Mobilizing Religion in Twenty-First-Century Nativism in the United States

Religion has played a role in American debates about immigration, who should be allowed to come to the United States, and who qualifies as a “true American.” This is also true in contemporary immigration politics. This paper focuses on the use of religious arguments, images, and references by anti-immigrant forces that supported the Trump administration’s policies, particularly post-2016. Empirically, the purpose here is to illuminate specific ideas and symbols, drawn from Christian and Hebrew scriptures, to reach White Evangelical Protestant audiences. Theoretically, the argument illustrates how mobilizing and framing rhetorics in collective action can form a multilayered ideology that offers policy prescriptions, moral justifications, and a subtext of collective identity.