May 10, 2023
The Left’s latest cudgel against religious conservatives.
Since Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 election, a rash of articles, surveys, and books have claimed that many—maybe even most—Americans in flyover country are “Christian nationalists.” That’s supposed to sound scary. But the term is mostly used as a smear against conservative Christians who defend the role of religion in American public life.
Sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry give the perceived threat a scholarly gloss in their recent book from Oxford University Press, Taking America Back for God. They define Christian nationalism as “an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture.” What’s more, it “includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism.” That’s quite a parade of horribles.
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