On the Rise of White Christian Nationalism in the US

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UC Santa Barbara successful the 1980s felt similar the counterculture’s afterparty: sun-drenched, restless, and inactive echoing defiance. Palm trees swayed implicit a serene field wherever students surfed astatine Campus Point betwixt (or successful lieu of) classes. On the surface, it was idyllic. But beneath the serenity, you could inactive consciousness the taste quakes of the 1960s and ’70s. A decennary earlier, UCSB had been a frontline field successful what immoderate called America’s large unraveling. Students marched against the Vietnam War, demanded radical and sex justice, challenged puritanical norms, and torched symbols of constitution power. In 1970, antiwar activists clashed with constabulary and acceptable occurrence to the section Bank of America astatine the borderline of campus—a melodramatic enactment of rebellion seared into field lore. By the clip I arrived arsenic a freshman successful the autumn of 1982, the flames were agelong gone, but you could inactive odor the fume successful the carpet.

I stepped disconnected the autobus successful Santa Barbara arsenic a devoutly spiritual eighteen-year-old from Independence, Missouri, reasoning chiefly astir the postcard-perfect field and the assistance that had landed maine a spot connected UCSB’s top-ranked Gaucho volleyball team. I wasn’t yet alert that I’d besides stepped into 1 of the much volatile intersections successful American taste and governmental life, a responsibility enactment wherever Reagan-era conservatism was clashing with the counterculture idealism of the California coast.

The UCSB field community, including a teaching adjunct successful my archetypal governmental subject people who casually told america she’d thrown the archetypal ceramic done the BofA window, didn’t privation to admit that America was lurching rightward. But conscionable a fewer miles eastbound successful the Santa Ynez Mountains sat Ronald Reagan’s occidental White House. Two years earlier I arrived connected campus, the Gipper had galloped into Washington with a posse of fundamentalist Christians calling themselves the Moral Majority. They filled a void successful America’s psyche that Vietnam had bled dry. Assassinations, contention riots, and Watergate had scorched the nation’s conscience. There was nary spot successful government, and past came inflation, malaise, and a stalled Cold War nether Jimmy Carter. By 1980, the near was exhausted, and the close was furious—perfect conditions for a blimpish counterrevolution.

Of course, overmuch of this was mislaid connected maine arsenic a wide-eyed freshman adjusting to my caller surroundings. But by the wintertime of my inferior year, the civilization daze of UCSB had worn off. I was soaking up the governmental and taste complexity astir maine and for the archetypal time, I recovered myself caring astir arsenic overmuch astir schoolhouse arsenic I did astir volleyball. That displacement had a batch to bash with a spiritual studies prof named Walter Capps.

The Christian nationalism of that epoch didn’t wholly disappear. In the 1990s, vestiges of the fallen New Religious Right began evolving to conscionable the moment.

Professor Capps didn’t conscionable thatch astir religion and politics; helium made the collision compelling. A seminarian and Yale-trained scholar, helium was soft-spoken, probing, and profoundly humane. He taught america to dissect ideologies, to situation their champions and critics, and helium welcomed each sides into the lecture hall. His courses were besides legendary for the constellation of high-profile impermanent speakers helium attracted.

Capp’s flagship people connected the Vietnam War’s interaction connected American religion and civilization became a nationalist sensation, drafting praise from members of Congress, tv quality anchors, and nationalist intellectuals. I took the Vietnam people arsenic a sophomore, and by inferior twelvemonth I was anxious to enroll successful different of his signature offerings: Religious Studies 153, Religion and Politics successful America Today. The people generated buzz erstwhile it debuted 2 years earlier, cotaught by Capps and erstwhile statesmanlike campaigner George McGovern, and featuring impermanent appearances from ideologically divers luminaries similar Eugene McCarthy, Jerry Brown, Paul Weyrich, Cal Thomas, and Robert Billings.

In the 1985 iteration of the course, Capps and his guests dove heavy into what helium called “the New Religious Right,” a question that was rapidly reshaping American politics. Our speechmaking database spanned the spectrum from GOP strategist Richard Viguerie and evangelical firebrand Francis Schaeffer to world analysts similar Erling Jorstad and George Marsden.

No fig formed a longer shadiness implicit this question than Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the charismatic televangelist who founded the Moral Majority, a governmental enactment that became synonymous with the New Religious Right. Falwell was a virtuoso communicator and, though we didn’t usage the word backmost then, a full-throttle Christian nationalist.

He began preaching successful the 1950’s arsenic a segregationist and hostile of civilian rights. By 1976, erstwhile helium launched the Moral Majority with a fifty-state “I Love America Tour,” Falwell had rebranded his connection into a much genial signifier of bigotry. Racially segregated spiritual schools, for example, were defended successful the sanction of “religious liberty” alternatively of overt racism. His preaching distilled the Moral Majority’s warfare connected America’s alleged sins: tribunal rulings that curtailed schoolhouse supplication and condoned abortion, the emergence of feminism, intersexual permissiveness, homosexuality, wide media, and overseas argumentation that coddled godless communists. Falwell championed a imaginativeness of America rooted successful obedience to biblical authorization and conformity with accepted values, placing him successful hostility with Enlightenment principles similar idiosyncratic rights, rational inquiry, and escaped thought. Indeed, helium railed against modernity and “secular Humanism” arsenic threats to the Bible that were corrupting the nation’s soul.

While Falwell seethed astatine wide politicians and journalists, helium was arsenic scathing toward chap Christians successful the ecumenical movement—those who wanted to span historical schisms betwixt denominations and beforehand “big tent” Christianity. To Falwell, ecumenicalism was a Trojan equine for doctrinal compromise, taste decay, and governmental surrender. He demanded purity, particularly connected abortion, feminism, and household values. These weren’t conscionable theological positions; they were strategies to beforehand the 1 ecumenical extremity Falwell embraced. He sought to forge a almighty conjugation betwixt blimpish evangelicals and Catholics, a “moral majority” susceptible of reshaping American authorities and civilization from the crushed up.

I recovered Jerry Falwell’s politicized preaching appalling. As a twenty-one-year-old, I had spent astir of my beingness successful and astir churches wherever authorities were kept retired of the sanctuary. In the religion assemblage wherever I grew up, subjects similar abortion, schoolhouse prayer, and Supreme Court rulings were simply ne'er discussed, not from the pulpit, and not adjacent among congregants successful my experience. It would person been unthinkable. Which is wherefore Falwell’s brash fusion of Christian theology and nationalist argumentation felt truthful jarring.

I besides recoiled astatine Falwell’s hellfire absolutism and his condemnation of anyone extracurricular his content system. The caller decease of my begetter had shaken my religion successful the supernatural tenets of Christianity; I yet abandoned those beliefs. But the ethical teachings of Jesus Christ arsenic I understood them—the values of love, humility, compassion, forgiveness, nonjudgment, and grace—still drove my motivation compass. Falwell’s preaching struck maine arsenic the antithesis of those values.

My main takeaway from Capps’s people was that the New Religious Right was not a spiritual revival but a governmental machine, 1 that cloaked its ambitions successful scripture and wielded religion for partisan ends. Falwell, with his booming dependable and confederate charm, was persuasive to many. But to me, particularly astatine that time, recently estranged from faith, skeptical of spiritual dogma, but inactive steeped successful the values and sensibilities of my Christian upbringing, the full show felt profoundly offensive.

Professor Capps, ever the dispassionate intellectual, fto the worldly talk for itself. He showed Falwell’s sermons and speeches, posed probing questions, and urged america to grapple with the societal implications of the New Religious Right. But reviewing the UCSB archives of Capps’s penning from that epoch makes wide that his restraint successful the schoolroom masked a deeper interest astir the question and its corrosive power connected nationalist life.

In a 1982 essay, Capps wrote astir his sojourn to Lynchburg, Virginia, wherever helium interviewed Falwell and different Moral Majority leaders and attended a sermon astatine Liberty University. True to form, Capps presented Falwell’s remarks with minimal editorializing. But each truthful often, helium exercised the writer’s prerogative by offering a quiescent rebuttal, a pointed observation, oregon a subtle critique. For example, Capps wrote critically of Falwell’s fixation connected termination and intersexual norms arsenic a defence of “male dominion and the supremacy of patriarchal order.”

One of the astir compelling critiques to look from Capps’s writings connected Falwell centers connected their opposing narratives astir the Vietnam War. For Falwell, America’s decision was divine punishment: a effect of secularism, motivation decay, and the abandonment of our covenant with God. His medicine was clear. We needed to reset the nation’s motivation compass, reconstruct the covenant, and rebuild our subject mightiness to guarantee we ne'er again suffer to “demonic” communists.

Capps saw thing other entirely. He viewed Falwell arsenic a merchandise of Vietnam, a fig calved from the nationalist disillusionment and existential drift that followed. He argued that the world and spiritual establishments had underestimated Falwell, dismissing him arsenic a fringe fig alternatively than reckoning with the existent motivation anxieties his question tapped into. Falwell’s theology whitethorn person been simplistic and flawed, Capps argued, but helium had keen instincts. Falwell correctly sensed vulnerability successful the uneasy confederation betwixt rationalism and Christianity that had prevailed since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. That truce, calved from the scars of Europe’s bloody spiritual wars and America’s ain assemblage theocracies, was deemed unbreakable, but Falwell was making inroads toward prying it apart.

Perhaps astir viscerally, fixed the ever-present specter of atomic annihilation during the Cold War, Capps was appalled by Falwell’s apocalyptic rhetoric and cavalier posture toward planetary destruction. That, on with Falwell’s different motivation and theological shortcomings, led Capps to reason that the Moral Majority was doomed to neglect due to the fact that it would simply scare excessively galore Americans. He believed that Falwell and the New Religious Right were profoundly troubling but yet transitory—too antithetical to America’s founding principles to endure, excessively dismissive of idiosyncratic rights and intelligence state to thrive. By demeaning and alienating astir people, Capps predicted, the Christian close helping was planting the seeds of its ain demise.

That epoch of Christian nationalism was intelligibly antithetic than what we’re surviving done today. While immoderate of the Moral Majority’s rhetoric resembles MAGA Christian nationalism, it ne'er seemed to Capps oregon to maine that they were trying to overthrow democracy. Capps hated their warmongering, but helium believed that it was the policy, not the question itself, that threatened nationalist security.

Indeed, Falwell and different Moral Majority stalwarts framed their efforts arsenic a reflector representation of the left’s ain playbook from the 1960s and ’70s. They utilized the aforesaid tools of grassroots mobilization, ineligible advocacy, and taste persuasion to further their blimpish Christian vision. Falwell disclaimed immoderate involvement successful theocracy, insisting helium simply wanted to steer a wayward civilization backmost toward motivation clarity, utilizing the levers of governmental influence. He touted his relationship with Senator Ted Kennedy, seemingly an affirmation that, for each their utmost positions, Falwell and his allies were intent connected moving wrong the strategy of democracy.

Falwell adjacent invited Kennedy to code the students and module of Liberty University. Kennedy’s October 3, 1983, speech—delivered aft eating with the Falwell household successful their home—was 1 of the astir impactful people materials from Capps’s class. Standing earlier a staunchly blimpish evangelical audience, the wide Catholic fearlessly defended church-state separation, condemned publication burning, and reminded the assemblage of the fragile quality of spiritual liberty: “Today’s Moral Majority could go tomorrow’s persecuted minority.” On abortion, helium didn’t flinch, telling the pro-life audience, “The due relation of religion is to entreaty to the conscience of the individual, not the coercive powerfulness of the state.” His thunderous conclusion: “In short, I anticipation for an America wherever neither ‘fundamentalist’ nor ‘humanist’ volition beryllium a soiled word, but a just statement of the antithetic ways successful which radical of goodwill look astatine beingness and into their ain souls. I anticipation for an America wherever nary president, nary nationalist official, nary idiosyncratic volition ever beryllium deemed a greater oregon lesser American due to the fact that of spiritual doubt—or spiritual belief.”

The Liberty University assemblage warmly applauded, and Falwell praised Kennedy for his sincerity and courage. That benignant of grace crossed ideological lines feels similar a relic of a much antiauthoritarian era.

The New Religious Right of the 1980s was galore things, nary of them bully successful my view. Falwell and the Moral Majority were brash, combative, and wrong. Their docket was backward-looking, morally coercive, and steeped successful righteous absolutism. But they were trying to triumph wrong the system, not pain it down. At slightest successful the 1980s.

Capps’s seminal work, The New Religious Right: Piety, Patriotism, and Politics, was published successful 1990. Seven years later, aft an unexpected triumph successful the 1996 midterm election, helium recovered himself serving successful Congress, but lone for a fewer months. Capps died abruptly of a bosom onslaught astatine Dulles International Airport. I ne'er had the accidental to reconnect with my erstwhile professor. But I did person the privilege of serving successful Congress alongside his widow, Lois, who carried guardant his bequest with grace and conviction. For that, I’m profoundly grateful.

Capps’s prediction astir the New Religious Right was correct. The Moral Majority was disbanded conscionable earlier his publication was published. The question fragmented, and by the aboriginal 1990s, it had collapsed. But it wasn’t due to the fact that they were excessively extreme, arsenic Capps had imagined. It was the abrupt implosion of the Soviet Union and the extremity of the Cold War that brought them down. Up to that point, America’s outer enemy—the godless Soviets—gave the question coherence and urgency. When the Cold War ended, that ideological scaffolding vanished.

Republican statesmanlike campaigner Pat Buchanan tried desperately to revive the aged magic astatine the GOP normal successful August 1992, with his fiery “culture war” speech, but the infinitesimal had passed. The code failed to registry successful the caller governmental terrain. That fall, Bill Clinton won the presidency, ending 12 years of Republican regularisation and signaling that the state was acceptable to determination connected from some the Cold War and the civilization warfare it had fueled. Right-wing Christians were nary longer successful power; their governmental question had crumbled. But the Christian nationalism of that epoch didn’t wholly disappear. In the 1990s, vestiges of the fallen New Religious Right began evolving to conscionable the moment.

By 1993, religion attendance was plummeting. The staunchest pro-choice president since Roe v. Wade was successful the White House and his wife, a career-minded Ivy League lawyer, was unapologetically redefining the relation of First Lady. Americans were warming to sex equity, LGBTQ rights, and multiculturalism arsenic a surge of migration from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean brought demographic and taste shifts. Throughout the agelong Cold War, America’s monolithic achromatic Christian individuality had held steady: The federation was 76 percent achromatic and 90 percent Christian. By the extremity of the 1990s, however, the percent of Christians had dropped 10 points, religiously unaffiliated “nones” were rising fast, and abruptly Hawaii was nary longer the lone authorities wherever whites were not the majority: California joined the list. Texas and New Mexico would travel conscionable 4 years later.

In the look of these changes, the fractured Christian close scrambled for caller strategies. Their rules-bound civilization warfare began morphing into an aggrieved insurgency. With the Soviet Union gone, their motivation panic turned inward toward home enemies. Government, portrayed arsenic demonic and evil, joined wide civilization arsenic the caller foil. Guns became sacred, and unit was progressively justified, if not sanctified.

Critical milestones successful this transitional signifier of the question were the deadly confrontations betwixt achromatic Christian extremists and national agents astatine Ruby Ridge, Idaho (1992), and Waco, Texas (1993). Ruby Ridge is wherever achromatic separatist Randy Weaver barricaded himself, his family, and a person successful a distant Idaho compartment aft refusing to look successful tribunal connected national weapons charges. Weaver embraced a theology known arsenic Christian Identity that was spreading among militia groups astatine the time. It exalts radical purity, apocalyptic readiness, and a conspiratorial content that the national authorities is satanic. His standoff with US marshals resulted successful the decease of a lawman marshal on with Weaver’s woman and fourteen-year-old lad earlier Weaver and his friend, some earnestly wounded, yet surrendered.

Waco was adjacent much deadly. It progressive a Christian sect known arsenic the Branch Davidians astatine their heavy equipped compound. The group’s leader, self-declared prophet David Koresh, founded the communal sect based connected his content that God had chosen him to usher successful the Bible’s end-times. When national agents attempted to service a warrant for amerciable weapons, Koresh and his followers saw it arsenic the opening of an apocalyptic showdown foretold by scripture. A gunfight erupted, sidesplitting 4 agents and six Branch Davidians. The ensuing fifty-one-day standoff ended successful a catastrophic fire, sidesplitting seventy-six Davidians including Koresh, twenty-five children, and galore who had been changeable oregon trapped inside.

These tragic flashpoints were mythologized into persecution stories, recast by right-wing Christian leaders not arsenic tragic consequences of extremist defiance but arsenic impervious of an evil secular authorities astatine warfare with religion and freedom. Ruby Ridge and Waco became conflict cries that catalyzed the Patriot Movement, a achromatic supremacist militia question that fused conspiracism and antigovernment narratives with Christian nationalism. At its highest successful the mid-1990s, the Patriot Movement swelled to hundreds of militias with tens of thousands of members. In 1995, aft 1 of these militiamen, Timothy McVeigh, bombed a national gathering successful Oklahoma City, sidesplitting 168 people, including nineteen children, the “Patriot” sanction was tainted with home coercion and fell retired of favor. But the militias and their ideology endured, metastasizing into groups—including Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Proud Boys—that would go woven into the cloth of today’s MAGA Christian nationalism.

Those of america who saw the motivation arc of the beingness bending toward justness missed the information that millions of our chap Americans saw it differently: They saw a Christian federation nether siege from within.

The governmental enactment of the New Religious Right continued nether the auspices of assorted GOP groups, including caller governmental and ineligible organizations that focused little connected fashionable persuasion and much connected litigation, caller ineligible theories, and long-game law battles premised connected securing a blimpish spiritual bulk connected the Supreme Court. Mobilizing Christian voters became the enactment of decentralized religion networks alternatively than the top-down operation of the 1980s.

This decentralization mirrored a broader translation wrong evangelical Christianity itself: a displacement from denominational authorization to a sprawling, entrepreneurial spiritual landscape. Across American Christianity, accepted denominations were shrinking, and churches were closing. But autarkic charismatic ministries, led by innovative and enterprising pastors, were uncovering ways to grow.

This inclination caught the attraction of an evangelical scholar, C. Peter Wagner, the Professor of Church Growth astatine the Fuller Theological Seminary successful confederate California. In 1996, helium launched a web of churches and ministries called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), which rapidly began to alteration evangelical Christianity. NAR combined a decentralized, nondenominational maturation exemplary with militant, charismatic theology rooted successful the imperative of Christian dominion implicit each parts of society, including government. NAR preached that governmental adversaries are demons who indispensable beryllium vanquished done wide mobilization and “spiritual warfare”: targeted supplication and worship campaigns. The database of NAR’s demonic enemies was familiar: abortionists, the LGBTQ community, nationalist education, secularists, liberals: fundamentally the aforesaid groups targeted by Falwell’s Moral Majority. But NAR brought an ethos of conquest, not persuasion, and it explicitly advocated theocratic takeover.

Thanks successful important portion to the maturation of NAR-aligned churches and online ministries, the militant antidemocracy ethos of the emerging Christian nationalist question began to intensify during the 2000s, particularly aft Barack Obama’s 2008 election. For many, the Obama presidency felt similar a clip erstwhile America’s founding principles of equality and liberty for each were yet being realized. But those of america who saw the motivation arc of the beingness bending toward justness missed the information that millions of our chap Americans saw it differently: They saw a Christian federation nether siege from within.

We besides failed to announcement that the atomized remains of the New Religious Right were radicalizing into what would soon beryllium called the Christian nationalist movement. Beginning successful the 1990s and progressively successful the 2000s, increasing numbers of right-wing Christians rejected pluralism and church-state separation outright, breaking with ideology and progressively embracing governmental unit arsenic an option. The explosive maturation of NAR, with its theology of demonization, conquest, and theocratic ambition, was a catalyst. Throughout these years, the seeds of extremism that would forcefully erupt connected January 6, 2021, were germinating. Most of america conscionable didn’t spot it.

One of the elder henchmen of right-wing Christian authorities saw this unsafe translation unfolding from the inside. Colonel V. Doner helped propel the New Religious Right to its highest of powerfulness successful the 1980s and remained a cardinal GOP strategist for the adjacent 2 decades. Doner was much than conscionable a run guru: He was a existent evangelical believer who worked astatine the highest levels, from Falwell and Ronald Reagan to Pat Robertson and Sarah Palin, constructing and guiding the right-wing Christian governmental machine.

But arsenic his question edged toward what would go today’s MAGA Christian nationalism, Doner’s conscience began to stir. He grew progressively unsettled by the movement’s fixation connected dehumanizing enemies and its neglect of halfway Christian teachings, including love, mercy, and compassion. He saw however volatile theology fused with militant rhetoric was starting to ignite real-world violence, including murders of termination providers.

Then came September 11, 2001. When Islamic jihadists carried retired their deadly attacks connected the United States, Doner saw thing hauntingly familiar: spiritual absolutism, the demonization of enemies, and a righteous lust for violence. It was, to his horror, a reflector representation of the Christian governmental question helium had helped construct. Yet alternatively of reckoning with the parallels, right-wing pastors were urging Christians to emulate the strength and all-in dedication of the jihadists. Doner recounts a chilling illustration of a salient younker pastor urging peers to indoctrinate an service of “spiritual termination bombers” for Christ to marque young Christians conscionable arsenic violently fanatical arsenic Islamic jihadists.

He traces his motivation reckoning successful his publication Christian Jihad, which chronicles the escalating radicalization and warns—nearly a decennary earlier the January 6th insurrection—of a question that had traded ideology for dominion and was sanctifying unit to that end.

I didn’t cognize astir Doner and his communicative until 2024, but speechmaking Christian Jihad carried maine backmost to the New Religious Right I had studied astatine UCSB. I realized that adjacent though we didn’t usage the word then, Prof. Capps’s people was each astir the 1980s variant of Christian nationalism. He predicted that question would collapse, and it did, albeit for reasons helium hadn’t anticipated. But helium surely would person been dismayed to spot it metastasize implicit the adjacent 2 decades into thing overmuch much virulent.

Imagine what Capps’s course, Religion and Politics successful America Today, would beryllium similar if helium were inactive live and teaching. Without a doubt, it would absorption connected MAGA Christian nationalism, tracing however this utmost antidemocracy insurgency evolved from the ruins of a question that seemed extremist successful the 1980s but present looks astir quaint. Capps would permission the contrasts and contradictions for america to grapple with. With scholarly detachment, helium would contiguous the evidence, including worldly from the experts and religion leaders we’ll conscionable aboriginal successful this book, and possibly he’d bring immoderate of them successful arsenic impermanent speakers. Capps’s acquisition was the subject of inquiry, not certainty, truthful helium would inquire probative questions and permission the answers to us.

He would apt airs the aforesaid last exam question helium asked my people successful 1985. That deceptively elemental question outlived the prof and his course, and present it belongs to each of us: “Is the engagement of spiritual groups successful authorities a bully oregon a atrocious thing? Discuss.”

I don’t retrieve however I answered it successful 1985, but I cognize my reply today: It depends.

If spiritual groups prosecute successful authorities portion respecting antiauthoritarian norms—following the law, peacefully bringing their values into the nationalist square, and accepting that successful a ideology you don’t ever get what you want—that’s a steadfast democracy, whether I hold with their views oregon not. But if they cull the antiauthoritarian bid and question to enforce their religion connected others done the coercive powerfulness of government, past it’s not conscionable bad, it’s unsafe and anti-American.

I’ll involvement my people connected that. But this exam is inactive successful progress, and past is doing the grading.

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