The assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University is undoubtedly going to lead to a lot of conversation about our identity as a nation, the nature of our problems and how we pursue justice.
One of the contexts for these conversations is college campuses. As Mara Richards Bim reported earlier this year, Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA grew in popularity due to hosting public debates on college campuses that included guest appearances by “alt-right neo-Nazis like Milo Yiannopoulos” and led to “massive (and sometimes violent) protests.”
The evening before Kirk’s assassination in Utah, I attended a different event about politics and religion at Clemson University’s Department of Philosophy and Religion that featured sociologist Samuel Perry speaking on the topic “What is Religion Now? And Why Does It Still Matter?”
Samuel Perry
Even though the two events each focused on religion and politics, they could not have been more different. Kirk’s event was outdoors with all the excitement that comes from the clashing of a political rally, while Perry’s event was in a classroom as students and faculty sat quietly to learn. Kirk’s event included cheers as he debated about transgender mass shooters, while Perry’s event included the quiet reflection of nodding heads as he explained the results of peer-reviewed research projects.
Then there’s the contrast between Kirk, who never attended college, and Perry who is one of the leading sociologists of our day.
What happened to Kirk was a tragedy. Despite our differences, he was a human being who deserved to be valued and loved. There is no excuse for violence against anyone, including Kirk. We need to have space to grieve and be angry.
Perry posted on Bluesky after Kirk’s death: “Your condemnations of political violence don’t mean a damn thing when you only apply them to victims on your team. Having real principles means you unequivocally condemn political violence as anti-democratic and immoral even against villains. Kirk is dead. This is abhorrent. I condemn this completely.”
We also need to reflect on how to have healthier dialogue at college campuses. And Samuel Perry’s event last Tuesday evening at Clemson University was an excellent example of the kinds of conversations we need to have moving forward.
How religion works in our lives
Like Kirk, Perry identifies as a Protestant Christian, comfortably mentioning it throughout his presentation, which was largely centered around his book Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion. As Perry put it, his interest in discussing religion publicly is to explore “how it works in our lives.”
Perry began by noting the similarity between his book title and another book called Democracy for Realists.
“We tend to approach democracy as if it was people making rational choices on the basis of information they gather and voting in light of those decisions.”
“We tend to approach democracy as if it was people making rational choices on the basis of information they gather and voting in light of those decisions and electing their representatives on the basis of information,” Perry said. But Perry added the book by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels demonstrates how people actually make decisions — more “on the basis of vibes, on the basis of identity and fear and anger and the kinds of messages that they get.”
Religion, Perry argues, functions much in the same way.
Misconceptions about how religion works
One of the most fundamental problems going on is the disconnect between how we assume religion forms us and how religion actually forms us.
As Perry mentioned, most Anglo-Protestants assume: “You have a set of convictions or commitments to a body of ideas or doctrines and the primary change agent is obedience or individuals acting in obedience.” To these Christians, Perry says, “You have people who believe faithfully in certain doctrines and ideas, and we change the world one person at a time.”
But this is not how religion works.
Rather than primarily being rooted in beliefs, Perry shows how our religious and political reality flows from group identity. Or as Perry puts it, “We are belongers before we are believers.”
Projecting onto God othering the ‘ill-shaped’
Perry noted how the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza used the illustration of a circle claiming God is circular or a triangle claiming God is triangular. “Each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped,” Spinoza argued.
In other words, Perry summarized, “Spinoza is saying social groups project their own values, the things they prioritize, onto God.”
“Our theological claims are conditioned by our social contexts,” Perry affirmed.
For example, Perry talked about one survey where researchers asked people what God thought about certain political policies. But when the people responded, the researchers went on to give them more information that changed their views about the policies. And then suddenly, they believed God thought differently about the policies too.
In Perry’s own research, he has asked people to place Jesus on an ideological spectrum from liberal to conservative. And as would be expected, Perry found 73% of conservatives said Jesus was on the right, 70% of moderates said Jesus was a moderate, and 76% of liberals said Jesus was a liberal. Each group projected theology onto Jesus from their social identity.
“It turns out the best predictor of Jesus’ political ideology is your political ideology.”
“It turns out the best predictor of Jesus’ political ideology is your political ideology,” Perry quipped.
So imagine how this might fuel some of our problems today. White evangelicals are fully convinced they are being driven by theology, when at a deeper reality their theology is being projected from their social identity and those who disagree are considered “ill-shaped.”
Developing vocabularies of motive
One example Perry explores is how white evangelicals think about adoption. When asked why they pursue adoption, he says evangelicals typically respond with: “It’s the gospel. It’s the Great Commission. This is why we feel called, compelled to adopt these children and to carry out the Great Commission. Jesus adopted us and so we’re going to adopt them.”
But after interviewing hundreds of families as well as those who were writing books, Perry said, “It became clear that almost to the person, almost to all of them, their story didn’t start with some theology of adoption. It started with infertility.”
“Adoption wasn’t the Plan A for most of these people. It was Plan B, by far Plan B,” he explained. “After they had tried and tried and tried, they started to investigate adoption. And they started to read books by Christians about adoption. And they started to develop what C. Wright Mills, the famous sociologist, called ‘vocabularies of motive.’ They started to learn Christian ways of articulating why they were doing what they were doing. And they always had to start with theological justifications. In other words, it started with infertility, wrestling with this, ‘I really want kids.’ But they couldn’t say, ‘Well, we just want kids.’ They didn’t feel like they could say that. They had to come up with some kind of a theological vocabulary of motive, a justification that cited the gospel or the Great Commission.”
He added: “By the time I talked to them, they probably believed theology required them to explore this. But what got them initially interested in this was something deeper, a group identity, a norm about what it meant to be a Christian adult.”
His conclusion: “Theology does matter. But often our theology is downstream of our group identity and norms.”
Sorting into polarized political identities
During the 1970s, white Christians who attended worship weekly were a lot more politically overlapping than they are today. As Perry showed, 35.9% of them were either strong Republican or leaning Republican, while 51.7% were either strong Democrat or leaning Democrat. But in the 2020s, everything is reversed and polarized. Among weekly worship attenders, those on the right are 60.4%, while those on the left are just 19.9%.
In other words, while there once was far more overlap, today Perry says, “Our social identities have become organized and subordinated under our partisan or political identities to where these identities now overlap in some key ways. And with that comes social isolation, the inability to understand each other, to interact with each other in any kind of real ways.
“Our social identities have become organized and subordinated under our partisan or political identities.”
“And that’s problematic for a variety of reasons because we can’t get past hatred, distrust, lack of understanding if we never actually interact with one another and if we don’t ever have reason to interact with one another because these social groups are so disconnected now. And that is what happened to American religion.”
A prioritization of politics
“So what does that mean when the political identity starts to almost perfectly overlap with the religious identity?” Perry asked.
Then he shared what pastors began telling him after 2020: “If I came out and said something about George Floyd and racism, people left and people came. If I didn’t say anything about George Floyd and racism, people left and people came. If I wore a mask, or if I held online services, people left or people came. If I came out for Trump, if I didn’t come out for Trump, people left and they came on the basis of what I was doing politically. I didn’t preach a different thing. I didn’t change my theology. But people were feeling out — are these my kinds of people who go to this church?’”
One way this has showed up is in how evangelicals dismiss Donald Trump’s immorality and treatment of women. From one study Perry shared, in 2011, 60% of white evangelicals said “an elected official who commits immoral acts in their personal lives can’t be ethical in their public duties.” In 2018, that number went down to just 16%. One would imagine that number would be even lower today.
Perry said, “Our theology of morals and right or wrong is predictably downstream of what might serve my religious, political, cultural, ideological group.”
Similarly, Perry found before and after the 2020 election that when Trump loses elections, white and Republican evangelicals are significantly less likely to believe God appoints the president, with 56% believing this prior to the election and just 34% believing it after the election.
“The only thing that changed was Trump lost and so God no longer appoints the president for that percentage.”
Perry joked, “The only thing that changed was Trump lost and so God no longer appoints the president for that percentage.”
While Black and Democratic evangelicals remained consistent in their views of the morality of elected officials and of God’s appointment of the president over time, white and Republican evangelicals were dramatically shifting their theology based on what happened politically for Trump.
Theology still matters
Of course, despite understanding how theology grows from our group identity, it still matters in shaping how we treat our neighbors. For example, Perry studied the relationship between Christians who believe the rapture is going to happen before the end of the world and who care about addressing climate change.
“We found that telling Americans God is in control of the future made them less inclined to view climate change as a threat, support policy interventions addressing climate change, and even made them less likely to want information about climate change,” he said.
To the contrary, he noted, “When we told people humans were in control of the earth’s future, it made them more likely to say, ‘No, actually I do want more information about climate change. This is a thing we need to address with policy.’”
So Perry suggested: “We need to think differently about theological beliefs and claims. Rather than thinking about theology, our religious beliefs, primarily as driving our religious behavior and other kinds of behavior like politics and the way we treat people, theological beliefs and claims more often serve as group identity signalers. We express, ‘We favor A-B-C, and we oppose those who believe X-Y-Z.’ And that has social consequences because it draws boundary lines. It signals who is a part of our group and who is not part of our group. And this reinforces itself — who is in, who is out, who I interact with, who I know, who I value.”
A fuel for violence
That piece about who we value has a lot of implications for those who aren’t in our group.
Perry explained: “Theology serves as group identity amplifiers. It infuses what might otherwise be secular ‘Us vs. Them’ conflicts with cosmic and ultimate significance. This is the danger of sorting.”
“What happens when the other side is Satan and the children of Satan?” Perry asked. “What happens when if the other side wins, we plunge the nation into a thousand years of darkness, this is light and darkness, angels and demons, God vs. Satan. What happens when we amplify those partisan conflicts with cosmic and ultimate significance? I think that is potentially a fuel for violence.”
Little did Perry know what would happen at another college in Utah the following day.
This is why so much of my concern is with the rhetoric of Christian nationalists like Sean Feucht or Charlie Kirk. To men like them, these conversations on college campuses are not merely exchanges of ideas or neighbors coming together to discuss how to make the world a better place. Instead, these college campus clashes are spiritual warfare.
They’re not using theology in a way that subverts the passions of violent retribution. They’re using theological language in a way that sacralizes fighting against the “ill-formed” other who fail to conform to Christian nationalist projections of God.
Embracing a deeper group identity
In one sense, Charlie Kirk represented a group of people who are the “other” for me. There’s simply no way I could ever approve of the language he used and the policies he pushed against my neighbors. But in a deeper way, we shared a group identity. We both were human. And every human deserves to be valued and loved. So every human belongs. As Perry opened by saying, “We are belongers before we are believers.”
“We share a common fate as Americans, as people, as human beings in a world.”
I asked Perry how we should respond to Christians whose theology says a lot of us don’t belong because we supposedly aren’t sons and daughters of God like they are.
“We share a common fate as Americans, as people, as human beings in a world,” Perry replied. “We are linked together in that regard. And I think that can build a collective sense of identity.”
“Maybe they do think you go to hell,” he acknowledged. “Maybe they do think you don’t clear the bar in terms of what God will bless in the afterlife. But I think there is a lot of wiggle room in terms of how we end up treating difference in our society. And I think that matters with kind of a broader set of cultural values.”
Ultimately, he suggested we send a message to “conflict entrepreneurs” at the national level that we’re not interested in their polarizing politics, and then focus our attention locally.
“A remedy to a lot of this partisan sorting where we hate each other and don’t understand each other and can’t get along is addressed by getting involved with local politics where I have to work with people who are next-door neighbors and down the street toward common sets of goals. They can be evangelical Christians. They can be Muslims. They can be atheists,” he said. “But we want to get the school funded. We want to get these nice things that we want as a community.
“People who might otherwise say ‘Us vs. Them’ at a national level won’t do that at a local level.”
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.