Christian Nationalism Is Unbounded by LGB Status

• In Event: Developments in the Politics of Christian Nationalism

Abstract

In the exponential spread of research on Christian nationalism, much of it presumes supporters are heterosexuals. After all, those who hold Christian nationalist worldviews hew strongly toward anti-gay rights policy, among other hierarchical, discriminatory policies. This work most often presumes that the targets of those policy attitudes line up naturally opposed to Christian nationalists without evidence. Here we take up the question of whether there are LGB (there was no T item in our survey) Christian nationalists and whether they take the same positions on a wide range of issues as non-LGB Christian nationalists. Drawing on multiple datasets with appropriate questions from 2020 through 2023, we document that there are, in fact, LGB Americans with Christian nationalist views. And then we assess whether Christian nationalism has the same relationships with policy attitudes for LGB as it does for non-LGB Americans. We find small gaps and many similar slopes. Moreover, the similarities do not stop at the ingroup door – we find Christian nationalist LGB Americans taking positions against anti-LGB-discrimination efforts and against same-sex marriage. We conclude that religion plays an especially strong role in leading LGB Americans to advocate for a Christian America.

Authors

• Paul A. Djupe, Denison University

• Brooklyn Evann Walker