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

by Philip S. Gorski

In November 2020, we asked Americans a series of questions about economic systems and policies. We added up how much Americans agreed with statements like “Free markets are the key to our national prosperity” and “We must not over-regulate businesses or we will stifle productivity,” along with others like “We need strong social safety nets to provide for those who cannot work,” and “The government should intervene to reduce economic inequality” to create a scale. We ordered the responses such that higher scores tell us how strong of a free-market capitalist Americans were. When we ran statistical models to assess which factors predicted Americans’ scores on the scale, we found that Christian nationalism was the second strongest factor in scoring higher, second only to political conservatism. But what is just as interesting is that we found this connection between Christian nationalism and a strong preference for free-market ideals is exclusive to whites. Figure 1.9 shows the divergent patterns for white and Black Americans across Christian nationalism. As we’ve seen in previous figures, as scores on our Christian nationalism scale increase, Black Americans stay quite steady in their approval of strong free-market attitudes. But white Americans increase tremendously in their support for markets unhindered by government intervention.