There’s no denying that Christianity is omnipresent throughout the United States. From Puritan-led hunts for Satan through the American wilderness to fighting for abolition and prohibition to legislating Christian Nationalism — or the merging of the American identity with a conservative and often White expression of the religion — it’s abundantly evident that Christianity is one of the most influential power structures in American history.
Today, White Christian evangelicals represent one of the most powerful and predictable voting blocks among the American electorate. Their voter turnout is among the highest, and their generally conservative-aligned values position them as a reliably Republican coalition. Additionally, in the American South, where the majority of White Christian evangelicals are concentrated, there is a stark lack of third spaces outside of home and school or work. This absence in rural America decreases the chances that individuals encounter cross-cutting cleavages which promote tolerance, compromise, and social stability among differing populations.
The growing notion among Christian Nationalists and GOP leaders that American Christianity is under attack drives affective polarization — or the tendency to view those with opposing political allegiances as incorrect, immoral, and threatening — among White Evangelicals. Affective polarization drives “in-group love” and “out-group hate,” a phenomenon fortifying the White Evangelical in-group at the expense of driving mass polarization among the American electorate. Aided by the increasing homogeneity and politicization of Christian congregations, the lack of third spaces, and in-grouping self-preservation tactics among many Christian Nationalists, American Christianity, its proponents, and the American citizenry find themselves in a dangerous position.
The posturing of American Christianity as an all-inclusive ideological commitment ultimately will not bode well for the faith. According to Washington University professor and author Ryan Burge, the increasing integration of Christianity into GOP messaging has driven a parallel rise in the Nones, or individuals who claim to have no religious identification. The perversion of the Christian faith into a conservative, capitalist prop upon which the GOP can harvest donations and support is thus most certainly detrimental to Christianity as an institution. Adherence to the Christian faith is a fundamental liberty and a historied component of our nation’s tapestry, as are its practitioners. However, the leaders of the American Christian Nationalist movement have leveraged their influence to legislate “crazy” — or political and religious domination — and polarize America by making the faithful fear change. It’s these “crazy” individuals who pose a grave threat to the evolving American identity.
Contextualizing American Christianity
Christianity has undeniably been a ubiquitous source of morality in America with deep historical roots. Most certainly, Christianity has not always been a vehicle for a ludicrous, fantastical dream of nationwide dominance in America. Throughout our nation’s history, Christianity has been a major driver of radical acceptance and change. During the Antebellum period, it was Christians who spearheaded the abolition movement, motivated by a religious conviction that slavery was a profound sin. The Second Great Awakening’s emphasis on the moral responsibility of Christians spurred widespread, biblically-backed arguments about the necessity of expeditious emancipation in opposition to slave owners who utilized the Christian faith to defend enslavement.
Further, it was Christian women who drove the temperance movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the creation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. These women mobilized to fight the sale of alcohol, deeming it a source of poverty, domestic violence, and moral decay. Christians saw prohibition as a moral calling to protect their own families and communities from these issues. Later, the Civil Rights Movement was led by American Christians, specifically members of the Black Church. Christianity propelled the grassroots uprising and national sentiment for the fight for racial equality that was necessary for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
This certainly is not to suggest that Christianity has exclusively been a force for goodness. It has also been used to justify indigenous cultural cleansing and land theft, segregation, and the persecution of religious dissenters, among many other shameful actions throughout United States history. However, America certainly has Christians to thank for their part in backing some of the most consequential reformist movements in our nation’s history.
Unfortunately, progressive uses of the Christian religion have been largely lost in recent generations. Christianity no longer espouses the heroic deeds of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Shelby Spong, among countless others. Rather, modern American Christianity is increasingly associated with the far-right conservative movement, spearheaded by individuals such as Nick Fuentes, Pete Hegseth, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Erika Kirk, and the late Charlie Kirk. Even before the modern Christian Nationalist zealots, leaders of televangelism and megachurches contributed to the booming mobilization of American Christianity for profit and power. These individuals bear large responsibility for the devolution of American Christianity from a shield protecting individual freedoms and morality into a weapon attacking the liberties of those who fall outside of the Christian in-group.
While benevolence is not absent from modern American Christianity, the voices and missions of charitable faith-goers are often drowned out by broader, more dangerous representations of the religion at a national scale. Now more than ever, White Evangelical Christians — a crowd which overwhelmingly supports Christian Nationalism — represent far more than a religious demographic. The categorization also serves as a virtue signal for conservative and traditional commitments, political identification, moral high ground, and opposition to an increasingly pluralistic America.
The Christian Co-Op
The perversion of Christianity for political authority and legitimacy was no accident. Bob Smietana, a reporter for Religion News Service, explained in an interview with the HPR that the GOP has “strategically made a home for individuals reckoning with the changing pluralistic America.” This strategy has caused supporters of the GOP and the Democrats to diverge significantly. Christian zealots who want to preserve Christianity as America’s “civil religion” naturally flock to the GOP, while those more willing to accept what — and more importantly, who — the future of the United States may consist of find common ground with Democrats.
Smietana details how this form of party self-selection manifests in the makeup of both parties, claiming that “the GOP looks and sounds like what America used to look and sound like” while the Democratic party increasingly mirrors the changing American citizenry. By appealing to Americans unwilling to accept demographic shift, the GOP has increasingly become a home for fanatics of the American past. Such appeals attract and empower the bigot primed for a culture war while pushing out the moderate conservative, driving the extreme radicalization of the GOP. Above all, making space for those refusing to accept the changing American citizenry fosters a breeding ground for institutionalized bigotry. An echo chamber in the GOP like this is what helped prime White Evangelicals to accept domination and power as political and religious doctrine.
With the increasing religious homogeneity of the GOP, it should come as no surprise that its leaders utilize faith to mobilize support. The power of the prosperity gospel — or the doctrine that physical and financial blessings are part of the Christian god’s will for the faithful — cannot be overstated. President Trump himself has utilized Christian virtue signaling of the prosperity gospel by asking supporters to “sow a seed of faith” in America through financial donation. In tandem, GOP figures like Charlie Kirk brewed fear of those who aren’t MAGA footsoldiers, claiming that liberals used Islam as a weapon to “slit the throat of America” and that Islam “aims to conquer us, militarily and demographically.” The list of groups for White Evangelicals to fear, including immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals, goes on. By appealing to a deeply-held belief that the Christian in-group will prosper if they are faithful and a fear of those who are unlike themselves, the GOP has co-opted the White Evangelical voting block into a powerful political force.
The GOP’s strategic pandering to White Evangelicals has drastic consequences for both democracy at large and the Christian church itself. Professor Burge explained that the term “evangelical” now serves as a major political label rather than a theological one. He further claimed that such political labeling of a traditionally theological belief drives young Americans away from the Christian church and from dominantly Christian areas in rural and southern America. This integration has exacerbated southern “brain drain” — or the movement of young, talented, and educated individuals from their homes to areas with more opportunity and better conditions. Leaders of the Christian Nationalist movement continue to take advantage of rural America’s lack of cross-cutting cleavages; in these areas, human capital will continue to flow elsewhere. This leaves flyover America even more vulnerable to attack from those seeking political authority, for these areas become less concentrated with moderating forces like class, racial, and religious diversity — making for stronger echo chambers and further radicalization.
Faith, Fear, and the Future of the American Identity
Above all, it isn’t the White, Evangelical Christians who are crazy, nor are they the root of the problem. Rather, it’s the leading individuals who have made this group of people terrified of change. It’s the people who have twisted the word of the Christian Bible to justify bigotry, hatred, harm, arbitrary gender and racial hierarchies, and fear. It’s these individuals who constitute America’s “crazy Christian” problem. Leaders of the Christian Nationalist movement have beyond corrupted and perverted the teachings of the character of Jesus Christ. These individuals have traded in the deeply-held religious beliefs of rural Americans for profit and for power. They have promised fairytales of prosperity and profit, knowing that such personal wealth and abundance will never be realized, nor will it trickle down from the top 1%. It’s these lies, along with fear, that have lit rural America into a flaming MAGA hellscape. Rural Americans deserve far more than what Christian Nationalism has to offer.
The answers offered by Christian Nationalism at their core are exclusionary and contrary to the American founders’ vision of a free and fair America. The movement’s rise is ultimately a story of intolerance, fear, exclusion, and power. Dressing up the grief of the American past in politically garish clothing cannot be the way forward. While the Christian Nationalist movement has brought a slew of issues for American democracy and institutional Christianity, the movement’s traction has revealed most saliently that Americans are once again grappling with what it means to be American. With the United States becoming increasingly pluralistic by the day, such a consequential question will determine who America continues to accept as one of its own and who is entitled to the American Dream.
