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

by Philip S. Gorski

When scholars assess religious conservatives’ knowledge of many aspects of science (for example, atoms, lasers, viruses, or genes), they score well. It is only when they are asked about hotly contested culture-war topics (for example, evolution or the Big Bang) that they do poorly. This is why white Americans who more strongly affirm that America should be for “people like us” are more likely to answer questions about religion in America’s political history in a way that elevates the preeminence and alleged persecution of Christianity. Not only may they have learned erroneous religious history, but the ideology of white Christian nationalism may incline white Americans to reinterpret their history in ways that elevate their own group as heroes and victims. We can see this sort of ideologically driven approach to history more directly when we see how Christian nationalism corresponds to whites’ views about the Civil War and Confederate monuments. In August 2020, we asked Americans if they believed “historians debate whether slavery was a central cause of the Civil War” (an issue that is frankly of virtually no dispute among historians). We also asked them whether they would support the removal of Confederate monuments and statues of former slave owners—the vast majority of which were erected in the early 1900s to valorize the antebellum South—because of their racist legacy (see Figure 1.4). Even after holding other relevant characteristics constant, as white Americans more ...