New buzz words for Left will shift from White Nationalism, to White Christian Nationalism

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An ideology is on the march. Traces of it are detectable in a racist massacre in Buffalo; in Tucker Carlson’s monologues; in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s public comments. Find it again in the right’s anti-abortion rhetoric, which poorly disguises demographic anxiety, or in the right’s response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which shows it embracing God and guns with ever greater conviction. This ideology has a name, argue sociologists Samuel L. Perry of the University of Oklahoma and Philip S. Gorski of Yale University. Perry and Gorski call it white Christian nationalism, and in their view, it represents a pressing threat to democracy…. Gorski and Perry argue that white Christian nationalists share a set of common anti-democratic beliefs and principles. “These are beliefs that, we argue, reflect a desire to restore and privilege the myths, values, identity, and authority of a particular ethnocultural tribe,” they write. “These beliefs add up to a political vision that privileges the tribe. And they seek to put other tribes in their proper place.” Gorski: I think because it identifies one of the deepest and most powerful currents in American political culture, one that has been invisible to most folks outside of that culture and even, in a way, to a lot of people inside of that culture because it’s the water they swim in and the air they breathe. And of course it’s also important because it is right now evolving into a deeply anti-democratic ideology, one that really is driving some of the most radical fringe groups in the United States today, including many mainstream political candidates in the Republican Party. Perry: I would say that one element we see, just from an empirical standpoint, is that quantitative indicators of Christian-nationalist ideology seem to operate differently for white Americans than for, say, African Americans. When white Americans take our surveys and answer questions about whether the United States is a Christian nation or we don’t need a separation of church and state or we should advocate Christian values in the government, for them, it is powerfully associated with things like nostalgia and authoritarianism and a certain vision of America’s history as this kind of mythic story: that we have a special relationship with God and that there is this kind of place that we are going — this deep story. Gorski: The other reason I think we really use that term “white Christian nationalism” is that it connects policy preferences that we associate with the Christian right to an underlying narrative that connects those positions. I think a lot of folks go, “Well, gosh, how can you be anti-abortion and pro-gun?” and “How can you claim you’re pro-life but also be pro-death-penalty?” What does supporting the police or opposing masks and vaccines have to do with being a Christian? It doesn’t really make sense if you just look at it from a perspective of Christian ethics. But it does make sense if you think about it in terms of this underlying narrative or story about white Christian nationalism.

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