What empirical measures do researchers use to quantify Christian nationalism in public opinion surveys?

1. The standard five‑item battery: PRRI/Brookings and national calibration

The most widely cited empirical measure is PRRI’s five-question battery that asks about whether the U.S. should be a Christian nation and whether public life and government should reflect Christian values; PRRI used that battery across very large samples (more than 22,000 in recent American Values Atlas waves and roughly 6,000 in the original PRRI/Brookings fielding) and applied sampling weights and post‑stratification to approximate the adult U.S. population ^{[1] [2] [6]}.

2. Scoring and typologies: Adherents, Sympathizers, Skeptics, Rejecters

Analysts convert responses on these batteries into scaled scores and categorical typologies—PRRI reports that roughly 10% of Americans are “Adherents,” about 19–20% “Sympathizers,” with the remainder divided into “Skeptics” and “Rejecters”—a framing used to compare prevalence and correlate Christian nationalism with policy attitudes and political behavior ^{[7] [8]}.

3. Older and alternative item sets: Baylor and cross‑national variants

Earlier measures, such as items used in Baylor surveys, provide time‑series comparability (e.g., questions about prayer in public schools and religious symbols) and have been the basis for longitudinal claims about change since 2007; cross‑national work (Pew) adapts comparable items for other countries by substituting context‑relevant religious texts or symbols to measure religious nationalism more broadly ^{[9] [10] [11]}.

4. Methods to elicit concealed or sensitive views: list experiments and self‑identification

To detect stigmatised or socially sensitive preferences—like willingness to fight for a racially defined Christian nation—surveys have embedded list experiments and direct self‑identification questions; PRRI’s work included a list experiment to estimate latent support for explicitly racialized visions of a Christian nation, and some academic studies combine ideological items with explicit self‑labels to capture both belief and identity ^{[3] [12]}.

5. Critiques and methodological innovations: ambiguity, multidimensionality, LCA, and belief networks

Scholars caution that single additive scales can be ambiguous and may conflate distinct concepts (religion in public life, patriotism, racialized in‑group protection), prompting calls for conceptual splitting and analytic alternatives; proposals include latent class analysis to identify subtypes, multidimensional scales (e.g., Neighborly Faith) that claim greater validity, and belief‑network analysis to map how Christian‑public life beliefs interconnect with other attitudes ^{[5] [4] [13]}.

6. Validity debates and the role of race and sampling

Measurement disputes are substantive: some work argues standard scales under‑ or over‑estimate prevalence depending on item wording and scoring rules and shows that the political and behavioral correlates of Christian‑nationalist responses differ by race—leading to calls for careful sampling, transparent weighting, and interpretive caution when generalizing from scores to political threat assessments ^{[13] [14] [1]}.

7. Practical takeaway for empirical work

Empirical practice now mixes pragmatic, replicable batteries (PRRI’s five items) with experimental probes and emerging multidimensional approaches; researchers balance comparability (using established batteries and representative weighting) against validity improvements (LCA, alternative scales, network models), and ongoing debate centers on which combination best captures the ideology’s content, strength, and political implications ^{[1] [3] [5] [4]}.