The rise and rise of Christian nationalism

Week 1 ‍

To understand one of the most consequential religious movements in contemporary politics, we need to go back to the deepest structures of Christian political thought. This opening session digs at the roots of Christian Nationalism in the early modern period. We start in early modern England, where two long traditions converged. The first is th eChristian habit of identifying with Israel: Protestant monarchs celebrated as new Davids, Puritan settlers crossing to a new promised land. The second is the slow emergence of race as a theological category: as Europeans encountered peoples radically unlike themselves, they reached for biblical genealogy to make sense of human difference, collapsing race into lineage and lineage into divine destiny.

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Week 2

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a remarkable cluster of movements that would prove to be the immediate building blocks of today’s Christian Nationalism. This session introduces British Israelism - the pseudo-historical claim that white Europeans are the true Israel of the Bible - and follows its racial logic from John Wilson's 1840 founding text through to its American expressions. In the American context we will look at the life and work of John Alexander Dowie who governed a small suburban theocracy on the outskirts of Chicago, and Charles Fox Parham who founded the global Pentecostalist movement whilst at the same time serving as a preacher for the Ku Klux Klan.

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Week 3

This session tells the story of how a 1948 revival in a small Canadian Bible college gave birth to a theology of Christian dominance — the idea that an elite cadre of End-Times believers would exercise supernatural power not just over disease and death but over government itself. We follow that idea through the faith-healing revivals of the 1950s and into the formation of what C. Peter Wagner called the New Apostolic Reformation — a loosely connected network of self-appointed apostles and prophets who believed that God had called them to take control of every sphere of American life and to establish a Christian theocracy.

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Week 4

In the American context, Christian nationalists have long called for a long-march through the institutions. Many argue that the education system is the most important battleground in the struggle against secular democracy. In the 1980s and 1990s Doug Wilson – a pastor in small-town Idaho – set about building a network of schools, colleges, and homeschool curricula on an explicitly Neo-Confederate theology: the belief that the antebellum South represented a genuinely Christian civilisation worth recovering. At the same time, David Barton, became the de facto historian of the American right, rewriting the story of the founding as an explicitly Christian nationalist project and embedding that story in public school textbooks used across Texas and beyond.

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Week 5:

In the final session we examine the prophecy culture that surrounded Donald Trump's candidacies, the access which Christian nationalist pastors have gained to the White House, and the way QAnon absorbed and secularised prophetic epistemology while reviving some of the oldest antisemitic tropes in Western history. We will examine the events of January 6^th 2020 and Project 2025 both of which are rooted in Christian nationalist thought and which promise to shape the politics of the United States in the coming years and decades.

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