Despite "everyone knowing" that Christian Nationalism (CN) is growing by leaps and bounds -- whether in numbers or raw power -- I myself don't know this. I'm mainly confused. Clearly media discourses about "it" have been growing by leaps and bounds. Today's dose of news about that is a rally in Washington DC that framed Kamala Harris as Jezebel. Clearly there is dangerous energy in the intersection between Trumpism and Christianity. But what is "it" in the first place?
Regarding definitions, they are multiple and slippery. Regarding numbers, whether these are rising depends on the definitions. (Let's be clear, one could think raw numbers are down and still be very worried!) Regarding cultural weight, is that larger, smaller, or the same as the Christian Right that supported Nixon, then Reagan, then two George Bushes? (Yes, we could worry in any case.) But since this bloc is significant, one wants to know: is there greater continuity or discontinuity? If the evidence for "its" growing power or distinctiveness mainly reduces to being part of Trumpism-- which is probably the best hypothesis to make sense of the discourse-- I have followup questions: Is CN (especially in its more extreme forms) helping or hurting Trump, on balance? What is it about Trumpism that differs from Reaganism or Bush/Cheneyism, and which of these three is most worrisome? All these are live and unsettled questions for me. CN might be growing-- it is just hard to parse the evidence offered for this claim. It may mark something importantly new or rehash the same old. It may be smaller but in a more dangerous form, or larger in farcical package that alienates two people for every one it draws in.
None of this is easy to read. And it is critical to see this as clearly as we can, given that big parts of what is lumped under the banner of CN are clearly dangerous and objectionable in serious ways, especially if we keep our eye on the how Trumpism and/or the Supreme Court hope to leverage Christian support. The danger and objections shift with various ways of conceptualizing CN. But generally they hold true whether we judge from various left standpoints, or if we simply judge by the norms of US patriotism (the preponderance of it since 1930) and a majority of US Christians.
My goal here is not to unpack what 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 numbers, makes the problems worse. There is a case in the news today suitable for 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 your polling questions or how you frame the resulting data, and the group you are fluffing or demonizing can jump up like a yo-yo. Massage your phrasing and reframe your interpretation and down it goes. For 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, for a sixfold swing in possible answers!** I take this to be paradigmatic, although one could say it's an extreme case. If you think so, then buckle your seat belt and read on.
People become hip to this game. Ask them if they support "Christian values in the schools" and if they are liberals they are supposed to know they should answer "no"-- even if they support Christian values of peacemaking, anti-bullying, and taxing billionaires-- because if they say yes this will be read as pro-military, pro-bullying of LGBTQ kids, and propagandizing for trickle-down economics, not to mention being part of the "objective growth" of CN.
Ask conservatives if they advocate theocracy and 99% will say no, even if 99% of them would also support things (ranging from fairly trivial to extremely significant) that some pollster will count as an "objective" indicator of their theocratic proclivities. (Do you think I exaggerate? Check this piece that is worried about the phrase "Have a blessed Day" as a sort of Christian Nationalist micro-agression, signaling weightier problems.)
Then anyone can cherry-pick a lurid case study for any trend their yo-yo is set up to fluff or demonize. Such cherry-picked anecdotes can be presented as paradigmatic or conversely as some sort of extreme outlier.
This is our normal world of religious reporting, currently driven by enormous financial investments in campaign spin . Everyone wants both to rile up their base and persuade swing voters, so it's all mixed messages, massaged polls, and cherry-picked examples all the time.
The Yo-Yo Meets the Clickbait of the Week
Today's example is head-spinning. Some highly politicized neo-Pentecostals, bolstered by or overlapping with some highly politicized "Jews for Jesus" evangelicals, held a October 12 rally on the mall in Washington. They framed Kamala Harris as a Biblical Jezebel-- complete with implications of her being demonic and as a result being being thrown off a tower and eaten by dogs.
To call this nasty racism seems straightforward. But was it interesting? Paradigmatic? Part of a growth trend? Everything depends. Certainly this was lurid and disturbing as a choice for cherry-picking, and perhaps surprising to some, although it struck me as roughly 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 routinely conflated with Satan, and both of these cases were extremely tame compared to the sadistic tortures imagined for all non-saved people in end-times novels.***
So was this week's rally "a crazy fringe," dramatizing its weirdness and in the process possibly doing Trump more harm than good? Conversely was it 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 it more clicks?
Such questions take on extra weight when pundits-- one example from this week being an interview with Brad Onishi on NPR's Fresh Air-- identifies the neo-Pentecostal tendency calling itself "New Apostolic Reformation" (how loosely or narrowly we should define this it is hard to say; this report pegs its numbers between 3 and 33 million) as a key driver of CN generally, beyond its key role in organizing this protest.
Let the Number Spinning Begin!
We learn in this report (which, by the way, includes lurid descriptions of the racist vitriol if that's what you're after-- trigger warning if it's not!) that rally organizers claimed the National Park Service told them 250,000 people were there, not counting many more who watched online. The organizers also claimed "others are saying up to 350,000-400,000." So yikes, even if that's a little high, still it's "large and significant by any reasonable measure" and "the number may even exceed a hundred thousand."
The New York Times, meanwhile, reported that "hundreds of followers" were there.
Between these two polls, several sources including the Guardian settled on "tens of thousands." The report from Mother Jones came closest to passing an impromptu smell test. It presented evidence that there were four main areas to stand, each designed to hold between 15,000 and 18,000, but "but only the front section was full."
Let's suppose the front halves of all four sections were full, so we cut back the maximum capacity number accordingly. If so, that's lower than 250,000 by a factor of about seven. Meanwhile, if we set a high end estimate for the Times's "hundreds" at 2000, that would be 18 times lower than the Mother Jones estimate.
Voila, did you think twice as many Muslims versus four times fewer 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 as our high end estimate and down to 400 for the Times's low end, we could push it to 1000-fold!
We could move from here to speculate about the proportions of very hardcore Trumpians in this movement with 3 to 33 million constituents-- the types who would storm the Capitol and set up a gallows for Mike Pence-- compared to average people from these churches whom its hard-core definitely do lobby, and yes they might vote for Trump which is not a small thing, but meanwhile they are relatively apolitical and/or wondering if they should leave.
I can't judge which end of this spectrum is more paradigmatic, nor the net gain vs. loss of NAR members created by this this rally, or whether Trump thought the rally helped or hurt him on balance. (If Trump wants to highlight this, he can easily do so at his big New York City rally this week, complete with NAR people tongue-speaking about demons and/or dressed up as Jews blowing shofars. Will he?) I'm simply insisting that extreme ambiguity is par for the course. This week's click-bait might be over-the-top, but it if helps us remember this, we will gain a helpful takeaway.
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.”