Trump's mainstreaming of antisemitism could blow apart the Christian nationalist movement: report

On Monday, a new report for Business Insider outlined how former President Donald Trump's controversial Mar-a-Lago meeting with antisemitic rapper Kanye "Ye" West and neo-Nazi livestreamer Nick Fuentes could create rifts in a major right-wing theocratic ideology that has been gathering steam in the Trump and Biden years.

That meeting, wrote Kelsey Vlamis, "helped shine a spotlight on antisemitism that some on the right have tried to ignore — and could hinder the growing mainstream influence of Christian nationalism," a movement that advocates for abolishing or subordinating democracy, or at least American culture, to an explicitly Christian government that rules by God's law. Speaking to Business Insider, Yale University Sociologist and co-author of "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy," said, "The Christian nationalism label was already generating a lot of debate amongst conservative Christians in the United States. Now you throw antisemitism into the mix, and I think that creates yet another set of divisions."

Shortly after that Trump meeting, Ye, who had already been cut off from several business partnerships for a series of antisemitic proclamations and the endorsement of the so-called Black Hebrew Israelite conspiracy theory, went on Alex Jones' InfoWars webcast with Fuentes, where the two of them professed their admiration for Adolf Hitler.

"Philip Gorski, a sociologist at Yale University, said he and other scholars of Christian nationalism have been saying for a long time that the ideology was tangled up with white supremacism, but they received a lot of pushback for it. 'People saying, 'It's not true. I don't know anybody who's like that. I don't know anybody who thinks that,'' Gorski explained," the report continued. "The recent scandals with Ye and Fuentes have 'just brought some of that deeper, uglier stuff up to the surface and into broad daylight, but it was there the whole time.'"

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"Despite the connection , Gorski said Christian nationalists would likely have 'pretty complicated reactions' to the Ye and Fuentes situation 'because they have a pretty complicated relationship to Israel and Judaism and American Jews,'" said the report. "Gorski said there is much less blatant antisemitism among conservative Christians in the US than there was in the mid-20th century ... The American right has also been closely linked to support of Israel in recent decades, in part due to what Gorski described as an expansion pact for Christian nationalism: Christian Zionism — which refers to a belief among some Christians that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy." Conversely, some Christian nationalists support Israel but believe Jews belong to Israel, so American Jews are not authentic or true to their identity.

"While Christian nationalism as a concept is still on the historical decline, its recent resurgence and influence in mainstream politics could be threatened if more far-right figures continue to shine a light on its ugliest parts," concluded the report.