Following the presidency of Donald J. Trump, a flood of books has been published on the US Christian Right's alleged radicalisation. Especially since the riots at the US Capitol in January 2021, it has been hard for commentators to resist the temptation of reading history backwards to find apparent confirmations in that day's events for earlier warnings about what used to be called ‘Christian Fascism’ and is now more commonly denoted as ‘Christian nationalism’. This entity, supposedly, has always constituted a dire existential threat to democracy in the United States but only now have its dangers been fully exposed. It used to be that serious scholars would not parrot the lines of this particular genre of polemical literature, as old as the modern Christian Right itself. But apparently those days are now past.
In many ways, Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry's The flag and the cross constitutes an exemplar of this polemical literature's migration into academic discourse. Ostensibly, their book is a ‘primer on white Christian nationalism’ (p. 1), but in fact it constitutes a sweeping, ambitious overview and reinterpretation of all of US history, religious and otherwise. In Gorski and Perry's telling, all of US history is explicable through the operations of ‘the holy trinity of white Christian nationalism – that peculiar nexus of freedom, order, and violence’ (p. 57) in which White Americans maintain a strict monopoly on power, their freedom is all that matters and they use violence to keep others in subjection to the public order that they have imposed.
The authors’ public opinion surveys in 2019–21 (on which this book is partly based) confirm that African American conservatives share most of the tenets of ‘Christian nationalism’, but this fact is quickly explained away. ‘White’ is thereafter invariably attached to descriptions of conservatism whether religious or political. Indeed, nearly everything in this book ends up being reduced to race, and race is seemingly all that matters. In particular, the threat to democracy posed by ‘Christian nationalism’ is said to be all about race. White Christians’ loss of demographic majority status has prompted an ethno-nationalist response narrated in Christian terms that repudiates ‘a truly multiracial democracy’ (p. 8) in which belonging would not be by race, religion and birth. In this way, Gorski and Perry claim, ‘Christian’ has become identical with ‘whiteness’ (p. 27).
In this telling, it was the Puritans who first fused Christianity and nationalism and White Southern Christians the ones who transformed the Puritans’ ‘chosen-ness’ (p. 53) into White supremacism. The Progressives globalised this through their ‘WASP imperialism’ (p. 61) and the Cold War era Christian Right forged out of it all the contemporary sex-obsessed ‘white Christian libertarianism’ (p. 71) that uses ‘color-blindness’ (p. 69) as a cover for a refusal to address racially-inflected structural injustices and exclusions. Persuasively, Gorski and Perry tie Donald Trump to the story in terms of a ‘semi-secularized version of white Christian nationalism's deep story’ (p. 84) in which ‘evangelical’ and ‘Christian’ are political and racial categories, not religious.
In his Embattled America, Jason C. Bivins traverses the exact same terrain but offers a very different interpretation. On some issues, the analysis does move on parallel lines, and eventually Bivins, too, devolves into utterly predictable denunciations of ‘white privilege’ (p. 191) of the ‘constitutive nature of white supremacy’ in US public life (p. 191) and of the ‘yearning for the erasure of black bodies, womens’ bodies, Muslim bodies’ (p. 211) that has been ‘authorized’ by religion (p. 192). And yet ‘the much-ballyhooed Christian nationalism of our time’, he also insists, ‘is not the key to understanding the roots of the many problems bedeviling America, nor should it be the main vector of analysis of those concerned about American democracy’ (p. 2).
Instead, Bivins proposes that the fault lies in equal measure on both sides of the culture wars (or ‘Embattlement’, as he calls them, p. 5). It lies both with the ‘Martyrs’ (p. 5) of the Christian Right who feel that their ‘Christian America’ is being stolen from them by secularists and with the liberal ‘Whistleblowers’ (p. 5) who try to expose the Christian Right for its theocratic ideology and agenda. Both groups believe themselves to be the custodians of the only ‘real’ America, but both are wrong. To validate this thesis, Bivins embarks on a sophisticated multi-layered excavation of the cultural and historical forces that have created the condition that he diagnoses. This unfolds through case studies, including of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry, of history textbook and birthright citizenship fights, and of the Tea Party and MAGA movements.
The deep cultural forces that Bivins identifies behind each case include long-standing ‘American fascination with trauma and victimhood’ (p. 13), a cultural bent towards ‘Life as Action Movie’ (p. 11) where the individual only and his or her grievance and triumph matters, and ‘the Long Con of anti-politics’ (p. 13) by which generations of Americans have been taught to distrust politics and to value individuality and the market alone. Much of this, Bivins insists, has been created by a ‘hypercapitalism’ (p. 9) that has been sacralised by the Christian Right and is kept in place in order to prevent needed structural reforms. For the other part, these are logical results of liberal democracy itself, given its prioritising of individualism and personal rights. And yet, beyond all this, there exists also Bivins's own ‘real’ America, one composed of communitarian and ‘inclusive’ publics, which he hopes to reanimate and empower.
Despite their differences, both the Bivins book and that by Gorski and Perry do share one key common characteristic. Both are baldly agenda-driven. Both opine, mostly against Christian conservatives, both issue dire warnings, and both include long sections of prescription about how things should be and how to get there. While this approach can yield valuable insights (as both of these books certainly do), one wonders what happened to scholarship pure and simple, scholarship that merely attempted to explain what is, why it is and how it became so.
