The Big Q&A With Robert P. Jones

Robert P. Jones, President and Founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, takes questions from George and Team Takei.

PRRI President and Founder Robert P. Jones. Photo credit: Noah Willman.

As we saw in his Iowa caucus victory, Donald Trump is being propelled to his party’s nomination by strong support among white evangelical Christians. It has long befuddled me how such a movement that scolds the rest of us on supposed morality and “family values!” can get behind someone as morally bankrupt as Donald. So I was excited to ask Robert P. Jones, President and Founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, to shed some light on this phenomenon.

Jones also writes eloquently about the rise of white Christian nationalism—a topic we have explored here at The Big Picture—which remains a worrisome threat as Trump’s potential return to power looms. Trump has not only surrounded himself with purveyors of Christian nationalism and white supremacy, he has fanned the flames of these movements. It’s a powderkeg that I fear may be getting ready to blow. You can read more from Jones on these topics at his ‘White Too Long’ Substack here. - George

You and I share a deep fear of the rise of Christian nationalism and how the Republican Party—and its presidential standard-bearer—has been taken over by it. How would you characterize the threat that Christian nationalism poses at this moment in our history?

First, I should state that by nature, I’m generally an optimist and not prone to being alarmist. As I noted in my recent book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, the impulses behind what we are today calling white Christian nationalism are not new. There have been, since before the founding of the nation, two competing visions for what this country is intended to be and who it is for. 1) Is America a pluralistic democracy, where everyone–regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or other characteristics—stands on equal footing as citizens? Or, 2) Is America a kind of promised land for European Christians? We have struggled to answer this question throughout our history.

The good news is that most Americans embrace the former vision. But a desperate, defensive, mostly white Christian minority clings to the latter. The rise of contemporary white Christian nationalism, as it is constituted through Trump’s MAGA takeover of today’s Republican Party, constitutes the largest threat to democracy I have experienced in my lifetime.

In a PRRI-Brookings survey conducted last year, we found that a majority of Republicans were either Christian Nationalism Adherents (21%) or Sympathizers (33%), believing for example that U.S. laws should be based on Christian values and that the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation. Among white evangelical Protestants, who form Trump’s MAGA base, two-thirds qualify as either Christian Nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers. And majorities of both Republicans and white evangelical Protestants agreed with this statement: “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world” (52% and 56% respectively). Among all Americans, only one-third agreed.

We also found that beliefs in Christian nationalism were strongly linked to a range of other attitudes that are corrosive to democracy: white racial resentment and denials of the existence of systemic racism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and support for patriarchal gender roles. In other words, this white Christian nationalist worldview evokes a set of hierarchies that posits white, Christian, heterosexual men as the divinely ordained recipients of power and dominion. This sense of white Christian entitlement and chosenness is toxic to the cultivation of the democratic values of pluralism and equality.

With Christian Evangelicals having just propelled Trump to victory in the Iowa caucuses, many of us continue to be puzzled by how a group that preaches morality and conservative “family values” can be taken in by such a pathological liar and amoral con man. Can you explain the root of his appeal to this base of voters?

Much of this perceived contradiction comes from accepting the misleading, self-serving claims that white evangelicals make about their own political motivations and history. Although this is not the story white evangelicals tell about themselves, the historical record clearly indicates that the fuel that launched the Christian Right political movement in the 1970s, the precursor to today’s Christian nationalist movement, wasn’t abortion; it was opposition to the desegregation of schools and the social changes wrought by the broader civil rights movement. The largest contemporary expression of white evangelical Christianity, the Southern Baptist Convention (my childhood denomination), was founded explicitly to defend the rights of white Christians to enslave Black people. In the twentieth century, the SBC didn’t elevate abortion as a core issue until five years after the passage of Roe v. Wade, but it has consistently held segregation—that is to say, white supremacy—as a core commitment.

As I documented in my 2020 book White Too Long, terms like “family values” and obsessions over the Christian character of candidates have mostly been held as fig leaves to cover the nakedness of white supremacist interests. Trump simply demonstrated just how easily they could fall away. Take this remarkable finding from PRRI polling between 2011 and 2016. In 2011, only 30% of white evangelical Protestants agreed that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” But by 2016, with Trump at the top of the Republican ticket, 72% of white evangelicals agreed—a 42-point jump. This wholesale abandonment of concern about a candidate’s character remained unchanged the last time PRRI asked this question in 2020.

Over the past couple of years, Trump has increasingly surrounded himself with Christian nationalists. His most trusted spreaders of the Big Lie, e.g., Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Mike Flynn, all claim to be devout, conservative Christians, with some even espousing QAnon beliefs. What is the common thread here?

The devolution of the Republican Party into the carnivalesque party of MAGA rallies, messianic prophecies, and conspiracy theories parallels the unmaking of what I’ve called “white Christian America,” the worldview built around the claim that America is divinely ordained to be a country of, by, and for Christians of European descent.

There have been two chief shocks to the foundations of this worldview in the last two decades. First, demographically, we have become a country that is no longer majority white and Christian. Two decades ago, 54% of Americans identified as white, non-Hispanic Christians, but that number has dropped to 42% today. Over that same period, the subgroup of white evangelical Christians has dropped from approximately one-quarter of Americans to only 14% of Americans. Second, during this same period, we elected—and then re-elected—our first African American president, Barack Obama.

We are witnessing the disillusionment and vertigo that these demographic changes have unleashed among conservative white Christians, as they are faced with the loss of their dominant place in the country and the increasing implausibility of their White Christian America narrative. The contemporary Republican Party—which is approximately 70% white and Christian—has become the repository for a politics driven by white Christian anomie.

The crumbling of a social world always spawns desperate efforts to shore it up, and we see these effects among white evangelical Protestants in recent PRRI polling. Six in ten continue to believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; two-thirds believe Trump has done nothing illegal; and nearly half of those who hold favorable views of Trump overtly say there is virtually nothing he could do to lose their support. One in four are full-on QAnon conspiracy believers, and nearly one-third believe that because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.

Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that the most powerful word in the four-word MAGA mantra is the last word, “again.” Trump’s conservative white Christian base isn’t supporting him because he embodies or even supports some version of “family values.” Trump’s most powerful appeal for his white evangelical base is his promise to turn back the clock on demographic and cultural change to a time when white conservative Christians were the unquestioned demographic majority and held the keys to cultural and political power.

Trump is telling us who he is and what he plans for his next term if he wins in November. His latest is claiming he must have total immunity against any criminal prosecution, even as he suggests he intends to indict Joe Biden if he returns to office. This is pure dictatorship, and we saw some Iowa voters express enthusiasm for this model of leadership Trump is selling. What is the appeal to Christian nationalists of such a dictatorship?

Many of Trump’s most loyal Christian followers, white evangelical Protestants, have indeed come to see him as a kind of messiah figure. Throughout his tenure as candidate and president, and even following his incitement of an insurrection and four indictments, Trump’s favorability has never dipped below 60% among white evangelicals, with churchgoing evangelicals consistently registering higher levels of support. In the Republican primary contests so far, white evangelical participants gave Trump 53% of their support in Iowa in a more crowded field and 70% of their support in the two-way race with Nikki Haley in New Hampshire.

But it’s notable that the most prominent messianic comparison white evangelicals make about Trump is not to Jesus (for some obvious reasons) but to the Persian King Cyrus from the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible. In that story, Cyrus is presented as an ungodly king who nonetheless frees a group of Jews who are held captive in Babylon. By this comparison, Trump is the powerful authoritarian liberator, someone by definition and by necessity above the law, who is alone capable of liberating conservative white Christians from their oppressors.

The characterization of Trump as a messianic figure in the mold of King Cyrus allows white evangelicals to ground biblically their claims to be the oppressed but divinely chosen inheritors of the land. And it also reveals a practical truth: To fully accomplish their ends, they need more than a party and a president; they need a king.

As the President and Founder of PRRI, you oversee the collection of data surrounding faith and religion in the U.S. Can you share a couple of data points that might surprise our readers and give us hope for our future, which many readers could use right now?

I’ll start with the flipside of the PRRI-Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey findings. While three in ten Americans are either Christian Nationalism Adherents (10%) or Sympathizers (19%), two-thirds of Americans reject this anti-democratic worldview. Similarly, nearly three-fourths of Americans (73%) say they would prefer the U.S. to be a nation made up of people belonging to a wide variety of religions.

And this pattern holds across many important issues, although our politics don’t reflect this underlying reality. For example, all of the following attitudes are held by a margin of at least two to one in the general American population:

• Allowing immigrants who are currently living in the U.S. illegally a way to become citizens or permanent legal residents provided they meet certain requirements.

• Favoring laws that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, and housing.

• Allowing same-sex couples to marry legally.

• Teaching our children both the good and bad aspects of our history.

• Believing that public school teachers and librarians are professionals we should trust to provide our kids with appropriate curriculum.

• Opposing bans on books depicting slavery or bans on teaching AP African American history because it might make white students uncomfortable.

The partisan polarization in the country today often makes it seem like we are living in a closely divided 50-50 country. But on many fundamental issues, we live in a two-thirds/one-third country—it’s just that white Christian nationalists have amplified their voices by seizing control of one of our two major political parties.

Robert P. Jones is President and Founder of PRRI, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. Jones is also the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award, and The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. He writes a weekly Substack newsletter at White Too Long. He holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University, an M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a B.S. in computing science and mathematics from Mississippi College.