I spent Wednesday morning at the Brookings Institution’s Falk Auditorium watching the release of the PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey. Aside from being an excellent time to catch up with old friends (I started my DC career at PRRI a decade ago), it is an incredibly relevant study to understand the place of nonreligious people in contemporary American politics. So instead of the second part of the openly secular state legislators analysis, I will write some thoughts about the survey. We will be back next week for our scheduled legislators’ analysis.

The main component of the report is the Christian Nationalism Scale, consisting of five statements:

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1. The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
2. U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
3. If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
4. Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
5. God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

Respondents are sorted according to their agreement with these statements and divided into groups: Adherents, Sympathizers, Skeptics, and Rejecters. You can see the distribution of these groups in the figure below.

These numbers can be interpreted in a few ways. One can feel relief that more than two-thirds of adults are skeptics (39%) or rejecters (29%) of these tenets measuring Christian Nationalism. Or one can freak out that nearly three in ten are adherents (10%) or sympathizers (19%). I’m somewhere in between, confident that this ideology is not as popular as it seems, and it just happens that its supporters are rather loud. Yet, I’m also worried because ten percent may look like a relatively small number, but it means that 25 million Americans are attracted to these ideas. The whole report is interesting, but here’s my main takeaway.

Secularism Leads the Opposition

One of the most impressive charts at the beginning of the report shows the distribution of the Christian Nationalism Scale categories across various religious (mostly Christian) groups. Sorted according to their support for Christian nationalism, the chart shows white evangelical Protestants at the top. Nearly two-thirds of white evangelicals are, to no one’s surprise, adherents (29%) or sympathizers (35%) of Christian Nationalism; see below.

On the other side of the spectrum are the unaffiliated (aka the nones). More than nine in ten are either rejecters (61%) or skeptics (31%) of Christian Nationalism. Whereas the top groups that adhere to or sympathize with Christian Nationalism are Protestant Christians, the groups more likely to reject its tenets are non-Christians. Eighty-nine percent of “other non-Christian religious” (a medley of groups such as Muslims and Buddhists) are rejecters or skeptics of Christian Nationalism. Jewish respondents are almost identical in their classification as the nones.

In essence, the main opposition to Christian Nationalism mostly comes from the non-Christian corners of American society. That’s no small group. According to the 2021 PRRI American Values Atlas, about one-third of Americans aren't Christians. However, most of these are not members of other religions but religious nones. The AVA finds that 25% of Americans are religiously unaffiliated (other polls may have higher percentages, but I will keep these calculations within the PSU: PRRI Surveymatic Universe).

The adult population is roughly 250 million, meaning that the nones are roughly 62-63 million. If 29% of Americans are rejectionists (just over 70 million), it means that the vast majority of rejectionists are nones. About 38 million of the 70-ish million rejectionists are nonreligious American adults. If we add the other eight percent who are religious but not Christian, roughly 50 million of the 70 million who reject Christian Nationalism are not Christian.

Christian Nationalism is a Conservative Rant Against a Diverse U.S.A.

Christian Nationalism rejecters are the growing non-Christian religious population and the even larger non-religious population. This makes sense if we consider that though Christian Nationalism as a concept is not new in this country, its current iteration is a cultural response against racial and ethnic minorities, immigration, feminism, and secularism.

Since they lost the culture war, they will use the state's power to bend the population to its will. This loss is why Christian Nationalists have antidemocratic tendencies. This is why they are turning the places they control (looking at you, Florida) into fiefdoms of grievance.

Of course, #notallchristians are adherents of Christian Nationalism. Most fall somewhere in the middle. The statement with the most agreement among the five that make the scale is “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values,” with 40%. Those who mostly agree with the statement are twice as many as those who completely agree (27% vs. 13%). It is possible that to some, “Christian values” is a synonym for “good.” Conversely, the lowest support (20%) statement is “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” Only six percent completely agree with it.

As I looked at the numbers, I kept thinking about the Straight White American Jesus episode about the religious left. I was listening to it over the weekend, coincidentally. The hosts discussed how mainline Christianity won the war on many cultural aspects at the expense of their relevance as denominations.

The nones hold the values of equality that the Christian left espouses. The nones are the majority of the American left-of-center. Without the nones, those Christians on the left don’t have enough clout to fight the right.

Democrats are often afraid to reach out to the nones (and terrified of the atheist side of the spectrum). Mainly because they fear it will turn off religious voters. But the religious voters that will reject the party because of nones’ outreach will not join them anyway.

Humanist/atheist voices are slowly making inroads with liberal religious ones. Compared to when I started studying American secularism 15 years ago, I see more cooperation with religious organizations that share our values but not our beliefs. Nick Fish of American Atheists was recently a speaker at the Religious Freedom Summit. Humanist chaplains like Greg Epstein and Vanessa Gomez Brake have become prominent leaders. Yours truly writes for Interfaith America Magazine from a Humanist perspective. That these interactions and cooperation are happening is great, we need more. In the end, without a joint effort between the secular and the religious progressives, it doesn’t matter how few the Christian Nationalist voices are when they are motivated to wreak havoc.

For more information about the 2023 Christian Nationalism Survey, including methodology, visit the website.

Other News

• reports that a new openly secular legislator (Rep. Brandon Phinney, a Republican atheist from New Hampshire) was elected in 2022.
• Jack Jenkins reports at the Religion News Service that Democrats passed a resolution condemning ‘white religious nationalism.’
• Sarah Levin interviews Palm Desert, Calif. Mayor Pro Tem Karina Quintanilla in The Humanist for her “Representation" Matters” series with openly secular elected officials.

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