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Abstract
That white evangelicals form the political foundation of Trumpism is widely taken for granted. A contrary interpretation focuses on Christian nationalism: the view that the United States is, and should remain, a predominantly white Christian nation. Drawing on analysis of religious nationalisms in India and South Africa, this essay suggests how Christian nationalism can be seen as part of a contradictory hegemonic project, intimately linked with US imperialism and racial capitalism. The essay also reflects on the political challenges of the present moment.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The Rachel Maddow Show.
2 Smith, Ballard, and Sanders. “Most Voters Say.”
3 The most astute commentary is by Mike Davis, “Riot on the Hill,” along with his “Trench Warfare”—a fine-grained analysis of the election results that sheds light on the rise of Latinx support for Trump in specific regions such as the Texas border.
4 On November 12, 2020, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post cited exit polls from the National Election Pool showing that, as in 2016, Trump won more than 80 percent of the White evangelical vote: Rubin, “What Election Results Tell Us about Religion in America.” In mid-November in the New York Times, Katherine Stewart cited exit polls from Edison Research showing that 28 percent of voters identified as either white evangelical or white born-again Christian, and of these 76 percent voted for Trump: Stewart, “Trump or No Trump.”
5 Gerson, “The Last Temptation.”
6 In “The Last Temptation,” Gerson railed fiercely against Trump and his religious allies.
7 Rubin, “What the Election Tells Us About Religion in America.”
8 Stewart, “Trump or No Trump.”
9 In addition to the insights generated by analyses such as those of Davis in “Trench Warfare,” Cristina Beltrán’s conception of multiracial whiteness in “To Understand Trump’s Support” is apposite: “Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity—a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.”
10 Gorski, American Covenant, 3.
11 O’Meara Volkskapitalisme, 83.
12 As recently discussed by Walden Bello, “The conservative version of American Exceptionalism was first forcibly expressed in the early 1980s by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, who said that the United States was indeed exceptional and unique and that its democracy was not for export as other countries lacked the cultural requisites to water it, thus providing the justification of American support for dictators like the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.” Bello, “The United States Has Entered a Frightening Weimar Era.”
13 See Hart “Changing Concepts of Articulation” for a discussion of my use of this concept.
14 Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 4.
15 See Williams, God’s Own Party, 278–79 for a bibliography of earlier literature.
16 Worthen, Apostles of Reason, 10.
17 Gerson, “The Last Temptation.”
18 Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, 2–4.
19 Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, 5.
20 Williams, God’s Own Party, 2.
21 Kruse, One Nation Under God, 292–93.
22 Gorski, “Revisited: Why Do Evangelicals Vote for Trump?”
23 Gorski, “Why Evangelicals Voted for Trump.”
24 Gorski “Why Evangelicals Voted for Trump;” see also his American Covenant for an elaboration of this argument.
25 Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God, 62. They draw mainly on the 2017 Baylor Religion Survey to construct a composite scale based on respondents’ level of agreement with six separate, though related, statements about whether the United States should be a Christian nation, and use this to identify four main orientations towards Christian nationalism. They then use multiple regressions to correlate these measures with various indicators.
26 Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God, 153.
27 Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God, 19; emphasis in original.
28 Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God, 17, 117, 178.
29 See Rehmann, Theories of Ideology, for an extremely useful elaboration of theories of ideology.
30 Stewart, The Power Worshippers.
31 Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 7.
32 Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 8–9.
33 Diamond, The Road to Dominion, 248. Other significant but uncited contributions include Goldberg, Kingdom Coming that traverses some of the same ground as Stewart’s account, and Hedges, American Fascism.
34 Shea, Believe Me, 36.
35 Clarkson, Dominionism, 7.
36 Hawley, “The American Renewal Project.”
37 Monographs of which I am aware are McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart; and Bean, The Politics of Evangelical Identity.
38 Bean, The Politics of Evangelical Identity.
39 See also Jadhav, “Was It Rural Populism?”
40 Hart, “Why Did It Take So Long?”
41 Davis, “The Great God Trump.”
42 In “D/developments After the Meltdown,” I distinguish between “small d” as the development of capitalism, and “big D” Development as a project of intervention in the
“Third World” that took hold in the post-World War II era.
43 Ahmad, “India: Liberal Democracy,” 182.
44 Ahmad, Lineages of the Present, 165.
45 Bannerji, Demography and Democracy and Frosini, “Why Does Religion Matter?”
46 Frosini, “Why Does Religion Matter?” 183.
47 Hart, Rethinking the South African Crisis, especially chapter 6.
48 Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets, 11.
49 Singh, Black is a Country, 3.
50 Singh, Black Is a Country, 14.
51 Singh, Black Is a Country, 219.
52 Panitch, “The New Imperial State,” 10.
53 Kepel, The Revenge of God, 2.
54 Important accounts of the resurgence of Hindutva in the 1970s include Bannerji, Democracy and Demography and Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags.
55 Hart, “Why Did It Take So Long,” 253–54.
56 I will develop these arguments more fully in forthcoming work. Key interlocutors include Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis, Singh, Race and America’s Long War, and Camp and Greenburg “Counterinsurgency Reexamined.”
57 Posner, “How the Christian Right Helped Foment Insurrection.”
58 Hart, “Why Did It Take So Long?” 251–56.
59 Bray, “Rearticulating Contemporary Populism” and Powers of the Mind.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Gillian Hart
Gillian Hart is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Graduate Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and Professor of the Graduate School in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, the United States. Her most recent publication is a special issue of Geografisker Annaler that she edited on “Resurgent Nationalisms and Populist Politics in the Neoliberal Age” (2020). [email protected].