Christianity should not only influence what we support but also how we engage in the political sphere, namely, in a spirit of humility, charity, and good-faith deliberation. Christians should reject Christian nationalism, but not allow the moral panic surrounding it to shame them out of fully engaging in the public square, and doing so as Christians. Overall, Hall’s book is a vital contribution and a welcome alternative to the series of muddled screeds that constitute the mainstream discourse on Christian nationalism.

A moderately informed observer of American politics in the 2020s might be forgiven for perceiving Christian nationalism to be an imminent and existential threat to our political order. As of this writing, a Google search for the term quickly yields headlines such as “Christian nationalism is a grave threat to America,” and the grammatically questionable “What is Christian nationalism and why it raises concerns about threats to democracy.” The past several years have produced a flurry of books and articles from both popular and academic presses claiming to unearth Christian nationalist designs in virtually every aspect of right-wing politics. It’s a moral panic. But at a glance, one might suppose so much smoke must surely emanate from a very great fire.

In his recent book, Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism? Why Christian Nationalism Is Not an Existential Threat to America or the Church, Mark David Hall calls for everyone to take a deep breath. Once we wave away the alarmist rhetoric and sort through the arguments and evidence, Hall suggests, there is ultimately little cause for concern. While acknowledging that Christian nationalism exists and is problematic, he argues that it is far less prevalent than we have been led to believe, and that the stakes are low in any case. In the unlikely and unfortunate event that Christian nationalists succeeded in securing a greater degree of state recognition of Christianity, this would not represent anything like a fundamental threat to American democracy. Nevertheless, he concludes we should still oppose Christian nationalism where we encounter it, in favor of a robust understanding of the religious freedom and pluralism that are fundamental principles of the American founding. The book is a timely and necessary response to the litany of doomsaying that has marked so much recent progressive commentary. The tragedy is that the people who most need to hear its message are the least likely to read it.

Hall first addresses polemical works from authors such as Katherine Stewart, Julie Ingersoll, Randall Balmer, and Andrew Seidel. In their work, he points to several problematic claims: that the Christian Reconstructionist movement is enormously influential, that the Christian Right originated as a defense of racial segregation, and that the current Supreme Court is on a crusade to establish Christian supremacy. Scrutinizing the evidence for these claims, he finds much of it to be incomplete, distorted, exaggerated, or in some cases fabricated outright. He marshals considerable counterevidence from the historical record as well as direct communications with key actors to argue that accounts of the Christian Right viewed as foundational in many progressive circles are of marginal evidentiary value. Some are better understood as minor subplots in the American Christian landscape, while others are pure partisan narrative.

He then turns to the empirical research on Christian nationalism. Hall is in many ways quite charitable towards social scientists, granting that their studies are more rigorous and made in good faith. Nevertheless, the studies too are ultimately susceptible to similar partisan distortions. For instance, in the widely cited Taking America Back for God, sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry offer an extreme definition of Christian nationalism as an ideology that “includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism,” a kind of toxic stew poisoning much of the political right. They proceed to claim, based on survey data, that over half of the American population (51.9 percent, to be exact) subscribes to this ideology to some extent, a prospect that does, indeed, seem to be cause for alarm. Yet these claims are based on survey questions that appear far more benign than the phenomenon they are purported to measure. For instance, respondents ostensibly show Christian nationalist sympathies by agreeing that “the federal government should advocate for Christian values.” Other social scientific sources demonstrate a similar mismatch between rhetoric and the evidence, which is wholly inadequate to support claims of Christian nationalism as something extreme and widespread.

Although Hall treats the polemical and social scientific work on Christian nationalism separately, this is something of a blurry distinction. Some of those he identifies as polemicists have academic credentials, while some of the work credited as scholarship is transparently partisan in its claims. Furthermore, through avenues such as collaborations, citations, and reviews, scholars of Christian nationalism treat even the most aggressive polemicists as if they were themselves credible authorities and comrades-in-arms. I fear this dynamic does more to degrade the credibility of the scholarship than it does to raise that of the polemical literature.

Having demonstrated serious flaws in claims regarding the prevalence and danger of Christian nationalism, Hall then turns to an assessment of the figures who have openly embraced the label. He focuses on published works articulating and advocating some form of Christian nationalism, specifically those by Douglas Wilson, Andrew Torba, Andrew Isker, and Stephen Wolfe. Though he finds little merit in their ideas, he nonetheless concludes, first, that their visions bear little resemblance to the kind of white supremacist hellscape feared by the critics of Christian nationalism (though they may be plausibly read as ethnocentric or patriarchal), and second, that “there is little reason to believe [these works] will have much impact beyond a handful of idiosyncratic Calvinists.”

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