Girls Just Want to Have Fundamentalism: The Women Inside Christian Nationalism

Collison, Clara

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Girls Just Want to Have Fundamentalism: The Women Inside Christian Nationalism Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/3x816p267

Abstract

Christian nationalism refers to a worldview that sees the United States is a Christian nation where Christianity should have a privileged place in society. A lot of research has been conducted on Christian nationalism over the past decade. However, despite the acknowledgement that women tend to be more religious than men, little research has focused on the women who hold Christian nationalist beliefs. In this thesis I address multiple questions around this, most notably: Why are some women in the United States more supportive of Christian nationalist ideas? I use data that is nationally representative of the American public (i.e., the 2017 Baylor University Wave V Study) to explore this question quantitatively, looking at Christian nationalism by gender, religion, and various demographic factors. Overall, I find that women are more likely to hold Christian nationalist sentiments, and that the driving force behind this trend is evangelical women. Furthermore, I estimate an interactive model for evangelical respondents that looks at the effect of being female across levels of religiosity and age. I find that for younger American evangelicals, women who are relatively low in religiosity are more likely to score higher in Christian nationalism than their male counterparts—a trend not seen in older evangelicals. I further address this difference with two alternative arguments: one being socialization, and the other being attitudes toward abortion. In the end, I claim that my findings may actually reflect evangelical women’s desires for more societal support and resources.

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