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

Abstract

In the years surrounding Donald Trump’s presidency, a burgeoning strand of literature has emphasized the role of Christian nationalism in American political conflict. The authors argue that this literature contains mutually reinforcing theoretical and empirical shortcomings. Theoretically, the concept of Christian nationalism is overextended and conflates multiple conceptualizations of religion in public life. Empirically, the standard scale used to measure Christian nationalism contains survey items that are too ambiguous to adequately inform (or constrain) interpretations of findings. The authors draw from cultural sociology and political science to highlight key questions current Christian nationalism scholarship does not adequately address. The authors present results from a latent class analysis to show how the same survey items allow other interpretations of how Americans think about religion, state, and public life. The authors conclude with a discussion of theoretical and empirical steps that may strengthen the contributions of this scholarship.

The Duality of American Christian Nationalism: Religious Traditionalism versus Christian Statism

“…In addition, we decide to follow the common practice in the quantitative CN scholarship (e.g., McDaniel, Nooruddin, and Shortle 2022; Perry and Gorski 2022; Smith and Alder 2022; Whitehead and Perry 2020), assuming that these survey questions measure similar sentiment across meso‐level populations because we do not have sufficient information to falsify this assumption with our data. In our surveys of analysis, these CN items were not designed to only measure white Protestants’ attitudes either.…”

“…In addition, we recognize that both Davis and Smith and Adler (2022) conduct latent class analysis (LCA) that treat the six CN items as ordinal variables in the BRS 2017 sample. Relying on the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) statistics, both studies suggest there should be ideally six latent groups who answer the six CN items distinctly.…”

“…In contrast, dividing people into several latent classes as Smith and Aldler's can be less intuitive. Take their differentiation between “secular civic republicans” and “pluralist civic republicans” for example—neither answering patterns nor class membership compositions are obviously different from each other (see figures 1 and 2 in Smith and Adler 2022).…”

“…Historically, it has been society-centric nationalisms that dominate America's popular nationalistic traditions (Billig 1995;Bonikowski 2016;Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016). Even today, while many Americans prefer a Christian-majority country (Heclo 2007;Smith et al 2022), most American religionists do not want the federal government to legally establish a Christian state and recognize the Bible as a source of law given the long American tradition of disestablishment (e.g., Marsden 2018). However, many American Christians are confident that Christianity will maintain its dominance in fair and free competition with other religions without intervention from the state (Smith 2000;Wuthnow 1988).…”

Spiritual Appeals Underperform Civic Appeals in Depolarizing Christian Partisans

“…A growing tendency among Christians, and especially those identifying as White Republican evangelicals, is to see core American values as deriving from Christian principles (1)(2)(3). This tendency has been described as a serious threat to American democracy (4), in part because it leads Christian partisans to perceive political opponents as spiritual enemies (5), which in turn contributes to high levels of affective polarization and support for anti-democratic attitudes like overturning the results of the 2020 election (6,7).…”