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Abstract

Recent research demonstrates strong connections between Americans' embrace of Christian nationalism and their beliefs and attitudes towards a host of salient social and cultural issues. Implicit in these explanations is that a stronger embrace of Christian nationalism signals an underlying fear of changes to the broader culture, which are perceived as leading the nation further away from a preferred, mythic past. To date, however, empirical studies have not focused explicitly on the relationship between social fears and Christian nationalism. Using a nationally representative sample of American adults, we examine the relationship between Christian nationalism and Americans' fears about immigrants, Muslims, communism, white racial replacement and gun control. We find that Christian nationalism is strongly associated with fears about ethnoracial ‘others’, as well as fears about losing economic autonomy and access to guns. Overall, our study shows that contemporary Christian nationalism in the United States is situated in a constellation of social fears about ethnoracial purity, as well as about the perceived loss of individual autonomy.

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Many scholars argue that evangelical Christian beliefs and traditions are central to dominant conceptions of American national identity, but most empirical studies in this area focus on the activities and identities of evangelical Christians themselves. Missing is an assessment of how evangelical-infused understandings of national belonging shape the views of people outside the white evangelical subculture. We analyze how Americans of all religious backgrounds evaluate a secularized evangelical discourse (SED) - a repertoire of political statements that are phrased in religiously nonparticularistic terms, but have roots in evangelical Christian history and epistemologies and have been politicized through social movements and party politics. Using latent class analysis and nationally representative survey data, we identify four prevailing profiles of support for claims about public religious expression anchored in this repertoire: ardent opposition, moderate opposition, moderate support, and ardent support. We find that a majority of Americans, not just evangelicals, respond positively to propositions that employ SED. Consequently, we argue that conservative Christianity influences contemporary politics not only by furnishing individuals with beliefs and identities, but also by providing a durable and flexible source of boundaries around a culturally specific vision of national belonging that resonates far beyond the boundaries of the evangelical subculture. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.
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Since 9/11, scholarly work has demonstrated that Muslim Americans are viewed unfavorably, but existing measures lack enough contextual specificity to capture the unique experiences and situation of Muslims in the United States. Given the central role that Muslims and the war on terror played in the 2016 presidential campaign and election, we fill this void by introducing a new measure that focuses on Muslim Americans, specifically, and then examine its role in explaining presidential vote choice in 2016. Across five distinct surveys fielded on convenience and nationally representative samples from May 2016 to June 2017, we find that anti–Muslim American sentiment is a strong and significant predictor of supporting Trump, even when controlling for a whole host of factors. Our measure of Muslim American sentiment also more strongly and consistently predicts support for Trump, relative to previous measures of anti-Muslim sentiment. © 2018 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
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Objectives Negative sentiment toward immigrants helps fuel preferences for restrictive immigration policy. Religious commitments have been linked to both positive and negative dispositions toward immigrants, Muslims, and immigration. This study tests how religious factors impact negative sentiments toward immigrants and Muslims, and preferences for more restrictive immigration policy. Methods We analyze data from the 1996 and 2004–2016 General Social Surveys (GSS), examining scales for negative sentiment toward immigrants, civil liberties for Muslims, and preferences to restrict immigration. Ordinary least squares and ordinal regression models are used to examine the effects of religious factors net of social background and political identifications. Results Sectarian Protestants, white Catholics, and biblical literalists were found to have more hostile views of immigrants and Muslims, while nonwhite Catholics, non‐Christians, the unaffiliated, and those with secular beliefs held more positive views of immigrants and immigration. Conclusions While elite sectarian Protestants and the Catholic Church hierarchy have urged tolerance for immigrants and immigration, our findings suggest that the sectarians, white Catholics, and biblical literalists hold negative views of immigrants, Muslims, and immigration. Subscription to Christian nationalism also appears to play a role in structuring negative views of immigrants and Muslims.
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Building from the literature on racialization of Muslims, we argue that there are two unique dimensions to anti-Muslim attitudes: Christian nationalism and nativism. Christian nationalism subscribes to the idea of Christianity as being central to American identity, and nativism provides insight into the monopolies regulating citizenship. We then test this framework’s hypotheses on data drawn from the General Social Survey in 2014 to see if these two dimensions predict support for civil rights infringements of Muslim-Americans compared to other outgroups, including atheists, communists, and racists. The results indicate both Christian nationalism and nativism have significant and negative effects on Muslim civil liberties. We also find some differences between the effects of Christian nationalism and nativism on Muslim civil liberties compared to the other outgroups. We interpret these results as an indication that nativism works as an ordering principle to reconstitute who counts as American and who does not.
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We argue that subjective emotional experience, the feeling, is the essence of an emotion, and that objective manifestations in behavior and in body or brain physiology are, at best, indirect indicators of these inner experiences. As a result, the most direct way to assess conscious emotional feelings is through verbal self-report. This creates a methodological barrier to studies of conscious feelings in animals. While the behavioral and physiological responses are not ‘emotions,’ they contribute to emotions indirectly, and sometimes profoundly. Whether non-verbal animals have emotional experiences is a difficult, maybe impossible, question to answer in the positive or negative. But because behavioral and physiological responses are important contributors to emotions, and the circuits underlying these are highly conserved, studies of animals have an important role in understanding how emotions are expressed and regulated in the brain. Conflation of circuits that directly give rise to conscious emotional feelings with circuits that indirectly influences these conscious feelings has hampered progress in efforts to understand emotions, and also to understand and to develop treatments for emotional disorders. Recognition of differences in these circuits will allow research in animals to have a lasting impact on understanding of human emotions as research goes forward.
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While some research argues that religious pluralism in the United States dampens conflict by promoting tolerance, other work documents persistent prejudice toward religious out-groups. We address this ambiguity by identifying a distinct cultural style that structures Americans’ attitudes toward religious others: support for public religious expression (PRE). Using data from a recent nationally representative survey, we find a strong and consistent relationship between high support for PRE, negative attitudes toward religious out-groups, and generalized intolerance. Addressing the previously overlooked public aspects of religion and cultural membership in the United States has important implications for studies of civic inclusion.
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Since the Tea Party Movement (TPM) emerged, observers have drawn parallels between this movement and the Religious Right (RR). This article deepens our understanding of this relationship by providing a detailed analysis of religiosity in the TPM versus the RR. We find that compared to the RR, the TPM mobilized a religiously heterogeneous membership. Although roughly half of TPM members were also members of the RR, the other half of this movement reported lower levels of religious orthodoxy and commitment, and included relatively large numbers of nonreligious individuals. Yet a majority of TPM members, including disproportionately high numbers of nonreligious members, believed that America is a Christian nation. Our findings complicate the notion that religious “nones” are predictably liberal and that Christian nationalist views are necessarily linked to Christian identity, instead raising the possibility that Christian-America rhetoric can operate—even for some nonreligious individuals—as symbolic boundary-work that marks certain groups as political “others.”
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This book investigates American political religions by studying how conservative evangelical political orientations are shaped and spread by pop cultural narratives of fear and horror. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to what it calls the "religion of fear", a form of religious social criticism produced and sustained in evangelical engagements with pop culture. The book's cases include Jack Chick's cartoon tracts, anti-metal and anti-rap preaching, the Halloween dramas known as Hell Houses, and Left Behind novels. By situating them in their sociopolitical contexts and drawing out their creators' motivations, the book locates in these entertainments a highly politicized worldview comprising evangelical piety, the aesthetics of genre horror, a narrative of American decline, and a combative approach to public politics. The book also proposes its own theoretical categories for explaining the cases: the Erotics of Fear and the Demonology Within. What does it say about American public life that such ideas of fearful religion and violent politics have become normalized? The book engages this question critically, establishing links and resonances between the cultural politics of evangelical pop, the activism of the New Christian Right, and the political exhaustion facing American democracy.
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This book traces the emergence and development of the American jeremiad, a form of political rhetoric that laments the nation's decline from a virtuous past and calls it to repentance and renewal. Employed by Americans of all political persuasions since the earliest days of settlement, the jeremiad has proven to be a powerful way of invoking the American past in order to chart a brighter American future. Part I of the book focuses on three especially important episodes in the jeremiad's history: early New England, Civil War America, and the rise of the Christian Right. Part II provides a critical analysis of the jeremiad's role in the American "culture wars" and politics more generally. In seeking to place the American past in the service of the American future, the book argues, the jeremiad takes not one form, but two: a traditionalist jeremiad whose view of the past depends heavily on claims about how things used to be, and emphasizes the importance of preserving concrete aspects of the past as we move toward an uncertain future; and a progressive jeremiad, which views the past as a repository of emancipatory principles articulated at the founding but never fully realized in practice. Acknowledging that both traditionalist and progressive jeremiads are deeply entwined with the nation's history, the book concludes with a call for a revived progressive jeremiad as most compatible with the deep diversity-cultural, religious, political, philosophical-that characterizes American society at the dawn of the twenty-first century.