Christian Nationalism Reading List
Six Books to Pick Up From Your Library or Local Indie Bookstore
One of my many special interests is doing deep dives into evangelicalism both to deconstruct the tradition in which I grew up but also to understand how these toxic fundamentalist beliefs are affecting the culture and politics of the United States. (As well as current events around the world.)
These are six of the best books that I have read covering the interrelated elements of evangelicalism, fundamentalism, Christian nationalism, White supremacy, and fascism.
Religious Right: The Greatest Threat to Democracy by A.F. Alexander (2012)
I read this book almost exactly ten years ago. At the time, I remember thinking, “IDK, some of these predictions seem a little over the top. Maybe take a grain or two of salt with this.” Even though I grew up in these evangelical circles hearing some of this rhetoric, I was a little hesitant to think we could end up in the worst timeline because of these folks and their beliefs. I don’t think that anymore. Every unhinged statement by some fundie member of Congress or diabolically cruel ruling issued by the Supreme Court kind of confirms it.
When these people say the quiet parts out loud about wanting to hand down the death penalty for abortions (to doctors and/or women), execute LGBTQIA+ people, privatize/Christianize public education, and put undocumented immigrants into concentration camps, believe them! They are true believers and are not fucking around.
CHAPTER TITLES
chapter 1: Separation of Church and State
chapter 2: Who Are They and How We Got Them
chapter 3: Joining with the GOP
chapter 4: Moving On Up — to the Courts
chapter 5: Add Dominionists and Reconstructionists
chapter 6: Naming Names
chapter 7: Democracy’s Greatest Threat
chapter 8: Tactics
chapter 9: We Obey a “Higher Law” Ethics
chapter 10: The End Times Focus
chapter 11: Religious Caste System
chapter 12: The Seven Mountains of Influence
chapter 13: Religious Right and Our Military
chapter 14: The Mountain of Religion
chapter 15: The Mountain of Business
chapter 16: The Mountain of Media
chapter 17: The Mountain of Arts and Entertainment
chapter 18: The Mountain of Education
chapter 19: Rewriting History
chapter 20: The Church and Science — a Long Battle
chapter 21: Women’s Role
chapter 22: The Quiverfull Movement
chapter 23: Not Just About Abortion!
chapter 24: Childre Are the Prize to the Winners
chapter 25: Gays and the Traditional Family
chapter 26: The Soap Opera of Church in History
chapter 27: Resources to Get Involved
chapter 28: Sum It Up
Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism — and What Comes Next by Bradley B. Onishi (2023)
This book comes from one of the creators of the Straight White American Jesus podcast. I started listening to a few episodes here and there back before COVID, and the topics and discussions are pretty extensive. They run the gamut from the specificities of evangelical subculture to reactionary GOP politics and current events.
Onishi grew up in American evangelicalism and was fully indoctrinated within it. He opens the first chapter wondering if he might have been present at the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021 had he not left the ranks of conservative evangelicalism and Christian nationalism. Would he have been drawn in by its siren song?
He recounts a lot of memories from his childhood and adolescence that were very similar to mine. Extensive involvement in youth groups, purity culture, obnoxiously proselytizing friends and classmates, being indoctrinated with intolerant culture war beliefs, and discussions of anxiety-inducing End Times conspiracy theories.
He really delves into the beliefs and underlying history of Christian nationalism, how it was able to coalesce around Trump (a guy who has never been known for his religiosity), and finally came to a head on January 6th.
CHAPTER TITLES
prologue: Before and After
chapter 1: Would I Have Been There?
chapter 2: Extremism Is a Virtue
chapter 3: The New South Rises
chapter 4: Segregation Is a Religious Right
chapter 5: The Cross and the Flag
chapter 6: The Pure American Body
chapter 7: Killing Democracy to Save the Nation
chapter 8: Real Delusions
chapter 9: Insurrection
chapter 10: MAGA Myths
chapter 11: Right Flight
epilogue: Those With Eyes to See
Confronting Christofascism: Healing the Evangelical Wound by Carolyn Baker (2021)
Like Bradley Onishi, Carolyn Baker also grew up within fundamentalism and evangelicalism, although in an earlier era. She connects the trademark beliefs of Christian fundamentalism to the deepening authoritarianism within both American evangelical culture and conservative/reactionary politics.
There is a deep desire in evangelicalism and fundamentalism for control. Controlling women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, non-Christians, the “wrong” kind of Christians, immigrants, the poor, and so on. Essentially to control anyone who is not a straight White wealthy conservative Protestant American-born man. (A handful of Global North countries might also be acceptable as a country of origin.)
This need for control has deepened and significantly moved into their political beliefs resulting in the fascistic tendencies on display first by Donald Trump but then by most non-MAGA Republicans as well. Even sections of the Democratic Party are jumping on the fascist bandwagon now.
CHAPTER TITLES
chapter 1: Understanding Christofascism
chapter 2: Race, Gender, and the Prosperity Gospel
chapter 3: The Psychology of Contemporary Christian Fundamentalism
chapter 4: Bring Them In From the Fields of Sin
chapter 5: Evangelical Politics
chapter 6: A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing
chapter 7: Healing the Evangelical Wound: Restoring the Soul
chapter 8: Confronting Ku Klux Christianity
White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea D. Butler (2021)
“The election of Barack Obama was the sign of the apocalypse for evangelicals. Because of the marriage of evangelical morality to the Republican Party — all in the service of maintaining white conservative male leadership — the election signaled a failure of the evangelical political machine. It also stripped the gloves off the carefully crafted racial reconciliations of the 1990s and moved evangelicals toward an alliance with outwardly racist movements. Evangelicals found themselves making friends with strange but like-minded conspirators who promoted their ideologies and took them down a bath toward embracing openly racist memes and themes to get their message out.” — White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America
I was heavily involved in evangelical communities from the mid-1990s until 2003. I began stepping away in 2004 and finally removed myself entirely by early 2008. During all those years, race issues were rarely spoken about by any of my pastors or adult leaders. And when they were briefly mentioned, it was never in a negative or derogatory way.
Back when Facebook was still shiny and new, it was common to just look up anyone you happened to know in any capacity and friend them. I friended a lot of people from my youth group days. The ones closer to my age were mostly unproblematic, but some of the former adult leaders? Hoo boy. Some of the stuff they posted on Facebook was beyond disappointing.
It’s fine to dislike politicians. It’s good, actually. They aren’t heroes. They’re supposed to represent us, and they usually don’t. I voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and I am still thoroughly disappointed in him as a president. But so many of the people I had looked up to at church as a junior high and high school student posted some of the most blatantly unhinged, racist, Islamophobic stuff I had ever seen. Their dislike (hatred really) was almost never about tangible policy or actual real-world issues; it was all based on identity politics and far-fetched hypotheticals.
The racism, hatred, and xenophobia had always been there in the evangelicalism of my adolescence; it was just latent. The election of Obama was merely the spark that ignited the meltdown.
CHAPTER TITLES
introduction: Evangelical Racism: A Feature, Not a Bug
chapter 1: The Racist Foundations of Evangelicalism in the 19th Century
chapter 2: Saving the Nation Fervor, Fear, and Challenges to Jim Crow
chapter 3: Whitewashing Racism and the Rise of the Religious Right
chapter 4: How Firm a Foundation A 21st-Century Precipice Appears
conclusion: Whom Will You Serve?
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges (2007)
“Radical Christian dominionists have no religious legitimacy. They are manipulating Christianity, and millions of sincere believers, to build a frightening political mass movement with many similarities with other mass movements, from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia. It shares with these movements an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt, and uncertainty. It creates its own “truth”. It embraces a world of miracles and signs and removes followers from a rational, reality-based world. It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy.” — American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
“Chris Hedges may be the most credible figure yet to detect real-life fascism in the Red America of megachurches, gay-marriage bans, and Left Behind books. American Fascists is at its most daring when it enunciates … the perversities that are obvious to those of us not beholden to political exigencies.” — New York Observer
Chris Hedges is a goddamn national treasure. This book was released way back in January 2007! Which means he was researching and writing it possibly as far back as 2004 or 2005. A full ten years or more before Trump came down that tacky gold escalator in the even tackier Trump Tower. American Fascists was published almost 14 years to the day before the Christian nationalist attack on the US Capitol. That is next level prescient.
In the early 2000s, Hedges would have been writing mostly in response to the George W. Bush Republican Party and the evangelical “compassionate conservatives”. The illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the various culture war issues (marriage equality, reproductive rights, etc.) that never seem to go away also would have taken center stage at the time.
But Hedges was able to predict where the movement was heading and where it would inevitably go. From “prophecies” to QAnon conspiracy theories to End Times fantasies to COVID-denial, his descriptions of American fascists fit these evangelicals and MAGA Republicans to a tee.
CHAPTER TITLES
chapter 1: Faith
chapter 2: The Culture of Despair
chapter 3: Conversion
chapter 4: The Cult of Masculinity
chapter 5: Persecution
chapter 6: The War on Truth
chapter 7: The New Class
chapter 8: The Crusade
chapter 9: God: The Commercial
chapter 10: Apocalyptic Violence
The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet (2023)
“A riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America.” — Joseph O’Neill, New York Times Book Review
“A foreboding drive through the backroads of the country’s rising militancy from campy Trump rallies and a memorial service for the January 6th insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt to a televangelist’s church in Miami and a self-declared prophet in Omaha, Sharlet takes a hard, unwavering look at the nation’s guns-and-Bibles underbelly.” — James Sullivan, Boston Globe
I loved this book. It’s like a stream of consciousness narration of the descent of the United States into madness. Sharlet goes out searching for the threads that other journalists tend to miss and draws them out, eventually unravelling the entire multilayered fabric. He then weaves those threads back together into a coherent narrative of collapse.
Sharlet, a journalist, travelled the country in the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection to unearth what had led to the violence that day. While the majority of the focus is on political, cultural, and economic contributions to American instability, there are significant elements of evangelicalism and fundamentalism that made their mark on the movement which attempted to overthrow American democracy just over three years ago.
CHAPTER TITLES
prelude: Our Condition
chapter 1: Voice and Hammer
chapter 2: On the Side of Possibility
chapter 3: Heavy with Gold
chapter 4: Ministry of Fun
chapter 5: Whole Bottle of Red Pills
chapter 6: The Trumpocene
chapter 7: Tick-Tock
chapter 8: The Undertow
chapter 9: The Great Acceleration
chapter 10: The Good Fight Is the One You Lose
Good luck and godspeed in your own coming deep dives.
Thanks for this comprehensive list, Brigitte. It looks like you've been doing a really deep dive on this.