The Sunday Interview: Leah Payne with Dr. Melissa Deckman (PRRI) on Measuring Christian Nationalism (PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas)
Dr. Melissa Deckman’s PRRI 2025 American Values Atlas—surveying 22,000 adults—reveals 32% of Americans hold Christian nationalist views, despite 64% rejecting or skepticism toward them, with 65% of Newsmax viewers as adherents. Black and white respondents align closely (33% vs. 34%), but evangelicals show highest adherence due to church attendance. Post-Trump’s 2024 reelection, support for political violence dropped among adherents yet remains far higher than rejectors’. While 80% of Christian nationalists score high on authoritarianism, Deckman clarifies their distinct focus on white, male-dominated dominance and anti-immigrant narratives. Local elections now mirror national culture wars, with DEI opposition driving polarization, underscoring how media and faith reinforce these ideologies as existential threats to America’s identity. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus Sunday Interview00:02:18
Axis Mundi.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus Sunday Interview.
I'm Leah Payne, author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You, a history of contemporary Christian music and a scholar of religion, politics, and pop culture in the USA and beyond.
And I'm speaking today with Dr. Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, PRRI.
Dr. Deckman is a political scientist who studies the impact of gender, religion, and age on public opinion and political behavior.
Dr. Deckman is also author of a really excellent book, The Politics of Gen Z, Essential Reading for the 2020s, which tells the story of Gen Z's growing political participation.
In February of 2026, PRRI released findings from its 2025 American Values Atlas, a nationwide survey conducted throughout 2025 with more than 22,000 adults across all 50 states.
A key question in the report, how widespread is Christian nationalism?
According to PRRI's data, about one-third of Americans qualify as either adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalist ideas, while two-thirds fall into more skeptical or rejecting categories.
The survey maps how these views intersect race, religious practice, party affiliation, media trust, geography, age, and education, revealing clear patterns across regions and religious communities.
In this episode, we will unpack with Dr. Deckman what PRRI measured, how they measured it, and what these results can and cannot tell us about religion and politics in the United States today.
Full disclosure, I'm a PRRI affiliated scholar.
I've made regular use of their data in my writings over the years.
Welcome, Dr. Deckman.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you for having me.
Welcome to the Straight White American Jesus Sunday edition.
Understanding Christian Nationalism00:11:56
Can I just start off with one question to get us going here?
It's a question about the term Christian nationalism.
I'm a historian and in my field, the phrase can take on a lot of meanings.
The term Christian nationalism has a longer history than its recent surge in public debate.
The term gained broader public visibility, especially following the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack, when journalists and researchers used it to describe movements that frame the United States as fundamentally Christian and advocate aligning government authority with that vision.
But it really gets applied in a lot of different ways.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you all are defining and using the term Christian nationalism in this study?
Sure.
I think about Christian nationalism as really an ideology that holds that America was founded as a Christian nation and should remain so.
And so Christian nationalists would have no trouble, for example, really trying to close that separation of church and state and using the force of government to really impact policies that have a conservative Christian bent to them.
I think it's also a worldview that largely rejects pluralism.
And what I mean by that, pluralism is an idea that individuals, regardless of their race, their gender, their religious background, their class, should count fully as American citizens.
And they should have a seat at the table of our democracies.
And Christian nationalists, however, largely reject this idea of a more diverse country.
And they'd rather, in fact, have people at the table who largely are white, heterosexual men in terms of holding positions of power.
So that's like a broader kind of consideration of Christian nationalism, but that's, of course, hard to get on a survey.
Do you agree with those or not?
And I think an extra challenge for social scientists is simply asking Americans if they are Christian nationalism is problematic because some people might not be familiar with the term.
Right.
For some people, it holds some negative connotations.
So what we've done, like good social scientists, is that we have come up with a scale that we ask Americans about that really combines five different measures.
And so we ask Americans the extent to which they completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree or completely disagree with a series of statements that really are trying to unpack the relationship between Christianity, American identity, and U.S. government.
And so it's a little bit in the weeds, but I'm going to go ahead and kind of read you those statements, right?
So I think it's important to understand how we're getting these measures in our work.
So we ask Americans, do you agree whether or not the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation?
Should U.S. laws be based on Christian values?
If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
And lastly, God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.
That last one, the dominion question, you're probably very aware of this and your listeners are aware of this, you know, comes really from some of the theological views of the new apostolic reformation, which essentially the seven mountain mandates holding that Christians should have dominion in government, but in education, in business, all sectors of society.
Most Swatch listeners know about Charismatic Revival Fury by Matthew Taylor.
But if you don't, it's a must-listen.
Taylor breaks down the networks, personalities, and power plays driving an independent charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, the NAR.
It's the kind of podcast that helps you connect the dots between ideas like the Seven Mountains mandate and right-wing politics.
This one is totally worth your time.
And so what we do with those statements is we combine scores that Americans in our survey give.
And so essentially, if you agree or completely agree or mostly agree with all five of those statements, we consider you to be an adherent to Christian nationalism.
So we define those Americans as Christian nationalism adherents.
Next, we look at Americans that mostly agree with those statements.
So we refer to those Americans as Christian nationalist supporters.
So if you look at those two groups of people in American society, we tend to find about one in 10 Americans are Christian nationalism adherents.
Another two in 10 roughly are Christian nationalist supporters.
So again, roughly three in 10 this year's survey showed about, I think it was 32% of Americans.
If you combine all those scores together, would qualify as holding essentially Christian nationalist views.
That means, of course, that most Americans, in fact, do not hold Christian nationalist views.
So we have two categories here.
Americans who completely reject all of these ideas, right?
They basically are scoring zero on our, the way that we calculate the score.
That's about 27% of Americans.
And then an additional roughly 30, I think it's 37% are skeptical of Christian nationalism.
They generally don't agree with a lot of what was included in those statements there.
So I think the upshot here is that Americans are about twice as likely to reject that worldview than to endorse that worldview.
And that's been a pretty consistent finding since we started measuring this concept back in late 2022.
Also to let you know too, I think it's important.
And one really great thing about the study and the work that we do is this comes from our American Values Atlas.
And so we have interviewed more than 22,000 Americans about these attitudes and these issues.
And so it really is really high quality data.
We're able to do a deep dive into looking at specific religious traditions and whether they're susceptible to these ideas.
And we can do some really interesting gradations and analysis in our survey.
So I just wanted to throw that out there too.
And it's also available to listeners.
So please go read the report, look at our American Values Atlas.
You can look at some of this research.
They can look at this research for themselves.
I think that's really helpful for people to understand, both people who subscribe to these ideologies and also people who are seeking to understand them, that it's not a denomination.
Like you say, I'm Baptist or I'm, it's more the way that PRRI is using this is more a tool for interpreting where American practitioners are now or American believers, I guess, if it's adherents.
A lot of times you'll have people who will use that phrase and sort of lob that phrase back and forth toward people.
And sometimes they're not even agreeing on what the phrase means, you know, or even what they're talking about.
As a historian, it's a pet peeve of mine when it gets used imprecisely or anachronistically.
I think it's helpful for listeners to understand that in the hands of the brilliant data scientists at PRRI, this is a tool for understanding the 21st century American mood when it comes to religion and politics, specifically Christianity and politics.
One thing that I think is really interesting about this is that it doesn't seem like the numbers have changed much in 2022.
I wonder how do you interpret that?
Why do you think that is?
Sure.
Really, I think there's been remarkable stability.
We don't see Christian nationalism growing as a movement in the country, really.
Now, of course, we find a clear relationship between party and Christian nationalist views.
So we find that a majority of Republicans subscribe to these sorts of views here.
So I think in terms of political power, that's sort of a separate question.
But if you look at the American landscape writ large, I think we haven't found Americans embracing this ideology for a number of reasons.
One is really a religious reason.
So we know our Census of American Religion every year tracks religious affiliation throughout the country.
We find roughly two-thirds of Americans today are Christians.
That includes both white Christians and Christians of color.
That's down from previous decades.
But we also find that the percentage of Americans who identify with no religious affiliation, we often talk about these as the nuns in American society, N-O-N-E-S, you know, they've leveled off in recent years, but there's still a discernible pattern of growth in terms of people that are getting more secular in society, right?
And I think because of that, and roughly now, about 28% of Americans, we classify as really just not having any religious affiliation.
Like this is according to how they check off boxes in our surveys.
So when you have an increase in the number of Americans who are secular, it's going to limit the growth opportunities, I think, in some ways for Christian nationalism.
I think there's also an age component.
As you said, you know, as you indicated, I write a lot about Gen Z, but Gen Z, currently Americans now, this year will be 18 to 29 in terms of American adults.
They are the most racially and religiously diverse generation.
They're also the least religious.
They're far more likely to be secular than our older Americans.
We find pretty consistently in this report and previous analysis of Christian nationalism that there's a big under over 50 divide, right?
Christian nationalists tend to be a lot older in American society.
And with a rapidly, you know, population that's, you know, we see Gen Z and soon Jin Alpha coming into the population, making becoming a bigger part of the population, that's also going to limit the appeal of Christian nationalism.
And finally, frankly, there's a political component to why I think there's no growth with respect to Christian nationalism.
You know, we have in the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, really a more overt connection between Christian nationalist leadership and people in power within the Trump administration.
Right.
There are a lot of examples to point to, but one recent one from Right Wing Watch, the Trump administration is partnering with worship leader Sean Foyt to host Christian worship events as part of an official federal outreach tied to America's 250th birthday celebration.
Foyt describes a formal collaboration with a White House-linked initiative, including plans for events on the National Mall where the nation will be called to quote unquote rededicate itself to God, implicitly the Christian God.
For critics, of course, this kind of church-state alignment raises serious First Amendment concerns and reflects a core Christian nationalist idea that the United States is and should remain a distinctly Christian nation.
And we've seen, of course, that even from day one, when Trump was inaugurated, there were policy changes at the executive level that really were meant to appeal to Christian nationalists.
Things like defining gender, for example, as biologically male and female, cuts to Planned Parenthood, making changes that allow for the separation of church and state to be lowered, that kind of wall of separation that Jefferson talked about.
So pastors now can endorse political candidates that never was really allowed according to federal policy.
Trump, of course, appointed a task force to eradicate anti-Christian bias, even though there's little evidence that that really exists.
But he's touching into, I think, the grievances that many conservative Christians have with respect to their place in society, cutting DEI programs, launching wars against our cultural institutions and universities, dismantling the Department of Education.
All of these sorts of things are policies that Christian nationalists have long fought for, but aren't necessarily very popular with the American population.
And the best example, I think, recently is immigration.
We find very clearly in our data analysis, and you see it in this report, Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalist views are often far more likely, significantly more likely to believe in the great replacement theory.
They're more likely to endorse these very harsh immigration policies.
And as we see in the American public, these policies are not at all very popular.
They do have a link to especially white Christian nationalism.
But because a lot of those policies simply aren't popular with the U.S. population, it's hard to see that the growth, that we're going to see growth in the number of Americans who are Christian nationalists moving forward.
Christian Nationalism's Immigration Stance00:05:49
I wonder if I could run an idea by you that has been kind of swimming around in my head that's related to this.
I'm teaching a history of Christianity in America class right now.
And every semester I teach it, there's always something that comes up.
And this semester and really the last couple, something that has come up is my students learn about kind of the seeds of ideas about religious liberty.
Oh, and this semester and really the last couple of semesters, something that has come up is my students learn about the seeds of ideas about religious liberty.
They talk about Quakers and Baptists.
And of course, early Quakers played a huge role in shaping American ideas about religious liberty.
They were persecuted for refusing to conform, declining to swear oaths, rejecting established churches or deferring to religious authorities.
But when Quakers gained influence in colonies like Pennsylvania under William Penn, they helped build a political culture grounded in liberty of conscience.
They argued that every person could experience the quote-unquote inner light of God directly without coercion or a state church.
That theological belief translated into laws that protected freedom of worship.
Their experiment didn't solve every problem, of course, but it did help normalize the idea that a stable society didn't require religious uniformity.
We talk about the Baptists especially and religious liberty.
Early Baptists insisted that faith needed to be voluntary.
So no infant baptism, no state coercion, no government telling you what to believe.
That theological commitment naturally led to a bold political claim.
The state had no authority over conscience.
And in the colonial era, that idea got people banished, fined, marginalized, but it also really laid a groundwork for a powerful defense of church-state separation.
push for soul liberty created tension within communities and the legacy of Baptist religious freedom has been interpreted and sometimes selectively applied across generations.
But that core conviction remains very striking that authentic Christianity can't be forced and the protection of liberty of conscience protects everyone, not just Baptists.
One thing I like to remind my students of is the fact that Baptists and Quakers are leading legal challenges against the federal government's decision to allow immigration enforcement at houses of worship.
And the argument that they are making is that the rollback of long-standing quote-unquote sensitive location protections violates core principles of religious liberty.
It's really fun as a historian to say, look, like those seeds of ideas about religious liberty run really deep and they're also core to the American project.
So Christian nationalist ideologies are not the only longstanding ideologies that form the American public.
Do you think, if I remember right, do you have Baptist roots yourself?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
I wonder what you'd think about that.
These sort of longstanding ideas that kind of come up again and again.
So I used to teach a religion and policies class for many years and we'd always start by talking about the founding period.
So there is this idea that's pervasive on the political right that America was founded as a Christian ration.
And so there's some examples, right, of the pilgrims fleeing, the Puritans fleeing religious persecution in England.
You know, that's a good example.
Although, of course, they set up a theology, theological kind of yeah, they were there to do it rightly, according to them, not freely in that way very long, right?
But I think the more accurate picture is one where the founding fathers, the framers of our constitution, kind of realized that, you know, hooking one denomination, one sectarian viewpoint with the government was going to be problematic, right?
Because people have different thoughts and philosophies about religion.
I don't think it's hard to kind of go down and see how it's bad to kind of intermix those things in some cases, especially if you're trying to form a democracy where people have liberties that are protected.
And going back to the Baptist, you know, I always used to have students read the Danbury letter.
You know, when Thomas Jefferson was president, he was an early champion of religious liberty in the state of Virginia, what used to be the colony of Virginia.
That really had a big influence on the First Amendment and the way that it was adopted.
But essentially, he was an attorney who fought for the case of a Baptist minister who'd been imprisoned in the colony of Virginia because he was preaching.
That was viewed as a threat to the, I think it was the church at the time, the predominantly powerful church in that colony.
Because of that experience, even though Jefferson himself was a deist and not exactly one to endorse Baptist views, the Danbury Baptists wrote him a letter to thank him.
And this is viewed as an example of the importance of religious liberty established at the time of the nation.
It's interesting that you mentioned the Baptists.
Baptists, of course, there's a variety of kind of viewpoints here.
Southern Baptists are not ones who would necessarily be, I think, advocating for ICE to kind of back down.
I believe it was the cooperative Baptists.
I'm not sure, but I'll have to look out.
So there's a range, you know, Baptists that have more of that kind of more of a mainline non-evangelical perspective.
Maybe not non-evangelical is not the right way to put it, but they're, I think, more moderate in their policies, but have been committed to the idea of church-day separation for many, many years.
But that's not all Baptists necessarily.
When I talk about Baptists with my students, I always remind them that both Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. were Baptists, and they both had ideas about democracy.
It got exercised in much different ways.
We are just giving Baptists a lot of airtime today, shaping the United States since before there was a United States.
I did want to keep working our way through these fascinating survey findings.
And I'm sure listeners have their own ideas about this.
Race And Christian Nationalism00:14:47
But in your opinion, why are white churchgoers more likely than Black or Hispanic churchgoers to support Christian nationalist ideas?
Sure.
Let me just back up a little bit to talk about the relationship between race and Christian nationalism.
You know, if you look at our studies, you'll find pretty consistently, just looking at racial categories, that Black Americans are just as likely as white Americans to be characterized as holding Christian nationalist views.
In this current survey, a third of Black Americans are Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers versus 34% to 33% for white Americans.
And a lot of people are often like, what's going on here?
How can so many African Americans be Christian nationalists?
About 30% of Hispanic Americans we categorize as being Christian nationalists here.
Well, I think there's a couple of things to kind of bear in mind as you think about the relationship between race, ethnicity, and Christian nationalism.
One is for Black Americans, they're more religious than white Americans in general.
And one of the things that we find pretty consistently, which often cuts against the grain by some folks who talk about Christian nationalism, is that it's a very religious movement.
It's an ideological movement, but it's a very religious movement.
And so we see a strong connection between church attendance and reading scripture frequently and praying frequently.
We find that Christian nationalists are just more religious than other Americans in general.
And so because African Americans attend church at higher levels, they're more religious, we do find maybe to some people, a pretty surprising number who are Christian nationalists, according to our analysis.
But I have to say this, we've done a deeper dive into this at PRI, not in this study, but in a couple of other survey reports.
And what we found is that for African Americans who get classified as being Christian nationalists, it's purely a religious sort of thing.
So those folks tend to be far more religious in terms of religiosity.
They also, you will probably not be surprised to hear this, Leah, given your own research, they're far more like those African Americans who hold charismatic prosperity gospel ideas are more likely to be classified as being Christian nationalists.
Yes, I have to point to the work of my fellow PRRI fellow, Dr. Dara Delgado, who has analyzed PRRI data on Black charismatics in particular.
She's got a great article, Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians Boost Their Political Visibility.
We will put a link to that in the show notes today.
That's also true for white and Hispanic Americans, but for Hispanic and white Americans, partisanship plays a bigger role in terms of determining whether they're likely to hold these sorts of views.
So the party becomes far more important in explaining white Christian nationalism and Hispanic Christian nationalism to some degree.
It really matters far less for African Americans here.
So I would point folks to two of our former fellows.
Oh, good.
I was hoping you didn't even say that.
So Michael Fisher and Ainslie Kiros have written pretty extensively in looking at that.
And they're historians.
And so they have a different kind of unique angle here.
But I think it's important that the idea of a Christian nation means something likely different for African Americans than it does for white Americans.
And so Ainsley cites the work of Eddie Cloud, who's a very prominent religious studies professor and author.
He wrote a book called Exodus.
And his argument is that black national consciousness, the idea of a black nation, really as it emerged in the 19th century, is very closely intertwined with black Christian identity.
And so even today, that has some ramifications because I think a lot of people who study the black church, I'm not an expert, but relying on our wonderful fellows who brought these sorts of things to my attention.
But the idea of having a Christian nation kind of for African Americans often can be seen as aspirational because many Black Americans want America to reflect the equality and justice that they see in the Bible's teaching.
So their ideas of what Christianity is very different in terms of equality, justice, the role of government.
You know, that's particularly strong, I think, for African Americans.
I think for white Americans, especially, it's a very different kind of approach to what Christian nationalism should be.
So that also means politically, we see some very big differences.
So for example, Michael Fisher, I know I talked about his work.
He did an analysis where he looked, for example, at attitudes about white supremacy.
So his analysis showed, for example, that white Christian nationalists, only 34% found that they believe white supremacy is still a major problem.
It's 86% of white, black Christian nationalists.
We also find, for example, that black Christian nationalists are far, far less likely to believe in the great replacement theory, which is this idea that brown and black people are coming to the U.S. to take over and replace white Christians.
And that's kind of an animating drive for Christian nationalism to promote these very harsh immigration policies.
Very different political implications when it comes to race and Christian nationalism.
But to your original question, I think why are we finding that religiosity is mattering more to white Christians?
Well, part of it, I think, is linked to the fact that we find that two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants are Christian nationalists.
That's the highest of any religious tradition.
We also know that white evangelicals go to church a lot more often and they're more religious in their behavior.
So I think that is what's driving higher rates of attendance, church attendance, and that sort of thing for many white Christians who are evangelical.
Also, a bit with white Catholics in the analysis, too, we find that to break that down matters less for mainliners.
I think church attendance, the mainline white mainlanders tend to be less likely to be Christian nationalists, but it's not really linked to their church attendance at all.
I appreciate you spelling out how important it is to de-link ideas about Christian nationalism and partisanship in order to understand what's happening.
Initially, people made assumptions about those categories and were so surprised.
I would love to do another full episode wherein we talk about Hispanic respondents and do a deep dive on those findings.
I do want to give a shout out to Drs. Lloyd Barba, Erica Ramirez, and Flavio Hickel Jr., who spoke with me about Latinx, Latino Charismatics, and the 2024 election.
There's a lot of insight there.
We will put a link to that episode in the show notes as well.
One thing that you brought up that I think is helpful too is the connection between church attendance and these ideas.
And I think when I think about that, I think about the role that preachers and music plays in creating the theological landscape of Christian nationalism.
And I wonder what role do you see the media playing in shaping ideas about Christian nationalism?
Do you think that the people who trust far-right media became more Christian nationalists or are Christian nationalists more likely to choose those media sources?
I guess this is kind of a chicken or the egg question, but I wonder what your thoughts are on that.
Leah, I have my notes and I put chicken or egg.
I literally on the same wavelength here.
That's great.
I mean, it's very clear that there's a strong relationship between how people get their media and their propensity to hold Christian nationalist views.
So we have a figure in here where we ask Americans who basically what's your most likely trusted news source?
And at the very top, Americans who subscribe to far-right news.
So I would include something like One American Nation or Newsmax and Fox News and radio, which is dominated really by talk right-wing radio.
We see by and large, those folks are far more likely to endorse Christian nationalist views.
In fact, if you're watching a regular programming of Newsmax, we find that about 65%, almost two-thirds of those viewers subscribe to Christian nationalist views.
And so it's always interesting to think, though, do they develop those views because they're watching it or do they maybe they've turned the news on and embraced those sorts of things?
It's hard to tease that direction of causality is what I think how political scientists, social scientists would look at in terms of public opinion research.
But I do know that it's certainly reinforcing.
And if anything, the power of news media is so profound because even if you are a devout Christian going to church regularly doing Bible study, the odds are that if you attend a church that espouses Christian nationalist views, you're going to be home watching news media probably more often than you're in church.
And so I think in lots of ways they play off of one another and reinforcing those kinds of ideas.
And I do think that the media landscape is monitoring the influence of that in terms of news and perspective.
It's really important to understanding American politics today, including with respect to Christian nationalism.
I think as more and more Americans spend more and more time consuming media, we'll need to keep revisiting this question.
I've also been thinking a lot lately about the social value of attending to these media sources.
When I was a very young adult, I learned about water cooler television.
In fact, the show that taught me about that was the West Wing, the place where I worked.
Everyone would show up on Friday because it was on Thursday, back in my day when they had broadcast TV.
And I started watching it because I wanted to know what everybody was talking about because they were into whatever storyline was happening.
And if your entire social network is engaged in these really compelling stories, you don't want to be left out of that at all.
These kinds of storytelling techniques are interwoven with social networks.
And I wouldn't want to be behind on it either.
I can understand the appeal there.
One question that I have about some of the findings is that support for political violence went down after Trump was reelected.
We've long asked Americans this idea of if you feel like the country is so broken, will true American patriots have to resort to violence to save the country?
That's something that's language you hear a lot in terms of saving America, part and parcel to Christian nationalism.
And we did find, in fact, a drop, a decline, both with respect to Republicans writ large, but also to Christian nationalists in terms of you see a very steep decline in our survey after Trump was re-elected.
And I think it's just a referendum that they're very happy with what Trump's doing.
And so they don't necessarily believe that the country is in need of saving.
I would say this, though.
We still find pretty consistently that Christian nationalism, even in the last year during the Trump administration with this data, are still far more likely, significantly more likely, for example, than Christian nationalist rejectors to endorse the potential use of violence.
So I think it's something to keep in mind, but I think it's also just a reflection of the political reality.
They're very happy with the job that Donald Trump is doing.
They think he's actually probably effectively saving the country from their perspective.
And so maybe the need for political violence is not necessary according to that kind of worldview.
I'm curious to see.
When was the survey conducted?
I'm sorry, I can't remember.
So this survey was conducted all of last year in 2025.
I really want to know what's going to happen in 2026.
We'll get to that here in a little bit.
But one question that I have before, and this is one about terms, is that it looks like Christian nationalism here is overlapping a lot with authoritarian attitudes.
I wonder, are those different things?
Could you help us understand how these ideas overlap and also how they're distinct from one another?
Sure.
A couple of years ago, we started really to try to measure right-wing authoritarianism here at PRI, really out of a growing concern of more illiberal tendencies that many Christian nationalists invoke or promote.
And we went back to classic studies of right-wing authoritarianism that really had been developed after World War II, right?
In wake of fascism.
How do we understand people that might be prone to having these authoritarian views?
And so among the American public, we find maybe about 25% hold high or very high views on our scale of authoritarianism.
And I'd encourage folks to go look at our previous measures and you can kind of see how we specifically are analyzing that and measuring it on a scale.
But importantly, 80% of Christian nationalism adherents score very high or high on that right-wing authoritarianism scale.
And it's almost the mirror image for those Americans who reject Christian nationalism, right?
So there is a very strong connection here, in part because there's some similarities with both ideologies.
Both ideologies promote social hierarchy and traditionalism.
And for authoritarianism, they want to try to maintain the established power structures to ensure stability.
So they're trying to prevent alternative voices from participating in politics.
With Christian nationalism, I think the social hierarchy is one where we support traditional gender roles or the nuclear family.
They view that as divinely ordained, right?
For white Christian nationalists also, I think that is linked to immigrants and people of color.
So there's kind of that added kind of hierarchical element.
So social hierarchy, traditionalism, I view both authoritarianism and Christian nationalism.
There's also this very strong in-group, out-group dynamic that you often see in terms of authoritarian regimes.
So defining the nation to include folks who are largely white, who are native born citizens, for example, increasingly we hear that sort of thing.
But not just that you define folks in your country as having those traits, but you're also importantly defining out-groups as not just being different, but really being an existential threat to the nation's identity.
For Christian nationals, of course, that true national identity, being an American, to be a true American, you have to be a Christian American, right?
That sort of thing.
So it's through specific religious and a cultural lens here.
And finally, I think that both movements, whether it's authoritarianism or Christian nationalism, really are fueled by this sense of perceived victimhood or national decline.
Not lost on me, one of the things that was so effective about Donald Trump when he first ran for president in 2016.
He talked about making America great again.
Again, right?
It's an endpoint that really resonated with a lot of Americans who felt like their lot in life hadn't improved.
They were concerned about cultural change happening in America.
And so those promises to restore America's greatness, you see it happening both in our politics and in authoritarian regimes.
But for Christian nationalists, it's reclaiming the country for God.
I think that tie between authoritarianism and traditionalism and the links that you're making between conservative Christian ideas about gender and social order are especially helpful here.
It helps make sense of how Trump as president can seem like a chaos agent to some and then a return to order to others.
Their idea that America being founded as a Christian nation, we need to reclaim that heritage.
There's lots of overlap between the two ideologies.
They really swim in similar waters.
Christian Nationalism's Rise00:04:04
A few years ago in my town, a school board election got completely swept up into national politics.
Pretty soon, people like me were getting flyers from national level political organizations urging me to vote for a particular candidate.
I am very sure that in another era, none of these organizations would be paying attention to school board elections.
Toward the end, you wouldn't even know it was a school board election based on the rhetoric that people were using.
I know there's been a lot written about the conservative strategies at play, but I think it's also an example of how the national conversation totally overtook the local one.
And I wonder how this idea of quote unquote Christian nationalism, especially how it's used in the media, is shaping local politics.
Feel free to reflect on this as an American citizen or as a data scientist or some combination of both.
Do you see from the study that could help us understand how at the state level or even in the county small town level, how these national stories are shaping local political culture?
When I was first a political science professor many years ago now, we used to always talk about how Tip O'Neill, the former legendary speaker of the House, he was speaker of the House when Donald Reagan was president, would famously say, all politics is local, right?
That's not true anymore.
All politics has become nationalized because essentially we now have access to social media, to news 24-7, cable news.
And so all of those issues have filtered into local and state level politics.
And really, I think one of the charts that I thought was important in our new report, we do this scatter plot where we look at the spread of Christian nationalist ideology in all 50 states and elected representation by Republicans in those state legislatures.
And it's almost like a perfect correlation.
So the more a state has citizens who subscribe to Christian nationalism, and we have a handful of states where it's more than half, you have the highest percentage of state representatives who are Republican.
The flip side, of course, though, is the states that have relatively few, like a state like Massachusetts, a very low level of Americans who we classify as being Christian nationalists, they're far more likely to have Democrats in charge.
So I think that Christian nationalism, then because of the nationalization of our elections and our politics, whether it's at the state assembly, whether it's in a city council, whether it's at the local school board, I think we increasingly see these kinds of cultural issues becoming important in Germaine.
I don't know, Leah, if you know this, but my very first book was about the Christian rights attempt to take over school boards.
And so I feel like we're having many of those conversations in part because I think social media allows people to organize in ways where these cultural issues become more relevant.
And with school board elections in particular, it doesn't take many people to vote.
That's true.
You can organize people pretty effectively.
There's a flip side, though.
I think when you have very conservative Christian nationalist folks running for office, trying to get rid of DEI or making sure that gender ideology isn't talked about in schools, that sort of thing, there's often a counter mobilization as well.
So it's kind of interesting to see the dynamics that take place in school board elections even that touch onto themes about Christian nationalism and our identity as Americans.
I think what we need listeners to do is to go see the complete works of Dr. Melissa Deckman.
I think would be a great place to click my best-selling first book.
For sure.
I highly recommend.
Highly recommend.
School board battles is what it was.
I love it.
Oh, I love that.
Thank you so much.
So where can people find you in the world?
I'm on Blue Sky.
So kind of look at Melissa Deckman.
Whatever the blue sky things are.
So I try to post pretty regularly.
I would also recommend, please follow our sub stack at PRI.
So I've been trying to write more regularly and a feature called CO Corner where I share sort of my thoughts and reflections on what our latest studies are telling us.
I'm on LinkedIn as well, but those are my two main Blue Sky and LinkedIn are my two main hubs.
Excellent.
We will all follow you there.
I already do, but and I love reading your work.
Thank you for listening to the Sunday interview at Straight White American Jesus.
Find Dr. Leah Payne00:00:20
I'm Leah Payne, author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You, A History of Contemporary Christian Music.
Find me at Dr. Leah Payne on most social media platforms or at drleahpayne.com.
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