“Year of the Bible, 1983”. Reframing the U.S. as a Christian Nation

first_page settings Order Article Reprints Font Type: Arial Georgia Verdana Font Size: Aa Aa Aa Line Spacing:    Column Width:    Background: Open AccessEditorial Religions Series: “Christian Nationalism in the United States”—Ebook Introduction by Mark Edwards Department of History, Political Economy, Geography, and Social Studies, Spring Arbor University, 106 E Main St, Spring Arbor, MI 49283, USA Religions 2017, 8(5), 93; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050093 Received: 9 May 2017 / Revised: 10 May 2017 / Accepted: 10 May 2017 / Published: 13 May 2017 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Christian Nationalism in the United States) Download Download PDF Download PDF with Cover Download XML Download Epub Versions Notes While Christianity in American history remains a vibrant subfield, the subject of Christian nationalism in the United States remains understudied. The best survey on the topic, Robert T. Handy’s A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, was lasted updated in 1984. The long absence of studies is particularly striking, given that related abstractions such as “civil religion” and “culture wars” receive regular updates. Recently, a number of historians have returned directly and indirectly to the subject of Christian nationalism, including John Fea (Fea 2016), Steven Green (Green 2015), Amanda Porterfield (Porterfield 2015), David Sehat (Sehat 2011), Emily Conroy-Krutz, (Conroy-Krutz 2015), Matthew Sutton (Sutton 2004), Kevin Kruse (Kruse 2015), Michael Thompson (Thompson 2015), and Sam Haselby (Haselby 2015), among others. Their scholarship teaches us several lessons. First, we should avoid “decline and revival” narratives and understand Christian nationalism as a construction (a “myth,” as Green terms it) that has arisen at various times in various places to accomplish a myriad of work. Second, Christian nationalism has been advanced by a diversity of persons and groups favorable and hostile to the idea, not just by evangelical Protestants. Third, Christian nationalism can be operational even when its keywords “Christian nation” and “Christian America” are absent. Finally, and most importantly, “Christian nationalism” is a discursive site where politics and history meet—where assertions of identity and power are conjoined.The essays in this Special Issue will assess and apply (or relate) those lessons to a number of new subjects, events, and time periods within American history. Our intent is not to document every instance of Christian nationalism from every possible perspective. Rather, our aim is to prove the utility of “Christian nationalism” as an analytical concept—like “civil religion” or “culture wars”—to understand continuity and disjuncture throughout U.S. politics, culture, and society. Our respective definitions, redefinitions, and reframing of Christian nationalism should spark further investigations into its multiple manifestations and impact. Conflicts of InterestThe authors declare no conflict of interest.ReferencesFea, John. 2016. Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? Revised Edition: A Historical Introduction. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. [Google Scholar]Green, Steven. 2015. Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]Porterfield, Amanda. 2015. Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]Sehat, David. 2011. The Myth of American Religious Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]Conroy-Krutz, Emily. 2015. Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]Sutton, Matthew Avery. 2014. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Cambridge: Belknap Press. [Google Scholar]Kruse, Kevin. 2015. One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic. [Google Scholar]Thompson, Michael. 2015. For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]Haselby, Sam. 2015. The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar] © 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Share and Cite MDPI and ACS Style Edwards, M. Religions Series: “Christian Nationalism in the United States”—Ebook Introduction. Religions 2017, 8, 93. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050093 AMA Style Edwards M. Religions Series: “Christian Nationalism in the United States”—Ebook Introduction. Religions. 2017; 8(5):93. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050093 Chicago/Turabian Style Edwards, Mark. 2017. "Religions Series: “Christian Nationalism in the United States”—Ebook Introduction" Religions 8, no. 5: 93. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050093 Find Other Styles Note that from the first issue of 2016, this journal uses article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here. Article Metrics No No Article Access Statistics For more information on the journal statistics, click here. Multiple requests from the same IP address are counted as one view.

The article argues for a theology of decolonial reconstruction to aid the Ministry of National Guidance and Religious Affairs (MNGRA) in its search for a new political vision for Zambian society. The MNGRA was established in 2017 by President Edgar Chagwa Lungu to strengthen the Declaration of Zambia as a Christian nation. The second republican President Frederick JT Chiluba declared Zambia a Christian nation (hereafter, the Declaration) on 29 December 1991. In 1996, the Declaration was enshrined in the preamble of the National Constitution. Zambian Pentecostalism, perceived as chief architect and guardian of the Declaration, is also believed to have masterminded the introduction of the MNGRA. A female Pentecostal Pastor, Hon. Rev. Godfridah Sumaili, in fact heads the ministry. One of the key roles of the MNGRA is to stimulate faith-based organizations and religious communities’ interest, support and participation in pursuit of social reconstruction and transformation of the nation. To this effect, MNGRA has deployed a methodology, which seeks to dialogue with these organizations and at the same time use a ‘top-bottom’ approach to promote religious morality in the process of social reconstruction and transformation. This article argues that, being a ministry with a strong conservative Christian orientation, MNGRA is in danger of falling prey to a Pentecostal demo-theocratic (democratic and theocratic) political paradigm which rejects certain human rights, religious pluralism, and knowledge constructions from other religions, which are perceived inferior. The article also analyses the viability of ‘top-bottom’ approach utilizing a theology of decolonial reconstruction. This approach embraces a pluralistic model of integral religious praxis at all levels of life.

Taking America Back for God conclusively reveals that understanding the current cultural and political climate in the United States requires reckoning with Christian nationalism. Christian ideals and symbols have long played an important role in public life in the United States, but Christian nationalism demands far more than a recognition of religious heritage. At heart, Christian nationalism fights to preserve a particular kind of social order, an order in which everyone—Christians and non-Christians, native-born and immigrants, whites and minorities, men and women—recognizes their “proper” place in society. The first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in the United States, Taking America Back for God illustrates the scope and tremendous influence of Christian nationalism on debates surrounding the most contentious social issues dominating American public discourse. Drawing on multiple sources of national survey data collected over the past several decades and in-depth interviews, Whitehead and Perry document how Christian nationalism radically shapes what Americans think about who they are as a people, what their future should look like, and how they should get there. Regardless of Americans’ political or religious characteristics, whether they are Ambassadors, Accommodators, Resisters, or Rejecters of Christian nationalism provides powerful insight into what they think about immigration, Muslims, gun control, police shootings, atheists, gender roles, and many other political issues—even who they want in the White House. Taking America Back for God convincingly shows how Christian nationalists’ desire for political power, rigid social boundaries, and hierarchical order creates significant consequences for all Americans.

The chapter establishes the book as a new history of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, drawing upon feminist oral history to explore the extraordinary individual accounts of pioneering women activists. Going beyond abstracted, ideological versions of movement history, the book advocates a greater appreciation of the actions, pleasures, hopes and faiths of individual activists and a more generous understanding of what it meant to live a feminist life in the midst of individual and collective struggle for gender, racial, social and economic equality. Building upon Sheila Rowbotham’s contention that listening is essential to the transmission of memory, the chapter introduces Sisterhood and After (S&A), the oral history archive stored at the British Library which is the book’s primary source, showing how this invokes the voices, sounds, and songs of ‘second wave’ feminism, highlights the aura of the voice and captures the inadvertently caught sounds of the lived environment.

Reviewed by: The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy by Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry David M. Krueger Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 176. $21.95. The concept of Christian nationalism has long been used by scholars to analyze the intersection of religion and politics, but, in the last few years, the term has surged in public use. In 2022, some U.S. politicians such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green openly declared themselves to be Christian nationalists. In their book, Gorski and Perry argue that Christian nationalism was largely invisible both to conservative Christians because it was simply “in the air they breathe” and to secular progressives because they viewed the beliefs to be fringe. The Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, and its distinct Christian imagery are what brought Christian nationalism into mainstream consciousness. There has been a flood of scholarship on the topic in recent years. Gorski and Perry’s book has synthesized this material in a compelling and succinct manner, while also illuminating the grave threats that Christian nationalism poses to a religiously and racially diverse democracy. The authors offer their book as “a primer on white Christian nationalism,” with its chapters organized around the questions of what it is, when it emerged, how it works, and where it is headed. At its core, white Christian nationalism is framed by a “deep story” asserting that the United States was founded by white [End Page 131] Christian men guided by Christian principles, who saw the nation as chosen by God for a special purpose, but ever at risk due to “un-American influences both inside and outside our borders.” Drawing on their own sociological research, Gorski and Perry identify “seven indicators of Christian nationalism,” such as believing the nation’s founding documents were divinely inspired and that the federal government should advocate Christian values, allow prayer in public schools, and mandate a strict separation between church and state. While many white and Black Christians score high on their assessment, the data show that the higher the level of adherence to Christian nationalism, the higher the tendency for whites to claim they are discriminated against, to mistrust experts and mainstream media outlets, to support the use of violence to maintain order, and to uphold personal liberty and economic prosperity—even if the vulnerable in society suffer. The same correlations were not present for Black respondents. Many academic and popular treatments of Christian nationalism do not include “white” as an adjective, but the authors craft a persuasive genealogy that centers on race. Gorski and Perry craft a historical narrative to demonstrate that white Christian nationalism is not new but is “one of the oldest and most powerful currents in American politics.” The authors begin their genealogy, not in 1619 with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia, but in 1690 when religion and nationalism became fused with the concepts of whiteness and order. They identify other key inflection points such as the nation’s turn toward empire in 1898 and the embrace of libertarianism as a subtler way to encode race in social policies. Along the way, the authors emphasize the contingencies of each moment and the ways that various actors exerted their agency. The final chapter offers a warning that the January 6th insurrection was not an isolated incident but was the product of “subterranean forces that had been building for some time.” As such, the event ought to be seen as a harbinger of a potentially larger and more violent event that could imperil the future of American democracy. The authors offer a dire warning about what the future may hold, asserting that a “Trumpist America” would not necessarily become “Hitler’s Germany” but could share a resemblance to “Putin’s Russia.” This is an entirely fair claim and perhaps a wake-up call for some readers, but the book’s brief three pages on “what can be done” is insufficient to meet the challenge. In summary, Gorski and Perry call on the...

The idea that the United States is a Christian nation—the presupposition of Christian nationalism—has always been a powerful theme in American culture. Christian America and the Kingdom of God: White Christian Nationalism from the Puritans through January 6, 2021 is a comprehensive history of Christian nationalism in the United States. It explores legal and cultural arguments for a Christian America, including literature on civil religion and forms of nationalism. Second, it explores what the Bible says about the ideas of “chosen nation” and “kingdom of God,” the only terms in the biblical text even remotely analogous to “Christian nation.” Finally, the book traces the development of the myth of Christian America from the Puritans through the insurrection on January 6, 2021 and the 2022 midterm elections. It illumines how pursuit of a Christian America has led Christians to act in decidedly unchristian ways, leading to a more aggressive white Christian nationalism that distorts the Christian faith and threatens the nation. In this updated and expanded edition, Christina Littlefield develops the work of Richard T. Hughes to showcase how Christians have often embraced an “empire state of mind,” pursuing their own cultural dominance over the Cross.

This study examines how Christian nationalism—an ideology advocating for a specific form of conservative Christianity to be privileged in American civic life—mediates the relationship between religio-political conservatism and opposition to legal abortion across social-sphere circumstances (financial reasons, marital status, family size) and physical-sphere circumstances (rape, health risks, fetal defects) in the United States. Using structural equation modeling with 2021 General Social Survey data—the last wave collected while Roe v. Wade held precedent—we analyze how traditional measures of religious and political conservatism associate with abortion attitudes through Christian nationalism. We address “abortion exceptionalism,” a norm whereby the moralization of abortion provides public legitimation for relatively stringent state regulations, investigating whether Christian nationalism mediates religio-political conservatism such that adherents reject exceptionalist regulatory regimes in favor of totally opposing legal abortion across circumstances. Our findings reveal that Christian nationalism significantly mediates the effects of conservative Protestant affiliation, religious service attendance, Republican identification, and conservative ideology on opposition to social-sphere abortion circumstances; mediation of religio-political conservatism under physical-sphere circumstances is somewhat weaker. We discuss implications of these results, which illuminate how the convergence of religious and political conservatism through Christian nationalism shapes abortion attitudes and abortion exceptionalism among the American public.

Religious right leaders often promulgate views of Christianity's historical preeminence, privilege, and persecution in the United States that are factually incorrect, suggesting credulity, ignorance, or perhaps, a form of ideologically motivated ignorance on the part of their audience. This study examines whether Christian nationalism predicts explicit misconceptions regarding religion in American political history and explores theories about the connection. Analyzing nationally representative panel data containing true/false statements about religion's place in America's founding documents, policies, and court decisions, Christian nationalism is the strongest predictor that Americans fail to affirm factually correct answers. This association is stronger among whites compared to black Americans and religiosity actually predicts selecting factually correct answers once we account for Christian nationalism. Analyses of “do not know” response patterns find more confident correct answers from Americans who reject Christian nationalism and more confident incorrect answers from Americans who embrace Christian nationalism. We theorize that, much like conservative Christians have been shown to incorrectly answer science questions that are “religiously contested,” Christian nationalism inclines Americans to affirm factually incorrect views about religion in American political history, likely through their exposure to certain disseminators of such misinformation, but also through their allegiance to a particular political‐cultural narrative they wish to privilege.

Though recent research on White racial solidarity has advanced our understanding of White identity politics in the United States, the religious underpinnings of White identity politics remain understudied. Building on the documented conflation of religious, racial, and national identities among White Americans, we propose American Christian nationalism is best thought of as the religion of White identity politics. Drawing on nationally representative data with a strong, novel measure of Christian nationalism and tested measures of racial solidarity, we find Christian nationalism is among the leading predictors of racial solidarity but solely among White Americans. Specifically, Christian nationalism among (only) White Americans predicts greater racial identity salience, believing their racial group has a lot to be proud of, that their racial group members share much in common, and that it is important for their racial group members to work together to change laws unfair to their racial group. The result is that while Black and Hispanic Americans on average score higher on indicators of racial consciousness and solidarity than White Americans, at higher levels of Christian nationalism, White Americans become indistinguishable from their Black and Hispanic counterparts. Moreover, among Black Americans, Christian nationalism is negatively associated with the belief that Black people should work together to change laws unfair to Black people, suggesting that while Christian nationalism increases or reflects White racial solidarity motivating White identity politics, it may weaken Black Americans’ motivation to advocate for Black Americans in politics.

Since 2016, Americans’ attitudes toward Russia and Vladimir Putin have shifted, with Republicans becoming far more supportive of both. And though condemnation of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 remains bipartisan, many Christian‐right leaders still support Putin and Russia. What undergirds this support? Drawing on three national data sets, we theorize Americans’ warmth toward Putin and Russia is reinforced by an ideology that seeks to institutionalize America's mythical Anglo Protestant ethno‐culture—Christian nationalism. Though we propose Christian nationalism's relationship with Russia is more contingent on Russia's geopolitical activity vis‐à‐vis the United States, we theorize that Christian nationalism consistently predicts Putin support due to his authoritarian ethno‐nationalism. April 2018 data show those who affirm America's Christian heritage in the past and/or present are more likely to view Putin and Russia favorably and Russia as our ally. March 2021 data also reveal a linear positive association between Christian nationalism and favorability toward Putin. And March 2022 data reveal a linear positive association between Christian nationalism and admiring Putin's leadership. They also show a U‐shaped curvilinear relationship with viewing Russia as a threat. Paradoxically, Christian nationalism may warm Americans toward foreign authoritarians like Putin even when it compels Americans to perceive their nations as threats.

This essay uses the concept of Christian nationalism to explore the religious dynamics of the Contra war and U.S.–Nicaraguan relations during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Religious organizations and individuals played crucial roles on both sides in the war in Nicaragua and in the debates in the United States over support for the Contras. Evangelistic work strengthened transnational ties between Christians, but also raised the stakes of the war; supporters of the Sandinistas and Contras alike alleged a victory by their adversary imperiled the future of Christianity in Nicaragua. Christian nationalism thus manifested itself and intertwined in both the United States and Nicaragua. Examining how evangelicals and Catholics in the United States and Nicaragua, as well as the Reagan administration, the Contras, and the Sandinistas, used Christian nationalism to build support for their policy objectives sheds light on both the malleability and the power of identifying faith with the state. Having assessed Christian nationalism as a tool and a locus of conflict in the Contra war, the essay then steps back and considers the larger methodological implications of using Christian nationalism as a category of analysis in U.S. foreign relations history.

ABSTRACT: Avicenna’s political philosophy has received relative short shrift compared with Al-Fārābī in the literature: it has been primarily discussed by Butterworth (2000). Nevertheless, Avicenna’s philosophy is particularly relevant to the present moment with the burgeoning interest in theocracies such as Christian Nationalism. This paper provides a basic explication of the minimal elements of Avicenna’s parsimonious theocracy. According to Nussbaum’s criteria, serious political philosophies have seven elements (1997). While, in her estimation Nietzsche’s philosophy lacks these elements, I argue that Avicenna satisfied her criteria. Once the basic principles of Avicenna’s political philosophy as found in the concluding chapters of book X of his Metaphysics of the Healing are established, a comparison is made with the philosophy of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, it is argued, has identified many of the symptoms of the malaise of modernity and late-stage capitalism in his Zarathustra . It is argued that these problems identified by Nietzsche can largely be addressed by Avicenna’s teleological political philosophy and his insistence on a prophet as lawgiver. Having made the comparison between Avicenna and Nietzsche, the paper turns to the topic of Deep Ecology. It is maintained that, while philosophers have tried to ground Deep Ecology in elements of Nietzsche, Spinoza and Gandhi, Avicenna is also particularly relevant to this project in providing a metaphysics and political philosophy in line with some of the aims of parts of Naess’s project and other adherents of Deep Ecology.

This article examines whether the convergence of an individual's religious and national identities promotes authoritarian attitudes towards crime and deviance. Drawing on theories of social control and group conformity, as well as Christian nationalism's influence on intolerance toward out‐groups, I argue that the inability to distinguish between religious and national identities increases desire for group homogeneity and therefore increases willingness to utilize formalized measures of social control. Analysis of 2007 Baylor Religion Survey data demonstrates that adherence to Christian nationalism predicts three indicators of authoritarian views toward controlling crime and deviance: support for capital punishment, stricter punishment for federal crime, and for society to “crackdown on troublemakers.” These effects are robust to the inclusion of a comprehensive battery of 20 socioeconomic, political, and religious controls, and are consistent with previous research on Christian nationalism showing it is not religious commitment or traditionalism per se that leads to intolerant attitudes, but rather the conflation of one's religious identity with other social identities, in this case national. These findings indicate that, beyond sociopolitical and religious influences, the belief that the United States is, and should be, a “Christian nation” increases desires for group conformity and strict control for both criminals and “troublemakers.”

Conservative political orientation is a strong predictor of gun ownership in the United States. We explore the extent to which this relationship is mediated by two related belief systems: Christian nationalism and Right-Wing conspiratorial thinking. Drawing on nationally representative data from the sixth wave of the Baylor Religion Survey (N = 1,248), we use logistic regression and the Karlson-Holm-Breen method to analyze gun ownership, disaggregated by type of gun and reason for ownership. Christian nationalism and conspiratorial thinking underlie political effects on automatic and semi-automatic guns, handguns, and guns owned for protection, especially among non-Hispanic white respondents. Christian nationalism and conspiratorial thinking are less salient to driving political differences in long gun or recreational gun ownership. Findings elucidate the belief-based mechanisms underlying the societally important link between conservative politics and gun ownership, demonstrating how beliefs pattern who owns guns (and why) in the United States.

Recent research demonstrates strong connections between Americans' embrace of Christian nationalism and their beliefs and attitudes towards a host of salient social and cultural issues. Implicit in these explanations is that a stronger embrace of Christian nationalism signals an underlying fear of changes to the broader culture, which are perceived as leading the nation further away from a preferred, mythic past. To date, however, empirical studies have not focused explicitly on the relationship between social fears and Christian nationalism. Using a nationally representative sample of American adults, we examine the relationship between Christian nationalism and Americans' fears about immigrants, Muslims, communism, white racial replacement and gun control. We find that Christian nationalism is strongly associated with fears about ethnoracial ‘others’, as well as fears about losing economic autonomy and access to guns. Overall, our study shows that contemporary Christian nationalism in the United States is situated in a constellation of social fears about ethnoracial purity, as well as about the perceived loss of individual autonomy.