199: Inside Anti-Abortion Christian Nationalism (w/Rob Schenck)
Reverend Rob Schenck spent 30 years on the front lines of the Evangelical war against Roe V. Wade. He blockaded abortion clinics, screamed at women in crisis, used fetal remains as political props, and helped wage a covert war of moneyed influence over federal officials to end abortion access.
Now, in a return to his deeper religious commitments, he is repenting his past. In an interview with Matthew, he discusses his blissful conversion experience as a teenager rooted in what he believed was a radical social justice movement. And he describes what he now sees: an anti-abortion movement helping to galvanize the Christian Nationalism poised to wreak havoc on American politics, and what we can do to push back against its aggression.
Show Notes
Fresh Air for July 11, 2018: An Evangelical Minister's Change Of Heart On Abortion
Former Anti-Abortion Leader Alleges Another Supreme Court Breach
Former Anti-Abortion Lobbyist Rev Robert Schenck Statement on "Operation Higher Court"
Robert "Rob" L. Schenck
About - Truth Revealed — Rob Schenck’s blog
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
And that's when the Republican Party co-opted American evangelicalism.
It all worked together towards the end that you are describing now, which is that racist impulse became something of a misogynistic impulse.
And the two together created a highly politicized anti-abortion movement,
which created the entities I eventually became part of.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspiratuality 199 Inside Anti-Abortion Christian Nationalism with Rob Schenk.
Reverend Rob Schenk spent 30 years on the front lines of the evangelical war against Roe v. Wade.
He blockaded abortion clinics, screamed at women in crisis, used fetal remains as political props, and helped wage a covert war of moneyed influence over federal officials to end abortion access.
He describes being party to a conspiracy named Operation Higher Court, in which he says he helped recruit wealthy religious donors to lobby Justice Sam Alito, the Catholic, who wound up writing the majority opinion for the case that ended Roe.
Now, in a return to his deeper religious commitments, he is repenting his past.
And today, we'll roll an interview I recorded with him in which he tells a bit of his story Growing up Jewish in Grand Island, close to Buffalo, New York, how his blissful conversion experience as a teenager was rooted in what he believed was a radical social justice Christian movement.
Back then, when the focus of that movement turned to saving the unborn by any means necessary, It took him far too long to realize that he was being swept up in a wave of reactionary authoritarianism rooted in the racism of the lost cause and soaking in misogyny.
He also describes what he now clearly sees, how the anti-abortion movement helped galvanize the Christian nationalism now poised to wreck havoc on American politics and what we can do to push back against its aggression.
It's a great story, Matthew.
And as you were saying at the end there, it is contextualized within our current situation, you know, with both Trump and Biden now having clinched their party nominations, we're officially into election year rematch territory, which makes this fascinating interview all the more relevant.
Rob Schenk, as you mentioned, is a former insider.
He took part in the Christian nationalist long game that is bearing fruit right now, and the jewel in their crown is the current SCOTUS supermajority, which, after overturning Roe and then ending affirmative action, stands poised to continue down its reactionary path while posturing, when convenient, as constitutional originalists.
At the center of that story is judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and his billionaire donor friends, people like Barry Seide, who gave Leo an unprecedented $1.6 billion in 2020, and Harlan Crowe and Paul Singer, who have lavished extravagant gifts upon judges loyal to the Federalist Society.
Their shared agenda is simultaneously anti-environment, anti-equality, and pro-corporation, pro-theocracy.
As a long-time anti-abortionist, Schenck describes himself and the religious activists and pastors around him becoming immersed in the influx of money, the private jets, the luxury hotels, and getting high on the self-importance of moving in those circles.
And as you'll hear him say, as early as 1988, he watches the unlikely figure of Donald Trump endear himself to evangelical leaders, as those same leaders calculate how to not throw up in their mouths at the recognition of how useful Trump could actually be to their cause.
I think tracking this particular thread is instructive in terms of understanding where we stand right now and how we got here.
I would argue that both QAnon's 2020 apocalyptic fever dreams and the rise of religious, billionaire-funded, cool-kid, reactionary, independent online media like PragerU and The Daily Wire run parallel to Schenck's timeline.
As we stare down this 2024 election, contrarian podcast land is uniformly on board with appeals to traditionalist reforms.
You know, have women really benefited from the liberation movement in the face of Chris Ruffo style Red Scare propaganda, which is braided into climate denial and then anti-vax and COVID grievance mongering as we've become so familiar with.
I'm really glad we're doing this.
We have an inside look from someone who is super activated in this movement.
The interview really answers the question to me, what are they thinking?
And it's kind of easy to assume that we can slide into someone else's self-awareness.
But one time reading a neuroscience book, I read that if Freaky Friday was real, that movie from the 80s where people switched bodies.
And lived inside someone else's body.
It would actually feel like an intense LSD trip because metacognition, the ability to know that we know, comes at a high biological cost.
And thinking we can ever know someone else's consciousness in that level is pretty delusional.
Yeah, it's that famous philosophical paper that speculates about what it might be like to be a bat, right?
And I agree with that up to a point.
Like, obviously, we can't get inside someone's consciousness.
What you're saying underlines the importance, I think, of asking questions and seeking to understand by listening, as Matthew does beautifully in this interview.
But I also think that we're all human beings and the empathic imagination can take us a significant distance toward understanding the strongest beliefs, motivations, and ensuing actions of others.
It's not like they're aliens to us, right?
As long as we're not claiming to be...
I mean, I just really like talking to people I normally wouldn't, and I just don't think that any amount of mind reading could have shed light for me on how a person got into anti-abortion activism through the inspiration of Martin Luther King Jr.
or Dorothy Parker.
So, as we'll hear, that's where Rob started, in a super idealistic vein.
I mean, I have some memory of that civil rights angle when I was growing up Catholic, but I had no idea that it could get twisted into harassing women outside of clinics.
But that's the power of radicalization.
Well, I mean, the thing that I want to add to that is that the...
Anti-abortion activists are very idealistic too, right?
Yeah.
And they see people on the other side who have religious faith as having gotten their faith twisted and lost touch with their true ideals of what Christianity should be about, right?
Right, right.
Yeah, so it's pretty wild.
I mean, for me, that's part of the problem with the idea that any religious metaphysics can be a basis for accurate political or moral views about the world, like it's somehow inevitably trends in the direction of being progressive.
I do agree that we can always speculate.
The hallucinatory aspects was trying to understand all the physiological mechanisms of another body, to be clear.
Yeah, totally.
Yes, obviously we can have these sorts of conversations.
Of course, just this morning, Bob Marley came back from the dead to troll me on my Andrew Huberman video that came out.
So, you know, there's levels of speculation I cannot understand at the moment, but I'm getting there, Julian.
I'm really trying.
On one level, I understand the premise of the anti-abortion argument, and what we hear with Rob's interview is really two levels, and they play out on this level.
First, metaphysics, which you just mentioned.
There's this idea of a divine right or wrong regarding life or ethics, and as an atheist, This argument just will never appeal to me, even when I get where it's coming from.
I don't think life at any stage is a right, just like I don't think things like socialized healthcare is an inherent right.
Because we have to fight for these things in a society that doesn't want the proletariat to have any sense of power.
And when you live in a wealthy society like we do in America, it's easy to take things we once had to fight for for granted, as we're seeing right now.
But then there's the biological level, which is an argument I can understand a little bit better because people will have different perspectives depending on where they believe life begins, and I think good faith arguments about that are fine.
So for me, When I hear these arguments, it comes back to this sort of laissez-faire social attitude that conservatives often champion on an economic level, but they overlook it when it comes to people's personal lives.
And I'm very much in the camp that women's bodies are not my body.
One moment that hit me hard in the interview was when white men were talking about what's best for women, and they felt that they were justified in doing so.
Again, I'm really following this Andrew Huberman story right now, and man, just go to Twitter for a few hours or a few minutes and you're going to see that attitude there.
And I'm sorry, but women should have the final say over what happens to their bodies.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're exactly right, especially about the biological argument, which is never going to be resolved in any legal sense.
It's going to be debated philosophically, morally, down through the ages.
And when it comes down to dust, like the decider just has to be the person impacted most.
Yes, I agree, Matthew.
And as you'll hear, listener, I do believe Rob truly believed in his activism.
We often talk about intentionality on this podcast.
Does this person really believe what they're selling or is it just attention capture?
Are they trying to monetize you?
In this case, I can pretty firmly say it's true belief, even though later on money did play a role as you flagged, Julian.
It's a really complex and fascinating story and I'm glad he's sharing it.
Yeah, I mean given what he's told us, we have no reason to believe he didn't start off incredibly sincere in terms of his beliefs and how he was choosing to act upon them.
Yeah, and he does reflect then about this compromised time in which he's coming to understand that his beliefs are harmful and they're contradictory and that he's not really protecting who he thinks he's protecting and that his big money backers are corrupt and don't actually give a shit about Christianity really, and yet He admits he struggles to leave, and I didn't note this during the interview, but I think it's good to remember that most people who wind up leaving cultic organizations or organizations that have really sort of self-sealed logic or closed-loop logic
They know that they should be leaving long before they actually manage to do so.
That's an excellent point.
It's this cognitive dissonance, right, between how their beliefs and feelings may have changed over time versus their dependence on and enmeshment in a cultish group.
It's similar to toxic relationships and dysfunctional families.
Like, you're often in that.
Kind of heart-wrenching internal struggle.
With Schenck, the sincere beliefs driving his activism seem to get challenged over time, as you point out, and then these inevitable reality tests, I would suggest, are one reason why extremist politics and metaphysics try to self-inoculate by valorizing unwavering faith without any evidence and demonizing the rational points of view that might threaten your loyalty to the group.
Yeah, I think that's all true.
One kind of strange thing about sincerity and belief that he and I chatted about in our pre-interview, it didn't make it into the final cut, is that he and his anti-abortion colleagues, they knew that the satanic panickers were delusional.
That these were people who saw demons behind every couch and they did not believe in that stuff.
But they knew that those beliefs and the passions they stoked were useful to their cause.
Speaking of knowledge, you know, I did flag and have often flagged that I'm an atheist, but I also find value in religion.
And I will say that I believe Rob has come to embody the best form of it, even if he got on this track with what I believe is one of the worst.
When he uses religious terms like redemption and charity, it feels earnest and heartfelt.
And the funny thing is that from my point of view, you can completely remove metaphysics from the picture at this point because it's just about being a good human being.
And it's all based on what I feel is one of the most important aspects of any religious or spiritual practice, which is humility.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I'm with you there that we can root our moral principles and ideas about how to act in the world in You know, basic sort of human values and understanding and inquiry.
I think it gets really tricky when we bring in the supernatural metaphysics because then we can end up saying, well, when the interpretation has progressive political implications, that's good religion.
And when it has conservative political implications, that's bad religion or that's an incorrect interpretation.
And for me, we're on very shaky ground.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, there's over 2,000, 3,000 different forms of Christianity alone that are sanctioned.
Like, that's insane.
How do you have one book and have that many different... I've talked to people who will try to distinguish between their brands of Christianity with another, and sometimes it comes down to like one passage in the Bible.
And at this point, like, what are you really doing?
Just be a good human being.
But this interview made me reflect on my own journey with this podcast.
I've stated these things before, but I was a regular Joe Rogan listener.
I read 12 Rules for Life because I was interested, not because I was doing research for a podcast.
I very much fell for headlines that used thin evidence as scientific justification.
This project has helped me uplevel my skills on that regard quite a bit.
And all of the feedback we've gotten over the years has helped to broaden my understanding of science, health, people in general.
And it doesn't mean I'm going to agree with everyone, but I do hope I have a broader knowledge base to operate from when I'm engaging in dialogues and debates.
So, hearing how Rob landed where he has is really fascinating and I hope everyone listening will use it as an opportunity, as I did, to reflect on their own blind spots and beliefs.
Because while he might be an extreme example of how fervent belief can blind you from understanding other people, we all suffer some level of our own cognitive biases.
So when I was listening to him speak, I was both taken by the narrative itself, but I was also taken by how the narrative fits into this much larger story.
That's a great self-reflection, Derek.
It's funny that you mentioned Jordan Peterson and seeing as I Already seem to be previewing what we're going to talk about next week.
Let's just say that Jordan Peterson's 13th rule for life should have been don't debate destiny on vaccines and climate science.
And for anyone unfamiliar, you can look this up.
Peterson hosted this increasingly prominent millennial YouTube and Twitch political streamer named Destiny, who not only stood his ground in the face of Jordan's irate yelling and bullying, but very competently wiped his floor with him on climate science and vaccines and conspiracy theories.
It's a fantastic debate, because it actually does take place in a place where they respect each other on some level.
And what I think was most powerful was that Destiny, when Jordan starts talking about Vares and unrecorded deaths, Destiny just laughs at him, which I think is very powerful in that circumstance.
You just see Jordan blow up at that point.
It was really good.
Okay, we're getting to Rob's interview, and I want to point out that underlying his story is something that's often missed about the anti-abortion movement.
And we covered in our recent episode on Christian nationalism with Catherine Stewart that abortion was not a conservative issue until the likes of Billy Graham and Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell, who Rob spends time with, uses it to consolidate the Republican base and align it with Christian nationalism.
I mean, when Roe v. Wade passed in 73, more Republican voters were pro-choice than Democrats.
And there have always been anti-abortion sentiments.
Planned Parenthood, like the devil to the right right now.
They were a regular target of activists, but the founder, Margaret Sanger,
was actually anti-abortion.
She was pro-contraception, which was a big culture war issue a century ago,
and which has somehow made a comeback in recent years.
You know, you said affirmative action and abortion are gone.
They are targeting contraception now.
It's insane.
This week.
Well, today, today in the Supreme Court.
We're recording on Tuesday, March 26th.
Planned Parenthood didn't start offering abortions until three years after Sanger's death.
And even today, abortion is a tiny part of what the organization offers in terms of women's health care, but it's a symbol that the right uses to bludgeon the opposition with.
And I don't think most people today realize that, given how important Sanger is for women's healthcare, rightfully so.
So when Rob mentions that he didn't realize being anti-abortion was not part of Christian religious belief when he began his activism, I take him at his word.
The movement was actually started to boot Jimmy Carter out of office because you can't have a liberal peanut farmer occupying that seat and making legislation.
So when the real push began in 79, Jerry Falwell was setting up the moral majority Which would be where the modern relationship between right-wing politics and the Christian religion was solidified.
In fact, Falwell traveled over 300,000 miles across America that year and by 1980, his
organization was active in 47 states.
Now we've done a lot of work discussing Project 2025 on this podcast and Julie and I actually
have two more bonus episodes on the topic coming out in the next few weeks.
But the notion of a linked network of churches aligned with right-wing politics and which uses cultural war issues to obscure the real intention, which is the acquisition and implementation of power, that all began with Falwell and friends, and they used abortion to do it.
I don't know how someone gets radicalized into a movement that harasses women outside of clinics and threatens on occasion to murder doctors and actually does murder doctors sometimes, but I do know that we need to understand how it happens.
So listening to Rob gave me some of those essential insights and I'm really glad you found him and talked to him, Matthew.
I have one final thing to address.
When Rob emails us after the interview to answer another question that, Matthew, you posed, I do, again, take him at his word that the people in his former movement are good people.
That's what he said and I believe that.
But that does not mean good people can't accomplish terrible things.
The very notion of some sort of ultimate good and eternal evil, this metaphysics idea, is a very Christian Western concept.
There's an entire range of philosophies from Asian countries with Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Shintoism, and they understand that actions are expressed and lived out on a spectrum and that no one is inherently one thing or the other because it's always relative and contextual.
So that's how you get Shiva, the meditation guru who abstains from sex in one story, and in the next story he's out having an orgy with the forest nymphs while he's high on bong.
And I don't think good and evil are good indicators of anyone, but I do think our actions can be labeled as such.
And I'm really glad Rob has found a path where he can do good deeds.
Even if his former friends now think he's doing evil.
That spectrum is not only contextual, but it is relative to where you stand on the spectrum.
And from where I am, championing the rights for women to control their bodies is a good thing.
So we've got this interview to roll, but here's a short bio to begin.
For over 30 years, Rob was a Washington, D.C.-based religious rights activist.
Meeting with U.S.
presidents, congressional leaders, and behind-the-scenes with Supreme Court justices, seeking to persuade them to take extreme positions on social issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and church and state.
Moving away from this work involved pursuing doctoral studies of the WWII-era German Evangelical Church's support of the Nazi Party, leading him to eventually break with the Evangelical movement over its similar support for an increasingly extremist Republican Party What is the main thing that opponents to Christian nationalism get wrong about the movement?
And what is the main thing we can do to stop it?
that I dropped the ball on this key question that I had to email him about, as you said, Derek.
So here's the question that I asked by email.
What is the main thing that opponents to Christian nationalism get wrong
about the movement?
And what is the main thing we can do to stop it?
Quote, not all adherents of Christian nationalism are inherently bad actors.
There are as many victims among them as there are victimizers.
For a half century now, evangelicals especially have been awash in propaganda, frightening them into thinking they will be responsible for the collapse of America and even Western civilization if they don't give themselves entirely to this project.
They are in bondage to an utterly controlling fear.
The blame lies at the top with the purveyors, some of whom cynically do not believe their own propaganda but keep it going because it benefits them in many obvious as well as subtle ways.
There's a lot of exploitation going on.
Stopping it requires constant, relentless exposure of the exploitation, manipulation, and abuse, as well as the movement's contradiction to the core Christian mandate to love God and love our fellow human beings.
However, this must be done with respect and by giving adherence the benefit of the doubt.
Otherwise, an equal and operate Otherwise, an equal and opposite reaction will ensue, and
followers will only become more entrenched and even dangerously defensive, defeating any effort to diminish its deleterious
influence."
Unquote.
♪ Rob Schenck, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
I'm so glad that you've been able to take the time.
Thank you for having me.
I'm honored by thee.
Well, you're very welcome.
And I think we can start with the hardest question first, because I think that many of our listeners will need to hear your response to this.
Because we're talking about some deep cultural wounds today, and a lot of us are in the process of figuring out who we can trust as colleagues or as allies.
So, for about 40 years, you were a leading figure in the pro-life, or in the terms that our side might use, the anti-choice movement.
Campaigning vigorously and emotionally against abortion.
You helped to organize clinic blockades.
You conspired to undermine clinics by organizing young Christian women to sign up for bogus appointments.
You smuggled fetal remains on airplanes to use as political props.
And you were arrested many times for various protest actions.
And your rhetoric arguably contributed to violence against abortion providers, some of whom were murdered.
And so you were highly visible, well-networked, well-compensated.
And because abortion was a galvanizing issue for conservative politics, your movement helped embolden and cohere what many are now recognizing as a Virulent form of Christian nationalism, which is now poised to wreck havoc on the U.S.
Now, you're on record in many places in interviews and in your memoir expressing deep regret for these actions and their political consequences.
But just to start, given this background, why should women, feminists, agnostics, atheists, or even centrist Democrats listen to you and trust what you say now?
Well, thank you for the question.
And it's one I either face literally or at least in some emotional form.
With virtually every sitting I do now with a new universe of people.
And my immediate response to that is that no one should automatically trust me for anything.
First of all, I haven't earned that trust.
No one is obligated to offer it before, during, and after that regrettable season of my life.
I was always taken with the words of Jesus, and I'm still going to sound like the preacher I am, I'm afraid.
I will beg everyone's indulgence for that, even though they don't owe me that either.
But Jesus said, you will know a person by his fruits.
In other words, look for what is the product of that person's life.
And that's kind of the proof of who they really are.
So in this season of my life, which I describe as a season of penitence for me, I have to do a lot of repair work, you know, a lot of correction, as much healing as I can offer to the people I injured.
And that will take a very long time.
And so frankly, I don't expect a lot of people to trust me.
I will probably die untrusted by a majority of people on both sides.
The old crowd who now see me as a traitor and the new crowd who says a bit of a harmful Johnny come lately.
So I live with that reality.
I sit with it.
I don't always have peace with it.
It's troubling.
But it's reality, so I guess I go about my work.
I always feel that people who give me some measure of trust at this stage do not owe it to me, so I see it as an act of grace to employ the terms I've used most of my adult life now.
It's a form of mercy.
It's a very long way of saying no one owes me any trust at this point, but I am trying to earn it by the work that I'm doing.
Let's just assume that we've cleared a hurdle with that and that listeners will be able to take in your story and advice.
I'd like to begin with the kind of Christianity you were first attracted to so that we can
get a sense of how you came to this and how you've pulled yourself out of it.
You described several conversion experiences after falling off the track towards your bar
mitzvah.
One was sitting in a Buffalo music theater watching Jesus Christ Superstar.
The other was a transformative moment that we're very interested in on our show which
is a transcendent experience.
You had in a kind of a post-Jesus people but still folksy and bohemian evangelical youth
gathering.
And then a third took place during, you know, an old-fashioned altar call where you felt mystically and I would say permanently saved.
Looking back on those seemingly benign experiences now, is it strange to think that they led to a militant prosecution of Christianity?
Well, I'm still exploring.
How that led to what I spent, you know, almost 30, actually over 30 years inside of, which was so alien to that first iteration of Christianity as I encountered it, you know.
My parents were expansive people.
They were intellectually curious people.
They were even adventuresome.
And they gave permission to their four children, my identical twin brother, my two older sisters, to go out and explore the world and shop.
For a religion that might, you know, be attractive to us, my brother and I found evangelical Christian faith.
And what I saw in the person of Jesus, for example, and hearing for The first time the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus blesses the poor, the suffering, the lonely, the marginalized, the isolated, those in various forms of physical and emotional pain.
That was so revolutionary to me.
I saw it as a radical anti-establishment movement.
And I joined up with him, and very enthusiastically, and afterwards discovered people like the Catholic worker, Dorothy Day, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his very Christian message.
And all of that was the Christianity I embraced.
And it was radically anti-establishment.
And I enjoyed it.
It was a wonderful community of people who cared for each other.
And then I would be introduced along the way to a more and more rigid, conventional American religion that was quite different from that earlier iteration.
But that was the Christianity I was first introduced to, and that I've in some way returned to now.
But after too long, Of a politicized hiatus.
It was where you started, and it also was a doorway into the beginnings of your pro-life activism, if I'm reading your memoir correctly.
Because you started with what you believed was a strong civil rights orientation.
You were an earnest believer in the cause from what you described as a social justice perspective.
You mentioned your Jewish Christian parents venerating Martin Luther King Jr., and he figures into your early formation as well.
So, I think this approach that takes reproductive rights or access to abortion as a social justice issue, but going in the other way, will be unfamiliar to our listeners.
So, how did you reason that out at the time?
The culture group I was with saw the nascent human being, the child, the developing fetal human in the womb as the weakest of human beings.
Not only did that, you know, developing human being not have a voice, But couldn't even be literally seen, was invisible to the human eye.
So when we say, you know, people are invisible or restricted to the shadows or whatever, we mostly mean that in a figurative sense.
We can see them, but we choose not to see them.
With the unborn child, which was the operative term we used in those days, we saw that human being as literally unable to be seen or heard.
So they needed an advocate.
We saw, and I think erroneously so now, I've reflected on these things very deeply since then, but we saw the woman And always reminded people that there was a father involved somewhere as the power players and the abortion provider as a power player.
So these people were in positions of power over this utterly impotent human who was entirely at their disposal.
So that's how we saw it.
And I was a deep believer in that.
I didn't approach it cynically.
I was a passionate believer in that.
What I missed was the vulnerability of the woman in crisis, the people around her.
There was an equal vulnerability or suffering there that was given very little to no examination.
And that set us up On a very bad trajectory, which ended in some of what you described, the horrors of not just the verbal abuse, which was bad enough of women in front of the clinics, but eventually the murder of physicians and their staff members.
I want to focus in on the acts of protest that we've touched on.
Now, back in 2018, you told Terry Gross on Fresh Air about your clinic blockade days.
You said, I remember women, some of them quite young, being very distraught, very frightened, some very angry.
Over time, I became very callous to that.
Now, you said that the women became objects to you, and I suppose that when we are ideologically driven, we can disconnect from all kinds of emotional realities.
But I want to ask, did you feel that hardening of your heart to be a slow process?
Did you know it was happening?
Was it something that you sought counsel over?
It was slow, relatively slow.
I mean, it depends on how you calculate that.
But for me, it was probably a 10-year process.
And it went something like this.
At first, we were kind of, we were a bit suspicious to the, you know, the elite within the anti-abortion movement, the right-to-life people, the political groups that were working for everything from a constitutional amendment in the United States to ban abortion, to legislation, to overturning Roe v. Wade.
Those groups at first saw us as kind of radicals.
We were advocating for more involvement of initially black church leadership in our movement, but beyond that, we were putting a lot of women forward.
They would eventually be crowded out.
And silenced.
But at first, we were putting many women, even women clergy forward, which again, for the fundamentalist world, was beyond the pale.
It was inappropriate.
And so, you know, I was learning where the boundary lines were for all of this.
And we would push at them and try to advocate from the inside.
I remember, for example, once I got to Washington, In the late 1990s, I sat with a Southern member of Congress who was a rising star in the Republican Party and the very conservative right wing of it.
And I said to him, you know, every time we have one of our pro-life news conferences, we always have a phalanx of Middle-aged white men with paunchy bellies.
Why do we do that?
Let's put our women, let's put our people of color forward.
Let's put our young people.
And he snapped back at me and said, what would that gain us?
We're only going to lose votes with that.
Ain't going to gain votes.
Let's move on.
Let's move on.
Wow.
At that moment, I wish I would have been the courageous, moral voice in the room.
What I realized was, we're fighting a lost cause here.
This is not where this movement is going.
And eventually, I'd be told, you keep saying that kind of stuff, you're not only going to lose constituents, man, you're going to lose a lot of money.
And that's when I made my great moral compromise.
Now, in addition to the women who are obviously suffering the most immediate impacts of this conflict becoming abstract in a way, or political pawns, it also seems that the fetuses themselves became symbolic.
And objectified, so it was common for your movement to procure fetal remains from pathologists and then transport them to protests for displays.
But it seems like there's a real cognitive dissonance in that action, because if what you're saying is that the unborn child has a kind of sacred personhood, I mean, this would not be the way to treat them, right?
Exactly right.
Matthew, thank you for your observations.
I only wish I would have met you a lot earlier than I have.
Well, let's be honest, though.
What would you have said 20 years ago?
Yeah, well, that's true.
You would have had an answer.
Yes, you're right.
I would have.
But you would have haunted me on my pillow at night, which is which is true of some of the voices.
Some of the people I encountered, even in the most ferocious of exchanges, Their words would haunt my conscience, but I was very good at compartmentalizing.
It is cognitive dissonance.
It is conflicted.
It's hypocritical, and this is where I find the greatest fault in our movement was our hypocrisy.
Because as you say, while we called ourselves pro-life, we were not.
In the sense that we never thought really beyond the first few weeks to months of life.
And even then, we were operating by a fantasy, a fiction.
Because in my mind, any woman who was in a crisis pregnancy, an unwelcome pregnancy, could simply cry out and say, help, and an army of earnest Born-again, Bible-believing, mostly young women would come to their aid with all sorts of things.
Free childcare, free diapers and bottles and formula, vouchers for medical care, and so on and so forth.
Maybe even adoptive parents for their child.
And that did happen.
And I'm in contact with some of the Babies who were ultimately born and were adopted.
There are those stories, and some of them are quite wonderful stories.
But that does not justify or excuse the fact that we saw the woman as kind of a tertiary actor in all of this.
The central person to be concerned with was that unborn infant to the point of birth and just beyond, just a little beyond.
We never thought of that child at age six and needing all kinds of support services and educational opportunities and child care for a mother who would likely need Some kind of job training, income assistance, all of that.
And of course, now by the mid 2000s, we are wed inseparably to the Republican Party, which is all the while acting to shut down social service programs, supportive programs in the United States to cut back budgets, to shut down everything from departments to facilities.
I'm just having kind of an extraordinary moment of recognizing the moral injury that you must bear from that particular irony, that if you come from a social justice perspective where you are imagining somehow, and you've criticized this, you refute this now, that the unborn child is the least among us and must be saved and served, you wind up serving a party of austerity.
You wind up serving a politics of cruelty.
That must be excruciating to think on.
Yes, in fact it is.
And it opens up a whole vista of reparative work that I need to do and try to do now.
One is, of course, denying the Republican Party I once advantaged by facilitating the cooperation of American evangelicals.
I now work to decouple and deprive the Republican Party of those votes.
And there's a lot of good streams of a kind of, I'd like to say, renewed, socially conscious evangelicalism in the United States that I think portends good things for the future.
Unfortunately, it takes 10 to 20 years.
There's a lag time there.
So this is not going to be immediate, although we may be able to shave off just enough To deny Republicans a majority in the federal legislatures and the presidency, I hope.
The states are a whole other story, and now the worst of it is located in the states after the dismantling of our Roe v. Wade provision on the constitutional level.
And that was the whole point.
The whole point was to get it back to the states.
Because it's easier to work on the state level to overtake state legislatures than a national legislature.
And that was part of that lost cause Southern tradition.
They wanted to maintain state sovereignty for the same reason.
So this is making a hideous comeback.
And it's 175 years in the making, 150 years in the making.
And this is what we're struggling with.
But yes, it's agonizing for me.
It's sometimes Keeps me frozen, staring at the ceiling, but I'm not going to allow myself that luxury.
I have to get about my work and I'm trying to do that repair in a small way.
Now, you've detailed a little bit of how your movement involvement changed in around 1995 as you moved to Alexandria, right outside of Washington.
And in our prior conversation, you told me about this very specific realization you had about But it was a slow-growing realization that you had about the role that you were playing as a preacher alongside other preachers in relation to wealthy GOP donors.
What was that role?
Well, there came a time, I'm going now to early 2000s, our movement was gaining Political currency.
We had arguably helped to elect a president, George W. Bush.
We had more of our own constituents in national legislative seats than at any time in American history.
We were flexing our muscles.
The one branch of our federal government And, you know, we talk about the three, which are separate but equal and keep each other in check, the executive being the president and all the agencies under the presidency, the legislative branch being the Congress, the two houses, House and Senate, and then the courts, the federal courts, the Supreme Court at the top, all the other federal courts down below them.
And it was the judiciary that was seen to be the impenetrable wall.
Everything we attempted to do in the legislative branch and in the executive branch would ultimately meet this brick wall at the Supreme Court.
As it defended the 1973 Roe versus Wade decision that more or less guaranteed the right to abortion, legal and safe abortion.
I looked at that and said, it's time we take on the judiciary.
How do we do that?
And as I got inside into the back rooms and I saw the response of certain Conservative members of the court, justices, who seem to sally up alongside of and enjoy the company of decamillionaires and billionaires.
And I said, hmm, perhaps that's a way to get to them.
And so I went out and I recruited my own high-end evangelical and in some cases arch-conservative Catholic donors and deployed them inside the court to develop, I don't know that you can really define them as friendships, but acquaintances of a sort.
with certain justices to bolster their conservative sensibilities and their courage to render the strongest possible decisions.
One of them was Samuel Alito.
He was one of our targets.
He and his wife, Martha Ann, who would very much cooperate with this operation that we had going that we called Operation Higher Court.
It was top secret.
It was a clandestine operation.
We did no public exposure of it at all.
But these wealthy contributors to both the Republican Party and our causes would come in, entertain these justices, take them on international trips, have them at their lavish vacation homes.
In one case, one couple rented the entire Snake River From Wyoming up into Idaho, every fishing hole along the river so that one of the justices could throw his rod in and get a big fish every single time, and that guaranteed he was coming back and spending a lot more time.
This was corruption on the worst level.
And it would be one of our premier targets, Justice Samuel Alito, who would write the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, which was the epic objective of the whole operation.
It took years to accomplish, but it happened.
I did that for 20 years.
I think there are key elements of this story for which you're the only source at this point.
As I understand, like, this hasn't been fully reported in major media.
I know that you testified before Congress.
Is this aspect of your story something that you're seeking to have corroborated so that it can be fully known?
Yes.
In fact, for the longest time, I resisted urgings to chronicle all of this in a book, detail it.
By the way, I cooperated with the New York Times, which did a front page expose.
Not everything, but a good part of it.
And more has even surfaced since.
You know, it's an untold story that needs to be exposed.
It can happen anywhere because people in power Attract people with money, because people with money enjoy exercising power, so the two meet each other.
And I remember speaking with one billionaire, Foster Fries, who would become a major political player in the United States, and in fact ran for governor of Wyoming, one of the most conservative states in America.
And Foster Fries had made his billions in stock trading and so on.
And he sat with a small group of our movement leaders and me and said, look, we need each other here.
You need my money to do what you need to do.
And I need your help on the legislative level so that I can make more money so I can give more of it to you.
So you see how it works together?
So you help me, I help you.
And that was an irresistible seduction for those movement leaders.
It's shameful to say these things, but they have to be said.
There came a time when those early movement leaders I knew who were social revolutionaries, be it in error or not, they were sincere and were doing good work in many other spheres.
But there came a point where everybody was flashing an American Express Cobalt card their NetJets membership so they could fly anywhere on private jets.
We were being met by fundraisers with big Cadillac SUVs who would take us to the most expensive restaurants and lavish us with entertainment, checking into Five and seven star resort hotels, and on and on it goes.
It was complete corruption.
And in this season of my life, when thank God I'm a lot poorer, it's really helpful.
You know, with this season of my life, I think a lot about what I used to read in the New Testament and even preach from church pulpits about the love of money being the root of all evil.
So those women, even those unborn children we used to champion, simply became methods for gaining more notoriety, More money, more political power.
And that was the ultimate corruption.
And that's the work of repentance as much as repair that I have to do and that I hope more and more movement leaders, and I've talked with many who have left the movement, saw some of the same in their own lives and in others.
Some acted sooner than I did.
But they are leaving, and they're trying to find this path of spiritual and moral and social repair.
When I think about what Foster Freeze is paying for, it would seem that a core product that you're offering to this conservative austerity agenda is your ability to excite people over moral issues, a kind of charismatic juice.
That ends up justifying whatever the leadership wants to do.
Now, I think this ties into our present era when you get around to talking about how you first met Donald Trump at Pat Robertson's 80th birthday.
And what I wanted to ask you was whether or not Trump, even back then, was figuring out how to capture that evangelical fire for his own purposes.
When that happened, when I first encountered Donald Trump, I had taken more or less leave of absence from all this work I had been doing, and I was out West.
My wife and I were both pursuing late in life advanced degrees, she in psychotherapy, mine in theology.
I was in a doctoral program, and I was actually looking at the history of the Evangelical Church in Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
And it's collaboration with those racist and genocidal movements.
So I was already dismantling some of myself in all of this.
And so I kind of saw this with a new lens when I flew back east.
For this event, and if anybody's not familiar with Pat Robertson, at the time he was probably the most, maybe not the most popular, but certainly the most influential religio-political figure in all of us.
Had founded the Christian Broadcasting Network in the United States, a massive operation.
He had run for president back in the 80s, and I had campaigned for him.
He had birthed the Christian Coalition, which was a massive, mostly evangelical, political movement.
Huge university, Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
All that to simply say, you know, I walked into the room and it was full of virtually every evangelical luminary in the United States was in that ballroom.
And I sat with a group of ten, and Pat introduced his guest of honor, who was none other than Donald Trump.
And this is 2011.
Amazing.
So this is five years before he runs for president.
And he's working the room, and he's learning the ropes, and he's testing for response, and he holds up his mother's Bible.
which was clumsy and ham-handed.
Obviously he was not familiar with it, but he was holding it up as a prop.
And he was, I could see it.
Anybody who has spent their life on a stage knows how to measure an audience,
to size them up, to feel the vibe in the room, to test what works and what doesn't work.
And there was enthusiastic responses to certain phrases and such.
And so I could see he's learning here.
This is a rehearsal.
This is an audition.
And we're going to either give him our approval.
And I was stunned because as far as I had traveled, Donald Trump was to me always somebody who represented the antithesis of Jesus Christ or Christian values in every possible way.
And so I said to my colleagues around the table, What is this guy doing here?
What is this?
What's going on here?
And one of them said, look, Rob, he wants to make all of us vomit, you know, but he's also got the cojones to get it done.
You know, we need people who can make it happen, man.
And this guy can make it happen.
So the demoralization of our movement was vivid in that room.
And then to watch his trajectory, I made the break after attending the Republican National Convention, the big political event at which the party chooses its nominee for president in 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio.
And I finally said, I can't travel with this tribe any longer.
And I made my permanent break.
It would cost me everything, literally everything.
And I would have to start anew.
But that moment in time, that first encounter in 11 and five years later with all of my old gang signing on to his roadshow so sickened me that by that time I could not abide it anymore and I made my break.
That moment where your friend turns to you and says, well, he makes us vomit but he can get things done sounds like the christening prayer over the Christian nationalist movement under Trump because It's literally saying our object here is worldly power.
I'm afraid you're right on that.
At that point, the movement loses its soul.
For me, we call it Christian.
It has nothing to do with Christianity.
It is absolutely the opposite of the Christian message.
Christians have certainly given themselves to it throughout history, and we're facing it again, and I believe it's perhaps the greatest danger in our time because religion allows permission to go about its atrocities without question.
In my ethos, in the evangelical Culture.
You don't question authority because the authority is ordained of God.
We use those terms.
Ordained of God.
And you touch not the anointed.
We've heard Donald Trump referred to as God's anointed.
Well, there are operative verses in the Bible that say you touch not God's anointed.
And to question authority is a form of rebellion against spiritual authority.
And the Bible also has an operative phrase, rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.
Well, witchcraft is animated by Satan or the devil.
I'm just going through a lot of theology here, gobbledygook here, but this is the way it works.
Right.
Well, who wants to be an instrument of Satan or the devil?
So I'll keep my mouth shut.
I won't question Donald Trump.
He's God's anointed leader for our time.
And if I question him, I'm cooperating with Satan, with the devil, so I better keep my mouth shut and go with the program.
That's how it works.
And that's what makes it so dangerous.
And it is a grave danger to human flourishing.
Again, part of my work is to warn the faithful of that.
And remind them that it has happened before.
It happened in the Evangelische Kirche, the Evangelical Church of Germany, which declared Adolf Hitler a gift, quote, a gift and miracle from God.
We're committing the same error now.
Well, it seems that you're also giving those Christians who will listen to you a sense of what actual rebellion means because, you know, you're clearly presenting this 180 degree turn, you're vocal about it.
I've sat with your story for a number of weeks now and I wanted to just speculate on some factors that may have helped with that because I think they might be Informative.
It seems that you converted through mystical and loving and benign experiences as a teenager, and I imagine the callous world you wound up in felt just very disconnected from that over time.
And, you know, you still identify as evangelical, but it seems to me that there's something very Jewish about backing away from The piety and the certainty.
Does that track?
Very much so, and I'm so glad you asked that because I find myself reflecting on my Jewish formation more and more the older I get.
I'm now 65.
It's taken an awfully long time for me to go back and appreciate how much, for example, my paternal grandparents Mac and Helen Shank helped establish a reformed synagogue outside of New York City in 1926, I believe it was.
Wow.
And for that period, that was one of the most progressive forms of religion in the United States at the time.
They were the vanguard.
Indeed.
Right.
And I failed to appreciate that about them, or I failed most of my life.
Now, I appreciate it enormously.
I've just taken a faculty position with a very progressive Jewish institution, Hebrew College, outside Boston.
I do my work in the Washington, D.C.
area, but I'm on faculty with their Miller Center for Interreligious Learning and Leadership.
And I see this.
I see the tenets, the principles, you know, the deep philosophy and conviction that was present in my own family line and was very helpful to me.
I like to say that maybe one of the things that truly saved me from going to the grave in this Terrible state being a part of this injurious, you know, subculture movement was my Ashkenazi genes.
I think they awakened something.
They preserved me somehow.
And then I guess I had a secret, you know, life of the mind.
Where I held a lot of things in suspicion and doubt, even though I didn't voice them.
Again, I went along to get along, but there were times my brother and I would whisper to each other.
I would say things to my wife, Cheryl, who in many ways traveled this new journey ahead of me, and I followed her.
But other people, other interlocutors in my life who were safe that I would Sometimes very cautiously and guardedly voice these doubts to them, and they would come back reinforcing them.
I see the same things.
I know it shouldn't be this way.
We need to look anew.
And that helped me.
But ultimately, I'd like to say, because my faith remains intact, I was the one in error here, not the divine that I know.
Or have felt present in my life all these years.
I'd like to think, finally, the voice of God got my attention, and I returned in repentance.
Rob, you've mentioned your age, and so my last question is the following.
I think there's going to be a lot of millennial sons and daughters out there who come from rigid Catholic or evangelical families, and they're going to be listening to you speak as an older person.
And I think they might wonder if their own fathers, who might be still caught up in the militancy that you left behind, whether they'll ever come around, whether they will turn off Fox News, whether they will let go of their anger and righteousness.
What would you say to them?
You know, of course, their pain and alienation and frustration, whatever it may be.
is very real, and, you know, I have to honor that and not give out glib consolation here, but people do change late in life, sometimes very late.
For me, too late, but not entirely.
I still have some time and energy, and I want to put it to good work.
I will say my own kids, Had a lot to do with my change, and I should have named them in that recitation of who played a role, because ultimately, their appeal to me and my conscience carried an enormous amount of weight.
And I have seen people, even during the worst of my days, affected by their own children in ways nothing else Would do, would have that impact.
So I think the power of a relationship, the power of appeal to a parent, to a grandparent for that matter, don't underestimate that.
And holding your ground and speaking your conscience and mind and challenging them, even if their response at first is highly defensive and combative and even maybe Man, this thing.
Older folks take those things to their beds at night, and it haunts us and plays and does its work, sometimes over long periods of time.
We all want instant conversions.
I preached and tried to model that for decades.
It was false.
People change over time, and maybe it'll take five months, five years, or for some people, 50 years.
But they can change, and they do change.
And I know them.
I keep company with them now.
So... it sounds so glib.
Don't give up hope.
And don't undervalue your own voice and place in the family.
It's more powerful than you might imagine it to be.
Rob Shank, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for taking the time with me.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
