Fight‐or‐Flight for America: The Affective Conditioning of Christian Nationalist Ideological Views During the Transition to Adulthood^1,2

Abstract

Christian nationalism has gained attention both inside and outside of academia for its powerful influence on sociopolitical attitudes, voting behaviors, and political mobilization. However, limited work has examined how Christian nationalist views develop, the mechanisms by which they relate to sociopolitical attitudes, or potential varieties of Christian nationalism. Building on recent culture and cognition scholarship, this article synthesizes insights from affective neuroscience to conceptualize the fundamental role of emotions in shaping ideological views and cultural attitudes—an enculturation process termed “affective conditioning.” The author then examines the development of Christian nationalist ideological views during the transition to adulthood using longitudinal interviews, field notes, and surveys with 41 Christian nationalists from the 10‐year National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). The author identifies distinct traumatic upbringing experiences among respondents, which condition heightened RAGE and FEAR affective systems. This gives Christian nationalists an enduring sense that their way of life is “under attack” and motivates reactionary sociopolitical attitudes. The author also distinguishes two dominant affective types of Christian nationalism, dubbed “Fight for America” and “Flight for America.” These findings illuminate how both past and present social conditions interact with emotional neuroarchitecture to influence ideological views and cultural attitudes.

A Social Disorganizational Theory of Suicide1

“…Some sociologists have argued that communities and classes of people can develop emotional biographies (Turner 2010), meaning that emotions are not simply randomly distributed, but like any resource can cluster and cohere in time and space. For instance, research on Christian Nationalists found excessively high exposure to stimuli and, subsequently predispositions to, feeling fear and/or rage when perceiving environmental crises (Rotolo 2022). Consequently, their response to real or imagined crises evoked these affectual responses as though they were innate.…”

“…In turn, this social pain borne of rejection and exclusion motivates individuals and, in some cases, collectives to develop defensive strategies designed to protect ego, dignity, and respect (Abrutyn 2023); unfortunately, defensive strategies very often are (or invite pathology that is) harmful to the self and sometimes others (Summers‐Effler 2004). Thus, while beliefs may act as Weber's proverbial “switchman” in determining the course of action a given individual or set of individuals experiencing pain are likely to take, it is the underlying affective neurophysiological response (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016), innate yet conditioned by the environment (Rotolo 2022), that helps explain why some places condition people to respond to similar crises in exceedingly different ways.…”

“…Denial of access to a social object we want or have liked in the past, especially when this denial is objectively or subjectively understood as rejection, exclusion, or isolation, hurts (Abrutyn 2023); not in the metaphorical sense, but in the literal sense as the same affective neural circuits associated with physical pain are activated by social separation (Eisenberger 2012). Likewise, we can be conditioned to be hyper sensitive, through particular structural and cultural environmental conditions, to certain negative affect that encourage anti‐social, self‐harm, and other harm responses to crises (Rotolo 2022).…”

“…When these places mix with permissible suicide beliefs, they become vulnerable to high rates of suicide. In short, when the social world is perceived as failing to provide for us or it in fact does fail to provide for us, we are clearly receiving negative affective alarm signals motivating us to act (Abrutyn and Lizardo 2022; Rotolo 2022), but because of social and psychological conditions, we often have delimited choices. On the one hand, it could motivate us to pursue new social objects, while on the other hand, it could lead to defensive strategies designed to conserve emotional energy and, subsequently, cause more pain than alleviate.…”

What Isn’t Christian Nationalism? A Call for Conceptual and Empirical Splitting

“…providing a theoretical explanation for how religious symbols or stimuli external to persons may be drawn on or "used" even by those who are not themselves religiously devout or theologically knowledgeable (Delehanty, Edgell, and Stewart 2019;Rotolo 2022). Such a toolkit could be widespread without being deeply held.…”