Dr. Ruiqian Li

Bio

Ruiqian (Richie) Li, PhD is currently a Senior Researcher at the American University Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL). Richie feels blessed as he was well trained in sociology of religion during his PhD journey with Baylor Sociology. At Baylor, Richie worked for Dr. Paul Froese, the PI of Baylor Religion Surveys, and the Association of Religion Data Archives (theARDA.com). Prior to Baylor, Richie earned degrees in American Politics and Law. Self-identified as an interdisciplinary social scientist, Richie is ambitious to produce cutting edge scholarship on American cultures related to religion, nationalism, and morality.

Dissertation

State vs. Society: Divergent Images of Christian America

Abstract

Christian Nationalism (CN) has garnered significant attention in American social sciences since 2015. Scholars widely agree that the mass opinion to establish a Christian nation is a main factor that caused the unexpected rise of Donald Trump and his anti- intellectual and populist conservatism. However, previous research defines and measures CN ambiguously. The analytical ambiguity has notable consequences. On the one hand, it results in social scientists overestimating the impact of CN in public opinion, wrongly suggesting majority of Americans are at least sympathizers of the notion to imagine a Christian America. On the other hand, the vagueness misleads scholars to analyze CN as a monolithic ideology and ignore that the notion of Christian America has two distinct meanings in contemporary public opinion. 

This dissertation is one of the first few projects that address the analytical ambiguity. Importantly, it provides a new and much clearer theoretical framework to differentiate two popular understandings of Christian America. Bridging the literature of American popular nationalisms and that of sociology of religion, the study theorizes that average Americans envision a Christian nation along with two traditions: the state-centric and the society-centric. The state-centric nationalism prefers an ethnoculturally homogeneous nationality enforced by the national state while the society-centric nationalism prioritizes a sense of national community dependent on a more self- governing yet color-blind civil society. While both notions demand a religiously and racial-ethnically defined American membership, they are associated with divergent collective identities, intergroup behaviors, and a group of religious, demographic, and political factors. Therefore, this study argues that as posited as a unified ideology, Christian Nationalism (CN) contains two distinct views of what it means to be a “Christian Nation” – one which envisions a Christian civil society separate from the profanities of politics, what we call “Religious Traditionalism.” The other envisions a Christian federal government where power is wielded exclusively by ethno-religious insiders, or “Christian Statism.” 

What Faculty Say

 Richie has conducted complex analyses using multiple national surveys, including six waves of the Baylor Religious Survey (2005-2020), to empirically demonstrate that there are indeed two types of Christian Nationalists. This is a major advancement in the study of Christian Nationalism and a chapter of his dissertation has already been published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the premiere social science religion journal.