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How Christians can fight back against Christian nationalism

A new book argues the future of democracy depends on a segment of American Christians. What should they do?

Are we on the precipice of a white Christian nationalist takeover?

The author and religion scholar Robert P. Jones sure feels like we’re close. “This is our 1933,” he writes in his new book, referencing the year that Weimar Germany fell to a Nazi takeover.

Panicked allusions to Nazi Germany have been a common occurrence in the Trump years. But Jones, who has studied religion for decades and grew up Southern Baptist, has a very specific perspective on why those references are warranted now, particularly because of the role Christians played then — and it all worries him.

It was in 1933, Jones writes, that the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller began resisting Nazi rule. He was arrested four years later and imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp until 1945. Revisiting Dachau after World War II, Niemöller remembered 1933 as not just the year the camp opened, nor a reminder of a time when he was still a free man, but also a marker of how much time he had wasted in the preceding years supporting the Nazis. From their rise in the 1920s until that moment, he’d been supportive of much of the Nazis’ movement, voting for them in three different elections. After his release, every day of that time felt like a missed opportunity to do something to avert a tragedy.

Jones doesn’t make this historical parallel lightly. In his new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, he spends a significant amount of time building the case that the actions of the second Trump administration, combined with rock-solid support from white Christian evangelicals, are resulting in escalating religious authoritarianism, pointing to evangelical support for mass deportations earlier this year and Christian nationalist rhetoric by members of the administration, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “We are now living in a democratically back-slidden nation, abetted by an apostate white Christianity,” he writes.

But his book isn’t just a panicked observation; it’s a call to action. Like Niemöller, he argues, religious people who’ve sat out or passively supported MAGA can still effect change. And churches are just as important to stopping a slide into religiously backed authoritarianism as many were in abetting its rise.

So what should Christians who don’t buy into this vision of their faith do to resist it?

Jones is the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, the leading research and polling think tank on politics and religion, and a scholar of religion — spending his career analyzing and writing books on the relationship between race, white supremacy, and faith in America. I decided to chat with him to figure out what the road map for Christian resistance to Christian nationalism might look like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A year of Trump is backfiring on the religious right

Why are you taking on this project now?

If you look back at the three previous books I’ve written in the last decade, they have been responding in various ways to the rise of Christian nationalism that we’ve seen in the country and the threat that that poses. This book is motivated by a sense of urgency.

I’m also trying to turn the corner in this book by saying, For those of us who care about........

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