RACIAL HYGIENISTS:

On March 10, President Trump retweeted a post from conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, who referred to the coronavirus (COVID-19) as the "China Virus." Kirk also exclaimed in his tweet, "Now, more than ever, we need the wall...the US stands a chance if we can get control of our borders." Trump retweeted this and added the comment, "Going up fast. We need the wall more than ever!"

At first blush, this exchange might seem like the garden-variety white nationalist xenophobia characteristic of Trump or many of his influential supporters. Fox News' Tucker Carlson and GOP House Representative Kevin McCarthy, in fact, have both insisted on continuing to call the disease the "Chinese Coronavirus." But Trump's retweet, and where it originates, helps shed light not only on the Right's brazen xenophobia, but on the link between America's supposed religious heritage and fears of ethnic pollution. 

Charlie Kirk is co-founder of Liberty University's Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty. The Falkirk Center is described by Liberty's newspaper as a "modern think tank set to renew and defend God-given freedoms and Christian principles throughout American politics and culture." 

That an ambassador of Christian nationalism like Kirk would hold xenophobic attitudes should be no surprise. In Taking America Back for God, we show that such views are fundamental to the Christian nationalist framework. One of the most consistent findings in research on Christian nationalism over the past decade is that Americans who more strongly subscribe to this ideology are more likely to be staunchly anti-immigrant―especially if those immigrants are non-white and/or non-Christian.

But Kirk's repeated "China Virus" tweets, and Trump's powerful retweet, both connecting the spread of disease with the need to keep immigrants out, are a clear reminder that white Christian nationalism has always connected non-white immigrants with social and biological contamination. Immigration is framed as an issue of purity or contamination; a righteous body politic or pathological disease. 

Chinese immigrants have long been the target of such attacks. The Immigration Act of 1882 included the Chinese Exclusion Act, which all but banned immigrants from anywhere in Asia, who were perceived to be plagued with "the social and political diseases of the Old World." Asians in particular, and to a lesser extent Eastern Europeans, were deemed less worthy than immigrants from parts of Europe populated by those more likely to be "White" and "Protestant," which have often been historically been understood  to mean the same thing.

Trump's 2016 Presidential campaign, which was successful due in no small part to his appeals to white Christian nationalism, drew on similar "contamination" rhetoric to shore up support for the Mexican border wall.

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