Beyond the Surface: The Psychological Roots of Christian Nationalism

Ever since we were first astonished by the onset of a Trump presidency in 2016, so many of us have found ourselves in ongoing conversations around the glaring hypocrisies of religion in the United States. How can Christians vote for such an un-Christian candidate?

To find answers, there are countless podcasts, essays, and books about privilege and racial power, sexual ethics and abuse, gender inequality, and ableism, and we talk about these issues theologically, biblically, socially, historically, and politically. In my work in book publishing, I live within these critiques myself (where I often say that we are not done deconstructing until we are done deconstructing).

The Persistent Puzzle of Evangelical Support

Yet now as we face another four years of opportunistic buffoonery and leadership chaos and worse, we must ask ourselves what is missing from our critiques, especially where religious people are concerned. Why, for the third time in over eight long years, do evangelical or “born again” Christians still overwhelmingly support a venal, lascivious, and mendacious political leader? Why do people who theologize with “sound reasoning” doggedly persist in allegiance to someone who does anything but theologize or reason? After so many of us have left our evangelical culture, why haven’t our protestations, arguments, and anguish registered? Are we really going to keep at this critique of Christian nationalism for another four years and in the same way?

In the recent presidential election, the percentage of evangelicals who support Trump hasn’t changed much from previous elections (81% give or take). And while the rest of the population votes according to a narrative about the economy, and either didn’t show up to vote as Democrats or increased their participation as Republicans, evangelicals remain consistent. It’s not the economy, stupid, that concerns them.

Like so many others, I’ve kept my head in the sand the last two months, staying away from the news and being careful what media I consume—all helpful. Nevertheless, the only new idea I’ve heard from the progressive religious sphere is that we must end the critiques and better practice compassion and openness and show them the “true” Jesus. If we just show them love, all will be well.

Sorry, but that’s not enough either. Instead, our critiques need to stop scratching the surface and go deeper. It’s time we better understand how hypocrisy happens and where it starts, then ask where we go from there.

The Psychological Underpinnings of Evangelical Behavior

I may have spent most of my professional life working in religious book publishing, but as someone with a PhD in religious studies and psychology, I am a psychosocial—not confessional—thinker. I look for the lasting, very mammalian ways we are motivated to do things that don’t align with our professed religious ideals. I stand in a lesser-known, more interdisciplinary theoretical stream that applies discoveries from the therapist’s office to how individuals act as religious people and how whole societies live and breathe their religion.

As such, to explain the repetitive duplicity of evangelical Christians voting for an un-Christian candidate, we must consider the ingrained responses of our unconscious life. Appeals to historical origins, summaries of sociological data, biblical and theological exposition, and even reports of outrageous religious behavior matter as much as ever. Yet we must ask ourselves, do these types of analysis capture the whole picture? Are they enough?

We need to do better, and we can with a look at our human nature.

So, what it is about our evangelical religious culture that sets people up psychologically to ignore their ethics? In other words, how can an evangelical-style religion that emphasizes love for one another be so complicit in the patriarchy, racism, homophobia, and toxic capitalist exceptionalism of the culture it seemingly abhors?

Some of the culprits that come to mind are a white evangelical culture that offers feelings of belonging and social cohesion; the fact that our colonizing national founders were religious separatists and dissidents; the fact that we’ve needed rigid ideologies and tight-knit subgroups to find meaning and solace after leaving mother countries; the fact that the plentiful resources in North America became a hotbed for capitalism, individualism, and upward mobility; and the fact that modernism has created more alienation than ever and people are acting out.

All true, yet to me, one of the strongest, most thematic elements of evangelical duplicity is the idea that you can and must be “born again.” The promise, one fine-tuned by Billy Graham, of being one kind of person and then becoming a completely new person is a siren call for our psyches and our souls.

The Role of Conversion Narratives in Shaping Identity

What happens to us when we make the “decision for Christ” doesn’t take a PhD to figure out. We start splitting ourselves in two. An old us and a new us. A world of bad and a world of good, obsessively defined. We create elaborate culture around the act of conversion. We assert that we are now “saved” simply by reciting a “sinner’s prayer.” We develop a testimony that we begin telling ourselves and others ad nauseum about how terrible we were before but how we now routinely read the Bible and go to church and love “the Lord.” And we put all this on our children.

When I was in first grade Sunday school, I was given a sheet of white paper with two simple heart drawings, one completely black and one an outline of a heart “white as snow.” The message was clear: you must make a choice, and better make the right one.

Here’s the issue: it’s too much to ask a six-year-old to think about how sinful they are. They can barely read The Cat in the Hat and yet are told that they are inherently sinful creatures and must take on shame and pretend they have conquered sin. In short, it is a very adult conversion narrative—a story complete with a life crisis turning point—expected of a small child. Such an emphasis is developmentally inappropriate and mentally harmful. You simply can’t ask a human being, especially a young one, to adopt a narrative that they are wholly sinful. We can’t bear it. It’s too much.

What happens next is a question of psychological survival. How do we maintain a coherent view of who we are? For our ego (our mediating mind) to accomplish this, for us to grasp some semblance of balance, we make a deal with ourselves. We begin to ignore, discredit, and discount ourselves. We mask, we pretend, we lie. We deprive ourselves of our emotional life, or more precisely, we curtail our emotions and ignore learning how to live with them.

On the one hand, the notion of being originally sinful shuts us down into a melancholic state. We are numb and unthinking, and in the parlance of Karl Marx, we gladly take the opium of religion. On the other hand, the flip side of melancholy is mania. Still unfeeling, we engage in a maneuver of the mind. To find equilibrium after taking on such a mantle of self-loathing, we engage in othering—we project our denied emotional life onto others. At an early age, we learn that it is “the world” that is corrupt, not us. We learn that we are to be “in the world but not of the world.” Fundamentalist prohibitions come into play. We attach ourselves to what is allowable and what is not. No swearing, drinking, having sex before marriage, watching certain movies, or reading certain books. We take these rules to obsession, that is, incessantly thinking about them. How strange. God forbid there might be such a thing as drinking in moderation that might bring joy or taking in a Harry Potter movie that might bring epiphanies of understanding.

This rule-driven religion, wrapped up in self-hatred, becomes, in the words of child analyst Anna Freud in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, ego syntonic—pleasing to us. When we repeatedly renounce desire, our reasoning and observing mind becomes well practiced at making such renunciation pleasurable. It happens unconsciously, behind the scenes of our awareness. The ego makes deals between our emotional selves and the outside world. If we must accept that we are inherently sinful, then we must also find a way to put that sinfulness somewhere, or onto someone, or onto “the world.”

Since we aren’t aware that we have done such deals, it makes it easier to do things that are the opposite of what we might say is rational, consistent behavior on our part. We love one another but we loathe liberals, criticize other religions but not our own, and demonize queer folks but not our own sexuality (which in the evangelical world has repeatedly revealed itself in some horrific ways). These ideological maneuvers are a balm and a comfort. Our minds are blank to discrepancies and inconsistencies (like biblical inconsistencies) that are obvious to an outside observer. These hidden attitudes and behaviors are taken for granted and socially normative. We are skilled at avoiding uncomfortable evidence. It is impossible to have an internal or external rational debate about the inconsistency between our professed beliefs and our actions.

The obsession of the evangelical mindset with the “outside world,” or in today’s political parlance the “liberals,” becomes a sport. We take our internal emotional pressure, and instead of finding and exploring its appropriate expression, we project this renounced desire onto others, the bad people, who we are not. Worse and all too often, we find weaker examples of imagined bad people and project our anger and fear of ourselves onto them: the unhoused, the underprivileged, the nonbinary, the handicapped (the image of Donald Trump mocking a disabled person comes to mind), and so on. We invent and manufacture controversies about crime, for example, which is primarily a function of income inequality, and turn it into an overstatement about morality and race.

Why are Christian nationalists unbendingly in support of such an un-Christian politics? Because they are psychologically split in two by the bargains of our born-again backgrounds.

It’s Time to Create a New Bargain with Ourselves

We aren’t going to reduce this fever by trying to reason with it. Doing so only cuts off the pleasurable parts of self-hatred to which evangelicals cling.

Instead, we must dispense with the old bargain of othering and create a new one based on self-love. It’s time we learned to better explore dreams not subsumed to an emotional survival mindset. Our work now is to rejoin those parts, not renouncing them. What are our passions, our interests that we can pursue but not possess and objectify? What histories can we come to love and repair but not consume, grasp, and overprotect? What losses can we become better acquainted with and mourn?

The doggedness and fealty of do-gooding Christians to a program for saving America will consume itself and remain a game of diminishing returns no matter how out of control it gets. It can’t be reasoned with, it can’t be reformed. It’s like quitting a bad habit, we must find something else to replace it with, but what will that something be?