Christian Nationalism as a Social Identity

Abstract Over the past decade, research on Christian nationalism in the United States has grown substantially. Some of the associated public opinion literature has described Christian nationalism as an identity, and some of it as a worldview, but scholars have not grappled with this ambiguity or its consequences. Accordingly, we make two moves to bring conceptual order to this rapidly expanding literature. First, we use well-established social identity measures to assess whether respondents think of Christian nationalism as an identity, and we compare the responses to popular measures of the Christian nationalist worldview. Second, we use multiple survey experiments to evaluate the extent to which identification with Christian nationalism is dependent on the definition of Christian nationalism. We conclude that Christian nationalist identities exist, they are strongly linked with a Christian nationalist worldview, and to some extent they depend on the definition of the identity group. In this unique case of elite contestation of an emerging identity, we find that the typical worldview measure also serves effectively as a strength-of-identity measure.