In the reality shaped by secularism and close proximity of diverse traditions, cultures, and faiths, Christian nationalism (CN) has challenged the existential question of belonging. Running at the core of CN is endogamy, in this case, ethnic purity. It means to show disgust toward exogamous changes, not only biological but also cultural. Disgust, ironically, illustrates fear of the very thing one is disgusted by. That is, fearing the shame of the association with the object of disgust (Nussbaum 2001).
This endogamous sentiment has accompanied Christianity throughout history, with visible footprints in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament reception, where belonging is often framed through genealogical purity and chosen nationhood. Yet the Hebrew Bible itself preserves a range of alternative models, genealogical, covenantal, ethical, and universal, through which communities negotiated belonging. The New Testament continues this multivocal conversation from within Second Temple Judaism, exploring ethnic belonging through affective discipleship, embodied communal practices, and fellowship that both crosses and sets boundaries. The question is, “How do we approach this biblical negotiation of belonging in our pluralistic age?”
The idea of American belonging is under scrutiny once more, especially since the second Trump presidency began. The pattern of dividing insiders from outsiders, highly evident in CN, is not unique to CN. But the theologizing of ethnic classifications through a logic of purity in CN transforms a human tendency into sacralized grammar of “us and them.” This amnesia of forgetting since when and how we became “Americans” denies the liminality of human existence. Human identity has always formed in transition between horizons. Who’s the foreigner and who’s American? The ethnic purity logic that CN pursues can only be sustained within this fleeting liminal moment.
Recent data from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI, Feb 2025) suggests that support for CN is correlated to lower educational attainment as well as nativist narratives linking ethnicity to national belonging. White evangelical Protestants showed the strongest CN support, Muslims and Universalists the weakest. Meanwhile, support was relatively even across racial categories. CN adherents are more than three times as likely to be republican than democrat. The majority of them consumes far-right media and believe that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” and “poisoning the blood of our country.”
As a cosmopolite, I recognize these CN insights on ethnicity as part of lived experience. Likewise, my understanding of ethnicity, race, and nationhood is shaped by my formation as a cosmopolite. The term, cosmopolite is often misunderstood. It does not mean holding multiple passports or being rootless. Rather, it means to inhabit as a citizen of the world whose belonging is plural and simultaneous. Cosmopolitan belonging forms across continents, languages, and cultures one encounters and participates in over decades of time. Consequently, it resists being confined to a single ethnicity.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a leading scholar in cosmopolitanism, gives his account in ‘Who Are We? Identity and Cultural Heritage’:
“My theoretical thinking about identity began, actually, with thoughts about race, because I was genuinely puzzled by the different ways in which people in different places responded to my appearance.” (Appiah 2022, p. 4)
Appiah goes on to show that identities are never self-contained but continually negotiated through exchange. I find myself inspired from the same empirical ground that he describes here, from the everyday experience of how appearance elicits assumptions and generates variety of readings of my identity.
In our globalizing world, an individual can be perceived in vastly different ways depending on the cultural and geographical lens, through which their ethnicity is anticipated and interpreted. This is echoed in Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov’s claim that ethnicity is a socially shared schema of perception in ‘Ethnicity as Cognition.’
“Race, ethnicity, and nationality exist only in and through our perceptions, interpretations, representations, classifications, categorizations, and identification. They are not things in the world, but perspectives on the world, not ontological but epistemological realities” (Brubaker et al. 2004, p. 45).
When these perceived categories of identities are institutionalized in bureaucratic systems and public discourse, they are mistaken for objective truths. This authority to define, name, and classify is what Bourdieu calls symbolic power, by which social perceptions of ethnicity, race, and nationhood acquire the divisive reality (Bourdieu 1989).
Who is authentically American? Swedish? Who is truly Asian? Or white? Can one be all at once, or does one cancel another out? Who defines such boundaries of belonging?
If a man named Adam, born to two white American parents, lives his entire life in Korea, is Adam’s ethnicity white? If Adam holds an American passport despite never having lived on U.S. soil, is Adam American? Would you say that Adam is more American than a Korean person who lived most of her life in the U.S.? And if Adam had lived his entire life in the U.S., would that make him more American than her?
In Los Angeles, I was referred to as a “banana,” yellow on the outside, white on the inside. It’s a term that describes an ethnic hybrid. Often uttered by Asian friends, while not derogatory, it emphasized a mismatch between the interior of a person and perceived ethnicity by the exterior. I wasn’t called a “banana” in the Pacific Northwest where I was just seen as “one of us.” Despite being the only Asian girl in school, it was not considered anything to be labeled. But once there were enough bananas in the geographic region of Southern California, the label entered the local lexicon of socially shared schema for classifying such category. Still, it was a descriptive term and not necessarily exclusionary.
Some labels are more exclusionary than others. Take White, Asian, Black, Native Indian(?), Hispanic for instance. When filling out a survey or health forms, which ethnicity box do you tick? Answering this is required even when registering an employee. Do we have to choose only one? What if you are a banana like me? Or what if your dad is white but your mom is black, which one do you check? What if you’re an adoptee with adoptive parents of different skin color? How about nationality? Does your passport tell us who you really are?
My ethnicity is plural: Korean American and Scandinavian by my memories and cultural & moral values that resulted from both autonomous and socialized constructions. And it is not completely settled yet but malleable as I continue to expose myself to new experiences. Can you accept this ambiguity? If not, what would accepting it say about your idea of ethnicity?
When in Europe or conservative regions of the U.S., some people ask me out of the blue if I miss eating Korean food. This question usually comes up right after they find out my parents are Koreans or that I know the language. I find this sequence, let alone the unprompted question, intriguing as it reveals how quickly assumptions fill the gaps of the unknown. Though rarely malicious, their perception of my “Koreanness” becomes evidence of my presumed culinary preference—as if ethnicity can be solely inferred from appearance, language, and ancestry.
In a cultural context where everyone is expected to embody a homogeneous ethnic identity, hybridity is perceived as something that dilutes or contaminates purity.
TCK, a third culture kid, is another label I’ve been referred to that exemplifies hybridity. Though I have long outgrown childhood, the label still classifies the grown-up me. It acknowledges cultural hybridity while carrying a connotation of deviation from the norm. Ethnic hybridity, embodying plural associations like TCK and the aforementioned term “banana”, is perceived as a problem to be solved. It implies that hybridity, by which cosmopolitanism is also characterized, represents incompletion while purity is considered complete, so that showing up as the hybrid-self unapologetically violates the unspoken rule of uniformity to belong to a particular group.
Choosing authenticity, in this circumstance, reveals the paradox of ethnic purity where it requires surrendering the very purity of being yourself. The pursuit of ethnic purity also demands limited intercultural experience, leading to further misrecognition and denial of authentic identities.
As demonstrated, “Identity,” meaning the essence of personhood, is easily hijacked by external perspectives that project their fears, desires, and inherited hierarchies of meaning. They claim to define who you are and who you should be, rather than listening to and discovering your self-expression. Hence, these projections mirror not your identity, but who they are.
The theological danger of CN is that it sanctifies these projections, turning social fears into sacred boundaries. In the name of preserving holiness, it demands uniformity and condemns plurality. CN’s longing for ethnic purity becomes not a defense of faith, but a denial of authenticity of hybridity.
Identity is not fixed but continually renewed through dialogue between inner experience and external encounter. In this sense, ethnicity, race, and nationhood—each informing our identity—are acts of interpretation: of self into relation, and relation into self. Encountering one another authentically unfolds through practicing interpretation with curiosity instead of assumption, listening instead of overwriting.
If CN promotes a polemical worldview of division, our challenge is to nurture a way of seeing that restores connection. Every human difference can be an opportunity to learn something new rather than to police. Acknowledging the very condition of being human is to embrace plurality and malleability, and to recognize that humanity has always existed in liminality. Never just this or that. We like to label what lives in liminal spaces and hope that believing they do not change might quiet our fear.
Appiah, K.A. (2022) ‘Who Are We? Identity and Cultural Heritage’, in Cuno, J. and Weiss, T.G. (eds) Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, pp. 27–48.
Bourdieu, P. (1990) ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’, Sociological Theory 7(1), pp. 14–25.
Brubaker, R., Loveman, M. and Stamatov, P. (2004) ‘Ethnicity as Cognition’, Theory and Society, 33(1), pp. 31–64.
Nussbaum, M.C. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) (2025) Christian Nationalism Across All 50 States: Insights from PRRI’s 2024 American Values Atlas. Washington D.C.: PRRI. Available at: https://prri.org/research/christian-nationalism-across-all-50-states-insights-from-prris-2024-american-values-atlas/
Updated on 12-09-2025.
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