Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States

by Andrew L. Whitehead

Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are less likely to believe actively seeking social and economic justice is important to being a good person.

its conception of morality centers exclusively on fidelity to religion and fidelity to the nation.

understanding Christian nationalism, its content and its consequences, is essential for understanding much of the polarization in American popular discourse.

Christian nationalism expresses a particular racialized understanding of national identity. It allows those who embrace it to express a racialized identity without resorting to racialized terms.

Christian nationalism, we will show, tends to promote defenses of authoritarian control, especially when the target population of that control is nonwhite.

Christian nationalism idealizes a mythic society in which real Americans—white, native-born, mostly Protestants—maintain control over access to society’s social, cultural, and political institutions, and “others” remain in their proper place.

Christian nationalism is used to defend against shifts in the culture toward equality for groups that have historically lacked access to the levers of power—women, sexual, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.

strong support for Christian nationalism is—without a doubt—a threat to a pluralistic democratic society.

Christian nationalist ideology is fundamentally focused on gaining and maintaining access to power.

Embracing Christian nationalism, therefore, results in a propensity toward consequentialism, where the ends justify the means.

Strong support for Christian nationalism demands complete allegiance and ultimately desires the silencing and exclusion of its opponents from the public sphere.

The rituals, symbols, and celebrations assert not only that in order to be truly American one must be Christian, but that in order to be truly Christian one has to be American.