Christian Nationalism in the United States is a movement on the rise. It can be defined as an ideology that merges Christian identity with notions of American patriotism, and seeks to establish an explicitly Christian government. Since the lead up to Donald Trump’s presidential election in 2016, and particularly in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Christian Nationalism has been emboldened but has also come under greater academic and popular scrutiny. It remains, however, a movement with a long history in this country and its resurgence in American public life is tied to the growth of specific beliefs, with implications that must be unpacked.

As the movement has grown out of a decades-long process of politicization in American evangelicalism, so have its detractors, which include scholars, policymakers, and a number of Christian organizations who see it as a threat to democracy and the principles of Church-State separation the country was founded upon. Since the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building by rioters who operated under a Christian Nationalist banner, these concerns have only deepened. There is tangible concern that with its authoritarian leanings, radical reading of the Bible, and reconstruction of American history, the movement poses a serious threat to democratic norms and civic life. It is therefore vital to understand what purpose Christian Nationalism serves for the right wing in American politics, the source of its appeal to those on the receiving end of its messaging, and the deeper psychological and emotional drivers that lead people to identify with it.

What the Right Gains 

At first glance, one might surmise that the politics and ideologies of the far right in America would be hindered by a Christian worldview. The tenet “love thy neighbor” doesn’t support an anti-immigrant agenda, for example, and nor does Christ’s outreach to the poor necessarily go along with reducing social support programs. Both of these are in fact central positions of the far right. But upon further examination into the alliance forged between the Donald Trump campaign and American Evangelicals in 2016, we understand why on key issues, the former president could deliver wins to the evangelicals that were worth setting aside the less Christian parts of his personality (or were even worth embracing them).

Trump and the right made gains through their alliance with a certain brand of Christianity in America. First, he gained an impressively active and committed voting bloc. Eighty percent of evangelicals supported Trump in 2016 exit polls, while 26 percent of polled voters identified as evangelical. Paul Djupe, associate professor of political science at Denison University, told The Cairo Review that while the number of evangelicals has been declining in America over time, their proportion of the electorate has stayed roughly the same. With this kind of outsized participation, it is no wonder that the right continues to court this group and indeed has begun to mainstream more Christian nationalist rhetoric and supporters into its ranks.

Second, it seems that for a group with conservative political views that run the gamut from anti-abortion to pro-gun, pro-death penalty and anti-LGBTQ (views which have in fact been spread across the political spectrum historically in this country), the unifying power of a religious identity might have something to offer.

In a report compiled by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC) last year, a number of scholars analyzing the lead up to the January 6 attack on the Capitol building noted how the use of Christian imagery and language seemed to unify rioters and propel them forward. Amanda Tyler, head of the BJC and one of the authors on the report, told The Cairo Review, “They were there not just to reach a political aim but in some of their minds to reach a religious aim—that God had ordained this result, that Trump was God’s hand picked candidate, and by trying to overthrow the election results they weren’t just carrying out Donald Trump’s will, they were carrying out God’s will for the country”. This underscored the  potential motivating power of religiosity and religious imagery for people carrying out a political act.

That said, keeping that moniker of “Christianity” very general is also key to the movement’s success and something its leaders have deftly had to navigate. Thomas Lecaque, professor of history at Grand View University, observed, for example, that what brings different Christian Nationalist groups together under one banner would likely crumble under the weight of all of their differences if they were ever to achieve their goal of overthrowing secular government in America. “The problem is these groups don’t agree on what comes next. They agree on who they hate, but in the aftermath of dealing with them, these groups don’t get on. For example, the number of evangelical groups who don’t believe that Catholics are Christians is staggeringly high ” he says. Maintaining the movement’s brand, then, means really focusing on the ins and outs of the faith only in cases where it needs to push  political goals, that is to justify an anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, generally anti-liberal agenda. In cynical terms, the politics justify the use of faith, and not the other way around, although this is often misrepresented to congregants who are being preached the message of Christian Nationalism. (Katherine Stewart explores this relationship between the leaders and followers of the group at length in her book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism).

Beyond the need it serves to unify the in-group, there may also be a sense that an association with Christianity carries wider cultural legitimacy, which political leaders take advantage of. The United States is well known to be more religious than other countries in its income bracket. Even though it is secularizing (more people identify as having no religion than ever before), the culture still holds space for a certain sense of moral rectitude surrounding Christianity. “Our constitution says there’s no religious test for public office, yet every American president has claimed Christian as a label. So, we have found that if you’re not Christian it would be very difficult to win the presidency,” Tyler points out. “It still has enough cultural currency that people think it will legitimize their political claims.”

Although the right has gained much from its association with faith,what explains the willingness of rank and file Christians to be associated with this movement? How has the movement achieved all this loyalty, and how has it managed to seamlessly unite a certain brand of faith with such very worldly political goals? In short, why the mass appeal?

A Population Ripe for Mobilization 

A “persecuted minority”

The overarching reason for Christian Nationalism’s appeal, identified by several scholars who spoke with The Cairo Review, was the sense that a way of life, and a certain foothold in power, is being lost for this group of Americans. According to Ryan Burge, political science professor at Eastern Illinois University and author of 20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America, “The idea of Christian Nationalism is not so much about the nuts and the bolts of Christianity; it’s about the idea of ‘we want to go back to the way things were seventy years ago when white Christian people basically dominated every facet of American life and American society’. And if you’re a white Christian you look at the future where white people are not going to be the majority, where Christianity is rapidly declining, you long for an era when you were in a privileged position in American life”.

Siege mentality, whether threats are real, perceived, or a combination thereof, has a way of cutting people off from alternative viewpoints and messaging that might contradict their worldview. This has obvious political advantages, which have made it a key component of the authoritarian playbook throughout history. In this case, it keeps voters on-side.

Ironically this kind of fear is not unique to the present moment. Christian Nationalism has existed in multiple forms throughout history, touting many of the same concerns. “People have been panicking about the collapse of Christianity since the nation’s founding,” noted Lecaque. It’s proven to be a potent rallying cry before, too. The Klu Klux Klan, for example, mobilized thousands of people to march in Washington two years in a row (some 30,000 in 1925 and 15,000 in 1926), Lecaque added. That kind of fervor definitely speaks to a perennial fear and anger that things are slipping out of control and need to be reined in.

For Djupe, a recent turning point that renewed this sense of threat and bolstered arguments for the movement came in 2015, the same year Trump began campaigning for office. “You can see that cultural threat developing across time, especially clearly with gay rights. And the big flip was the Obergefell decision in 2015 [which guaranteed gay couples the right to marriage in all states]. So many evangelicals still felt like they had some part of the culture on their side… then once that decision was made they really felt like a persecuted minority.”

Another part of the answer to why people have been so well mobilized by Christian Nationalist messaging, comes by looking more closely at who forms the core of this movement and understanding what else they identify with. One thing we now know is that Christians in the charismatic and ultra-conservative traditions are far more likely to support the movement than Christians of other persuasions. “It’s not that you don’t find a lot of random people from various churches who might be Christian Nationalists,” Lecaque said, “it’s just that the reason there is this core coming out of Pentecostalism, evangelical, and a radically traditionalist brand of Catholicism, is because these are incredibly conservative groups that the far right can latch onto in the culture war.”

When faith aligns with political ideology 

Beyond their conservatism, there seem to be other aspects of these faith traditions that predict involvement. One of these is a tendency toward black and white and good vs. evil thinking. Another is belief that we are nearing the end of days. These two ideas are closely linked in a certain understanding of the scripture of Revelations, in which the final battle between good and evil takes place. In his research, Burge said: “What we’re seeing is that the factors that you need to have are not just conservatism, you have to tie it in with this idea of the apocalypse, Armageddon, the end of time. And that’s something that Pentecostals and charismatics are more predisposed to talking about… And what we see is that people who believe the world is going to end soon, and a lot of evangelicals and charismatics do believe that we’re in the end days, are more likely to be Christian Nationalist.” He noted that with Americans identifying as having no religion (the “nones”) at the highest percentage in history, apocalypse believers are reading the signs, and heeding the call to mobilize. In many cases, that just translates to evangelizing and trying to turn others onto the faith; however the positive intentions behind this are not aired much in mainstream media, Burge noted.

Of course, the difficulty with this grand Manichean framing—the idea of cosmic battles of good and evil playing out in our day-to-day lives—is that it splits every issue in half and leaves very little room for nuance or dialogue. This gets cumbersome in a political structure where there are two major parties constantly vying for singular control of government. If someone’s been taught to think about the dichotomy between good and evil, Burge noted, it may be easier to convince them that their politics must, by necessity, fall along that same divide. “Twenty-five years ago, Pre-Newt Gingrich, Democrats and Republicans saw each other as different but not evil. And now you’re hearing a lot of rhetoric, on the right especially, that the democratic party is evil. ‘They will take us down a sinful path’.”

Djupe argues that this is where the potential for radicalism comes in, especially when apocalypticism is becoming a widespread—not fringe—perspective. “That idea that demonically-inspired behavior has affected the other side then justifies any action to stop it.”

It appears that this kind of stark black-and-white thinking makes people susceptible to suggestions from authority figures that encourage further radicalization. There are multiple factors at play here, which relate to religious conservatism but also go beyond it. According to a wide-ranging study published this year by Miles Armaly et. al, leaders on the far-right are well-positioned to nudge pre-existing characteristics in the Christian Nationalist community into support for both targeted and abstract violence. These characteristics include, but are not limited to, religious extremism, which multiple studies have found is generally not sufficient to predict support for violence.

For example, there is also a streak of authoritarianism that these religious groups appear to share with leaders in the movement and with the rhetoric and behavior of former president Trump. According to Matthew MacWilliams (author of On Fascism: 12 lessons from American History), as early as 2015, the single factor that predicted whether a Republican primary voter supported Trump over his rivals was an inclination to authoritarianism. This is also observable in the data present  on Christian Nationalists, which links Christian nationalist adherence with a desire to limit voting. This makes sense given that the movement is also explicitly trying to establish theocratic governance in the United States. Authoritarian leanings are baked into the ideology.

This isn’t a phenomenon unique among evangelical and charismatic groups, but there is a remarkable degree of overlap. The tenets of much of modern evangelicalism favor patriarchy, hierarchy, and strong-man leaders. As Kristen Kobes du Mez thoroughly lays out in her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, the most vocal leaders of the evangelical community have worked hard over the course of decades to enshrine an image of Christ as a warrior figure, bent on enforcing the hierarchy of man over woman, parents over children, and church over society.

Burge pointed out that Americans by and large are not anti-authoritarian.There’s nothing necessarily dangerous in this way of thinking on a local scale, but in the hands of an influential, wealthy, and determined network of people leading a large-scale movement, it is troubling. You have leadership calling upon people’s tendencies to accept strong leaders who can deliver order, explicitly at the cost of democratic process and the separation of church and state.

With these factors in mind, it is possible to see how Christian Nationalism has managed to mobilize a determined voting bloc of Americans. But what bolsters the draw of this specific kind of messaging, especially when it makes emotional appeals to fear, anger, and a sense of good vs. evil thinking about the world, or the urgency of a dawning apocalypse? To explore this, we should ask, what is the deeper psychology behind some of these beliefs. What are the psychological needs that aren’t being met by other sources?

What makes people tick this way?

First, it’s important to be clear that the study of Christian Nationalism is still in its infancy. Burge points out that the science is not nearly as developed as the popular press thinks it is, given all the writing lately on this subject. With that in mind, the following is a series of questions for further exploration, not answers. What do psychologists have to say about black and white thinking more generally?

In psychological terms, black and white thinking is seen as a common cognitive bias, known as “splitting”, but one that becomes problematic the more it intensifies. At an extreme end, it is a feature of personality disorder, and marks the way someone may not be able to unify good and bad qualities in the people they know into a holistic view of each person. Thus, they careen back and forth between seeing others and themselves as all good or all bad. A quick Google search on black and white thinking reaps article upon article explaining why this way of thinking is harmful to our happiness and intellect, and suggestions on how it can be overcome.

In Black and White Thinking: the Burden of a Binary Brain in a Complex World, Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton takes a practical view of the issue, appealing to evolutionary psychology to show how all humans are programmed to categorize experiences, to use some degree of black and white thinking every moment of the day just to bring order to the world and make decision-making possible. The trouble starts when we become emotionally strained and revert to using black and white categories that don’t actually serve the nuances of a complex situation. It takes work and commitment to avoid this trap, and no one succeeds all the time.

But if Christian Nationalists hold up black and white thinking as a value to be cherished, there’s no end to the pitfalls for democracy. Once people have adopted this orientation to the world, it’s hard to change their minds.

Another field of study, which offers some insight into the state of mind people might be bringing to their adoption of this ideology, is the psychology of conspiracy theory belief. There is data showing that belief in cosmic good vs. evil makes people more likely to believe in conspiracy theories (and indeed there is a great deal of overlap between those identifying as Christian Nationalist and those who believe in Qanon and other popular conspiracy theories on the far right). Indeed, Armaly et. al. show that Christian Nationalist adherence is enmeshed in corresponding belief in conspiracy theories. Studies have also demonstrated how belief in conspiracy theories can function in similar ways to religious belief.

Professor of social psychology at Kent University Karen Douglas has found that people are more drawn to conspiracy theories when one or more psychological needs are frustrated. She told 0he Cairo Review that these needs can be broken down into three categories: “The first is epistemic, related to the need to know the truth and have clarity and certainty. The other needs are existential, which are related to the need to feel safe and to have some control over things that are happening around us, and [finally] social, which are related to the need to maintain our self-esteem and feel positive about the groups that we belong to.” In times of especially high uncertainty (like the Covid-19 pandemic), conspiracy theories tend to thrive because people are seeking cognitive closure in an environment where the official explanations for what’s going on don’t offer it.

Like conspiracy theories, Christian Nationalism promises a reassertion of a certain order and clarity that adherents feel has been lost. It also offers a path toward a unified identity, with clear borders delineating the in-group and out-group. Djupe pointed out that one reason that religious nationalism is so common around the world, is that “most people want to conflate the identities that they have. Having people see a much broader identity takes a lot of effort”.

Finally, adherence to this movement carries the promise of a more authoritarian leadership, which may appeal to a heightened existential need for security. A recent study published by the APA found that when people perceive a low sense of personal control over the affairs of their life, they are more likely to desire living in a tight, strictly rules-based society. This aforementioned sense of a loss of status in society could certainly induce a sense of powerlessness.

A Way Forward?

Given the dissonance between the gospel and much of what the Christian Nationalists preach, many Christians in America who don’t support the latter movement have been confused and appalled by it, and there is real anguish over what they see as exploitation of the scripture.

Pastor John Sowers leads a Presbyterian congregation in Spokane, Washington, and said that he’s watched the growth of the movement with concern. He’s had some parishioners who were looking for a more conservative voice from the pulpit leave the church in recent years. But he’s also gained people he says came from Christian Nationalist churches and were repulsed by them, “tired of being bullies and having their churches be bullies”.

In his view, democracy is not at odds with Christianity. “We’ve always been at our best when we’ve been the minority party, not the majority party. Or when we’ve been persecuted,” but not the way Christian Nationalists talk about persecution, Sowers noted, adding that their version of persecution is more about the preservation of power.

Is this a rift that can be healed inside faith communities? One answer may lie in encouraging people to engage more honestly with both the history of the country, as well as the bible itself. For the latter, Tyler argues that there are more and less ethical ways to approach the scripture, that lie with the reader’s intentions. “Where Christian Nationalism runs afoul is having a political aim and then trying to use the bible to justify that political aim, as opposed to viewing the bible as a religious text that informs all of our lives. And I think that we are called to read and study and consider and interpret the bible through prayer and discernment to understand what God is asking us to do in our lives, not to take a political aim that we want and then try to use the bible to justify it.”

When it comes to an accurate reading of the constitution and the intentions of the country’s founding fathers, Tyler’s organization is also working to make that information available to all. The BJC provides free resources online that tackle the foundational myths of Christian Nationalism, and clarify the history and importance of the separation between church and state in America. She added that as a faith-based organization, “our campaign helps rebut a false statement that to call out Christian Nationalism is to be anti-Christian.”

Tyler added that pastors and faith leaders do still carry clout with their congregations, and do have the influence to step in and call out distortions of the faith where they find them. That doesn’t catch the subset of people who identify as Christian Nationalists but don’t actually attend church, (or the pastors who actively espouse the ideology) but it’s a start that can be supported by organizations like the BJC or the American Values Coalition.

Whether someone who’s already gone far down the path of identifying with the movement can be nudged back by these tactics is hard to know. But organizations like this may play a role in educating those still on the fence who are seeking information and put them on a better path.

Ultimately, one hopes that individuals who wrestle with their faith and politics will meet with good advice when they face a dark night of the soul. Pastor Sowers related a moment with one of his congregants at a church barbecue when the woman said with fatigue, “I just wish things were black and white like they used to be.” Sowers paused before responding “I think Jesus moved in the gray”.