This week, during our fall series “How to Do Social Justice This Election Season Without Being a Jackass”, we talk on a really high level about the concept of populism.
We rely on the research of Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, who suggest that populist regimes develop their policy strategies around three principles:
Policies support the advancement of “the people”. Except “the people” is not actually the larger group of people; rather, policies favor a narrowly defined group, or identity, of people.
“The people” have a sense of purity, either through ordination by a deity, merit, or the identity itself (such as in the case of White supremacy), that justifies policies being created to favor them. The sense of purity is described and maintained through a mythology, or set of stories. “The people” are often defined by what they are not, rather than what they are.
Populist organizations are led by one person (or a small group of people) who proclaim that they and they alone have the answers to the problems of society. Except by society, we really mean “the people”. And by “the people”, we really mean a selected identity or group.
For more info, check out their article “Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism” in a 2013 issue of the International Journal of Comparative Politics.
We wanted to keep our conversation high level, because any system, organization, and regime can turn populist. Our guest next week,
, co-host of the podcast Conspirituality, studies how populism develops in purported left-wing and progressive organizations, such as the yoga community and semen retention practices. (“Purported” being a key word.) We have noticed how the subset of folks that we study and work with, formerly Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal people, are uniquely prone to either joining these types of groups, or worse, spearheading them. The title of our podcast series, How to Do Social Justice This Election Season Without Being a Jackass, warns against the allure of populism in all of its forms.But let’s be honest. In 2024, the major form of populism that is plaguing the functionality of American political systems is the Republican Party, with Trump as its figurehead, and Christian nationalism as its ethical and moral guiding force.
And while we’ve alluded to Christian nationalism a lot on Relationship 101 and Sexvangelicals, we’ve never actually defined it.
What is Christian Nationalism?
To help us, we rely on some of the rock stars of sociological research on Evangelical Christianity: Samuel Perry, professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma, Joshua Davis, professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and Joshua Grubbs, professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico.
In a recent paper, they define Christian nationalism this way:
“Christian nationalism is a social and cultural framework which seeks to marry a heavily constrained vision of Christianity to American civic life and polity such that conservative, predominantly white Evangelicalism establishes and maintains a position of explicit privilege in American society.”
Christian nationalism is associated with certain kinds of “liberty”, such as religious liberty, gun rights, libertarian economic policies, or liberty to expose oneself to COVID, while minimizing the liberty of others and an emphasis on formal means of social control.
When Julia and I study Christian Nationalism, we’re observing the impact of the specific implicit and explicit messages that Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal churches give about sex, sexuality, bodies, and relationships. As relationship therapists and coaches, we’ve observed time after time how repressive, shame-based messages about sexuality negatively impact a couple’s ability to talk about and engage in sexual experiences that are meaningful for both people.
If you are in a relationship that has been negatively impacted by the church’s messages on sexuality, our relationship and sex coaching services might be a safe space for you to unpack the unhelpful messages about bodies and sexuality, and step into brave spaces of exploration and curiosity with your partner:
But these messages of bodily and sexual repression exist in a larger culture of repression, mistrust, and subjugation, as Perry, Davis, and Grubbs note.
They interviewed 1137 Americans, as a larger part of the Public Discourse and Ethics Survey, to assess their values eight times over the course of two years (2019-2021). Specifically, they asked research participants which of seven features of the Bill of Rights is most important?
For more information about their research process, check out the article “Liberty for Us, Limits for Them: Christian Nationalism and Americans’ Views on Citizens’ Rights”, published in the Spring 2024 issue of Sociology of Religion.
They observed that folks with high levels of Christian Nationalism were likely to name these three items as most important:
The right to keep and bear arms (34%)
Freedom of religion (27%)
The rights not outlined as going to the federal government going to the states, such as voting rights. By the way, according to their study, 80% of Christian Nationalists view voting as a privilege, rather than right.
They also observed that folks with high levels of Christian nationalism were unlikely to name these four items as important:
Freedom of press (unless the press covers from a conservative ideology, i.e. Fox News)
Freedom of speech
Right to speedy and fair trial
Protection against unlawful searches or seizures
Throughout American history, Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal churches have been vehicles that house and propagate the messages that a certain subset of people are chosen based on their identity and/or commitment to a specific process of purification. (The second principle of populism, according to Mudde and Kaltwasser.)
It’s important to criticize the inequities, exploitations, and abuses that happen within these churches and organizations. That’s one of the reasons that Julia and I have jobs and a relationship coaching practice.
We cannot lose sight of the ways that many Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal systems have longed to connect church and state, even though they simultaneously promote anti-government, anti-establishment rhetoric from their pulpits.
The real issue at hand is the allure of power and the purported legal protections and privilege that a person or group of people might receive for “believing in God”, knowing that the definition of “belief in God” varies widely between religious communities.
As we read in the Project 2025 document, the ways that the 2024 Republican Party seeks to fuse church and state will create a different, more widespread, more insidious subset of relational and sexual issues for couples and families, such as expectations of violence, performed gender roles, and lack of choice around contraception and fertility, to name a few.
Politics inform relational health. Check out the theocratic governments of Iran, Yemen, and Afghanistan to see what theocracy looks like in real time. It’s not pretty.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia