New PRRI Survey: A Reality Check on the Reach of White Christian Nationalism in Seven Charts
White Christian Nationalism is Neither the Best of Us, Nor the Majority of Us
In the wake of the election of Donald Trump with the strong support of white evangelical and other conservative white Christians, my organization, PRRI, released yesterday our annual update of the largest ongoing study of Christian nationalism ever conducted. Based on interviews with more than 22,000 adults each year as part of the PRRI American Values Atlas, the new study examines the connections between support for Christian nationalism and voting for Trump, support for political violence, religious affiliation and church attendance, and more. You can read the underlying methodology and the full report on PRRI’s website.
With Trump’s return to political power completing the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party, with avowed Christian nationalists such as Pete Hegseth being confirmed to head the Department of Defense, and with conservative white Christians providing moral and theological cover for clearly illegal and unconstitutional activity, it can feel like a wave of white Christian nationalism has crashed over the entire nation.
White Christian nationalism—exploited by an authoritarian madman, trumpeted by bigoted white evangelical accomplices, and amplified by the quirks of the electoral college—has indeed come into remarkable power. PRRI’s new study demonstrates the danger of this worldview, but it also provides a reality check on the actual reach of white Christian nationalism among all Americans.
I walk through the findings in seven charts below. And here’s a link to my video conversation with
at about the study, including my thoughts on where I find hope in these challenging days.
Christian nationalism supporters comprise only 3-in-10 Americans.
To measure Christian nationalism, PRRI used a battery of five questions about the relationship between Christianity, American identity, and the U.S. government (Full methodology here). Overall, three in ten Americans qualified as Christian nationalism Adherents (10%) or Sympathizers (20%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (29%). These percentages have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022. In other words, Christian nationalism supporters, while a sizable minority, are outnumbered by a margin of two to one among the general public.
There are only two religious groups, white evangelicals and Latino Protestants, in which a majority hold Christian nationalist views.
White evangelical Protestants (65%) and Hispanic Protestants (57%) are the only two major religious groups in which a majority qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers. While support for Christian nationalism has remained stable among almost all religious groups, support for Christian nationalism among Hispanic Protestants has grown 14 percentage points from 2022, when PRRI first asked these questions. Among all other major Christian groups in the country—Black Protestants, white non-evangelical Protestants, Catholics (both white and Hispanic)—and among all non-Christian religious groups and the religiously unaffiliated, majorities oppose Christian nationalism.
Notably, support for Christian nationalism is higher among those who attend church more frequently. A majority of those who attend religious services weekly or more qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers (51%), compared with 39% of those who attend at least a few times a year and 18% of those who seldom or never attend services.
The Republican Party has devolved into a white Christian nationalist party.
A majority of Republicans today qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (20%) or Sympathizers (33%), compared to less than one quarter of independents (6% Adherents and 16% Sympathizers) and less than one fifth of Democrats (5% Adherents and 11% Sympathizers). These views are reinforced by TV media outlets consumed disproportionately by Republicans, such as Fox News or far right TV news outlets such as OAN and Newsmax.
Importantly, the partisan patterns of support reflect what political scientists call “asymmetric polarization.” Partisans are indeed polarized, but not equally from the center. Only 22% of independents are Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers, holding views that are much more closely aligned with Democrats. Republicans are the outliers from mainstream American opinion.
Support for Christian nationalism among Republicans is also reinforced by the demographic composition of the party. As the US has become more racially and religiously diverse over the past few decades, our two major political parties have responded in dramatically different ways to these shifts. Today, only 41% of Americans identify as white and Christian. But today’s Republican Party is 70% white and Christian, a stark contrast from the Democratic Party, which is 25% white and Christian.
Support for Christian nationalism is nearly perfectly correlated with voting for Trump in 2024 at both the national and state levels.
As the partisan analysis demonstrates, support for Christian nationalism is the animating force of today’s MAGA controlled Republican Party. This group sees divine purpose behind Trump’s rise to power. Two-thirds of Christian nationalism Adherents (67%) and nearly half (48%) of Sympathizers agree that God ordained Trump to be the winner of the presidential election, compared to just 20% of Skeptics and 4% of Rejecters.
Because of the large sample size of the PRRI survey, we can also see that this connection between Christian nationalism and support for Trump goes all the way down to the state level. If you were writing a statistics textbook, this chart plotting the average score on the Christian nationalism scale by each state’s vote for Trump in 2024 would provide a perfect example of a strong linear positive correlation between two variables.
Support for Christian nationalism is strongly correlated to support for political violence, at both the national and state levels.
At the violent January 6th insurrection after Trump’s 2020 loss, we saw a disturbing number of Christian symbols intermingled with Trump flags, Confederate flags, and other white supremacist symbols. We see the connection between Christian nationalism and support for political violence clearly in the data. Nearly four in ten Christian nationalism Adherents (38%) and nearly three in ten Sympathizers (28%) agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,” compared with only 15% of Skeptics and 7% of Rejecters.
The relationship between Christian nationalist views and support for political violence is also strong at the state level, especially among white Americans. The chart below reflects the strong linear correlation between average scores on the Christian Nationalism scale by state and support for political violence (i.e., agreeing that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may need to resort to violence in order to save the country.”
White Christian nationalism is neither the best of us, nor the majority of us
At the dawn of a second Trump administration, the threat white Christian nationalism poses to the promise of multiracial, multifaith democracy are plainer than ever. Over the last two years, PRRI has documented the connections between support for Christian nationalism and support for a host of opinions that are corrosive to a pluralistic democracy: anti-Black attitudes and denials of the existence of systemic racism, harsh anti-immigrant attitudes, anti-Muslim attitudes, antisemitic attitudes, support for patriarchal gender roles, and anti-LGBTQ attitudes just to name a few.
White Christian nationalism is certainly not the best of who we are as Americans or, for those of us who understand ourselves to be followers of Jesus, the best of who we are as Christians. But this new PRRI data shows that white Christian nationalism is also not the majority of us. If we’re going to save our democracy from Trump’s MAGA crusade, we’ll have to find a way to make the power of what is truly the American moral majority felt.
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I’ll put my usual “hurray for us mainline protestants” spin on Figure 5 by noting this happy coincidence:
That the percentage of “skeptics/rejectors” of Christian Nationalism among Americans as a whole and White Mainline Protestants is exactly identical.
Thus reinforcing my sense that we White Mainline Protestants are now, and will be, in a nice position to be helpful in our present moment.