“White Christian nationalism” (WCN) has become quite the bogeyman in contemporary religion coverage, even though few reporters seem to have spent much time actually engaging with people in the flocks led by said nationalists.

Instead, journalists read their social media, watch their YouTube videos and talk with sources drawn from a rather predictable list of activists and experts who oppose the bogeyman.

But that does not a complete story make. Readers end up with, at best, half of a debate.

One outlet that’s building or staking its reputation on WCN continuing to be a thing is Religion News Service, which has been rolling out stories on the topic since last September, thanks to a grant from the Pulitzer Center. The latest story in its “White Christian Nationalism since the Jan. 6 Attack” series ran Jan. 26 here. It began:

When supporters of former President Donald Trump rallied near the White House on Jan. 6 of last year, a boisterous pocket of young men waving “America First” flags broke into a chant: “Christ is King!” It was one of the first indications that Christian nationalism would be a theme of the Capitol attack later that day, where insurrectionists prayed and waved banners that read “Proud American Christian.”

It also announced the presence of followers of Nick Fuentes, a 23-year-old white nationalist and former YouTube personality who was subpoenaed this month by the U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating the Capitol attack. …

“Christ is King” is not controversial in itself: The phrase is rooted in Christian Scripture and tradition. But Fuentes’ supporters have given it a different connotation. They have chanted it at anti-vaccine protests and the anti-abortion March for Life, some of them holding crucifixes aloft. It was heard in March, at an America First conference, where Fuentes delivered a speech saying America will cease to be America “if it loses its white demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ.” Fuentes also declared the country “a Christian nation.” 

There are a bunch of academics and other sources quoted here but what appears to be the central thesis — that WCN is bleeding into the mainstream institutions and life of conservative Christianity — was not proven by a long shot. As GetReligion has been noting for several years now, it’s crucial to understand that the actions of some independent evangelical and Pentecostal preachers may have little or nothing to do with that is happening in mainstream pews, denominations, schools, publishing houses, parachurch groups, etc.

Simply saying that leaders of QAnon or Proud Boy personalities were preaching messages to conservative Christians wasn’t proof that said mainstream conservatives were responding or that these messages are guiding the actions of larger and more influential conservative groups.

Claiming that nationalists were delivering threats (plural) to American Jews, but only giving one example, doesn’t document multiple threats. Noting the presence of a cell of radical activists at the massive March for Life is not a sign that WCN is guiding the millions of women and men — Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Latter-day Saints, etc. — who work to oppose abortion. Meanwhile, trying to link Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez with Christian nationalism, as one academic did, was a ridiculous stretch.

The story could have been made livelier by contacting some of these nationalists themselves for quotes, but the writer, Jack Jenkins, appears not to have done that. (I understand these guys don’t return calls; I ran into the same thing while reporting on Christian singer/evangelist Sean Feucht in 2020. So I showed up at his rallies in person until he eventually agreed to talk with me since I was standing next to the stage exit.)

Here’s another suggestion: Talk to conservative religious leaders who oppose WCN, then see how that material supports (or clashes with) all of those interviews with experts and activists on the religious and secular left.

Far better was Jenkins’ Oct. 21 story “Inside the Fraught Effort to Create a Christian Nationalist Internet,” about the social media platform Gab. The intro paragraphs drew you into the story:

 It was late September when Andrew Torba, founder of the social media platform Gab, tapped out a message to his users declaring the website would update its online infrastructure. Upgrades are common in the tech industry, but Torba’s reasoning for expanding Gab’s data center was anything but: He wanted to touch up the tech, he said, to “preserve a parallel Christian society on the internet for generations to come.”

“One day our great-grandchildren will learn what really happened during the greatest Spiritual war of our time,” Torba wrote, “and how we laid the foundations for a new parallel Christian society.”

“It is my intention that they do so on Gab.”

Again, the white nationalist players themselves didn’t present themselves for interviews, but one key sentence explained why they’re being driven to extremes.

The spiritual bluster may belie a practical subtext: A parallel Christian nationalist digital world may be a necessity for sites like Gab to survive at all as Big Tech moves to restrict or ban their content.

As anyone with the remotest knowledge of Facebook knows, the leaders of Big Tech go after all sorts of users for bizarre reasons and are quite adept at crushing or financially starving views they oppose. This is a fact that some on the left are finally admitting (hat tip to SpokaneFavs.com for that one). The story alleged that Gab had allowed porn on its site but where was the proof? Just because Facebook said so?

Other stories in this project (five published to date) include Yonat Shimron’s Nov. 29 profile of Rabbi Rachel Schmelkin, who was an associate at a Charlottesville, Va., synagogue during the Aug. 13, 2017, rally there.

Why her and why there? The story says:

For Jews and people of other minority faiths, the events in Charlottesville, which resulted in the deaths of three people and injuries to more than 50, were the first in a series of wake-up calls about the rise of white nationalism.

It also brought into sharp relief a reality many hadn’t before considered — that white nationalism is at its root antisemitic.

My chief criticism of this series is the lack of feedback and information from the people being reported on, as well as the need for more diversity among the experts being quoted.

One example is Alejandra Molina’s Jan. 7 piece on the work Christian leaders have done in the past year to combat WCN. The careful selection of quotes and arguments well represented one side of the story and left completely bare any narrative from the other.

For instance, why does a rabbi in Santa Monica get to argue — with no pushback or debate — that the Christian belief that Jesus is the Messiah is antisemitic and a sign of the influence of white Christian nationalism? Where is the proof? Where are the mainstream voices on that subject?

Here’s another question that bewilders me: Didn’t the Pulitzer grant include travel funds?

The first story in this series, also by Jenkins, was on Christian nationalists and vaccine resistance. The intro to the story was intriguing enough:

About midway through his address to a crowd in St. Louis in late August, Greg Locke shifted gears. The goateed pastor of Global Vision Bible Church in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, had been regaling the audience — “patriots,” he called them — with stories of defying state health recommendations by holding maskless, in-person worship services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shouting into the microphone, Locke — who weeks earlier denied the delta variant of the coronavirus existed — suddenly began scolding listeners for not doing enough in the fight against pandemic restrictions.

“Do something in your hometown,” Locke said. “Stir your school board meeting up for the glory of God. Run for office. Do something. Go let some churches know in town they need to open up and quit playing the coward. Make some Facebook videos until they de-platform you. Don’t just go to conferences and enjoy people — save the nation.”

I quickly realized that the writer apparently watched the whole thing on video instead of traveling there. That certainly would make it hard to discern what kinds of religious congregations and groups were actively supporting his message and why. What was up with that? The illustrations were largely screen grabs of videos.

Why not show up at Locke’s church? (For a taste of that, watch the video at the top of this post — especially just before the 16-minute mark where he’s asked if he actually is a proponent of WCN).

Also, this Locke guy certainly gets around and reporters love to quote him. However, as tmatt noted in an earlier GetReligion podcast and post on this topic:

… Who is Pastor Locke? Well he leads Global Vision Bible Church in Mt. Juliet, Tenn. He certainly has a social-media following … but he appears to be the leader of one of those independent churches that are so common across America. Where did he study? His website doesn’t say. What denomination does he represent, somehow? That isn’t clear either.

I think it’s a laudable effort to report on WCN, but it can’t be done over the telephone or even on Zoom. How many of these five stories avoided face-to-face contact with first-hand sources? Why wasn’t there more effort to engage with leaders of the white nationalist Christian groups, as well as their critics on the religious left and right? Why not travel to Portland, Ore., and interview the Proud Boys there who are proclaiming what they say they believe about Jesus?  

I realize that the WCN crowd hates the media, but that shouldn’t stop journalists from making the effort.

I assume there’s more stories to come in this package and I hope to see some datelines in them; evidence that the reporters were able to have face-to-face encounters with these people. And I hope there’s reporting on the women of the WCN movement because, without them, the men wouldn’t be out there. And at least one story needs to be reported out of Idaho, a national center for extreme elements of this movement if there is one.

But you can’t do it from your desk at home. Buy some plane tickets and actually fly out there and meet these folks. Your stories will reflect that, believe me.

FIRST IMAGE: A tapestry for sale at TeePublic.com.