“Christian Nationalist” has become a popular pejorative in certain circles, and it is a specter that some people profess to find menacing. A book by two sociology professors, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, claims that “over half of the United States population embraces Christian nationalism to some extent”. And what is “Christian Nationalism”? The authors provide a definition:
Simply put, Christian nationalism is a cultural framework – a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems – that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life. But the “Christianity” of Christian nationalism is of a particular sort. We do not mean Christianity here as a general, meta-category including all expressions of orthodox Christian theology. Nor will we use terms such as “evangelicalism” or “white conservative Protestantism” (to the extent that these represent certain theological-interpretive positions) as synonyms for Christian nationalism. On the contrary, the “Christianity” of Christian nationalism represents something more than religion. As we will show, it includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism. Understood in this light, Christian nationalism contends that America has been and should always be distinctively “Christian” (reflecting this fuller, more nuanced sense of the term) from top to bottom – in its self-identity, interpretations of its own history, sacred symbols, cherished values, and public policies – and it aims to keep it that way.
The authors classify roughly half the country as “accommodators” or “ambassadors” of this dire mindset. Their empirical evidence for that astonishing proposition rests on the results of a survey that asked whether and how strongly (on a “0” to “4” scale) respondents agreed with these six propositions:
The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.
The federal government should advocate Christian values.
The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.
The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces.
The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.
The federal government should allow prayer in public schools.
Christian Nationalists were presumed, quite reasonably, to agree with all of these statements except the third. Here is what the results looked like:

A whole one percent got a score of “24” by giving every presumed Christian Nationalist position a “4”. The most common scores (slightly over seven percent each) were zero and 14. Just about exactly equal numbers fell to the left and the right of the Laodicean median score of 12. The conclusion that flows naturally from these data is that most Americans don’t have strong opinions about these supposedly diagnostic positions.
But even if some huge percentage of the country were 24’s, would it follow that they fit within the authors’ concept of Christian Nationalism? Can one logically leap from support for government advocacy of “Christian values” (which include, let us remember, the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount) to “nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism”?
The logical mistake here should be apparent even to a sociologist. Professors Whitehead and Perry are guilty of the “fallacy of the undistributed middle”, which concludes that two classes are identical because they share some characteristic. “All men are mortal. All dogs are mortal. Therefore, all men are dogs.”
Let me illustrate with a different set of propositions:
The rich don’t pay their fair of taxes.
Corporations should serve significant purposes other than making profits for shareholders.
Government regulation of markets is essential to preventing domination by monopolies.
The government should do more to promote economic equality.
Economic progress has been largely the product of government action.
Labor unions are necessary to protect workers from exploitation.
Asked to rate agreement with those statements on a zero to four scale, a dogmatic communist would score very high, but so would a great many run-of-the-mill liberals. Using the Whitehead/Perry methodology, a large proportion of the American public would be labeled “accommodators” or “ambassadors” of communism.
Alternatively, an anarcho-capitalist would score zero or not much above, as would many run-of-the-mill free market conservatives. Does America therefore have a large cohort of “accommodators” or “ambassadors” of the thought of Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand?
Returning for a moment to “Christian Nationalism”, Lenin, Stalin or Mao, who constructed regimes unparalleled in horrific religious persecution, would have emphatically rejected the supposed Christian Nationalist diagnostics. Look again at the chart’s “rejecters” and “resisters”, nearly half of the respondents. Are they “accommodators” and “ambassadors” of banning expressions of faith, destroying houses of worship and executing believers?
If Christian Nationalism is truly the all-pervading intellectual aether of progressive nightmares, it shares a characteristic with the more famous luminiferous aether of 19th Century physics: It is undetectable. Aside from the rather nutty Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s hard to think of any self-identified Christian Nationalists in the American public square. The most extreme real-world advocates of breaking down walls between Church and State don’t go any further than wanting to reintroduce anodyne nondenominational prayers into public schools. As for a foreign policy founded on aggressive support of Christian interests (surely a sine qua non of a policy both Christian and nationalist), we are so remote from that idea that the U.S. government is barely willing to take notice of persecuted Christians, while scarcely anyone, in or out of government, cheers, as a true Christian Nationalist surely would, for persecution that governments carry out in Christianity’s name. (Rep. Greene, one notes, is an isolationist.)
The “Christian Nationalist” label is simply a smear, the left-wing parallel to “All liberals are really communists”. Progressives may denounce the memory of “McCarthyism”, but they have no qualms about adapting it to their own cause.