This article was originally published on Andrew Whitehead’s Substack, American Idolatry.
First—some exciting news! I was asked to be one of three research fellows with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation for the next year. Our goal will be to help the Foundation “advance inclusive democracy by equipping the public, policymakers, and civic leaders with essential knowledge needed to understand the forces destabilizing democracy.” I look forward to sharing more about this work in future newsletters!
Now, today’s content on Christian nationalism, education, and the 2024 Presidential election. . .
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Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild is a keen observer of rural America. Her recent NY Times essay highlights how some citizens in Appalachia feel left behind and lost. One man she interviews shares,
“We’re losing our best and brightest,” Roger Ford, the 58-year-old president of an energy startup, told me sadly one day as we ambled through a hillside cemetery brightened by graveside flowers. “Too many young people are leaving these mountains looking for jobs in cities, and too many of the ones who stay behind have been caught in an opioid epidemic.”
But despite the current administration’s cuts to programs that will directly serve them, she finds they continue to support Trump, as his “story” affirms their feelings of “stolen pride,” and provides them feelings of belonging around this sense of loss and shame, with promises of retribution for those to blame. [1]
Recent quantitative analyses of the relationship between county-level education and income and voting over the last three elections underscore the stories in Hochschild’s column.
NY Times analyses of the last three election cycles shows how Trump has remade America’s political landscape. For instance: a vast majority of counties with lower levels of education (see below) and income have shifted toward Trump in each of the last 3 elections.
As the NY Times points out: “only one of the 1,500 counties with the smallest proportion of college graduates voted steadily more Democratic over the last three elections. Republicans steadily grew their vote share in more than two-thirds of those less-educated counties.”
Both of these stories underscore how Americans in the working class sense very real headwinds. And in these times of upheaval, they are searching for community and a shared narrative that tells them how we got here, where we should go, and how to get there.
Furthermore, these stories demonstrate there has been an absolute hollowing out of working class support for the Democratic Party. In places with lower levels of education (signaling a larger working class population), support for Trump has been ascendent for a decade or more.
Enter Christian nationalism.
In a recent free-to-read article, a first-of-its-kind analysis I conducted with Sam Perry, we find that each state’s proportion of supporters of Christian nationalism was predictive of voting for Trump in 2024, even when we controlled for various other possible explanations.
As this graphic shows, more support for Christian nationalism across a state equals greater support for Trump in the 2024 election.
Here’s the kicker, though: Christian nationalism’s association with Trump support was STRONGEST in states with fewer college graduates.
As you can see above, the blue and red bars both increase from right to left. This means that as Christian nationalism increases (x-axis), the vote share for Trump increases (y-axis).
But notice how the blue bar slope is steeper?
This is showing us that for states with fewer college graduates (and perhaps more working class folks), the relationship between increasing levels of Christian nationalism and vote share for Trump is at its strongest.
These findings show that state-level Christian nationalism is part of the broader social context for Trump’s populist appeal.
Christian nationalism is most powerfully associated with Trump support in states with populations who will have less economic mobility, that is, fewer opportunities to take advantage of higher paying, tech-related, white-collar jobs that require college degrees.
So in those Appalachian counties Hochschild writes about, or the lower-education counties that have moved toward Trump for 3 straight elections, Christian nationalism provides a sense of ethnonational solidarity while amplifying a sense of ethnocultural threat.
It primes these populations to support Trump and his story that promises them not only economic prosperity but also victory over those they’ve been told are responsible for harder times (e.g., immigrants, academics, Democrats, secular establishment elites).
Christian nationalism serves to bind those Americans who embrace it to Trump and the MAGA movement because it offers them a strong sense of community around who the true Americans are (the “we”), verses those who are trying to lead the country astray (the “them”).
It provides a narrative and an identity that answers the questions “How did we get here?” “Where are we going?” “How do we get there?”
These are questions all Americans have, no matter their political stance! It isn’t wrong that Trump voters or Harris voters or those who sat the 2024 election out are searching for community, identity, and a uniting narrative.
As I share in American Idolatry, though, Christian nationalism offers answers to these questions that ultimately harms us all, particularly the marginalized. With the outcome of the recent election, we see the policy fruit of the Christian nationalism-Trump arrangement.
As Hochschild writes,
“Are we approaching a tipping point when they might start to question Mr. Trump — either because of his threats to democracy, or because his economic policies will make their lives tougher? After all, experts predict Mr. Trump’s tariffs will raise prices, and his budget cuts will hit some of his strongest supporters the hardest. Meals on Wheels: cuts. Heating cost assistance: cuts. Black lung screening: cuts. One nearby office handling Social Security has closed. Even the Department of Veterans Affairs may have to pull back on the services it offers.
These are services people need. More than 40 percent of people in the Fifth District rely on Medicaid for their medical care, including addiction treatment. Now, Mr. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is poised to cut benefits, which could lead to layoffs in the largest employer in eastern Kentucky, the Pikeville Medical Center. Meanwhile, many children in the district qualify for food stamps, and the administration’s chain saw is coming for those, too.”
Will we be a country that continues to cut programs that fund life-saving scientific research, rural hospitals, and health care for the disabled and poor in order to fund tax cuts that primarily benefit Americans making over $600,000 a year?
Will those cuts that primarily harm the communities of folks who overwhelmingly moved toward Trump in the last 3 election cycles—the American working class—change their political views? The states and counties with a strong cultural foundation of Christian nationalism and larger working class populations?
It’s impossible to say at this point. In some ways, only time will tell.
What do we do while we wait?
My friend and colleague
points out that those troubled by the current state of affairs shouldn’t only be about scolding those who might have turned to Trump/MAGA as a result of looking for community and a compelling narrative.
As she writes in her recent column:
It’s not enough to say that Trump is offering something bad. Because that overlooks the things that people are getting from supporting his movement: a feeling of belonging, purpose, pride. In a community where those goods are in scant supply, even cheap versions of them are likely viewed as better than nothing.
Those who oppose him cannot simply scold people for wanting that. Because we all want that! They need to replace it with something better.
Only by working toward building something that serves everyone can we both protect those being harmed and welcome in those who, we hope, will begin to see that they’ve been offered a bad deal.
I think a first step on this journey is doing what we can, where we can.
This recent column from the Kettering Foundation [2] is a good place to start: “Feeling Paralyzed, Helpless, or Hopeless? 10 Things Everyday People Can Do.” As the authors rightly note, “no big changes ever start as big changes.”
So remember: you’re not alone. You don’t have to do it all. And you aren’t going to do it alone.
We can be about creating a world where all have the opportunity to flourish—no matter who they voted for in the last three elections. Onward, friends. Together.
1: These findings resonate with her last book, Strangers in their Own Land, where Hochschild showed us how folks in areas of the country directly harmed by some of policies of the political right continued to offer their support. Their cultural values—including religious—played a vital role in their perception that they were being left behind and betrayed by “elites.”
2: Sign up for the Kettering Foundation’s newsletter to stay up-to-date on their ongoing work to support democracy and a strong civil society.
