Vital Interests: Phil, welcome to the Vital Interests forum. Your work focuses on the study of the role of religion in American history and its influence on contemporary politics. You have written two relevant books - American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present and American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump.

Since the January 6 attack on the Capitol there has been a lot of commentary on those involved - militants like the Proud Boys and Oath Takers, conspiracy followers like QAnon - but another significant group was identified as White Christian nationalists. To begin this conversation can you put the Christian Nationalist movement into context in American society?

Phil Gorski: It’s important to emphasize that religion and national identity and democracy have always been complexly entangled in American history. But there are competing understandings of how they have been and should be related to each other. White Christian Nationalism is one such understanding.  It can be defined as a particular understanding of American history -- one that most of your readers will be familiar with -- which is the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation, that the founding fathers themselves were Orthodox Christians, and that the power and prosperity of the United States is a sign of divine favor.

The presence of non-whites, non-Christians, and non-Americans on American soil is understood as a threat to those blessings. Thus, it's important to make America Christian again and, sotto voce, "Make America White again." As I’ve noted elsewhere, Trumpism is, amongst other things, a secularized version of White Christian Nationalism.

VI: One of the terms introduced in your book American Covenant is a concept of “civil” religion developed in the United States. Can you go into that concept?

Phil Gorski: This is a very contested concept, also a very provocative concept. It provokes orthodox religious believers as well as more secular folks. Personally, the provocation is, for me, part of the attraction: the civil religion idea does get people thinking. What I mean by that term “civil religion” is that in America's first two foundings - the Puritan founding and then the Revolutionary founding - there was a widespread and deeply held belief that there was a fundamental compatibility and complementarity between civic republican politics and a certain kind of very broadly defined Christian ethics.

Many of the Puritans, and also many of the Revolutionaries, embraced the notion that the form of government that God preferred for the ancient Israelites was a republican government. Indeed, the Israelites flirtations with accommodation of monarchy were actually even a form of punishment because they were a form of idolatry. The “Hebrew Republic”, as they called it, had a number of civic republican features that are worth underlining: rule of law, dispersion of authority, inclusiveness, and emphasis on social justice. These same features are increasingly contested by White Christian Nationalists today. 

That’s one aspect of the civil religious tradition. The other is a Christian appropriation of the Hebrew prophets, what some theologians refer to as “prophetic religion.”  It references figures such Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah with their calls to righteousness, hospitality, and social justice. This form of political theology is still very much alive too in figures like Raphael Warnock, Amanda Corman - even in a certain sense Joe Biden - who all during and around the inauguration articulated that version of American political theology.

VI: The Founders were well-educated in classical philosophy and familiar with the contemporary European intellectual movement’s ideas about democracy. So their vision of the governing principles that would shape the United States extended beyond just Christian beliefs?

Phil Gorski: Exactly. This is a very important point. It's one of the reasons why the term civil religion captures something important about the founders’ vision. It was civil in the sense of civic and republican. But it was also religious in a sort of a broadly Christian or deist sense. It is absolutely right to emphasize that all of the founders were deeply read in republican political philosophy but also deeply read in the history of civic republicanism from antiquity through the Florentine Republic, the Dutch Republic, English republicanism, English Whig thought right up through the revolutionary era itself.

One of the things the Founders achieved was a pretty coherent synthesis of those two strands of thought: the republican and the prophetic. What I think is fundamentally historically false about the Christian Nationalist narrative is that it claims that the founding documents were directly inspired by or exclusively based on Christian scripture and teaching. This is a half-truth at best. 

VI: At the time of the Founding and throughout the history of the United States Christianity has been fractured. There were many actively competing Christian Protestant denominations - Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Quakers, Anglican, Lutheran, Congregationalists and then there are Catholics and Mormons. How did all these religious beliefs contribute to contemporary Christian Nationalism?

Phil Gorski: It’s important to stress that religious pluralism has given rise to political conflict throughout American history. There was conflict between the Puritans and the Quakers, between the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians and the Baptist and the Methodists. Then, there was a conflict between Protestants and Catholics, and with the Mormons later with Jewish immigrants as well. Again and again, one religious group or another has claimed to be the real Americans, the true defenders of American democracy, even if the composition of that group has changed over time.

So, what’s different about the present moment? What really worries me right at the present moment is that significant parts of the Christian right really do seem to be taking anti-democratic and even an authoritarian turn. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville argued that Christianity and democracy complemented one another in the United States, in contrast to his native France. He argued that American Christianity instilled civic virtue and respect for law, and that the churches themselves often serve as the schools for democracy insofar as they inculcated habits of democratic association and volunteerism. That, I think, is very much in danger and in part is because of fundamental transformations in the organization of American Christianity. This is not unprecedented, of course. There have always been anti-democratic currents within American Christianity, such as the Know Nothings or the KKK. But they never controlled one of the major parties and never put someone in the White House.

So, what happened? What explains this anti-democratic and proto-authoritarian turn? I would point to two factors. One is the increasing size of congregations, especially the rise of the so-called megachurches, which don't really leave much space for serious lay participation. Those tend to be dominated by a relatively small elite group within the congregation. Second of all, the rise of celebrity pastors. There have always been celebrity pastors but I think one of the things that's new in the present day is that their interest now extends so far beyond pastoral care or preaching per se and to far-flung, media and business dealings to the extent that some of the leaders themselves are no longer even really clergy in any sense.

Here, the best example would be Jerry Falwell Jr. who I think many people think of as an evangelical pastor but he considers himself a real estate developer and has no theological education whatsoever. Despite the fact that he leads what he claims as the largest Christian University in the country and probably in the world.

Reminds me a little of another celebrity “real estate developer….” 

VI: Can you go into the way these Christian mega-congregations define themselves as preaching fundamentalism or having an evangelical mission? Are they one and the same?

Phil Gorski: This terminology is really murky and complicated, and scholars argue a lot about how to draw these lines.  I myself tend to think about it historically: the “fundamentalist” moniker emerged in the early 20th Century. It arose out of a debate between liberal and conservative Protestant theologians. The conservatives said: "We believe in the following fundamentals." They even published a series of pamphlets that were collected into several volumes called “The Fundamentals.”

What separated the fundamentalists of the first half of the 20th century from the evangelicals of the second half is that the fundamentalists were sectarian and a-political whereas the evangelicals were actively engaged in politics and of course evangelism.  The Fundamentalists were concerned with personal holiness and communal purity. Evangelicals wanted to win souls and change “the culture.” 

During the '70s or '80s the evangelical movement underwent an important change: it   became more openly partisan. Billy Graham, certainly, always leaned Republican. He was a very close adviser and friend of Richard Nixon until Watergate broke. Still, he was never openly partisan. He served as a spiritual adviser to Democratic Presidents, too, remember. That all changed in the late 1970s with the rise of the moral majority, with Jerry Falwell Sr., and then even more when Pat Robertson made his first run at the presidency in 1988. This was an ever-tightening embrace between white evangelicals and the Republican Party.

Today, one of the really striking things that survey researchers have found is that there is a more complete alignment between the Republican Party platform and the political attitudes of White evangelicals. This is distinctive. This is not true of any other religious group. There's far more distance, for example, between what Black Protestants believe and what Democrats believe or what White Catholics believe and what their particular party believes. There is just this incredible alignment, partisan alignment, so that, effectively, the White evangelical community just becomes a political extension of the GOP, and vice versa.

VI: There have been other times in American history when religious groups and religious leaders have entered into the political sphere. During the Civil War churches advocated for the abolition of slavery and after either supported Reconstruction or stood by Jim Crow Laws and the KKK. In the early 20th Century religious groups weighed in on women's suffrage and embraced the temperance movement and actually got an amendment passed that brought on Prohibition. Preachers across America played a major role in the post WW2 anti-communist movement and supported Joe McCarthy because for them all communists were godless and needed to be purged from the country. From the 1970’s church groups have united in opposing abortion. Is this history all part of what we are now witnessing?

Phil Gorski: You make a very important point. I think, sometimes, secular progressives look at the Christian Right and they say, "Wow, it used to be that we had a secular democracy and now, all of a sudden, we have these religious people who are busting their way into the public square and mixing things up." That, of course, is also a misreading of history. There have always been religious groups that have been involved in American politics. I don't even think you can really tell a coherent and convincing story about the history of social movements and political reform in the United States without taking very much into account the role of churches and even more of parachurch and interdenominational organizations. That too is nothing new.

Just to give one example, the National Reform Association of the mid-19th century was determined to insert a Christian clause into the American Constitution, which the Confederate Constitution did include. And they came pretty close to succeeding, too! The notion was that the Union, in order to preserve divine favor, needed to do the same thing.  So, there’s nothing new about American Christians being heavily involved in American politics. What is new is the degree to which, in recent years, all of that energy has been on the Right. That's partly to do with the alignment of the Republican Party and evangelical organizations, but it's also partly to do with the relative silence of religious progressives. That actually may be changing.

It's early days, it's hard to tell, but again, the inauguration, the election of Raphael Warnock, the increasing prominence of Black Christians in the Democratic Party may actually bring about a moderate resurgence of progressive Christianity and the religious Left more broadly.

VI: However a significant part of the Democratic Party is quite secular and does not align with religion at all?

Phil Gorski: Right. I do think that one of the internal challenges that the Democratic Party faces right now, is finding a way to bridge those internal gaps. Secular progressives could, I think, find some political allies among younger White evangelicals. They often have very different politics than their parents do. They still tend to be very pro-life, very anti-abortion, but on a range of other issues, gay marriage, climate change, social justice, racial reconciliation, they have politics that pull them much more in the direction of the Democratic Party. 

Particularly at this moment it seems to me that the objective of the day is to build a popular front in defense of liberal democracy, a popular front that reaches from Bernie Sanders to the Lincoln Project. You want the door to be open to those folks and make them feel like they're welcome. Abortion is going to continue to be a very difficult issue for that coalition. I think the task is to persuade some of those folks to not just be one-issue voters, the way that a lot of their parents are.

VI: Many describe what is happening as a cultural war - that it goes beyond just religion and embraces the loss of what are considered core American values. Within Christian teachings there was a concept of conversion, that the faithful would be able to influence others by example and by preaching biblical truths and bringing them to salvation in the church. Today we see the rhetoric of a battle between good and evil. Doesn’t this contribute to the stark polarization we are now witnessing?

Phil Gorski: You make two good points. One is in a way the failure of the entire evangelical project, which was to convert America to Christianity one person at a time. I think it's very clear at this point to most White evangelicals that this is not going to happen. That certainly has pushed them into a more defensive posture than they were in 20 or 30 years ago, where they had this sense of being an ascendant and a growing group, whereas today they're at best in a steady state. And that is really only because they have very high birth rates compared to other groups.

That sense of cultural anxiety, this concern about losing the culture that is no longer being the culturally dominant group or the demographic majority, I think that certainly feeds into some of the Manichaean thinking that you find among white evangelicals. Though here, I would also emphasize the profound and enduring influence of apocalyptic thinking amongst White evangelicals. This was not always the case. If you were to go back to the late 19th Century, for example, most American Christians embraced a different interpretation of Scripture, in which gradual processes of social reform and religious conversion would create the Kingdom of God on Earth. Only then would Christ return. In the early 20th Century there's a really pretty rapid and decisive shift towards the kind of apocalyptic thinking we have today in which Jesus is going to return to the Earth on a white horse, swooping out of the clouds surrounded by His angelic armies to wreak justice and vengeance on all the unbelievers and usher in a horrific period of tribulation.

The reason that evangelicals feel so embattled is the confluence of those two things: demographic decline and apocalyptic thinking. And now, in the midst of the pandemic, apocalyptic thinking is melding with conspiracy theories, too. 

There is a kind of a natural fit between them.  After all, apocalyptic thinking is really the mother of all conspiracy theories, the idea that there are dark, hidden forces at work behind events, that there are secret codes and signs that only you and your group can decipher, that there will be this Day of Judgment, an explosion of violence that will purify the world. That's apocalyptic thinking. It’s also QAnon. They pretty much follow the same script. It's no accident that this QAnon thinking has so deeply permeated many, many evangelical laypeople.

VI: Because it resonates with things that they've already been indoctrinated in?

Phil Gorski: Exactly. it's the same basic propensity. I do think that most people reason about politics in terms of stories. And the basic frame or deep story of the QAnon and apocalypticism are incredibly similar. It’s not hard to blend the two.

VI: The education of these evangelicals, the White Christian nationalists, is coming from the populist preachers of the mega-churches you mentioned. There is also a network of Christian colleges and universities like Liberty University. There is a huge Christian home-schooling movement. Is this part of also what contributes to this frame of mind?

Phil Gorski: This is something that's not super well understood just yet. Colleagues and scholars I know who do study this emphasize the role of Christian Homeschooling. One of them just recently sent me a screenshot of something that he had gotten in his email inbox from Mike Huckabee. Mike Huckabee is a perfect embodiment of the certain moniker of clergyperson, politician and entrepreneur.

He had sent around a certain ad for some Christian homeschooling kit with videos and textbooks. The central image is Abraham Lincoln in the middle flanked by Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. There's a cartoon dove hovering above the three of them, which I presume is the Holy Spirit. Here you have the Holy Spirit hovering over an agnostic at the center, a deist on the left and a bon vivant on the right. It's just such an incredible distortion of the historical reality. 

But homeschooling is not the only means of propagating the Christian nationalist narrative. There is an entire Christian Nationalist industry. At the moment one of the most famous leaders is the evangelical Christian political activist David Barton. He sells books, gives lectures, makes videos and so on via an organization called Wallbuilders in Texas. This is really how he makes his living and he's not the only one. He's just one of the people who's been at this the longest.

The third way that this happens in a more subdued way is through concerted efforts to influence the content of the history textbooks that are used in public schools. Barton, for example, was even elected to the statewide curriculum board that reviews and makes recommendations about textbooks in Texas. There are such boards in many states.  If a textbook can't be sold in Texas or other large states like California, it probably won't be published. They've had a huge influence therefore on public school history teaching.

VI: You have the rank-and-file Christian Nationalists who are members of megachurches, were homeschooled, and then attended doctrinaire Christian universities. However, In the last four years we have seen major figures in the Trump administration such as Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and  Attorney General William Barr repeat the rhetoric of the Christian Right and espouse the notion that the United States urgently needs to return to strict Christian principles, otherwise the rot of secularism will destroy the country. How does this contribute to the power of Christian Nationalism?

Phil Gorski: Yes. It's interesting that you mentioned Bill Barr because that raises another issue.  White Christian Nationalism is very widespread amongst White evangelicals. But it has also made substantial inroads among White Catholics and non-evangelical Protestants as well. Also, there is a real resurgence of integralist thought amongst Catholic evangelicals, such as William Barr. The basic idea is that you can't have a coherent flourishing society unless there is some kind of unitary religious worldview, and that imposing this worldview on a populace is for their own good. 

This view broke out into public view a couple of years ago with a debate between Sohrab Ahmari and David French. Ahmari writes a column for a conservative Catholic journal called First Things and is an op-ed columnist for the New York Post. French is a political commentator who writes for National Review and does legal work on religious freedom. He was a vocal never-Trumper. French described himself as a classical liberal. He's also one of those evangelicals who really takes racial justice seriously, in part because he has an adopted child of color.

Ahmari, on the other hand, has a response to this and just said, "Look, pluralism, accommodation, we're done with all that. We just need to fight." He spoke in this essay disparagingly of “David Frenchism”, as if it was a kind of squishiness and accommodation. In a way, it's just a high-minded version of this trope about fighting, fighting, fighting all the time that you increasingly hear amongst the more radicalized Trump wing of the Republican Party. Now, the alliance between conservative evangelicals and Catholics is not new. Indeed, the founding editor of First Things, R. John Neuhaus, helped to broker it. But this was an electoral alliance, a democratic alliance. What you’re witnessing now, I fear, is its evolution into an anti-democratic and authoritarian alliance.

Not all the evangelicals, and certainly not all Catholics, are part of this alliance. But a lot are. They share a similar affinity for authoritarian governance and this is one of the reasons for their fascination with Putin’s Russia. Christian Nationalists are drawn to the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church as it does not present a clear dividing line between church and state or between religious and political leadership. In Russian there is no public tolerance for homosexuality.  White Christians remain the dominant group. They wish America were more like Russia. When you think about the evangelicals’ Cold War crusades against “Godless Communism”…it’s almost too ironic. 

VI: Let's talk about the globalization of White Christian Nationalism, the transnational aspect. You mentioned Russia, but certainly there are other emerging authoritarian states like Poland and Hungary where using religion is an important part of their governing strategy?

Phil Gorski: Absolutely. I think it's very important to realize that religious nationalism, as a broader category, is something that has been very much on the rise for the last 20 years or so. Various types of religious nationalism do have an affinity for right-wing populism, or right-wing authoritarianism. We see this throughout the world: with Modi in India, with Bolsonaro’s Brazil, in Erdogan's Turkey. The list could easily be extended. This, I think, is one of the most important recent developments in global politics.

If we're focusing more narrowly on the West, in the sense of North America and Europe, we'd witness much the same affinity in the form of a Christian Nationalism that's often coded as racially White. We see expressions of that in Poland and Hungary that are really quite similar to what we see in the United States.

There are large numbers of practicing Christians still who are very attracted to this ideology. What you see in Western Europe is slightly different than in Eastern Europe insofar as the people who are most often the loudest advocates of right-wing populism and "Christian civilization" are often quite irreligious or even anti-religious people. If you look at the Le Pen movement in France, or the Alternative for Germany followers, those folks are really nationalist conservatives or White nationalists, who are just using Christian symbols and language as a cover for racism and chauvinism. 

At the same time, I think you're starting to see some convergence between Europe and America, too. If you just think about the Capitol riots, a lot of the white nationalists put on displays of piety. The Proud Boys kneeled and prayed before storming the Capitol. So did the group that penetrated the Senate and House Chambers. 

They see themselves as defenders of a White Christian culture that for them represents true American values. You can even see this statistically. One very interesting finding is that if you look at who Trump supporters were amongst Evangelicals, he got the strongest support from people who say they are Evangelicals and go to church very frequently, at least once a week, and almost as many from people who say they're Evangelicals, but never go to church. This latter category of people, you've got to think of as cultural Evangelicals. People for whom evangelicalism is almost like an ethnic identification or maybe a cultural identification, but certainly not a religious affiliation.

There I think even in the United States, though the balance of course is a little bit different, you are starting to see this convergence with a more culturalist civilization as more of a White Christian Nationalism than is happening in Western Europe.

VI: Would you say that the Christian Nationalists are adopting or thinking that it's okay, to take on the militancy of the Radical Right? To embrace the idea of organized militias, of armed insurrection, of using violence, as we saw on January 6th, as an appropriate means to their end?

Phil Gorski: I think there is an increasing danger of that. I think one of the biggest questions at the moment is, in a Venn diagram that includes White Nationalists and White Supremacists in one circle, another includes Christian Nationalist, and a third Catholic Integralists - how much overlap is there and in particular how much shared willingness is there, to engage in violence? I do think that apocalyptic thinking and even more the QAnon conspiracy theorizing and the demonization and othering that go together with that are connected.

Anybody who's a security or intelligence analyst who’s studied places where there has been intense civic conflict and civil war will tell you that we now see many of the key precursors of serious forms of violence. A lot, I think, will depend in this case on what happens within these evangelical communities. I know that there are a lot of church leaders who are horrified by what's going on. The question is, whether they'll be willing to stand up and try to call some of their parishioners back to normality or reality.

For sure, I think everyone would agree that there's a very serious risk of domestic terror attacks, a very real possibility of mass casualty attacks. In the coming years, I expect that those probabilities will spike, particularly in the months before and after the 2024 presidential election. I have no doubt that there will be some folks who were kind of garden variety White Christian Nationalists, who will have been radicalized and engage in that kind of activity as well. Small numbers, no doubt. but I think that's almost inevitable.

VI: What role could conservative political leaders, Right leaning think tanks, and groups like the Federalist Society play in intervening to guide the White Christian Nationalists movement into a more moderate political force?

Phil Gorski: You make an excellent point because I think that the folks who have the best chance of being heard in these circles are people who are themselves identified as Conservatives, Conservative Christians, White Evangelical, and so on. There certainly are such voices, but so far definitely not enough of them. I think you're also right to say that, probably at the moment, it looks like those voices are going to be outside of the circle of Republican politics proper. Very few Republican politicians have been willing to stand up, in any serious way, at least not publicly.

I think in part because they're themselves afraid - and not without reason - of their own voters. We'll really need more church leaders, legal thinkers, and scholars, people from the think tank world to counter this trend toward militancy. They have to play that role, and perhaps if enough of them are outspoken about this, it will create a space in which more Republican politicians can follow the lead of people like Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, and others, and clearly denounce what's been going on.

VI: When you have a struggle that is portrayed as good versus evil, that is a moral struggle in the apocalyptic terms you mentioned, don’t you confront the problem that in a liberal democracy a spirit of compromise and cooperation is needed? How do you compromise with something which you see as morally destroying everything you believe in?

Phil Gorski: I do think that we're now moving out of the realm of the interaction of religion and politics to the many societal changes required to bring American democracy back to a modest degree of health. Certainly, something has to be done about social media and the information ecosystem more generally. I don't know what that is. It's tricky because it raises all these constitutional issues around free speech. Certainly, another thing that would probably need to be done is some serious constitutional democracy reform. Something like the new voting rights act that's been proposed.

VI: HR1 - this significant piece of legislation has been blocked for a long time.

Phil Gorski: Exactly - HR1. Of course, the Democrats don't have the votes right now, because in our bizarre system, this bill requires 60 votes, whereas, giving gigantic tax cuts to people that don't need them only requires 51. But there we are.

Thinking a bit more outside the box, about more ambitious undertakings, one thing I would really like to see would be a national service program. It might solve or at least ameliorate two of the deepest problems in American society today: increasing levels of segregation and decreasing levels of trust. Ask yourself what it was that created a somewhat greater willingness to compromise amongst American politicians in the 1950s and 1960s.Well, part of the answer was the tacit agreement to do nothing about civil rights. But I suspect that another part was the shared experience of suffering and sacrifice during the Depression. Then during the Second World War, many Americans had literally been in the trenches with people who were very different from them. I'm certainly not wishing for a Third World War, but I think something like the national service program could in fact serve as a proxy for that.

It was encouraging to see that one of Biden’s executive orders included creating this climate-oriented Civilian Conservation Corps. Something like that I think would be very positive going forward - for the US to rebuild some sense of solidarity,an attempt to solve a fundamental sociological and political problem. At the moment, if you want to truly have a multi-racial democracy, you have to figure out some way to have democratic solidarity, that goes together with cultural diversity. 

That is the heavier lift. I don't think any of us should be naive about how difficult that is. In my view this kind of effort to bridge our social, religious, economic, and political divides could once again demonstrate America could be a kind of City on the Hill, a society that recognizes serious challenges and undertakes the challenging work needed to continue evolving the unique American experiment. There are certainly many folks around the world who think that's impossible and don't even think is desirable.

VI: Phil. we are coming to the end of our time. Thank you for an in-depth discussion on the realities of Christian Nationalism - its roots in American history, what it is now, and what we have to be concerned with in the future. We have to pay attention in the coming years to understand how the Christian Nationalist movement impacts American society.

Phil Gorski: It has been my pleasure. Attention is certainly needed as I do believe we will see implications sooner rather than later.

Philip Gorski is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University. His research focuses on the interaction between religion and politics in modern and early modern Western Europe and North America. His most recent books are American Covenant (Princeton, 2017) and American Babylon (Routledge, 2020). He is currently completing a short primer on the history and politics of White Christian Nationalism in the U.S.