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

by Philip S. Gorski

Is their freedom really in danger? They surely believe that it is. White Christian nationalists sincerely believe that whites and Christians are the most persecuted groups in America.

First, white Christian nationalism is not “Christian patriotism.” White Christian nationalism idealizes the power of white Christian Americans. It is rooted in white supremacist assumptions and empowered by anger and fear. This is nationalism, not patriotism. Patriotism, as the political philosopher Steven Smith explains, is first and foremost “loyalty . . . to one’s constitution or political regime.” Nationalism is loyalty to one’s tribe “but always at the expense of an outgroup, who are deemed un-American, traitors, and enemies of the people.”

Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred. To confuse the one for the other is to pretend that hate is love and fear is courage.”17

Third and finally, white Christian nationalism is not just a problem among white American Christians. There are secular versions of white Christian nationalism that claim to defend “Western Culture” or “Judeo-Christian civilization.”

For some white Christian nationalists, the fight has become more important than the faith. This is one reason why many leaders on the Christian right were so unexcited about the prospect of a Pence presidency during Trump’s first impeachment, despite Pence’s unimpeachable evangelical credentials: Pence had the faith, but Trump had the fight, and it was the fight they really cared about. That is because their goal is power, not piety.

Either way, the message was the same: the Puritans’ wars were holy wars, the native lands were to be Puritan lands, and the expulsion and extermination of the natives was a righteous sacrifice to an angry God.9

The need was soon met. Writing in 1681, the Anglican priest Morgan Godwyn listed the two most common forms of racist theology. The first was “pre-Adamism,” the belief that there had been two separate creations resulting in two separate species: pre-Adamites and Adamites. Only the latter were humans with souls. The second was Noah’s Curse: because Ham had seen Noah drunk and naked in his tent, God placed a mark on Ham’s son Canaan and condemned his offspring to perpetual servitude.14

By 1700, proslavery theologians had woven these and other stories together into what historian David Whitford calls the “Curse Matrix.” It had three elements: (1) “black skin is the result of God’s curse”; (2) so is Africans’ supposed “hypersexuality and libidinousness”; and (3) slavery was actually a boon to Africans because it exposed them to Christianity and (white) civilization.

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.

One of the more distinctive features of the Tea Party movement was its constant appeals to, and religious reverence for, the US Constitution. Tea Partiers believed that the “founding fathers” had established a “limited government” whose only purpose was to protect “individual liberties.” They often pointed to the 10th Amendment, according to which “powers not delegated to the United States . . . are reserved to the States . . . or to the people.” Tea Party leaders such as Texas Senator Ted Cruz often styled themselves as “Constitutional conservatives.” Members of the rank and file sometimes carried pocket-sized copies of the Constitution; many joined study groups where they parsed and memorized passages from the Constitution. Despite the fact that there were often sharp disagreements about the meaning of the Constitution among legal scholars, Tea Partiers insisted that its meaning was clear to anyone with eyes. To secular observers, these practices probably seemed very odd. To 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. Trump’s narrative is shorn of the sorts of biblical references and allusions that peppered earlier presidents’ speeches. 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. He sees hidden conspiracies everywhere he looks. We should not be surprised that Trump’s rhetoric resonated so strongly with many white devotees of Christian nationalism. Their deep stories are quite similar.

Political scientist Ryan Burge has shown that an increasing number of Americans outside of evangelical Protestant traditions (such as Catholics, Mormons, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, and even Muslims and Hindus) are now identifying as “evangelical or born-again Christians.” He shows that this is largely driven by the merging of Republican and evangelical identities, so that when Americans are asked whether they’re “evangelical,” they increasingly read this not as a question about their theological beliefs, but whether they identify with the Republican Party.

MAGA was white Christian nationalism shorn of biblical references, but with the same deep story. “Disaster” replaced “apocalypse.” Broken promises to the “forgotten man” replaced a broken covenant with the Puritans’ God. Though race, religion, and nation were still tightly entangled, both in the equation of “Muslim/Arab/terrorist” and of “white/evangelical/patriot.” There was nothing subtle about it. Trump and his followers reveled in “saying the quiet part out loud” as a way of “owning the libs.” Audiences cheered Trump’s “honest” talk about “shithole countries,” “pig’s blood,” and “banging heads.” Not since George Wallace had a presidential candidate spoken this way. Not since Woodrow Wilson had such an outspoken racist occupied the White House.

But what, to paraphrase, hath Jesus to do with John Wayne? In many corners of white evangelicalism, the answer is this: a great deal. John Wayne could not be made into Jesus, so Jesus was made into John Wayne. Not “a wuss who took a beating and spent a lot of time putting product in his hair,” as one popular preacher explained; nor a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy,” in another’s words. Instead, Jesus became tall and strong, fair and handsome, a warrior and fighter, a leader and an entrepreneur, in word as well as deed. He became, in effect, Straight White American Super Jesus.18 A Jesus who doesn’t bring peace, but openly carries a sword. A Jesus who kicks down the cross and thrashes the (socialist) money changers.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump. Trumpism has been called many things: populism, patriarchalism, nationalism, and even fascism. All of these labels capture something about the Trump phenomenon. But only one of them—patriarchalism—hints at the connection to individualism. And yet, it is there—and powerfully so. MAGA is a secularized and reactionary form of white Christian nationalism. Which makes Donald Trump the new John Wayne.

So why does Trump’s ethos still resonate with so many white Christians? Because there are many deep continuities between Trumpism and white Christian nationalism’s core ideals of freedom, order, and violence. Or, in story form: (white) men exercising (righteous) violence to defend (their) freedom and impose (racial and gender) order. Viewed through this lens, it becomes easier to understand Trump’s hold over many white Christian men. He is a cruder version of their masculine ideal.

But the “freedom” rhetoric is more than just a reaction to political correctness. Political scientist Andrew Lewis has documented what he calls “the rights turn” in conservative Christian politics.19 Increasingly, over the course of several decades, Lewis shows, religious conservatives backed away from justifying opposition to sexual, gender, or ethnic minorities on explicitly moral or religious grounds. Those arguments don’t play so well anymore in a post-Christian society. Religious freedom is an important right. But some Christian conservatives now bend the language of “free speech,” or “religious freedom,” or “religious liberty” into a cudgel that can be used to deny minority grievances—and privilege their own.

These two examples are part of a larger pattern. Conservative whites fear and abhor violence in some contexts (for example, from Blacks, immigrants, or Muslims). But they applaud it in other contexts (for instance, by police, soldiers, and other “good guys with guns”). The key that explains the inconsistency, we argue, is white Christian nationalism and its racialized combination of libertarian freedom (for whites) and authoritarian control (over non-whites).

Though white Christian nationalism was only weakly related with white Americans’ views toward violence in general, here it is not only associated with support for “righteous violence,” but it is far and away the strongest predictor in each of our models. The more that white Americans seek to institutionalize “Christian values” or the nation’s Christian identity, the more strongly they support gun-toting good guys taking on (real or imagined) gun-toting bad guys, the more frequent use of the death penalty, any-means-necessary policing, and even torture as an interrogation technique.

We’ve already observed that the “individualism” or “libertarianism” associated with white Christian nationalism inclines Americans to claim “freedom” or “liberty” for themselves. And traditionally this has involved restricting the liberty of gender, sexual, or racial minorities. White Christian nationalism designates who is “worthy” of the freedom it cherishes, namely, “people like us.” But for the “others” outside that group, white Christian nationalism grants whites in authority the “freedom” to control such populations, to maintain a certain kind of social order that privileges “good people like us” through violence if necessary.

White Christian nationalism is a theory of order, and of hierarchy. It distinguishes insiders and outsiders, and when those two must occupy the same country, those on top and those on the bottom. “People like us”—white Christian citizens—are the true Americans. Everyone else is only here on their sufferance. In the blunt language of the Trump-friendly Claremont Institute: “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are “zombies” and “rodents,” not “real men and women who love truth and beauty.”27

The insurrection was an eruption of subterranean forces that had been building for some time. Those forces have not disappeared. On the contrary, they are building again. A second eruption would likely be larger and more violent than the first. Large enough to bury American democracy for at least a generation.

It may seem contradictory to ask how a “conservative” movement is changing. Isn’t the whole point of conservatism to prevent or slow change? This question rests on two misconceptions. The first is that contemporary white Christian nationalism is “conservative.” It is not. It is “reactionary.” It does not seek to preserve the status quo. Rather, it seeks to destroy the status quo and return to a mythical past: to “make America great again.”

In a poll conducted in October 2020, political scientist Paul Djupe found 73% of Americans who scored in the top 25% of our Christian nationalism scale also affirmed core tenets of the QAnon conspiracy.

The growing chorus of authoritarian sentiment among conservative Christian intellectuals is not just empty chatter. It is a leading indicator of a broader shift on the religious right. So long as natural-born white Christians were the dominant group, numerically and culturally, they did not need to directly challenge America’s democratic institutions. Confronted with minority status and diminishing power, some are now prepared to reject liberal democracy in favor of “stronger measures.”

The more probable outcome, should Trump and his allies return to power, is what the South African sociologist Pierre Van Den Bergh calls Herrenvolk democracy, which he defines as “a parliamentary regime in which the exercise of power and suffrage is restricted, de facto and often de jure, to the dominant group,” which understands itself as a superior race or culture, and in which other races and subcultures are subjected to varying degrees of legal discrimination and violent subjugation.32 Let’s call it Jim Crow 2.0.

If the MAGA regime endured for two decades or more—and most authoritarian regimes do—existing trends toward self-sorting along ideological lines would likely continue or even accelerate. MAGA-minded whites might follow libertarian-leaning “tech bros” and “finance bros” from California and New York to Texas and Florida. College-educated white professionals might migrate in the other direction, leaving suburban Dallas and Orlando for suburban Chicago and Seattle. At this point in the process, argues Never Trump conservative David French, secession scenarios and even civil war would start to become live possibilities.33 The result could be the dissolution of the Union.

Which way will it turn this time? Now, as in the past, the answer will depend in part on which path white Christians choose. But it will also depend on whether secular progressives are willing to ally with people of faith who share their commitment to liberal democracy. What is needed now is a popular front stretching from democratic socialists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders not only to classical liberals such as Bill Kristol and David French but also to cosmopolitan #NeverTrump evangelicals like Russell Moore, Beth Moore, or Tim Keller. The ideological distance that separates the end points of this alliance is considerable. There are deep disagreements about policy issues such as abortion and inequality. But also an overarching consensus about liberal democratic principles such as voting rights, racial justice, freedom of religion, and the rule of law.

If they are really serious about liberal democracy, then secular progressives will also have to set aside some of their own most deeply held prejudices, prejudices that have also played an important role in stoking populist resentment and driving political polarization.