Trump’s Christian Nationalist Vision for America

Donald Trump’s ambivalence on abortion is back in the news following his recent U.S. turn on a November referendum in his home state of Florida. On August 29, Trump said he had proposed voting for the referendum, which would expand abortion rights and lift the state’s current six-week abortion ban. After a fierce backlash from anti-abortion activists, Trump withdrew his support the next day.

While Trump’s about-face on this referendum shows that the activist class still has some clout, it remains true that Trump has done something unimaginable in modern Republican politics. He has bullied the GOP into abandoning four decades of support for a nationwide abortion ban. Even more startling, there is no evidence that Trump’s renegotiation of the supposedly non-negotiable has hurt him among the party’s membership.

This stunning finding is revealing. Trump’s nonchalant treatment of this supposedly sacred subject has exposed the Republican Party’s best-kept secret: The connection between Republican voters and their leaders has never been primarily about abortion. Instead, as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) transformation of the party reveals, Trump’s connection with his supporters is forged from different fabric: namely, his militant mission to return power to white Christian America.

Trump understands this reality instinctively. In contrast to his hesitation about abortion, Trump’s rallies are filled with evocations of an idealized ethno-religious state that are articulate, energetic, and consistent. His nostalgic tirades about reclaiming a lost white Christian past fueled his rise to presidential power, and he has continued this strategy in 2024.

One of Trump’s first reelection campaign stops was the annual National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville on February 22, attended by leaders of the largest white evangelical outlets. In his rambling 75-minute speech to these leaders of the Christian Right, Trump spent just two minutes talking about abortion. He started off strong, saying, “From my first day in office, I’ve taken historic action to protect the unborn. Like no one else has ever done.” He also touted his attendance at the pro-life rally in Washington, D.C., in March. But he then went on to praise his achievement in sending “this issue” (he conspicuously did not say the word “abortion” in the speech) back to the states, since “everyone agrees that’s where it belongs”—a position that was a clear departure from a nationwide ban on abortion. While there was no applause for that line, the audience stuck with him.

The beating heart of the speech was the projection of a white Christian nationalist vision. Trump told the enthusiastic crowd — many of whom wore red hats emblazoned with the words “Make America Pray Again” — that he knew they were “under attack.” He declared that one of his first acts in his second term would be to create a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” and pledged to protect “pro-God context and content.” He drew spontaneous applause for his vows to promote vouchers for private Christian schools and to seal the U.S. southern border against “an illegal alien invasion by the world’s most sadistic criminals and vicious gangs.”

He openly mentioned his four criminal charges, but transformed them into a messianic narrative. Echoing the evangelical theology of substitutionary atonement, he claimed, “I’ve been very busy fighting and, you know, catching the bullets, catching the arrows. I’m catching them for you. And I’m so honored to catch them. You have no idea. I’m being charged for you.” After narrowly surviving an assassination attempt in August, Trump mused that he was only alive because of divine intervention, making this messianic comparison quite literal.

Strikingly, his promises to evangelical broadcasters extended beyond the realm of policy: “If I’m confirmed, you’re going to use that power at a level you’ve never used before.” He continued: “I truly believe that this is the greatest failing in this country, the greatest failing. We’ve got to bring our religion back. We’ve got to bring Christianity back to this country.”

Trump’s use of the term “our religion”—a term he frequently uses when addressing predominantly white evangelical audiences—is a clear affirmation of an America of, by, and for white conservative Christians. This worldview, most often referred to today as white Christian nationalism, is an ancient one, predating our nation’s founding. It flows directly from the 500-year-old Christian doctrine of discovery—the idea that America was divinely appointed as a promised land for European Christians—that justified the settler colonial project and is at the heart of our nation’s ancient history.

Read more: The roots of Christian nationalism go back further than you think

A 2024 study conducted by PRRI, where I am president and founder, examined how strongly white Christian nationalism is connected to Trump’s contemporary appeal. Building on research by political scientists Paul Djupe, Phil Gorski, Sam Perry, and Andrew Whitehead, PRRI developed five separate agree/disagree questions to measure support for Christian nationalism:

The PRRI survey, the largest ever conducted on the subject, found that 3 in 10 Americans can be classified as supporters or sympathizers of Christian nationalism (those who completely or mostly agree with these five statements), while two-thirds of Americans can be classified as skeptics or rejecters (those who completely or mostly disagree with these five sentiments). So by a two-to-one margin, most Americans oppose this anti-democratic worldview.

But the minority of Americans who affirm these sentiments wield disproportionate power because their voices are amplified by Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and takeover of the Republican Party. Today, a majority of Republicans (55%) — and a whopping two-thirds (66%) of white evangelicals, the GOP’s religious base — identify as Christian nationalists or sympathizers.

The study also shows how closely Christian nationalism correlates with support for Donald Trump, not just at the national level but also at the state level. The percentage of Americans who identify as supporters or sympathizers of Christian nationalism varies significantly by state, but there is a clear pattern. Residents of red states are nearly twice as likely to be supporters or sympathizers of Christian nationalism as residents of blue states. And among white Americans, the positive correlation between a state’s average score on the Christian nationalism scale and the percentage of residents who voted for Trump in 2020 is a textbook example of a strong linear relationship. The more strongly white residents of a state support Christian nationalism, the more likely they were to vote for Trump in 2020.

Why should we care? There is, of course, the obvious answer that the overall vision of America as a promised land for European Christians is fundamentally anti-democratic. Moreover, Christian nationalist beliefs are deeply connected to a range of other attitudes that undermine democracy: white racial resentment and denials of the existence of systemic racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, homophobia, and support for patriarchal gender roles. In other words, white Christian nationalism invokes a set of hierarchies that position white, Christian, heterosexual men as the divinely ordained ruling class. This assertion of white Christian entitlement and chosenness is toxic to the values ​​of pluralism and equality upon which democracy rests.

Most ominously, Christian nationalists are more likely than other Americans to think of politics in apocalyptic terms and are about twice as likely as other Americans to believe that political violence can be justified in our current circumstances. Nearly 4-in-10 Christian nationalists (38%) and a third of sympathizers (33%) agree that “because things have gotten so far out of hand, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,” compared with just 17% of Christian nationalism skeptics and 7% of rejecters. And support for political violence is rising among Christian nationalists. While there has been no significant shift in support for political violence among Christian nationalists over the past year, support for political violence among sympathizers has increased 11 percentage points.

The worldview of white Christian nationalism raises the stakes of political contests exponentially, turning political opponents into existential enemies. Politics is no longer understood as honest disagreements between fellow citizens, but rather as apocalyptic battles over good and evil, literally fought by agents of God against agents of Satan. From these illiberal assumptions, it easily follows that political rivals should not only be defeated in honest electoral contests; they should be imprisoned, exiled, or even killed.

This racist ideology, thankfully, no longer rests comfortably in the psyche of most Americans. But paradoxically, it has found a last refuge in the ruins of the party of Lincoln. More than any other discrete moment in the past half century, the 2024 election will present us with a choice that is far more than partisan.

We are being given the opportunity to choose between a regressive fantasy of America as a white Christian nation and an ambitious vision of America as a pluralistic democracy. Until we find the will to reject once and for all the dangerous, authoritarian political theology that now governs one of our two political parties, it will continue to undermine the potential for a truly democratic American future.

Excerpt adapted from the paperback edition of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and a Path to a Shared American Future by Robert P. Jones, published by Simon & Schuster on September 10, 2024. Copyright © 2024 by Robert P. Jones.