Christian Nationalism in the United States and Europe: A Comparison

• In Event: Experimental Methods in Religion and Politics Research

Abstract

The study of Christian Nationalism is notable both for its ubiquity and for its near-total placement within the Americanist subfield, despite its growing presence in Europe and Eurasia. The comparative study of Christian Nationalism faces serious theoretical and methodological hurdles that obscure its transnational nature and deep roots in twentieth-century racialized ideologies. In the American context, Christian Nationalism–the conflation of Christianity, nativism, and ultra-nationalism in the political sphere–has largely been studied at the intersection of modern right-wing populism and support for Donald Trump. In the European context, Christian nationalism is often framed as identitarianism or understood as cultural chauvinism, divorced of its religious aspects and studied starting in the late twentieth-century or twenty-first century. In this foreshortened understanding of Christian Nationalism, early twentieth-century intellectual predecessors are often ignored in favor of isolated contemporary case studies or the development of stand-alone Christian Nationalism scales in Americanist literature. Further, many studies ignore variation in racial and ethnic approaches to Christian Nationalism. For example, “non-whiteness” in the American context is similar to, but different from “non-Europeanness” in the German or French context. An understanding of the deep, historic transnational contexts in which Christian Nationalism arose and operates is necessary for understanding variation in its political manifestations and influence. This paper first provides an overview of the extant Christian Nationalism literature in the United States and Europe. Specifically, we conduct a meta analysis of the various measurement strategies to see where or how they are engaging with or talking past each other. Second, we provide an intellectual history of contemporary Christian Nationalism that tracks the evolving definition of the Christian Nationalist in-group and out-group(s). Third, we develop a theoretical framework for transnational comparisons. Finally, we test the power of the framework through an online survey experiment among American and German respondents that seeks to isolate variation in historic ideological influences on current Christian Nationalist positions.

Authors

• Emma Rosenberg, New York University

• Ben Gaskins, Lewis & Clark College