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

by Philip S. Gorski

Between these two dates falls another crucial milestone—not a founding, exactly, but an inflection point. For it was around 1690 that racism, apocalypticism, and nationalism first fused into a deep story. It’s important to emphasize that things could have turned out differently had some of the colonists acted differently. You could say that in 1690 we lost an alternative vision for life in the New World: one in which the natives and the colonists would live in concord or even in community; one in which the line between white and Black did not yet fully and irrevocably correspond to that between freedom and bondage; and one in which there was room, not only for non-Protestants but also for non-Christians. The death of that vision went hand in hand with the birth of a new vision: a social order dominated by white Protestant men and defined in opposition to “red savagery,” Black bondage, and Roman popery. Within that order, race, religion, and nationalism were to be aligned—by force, if necessary. That is the spirit of 1690: the spirit of white Christian nationalism.

1690…an important inflection point.