"When we don't avoid people who think differently than we do, we gain an opportunity for growth and national renewal." So opens Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump, a fascinating and insightful book by Lutheran pastor and journalist Angela Denker. Denker spent years on the road talking to Christians who voted for Donald Trump—listening to their motives and writing honestly, but not uncritically, about their reasoning. To her surprise, she discovered a much more diverse coalition than you’d likely imagine—just like the Left is not the monolith that conservatives sometimes paint. From abortion rights and racial issues to immigration and football, Denker offers an inside look at the American mindset.
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Matthew and Julian are taking the week off to be with their family, and we will be presenting just one interview this week, which I think is extremely important.
Before we get to that, make sure to stay up to date with us on all of our social media handles, including predominantly Instagram.
We're all individually on Twitter, occasionally on TikTok, something new coming this week as well, and not really using YouTube these days, but you can find us at the other channels readily.
Spirituality 84, Red State Christians with Angela Denker.
So this week I am talking to Angela Denker about her 2019 book, Red State Christians, Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump.
Now, unlike those who pay lip service to wanting to bridge the divide in a polarized country, only to retreat into their corners, Angela spent years traveling around America to talk to and understand the Christians who voted for Donald Trump, to listen to their motives and write honestly, but not uncritically, about their reasons for doing so.
What she found, as you'll hear during our conversation, is that it's a much more diverse coalition than you'd likely to imagine.
Just like the left is not the monolith that conservatives sometimes paint us as.
Religion is Angela's wheelhouse.
Besides being a journalist, she's also a Lutheran pastor.
She's covered a lot of sports for Sports Illustrated, and she claims bylines in the Washington Post and Fortune.
And while I'm not religious personally, I'm a bit partial to her faith, given that my middle name is Martin, plus the fact that Lutherans have a pretty good track record of reform.
In fact, Angela devotes her time and faith to activism within her community.
And as she mentions, she lives quite close to where George Floyd was murdered, and we touch upon her congregation's reactions to her calling for racial healing and social responsibility during that time.
The conspiritualist world is dominated by Eastern religions and New Age thought, so focusing on Christianity hasn't been a goal of our podcast to date.
Yet I think back to my own upbringing, growing up the son of a Catholic and Russian Orthodox, but to be honest both my parents were agnostic at best.
So even though I was more likely to consider Jesus a baseball player than a savior, the small conservative New Jersey borough that I grew up in was dominated by Christian thought.
And I suspect this is the case for a lot of Americans who also operate in the wellness space.
Our nation's dominant religion has an unconscious effect on us, even down to our views on an ultimate good or evil, which is not how billions of people around the world view human existence.
Monotheism has made a giant imprint on our consciousness, and it often serves as a philosophical guide for the divisiveness that we're currently experiencing.
For example, the other side is treated as completely corrupt and evil, or even satanic.
And let's be honest, we know the dangers of what happens when a collectivist mindset considers their opposition to be inhuman.
And we even seem incapable of resolving those issues, which is why I feel that a book like Red State Christians is so important to read and why I wanted to talk to Angela in the first place.
But I'll save my critiques of Christian philosophy for future episodes, as we're working on a deep dive into muscular Christianity right now.
In the spirit of the holidays and transitioning into the new year, we're going to focus on Angela's work this week, a woman who put aside her own biases to write a really important book about a fractured nation.
As I said, that doesn't mean we're not being critical during the conversation of certain aspects and ideas, but it's also important to remember that you have to critique what you love if you hope to make it better.
America is, and always has been, an aspirational nation, an idea to live up to, and that keeps us from getting too comfortable and forgetting that striving is part of the human condition.
So let's keep striving.
I give a shout out to Lisa Braun Doubles who introduced me to Angela and her book as well as her person and I really appreciate that.
I hope you are having a great holiday season and are really focusing on your transition into the new year in 2022.
And despite what the Twittersphere might say, even an atheist like myself can say Merry Christmas.
So hope you had a great one.
Thank you, Angela, for taking some time out to talk to us this week.
Thanks for having me.
When you began writing the book, you wanted to end with a story with your close college friend, Lindsay, who is a red state Christian who surprised you with her support for Donald Trump in 2016.
And even though you never got to interview her for the book, some life stuff got in the way.
What did you learn about Lindsay during the course of researching your book?
You know, I think her story represents hope, and that's really where I wanted to end.
You know, since the book came out in 2019, admittedly, I'm in a less hopeful place, just to be honest about that.
But what I did see in Lindsay, I have seen in other folks, and I see it in my rural Minnesota congregation as well, which is Still an openness to want to learn, to want to embrace viewpoints that are different than your family or your community.
You know, I did get a chance to sort of interact with Lindsay again in 2020 around George Floyd's death real close to my house and around just, you know, for a lot of white people, sort of an opportunity to hopefully wake up a little bit and address the real reality of racism.
And she, she really was outspoken about that within her conservative Christian context.
And, you know, I continue to applaud those sort of people who are beacons within communities where their voices are certainly a minority.
You also discuss your husband's family toward the end.
The members are part of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, which is a more fundamentalist church.
And you're a Lutheran pastor, but their church does not recognize female pastors.
And one of the many anecdotes you write about, the fact that They wanted you to lead a prayer, although you were in the bathroom with your child at the time.
But your book is filled with so many of these complexities, and it's really why I wanted to talk to you today, because the media paints such a general broad stroke of the relationship of spirituality, not just in the context of who we cover, but in Christianity as well.
And so this is a very broad question.
So you can enter wherever you'd like, but how do you find the general media reporting on religion and politics, given what you've gone through researching your book?
Yeah, well, let me give a very pertinent, but also poignant and heartbreaking and somewhat hopeful update to that last vignette in my book.
Since my book came out in June of 2020, Sorry, June of 2021, my brother-in-law, so my husband's brother, contracted COVID right when the Delta variant was really taking off in southwestern rural Missouri, and he was down in Branson.
And he had decided not to receive the vaccine and became terribly sick and ended up dying in November of 2021.
And as sort of an update to what I mentioned in the end of that book, you know, throughout 2020 and 2021, I had some really hard interactions with my in-laws around racism, around politics, around religion.
And yet, when my brother-in-law He made the decision to be removed from his life-sustaining ECMO machine.
I was the pastor in the hospital room with my family as we said his final prayers, and I was the pastor who presided over his funeral.
And yeah, that's not the kind of story that's real popular in national media, and yet it's my story.
And so I have no choice but to sort of reconcile My incredible heartbreak at the right-wing Christian politics that sort of led to his death in my opinion in some ways, and also at the same time, To see the grace that I extended and that my husband's family has continued to extend to me.
So, yeah, I think that stories of real, true reconciliation are not always so popular.
And I think also the national media, you know, coming as someone who worked in newspapers, worked as a sports writer for a number of years, has become really dominated by folks who can afford to write because of family money, because of other occupations, because journalism does not tend to pay really a middle class even salary or very, you know, very difficult.
So you tend to get stories that ignore the vast majority of the country because people simply don't run in.
They run in elite circles.
So that's a long answer.
We could spend the whole podcast talking about that.
But I hope that gives a little bit of insight into it.
My first reporting job out of college was $19,000 a year.
It was local news reporting.
Right.
So just to give some context for people who understand how, it's one of the more frustrating aspects to me because I don't really think that there's anything as mainstream media because these are competing organizations, many of them underfunded.
And it's really frustrating.
I want to pull back a little before, because there's so many wonderful stories in your book, and I want to ask about a few of them.
But just in terms of your own, a Lutheran pastor who is progressive on many issues, what made you want to get involved in the church in this way as someone who is leading on topics like racism, but also I mean, true to the Lutheran tradition, trying to actually implement some sorts of reform in our understanding of what faith actually means.
Yeah, thank you.
So I've had my own evolutions.
One of the callings that I Really felt that I heard strongly throughout my time in pastoral ministry.
I've been a pastor for almost 10 years now, but recently I've really felt God calling me to speak, to be more courageous, to speak more powerfully.
been one of those people who for a number of years thought that my best way to have a voice in the church was to sort of have white men in power share the microphone with me.
And, you know, I've worked with some pastors who did that really beautifully, but in general, I realized that in some ways I was still being too timid.
So, you know, I've had my own evolution.
I've become more strident, more courageous in some ways, in the way that I speak, particularly around racism, around people who are marginalized.
I've had my own evolution on LGBTQ rights and LGBTQ participation in the church.
And I was certainly more conservative at one point.
I always was open to evolution, but when I started seminary, I was in a much different place than I am now.
Let's bring up one more piece of evolution because there's a scene where you take a day trip to Juarez and you write that you didn't realize you were such a xenophobe at that moment because of your perceptions of, and you know, we live in a country where something like less than 40% of Americans even have a passport.
So their possibility of even experiencing other cultures, it doesn't exist for them.
How do you make progress on topics like, let's say, immigration, because that's also something you write about?
Yeah, so I'm currently serving three-quarter time as a solo pastor in rural southwestern Minnesota, which is an interesting thing all itself.
I live in the city of Minneapolis.
I'm in Ilhan Omar's district, so I'm in a very liberal neighborhood, but commune about an hour west to serve my church, and most of the people who go to my church are They're farmers.
They're factory workers.
I do have a local ER doctor.
I have a lot of teachers.
But it is a, you know, some of the people from my church say it's like going to a different country from coming to where I live to this community.
All that to say that I think what I said in the book I still believe in today, even though it's tough and it's getting tougher.
Is this opportunity for engagement, you know, just the conversations that I'm having with my congregation and they're having with me, is a real opportunity to build empathy and to create change.
And so as I make that drive, It's not as an easy drive.
I'm driving past Trump sign after Trump sign after Trump sign, you know, Trump flags.
You know, it's they're new again.
People are adding more, you know, I kind of thought that at some point, maybe they would go away after he lost the election.
But it's You know, I just, I do see these tiny little pieces where, and it's not one way, I'm learning from my congregation as well, right?
And so your question around immigration, there's a large population of Hispanic workers who are working in the factories, who are working in the Food processing plants, primarily.
There's some Mexican restaurants.
And so there's an influx of this Latino population into an area of southwestern Minnesota that is historically very white, dominated by Lutherans, to be honest, and German and Scandinavian immigrants.
And one thing we did with my confirmation class is we took a field trip to the next town over to the Catholic Church to learn about their Spanish-speaking ministry.
You know, just like little things like that to say, You know, we have an opportunity to learn about each other.
This stuff is important.
And we need to meet each other and learn each other's stories.
So, I don't know.
I don't know if that changes my congregation's view on immigration, but I think it does help them to humanize, you know, when I do continually hear things like, well, the only reason COVID is here is because of the factory workers.
Well, no, it's not.
It's going through the white population as well.
One of the most incredible stories occurred close to me in Orange County at Mariner's Church.
The pastor, Wes Tamifuna, is Tongan and Mexican.
I see he's at another church now.
I went to his Instagram yesterday.
He's also a very fit person.
Yes.
Yes, he's awesome.
But you write that he is sometimes confused for being a groundskeeper or a waiter by the attendees of the church who are predominantly white.
And from talking to him, how does someone who is Pacific Islander Mexican deal with that perception issue?
Does he use it to catalyze his sermons or does it affect him more personally?
Yeah, I mean, that's the sad story of the last couple years, and in some ways, as you mentioned, he had to leave.
He just could not exist in that space anymore, and he had to go to a different church.
But I think his story is so important because it surfaces this common thread of, particularly in places like Southern California, but also in New York City, you see these very large churches, often popular with celebrities, you know, the Kardashians, Justin Bieber, That are really highlighting, hey, look, we have leaders of color.
You know, Wes was an example of that.
There's this good looking guy, former football star, we're going to put him on stage.
But they didn't do the work underneath to really address racism, to really address How the predominantly white congregation saw people of color.
And so then they just stick him up there on stage for his one sermon and he gets, you know, after preaching, he still gets people like, Hey, can you get me a cup of coffee?
You know, assuming he's the cafe worker or, you know, Hey, you got, you really need to water these bushes more.
And he's like, I just preached.
Um, And I can relate to that as a female pastor.
You know, I can see some of those same things.
I spend a lot of time just like proving that it's okay for me to exist.
So, I think it was real tough on him, but I think his story is so important because it represents this idea that just because you may see black and brown faces highlighted within movements that are actively racist and that underneath the surface, like many of these large congregations, are propagating messages that are anti-gay, that are anti-black, But they're highlighting black and brown faces.
It does not negate the overall messaging that's coming out of these churches.
You lived, as you mentioned, before we started recording in Orange County, and I know this area all too well.
One weekend, I just decided to drive to Rick Warren's church because I've heard so much about him and I wanted to actually see the grounds and listen to him.
Sure.
I totally understood.
You had the coffee shop, you had childcare.
It was a place where people can go and do everything, and that makes sense.
But I was also fascinated with the way that he coded his language.
It's just like there was a soft bigotry in it that doesn't really come across if you're not listening.
And that weekend, he would talk about an all-encompassing faith, but then he was really saying, Being transgender is an abomination because it's not what God intended.
And I think sometimes people are surprised that the West Coast of California is usually seen as a very liberal area, but you have the cluster of megachurches there.
What was your biggest takeaway from your time there and just living among the, what was it, boob jobs?
Yeah.
I mean, again, so the book, I think maybe what you read in the book, the book I initially pitched was entirely focused on Orange County, because I do think it's such a fascinating microcosm in Southern California in general.
And of course, if you look at Trump's staff and some of the most influential advisors of his that were really pushing this anti-immigration agenda, Stephen Miller, right out of Santa Monica, you know?
So people in my hometown here in the Midwest, that's a case where, you know, we say people on the coast have perceptions about the Midwest, people in the Midwest also need to understand, you know, the breadth and depth of California and California conservatism.
I think wherever you have churches that have such a concentration of wealth and power and influence, you're going to get a gospel that is beholden to financial interests, and even if it's not initially intended.
You know, so I served with a wonderful pastor in Orange County with a church that had a two million dollar budget, and as much as the other pastor and myself wanted to speak about justice, wanted to speak about racism, The people in our church who had a lot of money had a lot of influence because we had a big budget to pay.
So that's my caution and that's become my caution about really large congregations in general.
And I think it just speaks to the fact that, you know, in Orange County, I think I recently read that the average home now is over $800,000.
That's just totally out of reach for the vast majority of Americans.
And so when you have so much wealth, You know, Jesus did warn us a lot about money, and when you have such a high concentration of money, and a lot of that money is concentrated in Orange County among white conservative Christians, of course you're going to have a gospel that is preached.
You know, in Rick Warren's case, they had, I think I wrote it in the book about Saddleback Sam, you know, they had their ideal churchgoer who was a Wealthy white guy who wanted to be told how good he was and Jesus forgave him and please give us some money.
So there you go.
But then Warren, you know, gave us the address for Barack Obama.
So yeah.
Well, let's let's talk about Jesus for a moment, because in the chapter on Dallas, when you're in Dallas, you write that America is not, in fact, the world.
And it's not even mentioned in the Bible.
And you also write elsewhere that Jesus was of the same region and skin color that many Americans are biased against.
And it made me think of Stephen Prothero's book, which is American Jesus, Which just shows the history of Jesus in America and all of the different incarnations he's received that usually reflects what the congregation wants him to be.
And so, is it possible to teach Americans that Christianity is a global religion and one, as you said, that is about money in a lot of ways?
And can you see any hope that we can focus on the ethical teachings instead of always getting bogged down in tribal warfare?
Yeah, so you bring up a really important point, and this is a place where I have evolved and even become more concerned since the publishing of the first edition of Rose State Christians.
So we have a new edition coming out in August, and one of the main points that I make in the new content for the book is that when I first began talking about the book, and particularly about the Christian nationalism that I encountered in Dallas on the 4th of July, I thought it was really important for me to tell people When I talked about the book, that Jesus is not an American, right?
And so I still think that's important, but what I actually think is more important for me to say now is the very thing that you mentioned, which is that Jesus is not white, and the extent to which race plays a role, you know, that when we say Christian nationalism, we have to add white to it.
It's just an inextricable part of the way that Christianity in America is understood, even though, you know, I take pains throughout the book to say, like, hey, the richness of black American Christianity and the power and the justice that comes out of The Black Church in America.
I mean, PBS did the documentary this year.
There's just such incredible examples.
And yet, white Christian nationalism is the dominant way that most Americans view what it means to be Christian in this country.
So we have to talk about race.
Yeah.
And we have to talk about music, because the music in the Black Church, I'm sorry, is just way, way better.
But one factoid I pulled was the fact, I didn't know this, that there are more Arab American Christians than Muslims in America.
And how your experiences, and that was also in Dallas where you were talking about that, how do they square being Christian but being biased against because of their skin color and where they come from?
Yeah, again, that was one of the goals of my book, was to tell the stories that are not getting told, and the Arab-American Christian story was by and large not being told in many places.
And I think it's such an important story, particularly, too, because it reminds us That these are Jesus' descendants, that Jesus came from the Middle East, and that the Middle Eastern Christians who are here in the U.S.
have many lessons to teach Americans.
I think, you know, I would be interested to go back to Houston to the Arab Christian church that I visited And to speak with these folks and to see how their opinions have changed since I was there in 2018.
At that point, they had been swayed, many of them, by Trump's supposed toughness on ISIS to say, like, okay, we're going to vote for Trump.
But also, like black Christians in general, Arab American Christians are socially conservative when it comes to gender roles, when it comes to sexuality.
But they're, you know, more liberal in like economic issues in many cases.
So you find people and communities that have their feet in different areas.
And I think we see this with Hispanic voters as well.
And so I think that's where often National Democrats, national media sort of tends to look and say, OK, this person has brown skin.
This is how we assume they're going to vote or this is how we assume they're going to view different issues.
And we fail to understand the complexity between people who may have to weigh, you know, what do I think is going to happen to my loved ones back in the Middle East under this president?
And also, how are people like me going to be treated here in the U.S.? ?
So it's, you know, hard a lot of times for white Americans to grasp the complexity with which many Christians of color address their voting in this country.
In my former life as a fitness instructor, I taught, one of the places I taught was the Equinox here in Westwood, and it has a large Persian Jew population.
Yeah.
I was taken off guard by how many of them supported Trump.
Yeah.
And it was specifically because of what you bring up, that complexity of race issues, because they thought that he was going to really champion Israel.
Yeah.
And that honestly threw a lot of people off.
In all of your research, you also talk a bit about the judges being a primary concern that obviously superseded any talk of ethics in terms of who who Trump was.
Is that really the drive?
What were the driving reasons of people who you may not expect to vote for Trump who claim to be ethical Christians, but then they also support him?
Yeah.
And again, I would expect to see some as men.
I would have to look again at the data from 2020 to see how that shifted.
I do know that along the border that Hispanic voters moved towards Trump in large areas in Texas.
So I think, yeah, it's a mix.
It's never unpopular for American Christians to denigrate women and American politicians, you know?
I mean, people can line right up behind that, and that's a real thing.
Yeah, amazingly, especially when, you know, you have like Phyllis Schlafly and that lineage of saying, hey, we should be in the kitchen.
As a pastor, as a female pastor, how do you deal with that?
What do you try to preach?
Yeah, it's, well, I've, you know, been reading a lot recently about, of course, the Supreme Court and the abortion law in Texas and Amy Coney Barrett and some of her remarks about, you know, well, because of adoption, why do women need abortion?
And it's just sort of unfathomable to think that a woman who has been through pregnancy herself would make a remark like that and just totally dismiss the The trauma of pregnancy on a woman's body, the risk particularly of giving birth for black women, for indigenous women.
And so I think what we really have to look at too is just the role of privilege.
And I think I was also reading about a legislator from Texas who talked about, you know, well, I made it as a single mom.
You can too.
Well, yeah, that's easy when your father is a multimillionaire and he's bankrolling your life and paying for your nanny.
So, you know, I think it's important to talk about the role of privilege and to be honest, To be honest, as women, about our economic situation.
I could not have written this book if my husband was not an engineer.
And we still went into debt.
You know?
Because I took a year to travel and write.
But, yeah.
I think it's important to be honest.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you pulled it off, which is wonderful.
but those sacrifices are really important to highlight, especially when the fact that a lot of the people you see out there are preaching anti-abortion, for example, and they do have that privilege.
The women that are going to be most affected don't even have the opportunity to have a choice or a say in the matter.
It's really disturbing.
How have you felt now that it's very possible that Roe v. Wade, if not overturned, will be chipped away at?
What do you think that's going to do to the attitudes of so many of the people that you cover in the book?
I do sort of sympathize with the argument that Roe v. Wade being in existence has been a more powerful tool for the Republican Party than once Roe v. Wade has fallen.
I was also thinking about this morning.
I live in a blue Midwestern state.
I live in Minnesota.
I am 36 years old.
I have two children.
I'm married.
I'm white.
I'm going to be in a pretty good position if this law passes, you know, if Roe v. Wade falls.
Most American women will not.
And having said all that, it still just kind of scares me to think about, because I, between my two pregnancies, I had a miscarriage, and I wrote about this for the Washington Post, I had a miscarriage And the pregnancy failed to further develop.
It was, you know, super, super early.
There was never even a developed heartbeat or anything like that.
It was just kind of a false start.
But I had the option to sort of have that surgically removed, or I could wait until it came out on its own.
But that would be You know, very painful.
It would make it more difficult for me to get pregnant in the future.
And so I did have the opportunity to have that surgically removed after my miscarriage, and it was still very traumatic.
But it would have been much more traumatic to be going to lead a church preaching and wondering, when am I going to be, you know, Am I going to be bleeding all over the pulpit this morning?
So I think those are the realities for women that we have hidden and we've covered up for so long and it's really heartbreaking the ways that religion has been used to demonize and dismiss women's bodies.
Well, speaking of Trump again, I've been on a sort of muscular Christianity kick recently.
I read Jesus and John Wayne, and then I read Francis Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals right before reading Red State Christians, and that's very much been top of mind, especially with Where we're heading as a society, and you focus a chapter on football, which is a great unifier for Christians.
I'll never forget the one time I was in Alabama, and the professor that brought me there to lecture showed me the 100,000-person stadium for college.
And it's a very Christian area there, and it's a violent sport, and yet you discuss how, at heart, Jesus is about nonviolence.
Is nonviolence really a factor with a lot of the congregations you deal with?
Is that how they view their religion?
Well, you know, you saw a big movement in the early 2000s.
I highly recommend Christianity Today's podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, which documents Mark Driscoll, who was one of the leading proponents of this muscular Christianity and the idea of Jesus as an avenging warrior.
And so I think that became popular as a way for panicked congregations who thought, oh my gosh, we're losing numbers, people are coming to church, we're going to get the men back in church.
So do I think that there's an element of that within every American church?
I do.
I don't think it's a dominant for the congregations that I serve.
I don't think they dominantly see Jesus as violent.
I think they do see Jesus as nonviolent and they do see him I actually have a good example about that.
I live about three miles from where George Floyd was murdered, and when I came to church that following Sunday to preach, You know, I talked about it and talked about the injustice and talked about the racism that we often have ignored here in Minneapolis because we think, oh, we're, and particularly in rural Minnesota, they think, well, we don't have issues like that.
And so I talked about it and my, I received, you know, people who appreciated it and then also people who ended up leaving the church over it.
And My council president, I thought he just had a beautiful way of coming around it when he was receiving a lot of these complaints.
Because, you know, in Minnesota, they won't tell me directly.
They'll tell somebody else about me.
We're very passive aggressive.
But when he's receiving, you know, these complaints, he said, Well, what do you want?
Do you want a pastor who's gonna stand up there and say about the protesters, let's just gun them all down.
We need to just gun them all down.
Is that what you want your pastor to say?
Because the pastor's role is to preach about Jesus and preach about nonviolence.
And I just thought he had a beautiful way of just calling a thing what it is, which is what the Bible asks us to do.
And to say, you know, if If pastors are preaching violent Christianity, that's what it looks like.
It looks like people dying.
And that's what we have in this country.
We have people dying of COVID.
We have people dying of school shootings.
We have people dying by suicide in rural America because of the ample access to guns.
We have people dying of opioid overdoses because of the massive despair.
And that's what a violent Christianity has produced.
Those are its fruits.
You just keep seeming to lead me to the next question because you write a chapter about guns, which is obviously, especially in your neck of the woods, a hot topic.
I mean, everywhere, honestly.
But recently I was interviewed about this podcast on NPR and the last question was like, Kind of pointing towards, can you give me some hope?
And I don't have a lot, you know, and I express that and they cut that part of the interview.
And you started, you started by saying you don't, you know, you have a little more despair now, too, after since the book's been published.
And I agree with that.
So all of that said, all of this, these mixtures in this cocktail, how do you feel about the potential for more escalation of violence in these communities?
I think it's just inevitable.
It's inevitable.
There are so many guns out there, and they're so available, and there's so many people dealing with untreated mental health and addiction problems, particularly in rural America.
One of my parishioners was just in sharing with me about Someone they know who's dealing with PTSD and they cannot get an appointment for months.
But there's guns around.
There's lots of guns around and there's lots of bars.
And so violent.
And then you have irresponsible politicians and pastors who are ramping up violent rhetoric because they want to sell books.
They want to make podcasts.
They want to get more social media followers.
And it's You know, it's really sad.
I mean, I am still in a deep, deep hole of grief because my brother-in-law died at age 43 and left behind four children.
And so, yeah, I do.
And I think that where the part of the book that I do still hold on to and the part of my faith that I You know, cling to amidst my fear and pain and anger and grief is the theology of the cross, which is that Jesus' redemption, Jesus' salvation came about as Jesus was killed by the government in capital punishment on a cross to the cheers of
It was a unification between religion and government, a form of religious nationalism that crucified Jesus.
It was a unification between religion and government, a form of religious nationalism that crucified Jesus.
So God's been here before.
Mentioning the anti-vaccine sentiment, this podcast was founded the week that Plandemic came out, which was produced by someone named Mickey Willis, who I know and is very much in my circle here in Los Angeles.
It was until Austin became the circle of that scene.
But we don't know.
We spend so much time deconstructing and showing how these wellness influencers have promoted and monetized anti-vax sentiments well before the pandemic.
So this is just a fever pitch now, but a lot of the focus is on MAGA supporting people who are anti-vaccination.
So how do you deal with that in your community?
Yeah, I mean, I had confirmation students tell me last year, like, I'm not getting that vaccine.
It's going to plant a chip inside my body.
And I had family members send me Plandemic when it came out.
And I think it's really heartbreaking because I think I told you before the podcast, this is really popular among white moms.
And, you know, I remember when I was a new mom and you can't sleep and you're freaked out and you're, you know, finding community on social media because we have, and particularly since COVID as well, but community has been sort of obliterated for American Motherhood and we're kind of, you know, do it on your own, do it yourself.
And so people find one another in social media communities and Facebook, you know, talk about social media companies, have monetized drawing moms to the most extreme corners of the internet because it's, you know, draws them in the hardest and causes them to spend the most time on there.
And that's where so much of this.
So I know a lot of women who I like and respect who have gone from sort of essential oils, organic food, cloth diapers, to anti-vaccine and Democrats are child pornographers.
The Essential Oils.
We've covered many episodes talking about MLMs and that phenomenon.
So speaking of child sex traffickers, there you are again, because I wanted to know if QAnon has infiltrated your communities and how you've managed to deal with that.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
You just hear I mean, even like sweet elderly people in my congregation will tell me like this this wacky thing that they have heard and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm so worried about this.
And oftentimes it comes, you know, back through a thread that started with something that had to do with QAnon.
And so I do think that there's some culpability among the national media for Allowing, you know, the movement of national media out of local communities has left a vacuum and a hole of trust in where sort of anyone with an internet connection can step in.
And the defunding of local news has led to, again, a space for unsavory grifters to step right in.
So it's a mix.
There's a responsibility on people's part to say, you know, let's look at our critical thinking skills and do some, do some research on, you know, and have some compassion, have some compassion for people outside of your immediate family.
And think about how your decisions are impacting them.
Just before we logged on, I got an email from someone on my mailing list.
And it's a very old mailing list, so a lot of people have churned.
And some people I don't have signed up over the years.
And this person I don't know personally, but it was talking about the anti-vax sentiment.
And they're just sharing studies that aren't actually studies and saying things like, well, if you're vaccinated, why do you have to wear a mask?
And there's just a real scientific ignorance of how viruses work.
And so have you, besides obviously, and I'm sorry to hear about your brother-in-law, but Have you lost people, meaning just friendships or relationships, through this process after the book was published and some of the things you said and the tension of anti-vax?
Has there been a lot of discord in your personal life with friendships and family?
Yeah, like I said, we've had some rough moments with my in-laws, and I appreciate that God's grace has enabled us to come through it with a relationship intact and a level of Trust and hope, you know, um, that's still there.
Uh, I was talking on the phone with a friend of mine who's an ICU nurse in Northern California.
Uh, she and I went to college together and we were talking about a mutual, you know, former volleyball teammate of ours from college.
And both of us kind of talked about how we have some friendships that are, she used the words on pause right now.
You know, I have some friendships where I, I haven't returned phone calls, I'll return texts, but I'm not ready to hang out one-on-one, you know, with people that I've been really close to who are propagating, you know, the same kind of anti-vaccine messages that my brother-in-law believed and that
You know, the truth is that the incontrovertible scientific truth is that as a 43 year old healthy guy, if he would have been vaccinated, the odds that he would die of COVID are just vanishingly low.
And so there's particularly, he had four children, but two little girls, ages six and 10, now seven, seven and 10 by the time this podcast airs, That are without a dad.
And that's the carnage of the anti-vaccine movement.
That's the carnage of, you know, Alex Jones making millions off of alternative cures.
That's the carnage of Joe Rogan and Invermectin.
is fatherless children across this country.
I just spoke to a church member today whose granddaughter's best friend's mom just died.
And my church member said, you know, well, she got over COVID, but then she died of pneumonia.
Well, she had pneumonia because she had COVID.
She died of COVID.
She's in her forties.
You know, it's, it's a real thing.
Well, let's try to end on a little more upbeat note here.
We were introduced through our mutual friend, Lisa Braun Doubles, who told me about your book.
I started reading and I reached out after I read this line, which was, when we don't avoid people who think differently than we do, we gain an opportunity for growth and renewal.
What would you say is your biggest area of growth from inception of the idea of the book to publication?
Two different kind of diverging areas of growth, right?
So one area of growth has been an increased courage for me to when people say things that are openly hateful, when people say things that are openly racist.
I'm being a writer, you know, in the past, I would kind of just not say anything in the moment and file it away and maybe write about it later.
I've really been, you know, emboldened to speak in those moments.
And when I do so, you know, thinking of my family members and friends who are directly impacted by statements like that.
So I think there's been a growth and some courage and a growth and some willingness to say, I am not, even as a white pastor, I'm not going to be beholden by trying to win over the white Christian establishment.
And then I think the other area of growth, though, too, is just ongoing humility, ongoing realization of the places where I Make snap judgments about people because of what they look like, because of where they're from.
And I continue to do it.
You know, I even as I know so many role Americans who are truly brilliant.
I can make judgments about people.
You know, just recently I had a young woman who I talked to and she was in scribes and I just kind of assumed that she was a nurse and she's not.
She's a doctor.
But so, you know, when I get worried about people being sexist about me or making this, you know, it's just that growth of continuing to be willing to be surprised by one another and surprised by God.
Red State Christians, I have the hardcover.
You mentioned the paperback's coming and you've updated.
Can we close with just some of what you've learned since the publication of what you've updated it with?
Yeah, so of course the book came out in August 2019.
That was pre-COVID, that was pre-George Floyd, and that was pre-January 6th.
So those three signposts of our last few years have, I think, continued to reveal the power and the destructiveness of the Movement that combined Trumpism and white conservative Christianity.
So I have added new content that really addresses how COVID has really brought to light the lies and the dishonesty of the pro-life movement.
in this country, because how can you be pro-life when you ignore and paint over the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans in order to prioritize the economy and your own personal wealth?
When it comes to George Floyd and racism, again, I've said I have learned that it's much more important to talk about the fact that Jesus is not white than it is even to talk about that Jesus was not an American, because We're in a sort of battle.
We're in a debate right now over what America looks like.
And there's a last last gasp attempt to make America defined by its ethnicity and its race rather than its ideals.
And then finally, when it comes to January 6th, we talked about violence.
We talked about guns and how January 6th brought to light How violent and how militant much of white Christianity in this country has become and how guns have played a role in that.
So yeah, the new subtitle is A Journey Into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind.
