Survey finds low levels of "Religious Nationalism" in America. Why doesn't it feel that way?
The Pew Research Center survey shows a major discrepancy between our people and our Republican-controlled government
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The good news is that the United States has a relatively low percentage of religious nationalists.
The bad news is that it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.
This is based on a survey recently released by the Pew Research Center that attempted to measure levels of religious nationalism around the world—i.e. How pervasive is Christian Nationalism in the U.S. or Hindu Nationalism in India?
They put respondents in the "religious nationalist” category if they answered yes to the following four questions (I’m paraphrasing):
Is being a member of your religion core to your national identity?
Is it important that your country’s leader shares your faith?
Do you think your holy book should influence your country’s laws?
If so, when the holy book and laws are in conflict, do you believe your holy book should take priority?
When the numbers came in for countries dominated by Christianity, Kenya had the largest percentage of religious nationalists with a whopping 32%. Sweden was under 1%.
The United States came in at 6%.
(Just for the sake of comparison, among predominantly Muslim nations, 46% of Indonesians were considered religious nationalists compared to only 11% of citizens of Turkey.)
When you look at that chart, the U.S. seems downright secular.
So why, then, does it feel like we’re living in a theocracy?
I would say the answer boils down to two things:
(1) Those Christian zealots, despite their relatively small percentage, have ridiculous amounts of political power.
(2) The U.S. is still an anomaly among wealthier countries. When you look at our closest economic allies, we’re way more religious than they are.
To that second point, just consider the questions about whether the Bible has influence on our nation’s laws and whether it should have that influence.
When those results are plotted alongside GDP, the U.S. stands out in all the wrong ways. While nearly 60% of Americans say religion has influence over our laws (which is true), about 50% believe that’s the way it ought to be (yikes).
With numbers that high, even Americans who aren’t Christian Nationalists believe that, in some way, the Bible should influence our laws. It should scare us that our democracy is in such poor shape that so many Americans believe religion should have any say in how we operate as a country. We have to do a much better job showing people why those two worlds shouldn’t collide—and all the damage that can happen when they do.
Just to name some examples, since there are no specifics in the survey, should we end same-sex marriage? Should we ban abortions? Should we close our borders to asylum seekers? Different Christian believers may answer that in different ways, but the conservative Christians in the government always respond by choosing the path that causes the most harm and chaos, even though specific policies like those are rejected by vast majorities of American people.
By the way, even though these responses aren’t about “Christian Nationalism,” per se, the results are strikingly similar to a survey from 2024 in which Pew asked Americans whether they’d heard of Christian Nationalism and if they supported it. Only 5% said they knew about it and had a favorable view of it.
That was before the election, though—before that idea became a governing principle under this Republican administration— but it seems like the number has only jumped up to 6%… which doesn’t seem like huge difference even though the new survey has a much higher bar for entry.
The other important distinction is that religious zealots in other wealthy countries don’t control the government. But in our current Congress, 98% of Republicans are Christians and all of them are falling in line with the Trump-supported “Project 2025” agenda that leans heavily on a conservative Christian view of the nation.
This is why the results are so much scarier than the poll would suggest. The Republican-controlled government is dead-set on aligning our country with their version of Christianity, even though only a small fraction of Americans say that’s what they want.
We currently have a government that doesn’t represent the people and doesn’t give a damn about it because, as we’ve seen so many times in the past month, what the hell can anyone do to stop it?
If there’s any silver lining here, it’s that the Trump administration is going to screw the country over so badly that they may end up driving many people away from Christianity in the process. If we can get out of this Republican term in one piece, those supposed “Christian values” are going to be blamed for all kinds of unnecessary cruelty. Or at least they should be if the rest of us are effective communicators.
The United States is a shining example of how everything can go wrong if you allow religious nationalists to take over what’s supposed to be a secular government.
Many Americans remain deeply ignorant of what the Republican party really stands for.
Many white Evangelicals remain deeply ignorant of what they and their churches actually support.
Many religious people assume that religion equals morality.
No one in their right mind would want to replace the American Republic with a Christian theocracy. Unfortunately, the people not in their right minds keep trying to get government to backstop their world view, in order to accomplish what they have failed to achieve from their pulpits. Never under estimate a determined minority. The idea religion can be forced on people with a happy ending is about as dangerous as thinking gets.