Christian Nationalism continues to exert a powerful influence around the world. Excellent studies conducted by a variety of gifted scholars have probed Christian Nationalism in its American and evangelical contexts. Better understanding this cultural and political movement fully demands that we take creative approaches to explore how Christian Nationalism expresses itself in other contexts as well. The papers in this session use a variety of methods to look at alternative areas and contexts where Christian Nationalism arises. Lisa Gasson-Gardiner takes a different approach by looking at Christian Nationalism through the lens of an affect economy in “Not Flattening the Foe: Teaching and Researching the Christian Far Right as Affect Economy.” Hannah Peterson explores Christian Nationalism in lesser-known contexts in “Orthodox Jews, Latter Day Saints, and the MAGA Movement: A New Lens on Christian Nationalism.” Eric Tuttle describes how the rugged individualism of wild west mythology shaped eschatology in “Cowboy Eschatology: Make Eschatology Democratic Again.” Guillermo Flores Borda takes us to Latin America in his presentation “Latin American Christian Nationalism: Adapting US White Christian Nationalism to Latin American Politics from 2016 to 2023.” Each of these papers brings valuable insight and broader perspective on this timely topic.
In an effort to make visible the affective dimension of intellectual work, Donovan Schaefer describes the satisfying feeling of “click” that motivates scholars to pursue discovery. In an affect economy, as described by Sara Ahmed, feelings circulate across bodies, concepts, space, and time to facilitate the maintenance of culture and society. What feelings, then, circulate in the study of the Far Christian Right? How do these feelings circulate between experienced scholars and beginners, like the undergraduates I teach? If the classroom is not neutral, religiously, politically, or emotionally, what do we do with it? Can we avoid flattening the complex humanity out of the Christian right and also enumerate the threat to Canadian democracy posed by these communities?
Research on Christian nationalism in the United States has largely focused on White Evangelical Christianity. However, the most widely used measures for assessing support for Christian nationalism—such as those employed by PRRI/Brookings (2023) and the General Social Survey (Gorski et al., 2022)—consistently capture significant numbers of non-Evangelical supporters and adherents. This paper, drawing on findings from a six-month comparative ethnography conducted among Orthodox Jews and Latter-day Saints (LDS) in the United States during the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2024 elections, argues that non-Evangelical support for the MAGA movement offers a useful lens for reconsidering the concept of Christian nationalism. Specifically, it does so by offering two interventions into the current discourse on Christian nationalism: (1) by distinguishing the overarching Christian nationalist meta-narrative from its particular Evangelical expression and (2) by highlighting the diverse leadership structures that facilitate Christian nationalist support beyond Evangelical contexts.
This presentation examines two uses of the cowboy archetype in American politics, focusing on its eschatological dimensions and its impact on democracy. During the Reagan era, conservative evangelicals, as detailed by Kristin Du Mez (2020), reimagined the cowboy as a symbol of rugged individualism, promoting a neoliberal vision of democracy. This cowboy eschatology, however, bypasses what I take to be the core democratic components of contestation, contingency and interdependence (Paxton, 2019). Drawing on Catherine Keller’s articulation of eschatology as an ongoing creation (2018), this presentation contrasts the conservative figure of the cowboy with a more historical understanding of the American cowboy as a paradigmatically queer figure. Riding the range, this figure represents a continual eschatological redrawing of frontiers in a way that is open to democratic contestation, contingency and interdependency. Cowboy eschatology is thereby repurposed as a theological resource for democracy.
From 2016 to 2023, Latin American conservative politicians mobilized a new form of religious discourse that resembled the White Christian Nationalism (WCN) rhetoric employed by US President Donald Trump in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, leading to both political victories and significant vote shares in Latin American elections. Using content analysis of political speeches, campaign communications, and policy proposals across Latin American countries, this paper studies how these politicians adapted WCN into a distinct Latin American Christian Nationalism (LCN) by: (i) advancing a historically rooted, divinely sanctioned Latin American “deep story” of what Latin American nations were, (ii) arguing for a “political vision” in which Latin American countries must be governed by laws and leaders protecting their “Christian identity,” (iii) framing their opposition to progressive social policies as the defense of “Christian nations” from “un-Christian foreign interference,” and (iv) allowing them to align their political identities with Trump’s brand.