Washington Post: With the Buffalo Massacre, White Christian Nationalism Strikes Again

This is lazy.

Washington Post:

“White Christian nationalism can be messy to define, but it’s critical to recognize its three animating impulses: freedom, order and violence — the ideology’s holy trinity. The freedom belongs only to Americans these nationalists see as like them (White men). The order is to be imposed on all those they don’t (everyone else). And righteous violence is to be deployed as necessary to achieve this twisted vision.

Both the racist massacre in Buffalo last weekend and the antiabortion legislation spreading rapidly through the states in anticipation of the overturning of Roe v. Wade next month are linked to white Christian nationalism, despite a pair of glaring paradoxes: The suspect in the Buffalo shooting doesn’t claim to be Christian in a religious sense, and many “pro-life” Christians are pro-death-penalty, pro-guns and pro-police brutality.

It makes sense in context. The ideology’s adherents are committed to instituting an ethno-culture that represents a shrinking minority — a traditionalist Christian social order in which the freedoms of White Christians are privileged. Theirs is a world where race, religion and national belonging have become virtually inseparable and are not necessarily tied to spirituality. And the spread of this kind of thinking is rapid and startling.

Over the last year or so, White Christian nationalism has become intertwined with the “great replacement” theory, which holds that a corrupt elite made up of Jews and Democrats is carrying out a plot to replace “real” Americans by engineering mass immigration from the Third World. Since 2015, that theory has captured the fringes and some in the mainstream on the right, from angry young men bearing tiki torches in Charlottesville; to pundits like Ann Coulter, Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson; to at least a half-dozen prominent Republican candidates and lawmakers, including Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.), Reps. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) and Scott Perry (Pa.), Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, and J.D. Vance, Ohio’s GOP nominee for the Senate. …”

Payton Gendron answered this question in his manifesto:

Christian nationalism is one thing.

White Nationalism is another thing.

White Christian nationalism is specifically where the two overlap.

A White Christian nationalist is someone who believes that their race and religion are both important and their country should be based on White identity and Christianity. Historical examples of White Christian nationalism include the United States until well into the 20th century. Actually, you could say that American national identity was even narrower that that through the Victorian era. The country was Anglo-Saxon and Protestant until at least the 1930s. Catholics weren’t really accepted into the fold until JFK’s time when the Cold War created a greater sense of Christian solidarity against communism.

For the vast majority of American history, an American was someone who was White or European in ancestry, Anglo-Saxon or an English speaker in culture, Protestant in religion and liberal republican in political principles. This is not something we invented. Liberals began to redefine America’s national identity in the 1930s as they fell under the spell of antiracism, cosmopolitanism and modernism in the 1930s and 1940s. During the Cold War, American national identity was watered down by liberals into the “American Creed” so that it could compete with communism in the Third World.

The idea that the United States is a miniature version of the United Nations with no essential racial, ethnic, religious or cultural foundation is a product of the liberal consensus during the Cold War. It also wasn’t until the 1990s that the Christian and English speaking aspects of American national identity began to be banished by liberals. It wasn’t until a few years ago that liberals felt bold enough to start condemning the republican aspects of the Constitution like the Senate and Electoral College as a cloak for “white supremacy.” They’ve also begun to reject core aspects of liberalism itself like the Bill of Rights.