Two of the nation’s leading opponents of Christian nationalism are joining forces in a new video report designed to call out proponents of the ideology.
“We are going to push back on the people who would deport Jesus, who would deport Baby Jesus — historical Jesus,” journalist and political commentator Joy Reid said about her new project with Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research Institute and author of three books on white supremacy.
Robert P. Jones
Reid and Jones will team up at 7 p.m. Eastern the third Wednesday of each month for “Confronting White Christian Nationalism,” which will air as a segment of Reid’s Joy Reid Show YouTube series. The first installment was recorded Dec. 17 and posted the following day.
The pair will tackle a wide range of issues connected to Christian nationalism, including Project 2025 and the “performative cruelty” of the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters, said Reid, who hosted The ReidOut on MSNBC before the program’s cancellation last February.
“They go to church on Sunday saying, ‘Our God is an awesome God,’ because they are complete hypocrites,” she said. “They are white Christian nationalists, and the Christian has an asterisk on it.”
Polling conducted by PRRI demonstrates most Americans oppose President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, Jones said.
“The good news is there has been movement almost in every demographic in Trump’s disapproval numbers, which have been cratering,” he said. White evangelicals are “still with him, but if you look at African American Christians, Latino Protestants, even Latino Catholics, they are all opposing these immigration actions.”
Polling also has shown only three in 10 Americans support Christian nationalism and its demands that the country should be based on Christian values and the U.S. should declare itself a “Christian nation.”
“Yes, we’re polarized, but we’re not evenly polarized here. It’s just that one group has seized the levers of power because there are two groups that are in majority supporting that worldview — one of them are Republicans and the other one are white evangelical Protestants,” he explained.
The Christian nationalism driving Trump’s immigration policies also is evident in the brutal treatment of dark-skinned immigrants and in the red carpet rolled out for white South Africans being resettled in the country, he said.
“No, Donald Trump also said he’d like some Swedes,” Reid injected.
“Right, let me not be too restrictive about it. But yes, it’s just so plain and so clear what that’s about,” Jones said, and polling reveals white Christians are “more likely than others to say they’d prefer to live in a racially homogeneous country.”
Opponents of Christian nationalism should remember the racist ideology is as old as the country itself, Jones added. “It came to these lands with European Christians when they landed on these shores. It’s just this concept, simply put, that these lands were intended to be a kind of divinely ordained promised land for European Christians. That’s the Christian nationalist claim.”