Is a “Christian America” a More Patriarchal America? Religion, Politics, and Traditionalist Gender Ideology

Abstract

Recent research shows that Americans who adhere to Christian nationalism-an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity and American civic life-tend to hold authoritarian and exclusionary attitudes, particularly regarding ethno-racial minorities and nontraditional family forms. Such findings suggest a fundamental connection between Christian nationalism and rigid symbolic boundaries, which would likely extend to Americans' understanding of gender roles. Drawing on notions connecting religious nationalism with defenses of patriarchal norms and utilizing a recent national, random sample of American adults, the current study examines the link between contemporary Christian nationalism and traditionalist gender ideologies. Our analyses reveal that Christian nationalism is the strongest predictor of holding a more traditionalist gender ideology, even after taking into account a host of political and religious characteristics. Moreover, the relationship between Christian nationalism and gender traditionalism holds across religious traditions, including more gender-egalitarian groups like Mainline Protestants and even the unaffiliated. We conclude by highlighting the implications of these findings for understanding contemporary populist support for Donald Trump, which previous studies have shown is undergirded by both Christian nationalism and sexism.

Liberty for Us, Limits for Them: Christian Nationalism and Americans’ Views on Citizens’ Rights

“…As a consequence of this narrower sense of civic belonging, Christian nationalism tends to elevate attitudes that are more closely aligned with the maintenance of a more "traditionalist" image of social order both formally and symbolically (Davis 2018;Whitehead and Perry 2019;. Davis (2018), for example, finds that Christian nationalists are likelier to emphasize the use of strict or even lethal means of formal control for "criminals" and "troublemakers."…”