During the last two decades, and increasingly as we approach the present moment, scholarship dealing with contemporary events has struggled to keep pace with the depth and rapidity of change. It is a difficult task to write about history as it is happening. For this and other reasons, Eric L. McDaniel, Irfan Nooruddin, and Allyson F. Shortle’s The Everyday Crusade is an impressive and necessary addition to work on the contested phenomenon of “Christian nationalism.” Grounded in a range of empirical methodologies (including particularly rigorous surveying) and with a broad historical sensibility, the authors identify a three-tier group of identities that they believe captures the range of religio-political dispositions at work today. The result is a very specific interpretive model for a particular form of social and political imagination.
The structure of the book moves from chapters outlining the methodology and the social-historical purview to a sequence of case studies, such as attitudes on foreign policy or immigration, which are used to delineate often quite fine-grained portraits of American religious attitudes about contentious matters. The authors acknowledge the toxicity underlying many of these attitudes, and they note correctly that such religious enthusiasm is deeply woven into all phases of American history. In general, the book is deeply learned and accomplished. Some may find fault with it for relying heavily on comparative models and polling analysis. However, in my view this is precisely the book’s strength. There are important questions to be raised about some of the authors’ historical observations, as well as elsewhere, but given the scope and intentions of the book, such questioning is part of the larger project of analysis so clearly necessary among scholars and citizens alike.
Given the scope of the authors’ intentions, the book seeks consistently to analyze contemporary religio-political formations within a broad historical context. In conversation with the large literature on mythology (e.g., Claude Lévi-Strauss) and civil religion (e.g., Robert Bellah and Philip Gorski), the authors identify what they contend is an irony in contemporary Christian nationalism: that it should flare up alongside other, more progressive developments in American life (p. xiv). I would contend that the bellicosity of far-right Protestantism has deepened precisely because of these trends and that it fuels the belief among Christian nationalists that they are an embattled class. Indeed, if myth is—as they suggest—an “instrument of identity transfer” (p. 7), this implies that it is precisely when this instrument is perceived to be buckling that political life can become violent in response. As the authors note, the worldview they analyze is heavily invested in the idea that “we” are righteous, an observation that helps clarify the deep emotional outrage around various “wokeness” spectacles, at the center of which is often an analysis of America’s flaws.
Although the opening chapter omits a few crucial historical pieces (notably absent are the Puritan commonwealths that shaped so much of America’s religious exceptionalism), on the whole it represents admirably thick and grounded scholarship. The opening chapter is, of course, not meant to be exhaustive (that would be difficult even in a book with entirely different purposes) but to provide texture for the analyses at The Everyday Crusade’s heart. At the center of these analyses is the authors’ distinction between three groups of “believers,” who have different levels of investment in mythic self-understanding, participation in religious institutions, and avowals of religious belief. They are identified as disciples, those “who wholeheartedly believe the nation is divinely favored”; dissidents, who “reject the idea of a special connection between the nation and a higher power”; and the laity, who “embrace some elements [of American religious exceptionalism] but reject others” (p. 51). These categories are harvested from multiple national surveys on religio-political attitudes and from the sociological literature. Through an abundance of both graphs and text, the authors arrive at several conclusions concerning Christian nationalism: its followers are anxious about declining religiosity (p. 45), they believe their religion should be manifest rather than private (p. 60), and, interestingly, they demonstrate clear evidence of both narcissism and a social dominance orientation (p. 65).
The bulk of the book, rooted in this analytical scheme, explores in greater detail a range of concerns that Christian nationalists publicly possess. These include concerns about membership and ethnoculturalism, immigration policy, foreign policy, representation and governance, and race. The focus on who is properly understood as an American is a nebulous one in the hands of many authors, and The Everyday Crusade provides a crisp, helpful analysis of some of the implicit understandings at work in contemporary America. Recognizing that most Christian nationalists do not stipulate clear criteria for belonging so much as descend into mood, the authors identify a clear continuum that ranges from identity, pride, and hubris to uncritical patriotism (p. 81). Clearly, the centrality of religion to good citizenship is the sine qua non of Christian nationalism, yet what is most useful about the analysis here is the detail that results from interrogating viewpoint alignment across this survey data. For example, when the data are harvested in detail, we discover interesting nuance (much of it racialized) on the question of whether antigovernment protest is valuable (p. 75) or whether other countries would be better off if they were more like America (p. 79).
Similarly, with regard to immigration, the authors’ analysis of the data reveals a range of opinion not only on border policy and naturalization processes but also on which persons are best suited to be Americans and what is necessary for them to believe. The attitudes are rigorously documented, and the authors historicize long-standing debates (looking to NAFTA, for example) while also attending to how attitudes are shaped in part by talking points and social media. Their history is more expansive in their chapter on American evangelizing on the world stage, which statistically unpacks the religious justification for various foreign policy ventures over time. And they are helpful in establishing, contra much sensationalist journalism of late, that a sense of mission is not of necessity grounded in belligerence (p. 161).
The two concluding case studies—“Governing the Temple” and “View from the Back Pews”—seem most relevant to how Christian nationalism actually operates on the ground and in people’s imaginations. In particular, examining the conservative use of civil religion categories in jeremiads such as Pat Robertson’s, the authors note the shift from a historical moment in which the conspiratorial energies of the John Birch Society were marginalized to our moment, when a loose populism has brought such energies into the mainstream (pp. 168–74). Importantly, they establish that those attracted to this shift are less inclined to actual political engagement, preferring symbolic victories over substantive policy (p. 183). The concluding chapter on race generates some unexpected nuance beyond the boilerplate observation that religious hubris is overwhelmingly white in America. They note that a variety of patriotic attitudes are present among racial minorities—for example, culturally conservative African American disciples can support liberal policies—that those in the “back of the pews” must nonetheless contend with a broader Christian nationalist sense of urgency, and that a religious legacy must be defended under duress (p. 215).
The contributions of The Everyday Crusade are considerable, both to a range of academic literatures and to general readers going forward. That said, from my perspective as a scholar of religion I would raise several questions as I think along with the authors. Broadly speaking, their rigor in documenting a range of attitudes leaves me with questions about the story behind these attitudes. Although their historicization is welcome, my own concerns as a scholar and citizen have to do with the how and the where of such attitudes; for example, I would ask which media, which persons of influence, and which institutional forces are cultivating and manipulating such attitudes. I also had questions throughout about whether religion, in all its complexity, can be properly understood as simply attitudinal. I was often left unsatisfied with descriptions of religious beliefs as “value systems” (145) or as imbuing believers with a sense of purpose. To me, this is more than a quibble because the communal, ritual, and disciplinary aspects of religion seem so central to the public, confrontational face of Christian nationalism. Acknowledging the importance of religion to participants in these surveys did not always adequately capture the reasons for the weaponization of religious attitudes.
I was also struck by an occasional elision of American religious exceptionalism and Christian nationalism. These phenomena are, of course, closely interwoven, historically and at present; and it is one of the authors’ main claims that the latter represents a sharpening of the former (p. 28). However, the gravity of the phenomenon Americans currently face—with its disinformation, its regular contempt for democratic procedure, its militant whiteness— represents something quite distinct from dreamings of a New Israel or a conviction that the United States is the indispensable nation.
These questions in my judgment do not diminish the many accomplishments of this fine book. Indeed, the authors are to be commended for providing a broad contextual account of a category so often lazily circulated among journalists. What is more, The Everyday Crusade is not shy about its own political convictions, making its contributions even more important in these fractious times.
