Defusing the Christian Right Requires Understanding It and Offering Something Better

But fear and loathing do not constitute a political strategy for curbing the influence of would-be theocrats. Denouncing this movement as a subset of patriarchal white supremacist MAGA does not dissuade adherents, it hardens them. Nor is it helpful to mischaracterize it as a uniquely or disproportionately rural phenomenon, an error that dovetails with the broader habit of denigrating rural Americans by equating them with MAGA and blaming them for Trump.

How we define the prevalence and meaning of Christian Nationalism matters. Only then can we effectively talk about and understand the movement and its followers, with an eye toward creating strategies for defusing its power.

There is no playbook for how to counter the political power of a religious movement. Lawsuits defending the separation of church and state shore up one crucial guardrail. But keeping would-be theocrats out of power in the first place requires that we understand what draws the laity to evangelical leaders who mix religion with extreme right-wing politics. Cultivating such an understanding enables us to move from simply recoiling in horror to meeting adherents where they’re at and then offering other kinds of experiences that meet their needs for fellowship, meaning and belonging.

Liberalism in crisis

Extremist ideologies and hardline religious movements flourish at the crossroads of four crises of contemporary liberalism:

• Distrust of institutional authorities
• Weak communal bonds and civic infrastructure
• The dehumanizing and destabilizing impacts of technology
• A diminishing ability to find meaning and purpose in life

These upheavals are taking place in the context of a democratic system so weakened and delegitimized by the influence of money that the guardrails protecting our democracy from autocracy have come loose.

Into the eye of this perfect storm of social and political crises step canny, self-anointed power seekers hawking an appealing product: Deliverance.

Deliverance from loneliness, confusion, self-loathing and existential dread. Deliverance from the fear of becoming marginalized.

Deliverance from existing as “strangers in their own land” as sociologist Arlie Hochschild called it in her book by that title.

Deliverance from the good, the bad, and the ugly features of modernity.

There are wholesome cures for what ails us, and there is snake oil.

What’s in a name?

“Christian Nationalism,” as some call it, is a decentralized, non-denominational right-wing evangelical network with worldly political ambitions such as electing Trump twice (or three times as many of their leaders insist). Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, defines it as a political ideology that “promotes the myth that the American republic was founded as a Christian nation” and an anti-democratic movement that demands governmental adherence to “idiosyncratic interpretations of the Bible.”  

Jaw-dropping headlines like “45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a ‘Christian Nation’ ” have led the public to perceive Christian Nationalism as a huge and growing movement. Dig beneath the 45% headline, and it’s not clear what people meant when they told the Pew Research Center that the U.S. should be a Christian nation. Political scientist James Kirk questions whether they want a Christian theocracy or “a society that embraces faith and Christian values like charity or forgiveness, without actually wanting to see a violation of the separation of church and state.”

Among those in the Pew study who say the U.S. should be a Christian nation, the majority do not want our country to establish an official religion and do not want the government to advocate for Christian values. But a significant number of Americans do, and their leaders are power players in Trump circles.

Christian Right theology and political activism have radically evolved since the days of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and several excellent books have chronicled its unsettlingly militant transformation. Matthew D. Taylor, visiting scholar at the Center for Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, estimates that 10-15% of Americans are radicalized Christian supremacists determined to impose Christian law and morality by hook or by crook.

Now that Taylor and his peers have our attention, some are shifting gears toward generating a more nuanced understanding of what drives the Christian Right and what strategies could begin to defuse its power and influence.

I use the term “Christian Right” rather than “Christian Nationalism” intentionally. Baylor University sociologist George Yancey, co-author of One Faith No Longer: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America, believes that the term “Christian Nationalism” does more to stigmatize than to clarify the perspectives of conservative Christians, most of whom do not endorse the theocratic ambitions implied by the word “nationalism.”

“The conversation ends when you tell people their goal is to impose a Christian theocracy,” Yancey says. Appending the word “white” (as in “white Christian Nationalism”) further antagonizes, imputing white supremacist goals all but a handful of right-wing Christians would reject.

Yancey began noticing the term Christian Nationalist deployed in academia in the wake of Trump’s first election, as shocked academics clamored for an explanation that morphed into a desire to lay blame on and deride conservative, white and presumptively racist evangelical Christians. He sees the term as a weapon designed to stigmatize and humiliate conservative Christians. (A search for the term Christian Nationalism in Media Cloud shows usage by almost exclusively left-leaning media).

Theologian Heath W. Carter took to the pages of The Atlantic in March to argue that the term Christian Nationalism does more harm than good. He wrote:

Christians played a pivotal role in both of Trump’s electoral victories. If his opponents are to fare better in the future, one small but meaningful step could be to retire the label Christian nationalist as a term of political combat. The phrase has no stable referent in the wider scope of American history,and its dismissive edge may do more to inflame resentments than to check them—let alone change anyone’s mind.

But for Taylor, the term is appropriate: “Calling someone a Christian Nationalist isn’t pejorative, it’s an analytical description.” However, he adds, it’s vital to recognize that Christian Nationalism takes many forms, some benign, some quite dangerous. Just because someone has a “sentimental preference for patriotic God-talk” doesn’t mean they want to establish a Christian tyranny.

Terminology aside, Yancey and Taylor agree there is a tendency for critics, as Taylor puts it, to “paint with too broad a brush, alienating conservative Christians and driving them into the arms of extremists.” Both are cautiously optimistic about the value of engaging in dialogue with people who are drawn to Christian Right churches and ideologies.

After the 2016 election, Yancey started asking Christian Trump supporters why they voted for him. One of their top reasons was a fear of persecution and the expectation that Trump would protect them, for example, from being forced to provide wedding services to gay couples or, later, from having their churches closed during the pandemic.

Their responses led Yancey to see the Christian Right’s activities as a form of identity politics analogous to racial and gender identity politics on the Left: This subset of conservative Christians believes that the secular, “woke” establishment is oppressing them. Once a group sees itself as marginalized, its tribal affinity can become morally blinding. Members of the oppressed group enforce ideological purity and rationalize rule-breaking and unfair treatment of their oppressors (the “Demoncrats”) as a necessary means to a righteous end.

Bashing conservative Christians gets us nowhere

The notion that conservative Christians are oppressed may sound absurd, but consider it from their perspective. Over the past 50 years, as the number of Americans who identify as Christian has declined, the country’s cultural mores have shifted in a decidedly liberal direction. Pornography is freely available; pre-marital sex and cohabitation are the norm; gay marriage is the law of the land, LGBTQ people are celebrated in entertainment and media; fifth graders in almost half of school districts are taught about puberty blockers; women are not expected to (and usually cannot afford to) stay home and raise children; and, perhaps most threatening of all, the U.S. is no longer a nation of churchgoers. The list goes on. Despite how deep into authoritarian oligarchy we have slipped, we are still a culturally liberal nation, as seen on TV.

Churches, evangelical mega-churches included, are a lot of things. Like most American institutions, many have racist skeletons in their closets (and homophobic ones on the front porch). But these are also places of communion and meaning, of faith and belonging. No matter how much outsiders may hate them, these are sacred places. In a country increasingly bereft of civic institutions, churches are one of the few remaining places where people gather in-person and enjoy a feeling of belonging and community and the prospect of personal redemption.

Allegations of racism are likely to land particularly badly on non-white evangelicals, of whom there are many. (A 2023 PPRI/Brookings study classifies 20% of non-white Protestants as “adherents” of Christian Nationalism and another 32% as “sympathizers.”) While some of the smaller branches of the Christian Right are openly racist, religious scholar Matthew Taylor tells me the biggest and most influential church bodies pride themselves on having diverse congregations and, adds Yancey, a “colorblind” anti-racist ethic. Colorblind anti-racism is not in vogue among progressive social justice activists, but it’s a cherished ideal among the vast majority of the population, evangelical Christians included.

“The Gospel is not just for a particular group of people, but for everybody,” says Bomi Roberson, a black leader of a New Apostolic Reformation church in Durham, North Carolina. Reporting for the New York Times, historian Molly Worthen notes that Roberson’s very diverse church “is a clue to how commentators have misunderstood this movement, especially when they cast it as a conspiracy focused on a right-wing, racist domestic agenda.”

There’s another popular misconception about the Christian Right worth clearing up: It’s no more prevalent in rural America than anywhere else.

To test this out, political scientist James Kirk added a series of questions to the 2024 Rural Voter Survey. (The Colby College Rural Voter Survey is the largest, most detailed survey of rural adults available.) Kirk discovered that rural folks are not more religious than their urban and suburban brethren. They are not more likely to go to church and do not score higher on the Christian Nationalism scale scholars use to identify adherents. When asked if they think the federal government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation, 24% said yes, the same as non-rural respondents.

Contrary to Kirk’s data, commentators routinely portray Christian Right extremism as yet another item on the checklist of things liberals hate about rural America. In White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, a shockingly error-ridden work, the authors assert that Christian Nationalism is stronger in rural areas than in cities. As proof, they cite an off-the-cuff comment made by Georgetown University professor Paul Miller on a podcast. (Miller did not respond to my emails asking for the basis for his assertion).

As further evidence of the rural scourge, the authors bring up a tangential incident as a weak proxy for rural Christian supremacy: The January 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol. They claim that, out of the 21 members of Congress who opposed a bill honoring the police officers who defended the Capitol, 18 represented “pure rural” or mixed “rural-suburban” districts. 

Using the same database the authors cited, I counted five “no vote” representatives from pure rural districts and eight from rural-suburban districts. That adds up to 13, not 18. But more egregious than the arithmetic error is what they omit: There are 82 members of Congress representing pure rural districts, and only five of them voted against the bill in question.

Put in this light, the vote on the bill does not corroborate the authors’ defamatory thesis: Rural America is a hotbed of theocratic, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, violent, conspiracy-tinged, rage-filled activities that pose an existential threat to democracy. You can’t believe everything you read, whether it’s in the Bible or in a book published by Random House in 2024.

I dwell on this book because it demonstrates the lengths even reputable authors will go to smash the dough into their cookie cutter narrative of rural pathology. All of which serves to super-juice liberals’ habit of blaming rural voters for our nation’s political dysfunction by exaggerating the degree to which rural people participate in the things liberals most hate and fear: bigotry, right-wing political violence and right-wing Christians’ flexing of political power.

Demonizing conservative Christians intersects and overlaps with longstanding demeaning of “hillbillies” and “rednecks.” Everyone from CNN pundits to Taylor Swift have taken potshots at the rubes, invoking worn out stereotypes of toothless, Bible-thumping rural bigots and fools. Jennifer Welch, host of the popular podcast “I’ve Had It,” takes the cake (and her 1.5 million fans eat it up): Evangelical Christianity is a “horrific cancer,” Welch proclaimed last March. She continued, “[T]hese people are the Christian Taliban … It’s just white trash, magical thinking, dumb people bullshit.”

Not to be outdone, Welch’s co-host chimes in with categorical condemnation: “It’s the ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ crowd who are the cruelest. They hate poor people. They hate people who aren’t like them. They hate women, gay people, black and brown people.”

Once a bigotry label is affixed, there is little interest in pursuing a deeper or more nuanced understanding of the alleged bigot’s values, feelings or belief structure. It’s a dead end, in the same way that denouncing MAGA as nothing more than a white nationalist movement proved to be a dead end that prevented us from seeing and understanding its appeal to non-white voters until it was too late.

To rebuild the commons, start with dialogue

Labeling the Christian Right as hateful, ignorant or cuckoo, and fervently wishing it would go away, will not weaken its hold; on the contrary, demonizing its adherents ratifies their perception of themselves as a righteous, persecuted minority who must ruthlessly battle their oppressors.

Taylor and Yancey have, I believe, a better way forward, one that involves respectful dialogue around people’s religious and ideological beliefs and values. To their prescription, I would add the importance of acknowledging people’s yearning for sacred customs and practices in an ultra-modern society that has been stripped of them.

Taylor’s forthcoming book, Defying Tyrants, is a theological manifesto that speaks directly to Christians who are drawn to so-called Christian Nationalism. Inspiration for the book came from wisdom Taylor gleaned from people around the world with firsthand experience fighting religious extremism in their countries. Most of them, he says, emphasized the importance of promoting an alternative populist theology. “If they [the Christian Right] are the only ones making religious arguments, they’re going to win that argument over people speaking only in the language of Enlightenment values,” he says.

Taylor’s book presents a theology in which Jesus and the early Christian church were staunchly anti-authoritarian foes of imperialist Rome who refused to bow to the cult of Cesar. The true Antichrists, says Taylor, are those who abuse power in Jesus’s name. Amen to that.

Respectful engagement is the path forward. Equally important: thriving communities with strong civic infrastructure. Humans have a fundamental need to join together in shared purpose. Labor unions, fraternal clubs, benevolent associations, and, of course, places of worship, used to serve this role, but have been on a steep decline for decades. Megachurches, big box stores and gun clubs sprout up to fill the empty space. If we don’t like what’s growing in the garden, we have to plant our own seeds.

Erica EtelsonMore by this author →

Erica Etelson is co-founder of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative and the author of Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide.