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

by Andrew L. Whitehead

Recall Joshua Davis’s study on punitive attitudes that we discussed earlier. While Christian nationalism seems to incline Americans to be more favorable toward capital punishment, harsher sentences, and the government cracking down on troublemakers (which many may have perceived as a dog-whistle reference to racial minorities), religious commitment influenced Americans’ attitudes in the exact opposite direction. Personal religiosity, unlike Christian nationalism, seems to have a softening effect when it comes to the policing of group boundaries.46