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

Despite "everyone knowing" that Christian Nationalism (CN) is growing by leaps and bounds -- whether in numbers or raw power -- I myself get stuck, whenever I try to write about it, because I personally don't know this. Mainly I get confused. Clearly media discourses about "it" have grown by leaps and bounds. Today's dose of news on this front concerns a rally in Washington DC that framed Kamala Harris as "Jezebel," as we will discuss. 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, these are multiple and slippery. Regarding numbers, they are either rising or falling depending on the definitions. (Let's be clear, one could still worry even if raw numbers are down!) Regarding cultural weight, is this larger, smaller, or the same as the weight of Christian Right that supported Nixon, then Reagan, then two George Bushes? (Here again we can worry, whatever the answer.) Given that this bloc of Christians is clearly significant, one would like to know: is there more continuity or discontinuity? If the evidence for "its" growing power mainly reduces to being a Christian part of Trumpism-- maybe the best working hypothesis to follow if we want to make sense of media spin-- I have followup questions: Is CN (especially in extreme forms that media often treats as paradigmatic) helping or hurting Trump, on balance? What is it about religious Trumpism that is distinctive compared to religious Reaganism or Bush/Cheneyism? Insofar as these three differ, which is the most worrisome?

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

None of this is easy to read. And it is crucial to understand this as clearly as we can, given that big parts of what is lumped under a CN banner is definitely dangerous and objectionable, especially if we keep our eye on how Trumpism and/or the Supreme Court hope to leverage passive Christian support. The exact dangers shift across various ways of conceptualizing CN. But, in general, objections will steady whether we judge from various left standpoints or simply appeal to widely held centrist standpoints: the values of US patriotism (at least the preponderance of it since 1930), the continuing majority of US Christians, or concerns for a common good wider shared across our society.

My goal today is not to unpack and defend 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 numbers" of "CN," makes the other confusions worse. The protests against "Jezebel" in the news today are 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 of the resulting data, and you can make the group you are fluffing or demonizing jump like a yo-yo. Re-massage your phrasing and reframe your interpretation and down it will go. Here's my favorite examples: 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, there is a sixfold swing in possible answers!** I take this to be paradigmatic, although one could say it's an extreme case. If that is what you are thinking , then buckle your seat belt and read on.

People become hip to this game. Ask them if they support "Christian values in schools" and (if they are liberals) they know they should answer "no"-- even if they do support Christian values of peacemaking, anti-bullying, and taxing billionaires. 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 an "objective growing number" of CN.

Ask conservatives if they advocate theocracy and 99% will say no. That's 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 worries about the phrase "Have a Blessed Day" as a sort of Christian Nationalist micro-aggression, signaling far graver aggressions that lurk behind.

After this, anyone can cherry-pick a lurid case study for any trend that they have set up their yo-yo to fluff or demonize. Such cherry-picked anecdotes can be presented as paradigmatic or conversely as some sort of extreme outlier.

This is our everyday world of religious reporting, currently driven by enormous financial investments in campaign spin . Since everyone wants both to rile up their most passionate base and persuade moderate swing voters, 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, 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 the 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 seems straightforward. But was it interesting? Newsworthy? Paradigmatic? Part of a growth trend? Everything depends. Certainly this was lurid and disturbing as a choice for cherry-picking. Perhaps is was 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 very widely conflated with Satan, and both of these cases were extremely tame compared to the sadistic tortures imagined for all non-saved people in best-selling 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 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 key driver of CN generally, beyond its role in organizing the Jezebel protest. How loosely or narrowly we should define NAR is not clear; this interview pegs its numbers somewhere between 3 and 33 million.

Let the Number Spinning Begin!

We learn in another report (which includes lurid descriptions of racist vitriol if that's what you're after-- trigger warning if it's not!) how rally organizers claimed that the National Park Service told them 250,000 people were there, not counting many more who watched online. These organizers also stated that "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 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 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 should scale back our own working estimate to half the maximum numbers. If so, that's around 7 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 is 18 times lower than what Mother Jones estimated.

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 a high end estimate and all the way down to 400 for the Times's low end estimate, we could push this to 1000-fold!

We could move from here to speculate 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 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 are fairly apolitical and might 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 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 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 in January 2025: As I guessed when I published this, Trump did not highlight NAR themes at his closing rally. 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, with the highest end estimate they could possibly conjure. In the ensuing election, some of my underlying worries proved true; liberals who swung too wildly in their attacks on "Christian Nationalism" seemed not to make any dent in the voting. I suspect they drove as many center-right Christians toward the Trump camp as they peeled people away. 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 the 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.”