Expanding the vision from a regional culture to a national one, Wolfe said, “Decreased immigration would be key and assimilation would hopefully occur.”
To further illustrate the point that his argument is not racial in nature, Wolfe said, “I wouldn’t want millions of Russians to migrate here anymore than millions of Syrians.”
Despite Wolfe’s insistence to the contrary, Perry told ChurchLeaders, “Stephen Wolfe’s comments are really the logical extension of white Christian nationalist logic and really all ethno-nationalist logic. Wolfe explains it clearly in his tweets. If groups (nations) are called to be separate, intermarriage violates that distinctiveness and produces a monoculture.”
“Thus while interethnic marriage may not be a sinful thing individually, it’s still a kind of sin in that you’re neglecting the obligation to stay separate and marry your own kind,” Perry said, adding that sociologists have been noting the correlation between White Christian nationalism and opposition to interracial marriage since 2015.
“We found that the higher white Americans score on our indicators of Christian nationalism (that we used then), the more uncomfortable they were with the idea of their children marrying Blacks, Asians, or Latinos,” Perry said. “Having seen tweets by Wolfe…it makes the ethnocentrism of their Christian nationalist project so clear.”
Because of these demographic concerns, part and parcel of the Christian nationalist vision for America is an emphasis on childbearing. Earlier this week, the Twitter account called “Christian Nationalists of America” posted their fourfold vision to “retake the country,” which included separating from “liberal culture,” relearning tradition, having a large family, and getting “involved in politics to stave off immigration/liberalism.”
With regard to that thread, Perry pointed out the trend among Christian nationalists to emphasize large families, arguing that the movement “is partly a response to demographic threat, it’s not only xenophobic, but also staunchly pronatalist in a way that’s not about kids as gifts *from* God, but kids as artillery *for* God.”
The “quiverfull” approach to childbearing, perhaps most popularized by the Duggar family of “17 Kids and Counting” fame, discourages contraception and sees large families as evidence of God’s blessing.
Perry argued that this theological framework, when paired with nationalism, sees children as weapons to fight against the “persecution against whites and Christians.”
“When we asked Americans questions about their views on American fertility, we found that three factors strongly predicted that Americans supported views like ‘our declining fertility should alarm us as a nation’ and ‘married couples should be having more children, not fewer,'” Perry told ChurchLeaders. “These three factors were a commitment to traditional, patriarchal gender roles; Christian nationalist ideology; and belief that whites and Christians receive the most discrimination these days.”
“In other words, the view that society should be characterized by patriarchal gender roles; America has a special relationship with Christianity that should be formally institutionalized; and whites and Christians are highly persecuted strongly predicted that Americans should have more kids in traditional families,” Perry continued, pointing out that these views “are actually quite analogous with similar authoritarian regimes throughout history (fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, the communist regime in Romania) up to the present (Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary) that encouraged citizens to have more babies to maintain ethno-cultural purity for ‘the nation.'”
