PREPARING FOR WAR

A former White Christian nationalist destroys “the myth of the White Christian nation,” which “provided the basis for our polarized public square…and the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries.”

As a teenager in the mid-1990s, Onishi, a religion scholar and host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, became deeply involved in a White evangelical church in Orange County, California. As a convert and then minister, he was entrenched in what he calls the foundational traits of White Christian nationalism, which he recognized in the rhetoric of the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters: “the myth of the Christian nation, nostalgia for past glory, and an apocalyptic view of the nation’s future.” In a pertinent, accessible combination of historical survey and memoir, Onishi looks at specific court cases that helped galvanize the White nationalist movement in the 1960s in reaction to the rise of the civil rights and feminist movements, especially Engel v. Vitale (1962), which “concerned the constitutionality of school prayer in public school settings where students were required to participate”; and Abingdon v. Schemp (1963), which “considered the matter of required Bible reading in schools.” Both were denounced by evangelicals as the moment “God was taken out of public schools.” Along with other forces such as desegregation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these cases helped propel Barry Goldwater’s hard-right candidacy. Onishi shows how the movement gained political might thanks to Paul Weyrich, “one of Goldwater’s foot soldiers,” and how the religious right combined with the GOP to frame the argument as an attack on family values and religious freedom. The election of Ronald Reagan and defeat of Jimmy Carter, “the wrong kind of Christian,” helped perpetuate the warlike, conspiratorial language of the movement, to which Donald Trump neatly subscribed a few decades later. Onishi’s systematic, well-argued narrative reveals the “nostalgia politics” behind the shrinking privilege of White nationalists.

A cleareyed, compelling study of the road to Jan. 6 and the possible future of the politics-versus-religion battle in the U.S.