Leftists and atheists have long pushed the dubious idea that a rising tide of white Christian nationalism, with explicitly theocratic aims, is a grave threat to the U.S.
A Politico piece on “the rise of white Christian nationalism” features an interview with Bradley Onishi, an ex-Christian conservative who apostatized after coming “to view evangelicalism as inextricably intertwined with American nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and xenophobia,” leaving “his faith behind to pursue a career as a writer and academic.” The interviewer, Ian Ward, cites a long New York Times piece I wrote last June on the secularization of American conservatism, and he tagged me in a tweet on the topic when the piece went live. Here’s the relevant section of the interview:
Ward: Does that help explain why conservatives are increasingly embracing the term “Christian nationalist”? Liberal critics have hurled that term at religious conservatives for decades, but now we’re seeing conservative politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and conservative academics like Stephen Wolfe embrace it.
Onishi: When I converted in the ’90s, there was a sense of being countercultural Christians — that you’re part of a broader culture that no longer honors God, so you’re going to have to get used to being kind of thought of as a little bit countercultural. And as a teenager, that’s kind of a fun thing to do — that really appeals to the 16-year-old person, right?
I think in the 20-year shift that we’ve endured, the sense is no longer,“Hey, let’s be a countercultural Christian.” Instead, it is: “We as Christians are going to dominate and conquer culture, politics, economics and every other domain of society — so, yes, we are Christian nationalists, because we’re the Christians who are the rightful founders of this country and the rightful heirs of the founders. We’re the people God has sent to take dominion over every aspect of the United States. It’s a Christian nation, and we’re gonna build it in our vision.”
Ward: Nevertheless, some conservatives have argued that the GOP is now the party of the “post-Christian right” — in other words, that the primary issues shaping the Republican agenda are cultural or class-based rather than explicitly religious. What do you make of that?
Onishi: I think it’s a really short-sighted argument. All of the arguments that young Republicans make about the GOP being a post-religious party relate to issues like the backlash against critical race theory or about PTA meetings and those kinds of issues. But as I lay out in the book, and as many other scholars have laid out, the very issue of challenging the public school system is one that was invented by the religious right. This was part of their playbook 60 years ago, and the whole anti-CRT campaign was carried out using the apparatus that Paul Weyrich and his cohorts helped to build.
In fact, I think what’s happened is that the ideology of the New Religious Right is so pervasive that a young Republican is engaged in it even if that young Republican does not consider themselves to be a religious person. In many ways, I think that’s a sign that Weyrich really succeeded in his mission. I think it’s more accurate to say that Christian nationalism is nimble and agile enough to encompass a whole host of people, including young Republicans who may not attend church.
Onishi, now a faculty member at the University of San Francisco, is the author of the recently published Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism, and the co-host of the Straight White American Jesus Podcast. Outside of this interview, he wrote a critical response to my Times essay soon after it was published. Much of his self-styled public persona is premised on the idea that a rising tide of white Christian nationalism — one with explicitly theocratic aims — is a fundamental threat to the United States. That, of course, is at odds with the thesis of my essay, which argued, “The conservative political project is no longer specifically Christian. . . . It is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, revolving around race relations, identity politics, immigration, and the teaching of American history” rather than “explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce, and homosexuality.” So it’s not surprising that he finds my argument lacking.
It’s worth noting that I made an intentional effort to avoid using the term “post-religious” or “post-Christian” conservatism in my essay; Ward’s attribution of that term to my argument, while understandable, isn’t quite right. To argue that today’s conservatism is no longer specifically Christian isn’t exactly the same as saying that it’s fundamentally “post”-Christian. The religious Right is still very much alive, albeit a shrinking constituency in the conservative political base, and it tends to support the priorities and agenda of the emergent cultural conservatism that’s now vying for hegemony on the right. The point isn’t that this more secular cultural conservatism is at odds with Christianity; it’s that it’s religiously agnostic, and its priorities can and often do appeal to a large swath of nonreligious Americans as well as the traditional Christian electorate.
On that front, Onishi’s implication that conservative Christianity’s self-styled “countercultural” identity has given way to dominionism is an odd reading of recent history. If anything, today’s conservative Christians are even more committed to the idea that their way of life is countercultural and at odds with mainstream norms and mores — that’s an argument you hear on a near-daily basis from religious figures and outlets. At the same time, the idea that the Christian Right’s desire to restore the power of their religious faith in the public square is a new phenomenon is at odds with what people in Onishi’s own cohort were worrying about in the era that, according to him, was characterized by a kind of Christian quietism — i.e., that “you’re going to have to get used to being kind of thought of as a little bit counter-cultural.”
The Bradley Onishis of the world have been saying something similar about the religious Right for most of its existence. In the early 1990s, Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State declared: “I have no doubt that the goal of [religious right leader] Pat Robertson’s organization is to create what amounts to a theocracy in America.” In a 1999 essay for New York Times magazine, Andrew Sullivan assailed the religious Right’s project as “an orthodoxy, to put it bluntly, of cultural and moral revolution: a wholesale assault on the beliefs and practices of an entire post-1960’s settlement.” The progressive freak-out over George W. Bush’s alleged efforts to implement a “Christian theocracy” was ubiquitous and well-documented — a 2004 Guardian election postmortem bore the title of “turning democracy into theocracy.”
This concern about the religious Right’s ambitions is why, around the turn of the millennia, “New Atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, became intellectual celebrities,” Derek Thompson noted in The Atlantic. “The 2006 best seller American Theocracy argued that evangelicals in the Republican coalition were staging a quiet coup that would plunge the country into disarray and financial ruin.” Sound familiar?
So for Onishi’s “20-year shift” thesis to hold, one must necessarily argue that his counterparts who have been warning that the United States is on the verge of a dominionistic Christian theocracy for the past three decades were wrong. Where Onishi saw a much more muted, inward-looking “countercultural” Christianity in the 1990s, they saw a power-obsessed puritanical counterrevolution. The reality is that Onishi’s predecessors were closer to the truth than he is. But the Christian political movement they feared was, on the whole, a failure. In fact, Onishi’s assertion that Paul “Weyrich really succeeded in his mission” conficts with what Weyrich himself concluded. In a pessimistic 1999 retrospective, the religious conservative leader argued that while conservatives succeeded in getting “our people elected, that did not result in the adoption of our agenda,” adding:
The reason, I think, is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics. . . . I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn’t mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn’t going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.
Onishi seems to suggest that there is something new about the cultural conservatism of our day, following the “20-year shift” from Christian “countercultural” quietism to Christian nationalism. He is correct that today’s conservatism is distinct from that of the 1990s. But its distinguishing characteristics are exactly the opposite of the ones he identifies.