Funding God’s policies, defending whiteness: Christian nationalism and whites’ attitudes towards racially-coded government spending.

ABSTRACT

Research shows that white Americans who subscribe to “Christian nationalism” – an ideology that fuses Christianity with civic life – tend to draw more rigid racial boundaries. Such research, however, has focused on overt forms of racial prejudices. None have considered how Christian nationalism may influence whites’ covert expressions of racism which are often more relevant for the reproduction of inequality. This study addresses this gap by examining Christian nationalism’s influence on whites’ relative support for government spending that is racially-coded, using data from a nationally random sample. Multivariate analyses demonstrate that whites who more strongly adhere to Christian nationalism are less supportive of welfare spending and more supportive of border spending and spending to reduce crime relative to more racially-neutral government expenses. Findings suggest that resurgent Christian nationalism associated with Trumpism not only reinforces overt expressions of racism, but also undergirds more covert, “colorblind” expressions shaping the policy opinions of white Americans.

KEYWORDS:

• Christian nationalism
• racialized spending
• race
• welfare
• crime
• immigration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Testing of these variables’ distributions reveal that they do not violate the assumptions of OLS regression.

2 Though previous research on Christian nationalism (Davis 2018; Perry, Whitehead, and Davis 2018; Whitehead and Perry 2015) has measured respondents’ political views continuously, I contend there is no measureable distance between “extremely conservative” and “conservative,” and it is therefore more appropriate to group these into theoretical categories. Additional analyses were conducted with the original coding for political ideology and results (available upon request) were not substantively different.

3 Because most respondents were hesitant to select responses that were overtly prejudiced, there was very little variation within racial trust variables. Thus, roughly two thirds of white respondents stated that they trusted all racial groups (whites included) “some.” To capture the effect of those that were willing to indicate overt racial prejudice, I dichotomize these measures to examine those individuals who tend not to trust racial others.

4 Models were also estimated controlling for frequency of religious service attendance and prayer alongside scripture reading, as well as a composite measure of religiosity comprising all three of these measures. Results did not vary substantively between these models.