THE IDENTITY CHANNEL - Christian Nationalism’s Mediating Role Between Structural Cleavages and Americans’ Boundary Attitudes

Abstract

This study investigates how Christian Nationalism (CN) drives support for political and cultural boundary maintenance (BM) attitudes. While the prior studies establish that CN predicts exclusionary views individually, it often overlooks how these issues such as immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage cohere as components of a broader boundary-maintenance logic defined by the traditionalist-communitarian macro-cleavage. To provide generalizable evidence, I pool data from four independent national probability surveys (Christian Nationalism Survey (CNS 2023), American Values Survey (AVS 2023), Baylor Religious Studies (BRS 2021), and General Social Survey (GSS 2021), using a Random-Effects (RE) meta-analytic pooled regression strategy. I confirmed the construct validity for the CN index via Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across all datasets. The results strongly support the hypothesis that CN predicts consistently stronger exclusionary attitudes, independent of partisanship, ideology, religious affiliation and practice, and other sociodemographic controls. The RE pooled Average Marginal Effects (AMEs) demonstrate a robust and statistically significant increase in the probability of supporting exclusionary boundaries for opposition to immigration (~53 percentage points), opposition to same-sex marriage (~45 pp), and opposition to abortion (~36 pp), all statistically significant. Findings affirm the Cleavage-Embedded Identity Mediation (CEIM) framework, confirming that CN serves as a powerful identity-value channel that translates macro-cleavages into measurable boundary attitudes and policy preferences for defining national membership and moral order.