What do migrants, God, and judo have in common? Well, apparently very little, according to the senior senator from Alabama, in an error riddled exhortation to Conservatives on immigration. Tommy Tuberville's remarks start off like he lifted from one of Donald Trump's anti-migrant speeches, but then it veers into the xenophobic. Listen.

We live in a constitutional Republic that's trying to do things without our judo Christian values. The biggest thing right now, I will tell you, is what's going on at our Southern border. When you've got a country without borders, you don't have a country. We have to get more values back into our country, and You can't do that when you have a million people every couple of months come into this country that know nothing about God, that know nothing about our laws and constitution.

Tupperville said that on a weekly conference call hosted by Bishop E. W. Jackson's National Awakening. They post their audio on their website, and CNN has reached out to Tupperville's office late tonight, but has yet to hear back. Joining me now is Leah Wright-Rigger. She's a senior CNN contributor and a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. Leah, first of all, it's Judeo-Christian values, not judo, of course. But secondly, what is he talking about?

Okay, so first of all, leave it up to Senator Tupperville to actually get the entire phrase wrong, which is no surprise because this is somebody who has described himself as a Christian Nationalist and before has actually fend it off right here on CNN accusations of being a white Christian Nationalist. This is very much in tune and in keeping with his understanding of what nationalism is and what Christianity is. Essentially, what we're seeing from somebody like Tuberville is a dog whistle. In fact, it's not even a dog whistle, it's a megaphone. It's really meant to be this call to arms, not just from MAGA followers across the country, but really for white Christian nationalists who believe that the United States is a place that is founded on Christian values and really should be a space that is for white people, right? It is a deeply xenophobic, at times bigoted and racist ideology. This is what Toberbill is referencing.

If you're white, you're not Christian, even though actually it could very well be many of these migrants are deeply religious Actually, many Latinos are deeply religious when they come into this country.

Well, you know what's actually shocking about this is that, one, many migrants actually have higher levels of religiosity than white Americans and their white American peers. But not only this, the number of people who self-identify as Christian nationalists among white people is actually really quite high. White evangelicals, it's like 66%. The second highest group, Latinos. The idea that these are godless people, that in there's no morals left in this country is in fact, completely wrong. But it is a calling card of white Christian nationalism in the world that they want to see.

We're talking about this, I think, more and more because it's becoming a bigger part of today's Republican Party. We saw just in the Alabama Supreme Court's decision about IVF, the Chief Justice in his concurrence wrote a whole thing about the root of his belief that these embryos are people, and it's God. He says, The people of Alabama took what was spoken of the Prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state. Another example of how this is not just part of the political rhetoric, it's part of the law.

It's incorporated into the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Alabama. I should say that almost 50% of Alabama natives say that they identify as Christian nationalists, with a lot of that being white understood. But the other part of this is that when we talk about Christian nationalism, what I think makes it so insidious and what makes it so remarkable that it's moved into the mainstream is that it's not just about espousing the ideas of Christianity or nationalism. It's about putting people in places that can ensure that government is run by nationalists, that we're run as a theocracy. The IVF ruling is 100% that.

There's been some recent reporting that if Trump is reelected, there's at least one outside group that considers itself a Christian-nationalist group that's planning to do exactly that, to build a government with those exact values. It's just something that we've got to keep an eye on. Leah Wright-Ruger, thank you very much for joining us on all of this.