The “Right” History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America

Abstract

A wide range of right-wing movements are bound together by their adherence to a nostalgic vision of the United States as a “Christian nation,” yet there are meaningful differences in the specific narratives promoted by these groups that are not fully understood. This article identifies two ideal-typical versions of this narrative: the white Christian nation and the colorblind Judeo-Christian nation. The two narratives share a common declension structure, but differ in their framing of how religion and race intersect as markers of American belonging and power. Although participants in right-wing movements often slide back and forth between the two narratives in practice, distinguishing between them analytically enables us to better understand how the two renderings of American history carry different meanings and perform different kinds of political work for participants in these movements. Theoretically, the analysis extends the insights of a “complex religion” approach to sites beyond organized religion, while also demonstrating how scholarship on Christian nationalism and on right-wing movements’ use of national history could each be enhanced by greater attention to the other.

American Religion in the Era of Increasing Polarization

“…Building on theoretical insights from the "complex inequality" and "intersectionality" literatures, a growing number of sociologists propose that scholars must take seriously the profound connectedness of American religion with race and class, among other forms of inequality (Edgell 2017, Wilde 2018, Yukich & Edgell 2020. Wilde & her co-authors (Wilde 2018, Wilde & Glassman 2016, Wilde & Tevington 2017, see also Braunstein 2021, Pearce & Gilliland 2020, Chap. 2, O'Brien & Abdelhadi 2020 have called this approach "complex religion."…”

Flowing Across with Demonic Hate: Belief in Supernatural Evil and Support for Stricter Immigration Policy

“…This language notably became more pronounced in the political sphere with the presidential administration of George W. Bush, where policy and decision making were couched in the language of spiritual warfare so familiar to his evangelical supporters (Domke and Coe 2008). The extended turn toward Christian Nationalism by the Trump administration has served to make such framing even more prominent in contemporary American political culture (Baker, Perry, and Whitehead 2020;Braunstein 2021;Davis and Perry 2021;Perry, Whitehead, and Grubbs 2021b).…”

Historical Fundamentalism? Christian Nationalism and Ignorance About Religion in American Political History

“…On one hand, the history of any society or nation consists, in part, of actual facts and events (about which statements can be true or false). But "history" also represents the mythological narratives that ennoble a peoples' self-conception and unite them around shared values (Braunstein 2021;Kammen 1991;Lepore 2010;Stanley 2018;Tudor 1972). As a result, "history" is inevitably political.…”

“…Like the more explicit factual inaccuracies, historians often criticize Christian nationalist interpretations of American political history as revisionist "political mythology" (Tudor 1972) or what Lepore (2010) calls "historical fundamentalism" (see also Green 2015;Kruse 2015;Noll, Hatch, and Marsden 1989). Nevertheless, such interpretations reflect a pervasive understanding of religion's place in American civic and political life that not only manifests itself among pundits, but in public discourse (Bellah 1967;Du Mez 2020;Kruse 2015; The President's Advisory 1776 Commission 2021), far-right movements (Braunstein 2021;Braunstein and Taylor 2017;Gorski and Perry 2022;Lepore 2010), and ultimately the ballot box (Baker, Perry, and Whitehead 2020a;Whitehead, Perry, and Baker 2018;Bean 2014).…”