs and values because everyone around you sees the world the same way you do.
Imagine that at the end of several of those connective strands, not all, but just a few, are people who perhaps hold different beliefs and values.
Your web is no longer quite as strong.
Some of the connective strands are no longer supporting you in the same way.
The degree to which your web is weakened depends on how close those several people are to you.
So if it's a thin strand from someone far away, the likelihood you reconsider deeply held beliefs and values is pretty low.
From someone close to you with a thick connective strand, the likelihood increases significantly.
So as I look back over my own journey, I can see the power of the plausibility structures that provided support for my meaning and belief systems.
Almost everyone around me saw the world in a similar way, and there was little reason for me to question those views.
However, as I built and maintained relationships with others, some becoming close while others were somewhat further away, I could no longer not evaluate the myths, traditions, narratives, and symbols of white Christian nationalism.
I was learning, and perhaps many Christians like me were learning too, that our beliefs about our faith and the nature of American identity could not just be taken for granted.
Now Christians had to make the case for what they believed the United States should look like, and how the Christian faith should be reflected in its national identity and public policies.
So, our plausibility structures were being rewired.
Sociologists refer to moments of demographic or social or cultural change as unsettled times.
People feel like the ground is shifting beneath their feet.
It's in these moments that the search for collective identity, explanations, and organizing frameworks that show us who we are, what we're all about, and where we're going begins in earnest.
People want something to lean on.
These moments have come and gone throughout U.S.
history and even before, so Christian nationalism has stood at the ready every time.
And while Christian nationalism has long been a part of the story of this nation and even the people that preceded the dawn of the United States, the most recent iterations of Christian nationalism in the United States really are a product of the rise of the religious and Christian right in the 1970s.
The cultural and social upheaval of the 1960s around race, gender, and sexuality created a context where many religiously and politically conservative white Christians were feeling like they no longer recognized their country.
The moral and traditional value system that causes things to have meaning and thus we ushered in a period of materialism and ...that produced the rebellion of the 60s and 70s, the dark ages of the 20th century, and caused, during those 20 years, a breakdown of most of the values that had been precious to and essential to the health of this republic for two centuries.
Jerry Falwell was a key figure in the rise of the Christian Right.
And as he famously said, Christian pastors in the U.S.
were called to get men saved, get them baptized, and get them registered to vote.
The Christian Right was focused on gaining and protecting political power in the service of privileging what they saw were the most important Christian moral values in the public sphere.
Brad Onishi's Orange Wave podcast series and book, Preparing for War, provide an excellent history of the marriage of the religious and political in the 1960s and 70s.
So growing up Christian in the 1980s and 1990s, I was, like many others including Brad, baptized into this culture war Christianity.
The leaders of the Christian right, as well as the pastors and religious leaders in our congregations, Pointed out how the rise of divorce and access to abortion and homosexuality all pointed to the decline of the United States as a great nation.
And it was up to Christians to insert themselves into these public discussions and vote for the correct people who could then defend true Christian morality in the public sphere.
But, as we look at the legacy of the Christian right, we find that it is not that they have brought more people into the Christian faith, although they may have won a number of battles in and around their preferred moral issues.
It's that, again, more and more Americans are leaving the Christian faith, and in some cases, pointing to this culture warring as the particular reason why.
Sociologist Ruth Braunstein from the University of Connecticut highlights how this backlash effect of the Christian right changed the landscape of American religion and especially Christianity.
Absolutely.
So there is a kind of irony in the fact that as the Christian right has achieved really significant political success on the national stage, that success has not led more people to conservative Christian churches.
And in fact, it has really alienated a lot of Americans, including many people who had previously been part of conservative Christian communities.
There is a huge amount of social science research that shows what researchers call a political backlash effect against the religious right.
And this effect takes a number of different forms and depends on kind of where people are situated within the religious communities involved.
But generally speaking, for people who are, you know, embedded in Christian communities, many people have left the faith because they've come to associate all religion with the kind of Traditionalist politics and uncompromising political style of the Christian right.
That's a trend that researchers started noting in the 1980s and has continued to this day.
And one of the interesting things that we have seen is that it's leading people not only to switch from, say, an evangelical congregation to a more liberal congregation, But rather to leave religion, or organized religion, I should say, altogether.
And this is the trend that we now refer to as the rise of the nuns, N-O-N-E-S, meaning people who identify with nothing in particular when you ask them about their religion.
Being Christian began to be defined as espousing a very particular expression of Christianity and fighting for its dominance in the public sphere.
And for many religious Americans, if that's what it meant to be Christian, they no longer wanted to be a part of it.
You can hear this in the experience of my friend Jason.
I left conservative evangelical Christianity in my mid-twenties, and it was largely a result of what is At the time, I called it Christian imperialism.
You know, this entitlement that we have the right to tell other people how to live our lives.
We have the right to affect policy.
Not only do we have the right, but we've got the obligation.
To kind of roll with an iron mace, and it just seemed to fly in the face of what I would read in Hebrews, you know, we're strangers in a foreign land.
And it felt like the religion that I'd been raised in was more of a usurper than a stranger, that mentality.
And it bothered me.
So I left and I became an Orthodox Christian.
This legacy of the Christian right and the backlash effect continues to this day and we are still living in the repercussions of it.
I've had Christians and ex-evangelicals, those who are formerly evangelical Protestant who have since left the tradition, over and over tell me that in the lead up to the 2016 election and after, wondering how and why Christian people that they worshipped with for decades could have supported a presidential candidate and then president who personally contradicted so many of the values and beliefs that they had always said were important.
Here's my friend Jason again, who by 2016 no longer identified as a Christian, but who attended a Nazarene congregation with his wife and children.
But I distinctly remember the Sunday after the 2016 presidential election The pastor took the stage and he was all grins and giggles.
And he said, are we all happy campers today?
And there was a lot of amens and ahein from the congregation.
And he said, just when you think that there is no way, God finds a way.
God finds a way.
Now, that's all I'm going to say about it.
And as though he was being magnanimous and restrained, and I just, well, I muttered a choice word under my breath, and I got up and left.
I was riding my bike to church.
My wife and my kids were driving, and I rode my bike home and just said, I can't even pretend to be associated with right-wing evangelical Christianity anymore.
There's no way I'm going to even pretend to support this.
And so I stopped attending with my wife and kids that Sunday.
I think I came back because my kids were...
And Jason's experience is reflected in social scientific studies of the backlash.
His story illustrates Ruth Bronstein's point regarding the irony of the political successes of the Christian right.
It has alienated and pushed out many who they would claim to want to reach with the love and hope of the gospel.
Here's Joseph Baker again, talking about the reasons for the dramatic rise of the religiously unaffiliated and how it influenced the taken-for-grantedness of the idea of the U.S. as a Christian nation.
And when you sort of dig into this, what you see is that this is, in a sense, a cultural backlash against the politicization of religion by the Republican Party in the United States.
I think it is true that the backlash against organized religion has brought something of a reckoning against that idea that America is taking for granted a Christian country. - I'm sorry.
I believe to understand this story of broad religious change in the U.S., both how we got here and where we go from here, we must acknowledge and grapple with Christian nationalists.
That's not who the Republican Party should represent.
We need to be the party of nationalism.
And I'm a Christian and I say it proudly.
We should be Christian nationalists.
And when Republicans learn to represent most of the people that vote for them, then we will be the party that continues to grow.
So now you might be wondering, what is Christian nationalism?
You might hear it discussed in magazine articles and on social media more and more.
But what do Americans who embrace Christian nationalism actually believe?
And how do these beliefs threaten American democracy?
After studying Christian nationalism for a decade and writing dozens of peer-reviewed articles and several books about it, here is an empirically supported definition of Christian nationalism: White Christian nationalism is a cultural framework that idealizes and advocates for a fusion of a particular expression of Christianity with American civic life.
So it holds that this version of Christianity should be the principal and undisputed cultural framework in the United States, and that the government should vigorously preserve that cultural framework.
Now white Christian nationalism combines a number of elements.
The first element is a strong moral traditionalism based on creating and sustaining social hierarchies.
So oftentimes these social hierarchies revolve around gender and sexuality.
And for some reason now, the Supreme Court has said homosexuality is now a constitutional right, and we want homosexual marriage.
This decision that was handed down recently by the majority glorifies this activity and talks about the civil rights and all this.
Well, The Bible didn't talk about civil rights.
It talked about this was an offense against God and the land.
It was an offense against the land, and the land would vomit you out.
Read it, 18th chapter of Leviticus.
Get your Bible.
Read it.
See what it says and which is going to take precedence, the Supreme Court of the United States or the Holy Word of God.
The second element is a comfort with authoritarian social control.
So it sees the world as a chaotic place, and at times society needs strong rules and strong rulers to make use of violence, or at least the threat of violence, to maintain order.
This election, people didn't vote.
I think this is what's important to understand is that evangelicals did not vote for Donald Trump based on his moral qualifications.
but based upon what he said he was going to do and who he was surrounding himself with.
Now, that was in the context of a general...
The third element is a desire for strict boundaries around national identity, civic participation, and social belonging that fall along ethno-racial lines.
So a Christian nation is generally understood to be one where white, natural-born citizens are held up as the ideal with everyone else coming after.
The church is supposed to direct the government.
The government is not supposed to direct the church.
That is not how our founding fathers intended it.
And I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk that's not in the Constitution.
It was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does.
And finally, Christian nationalism includes a populist impulse.
And this inclines Americans towards feelings of victimization, conspiratorial thinking, and suspicion toward elite leaders and institutions like academics, universities, scientists, or insider politicians.
Now, we call Christian nationalism a cultural framework.
And you can think about cultural frameworks like the scaffolding around which human social interaction and societies form.
So cultural frameworks consist of really powerful symbols.
You could think of flags and crosses and sacred books or places.
They contain narratives like the goodness of our people throughout history or particular stories about times that God has blessed us.
They also contain traditions, like when to stand, when to kneel, or when to come together for celebrations.
And all these things serve to unite and dramatize the values that we, as a people, hold dear.
So cultural frameworks tell us who we are, what we value, how we came to be, where we're going, and how we get there.
Cultural frameworks like Christian nationalism are deep stories.
Deep stories are taken for granted and just are.
Deep stories shape us, but we rarely think about them and we definitely rarely analyze them.
We don't even notice them most of the time.
And to the extent that they're unnoticed, they're most powerful.
Here's my good friend and colleague, Sam Perry, who's a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma and author of The Flag and the Cross, sharing how he and his co-author think about Christian nationalism as a deep story.
But a deep story is something else.
A deep story provides this underlying framework through which people interpret their own world and interpret the past.
And so, the deep story of Christian nationalism is like a movie script.
There are heroes and villains, and the context is this battle between good and evil.
And the heroes are people like us.
They are the Christians.
They are the Anglo-Protestants.
They are the conservatives.
And you read that back into the founding, and you also read that back today.
And the villains Change over time.
So they're always antagonistic against our group of people, the good guys.
And so the deep story that we're talking about involves the American mythology, but it also involves this kind of deep script of what our country has always been like.
And we kind of fill in the blanks with whoever are today's good guys and today's bad guys.
and that is something that has been repeated throughout history. - Now, I wanna talk about another aspect of Christian nationalism.
And for those listening closely, you might have heard me modify Christian nationalism with a descriptive term when I defined it.
I called it white Christian nationalism.
Now, why is that?
Why is it important to do so?
First, let me repeat my definition of Christian nationalism again.
White Christian nationalism is a cultural framework that idealizes and advocates for a fusion of a particular expression of Christianity with American civic life.
So, it holds that this version of Christianity should be the principal and undisputed cultural framework in the United States, and that the government should vigorously preserve that cultural framework.
Now, notice how I point to a particular expression of Christianity.
This is a vital point.
The Christianity of Christian nationalism is of a particular type.
It isn't just about acknowledging certain historic Orthodox beliefs about the faith, like the divinity of Jesus or the Apostles' Creed.
Rather, the Christianity of Christian nationalism brings with it a cartload full of cultural baggage.
So this expression of Christianity privileges conservative political ideology as vitally intertwined with what it means to be a faithful Christian.
Think of, if you don't vote Republican, then you're not even really Christian.
It also privileges free market capitalism and the production and protection of wealth as an unquestioned good.
It privileges being a natural-born citizen in the same way.
Christian nationalism privileges the right of men to lead, and the use of power and the threat of violence to subdue dissent and to conquer enemies.
Now, chief among the carry-on items of cultural baggage for Christian nationalism is how it centers and privileges the white experience.
So, Christian nationalism in the United States is inextricably tied to race.
Over the centuries, the deep story of white Christian nationalism in the Americas formed around identifying who was in and who was out primarily along racial and ethnic lines.
This is why scholars modify Christian nationalism with white.
So here are three reasons why.
First, white Christians and white Christian communities were intimately involved in the creation of racial categories from the earliest moments of American history.
This was where white was equaling good and Christian, while non-white or black equaled bad and heathen.
Jamar Tisby, a New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise, describes this early process.
When we think of religion and race, particularly in what became the United States, we can't think of them as separate categories.
Really, these elements, religion and race, are mutually constitutive.
That is to say, as religion was being formed and being established, so was race.
And I'll give you an example.
In 1667, the Virginia Assembly, which was comprised of all white men who were also Christian, enacted a law that said that baptism would not emancipate a person who was enslaved if they were of indigenous descent, mixed-race descent, or African descent.
And I think that law is incredibly instructive and emblematic because right there you have the confluence of race, religion, and politics.
You have this political body, the Virginia Assembly, crafting a law that had to do with religion in baptism and was also racially based because it designated indigenous mixed race or people of African descent.
And what you see there is the formation and hardening of racial categories along with religious rights like baptism.
Now that's just an early example, but it shows that even in the colonial era, this is before the Declaration of Independence, this is before the U.S.
Constitution is ratified, there were already these blendings of race and religion and also politics there.
And you'll get people even to this day who say, oh, slavery was bad, but at least people got the gospel, which is wrongheaded in so many ways.
First of all, the Christian gospel was in Africa long before it was in Europe.
And also, it doesn't justify in any way shape or form race-based chattel slavery, the abuse, the rape, the family separation, and the dehumanization of that practice.
Second, the mainstreaming of the modern narrative of the United States as a Christian nation was primarily located within white Christian religious traditions, and it was primarily focused on undergirding white Christian privilege as necessary to viewing the United States as a Christian nation.
Here's how Anthea Butler, who is a professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania and author of White Evangelical Racism, sums it up.
When I think about white Christian nationalism, I always say that this is the belief that America's founding is based on Christian principles and specifically white Protestant European Christian principles.
This is important to say, because for most people, that doesn't include Catholicism, and that's very interesting to think about.
This Christianity is the operational religion of the land, and the way that people think that Christianity should be thought of is as a white religion that other people embrace.
And the nationalism that goes along with it is a nationalism that's based in an idea of whiteness, or what I have called in my book, the promise of whiteness.
So this means that it doesn't necessarily have to be that white Christian nationalists are solely white.
We have a lot of people who buy into white Christian nationalism who aren't white at all.
What it is is about an ethos, a belief that these are the founding principles of the nation, and these are the principles that Americans should live by.
Third, social science research consistently finds that Christian nationalism operates quite differently for white Americans than for black Americans across a host of issues.
So, for whites, Christian nationalism functions in such a way that allows them to remain ignorant to historical and current injustices.
For black Americans, however, embracing Christian nationalism tends to make them more accepting and open to the civic participation of potential outgroups.
So, the white of white Christian nationalism doesn't necessarily refer to the skin color or racial identity of an individual American who might embrace it.
Rather, it refers to whiteness, and whiteness are the values, habits, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes that result in the organization of society in such a way that white Americans, as a group, tend to have greater access to power, privilege, wealth, and other benefits bestowed by various social institutions.
Therefore, non-white Americans can still participate in and perpetuate systems or cultural frameworks, such as white Christian nationalism, that serve to uphold a racialized society in which one group tends to benefit at the expense of other groups.
So the Christian of Christian nationalism is referencing all of this cultural baggage, including the elevation of whiteness as connected to the imagined ideal American.
And by the way, Christianity will have power without having to form.
Because if I'm there, you're going to have plenty of power.
You don't need anybody else.
You're going to have somebody representing you very, very well.
American Christians at the detriment of all other groups.
And by the way, Christianity will have power without having to form, because if I'm there, you're gonna have plenty of power.
You don't need anybody else.
You're gonna have somebody representing you very, very well.
Remember that.
So...
Now, you may be wondering, how do we and others measure Christian nationalism?
I don't want to bog us down with too much social scientific technical jargon, but here are a couple quick points.
First, we and others tend to ask for a level of agreement with a collection of questions, and then our survey respondents, who are Americans from all across the country, of all different demographic, political, religious groups, and they can strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree, or say they don't know.
So researchers like us will ask various things like the US government should declare the United States a Christian nation or the federal government should advocate Christian values.
Some of us ask the success of the United States is part of God's plan or if being Christian is important to being truly American.
Now, researchers assign point values to the answers each person gives, and then we add those up for all the questions, and we quickly see that Americans fall all along a spectrum of Christian nationalism, where some embrace it strongly, others might lean toward accepting it, but with some reservations, and you'll have some Americans who are resistant to the idea of a Christian nation, while we have other Americans who reject Christian nationalism wholeheartedly.
So here's the second important point.
Christian nationalism is not a binary.
We can't and shouldn't say people are either Christian nationalist or not.
Rather, we should focus on the cultural framework of Christian nationalism and then how strongly folks embrace or reject it.
So, in our book, Taking America Back for God, Sam Perry and I combine the responses along this spectrum into four categories, which make it easier to talk about where Americans fall along the scale.
So, Sam and I identify ambassadors, who are those in the upper quartile of the scale, the upper 25%, which represents about 15% of Americans.
Ambassadors are those who are wholly supportive of the Christian nation narrative.
They believe the U.S.
either was or still is a Christian nation, and that as a country, we need to re-establish it in order to flourish.
So ambassadors are consistently the smallest group.
A recent PRRI survey labeled a similar group adherents, and in their study, adherents were only 10% of the population.
Accommodators are those who fall between the mean or middle of the scale, up to the beginning of that upper quartile.
So these Americans lean toward accepting the Christian nation narrative, and their support, while undeniable, is not comprehensive.
They are consistently the largest group across many of the surveys we fielded, usually around a third of the population.
Other researchers find this group to be about 20% of the population.
Resisters are mirror images of accommodators, and exist on the scale from the mean, or middle, down to the beginning of that lowest quartile.
They're uncomfortable with the idea of a Christian nation, but they're not wholly opposed, right?
So they lean toward opposition.
Recently, we found they're about 25% of the population, but PRRI, in their survey, found this group was 39% of the population.
And then finally, we have rejecters.
Those folks who completely repudiate any notion of a close relationship between Christianity and American civil society.
So they are the folks that are on the very bottom end of this scale.
And they're around 25% of the population.
So, taken together, around half to two-thirds of Americans resist or reject Christian nationalism, with only 10-15% or so strongly embracing it.
The last quarter to a third of Americans are more or less comfortable with Christianity playing a role in public life, but not dominating it in any way.
So this means a small minority actually strongly embrace Christian nationalism.
But one in three Americans is willing to accept it passively as part of the nation's framework.
And as we'll explore in our next episode, this minority exercises an influence on US politics that far exceeds their size.
So, here's where we're going.
In the next episode, I'm going to clearly lay out how Christian nationalism threatens American democracy.
So this includes the role it plays and has played in instances of political violence throughout American history.
Whether it is the insurrection on January 6th.
We're going to walk down to the Capitol.
And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.
And we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
Because you'll never take back our country with weakness.
You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
Or mob violence from a century ago.
White Christian nationalism supports democracy until it doesn't.
We'll see that Christian nationalism is not interested in a government for the people by the people, but for a particular people and by a particular people.
In episode 3, we'll explore how Christian nationalism threatens the Christian Church, and particularly American Christianity.
So here I'll share a bit of my own journey as a person of faith wrestling with, and then ultimately rejecting, white Christian nationalism.
My book American Idolatry explores this connection in greater depth, highlighting the idols of Christian nationalism, of power, fear, and violence, and how these idols lead American Christians to betray the gospel in service of perpetuating social systems that benefit only a small slice of our society.
This is especially visible as we struggle with racial justice and immigration in our country.
And then in the final episode, we'll take stock of what this all means as we move forward and where we go from here.
So what is the future of American democracy under the shadow of a committed minority of Americans who embrace Christian nationalism?
What are groups doing in order to protect the guardrails of democracy?
We'll also ask, what is the future of American Christianity and is it defined wholly around white Christian nationalism?
We'll talk about Christians who are trying to show us a different way forward.
And we'll try to think about if there's any reason to hope when there's so much to be cynical about.
Can we imagine a future without the poisoning influence of Christian nationalism on our democracy and Christianity?
I hope you'll join us.
As we'll soon see, our collective futures depend on it.
Thanks for listening to American Idols from Axis Mundi Media.
American Idols was created and written by Dr. Andrew Whitehead.
It was produced by me, Brad Onishi, our sound engineer, Iskall Okamoto, who also provided original music.
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