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The Psychometric Properties of the Christian Nationalism Scale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2022
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.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Religion and Politics Section of The American Political Science Association
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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