New Data About How Issues of Family, Gender, Sexuality Drive MAGA Extremism
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In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, Brad Onishi welcomes back Dr. Andrew Whitehead, sociology professor at Indiana University and co-author of Taking America Back for God. They unpack how Christian nationalism uses ideas about gender, family, and sexuality to shape political identity—especially among white working-class Americans.
Dr. Whitehead shares key insights from public opinion data that reveal a strong link between Christian nationalist beliefs and support for authoritarian leaders. The conversation explores the myth of the “nuclear family,” the politics of fear, and how nostalgia and hierarchy fuel the MAGA movement.
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It's no secret that issues surrounding gender, family, and sexuality are intimately tied to mangaism and Christian nationalism.
But what does the data say?
What happens when we dig into voting patterns and opinion polls?
What happens when we ask people about the ways issues surrounding trans folks or gay marriage, abortion?
Or other family dynamics influence the way they vote and who they support.
Today, I welcome back to the program Andrew Whitehead, who's a professor of sociology at Indiana University in Indianapolis.
Andrew is the author, along with Sam Perry, of Taking America Back for God.
He's also the author of American Idolatry, one work of sociology about Christian nationalism, the other a more personal approach that warns of the dangers that Christian nationalism poses.
Andrew and I dig into new research that he and Sam have done about the ways that gender, family, and sexuality have a deep impact on the ways that people come to support MAGA, including people of color and those from underserved and underprivileged socioeconomic backgrounds.
In the bonus content, I link all of this to things that have happened over the last 50 and 60 years in this country.
One of the things I argue in my new book is that in the 1970s, the nuclear family became what Sophie Bjork-James calls a divine institution.
Paul Weirich was able to make the nuclear family the red line of Christian orthodoxy in the country.
And what that means is if you somehow depart from the structure of the nuclear family, if you are gay, if you're a single woman, if you're trans or non-binary.
If you're somebody who simply chooses to be single and not have kids because you just choose that as your choice, you're departing from the basic bedrock, the basic unit of civilization, and thus you are not a good Christian or a real American.
This directly links to Andrew's sociological work in the contemporary period, and it provides an explainer as to why these issues—family, sexuality, gender, patriarchy— I'm Brad Onishi, And this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi.
Great to be with you on this Monday.
I have someone here who's a return guest and who's also the creator of one of our best podcasts.
Hasn't been here in a while, though, and that's Dr. Andrew Whitehead.
So, Andrew, thanks for coming back.
Yeah, good to be here.
Happy to be with you again, Brad.
We're here to talk about two things.
You had a great Substack post the other day and a forthcoming article coming out with Sam Perry, basically about things that I think will, by the time we're done today, Mm-hmm.
election.
You have great data on this.
You have great research on this.
The other is a paper you wrote with Sam about state level voting patterns and what they show us about how Christian nationalism is a predictor for...
The ways people voted for Trump and why they did as it comes to their background, their demography, their identity, and so on.
So with all that said, let's jump in.
And I'll start with your Substack writing.
You talk about the ways that the Trump campaign emphasized gender and sexuality.
And I think a lot of people out there know that intuitively.
I'm not sure people listening, many of whom are probably in blue bubbles or shields or something, understand the onslaught of Trump's advertising on gender, the family and sexuality.
How much of the campaign was spent there?
I live in Indiana, and so this was a state where it was actually strange for me leading up to the election.
As I think back, I remember in the moment, too, seeing ads for Trump in Indiana.
I was like, this state is not...
It's going to, you know, the overwhelming majority is going to vote for him.
But the ads were still running here.
And so that gave me a sense as to they're got to be running everywhere.
But the main ad that we saw over and over really did focus on gender and sexuality and was focused on essentially the transgender community.
Right.
And linking Kamala Harris and the Democratic agenda with, you know, trying to.
And so the tagline, and hopefully I get this right, but the tagline was something a lot like, you know, Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you, or something like that.
So really digging into this.
And by, you know, estimates, you know, there were like $40 million spent, you know, a large portion of their budget for ads was spent there on that ad alone.
And then, too, internal studies from, you know, the Democratic Party, you know, they kind of found that, yeah, these ads were actually pretty successful to those independent or undecided motors.
They were doing the work.
And so that kind of primes us and think about, well, why?
Why would this ad that is kind of like a cudgel?
It's just, it's not a very precise instrument.
But it's doing the work.
And why is that?
So I think that's kind of where it lays out the question.
I think that point you just made is something I really hope people hear.
And that is, this had an effect, according to the data, on the independent, undecided voter.
So we can think about the ways this is red meat.
Trump is, you know, Kamala is for they, them.
Trump is for you.
All right, fine.
Red meat for the MAGA rally attending, MAGA hat wearing, whoever.
That casual voter, that I'm not into politics voter, that like, I'm a PTA mom and I'm not really into the politics, but I just, I'm not sure who to vote for person.
Seems like that ad was like one that reached them.
You've been studying Christian nationalism for a long, long time.
You are one of the preeminent figures in the field studying this today.
one of the things you point out in the sub stack is that traditionalist social hierarchies are a main factor of Christian nationalism.
Would you just remind people of that?
Yeah, definitely.
So I think this really gets at it where, you know, over the last number of elections, so 2016, 2020, and now again 2024, in those other elections, whether Trump won or lost Christian nationalism at the individual level was a key covariate.
It was strongly associated with how people were going to vote.
And so as we begin to unpack that, it's trying to understand why.
So this gets to the definition of Christian nationalism.
And again, the podcast I recorded with you all, I still get emails about that, for that.
And so thanks again for working with me on that.
But in that, trying to highlight what Christian nationalism is.
And so the way that we define it is Christian nationalism is a cultural framework that desires a particular expression of Christianity to be privileged in the public sphere and to see the government defend that.
Particular expression of Christianity as the central organizing framework.
So the particular expression of Christianity is key.
Because it isn't all Christianity.
So like, Reverend William Barber is, you know, arrested in the Capitol Rotunda.
That form of Christianity, no.
But this other form, very conservative both politically and religiously, is the type.
And it isn't just referring to historic beliefs of Christianity.
But it's referring to what I call this cultural baggage that's added into.
So the Christian of Christian nationalism is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
It is intuitively ringing these bells.
These are the other cultural markers of a true Christian.
And this is stuff, obviously, Brad, that you've written about extensively.
A lot of people probably know.
But it's important to lay that groundwork because what we find is some of the key cultural markers of that expression of Christianity are, as I write about and as you just mentioned, A desire for traditional social hierarchies, and these are revolving around gender and sexuality.
So it views God's desire for a good society and a good nation to be organized according to men leading, women supporting, marriage is reserved for a man and a woman alone, and they should commit to having babies.
And we see if people are kind of following the news even a little bit.
You see these markers everywhere with the executive orders, everything the Trump administration is doing.
And so that is one of the key cultural markers of Christian nationalism is, again, this desire for these very traditional understandings of gender and sexuality.
So I am not a sociologist.
I'm famously bad at numbers and often can't.
Read charts very well.
It's just the whole thing.
All right.
But most of my work is historical, and I just want to try something out on you and see if this hits your social scientific findings and all the data that you've been running.
So I'm writing a book, and one of the things I've been working on over the last couple of weeks is this.
We all know the story of the religious right.
Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, he links up with people like Paul Weyrich and...
And, you know, the story goes, and we can rehearse the whole thing, segregation of schools, racism, that's a whole part, and we've talked about it endlessly in this show, in writing, so on.
The part, though, that I want to simplify for people that has really become apparent for me in the formation of the religious right was this.
It was really Catholic voices.
Like Paul Weirich, who's hardcore Catholic, and others, who said, if we can posit that the nuclear family, the nuclear family, which includes, as you just said, patriarchal leader, man leading, only men and women can get married.
We're not going to have any same-sex marriage, etc.
You're expected to have children if you can, etc.
And we're not going to talk about single mothers.
We're not talking about polyamory.
None of that.
And so anything outside of that, including...
If you can make the nuclear family the bedrock of Christian orthodoxy, then you can unite Catholics, evangelicals.
You can get a bunch of Mormons.
You might get some Jews with you.
And what you're going to end up with is a movement that basically draws a line in the sand that says, if you are willing to get on board with the idea that the nuclear family is, as Sophie Bjork James calls it, a divine institution ordained by God.
You as a Catholic, you as an evangelical, fundamentalist, you might even be Mormon.
That's fine.
Get in here for a minute.
We're good.
And I guess what I'm seeing in your work is 50 years later, after Paul Weyrich made that move, we see it coming to fruition in the most clear and vicious ways in terms of our government's policies and approach to executive orders.
Does the history there feel resonant with your findings, or what else can we add?
Yeah, no, I think the short answer is yes, right, to all that.
And so that's where I think...
What's so great and the work that I rely on that you do and others charting out that historical relationship is that we do see the fruit now in the data coming to fruition where Trump is the natural kind of endpoint of decades of work of religious right.
And as we look at Christian nationalism in the U.S. and in politics and a lot of these cultural aspects of it.
So the traditional social hierarchies or ethno-racial boundaries, as you mentioned, or a And so I think what caused or what we see now, again, is this fruit of the work in the 70s in response to the cultural upheaval as they saw it in the 60s, is that, you know, the goal was we need to find folks that we can align with.
And so, yes, we will.
Redraw these boundaries to include folks that, theologically, we may have very different views on salvation, the afterlife, whatever, what happens, you know, when we take communion, all that stuff, because the key cultural markers, again, are traditional family, are authoritarian social control, are ethno-racial boundaries, and so those bound these folks together.
Whereas if we go back 100 years to the 20s, Protestants and Catholics, they were not, Working together.
Both were white.
They were not working together, right?
The KKK was attacking white Catholics.
This was a complete war, but we see not 50 years later.
They recognize, and again, I think a part of that story, too, is the social demographic and religious diversity increasing the U.S. They see the ground is shifting around us politically, socially.
And so who are our like-minded folks?
And so I think, yeah, the story and history that you lay out is reflected in the data when we survey folks now today.
But then I think, too, goes even further back to why these folks were willing to work together at this time.
I'm wondering if the data you're talking about here about the idea of a nuclear, quote-unquote, traditional family being something that needs to be protected.
Kamala's for they, them.
Donald Trump's for you.
Is this why Trump is seen as the only one who can protect the nation and Kamala and others like her are seen as an internal threat to the nation because they're an internal threat to the family?
Like, the two go hand in hand.
Yeah, I think so.
And what's so interesting, too, about that juxtaposition is, you know, Kamala and, you know, married...
It's this kind of tight knit family unit.
And then you have Trump with multiple affairs and just all of this stuff happening.
But again, I think, too, what we need to highlight is the role of fear and this idea and kind of sense of persecution and external threat to us, to the antigen.
Because again, a lot has been made of how Trump does not represent any of the values that the religious right has posited for decades.
But he says, I will defend your vision for the good of the country.
What you want to see take place, I will do that.
So it doesn't matter if he aligns.
It's the fact that he will give Those levers of power to the people that they want to see in power.
And so I think that's key.
So that sense of fear and threat, again, undergird gender and sexuality, ethno-racial boundaries, immigration, xenophobia, all of these aspects of persecution and sense of threat from the out-group.
Again, these are largely intertwined with Christian nationalism and recent work that I've done, too, really does actually focus on fear.
And Christian nationalism is tightly intertwined with that sense.
You know, there was all these memes and posts and really cringy content around the inauguration that said, Daddy's home with Trump becoming.
And feel free to vent.
I don't know if you want to vent, but go ahead if you want.
No, it was cringy.
That's a great way to describe it.
And I think on the surface that just looks Freudian and it looks really like, come on, this is gross.
Sometimes get confused by it.
You had these supposedly alpha male types who were posting that.
So like the Trump podcaster, the Trump acolyte, the Benny Johnson, the Tucker Carlson, the whoever, Daddy's Home.
And it's weird because you're like, well, aren't you supposed to be Mr. Tough Guy Machismo Retrograde Masculinity Guy?
Why are you saying your daddy's home?
But when you read work like yours, it becomes very clear that he is the national patriarch who represents the national family that is America.
And that vision is based on the patriarchal nuclear family that's largely based on a white model.
And so the ethno-nationalist boundaries come into play.
The gender, sex, and family boundaries come into play.
The immigrant boundaries come into play.
And that daddy Trump stuff, as gross and cringy and Freudian as it is, Is really like a decoder ring for understanding all the boundaries I think you're outlining in the Substack Post and your larger work on Christian nationalism.
Yeah, no, it is.
And I think the other piece of cultural baggage for Christian nationalism, besides the ones you just mentioned, is a comfort with authoritarian social control.
And that plays directly into this idea of...
strong rules, but especially a strong ruler to come in and enact order, whether it is gender, sexuality, ethno-racial boundaries, whatever else, we need somebody to come in and take control.
And that, again, over and over is that vision of the patriarchal leader of the family over and over.
And so those, yeah, are all intertwined.
And again, Christian nationalism provides that sense of legitimation in the sacred, that these things that we value are what God values.
And when God values it, democracy itself, as you have made clear over and over in your work, Brad, they will set aside democracy in order to achieve that.
Because if God wants it, who or what should stand in the way?
Nothing.
Yeah.
Christ is king.
Right.
And that trumps democracy.
Christ is king trumps the will of the people.
All right, let's take a break and we'll come back and dig into your brand new paper with Sam Perry about all of this.
Be right back.
All right, friends.
Some people get excited because they get like an early, they like wait in line and get a video game early.
Some people are normal and they get excited because they go to see like a movie on opening night.
I'm excited because I do this job for a living.
And I get to ask people like Andrew Whitehead, like, hey, that paper's not out yet, but, like, send it to me.
Could I read it early?
Your new sociology paper?
So that tells you the sort of state of my life and my mindset.
The paper is coming with Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry, Christian Nationalism and the Vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential Election, a state-level analysis, coming at nations and nationalism.
What you do here, and just please jump in and tell me where I'm missing stuff and don't understand things, is a state-level kind of analysis of Christian nationalism and how it played into support for Donald Trump.
And I guess the particular emphasis here is on the state level, because in this country, we vote in states.
And so you can really kind of see how Indiana or Nebraska or Georgia or Oregon voted and what was effective in those places in terms of messaging, what factors drove people to vote So a lot of work we've done on past elections and since looking at, again, individual level attitudes.
And so that tells us a lot when we can poll Americans and nationally representative data to show the more that somebody rejects.
Or accepts Christian nationalism, the more likely or less likely they are to vote for Trump.
But again, we live in a country where, yeah, the electoral votes are distributed based on states, and so what really matters is at the state level, does it have that same effect?
And so the limitation that we had for years is that we just didn't have data at the state level, or we didn't have enough data of people in states to then, you know, create kind of a proxy.
Of that level in the state of acceptance or rejection of Christian nationalism.
But the Public Religion Research Institute, PRI, they gather a lot of data on religion in the U.S. and politics.
And they were able to, over a year, collect enough data to give estimates of how strongly Christian nationalism is present in a state or if it's not very present.
And so then we can link that with vote share.
So then looking at the percent.
Of each state that voted for Trump once we had finalized results.
And then, too, our Census Bureau and other places collects data about Americans, and we can get state-level estimates for other things.
Because is it just education or men and women?
You know, if there's more men or women in a state, is it income level, immigration?
All these state-level estimates.
And so in this paper, we're able to actually look at Christian nationalism, that proportion of the state, alongside these other possible explanations.
To then get an idea of where are those states and where is Christian nationalism, you know, most important in kind of encouraging a state to turn for Trump.
And this will be one of those moments where it's a surprise, no surprise.
So the last 10 years, a lot of work done to say, hey, Trump voters are more than white working class people.
They are.
There's a lot.
I mean, you know, where I grew up in Orange County, a lot of affluent people there.
A lot of Trump voters.
You know, we can go across the line.
We've all talked about the rise in Latino vote for Trump.
We've all talked about the rise in women voting for Trump and so on.
But it does seem that when you isolated the state data, you did find that he made promises to white working class people.
And it seems like those promises were received and they made a difference and that there is a important role in states with.
Is that nexus hold together?
Yeah, it sure does.
So what we're able to do is not just look to see, you know, if we control for all these other possible explanations, is that proportion of a population that embraces Christian nationalism, is that predictive of voting for Trump?
We find that it is.
But then we're able to look.
In states with similar levels of education or as education or working class population differs, does that change how important Christian nationalism is, right?
So it's a slightly different question.
where does Christian nationalism matter more or less?
Not just does it matter once we control.
And what we find there is kind of the...
And here we see it operating as people kind of thought or wondered, is that Christian nationalism, that proportion of the population where there's more people that embrace Christian nationalism, it is more strongly associated with voting for Trump in places with lower overall levels of education.
And that doesn't mean that, okay, poorly educated folks just voted for Trump, but really that's an approximation of working class.
It's this white, working class areas of the country.
we see that Christian nationalism, this cultural framework around this identity of the us, the real Americans, it was even more predictive of voting for Trump than in places where there were higher levels of education.
So again, that really highlights that these Christian nationalist beliefs or values were more powerfully related to support for Trump That's another question.
Again, as a sociologist, you know, the pithy phrase, you know, it doesn't matter if a situation is real.
If people perceive it as real, that's what matters.
And so for these populations perceiving, receiving those messages that you're falling behind, they're coming to get you.
There's only one person that can save you.
All of that.
It was very predicted in those places with white working class populations.
And Christian nationalism, again, is this kind of identity to rally around.
It is the real Americans, the us.
And wrapped up in that are these understandings of race, gender, sexuality, authoritarianism.
All of that is a part of it, too.
I remember about the first Trump run, 2015-16, I had a conversation with somebody who I was kind of a military, paramilitary person.
I lived in D.C. at the time.
D.C. is one of those places where you end up running into all kinds of characters.
You go to a dinner for your spouse's work and you never know who you're sitting next to.
And here I am talking to this guy, part of intelligence community, part of all kinds of stuff.
And he starts telling me how Donald Trump's the greatest thing in the world.
And I'm like, okay, tell me about that.
It's 2016, before any of this happened.
And he's like, I'm from Missouri.
It's like, cool, my mom's from Missouri, too.
Like, where about?
Blah, blah, blah.
Great.
Okay.
And he's like, you know what?
My brother's not worried about all this other stuff.
You know what my brother's worried about is illegal immigrants taking his job.
And the more I dug into that, it was like what you just said.
It was like perception.
Like, there was very few undocumented people.
The job his brother did was not one I don't think that undocumented people were attaining.
But there was a perception that, like, I've been left behind, my family's been left behind, and this will fix it.
And it seems like 10 years on, those promises just still hold true with those communities.
You've been left behind, undocumented people have taken your way of life, all the elites care about is DEI, and Kamala Harris is just worried about pronouns.
And it seems like the message still slaps.
I mean, is that fair?
Yeah, no, it does.
I really think it does.
And that's the difficult part is, again, kind of within the social media apparatus and how all this plays out in our context today is that folks, yeah, can live in these very distinct silos of information.
And sadly, what we find is that being presented contrasting information or facts actually does nothing to change minds.
It really comes down to this feeling of identity and like, who is my group?
And then I will accept forms of information from, you know, these folks that are in my group and anybody outside.
I won't accept those forms of information.
And so, yeah, I think that still plays.
And something I've been thinking about lately, and I'll just test drive it here a little bit, is, you know, as folks look back, we talk about the strength of nostalgia, wanting to get back to this time, like this person in Missouri, right?
When, quote-unquote, illegal immigrants weren't taking our jobs or whatever else.
And they look back to these decades, and again, we could ask this question, well, what exactly about that decade do you want to get back to?
Because for some folks, it's better than others.
But it's wild, too, of looking back, they perceive what made that decade great was this idea that, well, there weren't as many racial and ethnic minorities or people from other countries.
And they think that was the reason it was great then, rather than the marginal tax rate was higher.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So which were the parts that were actually great about that time period?
And how does that messaging get out, right?
How does that take place?
And so that, I think, is the difficult part.
just as I was teaching this past semester, talking to students and just trying to get a handle on, like, as we talk about tax and tax rates, like how much a billion is.
We have these billionaires, like people can't wrap their minds around a billion.
So a million seconds is like 14 days, if you count it.
And then a billion.
seconds is like 32 years.
It's just incredible amounts of wealth.
And so again, all these things are wrapped up together, but the messaging...
Yeah.
Yeah.
So let's tie the two together.
If I'm that white working class voter, you're telling me as Trump, you're telling me that the undocumented people have ruined your country.
And I'm like, yeah, my country is.
I'm hurting.
That must be the reason.
Like, my knee hurts.
That must be what happened.
That hurt my knee.
That's, right?
And then it's like, yeah, and the elites don't care about you.
They care about DEI.
That's all they care about.
Yeah, that's right.
I can't even get a job anymore because DEI.
Okay.
Slot in the family gender sex piece there.
Does the, like, the idea of Kamala for they-them fit into the white working class puzzle that we're talking about now?
Yeah, no, I think it does.
Again, and one of the reasons why is with this cultural framework of Christian nationalism, these things are tightly intertwined.
And so, again, as you pointed out earlier in our conversation, this desire for the traditional family, the family as God designed it, is intertwined with and plays a role in this understanding of how our politics should be decided and organized.
Who should be citizens or not?
Who is closer to this ideal of the true American citizen?
All these things are wrapped up together.
And so as you pull on one thread, you're pulling on others.
And so, you know, other writers and folks, Anthea Butler, her book on white evangelical racism comes to mind.
This desire for the traditional quote-unquote family is wrapped up in very strong beliefs around ethno-racial identity for evangelicals.
You can't just pull those apart.
These things are part of this common worldview and belief system.
Well, and that's why we get the obsession with trans high school athletes.
Not only are they taking our jobs, not only are they leaving us behind, but now they're letting our kids be attacked and this and that.
That's the messaging people get.
All right, y 'all.
I'm gonna ask Andrew one more question, and it's one I've been mulling.
But if you're not a subscriber, now's the time to subscribe, because I'm gonna ask Andrew this question, and it's all about the ways that sexuality and gender identity surrounding trans
Andrew, here's my historical nonsense to get.
You out the door so my wife doesn't have to hear me talk about it at dinner tonight, okay?
Because she doesn't want to hear it.
So if I go back to the 70s, that is the years right after the summer of love.
Okay, so just give me the summer of love 1968.
There's a historical marker.
And this is a moment in American history where...
People are like, maybe I won't get married, the summer of love.
Maybe, you know, we're going to have different mores and ethos around people's sex lives and all the ways people conduct those.
The birth control pill changed the ways people could have sex lives and perhaps not worry about pregnancy as much and so on and so on and so on.
So the 1970s are the wake of that.
And I think...
which is the summer of love.
Hippies and free women not wearing bras, going into the workplace, not having children, so on and so on and so on.
Okay.
The backlash was stronger almost.
Whatever we think happened in the summer of love and everything surrounding it.
The pandemic years for me, as I taught in classrooms in largely secular and liberal universities, were the years where what broke into American consciousness were pronouns, trans identity, non-binary identity, the idea of being they, them.
And those are all things that I give full-throated support for.
And on this show, we are always about, I, I did, Recognizing everyone's identity, their body, their existence in the world.
We want to protect trans people and so on.
What I'm driving at here is I think what I think what we're experiencing 2025 is similar to what we experienced in 1975, which is the capitalization on the outrage about a trans girl running cross country in a high school or.
and it's a function of the way the right-wing Christian mobilization networks are just completely tuned.
To create these ways of creating outrage and then getting people to vote and give money a certain way.
That's my historical comparison nonsense.
Does that feel...
You don't want to do feelings.
But do you see in the data ways that people are reacting to issues of gender and sexuality and family that might back up my little historical trope there?
Yeah, no, I think that there is some data that supports that understanding.
So one...
One paper I worked on and looked at with a colleague was whether Christian nationalism ebbed and flowed depending on different historical moments.
And so we were particularly looking at 9-11.
And so that is kind of tapping into a different kind of part of that cultural framework.
But what we found is that it did, you know, ebb, you know, and really increase, you know, it waxed soon after 9-11 and then waned again and returned to kind of a level before 9-11.
And so if we're looking at the 70s or the early aughts or now the COVID years, I think there is evidence that Christian nationalism is responsive to different historical moments.
And so depending on what those cultural markers are in that moment, I think it does.
And so, you know, there's a theoretical tradition in sociology really thinking about that culture in unsettled times.
And so when people are feeling as though it is unsettled, They're looking for these kind of markers of who we are, what we're all about.
And I think, particularly as I'm written with Christian nationalism, it's about who are we, where do we come from, who are we now, where are we going, and how are we going to get there?
And Christian nationalism provides these explanations for that.
Whether they're actually achievable is not the point.
But do people feel seen and heard?
And I think that's an important point too.
Like the feelings people have are real, whether it's based on...
But then how do we get that messaging out?
And that's the tough part.
So I think, yeah, we're in a moment culturally where Christian nationalism as a powerful cultural framework is, yeah, waxing.
It's really a part of our political rhetoric, partially due to those in political power more than willing to use that as a political tool in their rhetoric.
Yeah, it's frightening.
And I think for people like you who've written about this for a long, long time now, for people like me who spend a lot of days in the trenches trying to study these things and understand them, unfortunately, some of the worst things we thought might happen with a second Trump presidency are actually happening.
And so it's not a vision you want to see come to fruition, unfortunately.
All right, friends.
I need to tell you that Andrew has written a great book called American Idolatry, which you should read.
And it's one of those reads that you look up and you're like, oh, how did I read 50 pages?
Because it's super easy to read and you're going to learn tons.
He also made a podcast with us, four parts, called American Idols.
And I'm a little biased, but I think that four parts, about half an hour each.
I cannot think of a better thing to send to, like, your church adult group or some book club or just somebody who needs a really easy and smart, concise primer on Christian nationalism.
It's pretty amazing.
So I'll just say check American Idols out, too, and then all the further work you're doing.
So tell us about your Substack and other places that your work is appearing now, Andrew.
Yeah, definitely.
Thank you for that.
I appreciate it.
Yeah.
So writing at Substack right now, around once a month at least.
And so it's my name, andrewwhitehead.substack.com.
It's named after American Idolatry, the book.
But yeah, I would love to have people find me there.
And then, you know, I'm on Blue Sky.
And as we're all just kind of figuring out what is life like after Twitter there and Instagram.
But Substack is a place that, yeah, with kind of each month, trying to really think through, okay, what...
What type of research have I done or others that I can connect to what's going on around us and give a little bit of that social scientific angle on?
So yeah, we'd love to find people there.
I love Blue Sky.
I enjoy it a lot.
But the rhythm of Twitter that existed there for a minute, for me at least, I kind of got hooked in and I got to see Andrew Whitehead every day doing stuff and Sam Perry and Anthea Butler.
I felt like it was a real living thing.
And now it feels like what happened is where we normally have our party got burned down.
And someone was like, oh, hey, I got a building over here.
It's the same exact building.
And we're going to decorate it the same way.
Just come party over here.
And some people didn't come.
Or on the way, they decided they were tired and went home.
Other people are like, you know, it's just not the same, even though it's supposed to be the same.
And, like, I love Blue Sky.
Blue Sky, this is not me saying anything negative, but, you know, there's just not, like, those, like, 2019 days of, like, you know, Twitter was really a place I learned something every day and got to hang out with people like you every day.
I just, it's not there anymore.
So maybe I'm just not in the right blue sky circles and all of you are just group texting behind my back You know, that's okay.
Anyway.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
All right, y 'all.
Thanks for listening today.
We appreciate your support so much.
You can check out Andrew's work in the show notes, his substack, and the paper that is now out and publicly available that he and Sam Perry have just published.
I want to turn now to some history that will really connect with what Andrew talked about today in a sociological context.
And that history, it comes from my new book, American Caesar, that will be out in 2026.
So if you're a subscriber, stick around.
I got about 10 or 15 more minutes for you on that front.
If you're not a subscriber, we'd invite you to think about joining today to get all the rest of this episode, our bonus episodes, access to the entire archive, ad-free listening, and an invite to our Discord server.
It only costs $5.99 a month, and it will be the best decision you make today.
