"God's Country" in crisis: Racial justice, ontological (in)security, and white Christian nationalism in the United States

Abstract

The modern United States has witnessed the contemporaneous rise of an ongoing war against "critical race theory" (CRT) and more virulent expressions of white Christian nationalism (WCN). Opponents maintain the narrative: CRT is an evil ploy by the Marxist Left that now poses a mortal threat to America. Despite the unequivocal success of the narrative, its affective drivers remain under-examined. Accordingly, the dissertation asks: why has the anti-CRT narrative succeeded, and how is WCN related, if at all? Building on early ontological security scholarship and Lacanian theory on affect, discourse, and subjectivity, it argues that WCN is a project of ontological security that provides the subject with an internal (if unstable) sense-of- self. CRT serves to threaten this narrative, while the external anti-CRT narrative serves to reify it. Its success to this end can be attributed to its use of three "affective sticking points", to include valued signifiers, fantasies, and intertextual links to broader biographical narratives. To provide empirical support for this claim, the project examined a series of City Journal and Fox News articles, discursive sites of narrative (re)production, for traces of these linguistic phenomena. The analysis reveals that the narrative makes use of signifiers such as...