Taking it Personally: How Christian Nationalism Helps Fuel the Republican Outrage Machine

Recent US elections saw a rise in the prominence of culture war issues centering around questions of how to address contentious issues including race and history. These debates were often marked by criticism from dominant groups who vocally resisted suggestions that their group could be implicated in wrongdoing. Using data from the 2021 General Social Survey, this paper seeks to understand why conservative Christians are more sensitive to interpreting criticism of their religious group as a personal criticism. It forwards two mechanisms by which this takes place: 1) members fuse their identity with that of their social group, and 2) members have an expectation that their religious group should be held in high esteem. I find that religious commitment and Christian nationalism are strong predictors of interpreting group criticisms as personal attacks. More specifically, I find that, when mapping Christian Nationalism against other identifiers such as race, religious tradition, religious commitment, partisan identity, and ideological identity I find that perceptions of group criticism as a personal attack are predominantly a feature of White, devout, Protestant, and conservative Americans. This paper contributes to understanding the impact of Christian Nationalism in shaping public debate about history and education and its utilization by the Republican Party’s outrage machine.