What is a White-Christian Nationalist?
It's not just another name for 'racist'
“My opinion of a White nationalist, if somebody wants to call them a White nationalist, to me, is an American. It’s an American. Now, if that White nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do, because I am 110% against racism.” - U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville
Tommy Tuberville, Alabama's senior senator, stepped into controversy during a recent CNN appearance in which he insisted on distinguishing between a White nationalist and a racist.1 The media and his political opponents denounced him for defending White nationalism. A more charitable reading is that he stumbled in his effort to condemn what he views as identity politics that polarizes the nation. For Tuberville, "White nationalist" is the latest epithet used by the political left to caricature the political right as racist. For him, a nationalist is a patriot, and a white nationalist is a white patriot. In his view, a white nationalist is a good American, but a white nationalist who is also racist is not.
I begin with that episode not because I am inclined to defend Tommy Tuberville. I've not forgiven him for the many times his Auburn Tiger football team embarrassed my LSU Tigers, and he and I disagree significantly concerning how we achieve America. I begin with that episode because it nicely demonstrates how confused Americans are by the burgeoning use of White Christian Nationalism and its derivatives as the latest critique of the political right.
In October 2022, the Pew Research Center reported that most Americans surveyed (54%) had never heard of Christian Nationalism, and almost two-thirds (63%) of Republicans had never heard of it. Majorities from both dominant political parties had either not heard of it or did not know enough to have an opinion about it (GOP - 73%, Democrats 51%).2 The Tuberville episode highlights two important points. First, the jargon surrounding White Christian Nationalism has become politicized, with leaders on the political right starting to claim or defend the description as a badge of honor and the media and elite on the political left using it to accuse their opponents of racism. Second, most Americans, including United States senators, experience the naming of Christian Nationalism as new and unfamiliar.
I call attention to the recent politicization of the discourse concerning White Christian Nationalism because it impedes efforts to resist it. Christian Nationalism is a clear and present danger to American Christianity and liberal democracy. We need Americans on the left and right cooperating in its renunciation. Politicization presents it as a less pernicious caricature, feeds it, and magnifies its polarizing effect. Throughout this series, I will challenge the political left and right to avoid impeding our resistance by reductively deploying Christian Nationalism as a weapon in our American cultural wars.
I call attention to its relative obscurity in our public discourse because - like Senator Tuberville - most Americans don't know what Christian Nationalism is or why we should be concerned about it. Answering those questions is my focus in this and immediately following articles. In a subsequent article, I'll share some concerns about quantitative Christian nationalism research (QCN research) that cause me to urge caution in embracing some of its conclusions.
So who, what, and where are Christian nationalists? Christian Nationalism turns out to be a diverse genus with multiple species. To answer these questions, start with the species that tripped up Senator Tuberville, White Christian Nationalism.
Like Senator Tuberville, persons on the political left and right commonly misconceive "White" or "White Christian" with plain adjectival meanings clarifying the type of nationalism in view. For Tuberville, a "White Nationalist" is simply a nationalist whose racial category is White, and a "White Christian" is a nationalist whose racial category is White and whose religion is Christian. But, as we will see, QCN research shows that's a significant misconception. In 2023, "White-Christian" should be hyphenated to signal that it denotes neither a racial nor a religious grouping but the set of citizens who conform to Anglo-Protestant values and practices. A White-Christian Nationalist, in a self-contradictory fashion, illiberally sees such conformance as normative for American political identity.
Georgetown political scientist Paul Miller suggests that American White Christian Nationalism is identity politics for what Samual Huntington infamously defended as our majority Anglo-Protestant tribe.3 The Anglo-Protestant ethno-tradition has historically been a dialectical discourse between practicing Protestant Christians of Anglo-Saxon descent. That's no longer true. In 2023, "Anglo-Protestant" no longer denotes Anglo-Saxon descent, Protestantism, or Christian practice. Instead, it signifies those who embrace the normativity of the received Anglo-Protestant ethno-tradition for daily life. A people bound voluntarily by mutual subscription to a shared ethno-tradition, White-Christian community membership now includes persons of all colors, a plurality of non-Protestant Christians, and non-Christians.4
Except for immigrants, White-Christian community consciousness is generally pre-rational and pre-voluntary, a given generated by heredity, geographic and historical context. Because of assimilation pressures, immigrant and native non-White and non-religious persons often rationally and voluntarily embrace that community consciousness while simultaneously embracing their originating community's consciousness. Assimilated, they cherish the dominant Anglo-Protestant ethno-tradition while sometimes suffering, often illiberally excluded from power or inclusion within the societies it spawns.
America’s dominant White-Christian community stewards an ethno-tradition widely admired at home and abroad. Yet, all too often, the community bears witness to the goodness of its ethno-tradition through its breach. After 243 years, we’ve still not achieved our country. White-Christian community is largely culpable as the overwhelmingly dominant power among the many communities constituting the American body politic.5 To the extent that it respects the rights and liberties of all persons and communities and works cooperatively in civic friendship with other American communities toward the common good under the rule of law, the American White-Christian community is rightly ordered. Consistency in such communal ordering is, of course, the hope of the American experiment. Tragically, such consistency remains evasive.
American White-Christian Nationalism should not be understood as just the latest word for racism, for it is more pernicious than that. It is identity politics for those whose social identity and cooperation arise from mutual subscription to the Anglo-Protestant ethno-tradition. It is a complex and disordered sociopolitical phenomenon that divinizes that community, rendering its claims to power absolute while marginalizing others and inviting the American government to enforce the priority of its ethno-tradition by law. Paradoxically, its blasphemous illiberality makes White-Christian Nationalism deplorably oxymoronic. I’ll unpack that claim in future posts.
Wolf, Zachary. 2023. “Here’s What Sen. Tommy Tuberville Actually Said about White Nationalists.” CNN Politics (blog). July 11, 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/11/politics/white-nationalists-tommy-tuberville-what-matters/index.html.
Smith, Gregory, Rotolo, Michael, and Tevington, Patricia. 2022. “Views of the U.S. as a ‘Christian Nation’ and Opinions about ‘Christian Nationalism.’” Pew Research Center (blog). October 27, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/10/27/views-of-the-u-s-as-a-christian-nation-and-opinions-about-christian-nationalism/.
Miller, Paul D., and David French. 2022. The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism. IVP Academic. 12.
Whitehead, Andrew L., and Samuel L. Perry. 2020. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford University Press, 29.
Rorty, Richard. 1999. Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. New Ed edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.