Confronting Christian Nationalism: Conscious and Unconscious Motivations and How to Talk Across the Divide with Pamela Cooper-White, MDiv, PhD, LCPC

French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva once wrote, “How could one tolerate a foreigner if one did not know one was a stranger to oneself?”  Xenophobia, or fear of the other, has blossomed in the U.S. into a radical divisiveness, in which the right-wing fear-mongering of narcissistic, charismatic leaders has dangerously heightened hate-motivated speech, acts of violence, and legal attacks against persons of color, Jews, women, and LGBTQ persons.  What are the conscious and unconscious motivations behind Christian nationalists and others who joined right-wing extremist movements in the U.S.?  And how – if ever – is it possible to talk across the divide?  Beginning with Freud’s “Group Psychology” as well as implications from Self Psychology and relational multiple-self theory, this program will include an introductory lecture, and ample time for small group and plenary discussion and exploration.

Learning Objectives

1.   participants will be able to describe four conscious motivations behind individuals’ participation in movements that promote hate and extremism in the U.S. today.

2.   Participants will be able to describe unconscious dynamics that fuel individuals’participation in movements that promote hate and extremism, from Freud, Self Psychology, and contemporary relational psychoanalytic theoretical perspectives.

3.   Participants will be able to apply their therapeutic listening and responding skills to build strategies for talking with individuals who have fallen into extremist group beliefs.

Pamela Cooper-White, MDiv, PhD, LCPC, is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion Emerita at Union Theological Seminary, New York, and an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of New York.   She has published 10 books, including Old & Dirty Gods: Religion, Antisemitism, and the Origins of Psychoanalysis, and The Psychology of Christian Nationalism which received the 2022 INDIE independent publishers’ gold award for social and political science. She was the 2013-14 Fulbright-Freud Scholar in Vienna, Austria, and is a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association; honorary member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP); and serves on the boards of the Freud Foundation U.S. (Freud Museum Vienna), the Journal of Pastoral Theology, and the Psychology, Culture, and Religion program unit of the American Academy of Religion.