The analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute - founder Robert P. Jones is pictured above - found that support for authoritarian politics is highest among Trump-loving Republicans, white evangelical Protestants, and supporters of Christian nationalism. Americans who support authoritarianism are nearly twice as likely as the general public to support the use of political violence.
The PRRI survey also measured attitudes toward the teachings of Seven Mountains Dominionism, an ideology promoted by leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation movement. NAR leaders say that Christians who share their religious and political worldview are meant to take “dominion” over the spheres of influence in society: government, business, education, media, arts and entertainment, religion, and family. Most Americans reject this dominionist ideology, but a majority of people with Christian nationalist and authoritarian worldviews embrace it. The same is true for the statement that “the final battle between good and evil is upon us,” an idea rejected by most Americans but embraced by more than two-thirds of Americans who say Fox News is their most trusted source of news.
Other findings from the survey:
- A majority of Americans who can be considered adherents or sympathizers with Christian nationalism agree that the nation needs a leader who is “willing to break some rules.”
- Most Americans do not accept Donald Trump’s claims that people convicted for their role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol are really patriots being held hostage by the government, though Republican Trump supporters and white evangelical Protestants are most likely to agree.
- Harsh and bigoted attitudes toward immigrants go hand in hand with authoritarianism and Christian nationalism.
- White evangelical Protestants are the only religious group with a majority that embraces the “Great Replacement" conspiracy theory that there is a plot to allow immigrants to "invade" our country for the purpose of replacing our historically white cultural and ethnic background.
Simon & Schuster just published an updated paperback edition of PRRI President Robert P. Jones’s latest book, “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and a Path to a Shared American Future.” TIME magazine published an excerpt adapted from the book under the title, “Trump’s Christian Nationalist Vision for America.”
Jones notes that Trump accomplished the “unimaginable” feat of bullying the Republican Party into abandoning its platform plank calling for a national ban on abortion, but that “there’s no evidence that Trump’s renegotiation of the allegedly nonnegotiable has hurt him among the rank and file of the party.” Writes Jones:
This perplexing outcome is revelatory. Trump’s cavalier treatment of this supposedly sacred issue has exposed the Republican Party’s best kept secret: The connection between Republican voters and their leaders was never primarily about abortion. Rather, as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) transformation of the party reveals, Trump’s bond with his supporters is forged from different material: namely, his militant mission to return power to white Christian America.
Trump instinctively understands this reality. In contrast to his vacillation on abortion, Trump’s rallies are filled with evocations of an idealized ethno-religious state that are articulate, energetic, and consistent. His nostalgic diatribes about reclaiming a lost white Christian past fueled his rise to presidential power, and he has continued this strategy in 2024.
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Trump’s deployment of the term “our religion”—one he regularly rolls out when addressing predominantly white evangelical audiences—is transparently an affirmation of an America of, by, and for white conservative Christians. This worldview, most frequently referred to as white Christian nationalism today, is an old one, predating the founding of our nation. It flows directly from the 500-year-old Christian Doctrine of Discovery—the idea that America was designated by God to be a promised land for European Christians—which justified the settler colonial project and lies at the ancient headwaters of our nation’s history.
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Why should we be worried about this? There is, of course, the obvious answer that the overall vision of America as a promised land for European Christians is fundamentally anti-democratic. Beyond that, Christian nationalist beliefs are strongly linked to a range of other attitudes that are corrosive to democracy: white racial resentment and denials of the existence of systemic racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, homophobia, and support for patriarchal gender roles. In other words, white Christian nationalism evokes a set of hierarchies that positions white, Christian, heterosexual men as the divinely ordained ruling class. This assertion of white Christian entitlement and chosen-ness is toxic to the values of pluralism and equality on which democracy depends.
