Ruth Braunstein: More organizations are recognizing the threat of Christian nationalism

The original intention wasn’t to track what both groups thought about American democracy — I had other, more specific questions in mind — but one of the things that emerged was that they had these two fundamentally different visions of American democracy and of the role that religion plays in it.

In the tea party, we saw early rumblings of what we are now calling Christian nationalism, or what I sometimes call a more colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism.

When I was spending time with the faith-based community organizing group, I saw that they were providing a direct rebuttal to that vision of American democracy, which they envisioned as a multiracial pluralistic democracy.

People weren’t hearing their voices as clearly as people were hearing the tea party’s voices. And so part of the project in my first book was showing that this was a potentially powerful counterargument to the kinds of arguments that are more prominent and get more airtime on the conservative side.

F&L: Do you see reasons for why narratives about Christian nationalism have gotten so much traction in media?

RB: Christian nationalism has gotten a lot of attention in the past several years in part because the idea that the United States is an exclusively Christian nation or even a white Christian nation was viewed as a perspective that was largely going away as the country grew more diverse and more respectful of religious and racial diversity and difference.

To see it resurge, particularly in a movement like the tea party and then more explicitly in a figure like Donald Trump, was concerning to people and received — I think justifiably — a lot of attention.

But at the same time that people were seeing this more explicit embrace of Christian nationalism, there’s been a significant amount of organizing to resist it. That’s the piece that has not gotten as much attention, and the reasons for that are complicated.

Many of the efforts are local, many of the efforts are not public-facing, many of the efforts are not explicitly using the term “Christian nationalism,” and they’re quite diffuse across different kinds of networks and sectors that make it difficult to point your finger at one thing and say, “Oh, this is a resistance to Christian nationalism.”

Part of the project that my lab is doing, with support from the Luce Foundation, is trying to map that field of resistance as broadly as we can.

F&L: You have some criteria for what pluralist resistance to Christian nationalism looks like. Could you walk me through some of those points and how you arrived at those?

RB: In some ways, it has been an iterative process of having conversations with folks who are part of this field and also gathering a growing database of organizations and individuals that are part of this field and thinking about, “Should this or that person or organization be included?”

The most obvious criterion, and the one that we started with, was looking for efforts that are explicitly critiquing Christian nationalism or white Christian nationalism by name.

These are obviously the easiest to identify, because this is central to their work. I think of an organization or a coalition like Christians Against Christian Nationalism. It’s very clear what they are up to, but then it gets a little bit more complicated.

We also wanted to include groups that are critical of or resistant to the content of Christian nationalism. There are two parts there.

One is being critical of a mythological history of the United States that frames it as a divinely inspired Christian nation, which is central to the Christian nationalist vision of the country.

The other piece is critiquing a vision of American identity that centers white Christians and either explicitly or implicitly excludes religious and racial minorities. And so those are two of the primary components of Christian nationalism that many groups are taking aim at without necessarily talking about Christian nationalism.

And then on top of that, we started looking at organizations that are working to overcome some of the issues that are associated with Christian nationalism. And by issues I mean problems that people have identified as associated with adherence to Christian nationalism.

Some of that involves racial or religious prejudices and discrimination; some of that involves susceptibility to disinformation being spread by the far right; some of that involves polarization at the community level or the congregation level. There are now a number of organizations that are focused specifically on trying to address those more specific issues.

Then finally, and this is the piece where it’s a bit less clear whether the organizations are really imagining themselves as resisting Christian nationalism or not, there is a large field of organizations and campaigns and efforts across sectors that are promoting a vision of the United States as a multiracial pluralist democracy.

Sometimes that involves thinking about history in new and complicated ways; sometimes that involves thinking about American identity in newer ways that celebrate diversity. But that is a field that, whether it’s explicitly about Christian nationalism or not, is part of supporting a different vision of American democracy that is quite oppositional to the Christian nationalist vision.

F&L: What is the scale of some of these organizations that you’ve come across? Do you find that they’ve had a lot of impact, support or following?

RB: It’s a bit hard to measure, as you might imagine, just as it’s hard to measure adherence to Christian nationalism itself. One of the best recent efforts to do this comes out of PRRI, Public Religion Research Institute, and they estimate that about a third of Americans are either supportive of or strongly supportive of Christian nationalist views.

What that means is that almost twice that number are not. And when you look at their numbers, you see that about 30% of Americans completely reject the ideas associated with Christian nationalism and about 40% are skeptical of the ideas associated with Christian nationalism.

In the terms used by social movement scholars, I view this as what is called an unmobilized sentiment pool. So that’s about 70% of Americans who could be mobilized to resist Christian nationalism, who hold attitudes consistent with that work, who may or may not be plugged in to different kinds of organizational work that is actively resisting Christian nationalism.

The extent to which those people are involved with that more active resistance work, I don’t know. And that’s something that I’m still trying to figure out how to measure.

F&L: Have you seen an increase in this type of organizing over the past few years?

RB: Absolutely. Yeah. Almost every time we turn around, there’s a new organization or campaign that is dedicated to this cause. And that was — really, one of the reasons that my students and I began this project is that we saw this proliferation of efforts to deal with this, and in particular to address it at different scales of the problem, to educate people about it who are coming from really different places, and to do it in a way that is specifically tailored to that community.

That, I think, is one of the most important pieces of this. When you’re talking to a group of people who are themselves perhaps even conservative Christians and you are trying to share your concerns about Christian nationalism, you’re going to have that conversation in a different way than if you’re talking to a group of people who have left Christianity or a group of people who are perhaps members of a minority religious community and have a very different relationship to Christianity.

Each of those conversations is going to look very different, and organizations have emerged that are having those conversations with different groups in different ways.

One of the new things about this moment for that field is that it’s bringing more conservative white Christians into this work than ever before, in part because they’re concerned about what Christian nationalism is doing in their churches in terms of it being a divisive force or a distorting force, but also what it’s doing to the brand of Christianity publicly in the United States and around the world.

White conservative Christians have not always been open to as much interfaith or multifaith work, or at least haven’t been as well networked in that field, so that is a new challenge. But at the same time, doing multifaith and interfaith work is not, from what I can see, necessary for all of the groups that are doing this.

Many of the groups that are mobilizing around this issue are really intending to speak to their own communities in a way that feels authentic, that doesn’t feel like it’s been co-opted by outsiders, that is viewed as stridently pro-Christian, and that doesn’t necessarily involve working with other faith groups, at least at this stage.

F&L: Could you name some organizations that you felt have been particularly innovative in how they’re combating Christian nationalism?

RB: I mentioned Christians Against Christian Nationalism. That’s been a powerful network just for bringing clergy in particular together across denominations, across other kinds of divides, and starting these conversations and then providing resources really broadly to different communities around the country.

Vote Common Good has also been tireless in their efforts to educate their communities, which they identify as Christians, about Christian nationalism and the political implications of that.

Beyond those two, there are a number of groups that are thinking about it more broadly. One is the Poor People’s Campaign, which is not explicitly about Christian nationalism but weaves a critique of Christian nationalism into its broader critique of American politics right now, and specifically looks at how Christian nationalism has led to certain kinds of policies that they view as bad for most Americans. They’ve done a lot of education drawing lines between this ideology, which can feel very abstract, and specific policies.

And then finally, a newer organization called the J29 Coalition is actually a network of theologically conservative pastors, self-identified as evangelicals, who are nonetheless trying to think together about the challenges associated with Christian nationalism for their congregations.

Interestingly, they are funded in part by the Stiefel Foundation, which is an atheist organization, and I think that relationship represents a really interesting example of how strange bedfellows are coming together to think about the risks of Christian nationalism for democracy, whether or not they necessarily share a concern about the risks of Christian nationalism for the Christian church.