The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy

by Philip S. Gorski

Of course, if theology delivered some of the most influential arguments for Black enslavement, it also provided some of the most ...

In colonial Virginia though, the Curse of Ham won out over the Image of God. As so often happens, the theology followed the money. Like Williams’s, Sewall’s was the path less traveled. But it marked out the road that Christian abolitionists and civil rights activists would follow in the future.

The key events are two wars or rather series of wars: (1) the French and Indian Wars (1688–1763) and (2) the American Revolution (1775–1783) and the War of 1812.19

The two sets of wars affected the English colonies very differently. The first phase brought them much closer to the “Motherland.” At perhaps no other time did the colonists feel themselves more “British” than during their struggle against the Catholic French and their native allies during the French and Indian Wars (1688–1763). The second phase pushed them far apart. At perhaps no other time did England’s (former) colonists feel less “British” than after the Revolution and during the War of 1812. In sum, white Christian nationalism became “British” in phase one and then “American” in phase two.20 It was the heat of war that really fused religion, race, and nation together into white Christian nationalism.

But the “freedom” of Protestant Englishmen was only possible if the racial order was maintained; and that often required the exercise of violence against racial others. On the frontier, that meant natives who controlled land and other resources, such as furs. In the colonies, that meant enslaved Blacks, who were both a source and a form of wealth to white slavers.

But the key was that race should not be “politicized.” The only way to address racism, in this view, was to “change hearts,” or better yet, to stop talking about race altogether.

The Puritans had been equally concerned with other transgressions, such as drunkenness, covetousness, idleness, and immodest dress. The Methodists and Baptists of the 19th century also worried about “upright” living and personal “holiness.” For conservative white evangelicals on the other hand, “Christian morality” was increasingly equated with sexual morality.48

The individualist component of white Christian nationalism was also changing in the decades after World War II, becoming color-blind “Christian libertarianism.”

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America,

Christian libertarianism did not really become a major force in American politics until the Reagan Era. Here, too, the crucial turning point was civil rights. Evangelical resistance to desegregation could no longer be couched in explicitly racist terms. Libertarianism provided a politer language.

North took a rather dim view of human goodness that comported well with neoclassical assumptions about the inevitability of self-interested behavior. Because humans are inherently sinful, the best way to organize an economy is to channel their self-interest via the market. Free markets are also the best way to punish vice and reward virtue, to assure that everyone gets their just desserts. Government regulation is not only inefficient, on this view, it is also un-Christian.

If Gary North was the greatest systematizer of Christian libertarianism, then Dave Ramsey is arguably its greatest popularizer.

Ramsey’s gospel is not the prosperity gospel; it is an austerity gospel.

In some ways, white Christian nationalism has changed a great deal over the last three-plus centuries. The boundaries of whiteness expanded to include not just Englishmen but anyone of European descent. The meaning of “Christian” was loosened to include Catholics and Mormons and even hyphenated to include (some “good”) Jews.

Its individualist strand underwent a similar evolution during this period. The market replaced the frontier as the arena of “freedom.”58 The maintenance of order at home and abroad was transferred from lynch mobs and posses to the police and the uniformed military. Christian morality was shrunk down to fit into the box of “personal accountability.”

Making America “great again” seemed to mean making it both whiter and more Christian.

On March 12, 2021, a year into the COVID pandemic, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, reflected on the two defining political events of the tumultuous year gone by: the Capitol insurrection on January 6 and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Johnson said that he “wasn’t concerned” about the insurrectionists, because “those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement [and] would never do anything to break the law.” “Now, had the tables been turned,” he mused, “and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”

Of course, some Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters had also clashed with police and destroyed property the previous summer. But they did not attempt to overturn a presidential election.

Paul Pierson have also emphasized the connection between economic libertarianism, ethno-nationalism, and violent racial animus.1 But their explanation focuses on wealthy economic elites who manipulate the masses for their own benefit. This is part of the story, to be sure, but it is not the whole story.

The Puritan warrior is an early example. He built a “city on a hill”—and burned native settlements. Later examples include the Christian slaveholder who ruled with a mixture of paternal benevolence and brutal violence; or the Christian homesteader who settled the frontier and drove out the natives; the WASP imperialist who selflessly pursued his self-interest overseas; or the Cold War evangelical who battled “godless communism.” They, too, were prepared to use violence to defend (their) liberty and impose law and order (on others).

On April 15, 2009, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in hundreds of cities across America participated in the first major Tea Party protest. The date was chosen for a reason: April

As academics and journalists began researching the Tea Party supporters, they made several important discoveries.8 The movement did mobilize a fair number of younger, secular libertarians. So, the libertarian label was not entirely misleading. But as sociologists Ruth Braunstein and Malaena Taylor have shown, roughly half of Tea Partiers self-identify as “born-again or evangelical Christians” and well over half (57%) believe that America “is currently and has always been a Christian nation,”—a greater percentage than even self-identified members of the Religious Right.

“Christian” instead functions as a cultural identity marker, one that separates “us” from “them.”

The Tea Party was fueled by a blend of big money and popular energy. But ethnic and racial anxiety were the spark plugs that really ignited it.11 The very thought of a Black man in the White House was deeply disturbing to many white Americans. Running a close second was the fear of religious and cultural marginalization by radical leftists, secularists, or Muslims.

Unsurprisingly, in Braunstein and Taylor’s 2017 study, one of the strongest predictors of Tea Party membership was contempt for Obama.

those who knew the evangelical subculture, they were all too familiar. Pocket Bibles, Bible study groups, and biblical literalism were among its defining elements. Conservative white evangelicals simply applied them to another sacred text: the US Constitution.

The first thing to note is that Trump’s MAGA narrative can be understood as a semi-secularized version of white Christian nationalism’s deep story.

But the MAGA narrative still has many parallels with the deep story. The most obvious one is between the apocalyptic strand of white Christian nationalism and the catastrophizing aspect of MAGA. Premillennialists believe that there will be a final battle between good and evil, a life-and-death struggle between natural and supernatural forces that is visible to them, but invisible to unbelievers. Trump’s worldview is similar. “Disaster” is one of his favorite words. He sees life as an endless battle between us and them.

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.”

In this sense, the ban and the wall were both meant to protect the pure blood of the national body from pollution or infection.

MAGA was white Christian nationalism shorn of biblical references, but with the same deep story. “Disaster” replaced “apocalypse.”