Samuel L. Perry

And so I approached that with, with two different, um, primary conversation partners, um, Um, one is like kind of the more academic version.

And this came from a sociologist named Samuel Perry.

And he argues, you know, all religion, not just evangelicals.

So he does talk about us in particular, all religion is just, um, it's just like tribalism and it's just about the in group and benefiting yourselves.

Christian sociologist at Indiana University Indianapolis.

With Samuel Perry, he wrote Taking America Back for God, the research that gave much of the country its vocabulary for this conversation.

His 2023 book, American Idolatry, was written as a Christian to Christians, arguing that Christian nationalism betrays the very gospel it claims to protect.

In our conversation, he helps us to understand what Christian nationalism is, what it isn't, and the three idols he names, power, fear, and violence, and also why the quiet middle may matter so very much.

Even as worship has been spilling over into political gatherings, politics has been infiltrating worship gatherings.

During an event I attended at Clemson University in September 2025, sociologist Samuel Perry posed the question this way, What does it mean when political identity starts to almost perfectly overlap with religious identity? He noted that evangelical pastors told him in the wake of 2020 that worshipers were choosing which church to attend based more on politics than theology.

Pastors would tell me, if I came out and said something about George Floyd and racism, people left and people came.

If I didn't say anything about George Floyd and racism, people left and people came.

Whether you make the next jump to say that this is fascism or creeping fascism, is harder to say.

There was a really nice piece on religion in public by the authors of the Christian National Anthem, Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry, that did make that connection quite explicitly.

And that's really worth paying attention to and having a good argument about.

But, you know, there's definitely, Stanley's definitely onto something, and you can see those kinds of emotions at play here in this.