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The Psychometric Properties of the Christian Nationalism Scale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2022

Nicholas T. Davis Open the ORCID record for Nicholas T. Davis [Opens in a new window]
Nicholas T. Davis*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA
*
Corresponding author: Nicholas T. Davis, email: niickdavis@gmail.com, ntdavis2@ua.edu
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Abstract

A growing body of research connects Christian nationalism—a preference for a religiously conservative political regime—to social and political beliefs. This paper raises questions about the validity of a popular scale used to measure those attitudes. I begin by exploring the factor structure of the six-item Christian nationalism index. I then show how semi-supervised machine learning can be used to illustrate classification problems within that scale. Finally, I demonstrate that this index performs poorly at the interval level, a combination of measurement error and the sorting out of religious and political preferences. These attitudes have become so bound up in conventional politics that they often exhibit a threshold rather than a linear relationship to political preferences. I conclude with an appeal for care in matching theory to empirics: Christian nationalism is a prominent political theology, but research must grapple with the limitations of prevailing measurement tools when operationalizing it.

Keywords

Christian nationalismreligious nationalismsortingconservatism
Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , March 2023 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Religion and Politics Section of The American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

A previous draft of this paper was titled ““Who” is a Christian nationalist? Investigating the psychometric properties of the Christian nationalism scale.” The author thanks Amanda Friesen, Ryan Burge, and Kevin Reuning for thoughtful conversations regarding the subject of this paper; the editor and two anonymous referees contributed very helpful feedback that made the paper much stronger. All remaining errors are, of course, the author's own.

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