Prejudice and pandemic in the promised land: how white Christian nationalism shapes Americans’ racist and xenophobic views of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 crisis in March/April of 2020, far-right American political leaders and pundits proffered xenophobic explanations for the pandemic while ignoring that poorer, Black Americans and prison populations were being disproportionately infected. We propose such xenophobic and racist evaluations of COVID-19 drew from and appealed to a pervasive and politically strategic ethnoreligious ideology—white Christian nationalism. Panel data fielded before and during the COVID-19 crisis show that Christian nationalism was invariably the strongest predictor that Americans felt it was not racist to call COVID-19 “the Chinese virus”, blamed minorities for their own disproportionate infection rate, favoured immigration restrictions to solve the pandemic, and minimized or justified the infections of prison inmates. Racial identity also moderated Christian nationalism’s effect such that it was typically a more powerful influence among whites compared to Blacks. Findings affirm that racist and xenophobic views promulgated during the COVID-19 crisis were undergirded by white Christian nationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• coronavirus
• racism
• xenophobia
• Christian nationalism
• religiosity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Data collection for this study was supported by research grants from the Charles Koch Foundation and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Neither granting agency exercised any influence whatsoever in designing the survey, analyzing data, or reporting the results.