The Flag and the Cross by Philip S. Gorski

Author:Philip S. Gorski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.1 Percentage of white Americans who have serious moral problems with socialism across their agreement with views sacralizing the US Constitution.

Source: Public Discourse and Ethics Survey (Wave 6; November 2020)

The libertarian ideas of the Tea Party movement were entangled with the ethno-traditionalist impulses of white Christian nationalism.

“MAGA!” The Secularization of White Christian Nationalism

How could conservative evangelicals who claimed to defend “family values,” “character,” and “civility” support a thrice-married, egomaniacal real-estate mogul who paid off porn stars? Outside observers have been asking some version of this question ever since Trump’s early victories in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. So have some elite insiders, shocked to discover that their church and their party were not what they thought they were, at least not anymore.

The answer is complicated.

The first thing to note is that Trump’s MAGA narrative can be understood as a semi-secularized version of white Christian nationalism’s deep story. Trump’s narrative is shorn of the sorts of biblical references and allusions that peppered earlier presidents’ speeches. But the MAGA narrative still has many parallels with the deep story. The most obvious one is between the apocalyptic strand of white Christian nationalism and the catastrophizing aspect of MAGA. Premillennialists believe that there will be a final battle between good and evil, a life-and-death struggle between natural and supernatural forces that is visible to them, but invisible to unbelievers. Trump’s worldview is similar. “Disaster” is one of his favorite words. He sees life as an endless battle between us and them. He sees hidden conspiracies everywhere he looks. We should not be surprised that Trump’s rhetoric resonated so strongly with many white devotees of Christian nationalism. Their deep stories are quite similar.

If self-identified evangelicals respond to Trump’s semi-secularized version of white Christian nationalism, then this is in part because the evangelical label itself has become semi-secularized as well. Political scientist Ryan Burge has shown that an increasing number of Americans outside of evangelical Protestant traditions (such as Catholics, Mormons, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, and even Muslims and Hindus) are now identifying as “evangelical or born-again Christians.” He shows that this is largely driven by the merging of Republican and evangelical identities, so that when Americans are asked whether they’re “evangelical,” they increasingly read this not as a question about their theological beliefs, but whether they identify with the Republican Party.

The MAGA narrative is not only a secularized white Christian nationalism; it is a reactionary version. In the Puritans’ Promised Land narrative, recall, blood was the master metaphor that linked blood belonging (race), blood sacrifice (religion), and blood conquest (nation). In the sanitized 20th-century version of white Christian nationalism known as “American exceptionalism,” the blood metaphors were diluted into polite euphemisms such as “ultimate sacrifice.” In Trump’s “politically incorrect” version, blood reappeared. Sometimes it did so explicitly, as in the apocryphal story about “Muslim terrorists” executed with “bullets dipped in pig’s blood” that he often worked into his stump speech.13 Given the importance of blood sacrifice in many versions of Christian theology, and the mystical powers often attributed to it, Trump’s blood rhetoric probably resonated with many.

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