White Christian nationalists are poised to remake America in their image during Trump’s second term, author says

By John Blake, CNN

(CNN) — There’s an image that captures the threat posed by the White Christian nationalist movement — and how it could become even more dangerous over the next four years.

Taken during the Jan. 6 insurrection, the photo shows a solitary White man, his head pressed in prayer against a massive wooden cross, facing the domed US Capitol building. An American flag stands like a sentinel on a flagpole beside the Capitol under an ominously gray sky.

The photograph depicts a foot soldier in an insurgent religious movement trying to storm the halls of American power. What’s unsettling about the photo four years later is that much of the religious zeal that fed the insurrection is no longer outside the gates of power. Many of that movement’s followers are now on the inside, because their Chosen One, Donald Trump, returns this month to the Oval Office.

This is the scenario Americans could face in Trump’s second term. Under Trump, Christian nationalists will have unprecedented access to the power of the federal government. Trump’s GOP has unified control of Congress. And a conservative supermajority, which has already blurred the line between separation of church and state in a series of decisions favoring Christian interests, controls the US Supreme Court.

Trump has not been shy about what comes next. He ran a presidential campaign that was infused with White Christian Nationalist imagery and rhetoric. He vowed in an October campaign speech to set up a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” and restore preachers’ power in America while giving access to a group he calls “my beautiful Christians.”

“If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump told an annual gathering of National Religious Broadcasters in Tennessee during a campaign stop earlier this year.

Trump won the support of about 8 in 10 White evangelical voters in November’s presidential election. Nearly two-thirds of White evangelical Protestants in the US described themselves as sympathizers or adherents to Christian nationalism in a February 2023 survey.

Scholars have called White Christian nationalism an “Imposter Christianity” whose adherents use religious language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in a quest to create a White Christian America.

So what might life look like over the next four years for Americans who don’t subscribe to this movement?

CNN asked that question of Kristin Kobes Du Mez, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Christian nationalism. Du Mez is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” Her book has become a go-to source for understanding Christian nationalism. It explains how the movement’s tentacles reach deep into American history and pop culture.

To many people, declaring America a Christian nation may seem harmless. And it’s important to distinguish Christian nationalists from patriotic Christians who have a more inclusive view of what America should be. But Du Mez says Christian nationalism is ultimately incompatible with American democracy.

“This is not a pluralist vision for all of American coming together or a vision for compromise,” says Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University in Michigan and a fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion. “It is a vision for seizing power and using that power to usher in a ‘Christian America.’”

CNN recently spoke to Du Mez about this movement and what Americans might expect during Trump’s second term. Her comments were edited for brevity and clarity.

What will Trump’s victory do for the White Christian nationalist movement?

It will embolden and empower the White Christian nationalist movement. In all likelihood, it will institutionalize White Christian nationalism. It will transform our government, with the goal of transforming our society. It will likely place White Christian nationalists in positions of enormous political power. It could be transformative.

How would that institutionalization of White Christian nationalism look in ordinary people’s lives?

We can expect this Christian nationalist agenda to transform the public school system. One of the proposals with Christian nationalists is to eliminate the Department of Education, to look to the privatization of schooling, but also to transform the curriculum throughout public schools. The anti-CRT (critical race theory) and anti-woke agenda that we have seen played out on a smaller scale in certain states — that is what we should expect to see on a national scale.

Project 2025 (a conservative blueprint for the next Republican president, although Trump tried to distance himself from it during the 2024 campaign) is explicit about cracking down on woke ideology, eliminating certain terms from laws and federal regulations, terms like “gender equality” and “reproductive rights.” This anti-woke agenda is a key point of unity between White Christian nationalists and the broader MAGA movement.

Is there any potential for book bans?

Any book that could be perceived as pro-LGBTQ, for example, or to contain a harmful political agenda — those are the books likely to be targeted, and certainly removed from school curriculums and school libraries. But in terms of everyday lives, part of the agenda of Christian nationalists is a redefinition of human rights and of civil rights according to their understanding of God’s laws or natural law.

And in this respect, there is no right to same-sex marriage, there is no right to abortion, or broader LGBTQ rights. Those don’t exist within their understanding of the rights guaranteed by our Constitution. They read the Constitution through this Christian nationalist framework: God founded the nation, our founding documents reflect that and therefore they must be interpreted in light of God’s law, which in a sense, erases how we would normally understand constitutional rights and replaces them with essentially a Christian nationalist agenda.

Why are some Christian nationalists hostile to the Department of Education?

There’s a long history of opposition to the Department of Education within the Christian right, going back several decades. Schools are seen as a primary site of formation of children, and within this conservative Christian ideology there’s a very strong emphasis on the rights of the parent to shape the values and ideals of one’s children. When government steps in and takes on that role, they believe that it infringes on a parent’s God-given rights. They are extremely upset when these, quote unquote, government schools educate their children and teach them things that they do not believe in or that they would find harmful.

You could also trace this hostility back historically, and not coincidentally, to the kind of resistance to government schools that really welled up in the context of the civil rights movement and desegregation efforts. This was seen as the government intrusion into families and into communities.

With his victory, is Trump even more revered in White Christian nationalist movement circles?

Absolutely. In every way, there is celebration in Christian nationalist spaces. The idea is widespread that Trump’s victory demonstrates a divine mandate that resonates with the framework that they have been using to explain and promote Trump dating back to 2016. He is somehow God’s anointed one. He is God’s chosen leader for this particularly fraught, historical political moment.

You saw that early on in 2016 with these prophecies that were coming from charismatic circles that no, he was not necessarily a Christian, but he was still God’s chosen one to save Christian America. The sense of his divine role certainly wasn’t dampened by the assassination attempt and his survival, which seemed miraculous to some. Trump leaned into that and said God had saved him because God had a divine purpose for him.

You once said that Christian nationalism and militant patriarchy go hand in hand. What does that mean?

Christian nationalism is the idea that America is a distinctly Christian nation. But there’s a whole set of descriptors that go along with this that we see over and over again. There’s this idea that we need to restore Christian America. What does that look like? It looks like privileging the quote unquote, traditional family, the patriarchal family structure. They believe that the way that God has designed human flourishing is to have a male patriarch, and then to have a submissive wife, one who submits to her husband’s authority, and one whose primary role is a mother and a homemaker. Any family structure that does not look like that is seen as undermining society.

You’ll hear the rhetoric that we need strong Godly men to step up to defend faith, family and nation. And so when you get inside Christian nationalist spaces, there is all kinds of militant rhetoric about manly strength, about Christian men who need to step up and take power, and assert their leadership because that is their God-ordained role.

Given that description, was there even a remote chance that White Christian nationalists would support Kamala Harris?

No. No White Christian nationalist would vote for Kamala Harris.

No matter what she did?

No. Just an absolute nonstarter. I mean, how many strikes does she have against her? She’s a woman, and a woman of color. Her gender would probably be disqualifying for most. But no — because she’s a woman of color, and frankly a Democrat.

Christian nationalism thrives on this us-versus-them mentality. This militancy is linked to always needing an enemy. And in Christian nationalism today, the enemies are internal. Historically the enemies of Christian America were secular humanists, feminists and then more recently Democrats and the woke. This language of an enemy within that caught some attention in the last week of the campaign, when Trump said those words that resonate deeply with Christian nationalists. That fuels the sense that we need warriors to fight to save your family and Christianity. And to save America, you’re going have to fight fellow Americans who are threatening those values.

In some ways, is Trump just as much of a transformational figure for White evangelicals as Billy Graham?

I think we can say yes. The reason I pause is because I don’t think people fully understand the significance and legacy of Billy Graham. But yes, Trump is transformational but only because of the kind of deep roots of Christian nationalism. If you go back to the 1960s and 1970s and listen to the rhetoric of evangelical and fundamentalist pastors, and listened to how they talked about race, and their mission to save Christian America — that goes back a half of a century.

Given that resonance, yes, he has been transformational with that promise to give Christians power. And there he means, of course, power to conservative, White evangelical types of Christians. That (promise) has excited his base and emboldened that faction. A few years ago, it might have been frowned upon in many Christian spaces to support somebody like Trump. Now, the tables have really turned. Now there’s no shame in embracing Trump. There has been a transformative effect. I see much unapologetically crude and belligerent language inside these spaces. This kind of militancy is no longer beneath the surface, and it is aimed at fellow Americans and at fellow Christians who do not toe the line.

What happens though to those White Christian evangelicals who don’t subscribe to Christian nationalism. Where do they go?

There are a lot of pressures to get on board with this Christian nationalist agenda. It doesn’t need to be overtly supported, but there’s enormous pressure not to object. A person who works in an evangelical media organization explained it to me this way. The memo is: You don’t have to support Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda — you just can’t speak against it, so you can keep your job. When I heard those words, I thought that exactly describes what I’m hearing from people and what I’m observing. So you can quietly hold onto your beliefs, but if you try to object to something that is part of this agenda, if you try to say, fellow Christians, should we be supporting a man like Trump? — that will get you into trouble.

If this movement gets everything it wants, what will this country look like?

There will be no meaningful religious liberty. There will be essentially a two-tier society between the quote unquote, real Americans—those who buy into this, or pretend to — and then the rest of Americans. If you’re a person of no faith or a Muslim or anybody deemed not a true Christian, you will have a place, but you will not have a voice. The laws will be rewritten across the board. Rights as we understand them will cease to exist and instead, we’ll have the framework of biblical law.

The idea will be that true freedom comes from following God’s laws. So freedom will be redefined. You are free to follow the laws that we set out for you as a woman, or someone who is same-sex attracted. True freedom comes from submitting to God’s law, and we will help you do that, and it will ultimately be good for you. In our education system, our American history will be made up. It will be ideological.

They want to erase the teaching of actual history to prop up a mythical understanding of what this country was founded to be to justify their radical transformation of the country. There will be no abortion rights, and there will be limited, if any, access to contraception. There will be harsh anti-immigration laws with exceptions for people who subscribe to this Christian nationalist vision or who are seen to fit within it, religiously, politically and perhaps ethnically.

There are potential mitigating factors: infighting or incompetence within Christian nationalist and MAGA circles, the role of the courts, resistance within government agencies and at the local and state levels. And of course, the extent to which various aspects of the Christian nationalist agenda align with Trump’s own priorities and with those of members of his inner circle, like Elon Musk.

What do you say to people who say you’re being alarmist and playing into doomsday scenarios? I mean, this isn’t “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

I would love to be wrong about this. The reason I’m saying these things is because I have been listening to what they (in this movement) have been saying and I have been reading what they have been writing for years. They have been writing these things and saying these things for decades. For a long time, they were a powerful strand in the broader evangelical world and within the Republican Party. But they were offset by a more secular and pro-business conservatism.

What we’ve seen now is that they’ve moved into a dominant position within the Republican Party. The MAGA brand is the Republican Party. These ideas are not new. What is new is that for the first time, they are really in a position to carry out these plans.

Do you think White Christian nationalists will someday regret this alliance with Trump?

No. It’s hard for me to envision why they would regret it, because what they most want is power — the power to achieve their ends. And he appears to be granting them that power. I suppose then there could be some regret, but that just seems so far-fetched at this point. They have seen their movement go mainstream, and now they have incredible access to power.

John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”

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