Trump’s Christian Nationalist Vision for America

Donald Trump’s ambivalence on abortion is back in the news because of his recent flip-flopping on a November referendum in his home state of Florida. On August 29, Trump said he suggested he would vote for the referendum, which would expand abortion rights and overturn the state’s current six-week abortion ban. After intense blowback from anti-abortion activists, Trump walked back his support the next day.

While Trump’s about face on this referendum shows that the activist class still has some pull, it remains true that Trump has done something unimaginable in modern Republican politics. He has bullied the GOP into abandoning four decades of support for a national ban on abortion. Even more surprising, there’s no evidence that Trump’s renegotiation of the allegedly nonnegotiable has hurt him among the rank and file of the party.

This perplexing outcome is revelatory. Trump’s cavalier treatment of this supposedly sacred issue has exposed the Republican Party’s best kept secret: The connection between Republican voters and their leaders was never primarily about abortion. Rather, as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) transformation of the party reveals, Trump’s bond with his supporters is forged from different material: namely, his militant mission to return power to white Christian America.

Trump instinctively understands this reality. In contrast to his vacillation on abortion, Trump’s rallies are filled with evocations of an idealized ethno-religious state that are articulate, energetic, and consistent. His nostalgic diatribes about reclaiming a lost white Christian past fueled his rise to presidential power, and he has continued this strategy in 2024.

One of Trump’s early re-election campaign stops was the annual meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville on February 22, attended by leaders of the largest white evangelical communications outlets. In his rambling 75-minute speech to these Christian Right leaders, Trump spent a scant two minutes talking about abortion. He began strongly, stating, “From my first day in office, I took historic action to protect the unborn. Like nobody has ever done.” He also touted his attendance at the March pro-life rally in Washington, DC. But then he hailed his achievement of sending “this issue” (he notably did not utter the word “abortion” in the speech) back to the states since “everybody agrees that's where it should be”—a position that is a clear abandonment of a nationwide ban on abortion. While there was no applause for that line, the crowd remained with him.

The beating heart of the speech was the projection of a white Christian nationalist vision. Trump told the enthusiastic crowd—many of whom sported red hats emblazoned with the words “Make America Pray Again”—that he knew they were “under siege.” He declared that one of his first acts of his second term would be to set up a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” and pledged to protect “pro-God context and content.” He received spontaneous applause for vows to promote school vouchers for private Christian schools and seal the United States’ southern border against “an illegal alien invasion by the world's most sadistic criminals and savage gangs.”

He openly mentioned his four criminal indictments but transformed them into a messianic narrative. Echoing the evangelical theology of substitutionary atonement, he claimed, “I’ve been very busy fighting and, you know, taking the, the bullets, taking the arrows. I'm taking 'em for you. And I'm so honored to take 'em. You have no idea. I'm being indicted for you.”  After he narrowly survived an assassination attempt in August, Trump mused that he was only alive because of divine intervention, making this messianic comparison quite literal.

Notably, his promises to the evangelical broadcasters extended beyond the realm of policy: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.” He continued: “I really believe it’s the biggest thing missing from this country, the biggest thing missing. We have to bring back our religion. We have to bring back Christianity in this country.”

Trump’s deployment of the term “our religion”—one he regularly rolls out when addressing predominantly white evangelical audiences—is transparently an affirmation of an America of, by, and for white conservative Christians. This worldview, most frequently referred to as white Christian nationalism today, is an old one, predating the founding of our nation. It flows directly from the 500-year-old Christian Doctrine of Discovery—the idea that America was designated by God to be a promised land for European Christians—which justified the settler colonial project and lies at the ancient headwaters of our nation’s history.

Read More: The Roots of Christian Nationalism Go Back Further Than You Think

A 2024 study conducted by PRRI, where I serve as president and founder, explored just how strongly white Christian nationalism is connected to Trump’s contemporary allure. Building on research by political scientists Paul Djupe, Phil Gorski, Sam Perry, and Andrew Whitehead, PRRI developed five distinct agree/disagree questions to measure support for Christian nationalism:

The PRRI survey, the largest ever conducted on this topic, finds that 3 in 10 Americans can be classified as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers (those who either fully or mostly agree with these five statements), while two thirds of Americans can be classified as Skeptics or Rejecters (those who either mostly or fully disagree with these five sentiments). So, by a margin of two to one, most Americans oppose this anti-democratic worldview.

But the minority of Americans who affirm these sentiments wield disproportionate power because their voices are amplified through Donald Trump's MAGA movement and its takeover of the Republican Party. Today, a majority of Republicans (55%)—and fully two thirds (66%) of white evangelicals, the religious base of the GOP—qualify as Christian nationalist Adherents or Sympathizers.

The survey also reveals how tightly Christian nationalism is correlated with support for Donald Trump, not just at the national level but at the state level. The proportion of Americans who qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers differs considerably across states, but there is a distinct pattern. Residents of red states are nearly twice as likely as residents of blue states to be Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers. And among white Americans, the positive correlation between a state’s average score on the Christian nationalism scale and the proportion of residents who cast votes for Trump in 2020 is a textbook example of a strong linear relationship. The more strongly white residents of a state support Christian nationalism, the more likely they were to have cast their votes for Trump in 2020.

Why should we be worried about this? There is, of course, the obvious answer that the overall vision of America as a promised land for European Christians is fundamentally anti-democratic. Beyond that, Christian nationalist beliefs are strongly linked to a range of other attitudes that are corrosive to democracy: white racial resentment and denials of the existence of systemic racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, homophobia, and support for patriarchal gender roles. In other words, white Christian nationalism evokes a set of hierarchies that positions white, Christian, heterosexual men as the divinely ordained ruling class. This assertion of white Christian entitlement and chosen-ness is toxic to the values of pluralism and equality on which democracy depends.

Most ominously, Christian nationalists are more likely than other Americans to think about politics in apocalyptic terms and are about twice as likely as other Americans to believe political violence may be justified in our current circumstances. Nearly 4 in 10 Christian nationalism Adherents (38%) and one-third of Sympathizers (33%) agree that “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,” compared with only 17% of Christian nationalism Skeptics and 7% of Rejecters. And support for political violence among Christian nationalists is hardening. While there is no significant shift in support for political violence among Christian nationalism Adherents across the last year, among Sympathizers support for political violence is up 11 percentage points.

The worldview of white Christian nationalism raises the stakes of political contests exponentially, transposing political opponents into existential enemies. Politics are no longer understood to be honest disagreements between fellow citizens but rather apocalyptic battles over good and evil, literally fought by agents of God against agents of Satan. From these illiberal assumptions, it easily follows that political rivals should not just be defeated in fair electoral contests; they should be jailed, exiled, or even killed.

This racist ideology thankfully no longer rests comfortably in the psyches of most Americans. But it has, paradoxically, found a final refuge in the shambles of the party of Lincoln. More than any other discreet moment in the last half century, the 2024 election will present us with a choice that is much more than partisan.

We will have an opportunity to choose between a regressive fantasy of America as a white Christian nation and an aspirational vision of America as a pluralistic democracy. Until we find the will to finally reject the dangerous, authoritarian political theology that now controls one of our two political parties, it will continue to undermine the potential for a truly democratic American future.

Excerpt adapted from the paperback edition of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and a Path to a Shared American Future by Robert P. Jones, published by Simon & Schuster on September 10, 2024. Copyright © 2024 by Robert P. Jones.