Philippa Kaur

In the run-up to the U.S. midterm elections, some politicians continue to ride the wave of what’s known as “Christian nationalism” in ways that are increasingly vocal and direct.

GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Donald Trump loyalist from Georgia, told an interviewer on July 23, 2022, that the Republican Party “need[s] to be the party of nationalism. And I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”

Similarly, Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, recently said, “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church.” Boebert called the separation of church and state “junk.”

Many Christian nationalists repeat conservative activist David Barton’s argument that the Founding Fathers did not intend to keep religion out of government.

As a scholar of racism and communication who has written about white nationalism during the Trump presidency, I find the amplification of Christian nationalism unsurprising. Christian nationalism is prevalent among Trump supporters, as religion scholars Andrew Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry argue in their book “Taking Back America for God.”

Perry and Whitehead describe the Christian nationalist movement as being “as ethnic and political as it is religious,” noting that it relies on the assumption of white supremacy. Christian nationalism combines belief in a particular form of Christianity with nativist and populist political platforms. American Christian nationalism is a worldview based on the belief that America is superior to other countries, and that that superiority is divinely established. In this mindset, only Christians are true Americans.

Parts of the movement fit into a broader right-wing extremist history of violence, which has been on the rise over the past few decades and was particularly on display during the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.

The vast majority of Christian nationalists never engage in violence. Nonetheless, Christian nationalist thinking suggests that unless Christians control the state, the state will suppress Christianity.

From siege to militia buildup

Violence perpetrated by Christian nationalists has manifested in two primary ways in recent decades. The first is through their involvement in militia groups; the second is seen in attacks on abortion providers.

The catalyst for the growth of militia activity among contemporary Christian nationalists stems from two events: the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff and the 1993 siege at Waco.

At Ruby Ridge, former Army Green Beret Randy Weaver engaged federal law enforcement in an 11-day standoff at his rural Idaho cabin over charges relating to the sale of sawed-off shotguns to an ATF informant investigating Aryan Nation white supremacist militia meetings.

Supporters of Randy Weaver. The Ruby Ridge standoff sparked the expansion of radical right-wing groups.
AP Photo/Jeff T. Green, File

Weaver ascribed to the Christian Identity movement, which emphasizes adherence to Old Testament laws and white supremacy. Christian Identity members believe in the application of the death penalty for adultery and LBGTQ relationships in accordance with their reading of some biblical passages.

During the standoff, Weaver’s wife and teenage son were shot and killed before he surrendered to federal authorities.

In the Waco siege a year later, cult leader David Koresh and his followers entered a standoff with federal law enforcement at the group’s Texas compound, once again concerning weapons charges. After a 51-day standoff, federal law enforcement laid siege to the compound. A fire took hold at the compound in disputed circumstances, leading to the deaths of 76 people, including Koresh.

The two events spurred a nationwide militia buildup. As sociologist Erin Kania argues: “Ruby Ridge and Waco confrontations drove some citizens to strengthen their belief that the government was overstepping the parameters of its authority. … Because this view is one of the founding ideologies of the American Militia Movement, it makes sense that interest and membership in the movement would sharply increase following these standoffs between government and nonconformists.”

Distrust of the government blended with strains of Christian fundamentalism have brought together two groups with formerly disparate goals.

Christian nationalism and violence

Christian fundamentalists and white supremacist militia groups both figured themselves as targeted by the government in the aftermath of the standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco. As scholar of religion Ann Burlein argues, “Both the Christian right and right-wing white supremacist groups aspire to overcome a culture they perceive as hostile to the white middle class, families, and heterosexuality.”

Significantly, in 1995, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and accomplice Terry Nichols cited revenge for the Waco siege as a motive for the bombing of the Alfred Murrah federal building. The terrorist act killed 168 people and injured hundreds more.

Since 1993, at least 11 people have been murdered in attacks on abortion clinics in cities across the U.S., and there have been numerous other plots.

They have involved people like the Rev. Michael Bray, who attacked multiple abortion clinics. Bray was the spokesman for Paul Hill, a Christian Identity adherent who murdered physician John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett in 1994 outside of a Florida abortion clinic.

In yet another case, Eric Rudolph bombed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. In his confession, he cited his opposition to abortion and anti-LGBTQ views as motivation to bomb Olympic Square.

These men cited their involvement with the Christian Identity movement in their trials as motivation for engaging in violence.

Mainstreaming Christian nationalist ideas

The presence of Christian nationalist ideas in recent political campaigns is concerning, given its ties to violence and white supremacy.

Trump and his advisers helped to mainstream such rhetoric with events like his photo op with a Bible in Lafayette Square in Washington following the violent dispersal of protesters, and making a show of pastors laying hands on him. But that legacy continues beyond his administration.

Candidates like Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania who attended the Jan. 6 Trump rally, are now using the same messages.

In some states, such as Texas and Montana, hefty funding for far-right Christian candidates has helped put Christian nationalist ideas in the mainstream.

Blending politics and religion is not necessarily a recipe for Christian nationalism, nor is Christian nationalism a recipe for political violence. At times, however, Christian nationalist ideas can serve as a prelude.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Jan. 15, 2021. More

George Perry Floyd, Jr. was murdered when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin sank his knee into Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Video footage went viral within hours, helping to inspire protests against racism and police violence that lasted all the American summer of 2020.

But while the size of the protests was unprecedented, the activism of that summer had deep roots. Journalists across the United States and indeed the world, focused attention on that history of protest, as they had done during the 2014 police killings of Eric Garner, choked to death in New York, and Michael Brown, shot in Ferguson, Missouri.

Review: His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice – Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Penguin RandomHouse)

At the Washington Post, reporters and researchers devoted significant resources to a six-part series, George Floyd’s America. Now, two of those journalists, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, have expanded the work into a book: His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

When Floyd was born in 1973, 200,000 people were incarcerated in the US. By the time of his death, as Samuels and Olorunnipa point out, that number exceeded 2 million. The proportionate rate of growth of that number in Texas, where Floyd grew up, is even worse. African Americans are locked up at 4.75 times the rate of white Americans; Latinos at 1.3 times the rate.

This extraordinary rate of incarceration is a political choice rather than a reflection of more violent criminals being locked up. Rates of incarceration increase with political conservatism and the increased rates of poverty, income inequality and unemployment that accompany that conservatism. Extensive investment in prisons, jails and police forces has created a self-perpetuating system that evolves by producing the very criminals it locks up.

This life-and-times biography poignantly depicts the mechanisms by which African Americans, especially male children and adults, become disproportionately the fodder for that system. A long history of racism, it might be said, funnelled George Floyd to prison.

Read more:
The fury in US cities is rooted in a long history of racist policing, violence and inequality

The grandson of sharecroppers

Floyd’s two parents were both born to sharecroppers in North Carolina. The cycle of poverty in which they were trapped was not of their own making. Black Americans have been prevented from building wealth from the moment slavery ended.

Floyd’s great-great-grandfather, for example, who was born into slavery in 1857, amassed land worth $US30,000 in 1920, but his white neighbours stole it from him by a mixture of fraud underpinned by the threat of violence. That tale is absolutely typical for a majority of Black families in the US South.

The knock-on effects have been intensified by government policies that meant for generations, Black Americans had fewer opportunities for education; earned less even for the same work; and were prevented from buying property that would build wealth over generations.

Desperate for a better life for her three children, Floyd’s mother uprooted them to Houston, Texas, when Floyd was four. There, they lived in public housing in the segregated Third Ward.

Government policies that requisitioned homes from Black residents elsewhere in Houston had forced them into this section of the city. In the Cuney Homes development, known as “the Bricks,” even today the median income is US$15,538, well under half the national average.

A memorial to Floyd in Houston’s Third Ward.
David J. Phillip/AP

Floyd attended the local Jack Yates Senior High School, opened in 1926 when education was segregated by race and never the equal of other Houston schools catering to white children. As Floyd grew to 193 centimetres tall, he learned to offset the alarm that his size and colour induced in people.

He became self-deprecating and deliberately easy-going, charming people across generations everywhere he went. Excelling at football, he secured entry to college.

But Floyd’s dreams of playing pro football were stymied by his academic achievements. Never good at tests, Floyd fell behind by middle school and struggled to graduate high school. There were just not the resources in the schools to make up for living in poverty in an overcrowded flat with the responsibilities of caring for relatives.

After four years at two colleges, Floyd dropped out and returned to Houston. Not long after, he was arrested for the first time for selling drugs.

Samuels and Olorunnipa do an extremely good job of showing that at every node along the passage toward being turned into fodder for the prison-industrial complex, Floyd’s chance of escape was significantly less than that of a white man of the same age. Reading how Floyd’s options narrowed, it was impossible not to share his frustration and despair.

Protestors gather near the scene of the arrest of George Floyd on May 28, 2020.
Craig Lassig/EPA

Forensic exposé of injustice

Quotas for arrests meant police sought the “low-hanging fruit” of petty drug dealing done on the streets. Misconduct charges for these police officers are common: the cop who arrested Floyd in 1997 for selling drugs was sacked in 2002 after being charged with theft and hampering arrest. The officer who arrested Floyd in 2004 was “later accused of falsifying charges in hundreds of drug cases, including the one involving Floyd.”

Chauvin himself had faced 29 charges of misconduct and internal investigations prior to murdering Floyd. (Only 18 appear on the city’s police internal affairs records.) But because records of “decertification” are patchy, such “wandering” officers can often get themselves rehired.

The officers can stay unaccountable by targeting impoverished men who, unable to afford lawyers, are more likely to accept plea deals. Floyd was never tried by jury; he rather accepted eight plea deals.

He knew that even if he got to court, the decision was unlikely to be positive because the state of Texas does not provide public defenders. Rather, the court pays for a private lawyer to defend those who can’t afford their own representation. Judges in Harris County, where Houston is located, more often than not will appoint lawyers who had donated to their election campaigns.

In 2007, police arrested Floyd for a violent assault on evidence provided by a dubious photo ID process. (It has since been improved.) Facing up to 40 years of prison, a reluctant Floyd accepted a plea deal for five.

Claustrophobia made Floyd’s time in prison difficult, and yet he discovered that none of the mental health, drug addiction, or education programs included in legislation such as the notorious 1994 Crime Bill, which sloshed billions of dollars into prison building, were available. As the authors point out, it was only after the opioid crisis hit white communities that such funds were expended. In short, whereas policymakers declared crack cocaine a crime problem, they saw opiate addictions, more commonly associated with white people, as an epidemic or public health emergency.

The man responsible for prosecuting the case against Derek Chauvin, Jerry Blackwell, knew well the racism inherent at every level of what we uncritically call “the criminal justice system.”

Derek Chauvin at his trial.
Pool Court TV/AP

Blackwell anticipated the defence would claim that Floyd’s drug use or some physical anomaly was the reason he had died. He therefore required an independent medical examiner review the coronial findings into Floyd’s death.

That person, and the examiner who worked for the Floyd family in the civil case against the city of Minneapolis (which the city settled before trial for a record $US27 million), both questioned whether the autopsy had been conducted correctly. Specifically, they doubted whether the incisions made on Floyd’s body were sufficient to ascertain the cause of death. And, indeed, the defence claimed that Floyd’s drug use and a supposedly enlarged heart had contributed to his death.

This was not unique; as the authors report, in 2021 researchers found evidence that medical examiners “had misclassified or covered up nearly 17,000 deaths that involved police between 1980 and 2018”.

All this detail might make the book sound dull, but the research is woven lightly through the account of Floyd’s life so as to maintain momentum. We learn too about Floyd’s family, friends, girlfriends, and his young daughter Gianna. The authors bring to life Floyd’s ability to take people as he found them, underpinned by a deep Christian faith in God.

Activism

The final third of the book, which focuses on events after Floyd’s death, is also gripping. Even as we know the outcome, the twists and turns in the criminal case against Chauvin make for heart-in-the-mouth reading. Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter and is serving a 22-and-a-half year sentence. And in early July a federal judge sentenced Chauvin to 21 years in prison for violating George Floyd’s civil rights – the sentence will be served concurrently.)

Read more:
The sentencing of George Floyd’s killer has lessons for policing in Australia and New Zealand too

Even more striking is the depiction of the bravery of protestors in Minneapolis and of Floyd’s family members, especially his brother, Philonise Floyd, as they seized an opportunity they never wanted – as spokespeople for justice.

Philonise Floyd speaks to the media after Chauvin’s conviction.
John Minchillo/AP

Joined by the civil rights veterans, the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Philonise campaigned hard for federal legislation to reform policing. Republican opposition to the hardest-hitting sections of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, introduced to Congress in February 2021 by Rep. Karen Bass, meant the bill foundered – and has still not been passed.

Unlike all the earlier sections of the book, the activism around police and legislative reform is not given quite the context it deserves. Although Samuels and Olorunnipa interviewed 400 people for their book, activists who have long campaigned against police brutality and for the dismantling of the entire criminal justice system in favour of a society built on equal distribution of resources, such as Angela Davis and Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, do not appear.

Protests in Houston over Floyd’s death.
David J. Phillip/AP

Nor is there much comment on the efficacy of prior efforts to reform the criminal justice system via legislation. Banning choke-holds, for instance, will not end police murders when Black lives are still not regarded as mattering as much as those of white people.

This criticism aside, His Name is George Floyd is a monumental achievement – a work of activism in itself.

Bringing Floyd vividly to life, it makes an impassioned and persuasive plea for the dignity and preciousness of life. The book’s cover deliberately evokes the posters held aloft during the 1968 workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee (when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed), that proclaimed “I Am a Man.”

George Floyd was a man, too, who deserved a better life. More