The Violent Fictions of Christian Nationalism

Religiously-inspired fictions have played an important role in contemporary Far-Right politics in the USA, making a significant contribution to the project of constructing cultural and ideological support for a “post-liberal” regime. Since the 1970s, such fictions have provided imaginative representations of anti-liberal theologies and the customary-rights-based way of life that belongs to Christian fundamentalism. The development of a fundamentalist counter-public sphere, including Christian fiction, provided the cultural substructure for the politicization of American fundamentalism into the Christian Right. In turn, this politicization, culminating in Christian nationalism, has been reflected in the political redirection of religiously-inspired fiction towards millenarian themes. Doctrinaire fictions of “spiritual warfare” and “tribulation insurgency” have radicalized Christian literature in America, militarizing spiritual revenge fantasies into representations of terrorist violence. These aggressive fictions are forms of anti-Enlightenment and anti-democratic ideological propaganda, which promote the rightwing authoritarian social attitudes and aversive prejudices of today’s Christian nationalism.