‘Overhyped’ Christian Nationalism Label Draws Political Backlash
A pro-Trump protester carries a Christian cross during a rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Shutterstock photo)
O. Alan Noble, a Christian writer and social media influencer, has called former President Donald Trump “manifestly unfit for any office.”
In a recent post on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, Noble voiced concern about Christian nationalism — a label frequently attached to Trump and his biggest supporters.
But Noble’s specific criticism focused less on the melding of faith and U.S. politics and more on the wide-ranging misuse of the designation itself.
“Actual Christian Nationalism, a legitimate threat to the church and nation, gains strength from the overly broad application of the term ‘Christian Nationalism’ in precisely the same way actual racism gained strength from overly broad usages of the term ‘racism,’” argued Noble, an English professor at Oklahoma Baptist University and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Christ and Pop Culture.
“Be precise,” he advised.
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Noble declined an interview request from Religion Unplugged, explaining, “I'm not comfortable expounding on that tweet. [Christian nationalism] is a touchy issue that I'm not ready to speak about at length.”
But the point of his post seemed to resonate with fellow scholars.
“It strikes me the CN accusation has become for progressives what the ‘woke’ accusation has become for conservatives,” replied Christina Crenshaw, a cultural engagement and leadership associate at Dallas Theological Seminary.
“Like, not every orthodox Christian living faithfully in a pluralistic public square is a CN,” she added. “And not every expression of social/civic justice is Marxism. The reductionism and polarization is exhausting.”
Thomas Kidd, a church history professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, offered an all-caps assessment of Noble’s message: “PRECISION DOES NOT SELL.”
Boogeyman for the political left?
Debate over Christian nationalism has raged throughout the Trump era. The war of words intensified after a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — many waving signs linking the defeated Republican political leader to their religion.
But even as countless books, news articles and cable TV segments devote intense attention to the subject, the term has become so pervasive that it risks losing any real meaning.
At least that’s the warning of a growing band of prominent academics and political observers — on the right and the left.
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“My bottom line is that this is very much an overplayed, overhyped concept,” Matthew Wilson, director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told Religion Unplugged. “It has gotten a lot of cachet with people on the left who want to use it as a cudgel to beat on religiously conservative voters and portray them as frightening and authoritarian.
“Now, this is not to say that there is no such thing as Christian nationalism,” the political science professor added. “But I think that many on the left are portraying it as a much more pervasive and cohesive phenomenon than it really is.”
Wilson points to parallels between the way the left talks about Christian nationalism and how the right latched onto critical race theory a few years ago.
“Critical race theory kind of became a boogeyman for a while for people on the right — about this insidious philosophy that was a threat to America,” he said. “And I think people on the left think about, quote/unquote, ‘Christian nationalism’ in the same way.”
Debate over Christian nationalism has raged throughout the Trump era. (Shutterstock photo illustration)
‘Be wary of the use of this term’
Michael Wear, who served as a faith adviser to former President Barack Obama, detailed his concerns about the phrase at Mere Orthodoxy.
Christian nationalism “is regularly referred to by news outlets with little to no explanation, just an assumption that good people will oppose it,” wrote Wear, president and CEO of the Center for Christianity & Public Life in Baltimore.
But he urged his audience to “be wary of the use of this term.”
“Leave aside,” Wear suggested, “the matter that Christian Nationalism has become a vehicle for carrying out a whole range of niche political and theological disagreements that mostly failed to gain traction under other banners — while also serving as a convenient excuse to evade accountability for Religious Right politics prior to the presidency of Donald Trump — Christian Nationalism is a strategically disastrous term that has gained currency among partisans because it feeds the worst instincts our divided, polarized politics promotes.”
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Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C., distinguishes between Christian conservatism and Christian nationalism.
“Most of what is written about Christian nationalism is silly,” Tooley said in a post at Juicy Ecumenism. “Critics and analysts sweepingly deride conventional Christian conservatives as Christian nationalists. By some counts, there are, by this definition, tens of millions of Christian nationalists. Sometimes even civil religion, with its homage to a vague deity, is labeled Christian nationalism. If so, all presidents from George Washington to Joe Biden are Christian nationalists.”
David French, a former Army attorney, earned a Bronze Star in the Iraq War and later gained notoriety as a prominent evangelical critic of Trump.
Now a New York Times columnist, French recently declared: “If you’re alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism, the single worst thing you can do is define it too broadly. If you define it too broadly, then you’re telling millions of ordinary churchgoing citizens that the importation of their religious values into the public square somehow places them in the same camp or on the same side as actual Christian supremacists, the illiberal authoritarians who want to remake America in their own fundamentalist image.”
What does the term even mean?
Noting that “the phrase’s popularity has far outrun any coherent definition,” another conservative Times columnist, Ross Douthat, offered not one or two — but four — broad ways he said one could define Christian nationalism. They ranged from a theocratic state to any “kind of Christian politics that liberals find disagreeable or distasteful.”
At Religion News Service, veteran journalist Bob Smietana outlined “six loose networks of faith leaders and followers who fit some part of the definition” — from God-and-country conservatives to patriots and theocrats.
In their 2020 book “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry characterized Christian nationalism as “a cultural framework — a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems — that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.”
Whitehead and Perry used a 24-point scale to label 32.1% of Americans as accommodators and 19.8% as ambassadors of Christian nationalism.
In all, those figures comprise more than half the U.S. population — an estimated level of support that draws skepticism from Mark David Hall, author of the new book “Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism: Why Christian Nationalism is Not an Existential Threat to America or the Church” (read an excerpt).
“They’re all using this ridiculously alarmist language,” Hall, a professor at Regent University’s Robertson School of Government in Virginia Beach, Virginia, said in an interview. “There’s something like 24 books on American Christian nationalism, and almost always they’re sounding the alarm bells and saying, ‘Oh my goodness, this is so scary.’”
On the “Crossroads” podcast at Religion Unplugged, longtime religion columnist Terry Mattingly asked, “Does anyone know what Christian nationalism means?”
Mattingly directed listeners to a USA Today op-ed by Dan Darling, which highlighted one group’s 14-point definition of Christian nationalism.
According to Neighborly Faith’s definition, Darling noted, “Only 5% of Americans self-identify as Christian nationalists, and only 11% of Americans fit the category of ‘adherents.’”
As noted by Christianity Today — citing a recent survey from the Pew Research Center — “most white evangelicals want a president who reflects their religious beliefs, believe the Bible should have some influence on US laws, and see the retreat of religion as a bad thing. Yet they oppose adopting Christianity as an official religion and very few (8%) have a ‘favorable’ view of Christian nationalism.”
Meanwhile, a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that “fewer than a third of Americans, or 29%, qualify as Christian nationalists, and of those, two-thirds define themselves as white evangelicals,” as reported by Religion News Service.
Get the idea the various stats are all over the map?
That’s because they are.
“In short, in trying to estimate the prevalence of support for ‘Christian nationalist’ ideas, it’s very important to be precise about how, exactly, the concept is being measured and what it involves,” Gregory A. Smith, Pew’s associate director of research, told Religion Unplugged. “The estimates you get can be heavily dependent on what you ask and how you define your terms.”
Pew asked Americans in 2022 to describe, in their own words, what “Christian nation” means to them.
“The most commonly offered type of response we received,” Smith said in an email, “involved expressions that being a ‘Christian nation’ involves the general guidance of Christian beliefs in society — that is, a Christian nation is one where people have faith in God or Jesus Christ, or where a majority of the population is Christian.”
About 34% of respondents answered that way.
“It was less common for respondents to describe a ‘Christian nation’ as one where the laws and governance have a Christian basis,” the Pew researcher said. “Overall, 18% of respondents described the phrase ‘Christian nation’ that way. That description was much more commonly offered by respondents who do NOT think the U.S. should be a Christian nation (30%) than among those who DO think the U.S. should be a Christian nation.”
‘Merge’ of identities
Amanda Tyler serves as executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and leads its Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign.
On the “Respecting Religion” podcast, Tyler defined Christian nationalism as “a political ideology and a cultural framework that seeks to merge American and Christian identities.”
“Christian nationalism suggests that, quote/unquote, ‘real’ Americans are Christians and not just any kind of Christian but Christians who hold a particular set of fundamentalist religious beliefs that often align with certain conservative political positions,” Tyler said.
But who gets to define fundamentalist?
In a Christianity Today piece, theology professor Brad East likened talk about Christian nationalism to how academics, journalists and many Christians came to deploy the F-word (fundamentalist) to mean “a stupid [son of a gun] whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of” their own.
“I have all kinds of friends, colleagues and fellow Christians who regularly refer to Christian nationalism as kind of the burning issue of our day,” East, who teaches at Abilene Christian University in Texas, said in an interview.
“And sometimes it’s picking out a real issue, a real problem,” he added. “But often … what they’re saying is, ‘Christians to my right whom I have political disagreements with.’”
East gave the example of a church placing a U.S. flag in its sanctuary. While the Texas professor said he opposes that practice on theological grounds, he wouldn’t label everyone who does so a Christian nationalist.
“If there was a pastor in town that was a Nazi or put the swastika in the church, we would all condemn that,” East told Religion Unplugged. “We wouldn’t want to listen to him. We would just say that’s wrong. That’s not within the acceptable bounds of discourse.”
But the stars and stripes in a church?
In his view, that’s a legitimate matter of disagreement.
“My worry is that this phrase,” he said of Christian nationalism, “can be used to dismiss millions of people with pretty historically mainstream views that can now be rejected sight unseen, case unheard, and I don’t think that’s charitable or wise.”
His recommendation: “Let’s just drop the term, and let’s try to be specific and concrete about the concerns we have.”
Is Trump a Christian nationalist?
Despite the increasing verbal backlash, scholars such as Christina Littlefield remain adamant that Christian nationalism poses a real threat — to America and the church.
“It’s a severe problem,” said Littlefield, co-author of the forthcoming book “Christian America and the Kingdom of God: White Christian Nationalism from the Puritans through January 6, 2021.” “I think it is pervasive enough, and the underlying belief that we are a Christian America is pervasive enough … that it is incumbent on all people of goodwill to counteract that narrative.
“I am sympathetic,” she added, “to those who (ask), ‘Is this now being used as a cudgel to strip the nation of any kind of ideas of Christian values or to say that it’s bad that someone wants to share in shaping the nation?’ But I think it’s accurate to use Christian nationalism to describe what we’re seeing with the main presumptive nominee for the Republican Party.”
At the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville, Tennessee, in late February, Trump “promised to use a second term in the White House to defend Christian values and even suggested he’d shield the faith’s central iconography, warning … that the left wants ‘to tear down crosses,’” as The Associated Press reported.
Trying to recover from an avalanche of legal bills, Trump said late last month that he’s selling Bibles for $60 as he seeks another four years in the White House.
Do such examples identify Trump as a Christian nationalist?
Not necessarily, SMU’s Wilson asserted.
“I would say that he’s trying to appeal to and play on Christian nationalism,” the political science professor said. “I would not describe Donald Trump as a Christian nationalist because I do not think that Donald Trump is deeply committed to Christian theology. Right?
“But I think he understands that this is one tool in his toolbox for assembling an electoral coalition. The Christian nationalist base, if we want to use that term — even if it is only 5% or single digits of the American population, that’s still enough people to be an important part of his coalition and to make some money from.”
Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 18 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.