Christian nationalism is the position that the United States is and should be a Christian nation, with Christianity central to its laws, identity and public life. It is not an organization, and this page treats it as survey research does: as a set of positions held to varying degrees across the population rather than as a membership.
How it is measured
Whitehead and Perry’s 2020 study established the approach now standard in this area — measuring agreement with specific statements about Christianity and American identity, rather than counting organizations or inferring from denominational affiliation.
PRRI, working with the Brookings Institution, applied a five-item version of that approach to a survey of 6,212 U.S. adults fielded between November 21 and December 14, 2022. Scoring agreement across the five statements and cutting the resulting scale into four bands, it classified 10% of Americans as Adherents, 19% as Sympathizers, 39% as Skeptics and 29% as Rejecters.
Those numbers are the product of a scale and its cut points, not a count of people who describe themselves this way. Almost nobody in the 10% calls themselves a Christian nationalist. The figure is meaningful, and it means something narrower than it is usually quoted as meaning.
A note on the sources
PRRI’s report is titled “Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture”. That is the report’s stated conclusion and it belongs to PRRI and Brookings. This page cites the report for its measurements — the survey dates, the sample, the scale, the distribution — and does not adopt its framing.
What was removed
The previous version of this page set out a two-phase chronology from the 1980s, and a list of
political impacts including advocacy on Supreme Court nominations, the development of “alternative
media networks that reach millions of Americans”, and advocacy on platform policy. None was sourced.
The founded field read “1980s”, which is not a date and rested on the same unsourced chronology;
it has been removed.
Both recorded connections are associations drawn elsewhere rather than findings supported here, and their descriptions now say so.
Sources
- 01.
Whitehead, A. L. & Perry, S. L. (2020). Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford University Press. The standard scholarly treatment, and the work that established the survey-based approach to measuring this current rather than describing it impressionistically. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.
- 02.
PRRI and the Brookings Institution. A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture. (2023). Published February 8, 2023; surveyed November 21 - December 14, 2022, n=6,212 U.S. adults. Source for the four-category distribution and for the construction of the five-item scale behind it. The report's title states a conclusion about threat; this page cites it for its measurements, not for that conclusion.