I have found myself struggling to watch cable news during this election cycle, unsettled each time I turn on the television by the way pundits discuss the ongoing presidential race. But it’s not the bickering or bothsidesism that bothers me, it’s the business-as-usual tone; one increasingly at odds with the tone taken by the academics and experts I encounter in my professional life tracking and countering extremist movements. While the talking heads on the television are dedicating their time to polls, rallies, and horse race coverage as if nothing were amiss, the national security experts, legal scholars, political scientists, and law enforcement officials are warning of a surge in political violence. Far from business as usual.
Last week, an alarming new study was added to the pile of dead canaries in our national coal mine. Published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion by Nilay Saiya and Stuti Manchanda of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University – frequently ranked among the top 30 universities in the world – the study links Christian nationalism to political violence, demonstrating a pathway between Christian nationalist political rhetoric and self-professed Christians committing physical violence against religious minorities.
Despite its truly shocking findings and robust evidentiary backing, I do not expect to see the study on cable news any time soon: thus far, the Saiya & Manchanda paper has received exactly zero coverage in the American press. Despite its pressing warning about one of the most dangerous and influential political movements in the country, not a single outlet has touched it in the nine days since its publication. Today, we’re going to end that streak.
The scientific method starts with a hypothesis, and so did Saiya & Manchanda when they set out to measure the connection between Christian nationalism and political violence in the United States. In this case, their hypothesis was that a higher level of political support for Christian nationalism in a given state will correspond to a higher level of violence committed by Christians against non-Christians in that state. Or, as the authors put it in the paper: “American states with politicians exhibiting more intense Christian nationalist sentiments will experience more attacks by self-professing Christians against religious minorities than states with politicians exhibiting lower levels of Christian nationalist sentiments.”
The authors also took pains to discuss what they mean by “Christian nationalism,” providing a definition very much in keeping with those used by experts in the field like Professor Sam Perry (who, incidentally, first brought this study to my attention and is extensively cited therein). According to Saiya & Manchanda, Christian nationalism is “a political theology and cultural framework that seeks to amalgamate the Christian faith and a country’s political life and privilege Christianity in the public square over other faith traditions.” It is a movement which seeks to merge national identity and Christian identity, and give Christianity supremacy in law and society. Like other experts, the authors built this definition around poll and survey data like the Pew Research Center findings that 65% of white evangelicals believe the Bible should trump the will of the people in making laws, or that 81% of white evangelicals believe the United States should officially be a “Christian nation.”
Saiya & Manchanda extensively communicated the context for their research: a country in which Christianity, long dominant in the nation’s society and politics, is rapidly losing support. “Over the past 30 years,” the authors noted, “the United States has witnessed a sharp increase in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, rising from 6 percent in 1991 to 23 percent today.” Church attendance has fallen quickly in recent decades, and as of 2021 sat at 48% – the first time in a century that the figure has dipped below a majority. Christian nationalists who see their faith and their nation as inseparable have reacted to Christianity’s decline in the United States as an existential threat to the country. “American Christian nationalists believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that Christians, therefore, have a responsibility to maintain the country’s Christian identity—an identity they believe is being lost owing to increasing religious diversity and expanding cultural progressivism,” the authors wrote.
Though Christian nationalists often talk about “taking America back for God,” the context spelled out by Saiya & Manchanda puts the lie to that formulation. What movement adherents talk about as “taking the country back” is less about taking control of the United States than it is about maintaining the social and political control Christians have long held over American institutions – a control which has slowly weakened, for the very first time in our history, over the last three decades. Now, American Christian nationalists see their declining power and influence as a threat to the nation’s future, and see those who do not subscribe to their views as the ones threatening it. This self-perception as persecuted defenders of the country is crucial to the tendency towards violence which the authors describe.
As the authors put it, “Christian nationalist rhetoric is deeply cloaked in threat narratives, prompting efforts to retain Christianity’s hegemonic status.”
Though the link between Christian nationalism and an acceptance of political violence is not new, Saiya & Manchanda’s findings go further than previous research by other scholars. Past studies have documented a strong connection between Christian nationalist ideology and the belief that political violence can be justified, but Saiya & Manchanda set out to find if those beliefs can be converted into actual violence, and, if so, how that actualization happens. On both counts, what they found is fascinating and troubling. To understand how they found it, though, we need to take a closer look at the data they analyzed.
At the bare bones level, Saiya & Manchanda needed two metrics to create their dataset. First, they needed information regarding physical attacks carried out by self-professed Christians against religious minorities. To obtain that data, they relied on the Global Terrorism Database, housed at the University of Maryland, which includes information on sectarian violence around the world. Second, and more complex, in order to test their hypothesis that Christian nationalist political violence is more likely in contexts where Christian nationalism “receives political empowerment,” the authors needed to be able to measure whether the Christian nationalist movement was “empowered” in a certain state at a certain time. To do that, they cleverly used states’ U.S. Senators as proxies and measured “the extent to which sitting senators of a U.S. state publicly articulate Christian nationalist beliefs.” The paper’s Data & Methods section contains significantly more information on how those Senators’ public statements were analyzed and categorized for the task, for anyone interested in the minutiae.
Working with that dataset, Saiya & Manchanda were able to test their hypothesis, and were also able to produce a coherent theory of how Christian nationalist sympathies for the idea of political violence can turn into actual political violence – the kind of ideological transmogrification which it currently behooves every American citizen to understand.
On the first point, the authors’ initial hypothesis, their findings were clear: “Our results provide strong support for our hypothesis,” the authors wrote. “The results provide evidence in support of our hypothesis that Christian nationalist sentiments are associated with higher levels of antiminority violence.” In other words, their hypothesis checked out, and the data showed a statistically significant increase in instances of violence committed by self-professed Christians against religious minorities in areas where the Christian nationalist movement is politically empowered.
As to how the violent ideas entertained by portions of the Christian nationalist movement can be transformed into political violence, Saiya & Manchanda reached an unsettling conclusion: that the transformation is enabled by the rhetoric employed by politicians. The link between hate speech from political leaders and antiminority violence has been well-documented in places like the Balkans, India, and Sri Lanka, but Saiya & Manchanda documented that political rhetoric which falls short of hate speech can trigger violence as well. “While hate speech can directly trigger violence against minority groups, more subtle speech that would not necessarily be labeled ‘hate speech’ can have a similar effect,” the authors wrote.
“When politicians affirm the idea that a country belongs to a particular religious group, their beneficiaries may arrive at the reasonable conclusion that the state implicitly approves of discrimination, harassment, and even violence against nonprivileged faiths,” they wrote. “Thus, the language politicians use can fuel tribalism, reduce inhibitions, and reduce the perceived costs of engaging in majoritarian violence, even if this is not the intention of the said speech.”
“The resulting vigilante violence is committed for the purpose of protecting a country’s majority faith tradition from the threat posed by religious outsiders,” the authors explain. “In short, there is a powerful symbiotic relationship between politician rhetoric from above and antiminority violent hostility from below.”
Recent years have seen no shortage of acts of violence committed in the name of the Christian nationalist movement – most notably the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol – and we most often hear those stories told as individual narratives. How someone got radicalized, and what they proceeded to do, each one treated as a lone wolf. Saiya & Manchanda’s paper expands our frame of vision, and challenges that lone wolf notion, showing instead that the eruption of Christian nationalism into violence is not a freak occurrence, but a measurable and predictable outcome of the rhetoric employed by the movement’s leaders.
The paper marks a noteworthy step forward in the study of Christian nationalism, and in our popular understanding of that dangerous movement. Thanks to the work by Saiya & Manchanda, we have a better understanding of what might cause that movement to push the nation into the kind of political violence it has not seen since 1865. As Professor Sam Perry summarized the study’s findings online, “Christian nationalist statements by US Senators predict instances of actual physical violence by self-professed Christians against religious minorities in their state,” calling it “important evidence that political messaging matters.”
The evidence supporting the conclusion that Christian nationalism is a threat to American democracy grows every day: it is a large, powerful, and influential movement which has crafted a rationale for violence. And that movement, which Saiya & Manchanda demonstrated can be pushed over the edge into actual violence by political rhetoric, is currently Pied-Pipering towards November behind a dangerous demagogue holding the world’s largest microphone. American Christian nationalists affixed a large portion of their hopes for the future to this year’s Presidential election, and are unlikely to peacefully accept any outcome other than the Trump victory they prefer. The threat of violence is real.
It’s the biggest story in American politics, and you’re unlikely to hear anything about it on cable news – another canary unheeded in another mineshaft, as we bore ahead, digging deeper still.
