In the wake of the last two presidential election cycles, scholars have published a stream of monographs seeking to explain the rise of religious and ethnic nationalisms in US politics. Damon T. Berry’s Christianity and the Alt-Right: Exploring the Relationship builds upon the foundation of these “rearview mirror” analyses to illustrate the ongoing relationship between American Christianities and the Alt-Right. His central claim—that the relationship has impacted Christianity more strongly than it has impacted the Alt-Right—is forward-thinking and generative as a framework for future scholarship on religion and nationalism.
Berry limits his study of the Alt-Right by regarding it as a self-conscious “brand” (7). As a brand, the Alt-Right emerged largely online under the banner of Richard Spencer’s homonymous webzine, Alternative Right (8), and subscribes to an agenda of ethnonationalism, anti-egalitarianism, and white populism (4, 9-10). Because Berry’s work distinguishes the Alt-Right brand from general far-right white nationalism (6), he echoes the political scientist George Hawley’s statement that the Alt-Right should be spoken of “in the past tense” (7), effectively ending when Spencer infamously concluded a 2016 speech for the National Policy Institute with “Hail Trump! Hail victory! Hail our people!”—to which the crowd responded with Nazi salutes (4). Thus, Spencer’s capital-A Alt-Right has become irreparably damaged in public perception, including among Christians, as an ally to neo-Nazis (12) and an opponent of American Christianity (20). However, Berry posits that the Alt-Right’s legacy endures in the ongoing debates it sparked between American Christians regarding race, acceptance of LGBTQ+ persons, and the role of Christianity in the 21st century (85).
The book is written in two parts. The first examines the fractious impact of religion on the Alt-Right during its formation and decline; the second parses the lasting effects of the Alt-Right on American Christians, using the online communities Deseret Nation and Church Militant as case studies for the LDS Church and the Catholic Church, respectively. Throughout the book, Berry makes effective use of sources from the Alt-Right’s most prominent voices, gleaned from blogs, podcasts, Twitter posts, and alternative media companies (for example, Arktos, Red Ice, and VDare). As Berry notes, the world of the Alt-Right is cloaked in layers of pseudo-irony that make it difficult for scholars to achieve an emic conception of ultraconservatism (20). For example, the “Church of Kekism,” a quasi-satirical movement that refutes the values of “Catlady Ascendancy hierophant Hillary Clinton,” exists simultaneously as hyperbolic farce and genuine faith (23). Ironic deflection is integral to the Alt-Right habitus; both aspects must be considered to grasp its nature. By citing directly from Twitter feeds and Bitchute videos, Berry preserves the elements of the self-referential, meta-ironic culture that characterizes the far-right.
With these sources, Berry crafts a compelling narrative of the Alt-Right’s emergence in the late 2000s, building on Hawley’s argument that “the Alt-Right is an expression of white nationalism” (2). Berry contends that, since its inception, the cohesion of the Alt-Right brand was hindered by its lack of a unifying theological paradigm (17), and by the “entrenched hostility to Christianity” it inherited from its roots in historically anti-religious white nationalist currents (18). Certain self-professed Christians within the Alt-Right attempted to proselytize an “un-cucked” (that is, illiberal) version of Christianity for the movement to adopt—among them, Andrew Faser, author of Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology (Arktos Media Limited 2017, 49). Despite these attempts, the movement was unable to forge a common perspective on religious identity and the place of Christianity in white ethnonationalism (36). Berry asserts that forthcoming iterations of American white nationalism will be wont to find the failings of the Alt-Right instructive as they search for “common ground among themselves about the role of religion in [future] organized white racialist activism” (3).
Berry then explores the dialogue among American Christians prompted by the Alt-Right’s appearance in the mainstream during the 2016 presidential election. He argues that the movement catalyzed self-reflection, forcing American Christians to grapple with histories of racism and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in their own denominations (60). The book traces the course of these introspections, highlighting the Southern Baptist Convention’s controversial denunciation of the Alt-Right in 2017; the LDS Church’s firing of BYU professor Randy Bott in 2012, as well as its own denunciation of the movement in 2017; and a 2016 panel hosted by the Catholic University of America, entitled “How Catholics Should Respond to the Rise of the Alt-Right,” which rejected the Alt-Right as well. Berry maintains that this internal scrutiny is the Alt-Right’s most enduring legacy, as the brand became a framework for “what the proper Christian response to racism, xenophobia, and homophobia should be” (13).
Though I find Berry’s case studies convincing, I do wonder if his claim that “the most significant legacy of the Alt-Right phenomenon is not what it has meant to white nationalists, but rather what it has meant for American Christians” (13) is overstated. If we are to accept that the fractious nature of the Alt-Right’s views of Christianity produced the schisms which led to its downfall (17), and that the success of future white racialist activism is tied to Chistianity’s relationship to the movement, then the legacy of the relationship between Christianity and the Alt-Right may be less one-sided than Berry’s work suggests. In addition, Berry’s work prompts a question that plagues all scholars of contemporary internet humanities: how can we compile an archive when digital sources are exceedingly ephemeral? Berry notes that, within a year of finding certain Alt-Right sources (a video on YouTube, a screed on Twitter), the content has vanished (36). As social media platforms remove content that violates their terms of service, and as web addresses succumb to “link rot,” historians of the digital age must find ways to preserve sources as more than a memory in a footnote. Berry’s book—like others—provokes the question but offers no answer.
Ultimately, Christianity and the Alt-Right is a concise and compelling treatment of the Alt-Right brand and its ripples into religious institutions. Berry provides a forward-thinking analysis of the interplay between America’s far right and its Christianities that is well-suited to both undergraduate and graduate seminars.
Spencer Kunz is a PhD student in American Religious History at Florida State University.
Spencer Kunz
Date Of Review:
May 22, 2024
