The Psychology of Christian Nationalism

Why People Are Drawn In and How to Talk Across the Divide

Pamela Cooper-White

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506482118
• eBook ISBN: 9781506482125
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism

How do we overcome polarization in American society? How do we advocate for justice when one side won't listen to the other and cycles of outrage escalate?

These questions have been pressing for years, but the emergence of a vocal, virulent Christian nationalism have made it even more urgent that we find a way forward.

In three brief, incisive chapters Pamela Cooper-White uncovers the troubling extent of Christian nationalism, explores its deep psychological roots, and discusses ways in which advocates for justice can safely and effectively attempt to talk across the deep divides in our society.

1

Unholy Alliances

Christian Nationalism, White Supremacy, and the Pursuit of Power

On January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC, the mob that grew in intensity over the day was really an amalgamation of various groups, their rage stoked just hours earlier by then president Trump’s incendiary words at a rally near the White House. Many took the president’s encouragement to fight (“if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”1) as the direct order they had been awaiting. Before he even finished his speech, they began pouring along Constitution Avenue and the National Mall toward the Capitol building. Militant right-wing white-supremacist groups—the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers—mingled with the QAnon conspiracy followers and their bare-chested, fur-and-Viking-horn-clad “Shaman,” Jacob Chansley. The mostly white crowd wore Trump’s signature red MAGA (Make America Great Again) baseball caps and carried signs that read Stop the Steal along with overtly racist symbols, including a makeshift scaffold with a noose (eventually targeted at Vice President Mike Pence for his refusal to stop the certification of the election) and a prominent display of Confederate flags.

This insurrection was not a spontaneous igniting of outrage among right-wing Trump supporters (much less a “normal tourist visit”2) or a peaceful crowd full of love, as Trump later described it.3 Nor was it a riot inspired by Antifa, as right-wing Republicans later tried to assert.4 The multiple groups that made up the mass of protesters on the National Mall and at the Capitol had organized on mainstream and right-wing social media5 and in local meetings and rallies since even before the 2020 presidential election, when Trump predicted that if he lost, it could only be due to widespread electoral fraud and the machinations of a left-wing elitist “deep state.”6 The insurrection, while it might have picked up additional participants as the day went on, was no impulsive uprising. It had been carefully planned.

Throughout this motley mob, Christian symbols were ever present on flags that read “Trump Is My President / Jesus Is My Savior”7 and “God, Guns, and Guts Made America—Let’s Keep All Three.”8 There were handwritten signs with quotes from scripture, a cross fastened atop an American flag,9 and most striking of all, an at least eight- or nine-foot wooden cross. In a now viral Getty image,10 one man presses his head to the cross, while another with a bowed head puts his hand on the first man’s shoulder in a posture of fervent prayer. Standing close behind them are a white woman and someone wearing a cap emblazoned with “President Trump.” A blurred figure of another man wearing a green camo cap raises his arms toward the cross with a look of prayerful reverence. The people in this photo were likely members of the self-named Jericho March, a subgroup of Christian nationalists.11 This too was carefully organized in advance. As Emma Green wrote just two days after the event for the Atlantic, the Jericho March was “a gathering of Christians to ‘pray, march, fast, and rally for election integrity.’ After calling on God to ‘save the republic’ during rallies at state capitals and in D.C. over the past two months, the marchers returned to Washington with flourish. On the National Mall, one man waved the flag of Israel above a sign begging passersby to SAY YES TO JESUS. ‘Shout if you love Jesus’ someone yelled, and the crowd cheered. ‘Shout if you love Trump!’ The crowd cheered louder.”12

Green cites the Jericho March’s website,13 which draws an analogy between the group’s perceived corruption within the US government and the biblical story of corruption in the city of Jericho, brought down by Joshua’s triumphal march around the city’s walls. These marchers, a subset of Christian nationalists in the crowd more generally, imitated Joshua and his priests by blowing shofars14 and decrying “the darkness of election fraud.”15 As Green describes it, “Defiant masses literally broke down the walls of government, some believing they were marching under Jesus’ banner to implement God’s will to keep Trump in the White House.”16 At the sound of a shofar on January 6, one woman sang, “Peace in the name of Jesus. The blood of Jesus covering this place.”17 Once in the Capitol building, one man shouted, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!”18 In the Senate chamber, Jacob Chansley sat in the vice president’s chair and prayed at length through a bullhorn, thanking a “divine, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent creator God” for “filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ . . . to exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.”19

Throughout the crowd were banners proclaiming “Jesus saves,” and in one photo, a smiling woman holds a large poster showing Warner Sallman’s famous (and blond) “Head of Christ”20 wearing a MAGA hat.21 She stands with three additional protesters, two white women in Trump caps, and a Black man in a MAGA hat with a flag reading “Patriot vs. . . . ybody.” Another woman in the same photo holds a banner with the QAnon slogan “Trust the Plan.” Elsewhere, people were brandishing Christian flags alongside American flags and banners with more insider meanings such as the Israeli flag (signaling the Christian “dispensationalist” belief that the End of Times cannot arrive until the state of Israel is securely established with Jerusalem as the place prepared for Jesus to return to begin his reign);22 a lone pine tree with the motto “An Appeal to Heaven,”23 and the coiled rattlesnake on a yellow field with the motto “Don’t Tread on Me” (adopted from the American Revolution by right-wing activists).24 White supremacists wore T-shirts displaying a red Crusader cross.25 Throughout the Capitol that day, the most deeply irrational and violent impulses of Christian nationalism were on full display, with ample amounts of paranoia, rage, and apocalyptic fervor.

“Colonel on the Call”: An Example from Middle America

Early the same day, back in central Pennsylvania, a previously little known but highly ambitious state senator and military veteran, Doug Mastriano, and his wife, Rebecca, a Christian lay minister,26 were rounding up “Mastriano’s army”27 to board buses and join the Jericho March as part of the pro-Trump rally in DC, where Mastriano was slated to be a speaker.28 Mastriano, who frequently touts his military service, appears regularly on a right-wing talk radio program called “Colonel on the Call.”

The January 6 event was posted on Mastriano’s Facebook page, “Doug Mastriano Fighting for Freedom,” and the trip was financed by unused contributions to his state senate campaign.29 This gathering of Mastriano’s faithful was preceded on November 25 by an unofficial “hearing” where Trump’s former attorney and staunch ally Rudy Giuliani was a featured speaker, and Trump himself made a virtual appearance on screen before citizens were invited to “testify” before a nine-member all-white panel of state senators regarding their personal accounts of alleged electoral fraud in Pennsylvania.30 Previously, Mastriano had posed for photo ops on the steps of the Pennsylvania State Capitol with white men in Hawai’ian shirts (the dress code of the Boogaloo Bois militia) and others in military fatigues carrying automatic weapons. He has promoted legislation to mandate teaching the Bible in public schools and allow adoption agencies to reject same-sex couples as parents.31

Throughout this time period, he continued to rally his faithful most evenings with rambling “fireside chats” on Facebook, in which he promoted his motto (lifted out of context from the Gospel of John), “Walk as Free People.” Citing Covid-19 as a “fake crisis” and protective mandates as governmental overreach and an incursion on personal freedom—with particular animus reserved for Democratic Governor Tom Wolf and his publicly transgender health secretary, Rachel Levine32—Mastriano echoed Trump’s downplaying of the pandemic. He openly encouraged people to refuse to wear masks or abide by other preventive mandates (this in spite of his own Covid-19 infection, detected during a White House visit in November). He claimed to have talked by phone with Trump “at least a dozen times” prior to January 6 and to have his special confidence.33

Mastriano’s participation in the Capitol riot was met with predictably polarized responses in his home state. Several state legislators, appalled that he had participated in the mass gathering, called for his resignation from office.34 Mastriano shrugged off these demands, saying (in spite of photographs to the contrary), “As soon as I saw that things were getting weird, I left.” And, “When it was apparent that this was no longer a peaceful protest, my wife and I left the area.” But he later stated in an interview that he witnessed the first assaults on the Capitol.35 He has an ardent following of alt-right Republicans in central Pennsylvania and on January 8, 2022, announced his statewide campaign for the 2022 gubernatorial election, claiming that Trump encouraged him to run. He remains defiant and denies revelations about his role in trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election and a call by the US Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate his role in the January 6 insurrection.36

Mastriano is just one figure among many who fused political ambition with a ceaseless spewing of right-wing rhetoric in the months and weeks leading up to January 6. But he represents a style of Christian nationalist oratory common among such political figures—employing charismatic, cunning, self-styled (pseudo-) historical and theological expertise, and a virtually paranoid populist fearmongering, all laced with a sermonic evangelical fervor.

How Pervasive Is Christian Nationalism?

What exactly is “Christian nationalism”? And where does it fit within the broader picture of Christian faith in America and within the American nationalist movement? What are the core beliefs that characterize it, and what are some of the other overlapping belief systems to which many Christian nationalists also adhere?

In the most comprehensive research study conducted to date, sociologists of religion Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry mined two large-scale statistical studies of social attitudes and beliefs (together comprising over 16,000 respondents).37 They conducted follow-up interviews and site observations to arrive at the following definition: “Simply put, Christian nationalism is a cultural framework—a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives and value systems—that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.”38 Elaborating in their conclusion, they write that Christian nationalism

paradoxically holds America as sacred in God’s sight while viewing its future as tenuous and bleak. It valorizes conquests in America’s name and blood shed in its defense. It idealizes relations marked by clear (metaphorical or physical) boundaries and hierarchies both in the private and public realms. It baptizes authoritarian rule. It justifies the preservation of order with righteous violence, whether that be carried out by police against deserving (minority) criminals, by border agents against presumptively dangerous (minority) immigrants, or by citizen “good guys” with guns against rampaging “bad guys” with guns. And it glorifies the patriarchal, heterosexual family as not only God’s biblical standard, but the cornerstone of all thriving civilizations.39

These authors created a “Christian nationalism scale”40 to measure respondents’ attitudes toward six statements on a scale of “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”:41

1. 1. “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.”
2. 2. “The federal government should advocate Christian values.”
3. 3. “The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.” (reverse coded42—i.e., counting percentages who “disagree” rather than “agree.”)
4. 4....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Unholy Alliances: Christian Nationalism, White Supremacy, and the Pursuit of Power
• 2. Why Are People Drawn In by Extremist Beliefs? Conscious Needs and Unconscious Lures
• 3. How to Talk Across the Divide: Creating Human Ties across (Extreme) Difference
• Further Reading and Resources
• Notes