Christian nationalism began forming in White working-class evangelical neighborhoods in the early 1970s, and this talk will analyze the cultural matrix of religion, disenfranchisement, anti-feminism, and racism that were the roots of that movement. It developed in backlash to the Supreme Court decisions banning segregation, prayer, and Bible reading in schools, followed by the civil rights legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment and the Roe vs Wade decision on abortion. Those historic changes and the growing pluralism of American society led to the religious right organizing to defeat them. Evangelicals formed a coalition with Ronald Reagan on the promise of making America great again, which was understood as code for making America White and Christian. We will look at that coalition and the continued use of the MAGA slogan to the present.

Ron Duncan Hart is a cultural anthropologist from Indiana University with postdoctoral work at the University of Oxford on Jewish Studies. He is director of the Institute for Tolerance Studies and is a former University Vice-President and Dean of Academic Affairs. In addition to being a Fulbright Senior Scholar, he has received awards for his work from the Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation among others. He is an award-winning author and speaks widely across the United States and abroad. His most recent book is Evangelicals and MAGA: The Politics of Grievance a Half Century in the Making.