Red State Christians: A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind

A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind

Angela Denker

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506482507
• eBook ISBN: 9781506485645
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Campagnes politiques et élections

Winner of a 2019 Foreword INDIES Award Silver Medal

In Red State Christians, readers will get an honest look at the Christians who gave the presidency to the unlikeliest candidate of all time. Veteran journalist Angela Denker spent a year traveling across the United States, interviewing the Evangelical Christian voters who supported the Trump presidency and exploring how their voting block continues to influence the landscape of modern conservative politics. From booming, wealthy Orange County megachurches to libertarian farmers in Missouri, to a church in Florida where the pastors carry guns, to an Evangelical Arab American church in Houston, to conservative Catholics on the East Coast--the picture Denker paints of them is enlightening, at times disturbing, but always empathetic.

In this expanded edition, Denker reflects on the lasting impact of the Trump presidency, the Christian white nationalism it emboldened, the 2020 election and transfer of power, and the subsequent insurrection at the United States Capitol. A must-read for those hoping to truly understand what Trumpism means for the 2020s and beyond.

1

Christian Nationalism and Fourth of July Church in Dallas, Texas

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

In 1983, John Cougar Mellencamp wrote a song that told the story of America for conservatives, liberals, and Christians alike. Mellencamp sings about a black man living in Indiana with an interstate running through his front yard. He lives in a pink shotgun house, meaning you could open the front and back doors, shoot a shotgun shell through the house, and not hit a thing. The black man is watching a woman he loves in the kitchen, and he has loved her for a long time. He thinks he has it so good, in America.

Mellencamp sings in the second verse about a young man wearing a T-shirt and listening to rock and roll. He has greasy hair and a greasy smile; maybe he’s not too clean, not too rich. Still, this greasy young man believes he can be president one day—because America is a place for dreams and dreamers.

“Ain’t that America?” the song demands again and again. “Ain’t that America?”—where you and I might not be millionaires, but we can be born free, dream dreams, and maybe someday own a little pink house in front of an interstate in Indiana.

Thirty-three years later, newly elected US president Donald Trump gave an inauguration speech depicting a very different America:

Washington flourished—but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered—but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. . . .

For too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.^[1]

Cheering his dark and dire depiction of America were millions of Red State Christians, many of them weaned on church traditions that taught Christian Nationalism, the importance of America as a Christian country, and the fear that America was being destroyed for its apostasy. Somehow, despite being raised a millionaire’s kid in New York City, Trump spoke their language. He understood their colloquialisms and appealed directly to Red State Christians across America, whether by eating a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo, shouting “Merry Christmas,” bragging about his Big Mac consumption, or saying things that sounded racist, sexist, and rude. While Trump was connecting through the power of shared language, Democrats sounded like foreigners to Red State Christians across the South and rural America. Leading liberals didn’t understand the language, much less speak it.

Not so long ago, Americans spoke a shared language, before divergent strains of partisan media and sophisticated targeted advertising gave two Americas two different languages. Thirty-three years ­earlier—and probably still in 2016—lots of Red State Christians could recite the words to Mellencamp’s song, which had been played at campaign events for Republican presidential candidate John McCain until Mellencamp’s liberal beliefs became public and McCain was criticized for using the song.

“Land of the free” and dreams and little houses for everyone were sentiments that fit the sunny optimism of the Reagan/Bush Republican Party. The fact that Mellencamp’s song was also played at President Barack Obama’s inauguration—as well as at 2010 conservative political events opposing same-sex marriage, despite protests from Mellencamp himself—was not all that surprising in a country where most people saw America in much the same way as Mellencamp’s song described, despite partisan differences.

The song’s main idea, at least as most Americans heard it, was that America’s a place where anyone can succeed, anyone can buy a little pink house, and anyone can be free. This is the idea of America that immigrants climbed aboard rickety steamships for, the idea of America that soldiers died for, the triumph of America that made it the beacon of the world and the great enemy of despots and dictators everywhere.

By 2016, however, this optimistic idea of America was no longer a foregone conclusion. Two years later, McCain was dead. Most rock stars were hated by most Republicans (and vice versa), and the only ones deemed eligible to sing about America for conservatives were country singers.

Among those whose idea of America had changed the most since Mellencamp’s song were the 81 percent of white American Evangelical Christians who voted for Donald J. Trump.^[2] In Trump’s America, particularly among Red State Christians, people have lost confidence in America’s Christian identity. The United States is no longer the place where resurrection seems possible because anything is possible, even pink houses for everyone. And a shared song to represent America can no longer be sung at both liberal and conservative political events.

Instead, Red State Christians consider America and American Christianity under siege, resulting in a defensive pushback. Churches today must defend not just Jesus but also America. The American flag and the Christian flag are posted side by side in sanctuaries across the country, often directly in front of the cross.

Nationalism and American Evangelical Christians

Christian conservatives across America have watched their beloved social causes lose again and again in the Supreme Court, elections, and popular-opinion polls. The majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage and government-sponsored birth control. The white male patriarchal leadership that continues to be the norm in many conservative churches and families has been challenged on the national stage, especially in the midst of the #MeToo movement and the widely publicized alleged sexual misconduct and damaging misogynistic theology of several prominent Evangelical pastors and leaders, including Willow Creek founding pastor Bill Hybels and former Southern Baptist Convention president Paige Patterson, both of whom were forced to resign from their leadership positions in the second year of Trump’s presidency.

In response, Red State Christians have turned toward the flag, feeling their patriotic fervor and nostalgic desire for a more Christian America (where kids used to pray in school). This desire to turn back the clock is more about national identity than Christian identity, though the two are inextricably tied together for many Red State Christians. They want to be the ones who get to define what America is, and for them, it must be conservative, and it must be Christian. Otherwise the country—and their Christian faith—will utterly collapse.

Two years into Trump’s presidency, the Pew Research Council released a new religious typology to categorize American Christians.^[3] Among the 39 percent considered highly religious, 12 percent were called “God and Country Christians,” for whom American conservative values and national Christianity are most important.^[4] You can see this throughout the early twenty-first century at Southern Baptist churches across America, where even Christmas and Easter are subsumed by a sort of civic religion that worships God, Guns, and Country (really, the military), lifting up Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July to the same place of honor as religious high holy days.

Trump, Obama, and Christian Nationalism

Donald Trump is no devout Christian; he is no fundamentalist warrior or longtime pro-life activist, as is Vice President Mike Pence. Trump failed the Bible test when asked his favorite passage: “Two Corinthians?” he ventured, failing to realize that the biblical book is referred to as Second Corinthians. Trump is no Bible scholar, no pastor, no retreat leader, and no public pray-er, though he often assures his Evangelical fans that he is praying for them and for America.

Trump didn’t know much about the Bible or about Evangelical Christianity. But this new civic religion, popularized in Evangelical churches across America, especially in the South—with its unique blend of nostalgia plus a little misogyny and dog-whistle race politics on the side—well, that Trump understood well. He’d been winking and nodding at it for years, suggesting that Obama is neither an American citizen nor a Christian. Trump learned the lessons that McCain hadn’t. At one of his campaign events, McCain corrected a woman who said Obama was an Arab. Trump would never do such a thing. He understands instinctively the import of the connection between conservatism and Christianity, as well as the mystique of the inherent liberal threat that is not Christian and often not white. The voters who thought Obama was Muslim would be Trump voters, and Trump wasn’t about to dissuade them.

For most Red State Christians, it didn’t matter that Obama was a longtime attendee of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. It didn’t matter when he took on the cadence of a black preacher and sang “Amazing Grace” from the pulpit in a service remembering the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, where a twenty-one-year-old Lutheran white supremacist gunned down nine African Americans after Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

It didn’t matter because for most Red State Christians, Obama was the embodiment of the progressivism that threatened the America they’d known and loved for generations. Their fear, mixed with the sense that they are losing, results in a toxic, jingoistic stew. They were losing the culture wars, losing the young people at church, losing popular opinion, so things like actual church attendance and Bible knowledge mattered less than a politician’s ability to catalog their list of perceived cultural wrongs and manufactured fears, like transgender persons using middle-school bathrooms or caravans of unruly migrants storming the southern border. Here Trump was on solid footing.

A movement had begun—quietly, first as a resistance to Obama and progressive politics, then as a reaction to lost culture wars and an attempt to reclaim American identity in the face of perceived retreat. Nationalism, the political lion we thought had died on the battlefields of World War II, had been resurrected, this time with religion mixed in. As churches fought battles with pastors to display the American flag on the altar in front of the cross, Christian Nationalism asserted its dominance on the national stage. In churches across Red State America, Christian Nationalism battled for preeminence with the universal (and not exclusively American) gospel of Jesus Christ.

Much to the consternation of national media, celebrities, and intelligentsia (most located on the coasts), Trump speaks a language that appeals to Red State Christians. I don’t know if he understands them, but they definitely understand him. Ultimately, the unlikely love affair between Red State Christians and Trump comes down to a shared language. So I’ve set out to record how Red State Christians talk about their faith, their votes, their guns, and their president. Other books have tackled this issue by studying trends, polling, and social-movement theory. But in addition to being a pastor, I’m a journalist. In both of my vocations, I spend a lot of time listening to ­people—really listening. In the pages that follow, we will get a chance to hear from Red State Christians and, whether you like what they have to say and how they say it, the key to understanding their relationship with the most unlikely president is to listen to them, with empathy, scrutiny, and attention.

My First Fourth of July Worship

I’ve long been aware of this nascent power of Christian Nationalism. During my pastoral internship in Las Vegas in 2011, our worship director and I dared to remove some of the American flag bunting that had been prominently displayed around the church for Fourth of July Sunday worship. We didn’t move it all, and as a granddaughter and daughter-in-law of war veterans, as well as a former chaplain at the VA hospital in Minneapolis, I considered it important to honor those who’d sacrificed for America even as we reminded our congregation that we came first to worship Jesus. That is, from the perspective of this Christian pastor, it is through the lens of Jesus and the gospel that we must interpret everything else, including America and its government.

I didn’t think removing a few pieces of bunting would be a big deal, but we got a lot of pushback. Our worship director took the brunt of it. (I was young—and pregnant—at the time.) He forwarded me one of the angry emails he’d gotten after Fourth of July worship: “I can’t believe that you are not honoring the day that meant FREEDOM FOR THE WORLD,” the parishioner wrote.

Freedom for the world? We rolled our eyes, knowing that, in fact, the fourth of July in 1776 only meant real freedom for a small, white, landowning subset of American men. The end of slavery and women’s right to vote—those would come later. Also, America is not in fact the world, and it’s not even mentioned in the Bible. America’s genesis began in the hands of white, landowning men, and they had no magnificent God-drawn plan—only European conquest, murder, and the deaths of thousands of Native Americans, then slavery, lynchings, and abuse of women. I had been educated in a post-Christendom America and no longer celebrated Columbus Day. I was proud to be American, but mostly I was proud because of who we could be. My faith and my national identity were at odds from time to time, as I contemplated the glory of tax cuts for me as an individual taxpayer and at the same time my own rising guilt at the lack of support for people living in poverty and services for immigrants and refugees.

Trump and Red State Christians would push back against my post-Christendom education. They were tired of being ashamed, tired of learning the mercy of Jesus without participating in the Old Testament stories of conquests. They wanted to reclaim the idea of the Crusades, of a preordained battle between Christians and Muslims. Most of all, they were desperate to reclaim the idea that America was a uniquely and especially Christian nation, where your culture—your positions on social issues, your views on gun control and abortion—were much more important than your grasp of theology or your understanding of grace, death, and resurrection.

A Southern Baptist Pastor on Christian Nationalism

I first became aware of the power of this new Christian Nationalism during an interview at the Evangelicals for Life Conference in Washington, DC, coinciding with the March for Life, a large, predominately conservative Christian march on Washington to oppose abortion and support the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

My conversation partner that morning was Dean Inserra, a prominent conservative Evangelical pastor, the founder of City Church in Tallahassee, Florida, a Liberty University grad and an advisory member of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Red State Christians
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface to the 2022 Edition
• Introduction
• Christian Nationalism and Fourth of July Church in Dallas, Texas
• He Will Save the Supreme Court: Abortion
• God and Guns
• Bibles and Boob Jobs: The Money and Influence of Orange County Christians
• Young, Free-Thinking, and Pro-Trump: Young Midwestern Farm Families in Rural Missouri
• Winners and Losers: Trump, Football, and Christianity
• The Evangelical Intelligentsia: What about “Establishment” Christians?
• Evangelical Women and Donald Trump: Who’s Grabbing Whom?
• Less Conservative, More Consequential: Rural Rust Belt Red State Christians in Appalachia and Central Pennsylvania
• Conservative Catholics: Building a New American Kingdom and Defying the Pope
• Red State Arabs: Christians, Muslims, and Evangelicals in Houston
• On the Border: Donald Trump and Latinx Christians
• Conclusion
• Conclusion to the 2022 Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Notes