Christian nationalism is the belief that a certain kind of Christianity defines the American nation and that the government must take legislative and policy actions to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists insist that America is and must remain a Christian nation.
To achieve their destructive ends, a crucial part of the Christian nationalist project uses persuasive arguments, electoral processes, coercive governmental powers, and coarse domination of ideological opponents. Ridicule, mockery, ad hominem attacks, and violent words and actions are all employed to intimidate their detractors.
But adherence to Christian nationalism can also be passive and require very little imagination. With even just a bit of nostalgia or desire for times when races where legally separate and unequal, when White/European cultural mores predominated, and when ethnoreligious order determined American religious, social, and legal systems and their enforcement, it is possible to be aligned or affiliated with Christian nationalism. At its core, Racialized Christian nationalism is animated by racist White supremacist ideology that assigns a hierarchy to human racial groups and sees light-skinned people as superior to people of color.
