Research

Publications

Holy Nations: How White Racism Boosts Black Support for Christian Nationalism

Political Behavior, 2024

Current work on Christian nationalism emphasizes its strong correlation with exclusion of racial minorities and support for racialized policy, but Christian nationalism support is highest among Black Americans. If Christian nationalism is tightly bound to racism, why do Black Americans express such high levels of support for it? I argue that Black support for Christian nationalism is a response to White ethnonationalism. As Black Americans are denied their equal status as Americans, they increasingly assert their prototypicality as Americans by emphasizing their Christian identity. I employ an original survey experiment, finding that exposure to nationalist messaging in both its civic and ethnonationalist forms is related to higher levels of support for Christian nationalism among Black Christians, suggesting that the sense of national exclusion evokes Black Christians to emphasize their prototypicality as Americans. Moreover, by comparing the role of values underlying Christian nationalism support, I demonstrate that these results are not due to alternative understandings of the meaning of Christian nationalism for Black respondents. These findings shed light on Christian nationalism support as a racialized process.

· Featured in Religion in Public

A colorblind Christian country? How racial attitudes affect support for Christian nationalism and civil religion
With Donald Haider-Markel
Politics and Religion, 2024

Can racial primes influence support for public expressions of religion? While a growing body of research demonstrates correlations between racial attitudes and support for public religion among White Americans, experimental tests of subconscious connections between the two concepts have been lacking. We utilize a novel survey experiment to prime racial considerations, and we find that Black racial primes raise support for Christian nationalism and civil religion among White Americans, compared to White racial primes. Moreover, our analysis indicates that these effects are attributable to racial animus, namely the evaluation that Black Americans are not prototypical members of the national community. The findings suggest that the preference for a Christian/religious America and a White America are subconsciously interwoven for many White Americans, providing the first experimental evidence, to our knowledge, of this relationship.

· Featured in Religion in Public

Words and Attitudes of the Heart: The Emotional Content of Christian Nationalist Communications

Religions, 2024

Christian nationalism has emerged as an important component of the relationship between religious identities and political attitudes. While several studies have analyzed the constellation of Christian nationalist elites and the effects of Christian nationalist orientations on public opinion, to date no study has explored how Christian nationalist elites message to the public or what effects these messages have. Moreover, the current literature lacks comparisons of Christian nationalism to other similar orientations. This study uses content analysis to compare the content and use of emotion language of Facebook messages of Christian nationalist, Christian Christian nationalism (CN) opposition, and patriotic groups. I find that these groups focus posts on issues that are stereotypical to the group identity, and that the use of emotion language differs by topic and group type. Additionally, groups’ use of emotion language shifts the emotional responses of readers, especially in Christian nationalist groups. This study adds to our understanding of the role of emotion in social media communications and the effects of social media communications on readers.

Fear and Loathing: How Demographic Change Affects Support for Christian Nationalism

With Don Haider-Markel

Public Opinion Quarterly, 2024

Christian nationalism, the fusion of religious and national identities, has emerged as an important factor shaping public opinion on a range of issues. However, debates in the existing literature on the motivations behind support for Christian nationalism remain unresolved: Is Christian nationalism a response to secularization and/or a cover for discomfort with racial diversity and equality? Is Christian nationalism rooted in fear of social change, disgust about social change, or something else? We use an experiment embedded in a national survey of adults to isolate the effects of knowledge of both religious and racial demographic change among White Christians. Our analysis suggests that exposure to religious demographic change shifts support for Christian nationalism and perceptions of discrimination against Whites and Christians, but exposure to racial demographic change has limited impact. This effect is mediated by emotion—religious demographic change increases fear and disgust, which then influence support for Christian nationalism and perceptions of discrimination against Whites and Christians. Although our treatment suggesting exposure to racial demographic change had null effects, we note that racial attitudes do independently influence support for Christian nationalism and perceptions of discrimination against Whites and Christians.

· Featured in Religion in Public

Religious Liberties or Reading Rainbows? The partisan implications of religious liberties on education attitudes

With Don Haider-Markel

Social Science Quarterly, 2023

Objective: Many state legislatures have moved to restrict LGBT students’ rights, and the Supreme Court has veered toward greater protection of religious free exercise protection over LGBT nondiscrimination policies. Some studies have found that rights framings are associated with heightened affective and attitudinal polarization, while others have argued that rights framings lead to greater tolerance. Do religious liberties frames affect policy attitudes or group affect? And are some groups’ use of religious liberties frames more persuasive?

Methods: We utilize data from a survey that experimentally varies candidate statements on inclusion of LGBT issues in schools using a religious liberties frame and by the group asserting religious liberties. We use the experiment to document the extent to which religious liberties framings shift support for restriction of LGBT rights in schools and affect toward religious and LGBT Americans.

Results: Our analysis suggests there are few direct effects, but that responses to religious liberties frames reflect debates within the parties about morality, social group conflict, and civic nationalism.

Conclusion: Our results add to the growing literature on religious liberty, and we argue that there is a need to understand why religious liberties frames produce effects in some circumstances but not in others.

Christ, Country, and Conspiracies? Christian nationalism, biblical literalism, and belief in conspiracy theories

With Abigail Vegter

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2023

When misinformation is rampant, “fake news” is rising, and conspiracy theories are widespread, social scientists have a vested interest in understanding who is most susceptible to these false narratives and why. Recent research suggests Christians are especially susceptible to belief in conspiracy theories in the United States, but scholars have yet to ascertain the role of religiopolitical identities and epistomological approaches, specifically Christian nationalism and biblical literalism, in generalized conspiracy thinking. Because Christian nationalists sense that the nation is under cultural threat and biblical literalism provides an alternative (often anti-elite) source of information, we predict that both will amplify conspiracy thinking. We find that Christian nationalism and biblical literalism independently predict conspiracy thinking, but that the effect of Christian nationalism increases with literalism. Our results point to the contingent effects of Christian nationalism and the need for the religious variables in understanding conspiracy thinking.

· Featured in Religion in Public, PsyPost, The Civilian

Working Papers

Jesus and John Wayne Wannabees: How Christian Nationalism and Femininity Shape Extreme Politics Among Men in the US (under R&R)

With Paul Djupe

Christian nationalism, the well-known conflation of Christianity with the state, has been linked with a wide range of conservative, exclusionary, patriarchal, and anti-democratic attitudes and actions. Little work has sought to explain Christian nationalism itself and posit dispositional factors that may work to shape both the worldview as well as its outcomes. Inspired by the book Jesus and John Wayne, we explore the role of gender identity as one possible source of both Christian nationalism and extreme politics. However, instead of finding a link with (toxic) masculinity, we find that men identifying as more feminine are more Christian nationalist, adopt more sexist attitudes, support more group extremism, and are more likely to endorse violence. Following well-established literature, we argue that this pattern suggests extreme politics acts as compensatory mechanisms to project masculinity when it is lacking otherwise. Moreover, we find that these dynamics are not isolated to white Christian nationalism.

Christian Nationalism is Unbounded by LGB Status (under review)

With Paul Djupe

In the exponential spread of research on Christian nationalism, much of it presumes supporters are heterosexuals. After all, those who hold Christian nationalist worldviews hew strongly toward anti-gay rights policy, among other hierarchical, discriminatory policies. This work most often presumes that the targets of those policy attitudes line up naturally opposed to Christian nationalists without evidence. Here we take up the question of whether there are LGB (there was no T item in our survey) Christian nationalists and whether they take the same positions on a wide range of issues as non-LGB Christian nationalists. Drawing on multiple datasets with appropriate questions from 2020 through 2023, we document that there are, in fact, LGB Americans with Christian nationalist views. And then we assess whether Christian nationalism has the same relationships with policy attitudes for LGB as it does for non-LGB Americans. We find small gaps and many similar slopes. Moreover, the similarities do not stop at the ingroup door – we find Christian nationalist LGB Americans taking positions against anti-LGB-discrimination efforts and against same-sex marriage. We conclude that religion plays an especially strong role in leading LGB Americans to advocate for a Christian America.

Fellowship in the Fiery Furnace: A Research Note on How Christian Persecution Beliefs Transcend Racial Divides (under R&R)

With Paul Djupe and Brian Calfano

This study aims to investigate the relationship between Christian persecution beliefs (CPBs) and race. Existing CPB research has asserted that CPBs constitute a socially-appropriate tool to signal White advocacy, but much of this research has centered on White respondents. Utilizing an original dataset that oversamples Black and Latino Christians, we demonstrate that Black Christians are most likely to adopt CPBs (not White Christians); that the relationship between common measures of racial social identity and CPBs do not vary by racial group; that the same underlying religion variables predict CPBs in similar ways across racial groups; that CPBs predict support for religious exemptions for all racial groups, even when those exemptions protect racial discrimination; and that CPBs are linked to greater perception of discrimination faced by racial others. We conclude that the relationship between CPBs and racial hierarchies is more complicated than previously understood.

Reviewing and the State of the Discipline (under R&R)

With Paul Djupe

By many accounts, the state of reviewing is in dire straits. Editors can’t get people to respond to review requests, let alone get them to say yes and complete the review on time. In previous work (Djupe 2015; Djupe et al. 2021) conducted before the pandemic, reviewing was heavily concentrated in a core set of reviewers, reviewing grew with age/rank, and political scientists stood by the value of peer reviewing for themselves, the discipline, and the research. Is any of that still true in the post-pandemic period? In this paper, we analyze a Summer 2024 survey of 637 political scientists in comparison with 2013 data and find an evident decline in reviewing post-pandemic from those who historically review most. This pattern likely reflects some broader movements, especially toward diversification, in the discipline and higher education.

Religion is Sometimes Raced: Christian Nationalism is Ingroup Protection

With Paul Djupe, Brian Calfano, Andrew Lewis, and Anand Sokhey

Popular narratives suggest that the effects of Christian nationalism should be more heavily concentrated among white Americans. The academic literature on Christian nationalism largely reflects this take, often asserting that it is effectively White Christian nationalism. We question such pronouncements, as they have come without systematic analysis across the broad range of issue areas needed to justify subgroup segmentations. Utilizing national over-samples of Black and Latino Christians (alongside White Christians), we assess the relationship between standard measures of Christian nationalism and attitudes towards policies that vary in their degree of racialization. Our findings qualify typical narratives: consistent with a theory of Christian nationalism as sacralized ingroup protection, we find that Christian nationalism does indeed provide divine imprimatur of racial group interests on racialized issues, but that, as racial group interests recede, so does the racialized effect of Christian nationalism. effects that diverge by racial groups on racialized issues but otherwise converge. Instead of being permanently intertwined with White advocacy, we conclude that Christian nationalism is a flexible tool to advance multiple group interests. We close by discussing the implications of these findings and offering suggestions for future work linking race with Christian nationalism.

I Don’t Co-Parent: The Effects of Parental Rights Frames on LGBT Attitudes

With Don Haider-Markel

School board and education committee hearings in recent years have become quite heated, with activists increasingly claiming parental rights to be on their side. This is particularly true of the current focal point of the culture wars, LGBTQ issues in schools. Despite the serious implications of school policies for LGBTQ civil rights, it remains unclear how persuasive parental rights frames are. We employ a video based survey experiment that varies the stance taken by a parent at a school board meeting (in support or opposition to gender identity-consistent bathroom access for transgender students) and whether the parent employs parental rights claims. We assess the extent to which parental rights claims influence policy support, whether parental rights claims are more effective for anti-LGBTQ policy advocates compared to pro-LGBTQ policy advocates, and whether parental rights claims on one issue (transgender student bathroom access) spill over to other issues commonly associated with parental rights (i.e. school vaccine requirements). This study is the first experimental test, to our knowledge, of the efficacy of parental rights claims. Our findings have implications for the deepening culture war over LGBTQ equality.

Misc. Work

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