Dalla Nazione cristiana al rifugio identitario. Sviluppi della destra religiosa negli Stati Uniti

The article aims to show how right-wing political evangelicalism in the United States shifted from the “high ideal” of realizing the Christiannation in America to the project of separate identity communities,immune from the evils of modernity. A turning point for the rise of an evangelical right is identified in the 1970s Supreme Court decision in Coit v. Green (1971), establishing that a private school practicing racial discrimination could not be eligible for tax exemption. Some evangelical leaders, accordingly, defended segregationist academies in the name of religious freedom. In the following years they found in the crusade against abortion a more suitable issue to unite all Christians.Demographic changes, however, made the idea that Christian America, albeit including Catholics, could constitute the country’s “moral majority” increasingly problematic. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, new visions of identity emerged. The final part of the essay focuses, in this perspective, on “neo-monastic” projects of building isolated Christian communities, and reads them as signs of a crisis in the Christian nation narrative.