Monday, April 04, 2022

Americans’ support for LGBTQ rights higher than ever, even as white evangelicals lag

While Republicans and white evangelical Protestants are among the least likely to support three key policies regarding LGBTQ rights, their support still has increased overall in the past seven years.

Two females wear rainbow flags during the annual Pride parade in Portland, Maine. Photo by Mercedes Mehling/Unsplash/Creative Commons

March 17, 2022

Emily McFarlan Miller

(RNS) — Americans’ support for LGBTQ rights is higher than ever, according to a new report by Public Religion Research Institute, though two groups have “consistently lagged” in their support for key policies: Republicans and white evangelical Protestants.

Those findings, released Thursday (March 17), are part of PRRI’s 2021 American Values Atlas project, a seven-year survey measuring Americans’ support for LGBTQ rights policies.

The report comes as a number of states are considering legislation related to LGBTQ issues and as questions of whether one can refuse service to LGBTQ people based on religious beliefs are likely to come before the U.S. Supreme Court in the next year. Currently, few states have nondiscrimination protections in place for LGBTQ people.

Meanwhile, Christian denominations such as the United Methodist Church and the Reformed Church in America are splintering around marrying and ordaining LGBTQ people.

“This massive 50-state study brings into sharp focus the contradiction between increasing support for LGBTQ rights, including rights for transgender Americans, and the proliferation of laws seeking to restrict or abolish those rights over the last year,” PRRI founder and CEO Robert P. Jones said in a written statement.

“Support for nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ Americans has never been higher and garners the support of all political parties and major religious groups.”

Since 2014, PRRI — a Washington, D.C.-based research firm focused on the intersection of religion, values and public life — has been asking American adults whether they support allowing lesbian and gay couples to marry legally.

Natalie Jackson. Photo courtesy of PRRI

Since 2015, the firm has also been asking Americans whether they support laws to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodations and housing, as well as whether they support allowing small-business owners to refuse to provide products or services to lesbian or gay people if doing so would violate their religious beliefs.

“It remains critical to show that Americans are very broadly supportive of LGBTQ rights, especially in an environment where some of that is still subject to question and even being questioned more in the past couple of years than maybe it was five years ago,” Natalie Jackson, PRRI’s director of research, told Religion News Service.

Jackson pointed to recent moves by politicians in Texas and Florida. Gov. Greg Abbott recently directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate medical treatments for transgender adolescents as child abuse. Florida lawmakers passed what critics are calling the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would restrict discussions about LGBTQ people in public schools.

Other states are considering similar legislation.

Since PRRI began polling on the issue, the number of Americans who support same-sex marriage has increased among all political and religious groups from 54% to 68%, according to the report.

“Support for Same-Sex Marriage, by White Christians and Religiously Unaffiliated, 2014-2021” Graphic courtesy of PRRI

That includes 87% of those who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated (up from 77% in 2014); 76% of white mainline Protestants (up from 62%); and 74% of white Catholics (up from 61%). Trailing behind are 35% of white evangelical Protestants (still up overall from 28%).

However, while numbers have increased from 2014 overall, in the last year that support has taken a dip among white Catholics and evangelicals, though Jackson said the change in white Catholics is not statistically significant and she wouldn’t read too much into it unless it continued.

White evangelical support dropped from 43% to 35%, which Jackson called a “pretty solid downturn.”

“It’s just highlighting that even among white Christians, white evangelicals are a significant outlier,” she said.

Most Americans (79%) also support discrimination protections for LGBTQ people. That number has increased from 71% in 2015.

“Support for Nondiscrimination Protections for LGBTQ People, by Religious Affiliation, 2015-2021” Graphic courtesy of PRRI

That support is nearly universal among Unitarian Universalists (97%), although the report did not note how many Unitarian Universalists were surveyed. It is also high (87%) among the religiously unaffiliated, Catholics who are not white or Hispanic, and Buddhists. (The report also did not note how many Buddhists had been surveyed, though Jackson said no subgroup had fewer than 80 people.)

On the other end of the spectrum are 59% of Jehovah’s Witnesses, 61% of white evangelical Protestants and 71% of Hispanic Protestants. (The report did not note how many Jehovah’s Witnesses had been surveyed.)

Nearly two-thirds of Americans (66%) also oppose religiously based refusals to serve gay and lesbian people — a number that has fluctuated while trending upward from 59% since 2015.

“Opposition to Religiously Based Service Refusals for LGBTQ People, by Religious Affiliation, 2015-2021” Graphic courtesy of PRRI

The number of people who oppose allowing a small-business owner in their states to refuse service to gay or lesbian people because of religious beliefs is highest again among Unitarian Universalists (83%), the religiously unaffiliated (80%) and Catholics who are not white or Hispanic (79%).

Opposition is lowest among white evangelical Protestants (38%, a number that has not changed since 2015) and Latter-day Saints (44%).

While Republicans and white evangelical Protestants are among the least likely to support these policies regarding LGBTQ rights, the report noted, their numbers still have increased overall on most questions in the past seven years and strong majorities support nondiscrimination policies.

White evangelicals are a small part of the U.S. population, Jackson noted, but they are dependable voters. And evangelical leaders have had close ties to politics and politicians for decades, she added.

“White evangelicals are about 14% of the population overall, which is certainly not what you would think by the amount of focus that they get, the amount of leverage that they seem to have,” she said.

PRRI surveyed 22,612 adults ages 18 and up living in all 50 states in four waves during 2021. The margin of error is +/- 0.8 percentage points at the 95% level of confidence.

Study: Christians, Jews and Muslims encounter workplace discrimination differently

Rachel Schneider, one of the report’s authors, said workers often experienced religious discrimination in the form of microaggressions — such as stereotyping and othering.

Image by Mohamed Hassan/Pixabay/Creative Commons

March 16, 2022

Alejandra Molina

(RNS) — Christians, Jews and Muslims encounter workplace discrimination, but they experience it differently, according to a new report by Rice University’s Religion and Public Life Program.

While Muslims and Jews say they’ve felt targeted by anti-Islamic and antisemitic rhetoric, it’s most often in the context of being seen as part of a larger group, they said in the study. Whereas evangelical Christians say they more often feel singled out when taking an individual stand based on their moral views, the report found.

Rachel Schneider, one of the report’s authors, said they learned that people often experienced workplace discrimination in the form of microaggressions — such as stereotyping and othering — not just in the hiring, firing and promotion process.

“It was these everyday practices and behaviors in the workplace that was really surprising to learn more about how they’ve manifested,” said Schneider, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Religion and Public Life Program.

The report, “How Religious Discrimination Is Perceived in the Workplace: Expanding the View,” draws its research from Rice University’s “Faith at Work: An Empirical Study,” which included a survey of more than 11,000 people. Additionally, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with nearly 200 of those who were surveyed, including 159 Christians, 13 Jews, 10 Muslims and 12 nonreligious people. The research was funded by the Lilly Endowment.

A large proportion of Muslim (63%) and Jewish (52%) participants reported religious discrimination compared with other religious groups.

Perceptions of religious discrimination varied within Christian subgroups, with evangelical Protestants the most likely to report experiencing religious discrimination (36%), whereas roughly 20% of Catholics and mainline Protestants each reported religious discrimination, according to the report. About a quarter of other Christian/other Protestants say the same (24%).

Among nonreligious participants, 27% perceived religious discrimination in the workplace.

Image by Mohamed Hassan/Pixabay/Creative Commons

Through in-depth interviews, Jewish and Muslim participants described verbal microaggressions tied to antisemitic and anti-Islamic stereotypes.

One white Jewish woman working in social services in Indiana detailed co-workers using a common antisemitic trope, saying she was “good at bookkeeping and keeping track of money.” In another example, a white Jewish man who works in information technology in Florida described hearing comments such as “Well, Jews run all the banks.”

RELATED: Muslim women more likely than men to experience Islamophobia, survey finds

Similarly, Muslims described Islamophobic sentiment in the workplace.

An Asian Muslim man who is an engineer in New York mentioned colleagues expressing anti-Muslim views along the lines of “Muslims are extremists,” although he didn’t consider this to be discrimination or directed at him explicitly, according to the report.

In a more extreme example, a white Muslim woman working in sales at a construction company in Louisiana said she was “harassed” when she converted to Islam. She was “ridiculed” after deciding to cover her head and dress more modestly. Signs were put up in the office, with one reading “I tried to see your point of view, but your point of view is stupid.”

Schneider said Muslims and Jewish people didn’t feel they could take advantage of religious accommodations in the workplace, such as access to prayer rooms, because they would have their co-workers “looking at them a certain way.” Researchers found Jewish and Muslim women “concealed or downplayed their religious identity in the workplace to preempt discrimination.”

Muslims and Jews also felt like they were treated as foreign or exotic. “People didn’t really know how to act around them,” Schneider said.

online for their faith

Christians, particularly those who are evangelical, reported that verbal microaggressions often took the form of specific name-calling.

A white evangelical woman who is a nurse in Tennessee said her co-workers at a previous job “would call me ‘Ms. Holy,’ because some employees … would want to break protocol or break the rules,” she told researchers, adding that she just wanted to follow her employer’s policies.

Rachel Schneider. Photo courtesy of Rice University

In another example, a Latina evangelical in Tennessee said co-workers at a previous job “would make fun of me because I didn’t talk or participate in their tasteless conversations, saying, ‘Oh, there’s the hallelujah, or the sanctimonious person.'” Also, a Black evangelical man, working as a criminal investigator in Texas, told researchers “there’s kind of this theme out there that Christians are inherently judgmental and hypocritical.”

For Christian women of color, in particular, ”there was this sense that people just made assumptions that they wouldn’t want to be included in social gatherings because they perceived things like ‘they didn’t drink,'” Schneider said. They would be excluded due to “perceived moral lifestyle differences,” she added.

The report’s authors make it clear that Christian perceptions of discrimination don’t “carry the same risk for violence that religious minorities experience.”

“Yet it is important to recognize that Christians do perceive religious discrimination and othering in the workplace in ways that feel demeaning, prejudicial, or exclusionary, and this should not be dismissed by researchers,” the authors said in the report.

As for the nonreligious, respondents felt compelled to downplay or hide their identities.

A nonreligious Latino man working as a security guard in California told researchers he would speak softly when expressing his views due to fear of ”being reprimanded, disciplined, or fired if something was taken out of context.”

A Black agnostic engineer in Arizona said she “was hesitant to reveal her agnosticism because she was already a ‘triple minority’ in the workplace as the youngest employee and a Black woman,” according to the report.

To Schneider, it’s important employers recognize that religious discrimination in the workplace could lead to workers feeling “marginalized and stigmatized” and “may impact their ability to retain employees.”

Schneider said employers should offer training on religious discrimination.

“We all know employees are often, these days, given diversity training, but in another aspect of our study we asked how often religion came up in those kind of trainings and it was hardly ever,” she said. “If it did, it came up only in a very superficial way.”

Scholars, activists brief lawmakers on role of Christian nationalism at insurrection

The meeting, which included Rep. Jamie Raskin, was a rare instance of lawmakers openly discussing the prominence of religious expression during the attack.

Supporters of President Donald Trump overtake the inauguration stage in front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

March 18, 2022

Jack Jenkins

WASHINGTON (RNS) — Members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus met with a group of scholars and activists on Thursday evening (March 17) to review a new report detailing the role Christian nationalism played in the insurrection that took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The meeting was a rare instance of lawmakers openly addressing the prominence of religious expression during the attack, which was evident on Jan. 6 but has not been a central focus of public discussions on Capitol Hill.

California Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman, who said he first discussed the role of Christian nationalism and the insurrection with some of the panelists last summer, hosted the meeting for a slate of lawmakers that included Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a co-founder of the Freethought Caucus who also serves on the House Select Committee investigating the attack.

Raskin opened the virtual briefing by noting that while a variety of ideologies were represented among insurrectionists, Christian nationalism “clearly figured highly in the events of the day,” and was “a unifying theme for many of the factions that assembled on January 6.”

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin on Thursday, March 17, 2022. Video screen grab

His words were echoed by an array of panelists who presented findings from a recent report they helped author with backing from the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. Among other things, the 66-page study documents in painstaking detail the prevalence of Christian nationalist symbols and rhetoric at the insurrection and a series of events that led up to the storming of the Capitol.

Amanda Tyler, head of the BJC, told lawmakers the report faced “defensive pushback” from some conservative Christians after it was unveiled last month but has been embraced by Christians who see opposing Christian nationalism as a religious call.

Amanda Tyler. Photo courtesy of Baptist Joint Committee

“Let’s be clear: Christianity does not and cannot unite Americans under a national identity,” Tyler said, adding that Christian nationalism “debases Christianity.”

Samuel Perry, a University of Oklahoma sociologist and co-author of “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” told lawmakers he and others who study the ideology often use the more specific term “white Christian nationalism,” because data indicates Christian nationalist sentiments appear to “perform differently when white Americans affirm them as opposed to non-white Americans.”

He was followed by Jemar Tisby, a historian and head of Black Christian collective The Witness, who contrasted white Christian nationalism with fusions of faith and activism among Black Christians.

“In contrast to white Christian nationalism, Black Christians have historically tended to embrace a kind of patriotism that leads to an expansion of democratic processes, the inclusion of marginalized people and a call for the nation to live up to its foundational ideas,” he said.

Andrew L. Seidel of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a chief author of the report, closed out the briefing presentations by outlining the way Christian nationalism operated as a “permission structure” for activists, arguing it gave them “the moral and mental license they needed” to participate in events such as the Million MAGA March and the Jericho Marches in the months prior to the insurrection, as well as to attack the Capitol.

“(There were) other motivations and drivers of this attack, but this Christian nationalist permission structure — doing God’s will, fighting for God’s law, returning the country to its Christian roots — pervaded a lot of those other obvious drivers of this attack.”

People shelter in the House gallery as protesters try to break into the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Lawmakers appeared largely convinced by the report, peppering the panelists with questions over the course of the hour-long briefing.

“I think the proof points about just how central Christian nationalism — we should call it white Christian nationalism — was to the planning and the execution of the insurrection is really undeniable,” Huffman told Religion News Service in an interview.

Asked by Rep. Jerry McNerney, a California Democrat, to define the “fundamental core” that unites Christian nationalists (“I don’t think it’s belief in Jesus,” McNerney quipped), Perry argued it was an “ethno-culture.”

“This blends the idea of kind of an ethnic identity — this is the white part of it, but also ethnic implies a part of culture,” Perry said. “Religion is a part of this, but also an understanding of white — not necessarily white race, but whiteness. This combination of perceptions (that) the nation rightfully belongs to ‘people like us’ — and by people like us I mean, the ethno-culture, the white Christian conservative, traditionalist, almost certainly native born.”

Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan on Thursday, March 17, 2022. Video screen grab

Multiple lawmakers, such as Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, expressed concern about the role of Christian nationalism in ongoing fights with school boards across the country. School board meetings have become a staging ground for heated disputes over COVID-19 restrictions and supposed use of critical race theory, featuring many activists who have invoked religion. Several candidates currently running for school board seats across the country, Pocan said, appear to be tied to Christian nationalism.

Raskin also mentioned Christian nationalism’s pervasive role in ongoing political disputes.

“More than a year later, Christian nationalists continue to join forces to try to challenge our democratic institutions and values — whether it’s in the suppression of voting rights or the promotion of various culture, more battles, including to my mind the utterly fraudulent attack on critical race theory,” he said.

Seidel agreed, noting he planned to send testimony to the Jan. 6 selection committee on the subject. He argued that while there was a “moment of shame” among Christian nationalists immediately following the insurrection, many have since “adopted the insurrection and seem emboldened by it.”

He pointed to data showcased by Perry during his presentation that showed shifting views of the insurrection among Christian nationalists over the past year. In February 2021, immediately after the insurrection, 75% of white Americans who scored highest on Perry’s Christian nationalism index — a series of questions that gauge Christian nationalism — said those who attacked the Capitol should be caught and prosecuted. By August of that same year, the number dropped to only 54%.

By contrast, those who scored the lowest on the Christian nationalism index barely budged in that same timeframe, with around 95% saying both times they were asked that the insurrectionists should be caught and put on trial.

Similarly, slightly less than 15% of hardline Christian nationalists in February 2021 agreed with the statement “I stand with the protesters who stormed the Capitol.” Come August, that number went up to 26%.

FILE – In this Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021 file photo, a man holds a Bible as Trump supporters gather outside the Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Raskin also asked whether panelists believed Christian nationalism played any role in inspiring what he described as “the medieval violence” of Jan. 6.

Seidel responded by arguing that prominent Christian nationalists used “very militant” language in the lead up to Jan. 6, often couched in the rhetoric of “spiritual warfare.”

Among the incidents chronicled in the report is a speech by Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the militant group Oath Keepers, who is currently facing sedition charges for his alleged role in the insurrection. Delivered at a faith-themed “Jericho March” event in Washington, D.C., on December 12, 2020, Rhodes threatened a “bloody war” if the 2020 election results weren’t overturned.

When he finished, the event’s emcee, conservative Christian commentator Eric Metaxas, responded: “Oh, God bless you. This guy’s keepin’ it real, folks.”

Similarly, the night before the insurrection, Tennessee Pastor Greg Locke stood before a crowd in Washington and prayed for Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the militant group Proud Boys who now also faces charges related to the insurrection. Locke said: “We just thank God that we can lock shields, and we can come shoulder-to-shoulder with people that still stand up for this nation … God, help us to live, help us to fight, and if need be, lay down our life for this nation.”

Tisby added that historical efforts to “enforce this vision of a white Christian nationalist America” — particularly those used to further racist goals — often didn’t have to use explicit calls to violence. He pointed to the example of onetime Mississippi senator and Ku Klux Klan member Theodore G. Bilbo, who declared in 1946 that the best time to stop Black people from voting is “the night before.”

California Rep. Jared Huffman on Thursday, March 17, 2022. Video screen grab

Huffman closed out the meeting by asking panelists how best to combat Christian nationalism. The panel advocated for an embrace of the separation of church and state, the building of a “coalition of the religious willing” to combat Christian nationalism and the marginalization of the ideology.

Huffman echoed the panelists after the event, saying the “antidote” to Christian nationalism is “defending the line of separation between church and state.” The Freethought Caucus, he said, will continue to stay engaged with dialogue around Christian nationalism in the future.

In the meantime, questions remain as to how to broach the topic of Christian nationalism among his colleagues on Capitol Hill. Asked after the event whether he saw Christian nationalism among members of Congress ahead of the insurrection, Huffman laughed, replying: “Is that a rhetorical question? Of course.”

“We had colleagues at the ellipse for the pep rally that launched the insurrection,” he said, referring to the rally in support for former President Donald Trump that immediately preceded the Capitol attack. “If you look at their talking points, they just check every box on the white Christian nationalist agenda.”

Spiritual Politics

From the new Christian right to Christian nationalism, part 1

Up first, the 20th century.

President Ronald Reagan meets with Jerry Falwell in the Oval Office on March 15, 1983. Image courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

February 21, 2022

Mark Silk

(RNS) — When I first began studying religion and American politics 40 years ago, the new kid on the block was the new Christian right. Its avatar was the late Jerry Falwell Sr., pastor of an independent Baptist church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and a self-promoter eager to lead an evangelical crusade against feminism and gay rights.

In the 1970s, white evangelicals were in thrall to the premillennialism of Hal Lindsey’s mega-bestseller “The Late Great Planet Earth.” It taught that moral corruption had taken over the world, America was no better than any other country and Christians should content themselves with going to church and evangelizing others in preparation for the imminent End Times.

In countering his co-religionists’ political quiescence, Falwell flew something of a false flag. His social values were not “Christian” but “Judeo-Christian,” his organization, the nominally inclusive Moral Majority, Inc. This was not to look like a Christian political crusade.

But when other evangelical leaders joined GOP operatives to activate evangelicals as Republican voters, it was impossible to doubt what this movement was about. And with the election of Ronald Reagan and the defeat of a clutch of Democratic senators in 1980, the New Christian Right became a thing to be reckoned with.

Reagan himself steered clear of the rhetoric of crusade, conjuring up instead the restoration of an idealized America he liked to call “the shining city on a hill.” This was, as he put it in his farewell address, “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

By the 1988 election cycle, the Christian Right (no longer new) had established itself as an essential component of the Republican coalition. That year witnessed a surprisingly successful run for the GOP presidential nomination by pentecostal Pat Robertson, proprietor of the Christian Broadcasting Network and host of its daily newsmagazine, “The 700 Club.”

Republican presidential candidates in 1988 included, from left, Vice President George Bush, Rep. Jack Kemp, Pat Robertson, and Sen. Robert Dole after a debate in Atlanta on Feb. 28, 1988. (AP Photo)

Robertson’s campaign slogan, “For God and Country,” injected a nationalistic theme into the Christian right that would swell over time. After Vice President George H.W. Bush defeated him for the nomination and then won the presidency, Robertson established the Christian Coalition, which quickly replaced the Moral Majority as the movement’s marquee organization, doing serious grass-roots organizing under the direction of GOP wunderkind Ralph Reed.

The strategy of both the Reagan and Bush administrations was to give the Christian right — or religious right, as Falwell among others called it — a good deal of lip service but limited concrete action. This left a sizable cohort ready to follow former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan in his insurgent effort to wrest the presidential nomination from Bush in 1992.

Buchanan’s campaign slogan, “America First,” harked back to the America First isolationists who opposed U.S. entry into World War II and whose most prominent figure was Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. Speaking in support of Bush’s renomination at the 1992 Republican Convention, Buchanan hurled down the gauntlet of religious nationalism.

“There is a religious war going on in this country,” he declared. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” Where Reagan’s vision was that of an open and inclusive American civil religion, Buchanan invoked what the Italian scholar of Fascism Emilio Gentile calls a “political religion” — an intolerant and exclusivist sacralization of the nation for use as a weapon in partisan combat.

Four years later, Buchanan was out on the presidential hustings again, and while he was only modestly more successful against the establishment’s candidate (Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas) than he’d been against Bush in 1992, shrewd insiders like William Kristol, then editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, perceived him, rather than the pro-Dole Ralph Reed, as the real leader of the Christian right.

“Pat Buchanan has now taken over a movement that Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed spent eight years building up,” Kristol told The Washington Post early in the 1996 primary season. “Ralph Reed thinks the way to win the culture war over the long term is to damp down the enthusiasm of some of his followers and lead a long march through the institutions. Pat Buchanan wants to lead a fixed bayonet charge on the elites right now. It is a very different political strategy and implies a different agenda.”

That strategy would have to wait 20 years to come to fruition.

The story next time, in part 2.

From new Christian right to Christian nationalism, part 2

And, now on to the 21st century.

"One Nation Under God" (2009) by Jon McNaughton. Image via JonMcNaughton.com

February 22, 2022

Mark Silk

(RNS) — George W. Bush may have been the closest thing the Christian right had to a president who was one of them, but his eight years in office did little to further their political religion. The faith-based initiative that marked his first months in office was about the common good, not the culture war.

Immediately after the attacks of 9/11, Bush visited Washington’s Islamic Center to deny that terrorism was “the faith of Islam,” thereby signaling the U.S. response would not be a religious crusade. His wars in Afghanistan and Iraq harked back to Woodrow Wilson’s make-the-world-safe-for-democracy idealism, not Lindbergh’s America First isolationism.

But the gradualist political strategy pioneered by the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed proceeded apace. In the early 2000s, white evangelicals became solidly locked into the Republican Party, and they have voted for GOP presidential and congressional candidates by 4-1 margins ever since. In 2002, Reed gave an object lesson in faith-based mobilization as chairman of the Georgia Republican Party when he flipped the state from Democratic to Republican control.

After Bush left office and Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the wheels of Buchanan-style political religion began to turn freely again. Hostility to Islam became a wedge issue through the birtherism that made Obama out to be a Muslim born in Kenya, the Fox News-driven “ground zero mosque” controversy and state referendums against the establishment of “Shariah law.”

Tea party rally. Photo by Nicholas Kamm AFC

The 2010 midterms featured the tea party — or, to be precise, sundry organizations that bore its name. Created to protest taxes and the Affordable Care Act, the organizations drew heavily on white evangelicals, who were five times more likely to support than oppose it. Decked out in Revolutionary War garb, the partiers presented themselves as God-and-country patriots.

The tea party turned out to be a warmup for Donald Trump, who made white evangelicals his most fervent supporters as he constructed an America First ideology based on Islamophobia, closed borders, beggar-thy-neighbor tariffs and religious liberty for his religious supporters. What fireside chats were for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, political rallies were for Trump’s. The Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol was their apotheosis.

White #MAGA QAnon Jesus carried during the January 6 invasion of the Capitol. Tyler Merbler / Flickr

White #MAGA QAnon Jesus carried during the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol. Photo by Tyler Merbler / Flickr

“Thank you divine, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent creator God, for filling this chamber with your white light of love, with your white light of harmony,” prayed Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, on the Senate dais that day. “Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ.”

The role of religion in the assault on the Capitol was detailed last week in a report from the Baptist Joint Committee and the Freedom From Religion Foundation titled “Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection.” In the introduction, the BJC’s Amanda Tyler defines Christian nationalism as “a political ideology and cultural framework that seeks to merge American and Christian identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy.”

It would be more accurate to call this merging of identities Christian Americanism — the political religion of the Trumpist GOP.

No single piece of iconography better conveys this religion than “One Nation Under God,” the painting by Jon McNaughton reproduced at the top of this column. Based on medieval portrayals of the Last Judgment, it shows Jesus holding the U.S. Constitution, flanked by the country’s saints, with the saved (pious citizens) at the lower left and the damned (journalists, professors, feminists) at the lower right.

McNaughton is not an evangelical but a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That Christian Americanism considers the Constitution God-given is thanks to Mormon doctrine going back to Joseph Smith that it is so.

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