Christian Nationalism and the 2024 Election

Good evening everyone, welcome. So glad to have you here. My name is Daniel Jocelyn Simitowski. I am the director of the Center for Christian Jewish Learning and the Kraft Family Professor here at Boston College. On behalf of Father Mark Massa and our co-sponsoring partner, the Boise Center for American Religion and Public Life, I'm pleased to welcome you here in person and to our guests online tonight for this talk by Dr. Robert P. Jones. So please allow me to introduce our speaker. Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. as well as White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in America, and American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award. He is also the author of The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Gravemeyer Award in Religion. He holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University in Atlanta, and M.Div from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. A little note on how this evening will proceed. After we hear from Dr. Jones, Father Mark Massa of the Boise Center will guide our question and answer period. And after that, there'll be a dessert reception where people can also purchase copies of the new paperback edition of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, which I understand has a nice discount attached to it. So please join me in welcoming Robert Jones here tonight to speak on the topic of Christian nationalism, religious pluralism, and the 2024 election. Well, thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here with you today. I'm going to talk a lot about some data, so we'll have a lot of percent signs and some charts, but I'm also going to talk about stories and how these two things intersect with one another. begin with the kind of the narrative and the story side of things and kind of work our way into kind of what the data says about Christian nationalism, religious pluralism, and the 2024 election that we're now staring down the barrel of. It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking 13. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy. I am an invisible man. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. So these beginnings matter, right? The kind of beginnings of the story, the beginnings of the narrative. They grab us by the lapels. They focus our attention. They intrigue us. They bring into frame fragments of an entire world that's going to unfold upon us as we read. So why are the clocks striking 13? What's the nature of gender roles in marriage in this social world? What rights are humans born with? What does it mean for a child to be given permission to tell God, but not her mother, a horrific family secret? How is a man invisible? What's at stake in asserting an act of creation by a singular God? Beginnings allow specific things and questions to snap into focus, but as these opening sentences reveal, they also hide. Like a photo taken in portrait mode, the field of focus narrows, and other things fade into an indistinct blur in the background, or they recede altogether in the shadows. So our in-the-beginnings, our once-upon-a-times, are never neutral. They issue an invoice that the rest of the story has to pay. And ultimately, the story is only accountable to what's in that initial frame. So why am I starting here with stories, right? We're talking about the election, because I think one of the things that struck me as someone who's been, you know, my primary job and my day job is to look at public opinion data. And look at those patterns and what I've been struck with is over the last decade as I've been doing this is that our deepest deepest divides have become less about policy and More and more about identity Right source. We're not squabbling as much over. How do we do this particular policy even over more really divisive things? But it really is the deeper deeper divides are about who we are and big questions like who is this country for? Who is a real American? And these questions have pushed us back to fights about our founding myths and narratives that we tell about ourselves, and especially our origin stories. So I want to come back to that point. But one of the longest standing... kind of myths about this country that we have is that this country is a Christian nation, right? And it's taken a lot of different forms throughout American history. I'm going to start with kind of the present. So where are we today on that question? Where are we in terms of what Americans actually think about that question? So I'm going to unpack this a little bit. So are we a Christian nation? How do we measure this idea that people believe this? So there's been a lot of really good political science and social science work done over the past decade in particular to try to get at this question. And one of the ways that we've developed to measure this is to not just ask a single question, but to ask a whole range of questions and then measure a composite answer. to those questions. In other words, if you only answer one question one way, it may not tell us a lot about it, but if you answer five or six questions very consistently across a survey, we begin to see, okay, there's a worldview here that we're capturing by these five or six questions. So I'm going to show you a lot of data today about this idea of Christian nationalism, which you've all, if you picked up a paper, you've read a lot of media stories about this, but because I'm going to be doing kind of a lot of social science work here, we have to define it very specifically. So what do we mean by that? How do we operationalize this concept of Christian nationalism in the social sciences? We've essentially developed a scale that we have used in the scale, the data I'm going to be showing you, we use these five questions. And so I'll just read them real quickly. These are agree, disagree questions. God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of society. The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation. Being Christian is an important part of being truly American. If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore, and U.S. laws should be based on Christian values. So we kind of measured this and kind of strongly agree to strongly disagree here. And then we built this together into a composite scale and then kind of scored folks on how strongly or least strongly they agreed across all five of those questions. questions. When we do that, what we find is that there's essentially four categories of Americans. We've named these Christian nationalism adherents. These are people who agree, who actually strongly agree with like all of those statements. Christian nationalism sympathizers are people who generally agree, but not as strongly with those statements. And then skeptics and rejectors are on the other side. Skeptics are those who disagree, but not strongly. Rejectors are those who strongly disagree with all five of those statements. them together like that, this is what we find. So in the country today, about one in 10 Americans are in that strongly agree Christian nationalism adherence category, and another 20% are in the sympathizer category. So if you're kind of thinking about kind of just general lean about the country, it's about three in 10 who kind of lean toward supporting Christian nationalism, either strongly or very strongly, which means that the rest of the country is about two-thirds the other way, right? So about 30... 37% are in the skeptics category, and 30% are in the kind of rejector, the strong rejector category. So one of the things we want to do when we measure attitudes like this is try to think, well, how do they hold up across other kinds of measures to just make sure we haven't, you know, measured something odd. So I'm going to put these categories, adherence, sympathizers, skeptics, rejectors, across a couple of other attitudinal questions so you can kind of see how they fall out. So we had a very large survey. We had a bunch of other kinds of questions that we could measure this by. So here's two other questions about religious pluralism. in America. Again, one is they're both agree-disagree statements. God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that would be an example for the rest of the world. I would prefer the U.S. to be a nation primarily made of people who follow the Christian faith, right? So agree-disagree questions. In the country, it's about three in ten who agree with both of those questions, and I'm going to show you how they fall out along the scale, right? So among those who are Christian nationalism adherents, it's eight and ten who agree with both of those statements, and then you'll just see it fall out. It's a very linear structure to these questions, and you can also see the big gulf between those who lean one direction and those who lean another direction, right? So it's not just a stair step down. It's basically that the Christian nationalism adherents and sympathizers are kind of in one camp, and the skeptics and rejecters are kind of in a different camp. You see this big gap between those two there. So that gives you some sense of like that we're measuring something reliable, right? That we're kind of measured over independent, other kinds of attitudinal things. So who then is likely to support a Christian nationalism measured this way in this kind of adherence, sympathizers, skeptics, and rejecters? So take a look at it by party and religion. So here first is party. Again, here's all Americans at the top, about three in ten, either in the adherence or sympathizers part. And this is... really kind of a classic example of what sociologists call asymmetric partisan polarization, right? And basically what it means is that, yes, the parties are polarized, but it's not even, right? The independents are actually much closer to Democrats than they are to Republicans. You can see this kind of bigger gap. And we see this in a lot of these kinds of measures that increasingly Republicans are a little more out of step with the middle than Democrats are. And you can see it here. So it's 55% of Republicans versus only 11% of Democrats who were in one of the of those two categories. And then you can see, essentially, if we measure it by candidate favorability, you see the same patterns here with either favorability of Donald Trump or favorability of Joe Biden. Here's the other side of that question where you can just see the skeptics and rejecters in a full horizontal bar. One interesting thing that we found here is that Christian nationalism behaves differently across racial lines, right? So there are, this is a measure that doesn't have race built into the measure. And so there are non-white white Christian nationalists. But the interesting thing about this is that there's something about sort of whiteness that kind of binds these ideas to a particular partisan outlook. And so I'll show you the difference here. So among white Americans who are either adherents or sympathizers to Christian nationalism, two-thirds of them identify as Republican, right? So there's this tight connection between whiteness, Christian nationalism, and Republican identity here. You can just see how... it jumps. But if you look at the differences between Latino, even those who are Latino and are Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers, it really doesn't have that kind of partisan effect, right? They kind of look like the general population here. And among African Americans, it actually looks the opposite, right? So that among African Americans, even those who kind of hold these Christian nationalism views, it doesn't channel them in a kind of partisan direction in the way that it does white Americans. That's kind of one very interesting... thing we're able to see, by the way, we're measuring just Christian nationalism without whiteness, but you can see the work that white identity does here in terms of bonding those ideas to partisanship. In terms of religion here, this is basically what it looks like. I've got these sorted by religious group most likely to either be in the adherence or sympathizer category to least likely here. And you can see that white evangelical Protestants who are the most Republican. constituency in the country. Two-thirds, essentially, are either identify as Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers. Latino Protestants are next. Those are the only two groups in majority who have a majority who are either sympathizers or adherents. Latino Protestants, by the way, voted about 60 percent. Actually, they voted about 60 percent for Donald Trump in both of the previous two election cycles, so they lean Republican. They tend to be evangelical or charismatic, and they're... in their identity in their religious identity and then you can see you know the groups kind of go down from here And then American Jews and the unaffiliated way down at the bottom right here, which is what you'd expect from a measure like this. But that's the kind of lay of the land among religious groups. One other thing, there's been a fair amount of ink spilled about. the role of church attendance on these measures. And there's some theories out there flying around that's like, oh, well, these people are just Christian in name only, right? So they're not connected to churches. They don't, you know, they don't hear sermons. They're not in Sunday school. hearing they're not participating in liturgy, they're not reading the Bible. But what we found consistently here, and this is just one measure, I could show you 10 of these, but what we found on these measures is that actually there is a positive relationship between church attendance and adherence to Christian nationalist attitudes. In fact, it's quite linear. The more often you go to church, the more likely you are to kind of hold Christian nationalism attitudes. You can just see the stair step down here of the seldom or never, only 18. percent. Those who attend weekly or more, it's a majority, 52 percent in one of those top two categories. Now, I want to talk a little bit about what else comes along for the ride with this worldview, right, here. And there are some kind of, from the standpoint of a healthy democracy, there are some fairly dangerous attitudes that come along for the ride with Christian nationalism. It's not just a religious worldview, but I'm going to show you some things that we're able to see in this survey here that are essentially all positively correlated with holding Christian nationalists of views. So I'll just kind of lay them out and then show you. you the data. So one, denials of systemic racism toward African Americans. So just an outright denial that systemic racism is a thing. Two, the belief that immigrants are a threat, and particularly belief in the so-called great replacement theory. I'll explain what that is in a moment. Three, anti-Muslim attitudes positively correlated. Four, anti-Semitic attitudes positively correlated with Christian nationalism. And finally, patriarchy, hierarchical gender roles. So this is kind of the worldview or the kind of stew that kind of comes along with this views of Christian nationalism. So we have a lot more measures in the study. And by the way, if you want to dig in deeper, we have several studies. It's at PRI.org where you can like see, you can spend hours kind of diving into the data, a bunch of different charts. I'm kind of scratching the surface here, but let me just kind of give you a sense of these. So here. Here are the exact questions that we operationalize those measures with. Each one of these, there's four or five others, so it's not just, we didn't cherry pick just one question, there's like four or five other questions that go along with this to kind of back this up. But I picked out some here to make it kind of comprehensible. So the systemic racism, those who disagree that generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for many black Americans to work their way out of the lower class. The rest of these are agree. Immigrant. immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background. That's the kind of heart of the great replacement theory. We should prevent people from some majority Muslim countries from entering the US. Jewish people are more loyal to Israel than America. In a truly Christian family, the husband is head of the household and his wife submits to his leadership, right? So this is the numbers of all Americans who agree with each of those statements. And what I'm going to show you is what difference Christian nationalism adherents make and those who are white and Christian nationalism adherents. So there's like a little bit of a supercharge effect that white identity gives to these values as well. So here are the numbers for just Christian nationalism adherents, like those who strongly agree with all those questions. You can just see the... the jump here it's 20 30 even 40 percentage points uh different than uh the american public on many of these uh on actually all of these questions uh and then you'll see that just kind of a little extra boost that uh those who are white and christian nationalism adherence on each of these questions have right so there's kind of like another maybe 10 points uh of of attitudinal uh differences here among white christian nationalism uh adherence so again it's kind of a a kind of a world a view into the kind of broader worldview in which the Christian nationalist attitudes exist. One more here I want to give you is we did just a large study that we released, just actually we just released it at an event at Fordham University a few weeks ago on authoritarianism and violence. And these are also tightly connected to these views. So we did a similar thing with authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is an amorphous kind of concept to measure. And again, when you're doing social science, you've got to find ways to measure it very precisely, as precisely as you can. We did a similar thing with authoritarianism, where we used four questions together in one composite scale to get a good measure here. Here are the measures that we used. These actually were developed by Theodore Adorno and his colleagues following World War II in a book called The Authoritarian Personalities. They have a very long history all the way back from the end of World War II and trying to figure out what happened with fascism and authoritarians. in Europe in the early part of the 20th century. So they've had a long history in social science. But here is just an example. What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path. Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the rotten apples who are ruining everything. Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs. can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas. Right, so these are kind of put in the vernacular. I should also say on all these scales we also kind of measure their internal coherence. And so each of these questions actually are quite correlated with one another. So when respondents answer one way on this question, they're highly, it's highly correlated with the way they answer other questions. So we built, did a very similar thing. We built a scale out of this, scored people very high, high, low, and very low. Called this the right-wing authoritarianism scale. And you'll see some similar patterns here. So here are the partisan breaks on just the authoritarian attitudes. So Republicans are about two-thirds. either in the high or very high category. You get slightly more. You can actually see the favorability of Donald Trump even inside the Republican Party on these measures here, like Republicans who have a favorable view of Trump significantly more likely than Republicans who have an unfavorable view of Trump to score high on the authoritarian scale. And then again, it's asymmetric. Independents and Democrats looking much closer together than Republicans on the scale. In terms of, back to kind of Christian nationalism here, this will not surprise you after seeing the thing, but again, Christian nationalism and authoritarianism almost perfectly correlated. You can just see this kind of stair-stepping here. The more likely you are to score high on the Christian, or on the right-wing authoritarianism scale, the more likely you are to be a Christian nationalism adherent or a sympathizer, right? You just kind of see it here, how strong those are. So among Christian nationalism... adherence, it's 84% who score high or very high on the right-wing authoritarianism scale, and you can kind of see it cutting down on the other side. One other view, attitude that we've been tracking that is quite concerning, especially as we're kind of heading toward an election cycle and the aftermath of election, is political violence, and we've been tracking attitudes of political violence ever since the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and we've been asking a number of questions. This is... one we've been tracking the longest because things have gotten so far off track true american patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country do you agree or disagree with that statement um here's what we find it's only 16 percent of americans who agree uh with that statement but again you can see the influence of christian nationalism here among those who are christian nationalism adherents it's four in ten who say they agree uh right that agree or mostly agree uh that that we may have to resort to violence in order to save the country and it just just goes down, right? And so it makes a certain kind of logical sense if you do believe that this is sort of a divinely ordained mandate to take over the country, all means are kind of on the table, right? I think that's kind of the effect of what we're seeing here in this question. So what does this look like in terms of the electoral map? Most of our surveys are fairly large. There are 5,000 respondents. That's about five times as large as the typical poll you'll see from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, et cetera. They're usually about a thousand. people. Most of our polls are 5,000 folks because we want to be able to get good religious breaks and subgroups, but the data I'm about to show you came from a poll of 20,000 people that we did across the entirety of last year, which enabled us to get not only national data but data all the way down to the state level with 20,000 interviews. So can I give you a sense of kind of how these attitudes are operationalized, not just nationally but further down to the state level? So first just kind of grouping states by how they voted in the last election and are slated to vote in this election into kind of red states, blue states, and swing states. You can see here that if you just take all the attitudes of people who live in red states, they're significantly more likely than those who live in blue states to be either Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers, right? So again, it's about nearly 4 in 10 of those in red states compared to only 22% who those are in blue states in those top two. in those top two categories here. Here's a heat map. You can kind of see this. Now, if I had colored this red and blue instead of shades of green, this would look very much like the electoral map, right? You could see what we typically see with that kind of red and blue map is a swath of red down through the middle of the country, sweeping through the south and up the Appalachian Mountains. And that's basically what you see here. And so this is support for Christian nationalism among white Americans in the U.S. And you could see this very similar. pattern that we do. If you'll notice, Massachusetts, I don't know if you can read it on the screen up there, is up there on the right, it is tied as the lowest number of support for Christian nationalism. Only 16% of residents of Massachusetts are in that either adherence or sympathizer category. Compared to my home state, I grew up in Mississippi, where 52% of the residents there are in those top two categories. categories. Here's something that is quite striking, and actually this chart is in the afterward to the new paperback edition of my book, where it's kind of saying like, what does all this history mean for the present? And what I did here is this is a scatter plot, and on the scatter plot, On the bottom is the average score on the Christian nationalism scale. So the further to the right you are on the scale, the higher you score on the Christian nationalism scale. The vertical axis is that is a state's support for or vote for. for Donald Trump in 2020, right? So vote for Trump, score on Christian nationalism scale. Now, if you were taking a statistics 101 class and they were gonna give you a kind of example of a positive correlation, this would make a pretty good example, right? You could see how tightly clustered lines are around. There's not many outliers. They're pretty much right around the trend line here. And again, you know, my home state of Mississippi is in the upper left, right? It scores both kind of the furthest. out to the right on the Christian Nationalism scale and the highest on the Trump vote in 2020. Massachusetts is way down there on the bottom, right? You can see it is below the line, and it is one of the lowest scores on the Christian Nationalism scale and the lowest score in support for Trump. So what this tells us is just like how tightly these attitudes are driving kind of our politics, right? It's not the only driver. There are certainly other variables you can take into account, but it is... is an absolutely powerful driver of kind of what we're looking at in the election this year and how things are falling out. And as I said before, in particular, the way that issues in many ways have fallen away and identity issues have come to the fore as the key dividing lines, the key fault lines here in the country. So I'm going to kind of wrap this up with just a couple of kind of other big-picture remarks here. Part of this kind of comes from the long history I did in the most recent book. And there I kind of argued that the contemporary white Christian nationalist movement flows directly from a very long and old cultural stream that's really run through our continent since Europeans arrived five centuries ago here. And so, you know, the photographs, I'm going to show you like one photograph that I talk about in the book. So this is one of eight photographs that actually hang in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building here. It is the discovery of the Mississippi by DeSoto. in 1541. It was painted in 1855 and still hangs. It's 8 foot by 12 foot in the in the rotundus. It's huge there. And now you can see some things that you know probably look fairly familiar, right? So we've got de Soto and his kind of European finery on his white horse, right? And down at the bottom you kind of we have weaponry and what's lost a little the bottom cropped a little bit that's a cannon at the bottom and there's actually a cache of weapons, spears, swords right below the cannon where it's been cropped, if you follow it all the way across to the bottom right here, and it's a little dark, but you'll see a crucifix being raised, right, in the middle of the Native American village here, and this is kind of, you know, typical. You've seen probably lots of those paintings. In fact, there's one out there in the rotunda of this building that looks pretty much like that here, this kind of raising of the cross in the middle of a kind of Native American setting, and it is this idea, this very, very old idea, right, that goes all the way back to the Christian doctrine of discovery. into feeds into kind of it's it's the version of Christianity that lands on the shores of this continent right this like this idea that it is a kind of promised land right for European Christians for their benefit and divinely ordained so and that's what we see in these kind of very familiar paintings and I like struck if you kind of look at that and then you look at this right which is a shot from not far from my house right on January 6th, it's the U.S. Capitol building of a kind of very similar cross being raised, you know, here now this is not a crucifix, it's just a cross. I'm guessing these guys are Protestant and not Catholic, but nonetheless, the kind of very simple, this kind of claiming of space, claiming of ground. If you listen to those prayers that were uttered, you know, you see, you kind of heard these same kinds of assertions here, and I was just, I've just been really struck that these recent photos, they bear really an uncanny any resemblance to that painting, marshalling Christian symbols to claim indigenous lands for Spain way back in 1541. Again, it looks very similar. And, you know, on the Capitol steps, we had this massive wooden cross that was erected. Standards were emblazoned with the name of Jesus. Biblical passages were read. Hands were raised in both prayer and in violence. And seen in this light, the symbols brandished by the insurrectionists were not incidental. They were, in many ways, the centuries-old ritual implements of the doctrine of discovery, summoned to do the work that they've always done. Now, in parliamentary procedure, I used to be a kind of Robert's Rules nerd. There is this move called... calling the question, right? And you call the question, it's a motion to end debate on a pending question and bring it to a vote immediately. And it typically means that if it's done fairly, that both sides have had a chance to be heard. It's time to make a decision. It's time to move on, right? Get on with other business. And throughout history, there are critical moments where social forces come together to kind of call a moral or political question. It's a kind of fork in the road that will determine the future direction. And in U.S. history, there's been lots of these moments. There's that moment we see in De Soto. There are the decisive break with England from the British colonies, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Redemption, the modern Civil Rights Movement. And at times we hear these words like reckoning, where questions of justice and accountability can be discerned in ways that were not previously possible. And people are called upon to choose. And these moments that are pregnant with new possibilities, and I do believe we're living in one of those times today, the fights over our origin stories and narratives come to the fore. And the question is how truthfully we'll engage our history and how skillfully we'll engage our history. will use it to direct us into a better future. I'm gonna close with a little anecdote about James Baldwin, who's been one of the more formative influences on my own kind of Christian development and thinking. And I wanna kind of focus on a response he gave in an interview during a particularly challenging period in his own day. And I think his light was especially incandescent in the months following the assassination. of Martin Luther King Jr. in July of 1968. So against the backdrop of African American anguish and anger and with many American cities burning, a white interviewer in Esquire magazine asked him how the country might get African Americans to, quote, cool it. Now, if you know anything about Baldwin, this is maybe not the smartest move on the interviewer's part, but this was Baldwin's response. He kind of paused and he said, like, look the guy in the eye, all that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history, which is not your past, but your present. Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history. Now Baldwin gave this interview in the year I was born, and more than half a century later, it's still an insight I think that lays bare the roots of our present troubles. The only thing that can save us now is an honest confrontation, both what we're currently doing with our history, as this 500-year-old question is once again being called, demanding a response. I really do think in many ways it comes down to a fairly simple distinction. Are we a divinely ordained promised land for European Christians? Is that who America is? Or are we a multi-religious, multi-racial, pluralistic democracy? And it's well past time, in my opinion, for us to put that question finally to rest. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Christian nationalism, especially white Christian nationalism, is an amalgam of religion, racism, nationalistic belief, civil religion. And if we were in a class, I would ask you to draw bar blocks. on the thing. What's the most, what's the foundational? Is it primarily nationalistic? Is it primarily historical? Is it primarily religious? Is it primarily about race and ethnicity? I mean, how would you, this is an unfair, I will allow that this is an unfair question, so go ahead. Of course, yes. Well, we're going to begin with an easy one. Thank you for that. You know, so I guess when I boil it down, I think it's fundamentally about power. is really what it's about, right? And these other things have come to be tools to kind of secure power. And, you know, so I'm a religious studies scholar by background, and it's just, you know, I've been just so struck by, I mean, there is no strong stronger justification for power, right, than to claim that the God of the universe demands that it be so, right? And I think that's really, you know, my lens has been looking at that like, wow, okay, so how, you know, it's so interesting to me, like, how do we get to a place where we think that all of these lands that we didn't know anything about here, you know, where we are currently living, were to be ours, right? I mean, it's an audacious claim, right, when you think about it. Like, how do we get to a place where that, like, that's even thinkable? And so that's part of the kind of what I'm trying to unpack, I think, in the book, It's like let's trace this kind of back and see where does this come from and how does it explain? like not only the sort of fate of indigenous people in our treatment of indigenous people in the country so about land theft and genocide But how does it explain? This entire transatlantic slave trade right that we not only do we think we can sort of take land and goods But we can enslave others to do labor right steal their labor And I mean I think to me that's what it's about out. And so, whiteness gets invented as a way of distinguishing us and them. Religion gets kind of held onto as kind of maybe the strongest lever we could pull to kind of justify the entire project. But at the end of the day, it's about power and control and those kinds of things, and where I think religion, race become useful in that quest. Questions from the audience? Okay, Jeremy. Hey, thank you very much. I really appreciate this. Jeremy Wilkins, Theology Department. Oh, I'm supposed to stand up. I was really struck by the right-wing authoritarian scale. Because there's a way in which those questions could almost be re-described as like a Manichaeism scale. Like, how convinced are you that the line between good and evil is somewhere outside yourself? And so that opposition to evil... will consist somehow in controlling or dominating other people, which I think is related to the power issue that you're raising. In other words, you need power for a specific purpose, which is related to the way you've defined the problem of good and evil outside yourself. And I've wondered, and I wonder if you have any take on this, I've wondered, you see how that correlates with particular kinds of Christian groups more positively than with others. I'm wondering if it's related to particular kinds of theological options. And, you know, maybe, you know, as Mark was suggesting, maybe I'm putting too much freight on the theology, and that's an occupational hazard for a theologian. But, like, a theology of imputation... somehow seems to make it easy to suppose that good and evil are somehow sorted by this kind of bright line of inside and outside. And I just wonder if you think that's a reasonable suspicion to bring to this question. No, I really appreciate that question. I mean, I think we're hearing more and more of that. I mean, I think it's right to call it kind of a Manichean language, right, of good versus evil, black versus white, and this imputation that it's, yeah, it's out there, right, and not in here. I mean, another way of thinking about this is, I mean, it's about humility, right, and about a decent doctrine of sin, right, you know, that might hold a mirror up and not just sort of like a window to look out with, you know, and I think that's part of it, too, and I do think that's one of the things we've seen really degrade in our public life with this concept that, and we're seeing a lot of it with this, this this group in, on the kind of evangelical right, called the New Apostolic Reformation. If you don't know that word, you should probably know it. There's actually a good new book on it called The Violent Take It By Force by Matthew Taylor. It's just coming out this month, but it, it, it really is this, this idea that, you know, God is on our side, right, not on the other side, and then, and that sort of Satan is on the other side. I mean, it really is that, that black and white. And again, the problem with that in a democracy is that we then cease to talk about our fellow citizens as people with whom we disagree. But they're agents of Satan, right? That's literally who they are with that outlook, and that becomes like very, very dangerous, and it begins to feed the prospect of political violence, right? Because again, if we're fighting, if we're not just disagreeing with fellow citizens, but we are fighting agents of Satan, what means aren't available, right, to us in that way? Megan Sweeney, I think, had a question over here. Thanks. Megan Sweeney, Theology Department and the Pulse Program. I have two questions. I am curious what you think the role of religion in the public sphere or square is or ought to be. I think it would be valuable to have space for those kinds of conversations. Conversations and so I'm wondering what you think constructively would be options My second question has to go with the the quest the way you framed which story are we going to tell I? Can see in both of those narrative possibilities a lot of space for misogyny and strict gender roles and queer phobia and so I'm wondering how do you also make space for women and gender non-conforming persons in a narrative that would be open to the future yeah and actually do you study women specifically in your in your data and are there any data points that are different from that would be notably different yeah so interesting Interestingly enough, so yes, all of our surveys are general population surveys, so they have kind of everybody in the country in them. And again, we've got fairly large samples, so we can take a look. What's interesting is that while we do see some gender differences, partisanship is much stronger than gender differences on many of these issues. So Republican women look much closer to Republican men than they look to independent or Democratic women. So. So partisanship has really sliced through the gender differences in really remarkable ways here. So we see some differences, but they're not as pronounced as you might think here. And so we do have, we just did a whole survey actually on Generation Z that has a whole bunch of stuff on gender and relationships. But I think the connective tissue between that part of the question and the last question is the thing that goes along for the ride with with a kind of black, white, good, evil thing, is a hierarchical worldview, right? And where men are over women, white is over black, white is over all non-white, in fact, and straight is over gay or nonconformist and all of that. And there is this idea that, and I think one of the reasons why we're seeing so much energy around transgender issues. is because of, it's literally a transgression of those rigid boxes, right? That no, no, people are either male or female, right? And toward, according to that worldview, and so when you start, like, making that not the case, there is this kind of rejection, and, you know, and the thing is about this hierarchical worldview, you know, it's, it's always historically been straight white men at the top of a hierarchy, and other people finding their place, right, in, in lower places in that hierarchy, so that's. That's part of the larger world view. We have that one question here that I mentioned. There's a whole battery of questions on gender in that larger survey. The one that I had was about a Christian household where women submit to male leadership. That's kind of a prominent thing on the right, kind of hierarchical marriage, complementarian gender roles, et cetera. But we have a whole other set of stuff in the survey that you can dive into there. On the bigger question, I do think it's... a healthy question for us to think about now. Yeah, what is the role, right? What is the public role? I'm not one who thinks there's no public role for religion at all. That's not the case at all. But I think the real question, I think the line is when it starts bleeding into issues of ownership, entitlement, dominion, it's those kinds of assertions, right? Where there's a kind of first class of... of people who are Christian and then everyone else is where we get in trouble. But I think the kind of prophetic role that Christians and Jews and Buddhists and others have played, we've got plenty of examples of that that were making us a healthier democracy in the country. And the question is how do we kind of foster that, I think, while calling out this other thing as no, no, no, this is actually burning down the house, right? These kind of Christian nationalist claims are something quite different. Okay, yeah, in the back of the room, and then, not quite yet, and could you, I'm very conscious of time, so if you could ask a declarative or an inquisitive question, one sentence question. Totally. Two sentences. How much are you tracking belief in apocalypse? Like, in other words, like, these people also believe in the end times. And the second question is, how much can we trust the polls nowadays in terms of them reflecting accurately what public sentiment is, particularly around folks like... like Trump. Yeah, so on the, yes, so the other measures that we have, so the things that we're seeing is, I mentioned the new episodic reformation, it's kind of Pentecostal movement, and inside of that world, there are theological things that absolutely matter, a belief in the apocalypse that that's, we've long known that's made a difference on climate attitudes, for example, or if you believe the end times are coming, like why bother, right, to kind of take care of the planet, that either believe that God won't let that happen, or the end times are coming, the end times are coming, and there's no point in doing that. The other belief that's related to that is this Pentecostal belief in prophecy, that there are, God is raising up kind of prophets, and new prophets in real time, and they are issuing prophecies. You've kind of heard this language, I think some about like, particularly around Paula White and some of the other people in her circles there, and so I think those attitudes are absolutely kind of part of this view. and also kind of like the other view that goes along with that, and it should name, because it's very important for understanding January 6th, is the idea that kind of stitches many of these things together, is the idea that Satan or demons are geographically controlling specific realms, like specifically controlling geographic space. So part of the January 6th thing was about casting out demons, demons, literally demons. literally casting out demons from Capitol Hill. Like it was that sense that they were under control of demonic forces, and you have to be there, right, in that space to kind of do that work. So it's that kind of an attitude, too. And the polling question. So, you know, polling has changed a lot, really, in the last ten years. One thing I'll say about this, none of us should be relying on a poll to tell us who's going to win the election, right? That is not what polls are designed to do. They are not oracles, right? They are snapshots of public opinion. opinion in time, right? And that's all, because the biggest problem we have right now is that in order to kind of project who's going to win, you have to know who's going to vote, and there's no way to know who's going to vote, particularly post-pandemic, right? 2020 was such a weird election. All the models are going to be fraught, because do you assume it's going to be like 2020, or do you assume it's going to turn out to be more like the midterms, where we were coming out of COVID, and then you can't really go back to 2016, that's too far. far back. So how do you even model a likely voter? So I think like beyond the methodological like sampling issues and that kind of thing, which has gotten a lot better, most polls now are like online polls which are actually better in terms of sampling, but beyond that there's just a human, it's an art, it's not science, right, exactly. It's like who do we count as likely to vote and we don't know. But the biggest thing is that's not what polls are really decided to do. They're designed to give us a good reliable snapshot of who's there. And the last thing I'll say about this is like so far, you know, the only polls that matter for the outcome of the election are, of course, the swing states. Right. Seven swing states. The national polls do not matter. And so far, none of the swing states have been outside the margin of error. So if you if you see The New York Times writing somebody's up by three, somebody's down by four. If it's not seven, it is a tie. Right. Because the margin of errors are going to need in those state polls there. under a thousand people, right? So you're going to need a gap of like seven points before anybody's really up, but they don't want to write that because it's not a good headline, right? You won't click on it. But so just kind of like a word about that. But I think they're really good for telling us these broader contours of like what's driving the race, as long as we're not trying to read the tea leaves of what's going to happen, you know, in a given few weeks, and are very unpredictable. Camille, the third row from the front here. First of all, many, many thanks for your wonderful penetrating. I learned a lot from it. I have two quick questions. One is that you focused your analysis, understandably, entirely on the United States. It's really interesting, fascinating, that the same kind of religious nationalism is arising in a number of other countries, as I'm sure you know far better than I do. And in all religious traditions including think of India, for example, you know, for forever we thought of India as pluralistic because of, you know, Indian religion not being monotheistic. So that's one question whether you have reflected on why we have this phenomenon taking place really throughout the world and in all religious traditions. My second question is, I'm working on this topic myself, whether you make a distinction between Christian nationalism or more generally religious nationalism as an identity issue as who I am, who we are, and so on, versus what I would call the sacralization of the state. That is, the state itself is sacred. that goes beyond the view that we as a Christian nation. So let's get to the question. So these are the two questions. Again, small questions. Yeah. I mean, I do think it's right to say that you can look at religious nationalisms around the world. And again, I may just go back to the beginning question. I think people have figured out that these are useful tools, and they're about identity. And I think part of it's always the kind of pushback if we're thinking about a pluralistic state. I mean, we should forget, we should remember, like, a pluralistic state is not an easy thing to hold together. Like, it's tough, right? It's an experiment, and it's one that's, I think, open-ended about whether we're going to be able to pull it off at the end of the day, and so it's a hard thing to do, and these identities are ways to pull back, and I think, you know, many, many leaders, particularly authoritarian ones, are always looking for what lever can I pull, right, to kind of make us and them distinctions, and religion is just... just one of the most powerful ways historically to do that. So I think that's a part of it. And the second question was? The state. Yeah. So here, I would say it's less of that. There's so much actually talking about bad mouthing the state in our kind of populist rhetoric. I think there's less of that going on in this country than maybe in some other places where I can think of. of where the church had been more kind of co-opted directly into the kind of state apparatus. But here, I think it's a little less of that. Right. Camille, there was somebody in the back row over here. She's had her hand up. I'll be quick. It's about the graphic that you showed of black American either adherents or sympathizers to Christian nationalism. I was shocked that it was majority Democratic. So my question is within the context of the current ideals of the Democratic Party. as it stands. How does that work? Can you speak more to that? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it's complex. I think there's still a lot of research going on here, but I think when we first got the numbers back, we were a little like, oh, what's going on there, right? That they're that high among African Americans. But once we kind of dug into it, it was just interesting to see that the work that whiteness does with that set of attitudes is something very different than non-white Americans. So I think that's, and part of it is this, you know, that this sense that we've always known this about, you know, many African Americans, like if you compare, like I grew up Southern Baptist in the South, right? If you compare, like our theology to the Black Baptist Church down the street, the hymns. we sung, you know, the kind of general, kind of literal word of God, approach to the Bible, a lot of similarities there, right? But when it moves into political space, that racial experience really refracts those views in really different ways, and I think historically we've seen that, and I think that's what we're seeing, you know, here as well. Catherine, did you have your hand up? Okay, the gentleman... In your work on this problem, have you come across participants or individuals who renounced Christian nationalism and what responses do they typically give? reasons do they typically give for doing that? And on the flip side, have you encountered individuals who were devout Christians, just run-of-the-mill everyday Christians, who started to think, hey, these guys might have a point here, and what reasons do you see for that conversion? Yeah, well, I mentioned I grew up in the Southern Baptist Convention, right, which is in many ways the hotbed of Christian nationalist thinking. So in some ways, like, I might be exhibit A, of somebody who sort of like grew up in that world and has kind of moved out of it, you know, as kind of rethinking and some of its theological work, some of its like reading, being exposed to other kinds of things, but I guess I would say that the temptation, I think, is this you The sense of a changing country, I think, for many white Christians, I kind of sometimes joke about the great white Christian freakout moment, right, that we're experiencing over the last 20, 30 years in the country. So, just to give you a couple of quick numbers. it wasn't that long ago. In fact, before we had our first black president, right when he was running for president in 2008, the country was still a majority white Christian country. So we were 54% white and Christian. If you took Protestant, Catholic, non-denominational, everybody identifies as Christian, white, and non-Hispanic, 54% of the country. By the time he got out of office, at the end of his second term, the country was at 47% white and Christian. That number today is 41% white and Christian. So part of what's happening is, I mean, that's actually a fairly big change in a short amount of time in terms of demography, right? And so part of what's happening is this adjustment that we're seeing in the United States from being, wait a minute, like I thought we were the country, right, to, oh, no, actually we're one among many folks at the table. We have to kind of figure out a way to pull up a chair along with other people, and by the way, we don't own the table. So I think it's that adjustment that I think is, and the reactivity to that adjustment, the fear to that adjustment, and it's real, even if people don't know the statistics, you know, if you go to, you know, an average public school, and not one, if it's not out in one of the white flight suburbs, but an average public school, and you went back and look at their entering first, the photo of their entering first grade class over the last 20 to 30 years, you would see it, right? You would see the shift here, and I think people feel it in that way. They go to the grocery store, and there's like an ethnic food aisle, right, in the grocery store, right? So like, what's that about? They turn, they're turning the dial, and there's Spanish language radio stations next to the country music station that they used to listen to all the time, right? And it's playing until Tejano music, all right? And so it's that kind of thing that I think people feel in their bones, and their kids aren't going to church, right? That's the other kind of big exodus of kind of younger people from white Christian churches in the country. Today, young people, 38 percent of young people don't even claim a religion at all. Don't even claim it, not just Christianity, but no religion. So I think it's like that reactivity is what's pulling people, I think, toward it. I think the promise, though, of kind of living into what we said we always believe, right, that we're pluralistic. the country is, I think, what's pulled me and I hope others the other way. Great. Do you want to? No? Okay. Dan? In the very first row. Thank you. Yeah, what you're just saying kind of brings me to the religious pluralism piece of the question with some of your data set, which is where does the presence of non-Christians fit into the white Christian nationalist view? If white Christian nationalists have their ideal nation, their ideal society, where would Jews fit Muslims? I'm thinking of Vivek Ramaswamy, famously a Hindu who was in. running for president in this last primary cycle mirrored a lot of the language that we associate even with white Christian nationalism. So where does the fact, the givenness of pluralism fit for them? I don't know a lot of this is a public record. I'm sure if we could see Ramaswamy's inbox, we would have some clues, right? The one I do know that Nikki Haley has endured a lot of vitriol for her background and it's a fact that we have a lot of people And you see it there, like, are you legitimate, right? Are you not legitimate? And that's partly about ethnicity, it's partly about religious background, and those kinds of things. And, you know, for Obama, right, the whole birtherism thing was, and why was there an attempt not only to say he's not a U.S. citizen, but to say he was Muslim, right? It was kind of otherizing, right, a religious otherizing, not just racial, but religious otherizing there. But the unaffiliated are the bookend of this other story, right? The decline of white Christians in the country has been accompanied by the tripling of the number of unaffiliated Americans from the 1990s to the present. So the 1990s, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, those are people when we ask what is your religion, they say nothing in particular or I'm atheist or agnostic. They won't claim, even if we read them a list, they won't claim any of the big box traditional religious groups. And that group has gone from single digits in the 1990s to 28% today, right? So it's tripled there and again among young people it's 38% among Americans under the age of 30 today and that's something genuinely new and so the The answer is they don't fit very well into humanism, secularism, Marxism. Whenever you hear a claim about Marxism, it's always got a religious undertone to it as well. It's not just a political. thing. It's all about atheism and, you know, that kind of thing. So, they don't fit very well, right? And I think about, like, I mean, even somebody like FDR, who we think of as fairly progressive, you know, basically said this is a Christian country and everybody else here is here by sufferance, right? And I think that's... the world view, right? Yeah, maybe there's tolerance, but they're not here on the same way that we white Christians are here. One more question, to sum up the question. Megan, Sean, right here on the, good. Thank you. What factors would you say have led the Christian public country that we were built on into a more secular and pluralist country? What would you say those factors were? Say the first part again. would you say have affected our country from becoming a public Christian country and moving towards a secular pluralist country? Yeah, so it's a combination of things. There's some kind of mundane things that are about upward mobility in birth rates. So that's part of it, right? This is true for Catholics in the country, is true for mainline Protestants, and more recently is true of evangelicals. So like one of the reasons why, like white evangelicals, for example, again, we take that same time frame, go back to kind of early 2000s, white evangelicals by themselves were 23% of the country, nearly a quarter, like one in four Americans were white evangelical Protestant. Today that number is 13%, like half, essentially, of what they were. were just you know a good 20 years ago uh and it's been a some of that's been about evangelical women getting college degrees and when they get college degrees they want to space out uh having kids for a career birth rates go down right so that's part of part of it but the other part of it is really has been young people leaving uh that's really driven these numbers and the reasons there we've done some pretty recent studies on this that when we ask people um and we asked young people who were who grew up in uh religious and then left right so these aren't people who were born unaffiliated, these people who were originally in churches or synagogues or mosques, etc., and left. Why they left. And what they would, some of it was about belief. They said they just didn't believe the doctrines anymore, but the other things were actually about the kind of current political context. So the biggest things they name are anti-gay attitudes, right? So negative treatment of or negative teachings about LGBTQ people in the church, and nearly half of young people say that's the reason that they left, right? That's a big deal. The sexual abuse scandals in the church and the other city they named is thing teachings around climate change. So all of those things where many conservative white churches have been kind of doubling down have been at real odds with the values of younger people's they've been and hence we see the numbers. I lied I always give the last question to Catherine Grinnell. Thank you, and this is a follow-up. So if this is the reactionary movement, do you think that it's also temporary and passing? Because as it's a reaction to contemporary context, I would imagine that it's... also enduring. What's your sense? Yeah, well it is a reactionary to our moment. It's also very old, right? That's the other, you know, in the book, one of the reasons I wrote this last book Was to kind of answer the question. Okay, if I trace back this thing that we're experiencing right now To its kind of most proximate roots right before Well as Europeans are landing on this continent like what does that look like? Where does it come from? So in many ways it's a very old old claim and I think of like, you know We and it but it flares up at moments and what one of the things that tends to flare up actually is When we have demographic change in the country right now the foreign-born population is about 15% of the country. The last time that was true was in the early 20th century when there was a lot of anti-Catholic bias, a lot of anti-Irish bias, right? It was different, but it was a similar kind of thing, and why do we have the, and to kind of see this play out, if we ask the question, like, what about the, you know, the KKK, like the Ku Klux Klan, the resurgence of the Klan, right? Of course, everybody thinks about it as being an anti-black, and that's right, kind of violent terrorist organization, but I think what many people forget, right, is that it was... was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. But why was it anti-Catholic? What ties those things together, being anti-black, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish? Well, the thing that ties those things together is the claim that this is a white Protestant country. That's what ties these things together, was a positive Protestant. assertion of identity. And so I think in many ways we're feeling that again. The Protestant part has sort of that part is not as prominent and there's kind of been a melding of more conservative Catholic and more conservative Protestant forces here. that that piece is a little different today, but this claim is, it's pretty old. Again, one of the reasons why I ended with this kind of call to questions, I feel like we've called the question several times in American history, right, and we've made some progress, of course, but I think it just still keeps coming. So, I hope that the demographics are such that it's flared up, and I even use in the previous book this idea of kind of what we're experiencing is something akin to, many of you may know this book, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of growth. grief, right? And so if you remember, like, the first stage is denial, right? But what comes right after denial is anger, right? And that's, I think, part of kind of what's happening here, and like, how we manage this. may determine whether we just kick this can down the road and it shows up again, or whether we do some better job than previous generations have done of actually resolving it. Please join me in thanking Robbie. God loves you, but God loves you more if you buy his book, which is right over there. So we have books for sale over here. I believe Robert will be available to sign if you so wish. We also have coffee, refreshments, desserts, a reward for those students who came. You get something sweet now. So please do avail yourselves of that. Thank you all for being here. Thank you to our folks who are online. And thank you again, Robert, for a great talk. Thank you.

Good evening everyone, welcome. So glad to have you here. My name is Daniel Jocelyn Simitowski.

I am the director of the Center for Christian Jewish Learning and the Kraft Family Professor here at Boston College. On behalf of Father Mark Massa and our co-sponsoring partner, the Boise Center for American Religion and Public Life, I'm pleased to welcome you here in person and to our guests online tonight for this talk by Dr. Robert P. Jones. So please allow me to introduce our speaker. Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute.

He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. as well as White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in America, and American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award. He is also the author of The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Gravemeyer Award in Religion.

He holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University in Atlanta, and M.Div from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. A little note on how this evening will proceed. After we hear from Dr. Jones, Father Mark Massa of the Boise Center will guide our question and answer period. And after that, there'll be a dessert reception where people can also purchase copies of the new paperback edition of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, which I understand has a nice discount attached to it.

So please join me in welcoming Robert Jones here tonight to speak on the topic of Christian nationalism, religious pluralism, and the 2024 election. Well, thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here with you today.

I'm going to talk a lot about some data, so we'll have a lot of percent signs and some charts, but I'm also going to talk about stories and how these two things intersect with one another. begin with the kind of the narrative and the story side of things and kind of work our way into kind of what the data says about Christian nationalism, religious pluralism, and the 2024 election that we're now staring down the barrel of. It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking 13. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy. I am an invisible man. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

So these beginnings matter, right? The kind of beginnings of the story, the beginnings of the narrative. They grab us by the lapels.

They focus our attention. They intrigue us. They bring into frame fragments of an entire world that's going to unfold upon us as we read.

So why are the clocks striking 13? What's the nature of gender roles in marriage in this social world? What rights are humans born with?

What does it mean for a child to be given permission to tell God, but not her mother, a horrific family secret? How is a man invisible? What's at stake in asserting an act of creation by a singular God? Beginnings allow specific things and questions to snap into focus, but as these opening sentences reveal, they also hide. Like a photo taken in portrait mode, the field of focus narrows, and other things fade into an indistinct blur in the background, or they recede altogether in the shadows.

So our in-the-beginnings, our once-upon-a-times, are never neutral. They issue an invoice that the rest of the story has to pay. And ultimately, the story is only accountable to what's in that initial frame. So why am I starting here with stories, right? We're talking about the election, because I think one of the things that struck me as someone who's been, you know, my primary job and my day job is to look at public opinion data.

And look at those patterns and what I've been struck with is over the last decade as I've been doing this is that our deepest deepest divides have become less about policy and More and more about identity Right source. We're not squabbling as much over. How do we do this particular policy even over more really divisive things?

But it really is the deeper deeper divides are about who we are and big questions like who is this country for? Who is a real American? And these questions have pushed us back to fights about our founding myths and narratives that we tell about ourselves, and especially our origin stories. So I want to come back to that point.

But one of the longest standing... kind of myths about this country that we have is that this country is a Christian nation, right? And it's taken a lot of different forms throughout American history. I'm going to start with kind of the present.

So where are we today on that question? Where are we in terms of what Americans actually think about that question? So I'm going to unpack this a little bit. So are we a Christian nation?

How do we measure this idea that people believe this? So there's been a lot of really good political science and social science work done over the past decade in particular to try to get at this question. And one of the ways that we've developed to measure this is to not just ask a single question, but to ask a whole range of questions and then measure a composite answer. to those questions.

In other words, if you only answer one question one way, it may not tell us a lot about it, but if you answer five or six questions very consistently across a survey, we begin to see, okay, there's a worldview here that we're capturing by these five or six questions. So I'm going to show you a lot of data today about this idea of Christian nationalism, which you've all, if you picked up a paper, you've read a lot of media stories about this, but because I'm going to be doing kind of a lot of social science work here, we have to define it very specifically. So what do we mean by that? How do we operationalize this concept of Christian nationalism in the social sciences?

We've essentially developed a scale that we have used in the scale, the data I'm going to be showing you, we use these five questions. And so I'll just read them real quickly. These are agree, disagree questions.

God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of society. The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation. Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.

If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore, and U.S. laws should be based on Christian values. So we kind of measured this and kind of strongly agree to strongly disagree here. And then we built this together into a composite scale and then kind of scored folks on how strongly or least strongly they agreed across all five of those questions.

questions. When we do that, what we find is that there's essentially four categories of Americans. We've named these Christian nationalism adherents.

These are people who agree, who actually strongly agree with like all of those statements. Christian nationalism sympathizers are people who generally agree, but not as strongly with those statements. And then skeptics and rejectors are on the other side.

Skeptics are those who disagree, but not strongly. Rejectors are those who strongly disagree with all five of those statements. them together like that, this is what we find.

So in the country today, about one in 10 Americans are in that strongly agree Christian nationalism adherence category, and another 20% are in the sympathizer category. So if you're kind of thinking about kind of just general lean about the country, it's about three in 10 who kind of lean toward supporting Christian nationalism, either strongly or very strongly, which means that the rest of the country is about two-thirds the other way, right? So about 30...

37% are in the skeptics category, and 30% are in the kind of rejector, the strong rejector category. So one of the things we want to do when we measure attitudes like this is try to think, well, how do they hold up across other kinds of measures to just make sure we haven't, you know, measured something odd. So I'm going to put these categories, adherence, sympathizers, skeptics, rejectors, across a couple of other attitudinal questions so you can kind of see how they fall out. So we had a very large survey. We had a bunch of other kinds of questions that we could measure this by.

So here's two other questions about religious pluralism. in America. Again, one is they're both agree-disagree statements.

God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that would be an example for the rest of the world. I would prefer the U.S. to be a nation primarily made of people who follow the Christian faith, right? So agree-disagree questions.

In the country, it's about three in ten who agree with both of those questions, and I'm going to show you how they fall out along the scale, right? So among those who are Christian nationalism adherents, it's eight and ten who agree with both of those statements, and then you'll just see it fall out. It's a very linear structure to these questions, and you can also see the big gulf between those who lean one direction and those who lean another direction, right? So it's not just a stair step down. It's basically that the Christian nationalism adherents and sympathizers are kind of in one camp, and the skeptics and rejecters are kind of in a different camp.

You see this big gap between those two there. So that gives you some sense of like that we're measuring something reliable, right? That we're kind of measured over independent, other kinds of attitudinal things. So who then is likely to support a Christian nationalism measured this way in this kind of adherence, sympathizers, skeptics, and rejecters?

So take a look at it by party and religion. So here first is party. Again, here's all Americans at the top, about three in ten, either in the adherence or sympathizers part. And this is...

really kind of a classic example of what sociologists call asymmetric partisan polarization, right? And basically what it means is that, yes, the parties are polarized, but it's not even, right? The independents are actually much closer to Democrats than they are to Republicans. You can see this kind of bigger gap. And we see this in a lot of these kinds of measures that increasingly Republicans are a little more out of step with the middle than Democrats are.

And you can see it here. So it's 55% of Republicans versus only 11% of Democrats who were in one of the of those two categories. And then you can see, essentially, if we measure it by candidate favorability, you see the same patterns here with either favorability of Donald Trump or favorability of Joe Biden.

Here's the other side of that question where you can just see the skeptics and rejecters in a full horizontal bar. One interesting thing that we found here is that Christian nationalism behaves differently across racial lines, right? So there are, this is a measure that doesn't have race built into the measure. And so there are non-white white Christian nationalists. But the interesting thing about this is that there's something about sort of whiteness that kind of binds these ideas to a particular partisan outlook.

And so I'll show you the difference here. So among white Americans who are either adherents or sympathizers to Christian nationalism, two-thirds of them identify as Republican, right? So there's this tight connection between whiteness, Christian nationalism, and Republican identity here. You can just see how... it jumps.

But if you look at the differences between Latino, even those who are Latino and are Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers, it really doesn't have that kind of partisan effect, right? They kind of look like the general population here. And among African Americans, it actually looks the opposite, right?

So that among African Americans, even those who kind of hold these Christian nationalism views, it doesn't channel them in a kind of partisan direction in the way that it does white Americans. That's kind of one very interesting... thing we're able to see, by the way, we're measuring just Christian nationalism without whiteness, but you can see the work that white identity does here in terms of bonding those ideas to partisanship.

In terms of religion here, this is basically what it looks like. I've got these sorted by religious group most likely to either be in the adherence or sympathizer category to least likely here. And you can see that white evangelical Protestants who are the most Republican.

constituency in the country. Two-thirds, essentially, are either identify as Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers. Latino Protestants are next.

Those are the only two groups in majority who have a majority who are either sympathizers or adherents. Latino Protestants, by the way, voted about 60 percent. Actually, they voted about 60 percent for Donald Trump in both of the previous two election cycles, so they lean Republican.

They tend to be evangelical or charismatic, and they're... in their identity in their religious identity and then you can see you know the groups kind of go down from here And then American Jews and the unaffiliated way down at the bottom right here, which is what you'd expect from a measure like this. But that's the kind of lay of the land among religious groups. One other thing, there's been a fair amount of ink spilled about.

the role of church attendance on these measures. And there's some theories out there flying around that's like, oh, well, these people are just Christian in name only, right? So they're not connected to churches.

They don't, you know, they don't hear sermons. They're not in Sunday school. hearing they're not participating in liturgy, they're not reading the Bible.

But what we found consistently here, and this is just one measure, I could show you 10 of these, but what we found on these measures is that actually there is a positive relationship between church attendance and adherence to Christian nationalist attitudes. In fact, it's quite linear. The more often you go to church, the more likely you are to kind of hold Christian nationalism attitudes.

You can just see the stair step down here of the seldom or never, only 18. percent. Those who attend weekly or more, it's a majority, 52 percent in one of those top two categories. Now, I want to talk a little bit about what else comes along for the ride with this worldview, right, here.

And there are some kind of, from the standpoint of a healthy democracy, there are some fairly dangerous attitudes that come along for the ride with Christian nationalism. It's not just a religious worldview, but I'm going to show you some things that we're able to see in this survey here that are essentially all positively correlated with holding Christian nationalists of views. So I'll just kind of lay them out and then show you. you the data.

So one, denials of systemic racism toward African Americans. So just an outright denial that systemic racism is a thing. Two, the belief that immigrants are a threat, and particularly belief in the so-called great replacement theory. I'll explain what that is in a moment. Three, anti-Muslim attitudes positively correlated.

Four, anti-Semitic attitudes positively correlated with Christian nationalism. And finally, patriarchy, hierarchical gender roles. So this is kind of the worldview or the kind of stew that kind of comes along with this views of Christian nationalism. So we have a lot more measures in the study. And by the way, if you want to dig in deeper, we have several studies.

It's at PRI.org where you can like see, you can spend hours kind of diving into the data, a bunch of different charts. I'm kind of scratching the surface here, but let me just kind of give you a sense of these. So here. Here are the exact questions that we operationalize those measures with. Each one of these, there's four or five others, so it's not just, we didn't cherry pick just one question, there's like four or five other questions that go along with this to kind of back this up.

But I picked out some here to make it kind of comprehensible. So the systemic racism, those who disagree that generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for many black Americans to work their way out of the lower class. The rest of these are agree.

Immigrant. immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background. That's the kind of heart of the great replacement theory.

We should prevent people from some majority Muslim countries from entering the US. Jewish people are more loyal to Israel than America. In a truly Christian family, the husband is head of the household and his wife submits to his leadership, right?

So this is the numbers of all Americans who agree with each of those statements. And what I'm going to show you is what difference Christian nationalism adherents make and those who are white and Christian nationalism adherents. So there's like a little bit of a supercharge effect that white identity gives to these values as well.

So here are the numbers for just Christian nationalism adherents, like those who strongly agree with all those questions. You can just see the... the jump here it's 20 30 even 40 percentage points uh different than uh the american public on many of these uh on actually all of these questions uh and then you'll see that just kind of a little extra boost that uh those who are white and christian nationalism adherence on each of these questions have right so there's kind of like another maybe 10 points uh of of attitudinal uh differences here among white christian nationalism uh adherence so again it's kind of a a kind of a world a view into the kind of broader worldview in which the Christian nationalist attitudes exist.

One more here I want to give you is we did just a large study that we released, just actually we just released it at an event at Fordham University a few weeks ago on authoritarianism and violence. And these are also tightly connected to these views. So we did a similar thing with authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is an amorphous kind of concept to measure. And again, when you're doing social science, you've got to find ways to measure it very precisely, as precisely as you can.

We did a similar thing with authoritarianism, where we used four questions together in one composite scale to get a good measure here. Here are the measures that we used. These actually were developed by Theodore Adorno and his colleagues following World War II in a book called The Authoritarian Personalities. They have a very long history all the way back from the end of World War II and trying to figure out what happened with fascism and authoritarians. in Europe in the early part of the 20th century.

So they've had a long history in social science. But here is just an example. What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path.

Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the rotten apples who are ruining everything. Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs. can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.

Right, so these are kind of put in the vernacular. I should also say on all these scales we also kind of measure their internal coherence. And so each of these questions actually are quite correlated with one another. So when respondents answer one way on this question, they're highly, it's highly correlated with the way they answer other questions. So we built, did a very similar thing.

We built a scale out of this, scored people very high, high, low, and very low. Called this the right-wing authoritarianism scale. And you'll see some similar patterns here. So here are the partisan breaks on just the authoritarian attitudes.

So Republicans are about two-thirds. either in the high or very high category. You get slightly more.

You can actually see the favorability of Donald Trump even inside the Republican Party on these measures here, like Republicans who have a favorable view of Trump significantly more likely than Republicans who have an unfavorable view of Trump to score high on the authoritarian scale. And then again, it's asymmetric. Independents and Democrats looking much closer together than Republicans on the scale. In terms of, back to kind of Christian nationalism here, this will not surprise you after seeing the thing, but again, Christian nationalism and authoritarianism almost perfectly correlated.

You can just see this kind of stair-stepping here. The more likely you are to score high on the Christian, or on the right-wing authoritarianism scale, the more likely you are to be a Christian nationalism adherent or a sympathizer, right? You just kind of see it here, how strong those are. So among Christian nationalism... adherence, it's 84% who score high or very high on the right-wing authoritarianism scale, and you can kind of see it cutting down on the other side.

One other view, attitude that we've been tracking that is quite concerning, especially as we're kind of heading toward an election cycle and the aftermath of election, is political violence, and we've been tracking attitudes of political violence ever since the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and we've been asking a number of questions. This is... one we've been tracking the longest because things have gotten so far off track true american patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country do you agree or disagree with that statement um here's what we find it's only 16 percent of americans who agree uh with that statement but again you can see the influence of christian nationalism here among those who are christian nationalism adherents it's four in ten who say they agree uh right that agree or mostly agree uh that that we may have to resort to violence in order to save the country and it just just goes down, right?

And so it makes a certain kind of logical sense if you do believe that this is sort of a divinely ordained mandate to take over the country, all means are kind of on the table, right? I think that's kind of the effect of what we're seeing here in this question. So what does this look like in terms of the electoral map? Most of our surveys are fairly large. There are 5,000 respondents.

That's about five times as large as the typical poll you'll see from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, et cetera. They're usually about a thousand. people. Most of our polls are 5,000 folks because we want to be able to get good religious breaks and subgroups, but the data I'm about to show you came from a poll of 20,000 people that we did across the entirety of last year, which enabled us to get not only national data but data all the way down to the state level with 20,000 interviews. So can I give you a sense of kind of how these attitudes are operationalized, not just nationally but further down to the state level?

So first just kind of grouping states by how they voted in the last election and are slated to vote in this election into kind of red states, blue states, and swing states. You can see here that if you just take all the attitudes of people who live in red states, they're significantly more likely than those who live in blue states to be either Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers, right? So again, it's about nearly 4 in 10 of those in red states compared to only 22% who those are in blue states in those top two. in those top two categories here. Here's a heat map.

You can kind of see this. Now, if I had colored this red and blue instead of shades of green, this would look very much like the electoral map, right? You could see what we typically see with that kind of red and blue map is a swath of red down through the middle of the country, sweeping through the south and up the Appalachian Mountains. And that's basically what you see here. And so this is support for Christian nationalism among white Americans in the U.S.

And you could see this very similar. pattern that we do. If you'll notice, Massachusetts, I don't know if you can read it on the screen up there, is up there on the right, it is tied as the lowest number of support for Christian nationalism.

Only 16% of residents of Massachusetts are in that either adherence or sympathizer category. Compared to my home state, I grew up in Mississippi, where 52% of the residents there are in those top two categories. categories.

Here's something that is quite striking, and actually this chart is in the afterward to the new paperback edition of my book, where it's kind of saying like, what does all this history mean for the present? And what I did here is this is a scatter plot, and on the scatter plot, On the bottom is the average score on the Christian nationalism scale. So the further to the right you are on the scale, the higher you score on the Christian nationalism scale. The vertical axis is that is a state's support for or vote for. for Donald Trump in 2020, right?

So vote for Trump, score on Christian nationalism scale. Now, if you were taking a statistics 101 class and they were gonna give you a kind of example of a positive correlation, this would make a pretty good example, right? You could see how tightly clustered lines are around. There's not many outliers.

They're pretty much right around the trend line here. And again, you know, my home state of Mississippi is in the upper left, right? It scores both kind of the furthest.

out to the right on the Christian Nationalism scale and the highest on the Trump vote in 2020. Massachusetts is way down there on the bottom, right? You can see it is below the line, and it is one of the lowest scores on the Christian Nationalism scale and the lowest score in support for Trump. So what this tells us is just like how tightly these attitudes are driving kind of our politics, right?

It's not the only driver. There are certainly other variables you can take into account, but it is... is an absolutely powerful driver of kind of what we're looking at in the election this year and how things are falling out.

And as I said before, in particular, the way that issues in many ways have fallen away and identity issues have come to the fore as the key dividing lines, the key fault lines here in the country. So I'm going to kind of wrap this up with just a couple of kind of other big-picture remarks here. Part of this kind of comes from the long history I did in the most recent book.

And there I kind of argued that the contemporary white Christian nationalist movement flows directly from a very long and old cultural stream that's really run through our continent since Europeans arrived five centuries ago here. And so, you know, the photographs, I'm going to show you like one photograph that I talk about in the book. So this is one of eight photographs that actually hang in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building here.

It is the discovery of the Mississippi by DeSoto. in 1541. It was painted in 1855 and still hangs. It's 8 foot by 12 foot in the in the rotundus.

It's huge there. And now you can see some things that you know probably look fairly familiar, right? So we've got de Soto and his kind of European finery on his white horse, right?

And down at the bottom you kind of we have weaponry and what's lost a little the bottom cropped a little bit that's a cannon at the bottom and there's actually a cache of weapons, spears, swords right below the cannon where it's been cropped, if you follow it all the way across to the bottom right here, and it's a little dark, but you'll see a crucifix being raised, right, in the middle of the Native American village here, and this is kind of, you know, typical. You've seen probably lots of those paintings. In fact, there's one out there in the rotunda of this building that looks pretty much like that here, this kind of raising of the cross in the middle of a kind of Native American setting, and it is this idea, this very, very old idea, right, that goes all the way back to the Christian doctrine of discovery. into feeds into kind of it's it's the version of Christianity that lands on the shores of this continent right this like this idea that it is a kind of promised land right for European Christians for their benefit and divinely ordained so and that's what we see in these kind of very familiar paintings and I like struck if you kind of look at that and then you look at this right which is a shot from not far from my house right on January 6th, it's the U.S. Capitol building of a kind of very similar cross being raised, you know, here now this is not a crucifix, it's just a cross.

I'm guessing these guys are Protestant and not Catholic, but nonetheless, the kind of very simple, this kind of claiming of space, claiming of ground. If you listen to those prayers that were uttered, you know, you see, you kind of heard these same kinds of assertions here, and I was just, I've just been really struck that these recent photos, they bear really an uncanny any resemblance to that painting, marshalling Christian symbols to claim indigenous lands for Spain way back in 1541. Again, it looks very similar. And, you know, on the Capitol steps, we had this massive wooden cross that was erected.

Standards were emblazoned with the name of Jesus. Biblical passages were read. Hands were raised in both prayer and in violence.

And seen in this light, the symbols brandished by the insurrectionists were not incidental. They were, in many ways, the centuries-old ritual implements of the doctrine of discovery, summoned to do the work that they've always done. Now, in parliamentary procedure, I used to be a kind of Robert's Rules nerd. There is this move called...

calling the question, right? And you call the question, it's a motion to end debate on a pending question and bring it to a vote immediately. And it typically means that if it's done fairly, that both sides have had a chance to be heard.

It's time to make a decision. It's time to move on, right? Get on with other business.

And throughout history, there are critical moments where social forces come together to kind of call a moral or political question. It's a kind of fork in the road that will determine the future direction. And in U.S. history, there's been lots of these moments.

There's that moment we see in De Soto. There are the decisive break with England from the British colonies, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Redemption, the modern Civil Rights Movement. And at times we hear these words like reckoning, where questions of justice and accountability can be discerned in ways that were not previously possible. And people are called upon to choose.

And these moments that are pregnant with new possibilities, and I do believe we're living in one of those times today, the fights over our origin stories and narratives come to the fore. And the question is how truthfully we'll engage our history and how skillfully we'll engage our history. will use it to direct us into a better future. I'm gonna close with a little anecdote about James Baldwin, who's been one of the more formative influences on my own kind of Christian development and thinking.

And I wanna kind of focus on a response he gave in an interview during a particularly challenging period in his own day. And I think his light was especially incandescent in the months following the assassination. of Martin Luther King Jr. in July of 1968. So against the backdrop of African American anguish and anger and with many American cities burning, a white interviewer in Esquire magazine asked him how the country might get African Americans to, quote, cool it. Now, if you know anything about Baldwin, this is maybe not the smartest move on the interviewer's part, but this was Baldwin's response.

He kind of paused and he said, like, look the guy in the eye, all that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history, which is not your past, but your present. Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history. Now Baldwin gave this interview in the year I was born, and more than half a century later, it's still an insight I think that lays bare the roots of our present troubles. The only thing that can save us now is an honest confrontation, both what we're currently doing with our history, as this 500-year-old question is once again being called, demanding a response. I really do think in many ways it comes down to a fairly simple distinction.

Are we a divinely ordained promised land for European Christians? Is that who America is? Or are we a multi-religious, multi-racial, pluralistic democracy?

And it's well past time, in my opinion, for us to put that question finally to rest. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Christian nationalism, especially white Christian nationalism, is an amalgam of religion, racism, nationalistic belief, civil religion. And if we were in a class, I would ask you to draw bar blocks. on the thing.

What's the most, what's the foundational? Is it primarily nationalistic? Is it primarily historical?

Is it primarily religious? Is it primarily about race and ethnicity? I mean, how would you, this is an unfair, I will allow that this is an unfair question, so go ahead. Of course, yes.

Well, we're going to begin with an easy one. Thank you for that. You know, so I guess when I boil it down, I think it's fundamentally about power.

is really what it's about, right? And these other things have come to be tools to kind of secure power. And, you know, so I'm a religious studies scholar by background, and it's just, you know, I've been just so struck by, I mean, there is no strong stronger justification for power, right, than to claim that the God of the universe demands that it be so, right?

And I think that's really, you know, my lens has been looking at that like, wow, okay, so how, you know, it's so interesting to me, like, how do we get to a place where we think that all of these lands that we didn't know anything about here, you know, where we are currently living, were to be ours, right? I mean, it's an audacious claim, right, when you think about it. Like, how do we get to a place where that, like, that's even thinkable? And so that's part of the kind of what I'm trying to unpack, I think, in the book, It's like let's trace this kind of back and see where does this come from and how does it explain?

like not only the sort of fate of indigenous people in our treatment of indigenous people in the country so about land theft and genocide But how does it explain? This entire transatlantic slave trade right that we not only do we think we can sort of take land and goods But we can enslave others to do labor right steal their labor And I mean I think to me that's what it's about out. And so, whiteness gets invented as a way of distinguishing us and them. Religion gets kind of held onto as kind of maybe the strongest lever we could pull to kind of justify the entire project.

But at the end of the day, it's about power and control and those kinds of things, and where I think religion, race become useful in that quest. Questions from the audience? Okay, Jeremy.

Hey, thank you very much. I really appreciate this. Jeremy Wilkins, Theology Department.

Oh, I'm supposed to stand up. I was really struck by the right-wing authoritarian scale. Because there's a way in which those questions could almost be re-described as like a Manichaeism scale. Like, how convinced are you that the line between good and evil is somewhere outside yourself? And so that opposition to evil...

will consist somehow in controlling or dominating other people, which I think is related to the power issue that you're raising. In other words, you need power for a specific purpose, which is related to the way you've defined the problem of good and evil outside yourself. And I've wondered, and I wonder if you have any take on this, I've wondered, you see how that correlates with particular kinds of Christian groups more positively than with others.

I'm wondering if it's related to particular kinds of theological options. And, you know, maybe, you know, as Mark was suggesting, maybe I'm putting too much freight on the theology, and that's an occupational hazard for a theologian. But, like, a theology of imputation...

somehow seems to make it easy to suppose that good and evil are somehow sorted by this kind of bright line of inside and outside. And I just wonder if you think that's a reasonable suspicion to bring to this question. No, I really appreciate that question.

I mean, I think we're hearing more and more of that. I mean, I think it's right to call it kind of a Manichean language, right, of good versus evil, black versus white, and this imputation that it's, yeah, it's out there, right, and not in here. I mean, another way of thinking about this is, I mean, it's about humility, right, and about a decent doctrine of sin, right, you know, that might hold a mirror up and not just sort of like a window to look out with, you know, and I think that's part of it, too, and I do think that's one of the things we've seen really degrade in our public life with this concept that, and we're seeing a lot of it with this, this this group in, on the kind of evangelical right, called the New Apostolic Reformation.

If you don't know that word, you should probably know it. There's actually a good new book on it called The Violent Take It By Force by Matthew Taylor. It's just coming out this month, but it, it, it really is this, this idea that, you know, God is on our side, right, not on the other side, and then, and that sort of Satan is on the other side.

I mean, it really is that, that black and white. And again, the problem with that in a democracy is that we then cease to talk about our fellow citizens as people with whom we disagree. But they're agents of Satan, right? That's literally who they are with that outlook, and that becomes like very, very dangerous, and it begins to feed the prospect of political violence, right?

Because again, if we're fighting, if we're not just disagreeing with fellow citizens, but we are fighting agents of Satan, what means aren't available, right, to us in that way? Megan Sweeney, I think, had a question over here. Thanks. Megan Sweeney, Theology Department and the Pulse Program.

I have two questions. I am curious what you think the role of religion in the public sphere or square is or ought to be. I think it would be valuable to have space for those kinds of conversations.

Conversations and so I'm wondering what you think constructively would be options My second question has to go with the the quest the way you framed which story are we going to tell I? Can see in both of those narrative possibilities a lot of space for misogyny and strict gender roles and queer phobia and so I'm wondering how do you also make space for women and gender non-conforming persons in a narrative that would be open to the future yeah and actually do you study women specifically in your in your data and are there any data points that are different from that would be notably different yeah so interesting Interestingly enough, so yes, all of our surveys are general population surveys, so they have kind of everybody in the country in them. And again, we've got fairly large samples, so we can take a look.

What's interesting is that while we do see some gender differences, partisanship is much stronger than gender differences on many of these issues. So Republican women look much closer to Republican men than they look to independent or Democratic women. So.

So partisanship has really sliced through the gender differences in really remarkable ways here. So we see some differences, but they're not as pronounced as you might think here. And so we do have, we just did a whole survey actually on Generation Z that has a whole bunch of stuff on gender and relationships. But I think the connective tissue between that part of the question and the last question is the thing that goes along for the ride with with a kind of black, white, good, evil thing, is a hierarchical worldview, right? And where men are over women, white is over black, white is over all non-white, in fact, and straight is over gay or nonconformist and all of that.

And there is this idea that, and I think one of the reasons why we're seeing so much energy around transgender issues. is because of, it's literally a transgression of those rigid boxes, right? That no, no, people are either male or female, right? And toward, according to that worldview, and so when you start, like, making that not the case, there is this kind of rejection, and, you know, and the thing is about this hierarchical worldview, you know, it's, it's always historically been straight white men at the top of a hierarchy, and other people finding their place, right, in, in lower places in that hierarchy, so that's.

That's part of the larger world view. We have that one question here that I mentioned. There's a whole battery of questions on gender in that larger survey. The one that I had was about a Christian household where women submit to male leadership.

That's kind of a prominent thing on the right, kind of hierarchical marriage, complementarian gender roles, et cetera. But we have a whole other set of stuff in the survey that you can dive into there. On the bigger question, I do think it's... a healthy question for us to think about now. Yeah, what is the role, right?

What is the public role? I'm not one who thinks there's no public role for religion at all. That's not the case at all. But I think the real question, I think the line is when it starts bleeding into issues of ownership, entitlement, dominion, it's those kinds of assertions, right?

Where there's a kind of first class of... of people who are Christian and then everyone else is where we get in trouble. But I think the kind of prophetic role that Christians and Jews and Buddhists and others have played, we've got plenty of examples of that that were making us a healthier democracy in the country. And the question is how do we kind of foster that, I think, while calling out this other thing as no, no, no, this is actually burning down the house, right?

These kind of Christian nationalist claims are something quite different. Okay, yeah, in the back of the room, and then, not quite yet, and could you, I'm very conscious of time, so if you could ask a declarative or an inquisitive question, one sentence question. Totally.

Two sentences. How much are you tracking belief in apocalypse? Like, in other words, like, these people also believe in the end times.

And the second question is, how much can we trust the polls nowadays in terms of them reflecting accurately what public sentiment is, particularly around folks like... like Trump. Yeah, so on the, yes, so the other measures that we have, so the things that we're seeing is, I mentioned the new episodic reformation, it's kind of Pentecostal movement, and inside of that world, there are theological things that absolutely matter, a belief in the apocalypse that that's, we've long known that's made a difference on climate attitudes, for example, or if you believe the end times are coming, like why bother, right, to kind of take care of the planet, that either believe that God won't let that happen, or the end times are coming, the end times are coming, and there's no point in doing that.

The other belief that's related to that is this Pentecostal belief in prophecy, that there are, God is raising up kind of prophets, and new prophets in real time, and they are issuing prophecies. You've kind of heard this language, I think some about like, particularly around Paula White and some of the other people in her circles there, and so I think those attitudes are absolutely kind of part of this view. and also kind of like the other view that goes along with that, and it should name, because it's very important for understanding January 6th, is the idea that kind of stitches many of these things together, is the idea that Satan or demons are geographically controlling specific realms, like specifically controlling geographic space. So part of the January 6th thing was about casting out demons, demons, literally demons. literally casting out demons from Capitol Hill.

Like it was that sense that they were under control of demonic forces, and you have to be there, right, in that space to kind of do that work. So it's that kind of an attitude, too. And the polling question.

So, you know, polling has changed a lot, really, in the last ten years. One thing I'll say about this, none of us should be relying on a poll to tell us who's going to win the election, right? That is not what polls are designed to do.

They are not oracles, right? They are snapshots of public opinion. opinion in time, right?

And that's all, because the biggest problem we have right now is that in order to kind of project who's going to win, you have to know who's going to vote, and there's no way to know who's going to vote, particularly post-pandemic, right? 2020 was such a weird election. All the models are going to be fraught, because do you assume it's going to be like 2020, or do you assume it's going to turn out to be more like the midterms, where we were coming out of COVID, and then you can't really go back to 2016, that's too far.

far back. So how do you even model a likely voter? So I think like beyond the methodological like sampling issues and that kind of thing, which has gotten a lot better, most polls now are like online polls which are actually better in terms of sampling, but beyond that there's just a human, it's an art, it's not science, right, exactly. It's like who do we count as likely to vote and we don't know.

But the biggest thing is that's not what polls are really decided to do. They're designed to give us a good reliable snapshot of who's there. And the last thing I'll say about this is like so far, you know, the only polls that matter for the outcome of the election are, of course, the swing states.

Right. Seven swing states. The national polls do not matter.

And so far, none of the swing states have been outside the margin of error. So if you if you see The New York Times writing somebody's up by three, somebody's down by four. If it's not seven, it is a tie.

Right. Because the margin of errors are going to need in those state polls there. under a thousand people, right? So you're going to need a gap of like seven points before anybody's really up, but they don't want to write that because it's not a good headline, right? You won't click on it.

But so just kind of like a word about that. But I think they're really good for telling us these broader contours of like what's driving the race, as long as we're not trying to read the tea leaves of what's going to happen, you know, in a given few weeks, and are very unpredictable. Camille, the third row from the front here. First of all, many, many thanks for your wonderful penetrating.

I learned a lot from it. I have two quick questions. One is that you focused your analysis, understandably, entirely on the United States.

It's really interesting, fascinating, that the same kind of religious nationalism is arising in a number of other countries, as I'm sure you know far better than I do. And in all religious traditions including think of India, for example, you know, for forever we thought of India as pluralistic because of, you know, Indian religion not being monotheistic. So that's one question whether you have reflected on why we have this phenomenon taking place really throughout the world and in all religious traditions. My second question is, I'm working on this topic myself, whether you make a distinction between Christian nationalism or more generally religious nationalism as an identity issue as who I am, who we are, and so on, versus what I would call the sacralization of the state. That is, the state itself is sacred.

that goes beyond the view that we as a Christian nation. So let's get to the question. So these are the two questions. Again, small questions. Yeah.

I mean, I do think it's right to say that you can look at religious nationalisms around the world. And again, I may just go back to the beginning question. I think people have figured out that these are useful tools, and they're about identity.

And I think part of it's always the kind of pushback if we're thinking about a pluralistic state. I mean, we should forget, we should remember, like, a pluralistic state is not an easy thing to hold together. Like, it's tough, right? It's an experiment, and it's one that's, I think, open-ended about whether we're going to be able to pull it off at the end of the day, and so it's a hard thing to do, and these identities are ways to pull back, and I think, you know, many, many leaders, particularly authoritarian ones, are always looking for what lever can I pull, right, to kind of make us and them distinctions, and religion is just... just one of the most powerful ways historically to do that.

So I think that's a part of it. And the second question was? The state. Yeah.

So here, I would say it's less of that. There's so much actually talking about bad mouthing the state in our kind of populist rhetoric. I think there's less of that going on in this country than maybe in some other places where I can think of. of where the church had been more kind of co-opted directly into the kind of state apparatus.

But here, I think it's a little less of that. Right. Camille, there was somebody in the back row over here. She's had her hand up. I'll be quick.

It's about the graphic that you showed of black American either adherents or sympathizers to Christian nationalism. I was shocked that it was majority Democratic. So my question is within the context of the current ideals of the Democratic Party.

as it stands. How does that work? Can you speak more to that? Yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, it's complex. I think there's still a lot of research going on here, but I think when we first got the numbers back, we were a little like, oh, what's going on there, right? That they're that high among African Americans. But once we kind of dug into it, it was just interesting to see that the work that whiteness does with that set of attitudes is something very different than non-white Americans.

So I think that's, and part of it is this, you know, that this sense that we've always known this about, you know, many African Americans, like if you compare, like I grew up Southern Baptist in the South, right? If you compare, like our theology to the Black Baptist Church down the street, the hymns. we sung, you know, the kind of general, kind of literal word of God, approach to the Bible, a lot of similarities there, right?

But when it moves into political space, that racial experience really refracts those views in really different ways, and I think historically we've seen that, and I think that's what we're seeing, you know, here as well. Catherine, did you have your hand up? Okay, the gentleman... In your work on this problem, have you come across participants or individuals who renounced Christian nationalism and what responses do they typically give? reasons do they typically give for doing that?

And on the flip side, have you encountered individuals who were devout Christians, just run-of-the-mill everyday Christians, who started to think, hey, these guys might have a point here, and what reasons do you see for that conversion? Yeah, well, I mentioned I grew up in the Southern Baptist Convention, right, which is in many ways the hotbed of Christian nationalist thinking. So in some ways, like, I might be exhibit A, of somebody who sort of like grew up in that world and has kind of moved out of it, you know, as kind of rethinking and some of its theological work, some of its like reading, being exposed to other kinds of things, but I guess I would say that the temptation, I think, is this you The sense of a changing country, I think, for many white Christians, I kind of sometimes joke about the great white Christian freakout moment, right, that we're experiencing over the last 20, 30 years in the country.

So, just to give you a couple of quick numbers. it wasn't that long ago. In fact, before we had our first black president, right when he was running for president in 2008, the country was still a majority white Christian country. So we were 54% white and Christian. If you took Protestant, Catholic, non-denominational, everybody identifies as Christian, white, and non-Hispanic, 54% of the country.

By the time he got out of office, at the end of his second term, the country was at 47% white and Christian. That number today is 41% white and Christian. So part of what's happening is, I mean, that's actually a fairly big change in a short amount of time in terms of demography, right?

And so part of what's happening is this adjustment that we're seeing in the United States from being, wait a minute, like I thought we were the country, right, to, oh, no, actually we're one among many folks at the table. We have to kind of figure out a way to pull up a chair along with other people, and by the way, we don't own the table. So I think it's that adjustment that I think is, and the reactivity to that adjustment, the fear to that adjustment, and it's real, even if people don't know the statistics, you know, if you go to, you know, an average public school, and not one, if it's not out in one of the white flight suburbs, but an average public school, and you went back and look at their entering first, the photo of their entering first grade class over the last 20 to 30 years, you would see it, right? You would see the shift here, and I think people feel it in that way. They go to the grocery store, and there's like an ethnic food aisle, right, in the grocery store, right?

So like, what's that about? They turn, they're turning the dial, and there's Spanish language radio stations next to the country music station that they used to listen to all the time, right? And it's playing until Tejano music, all right?

And so it's that kind of thing that I think people feel in their bones, and their kids aren't going to church, right? That's the other kind of big exodus of kind of younger people from white Christian churches in the country. Today, young people, 38 percent of young people don't even claim a religion at all.

Don't even claim it, not just Christianity, but no religion. So I think it's like that reactivity is what's pulling people, I think, toward it. I think the promise, though, of kind of living into what we said we always believe, right, that we're pluralistic. the country is, I think, what's pulled me and I hope others the other way. Great.

Do you want to? No? Okay. Dan? In the very first row.

Thank you. Yeah, what you're just saying kind of brings me to the religious pluralism piece of the question with some of your data set, which is where does the presence of non-Christians fit into the white Christian nationalist view? If white Christian nationalists have their ideal nation, their ideal society, where would Jews fit Muslims?

I'm thinking of Vivek Ramaswamy, famously a Hindu who was in. running for president in this last primary cycle mirrored a lot of the language that we associate even with white Christian nationalism. So where does the fact, the givenness of pluralism fit for them? I don't know a lot of this is a public record.

I'm sure if we could see Ramaswamy's inbox, we would have some clues, right? The one I do know that Nikki Haley has endured a lot of vitriol for her background and it's a fact that we have a lot of people And you see it there, like, are you legitimate, right? Are you not legitimate? And that's partly about ethnicity, it's partly about religious background, and those kinds of things. And, you know, for Obama, right, the whole birtherism thing was, and why was there an attempt not only to say he's not a U.S. citizen, but to say he was Muslim, right?

It was kind of otherizing, right, a religious otherizing, not just racial, but religious otherizing there. But the unaffiliated are the bookend of this other story, right? The decline of white Christians in the country has been accompanied by the tripling of the number of unaffiliated Americans from the 1990s to the present. So the 1990s, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, those are people when we ask what is your religion, they say nothing in particular or I'm atheist or agnostic. They won't claim, even if we read them a list, they won't claim any of the big box traditional religious groups.

And that group has gone from single digits in the 1990s to 28% today, right? So it's tripled there and again among young people it's 38% among Americans under the age of 30 today and that's something genuinely new and so the The answer is they don't fit very well into humanism, secularism, Marxism. Whenever you hear a claim about Marxism, it's always got a religious undertone to it as well. It's not just a political.

thing. It's all about atheism and, you know, that kind of thing. So, they don't fit very well, right? And I think about, like, I mean, even somebody like FDR, who we think of as fairly progressive, you know, basically said this is a Christian country and everybody else here is here by sufferance, right?

And I think that's... the world view, right? Yeah, maybe there's tolerance, but they're not here on the same way that we white Christians are here.

One more question, to sum up the question. Megan, Sean, right here on the, good. Thank you. What factors would you say have led the Christian public country that we were built on into a more secular and pluralist country? What would you say those factors were?

Say the first part again. would you say have affected our country from becoming a public Christian country and moving towards a secular pluralist country? Yeah, so it's a combination of things.

There's some kind of mundane things that are about upward mobility in birth rates. So that's part of it, right? This is true for Catholics in the country, is true for mainline Protestants, and more recently is true of evangelicals. So like one of the reasons why, like white evangelicals, for example, again, we take that same time frame, go back to kind of early 2000s, white evangelicals by themselves were 23% of the country, nearly a quarter, like one in four Americans were white evangelical Protestant. Today that number is 13%, like half, essentially, of what they were.

were just you know a good 20 years ago uh and it's been a some of that's been about evangelical women getting college degrees and when they get college degrees they want to space out uh having kids for a career birth rates go down right so that's part of part of it but the other part of it is really has been young people leaving uh that's really driven these numbers and the reasons there we've done some pretty recent studies on this that when we ask people um and we asked young people who were who grew up in uh religious and then left right so these aren't people who were born unaffiliated, these people who were originally in churches or synagogues or mosques, etc., and left. Why they left. And what they would, some of it was about belief.

They said they just didn't believe the doctrines anymore, but the other things were actually about the kind of current political context. So the biggest things they name are anti-gay attitudes, right? So negative treatment of or negative teachings about LGBTQ people in the church, and nearly half of young people say that's the reason that they left, right? That's a big deal. The sexual abuse scandals in the church and the other city they named is thing teachings around climate change.

So all of those things where many conservative white churches have been kind of doubling down have been at real odds with the values of younger people's they've been and hence we see the numbers. I lied I always give the last question to Catherine Grinnell. Thank you, and this is a follow-up. So if this is the reactionary movement, do you think that it's also temporary and passing?

Because as it's a reaction to contemporary context, I would imagine that it's... also enduring. What's your sense?

Yeah, well it is a reactionary to our moment. It's also very old, right? That's the other, you know, in the book, one of the reasons I wrote this last book Was to kind of answer the question. Okay, if I trace back this thing that we're experiencing right now To its kind of most proximate roots right before Well as Europeans are landing on this continent like what does that look like? Where does it come from?

So in many ways it's a very old old claim and I think of like, you know We and it but it flares up at moments and what one of the things that tends to flare up actually is When we have demographic change in the country right now the foreign-born population is about 15% of the country. The last time that was true was in the early 20th century when there was a lot of anti-Catholic bias, a lot of anti-Irish bias, right? It was different, but it was a similar kind of thing, and why do we have the, and to kind of see this play out, if we ask the question, like, what about the, you know, the KKK, like the Ku Klux Klan, the resurgence of the Klan, right?

Of course, everybody thinks about it as being an anti-black, and that's right, kind of violent terrorist organization, but I think what many people forget, right, is that it was... was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. But why was it anti-Catholic? What ties those things together, being anti-black, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish?

Well, the thing that ties those things together is the claim that this is a white Protestant country. That's what ties these things together, was a positive Protestant. assertion of identity.

And so I think in many ways we're feeling that again. The Protestant part has sort of that part is not as prominent and there's kind of been a melding of more conservative Catholic and more conservative Protestant forces here. that that piece is a little different today, but this claim is, it's pretty old.

Again, one of the reasons why I ended with this kind of call to questions, I feel like we've called the question several times in American history, right, and we've made some progress, of course, but I think it just still keeps coming. So, I hope that the demographics are such that it's flared up, and I even use in the previous book this idea of kind of what we're experiencing is something akin to, many of you may know this book, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of growth. grief, right?

And so if you remember, like, the first stage is denial, right? But what comes right after denial is anger, right? And that's, I think, part of kind of what's happening here, and like, how we manage this. may determine whether we just kick this can down the road and it shows up again, or whether we do some better job than previous generations have done of actually resolving it. Please join me in thanking Robbie.

God loves you, but God loves you more if you buy his book, which is right over there. So we have books for sale over here. I believe Robert will be available to sign if you so wish.

We also have coffee, refreshments, desserts, a reward for those students who came. You get something sweet now. So please do avail yourselves of that. Thank you all for being here. Thank you to our folks who are online.

And thank you again, Robert, for a great talk. Thank you.

Transcript for:Christian Nationalism and the 2024 Election

Transcript for:
Christian Nationalism and the 2024 Election