To hear Democrats and their proxies in the establishment media tell it, Christian nationalists are lurking under every bed in America, plotting to undermine democracy and wreak havoc on the 2024 election.
Ever since Jan. 6, 2021, when the media spotted a Capitol protester holding a flag that said “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my president,” and a group of concerned Christians entered the Senate chamber to say a prayer, leftists have employed the term “Christian nationalism” as a way to maintain the self-serving insurrection narrative and to smear the faithful as a whole.
It’s been quite the two-for-one. But in their latest hasty attempt to delegitimize Christianity, Democrat strategists either neglected to arrive at a standard definition of what Christian nationalism is, or they purposely left it amorphous.
Even now, when so much ink has already been spilled framing politically active American Christians as modern-day bogeymen, the left’s definition is conveniently expanding, along with their inflammatory rhetoric, ahead of the election.
Just last month, Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla attempted to amp up the hysteria about so-called Christian nationalists by clutching her proverbial pearls and warning MSNBC viewers, “They believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress. They don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God.”
Imagine that. There are citizens who actually have the nerve to hold a belief that is fundamental to the American experiment, as the Founding Fathers called it, and that is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
This week, David Corn added to the fear-mongering about Christian nationalism from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, NPR and Salon, to name a few, with his Mother Jones piece very typically entitled “It’s a Good Time to Start Worrying About Christian Nationalism.”
His proof of Christian nationalists’ dangerous extremism is that they believe that killing babies and mutilating gender-confused children is not just wrong, it’s evil. “This is esoteric stuff and a bizarre and troubling political analysis,” he fretted.
Even actor Rob Reiner recently got in on the smearing effort with a colossal bomb of a documentary, a theatrical release called “God & Country: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.”
But whereas early propaganda following Jan. 6 characterized Christian nationalists as small in number and lumped them in with so-called extremists and even white supremacists, as is obligatory for the left, their current definition seems to include anyone who is a Christian and wants to participate in the town square.
Apparently, it’s now any Christian who believes in freedom, the rule of law, our nation’s founding documents and its Judeo-Christian roots, and the dignity and sanctity of life. In other words, a Christian nationalist, according to the left, is anyone who loves Jesus and his country and who opposes their ever-encroaching tyrannical Marxism.
All of this begs the question: Do Christian nationalists even exist? If so, what do they actually believe and how widespread is their movement?
Those are just some of the questions Kevin Singer and his colleagues at Neighborly Faith, a Christian think tank he co-founded and where he serves as president, sought to answer in a national survey conducted in tandem with Technites last June.
The survey was taken among 2,006 American adults with an additional oversample of 303 young evangelicals. The 95 percent margin of error was 3 percentage points.
In a news release about the study’s findings, summarized in a December report entitled “Christian Nationalism: A New Approach,” Singer got right to the point: “The prevailing narrative put forth by prominent thought leaders is that Christian nationalists are an imminent threat to our society and democracy, or ‘the single biggest threat to religious freedom,’ as one put it. However, this alarmism is misguided and relies on assumptions or cherry-picking within datasets.”
“It has become the communist witch hunt of the left,” Singer told The Western Journal in a video interview.
“An article came out a few weeks ago that said Christian nationalism isn’t just a thing; it’s in the air. It’s in the air we’re breathing. I find that to be the new strategy. If we can’t hit one when we throw a stone, we’re going to say, ‘OK, maybe it’s not the person, it’s the land.’”
Neighborly Faith’s survey, which asked nearly three times as many questions as previous studies that ham-handedly attempted to gauge Christian nationalism following Jan. 6, found that even with all the media attention, “only 28% of Americans have even heard of [Christian nationalism].”
Given that, it should come as no surprise that a much smaller percentage of people actually self-identify as Christian nationalists. In fact, the survey found that “only 5% of [respondents] self-reported as ever having identified themselves as a Christian Nationalist or sympathizing with Christian Nationalism as a movement.”
Moreover, the survey resulted in a classification of just 11 percent of respondents as Christian nationalist “adherents” and a further 19 percent as Christian nationalist “sympathizers.”
“What’s so interesting is that we are finding progressives and Democrats in our study who would absolutely not just identify but would be classified as Christian nationalists,” Singer said. “Oftentimes they really don’t like Republicans.”
The report classified only 17 percent of those “identifying as Republicans or leaning Republican” as Christian nationalist adherents. Ironically, and in direct opposition to the leftist narrative, the study also found that half of Christian nationalist adherents feel Republicans are “a threat to the United States.”
“This has so much more to do with ideas than political partisanship,” Singer said. “This has so much more to do with your perspective on the relationship between faith and government. It is not owned by Republicans. It is not owned by Democrats.”
Maybe that’s because the study confirmed others that have found few Americans are completely ideologically aligned on all their views.
“Many Americans hold at least some attitudes that are consistent with Christian nationalism,” the report noted. “Looking back at the 14 items that we used to classify the groups, we found that 83% agree with at least one item; 71% agree with at least two to five items; 31% agree with at least six to 10 items; and 3% agree with 11 to 14 items.”
What you won’t find in the study, Singer said, is what the left wants you to believe the most — that there is a link between Christian nationalism and white supremacy.
“What you won’t find is ammunition to begin to fear and villainize a group of people who happen to be white and happen to be Christian and they happen to be political.”
“Those we categorize as [Christian nationalist] Adherents are no more likely to self-report unfavorable attitudes toward Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, and Middle Easterners than the average American. Indeed, compared to others, they are slightly more favorable of Jews and Blacks,” the report said.
“One of the biggest headlines coming out of this study — if not the biggest headline — is your Christian nationalist neighbor,” Singer emphasized. “Not only are they further away from being totally deplorable, as Hillary Clinton would say, but they may actually be some of your best neighbors from a practical standpoint.”
Neighborly Faith’s study found that Christian nationalist adherents report “highly civic and pro-social attitudes.”
“They are among the most likely Americans to claim interest in working together with people of other religions on specific things like interfaith dialogues (52%); providing food, medical supplies, or clothing to those in need (77%); and discussing local issues and solutions (65%).”
Over half (51 percent) agree that the U.S. should take in refugees, “even if I do not share all of the same beliefs as them” — nearly identical to the mood of the general public (54 percent).
“Far from being the ‘single biggest threat to religious freedom,’ our study found that a majority of those we classify as Christian nationalists endorse having the government allow all faiths to display symbols in public spaces (60%),” the news release added.
Despite the study’s conclusions that directly contradict the left’s narrative, not even Singer thinks the left will abandon their Christian nationalist straw man because it serves their “political purposes.”
“I think at a meta level it is the war on faith in America,” Singer said. “And I don’t say that to you to be bombastic. I think faith is strange to the now-majority of people who do not identify with Christianity or even a faith in general.”
