White Christian Research Articles

Not all Christian nationalists are White (and not all White Christians are Christian nationalists): exploring the predictors of Christian nationalism

IntroductionIn recent years, the literature on Christian nationalism has grown exponentially. Studies have found that individuals who score high on a widely used Christian nationalism scale are likelier to advocate for traditional gender roles, endorse anti-immigrant policies, support policies limiting voting rights, oppose gun control and interracial marriage, express anti-vaccine attitudes, hold anti-globalist sentiments, and vote for Donald Trump. The literature on Christian nationalism is not without its critics, however. Some, for example, have questioned whether the scale used by many studies adequately identifies Christian nationalists and suggested alternative methods for doing so. Much of the literature also implicitly or explicitly equates Christian nationalism with white Christian nationalism, ignoring the fact that 25 to 30 percent of respondents who express Christian nationalist sentiments identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, or another race or ethnicity. Finally, most of it has focused on the consequences of Christian nationalism. Very little has explored the predictors of Christian nationalism. The latter is the focus of this paper.MethodsDrawing on multivariate logistic regression, it examines potential factors driving Christian nationalist attitudes.ResultsIt finds that age, whether someone identifies as a conservative or a Republican, biblical literalism, and frequent worship attendance are positively associated with Christian nationalism, while being affiliated with religious traditions other than evangelicalism (or having no affiliation at all) is negatively associated with it. Notably, race and ethnicity have no effect, suggesting that other factors may be at work.DiscussionAs such, the paper briefly considers four potential factors not readily captured by statistical analyses of cross-sectional data. It concludes by noting that if Christian nationalism is potentially undemocratic and dangerous, then concerned individuals need to focus as much time and energy on its predictors as its consequences.

Sanctified Sexism: Effects of Purity Culture Tropes on White Christian Women’s Marital and Sexual Satisfaction and Experience of Sexual Pain

Abstract Since the 1970s, research consistently links conservative religiosity with higher rates of primary sexual pain disorders in women. The effects on women’s marital and sexual satisfaction and experience of severe primary sexual pain due to belief in sexually restrictive and sexually coercive gender ideological tropes common in evangelical resources are described in a large snowball sample of white American Christian women (Sexual Satisfaction and Function Survey, N=5489). We found that belief in purity culture tropes was associated with higher rates of sexual pain disorders. Current belief in sexually restrictive tropes was associated with lower marital and sexual satisfaction as was past belief in sexually coercive tropes. Current internalization of two tropes was associated with higher marital satisfaction, likely explained by decreased marital satisfaction among those who deconstructed compared with those who still believe. Never believing tropes were protective for women’s marital and sexual satisfaction while belief deconstruction showed mixed effects.

White Christian nationalism in Black education: Breaking bread at the kitchen table

This kitchen table dialogue brings together two scholars, one Black woman assistant professor and one white male doctoral student, unified in our research interests in the history of Black education and our faith as Christians. We gathered on the Zoom video conferencing platform to “break bread,” engaging in a cultural and spiritual tradition to share and commune with each other. The purpose of the kitchen table talk was to discuss the current state of white Christian nationalism (WCN) and how it has been foundational to the structure and establishment of U.S. schools. We explicitly explore its implications on Black education across time and offer critical theoretical perspectives and liberatory theological insights. We are hopeful that this discourse furthers critical conversations, teaching, and scholarship at the intersections of education, race, and religion that move U.S. education toward constructing educational structures that recognize the sacred nature of our work and care for the spirit and souls of all students.

Countdown to the apocalypse: the legitimization of white Christian violence in religious programming on the History Channel

ABSTRACT This paper describes the results of a content analysis of the History Channel’s religious programming, which shows that roughly 44% of episodes about religion from 1996 to 2020 prioritize violence. Additionally, an ideological critique of 17 selected episodes reveals that non-Christian violence is portrayed as inherent to geographic contexts outside the United States while Christian violence is portrayed as justified, heroic, and exceptional. From this we show how the History Channel’s telling of religious history perpetuates the deep and troubling alliance between American identity and violent forms of white, Christian nationalism.

Jesus and Prophets like Jonah: A Message for Womanists and White Christian Nationalists

This essay explores the prophetic vocation vis-a-vis the challenge of contemporary Christian nationalism by reading the book of Jonah in the Hebrew Bible in conversation with what Jesus says about the sign of Jonah in Matthew 12. This essay puts two readings of Jonah into dialog—one for womanist prophets and one addressed to White Christian nationalists. These texts reveal God's relentless mercy for the outsider and God's unwavering love for the prophet of the oppressed. The essay considers what the sign of Jonah means for race relations and the troubling rise of White Christian nationalism in the United States today.

“Make Rome Great Again” Preceded “Make America Great Again”: The Ancient Romo-Nationalism of Biblical Writers

The ideas about religious, sexual, gender, ethnic, urban, moral, and family decay that underlie “Make America Great Again’s” message have notable antecedents in ancient Greek and Roman mythologies about societal degeneration. Roman writers promoted a Romo-nationalist version we can call “Make Rome Great Again” that served to make the patriarchal, exploitative, and imperial power of elite Roman men seem like the solution to societal crisis. Biblical writers like Paul did not subvert these harmful Romo-nationalist logics but instead participated in them to describe gentile degeneration and sexual sin. Recognizing this troubling zone of contact between the Bible and MAGA-like ideologies can reveal the harm they cause and explain the depth of their attractiveness to White Christian nationalists.

After Restructuring: Understanding Religion, Nonreligion, and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract The Restructuring of American Religion (1988) provided a still-influential framework for the study of American religion that centered the emergence, after World War II, of a left–right religio-political divide driving mobilization around conflicts understood as moral. But in the last 30 years, the landscape of American religion has been transformed by decline in commitment to mainstream religious institutions, especially white Christian ones, and by the emergence of large groups of Americans who are religiously indifferent or who embrace spirituality or nonreligion. A new framework is needed to account for this transformed landscape. This framework must avoid problems characteristic of earlier approaches by conceiving of morals and interests as mutually constitutive, centering whiteness, racialization, and the defense of heteropatriarchy in explaining religio-political conflict, integrating the study of nonreligion and spirituality and religion, and analyzing not only decline in religious commitment but the changing meaning of religious identity in a transformed landscape.

Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism. Edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo

Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism. Edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo

United for what and for whom? An analysis of White Christian nationalism in a 2023 school board election campaign

Public school board elections have become cultural battlegrounds as groups with opposing views on education, politics, religion, and social and cultural issues vie to shape public education, their communities, and the nation. To date, little research has examined White Christian nationalism as a political force shaping these elections. This paper analyzes the November 2023 State College Area School District (SCASD) school board election in a polarized Pennsylvania town, focusing on the five “United for SCASD” candidates. Using public data (e.g., Facebook, websites, radio interviews, emails from candidates to board and administrators), the paper examines how these candidates’ rhetoric – largely drawing on Civil Rights-era minoritarian framing – mobilized key White Christian nationalist tropes such as persectuion and voicelessness. The findings explore how candidates characterized desirable versus undesirable types of unity and diversity. For instance, they advocated for focusing on students’ “common humanity” and teaching American exceptionalism as unifying strategies, argued for “parents’ rights” to opt children out of objectionable material, and asserted the need for “viewpoint diversity” on the board. However, they opposed the board’s alleged ideological uniformity and “divisive” initiatives and curricula focusing on systemic inequities, especially concerning race/racism and gender. The data show some evidence of White Christian nationalist tropes, particularly beliefs in American exceptionalism, the trope of persecution and voicelessness, the assertion of a common cultural template for US public schools, and us-them binaries, in this case, between liberal board members and their constituents versus the U4SCASD slate and more "conservative," often rural, families.

Positioning in Turbulent Times: Ottoman Intellectuals and the South African War (1899–1902)

ABSTRACT The South African War of 1899−1902, between Great Britain and the Boer states, marked by British victory, garnered extensive international attention, thus offering a compelling case study on the influence of modern propaganda globally. European and American audiences closely monitored the conflict between the ‘mighty’ British Empire and the ‘little white Christians’. Employing critical analysis, this article scrutinises Ottoman intellectuals’ pro-British propaganda and their stance on the war. Utilising sources like Young Turk publications and memoirs, particularly focusing on Ismail Kemal Vlora’s work ‘The Question of Transvaal’ (1900), it sheds light on their efforts to legitimise British imperialism in South Africa and beyond. Vlora played a pivotal role in leading the Anglophile faction amongst Ottoman statesmen and intelligentsia and his writings offer crucial insights into their perspectives. This study aims to comprehend the views of Anglophile Ottoman intellectuals on colonialism, imperialism, and civilisation, alongside their advocacy for Britain. Centred on Ottoman perspectives of the war, with supplementary attention to colonial South African history, this research unveils how and why the Southern African conflict impacted Ottoman intelligentsia. This study is embedded within the broader context of the South African War’s substantial international ramifications, emphasising its relevance to global historical discourse.

Ungrievable: Theorizing white Christian nationalist rhetorical practices in education

The religiopolitical movement of White Christian nationalism has increasingly impacted policy and practice in public education in the United States. This theoretical paper examines how White Christian nationalist ideologies and rhetoric are influencing the discourse of schooling and education. We use Butler’s (2016) definition of frames, grievability, and precarity in order to describe two underpinning ideologies of White Christian nationalism–namely, dominionism and colonialism. Then, we draw on sociological, historical, journalistic, and theological descriptions of White Christian nationalism to identify rhetorical practices utilized by this growing religiopolitical movement, and also draw on practitioner texts written by Christian teachers as illustrative examples of the ways that White Christian nationalist rhetorical practices might find expression in classrooms and schools. We argue that identifying how ideologies and rhetorical practices of White Christian nationalism influence and affect teachers and students is an important step in considering how educational researchers, policymakers, and teachers might purposefully grapple with how White Christian nationalism is shaping American classrooms.

Democracy’s End: Far-Right Fundamentalism and the Rhetoric of R. J. Rushdoony

ABSTRACT R. J. Rushdoony was the founder of the “Christian Reconstructionist” movement. This movement combines Neo-Calvinism, economic libertarianism, and optimistic apocalypticism, envisioning the collapse of democratic society paving the way for a Christian theocratic order. Beginning in the 1960s, Rushdoony’s work helped shape White Christian conservative political activism and postdesegregation school-choice rhetoric. His rhetoric sheds light on the strategies of fundamentalists, Christian nationalists, and far-right activists today. As attacks on reproductive and racial justice; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual or ally, and other sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQIA+) equality; voting rights; and public education become normalized, it is crucial for scholars to examine Rushdoony’s impact on current political discourse and confront the implications of his arguments.

Navigating challenges in American higher education: Korean international Christian students’ use of spiritual capital in response to white Christian nationalism

Despite extensive scholarly debates on Christian privilege and Secular privilege in American higher education, the voices of international students have often been absent from this discourse. This article is a response to a recent call for diverse perspectives to advance current discussions on white Christian nationalism in American higher education. Borrowing Bradford Verter’s (2003) spiritual capital, we explore Korean international Christian students’ experience of white Christian nationalism and its counter-movements in a college town near a public land-grant university in the Northeast. Through life history interviews with 16 participants, our study reveals the complex, problematic, and nuanced relationship between Korean international Christian students and white Christian nationalism. On the one hand, our participants acknowledged that the dominance of whiteness in Christianity led their professors and classmates to overlook the possibility that Asians could also be Christian, resulting in feelings of isolation and marginalization in class. On the other hand, they encountered the perception of Christianity as outdated, broken, and unintellectual among American professors and colleagues, which silenced their voices. In navigating these challenges, participants drew on their spiritual capital to construct their meanings, identities, and belongings in the social, academic, and religious realms.

The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism by Lerone A. Martin (review)

The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism by Lerone A. Martin (review)

Raising a clarion call in challenging times: Prophetic risk and role

This article examines theoethical complexities of teaching, preaching, and ministering in a volatile public landscape that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Centered in the movement are tensions related to complex factors that still foment sociocultural divisions. One factor is that religion and theology are often weaponized to propagate partisan ideological stances. In some cases, a polarizing conservative or far-right homiletical rhetoric foments division. In other cases, extremist groups raise the Bible and the cross to proclaim America was founded as a Christian nation, excluding other religions while ignoring ethnic minority groups. The result is a supremacist privileging of white Christian nationalism. How do we build bridges to cross these divides in this era I call Black Lives Matter times? The article’s first section examines the ethos of the present era. In the second section, I use an interdisciplinary lens to examine theoethical perspectives that find historical disunity in this country still rooted in racialized inequality issues. In the final section, I consider faith implications for theology and praxis. Raising a clarion call in challenging times requires a unifying commitment to public witness with a theoethical charge to embody love as restorative justice. My hope is girded by messaging that presents a clarion call to believe God’s eschatological love and redeeming justice will prevail.

Nooses and Nazi swastikas on U.S. campuses: an anti-racist call for a rhetorical reframing of hate symbols as violent technologies

ABSTRACT The terrorizing placement of nooses and Nazi swastikas on U.S. college and university campuses has sustained a climate of fear, trauma, and intimidation. University administration responses often invoke protest from targeted communities over their approach. Examining news reports and university statements between 2010 and 2023, we critique universities’ use of the rhetorical framework of “symbols” (e.g., “heinous symbols of hate,” “racist symbols”). We argue that the “symbolism” framework reflects and reinforces a problem of minimization, if not dismissal, when responding to the impact of these events. Drawing on works by rhetorical studies scholars like Matsuda, Altman, Butler, and Ore, we argue that nooses and swastikas must be understood and treated in relation to their material, violent, spatial, and agential oppressive power and viewed through the relationship between the academic environment of white Christian spaces and anti-Black and anti-Jewish violence and exclusion. Coining the term, “technologies of violence,” we invite a rhetorical shift from hate speech and symbols to acts of violent doing and doing to within the context of historical and contemporary phenomena of systemic racism and antisemitism in academia and society. We offer an anti-racist approach to responding to and studying terroristic objects and acts on campuses.

Whiteness, Innocence, and Childhood in the Prioress’s Tale and Its Devotional Milieu

ABSTRACT This article draws on recent scholarship in premodern critical race theory and the history of childhood to argue that in the Prioress’s Tale, whiteness signifies innocence and describes innocent bodies. In the tale, the color white gains its meaning from its contexts in devotional and antisemitic literature in which it evokes milk and breastfeeding, which in turn evokes a complex set of ideas about heredity and learned culture. By referencing this tangle of meanings around whiteness, the Prioress’s Tale resituates Christian anxieties about the nature and value of childish innocence into the genre of the antisemitic miracle, whose primary anxieties are focused on the coherence of the Christian body and the Christian community. When the “white metaphors” of devotional literature move into an explicitly racial and racializing genre, they become part of race-making discourses of white Christianity or Christian whiteness.

The reincarnation of the Asian Buddhist peril: White Christian nationalism and contestations of mindfulness in K-12 public schools

This article explores legal contestations to school based mindfulness programs in the context of an increasingly overt White Christian nationalist agenda in the United States. By illuminating the force and logic of White Christian nationalism in education, I demonstrate that though Christian organizations’ legal opposition to mindfulness is framed around defending First Amendment Establishment Clause protections in schools, their ultimate objective is to safeguard Christian hegemony and structurally reinforce a racial-religious belief of the US as a White Christian nation. Interrogating the discursive invocation of Buddhism as a “danger” helps to reveal this intention, and its exclusionary function. In this light, I trace how the claims of Buddhist treachery recall and reaffirm 19th century White Christian nationalist imaginations of Asian immigrants as embodying dangerously foreign religions and inassimilable behaviors in order to facilitate their legal exclusion from the nation. Understanding this historical context sheds light on the ways these Christian legal contentions of mindfulness attempt to maintain a historical racial-religious subjugation of Asians as a “Yellow Peril” and inculcate anti-Asian phobias of national invasion. Thus, I also argue that the current legal disputes over mindfulness are not new assertions of White Christian nationalism. Rather, they illuminate the ongoing legacy of White Christian nationalism, and represent attempts to maintain the structure’s hegemonic positioning in the 21st century. In highlighting these arguments, this article demonstrates that we cannot understand the debate around mindfulness in schools (and secular mindfulness programs themselves) without understanding the White Christian nationalist history of Asian racial-religious exclusion in the US.

Cities on a Hill: American Religious Exceptionalism and White Christian Nationalism

Abstract Scholarly attention has shifted from a focus on white evangelicals and the Christian Right to the more pressing threat of white Christian nationalism. In The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics, Eric L. McDaniel, Irfan Nooruddin, and Allyson F. Shortle explore the antecedent ideology of American religious exceptionalism. They report that many elements of this ideology are present across the political spectrum, but the strongest believers are distinctive in many ways. American religious exceptionalism can be a basis for a variety of political mobilizations, but it has most recently been used primarily in an effort to deliver Christian nationalist votes to Republican candidates, including Donald Trump.

Unmasking Southern White evangelicalism in U. S. history education: Racialized theopolitical discourses at work

White evangelical churches and organizations play a significant role in mobilizing congregants as participants in the white Christian nationalist movement. This fusion of faith and politics has made white evangelicals “ambassadors” of white Christian nationalism (Miller, 2022). This paper interrogates the history, theology, and politics of white Christian nationalism to understand its influence in the U. S. educational system, specifically its implications for K-12 history curriculum in public schools. Beginning with current legislation around critical race theory, this paper traces the intersection of evangelical and conservative discourse in the Southern United States. This historical analysis shows how the white, Southern evangelical record on race and racism accommodates the theopolitical ideology of the white Christian nationalist movement. This paper argues the current white evangelical challenges to critical race theory and demands to teach “alternative histories” about America’s racial past not only limits discussions around race and power in classrooms but distorts the curriculum with white Christian nationalist tenets disguised as truth.