American leadership seems to have fallen under the pall of White Christian Nationalism. “Make America great again” looks a lot like make America white and Christian again as a shamelessly bigoted government diligently deports immigrants and insults Muslims. President Trump has in the past called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration. Vice President Vance suggests his nation is no longer Christian enough to be truly free.

The Americans aren’t alone. Similar nostalgia for a white Christian past is inspiring the far right in countries across Europe. Most disturbing are stirrings in Germany where the immigrant-bashing Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been showing well in elections.

White Christian Nationalism varies from country to country, but essentially adherents see their nation going downhill and needing to be recaptured by its rightful owners, by authoritarian means if necessary. The rightful owners are, of course, people like them.

The nationalists perceive that their domination in their homelands, once overwhelming, is now in decline. They have a point. Christian affiliation has been falling over the long-term throughout the West, while the presence of other faiths has grown.

Similarly, as native birth rates in the West fall, immigration increases the presence of people of non-European ancestry. In the U.S., for example, the proportion of whites in the country has dropped from 80 percent to 60 percent since 1980, and the white population is declining.

So is their concern reasonable? Can white Christian pride be a valid cause? After all, white nationalism isn’t racism. Racism is an ism, a belief. Specifically it’s the belief that we humans can be categorized by race, and because of our racial differences, some races are more deserving than others.

Who is to say then? In this pluralistic, multi-cultural country of ours we admire people who retain pride in their ethnicity or religion—in their tribes. We consider this to be one of our strengths. So who are we to find fault in folks taking pride in their whiteness or Christianity?

The problem is that they rarely stop with pride. White nationalism, it seems, invariably morphs into white supremacy, i.e. racism. They are as exclusionary as they are nostalgic.

The principle scapegoats for their perceived misfortune are immigrants. With many coming from Third World countries, they tend to bring darker skins and non-Christian religions to the West. To liberals this is simply change, but to nationalists it’s dilution.

Governments have helped provide fuel for the nationalists fire. U.S. immigration policy has long been a contentious mess, and Trump et al. are making the most of it.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed over a million Islamic refugees in just two years without preparing her countrymen, an imprudent policy that helped propel the AfD to the country’s largest opposition party.

Even here in Canada, the former Liberal government bringing in more immigrants than there was infrastructure for has allowed Alberta Premier Smith to exploit immigrants as fodder for her MAGA base. Nationalists are adept at turning people’s legitimate concerns into populist crusades.

Ironically Western countries may in fact need more immigrants, not fewer, as native birthrates continue to fall and populations age. Their value as scapegoats may wear thin. And we have gone through periods in the past when xenophobia turned us against immigration, but we always came to our senses.

As have the Americans. Once Trump, leading enabler of White Christian Nationalism, is gone, and Americans can recover their decency, the huddled masses may once again be invited to enter America’s golden door.