Christian Nationalism: The Principles, the Statistics, the Threat- with Samuel Perry
Summary
In an interview from early 2020, Brad talks with Dr. Samuel Perry, co-author of Taking America Back for God and a leading scholar on the phenomenon of Christian nationalism. They discuss the principles, structures, statistics, and threat of Christian Nationalism. For Perry, Christian Nationalism isn't just theocracy. As they discuss, it's a code word--a dog-whistle--used to signal xenophobia, racism, patriarchy, and so on.
Transcript
Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. My name is Brad Onishi. I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I am really, really excited to be having our conversation today with Dr. Samuel Perry.
Just a little pretext here before I give you his full bio: For those of us who are studying the religious right, ex-evangelicals, evangelicals, Protestantism in America - you know, you go to conferences, you're on Twitter. For those of us who are in that space all the time, you need to know that for like a year and a half, all of the whispers and anticipation have been basically about Sam's and his co-author Andrew Whitehead's book that's coming out.
So the book is Taking America Back for God. Every conference you go to, every time you're on Twitter, you talk to someone, they're sort of like, you know, pointing you toward it. "Oh, there's this new book coming out, and it's really going to change the game when it comes to talking about Trump and why evangelicals are voting for him, and why others are voting for him, what's happening in the country."
So, all that to say, thanks for joining me, Sam. It's great to have you. You are Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. You are also in Religious Studies and Gender and Women's Studies there as affiliate faculty. You've written three books in a very short amount of time: Growing God's Family: The Global Orphan Care Movement and the Limits of Evangelical Activism, Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants - which I think both of those actually will be of great interest to our audience - and then the one we're going to talk about today, which drops on March 2nd, so just about five or six weeks here: Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States.
So thank you, thanks for being here, Sam.
Samuel Perry: Yeah, thanks for having me. This is gonna be fun.
Brad Onishi: So let's jump right into this, because there's a lot to talk about. You were kind enough to let me get a glimpse of the final draft of the manuscript of the book that's gonna come out here in a couple weeks. And I knew we were gonna talk, and I knew we're going to have 30-45 minutes. And it was one of those times where I really had to stop myself, because I just kept highlighting everything and wanting to say, "Oh, I can't wait to ask him about that."
Let me start here: In my view, your book offers a fresh perspective on a three-year debate. For three years, a lot of us have been asking why religious conservatives voted for Donald Trump. We wanted to know why they continue to support him, even amidst scandals and lies and Stormy Daniels and everything from the election till now. Dan and I really started this show to help people understand that. We really wanted to talk about the history of evangelicalism, its culture, its politics, and give people an idea. But you know, we're just one part of what's become an industry, right? There are podcasts, articles, pundits - everybody is trying to answer this question.
However, with all that going on, you and your co-author Andrew Whitehead, who's at Clemson, offer a really, really, really compelling framework for understanding why religious conservatives, both evangelicals and others - which we'll get to - support Donald Trump.
So I just want to say, can you just give us an intro to your thesis? Let me put it this way: Why is it not complete to say that white evangelicals support Trump because he gives them an audience, and the way to understand why Trump's in the White House is just "81% of white evangelicals," and that's all we need to talk about when it comes to religion and politics? Like, why is this a bigger conversation?
Samuel Perry: A few years back, we started to study this phenomenon of Christian nationalism before Trump ever came on the scene. And so we got a hold of some data from the Baylor Religion Surveys, and we put together an index, and we were fascinated with how white Christian nationalists - people who believe that America has been and should always be distinctively Christian... And when I say Christian, that is coded language. I mean Christian meaning ethnically white, culturally conservative, native-born, likely Protestant.
And so people who believe the United States has always been Christian in this sense and should always be distinctively Christian - we kept finding in study after study after study that people who score higher on this Christian nationalism measure tend to be far more for racial boundaries, strict racial boundaries. They don't like interracial families, transracial adoption, interracial marriage. They're very much against immigration. They're very much suspicious of Muslims in the United States. They believe that America should favor - in fact, Christians - not just stay the way it is, but it should actually show preference toward Christian policies, Christian values, and Christian organizations.
And so when Trump came on the scene, we were able to collect some data that was able to connect both Trump support and our understanding of Christian nationalism, and how to measure this kind of thing. And so when we started to do some analysis, we found that being a white evangelical essentially disappears when you account for Christian nationalism, as does how religious somebody is, how often they pray, read their Bible, attend church, what they think about the Bible. None of those things tend to matter when we are accounting for Christian nationalism.
And so what we argue in our book is really it's not white evangelicals who are... There's nothing about white evangelicalism - if we define white evangelicals as a group of white Protestants who hold certain conservative views about the Bible, and they tend to be faithful in their religious practice, they attend church a lot, they pray a lot, they share their faith - there's nothing about that that would lead somebody necessarily to support Trump.
Christian nationalism, though, happens to be an ideology that about 75% of those white evangelicals tend to hold. And so what we argue in the book is that it's not about being a white evangelical. It's not about even being a conservative Christian. It is about being somebody who believes America was yours, it was intended for you, and Trump is promising to take that back.
Really the best boiling down that I could come to came from Tony Perkins. Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, on record one day, speaking for evangelicals as he tends to, was asked, "Why did evangelicals support Trump?" And Tony Perkins said, "We,” evangelicals, and by that he means Christian nationalists. He said, “We were tired of getting kicked around by Obama and his leftists, and Trump was the guy who was willing to punch the bully on the playground."
And that's exactly - I mean, in a nutshell, that is what Trump is to these guys. People who score higher on Christian nationalism - Trump is the guy who is willing to punch the bully who's picking on you.
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