From the Tea Party to MAGA – How White Christian Nationalism Is Taking Control of the US

In this commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias traces the rise of white Christian nationalism from Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and Reagan’s Moral Majority to the Tea Party and today’s MAGA movement. He argues that what appears as grassroots populism is, in fact, a carefully engineered project to transform fringe radicalism into a national force. Electoral restrictions, demographic anxieties, and evangelical mobilization have converged to produce a politics that is ever more exclusionary, authoritarian, and puritanical. Dr. Dias asks: Is MAGA truly the majority, or is it the triumph of minority rule through strategic manipulation?

By João Ferreira Dias

The Charlie Kirk Memorial was a turning point in the American ideological trajectory for the next decade, leaving the US in a state of social fracture only comparable to the civil rights era and the Vietnam War. We are witnessing the "great awakening" of nationalist evangelism, reminiscent of the peak of that authoritarian fusion between evangelical Christianity and political power in the 1930s, so vividly portrayed in the Perry Mason television series.

Indeed, Jason Stanley (2018) argued early on that Donald Trump revived the 1930s, precisely the period when fascist ideals were in vogue in the United States, with the cult of the "nation" and the strong leader, moral panic, and pamphleteering attacks against minorities and immigrants, as well as the cult of radically conservative religious values.

But is the MAGA movement truly a majority in the US, or are we witnessing a power grab by a minority through carefully engineered political strategy, with Trump serving merely as its face?

From a sociological perspective, there are clear demographic, cultural, and political changes fueling a socio-economic panic over the loss of social status—what Barbara Ehrenreich (1989) called the "fear of falling." This has led to radicalization around ethnonationalist values, broadly classified in Political Science as nativism (see Art, 2022; Betz, 2019, 2017).

Nowhere has this shift been more evident than in the US, with a well-identified turning point: the civil rights movement, which transformed the Republican Party into what one of its strategists, Stuart Stevens, called the "de facto white party,"its key base being Southern whites, historically Democrats.

Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan capitalized on the Southern white vote with the rhetoric of "law and order."Reagan went further by adding a Christian dimension to the white front, giving rise to the Moral Majority. From then on, the Republican Party was captured by what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2024) call the "racially conservative base," responding to demographic changes in the US from the 20th to the 21st century, as the white population fell to just 58% by 2020 and the proportion of non-white members of Congress quadrupled. A new racial order emerged in America, and the white majority entered into demographic and social panic, exacerbated by progressive shifts in American society.

With non-white Americans voting in growing numbers, Black voter turnout surpassed white turnout for the first time in US history in 2012. Faced with these profound changes, the Republican Party had two options: change its rhetoric/strategy or change the electoral map. It chose the latter. This was done through state-level legislative changes, such as requiring photo ID to vote, disproportionately affecting poor, Black, and Latino citizens—Blacks are twice as likely and Latinos three times as likely not to have photo identification. In Kentucky, Virginia, and Florida, those with a criminal record cannot vote, a maneuver that once again disproportionately impacts racial minorities, in a country marked by racialized incarceration and sentencing disparities. Additionally, attempts were made to pass laws shortening early voting and preventing election extensions in cases of long lines—measures struck down in court for deliberately targeting the African-American electorate.

Yet restrictions continued, with seven of the eleven states with majority African-American electorates and twelve states with majority Hispanic electorates adopting mechanisms that effectively disenfranchised these populations.

Amid demographic change, the Republican Party skillfully read and instrumentalized the fears of a shrinking white population. Many whites interpreted these demographic shifts, combined with changes in the social pyramid, as a threat. A 2015 poll found that 72% of white evangelicals believed America had changed for the worse since the 1960s, alongside another poll showing a growing perception of "anti-white prejudice."

It was in this context that the Tea Party (Formisano, 2012) — a reactionary movement of mostly middle-aged white evangelicals — emerged in 2009 after Obama’s election, spreading quickly under the slogan of "taking the country back." The old social order of Jim Crow laws (Tischauser, 2012) was remembered with nostalgia. The Tea Party’s social impact was crucial in shaping the MAGA movement, decisively rooting white Christian nationalism as a core identity marker of Republican politics in America.

Therefore, the answer to the question posed in this text is clear: we are witnessing an electoral and political engineering process that has transformed radicalized fringe electorates into a national electoral force, steering the country toward white Christian nationalism—ever more exclusionary, ever more puritanical, ever more authoritarian.

References

Art, D. (2022). “The myth of global populism.” Perspectives on Politics, 20(3), 999-1011.

Betz, H. G. (2019). “Facets of nativism: a heuristic exploration.” Patterns of Prejudice, 53(2), 111-135.

Betz, H. G. (2017). “Nativism across time and space.” Swiss Political Science Review, 23(4), 335-353.

Ehrenreich, B. (1989). Fear of falling: The inner life of the middle class. New York: Pantheon Books.

Formisano, R. P. (2012). The Tea Party: a brief history. JHU Press.

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2024). Tyranny of the minority: Why American democracy reached the breaking point. Random House.

Stanley, J. (2018). How fascism works: The politics of us and them. Random House Trade Paperbacks.

Tischauser, L. V. (2012). Jim crow laws. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.