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An academic opinion researcher and white Christian nationalism expert analyzes the phenomenon on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s “Freethought Matters” Sunday TV show.
Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts independent research about the intersection of religion, culture and public policy. He is a leading scholar and commentator on religion, culture and politics and the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award. His new work, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, will be coming out this fall.
“One of the things we did in the survey is that our scale for determining Christian nationalism did not mention race at all, and that was by design,” Jones explains to “Freethought Matters” host Annie Laurie Gaylor a recent comprehensive study his organization conducted. “But then we were able to kind of correlate this with other attitudes, for example, anti-black racist attitudes, anti-immigrant attitudes, anti-Muslim attitudes — all kind of facets of white supremacy. And we did find that there is a strong positive correlation, really, between varieties of white supremacy.”
Jones also dissects his group’s recent polls on abortion and LGBTQ rights, and how the religiously unaffiliated line up on those issues in comparison with white evangelicals.
If you don’t live in the quarter-plus viewership of the nation where the show broadcasts on Sunday, you can already catch the interview on FFRF’s YouTube channel. New shows go up every Thursday.
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Upcoming guests include researcher Ryan Burge, author of The Nones, and ex-Christian nationalist Bradley Onishi, who has written a new book about the movement and his participation in it. You can catch interviews from past seasons here, including the fall 2022 season with author John Irving, actor John “Q” de Lancie and Washington Post columnist Kate Cohen. Previous interviews include Julia Sweeney and Reps. Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, Hank Johnson and Eleanor Holmes Norton, among many other notable authors, activists and freethinkers.
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