The Everyday Crusade

Abstract

What is causing the American public to move more openly into alt-right terrain? What explains the uptick in anti-immigrant hysteria, isolationism, and an increasing willingness to support alternatives to democratic governance? The Everyday Crusade provides an answer. The book points to American Religious Exceptionalism (ARE), a widely held religious nationalist ideology steeped in myth about the nation's original purpose. The book opens with a comprehensive synthesis of research on nationalism and religion in American public opinion. Making use of survey data spanning three different presidential administrations, it then develops a new theory of why Americans form extremist attitudes, based on religious exceptionalism myths. The book closes with an examination of what's next for an American public that confronts new global issues, alongside existing challenges to perceived cultural authority. Timely and enlightening, The Everyday Crusade offers a critical touchstone for better understanding American national identity and the exclusionary ideologies that have plagued the nation since its inception.

Mating Call, Dog Whistle, Trigger: Asymmetric Alignments, Race, and the Use of Reactionary Religious Rhetoric in American Politics

“…Yet Bellah (1967:12) also recognized what he viewed as reactionary “deformations and demonic distortions” of American civil religion. 4 Following Bellah’s conceptualization, sociologists and other social scientists have subsequently drawn analytic distinctions between “civil religious tradition” (more ecumenical and unifying) in the United States and more reactionary strains of “religious nationalism,” “American religious exceptionalism,” “Christian heroism,” “White Christian nationalism,” “culture war rhetoric,” “tribal civil religion,” “public religious expression,” or “secularized evangelical discourse” (Aho 2013; Braunstein 2021; Chapp 2012; Davis and Perry 2021; Delehanty et al 2019; Gorski 2017; Gorski and Perry 2022; McDaniel et al 2022; Stewart, Edgell, and Delehanty 2018; Whitehead and Perry 2020; Williams and Fuist 2014).…”

“…Second, a considerable amount of work in the past decade has sought to understand the social correlates and consequences of (White) Christian nationalist ideology (Braunstein 2021; McDaniel, Nooruddin, and Shortle 2022). Yet sociologists are only beginning to theorize how White Christian nationalism, and reactionary religious rhetoric more broadly, are deployed by political actors as a discursive strategy and form of political mobilization (e.g., Braunstein 2017a; Gorski 2017).…”

Religious Freedom Backlash: Evidence from Public Opinion Experiments about Free Expression

“…As Patterson (2008) pointed out, perceptions of freedom take on different forms. For Patterson, two forms of freedom are at odds with one another: (1) personal-the power to do as one pleases, free of constraints; and (2) sovereignal-freedom from constraints but also the power to put constraints on others. As such, personal freedom is sought by marginalized people and sovereignal freedom is sought by the dominant group.…”

“…Similar to social dominance orientation, Christian nationalism emphasizes the maintenance of a hierarchy. 1 Because of this similarity, Christian nationalists likely are seeking sovereignal freedom to be able to control and constrain the activities of those perceived as challenging a white conservative Christian agenda. Therefore, both the underlying ideological and psychological dimensions, as well as the issue attitude in question, might affect an individual's view about religious freedom.…”

“…Majority religious freedom focuses on specific religious-freedom issues, using two questions about support for policies that are linked to cultural divisions: (1) allowing private businessowners to refuse services to same-sex couples because of their religious beliefs; and (2) allowing the government to restrict religious gatherings to protect public health. Minority religious-freedom measures support for religious freedom in cases that are specific to religious minorities: (1) providing freedom for Muslims to establish houses of worship; and (2) the need to respect Native American customs through limiting property development.…”