PRRI Study Finds 10% of Americans are Christian nationalists; 68% are skeptical or rejectors
“White evangelical Protestants are more supportive of Christian nationalism than any other group surveyed. Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%).” - PRRI
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Questions of definition usually come up pretty quickly with these survey reports, so, from PRRI:
Measuring Christian Nationalism
To measure Christian nationalism, the PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey included a battery of five questions about the relationship between Christianity, American identity, and the U.S. government. Respondents were asked whether they completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or completely disagree with each of the following statements:
- The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
- U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
- If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
- Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
- God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.
Personally, I’d affirm bullet 2, with two clarifications: add “and general revelation/natural law” to it, and note that most of the values I have in mind are not unique to Christianity.
Bullet 5 could be really confusing. Christians believe Jesus is Lord of all and every area of our lives is under His dominion. So that would be easy to misread. The point there, though, is that people who identify as Christians should be in charge of everything.
If Christians were, on average, all that much better than everyone else, it might be more tempting, but we’re all works in progress and still a mess. But even if the “personal transformation gap” was much larger—in practical terms—vs. nonChristians, it still wouldn’t be right or biblical to say “you don’t get to be in high level leadership because you’re not a Christian.” So, no. A qualified bullet 2 is as far as I can go.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
….what portion of survey respondents had time to actually work through the propositions. Now certainly, someone can point out that “see, the propositions were part of the survey!”, but to actually think through…..
That noted, I’d hold to #2 to a degree, and I’d add a point related to, but not identical to, the fourth; that there is something uniquely Protestant about the American notion of a Constitution that stands as an arbiter of what government can and cannot do, a political equivalent, in a way, to Sola Scriptura. I would thus suggest that for those who do not hold to a historic Protestant view, but rather a “Scripture + tradition” view (e.g. Catholics, Jews), there may from time to time some dissonance in thinking.
And it’s worth noting that pretty much everybody on the Supreme Court these days holds to a Catholic or (at least secular) Jewish religion. So we can quibble about how Sola Constitution our nation really can be these days.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I don’t think constitutional gov has much to do with sola scriptura vs theology with a greater role for tradition/historical theology. Evidence: in Roman Catholicism, changes in church doctrine—however they’re arrived at—always go into writing. It’s every bit as document focused as protestantism, though there are many more documents involved.
The inclination of many to view a constitution as a ‘living document’ that can be reinterpreted contrary to original intent when convenient has more to do with shifting views in the west on the nature of truth, along with really strong assumptions on the idea of societal evolution and progress.
What we see in recent years, on the right every bit as much as as the left, is this deterioration of belief that real truth exists and matters bearing fruit in new ways—especially behavior that values narrative more than facts and weaponizing of truth-claims to win power struggles. So now ‘truth’ serves power rather than power serving truth.
The Christian nationalism movement is an example of how this problem (among others) has afflicted the right.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Yes, the Catholics have documents, but we Protestants have one where we can go back and say “we are going to correct our mistakes in application.” Catholic doctrine is the church never changes, hence once it’s in Magisterium, it’s hard to go back to Scripture and say “oops, we garbled this one.” The emphasis on tradition and stare decisis is less. See what I mean?
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I can sort of half agree with you. It’s fair to say that the more complex view RCC has of historical theology vs. actual Scripture makes the relationship between the two fraught. It’s human nature anyway to not back down when you’ve officially taken a position on something. Protestantism removes many (though not all, despite ‘sola scriptura’) layers between the Scriptures and ‘here we stand.’
And that’s going to have consequences.
Where I disagree is that one of these consequences is a stronger bent toward fidelity to the Constitution. I just don’t think the drift we see on that correlates.
Protestantism has this huge variety of flavors because a theoretical commitment to the Book over all else frequently doesn’t translate into actual faithfulness to the Book.
In the case of Christian Nationalism, the survey data points toward RCC being more constitutional in their thinking than the protestants. There’s nothing constitutional about CN.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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