Why Christian Nationalism Is Harder to Challenge Than We Think

What happens when people believe in religious pluralism, but still lean into Christian nationalism when they feel threatened?

In this episode of Faithful Politics, Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram speak with political scientists Brooklyn Walker and Paul Djupe about their research on Christian nationalism, religious pluralism, and why appeals to tolerance do not always work the way we assume. Their work shows something surprising: many Christian nationalists already say they support ideas like religious freedom, diversity, and pluralism. The issue is that when they feel their identity, rights, or way of life are under threat, those pluralistic beliefs often get pushed aside. 

Brooklyn and Paul help unpack why Christian nationalism is different from simply being Christian or patriotic. It places boundaries around who fully belongs in America and who the country is meant to serve. They also explain why threat plays such a powerful role in shaping political behavior, especially when religious and political leaders repeatedly tell Christians they are being persecuted, silenced, or replaced.

The conversation gets into some unexpected findings, including why some Black, Latino, LGBTQ, and religiously pluralist Americans may still hold Christian nationalist views. Rather than treating Christian nationalism as one simple ideology held by one type of person, this episode looks at the deeper identity dynamics that shape how people think about belonging, fear, citizenship, and power.

Research / Articles

“The weakness of anti-Christian nationalism: when religiously inclusive orientations can’t increase tolerance” by Paul A. Djupe and Brooklyn Walker, Politics and Religion: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-religion/article/weakness-of-antichristian-nationalism-when-religiously-inclusive-orientations-cant-increase-tolerance/ABD3180209B76C360FC85AA2FECD0372

Guests bios

Brooklyn Walker is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research focuses on American politics, religion and politics, public opinion, and political psychology, with particular attention to Christian nationalism and how religious identity shapes political and social attitudes. 

Paul Djupe is a Professor of Political Science at Denison University and Director of the Data for Political Research Program. His work focuses on religion and politics, democratic life, public opinion, and the role religious identity plays in American political behavior. 

Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026.  Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091

Website: https://www.sarahstankorb.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

When people feel that they're threatened, right, when they're worried that the government, other groups are gonna take away their rights and hurt them somehow, that our natural tendency is to hunker down and to protect ourselves, right? And so when we're feeling that we have that threat, it's really hard to reach down deep and pull out these ideas, these kind of generous ideas of sharing space with other groups and embracing religious pluralism. That when we're afraid, we tend to want to protect ourselves and find our sense of safety and security again. And so as we're looking at the data, what we're what we're identifying is that people who are feeling a sense of threat tend to, like all the good stuff, all of the tolerance that religious pluralism can bring, like that, people can't access that when they're feeling threatened. Instead, when they're feeling threatened, they hunker down and really lean into beliefs about defending themselves and making sure that they have a space that's marked out just for them, that the country is centering them.

SPEAKER_03 1:04

Hey, welcome back, faithful politics listeners and watchers. I am your political host, Will Wright, and I'm joined by your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. What's up, Josh?

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Hey, what's going on?

SPEAKER_03 1:14

Not a lot. And today we have with us not one but two guests. One of them is a returning guest, Paul Jup, and he is here with Brooklyn Walker, whose recent research looks at Christian nationalism, religious pluralism, and why appeals to tolerance don't always look or don't always work when people feel threatened. This really, really informative paper actually helped explain a lot about how to kind of tackle, how to talk about uh Christian nationalism. And it's very, very scientific and academic. So I'm glad we brought two people on really smart that can help unpack all that. So welcome to the show, Breckman and Paul.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Thank you for having us.

SPEAKER_03 1:53

Yeah. Oh so I'll I'll just start off first. My first question is to you, Paul, and this is totally not even on topic. But last time I had carry on, we were debating the proper pronunciation of your last name. So can we just go ahead and just settle the debate once and for all?

SPEAKER_02 2:09

Well, I will say the D is for decoration, so it's just juop.

SPEAKER_03 2:15

Got it. I think she might have been right. Should have made you try first. I know, I know. All right. So, so, so about about the the research. So, Brooklyn, for you, for someone hearing for the first time the term Christian nationalism, because your your research report talks about anti-Christian nationalism. So just so we can kind of define terms, like when we think of Christian nationalism, like what does Christian nationalism mean?

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Oh, that's a that's a really good question and something that that scholars have been debating for the last 10 years or so as we've wrestled with exploring what this topic, what this concept means and how we're going to measure it. The way that I think about Christian nationalism is as a fusion between what it means to be American and what it means to be Christian. So folks that are Christian nationalist would believe that the United States is inherently a Christian country based on Christian principles, um, and that as a consequence, the country should publicly display that Christian character in its legislation, in its public settings. And we capture this in some of the ways that we measure Christian nationalism. There's lots of different items that people have used. Paul and I would argue that a lot that, you know, a lot of these are tapping into the same kind of concept. But when we try to capture what people mean by Christian nationalism or what who might kind of support Christian nationalism more or less, we ask for whether they agree with statements like these, like whether the US should declare America a Christian nation, US law should be based on Christian values, whether to be really American, you need to be Christian, whether Christian symbols and prayers should be in public spaces, those kind of items. And the more people agree with those concepts, the stronger we say their support for Christian nationalism is.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

I like that. I like that definition and discussion. I mean, I think kind of the the next steps is to disentangle, you know, concerns about, you know, how what is what is different about Christian nationalism versus just loving your country or just being a Christian in the United States. And, you know, I think the the what's clear about being patriotic is that you just love your country and there's no bounds about what kind of group, what kind of pre-existing kind of component of your of your life, of, you know, different kind of racial group or ethnic group or religious group. I mean, anybody can be patriotic. I mean the United States. And what's different about Christian nationalism is it puts bounds on what a good citizen would be, about what kind of group the country is is designed to serve. And so that's the crucial distinction here is moving from unbounded, where everybody can be, can benefit from the United States as well as love the United States, to one where it's really by, for, and of a particular group, and that's and that's Christians.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah, yeah. I and we've heard that kind of thing, right, quite a bit in our conversations that we've had with several experts, right, on this, just about every expert on Christian nationalism, almost out there. I mean, not not not every, I'm sure, but you know, we keep hearing the same kind of trends, the same kind of thing, right? And this tension, of course, is always there. Like, how do you love your country and be a Christian without being a Christian nationalist? Because that's essentially how people feel. Like I was even in a conversation with my my brother on Memorial Day, and we got in a conversation about Christian nationalism. He's a very, he's a very intelligent dude, um, educated and thoughtful on this stuff. And and and he's like, well, I don't, you know, I'm a Christian, I'm a patriot, I don't feel like I'm a Christian nationalist. And I sometimes the stuff you say doesn't even sound that bad. So like there's a lot of confusion, I think, that a lot of people have, and they and they think, ah, Christian nationalism sounds scary, except is it scary? Now we've had enough people on here to understand the concerns that are behind this, but I think one thing to separate even for our viewers, when you're talking about anti-Christian nationalism, you're not talking about anti-Christian or anti-Christianity. And you also talk about a weakness in it. I'd love for you to kind of help us understand what is anti-Christian nationalism in this, separate it from anti-Christian, because that's what people will hear. And if they're not, you know, they they might just automatically hear that depending on on their on their assumptions. And then what is this weakness? I know I've given you a couple questions, but they're kind of connected there, right? Like what is the weakness? Are we talking about it's ineffective, incomplete, wrong? What what is anti, why is it weak? Love to hear that. We could start with you, Paul, and then jump to you, Brooklyn, to get some more insight.

SPEAKER_02 7:11

Yeah, you bet. Absolutely. This is not about being anti-Christian under no circumstances. What this is really about is trying to understand. We started at, well, I'll start, I'll say this. We started from an academic perspective. And you heard some of the statements that Brooklyn kind of gave you about how we measure Christian nationalism, and they're really designed to embrace the high end of the scale. You know, so declare, do you agree declaring this a Christian nation, right? That sort of thing. But but it's not exactly clear what the very low end, what if you reject that statement, what does that mean? And so we are trying to define what that is. And clearly it's not rejecting Christians, it's rejecting the idea of putting bounds on national identity or for whom the nation might benefit, right? And and as I said before, you know, it's really about uh any patriotism, right? And anybody can benefit from the United States, anybody can come here and thrive, and anybody can be a citizen, right, if if they take the citizenship test or happen to be born here. So this is really about rejecting those boundaries. And what we thought is let's let's have an affirmative kind of set of statements that would capture that rejection in a sense of embracing religious pluralism. So there's lots of other possibilities about what rejecting those statements might mean, but we wanted to come up with a set of statements that that captured embracing religious pluralism. And so, you know, thinking that the United States is better off when people are more diverse, right? That's at least one of them. So we kind of walked through all our Christian nationalism kind of statements and thought, what really is sort of the exact opposite of this and use those as a way to capture it. So again, it's it's not about rejecting Christianity. It's really just about rejecting those boundaries. And I'll bet Brooklyn wants to add to that.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

So um, so you asked what some of the weaknesses are. I think something that we were surprised by is how commonly held these kind of anti-Christian nationalism views were. We had in our study a sample of about 1,500 Christians. And when we looked at the anti-Christian nationalism statements, they were overwhelmingly popular. Like there was much stronger support for them than there was for Christian nationalism. So these ideas are really quite present in the population. And so then the question becomes like, when what effect do they have, right? So does holding a worldview that's opposed to Christian nationalism produce a different worldview or outlook than a Christian nationalist worldview was, does? And if so, like how do we sort of bring that more to the floor? So those were some of the questions that we had about anti-Christian nationalism that we just didn't have answers to quite yet.

SPEAKER_03 10:04

You know, I'm I'm curious, and and this is my non-academic background speaking, but like when you look at those, those measures of Christian nationalism, whether it's like PRI or the Whitehead Parry stuff, and it's like it's way on adherence or I forgot what the spectrum is, but it's like it's way over here if you're really, really, you know, if you're the type of person that will assault the Capitol, like this is this is where you are. Like, why wouldn't anti-Christian nationalists just be on the other on the other side of that spectrum? Like the people that are scoring, you know, ones or whatever. I don't know how they score, but but you know, like like that the non non-adherence.

SPEAKER_02 10:42

There's really, you know, there's lots of reasons why people might be on that sort of down in the ones, as you, as you say, right? That reject it. Maybe, maybe they're just sort of libertarian and don't want the federal government involved with religion at all is one. The other possibility, and what we are finding, is that there are there are Christian nationalists who actually embrace religious pluralism. So what we thought would be definitely anchoring that one side, you know, that would that it would embrace religious pluralism, that think the diversity is a good thing for the United States, they actually also embrace Christian nationalism. And to some extent, that's that's not too surprising because there's a sense of equality and rights that plays into that, that everybody's valuable. And if you come into the public sphere thinking that groups across society don't like you and don't want you to be there, right? That don't think it's appropriate for religion to be in the public square, then religious pluralism, you think, actually applies to you. This is actually just talking about your experience as opposed to thinking about, you know, the way we would think other religious minorities, Muslims, Jews, perhaps atheists, right? And so once you kind of get into the mindset of thinking that, you know, Christians are actually persecuted in the United States, right? They're a minority and people don't want to hear their voices and hear their values, then then you understand how how they actually think that religious pluralism is about their circumstance.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

I think too, there's so in public opinion research, there's a idea that a lot of us don't actually have really well-formed, thought-out opinions, that instead we have a lot of different considerations that float around in our heads at any given time. So, for example, there was a more conservative church I attended quite a few years ago, and they had a really robust foster care ministry, right? So from church leadership, from church materials, from the congregation, I heard a lot of different messages about foster care, right? Like I heard that pure religion is looking after orphans, that God is a father to the fatherless. And so foster care and adoption is a way to emulate that, that bioparents need grace and redemption like everybody else. I saw parents that white parents who had adopted black children who really invested in learning about how to build connections so that they could stay connected with the black community that was local, learn how to care for their hair, provide dolls and books and representation, right? And then, like, you know, I also heard things like bioparents had been removed, had their kids removed because they had broke the law. They were lawbreakers, that those bioparents had morally failed, that they loved their sin more than their kids, that, you know, foster agencies were requiring parents to violate biblical child rearing principles by not spanking kids, for example, right? So on this one little tiny issue of foster care and adoption, there were all these different stories that I was getting about how I should think about it, right? That would lead me to really different opinions about foster care and adoption. And so in the in the public opinion research, we call all of those ideas considerations. And the theory is that we have these ideas in our head. And then when some public opinion researcher asks us what we think, we think about which of those opinions are kind of top of the bucket, and we just kind of pull one out, kind of kind of the most salient, the most recent, the thing we've heard the most. And so when it comes to the idea of how politics and religion go together, my guess is we all have a lot of considerations that are floating around in our head, right? Like we hear that we're to love the stranger, love the community, do good for the city. And we also hear messages about defending the in-group, right? And, you know, I and so I think when as public opinion researchers were asking people if they agree with these items or not, they're kind of thinking through their head and saying, Oh, I've heard that before, right? And they don't always cohere together into a single worldview. And I think that's what our data is kind of picking up.

SPEAKER_03 14:59

Got it. So, so and and as plain language as possible. And and I I want to just emphasize the plain part, if I could. Like, what what was your your paper's like largest takeaway? You know, so if if a reporter, an academic, somebody is watching this and they're like, wow, there's this really awesome research paper, what should I do with it? You know, like what would you tell them? Brooklyn, sorry, Brooklyn or Paul.

SPEAKER_02 15:25

Yeah, whichever. I'll I'll I'll start and then and then Brooklyn can uh chime in and correct me if I'm wrong. The way the way I understand this is that Christian nationalists, right? We know some things about them and that they have, you know, some some opinions and behaviors like January 6th, not everybody, of course, but you know, that are that are challenging to democracy, they already hold some of the beliefs that people have tried to use to to correct or tone down or bring down the temperature of of Christian nationalism, right? And so they already believe that. And they so if if we're trying to tell them, hey, you should embrace you know religious pluralism, they're like, yeah, already know that. And they but but when when they're kind of teasing out which consideration to apply to think about kind of other other kind of minorities, other people that deserve rights and liberties in the United States, they put the weight on Christian nationalism and not religious pluralism. Right? And so they already believe the things that we're trying to convince them of to tone down Christian nationalism, but they sort of put that aside and embrace the Christian nationalism to keep other people's rights and liberties beneath theirs. Is that plain enough?

SPEAKER_03 16:48

Yeah. Hear me out. Can I I'm just gonna try to re restate it if I could. So is it is it fair to say that Christian nationalists sort of like fall back on their kind of like protecting defense mechanism whenever like they feel like threatened? And the way to kind of get them out of that is not necessarily to remind them how great a pluralistic society is. It's it's to is to basically put them in their safe place, like whatever that that safe place is. Is that is that kind of accurate, close?

unknown 17:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Oh so you know, we uh can't we didn't test that last move that you made, but the first part of what you said is I think exactly right. That when when people feel that they're threatened, right, when they're worried that the government, other groups are gonna take away their rights and hurt them somehow, that our natural tendency is to hunker down and to protect ourselves, right? And so when we're feeling that we have that threat, it's really hard to reach down deep and pull out these ideas, these kind of generous ideas of sharing space with other groups and embracing religious pluralism. That when we're afraid, we tend to want to protect ourselves and find our sense of safety and security again. And so as we're looking at the data, what we're what we're identifying is that people who are feeling a sense of threat tend to like all the all the good stuff, all of the tolerance that religious pluralism can bring. Like that, people can't access that when they're feeling threatened. Instead, when they're feeling threatened, they hunker down and and really lean into beliefs about defending themselves and making sure that they have a space that's marked out just for them, that the country is centering them.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that idea that we would be most afraid of civilizational collapse, most afraid of like the idea that everyone would be like, hey, yeah, I want people, people are welcome to be here, people are welcome to whatever live their lives as long as they don't become so much of the majority that they then impose themselves on my life. That's kind of the idea that I was hearing as I was reviewing this. Even the idea that people could have say things that seem like they're opposite, right? Things that seem like they're opposite values, like I believe in religious pluralism and that the Chr, you know, and and that United States should be a Christian nation, or something along those lines. I'm not sure if that's the exact thing, right? But opposite enough in their beliefs that you're looking at this and you're thinking, well, there's not necessarily logic that is it's not necessarily the same logic that's operating everywhere, right? This seems like there's different boundaries to the logic when they're answering one question as opposed to another or different considerations. What did you see that explained this? How did you guys work through that tension that people were essentially answering in ways that you wouldn't that you wouldn't expect? They're they're they're they're very, you know, tolerant on one side and then and then very much not within a few questions, just depending on the way that they're phrased or or you know, so could you just explain that and how how did you guys work through that tension?

SPEAKER_02 20:27

Yeah. It's it's interesting. And it took us took us a minute because we just weren't expecting to see, you know, that that Christian nationalists would also be a religious pluralist. That's just not the way that anybody talks about this. But it but it it really resonated with me because I've been thinking about for a long time that there's just not a lot of political, religious elites out there that are sort of actively promoting a Christian nation in and of itself. What the way that they usually talk about this is in terms of threat, that there's so many different forces out there. There's atheists and there's Muslims. And of course, you know, it's an election year, so we're talking about Islamophobia, right? Sharia law and that sort of thing. But but this is the kind of thing they talk about is you're gonna be persecuted unless you take action, right? You're gonna be rounded up, the Bible's gonna get banned, you're, you know, the churches are gonna get closed. I just saw Ali Beth Stuckey talking about churches being converted to mosques in an interview with with Kevin Roberts. So, you know, like all these sorts of things are out there that are sort of constantly hitting that threat button, right? And so that's what and the natural solution to that, of course, is well, just put Christians in charge. You know, so so this I think resonates with the story of America. It's a free society, and free society comes with a tremendous amount of risks, right? And when those threats rise to a certain level, then you have to restrict people's freedoms, right? So that's that's the constant kind of message that people are receiving if those if those if those restrictions are going to benefit one side versus another. So here, that constant kind of hitting the threat button over the last, especially 10 years, but longer, longer than that, Trump's been amazing about emphasizing that sense of threat. I think that's what is getting people to favor kind of the devil on their shoulder as opposed to the angel on their shoulder.

SPEAKER_03 22:29

You know, Brooklyn, I'm curious. Like, so when you say that Christian nationalists, you know, can hold some religious pluralism views, like how do we know that like the way that they think about religious pluralism is the same as like how like you and I might think about it? Because you know, like like because the the first thing that came to my mind was like, and and to your surprise, Paul, I was like, really? That that that seems weird, right? Like based on everything I've read, it seems like they wouldn't believe that. But you know that there are, you know, there are interdenominational sort of factions of Christian nationalists. So so like, is that how they're thinking about religious pluralism? I'd love I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

So we actually have a lot more data to collect on this. We're just talking about this a couple days ago. So uh you should check back with us in a year or two and see where we're at. But we do have like a few snapshots. So we've actually been working on a book chapter based on some experiments that that we ran. And one like they they're they're varying who is getting kind of religious liberty or religious recog recognition. So, for example, one of them is asking about school textbooks and whether school textbooks should have more coverage of the religious contributions, the contributions of religious Americans or the contributions of Christians or of Muslims or of Jews, right? And so we have four different types of people, and we randomized our respondents. They got one of those four statements, and then they were asked if they agreed or not. And what we found is that for as Christian nationalism increased, the support for textbooks to highlight the contributions of Jews didn't really change that much. It didn't go down. Even Islam didn't go down a lot. Well, down a little bit, but not a lot. You know, of course, there was really strong support for highlighting the contributions of Christians. But Christian nationalism didn't necessarily dampen support dramatically for religious minorities representation in public spaces. And so, you know, that for me is a is a little bit of a hint that people who are strongly supportive of Christian nationalism or not so much, that when they're thinking about pluralism, they might be thinking about these groups in kind of similar ways. But that's just our first snapshot. We still have a lot more to try to unpack about some of those dynamics.

SPEAKER_03 25:08

I was I was gonna say, because as you're talking, again, it just sort of made me think about um we had we had somebody on to talk about the Mahmoud v. Taylor court case, which gosh, I think it's the Oklahoma one textbook in the classroom. But it was a, you know, it was a Muslim and like a Christian parent that that were working together. And and I'm just thinking, like, now I remember at the time reading it, like, that seems weird, you know. But but to to your your point in your study, like that it shouldn't be weird. It kind of makes perfect sense, I guess. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

One of the things you guys used was a least liked group approach. Could you explain what's up with the least liked group and why that was important to approach it like that?

SPEAKER_02 25:54

Yeah, it's a funny little term. But you have to go back to the way that that questions about tolerance, which is about giving rights and liberties to groups, right? And groups that are typically controversial in society. So the original studies were in the 40s and 50s, and they were talking about communists and socialists, right? But over time, people became less concerned about communists. They just weren't that important. They didn't have that much power in society. And so if we wanted to study these things over time, we had to let people come up with, you know, the groups that they didn't like. And so the way that this evolved was we'll come up with a list of groups that, you know, typically just are unpopular in the United States at the time and tell people, hey, pick the group here in this list that you like the least. And so that's least like grouped. And so what it does is it controls for the amount of prejudice that people have toward the groups being asked about, right? Like it's a pretty trivial kind of thing if you say, like to you, Josh, are you willing to give rights and liberties to Christians? Right. But if you ask that to maybe some atheists or to Muslims these days, right, then there's that kind of gap that you really want to know about. If you want to ask about tolerance and whether it matters in society, there has to be that tension over giving it to your political opponent. Right. So that's what that's trying to capture.

SPEAKER_03 27:26

When when you all are talking about threats, and I and I know that you I think you alluded a little bit to it, Brooklyn, that that's sort of an area that the the report kind of needs other folks to sort of jump on and and help out. But I would love to just kind of get get a sense of maybe from the data of like, you know, what what types of threats seem to trigger if you have that data, and if not, you know, we'll love just kind of get your thoughts on just probably speaking. Because when when you think about threats to Christian nationalists, and especially think about like the demographic Christian nationalists, like white, male, you know, rich, most of them, some of them. But but it's like if they're white, there's there's already a kind of built-in trigger if people use the word like white Christian nationalists, which people do, and it makes total sense. Like but also like if you, you know, if you read Michael Emerson's book, you're like, hey, there's this religion of whiteness, and then you just mention the word white, and people's like hair on the back of their neck start to stand up. And you're like, so like how how how do I even like you know have conversations with people? Do I do I remind them that white people are still the dominant race in addition to Christians? I I'm I'm just I just want to get a better understanding of kind of the the threat.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

In this particular paper, we thought about threat in a couple different ways. So, first, you know, we just wanted to know how much persecution people thought that Christians were experiencing. How much discrimination do persecution do Christians face? And then secondly, we asked them about that least light group that they picked. How big of a threat is that least light group? And what we found was was pretty similar things that for people who were feeling that there was a lot of threat, they were really leaning into that Christian nationalism and that that was kind of driving their willingness to give tolerance to their out to their least light group. And that those positive effects of anti-Christian nationalism just weren't really manifesting. So those were the ways we thought about threat in this particular paper.

SPEAKER_02 29:35

Yeah, just to jump in, we especially when we asked about the least like group, we were trying to capture a broad range here because there's lots of different ways that people think about groups and could feel threatened. And so one of them was asking about whether that least like group would threaten the American way of life. And so that can be more of sort of a cultural or economic kind of way of thinking about it. And then we also asked if they were, if that group was a threat to people's freedoms. And so we tried to capture sort of a socioeconomic political kind of conception of threat. So it was a really kind of broad-range thing. But like Brooklyn said, we also captured kind of a specific sense of, hey, is is your group being persecuted in particular, right? And so, you know, you hear from political figures these days all of those conceptions at different points in time. And so, yeah, we try to capture kind of the broad spectrum of threat here. The the one thing I'll say, because that you kind of went into the sort of white Christian nationalist kind of kind of thing. And that is a thing. And in part it's a thing because we talk about it as a thing. So we as the kind of chattering class and academics, right? But you're actually talking to two people that have tried to push back on that notion. Because, for instance, African Americans and Latinos score typically higher than white folks do. We've also investigated gay Christian nationalists, which exist. They exist. I mean, they have many of the same kind of viewpoints, like the Christian nationalism correlates to the same very conservative views for them as it does for others. So, yeah, we've looked at a pretty broad range of things here. And white is a fairly artificial limiter. It's true that that's kind of what you see in the mass media, but those other folks exist and they tend to have the same kind of views about democracy and about other groups and lots of things as white Christian nationalists do.

SPEAKER_03 31:32

Yeah. I'm curious, Paul. Also, the uh were there any like confirmations in your data? Because I know like so the PRI released, I don't know, a bunch of they always release surveys, but but like they released one recently about like the LGBTQ issue. And I I can't remember if you were on there or it was Leah Payne, or it may it may have been you, but but like there was a strong correlation of, hey, Christian nationalists don't like LGBTQ. So so like if I don't know if that was a question under sort of like the least light group, or you know, were were there other sort of groups that were also maybe captured in some other surveys that people might be familiar with?

SPEAKER_02 32:10

Well, I mean, here's the crazy thing is that LGBT folks with Christian nationalist views also don't necessarily want to protect LGBT folks from discrimination. I mean, they look like non-LGBT Christian nationalists. I mean, it's it's actually really wild. The one place where you start to see some differentiation is in terms of race, and in part because it's an immutable characteristic, right, that that LGBT status isn't quite at that at that same level. And so we we tend to think of Christian nationalism as an in-group protection worldview. And so when things like voting rights are at stake for African Americans, then you'll see black Christian nationalists stand up and say, you know, absolutely not, right? It it doesn't work that way for other groups that are that don't have kind of the same status as race. It's a pretty wild environment once you start looking at the data. But but you can't just make the assumption, I think, that, you know, because white Christian nationalists take this position that, you know, the target of that, of that opinion, that that group is going to take an opposite stand. That's that's just not quite the the way it works.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Yeah, that's so fascinating that you would find those kinds of things that people might even use, have like beliefs that would in some way be contrary to maybe their general interest at large and a part of maybe the ethnic group that they're in or whatever the case may be. And that's that's super interesting. Did did you find any? I mean, what what do you what's your take on that? What why what's your take on the psychology, maybe, or the the reasons for that?

SPEAKER_01 33:55

Sure. So at least in the case for black Christian nationalists, I had a chance to run an experiment a few years ago, and I basically told, you know, black Christians in my sample, half of them, or you know, some of them got a statement about how, you know, the United States is this place where no matter who you are, if you adopt certain values and beliefs about equality and democracy, that you're just as American as anybody else, right? That's the that's the what you have to do to be American is adopt beliefs that are available to everybody. And then some other folks in my sample got a statement about how, you know, some people, just by virtue of their ethnicity, their background, are just more American than other people are, right? So kind of signaling ethno-nationalism. And what I found is that for black Christians who got that ethno-nationalist message that they just didn't really belong as Americans because of their racial identity, that they responded with more Christian nationalism support. So when they were told they don't belong because they were black, they said, Oh, I do belong. And I belong to the country because I'm Christian. I'm just as much a member of, I'm just as much an American as anybody else. And there's this special place in the country for me and people like me because of my religious identity. So at least what that experiment found is that people are able to move between different kinds of identities that they have. When they feel threatened on the basis of one, they may kind of lean into identity on the a different kind of identity. And Christian nationalism can be one of those ways that sort of prove that you really do belong and that you're part of the majority group that you really want to be part of.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

Yeah, I I can definitely see how that would like I can definitely see the logic of that and the incentive structure there that you want to show and prove that you're quote unquote maybe one of the good ones or something like that. And so, you know, you're gonna be a part of this maybe major religion or majority, you know, whatever the majority is espousing, you're gonna want to do that so you can take the benefit of the majority, even if it means in some ways, you know, taking positions or or or even guilt by association with people that might not agree with this, right? Or or like or or or that could be seen as like a belief that is antagonistic to the interests of maybe the group you're born into or the group that you may have identified with before. And it's interesting because such a such a large part of this, right? All of this is about the idea of a threat, a threat, either manufac you know, a perceived threat, what real or not. The threat drives behavior. Could you describe a little bit more about how threat, that idea of threat that is driving the behavior, and even like how do the media ecosystems, how do our political elites, how do our religious leaders activate those threat perceptions? If you have data on that, I'll I would love to hear your thoughts.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

I think there's a there's a lot of different ways, but one of them is is you know, they want people to keep consuming information and and to stay tuned, right? And so kind of amping up people's anxiety triggers that sort of sensory, like, I need to be paying attention, I need to gather more information, right? And so it's a continually reinforcing kind of cycle here of saying there are people out to get you, then we have to look, we have to be remain vigilant, right? And this works especially well to particular kinds of believers who already have this kind of sense that, you know, there are forces out there out to get them, to get them to stray off the straight and narrow path, right? And so conservative Christians, especially those who have more apocalyptic kind of viewpoints, and we don't necessarily have to get down the rabbit hole of exactly what that means, but I think you know what it means. Those folks are already vigilant, and that this taps into that and then directs it toward politics, right? And so they're just constantly part of it is just reinforcing, you know, kind of belief systems that are already in place. And then some of them is introducing a new sense of threat, you know, a new group, a new force that just, you know, kind of amps up that anxiety a little bit so they continue to pay attention to things.

SPEAKER_03 38:41

I'm I I'm curious on at so at the end of your paper, you you kind of list like other things that you wish, you know, other and I don't know how the process works. Like I don't know if it's if that's like a subtle dig to be like, hey, you other researchers out there that have a lot of money, like can you help us out? Or or what? But like what what would be sort of the natural next progression of sort of like this kind of research to better understand sort of its implications?

SPEAKER_01 39:09

So we've been actually really thinking about that quite a bit in the last couple months. So how what does it look like to try to scale back that sense of threat? What kinds of interventions or manipulations could be done in order to achieve that goal so that you know these anti-Christian nationalist attitudes that we think people have can shine through, right? So, like we've got some different ideas. There's a a big literature in about prejudice and another literature about partisanship, about how we feel about how people that are belong to different political parties. And all of those literatures have like they're trying to wrestle with how do we help people have better, kind of healthier, more pluralistic opinions about outgroups. So there are some things that folks have tried in other contexts that we wonder if it, you know, those things might help in this context of Christian nationalism. So one idea is to think about bigger identities, right? That if you if you think about yourself not as an American Christian, but as an American or even as a Christian, as a member of this global body, does that change how threatening other groups in the United States feel to you? And could that sort of help you imagine yourself in a different kind of community and then change the way you think about those threats? We've thought about ways to signal that, you know, Christians don't really have to feel as threatened. Like, are there ways to provide a message that sinks in about, you know, how Christians have a lot of privilege? You know, we still, you know, we still celebrate a lot of Christian holidays in kind of a national way, like Christmas. Christians are still overrepresented in Congress. The Supreme Court has made some significant decisions in the past decade or so that really protect Christian religious liberties. So are there ways to sort of signal to people that there isn't that big of a threat? So, you know, we've talked about you know those kinds of ideas. We've talked about maybe changing some of the figuring out how you could change some of the stereotypes people have about out groups that they find really threatening, like atheists or Muslims. Could that maybe decrease people's support for Christian nationalism? Like, but all of these are just kind of ideas floating out there. We haven't tested them yet. So I think that's one of the next steps.

SPEAKER_03 41:40

Can I can I just make make one statement? And I probably shouldn't say this on the air, but I'm going to. Like the the name of our show, Faithful Politics, is a trigger for not for like non-Christian nationalists, if that makes sense. And and I and I know this because like when we first started, we would get uh requests for people to come onto our show all the time from like these organizations that are very traditionally Christian nationalists. I mean, like one person in particular, Jake Ling, you've probably seen him like all out and about. He's sort of a big right-wing influencer, like Nazi white supremacist. They they tried to come on our show. Just because faithful politics, like we do have a website, just so people know. But but like but but but it's weird how people can just sort of like you know see something and then instantly kind of be triggered one way or another. I mean, this is total like, you know, motivated reasoning, Jonathan Haidt stuff, but but like it it is really, really phenomenal. And I just appreciate just the work you're doing. I I know Josh had a question. I just wanted to uh just comment.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

Yeah. I mean, I think I I would definitely just second what Will said. I really appreciate the work that you guys are doing. Do you think that an effective response to Christian nationalism does it need to go beyond saying like just love your neighbor or support for religious freedom? Is it is there a specificity like if you say love your Muslim neighbor or love your atheist neighbor or love your gay neighbor? Does that does that, or trans neighbor, does that make a difference in how people respond is the abstraction in it? Oh yeah, I'm I'm about loving my neighbor. Oh yeah, I'm about religious freedom, but there's not specificity in it. Do you think that plays a role in this?

SPEAKER_02 43:35

That's a really good question. So so we don't we don't know to be to be clear, but we do know. I mean, one of the most replicated findings in the social sciences is called the contact thesis. And so if you have contact with diverse others and working on a common project, then prejudice goes down. So you become depolarized and you know, a much more kind of functional citizen. That doesn't really work. For everybody. And I suspect that the problem or the reaction that people would have to the statements that you gave is, well, I would if they just weren't going after my Christian values or, you know, trying to convert my kids or, you know, whatever other sort of boogeyman is out there. And so that's why we really focused on threat, because I'll bet people are pretty willing to, you know, to tolerate diverse others as long as they don't perceive that those people are going to take away some fundamental aspects, going to fundamentally change their lives, going to take away something that's of value to them. And so if we can just get to a place where people slow down, we can think through it, we can perhaps have some social contact, we can consider our place in the world and in maybe in a sort of factual way, that some of that sorts starts to go away. The problem, of course, right, is that, you know, these little simple interventions that that we're playing with as academics, you know, aren't going to be able to compete with the steady drumbeat from social media and from political figures and all the rest of it. And so I think I've written before, just on the blog or what have you, just saying, you know, what really needs to happen is elites just need to knock it off. And of course, they have no reason to knock it off because it's been really successful, right? I mean, this is why every election year we're talking about Sharia law, even though it's not a not a thing, right? Because it's just, it's effective. You know, but if enough of us kind of can say, look, this always happens. They're doing this on purpose. This is going to go away in, you know, a couple of months. Like, let's let's think about the fundamentals here. Are you actually threatened? Like, one funny thing is people who live in really strongly Christian states are much more likely to report that Christians face a lot of discrimination. So, you know, Mississippi, Alabama, you know, Louisiana. Yeah, they're the ones that report high level they they don't face that, right? People that live in in Vermont and Oregon and other kind of, you know, more non-religious, they don't they don't report discrimination. That that tells you a lot.

SPEAKER_03 46:11

Yeah, I don't know if it was um Ryan Burge or someone I read, but but it's like uh to your point that the reason that Christians feel like they're being discriminated against is because they're being told that they're being discriminated against. And and it's like it's so true. But yeah. Well, thank you to both you guys. This this has been a been a great conversation. And you know, a a a special uh shout out to the the unspoken person in the room, Ruth Bronstein, which was the person that uh brought me, you know, visibility of your guys' research. So kudos to her. She probably won't make it this far in the episode, it's pretty late. But uh but but kudos to you. And yeah, just just thank you so much. What what's uh what's kind of on the horizon for for each of you guys? Go ahead, Brooklyn. What's next?

SPEAKER_01 46:57

Well, so um a lot of what's on the horizon for me are is joint projects with Paul. And so um we do a lot of writing and work together. There's one thing I'm kind of excited about is that we've developed a measure of complementarianism, which is a like a Christian worldview about gender. And so we have a bunch of fresh data to explore to look at how complementarianism affects attitudes on everything from um reproductive rights policies to political violence to democracy attitudes, all kinds of things. So I'm really excited to dig into that.

SPEAKER_03 47:33

That is super cool. What about you, Paul?

SPEAKER_02 47:35

We're working on an edited volume about religious the state of religious pluralism in the United States. And so you heard a little bit of that research discussed, but I mean, a lot of these issues, right? We're kind of nailing down with a group of really great scholars. So that's gonna be a lot of fun too. I love that is what we're doing. Thanks so much for having us on. We really appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_00 47:54

And we'll have to have you on when you get that new the book out. I mean, that's religious pluralism is super important to work through.

SPEAKER_03 48:01

Yeah, absolutely. And um, thank you to our audience. Uh, thanks again for stopping by to another episode of Faith of Politics. And as always, keep your conversations not right or left, but up. And we'll see you next time. Take care.