White supremacist ideals have entered the mainstream of American discourse, as hostile rhetoric moves from fringe narratives to high levels of political power. With Christian nationalist ideals transgressing traditional boundaries between the church and state, divisive ideologies are increasingly shaping and influencing policy.
American history has long been witness to rises and dips in the salience of religion in public policy. The MAGA movement undoubtedly reignited the presence of radical ideals in discourse, and Christian evangelicalism heavily intertwined with the political mobilization of Donald Trump’s base.
“One of the things that really shifted in the last 10 years, really beginning with Trump’s first campaign in 2015, is the enlistment of a whole new set of radical Christian actors in these movements. Some of that has been through some of Trump’s kind of idiosyncratic appeals,” Matthew Taylor, Senior Christian Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, said.
Speaking at a briefing held by American Community Media on Nov. 14, Taylor said Trump enlisted the non-denominational and charismatic Christian coalition into broader far-right circles, uniquely energizing and fueling the MAGA message through Christrian supremacy. He said this coalition built a mythology that united the right around the idea that Trump is a kind of quasi-Messiah who came to deliver to the United States and realign the world order.
“I think those narratives have activated this MAGA coalition in a very particular way, both in these more racist directions and in these more Christian supremacist directions, and I think we’re seeing the overlap of that really expressed in our politics today,” Taylor said.
The overlap of such ideals with politics can be especially threatening to secularism, as this coalition is a frequent transmitter of Christian nationalism. Taylor said Christian nationalism is a habit of mind deeply embedded in American culture and fuses religious identity with a national and political identity, leading many to view the country as a carrier of Christian identity.
“Religion and race have become deeply embedded throughout American history, especially through White Christians weaponizing Christianity against people of color, even Christians of color, as a means of defining themselves as intrinsically belonging to the United States,” Taylor said.
The resurgence of Christian nationalism poses a grave threat to democratic stability, as it advocates for a theocracy in which religion dominates the government, a direct contrast to the democratic republic that the Constitution established.
Heath Druzin, a journalist and podcast host who covers extremist movements, said this ideology leads to legislation that reflects strict patriarchy, a foundational theme in Christian nationalism that often binds many followers together.
“That is something I found pretty much with everybody I talk to, and I’ve talked to a lot of Christian nationalists. They pretty much all agreed that men should be in charge. Most of them agreed that women shouldn’t be able to vote,” Druzin said. “…There’s not much debate on that, I found in Christian nationalism. Not just that women should follow men’s lead but that they should be disenfranchised completely.”
In the small college town of Moscow, Idaho, these ideas are embraced by a quasi-sect of Christianity called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Doug Wilson, leader of the sect’s Christ Church, is a self-described Christian nationalist pastor who believes women should not have the right to vote, the Confederacy was on the right side of the Civil War and that the LGBTQ+ community should be outlawed. He has arguably more national influence than he does in his own town of 26,000 people, as he has ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has reposted Wilson’s videos claiming women should not be eligible to vote.
Druzin, a host of the “Extremely American” podcast, completed extensive reporting on Wilson’s far-right church and his efforts to propel deep patriarchal and homophobic ideas onto the national political stage.
“He’s built up what my co-reporter, James Dawson, has coined a Christian industrial complex. I think that’s a really good term for it, because he has a whole empire, a whole education empire. He’s built up a fundamentalist Christian school network from coast to coast, nearly 500 schools, and his plan, as he told me, is basically to build this spiritual army where kids are in his ideology from kindergarten through college,” Druzin said. He’s also built up a church network. He’s got churches across the country, and he’s owned more, including his latest one in D.C., which Pete Hegseth has been to several times.”
Wilson aims to build a Christian nationalist network that spreads his ideology to the masses. His Canon Press publisher prints out large numbers of Christian nationalist titles and educational materials, and his streaming service is similar to what Druzin calls a “fundamentalist Christian Netflix.”
“He’s basically trying to recreate society in a fundamentalist Christian image, where you can give a one-stop shop for people to… give all of them their social and entertainment needs through a fundamentalist lens, and he’s been really successful and really influential,” Druzin said. “With Trump’s win, you’re seeing that a lot more. His ideas are getting mainstreamed, and his people are getting into places where there’s more influence. He’s been basically playing a long game for more than 4 decades for this moment, and he knows that this is his moment, and he’s trying to make the most of it.”
Devin Burghart, Executive Director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, said traditionally incubated ideas have already moved into mainstream policy. The onset of the Trump Administration brought expansive new changes to policy, many of which echo the same religious and even racial supremacist narratives spoken in Christian nationalist movements.
Legislation attacking the LGBTQ+ community, the erasure of black history and civil rights struggles, efforts to curtail women’s rights and the massive militarized crackdowns on undocumented immigrants are all ideas that have been on the periphery but are now part of official federal action. As the separation between the church and state erodes, public policy becomes increasingly more vulnerable to extreme political agendas that endanger the safety of marginalized populations.
Sanford Schram, adjunct lecturer in political science at Stony Brook University, said a “white identity politics” is coming to the fore in the MAGA movement, in which many white individuals see themselves as new victims being passed over in an emerging age of multicultural inclusion. He said many embrace the idea that white identity is threatened and subsequently support the unconstitutional ICE crackdowns on immigrants. The fear of white Americans being replaced by immigrants can be traced to far-right conspiracy theories that are becoming common in public opinion concerning immigration.
“The so-called Great Replacement, the idea that Americans are being replaced by immigrants, is a white nationalist conspiracy at its core, and while some folks will not emphasize part of it, there is, in addition to it being a profoundly racist and misguided idea, also an anti-Semitic component as well,” Burghart said.
The modern media landscape, fragmented into niche subchannels and platforms with echo chambers, is only worsening this problem. Conspiratorial thinking can gain widespread prominence as it travels from digital echo chambers to the halls of Congress, and white supremacy is a major by-product.
“For those who don’t monitor the dark corners of the Internet, there are alarming numbers of people who are fond of Hitler and not afraid of saying it out loud,” Druzin said. “…That kind of talk has become a lot more acceptable.”
The rise of social media specifically has contributed to this intensification in rhetoric, as anonymous online speech and frequent trolling make hateful narratives seemingly more acceptable in certain audiences.
“You start to say things there that you might not say if you’re talking to somebody face-to-face, and you get a lot of approval online, because you can be anonymous. You also just don’t really have to deal with face-to-face backlash, and I think you feel emboldened to say things that maybe you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying in public,” Durzin said. “…That’s a big part of why we’re seeing ideas that would be abhorrent to any mainstream politician become pretty acceptable in a way that I think 10 years ago most people would be surprised by.”
As communication norms shift, digital politics are only streamlining the nativist ideologies undergoing a revival in American politics. With power transferring to those holding white supremacist and Christian nationalist ideals, the very foundations of democracy are threatened.
“People who have these higher levels of white outgroup hostility towards these other groups of a diversity of kind are less likely to support democracy and are more willing to tolerate an authoritarian leader, because that’s the road through which they’re going to achieve power,” Schram said. “Unfortunately, a lot of people in government, on the Supreme Court and in Congress, as well as people in the Trump Administration, feel obligated to go along with this, because it’s turning out to be a winning strategy that has put liberal democracy and the rule of law and our constitutional system at risk.”
