Faith over fear? Christian nationalism and cultural fears in the United States

Recent research demonstrates strong connections between Americans' embrace of Christian nationalism and their beliefs and attitudes towards a host of salient social and cultural issues. Implicit in these explanations is that a stronger embrace of Christian nationalism signals an underlying fear of changes to the broader culture, which are perceived as leading the nation further away from a preferred, mythic past. To date, however, empirical studies have not focused explicitly on the relationship between social fears and Christian nationalism. Using a nationally representative sample of American adults, we examine the relationship between Christian nationalism and Americans' fears about immigrants, Muslims, communism, white racial replacement and gun control. We find that Christian nationalism is strongly associated with fears about ethnoracial 'others', as well as fears about losing economic autonomy and access to guns. Overall, our study shows that contemporary Christian nationalism in the United States is situated in a constellation of social fears about ethnoracial purity, as well as about the perceived loss of individual autonomy.