“God, Guns, and Guts”: Christian Nationalism from a Psychoanalytic Perspective

Abstract

This article explores the motivations behind adherents to Christian nationalism using several inter-related psychoanalytic theoretical lenses. Following a description of Christian nationalist beliefs, four conscious motivations for joining will be outlined first, including recruitment tactics/evangelization that fulfill the need for belonging and a sense of sacred purpose, the fear of loss of white social status, fear of loss of patriarchal authority and hierarchy, and the allure of conspiracy theories such as QAnon for conservative Christians. This will be followed by a more in-depth discussion of unconscious dynamics that can fuel individuals’ adoption of a Christian-nationalist belief system, including group dynamics and Freud’s insights into the power of a charismatic leader, the allure of guns reflecting deeper unconscious fears of emasculation, paranoid splitting and the role of trauma, and, finally, the ways in which this segment of American Christianity may be unconsciously carrying disavowed and split-off aggression towards other Christians—and how better integration might be achieved through nonviolent resistance to injustice, and positive political engagement.

1. Christian Nationalism and Its Conscious Motivations

On 6 January 2021, as recapped so vividly by the recent Congressional hearings, a violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, in a shocking effort to stop the certification of the election of Joe Biden as the next President of the United States. Deep in the midst of this mob was a loose-knit band of religiously motivated individuals who identify themselves as devout Christians. On display among the crowds during the attack on the Capitol were numerous flags and signs with “Jesus Saves” in bold letters, and other Christian symbols proudly displayed alongside numerous blatantly racist ones, including a Confederate flag paraded through the halls of Congress. A photo that went viral showed a group of men before a 7- or 8-foot-high cross—one with his forehead pressed against it in fervent prayer. One group among the mob called themselves a “Jericho march”, Christians blowing shofars, praying to bring down the walls of government.

Perhaps most shocking for many people of faith was Donald Trump’s appeal to millions of Christians—whose stated values of honesty, fidelity in marriage, humility, charitable speech and spirit of forbearance are the exact opposite of all that the former president represents. But Trump tapped into a deep and broad reservoir of resentment and paranoia that has been accumulating for decades, a large pool of Christians who feel they are being persecuted and are called by God to rise up and defend themselves against their enemies. And not only must they regain equal footing with others in society, many believe, but they must dominate and be in control—and all this in the name of Jesus. This growing movement of politically right-wing Christians is referred to as Christian nationalism.1

A common belief among Christian nationalists is that there has been a woeful decline in America’s standing in the world because of the nation’s growing degeneracy—and with it, the concomitant belief in an urgent call to restore the nation to its original goodness and mandate to lead the world into godliness.2 Therefore, God has withdrawn “His” blessing from America because, like the ancient Israelites, “she” has fallen into profligacy and a violation of God’s laws. The United States was founded, according to this group, by evangelical Christians—based on a misreading of the more complex history of the framers of the Constitution3—and had God’s special mandate to become a new Jerusalem in which (white) Christians, mostly male, will rule over a nation whose laws are perfectly aligned with their own selective, fundamentalist reading of biblical mandates. In their interpretation of apocalyptic scripture, many, especially a wing of Christian nationalism called “dominionists”, see an avenging Jesus coming to wage spiritual warfare against the current decadent ways of America (and the world). Those who hold such views see a growing depravity of the current age as evidence that the end of times is near—and it is their duty to help bring it about. Christian-nationalist preachers exhort the faithful in sermons and song to “take this nation back”—even by force, if required. (Gorski 2019; Gorski and Perry 2022).

Grim prognosticators have spun out scenarios in which the insurrection on January 6 was just the beginning of an attempt to undermine the core of democracy (Sund 2023)—exemplifying what historian Richard Hofstadter identified as a longstanding “paranoid style in American politics”. As I have argued elsewhere (Cooper-White 2022), the very term “Christian nationalism” really means white nationalism, and stands opposed to virtually everything taught in Christianity or Judaism about justice and compassion. How can Christians who claim to believe in love, mercy, justice, and truth, participate in a movement that is founded in lies fueled by white supremacy and masculinism—and even far-fetched conspiracy theories—while ignoring or even condoning its inherent propensity toward violence?

The main tenets of Christian nationalism are that God established the United States as a Christian nation, and, therefore, the country should essentially be a theonomy (= rule of laws) shaped by Christian values (as interpreted by an alliance of conservative Christian leaders and right-wing political activists) and a theocracy (= rule by religious leadership) characterized by the headship of men over their households and white male leadership in the public sphere. Christian nationalists, therefore, oppose the “separation of church and state”4 (Whitehead and Perry 2020, p. 42)—rather, advocating for the display of Christian symbols in public spaces and explicitly Christian prayer in schools and civic gatherings. Many Black Church Protestants also align Christian values with politics, but with Gospel-grounded social and political action for change—whereas white Christian-nationalists’ agenda is almost entirely opposed to what we would consider social justice: opposing religious pluralism, and opposing generous immigration policies (to keep out “drug dealers and rapists” as Trump infamously said and to keep out Muslims and other non-Christians); opposing abortion even in cases of rape and incest; opposing expanding the rights of women, LGBTQ persons; and, in a long chain of history beginning with the (utterly denied) genocidal founding of the nation, they oppose civil-rights legislation and embrace laws that perpetuate structural and institutional racism against black, brown, and indigenous people. Some even believe that ecojustice and addressing the climate crisis is moot, because the Apocalypse is coming and this world will be destroyed anyway.

Lest we conclude that this is a fringe movement involving only a small percentage of American Christians, statistics show that nearly two thirds of mainline Protestants—members of the supposedly “liberal” Christian denominations—and two thirds of all Christians taken together,5 agree with many of the beliefs, if not the actions, of the thousands who marched on the capitol on 6 January. Large-scale studies continue to show the surprisingly large size and scope of Christian nationalism in the United States:6

• Half or more of Americans overall agree with some or all Christian-nationalist beliefs.7
  Approximately 74–88% of Christian nationalists are white evangelical Protestants.
• Among evangelical Protestants, 80% agree with Christian nationalism.
• Three quarters of those Americans who disagree with Christian nationalism are non-Christians. Half of those who disagree are religiously unaffiliated and over a third belong to other religions (McDaniel et al. 2022).
• Perhaps most shockingly, 60% of “True Believers” and 37% of “soft” Christian nationalists (those who agree with some but not all Christian nationalist believe) agree with the statement that “Non-Christians create immoral policies”—vs. just 11% of those who disagree (McDaniel et al. 2022).

The most hard-core “True Believers” live mostly in the South, have the lowest formal education and economic status, and are overwhelmingly evangelical Protestants; while those who align with most but not all Christian nationalist beliefs live in both the South and the Midwest, have only slightly better educational and economic advantages, and are about one third evangelical Protestants and one third Roman Catholics. The vast majority of all of these taken together are white, and slightly older than average Americans. Just slightly more than half are women.

A vast publishing empire, and online Christian family content such as James Dobson’s decades-old Focus on the Family, also promotes Christian-nationalist ideas as part of a campaign to promote the traditional patriarchal family and to indoctrinate children into a melding of religion, right-wing patriotism, and a conservative “God-honoring” definition of Christian family life. Even political rallies are now awash in so-called “Christian music” (Dias and Graham 2022).

Why and how do people who would think of themselves as “good people”—good Christians—become hooked by demagogues and conspiracy theories? There are certainly a number of conscious motivations behind adherence to Christian -nationalist ideas:

• Evangelization that fulfills the need for belonging and a sense of purpose—heightened by the religious appeal of joining in a cosmic battle of good vs. evil!—with tactics which are similar, and at times nearly identical, to cult recruiting.
• The fear of loss of white social status, resentment against a perceived (though still quite minimal statistically) loss of jobs and economic power to immigrants and people of color, and a desire to maintain or regain white supremacy and white power, in face of the reality that according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the year 2042 will mark the end of a white majority population in the United States.
• The fear of the loss of patriarchal authority and a masculinist hierarchy both in the home and in the public sphere of work and governmental power.
• The irrational allure of conspiracy theories such as Q-Anon, whose beliefs are now adopted by as many as 1 in 5 Americans overall, and a quarter of evangelical Christians (Slisco 2021).

These four motivations are made explicit by self-identified Christian nationalists to varying degrees, but they are conscious to the degree that adherents would agree to them, even if using different language to describe them. Probably the least conscious of these four is the element of fear, which on the surface takes the form of racist, anti-immigrant attitudes and a defensive posture against all non-Christians—in its most extreme form, anti-Muslim violence and antisemitic attacks such as the increasing attacks on synagogues and other Jewish organizations; vandalism in Jewish cemeteries; and the Charleston, North Carolina white-supremacist demonstration in which torch-bearing white men shouted the Nazi slogan “Jews will not replace us!”8

2. Christian Nationalism Viewed through a Psychoanalytic Lens9

When a charismatic public leader appears to give permission to this rhetoric of rebellion, even permission to hate, this can be the final catalyst that brings the disparate anti-authoritarian groups together to form an armed rebellion. Unconscious group theory has contributed much to the understanding of this phenomenon, and no one, to this day, has made more keen observations than Freud himself on the ways in which a group also has a kind of collective mind, which encompasses and in certain ways takes over the attitudes and actions of the group’s individual members. Freud wrote his seminal book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in 1921, just a few short years after the end of World War I. (Freud [1921] 1955, pp. 65–144) He had lived through the fear for his sons’ lives, both of whom had enlisted (they survived). He then lost a beloved daughter and grandson to the Spanish flu, which swept through an impoverished Europe in the aftermath of the war. And all of this was wrapped up in a lifelong experience of being the target of antisemitism—which was rising again in Vienna in overt political rhetoric and public acts of violence by the time he was writing the book (Cooper-White 2018).

Having come to a feeling of deep disillusionment about patriotism and the leaders of nations, and pessimism about the human capacity for violence and aggression, Freud struggled to understand how seemingly rational people could come under the sway of a group, to the point of participating in collective violence that they would never commit as individuals. Given the similar rise in unabashed hate speech and mob violence in the U.S. today, his observations on the unconscious dynamics of groups remain highly relevant, and contribute another dimension to understanding how people can be drawn into groups that are destructive of the social fabric, even leading to violence.

Freud was not the first psychologist to study groups and to recognize that when people join a group, they begin to participate in a social dynamic that transcends individuals’ particular attitudes—even to the point of sacrificing their own personal morality and capacity for critical thinking. Freud drew heavily, in his Group Psychology, on the late 19th-century work of Gustave LeBon, whose treatise The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (LeBon [1895] 2001) laid the foundations for the study of groups, especially mass movements. LeBon’s work, like Freud’s, was prompted by experiences of war. LeBon described the phenomenon of a “collective mind” that takes over a group, “which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation”:

[T]he individual forming part of a group acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself, from the consideration that, a group being anonymous and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.

(Freud [1921] 1955, p. 74)

Freud continues, citing LeBon, that a form of contagion arises in groups, similar to hypnosis. Freud also agrees with LeBon that in groups, people regress—they lose touch with their most highly developed thinking capacity and begin to behave more in accordance with primal drives: “spontaneity, violence, ferocity, and also enthusiasm and heroism.” He quotes the German poet Schiller: “Jeder, sieht man ihn einzeln, ist leidlich klug und verständig; Sind sie in corpore, gleich wird euch ein Dummkopf daraus” (Everyone, when viewed as an individual, is quite astute and mature; when in a group, they become stupid.) (Freud [1921] 1955, p. 77n1) Freud adds that a group is more likely to think, as young children do, in images rather than words and concepts. (Freud [1921] 1955, p. 78) It is easy to see today how online social media can reinforce this, since it is a visual world of images.

Freud’s own contribution also went beyond the observations of LeBon, which focused mainly on groups’ emotional contagion. Freud proposed that the character and aims of a group (altruistic or nefarious) also depend heavily on the character and aims of the leader. Two unconscious motivations come into play when group members begin not only to admire or like their leaders, but to idolize them—identification and idealization—in psychoanalytic terms, unconsciously adopting another person’s characteristics, beliefs, or ways of being as a form of psychic internalization. One unconsciously takes the another’s attributes into the self, and they become a part of one’s identity and self-image. This begins in infancy, in which the small child incorporates the parents as a source of morality. A positive remnant of early identifications remains in the form of what has been taken in as good and idealized. Freud called this internal part of the self the “ego ideal,” which can be a foundation for one’s values, and the component of the ego related to conscience.10 For healthy individuals, identification with another person is an element in forming good relationships—an inner sense or intuition of having something in common that resonates with early positive experiences. But identification in adulthood, if it is too prominent, can also lead to a regression to a more dependent state of being, as in early childhood, in which the other person’s traits, actions, and beliefs are internalized and unconsciously begin to shape and even alter identity. This regressive form of identification is often driven by an unconscious sense of lack, and a compulsive need to make up for a loss or deficit in early childhood—such as a parent’s chronic emotional misattunement, unreliability, frequent absence or abandonment, or outright abuse. It is precisely this type of regression that Freud sees occurring in groups that become attached to a strong leader. The members of such a group have unconsciously substituted the charismatic figure of the leader for their individual ego ideals. The resulting bond creates both forceful emotional ties among the members of the group, who now all share a common ego ideal,11 and a strong bond of loyalty with the leader (who is now a part of themselves). And since, for Freud, these strong emotional ties are “libidinal” (i.e., coming from a primal sex drive), he also sees the attachment to this leader and to other members of the group as fulfilling a deep, instinctual wish (disguised in more socially acceptable form).

One final element in Freud’s observations about this type of leader is the element of narcissism. Freud understood that the psychology of individual members of a group and the psychology of the father-figure leader were symmetrical, not identical. The individuals still longed for emotional ties with others, but:

… the father, chief, or leader…had few libidinal ties; he loved no one but himself, or other people only in so far as they served his needs … Even today the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident, and independent.

(Freud [1921] 1955, p. 123)

Love, said Freud, “puts a check on narcissism,” ((Freud [1921] 1955, p. 124)12 and as such is crucial to civilization. But the narcissistic leader loves only himself and exploits the love and devotion of his followers only and always for his own benefit (as he sees it, according to his whims).

3. “God, Guns, and Guts—America Needs All Three”

Underlying all the overtly expressed hatred spewed at the extreme edges of Christian-nationalist rhetoric is, again, fear, now, at the level of the unconscious, not just the fear of losing economic and political power and racial supremacy, and not even the delusionally paranoid attraction to conspiracy theories based on this mostly conscious fear, but from a classical psychoanalytic perspective: fear of castration—emasculation and loss of white, patriarchal power at a visceral, personal level.

Both at the conscious political level, but also at the unconscious level of castration anxiety, white right-wing evangelical Christians’ apparent love affair with guns becomes more understandable. A flag was brandished by one Trump supporter at the January 6 insurrection: “God, Guns, and Guts—American Needs All Three.”. In the gun culture that characterizes much of the geographical regions where Christian nationalists are most numerous, guns are not looked upon as frightening, but, rather, as utilitarian and reassuring.13

Guns, of course, are also a multivalent symbol of masculine potency—and are now enthusiastically carried by many women as well. Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020) has detailed the ways in which American Christianity, in a backlash during World War I against what was perceived as a soft, feminization of Christ and Christianity, reclaimed a more masculine image of Jesus and a “muscular Christianity” to convince young Christian men that going to war was not only a patriotic duty, but a Christian one as well. This strand of masculinism has persisted in American Christianity, especially in conservative evangelical churches where the theology of male “headship” in home and society reinforces patriarchy as the morally correct Christian hierarchy of authority (from God to Christ to men to women to children).

Revival-style worship further reinforces a pervasive sense of fear and doom among evangelical Christians, and a concomitant need to arm oneself (both spiritually and physically). The sensory immersion of this style of worship and preaching often whiplashes back and forth between warnings about not being pure and prepared enough to be raptured or salvaged from among the sinful on the Day of Judgment, and warnings of the degradation of America today. As journalist Angela Denker (2019) describes, “the necessity of impending doom keeps the fear and defensiveness of many Red State Christians at a fever pitch, which keeps them a captive audience and emotional prey for pastors like Allen [whom she observed preaching at a heavily armed church in Tampa Bay, Florida] or presidents like Trump.” (p. 71) The language of “spiritual warfare” further reinforces the militancy with which Christian nationalists push back against their fear of creeping secularism and the loss of their way of life. It justifies taking (or at least considering) extreme measures to defeat the foe, which is variously described as Satan, or the Left, or both in one breath.14 This feeling of being continually embattled bleeds into the prevalent belief that Christians are being persecuted, not only in other nations (which, in some contexts is horrifyingly true), but in America itself, leading to a perpetually simmering paranoia.

Journalist Michelle Goldberg (2007), who has long followed the Christian right, reports: “The refrain that Christians are under siege creates a sense of perpetual crisis among the movement’s grass roots.” (p. 18; cf., Du Mez 2020, pp. 12–13) Not long after the end of the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts, historian Richard Hofstadter (1964) observed that American politics has always had more than a faint trace of paranoia. As a nation born out of a revolution against an authoritarian monarchy just 250 years ago (which, in comparison to most countries’ history, is a very short time), a certain suspicion against authority continues to be passed down the generations. It shapes a characteristic American embrace of individualism and personal freedoms and also returns over and over, in different generations, as a tendency to mistrust institutions and authorities. Hofstadter noted a tendency toward obsessively seeking out “evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed” (p. 86).

Paranoia—as an amalgam of both fear and hate—provides a fertile, receptive ground for the seeds of conspiracy theories to take root and grow. Christian nationalists are vulnerable to right-wing conspiracy theories, ranging from anti-vaccine campaigns15 (even before COVID), to QAnon. All these distorted notions once considered fringe, but increasingly amplified by social media and right-wing radio talk shows and TV news, align well with one of the foundational sentiments of Christian nationalism—that their “way of life” is being undermined by a cabal of child-abusing liberal politicians and “anti-American” elites. While statistics vary, a number of studies have confirmed that somewhere between one quarter and fully one half of white evangelical Christians “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with QAnon. (Rogers 2021; Kaleem 2021).

At its extreme, this dynamic is also characteristic of cults, and heightened even further when a cult is explicitly religious and the leader presents him- or herself as a shaman or guru. Robert Lifton (2019), a pre-eminent scholar of cults for several decades, has observed that a “sense of apocalypse turns out to be present in extremist political movements no less than in extremist religious cults,” motivated by a “strong emotional commitment to apocalyptic world purification.” (p. 5) The leader increasingly imposes an alternate, paranoid worldview, which encourages the group to act with some urgency to fight against a creeping “defilement” of the world (or nation) in order to restore an imagined ancient purity.

Mystical fabulations, rigid religious rules for behavior, and outright political lies, when repeated often enough, can become normalized to the point where reality and fiction blend together. At a certain point, especially when input is missing from other sources, this creates an alternate reality. The group becomes bonded even more closely together under the mantle of the leader, not only in an “us vs. them” designation of certain enemies, but now an “insider vs. outsider” version of reality itself. Cults are distinguishable from healthy groups not merely by their recruiting strategies (some of which are shared by any group keen on membership growth, as described above), but by the character of the leader. In a healthy group, the leader is outward-focused, concerned for the welfare of group members and supporting them in being able to carry out their mutually agreed-upon goals.16 By contrast, as cult expert Margaret Singer (2003) puts it succinctly, “cult leaders center veneration on themselves” (p. 8).

4. Trauma and Splitting

In addition to the narcissistic symbiosis of leaders and followers, there is the issue of trauma and its impact on individuals. While this factor is admittedly speculative, because there are no studies (to my knowledge) on the percentage of Christian nationalists who have a history of trauma—although there is an increasing attention among therapists to the ways in which religion itself can cause trauma and require trauma-informed treatment after leaving a highly controlling church context (e.g., Russell-Kraft 2021; Winell 2011)—perhaps some of the most vulnerable people who fall prey to extremist views and political agendas are those who, because of prior exposure to violence, abuse, or sexual assault, are prone to seeing the world in terms of absolute good vs. evil.

One of the most difficult aspects of surviving trauma is that such an extreme experience has the capacity to erase nuance from one’s thinking. Witnessing or experiencing violence face to face has the shock effect of reframing many subsequent experiences in terms of all or nothing, totally pure and perfect vs. utterly bad. Psychoanalysts identify this dynamic as psychological “splitting.” (Klein 1946)17 This happens mostly below the level of our conscious awareness, especially because trauma is not established in memory in the same way as ordinary events—the unbearable and overwhelming nature of trauma causes the traumatized person most often to dissociate, so that memories become “stored” separately, without creating a coherent story of what happened. Fragments of experience are kept in different parts of the brain, compartmentalized to be experienced as clouds or jolts of memory, not just in the mind, but also separately in the body, in the emotions, and in behaviors that seem to just “happen” without our conscious intent.18

As Melanie Klein (1946), one of the earliest psychoanalysts in the 20th century, described, such unconscious psychological splitting begins in all of us in infancy, as we try as best as we can as tiny nonverbal beings to manage our experiences of good (tasty milk at just the right temperature, dry diaper, parental holding and feeling safe) vs. bad (nursing mom ate garlic for dinner or the bottle is too hot or too cold, I am wet and scratchy, I am crying but nobody is coming). Transient experiences of discomfort, if not too frequent, are fairly easily absorbed psychologically in the overall context of what early psychoanalyst and pediatrician D.W. Winnicott ([1984] 2019) called “good enough” parenting. No parent can (or should) be perfect (or a child would have no incentive to meet challenges and grow up). Reliable love and caregiving establishes in the infant’s psyche what attachment theorist John Bowlby (1988) called “a secure base” and developmental psychologist Erik Erikson (1950) called “basic trust”. (pp. 247–50) When bad experiences are too extreme, or too frequent, however, as in traumatic situations of abuse and chronic neglect, mentally separating primal sensations of good and bad becomes a psychological necessity, a survival mechanism and defense against overwhelming terror or psychic disintegration.

In infancy, there is no capacity for what we would regard as rational thought or being able to think about a more nuanced reality over time. Experience is in the body, as here-and-now sensation, all good or all bad. We split off our awareness of badness in the parent, because it intolerably threatens our primal attachment to the one on whom we are wholly dependent (and without such attachment, as Harlow (1958) showed, no one can survive intact), and internalize it unconsciously, psychologically, so that we ourselves contain all the badness. But to feel that we are bad also then becomes intolerable, so then we switch to perceiving our parent as bad and ourselves as good. We are psychically restored to our original state of goodness within ourselves, but now the world outside ourselves (represented mainly by the parents) is bad, and that is terrifying. This is what leads to the destruction of “basic trust” and a state of paranoia.

The only way out of this unrelenting back and forth of projective splitting between the all-good and all-bad states kept within ourselves or extruded psychically into our caretakers is, as Klein proposed, that as we mature (even as very young children), we begin to understand that sometimes we are both good and bad, and the same is true for our parents. To learn that we are “good enough,” and that our parents are also reliably “good enough” (if they are) is what enables healthy growth. This gradual recognition of the “good enough”, rather than everything and everyone being either perfect or bad, can lead to reparation, and a reduction in psychological splitting and projection—which she believed was the hallmark of mutual love and the goal of all mature relating.

Reaching this state of “good enough” is the sign of healthy infantile development. But, of course, a good many children do not experience good-enough parenting. Childhood abuse and neglect can set up a lifelong tendency toward splitting that can only be healed by a gradual experience of a new relationship (if one is lucky or determined enough) that is good enough (a grandparent, a wise and caring partner, a good therapist). Under stress, we can all fall back into unconscious splitting, but when we experience real trauma—including well into adulthood—this unconscious dynamic can become the dominant way of perceiving the world. Especially after a sexual violation (as in sexual assault or childhood molestation) or up-close severe violence against oneself or other human beings (as in war or gang violence), or the experience of chronic and unrelenting pain or oppression, a common shared assumption of human goodness may be shattered. And what Klein (1946) termed the “paranoid-schizoid” mode of the psyche can then predominate.

Not all traumatic experiences lead to an official diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”), with its particular symptoms such as flashbacks, nightmares, dissociation, uncontrollable panic rage, or depressive anxiety. (McNally 2003) But even in the best of circumstances, when the aftermath of trauma is well-processed and cared for in the context of a strong support network, an encounter with extreme violence or suffering can still transform an individual’s worldview from one of basic trust to a deep-seated and fundamental distrust, which is very hard to shake. Such experiences teach a tragic lesson that the world is no longer safe (if it ever was). Personal relationships can become laden with projections toward others that cast interactions in a binary victim–perpetrator dynamic, or, as contemporary relational psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin has described in detail, a polarity of “doer and done-to”.19

I am not suggesting that we should assume that all or even most individuals who have experienced trauma would be attracted to groups where fear and paranoia are major emotional features of the group’s agenda. Many trauma survivors, in fact, have a well-attuned radar for the possibility of emotional re-traumatization in such organizations or movements. Nor should we assume that all Christian nationalists are survivors of abuse or other trauma! But there are some—perhaps even many—in whom a tendency toward psychological splitting would make the extreme worldview of certain groups compelling, especially when a charismatic leader seems to present an all-good idealizable protector. Simple (or simplistic) answers to big spiritual, existential, or political questions and unambiguous rules of right and wrong can appeal strongly to an all-or-nothing mindset.

A high-conformity group, with a highly manipulative leader, can exploit the victim–perpetrator thinking of a trauma survivor by framing everything in terms of good vs. evil. Many survivors, having once seen or experienced evil directly, might not be put off as easily as non-traumatized people by the language of purity vs. the demonic, and their own conscious or unconscious desire for justice might stimulate a desire to believe in an imminent cosmic day of reckoning.20 As trauma survivors, they have already experienced the fire and the ice. Especially if such earlier life suffering is still deeply repressed and not available to conscious awareness, they may feel a resonance with apocalyptic rhetoric, and they may experience considerable emotional arousal when called to fight whatever or whomever has been named as the enemy.

This may help to answer a question that many commentators posed immediately after the Jan. 6 insurrection: how could so many former military and police participate in such a lawless rebellion? How could protesters be carrying distinctive “Blue Lives Matter” flags one moment, mixing support for police and a strong “law-and-order” attitude, and the next moment participating in or cheering on deadly acts of violence against the police who were there trying to maintain order? Countless military veterans and law enforcement officers have been exposed to horrible events, often many times over. Even a strong indoctrination into a military culture of masculinist bravado (which is expected of both male and female police and soldiers) may mask more raw and “unacceptable” feelings of fear and vulnerability.

Bulletproof vests and helmets and armored vehicles may (imperfectly) help protect soldiers’ bodies, but there are no bulletproof vests for the psyche. An uncompromising “law-and-order” attitude, especially when amalgamated with white supremacy, is as much a symptom of psychological splitting as is a preference to use violence to solve problems (whether in public or in private relationships21). Thus, the conflation of “God, guns, and guts” also has unconscious post-traumatic resonance. There are only good guys and bad guys, and when the fight is on (whether it is to “stop the steal,” or to “take America back for God”), there is no middle ground. As Trump infamously exhorted the crowd on 6 January, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

5. Who Is Carrying Non-Christian Nationalist Christians’ Disavowed Aggression?

Finally, and probably most speculatively, is the insight we might possibly derive from unconscious group-relations theory.22 Might Christian nationalists be “carrying” aggression for the rest of the Christian community—the “body of Christ”—in America? Christian theology—however distorted and misused over the centuries in the course of Crusades and other wars in the name of Christianity—at its heart repudiates violence. Jesus himself, worshipped by Christians as the Messiah, is also known as the “Prince of Peace.” Numerous passages in the New Testament—both in the narratives of Jesus’ life and teachings in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and in the Epistles exhorting the members of the early church how to live a truly Christian life—portray Jesus as a model who stood for justice in the midst of a Jewish society bearing the yoke of a cruel first-century Roman oppression. The way to peace, for Jesus and the early Christians, was justice, and nonviolent resistance to dominating powers. This, of course, is a liberal reading of the New Testament. Evangelical Christians and many Catholics emphasize personal salvation through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Christian nationalists, however, have so distorted even the traditional evangelical understanding of Christian theology for the sake of maintaining political power (e.g., Stewart 2020) and accomplishing certain conservative aims (such as the prohibition against abortion), that there has been a fusion of violent rhetoric with a nominal but scarcely defensible Christian identity. This is justified in Christian-nationalist circles by a “millenialist” understanding of the Apocalypse as a violent overthrowing of the current world order—led by Christ himself in the Second Coming—and one that will not happen in some remote, unfathomable time, but must be brought about by Christians themselves through holy warfare. So Christian nationalists embrace warfare in the name of Christ, brandishing semi-automatic weapons in public without any sense of contradiction with their self-avowed Christian faith.

But what about the rest of us who still embrace Christianity as a religion of justice and peace through nonviolence? Where do we put our own necessarily human aggression (not to mention Christians’ centuries-old aversion to and efforts to control sexuality, especially women’s sexuality!?) The “muscular Christianity” of the 20th century was a reaction against the perception of a feminization of Christianity in the Victorian era. But both popular expressions of Christianity were defensive—the former, as a masculine defense against castration anxiety and loss of power (both personal and political), and the latter, as a stereotypically feminine reaction formation that repressed both aggression and libido in favor of etiquette and sentimentality. (Pictures of a blond, white Jesus surrounded by sheep and little children—still popular today in many places—served both to neuter and whiten the Jesus depicted in the Gospels, and to infantilize believers.)

Where might integration and a movement beyond paranoid splitting be possible, in which the genuine love expressed in the Gospels might be a channel for constructive aggression (including an embrace of authentic, fully incarnational sexuality and gender equality)? Perhaps such integration might best be as nonviolent resistance to injustice, and positive political engagement? It is far too much to unpack in this article, but perhaps aspects of a model might be found in the 20th-century Social Gospel movement, or in the Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day, both of which offered approaches to addressing poverty and social injustice that differed from either sentimentality or stark appeals to physical strength. These and other 20th-century alternative Gospel-centered movements were not without their own problems, including their own sexism and racism. But they provide an alternative that is perhaps less prone to demonizing the other than expressions of Christianity that live within a paranoid-schizoid worldview. Neither defensive masculinism nor saccharine Christian sentimentality will do, but in what ways might we, in our own time, turn toward Gospel-centered action, holding together both justice-making, and mercy—strength and care—both for individuals and for the nation?