The MAGA narrative is not only a secularized white Christian nationalism; it is a reactionary version. In the Puritans’ Promised Land narrative, recall, blood was the master metaphor that linked blood belonging (race), blood sacrifice (religion), and blood conquest (nation). In the sanitized 20th-century version of white Christian nationalism known as “American exceptionalism,” the blood metaphors were diluted into polite euphemisms such as “ultimate sacrifice.”
