Response to Jason C. Bivins’s Review of The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics

Abstract

energies of the John Birch Society were marginalized to our moment, when a loose populism has brought such energies into the mainstream (pp. 168–74). Importantly, they establish that those attracted to this shift are less inclined to actual political engagement, preferring symbolic victories over substantive policy (p. 183). The concluding chapter on race generates some unexpected nuance beyond the boilerplate observation that religious hubris is overwhelmingly white in America. They note that a variety of patriotic attitudes are present among racial minorities—for example, culturally conservative African American disciples can support liberal policies—that those in the “back of the pews”must nonetheless contend with a broader Christian nationalist sense of urgency, and that a religious legacy must be defended under duress (p. 215). The contributions of The Everyday Crusade are considerable, both to a range of academic literatures and to general readers going forward. That said, from my perspective as a scholar of religion I would raise several questions as I think along with the authors. Broadly speaking, their rigor in documenting a range of attitudes leaves me with questions about the story behind these attitudes. Although their historicization is welcome, my own concerns as a scholar and citizen have to do with the how and the where of such attitudes; for example, I would ask which media, which persons of influence, and which institutional forces are cultivating and manipulating such attitudes. I also had questions throughout about whether religion, in all its complexity, can be properly understood as simply attitudinal. I was often left unsatisfied with descriptions of religious beliefs as “value systems” (145) or as imbuing believers with a sense of purpose. To me, this is more than a quibble because the communal, ritual, and disciplinary aspects of religion seem so central to the public, confrontational face of Christian nationalism. Acknowledging the importance of religion to participants in these surveys did not always adequately capture the reasons for the weaponization of religious attitudes. I was also struck by an occasional elision of American religious exceptionalism and Christian nationalism. These phenomena are, of course, closely interwoven, historically and at present; and it is one of the authors’ main claims that the latter represents a sharpening of the former (p. 28). However, the gravity of the phenomenon Americans currently face—with its disinformation, its regular contempt for democratic procedure, its militant whiteness — represents something quite distinct from dreamings of a New Israel or a conviction that the United States is the indispensable nation. These questions in my judgment do not diminish the many accomplishments of this fine book. Indeed, the authors are to be commended for providing a broad contextual account of a category so often lazily circulated among journalists. What is more, The Everyday Crusade is not shy about its own political convictions, making its contributions even more important in these fractious times.