The "Demonic Jezebel," Media Spin, and Right-Sizing Fears About Christian Nationalism

Despite "everyone knowing" how Christian Nationalism (CN) is growing by leaps and bounds -- in numbers and raw power -- I myself get stuck when I write about it because I personally don't know this. I get confused. Clearly media discourses about "it" have grown by leaps and bounds. Today's dose of news about this concerns a rally (of wildly uncertain size) that framed Kamala Harris as "Jezebel." Tomorrow there will be a new outrage. I do not doubt that, in general, there is dangerous energy in an intersection between Trumpism and Christianity. But what is this 'It" that we call "Christian Nationalism" in the first place?

Regarding definitions, they are multiple and slippery. Regarding numbers, they are rising or falling depending on the definitions. (Let's be clear, we can still worry even if numbers are down!) Regarding cultural weight, is it larger, smaller, or the same as the Christian Right that supported Nixon, Reagan, and two George Bushes? (Here again we could worry even if it's smaller.) Given that this bloc is clearly significant, one would like to know about its continuities and discontinuities. If the evidence for its rising power reduces to being a Christian part of Trumpism--which is likely the best working hypothesis for making sense of media coverage--I have followup questions: Is CN (especially in its extreme forms that liberals often treat as paradigmatic) actually helping or hurting Trump's cause? What is it about religious Trumpism that is distinctive compared to religious Reaganism or Bush/Cheneyism? Insofar as these differ, which is most worrisome?

All these are open questions for me. CN may be growing in numbers and/or power--- it is simply hard to parse the evidence. "It" may mark something distinctive or mainly rehash the same old Christian Right we have lived with since... well... name your decade. It may be smaller but taking a more dangerous form, or larger but in a farcical package that alienates three people for every one it attracts, whereas it used to only drive away one in [name your decade.]

It is crucial to understand this as clearly as we can, since large parts of what gets lumped under the CN banner are definitely dangerous, especially if we keep our eye on how Trumpism and/or the Supreme Court hope to leverage passive Christian support. Exact dangers shift across various ways of conceptualizing CN. But, in general, worries hold steady whether we judge from left standpoints or appeal to widely held centrist standpoints: the value of US patriotism (at least the preponderance of this since 1932), a majority of US Christians, or concerns for a common good shared across our society.

My goal today is not to unpack everything I just wrote. I do that in other places on this site. Rather I want to make a smallish point about how media spin, especially regarding the size of "CN," makes the other confusions worse. The protests against "Jezebel" in the news today offer us a slam dunk version of this argument.

Spinning the Yo-Yo of Polling

Polling data on US religion is remarkably slippery. My image is a yo-yo. Spin the phrasing of polling questions or how you frame the resulting data, and you can make the group you're fluffing or demonizing jump like a yo-yo. Re-massage your phrasing and reframe your interpretation and down goes the yo-yo. Here's my favorite example: were there twice as many Muslims as Presbyterians around the year 2000 or almost four times fewer Muslims? It's both!-- depending on how we count, that's a sixfold swing in possible answers!** I see this as paradigmatic, although one might try to say it's an extreme case. If you think this sixfold margin of error is extreme, buckle your seat belt and read on.

People become hip to this game. Suppose we ask people if they support "Christian values in schools." If they are liberals they know they should answer "no"--even if they do support Christian values of peacemaking, anti-bullying, and taxing billionaires to support the common good. We presume they know that if they say "yes," they will be read as pro-military, pro-bullying of LGBTQ kids, and propagandizing for trickle-down economics. That's not to mention being part of the "objective rising growth" of CN.

Ask conservatives if they advocate theocracy and 99% will say no. That's even if 99% of them do support things (ranging from fairly trivial to extremely significant) that some pollsters will count as "objective" indicators of their theocratic proclivities. Do you think I exaggerate when I say some of this is trivial? Check this piece that worries about the phrase "Have a Blessed Day" as a Christian Nationalist micro-aggression, assumed to signal far graver problems below its gentle surface.

Anyone can cherry pick a lurid case study for any trend that they have designed their yo-yo to fluff or demonize. They can present their cherries as a paradigmatic norm to valorize or an extreme outlier to mock.

This is our everyday world of religious reporting. Currently this is driven by enormous financial investments in campaign spin. Since everyone wants both to rile up their most passionate base and lure moderate swing voters, it is all mixed messages, massaged polls, and cherry-picked examples all the time.

The Yo-Yo Meets the Clickbait of the Week

Even by the standards of this "everyday," today's example is head-spinning. Some highly politicized neo-Pentecostals, overlapping with some highly politicized "Jews for Jesus" evangelicals, held an October 12 rally on the mall in Washington. They framed Kamala Harris as a Biblical Jezebel--complete with an implications that Jezebel was demonic and, by extension, that we should devoutly celebrate when she is thrown off a tower and eaten by dogs.

To call this disturbing racism is straightforward. But was it newsworthy? Paradigmatic? Part of a growth trend? Everything depends.Certainly this was a lurid option to cherry-pick. Perhaps it surprised some, although it struck me as par for a course that has ebbed and flowed in a similar channel for fifty years. Pat Robertson even called George H.W. Bush demonic in his 1991 book The New World Order, Obama was widely conflated with Satan, and both of these cases were tame compared to the sadistic tortures imagined for non-saved people in best-selling end-times novels.***

So was this week's rally "a crazy fringe?" If liberal media shine a spotlight on its weirdness, does this do Trump more harm or good? Is this a paradigmatic part of a powerful rising trend--something to be hyped to max by the right on one side, while blown up into a maximum boogey-man on the other? Am I dangerously normalizing their threat or were they "pre-normalized" so that we should learn not to feed them more of our clicks?

Such questions take on extra weight when pundits-- including an example this week on NPR's Fresh Air--identifies a neo-Pentecostal tendency calling itself "New Apostolic Reformation (NAR)" as a major driver of CN generally.

If so, its role in organizing the Jezebel protest would more paradigmatic and less of an outlier. So how narrowly or loosely should we define NAR? This interview pegs its numbers somewhere between 3 and 33 million.

So we're up to a 10-fold margin of error. But spoiler alert--you ain't seen nothing yet!

Let the Number Spinning Begin!

We learn in another report (it includes detailed descriptions of racist vitriol if that's what you're after, and this is your trigger warning if not!) how rally organizers claimed that the National Park Service told them 250,000 people were there, not counting many more who watched online. The organizers also stated that "others are saying up to 350,000-400,000." So yikes, even if that seems pretty high, still the report can worry that it was "large and significant by any reasonable measure." Also, "the number may even exceed a hundred thousand."

The New York Times, meanwhile, reported that "hundreds of followers" were there.

Between these two sources, several others including the Guardian settled on "tens of thousands." The report from Mother Jones came closest to passing an impromptu smell test. It offered evidence that there were four main areas to stand at the rally, each designed to hold 15,000 to 18,000, but "but only the front section was full." Let's suppose the front halves of all four sections were full, and then scale back our working estimate to half the maximum numbers. If so, that's seven times lower than the organizers' estimate of 250,000. Meanwhile, if we set a generous working estimate of 2000 for the Times's "hundreds of followers," that's 18 times lower than what Mother Jones estimated.

Voila, did you think a six-fold margin of error for Muslims and Presbyterians was a big deal? Now we have an overall swing factor well over 100-fold. If we go all the way up to 400,000 (or even more!) as our high end estimate and all the way down to 400 for the Times's low end "several hundred" estimate, we could push it over a thousand-fold!

After this we can move to speculating about the proportions of extreme hardcore Trumpians amid this movement with somewhere between 3 and 33 million followers--the types who would storm the Capitol and set up a gallows for Mike Pence--compared to more normie people from these NAR churches whom its hard-core definitely do lobby, and yes most of them will vote for Trump which is not a small thing, but meanwhile are fairly apolitical and may well be wondering if they should look for another church.

I can't judge which end of this spectrum is paradigmatic, nor how the rally translated into net gains vs. losses for NAR church membership, nor whether Trump thought this rally helped or hurt his cause on balance. (If Trump wants to highlight this, he can easily do so at his big New York City rally this week. We could see NAR people tongue-speaking about demons and/or dressed up as Jews blowing shofars. Will he do this?) I'm simply insisting that extreme ambiguity is par for the course. This week's click-bait may be over-the-top, but it if helps us remember this, we will gain a useful takeaway.

[UPDATE from January 2025: As I guessed when I published this, Trump did not invite NAR people to tongue-speak about demons and blow shofars at his closing rally. But if he had done so, two things would have likely followed: First, the liberal press would have gleefully mocked it. Then, Trump's camp would have spun it as liberals attacking all Christians indiscriminately, using the highest end estimates they could possibly conjure.

In the ensuing election, some of my underlying worries proved true; liberal critics who swung wildly in their attacks on "Christian Nationalism" seemed not to make any dent in evangelical voting. I suspect that for every center-right Christian they peeled away from the Trump camp, they drove another one deeper into it. Now, post-election, Trump seems poised largely to throw the organized Christian part of his coalition under the bus-- although what does "Christian part" mean here, in practice? We return to extreme ambiguity.]

NOTES

**I quote from my book, following 1990s numbers from Stephen Warner, “Religion and New (Post-1965) Immigrants: Some Principles Drawn from Field Research,” American Studies 41 #2/3 (2000), 267-286. We could spin the data to suggest that there are twice as many US Muslims as Presbyterians if we compare the official membership rolls of Presbyterian churches to the highest published estimates by Muslim spokespeople—estimates that might, for example, count most Iranian immigrants as Muslim.  However, if we compare the larger group of people who tell pollsters they consider themselves Presbyterian to the lower estimates of Muslims discovered by scholars who count people connected with mosques, we could claim nearly four times more Presbyterians.

*** Shortly after the fall of Soviet Union when George Bush, Sr., spoke about building a new world order, Robertson wrote that Bush’s participation in the Trilateral Commission and his cooperation with the United Nations in the Persian Gulf War were part of a Satanic conspiracy to institute “an occult-inspired world socialist dictatorship.”