Researchers warn that Christian nationalists are becoming more radical and are targeting voting

New research linking Christian nationalism with a desire to limit voting. People citing their faith as the reason they support trucker convoys that shut down the border over covid protections. And the fact that Jesus’ name appeared all over the place during the Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol insurrection.

Concern about rising radicalism among a segment of White American Christians led this week to what some religious extremism experts call the biggest Congress-related event on the topic in years.

The Thursday evening briefing, called “God is On Our Side: White Christian Nationalism and the Capitol Insurrection,” was hosted by the Congressional Freethought Caucus, a group that includes Democratic House members Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Zoe Lofgren of California and Steve Cohen of Tennessee.

The Freethought Caucus was launched in 2018 to “protect the secular character of our government” and has 16 members.

The virtual briefing, which was not open to the public and included more than 50 members, staff and experts, focused on a new, 66-page report about the role of Christian nationalism in the Capitol attack, and on its “implications for the future of Democracy,” an announcement for the event read. Its goal was to bring awareness to Americans about what the caucus sees as the threats of Christian nationalism, organizers told The Washington Post.

The report was released Feb. 9 and is a project of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). It chronicles in exhaustive detail the art, signs, flags, jewelry, spoken words and even a gallows that protesters brought Jan. 6 that cited Christ and Christianity. It also talks about various nonprofit groups, lawmakers and clergy who worked together to adorn Jan. 6 and Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his electoral loss with theological fervor. It talks about the important role of race.

Andrew Seidel, one of the authors of the report and a spokesman for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said he believes Jan. 6 was “the culmination but not the end. ... Insurrectionists were given moral license for the attack, and since then a growing slice of Americans are justifying it.”

“I look at what’s happening now, the rhetoric leading up to the midterms, and am more worried, not less,” he told The Post before the Freethought event. “We have more brazen nationalism. The Republican Party saying that day was ‘legitimate discourse.’ We are going to see something like this again.”

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., a founder of the caucus, said the group has grown steadily in number since it was founded and he wanted to hold the event because White Christian nationalism “is the most important piece of this insurrection people don’t yet understand fully.”

“A lot of Americans look at that day and think: ‘A lot of crazy people acted out.’ But it was far more organized, and it wasn’t just the Trump political organization,” he said. What tied many unconnected people and groups together was a shared worldview that Christianity should be fused with civic life and that true Americans are White, culturally conservative and natural born citizens.

Seidel and other experts involved in the event said they fear Americans don’t appreciate the role of White Christian nationalism in the insurrection and in current anti-democratic efforts. “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” he said. “These folks are embedded in state legislatures, in the truck convoy spectacle. We haven’t heard the last of them.”

Christian nationalism is centuries old. The phrase, however, only took off in recent years, including among researchers seeking to understand and explain the idea that people can be sorted into distinct groups (nationalism) and that those groups are defined by, and must remain defined by, a certain expression of Christianity. People who are considered Christian nationalists don’t usually see themselves or refer to themselves that way.

While concern about White Christian nationalism in America is today most commonly expressed by people on the left, it is not a partisan issue. Multiple well-known figures on the more conservative side of the aisle have sounded alarm about the danger of conflating Christianity with patriotism, or love of country.

Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore called it “heretical,” saying linking God and country is akin to idol-worship and is bad for the faith.

Paul Miller, an international affairs professor at Georgetown University who writes on religion and politics, calls it “a serious problem” because it allows one group to define who is, and who is not, part of the nation. In a piece last year in Christianity Today about Christian nationalism, Miller noted the periods when Protestantism was a quasi-official religion in America, and said it violated the value of religious freedom.

Government discrimination against non-Protestants goes back to the earliest U.S. colonies in the 1600s, when Catholics were banned and Quakers were hanged. In newly independent America, only Christians could hold office, so long as they renounced the pope’s authority. In New York, Catholics were banned from public office until the early 1800s. They had civil rights in Maryland, but Jews did not. In the mid-1800s, Mormons were expelled from Missouri and later their practice of polygamy was legally banned.

An interpretation of Christianity also was used by the government to support slavery and segregation.

University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel Perry, another participant in Thursday’s event, has written several books about religion and politics. New research for “The Flag and The Cross,” which comes out next month, shows a powerful correlation between people who subscribe to Christian nationalist beliefs and anti-democratic beliefs.

The book, co-written by Perry and Yale sociologist Philip Gorski, lays out a scale of Christian nationalism based on agreement with seven points, including “the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation,” and “the success of the United States is part of God’s plan.”

Their research shows how, the higher people are on the Christian nationalism scale the more they tend to agree with the statement “we make it too easy to vote.” The same thing happens when people agree with the statements “the best way to stop bad guys with guns is to have good guys with guns,” and “authorities should be able to use any means necessary to keep law and order” and “if national security is at risk, I support torture.”

“Even after accounting for partisanship and political ideology, the more strongly White Americans affirm Christian nationalism, the more likely they were to respond to Trump’s election loss with a view that voting access should be restricted even more,” the book says.

“White Christian nationalism is not just in the people who stormed the Capitol but it’s powerfully associated and a leading predictor of whether people affirm authoritarian tactics to control populations they think are problems,” Perry told The Post.

Perry and other experts say new data doesn’t indicate that an expanding percentage of the U.S. population hold these views. He says that’s because of younger Americans being more secular and the Trump presidency heightening awareness of the issue.

However, it is wrong to see this group as “ineffective or in a dying grasp,” he said. Instead, they are becoming more angry and, he believes, dangerous. The book’s research showed that the same group more powerfully believed “it’s too easy to vote” after the 2020 election compared with before.

“They idealize a world where the right kinds of people participate,” Perry said.

“As this group of Americans - Whites who believe the country is for people like them - the more they feel marginalized, in a corner, and can lean into that, there is more potential for them to become more radical, more militant,” he says. The topic becomes wrapped up in partisanship, with followers saying: “If the liberals hate this Christian nationalism, it must be good.”