Like a comet closing in on Planet Earth, the US presidential election is hurtling toward its destination. With around two weeks left before impact, the stakes of the choice before the American electorate are becoming ever clearer, as are the differences between the parties’ standard bearers.
Robert P. Jones, President and Founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), has long been one of the sharpest observers of those consequential differences. In contrast to the horse race mentality that dominates US election coverage, Jones grounds his analysis in a sophisticated, data-based understanding of religion, race, and authoritarianism.
A number of large outlets covered aspects of PRRI’s recent survey report which offers important new insights into the landscape of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism in American politics. But in order to dig a bit deeper into the implications of this research, RD Senior Writer Daniel Schultz spoke to Jones about the popularity of authoritarianism, the tip of the GOP spear, and why this election isn’t just about who we want to lead us, but how we want to be led.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I don’t want to discount the threat posed by authoritarianism and Christian nationalism, but it’s striking to see how unpopular that authoritarian project really is. Just 14% of Americans think that if Trump isn’t confirmed, the election is invalid. Only 19% think the president should be able to ignore Congress.
I think you’re right. There’s some scary news here, but there’s some good news. Overwhelmingly Americans aren’t lining up behind the authoritarian project and aren’t buying the strongman cocktail that Trump is trying to sell.
It’s particularly true when you start asking about specifics: Are we going to need to resort to violence? Do we need to ensure the rightful leader takes office? It’s notable that all three of our questions that had to do with violence [showed around the same level of support]. It’s around 15, 16 percent who say we need armed poll watchers, we need to use violence to ensure the rightful leader takes office, [that] we may have to resort to violence to save the country.
It’s only about one in 10 who are hardcore Christian nationalism adherents. If you look at the kind of hard edge of this, overwhelmingly Americans reject those views. I think the challenges start to be that, when we’re talking about authoritarianism—in particular, talking about violence—we don’t need a majority of folks supporting violence to get violence.
For example, Republicans are two and a half times more likely than Democrats to agree with these measures of political violence. So then you start saying, okay, well, one of our two political parties has somewhere between one in four and three in ten agreeing with violent actions in the context of an election. That starts to become troubling, even if overall it’s not at all where Americans are. There’s a kind of minority view that’s become amplified within one of our two political parties.
Ten percent of Americans is still 35 million people.
Yeah, right. You can do a lot of damage with that.
Some of these measures have actually dropped since you last measured them. The Child-Rearing Authoritarianism Scale score in particular stood out. Do you have a sense of what drives those shifts?
I can only conjecture here, but the threat of violence in the United States and political terms is no longer an abstract problem after January 6, 2021, right? We’ve seen the actual possibilities there and one of our two leading candidates for president saying things like, “If I don’t get elected, there’ll be a bloodbath.” Then he says, “Oh, it’s not really what I was talking about.” But we know how that rhetoric works, that it’s out there to do some work. Then you do start to be concerned.
I would be much more concerned if we saw it going up, if we saw the steady upward trajectories. Instead of a growing appeal, what we may be seeing is an emboldening of a very small minority, so that they’re not convincing more people, but we may be seeing credibility being given to the very few that do hold these beliefs.
Sure. One exception to that decline is around immigration and culture and identity. About four in 10 Americans think their society is losing its culture. It’s easy to see why Republicans would think it would be a great wedge issue for them.
Yeah, I think that’s right. They’re playing on the real changing demographics in the country. I mean, that’s real, not just in California and New York; it’s real in Nebraska and Kansas and Illinois. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the latest kerfuffle we have over these ridiculous completely fabricated claims about immigrants eating pets comes out of Ohio. That’s not a story coming out of Texas.
One of the oldest questions we have on this subject is about what to do with immigrants who are here in the country without documentation. We’ve been asking that question for almost 15 years now. We have a three-part question asking:
- Should we offer them a path to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements?
- Should we give them some other kind of [immigration] status even if we don’t grant them citizenship?
- Or should we identify them and deport them?
The general population number is about 60-40: a little more than six in 10 Americans [agree with a] path to citizenship and the rest are divided among these other positions.
But what we’ve seen are two things. The [second] option has thinned out a little bit and the deportation number [option 3] has gone up. That’s mostly been because Republicans have shifted. They’ve actually followed the lead of Trump and become less supportive. We used to have a slim majority of Republicans supporting that idea, but now it’s slipped below a majority with increasing numbers moving toward deportation. But again, [overall] it’s still more like 60-40, with most Americans [in favor of some form of immigration] status for those who are in the country without documentation.
It sounds like you find a lot of support for the thesis of asymmetric radicalization.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. You can absolutely see it here. I think the clearest place to see it, and to see it connected tightly to Trump, is where we looked at support for this new right-wing authoritarianism scale. We looked at the differences between self-identified Republicans who had a favorable view of Trump versus self-identified Republicans who had an unfavorable view. So Republican versus Republican.
The only difference is one group supports Trump and one does not. What you see is that the group that supports Trump—I mean, 75% of them score high or very high on the authoritarianism scale, versus only 39% of those Republicans who don’t support Trump. In fact, the ones who don’t support Trump look pretty much like the general population on that scale. Whereas the Republicans who now support Trump are just kind of off-the-scale on that authoritarianism scale.
This gets into the most striking thing for me in reading through the whole report. It seems like Americans are trying to decide not just who they want their leaders to be, but how they want to be led, or how they want to solve these societal problems. Do they want that authoritarian path, or do they want a less authoritarian path? Do you think that’s a reasonable conclusion from your data?
I think that that’s right. Yeah, I think it’s an astute way of thinking about this. In many ways, this election is less about policies and more about that kind of [larger] question. Trump can run roughshod over the Republican platform’s nearly half-century commitment to a ban on abortion, and pay no penalty for it among his staunchest supporters. Which tells you right off, it’s about something else. And so what are the stakes?
I think they’re about how we want to be led, [which is] a question about democracy. And it’s about what kind of a country we want to be and who counts. Who’s included in the vision. Those are linked questions. If you’re envisioning a democracy that really is about including everyone regardless of race and religion on equal footing, then you have to have democratic procedures in order for that to happen.
If you’re running a Christian nationalist state, where White Christians of European descent have pride of place over everyone else in the country, well, then you can run an authoritarian regime that gives preference to that group and everyone else just kind of gets what they can get, as second- or third-class citizens.
I think, absolutely, this election’s about who we want to be as a country. And related to that, if we want to be a pluralistic democracy, then how we want to be governed. That we have to kind of move away from this authoritarian temptation and move toward a more democratic spot.
Thinking a little bit about this, I think that Christians are always particularly tempted by the authoritarian impulse. Part of that’s because of patriarchal and often hierarchical structures inside of Christianity itself. There’s styles, pastoral leadership models, church hierarchies, that all lend themselves to an authoritarian culture. But the other temptation is that if you get the authoritarian leader who represents your interest, you can guarantee certain ends. Then the means cease to matter. But that’s not democracy.
The challenge for many Christians is to figure out how to take our place in a pluralistic democracy where we may not win the policy argument. We may lose the policy argument and we have to be willing to live in that context, still as good citizens. I think we have a paucity of Christian theology to help Christians live that way.
Right, I’ve often thought over the course of this election that there’s a huge theological aspect to it, not just in those terms of straightforward theological propositions, but in how we view things. How we understand facts. How we want to be in the world.
I think that’s right. And a kind of humility here, particularly for my people, White evangelical Protestants, the group I grew up in. I often thought [we would possess] an epistemological humility that says: Okay, we belong to the group that was absolutely on the wrong side of justice and history and God, on slavery, on segregation, on our conceptualization of who non-European people were and how we were to be in relationship with them. We got all that wrong. Shouldn’t that maybe leave us a little more humility in how we go marching into politics, declaring that we have all the answers?
Sure. God hastens to chasten. Discuss.
Yeah, right.
Do you have takeaways that you want to leave us with?
Just to sharpen the immigration point, where we’re seeing immigration as the tip of the spear, is the dividing of the us and the them, in the electorate. It’s always in the toolkit of authoritarian leaders to create categories of us and them, to scapegoat immigrants. Even the rhetoric we’re hearing—poisoning the blood of the country, eating pets, even the mention of Hannibal Lecter—is always done by Trump in the proximity of immigration. So they’re literally cannibals, right? That’s the most extreme form of othering and subhumanizing another group. These things all hang together.
I think that’s why immigration is the thing that Trump is always pivoting to, because it’s always the best tool in his toolbox to drive his authoritarian agenda forward.
And to the extent that anyone can tell, he really believes it.
I think, though, Trump doesn’t practice Christianity in any recognizable way, [but] he culturally believes this is a White Christian country. And that’s who he’s going to bring back.
