Christian nationalism persists because underlying inequality forces still produce it.

Evidence

In the final analysis, Rushdoony and his Reconstructionists were effects of history, too, not its causes. The new nationalists rediscovered—or simply reinvented—their ideas because they answered to a logic that has much deeper roots in American history. Slavery may have ended with the Thirteenth Amendment, but the system of economic exploitation through racial division lived on, and the proslavery theology that sustained it in an earlier time did not simply vanish. The hierarchies that arose in the Gilded Age hit some roadblocks in the progressive era, but that hardly stopped plutocrats from enlisting new champions of theological legitimation. Christian nationalism exploits and intensifies inequality, and dominionism is its logical end point and the actual engine of the so-called culture wars. Its ideas persist not on account of any clandestine texts or secret cabals but because the forces that produced them remain very much at work in shaping the movement today. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 497

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A materialist explanation of Christian nationalism that flips the usual ‘cabal/secret texts’ causation on its head — the ideas’ persistence is credited to living social forces, not clandestine influence.
• XREF: Connects to Frankfurt School critical theory’s materialist analysis of fascism as serving concentrated economic power (Horkheimer, Fromm on authoritarian character and status anxiety). — connects to: Christian nationalists collaborate with Russia because they reject America’s pluralist founding ideal — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 1064