January 6, 2021. MAGA hats, tactical gear, American flags, poles turned into clubs. Another flag appears: white, with a blue corner square containing a red Latin cross. Another that proclaims “Jesus is King.”
If you’re agnostic or atheist, you might get that old familiar feeling. Horror at the irrational devotion, nausea at the toxic masculine violence that justifies itself as holy.
But what if you recognize that Protestant flag from your own church sanctuary? What if you recognize in that mob people from your church choir? Will you wonder how their faith was replaced by conspiracy theories, and how their Jesus turned into Trump?
That’s the question posed by “God & Country,” a new documentary by Dan Partland and produced by Rob Reiner, based on the book The Power Worshippers by Katherine Stewart. Stewart is an investigative reporter and author who has covered religious liberty, politics, policy, and education for over a decade. Her journalism appears in the NY Times, NBC, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. She joins us today to discuss the dangers of growing Christian Nationalism in America.
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The issue of trying to get different types of messaging into churches is not going to solve the problem alone.
I think if we want to turn the political tide, we really need to recognize that, again, this is not a problem of theology.
It's not just about the culture wars.
This is a problem of politics, and it requires political solutions. We need to recognize the value of
turning out the base of voters who reject the politics of domination in the first place.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod.
And you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes and other goodies like Matthew's ongoing live stream series on Fridays over on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
You can also access our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
It's January 6th, 2021.
You're glued to the livestream from the Capitol.
You see the MAGA hats, the tactical gear, the American flags, their poles turned into clubs.
But then you see another flag, white, with a blue corner square containing a red Latin cross.
Then you see another flag, Jesus is King.
The camera pans over a homemade gallows to land on a wooden cross someone has fashioned out of 4x4s and scarred up to look ancient.
Now if you're agnostic or atheist, if you fled Christianity for all of the reasons that people commonly do, you might get that old familiar feeling.
Horror at the irrational devotion, nausea at the toxic masculine violence that justifies itself as holy.
But what if you recognize that Protestant flag from your own church sanctuary?
What if you recognize in that mob people from your church choir?
Will you wonder how their faith was replaced by conspiracy theories and how their Jesus turned into Trump?
That's the question posed by God and Country, a new documentary by Dan Partland and produced by Rob Reiner.
It dropped this week.
And it's also the question we'll ask Catherine Stewart, the author of Power Worshippers, the book the documentary is based on.
And if you're interested in how someone like Trump turns into a Jesus figure, I just have to ping the book by Stephen Protero called American Jesus.
It looks at the history of how Jesus is presented in America throughout a couple hundred years.
And it shows the cults of personality that grow around the idea of Jesus to be able to fit into certain containers built up by these different groups.
So that was a really good insight by Matthew there, but for a deeper exploration, that book is just fantastic.
So Derek, Friday, February 16th, saw the release of God and Country, and I was able to view a screener, and I've got a lot of reasons to give you and the listeners for going to see this film, which is now out on about 100 screens across the US.
And the reasons fall into two main categories.
First, I'd say there's really direct, accessible, and timely educational value here.
And we'll get into the details as we run through the book by our guest today, Catherine Stewart.
But secondly, I think that veteran documentary director Dan Partland, and one recent film of his is 2020's Hashtag Unfit, The Psychology of Donald Trump, along with producer Rob Reiner, have really put together a masterclass in political dialogue and persuasion that American Christians on the edge of disillusionment with where their community has wandered can go and absorb in 90 minutes and maybe even share with family members.
So there's a really tight flow to this film that starts with the J6 riot footage, which shows the signs and the flags of holy war.
But then time travels through the long-term and more recent history of Christian nationalism, all to wind back up on that terrible Capitol Hill day with a lot of questions answered about the history of segregationism, abortion as a cynically made-up issue to rally around, and the organizing power of anti-LGBTQI hatred.
The heart of the documentary is this battery of talking heads, and the most prominent of them are Christians of various stripes who are taking a stand against Christian nationalism from within their understanding of faith.
So there are mainstream pundits like David French, Holy Post podcast hosts Phil Vischer and Sky Jatani, Sister Simone Campbell, who's a lawyer and executive director of Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice.
There's the author of Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes-Dumais, whose work on muscular Jesus has been pretty central to your reporting, Derek, on the intersection between American religious fervor, masculinity, and healthism.
And then they open and close, of course, with the extremely compelling Reverend William Barber II.
Here's his opening question and challenge.
When he was in the Birmingham jail, Dr. King said, when I look at all the injustices in the world, and I drive past churches, and I see these high steeples, I ask myself, what kind of people worship there?
What do they care about?
Are they at work in the world for those things which look like love and look like justice
and look like truth?
I mean, you just can't get more direct than that in the American socio-religious imagination.
And then there are some heavy-hitter scholars.
Reza Aslan, Anthea Butler, who chairs religious studies at University of Pennsylvania,
and the sociologist of religion Andrew Whitehead.
And here's the important thing about the talking heads, not one of them is hostile to Christianity in any general sense.
These are mainly believers, most of them are believers that are seeking to reclaim something of value.
And why then did they take this practitioner and scholar-practitioner tack?
Well, as director Dan Partland and Rob Reiner told the Holy Post podcast, they're actually interested in the positive social capital and moral content of American Christianity.
So here's Reiner saying just as much to Phil Vischer on Holy Post.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love thy neighbor. These ideas, to me,
they cut across all religions and they're profound. And that my dad used to tell me when
I was younger, he said, you know, if you believe in do unto others and you really believe in that
and take that to heart, you You don't need the Ten Commandments, because all the things that happen that are listed in the Ten Commandments, if you apply, do unto others, you'll know the right thing to do.
You don't, you know, you don't have to say to somebody, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill.
These things are, you live with them.
You know, I'm a flawed person.
I'll fail here and there, but I always come back to that, which is how do I want myself to be treated?
How do I treat somebody else?
And those are the teachings of Jesus.
And I felt that this movement, this political movement, has gotten far away.
This Christian nationalism has gone far away from the teachings of Jesus, it seems to me.
So you would consider yourself a concerned outsider?
Yes, yes, because I see it as a danger to democracy.
But what I know, what I learned is that very conservative Christian leaders see it as a danger to Christianity.
Then in an interview with director Dan Partland, Our friend of the pod, Brad Onishi, who definitely should have been in the film, points out that they made some safe or maybe centrist choices in staffing that roster of talking heads.
There are no openly queer pastors or trans activists.
Partlin's response was kind of disappointing to me, but in an interesting way.
He said, really, that he hadn't been conscious of those exclusions.
And that's, you know, basically like saying inclusion is not something I really work at.
But perhaps the exclusions happened because this is him saying that there was this overall feeling that social acceptability is essential to political accessibility.
And like Derek, I just have to say that as a small-scale independent media worker, I'm actually glad I don't have Partlin's pressures.
Because in the end, if I'm heading up that multi-million dollar project and I staff that roster with the most incisive queer experts I know and love, it'll take two hours before Libs of TikTok just clips excerpts of the crew with their dyed hair or whatever.
And on the basis of 30 seconds, you know, the whole project will be mocked, distorted, and the poison in the water around it will just ruin it in the eyes of those I most want to see it, or those who would take it into their communities and have the strongest impact with it.
So I'm really glad that, you know, I don't have to deal with that level of responsibility.
You know, I want to point out, too, because what we're talking about today and the effects, the downstream effects of Christian nationalism and this sort of thinking, we just see it.
We see it constantly.
But Libs of TikTok pointed to a specific town recently about some transgender people, and then one of them was just murdered.
Yeah.
That happened this past week, and you see the real-world effects.
We often talk about how the online world and the real world don't necessarily mesh, but sometimes they do in very dangerous ways.
And she is one of the more disgusting and damaging people out there right now, and we're going to continue to see those effects as long as they have this sort of influence.
So, as you might expect, Onishi also has a little bit of shade to throw on the romantic premise embodied by some of the Reformed evangelicals on screen, which kind of goes like this, that Christian nationalism is a recent anomaly.
It's an infection that you could kind of wipe out with the antibiotics of a truer and more authentic faith.
Or a return to the social gospel.
And as Onishi points out, you know, history always makes things more complex than that.
And so, I agree with all of that.
And at the same time, I also think that according to the stated purposes of Partland and Reiner, all in all, it's a really solid documentary.
It stands on the shoulders of a powerful book that you're going to run down, Derek.
I'm just going to point out one other thing, which is the serendipity of Rob Reiner being involved in this.
So, Stand By Me, When Harry Met Sally, Few Good Men.
I mean, Reiner is in the sort of Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron territory with his finger on the American pulse for decades.
One of those guys.
But as Phil Vischer, the Holy Post host, pointed out in their episode with him, Reiner first made his mark In the 1970s, in the role of Michael the Meathead Stivick in All in the Family, playing opposite Carol O'Connor as Archie Bunker in the first great culture war TV show of the postmodern era.
I'm sorry, Derek, I think you're traumatized by that a little bit.
I remember, kind of like you, I was a little bit young, but I definitely watched a lot
of the reruns over at my grandparents' house.
Yeah.
And you just, when you're that age, you're just like, oh, this is reality.
And now you look back, you know, my wife and I have this thing because she's seven years younger than me.
So she's kind of missed part of the 80s where I was like full on and like coming up into high school and
she was a little younger.
So, we have this thing where we go back and we watch some of the movies and see what holds up.
And sometimes, some movies hold up amazingly.
I mean, you said Stand By Me, you know, I'm watching Stranger Things right now.
There's the influence there. It's awesome.
And then sometimes you put on a movie and you're like 10 minutes in, like the airplane for example,
and you're like, oh, this is not a good look.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, so I watched it in reruns like you.
I was about 10, I guess.
And I could see Archie's racism, his misogyny, the homophobia, all of his asshole defended reactionary views just plain as day.
I mean, he was really the OG MAGA chud sitting in his tin pot, lazy boy throne.
And then Rob Reiner had this haircut that reminded me of older pictures of my dad and their anti-war politics, their general leftism lined up.
And so I sat there watching Meathead yell at Archie and I cheered him on.
Michael would poke Archie's Nixon-devoted bear every episode, and they cranked at each other like it was living room Twitter for nine seasons.
But then there's this late episode where they sit quietly together on the day that Michael and Gloria are off on their move from Queens to California, where Michael's gonna be taking a sociology job at UC Santa Barbara and then join a commune after he and Gloria split.
You know, this is what happened.
But in that moment, Michael finds it in himself.
And he's a father at that point, so he's a lot softer than he has been in years past.
And he turns to Archie, who's this like old honey-glazed ass, and he says, thank you for putting up with me.
There were good times.
You've been like a father to me.
I will miss you.
And, you know, Archie can't say much in return without choking up, but you can see that he's still a boy, frightened, defended, needing friends.
He still has values of care and loyalty buried within him.
Like most of the Fox News dads probably do.
And so I can't help but feel that Reiner, bringing this telehistory behind him
is well positioned to leave the door open in this film to the possibility of cultural repair in America,
maybe even forgiveness.
♪♪ Okay, well, we are certainly going through
a tough cultural moment at this time, Matthew, and I don't think we've seen the worst of it.
I do think it can and will get much darker.
But taking a historical perspective is really important, and I've read a number of excellent books on this emerging Christian nationalism.
You mentioned Kristin Kobez Dumez.
Kevin Cruz is excellent.
Frances Fish Gerald sort of wrote an opus on the Evangelicals that I read last year.
Angela Denker, she was on our podcast over a year ago.
Her excellent book, Registate Christians.
And now we have Catherine Stewart, whose book came out years ago, but I read it in preparation for this episode.
It is fantastic.
Her reporting from inside of these churches with the people leading the Evangelical and Muscular Christianity movements are So insightful, but they also offer a cautionary tale to every American interested in actually salvaging the First Amendment.
I just want to underline inside these churches because that's literally true.
She's recording in this book years of attending services, conventions, prayer meetings, never undercover.
She always gets people to talk to her somehow.
It's really an admirable investigative work.
Yeah, it reminds me of reading Jeff Charlotte too, our recent guest, because he's the same way.
And it really, I would imagine, I'm not often in those circumstances, but they seem to approach people with a level of curiosity.
And one thing is, regardless of your politics, if you talk to a person as a human and you're actually interested, you'll often pull things out of people.
Not even in a nefarious way.
And you're actually interested in learning, and I got the sense, both from your excellent interview
with her and reading the book, that's what she is trying to do here.
Yeah, totally.
Now, you said earlier, like Christian nationalism is framed as a newer phenomenon.
In some ways, that is true in its incarnation, but it also goes back to the earliest settlers, right?
You have Congregationalists and Episcopalians who were minority religious Communities in Europe that were escaping prosecution, that's how they landed in America, in parts.
So the American expansion westward was really driven by upstart religious groups like the Shakers and Mormons, who were trying to establish their own brands of Christianity.
I mean, you have Oregon, where I live now.
It was founded as a post-Civil War exclusionary haven that only allowed white settlers to own property.
And these groups were driven by a lot of bigotry and by their own brand of religion, which sadly often goes together.
In his book, One Nation Under God, Kevin Cruz pinpoints the current strain of Christian nationalism So, a number of major corporations during that time that were being subjected to antitrust laws, so we're thinking General Motors, Hilton Hotels, they paid conservative clergymen to attack the New Deal as pagan statism.
That perverted the main teaching of their brand of Christianity, and that was all focused on the salvation of the individual.
Yeah, never mind the Depression, or what we're going to do about that, or how we're going to pull people back out of the hole, right?
Forget that.
Yeah, yeah, and there's so many.
The Depression era is so fascinating, that era between the late 20s through World War II.
I've read so many different books from different angles on it.
And in one sense, you have this sort of unifying story coming together through the New Deal
that actually helped create a lot of the social safety nets.
And in another sense, you have figures like Father Divine, who was siphoning off money
from his brand of Christianity in Harlem.
You have all these splinter groups who are just trying to get basically power and position
and money in any way that they could.
Yeah.
And so, that's the argument that Cruz makes, is that that is when this current iteration starts.
So, Catherine Stewart looks at the current state of Christian nationalism in her book, and it's driven by the same notions of manifest destiny that have driven the religious for generations, while she basically picks up threads that were occurring from the 60s onwards.
You know, she's always slamming the history back into the present, just like while covering the theological heritage, really clearly she's always bringing things back to the material assault on institutions.
So, yeah, religion in Stewart's analysis is always sort of both historical and present.
It's really vital.
Yes, yeah.
I think understanding those strains and how things build on each other.
I mean, in my own work, thinking about people with mRNA vaccines and like, how is this developed?
And we're like, well, we've been developing these technologies for centuries.
And it's the same thing here.
Things don't just occur in a vacuum.
You know, the conditions are there.
Right.
So, Catherine will be speaking for herself soon.
I just want to give a quick rundown of my highlights from the book.
So Stuart reminds us that the tax exemptions that churches enjoy come with contingencies, one being that they can't advocate for political parties.
And I think everyone here knows how much of a sham policy that is in actual practice.
There are many ways church leaders advocate without quote, advocating.
And Stewart frames it well when she writes, one could say that the United States now has a publicly
subsidized political party that promotes an agenda of religious nationalism.
You can find this on full display in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's 900 plus page document that we've
been covering for all of this year so far, and which seeks to implement Christian nationalist
policies by handing all of the governmental power to the executive branch and filling the
next conservative president's administration with 50,000 or so employees.
Now, Stewart notes another important tactic, that Christians are constantly claiming that they are an oppressed group in America, which is just absurd.
She writes that there's no data to support this, and yet it's proven to be one of the most effective messages that drive Christians to the polls.
Cosplaying the oppressed is really weird to me, but white people seem really good at doing that.
Now, Stewart notes how effective church leaders are in disguising the quest for power as a matter of values, and that in these spaces, church followers actually prefer autocrats to democratically elected leaders.
Jon Stewart did a really good job of that this week, where he shows what Tucker Carlson did when interviewing Putin, and how Putin used him and then basically trashed him a day later on Russian TV, being like, oh, I thought he was going to actually ask me hard questions.
And so, Stuart is arguing that they are basically setting the conditions for an autocrat to come into power in America and getting their followers used to that, which lines up with Project 2025 perfectly.
Now, back to Stuart.
If tax exemption wasn't bad enough, she goes into details about the school choice ploy, which is basically a way of funneling public tax dollars into religious schools.
And if you think that includes Jewish and Muslim schools, you'd be very wrong, because all of a sudden there's a problem with those sorts of schools.
Now, whenever you hear the term school choice, just know that it's a dog whistle for using public funds for Jesus.
And usually specifically, again, a specific brand of muscular Christianity.
And this is actually a reversion to segregated schools because this plot began shortly after the civil rights.
Want to ping Jeff Charlotte again and The Undertow because he writes about that and unpacks it really well in that book.
Right.
Okay, two more points.
Stuart writes that the electoral future of Christian nationalism is not ethnically homogenous.
This is very interesting.
It's really important too because white nationalism has tactics for inviting all sorts of people into the fold Especially if they're going to help them electorally.
But it's kind of like people who work for Donald Trump or Elon Musk, who believe that they're in their good graces, and then all of a sudden they get kicked to the curb, and they wonder how it happened to them.
They thought they were exempt.
How did they do that?
Well, abortion, and we're going to get to that in a few minutes, that's a big one in Latino culture, which is why the GOP has been gaining more Hispanic support, because they're really targeting through that message.
I would also remind people that this is a very anti-feminist movement as well.
Stuart covers this extensively, and she traces it back to abolition and how slave owners were just as scared as women gaining power as they were of black people gaining power.
Now, last thing, this one really hit home.
Growing up, it was common for my friends to be contrarian just for the sake of it.
You know, if you like this, I like the opposite just to get you.
Like, that's the thing kids that I grew up with did.
Again, pinging stranger things, they do it, you know, in the 80s.
It's just one of those cultural things that Americans do for some reason.
I honestly thought it's something that you mature out of.
Nope.
Most of my friends did.
Maybe we'll be sarcastic.
You know I'm sarcastic.
But at the end of it, you don't actually hold on to that.
You're like, ah, just fucking with you, whatever.
And from the outside, we look at the inherent contradictions of these Christian nationalists With horror, like, how are you for freedom of speech, yet you limit the speech of others?
How do you claim religious choice is a God-given right, yet it only applies to your choice of religion?
So Stuart goes to great lengths to show Just how callous this movement really is.
They're going with the opposite of woke or liberal or whatever just to get you.
Again, I want to ping Jon Stewart, another Stewart, on Monday Night's Daily Show because he says the exact same thing.
And you kind of feel like that's what's going on, but Katherine Stewart makes a really compelling argument that that is exactly what's going on.
There's nothing deeper.
It's like, I'm going to get the liberals.
That's all I care about.
And when you're up against people with no moral compass, there is real danger ahead.
I think, Derek, that that contrarian, that dissonant reflex is integral to the fact that Christian nationalism is an overtly anti-democratic movement.
They don't have to make sense, except within their own terms, their own echo chambers.
Every bit of democratic tradition and functionality is instrumental, which means they'll take it or leave it.
Free speech for me, but not for thee.
So one of the things, this is nuts Derek, they'll claim that the Establishment Clause doesn't apply to religion in general, but to the possibility that the state might discriminate between Christian denominations because the state is Christian, right?
So the Establishment Clause is that the state shall make no law with regard to Christianity.
Nuts.
They don't view the branches of government as a series of checks and balances, but as
a pyramid structure.
And Stuart's metaphor is that, you know, this is intended to ultimately validate a
kingly president ordained by God.
And I think this is where Christian nationalism really shows how deeply reliant it is on both
conspiratorial logic and the promises of conspirituality.
Because for these folks, every pile of real evidence against their claim that the US was
was founded as a Christian nation is fabricated by a cabal of godless liars.
And that that godless narrative is swallowing up the possibility of being saved in their minds.
And so the promise is that by realizing the danger, they spark a revival that will root out the black rot of secularism and privacy.
But I think what stands out most to me in relation to the overall summary of Stuart's work that you've laid out, Derek, are these threads of moral betrayal and spiritual abuse.
And there are many ways to go with this theme, but I just want to focus on something that blew my mind in this book and in the documentary.
I wasn't aware that abortion is an invented moral panic.
It was outrageous for me to hear that it took years after Roe v. Wade for this very small cadre of evangelical political hacks to zero in cynically on a chosen issue as an organizing principle that would launder the actual foundation of modern Christian nationalism, which is in the racist politics of opposing desegregation.
You know, that goes all the way back to Brown v. Board in 53.
So, integration in the public sphere was bad enough for big league evangelicals, but then they realized the law was going to make them, you know, desegregate their schools, their high schools and universities.
They might lose their federal tax exemptions.
And so that is the essential glue of the modern movement that we're talking about now is that a place like Bob Jones University is on the verge of being pressured by the IRS to fully integrate after allowing like only married black students on campus starting in 1971.
But for them, the optics of maintaining Jim Crow wasn't flying with their donors.
It was a bad look.
Roe drops in 1973.
And as Stuart explains, the power worshippers are trolling around for platform issues.
Anti-communism has run out of steam.
It's not really enough to just hate the gays, although that rallies well.
What they needed to do was to start pretending that they cared about fetuses.
Now, Catholics had been dogmatically anti-abortion and against birth control since the mid-19th century.
Later, that legacy made them useful to the broader movement because they had this century of highly scholastic dogma that proved the immorality of abortion and birth control from their point of view.
And they had the centralized theology that, like the Supreme Court, can make some sort of ruling for the ages.
But Stuart draws out the history that shows that evangelicals had always been more ambivalent and individualistic on the issue.
Maybe they were even medical libertarians, we could say.
And in fact, they had resisted Catholic-style intrusions on the Protestants' personal relationship with God and morality.
So there had been a few bipartisan Christian strikes against abortion and birth control in the pre-war era, but only because it was feared that expanding women's reproductive rights would slow down the white middle-class birth rate and accelerate the Great Replacement.
So in other words, early bipartisan abortion restrictions were really about eugenics.
So then, Stewart quotes a professor of history at the University of West Georgia, Daniel Williams, who points out, quote, The early political battles over abortion in state legislatures pitted Catholic anti-abortion lobbyists against Protestant proponents of abortion law liberalization, with most Republican legislators siding with the Protestants.
Many Republicans supported the liberalization of state abortion laws, believing that abortion law reform accorded well with the party's tradition of support for birth control, middle-class morality, and Protestant values.
Billy Graham said in 1968, in general, I would disagree with the Catholic stance, adding, I believe in planned parenthood.
So, when all of these people suddenly pivot hard in 1970, what, 6, 8, 7, 9?
to the imaginary and symbolic realm of the womb.
When the anti-abortion movement, the Right to Life movement, really gets started, they are making things up.
They are suddenly turning women's bodies into churches where God must be centered into empty shells that house the Holy of Holies, the child of the future, the little Jesus everyone might become.
They didn't believe that before.
They didn't think about that before.
So, Derek, were you confused about the seeming hypocrisy around this issue whenever you encountered the pro-life rhetoric?
Did it never add up to you?
It always felt off to me, and now I think I know why.
Yeah, I know it very well, and I think that's just because I've been studying Christian nationalism just from afar for a few decades now, and the idea that the pivot happened in the late 70s was not new to me, but it is always frustrating.
I also want to say that, you know, you ping Billy Graham saying that about Planned Parenthood, What's very interesting is Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was exceptionally birth control forward.
She was all about that.
But she was actually anti-abortion.
And Planned Parenthood didn't start offering abortions until three years after her death.
Right.
So even there, like the idea that this institution and very important organization for women's health in general, you know, the founding mythos was actually still for the baby coming from that Catholic perspective.
But in terms of Stewart, she first points out that at the time Roe v. Wade was made into law in 73, more Republican voters were pro-choice than Democrats.
And it boggles the mind to think in those terms, but it's true.
Republicans didn't give a shit about abortion until a few charismatic church leaders intentionally, as you said, made it a political issue in the late 70s, led by Billy Graham and also Phyllis Schlafly.
Amazing.
Their whole goal was to boot Jimmy Carter out of office and consolidate power.
So in 1979 alone, Jerry Falwell, another one in that group, traveled over 300,000 miles across America setting up moral majority chapters.
This is where the modern anti-abortion movement starts.
By 1980, The moral majority was firmly embedded in 47 states, and this is also the precursor to Project 2025, which is effectively a linked network of churches across America that are on the exact same page about culture war topics.
You know, Derek, I'm thinking about Falwell traveling 300,000 miles.
I'm thinking, that is a lot of air travel.
And man, just one little clot could have taken that guy out.
And also, people track Taylor Swift's Private Jet, man.
If that was available back then, that map would be pretty crazy.
And it wasn't just abortion.
You said they were looking for a topic, and it was a bunch of topics.
There was the ERA, there were drugs, gay rights, they were against secular humanism.
Feminism in general was also under attack.
But abortion Struck the hardest, it has resonated the longest, likely because the images of babies is such a powerful motivator for so many people.
I think back to Eula Biss's wonderful book that we both love on inoculation, which just talks about part of the reason the anti-vax movement is so effective is because the image of a needle going into a baby just strikes horror into people.
And as Kristen Cobes Dumez writes in Jesus and John Wayne about this, only in time as abortion became more closely linked to feminism and the sexual revolution did evangelicals begin to frame it not as a difficult moral choice, but rather as an assault on women's God-given role on the family and on Christian America itself.
But There's a line from the intro of Catherine Stewart's book
that has stayed with me.
Quote, today it makes more sense to regard the Republican Party as a host vehicle for a radical
movement that denies that the other party has any legitimate claim to political power. And a big
part of the way that radical movement has gained power is by constricting women's bodily autonomy.
There are other ways, there's immigration, there's the anti-DEI and anti-CRT initiatives, but notice how these all go back to slavery time and again.
The fear that the power structure of white men at the top will crumble if others gain power.
I kind of wish it was more complex than that, but it's really not.
Now, there's one moment in the book when Stuart is traveling through North Carolina with her friend, Chris Lyles, who's a head pastor at a small Baptist church in South Carolina.
And he is certainly not a Christian nationalist, but he tags along to those churches to offer commentary from his own Christian perspective.
And he offers one of the most moving passages in the entire book, quote, As much as abortion is a pro-life issue, so is affordable healthcare, access to contraceptives, and real comprehensive sex education, minimum wage, fighting poverty.
These should all be part of the pro-life conversation.
And he doesn't, from what I gather from Stuart's writing, is he's not a fan of abortion.
And you know what?
This is someone who I'd rather be out there who's saying, hey, I might not like this thing, but let's look at all the things that happen later downstream from not allowing access to abortion.
And let's try to actually create social services, which I can appreciate.
Right.
A number of Christians who take an actual laissez-faire attitude toward this issue, as in, let other people decide what's best for themselves.
And this, again, really strikes at the hypocrisy of Christians who want freedom of speech and bodily autonomy for themselves, but deny it to others.
In fact, later in the book, Stuart is at a March for Life rally in Washington, D.C., and she asks people about this very issue, and she quotes one pro-life marcher who says, Poverty has always been with us in order to actually avoid or in order to act to avoid actually addressing systemic inequalities.
And the fact that having children is actually too much of a burden for some people to carry.
I love when people quote Jesus as though he's just some avoidant fucking like just just he just doesn't give a shit about anybody.
And so you shouldn't either.
Great job with the gospel of Mark there.
You know, Derek, I I invoked spiritual abuse.
I think there are many examples of this that we can track through this movement.
I think everybody should read Stewart's book just for the riveting story of Jim Doman, who's the self-described reformed homosexual who's been leading the religious conversion therapy charge for years.
I mean, the level of self-loathing that he has to internalize, normalize, and then spiritualize and then project out into the world is really incredible.
But I would say that with something like abortion, the spiritual abuse is just front and center.
There's a contrived theology.
There's the pretense that the Bible says anything at all about abortion.
The brutal cynicism of suddenly pretending to care.
And about women, no less.
And then to whip people into a spiritual fervor that their parents wouldn't even recognize or they wouldn't have cared about.
I'm thinking about Brad Onishi as a young evangelical guy walking into the voting booth and believing that he was going to be punished by God if he voted Democrat.
Because if he did, he would be sending a million fetuses into the compost heap.
And to me, this is the inverse of spiritual care.
It is a form of abuse because what it does is it reaches into this most tender spot of concern, this deepest place in people's bodies.
Because, I mean, who doesn't venerate sex and creation and where all of this stuff comes from?
And what this movement does is it says, those intimate private things are not yours.
Those things are the property of this divine war.
So now I'm joined by Catherine Stewart, an investigative reporter and author who has
covered religious liberty, politics, policy, and education for over a decade.
Besides her books, Power Worshippers, which we've talked about today, and The Good News Club, which
is about the Christian nationalist attack on children's education and rights, her journalism
appears in the New York Times op-ed, NBC, The New Republic, and the New York Review of Books.
Katherine Stewart, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Thank you so much.
It's great to be in conversation with you.
And before we get started, I want to set the record straight.
I do yoga myself.
Every day I try and do a little bit.
It's a great form of exercise.
But I have had a few run-ins with folks for whom yoga and extreme wellness was a kind of conduit to MAGA irrationalism.
Right.
So I'm really happy to be here.
Well, I really appreciate hearing that and maybe we'll have to have you back to talk about that particular pipeline.
But you have had your ear to the ground of a radicalizing American Christianity for more than a decade now.
And we're pretty familiar now with the political and legislative impacts that are crashing into us all.
But I wanted to ask you, how have you seen Christian nationalism impacting people on the community level within That's a great question.
You know, what has it done on the ground?
Without being overly broad, I would say that it is divisive and polarizing as it's intended to be.
community service, marriages? That's a great question. You know, what has it done on the
ground? Without being overly broad, I would say that it is divisive and polarizing as it's intended
to be. You could almost say it's, you know, characteristic of a cult in a certain way.
Cults typically divide people against one another.
They foster distrust of others who their members would normally be close to, such as Family members or people with whom they've had long-standing friendships or the people they meet at work or at their kid's school.
And you know, they separate people from those communities and from people that they love.
And they do it to tighten the bonds to the in-group, right?
The bonds to the cult.
And there's definitely an abundance of anecdotal behavior, anecdotal evidence about that.
I've certainly seen it.
In my own circle, unfortunately.
I think many of us have.
And so many other people I know have written about the fact that they have either written off or been written off by an uncle or a parent or a sibling or some other branch of the family because they've gone off into this land of crazy politics.
So on the community level, it's really divided people and polarized our country.
Well, I want to ask about something that resonates particularly with a phenomenon that we're familiar with as students of conspiracy theories, which is kind of like a, it's an undertone within your writing, which is how do we characterize the function of the Christian nationalist persecution complex, which is this perilous feeling that everything is always on the verge of collapse.
Because isn't faith supposed to be strengthening and encouraging?
I don't read faith that way.
I mean, there are many different varieties of religious faith.
And for many people who profess absolute, unwavering belief in a particular dogma or religious idea, it becomes absolutely essential And, in fact, a kind of neurosis and a way to defend that particular belief or dogma.
It doesn't always happen, but it sometimes does happen.
And when it does, it brings along a need to lash out at people who are perceived as heretics, right?
Who deviate from their belief system or who are perceived to threaten it.
So, I guess I don't agree with the premise that professions of faith are evidence of freedom from fear.
In fact, in many instances, we can really see the opposite.
And the persecution complex that you mentioned is really central to that, because you can persuade people to do these extreme things if they think they're in extreme danger.
And so by playing on people's fears and convincing them that they're actually the subjects of the most vile and unfair persecution, movement leaders are priming members of their base to embrace extreme programs.
Such as, you know, installing a dictator to deal with the alleged threats by separating people from the facts and persuading them that they're being, you know, oppressed and on the brink of being annihilated.
You can persuade people to do some pretty crazy things.
So, there is a dissonance there that seems to be really clearly weaponized, and it's one of a number of paradoxes.
And some of them, you know, are plainly seen on the ideological level, but some of them are also psychological.
And I have a citation here from your book that I wanted to Feedback to you that really stood out to me with regard to a particular kind of split.
But you write, perhaps the most obvious paradox of Christian nationalism is that it preaches
love but everywhere practices intolerance, even hate.
Members of the movement are often kind in person.
They love and care for their children, volunteer in their communities, and establish long friendships.
And then they seek to punish those who are different.
It is not enough for them to assert that they alone are religiously righteous.
They want everyone else to conform to their ideas of righteousness.
They save some of their most poisonous words for those who dare to identify as Christians of a different sort.
In their eyes, the archest of enemies are the misguided souls who would champion social justice.
And then you write, Jerry Falwell more than anyone embodied this unsettling mix of love and hate.
A jovial presence with an easy manner, Falwell was often celebrated as a loving man and a big heart, yet he regularly spewed toxins as when he blamed the, quote, abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians for the September 11th attacks.
And I wanted to ask you about the feeling of that paradox when you're in the room because you are interviewing Christian nationalist sources for years, and I'm wondering if you can feel that split between aggression and love when you're talking with your sources, and how does it come out if you do feel it?
It's true.
I suppose the people I meet are often incredibly cheerful and friendly, especially when you're in their spaces and they assume that you're one of them, one of the righteous.
There's a sense of community, a sense of common purpose, and that leads to a really terrific You know, feeling of solidarity, I suppose.
But if you're not one of the righteous, if you're somewhere outside of that, their language is extremely othering.
I mean, there's nothing friendly or loving about that.
It comes from this idea that's promoted by movement leaders that people can be divided between the insiders and the outsiders, the pure versus the impure.
You're either one of us or you're one of them.
And that's really what the movement leaders do.
You see it in sort of MAGALAND when Trump refers to his political opposition as vermin and surrounds himself with people who call them demons and then enables or otherwise permits his followers to engage in intimidation, right?
Here again we have a kind of rhetoric that amounts to a type of You know, it's it's othering in the extreme, and it actually amounts to kind of political violence.
It's not just viewing the political opposition as, you know, loyal opponents, people who are also human and maybe want the same things, but just have different ideas about how to get there.
It actually creates a kind of permission structure.
And he does nothing to condemn that.
Trump does nothing to condemn their words.
That is a kind of, it's a feature of authoritarian politics.
Look, when we think about a leader like Vladimir Putin in Russia, or Erdogan in Turkey, when these leaders bind themselves really tightly to ultra-conservative religious figures in their own country, To consolidate a more authoritarian politics, what they're doing is, you know, dividing their people between the pure, the impure, the us versus them, and they do it to sort of make the country less democratic, and it were less equitable, and to consolidate their own power, to bubble wrap themselves in sanctimony,
And to guard against any investigation of their criminality, their abusiveness, the sort of crimes they may be perpetrating against their own people.
You know, the impulse to exclude is very clear in the hateful language, but it's the love part that is communicated to the inner circle or to the in-group that seems to be most confusing to me.
It seems to hide Yeah, you're right.
or a thorn or something like that.
It feels like there's a continual warning within the sort of joviality or the friendliness
of Jerry Falwell, that this kind of contact or intimacy with the leadership,
this feeling of being in favor is something that you could instantly lose, because look at how quickly
I can turn on our enemies.
Yeah, you're right. You know, I've seen that fear, that cultivation of fear right from the very beginning
when I was, uh, started researching this movement.
It was back in 2009, I was living in Santa Barbara.
Something called a Good News Club came to my daughter's public elementary school, and...
And they literally target children who are too young to read.
We're talking elementary age, but very, very young.
The centerpiece of their program is called a wordless book.
It's got no words.
It just has pictures and shapes, and it's used to try to convert children who are too young to read.
Too young to read to a deeply fundamentalist form of the Christian faith.
You know, they're, by the way, entering public schools to do this, not churches, not playgroups, you know, private playgroups, whatever.
They're doing this in public schools.
And one of the pages on the wordless book has like a dark, like a, it's got like a black heart or something like that.
And the lesson that the children are taught is that if you don't believe in Jesus, you will be separated from God forever, meaning you're going to go to hell.
So that fear is like this huge piece of what they're teaching children in public schools.
And that sort of fear you can see kind of cultivated by movement leaders, not just a religious fear, but also this fear of the other.
One of the ways they do that is a total demonization of people who are different.
You know, you've got some passages that remind me of the Leonard Cohen line, it begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.
Although with Christian nationalism, the order might be reversed.
And, you know, as we speak about the impacts on children, I couldn't get past this searing detail about Ralph Drallinger, who's the leader of Capitol Ministries and, you know, they offer prayer meetings and Bible study sessions in the halls of Congress.
You write that he's an enthusiastic advocate of corporal punishment.
God's word on spanking, which is one of his study guides aimed at political leaders, quotes Proverbs 23, quote, do not hold back discipline from the child.
Although you strike him with a rod, he will not die.
You shall strike him with the rod and rescue his soul.
And in his exegesis, Drolinger elaborates, when rebellion is present, to speak without spanking is woefully inadequate.
And then you go on to make the connection, saying, Drolinger's views on presidential authority would appear to be taken from a page of the same book.
Quote, the institution of the state is an avenger of wrath, he explains in another sermon, and its God-given responsibility is to moralize.
A Fallen World Through the Use of Force.
President Trump, he believes, excels in these biblical criteria for leadership.
So this glorification of coercive discipline I think sums up a lot.
And it also frames the obsessive focus on children in a particularly ugly way from abortion to schooling.
To the war on Christmas, to what's in our public libraries, to how autistic children have been poisoned by the state, apparently, allegedly, to issues of trans healthcare.
And so, my question is, how do you think the children of Christian nationalists are doing?
Wow, I mean some of the focus on kids in these were the hardest parts of the book to research and then have to go back into that material as I was fact-checking because your heart breaks for these kids.
I mean, look, I don't feel qualified to make categorical judgments on this topic for all of the children of people who conform to or support this agenda, but on an anecdotal level Christian nationalism is strongly associated with authoritarian parenting styles.
Right.
People like James Dobson advocated beating or otherwise physically, you know, hurting their children.
You know, a lot of the children of these families grew up being spanked or hit or being subject to other extremely sort of harsh punishments.
You know, what happens to them?
Some turn around and are desperate to make their own children obey and believe.
As they were made to obey and believe.
Well, I think a good number of others seem to be trying to recover from the trauma.
Some of them are very vocal about that, and we're hearing a lot from those folks these days through books, podcasts, films, and other media.
Yes, I'm aware of the exvangelical crowd that specifically is speaking out or reflecting upon their engagement in purity culture, but is there also a faction that's talking about the disciplinary parenting that they grew up with?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I want to go back to your focus on children.
They call it the 4-14 window.
That means children between the ages of 4 and 14.
Pat Staver, founder and president of Liberty Council, called this the most strategic age group that we have.
Focus on kids who are, you know, they know if you get the kids, you can get the kingdom.
He gave a speech in which he said, if you wanna change the direction of the entire cruise ship,
meaning the culture, you wanna focus on those kids aged, I think he said in the speech, five to 12.
That is the most strategic age group that we have.
If you're focusing on people later, you're talking about what they often call
the quote unquote repair stage.
Zooming out to the sort of overall context of your book and the presentation of it as we get, or it's the threads that we get from it in the documentary God and Country, There is an overt premise in the documentary.
It's in your book a little bit, but to a lesser degree, I would say.
Christian nationalists are, according to ex-evangelicals or progressive Christians, are committing a kind of worldly heresy that betrays the true message of Jesus or the social gospel.
And so I have a question about bridge building and alliance making here, which is how are agnostic and atheist people, I believe you're Jewish Catherine, like how are we really supposed to empathize with an argument like this given how loud the fundamentalist voices are and how much damage they've done to human knowledge and equality down through the ages?
Well, I don't think that's the basic message of my books or any of my writing.
Look, I'm an investigative reporter.
I'm an analyst of politics.
I'm not a theologian.
I think we face a political crisis.
And to meet it, we need political solutions.
Now, the film, which has a different focus in this regard, is more focused on distinguishing these varieties of Christianity.
I see that as perhaps tactical choice on the part of the filmmakers, but only one part of the solution is going to involve reviving the religious so-called left.
But that by no means is the only solution, and it also does not mean excluding and empowering secularists, members of other faith groups, and really anyone who values our democracy.
I think we need to be clear here.
This movement is not just an attack on the way in which some religious people may understand their religion.
It's fundamentally an attack on our rights, on our democracy, our freedoms, our institutions.
It's an attack on the principles of justice and equality that represent the best of the American promise.
We need a big tent to meet the challenges of this movement, and it's going to include a lot of people who do not identify with Christianity or indeed with any religion, but instead who are united in a commitment to our freedoms and our democracy.
Well, on that note, do you think there is good work going on in terms of de-radicalization within American Christianity?
Good and effective work?
Who's doing the best work there?
Wow, thanks.
That's a great question.
I mean, there are so many different groups working on this.
They all deserve credit.
I'm almost afraid to start naming names here because I'm sure I'm going to leave someone out.
OK, I'm going to just throw out a few names, but this is by no means comprehensive.
I know Vote Common Good is doing some Great stuff.
I know that Faithful America is doing some work in this.
There are so many different groups.
I really am hesitant to... Baptist Joint Committee is doing some wonderful stuff.
There are just so many others.
I think we have to look at what we're up against.
Like, there's so much money and organization on the other side.
So, the issue of trying to get different types of messaging into churches is not going to solve the problem alone.
I think if we want to turn the political tide, we really need to recognize that, again, this is not a problem of theology.
It's not just about the culture wars.
This is a problem of politics, and it requires We need to recognize the value of turning out the base of voters who reject the politics of domination in the first place.
And look, in a country where 40 to 50 percent of people don't bother to vote, and an additional number do not vote because they feel disenfranchised, they think their vote doesn't matter, they don't have time, They don't really understand the issues, whatever.
It doesn't take a majority to win elections.
All it takes is a disproportionately mobilized minority.
And, you know, as I described the movement and the Power Worshippers, which is not just a set of ideas, it's also an organizational infrastructure, they have the You know, the get-out-the-vote machine that gets their people to vote in disproportionate numbers.
And people like George Barna, who is one of the strategists and pollsters in the movement and a sort of avid writer, he said, all you need is something like 10 percent.
to change the direction, if you can get them out in the right numbers.
Maybe it was David Barton who said that, someone who he works with frequently.
Let's look at 2016.
Barna identified the most voted religious right supporters, and he said there were only 10% of the population.
But in that election, 91% turned out to vote.
And 93% of those turned out to vote for Trump.
That's an extraordinary number.
If you can turn people out to that degree, you can really swing a district that will swing a state that will swing an election, provided you're targeting your outreach efforts appropriately.
So we really need to get people out there, help them understand the issues.
We can't meet our challenges as a country until people know what's at stake.
I think sometimes people look at the frontrunners, they say, do I want to have beer with that guy?
What do I think of him?
I don't like something he said back in 1987 or whatever.
It's not just about the frontrunner, it's who they're going to put in charge of the cabinets, the policies they're going to privilege, and the justices they're going to appoint to the courts, not just the Supreme Court, but lower courts as well.
So we need to help people really understand the bigger issues at stake.
You know, I'm sensing a kind of new clarity around division of labor, given how difficult these issues are and how intractable it seems that the, you know, the intellectual, the cultural differences can be.
Whenever anybody like yourself, you know, mentions the 40 to 50 percent absentee rate at elections, All of the discussion around how would you persuade your opponents to think differently becomes a little bit smaller or a little bit more contextualized in how can you actually just get your people out to vote, which seems to be a totally different task and not as hopeless, really.
Yeah, you know, I don't think it's either or.
I think all of these things are really important.
I think it's always good to have conversations with people who take different political points of view and try and find common ground and, you know, listen to what they have to say and then try and sort of reframe Some of the issues that you have mutual interest in and try and see what you can do.
But I think getting out the vote is really important.
And it's not just knocking on doors and making phone calls.
It's holding people in your circle accountable.
It's babysitting for that lady down the street so she actually has time to vote.
It's driving that person who may have a disability or be a little bit older.
It's driving them to the polls.
You know, if they can't get themselves there.
And definitely helping people understand that their vote matters not just in national election cycles, but also a lot of our politics is local.
I mean, look at groups like Moms for Liberty that, you know, for a time flooded school boards before they fell apart with their sort of don't-say-three-way problems.
You know, a lot of the politics happens on the local level.
I mean, if you Seed, you know, the ground to folks like that.
You're not just seeding local politics to them.
Those positions, for instance, become sort of pipelines for far-right activists to train and then run for positions in higher levels in the state and then eventually perhaps nationally.
So it's really important to get involved in politics at the local level as well.
Catherine, you end your wonderful book, and I'll just say to the listeners again that I hope that the documentary, well, first of all, I hope everybody reads it, but I hope that the documentary also sells thousands of copies for you.
You end this book on a hopeful note.
You call yourself an optimist.
But, you know, Power Worshippers came out five years ago.
This is before the fall of Roe, before Project 2025 really took shape, before Mike Johnson became Speaker of the House.
Are you still optimistic?
To tell you the truth, I'm not an optimist or a pessimist.
I follow the facts.
But some of the facts that I lay out can lead to optimistic conclusions.
So, for example, there's the fact, here's a great fact.
This is the fact that it should be the likeliest to lead to optimism, right?
I point out that most Americans are not okay with this far-right agenda, whether it's the economic side of it, promoting economic policies that are concentrating wealth at the very top and disempowering the rest of us, whether it's the culture war stuff, this sort of fake CRT scandal in public schools, which is really a form of race-baiting, whether it's stripping American women of our reproductive rights, Or defunding public education or anything else.
So, the plain fact is that there are more of us that care about one another, that care about the common good, and care about these issues, than folks who are sort of caught up in this movement.
They are a disproportionately mobilized minority.
So, if we can mobilize as well, it's getting out the base, persuading those on the fence, and yes, Even trying to find common ground with and flip some of those who've been caught up in this nonsense, that's when our democracy really stands a chance.
You know, when it comes to what can be done, I think it's important to remember that there are organizational issues to pay attention to.
And there are also communication strategies that we need to consider.
This movement does depend critically on that organizational infrastructure supplied by right-wing and conservative-leading churches and religious groups.
So anything that we can do to reorient those organizations or counter them Counter them with mobilization through more enlightened organizations, civic organizations, or others is really going to be helpful.
But at the same time, we do need messaging and strategies that draw in appeal to all Americans, religious and non-religious alike.
There's so many avenues for engagement, and everyone has a role to play.
Katherine Stewart, thank you so much for taking your time, and we would be thrilled to have you back.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
