Has Christian Nationalism Intensified or Faded?

Comparing Survey Data from 2007 and 2021

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

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There's been no bigger term in religion and politics over the last five years than "Christian Nationalism." I went to graduate school between 2005 and 2011, and I can say with a great deal of certainty that I never read that term in any research I combed through for my coursework or dissertation. My, how things have changed.

I just did a quick search for the term on Google Scholar, and across the first thirty articles and books that appear, 21 of them have been published in 2020 or later. That's not typically the case with other queries of the literature; it's usually heavily tilted towards older works that tend to have a lot of citations. All that to say - academic work on Christian Nationalism is very much in its embryonic stage.

I can easily list seven books specifically dedicated to Christian Nationalism that have been released in the last few years:

1. Taking Back America for God by Perry and Whitehead (2020)

2. The Flag and the Cross by Gorski and Perry (2022)

3. American Idolatry by Whitehead (2023)

4. Preparing for War by Onishi (2023)

5. Red State Christians by Denker  (2022)

6. The Everyday Crusade by McDaniel, Nooruddin, and Shortle (2022)

7. The Full Armor of God by Djupe, Lewis, and Sokhey (2023)

It's all happened so fast that it's hard to get our arms around a pretty basic question in the discussion about Christian Nationalism - are those sentiments increasing or decreasing in the general public? Well, now I can answer that with a great deal of specificity.

If one is looking for the empirical foundations of the Christian Nationalism debate, it’s in a series of statements that were posed to respondents in the Baylor Religion Survey back in 2007 - Wave II. They are as follows: 

1. The federal government should advocate Christian values

2. The federal government should allow prayer in public schools

3. The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces

4. The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation

5. The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state

6. The success of the United States is part of God’s plan. 

Response options ranged from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The middle option is undecided. I know that there's a lively debate about defining Christian Nationalism and whether these questions are tapping that concept accurately. I am going to sidestep that discussion entirely here. The authors I mentioned above are much more well-versed in those debates than I am. My focus here is narrow - I just want to see how responses to those questions have changed over time.

I can do that because the fine team at Baylor did another survey in 2021 that asked the exact same questions. That’s fantastic because we can compare apples to apples in terms of longitudinal changes. So, enough with the preamble. Let’s get right to it. 

I think it's fair to say that the results point to the fact that Christian Nationalism is fading in the general population. That's evident in a number of these statements. For instance, in 2007, 55% of folks said that the government should advocate Christian values. In 2021, that share had dropped to just 38%. That's substantial.

Additionally, 69% thought that the government should allow prayer in public school in 2007 - that declined to 55% in 2021. There was a nineteen-point drop in the share of respondents who say that the government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces. In 2007, a bare majority (51%) agreed that the government should enforce a strict separation of church and state. That increased to 62% in the most recent data.

The only real oddity to me is the last statement: the success of the United States is part of God’s plan. In 2007, just 32% of people agreed with that one. In 2021, that actually rose to 37%. I don’t have a good explanation for that one.

Taken together, I think it's empirically defensible to say that Christian Nationalism has declined significantly since 2007. But, there's a caveat here. The share of Americans who were nones in 2007 was about 16%. It was nearly 30% in 2021. So, a lot more nones in the sample would drive down Christian Nationalism. In the Baylor sample, 11% were nones in 2007. That increased to 19% in 2021. So, let's just exclude them and do the same analysis.

That's reassuring because our results really don't change that much. Agreement with the Christian values statement has dropped by 17 points. It's down 14 points for the statement about prayer in public school, and it's declined a whopping 18 points on allowing the display of religious symbols in schools. The percentage who want a strict separation of church and state has jumped 12 points as well. The results in the first graph are not just an artifact of the declining number of religious folks in the sample - even the religious folks are less willing to embrace Christian Nationalism based on these six statements.

But, let's not stop there. I created a scale of Christian Nationalism. When someone strongly agreed with a CN statement, that was scored a 5; if they strongly disagreed, that was a 1. If someone was unsure, that was a 3. I added the scores from all six statements, then I subtracted six. So, the scale runs from 0 to 24.

I calculated the mean for six different religious groups in both 2007 and 2021. It's pretty apparent that Christian Nationalism has retreated among most of them. For evangelicals - their mean score was 15.9 in 2007. That dropped to 13.8 in 2021.

But the drop for mainline Protestants was huge, from 16.3 in 2007 to just 10.4 in 2021. That's six points on a 24-point scale. Maybe the discourse about CN has permeated more into the mainline, and it's pushed some members away from embracing statements that could be indicative of Christian Nationalism. I don't have a great answer for that big shift. For Catholics, the shift was a bit smaller (from 12.4 to 9.7), but still a noteworthy decline.

Black Protestants are a real puzzle that needs additional exploration. In 2007 their mean score was 12.3, and that didn't change at all in 2021. One thing worth pointing out is that the sample of Black Protestants was 351 in 2007 and only 96 in 2021. That may play a role, but I'm not entirely certain.

So, that's the change at the top level. How about looking at each of the six statements individually to get a better sense of where the movement has occurred?

To me, this is where those shifts in the mainline really become clear. In 2007, 79% of mainline Protestants said that the government should advocate Christian values. That dropped to just 40% in 2021. That's huge. And the mainline numbers are also way down on other questions too. It's a drop of 29 points on the question of allowing prayer in public schools and a 23-point decline on allowing religious symbols in government spaces. There's no doubt in my mind that Christian Nationalism is much less pervasive in the mainline today than in the late 2000s. The only problem is the share of Americans who are mainline is dropping rapidly, so this is having less of an impact on the aggregate numbers.

There are drops for evangelicals here, but they are more modest. Thirteen points on the Christian values question, six points on allowing prayer in schools, and eleven points on allowing religious symbols in public spaces. But the share of evangelicals who want the government to declare the United States a Christian nation is unchanged - 43% in both surveys.

Let's take a step back from religious tradition and move to political partisanship to finish this post. Again, the same six statements but this time the sample is broken down into Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.

A Democrat in 2021 was half as likely to say that the federal government should advocate Christian values as they were in 2007 (42% down to 20%). They were 21 points less likely to say that the federal government should allow prayer in public schools and 23 points less likely to support the display of religious symbols in public spaces. It's pretty clear to me that Democrats have become much less supportive of many of these statements compared to 2007. That's probably due in no small part to the increasing God Gap.

For Republicans, the shifts are less dramatic. There's been a ten-point decline in support for the first three statements (Christian values, prayer in schools, and religious symbols). And there's been a 21-point increase in the share of Republicans who say that the government should enforce a strict separation of church and state.

But, that's not the whole story. The share of Republicans who say that the government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation has risen by 5 points since 2007 (from 40% to 45%). And the share who say that the success of the United States is part of God’s plan has jumped 13 points during this same time period (from 46% to 59%). So, it's fair to say that it's a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to Republicans and Christian Nationalism.

When this data is looked at broadly, it's generally true (but not universally the case) that Christian Nationalism has retreated over the last several years. That's especially true for mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Democrats. But there is evidence here that evangelicals are also less likely to embrace some sentiments related to Christian Nationalism as well.

Why these declines have happened is not an easy question to answer. Whitehead and Scheitle found that the average Americans link to religious symbols is highly contingent upon current events. Thus, the aftermath of January 6th and the subsequent discussion of Christian Nationalism pushed some away from many of these sentiments.

It could be the rise of the nones, but that doesn't appear to be the whole story. It could be more people have become aware of this debate in 2021 when there was little discussion of Christian Nationalism in 2007. Or it could be simple generational replacement - younger birth cohorts are just less strident in their beliefs and the most fervent supporters of CN have largely died off in the last 14 years.

Either way - this longitudinal data should help situate the large discussion about Christian Nationalism in 2024.

Code for this post can be found here.