Are we on the precipice of a white Christian nationalist takeover?<\/p>\n
The author and religion scholar Robert P. Jones sure feels like we\u2019re close. \u201cThis is our 1933,\u201d he writes in his new book, referencing the year that Weimar Germany fell to a Nazi takeover.<\/p>\n
Panicked allusions to Nazi Germany have been a common occurrence<\/a> in the Trump years. But Jones, who has studied religion for decades and grew up Southern Baptist, has a very specific perspective on why those references are warranted now, particularly because of the role Christians played then \u2014 and it all worries him.<\/p>\n It was in 1933, Jones writes, that the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niem\u00f6ller began resisting Nazi rule. He was arrested four years later and imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp until 1945. Revisiting Dachau after World War II, Niem\u00f6ller remembered 1933 as not just the year the camp opened, nor a reminder of a time when he was still a free man, but also a marker of how much time he had wasted in the preceding years supporting the Nazis. From their rise in the 1920s until that moment, he\u2019d been supportive of much of the Nazis\u2019 movement, voting for them in three different elections. After his release, every day of that time felt like a missed opportunity to do something to avert a tragedy.<\/p>\n Jones doesn\u2019t make this historical parallel lightly. In his new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy<\/a>, he spends a significant amount of time building the case that the actions of the second Trump administration, combined with rock-solid support from white Christian evangelicals<\/a>, are resulting in escalating religious authoritarianism, pointing to evangelical support for mass deportations earlier this year and Christian nationalist<\/a> rhetoric<\/a> by members of the administration, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. \u201cWe are now living in a democratically back-slidden nation, abetted by an apostate white Christianity,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n But his book isn\u2019t just a panicked observation; it\u2019s a call to action. Like Niem\u00f6ller, he argues, religious people who\u2019ve sat out or passively supported MAGA can still effect change. And churches are just as important to stopping a slide into religiously backed authoritarianism as many were in abetting its rise.<\/p>\n So what should Christians who don\u2019t buy into this vision of their faith do to resist it?<\/p>\n Jones is the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute<\/a>, the leading research and polling think tank on politics and religion, and a scholar of religion \u2014 spending his career analyzing and writing books on the relationship between race, white supremacy, and faith in America. I decided to chat with him to figure out what the road map for Christian resistance to Christian nationalism might look like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n Why are you taking on this project now?<\/p>\n If you look back at the three previous books I\u2019ve written in the last decade, they have been responding in various ways to the rise of Christian nationalism that we\u2019ve seen in the country and the threat that that poses. This book is motivated by a sense of urgency.<\/p>\n I\u2019m also trying to turn the corner in this book by saying, For those of us who care about the integrity of Christianity and the future of democracy, the real question is what are we going to do in this moment?<\/p>\n Throughout the book, you argue that there is very little daylight between what the administration is doing and what white Christian evangelicals will support. I think immigration policy comes to mind: that it\u2019s hard to propose draconian enforcement policies that these Christians won\u2019t tolerate. Do you really expect people to change?<\/p>\n So the line you\u2019re thinking about \u2014 because I remember writing this line \u2014 it was, \u201cIn the Trump era, white evangelical attitudes about undocumented immigrants are so extreme that it seems virtually impossible to construct a policy that is too brutal for them to support.\u201d<\/p>\n I go through the options [offered in PRRI polling<\/a>]: Do you support putting things like razor wire and barricades in a river that might make people drown? Yep, we\u2019re good with that. Do you put people in internment camps? Yep, we\u2019re good with that. And so I do think it should be shocking to hear those kinds of responses, again, from people who say they follow a Bible that talks more about caring for the widow or the orphan and has a lot to say about immigrants and the stranger who resides among you and being kind to them, not oppressing them.<\/p>\n I even say at the beginning of the book, I\u2019m not writing for the people who have completely given themselves over to this MAGA worldview. And the evidence shows that it is the vast majority of white evangelicals that have done that. But among white Catholics, among white mainline Protestants, it\u2019s less of a complete acquiescence to that seductive political worldview. That\u2019s who I\u2019m writing to.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest challenge has been apathy among many white Christians who have watched this extremism take hold, have watched it grow, and have really been uncomfortable speaking out.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m a pragmatist on this point. At the end of the book, I talk about the need for division, and that we have to realize that there are going to be some people who are so wedded to this kind of power and violence that they\u2019re beyond persuasion. The only solution is to out-organize and resist that movement and to stand up something else in its wake.<\/p>\n We\u2019re starting to see some of that as well. White evangelicals only make up<\/a> 13 percent of the country. And even though almost 85 percent of them are all in on the MAGA movement, that\u2019s nowhere near a majority of the country.<\/p>\n And even if you take everyone who supports a Christian nationalist worldview, it\u2019s only about three in 10 Americans. Now that\u2019s a lot, and it\u2019s a majority of Republicans and it\u2019s two-thirds of white evangelicals in that camp. But it does mean that the country as a whole rejects that worldview by a margin of 2-to-1.<\/p>\n The biggest challenge has been apathy among many white Christians who have watched this extremism take hold, have watched it grow, and have really been uncomfortable speaking out and saying, Wait, wait, wait, that\u2019s not how I understand Christianity. That\u2019s not how I understand the Bible or the teachings of Jesus. And so I think this book is in some ways aimed at that group and saying, Yeah, it\u2019s kind of now or never. If you want a different version of Christianity to exist in this country, it\u2019s time to stand one up and make it a very publicly visible thing.<\/p>\n So where does that leave us in terms of resisting and out-organizing? What is the playbook for beating back this takeover?<\/p>\n I\u2019m pretty convinced that if we\u2019re talking about persuading the folks that have been all in for Trump for a decade now, for three consecutive elections, that\u2019s a fool\u2019s errand.<\/p>\n But I do think there\u2019s a bunch of folks in the middle that aren\u2019t that group. The white mainline Protestant world is much more divided. The white Catholic world is much more divided. The Latino evangelical world is much more divided than the white evangelical world. And so there are other groups of Christians that I think are still debating this out. And I think those are the places where I think there\u2019s fertile ground for a conversation to be had. And I also think there is a great mass of Christians that have been very deeply but quietly disturbed at the way that Christianity has been portrayed and hijacked, but haven\u2019t really found their voice or their feet in putting out a different version.<\/p>\n One thing to say here too is that we have long had Christian voices and, to talk Democratic politics for a minute, in the Democratic Party, they\u2019ve just mostly not been white: the late Rep. John Lewis, Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn<\/a> from South Carolina, Sen. Raphael Warnock, who have been very eloquent about talking about their own faith. Warnock is himself a pastor at Martin Luther King\u2019s old church, so very prominent.<\/p>\n But I think what we\u2019ve had less of is people who come out of the white Christian denominations who have been willing to speak from their faith perspective in that way. And I think it\u2019s why Texas Senate candidate James Talarico\u2019s gotten so much attention because he doesn\u2019t fit the mold in many ways. But we are seeing half a dozen other folks running up and down and from a lot of Midwestern states, which is interesting.<\/p>\n And partially that\u2019s because in those Midwestern states, the white evangelical group is typically smaller than the white mainline \u2014 in Iowa, in Michigan, and those kinds of upper Midwest states. And so I think we\u2019re seeing more people coming out of that mainline Protestant, Presbyterian, Lutheran world that are representing that. And in Minneapolis, we saw that as well [the active organizing of Lutheran and other mainline Protestant communities<\/a> to protest ICE, aid immigrant communities, and monitor ICE agent movements].<\/p>\n I\u2019m also thinking in Texas, there was just a story about a Catholic bishop and parishes in a community outside of El Paso that looks like they\u2019ve successfully stopped ICE from building a very large detention center. And Pope Leo has been speaking out about this as well. So I think there are these signs that this other voice of Christianity is emerging, particularly out of alternative white Christian spaces. And I think that\u2019s super, super important.<\/p>\n What does that mean for the average person reading this? What should they be doing?<\/p>\n In the last three years, I\u2019ve probably been invited to well over a hundred mostly predominantly white Christian churches who are asking the question: What can we do? And how do we resist this in our communities? How do we stand up and be a witness to a different kind of Christianity that centers love rather than fear and inclusion rather than exclusion?<\/p>\n