Rec: "The Threat of Christian Nationalism"
Robert P. Jones on the Public Religion Research Institute's (PRRI's) Christian Nationalism Survey, the largest survey ever conducted on this topic
The complete report on the PRRI website
Andrew Whitehead’s post on his Substack, American Idolatry.
The Webinar (on YouTube) of the survey launch, with a number of guest experts on the topic.
I’m sorry for the sparse posting recently: I’m juggling with doing the editing on two anthologies to finish them to submit for the peer-review at McFarland and with preparing for three conferences (scheduled, variously, in February, March, and April — so one down, two to go!). I have a bunch of possible posts (some growing out of previous work I’m finding as I organize my e-files!) that I hope to start posting soon.
But as I was doing some work on my paper for the March PCA (in Chicago!), "Really I'm an atheist, but I'm not the kind that yells at people": Atheist Readers of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium,” the results of the major survey (22,000 Americans surveyed throughout 2023) dropped. The irony is the way my “Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists: Secular Readers of Tolkien” project (of which the presentation is a small chunk) intersects with my “Tolkien Culture Warrior project” on the backlash against the Tolkien Society’s Summer 2021 Seminar on Tolkien and Diversity. Here are some links with more information about the actual Seminar instead of the Backlash Demonic Stereotypes:
a positive review of the seminar by Christian S. Trenk here
Part of my PCA presentation will cover scholarship on the prejudice against and stereotypes of “atheists” (not only in the U.S. but globally) and how that has been changing (somewhat) in recent years.
The PRRI report emphasizes the growth of Christian nationalism (which given current events and my history in Texas, I am calling “Christofascism”) and is something I want to look at (as soon as I can find the time). While a great deal has been written being written about the movement’s threats to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and immigrants, to LGBTQA* communities, to religious minorities, and to reproductive rights (all of which overlap for many of us), I’ve not come across anything new other than their more significant negative attitudes to atheists which having lived in Texas, not a surprise! (During my 27 years in rural Texas, I came out, on my campus, as queer years earlier than I came out as an atheist!). The biggest question I have is whether or not there are attempts to restrict atheists’ rights (in the same way they are pushing laws against all their other targeted groups) on the grounds that the only people who have religious freedom are Christofascists, and anybody else is a threat to their (sorry, cannot resist this) freedumb.