Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--and What Comes Next

by Bradley Onishi

God, nation, freedom: the holy trinity in the Christian nationalist theological pantheon. What’s critical to notice in Goldwater’s approach is that the politics come first. The foundations of the belief system are not Christian love or neighborliness but individualism, capitalism, and Whiteness. The political shapes the theological to its needs, forming a Christianity in line with nationalist and racist priorities. Religion is the vehicle. Politics is the engine.

I agree strongly. Many (most) people I think of as “Christian Nationalist” consistently use politics to shape their expressed theology. This requires ignoring the major principles of Jesus teaching to make room for and justify “Conservative” thinking. I do think the author over-played the racist aspects of American Christian Nationalism. I do see its presence in todays culture and it certainly has been part of the cultural history in my lifetime.

For many White Americans, particularly in the South (and Southern California), Jesus is, and always has been, a White savior. This is not an accident. Representations of Christ as a White man indicate a larger theological, social, and racial matrix of White supremacy justified by religious means.

Leon had been at the church since the beginning. He was the lifeblood of the place—the guy who drove the bus on youth group outings, fixed up the chairs and stage and pews when they needed repair, and ran the sound system for Sunday services. His life had been spent in service to Rose Drive Friends Church. But as soon as the American flag was no longer part of worship, he vowed never to attend there again.

Not being able, or willing, to separate cross and flag is Christian nationalism in a nutshell. It’s about more than theology or doctrine. Christian nationalism is a cultural identity built around the myth that the United States is a Christian nation. For many Christian nationalists, who believe that political power is a sign of God’s favor, the Bible should be a governing document of the republic, alongside the Constitution. And many Christian nationalists are willing to topple and overtake anyone or anything that gets in the way of enacting this vision of the United States. Even if it means ousting one of their own.

It’s important to note (to me) that the very people who say they want a “Christian Nation” in terms of laws and traditions are actually ignoring some of the most basic and critical teachings of Jesus. Based upon my observations of my community and people I come in contact (all of which are predominantly Christianand/or conservative and Christian-ish) “Loving your neighbor” is being displaced by an attitude of “Let’s Go Brandon”. “Turn the other cheek” is getting lost to bitter arguments and antagonism. Patriotism as a form of clan building is becoming much more visible than washing others feet, or doing anything for “the least of these”. Ego has definitely taken priority over humility.

In retrospect, the evangelical breakup with Jimmy Carter was the result of numerous complex issues. But all the details lead back to a central theme: though Carter was one of them, his policies didn’t fit their agenda. His faith was unquestionable. He was born and raised a Southern Baptist, served as a missionary, supported his church at every turn, and married his one and only love. Carter’s politics, on the other hand, were not aligned with the vision Weyrich, Falwell, and the others had for the United States. They felt he didn’t represent the power of the nation.

Jimmy Carter intentionally lived a life to be Christ-like. His sacrifices and his joy of serving others are well known and a beautiful testament to his heart. He wasn’t perfect, but his life attitude is admirable to me beyond any politician or leader in my lifetime. It’s ironic that Christian America rejected him as a leader, and are. now devoted and loyal to openly immoral leadership to a great extreme.

The man who embodied family values was characterized as hating the traditional family. The man who was an officer in the navy was castigated as unpatriotic when it came to foreign policy. We could say that he brought the cross into the White House but that, according to his critics, he left the flag out of the sanctuary.

This leads to one final lesson to be learned from the Carter-Reagan election. When it came to voting for Donald Trump, Christian nationalists had a precedent for prioritizing politics over morals and policies over identity. In the wake of Trump’s 2016 election, in which he gained the support of 81 percent of White evangelicals and 60 percent of White Catholics, many claimed that conservative Christians must have had to hold their noses in order to vote for a thrice-divorced television star who talked about God at opportune moments but seemed, by all accounts, to have no relationship with God. Yet viewed through the lens of the Goldwater-Reagan heritage, as it was cultivated by the likes of Weyrich, Falwell, and others, voting for Trump was likely a gratifying, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many Christian nationalists. If Reagan’s two-term presidency was the culmination of Goldwater’s extremism, then the election of Trump was an unforeseen triumph.

Trump was not an imperfect candidate who somehow managed to garner the votes of White Christians. He was the prototype of the candidate White Christians had been searching for since the early 1960s.

This, in essence, was Jimmy Carter’s approach. He wanted to be a Christian and an American, but not a Christian nationalist. In other words, he did not believe the country was built for and by White Christians, and he did not think it was the government’s job to protect or privilege them. This wasn’t good enough for the White evangelicals and Catholics on the New Religious Right.

many White Christian American nationalists now see autocratic regimes as the shining cities on a hill. They are the models of how to construct a pure society. Using the rhetoric of Christian heritage and family values, leaders like Orbán and Putin give transcendent authority to their antidemocratic, anti-LGBTQ, and antipluralist modes of governance.

“They’ve made a kind of seamless transition from being anticommunist to supporting these autocrats,” Sarah Posner told me in 2020. “And it seems that the reasonable conclusion to draw would be that they don’t like totalitarianism when it’s left-wing totalitarianism, but they’re okay with it coming from the right.”

One of the peculiar aspects of the White Christians’ love affair with Trump is the clear dissonance between their sexual ethics and his sexual abuses. It’s perhaps the most glaring hypocrisy when it comes to conservative religious voters claiming Trump is an American messiah who will deliver the nation back to its founding—and back to God. Yet there is a way that Trump’s sexual savagery actually reinforces rather than betrays the family values discourse and purity culture ethos we’ve been examining in this chapter and the previous one. And it ties directly to the White Christian nationalist admiration for foreign strongmen.

Jimmy Carter was too much of a Christian to be a Christian nationalist, much less a protoauthoritarian in the vein of Putin or Orbán. His dedication to Christ actually hindered his manifestation of the types of viciousness that many White Christian nationalists see as requisite for protecting the nation from outside invaders and internal threats. Carter, in other words, was too Christian to be the kind of president many White Christians want. Instead, they prefer a self-styled barbarian, unhindered by the duty to be Christlike.

While the Christian dimensions of the QAnon conspiracy seemed surprising to some, deep historical precedents show the entanglement of White conservative Christians, conspiracy theorists, and GOP leadership since the 1960s. In every chapter of the New Religious Right’s history, there has been a corresponding conspiracy theory that explains why their opponents are not just wrong about certain political issues but are actually malicious actors who are trying to destroy the country and its people of faith.

The New Religious Right always envisioned the cross and the flag together. There was no separating national identity from the divine calling of the United States. This meant sacrificing the republic in order to save the America they wanted—a nation where White, straight Christians maintain power. If authoritarianism and conspiracy were necessary to retake America, then democracy be damned.

“By the time Trump arrived proclaiming himself their savior, conservative White evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates ‘the least of these’ for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses,” she writes. “Rather than turning the other cheek, they’d resolved to defend their faith and their nation, secure in the knowledge that the ends justifies the means.”

If one accepts, as the data says we should, that Christian nationalism is the standard worldview for not only a large number of the January 6 rioters but White Americans as a whole, it becomes clear that what happened on January 6 was the inevitable outcome of an American cold civil war half a century in the making.

In a very real sense, January 6 was not the end of a movement—some last-gasp attempt of a weakened and aggrieved group supporting a politician who didn’t want to admit he’d lost an election. No. If we are paying close attention to the extremist backstory of the people who stormed the Capitol that day, we will see that the insurrection was the logical next step for a certain diminishing White Christian population trying desperately to retake what they considered theirs. Acclimating or adjusting themselves to the inevitable waves of religious, racial, and other forms of diversity, for White Christian nationalists, is no option at all. This was not the last stand of a dying faction. It was the first violent battle in what they foresee as the coming civil war.