PRRI survey of Christian nationalism in the US

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), an American nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization, conducts research on politics, culture, and religion. In 2024, PRRI conducted a pioneering national survey enabling estimates of Christian nationalism (CN) support across every U.S. state. Building on this effort, PRRI conducted in-depth interviews with over 22,000 adults to gauge the prevalence and drivers of these views. The following are some of their findings.

Three in ten Americans can qualify as Christian nationalists (10% CN adherents and 20% CN sympathizers). A similar percentage (29%) are rejectors of CN, while 37% were CN skeptics. Support for CN correlates strongly with politics, media consumption, age, and education. Most Republicans are Christian nationalists (53%), compared to only 22% of independents and 16% of Democrats. Americans who view far-right TV news, older Americans, and less-educated Americans also show majority support for CN. In terms of Christian denominations, White evangelical Christians and Hispanic Protestants are the groups most likely to support CN. Also, frequent church attendees (51%) are far more CN supportive than those who seldom or never attend (18%). 

Geographically, unsurprisingly, support for CN is concentrated in the US South and Midwest. States, where CN has the highest support (approximately 50% of their residents) include Mississippi, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, and North Dakota. Regarding elections and democracy, most Christian nationalists (two-thirds of adherents and nearly half of sympathizers) believe Trump’s victory was divinely ordained. They also express greater confidence in democracy’s strength, are more likely to believe Trump will leave office peacefully, and are less concerned he will use federal power to punish opponents.

Christian Nationalist Americans differ from other Americans on immigration and gender roles. A large majority of CN believe immigrants are mostly illegal, are invading the US, and are replacing their culture and ethnicity. They are also more likely to believe society has become too soft and feminine and that men and women should stick to “naturally suited” roles. Finally, believers in CN are more inclined to endorse political violence.

White evangelicals' jeremiad on DC tours

Most religions exhort their followers to leave their evil/non-religious ways to move to a better future both on earth and hereafter. The religious narrative links the current woes to not accepting and adhering to religious edicts and cautions that if the people did not mend their ways, they will be replaced and/or destroyed. The unpleasant and unsatisfactory present is set between a cherished past and a glorious future. There is a call to return to the right path to avoid catastrophe. There are lamentations remembering the paradise lost in contrast to the dark present, and sorrow, despair, and grief are the main themes. Prophet Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations are possibly the best expressions of this reoccurring religious theme.

Harvard researcher, Lauren Kerby, has written a book on how White evangelicals' tours to Washington DC help revive, support, and confirm the "Christian-origins" of the United States. Unsurprisingly, these tours strengthen religious nationalism. In an interview with the Harvard Gazette, she summarizes her book,  “Saving History: How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation’s Capital and Redeem a Christian America.”

Kerby points out that these tours, or more specifically tour guides, present white evangelicals as both insiders as well as outsiders:

While I was in D.C., I noticed these two distinct — and contradictory — stories that guides and tourists told about Christianity in the U.S. In what I call the insider narrative, they claim that America is a Christian nation and that they, as Christians, are the rightful leaders of the nation. They argue that American law, for instance, is based in biblical law, and that the founders intended that Christianity would occupy a privileged position in government. 

But they also tell stories about how the nation has abandoned its covenant with the Christian God, causing the United States to experience decline in morality and military power. This is what I call the outsider narrative: a story in which Christians are persecuted and victimized by a secular establishment that wants to erase the nation’s Christian heritage and keep conservative Christians and their values out of government.

Beyond the context of D.C., these two narratives are patterns for how white evangelicals talk about their relationship to the United States. Together, they form a jeremiad, the prophetic call for repentance and return to a past righteous state. And it’s worth noting that one of the most famous slogans of the 21st century follows this exact pattern: Make America Great Again.

Kerby also talks about how white evangelicals imagine themselves playing four roles in the American story depending on what benefits them. Two of these roles (founder and savior) focus on their position as an insider, while the other two (exile and victim) portray them as outsiders and are used to heighten their fears:

An essential part of political strategy is how you position yourself in the story you’re telling. Are you the scrappy underdog? Are you the avatar for tradition? Are you a sympathetic victim? Depending on the circumstances, you’ll probably benefit more from one position than another.

These four roles I identify — founder, exile, victim, and savior — are the different positions white evangelicals take in their political activities. They offer a lot of range, and if one isn’t working, it’s easy to switch to another role. For instance, as founders they can appeal to the authority of George Washington and other Christian leaders in early America to justify things like posting “In God We Trust” in schools. But if, say, something unflattering comes to light about a white evangelical leader, the victim role lets him dismiss it as an attack from anti-Christian forces. It’s a ready-made defense. 

Kerby also explains that her book is about white evangelicals and not all evangelicals as non-white evangelicals do not relate to the American history the same way, and the DC tours, she has written about, did not have many non-white evangelicals in them:

By now, it’s old news that 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. Non-white evangelicals, however, voted against him at a similar rate. Lumping all evangelicals together, as many outlets still do, erases non-white evangelicals. Even when theology is shared across these groups, the political behaviors I’m interested in are distinct. So it’s important to be specific about which subset of evangelicals I’m talking about, and even then, it’s worth noting that white evangelicals are themselves an internally diverse group. There’s enough commonality that we can make generalizations, but there will always be exceptions.  

The other reason I emphasize this group’s whiteness is because I’m talking about their historical relationship to the United States, and race is inextricable from that. White supremacy in the United States means that white evangelicals have enjoyed privileges and safety not granted to non-white communities, evangelical or otherwise. And one of the most distinctive features of Christian heritage tours is the way they highlight white Christians in American history and exclude everyone else. I want to draw attention to that with my word choice, because it shows the entanglement of Christian nationalism with white supremacy. When tourists say “Christian America,” they mean white evangelical America. It’s much narrower than it sounds.

Religious Equality in America and White Christian Privilege

Khyati Joshi in her new book, “White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America,” documents how in diverse ways whiteness and Christianity is favored in the US. She argues that Americans believe that there is religious equality in the US because of the First Amendment. They think that the constitution and courts have been successful in making the US a land of religious freedom. Dr. Joshi contends that this belief is not true and links whiteness privileges to Christian privileges. In an article in Religious News Service by Simran Jeet Singh, Dr. Joshi explains using three key concepts: Christian privilege, Christian normativity, and Christian hegemony. Christian privilege is associated with the everyday advantages that Christians have in the United States. Christian normativity "refers to how Christian ideas, beliefs, and practices have become so entrenched in American society that they have become the national standard." Christian hegemony is linked with the state or government. It demonstrates the myriad ways in which the American state endorses Christianity. 

In Khyati Joshi’s new book, “White Christian Privilege,” Joshi brings religion into the conversation about privilege, arguing that our perception of whiteness suffers from an “optical illusion”: that religion is one place where there is equality in America.

Because it is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution, we presume that religious equality is manifest in our society as well. Yet any analysis that neglects white Christianity’s role in creating and upholding whiteness, Joshi argues, fails to capture the full picture. 

Source: Religious News Service

Joshi upends our usual approach to these questions by focusing not on marginalized communities’ experiences, but the other side of the equation: how the dominant group has created, sustained and framed its distinct advantages. In helping us to see “the rules of society that have been constructed to benefit Christians,” Joshi connects the dots of just how this privilege functions.

The relationship between whiteness and Christianity becomes clearer as Joshi follows multiple threads through American history that inextricably intertwined one’s faith and the color of one’s skin. In the 1790s, the U.S. Congress passed a naturalization act that declared one must be a free white man of good moral character to become a citizen. Explicit about race and gender (white, man) but implicit about religion (good moral character), the legislation deftly linked whiteness and morality, itself an indicator of being a Christian in good standing.

Nearly a century later, when African Americans were granted citizenship through the 14th Amendment (1868) and the Naturalization Act of 1870, it seemed on its face a sign of racial progress. But non-Christian communities — East Asians, South Asians and Native Americans — were still denied citizenship, ensuring that who counted as an American had as much to do with religion as it did with race.

Joshi organizes the rules of Christian society using three key concepts. The first is Christian privilege, which pertains to everyday advantages that folks who identify as Christian or grew up as Christian have in the United States. She gives an example from her childhood in the American South in which a Hindu American named Suha is barred from starting on his high school soccer team because he refused to recite the Lord’s Prayer with his coach and teammates prior to their matches.

Suha’s story transported me back to my high school soccer days in Texas. My team, too, would recite the Lord’s Prayer before each game. I would kneel alongside my teammates and bow my head out of respect – it never occurred to me until much later that I could have requested we say a Sikh prayer as well. Christian prayer was the default, and that this seemed normal to all of us.

Joshi’s second concept, Christian normativity, is related: It refers to how Christian ideas, beliefs and practices have become so entrenched in American society that they have become the national standard. Christian — and particularly Protestant — ways of doing things come to be so normal that non-Christian approaches are perceived as deviant, even threatening. It doesn’t take much of a leap from there to understand why maintaining Christian normativity is at odds with achieving religious pluralism and religious equality.

The third bucket is Christian hegemony. Here the state is the power that endorses Christianity, inserting the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance and the inscription of “In God We Trust” on our currency. These and other examples, Joshi argues convincingly, point to how deeply Christianity has been established as our official religion.

The first half of the book, which recounts how these constructs have worked their way through American history, is fascinating and illuminating: fascinating because it helps us see the subtle and overt ways in which religion has partnered with race to produce American racism; powerful because Joshi sheds light on an aspect of white supremacy that is so often left under the hood.

In the latter chapters, rather than historicizing and teaching, she shifts slowly into practical matters, which comes as little surprise to those who know her social justice training. It’s also refreshing in an academic text, a genre that more often than not wallows in problematizing and stops short of solutions.

An entire chapter, “Making Meaning and Making Change,” offers helpful advice on how to move forward, as well as a vision for what it would take to establish religious equality and religious pluralism in America.

Two ideas of hers stuck out to me in particular, both of which I am yearning to see realized. One is changing our assumptions. Once we can see clearly past the optical illusion of Christian privilege, we will become conscious of how damaging our assumptions of Christian normativity can be for religious minorities. Seeing its harmful impact can and should move us to challenge and change our assumptions of what is normal and acceptable.

Second is Joshi’s suggestion of changing our paradigms. Living within a structure built on white supremacist and Christo-centric norms makes it difficult for those who are not white and not Christian to establish equal footing. Bending the structure, opening the door for other faiths to exercise privilege of their own, won’t work, as we will ultimately end up with the same results. A meaningful interrogation calls on us to replace it with a new paradigm, one that does not privilege any groups over any others.

These interventions are as powerful as they are compelling: It is clear that without these steps, we have no path to realizing religious equality and pluralism.

We need Christian Nationalism in the US

In The Federalist, Matthew Cockran defends Christian nationalism and its place in the US.  In his article, We Need Christian Nationalism Because Religious Neutrality Has Failed, he rejects religious neutrality and equality and claims that "our religious liberty never proceeded from attempts at religious neutrality. It came precisely from the privileged position that Christianity has historically held in America and in the West."

He defines Christian nationalism, not as the conflation of American and Christian identities or a call for theocracy or white supremacy, but in a much simpler way:

A rejection of the religious neutrality of the late 20th century in favor of 1) a recognition that Christianity has had a unique and privileged influence on our American heritage that overshadows the influences of other faith traditions, 2) a conviction that a Christian understanding of the world should predominate over other worldviews in American civic life, and 3) an understanding that a nation that successfully excised or sufficiently diluted this influence could no longer be called “American” in the same sense as before. Although more general than what the statement condemns, this understanding would actually encompass many Americans, whether they accept the label or not.

Cockran argues that all religions are not the same and religious freedom is specifically linked to Christianity: 

Different gods make different demands. One of the reasons theological liberals are so blind on this issue is their ignorant presumption that, at their root, all religions are basically the same—that they all worship the same God, proclaim the same general values and ideals, and merely have different cultural trappings or modes of expression. In such a fantasy, a neutral pluralism is conceivable, but reality is a different matter. 

Although there is only one God, there are many gods (i.e., idols) in this world. The extent to which a person will support or even accept things like secular democracy and religious pluralism depends on that person’s god... 

What then does that mean for American democracy and religious freedom? It means neither can ever be religiously neutral. Some gods demand such things; some gods merely tolerate them; and other gods abhor them. To embrace these things as worthy of our support and protection and prioritize them over other concerns is to favor some gods and therefore some religions above others.

Rather than submitting to a fantasy of religious neutrality, Christian nationalism accepts and adapts to this reality. After all, the Christian faith is the root from which our form of religious freedom grew, and the American nation is the heritage in which it is enfleshed. The positive forms of secularism and religious liberty that had been enjoyed in America grew out of the specifics of Christianity. 

Christians, for example, have always held that there is a fundamental distinction between worldly government and the kingdom of heaven. Even the statement acknowledges this. You can see it in the teachings of Jesus—that his kingdom was not of this world, and that we should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. 

You can see it in St. Augustine, when he wrote of the City of Man and the City of God. You can see it in Martin Luther’s Two Kingdoms theology. You can see it in the Church of Rome’s doctrine of the Two Swords. Different Christian traditions have certainly differed as to how these two realms relate to one another, and some have separated them far more than others. Nevertheless, the distinction has always been there. Civil government can be disentangled from the church precisely because of that Christian distinction... 

So in the end, even the simple idea that church and state have distinct authorities and responsibilities is by no means religious neutral. It blatantly gives Christianity a seat of privilege in the way government is organized, and it does so at the expense of some other religions. 

The same can be said of American religious freedom. Americans have deliberately refrained from establishing a state church, and we allow extremely broad freedoms for the exercise of religion and the expression of religious ideas. This was a natural outgrowth of Christian ideas, since in Christianity, salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ—a faith that cannot be compelled by force. Accordingly, from the Christian perspective, there is very little point in using the state to enforce religious adherence... 

In America, the weight of those past decisions have always been rooted in the values of the Christians who founded and cultivated this nation. Their substance is indelibly colored by Christianity. Our Declaration of Independence hinges the entire matter of independence on the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and ascribes our rights to endowment by the Creator. 

These are by no means religiously neutral statements. They are not sectarian, grounded as they are in the language of natural law, but they are nevertheless grounded in a Christian understanding of that natural law. Not every religion sees the matter the same way. Not every religion even has a natural law tradition.

Rejecting common objections to Christian nationalism, he contends:

Some would object to this line of thought, claiming that our nation really founded as much by deists rather than Christians. There were certainly a few prominent ones in the mix, but it doesn’t weaken my case in the slightest. Deism itself was always an attempt to possess a Christian heritage without possessing a Christian faith... 

Others would claim that our religious liberty is no longer Christian because many non-Christian nations have also provided measures of religious freedom. This is true, and I’m quite pleased that they’ve culturally appropriated religious liberty from the Christian West. I believe my heritage to be of value, so I think it’s great when others learn from it.

Is White nationalism Christian or religious?

Three articles debating whether white nationalism is Christian? Murali Balaji's articles support the contention while John W. Morehead's article negates it.

Source: The way of improvement

Behind New Zealand Terror Attack Is a Problem Bigger Than Islamophobia

Mar 18, 2019, 3:21pm Murali Balaji

Even as advocates point to growing Islamophobia as the cause of the attack, the larger issue seems to be white Christian nationalism.

As a white terrorist from Australia emptied clips of his M16 into the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in New Zealand, killing 49 innocent worshippers, his manifesto revealed the depths and scope to which Christian nationalism has entrenched itself into white majority countries.  

Even as advocates point to growing Islamophobia as the cause of the attack, the larger issue seems to be a reactionary—and almost theological—white Christian nationalism that has taken hold over the past decade. And it can’t just be whitewashed away with the “economic displacement” trope.

Indeed, white Christian terrorists like Anders Breivik in Norway, Dylann Roof in South Carolina, and now Brenton Tarrant, are self-styled (and self-described) soldiers in a fight against greater threats: secularism and pluralism.

While white Christian nationalism has its roots in the United States during Reconstruction, it grew in the 1960s as the evangelical movement attracted new congregants fearful of racial and gender equality activism. Over time, these congregants conflated their racial resentment with religiosity, and viewed the idea of a secular country—and a pluralistic one—as tantamount to their extinction.

This Christian nationalism found its way to other parts of the globe, and weren’t necessarily tied to evangelical movements. The resentment-bred, reactionary politics of the National Front in France and far-right movements across Europe were tied to insecurities about what it meant to be a citizen of a particular country. Breivik weaponized that sentiment in 2011 with his terror attack, and Roof cited similar sentiments after slaughtering congregants of an African American Church in 2015.

We are distracted by incidents of mass murder and terror, and assume white Christian nationalism is a series of one-offs, rather than an increasingly pandemic problem across white majority nations in demographic transition. It’s growing in our own backyards, too, and not just because of Trumpism and social media.

To blame Trump, Facebook posts, and rambling manifestos for carnage overlooks our failure to confront the grievances fueling white Christian nationalism. Assuming secular values and pluralism will win out in the end does nothing to prevent the ideological violence of Christian nationalism from spreading. Just as Wahhabism spread as a grievance-based movement against ostensibly secular Pan-Arab dictatorships in the 1960s before morphing into a powerful global threat, white Christian nationalism is a tinderbox.

We have to have the tools to snuff the fire before it lights.

White Christian Nationalism May Not Be Religious, But It Is Christian

Mar 21, 2019, 4:26pm Murali Balaji

White Christian nationalism’s foot soldiers don’t necessarily connect their racial resentment with their devotion to the Bible, yet they're often trying to retake what they presume to be lost: white and Christian dominance. 

After my recent post on the terror attack in New Zealand, several Christians reached out to Religion Dispatches and directly to me asking why I conflated white terrorism with Christian nationalism.

They eloquently noted that the shooter (whose name I shall not use) did not use Christian theology, but espoused anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views that seemed disconnected from religion. But in making that argument, they might be missing a larger point: white Christian nationalism isn’t religious (or even grounded in religious scripture), but its adherents nearly always frame their grievances in terms of endangered white Christian societies.

Following Charlottesville, I wrote that white nationalism does have theological roots, with evangelicals like Bob Jones standing firmly in the way of civil rights. In modern iterations, white nationalism and Christian fundamentalism have converged with folks like Tony Perkins, Steve King (who is at it again), and David Duke.

But for the most part, white Christian nationalism’s foot soldiers don’t necessarily connect their racial resentment with their devotion to the Bible. Many aren’t religious, and in fact that’s generally beside the point. Instead, their resentment towards Others (generally non-white and non-Christian populations) is built up over time, largely through online portals that function as echo chambers for the blend of history, conspiracy theory, and racism that produces and sustains white Christian nationalism.

And we should note that it’s really a resentment movement that wears religion like a hood ornament or team colors. In such a definition, these nationalists are trying to retake what they presume to be lost: white and Christian dominance. 

In a larger context, none of the nationalist and exclusivist movements—Jewish nationalism in Israel; Islamism in parts of Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia; Hindu nationalism in parts of India; Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand—that have grown in recent years are grounded in theology. They’re all connected by a shared sense of grievance and an imagined community based on assumed shared ideals.

The New Zealand terrorist might not have been religious per se, but he was 100 percent devoted to the divine providence of white (Christian) nationhood.

Misdiagnosing Nationalism as ‘Christian’ Exacerbates the Challenges of Islamophobia: A Response to Murali Balaji

Mar 29, 2019, 12:59pm John W. Morehead

Christian nationalism and White nationalism have some common concerns, but they shouldn’t be conflated in their differing narratives and responses to Muslims and other immigrants.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on two Muslim mosques in New Zealand by Brenton Tarrant, many are looking to address the motivations and influences underlying the violence. In two RD posts, one from March 18 and another from March 22, Murali Balaji argues that the attacks were rooted in white Christian nationalism. But is Balaji defining Christian nationalism correctly, and is it the best way to characterize Tarrant’s ideological narrative? I will argue below that the answer is “no” to both questions.

To the question of defining Christian nationalism, there is a helpful body of academic research in political science and the social sciences relevant to this. The lead researchers in one study argue that “the conservative strain [of American civil religion] views America as holding a unique covenant with God, which requires it to be protected from outsiders and those who would do it harm. We refer to these ideas more generally as Christian nationalism.” Contrary to Balaji’s assertions in his second essay, Christian nationalism is religious, and it incorporates theological elements. This results in perceptions of “divinely anointed” Christian ingroup members vs. “theologically condemned” outgroup members like Muslims. This fusion of religious and national identities is noteworthy among white American evangelicals, where being Christian is very important to being truly American. This was the Christian nationalism that was a significant factor for white evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016.

By contrast there are other forms of nationalism. The type associated with white supremacy, sometimes called white nationalism, is concerned with ethnocentrism and the superiority of the white race. Both white nationalism and Christian nationalism have shared concerns about “cultural displacement,” and involve prejudice toward immigrant populations, sometimes seen as “invaders,” manifested in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attitudes. But these two forms of nationalism, even with some shared fears, are not the same thing. So Balaji does not define Christian nationalism correctly and conflates it with other forms of nationalism.

To the second question, what type of nationalism did Tarrant espouse? Before his attacks, Tarrant posted a 74-page document on the internet. According to J.M. Berger, an expert in online extremism, Tarrant’s manifesto is “clearly a statement of ideology,” described as white nationalist, and the author “is a white supremacist, and anti-immigration and anti-Muslim.” There is no indication in Berger’s analysis that Tarrant included statements that would characterize his ideology as a form of Christian nationalism.

If Christian nationalism is not the proper way to understand Tarrant’s nationalism, but instead a form of white supremacist nationalism is more accurate, where did the major anti-immigrant influences come from? According to Sasha Polakow-Suransky and Sarah Wildman at Foreign Policy, Tarrant draws upon the work of Renaud Camus, a French anti-immigration writer. They note that while Tarrant was in France at a mall watching immigrant “invaders,” the idea came to him to use violence against nonwhites. Polakow-Suransky and Wildman quote from Tarrant’s manifesto illustrating the emotional impact this had on the soon-to-be mass murderer: “I found my emotions swinging between fuming rage and suffocating despair at the indignity of France, the pessimism of the french [sic] people, the loss of culture and identity and the farce of the political solutions offered.”

It would seem that Balaji has identified the wrong type of nationalism in connection with the New Zealand terrorism. White nationalism provided the ideological narrative, not Christian nationalism.

In the interests of full disclosure, I identify as a Christian. But my disagreement and critique of Balaji’s thesis should not be interpreted as a failure to accept criticism of those in my religious tradition. For the last four years I have been pursuing a grant from the Louisville Institute that has brought social psychology into conversation with American evangelical theologies of opposition to religious others, particularly Muslims. Among the contributing factors, our research indicates that Christian nationalism is a significant predictor of negative attitudes toward Muslims. I accept this, and advocate strategies to counter this narrative so as to foster more positive forms of multifaith interaction.

Christians have behaved badly, and pursued violence toward others, in the name of their religion. That’s beyond dispute. But whether Christian nationalism was the ideological narrative underlying New Zealand’s attacks, that’s another question. And it’s one that I think Balaji misidentified. If we misdiagnose the challenges we face we will create inappropriate strategies to counter them, and possibly foster even more tensions between Christians and Muslims.

***

Murali Balaji responds:

Following my first and second pieces in Religion Dispatches, several evangelical leaders have offered thoughtful critiques of my position that the New Zealand terrorist (whom I will not name) is a white Christian nationalist.

John Morehead writes in his response that I mislabeled anti-immigrant white nationalism as “Christian nationalism,” asserting that “White nationalism provided the ideological narrative, not Christian nationalism.”

I respectfully disagree.

For starters, I emphasized that a white Christian nationalist doesn’t necessarily have to be “religious” in the traditional sense. I would argue that Donald Trump and Mike Pence are both white Christian nationalists, though the former hardly has any attachment to the actual theology of Christianity.

In this regard, white Christian nationalists draw upon and reference a pure white Christian ideal—one that arguably never existed anywhere. If we reference Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, the white Christian ideal becomes an affinity that helps to build a collective identity.

The terrorist’s manifesto also makes reference to Pope Urban II and the First Crusade, implying that he fancied himself part of a holy war against Muslims and other invaders. While Morehead’s argument seeks to clearly distinguish between white nationalism and Christian nationalism, the terrorist’s own words seem to undercut this attempt.

“We are coming for Constantinople and we will destroy every mosque and minaret in the city,” the terrorist wrote in his manifesto. That’s not subtle in its call for Christian supremacy and destruction of Islam.

I sympathize with Morehead’s position, but the terrorist seems to make both implicit and explicit references to a dream that many white Christian nationalists share: a return to white Christian dominance over its non-white, non-Christian others.