Description
American Christian nationalism is a political movement built around a myth of divine national destiny. As numbers of white, religious voters decline, it has become one of the foremost drivers behind authoritarian populism in American politics and around the world. The movement’s goals are to simultaneously protect the cultural influence of its adherents and to enhance the power resources of the American state in a rapidly changing international system. Recent sociological research frames Christian nationalism as an isolationist movement with limited influence beyond its national context. This paper traces the substantive and procedural elements of this anti-liberal ‘counterrevolution’ through the movement’s many moving parts - religious ministries, legislative networks, policy institutes, pseudo-legal agreements such as the Geneva Consensus Declaration, and the offices of elected officials. Using methods from global political economy and insights generated in religious studies, the authors demonstrate the increasing centrality of the institutions of Christian nationalism to both American foreign policy formation and global governance leadership. The institutions of Christian nationalism have become a regime complex for managing the reconfiguration of American power in a decaying order.
