How Many Americans Are Christian Nationalists, Really?

In late January, the Pew Research Center released a study of religious nationalism worldwide, including in the U.S. The results? Only 6% of Americans fit Pew’s definition of “Christian nationalist.”

At first glance, the study’s results are drastically different than other research into Christian nationalism in the U.S. — Public Religion Research Institute reports that 30% of Americans are Christian nationalists, while sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry found 20% of Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalist ideals according to their book Taking America Back for God.

At face value the numbers may be different, but sociologists and researchers told Sojourners that there was reason to see the various studies as cohesive, not contradictory.

Defining terms

Pew began planning for their cross-national survey in 2022 and in total surveyed 36 countries. The center has a history of studying nationalism and faith in the U.S., but Laura Silver, an associate director at Pew, said there was a real value in studying across countries.

“There have not been a lot of sustained cross-national studies of religious nationalism with the number of countries that we’ve surveyed and nationally representative samples,” she told Sojourners.

Silver told Sojourners their team first came up with a litmus for religious nationalism broadly, one that could be applied in Israel, Turkey, and India as well as the U.S.

“We wanted to set a really high bar, so we didn’t overcount people as religious nationalists, particularly in places in middle-income countries, for example, where there is much more of a relationship between religion and state,” Silver said.

For that reason, their team settled on four questions to gauge religious nationalism and required that respondents answer affirmatively all four questions while also identifying with the country’s “historically predominant religion.”

Michael Rotolo, a research associate at Pew, said that despite their study having a higher bar for defining religious nationalists, it shouldn’t be interpreted as a slight on the scale other researchers use to define religious nationalism.

“I definitely wouldn’t say this is a pushback against anything in academia. Part of our nonpartisan, nonadvocacy [position] is that we also generally don’t comment on other people's work … but I'll say back in 2021, when we first really started exploring Christian nationalism in the United States, we consulted with Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead, talked with them a lot about what they had found and how they thought the scale was working.”

Specific questions

Pew’s four questions were:
“How important is belonging to the historically predominant religion to being truly part of your national identity?”

“How important is it to you for your national leader to share your religious beliefs?”

“How much influence do you think the historically predominant religion’s sacred text should have on the laws of your country?”

“When the sacred text conflicts with the will of the people, which should have more influence on the laws of your country?”

Respondents were given the options of “very important,” somewhat important,” “not too important,” and “not at all important.” The fourth question was only asked as a follow-up to those who said a sacred text should have a “fair amount” or “great deal” of influence. Only those who answered all four with “very important” and identified with the country’s historic religion were considered religious nationalists.

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While the bar for being defined as a religious nationalist may have been higher than other researcher’s scales, those four questions were consistent with the last decade of sociological research into religious nationalism, said Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute.

In PRRI’s research, a scale of five questions is answered in terms of degree of agreement, and points are assigned to each question. The average of responses determines whether PRRI categorizes one as a Christian nationalism “adherent,” “sympathizer,” “skeptic,” or “rejecter.”

In fact, Jones said Pew’s data corresponded well to PRRI’s work defining “Christian nationalist adherents.”

“If you just take our most restricted category [adherents], we found that group is 93 percent Christian, but it’s not all Christian,” Jones told Sojourners. “If we restrict it to only people who identify as Christian, it drops slightly from 10% to 9.5%, that’s actually a pretty close measurement, given that these were constructed with very different question wordings — similar ideas, but different question wordings.”

Using broad and narrow definitions

Philip Gorski, a sociologist and coauthor of The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, said he was grateful for how Pew’s study helps him and other sociologists do comparative work. But he worried that a topline result of “only 6%” could be used to deny that Christian nationalism is a real problem in the U.S.

“All you have to do is look at folks who are absolutely at the center of the Trump administration — Pete Hegseth, Russ Vought, Mike Johnson — all of these guys have, by any reasonable standard, very strongly Christian nationalist views and credentials,” Gorski said. “I do really worry that this is going to be a little bit of a fig leaf for folks who want to say, ‘This is not real, this is just made up, this is a smear, this is just a bunch of woke leftist academics trying to smear conservative patriotic Christians.’”

But Gorski said that danger was true of most quantitative research.

“You have some kind of very complicated findings, and the results get translated into a single number, which turns into a talking point or a soundbite, and that’s all that people hear and all they remember,” he said.

For Christian nationalism in the U.S., Gorski said headlines suggesting that 6% or 30% of Americans are “hardcore Christian nationalists” felt equally misleading. His work has preferred to measure Christian nationalism on a spectrum.

For Jones, the trouble with Christian nationalism lies not just with the hardcore Christians who strongly affirm Pew or PRRI’s statements and become “religious nationalists” or “Christian nationalist adherents.” It’s those who don’t affirm all the statements but are still sympathetic to some Christian nationalist views and lend power to Christian nationalist adherents.

“On abortion, if you were looking at only the people who completely opposed abortion in all circumstances, you’re really not looking at that many people,” Jones said of the 8% who oppose abortion in all circumstances according to Pew. “If you only had that number, you’d say, ‘Well, why is abortion a divisive issue?’ … that’s because you’re ignoring an additional [28%] of the public who say abortion should be illegal in most cases.

“If you only look at the adherents, you’re like, ‘Why is it then that this seems to be so powerful in the culture?’ … If you look at adherents and sympathizers, that’s 30% of the public. But it’s a majority of Republicans. It’s two thirds of white evangelicals.”

Rotolo echoed Jones, saying that even though a small number of Americans qualify as religious nationalists on Pew’s scale, an additional 15% of Americans say they would like to see Christianity declared the national religion.

A more careful estimate

Still, Pew’s research was similar to prior survey data released in February 2024 that found only 5% of Americans had heard of Christian nationalism and had a favorable view of it. Rotolo described their count of Christian nationalists as a methodically conservative approach: “It's nice that everyone in this category certainly affirms these views.”

Public polling on religion and identity can lead to interesting, unexpected results, the researchers said. The methodically conservative method helped researchers in making cross-national comparisons, as well as parsing out those who affirmed the views and not just agreed with them.

In Israel, for example, both Jews and Arabs say that it is very important to be Jewish to be truly Israeli, but the reason for answering affirmatively may be different.

“Arab Israelis or Muslim Israelis are more likely to see it not necessarily as a positive in terms of belonging, but more as a pushback against their own belonging,” Silver said.

And a similar phenomenon happens in the U.S., where “Christian” is often conflated with “moral,” Rotolo said.

“In 2024, 4% of religious ‘nones,’ said the federal government should officially declare Christianity, the national religion,” Rotolo said. “And 10% of Muslims say that.”

Rotolo and Silver said it was important for their study to make sure they didn’t overcount, especially because of the comparisons across countries. The U.S. doesn’t stand out geographically for its 6% rate of religious nationalists. Mexico, for example, had an 8% rate. But the report did find the U.S. stood out compared to countries with similar income levels.

“U.S. adults are more likely than people in any other high-income country surveyed to say the Bible currently has either a great deal or some influence over the laws of their country (in other countries, people were asked about other texts),” the report reads.

Rotolo said there’s still more to learn about the nuances of Christian nationalism in the U.S.

“A lot of people are interested in the American flag, and if it has a place in religious sanctuaries and where in those sanctuaries and where it stands in relation to a Christian flag,” he said. “We do surveys on the workplace regularly. … It would be interesting to talk about how people feel about discussing religion in the workplace.”