Is America a Christian nation, and should the government declare it so? Yes, says about one-quarter of the public. Do you need to be Christian to be truly American? About one-third of the country thinks so. According to sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, authors of Taking America Back for God, these folks are “Christian nationalists,” a retrograde force that is becoming increasingly desperate and apocalyptic as it loses its grip over American society. Their book is an important one that offers original insights, but it succumbs to a self-confirming narrative that collapses a complex phenomenon into a simplistic binary, pitting Christian nationalist reaction against liberal progress.
To their credit, the authors base their argument on original, representative survey data, providing detailed statistical models in the appendices. They spruce up the picture with 50 interviews, along with eyewitness reports from four nationalistically themed religious events at evangelical churches in the South, where the authors are based. This makes for a readable book that manages to be at once rigorous and richly textured.
Whitehead and Perry distinguish what they call Christian nationalism from Christian religiosity. The former, they suggest, is an unalloyed reactionary impulse according to which white Christians, especially evangelicals, are the only true Americans. For Christian nationalists, religion serves as a symbolic boundary marker despite the universalist message of the New Testament. By contrast, the authors argue, Christian religiosity is outward-oriented and concerned with social justice.
Although the authors don’t mention it, Nadia Marzouki, Olivier Roy, and Duncan McDonnell observed a similar phenomenon in Europe in their 2016 book, Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion. They outlined how the European populist right combines a defense of Christian Europe against Islam with scorn for the pro-refugee sentiments of European church leaders such as Pope Francis and admiration for their nations’ pagan roots. European surveys show that Christians who attend church regularly are less likely to vote for populists and are more pro-immigration than those who identify as Christian but never attend services. In America, this pattern has been noted by several researchers, most recently Emily Elkins. The authors add to this body of work, usefully wrapping it all up into a book-length argument.
At the core of their analysis lie six 5-point “agree-disagree” survey questions, the sum of which produces a composite score out of 30 for each survey respondent, allowing the authors to categorize people into four groups, from the least to the most Christian nationalist. The problem is that the scale includes some questions that measure nationalism — “Should the government declare America to be a Christian nation?” — and some that can be interpreted in either a religious or nationalist direction, such as questions about rejecting the separation of church and state or favoring school prayer. This gets at one of the problems with Christian nationalism as defined in the book: It is a catchall term for people who are motivated by conservative Christianity, white nationalism, Christian-inflected nationalism, and various mixtures of the three.
Only from the perspective of an urban, liberal academic does all of this cohere. Thus, for the authors, religious fundamentalists and white people who want less immigration merge into a monolithic bloc, a kind of Trumpist “other.” Negative partisanship seems to be the only thing holding the concept of Christian nationalism together.
Facts that don’t fit the narrative of liberal progress and Christian nationalist reaction, such as the reality that white people are no more Christian-nationalist than black or Hispanic people, get little sustained attention. Curious about the numbers, I revisited the 2016 American National Election Study and discovered that the share of white respondents who said it’s important to have American ancestry to be truly American is 39%, below the 43% for Hispanics and 55% for black respondents. A similar pattern holds when people are asked whether it’s important to have been born in America to be truly American. Moreover, the political scientist Deborah Schildkraut has shown that Hispanic people are significantly more likely than white people to say that being Christian is important for being American.
Although Whitehead and Perry acknowledge some of these complications, they do little to explore them, and the latter sections of their book are taken up almost entirely with examining the connection between white people’s Christian nationalism score and their views on immigration, President Trump, guns, police racism, or on social questions such as gay marriage, the role of women, or transgender bathrooms. The interviews and participant observation focus primarily on white evangelicals, reinforcing a one-dimensional caricature.
When they slip from the surveys into the qualitative data, the authors lose discipline, freely asserting that Christian nationalists are chiefly interested in reestablishing the patriarchy and keeping nonwhite individuals in their place. The idea that black people are disproportionately involved in police shootings because of racism is assumed to be a sacred truth that only an ignorant Christian nationalist could contest rather than a matter of scholarly debate in which studies typically fail to find bias. The authors rightly point to overblown fears about Muslims and Mexican gangs, but they fail to grapple with the more nuanced position of white people who want slower immigration and secure borders for reasons of social cohesion or cultural attachment. Those who criticize family breakdown are assumed to be intolerant dinosaurs even though the data convincingly show that working-class children do much better with two parents than with one. I have no doubt there are patriarchal traditionalists, anti-gay bigots, and racists in America. But there is nothing in the statistical models of opinion or Trump-voting to suggest that most so-called Christian nationalists are these things, and the concept of Christian nationalism adds little to existing studies based on measures such as authoritarianism, white identity, and the misleadingly labeled “racial resentment.”
Beneath the subject matter of Taking America Back for God are three distinct forces: religious conservatism, white ethnotraditional nationalism (which includes Christian identity), and minority Christian nationalism. The three overlap, but to bag this common ground as “Christian nationalism” conceals more than it reveals. Had the book been subdivided into these natural components, it would have made a stronger contribution. Yet because Whitehead and Perry are sociologists, a discipline with essentially no “Christian nationalists,” no one in their field thought to check the liberal prejudices that prevent flawed concepts such as Christian nationalism from being challenged and refined.
Eric Kaufmann is a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the author of Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities.
