USM forum books PRRI founder Robert Jones, whose 50-state survey puts Mississippi at 52%

The University of Southern Mississippi's Honors College has booked Robert P. Jones for the 2026 season of its University Forum, the lecture series the college's own page dates to 1974 and calls "the premier speaker series" at the university. The schedule page groups him with the novelist Michael Farris Smith as "Mississippi natives Robert Jones and Michael Farris Smith," and names the institute he runs, the Public Religion Research Institute. What the page does not mention is a number PRRI itself published about the state the forum sits in. In the institute's 50-state survey of support for Christian nationalism, Mississippi stands at 52%, above every state on PRRI's list but Arkansas.

The argument that runs through that survey is on the record under Jones's own name. PRRI's release announcing the study quotes him: "For another year, our survey reveals the continued hold that Christian nationalism has on the Republican Party and its white evangelical base," said Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI. The attribution closes at the end of that sentence. The line that follows in the release is written in the same voice but carried without a speaker: Americans overall reject the worldview by a margin of two to one, the document states, while its dominance among those groups makes it "an ongoing threat to our pluralistic democracy." The captured page attaches no name to that sentence, so it is the release talking and this piece leaves it there.

The schedule page introduces Jones through his newest book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, and states that his other works have won a 2021 American Book Award and a 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. PRRI's Substack post marking the book's publication opens with a question: "What happens when the church trades faith for power, and democracy for dominion?" The same post carries the line "A prophetic summons to moral responsibility." It names no source for that line, and the capture offers no way to tell whether the words are the institute's own copy or an endorsement reproduced from elsewhere.

So much for the claim side. The record is the 2025 American Values Atlas, and it counts something narrower than the book's title suggests. At the national level, the release reports, roughly one-third of Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (11%) or Sympathizers (21%), against two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (27%). The release does not itself link that split to its two-to-one line, though one-third against two-thirds is that ratio. Broken out by party, a majority of Republicans (56%) fall into the first two categories, compared with one in four independents (25%) and fewer than one in five Democrats (17%).

How the record was produced matters here, and the release announcing the survey sets out the sample and fieldwork behind it. The survey drew a random representative sample of 22,111 adults across all 50 states, of whom 20,771 came from Ipsos's KnowledgePanel and 1,340 were recruited through opt-in panels to lift sample sizes in smaller states. Interviews ran online between Feb. 28 and Dec. 8, 2025. The national margin of error is 0.87 percentage points at 95% confidence, with a design effect of 1.7. The 50-state analysis states that PRRI designed and conducted the survey, funded by the Wilbur and Hilda Glenn Family Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock.

The state numbers sit in a separate PRRI report, which lists them in one sentence: "The states with the highest levels of support for Christian nationalism are red states primarily located in the South and Midwest: Arkansas (54%), Mississippi (52%), West Virginia (51%), Oklahoma (49%), and Wyoming (46%)." The report never uses the word second; the ordering is the list's own. The same report identifies white evangelical Protestants and Hispanic Protestants as the groups most likely to hold Christian nationalist beliefs.

Read as analysis, that stability line is the most interesting sentence in the whole capture, and it comes from the claimant rather than a critic. A subtitle promising a "Christian Turn Against Democracy" describes a movement, a before and an after. PRRI's own release reports percentages that have largely held steady since late 2022. Both can be true - a worldview can be concentrated in one coalition, and politically consequential, without its national share moving - but the two documents are pointed in different directions, and a reader weighing the lecture is entitled to notice.

PRRI's release and its 50-state report also round differently. The release says roughly one-third of Americans are Adherents or Sympathizers; the 50-state report says "Around three in ten Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers." The captured 50-state report gives no component percentages, so these two documents alone cannot show whether the two summaries rest on the same figures. It is a small thing, and it is the sort of small thing that decides whether a number quoted second-hand comes out as 30 or 33. Neither document, in the captured text, reports how Mississippi's 52% has moved over time, so the stability finding published at the national level cannot be assumed to hold state by state.

What a reader can check next is unusually concrete. The forum schedule still lists Michael Farris Smith, described on the page as an award-winning author, screenwriter and musician, as the season's other Mississippi native, and students taking HON 321 earn one credit hour for attending. A falsifiable test follows from the institute's own stability finding: if PRRI releases another 50-state Christian nationalism analysis on or before June 30, 2027, Mississippi should land within five percentage points of 52%. If it moves further than that, the sentence PRRI attached to the 2025 atlas is the thing that broke, and the argument arriving at the USM forum will need a different number under it.