George Takei asks Robert P. Jones, head of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) how he would characterize the threat that Christian nationalism poses at this moment in our history. Jones says,
"The rise of contemporary white Christian nationalism, as it is constituted through Trump’s MAGA takeover of today’s Republican Party, constitutes the largest threat to democracy I have experienced in my lifetime."
"In a PRRI-Brookings survey conducted last year, we found that a majority of Republicans were either Christian Nationalism Adherents (21%) or Sympathizers (33%), believing for example that U.S. laws should be based on Christian values and that the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation."
"We also found that beliefs in Christian nationalism were strongly linked to a range of other attitudes that are corrosive to democracy: white racial resentment and denials of the existence of systemic racism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and support for patriarchal gender roles."
"In other words, this white Christian nationalist worldview evokes a set of hierarchies that posits white, Christian, heterosexual men as the divinely ordained recipients of power and dominion. This sense of white Christian entitlement and chosenness is toxic to the cultivation of the democratic values of pluralism and equality."