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Nov. 17, 2022 - Conspirituality
01:39:56
129: White Christian Nationalism (w/Philip Gorski & Samuel Perry)

American-style white Christian Nationalism tells of a promised land given by God to the Puritan settlers. Their divine mandate for political dominance sanctifies a violent history that stretches from the 1690's all the way through to modern right-wing politics. Our interview today is with sociologists, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, authors of The Flag and The Cross. We discuss their study of Christian Nationalism as a white supremacist phenomenon that has always leaned into conspiracism and a primordial obsession with blood purity and blood sacrifice. With the dreaded midterm elections now in our rearview, Derek covers the Muscular Christian masturbation rules of bro-science influencer Ben Greenfield, while we reflect on the prophesied red wave that never crashed. Show NotesThe Flag and the Cross—Gorski and PerryIs Christian nationalism growing or declining? Both.Most Republicans Support Declaring the United States a Christian NationRally Urges US Midterm Voting Connected to ChristianityBen Greefield: How I Practice The Spiritual Disciplines, Practical Ways To Build Your Spiritual Muscles, Listener Q&A On God, Religion, Reincarnation, Masturbation & Much More. -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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I'm.
American-style White Christian nationalism tells of a promised land given by God to the Puritan settlers.
Their divine mandate for political dominance sanctifies a violent history that stretches from the 1690s all the way through to modern right-wing politics.
Our interview today is with sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, authors of The Flag and the Cross.
We discussed their study of Christian nationalism as a white supremacist phenomenon that has always leaned into conspiracism and a primordial obsession with blood purity and blood sacrifice.
with the dreaded midterm elections now in our rear view.
Derek covers the muscular Christian masturbation rules of a bro science influencer.
And we reflect on the prophesied red wave that never crashed.
I am an absolute product of prayer.
I am an absolute product of prayer.
Thank you!
Prayer is probably the most powerful weapon system known to man.
This is what scares our enemies.
The left, the socialists, the Marxists, the communists.
This is what scares them.
I am not going to turn my country over to my children and my grandchildren.
I'm just not going to turn over a communist country to them.
No way.
No way.
In our land, we have got to start demonstrating even more courage.
God bless you.
God bless America.
And thank you very much.
Peace.
All right, so that is disgraced former three-star general and national security advisor Mike Flynn who, by the way, went to jail Uh, in the Russian, uh, interference, uh, investigation and turnstates evidence.
And now, of course, he has been remade by prayer.
He was not, of course, on the ballot last week, but he's a headliner in the Reawaken America tour that's been traveling the country for the last two years.
That clip is actually from the beginning of an excellent PBS documentary that was just released a couple weeks ago.
It's called Mike Flynn's Holy War.
And I want to be clear right off the top here is that Christian nationalism is based on a foundational lie.
That in the lost mists of a golden time, America's God-inspired founding fathers established America as a Christian nation.
Hence, at the end of that clip, we the people say, Amen.
Christian nationalism is political religion top to bottom, and political religion seeks to privilege a chosen people, which undermines democracy.
Now, these political religious revivals show up mostly in non-denominational churches that can hold between a couple thousand and as many as 20,000 people in some cases.
The speakers on this tour are a who's who of familiar anti-vax, COVID quackery, and quarantine grievance peddlers.
They're all spouting right-wing holy war rhetoric, and it appeals directly to Christian nationalism.
So, case in point, Mike Flynn here was widely quoted on that tour in 2021 as having said from the stage, if we are to have one nation under God, and we must, We have to have one religion, one nation under God, one religion under God.
Yeah, Julian, it's all mega churchy.
I think we also have to note that there's a kind of 1980s arena rock, big hair feeling to these events.
It sounds like they're a lot of fun, but, you know, there's really loud new country music and people raising their arms in praise, or they're kind of like soft Zieg Heiling and they're swaying back and forth.
There's merchandise, there's shirts, there's hats, there's probably toques in the northern venues, there's street meat, and I really don't think we should knock these folks who are just trying to have some fun.
Well, that's very tolerant of you, Matthew, but I'm hoping you're being tongue-in-cheek there.
I mean, the thing with these massive megachurches is they're usually tax-exempt, right?
So they're pulling in huge amounts of money, they've got massive production values, they're evangelical, they're all about the revelatory sort of mass ecstasy conversion experience, and then that is just seamlessly woven together with political rhetoric.
Now, Flynn is not alone.
In a June stump speech, Lauren Boebert called for an end to separation of church and state.
She said, the church should tell the government what to do, not the other way around.
And then in July, everybody's favorite Marjorie Taylor Greene told those kids at Turning Point USA, those young, bright and shiny faces, that they should call themselves Christian nationalists and be proud of it.
That same month, Texas Congresswoman Maya Flores, she had won a special election and she actually just lost in the midterms, she told MSNBC that she was a Christian nationalist and said she wanted to bring God back into the halls of Congress.
Yeah, so I don't really know Flores at all, but with Lauren Boebert and MTG and Mike Flynn, I just have such a hard time assessing the actual religious commitments and sentiments of Christian shit posters.
I really don't know how to believe or not believe what they say they believe in.
Well, hold on.
Are we gatekeeping their Christianity based on trying to psychoanalyze their internal state?
Yeah, I think that's what I'm doing.
I think that's why, because I associate, well, I mean, when we get to Gorski and Perry, we're going to be talking about a tradition of thinkers and activists who, as abhorrent as they are, really do seem to believe in what they believe in, to the point of, you know, prosecuting violence.
Of course, these guys are running up to the edge of it, too.
Yeah, I mean, one of the really fascinating data points that Gorski and Perry talk about is that The more people check all the boxes in their sociological research that defines them as being in favor of Christian nationalism, the less they actually go to church.
So it's more of a political identity at this point.
That's the thing!
That's the thing!
And there's a lot of good commentary recently about all of the heterodox folks like Peterson and so on, and Jonathan Pago, who go on and on about loving traditional Catholicism, for example.
But when they, oh, Elliot Hulse has the same problem, where, like, they find a Catholic church to go to, but then they find it boring, or they find it too woke, or there's too much, like, there's too many community activities to do, it's not transcendent enough.
Yeah, I mean I think we have to be a little bit careful of not falling into the same trap that a lot of people do in the yoga sphere where they're like, well this is the real, true yoga or Sanskrit teachings and all of these people who you're criticizing, they're actually just distorting the true faith or something like that, right?
Yeah, good point, good point.
Now look, as we approach this election, which we'd be remiss to not mention given what has just gone down the last week, I was certainly nervous that these MAGA crazy candidates who tend to be Christian nationalism, at least in their rhetoric, and are usually also election deniers, would get in.
And they would start dismantling the checks and balances that preserve our democracy, thus ushering in an authoritarianism that, you know, some of them are really open about, like Steve Bannon has sworn on his podcast that we're going to win by 100 seats and we're going to rule for 100 years.
And, you know, some of that at times seems like it could be possible.
And, you know, the heterodox sphere really had got off on stoking the fires of sort of Anticipating that this was going to be a terrible shellacking for Democrats, Joe Rogan said on his podcast with a smirk and a chuckle that the red wave was going to be like the elevator doors opening and the shining, right?
All of that terrifying blood just rushing at us.
There's something fantasizing about that statement, isn't there?
It's a fantasy of disruption.
It's a fantasy of owning the libs.
It's not really about a political position, I don't think.
Yeah, I think the overall tenor is that, oh, the libs are going to be so sort of wrong-footed when they realize how the whole country is just opposed to all of this woke agenda and there's going to be this massive bloody red wave and there'll be, of course, liberal tears for everyone to drink.
But you know, for the most part, as everyone knows from the news cycle, voters overwhelmingly said no to candidates who ran on election denialism.
Now when I say overwhelmingly, I mean 50-51% in a lot of cases.
My own fears, I have to come clean here guys, was that by this week we'd have Several potential domestic terror events, maybe we'd have more than one state capital, you know, with armed insurrectionists gathering inside or outside of it.
These things have not materialized.
Although there was a small group the last couple days of Cary Lake supporters in Arizona, who apparently reenacted the biblical Battle of Jericho, complete with shofar blowing outside the Maricopa County Center where votes were being counted.
But was J.P.
Sears there?
I mean, because he was a big backer, didn't he appear, she appeared on his podcast or he appeared on her podcast?
I don't know.
Yeah, I think he had other plans on that day.
So when we started this project, I didn't anticipate that we would be here, that we would be studying up on Christian nationalism and extremism and how it handshakes and shimmies along in concert with New Age conspiracism.
But here we are.
So Julian, I think I should have seen the Christianity slash New Age conspirituality pipeline emerge in, given that I spent three years in A Course in Miracles cult, and that immediately after 9-11, while Manhattan was still smoking, it spun up 9-11 truther conspiracy theories.
Talk about ground zero.
Right.
But by the time we get to April of 2020, It becomes completely clear once people like Christiane Northrup are releasing content under names like the Great Awakening series that there are a lot of influencers in this space that are making explicit reference to
Christian apologetics and metaphysics.
And in her case, she's using a phrase that's associated with two historical evangelical revival movements that had significant consequences in American politics.
And then we get to a figure like Dr. Zach Bush, who In one famous monologue that we spent some time picking apart, he expresses a kind of mystical commitment to divine sacrifice as being at the heart of his idea of spiritual experience.
And he even uses a perennial Christian metaphor to describe his conversion crisis, that he's swimming in the sea, that he's bearing witness to a school of fish, of silver sardines who surround him, and the sardines offer themselves joyfully up to the hungry gullets of the striking pelicans.
And he feels at one with the universe in the midst of all of this death and regeneration.
And that particular Christian glow isn't lost on any of his audience.
And I remember we also covered how the Almost 30 podcast, the two women on it, they wept as they discussed sitting with him as though they were sitting at the feet of Jesus.
They literally used that term and I don't think it's just charisma at play or entranced speech, although all of the people that we cover can do that sort of thing.
There's also something underneath it all, some kind of cultural memory.
And, you know, when we do a little bit of digging into Bush's past and we find that he's been brought up in a home church movement in Boulder, Colorado.
We also learned that one of his most prolific boosters as the pandemic got rolling is Del Bigtree, who also grew up in a Christian church, albeit a more New Agey one, Boulder United.
So the connections go on and on.
There's nothing new about it.
These folks are finding something deep within the culture to pull on and they're riding it.
More recently, we wind up seeing Jordan Peterson pivot from a kind of Jungian self-help to Christian apologist to outright Christofascism.
And, you know, I don't think we know whether this has helped or harmed his engagement, but I don't think he would have been able to make a flip like that if those currents weren't already there for him to ride.
So, you're going to dive into that river, right?
Yes, I just talked with Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, they're at Yale and University of Oklahoma respectively, where they do research and teaching at the intersection of sociology, religious studies, and politics.
And their book, The Flag and the Cross, is this sweeping history of religion, race, and national identity in America.
That actually brings us all the way up to today, and I think is kind of useful in terms of a lot of the analysis that you were just summarizing that we've been doing.
Our conversation was very broad and very deep, as their book is, but it all really centers on this concept of white Christian nationalism.
And in our prior discussions, as I understand it so far, at the heart of white Christian nationalism, Gorski and Perry are describing something that they call the Deep Story, which kind of sounds like a conspiracy theory.
Yeah, I mean, as is the case with anything that does the work to connect the dots and reveal an underlying picture and set of connections, it could be a conspiracy theory unless it were backed up by a lot of good facts, evidence, well-constructed reasoning, and intellectual citations, which they do really well.
This deep story goes back to the Puritans believing that America was a God-given promised land situated in apocalyptic end times, which, as we know, are perennial, in which, of course, violence is justified as a means to maintain racial purity and hierarchical order.
They say that this story has its inception around 1690, and I asked Phil Gorski to tell us more.
1690 is important because that's really when this deep story first crystallizes.
And the deep story really originates out of three different stories, all of them drawn out of the Christian Bible, and you alluded to that.
So, one is what we call the Promised Land story.
This is the idea that North America is a kind of a promised land first for the Puritans and then by extension for other European colonists.
Then there's this idea of the apocalyptic end times, this idea that there's going to be a final cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil fought out between natural and supernatural beings.
And then the idea that somehow, for some reason, North America is going to be one of the central battlefields.
And the third piece of it is what we call the racial curse story.
And this is the idea, basically, that the populations of Africa are condemned to eternal servitude by the curse of Ham that was pronounced by Noah in the Old Testament.
So, the reason 1690 is important is because this is the first point at which at least we could really find a text an influential text that really drew together and wove together all three of those stories into a single unified story, and that was in Cotton Mather's History of New England, which is a very odd text in a lot of ways, but an incredibly influential one.
Okay, so who's Cotton Mather?
This is a name I've heard many times.
I don't know who it is.
Yeah, he's a really important figure from this time.
He was an influential preacher and a writer, and he plays a key role in framing violence against Native Americans and also runaway slaves as being justified on religious grounds.
He also endorses a vigorous intolerance toward any non-Puritan Christians that happen to be in the colonies.
It also turns out that he was quite involved in the Salem Witch Trials, and these happened quite early on in colonial history, around 1692.
And this is like 200 people accused of witchcraft, group delusion.
Arthur Miller later writes about it in The Crucible.
There's a bunch of movies.
Pretty core story to the American Imaginarium.
Yeah, so a lot of people may have read The Crucible in high school if they were lucky, and the movies are quite well known.
Yeah, these trials led to the unjust deaths of 25 people.
They were mostly women and girls.
A majority of them were executed by hanging.
One was as young as five years old.
And you know, these events are so characterized by supernaturalism, by demonic possession, accusations of dancing with the devil in the moonlight, that I asked Phil Gorski if Salem was the original satanic panic on American soil.
Good question.
Which we would see again repeated in the 80s as we've covered and then resurrected once more with QAnon circa 2020.
The kind of social context for the Salem Witch Trials was exactly this sort of fear about cultural decline on the one hand and cultural others at the same time.
So very similar formula to what you see in subsequent satanic panics and also with this focus on children, a sort of corruption of children.
So you know a number of the You know, the people who really, in a way, sort of launch it, it's not Cotton Mather himself, but it's a group of young girls who, you know, are behaving strangely and, you know, who come to believe that they've been sort of enchanted or bewitched.
So, you know, the cultural worry is, oh, we're drifting away from kind of the heroic ideals and, you know, The sort of pious ways of our forefathers, the first generation of New England Puritans.
Cotton Mather is sort of a third generation Puritan.
His grandfather is amongst the original settlers.
And then, of course, cultural others, as there's increasing immigration of people from other parts of the British Isles and also from other parts of Europe, some of whom are arriving in Massachusetts and other parts of New England.
So it's just exactly the same kind of configuration that seems to lead to the emergence of satanic panics in later periods of American history.
Okay, so the flag on the cross unpacks how white Christian nationalism evolves over time, and it seems that the key markers are associated with major wars, right?
Yeah, you know, it's too much to get into in one sitting.
I really recommend listeners to read the book.
It's fantastic.
It's highly readable, but it covers a lot of ground.
Essentially, what they say is that every hundred years or so, there are these major transitions around multiple wars going from, you know, like the French and Indian wars really early on all the way up to the end of the Cold War.
And in each of these climates, White Christian nationalism is adapting and evolving into the form that it takes today, which is mostly evangelical, libertarian in terms of economics, imperialist, and focused on this old world nationalist identity.
But as I understand it, according to them, the deep story is really solidified during specifically the American Revolutionary War.
And that really happens around race, right?
Yeah, this is a really important moment.
I asked them about this line from the book.
They write, that white freedom was bought with black blood.
They say the holy trinity of white Christian nationalism is written right into the national anthem.
And this is in reference to the third stanza of the Star-Spangled Banner as written in 1812 by Francis Scott Key.
It goes like this.
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Okay, so what the hell is that about?
I asked them.
Interestingly, ironically, is the last time that the Capitol building In Washington was invaded and and desecrated.
So who was it invaded by?
Well, it was invaded, of course, by British troops and amongst those British troops.
were formerly enslaved Africans who had been offered freedom in exchange for fighting on the side of the British in the War of 1812.
And so there were black troops amongst those who invaded the US Capitol at that point.
And so that's what the reference is about the desecration.
The desecration is about the presence of black people in the Capitol.
And how do you wash that desecration away?
How do you purify the Capitol?
Why with the spilled blood of Americans, real Americans?
So there's also this sort of blood rhetoric, which really is another, you know, if I can put it this way, red thread that runs through the history of white Christian nationalism.
Right up to the present day, just to really connect things that seem disconnected, Donald Trump would make all these very odd remarks about blood during his presidential campaign.
You remember Megyn Kelly, blood coming out of her whenever, talking.
about Mika Brzezinski, about blood streaming down her face because of some plastic surgery.
And then worst of all, this apocryphal story he would tell about the First World War and the execution of Muslim terrorists with bullets that were dipped in pig's blood.
So that kind of blood rhetoric is another Kind of disturbing through line in white Christian nationalism.
You can see this, just to circle back again, and I'm looping around here, but go back to Cotton Mather.
One of the other innovations that Cotton Mather makes theologically, if you want to call it that, is he argues that, and I'm just lightly paraphrasing here, that salvation passes through the loins of mother and father.
So that it's like literally something That's in your bloodline.
And so this is again like this point about, is it Christianity?
Is it race?
Is it nationalism?
Well, no, I mean, it's all of those things mixed together.
And one of the ways you kind of glue those things together is with blood.
Now, of course, these racial themes would continue on until the Civil War, almost 90 years later.
And in the aftermath of the ensuing abolition of slavery, there emerged the Lost Cause myth, which, you know, frames the Civil War as really being the war of northern aggression and longs for the Confederate South to rise again.
I asked Phil Gorski to what extent he saw the current tenor of Republican politics and anti-democratic conspiracism as being animated by this lost cause myth.
Not everybody hears it, but there are religious undertones there that were really quite explicit back in the 1870s.
compare the old confederacy to a martyred christ who would literally rise again from from the dead and how that has been mainstreamed i think they're sort of Kind of both a supply and a demand side to that.
The supply side is that Southern politicians and Southernized strategies have really overtaken the Republican Party over the last half century.
I'm certainly not anything like the first person.
to remark on that and I would simply add that southernized forms of religion have become increasingly prevalent in northern evangelicalism as well.
So there's a lot more of this lost cause mythology on offer because a lot more of the politicians and religious leaders who are out there are sort of steeped in it to one degree or another.
But there's also a demand side to it.
So it used to be really that white Christian nationalism was a kind of a triumphalist ideology.
We're going to march forward and expand to the Pacific and take over the world.
What the Lost Cause mythology offers is a narrative that resonates with grievance, especially with white grievance.
And loss, especially cultural loss.
So we have Cotton Mather, we have the Salem Witch Trials, we have the strange third verse of The Star-Spangled Banner, we have The Lost Cause.
The book runs all the way up into the present day, but it really hits hard on the Cold War, as you've mentioned in our prior conversations, yeah?
Yeah, so the end of the Cold War in 1989 Of course, is the fall of the Soviet Union, and this is seen and has been seen in the years previous as a fight against godless communism.
But there's something else going on in religious terms.
This is something they underline as sort of emergent through this whole period.
It has to do with how most evangelicals think about the Second Coming.
Now, unlike earlier Protestants, Modern evangelicals generally embrace something called pre-millennialism and we won't get too much into the technical details but it's this interpretation of the book of Revelation that says Jesus will come at the start
of a 1,000 year period in which he'll rule over the earth instead of at the end.
It's a darker view actually than the more optimistic tone of post-millennialism in that it includes this real world scenario of a holy war against the Antichrist being necessary in order to establish Jesus' rule.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, so this starts to take over, right?
So if Jesus comes in the beginning, and then there's all of this intense battle with the Antichrist that needs to happen, that's a much darker vision than saying there'll be this thousand year period where things get better and better because we're instituting God's law upon the land, and then Jesus comes at the end!
Because we did democracy well.
Exactly!
Exactly, because we learned to love one another.
Because we listened to Jesus.
Exactly.
And then he came back because he was happy to see us.
Because we did such a good job.
So instead of that, this premillennialism is saying Jesus will come with the sword, right?
Jesus will come with the fire and there will be things like the rapture and the tribulation and it's all going to a very intense place.
So, of course, this kind of accelerationism intersects in our time with the fever pitch of things like the more contemporary Great Awakening-style prophecy, the 5D Enlightenment stuff that the New Age then sort of tacks onto the back of that.
This dovetails, of course, as I said, with belief in the rapture, the notion of Trump as the last world emperor before, you know, these momentous events will unfold, or perhaps as a lightworker.
Now, I think when we've talked about people like Lori Ladd discussing Trump as a lightworker, we've noted that perhaps part of what she's talking about is that he has some sort of trickster quality, but I think what underlies that is this kind of disruptive, accelerationist idea that he's come to fuck shit up.
And, as that happens, the ensuing battle will be completed.
Yeah, this is actually very, very related to what I talked about with Thomas Lecoq.
He shared the myth of the pseudo-Methodius, which goes back to the 7th century in Europe, and the idea that there will be this last world emperor, and he has to be imperfect.
He has to have all sorts of human failings.
This is part of what is required for the role.
And so Trump fit really well into this.
And the idea was that he would, in the myth of the pseudomethodius, he would do battle against the forces of Islam.
And once he was triumphant, he would surrender to the Antichrist.
And because he surrendered to the Antichrist, that makes Jesus come.
Oh, right.
So it's, yeah, it's a tangled web we weave.
Now, of course, we've gotten up into the 80s, so there has to be a lot of money flying around in our white Christian nationalism too, right?
This is the other development.
So, in the period during and after the Cold War, you have the emergence of something that they refer to as Christian libertarianism.
And here's what Sam Perry had to say when I asked him about that.
And who is the enemy?
Well, it's the communist regime in Russia and around the world.
And what does communism represent?
Well, it not only represents an economic threat, but also represents a religious,
represents a godless atheism.
It also becomes associated with radical minority identity politics.
Martin Luther King Jr. is slammed as a communist, as a commie, and that is kind of constantly
what is thrown at agitators during the civil rights movement.
So you've got race, you've got economics, you've got religion and all of these things,
a nation wrapped up into one another.
And so herein, this is the American Christianity, especially conservative Christianity.
Kristen Dume talks about this as well in her book, Jesus and John Wayne.
That American Christianity becomes even more solidly wedded with nation and patriotism, but also the idea of libertarianism, of free market capitalism, those things being really inextricable.
Leap forward, and you've got, I think, a resurgence of this following, say, Obama's election.
In Obama's election, you have dissent not only coming from evangelicals who believe he is a closet Muslim, who believes he represents everything, including leftist socialism, but also the Tea Party movement, which is also part of a Christian nationalist movement.
The Tea Party movement is not some kind of Secular, irreligious movement.
There's a lot of evidence to suggest that they bought into Christian nationalist tropes and narratives as much as anybody because these things are all tied together.
The idea of economic libertarianism, race, who the country rightfully belongs to.
And in some ways, what we're witnessing now, Trump, I think his appeal is due to a lot of the momentum that came from the Tea Party movement.
Their kind of radical narrative, all of the celebrities that were associated with the Tea Party movement, the people who were able to kind of speak out against the socialist resurgence on the left and everything it represented.
Immigration was also a part of that story.
And Trump was very much able to tap into that anger about economic loss, cultural loss, Religious loss following two straight losses to Obama and was able to ride that kind of Tea Party wave.
So our narrative around race has changed, our narrative around what is a real Christian has changed.
It is no longer about the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush.
That is so passe.
That is loser talk.
What Christianity represents now is it represents those who are unapologetically winners.
Those who are out for the country's best, which they would argue is best for everybody.
So another thing that happens during this period is a shift in messaging away from what some people might remember as the overt white supremacism of maintaining Jim Crow, resisting civil rights, championing segregation, being opposed to kids going to school together.
The shift moves now towards racial reconciliation, is the term, which as it turned out was really about telling black people to get over their historical resentments and accept the paltry apology that they've been offered and just stop bringing it up, right?
Let's have a reconciliation so we don't have to talk about it anymore.
That's over, it's history.
In addition to this emphasis on becoming more colorblind and embracing libertarian economic philosophy, evangelicals become more overtly, openly, publicly obsessed with regulating sexual behavior.
So, championing legislation around homosexuality, abortion, Contraception, these invasive and contradictory preoccupations of the small government, don't tread on me, leave me alone, moral majority Christians, it's like in the book they say, how do you reconcile leave me alone with thou shalt not?
Do you wonder if there's some displacement going on here that as evangelicals say they are becoming more colorblind or they are becoming more inclusive that the clamp down or the, I don't know, the control mechanism has to go somewhere else?
Yeah.
If we're not allowed anymore, if it's less politically correct in their view to talk about racism, well then we should go after these intrusive moral bodily issues.
Yeah, right, so we need a scapegoat.
We need somewhere to put our hatred and our rejection of some sense of the embodied self, right?
Yeah, I mean, this reminds me actually of the same kind of displacement that Aubrey Gordon describes in her book, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat, which I've read because, and we're reading because we're preparing to interview her.
Where she describes anti-fat bias as kind of containing the historical echo of other forms of discriminative speech that are no longer socially acceptable.
Yeah, so some sort of justifiable seeming disgust.
Right, that can be placed into another person's body, but then of course it can be justified in all kinds of unrelated ways.
But anyway, how does Christian libertarianism show up?
Well, as the authors were just saying, communism not only threatens Christianity, but also, of course, capitalism.
So, through the Cold War period, free markets gradually become enshrined as handed down from God, you know, just like Jesus wrote the Constitution.
So then you have this religious idea that arises that the free market will punish and reward people on earth in the same way that God supposedly will in the afterlife, and this is actually something that some preachers would talk about.
Now, we know that this will spawn the prosperity gospel to some extent, but also the New Age money grifts like The Secret and all of the thousand books and workshops and Instagram selfie sermons on the power of manifestation and abundance.
And then there's the Tea Party, which, spoiler alert, will set the stage for the emergence of Donald Trump.
Now, the Tea Party arises, to some extent, in reaction to Obama's existing, but also Obama's moves to get more people health insurance and to help homeowners who are underwater during that terrible mortgage crisis from 2008.
And what they do really prefigures the more aggressive rhetoric we will see being further developed by MAGA.
So in this vein, the authors also underline the more recent statements by Senator Ron Johnson.
This is from 2021.
And he said that he didn't really feel threatened during the Capitol insurrection But he might have, if the participants were Black Lives Matter or Antifa supporters.
Right, so if they're white Christians, they're his people, he'd feel safe, even if they're beating the shit out of the Capitol Police.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, yeah, and they're threatening to kidnap and execute different government officials.
But you know, it's all good, because they're people like me.
I want to say here that one of the really useful Simple ways of summarizing white Christian nationalism that Gorski and Perry use is these three principles of freedom, order, and violence.
But this is not the freedom that we appeal to on the left.
It's not the land of the free that I fantasized about as a kid growing up under apartheid in South Africa.
It's rather a divine mandate to impose traditional racial, gender, and religious order on society and this sacralized violence to that end.
So it's freedom for me and not for thee.
It's freedom in contrast to what was justified in terms of slavery and genocide of the native peoples.
As an extension of that, we can see MAGA violence as being justified and enacted by an in-group, by an us.
Whereas Black Lives Matter and Antifa, these are a scary them who are seeking to disrupt our promised land.
It's so strange and it sounds so abstract to me as an ex-Catholic who grew up with a totally different Jesus who I'm not hearing a lot about in this conversation so much.
Like, I grew up with a Jesus who minister to the poor, who constantly resisted and
questioned the state, a man of sorrows, existential realism, somebody who's like painfully aware of
impending death or you know people around him who are suffering and also somebody who's alone
most of the time and if they reached out to friends or they were surrounded by friends, it was
going to involve having supportive sometimes mystical, sometimes depressive or even unhinged
conversations, but he wasn't a general in any army, but I guess Gorski and Perry are
pointing to a totally different Jesus, you know, I'm imagining that the Jesus of white
Christian nationalism is muscular, that you know it's not about, he's not about forgiveness,
he's not about redemption, that he's a tough guy hero.
Yeah, that's part of what emerges through this evangelical narrative.
I asked them about this by quoting a line from the book that's a little bit cute, and the line is, what hath Jesus to do with John Wayne?
Evangelical men came to feel Disempowered, like cultural losers, and to be marginalized, sidelined, their voices not heard, and to feel politically, I think, disengaged.
It became necessary to make, you couldn't make John Wayne like Jesus, so you make Jesus like John Wayne, or William Wallace, or Russell Crowe's character in Gladiator, or some kind of warrior.
And so this narrative of Jesus being somebody who would be in favor, not of pacifism and turning the other cheek, but somebody who would be in favor of tough guy, the Jesus who kicks people out of the temple.
Um, who overturns the, you know, throws over tables and whips the money changers with, uh, with a cord, uh, and, uh, you know, does, does, does not, uh, lay down on the cross, but, but, but rises and, and, and, and returns victorious in the book of Revelation.
And there's also this, this kind of, I mean, I think Phil describes this so beautifully in, in, in several of the things that he's written, but the idea of this bloody apocalypse, and we're talking about blood.
So like the apocalypse that, that what really matters is the return.
What really matters is the victorious Jesus, who is not coming like a lamb, but he's coming like a lion, and he is going to slay his enemies to be able to institute his reign.
And I think that is where we see this militant masculinity that comes to characterize the right, that we are fighters, that we are sick of apologizing, and Trump is able to I think so viscerally tap into that frustration after two straight losses to Obama, and feeling marginalized.
I mean, Robbie Jones, I love, I love Robbie Jones, you know, right, who wrote, you know, the end of white Christian America, head of PRI.
But he writes, he writes this book in 2015, that is the end of white Christian America.
And I mean, read from a perspective, it would seem to suggest that like, you know, conservative white conservative Christians are, Are done for, you know, like their, their relevance in the conversation is, is just on the way out, uh, demographically because they just don't have the, and then, then comes Trump and he has to write a, he has to write an afterword quickly in 2016 saying, Hey, just in case, uh, you know, the, you know, just in case you were questioning the narrative that I was, that I was spinning here.
And, and so it, it is, it is Trump's ability to tap into this anger, to tap into this, this, uh, this frustration with feeling, You know, like Tony Perkins said, I think he said it beautifully, why do evangelicals keep giving Trump this mulligan?
This is after the Stormy Daniels thing, paying off porn stars.
And Politico, a reporter at Politico asked Tony Perkins, why do you guys keep giving him a mulligan?
And they say, you know, we were tired of getting, evangelicals were tired of getting pushed around by Obama and his leftists.
And we were glad somebody else was on the playground who was willing to punch the bully.
And Trump's rhetoric, his idea of kicking ass, of not apologizing for anything, of even applauding violence at his rallies.
And using that kind of rhetoric, I mean, I think it allowed conservative Christians to say, yeah, we don't need to, you know, we're the ones who are the victims here.
We're the ones who are justified in fighting Uh, fire with fire and the nice guy, the nice guy kind of Christian thing is not getting the job done.
As a matter of fact, I mean, Phil knows this as well.
That has actually been the rhetoric of the last year within the, within the Christian right is the end of winsomeness.
Uh, Tim Keller is looked at, Tim Keller is this, you know, a very charismatic and smart cosmopolitan pastor in New York City who is, uh, been influential.
And I think it's a very moderate, it looks like a very moderate voice, even though he's a conservative.
I mean, it's a very moderate voice now.
But people have been coming after him and saying, look, you spent all this time being this cosmopolitan, sophisticated guy and sucking up to the liberal sophisticates of New York, and what has it gotten us?
We're still losing.
And so we're done with that.
This is about fighting.
This is about war.
And Trump has ushered in, I think, a new kind of Ideal on the right that we're justified in mocking our enemies.
We're justified in being jerks to them.
We're justified in just, you know, arranging orienting our complete stance towards the left in terms of us versus them, fight
to the death, no apologies, and we don't have to be nice anymore.
That's not a part of being a Christian anymore.
Like that's, I mean, it's pretty, it's a pretty amazing shift, honestly.
Another fascinating and disturbing thread in the book is the ever-present evolving imagery
of blood as sacred.
And this can take many forms, right?
So you have noble sacrifice, you have ethnic identity, that the purity of your blood determines your status in the society.
It can take the form of sacralized violence against the enemy, who's framed as being on the side of the Antichrist, so shedding their blood is somehow sacralized.
Of course, QAnon comes to mind here and their preoccupation with blood.
Yeah, that rings a bell.
as does Trump's delight in repeatedly telling this horrible story involving bullets dipped
in pig's blood.
Yeah, that rings a bell.
It was pretty medieval.
You know, Phil Gorski mentioned it earlier, but it's worth fleshing out a little.
Apparently Trump was very fond of recounting what is a fake story, and he's been fact-checked on this several times, involving General John Pershing, this is going back to like 1911, I believe, putting down a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines by forcing six rebels to kill six of their comrades using bullets dipped in pig's fat.
And then wrapping their corpses in pigskin and entrails.
So this, of course, is a complete humiliation in religious terms of these Muslims.
Right.
On the campaign trail, Trump, as he is wont to do, would inflate the number to 49 Muslims and say that the bullets were in fact dipped in pig's blood and that there was one lone survivor left to tell the tale, to warn his people.
And Trump would reference this story as a way of putting a stop to Islamist terror attacks.
Like, this is what I would do.
And he, in fact, even tweeted references to this after there had been a terror attack.
So, with the fetishization of blood, there's gotta be stuff that Gorski and Perry have done around the correlations between white Christian nationalism and, you know, anti-vaccine politics, and then also quarantine attitudes.
And how about all of the other stuff, like guns, immigrants, gender politics?
Yeah, I asked Sam Perry about this specifically because he's done a lot of really good sociological research on this.
And he told me about the correlations in terms of people who check the boxes on what they identify as the markers of Christian nationalism, agreeing with Christian nationalism.
How does that then correlate with, as you said, guns, immigrants, gender politics, COVID denialism, vaccine and quarantine attitudes?
And he also has something interesting to say about how religious people really are in terms of their identification as Christian nationalists.
It's among the strongest correlations that we can find between, say, You know, I mean, partisanship matters, and ideological identity matters, conservative versus liberal, and those kinds of things.
But Christian nationalist ideology taps into another set of identities, and something I think more visceral and core to the idea of who am I, what is an American, and who does America belong to?
And believing that the other side of this equation is not some kind of religious other, It is everything on the left.
Everything.
It is leftism.
It is socialist.
It is everybody who stands to gain from the real Americans losing.
And so with that comes an allegiance to far-right leaders and impulses, but also a complete rejection from anything coming from the left, or perceived to be leftist.
It is populist.
In the sense that it is anti-elite, anti-media, anti-establishment, all the way down.
And with that becomes a suspicion that everything coming from those voices is ultimately about evil, it is about manipulation.
So we find that Christian nationalist ideology, very much so tied to a rejection of COVID vaccination, To a belief that the media has exaggerated the threat of COVID to be able to overturn Trump and to threaten his ascendancy to a second term or to his winning a second term.
The idea that the vaccines themselves are harmful and they've probably killed more people than they've saved.
Now, does that have anything to do with theology?
Not really.
I mean, it has more to do with The idea of who America belongs to and who are the enemies.
And I think therein lies, we're trying to get at, what is Christian nationalism?
Why Christian nationalism at that point?
It's really, I think, a deep story about who we are as a nation and a vision for who America should belong to going forward and how we're going to establish that.
And conspiracy is part of that.
It's part of seeing everything coming from elites, the establishment, as something that is negative and wholly against us,
and that we have to reject.
You know, there's one other interesting piece, a data point that I think is really important
for this whole conversation, which is that the correlation for Christian nationalists
who happen to be white with all of the attitudes that we've just been discussing is not present
with people who fit the criteria for Christian nationalism, but happen to be black.
Hmm.
And that's actually part of their central argument, that this is a uniquely white phenomenon, that all of these political attitudes coincide with this religious identification.
Now, you talked to them right before the midterms.
What were they thinking was going to happen?
Yeah, I did.
I, you know, I asked them how influential they felt white Christian nationalism was in the current political cycle, and if they had any predictions about how that was all going to go down.
The most recent phenomenon that we are witnessing now, even I think post writing the book, has been the emergence of Christian nationalism as an identity, as not just a This deep story and a vision for America's future, which we talk about in the book, and not just a political strategy that I think savvy politicians on the right can be able to leverage to mobilize those audiences, whether or not they believe in Christian nationalism or not.
I mean, I think that's just a rhetorical strategy.
But now, within the last six months in particular, people actually owning that identity of, I am a Christian nationalist and this is what I am arguing for, really not Not what we initially encountered in talking about this was either dismissal like that's not a thing that's just something you guys on the you know you you leftists academics made up to slur people on the right or it was minimized like hey that may be a thing maybe that's like January 6 people but that's not most people or any kind of like large population.
And now we've actually got a you know a lot of numbers saying that Pew came out with a report the other day and we just Fielded a survey a week and a half ago showing that 25% of Americans embrace the term Christian Nationalist, and it's about 45% of Republicans.
It's well over half of white evangelicals.
They say that Christian Nationalist describes them either somewhat or very well.
So that actually creates a situation where identities mobilize people to the polls.
Fear and anxiety and identity.
Mobilizes people and so the more politicians are able to activate those identities.
I think the more that they can expect to see So, the book, The Flag and the Cross, ends on a positive note.
There's a rousing call to action, but you know, when I talk to them, you know how it is.
As we're discovering, you write a book, and then you edit the book, and then it goes through whatever process it has to go through before the book is finally being publicized and then released out into the world.
So I found that in talking to Gorski and Perry, they were in a more cautious frame of mind than their closing argument at the end of the book.
Here's how I put the final question to them.
I said, you point out at the end of your book that even if MAGA gains more power, there are things about this country that make typical strongman fascism harder to instantiate.
You also issue a clarion call for a broad, multiracial, pro-democracy alliance that can stretch from secular democratic socialists to classical liberals to never-Trump evangelicals and others.
So, what makes typical fascism less likely in the U.S., and what does this alliance you're calling for need to do in order to turn this ship around?
Great question.
There are some, there are some things that I feel positively about.
I think we, we have seen, um, I think there's enough evidence to suggest that in the general population, uh, widespread support or people who would affirm Christian nationalist ideology, I think is diminishing somewhat.
Uh, there's a couple of reasons for that.
I think one of them is demography.
I think just, you know, I think older cohorts pass away who were very much like, you know, God and country Patriot, like they would affirm this language without even thinking.
I think the more we have brought to light this this people are talking about Christian nationalism and it's being associated with I think people who are you know Marjorie Taylor Greene I think you know is who is seen as kind of a wacky fringe character and the people who are arguing for it I think even on the Christian right people who are writing books advocating for Christian nationalism it helps that they have to be happen to be pretty not very nice people I mean like they're outspoken anti-semitic people people who have advocated at times for You know, against interracial marriage, or taking away the 19th Amendment, you know, for women to be able to vote.
Like, the more Christian nationalism becomes associated with these kinds of voices, I think it's a positive thing, and that people back away from that, and they say, hey, this is, like, racist.
I don't want to be associated with it.
So, on that point, that's a good thing.
I think the more that it becomes solidified, though, as a part of Christian right politics, as an identity, I think that means that people on the right become radicalized, or these people become radicalized and more militant and more motivated.
And that's really all it takes.
Most Americans who are in the middle are disengaged from politics, are not very active, and they really are persuadable in some negative ways.
They can be lured with fear and anger and that kind of rhetoric.
Or they'll just vote party.
Without knowing what they're going for.
So I think positively, I'm encouraged that I think more and more young people, I think, are turned off by that kind of rhetoric and they are walking away from it.
That's a good thing.
But obviously, the fact is, when you have structural advantage, when you have Supreme Court justices strategically in place who have lifelong appointments, When gerrymandering is on your side, when you only need to sway a thousand really angry, fearful people to be able to win strategically the Senate in certain states, you can do a whole lot of damage with not a lot of people.
And so I think that is worrisome going forward.
So historically, I think we've had some buffers in place against outright fascist takeovers There are some structural advantages that are on our side, and by our side I mean the side of people who are broadly committed to liberal democracy, to American democracy.
I think really the key one is the decentralization of power.
So places where you see these kinds of illiberal democracies, quote-unquote, Really haven't taken over.
People often point to Hungary, which is kind of the new darling of the radical right in the United States.
People regularly going over there.
They had CPAC there the last time, the Conservative Political Action Committee.
Tucker Carlson has done his show from there.
So on and so forth.
Well, Hungary is... The United States is not Hungary.
I mean, Hungary has a population of, what, five million?
Basically has only one large city, Budapest, where its cultural, political, economic life is concentrated.
It's not an extraordinarily wealthy country.
Contrast that with, it's not a particularly diverse country either.
Contrast that with the United States.
It's a big country.
Washington is by no means the only power center.
You know, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston.
There are many, multiple power centers.
There are lots of private institutions.
I suppose Donald Trump on day one in 2025 could take over NPR.
I mean, they already have Fox.
But the point is, how big of a power move would that be?
I mean, not a very big one.
Same thing with the university system.
I mean, he could not do what has been done in Turkey under Erdogan, where basically dissent has been almost completely squelched in academia, because almost all the universities are public universities.
You know, here the universities aren't even controlled by the national government, they're controlled by the state governments, and many of them are private.
And so, all of which is to say, it's even in the worst case scenario, where there is I feel complete Republican takeover of all three branches of government in 20, early 2025.
You know, I pray that doesn't happen.
But if it does, there are, you know, there are lots of sites to build the kind of movement of resistance and democratic renewal in the United States.
And I think we just, we have to look that, you know, just look that in the eye and realize that, you know, the struggle that we might be facing Is, you know, one that could take decades or generations and, you know, it's interesting, you know, throughout this, I have to say that, you know, by conversations with African American friends and colleagues, they just have such a different perspective on this.
You know, they're just like.
What country did you think you were living in, anyway?
You know, did you think that, you know, as to quote Martin Luther King Jr., that democracy was just going to roll in on the wheels of inevitability, that you would not have to get out there and, you know, get into some good trouble, put some skin in the game, actually, you know, put yourself a little bit at risk, you know, to defend the things that you value and care about, and that you would have to reach out and find Friends and allies in unlikely places, and that's just kind of the last point, is that I think for secular progressives, you know, the really key thing is to realize that there are some religious conservatives who are just as disgusted by what's going on as we are, and that
You know, that's not the majority, but it's a substantial minority, and you will probably disagree with those folks about a lot of things, but you will probably find more areas of agreement than you think, especially on issues about, like, social justice, climate change, you know, pluralism, race, you know, especially the younger ones, and you have to be open to those folks, you know, because You know, like it or not, you know, America, Americans are metaphysical people.
And, you know, you and a diverse people and you have to be willing to sort of, you know, go shoulder to shoulder with people who are very different with you, you know, from you, if you want to preserve the kind of pluralistic society that I think we all value and achieve the kind of multi racial democracy, which I think has always been You know, the kind of vision that many of us have aspired to in this country.
Alright Julian, so Gorski says that, like it or not, Americans are a metaphysical people.
How does that sit with you, Mr. Atheist?
Is this story just going to go on and on, or can it change?
I mean, I'm under no illusion that America's going to be majority atheist any time soon, or that you could run for president in this country without professing some sort of connection to Christian faith.
You know, we have Lauren Boebert right now as we're recording this in this very tight race where it looks like she might lose her seat, and she got up on stage in front of her supporters and said, we're pleading the blood of Christ.
That we will prevail in this election so that we can do God's will in the halls of government, right?
Yeah, and you know, as much as it's a real pleasure to listen to two top-notch historians on this stuff, it's things like that that give me this disquieting feeling that all of this intellectual labor that we do to figure out how white Christian nationalism functions through time seems to be confounded by this spectacle of irony poisoning And shitposting.
Because we see Lauren Bovert say what she says, and as I understand it, she might be a legitimate churchgoer, that might be really part of her heritage and her soul, but the larger part of her heritage is the shitposting nihilism of the MAGA movement.
So, you know, she and Marjorie Taylor Greene might firmly identify as white Christian nationalists, but I don't get the sense that they have any deep metaphysical investment in those values.
I feel, my gut says that they realize that the rhetoric carries power, but I'm very confused these days as to what people actually believe and how it motivates them.
Yeah, you know, I asked Gorski and Perry about religious figures going back into the early days of the American colonies, because they refer to several different figures who were really trying to write a different deep story, who were really much more interested in coexistence and in equal and fair treatment of, in really
establishing something different than the hierarchical tyranny that they were fleeing, there's
a man named Roger Williams who is sort of the most prominent figure in this regard.
He believed that the colonists should be buying the land that they were settling from the Native Americans, and that Native Americans should be treated fairly, and he put himself often in harm's way.
He also had some quite progressive, for the time, quite progressive attitudes about slavery.
He wasn't a complete abolitionist, but, you know, he's an important figure.
He ends up getting kicked out of the Connecticut Settlement, he ends up founding the Providence Rhode Island colony, which he sets up as a refuge for Jews and Quakers and people who are not Puritans, and he ends up founding the first Baptist church, which of course will have an important role to play politically in years to come.
And the reason that I mention all of that is that I said to them, how come people like Roger Williams didn't become the important authors of the deep story of Christianity in America, and their answer was essentially that theological concerns – I'm quoting Perry directly here – theological concerns tend to be downstream of situational concerns to do with power and material wealth, and that over time, what has dominated has tended to be what was expedient.
And so, no doubt, with Greene and Boebert, we're seeing something very similar.
You know, last week we platformed Tenmori Santoro Rajan and she made it really clear that like an integrated, interrogated, struggled with, syncretic mosaic of South Indian spirituality was essential to her political will and activism.
This discussion makes me think of what I want to do personally, in terms of following Gorski's advice, in terms of standing shoulder to shoulder with people who share my values but I might not see eye to eye with, and to really look out for people who are American metaphysicians, because I think we all are to some extent, who are using their spirituality in generative ways.
I'm thinking of Daniel Miller and Bradley Onishi, The ex-evangelical ministers, they're now scholars of religion, they host this really good podcast that we listen to called Straight White American Jesus.
They have not fled Christianity, but they've made something different out of what they were handed.
And, you know, I also think of my own Catholic trajectory from, you know, quite traditional to very progressive and super interested in the liberation theology coming out of South America at the time.
at which I kind of moved away from Christianity altogether.
I think of Dorothy Fortenberry who writes for The Handmaid's Tale and who treasures
her Catholic faith and you know does a lot of good work in environmentalism.
So I just feel like there are better and worse ways of understanding Jesus for those who
just can't get them out of their minds.
You know, obviously I would prefer that.
Bye.
Jesus would, for most people, in most people's minds, sort of take the place of being just another mythological figure that is interesting in certain ways that we can learn about.
But I have no quarrel with people who are working to create more freedom and equality who interpret their religion as being about manifesting that kind of love and that kind of social action.
You know, whatever their religious orientation is, if that's how their religion is playing out in the world, I'm all for it.
It's all of the other lamentable manifestations that I'm firmly opposed to.
We have the Lost Cause mythology around the South rising again, which is an expression of an aggrieved white Christian identity that pines for a time of God-given dominance.
We have muscular Christianity, this Americanized myth of a warrior culture for God, which is also part of a white Christian identity.
And then of course, an old favorite, we have Christianity involving the control of and often neuroses around sexuality.
Absolutely.
So, Julian, you just mentioned that you have no problem with people who use any religion, and in this case, Christianity, to help create a loving world, and I agree with that.
But you also mentioned the other forms that bother you, and that's why I wanted to end this week with Ben Greenfield, who brokers in quite a troublesome version in Christianity.
So, Ben does have some credentials.
According to his bio, he holds a bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Idaho in sports science and exercise physiology.
He also flouts a sports nutrition certificate and a condition certificate from paper mill organizations.
As a former fitness instructor, I know these very well.
You pay some money, you do kind of a bullshit program, and you can say you are certified.
I am guilty of doing that with ACE and AFA.
A lot of people do it.
Do you pay and you click the link and they send you a PDF kind of thing?
There is actually a test you have to pass and you do have to have working knowledge of concepts, I mean that's for sure, but it's not.
You'll see why, because he has a sports nutrition certificate and then how that translates into his nutritional advice, which is the realm of dieticians, right?
Yeah, awesome.
He's authored over 17 books.
I don't really know what over means, like just put how many books you wrote, but anyway.
Between 17 and 18.
He has a very popular podcast as well.
He's a big deal in the pro-science fitness world.
But the topics that it covers, and I'm not kidding, anti-aging, biohacking, brain, digestion, fat loss, fitness, hormones, lifestyle, low-carb and ketogenic diet, nutrition, spirituality, immunity recovery, self-quantification, sleep, supplements, parenting, and Julian, I will just say, he also brokers in quantum biology.
You know, I want to hear about Crucifixion Defense, Acupuncture, and Last Supper Detox.
Well, if you notice the screenshot I took, each of those categories have subcategories, so I might have missed some, Matthew, so we might have those already.
You didn't click on the little arrows.
You were done.
You were done.
You covered enough.
Well, how about let's make the Garden of Eden great again, just don't eat the apple.
He also will sell you a fitness plan for $997 and a nutrition plan for $997, even though, as I just said, he's not a registered dietitian.
But he does own a supplement company called Kion, which I'll get into soon.
And he uses the term spiritual a lot in his marketing, but he's actually a pretty devout Christian.
So, there's some playing with words that he does, which we're actually going to hear some of that in the clips.
And the episode that I'm clipping from is from March of 2021.
And the first half is about his daily spiritual practice.
And during the second, he replies to listeners' questions.
Now, Greenfield is a very buff gym bro, and this is where his warrior attitude emerges.
He's very often shirtless, flexing, things like that.
And he works out.
You can tell for that.
But in this episode, he opens with an ad for one of his supplement bars, followed by a red light therapy sponsor, which is a mostly unproven biohack that's the treatment du jour right now.
For balls, right?
For testicles.
Testicles make their way in.
I don't know if he does that.
I haven't seen it, but that is the Tucker Carlson thing, yes.
That's on his OnlyFans.
Both of his ads are bookended by sales pitches for his new quote-unquote spiritual disciplines journal.
So that's again where his spiritual nature comes out and his language.
He also likes to talk about secular science a lot, but that only happens when it confirms a Christian concept that he wants to get across.
And as I mentioned, I found an episode on quantum biology, so maybe Julian we can do a bonus episode on that someday.
I will look forward to that so much, or I'll be in a super position where I also really don't give a shit.
That's a big mental health question, isn't it?
It's like, I will really enjoy going into that, or I will go for a walk, I will take care of the dog, I won't give a shit.
It's a dual-slit experiment comment on the nature of reality.
I am both.
It's non-dual quantum physics.
I don't think you've been keeping up.
If we fire Julian through a double slit, particles of Julian, part of him will go into the waveform of wanting to do this material and then there will be points of light that try to avoid it altogether.
Precisely.
So just don't look at me at the wrong moment, guys.
Everything will be fine.
So, I want to rerun part of his energy bar ad here.
Awesome.
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You look at the label of this energy bar, cleanest thing you're ever going to see.
Crunchy, delicious, subtle hint of sweetness, goes great with a cup of coffee.
But it's just a bunch of superfoods like cocoa nibs and hydrolyzed grass-fed gelatin and chia seeds and cocoa butter and all sorts of wonderful nourishing foods that we've put into a bar that actually tastes, not like cardboard, but addictively, addictively good.
If you're hooked on donuts or chocolate cookies or anything like that, this thing's totally gonna replace all that for you.
And you get a 20% discount on it.
Whatever his credentials are, it's clear that he once worked at a high-end restaurant.
Yeah, right.
Right.
Because that was like, that was really a perfect description of today's special.
Also, excellent voice.
I can hear the lifting in the voice.
It's amazing.
That's great.
OK, so I want to point out the if you're addicted to donuts and cookies, well, you'll get addicted to this instead attitude, because this is a sort of fundamentalism around food, which is what we're going to see play out in his faith as well.
And, you know, you just mentioned, Julian, the high end restaurant, but it's also he has marketing chops and Can you read this marketing copy for his bar?
Kion Bar is a tasty, appetite-satiating, real food energy bar that will withstand the rigors
of living a limitless, adventurous life.
A clean-burning bar that will hold up under rigorous conditions of people living hard,
charging, high-achieving lives.
Every tasty bite of our bar gives you the guilt-free confidence that you're biting into.
Hold on, hold on.
You said he had marketing chops, but there's some really bad grammar in here because it sounds like the bar itself is withstanding the rigors of living a limitless adventurous life.
It sounds like the clean burning bar is going to hold up under rigorous conditions.
It sounds like he's going to use the bar to like plug up his crucifixion holes or something like that.
Like it's really, it's going to be really helpful.
I chose three lines out of over 20.
Okay.
Over 20.
I don't have the exact count, but over 20 lines that are in the marketing copy.
I just wanted to point out, you can see his aspirations, but also his dejection in this product, right?
You have this limitless life, this high achieving, and yet the mention of guilt, which he will later sexualize in this episode, not the bar, but his own attitude.
And that's why I clipped that.
Now, I've come across Ben's material before.
It's very, as I said, warrior-like.
Everything is optimizing and muscle building and weight loss.
And he's this really self-assured gym bro that we sometimes have covered before.
But for him, anecdotes provide the only data he ever really needs.
And that starts with his take on clean eating for optimal energy with that side of fat shaming that he throws in.
Now, I'm going to skip the journaling portion as it's largely irrelevant to this conversation and jump to the question about whether or not it's okay to be spiritual and not religious.
So, this comes from listeners, second part of the episode.
Now, he begins by stating that when people say they're not religious, what that really means is that they don't like legalism.
And in this case, it's the idea that you can follow moral law without having a personal religious faith.
And of course, there are a number of reasons why people don't like religion, but he's pretty firm that this is the only reason.
Now, here's where we get to the crux of his argument.
Now, secular spirituality tends to, in the long run, focus on satisfying and pleasing yourself, fulfilling your own desires and manifestations.
And many people find some satisfaction in that for a short period of time.
But really, until you get to the point where you can fill a God-shaped hole in your soul with the only thing that can fill that hole, which is God, you know, this idea of being spiritual But not religious ultimately in the long run leaves you with the same empty feeling as you get when you attempt to fill that hole with fitness or with nutrition or with biohacking or with relationships or sex or porn or you know anything else.
That may seem like it gives you that short term satisfaction and happiness.
And so one problem is that I have never seen secular spirituality like being spiritual without being religious and religious in this sense actually having a belief in and practice of worshiping a higher power, namely God.
I have not found that to produce long-term happiness or fulfillment in anybody who I've ever met.
This is fascinating because he's actually figured out how to apologize and make amends for the sort of superficiality of his neoliberal self-project.
He is offering secular spirituality throughout his menu, but then he's going to give us something more.
Is that the sort of pivot and the pitch?
Exactly.
That's exactly it.
It's pretty amazing.
And this is also what I meant by anecdote and his reliance on anecdote.
Because he has never met anyone that has been fulfilled outside of a Christian framework, it must mean no one has.
Yeah, he's playing a very common card I've found with fundamentalist Christians, but other people of other faiths as well, that your form of faith can only go so far, but if you want to go all the way, you have to come over to here, and that's where that fundamentalism really kicks in.
Yeah, you know, I'm also hearing like, here are the supplements that can help you optimize, but if you really want the stack that's going to take you over the edge, you need Jesus!
Jesus, because the reason my products are not working for you yet is that it's like any other of these grifts, right?
The level one course that you bought for 500 bucks, it's not going to change your life until you buy the $1,000 level two.
In his case, level two is just Jesus.
JSTACK.
$997, Julian.
Again, you gotta do your research here.
I had an uncle growing up who was Mennonite.
He was my dad's sister's husband, so not in the family, but he brought her heavily into Mennonite.
He was super religious, and when he found out I was studying religion in college and that it was focused on Buddhism, he would send me these long handwritten letters of why Buddhism's cool, but it will never be Jesus.
So when I hear Ben, it's kind of a trigger when I hear Ben, and I really didn't care.
But at my first wedding, I was married by a gay rabbi.
Right?
And then a gay Ayurvedic doctor or priest, right?
So, we had two people who happened to both be gay marry us, and he came to the wedding and actually, after my marriage, went up to one of them and started shaming them about being gay.
That's how hardcore this sort of mindset can become, right?
I'm not relating that to Ben, but when I hear that sort of language around that, that's what it reminds me of.
That complete You know, real quick here, just as an anecdote, I have a nephew in New Orleans, and my wife grew up in New Orleans, and it's a very Catholic town.
And my nephew is about nine years old now, and I was FaceTiming with him, and I said, what's your favorite subject at school?
He said, religion.
I was like, oh, this is amazing!
They're studying religion at school!
I said, so what are you learning about the religions of the world?
What do you mean?
And he showed me the textbook and it's just, it's a textbook for kids about Catholicism and that's what you study under the subject of religions.
Is this a public school?
No, private school.
Okay, well, yeah, that makes sense.
There you go.
So, you know, in Ben's world, there's no possible way that other people have well-thought-out proposals about living a fulfilling life that actually satisfy them, right?
It's only his interpretation of his brand of Christianity is the one that suffices.
And I know he tries to play it broad, as I said, by incorporating this anodyne language from spirituality.
But stating that Jesus is the only way to have a complete life is a pretty specific claim.
And notice what he's doing.
So, he has this energy bar that he's designed.
You'll give up donuts and cookies and you'll become addicted to what he's selling because, well, duh, he's the ripped influencer who knows what's best for you.
And now here he is an hour later in the same podcast saying, sure, you can do your yoga, your gratitude meditation, you can even give to charity.
This is what he says.
I didn't clip.
But all of them aren't the true ingredients for spiritual fitness.
You can only have that through God, specifically.
Now, to be fair, I remember this same sort of logic flow from the yoga world, which was, you know,
the postures, the sun salutations, the breathing exercises will clear your physical vehicle
and prepare you for some kind of spiritual experience that you wouldn't otherwise have.
And that's really the point.
It's like the stuff that we teach you in teacher training program or in the studio,
that's really kind of illusory.
You know, it's not the real thing.
It's not really yoga.
It's not really yoga.
The yoga is the thing that you get to through my studio or through Greenfield's power bars, but it's not the real thing.
You have to eat it, you have to eat them, but it's not the real thing.
But you have to still eat it.
Yeah, you have to still eat it in order to get there.
And then the thing that used to be the case, if we go back a few decades, was that, oh, now if you want the real thing, we're planning a trip to India to see the Guru.
Right.
And this is where you're really going to receive the darshan, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So, I want to look at one last place where this sense of fundamentalism creeps in, and that is in self-pleasure.
So, a listener asks, can you masturbate?
And he begins by comparing that to picking your nose, and then saying that they're all biological functions you can do.
And then he goes on to say, but should you masturbate?
And he has some thoughts on that.
If you are masturbating, whether you're a man or a woman, and you are thinking about all these other multiple partners, the problem is it's a slippery slope to acting upon that in real life.
So, for example, I personally masturbate, but I only ever would be thinking, because I'm a married man, of my wife.
And this is something I've dealt with a little bit.
Occasionally, I'll just paint almost like the portrayal of some like perfect woman
who might not actually exist in my mind and masturbate while thinking about that.
And I'm kind of on the fence about even whether something like that is okay,
or whether it would be just the equivalent of looking at porn or thinking about some actual real woman.
But I try to protect my mind quite a bit because I know if I'm thinking about someone specifically
while masturbating, it just increases the potential that I might act upon that sexual desire
in the real world in a physical way and wind up doing something like committing adultery
or tearing my family apart.
I mentioned earlier guilt-free.
His energy bars are guilt-free.
We just hear the guilt here and his inability to self-regulate, which is counter to so much of what he preaches about his physical life.
This is the basis of his belief that there's only a certain way to masturbate or else all else is a slippery slope.
And again, here he is taking anecdote for data.
He goes on in that clip to talk about how he has erotic photos of himself and his wife and they take them with them when they travel independently to masturbate to, which is fine if that brings you pleasure.
There's nothing wrong with that.
No kink shaming.
No kink shaming.
No, not at all.
No, but the problem is that he set up guardrails for himself and is then preaching to other people that going outside of his own guardrails can lead to problems for them, which just happens to coincide with his version of the Christian framework.
What about the Christian, here's my issue, he talked about maybe he imagines the perfect partner that may not exist and he's on the fence about whether or not that's adulterous or not.
What if the aspirational Christian is trying to imagine the perfect Jesus in order to be devoted to them, but But it's not really the real Jesus, because they don't have a real relationship with him.
What would that do to their faith sort of dynamism, do you think?
I suppose that's why in Islam you can't ever picture Muhammad.
Yeah, right.
I actually think it's an interesting attempt he's got going on to purify his techno-erotic landscape.
Like, you can have pure and impure food, but you can also have pure and impure porn to jack to.
And the stakes are similar.
Like, you choose the wrong stimulus, and you will be dirty and indulgent, or you will be faithful and devoted.
But I do think it would be interesting to have more context here, because this all comes out of purity culture, right?
And that, I mean, in that discourse, shame in relation to desire is like the strongest motivator of repression.
But there's also within that discourse, I've heard a component of foreswearing porn by arguing that it's like a form of exploitation that can actually hurt everyone in terms of power and consent.
And so, I don't know, like whether you buy that argument or not, or whether he actually thinks that way, you know, it lines up with some second wave feminism.
Or, I think the other thing that's going on is that there's an implication here that the sex worker that you would fantasize about is degraded or dirty.
So, whatever is going on for him, Greenfield might not just be talking about his own singular holy body that he wants to masturbate as Jesus would like him to.
Again, as we put people and occupations into buckets, there is a lot of exploitation in pornography.
And then some people just really like to do it.
They like that lifestyle.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But when you have these frameworks like this, which says all of that must be this, that's really where the problem is.
And one of the things I've seen throughout the pandemic is like health insurance for sex workers are getting some sort of benefits, you know, because it is a service that predominantly services men, and yet we have no regulations on it in this country.
So, that is a whole other Complicated story, but it's one that when I hear it reduced in the ways that he does and Christians do, it's really problematic, especially when some of those very same people are using that service, right?
But Ben seems to get trapped by a problem that plagues a lot of people, that they think their own thoughts and those who think like them define the world.
Throughout the episode, he keeps saying things like I've never met anyone who was ultimately fulfilled
unless they accepted Jesus.
As their masturbation guy.
I mean, I think he needs to get out more.
But then I wondered, how in his framework would one really be fulfilled?
And I'm not going to play this clip, but his response is very straightforward.
And he says, you just need to believe in God.
That's it.
That is it.
And that's what always kills me with guys like this.
Being a good person doesn't actually matter, provided that you say that you just believe in something.
But, I mean, I always come up with this question, which is, like, what does it actually mean to say that and how does a person know that they believe in God?
Is it that they hear themselves say the words?
An internal feeling?
And what other statement or affirmation might produce that same feeling?
Because it just seems like if that's the sort of final challenge, it's a set of goalposts that can always be moved.
There can be this answer that whatever you're going through or however you're suffering or however you are feeling depressed, You just are not believing in God.
You haven't committed yourself.
Is there magic in the commitment?
Is it about the words themselves?
You know, I'm agreeing with you more than him, Matthew, but you're sounding a little bit like Jordan Peterson there.
How do you know?
Well, like, what does it, what does it really, like, what do you mean when you ask me if I believe in God?
There are all these words and they mean different things, and what would that mean?
No, no, I'm not parsing the individual words.
I know what believe, I'm talking about the speech act, right?
Like, if you say, I believe in God, because they're offering that as a challenge.
That's like a threshold.
You've just got to believe in God.
So I want to know, how is that actually accomplished?
Like, how do you get approval for, like, succeeding there?
Well, I guess through the act of saying that you believe there is this all-powerful creator from whom moral law has come and to whom I must surrender any sense of autonomy or You know, critical thinking or selfish desire, right?
But I guess what I'm saying, this is what I'm getting at, is that you could actually say those words, we could write those out in a script, and I could repeat that back to you.
Yeah.
You know, I used to say the Catholic Creed, but how did I prove to another person, or how would I satisfy another person that I actually was a believer?
By sacrificing your firstborn son.
Okay, right.
You know, in Ben's worldview, being secular and giving to charity and doing good things, which provably makes the world a better place, is not as important as just being Christian, which does not provably make the world a better place.
So, in his view, and this kind of gets to it, I think, Matthew, at least in what they're saying, which is that you start with belief, and then right actions will automatically work themselves out.
But that's an assumption with no bearing in reality.
It's not testable is what I'm saying.
It's not testable.
It's like the person says they believe something, but why do I believe them?
How does it show up?
What does it actually mean?
You've just said the thing, but I know you're selling supplements, but what else is going on that you're telling me about?
I don't get it.
Well, that's always been one of my problems with the quote-unquote Western religious framework, because it's a hierarchy, right?
It's first this, then this, like climbing a ladder.
So that's the way that they look at it, and again, they're pretending that these steps automatically lead to one another.
But there's other ways, like the Noble Eightfold Path in Buddhism.
Right actions are a part of that, but they're practiced not in succession, but all at the same time because they're interdependent.
So, that's just to say that there are other ways of viewing existence and practicing faith because different philosophies appeal to different temperaments depending on the culture you're raised in.
But, you know, to return to your earlier point, Julian, about these other forms of religion that become problematic, This is where it becomes authoritarian.
So, Matthew, I don't really think at the end of the day, it is ultimately about belief, but about power and how that plays out in some capacity.
Because if someone reaches out to Ben and says, hey, you really changed my life and now I believe these things, that's an element of power he's going to feel.
And if I start to talk to him as an atheist about, but I feel very fulfilled without Jesus, he's going to say, well, then you're just not doing it right.
I'm speculating, but I'm guessing that's going to be his response system.
I think it would have to be his response, that you're missing out on something.
And then if you said, well, how do I know?
And he would say, well, because the quality of belief is X, and I want to know what the X is.
Yeah.
Like, what is that?
Because in your joy, in the joy that you have in life, You know, you would have a number of ways of describing it, and I guess what I'm getting at with this, and I'm a little bit convoluted so I apologize, is that the claim that I believe in God and that that is sort of sufficiently enlightening to me and that it's like nourishing to me, that that is so abstract.
And it's so, I don't know, it's a transcendental signifier, it's a conversation stopper.
You can't really ask about it, obviously, because we're puzzling it out right now.
Yeah, it's just a mystery to me.
And then, in terms of my comment that you've come back to a couple times, Derek, I mean, Ultimately what I'm saying is, whatever your set of justifications, be they rational, emotional, mythopoetic, for asserting that we should love one another and that people should have equality and dignity.
You know, if those come from some sort of religious idea that you have, I'm fine with that.
It's when your divine mandate for power over others issues from a religious source.
That's, I think, when you really, you know, there's a big problem.
Well, that's ultimately my issue with the religious, Julian, which is that I think Ben has the framework exactly backwards.
It's the actions that matter, and then if the belief—you're right, in the sense that if the belief provides fuel for the actions and you follow through on the actions, that's wonderful, but you can have the actions untethered from the belief.
And so when I hear that it has to start here and then the other things will automatically come, that there's nothing in our psychology that backs that up, because we have thousands of years of evidence of the opposite being the case.
So this idea that there's this ultimate unyielding dictator at the helm, because early in the episode, Ben specifically says that all moral laws come from God.
But again, it's going to be his interpretation of that, and that whatever entity is astray from that is unrighteous or as Ben would claim,
unfulfilling is to stray from that path, then he's not looking at the actual actions of people,
which is really to me what matters.
Here's maybe how I can sum up my scrambled thoughts is that like, when you have an indefinable declaration
of belief in God as being the ultimate sort of validation for whether or not your supplements are working
or whether or not you're doing the right kind of pornography and masturbation,
when that is your sort of ultimate justification and you can't really parse it or define it,
then the only thing that's going on is the strength of the statement.
It's the charisma of the statement.
The Speech Act is an act of power.
It's not an act of explanation and sharing and communion and conversation.
It is this, you know, belief in God is kind of like a zero-sum game.
Just sort of statement, a ritual statement that can't really be negotiated with and so it would have to take on the character of the authoritarian.
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