Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Dec. 14, 2024 - Conspirituality

28:03

Brief: The Unfreedom of Others (w/Talia Lavin)

Journalist Talia Lavin joins Derek to discuss her recent book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America. Show Notes Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
	If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast.
	I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
	Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention and then your mind lets you drift off.
	Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
	That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster Thank
	you.
	I'd recommend our listeners check out his Skeptical Sunday episode on hydrotherapy, as well as Jordan's episode about Tarina Shaquille, where he interviews an ISIS recruit's journey and escape.
	There's an episode for everyone, though, no matter what you're into.
	The show covers stories like how a professional art forger somehow made millions of dollars while being chased by the feds and the mafia.
	Jordan's also done an episode all about birth control and how it can alter the partners we pick and how going on or off of the pill can change elements in our personalities.
	The podcast covers a lot but one constant is his ability to pull useful pieces of advice from his guests.
	I promise you, you'll find something useful that you can apply to your own life, whether that's an actionable routine change that boosts your productivity or just a slight mindset tweak that changes how you see the world.
	We really enjoy this show.
	We think you will as well.
	There's just so much there.
	Check out jordanharbinger.com slash start for some episode recommendations or search for The Jordan Harbinger Show.
	That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
	Their freedom is the unfreedom of others, and they know it.
	They revel in it.
	There is no such thing as hypocrisy in a holy war.
	That's Talia Levin writing in her recent book, Wild Faith, How the Christian Right is Taking Over America.
	And that's the they in discussion.
	Christian nationalists and MAGA faithful who believe the dictates of the God that they invented are the only way to reach salvation and who are not at all concerned with actual freedom and sovereignty in a pluralistic society.
	They only want what they want and have spent decades intentionally chipping away at the laws and legislation to accomplish it, as Talia details so well in her excellent book.
	I'm Derek Barris, and this is a Conspirituality Brief, the unfreedom of others.
	You can find us collectively on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and we are also on Blue Sky individually, where we've spent a lot more time in terms of social media.
	And if you appreciate the work that we do, you can support us at patreon.com slash conspirituality, as well as via Apple bonus podcasts.
	Your support is how we're able to do this work, and we really appreciate it.
	Now there are so many quotable lines in Talia's book, which is why I wanted to talk with her.
	The first half of the book is a broad survey of the Christian right.
	There's even some conspiracy crossover in there.
	But she spends the second half honing in on two interrelated agendas.
	We spend a fair amount of time discussing her reporting on those two agendas, and we try to end with a note of hope, but as you can imagine, it's difficult considering we're careening toward a second Trump administration that was installed in part by the very Christian right that wants to dismantle the freedoms that we have left.
	I highly recommend reading Tali's book.
	I hope you enjoy our conversation here.
	And she also recorded the audio version of it herself.
	So if that's your preferred method of book consumption, look for it via your favorite audio book platform.
	All right, let's get into it.
	Talia, your last book was on white supremacists, and then you published recently, Wild Faith, How the Christian Right is Taking Over America.
	Do you see any continuity between these two books?
	I mean, totally.
	Besides just like my predilection for gazing into the abyss and various types of abysses and the journey from one to the other, I, as someone who'd been observing sort of self-described extremist fringe, watched so much of the stuff that I had initially only ever seen in like neo-Nazi telegram chats.
	Suddenly being on the lips of congressmen, these prominent Republican figures.
	And the question became for me, does it make sense as I'm approaching like a second book to write another book about people who are on the self-proclaimed fringe?
	Or rather, explore the ways that things have gotten more and more extreme in the quote-unquote mainstream.
	How did the mainstream get so polluted, as it were?
	with some of this extreme and violent rhetoric, looking for the answers and looking for the origins of intense radicalization of the modern right in America.
	You know, I find, I found myself delving in over and like encountering over and over again, these religious figures and sort of unique radicalization and black and white thinking that can only come from a sort of theocratic approach to thinking these religious figures and sort of unique radicalization and black and white thinking I think Frances Fitzgerald did a wonderful job of encapsulating how evangelicals have come to dominate American life.
	She wrote a 700 page book on the history of that particular sect and how it sort of dovetails at times with Christian nationalism.
	Where do you see, you said you were looking for the origins, but more toward the modern era, how do you How do you see it coming from those fringe groups into the mainstream in such a way that it's palatable to such a large percentage of the population, at least enough for people who have voted it into office basically?
	White evangelical Protestants are a minority of the U.S. population.
	They are a large minority.
	You know, there's about 14 million people that identify themselves as white evangelical Protestants.
	And then if you're looking at the Christian right more broadly, that's a, you know, coalition that includes some further tens of millions of reactionary Catholics.
	It's a large group of people.
	It is not the majority or plurality of the American population, but they are and have been really over the past 50 years that this movement has been gaining in political power.
	They are extremely politically engaged and really view politics since the 70s as sort of the site of kind of a holy war, a spiritual battle and acquiring temporal power is also a way of sort of making progress in the celestial sphere.
	And this is, you know, rather unique in terms of motivations for political actors in the American public sphere.
	It also generates a tremendous amount of, you know, enthusiasm.
	That's sort of very united, very enthusiastic.
	The biggest winner in the 2024 election was not Trump or Harris, but rather staying home.
	Apathy and American politics really go hand in hand.
	And there's so much distrust in institutions and often for very good reason.
	When you have a group of people, even if they are not...
	Sort of numerically supreme, but they turn out.
	That's a very, very powerful thing in American politics.
	Coming out of the last election, we're really seeing the power of that united, lockstep coalition that really feels the consequences of a loss is like Lucifer's victory, you know what I mean?
	Yes.
	And you identify something that's troubled me in terms of myself being someone who's left of center.
	Anywhere from center to left, you have a much more diverse coalition of people, which makes it hard to organize in some ways, especially when the sort of topics that people I find on the left generally care about.
	Overall, people generally care about the same things, but then we get into these niches where my personal focus is things like universal health care, and I spend a lot of my time focusing on that.
	But on the right, it seems like there is just a very few topics that unite them overall, and that makes it more dangerous because they are a less diverse coalition in that sense.
	Did you find anything similar in your reporting?
	I'm sure, yeah.
	And in both sets of sort of groups that I was looking at, the extreme fringe and the Christian right, Protestants and Catholics working together to achieve political goals in like lockstep churches that would have like been the subject of reformation wars just like a couple centuries ago, Protestants and Catholics working together to achieve political goals in like lockstep churches that would have like been the Centuries ago, really working confidently to pursue the same political goals.
	That's a remarkable thing.
	Not to mention Mormons, you know, who certainly receive a lot of disdain from mainline Protestants and from Catholics alike.
	It's like, oh, you've got your weird space religion over there.
	These are profound differences.
	Whereas on the left, it's like this extraordinary vitriol over relatively small differences or even over Aesthetics and just finding other people annoying, which is, everyone has the right to do that.
	But if you want to create a broad, large mass movement, you're going to need to deal with people you find personally irritating.
	That's just the nature of the game.
	I've been thinking about, why is this the case?
	And how does this work out?
	Is it just that the right has much more of an understanding of realpolitik?
	You know, I think there has been much more of an embrace of sort of a very brutal form of that kind of realpolitik of like, well, we're going to get it done.
	And if we have to team up with people that, you know, we think are papists and sinners and followers of that cad Luther, like fine.
	The other piece of it is that, and this is something just from my own observations and thoughts, is that if you believe that the people who you disagree with on these fundamental points are going to get their comeuppance in the world to come...
	You have that in your back pocket.
	The left being more material and focused on bodies, not souls, right?
	The here and now and not the world to come.
	We don't have that kind of, well, you're going to get your ultimate justice and I'll work with you in the interim kind of feeling, right?
	Beyond a kind of vague like, oh, the arc of history will show that these were the evil guys, which is like not, you know, at all certain or and certainly puts a lot of onus on like future historians to think like you do.
	Sort of feels more like wish casting than like, well, I know God is going to punish you for your, you know, filthy beliefs and transubstantiation or whatnot.
	And of course, there's tons of interpersonal conflict and it's super petty.
	It sucks having to think about all the coverage of Trump 1.0 and delving into that for the sequel.
	So much of it was this petty squabbling and people leaking about each other and the campaign was leaking.
	There's so much backstabbing and whatever.
	But then when it comes down to getting certain stuff done or appeasing certain demographics...
	The evangelicals sort of being primary amongst them, I would say.
	There's a bit of a lockstep situation happening.
	In the beginning of the book, you tie together a bunch of threads, which I really appreciated.
	You even crossed over into some wellness territory that we've covered, which was nice to see.
	But then about halfway through, you start to really drill down on two main topics around the Christian right, which are corporal punishment and homeschooling.
	And then you tie it together at the end, showing why this is such an existential threat to democratic way of life, really.
	But I would like to know why you chose these two topics to really drill down on.
	Maybe I want to write about the Christian right.
	Maybe that's where this book is headed, although I had initially pitched it as a book about terrorism.
	In the process of writing, things often change in strange and unpredictable ways.
	I wound up watching this documentary, which you've probably encountered, called The Way Down, about Gwen Shamblin Lara's church, the remnant fellowship that rose to prominence because its guru, Gwen Shamblin Lara had created this very successful series of Christian weight loss workshops.
	One of the things that really struck me about that documentary, which is quite good, I think that the second episode focused on corporal punishment in the church.
	And you had these members saying, oh, we carried around like rods in our bags and You know, we were really told and instructed to punish our kids.
	And this church was very extreme and actually went to the mat legally for a couple that killed their child that had been church members.
	And I was watching this, and I know, like, this cannot be an isolated incident, right?
	This can't possibly be.
	There's gotta be, like, a whole culture of this sort of thing, because Gwen Shamblin Lara, like, was, I mean, her innovation was mostly, like, starve yourself for Jesus, not so much, like, she wasn't inventing this doctrine of corporal punishment.
	I kind of put out some feelers.
	You know, I started looking into it and I was reading about, you know, the pearls and James Dobson and these sort of Christian right figures that advocated strongly for corporal punishment.
	And I put out some feelers on social media basically saying, hey, like...
	Did you grow up in a house like this with James Dobson on the shelf and corporal punishment being a big piece of things?
	And if so, can you talk to me about those experiences?
	The response was just so enormous.
	Within 48 hours, I'd had over 100 people contact me.
	I immediately knew, okay...
	Like, this is a story.
	This is the story.
	This is the beating heart of the book.
	Just because I had not seen coverage of the generational effects of corporal punishment in an evangelical context outside of academia at all.
	People were so...
	They were carrying so much pain, but also so eager to be heard and so amazed that someone cared, especially someone from outside that community.
	And so I wound up writing a series on it and then expanding it, obviously, into the last several chapters of the book.
	And I was really fixated on this system that so deftly combines theology with...
	So how did you feel having the book had probably been out a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden Tucker Carlson is at a political rally, supposedly the first one he ever spoke at as a non-journalist, and he's talking about...
	to make sure she stays in line.
	Did you see that moment and what went through your head having just spent so much time investigating this very thing and to see it celebrated in front of tens of thousands of people? - Yeah, I mean, that quote was revealing, right?
	It's also interesting that Carlson, for all his many flaws, is very good at knowing where the wind is blowing and how to appeal to a right-wing audience.
	You know, he spent a long time appealing to radicalized elements of the right.
	I was looking at that and thinking, hmm, I noticed that Tucker Carlson's also been talking about experiences with demons lately.
	Now he's talking about spanking, and it sure seems like he is trying to appeal to the Christian right here.
	The other piece of it, wittingly or unwittingly, Carlson's comments, which were, you know, your hormone-addled 15-year-old girl slams the door on you, and that's when you sort of snap and Daddy's home and you're administering discipline and so on.
	And this was the fantasy of spanking a teenage girl that he shared to raucous applause and shouts of daddy's home.
	Obviously, there's a lot going on here psychologically.
	What's interesting to me is that the particular...
	He didn't choose a rebellious toddler necessarily as his denouement.
	He didn't choose a seven-year-old.
	He chose a teenager...
	Whose specific mode of rebellion is breaking away from you, the parent, right?
	Seeking sort of maybe a different mode of life or detaching herself from your values.
	That struck me as this, again, unwittingly like right at the heart of What this biblical parenting sort of Christian right corporal punishment movement has always been about, which is controlling the youth, implementing a kind of ideological fixation on obedience, essentially reproducing itself from generation to generation.
	And then we get to basically all these ideas being codified in a sense through the homeschooling movement.
	I've done numerous episodes where I talk about how terms like school choice are just code words for funneling taxpayer dollars into private schools.
	Christian religious schooling.
	Now with Linda McMahon heading a department that the right wants to basically destroy, we seem to be inching closer to that dream of having Christian schooling be the predominant mode of schooling in America.
	We of course have Texas passing biblical instruction in public schools as well.
	What made you want to pursue this angle as well in your book to sort of show what's happening on the Christian right?
	I look at the Christian right in education in a couple of different ways.
	First of all, if you're looking at just the political birth of when we developed a Christian right movement that is in many ways at its apotheosis right now...
	Is arguably, you know, the driving factor behind the Supreme Court, you know, has the ear of the presidency, like the Speaker of the House is an unabashed Christian nationalist, you know?
	So we're not talking about ancillary or fringe figures, right?
	This is the, hopefully the zenith anyway, of their power, but certainly like up to the present moment, the zenith of their power.
	The two big developments were Brown versus Board of Education, subsequent legal enforcement of school desegregation.
	And what you had was immediately after Brown was this enormous upsurge in parochial schools across the South.
	And if you look at NAACP reports from the time, they're like, if you want to find A segregation academy, a school specifically set up to ensure that white and black students don't intermix.
	Look for a school with Christian or church in the title.
	These parochial schools were created in order to, and heavily subsidized by communities, in order to give white children an education where they didn't have to be in integrated schools.
	And then in the 70s, the IRS, after the Supreme Court ruling Green v.
	Connolly, where some very courageous Black parents were like, hey, how come this segregation academy that won't let our kids join has tax-exempt charitable status, right?
	The Christian right lost that battle, and the IRS really started to audit and go after the tax-exempt status of some of these parochial schools.
	This really woke the sleeping giant of the Christian right.
	This is where like the political origins of a mobilized Protestant South and mobilized white Protestants across the country, because certainly the South, while maybe the most visible, was certainly not the only place that had a monopoly on opposition to school integration. was certainly not the only place that had a monopoly
	And then what happened was like later in the 70s, you had these savvy Catholic operators like Paul Weyrich and Phyllis Schlafly kind of coming out and saying, segregation now, segregation forever is like a cool catchphrase, but you're not going to get a lot of new converts with it.
	It's not very sympathetic.
	And broadly, you're perceived as sort of the people who threw tomatoes at Ruby Bridges and stood a thwart progress.
	But you should get on board with a brand new civil rights movement, the rights of the unborn.
	By the way, you can kick it to those dirty feminists who you don't particularly like at the same time.
	That's where this idea of like the moral majority and the guardians of America against sex perverts really comes from.
	But if you look at the origins of the Christian right politically, it comes out of education and school segregation in particular.
	And certainly, like, you see this encroachment in Oklahoma and Texas, and I have no doubt in, like, various red states will soon be following their examples of sort of the Bible, meeting the Christian Bible into public education.
	The idea that there is a firewall between church and state has been Pretty corroded for a long time.
	I've definitely had folks being like, but what about the separation between church and state?
	And I'm kind of like, well, what about it?
	If you're a woman in like Idaho or Iowa or Kansas or literally any state with a red trifecta, you're functionally living in a theocracy.
	If you're a trans kid in any of those states, you've seen legislators use Bible verses to codify bigotry against you.
	Wild Faith is a historical survey, but it's also a cautionary tale.
	And of course, it came out a few months before the election, but now we are steamrolling right into a second Trump administration.
	Final question.
	I'd love to hear your fears of what that means for some of the topics you brought up in the book.
	And if there are any hopes, too, I'm always looking for optimism in this time.
	But we'll start with what you portend the Christian right doing come next month.
	I hesitate to offer confident predictions because I'm not a prophet, unlike many of the people I spoke to for the book who claim to be prophets.
	The best predictive thing for what the Christian right is going to focus on is what are they talking about and what have they been focusing on, right?
	So...
	You know, we're going to see this continuing, appalling and cruel attack on trans rights.
	You know, initially through this Trojan horse of like, well, it's about kids.
	It's really about driving trans people from public life.
	It's not about sports.
	It's not about bathrooms.
	It's about punishing gender nonconformity in service of a very, very narrow and very punitive view of what gender and what family should be.
	In the same vein, I think we will see a renewal of attacks on gay marriage and even possibly a return to Anti-sodomy laws.
	We're going to see, as we already are seeing, and, you know, folks like Mike Johnson have been very unabashed about their desire to repeal no-fault divorce.
	It's not like Divorcing is so easy.
	I've done it and it sucks, but at least I didn't have to go to court and prove my husband beat me or something like people used to have to do.
	I know I said I wouldn't predict, but I think within the first six months to a year, at least an attempt on a national abortion restriction.
	That is and has been priority one for a long time, and it will continue to be very high up.
	It's a very stark vision, and it's a very theocratic vision.
	It's one that's super weird and invasive about sex.
	Theocracies are traditionally just very, very interested in what you do with your junk and with whom.
	And then its opponents essentially have to say, no, we've got to fight to be weird and all different and all...
	Have different views of gender and different views of the family and different views of what our lives should look like and not have sort of this clean, neat, iron-molded arc for our lives.
	When I picture kind of how to fight this kind of zeal, I imagine the most chaotic orchestra you could think of.
	Where people bring their own versions of faith, people bring their sexualities, people bring their desires for freedom into the mix, and create a kind of counter zeal, where when you have the sort of onward Christian soldiers hymn from a thousand throats, like the answer is this joyous cacophony of freedom.
	And we say no, like...
	We reject your rigidity, your narrowness, your cruelty, and we have to marshal everything we have, including faith, including irritating memes, including, you know, every capability and every oddity we have, every element of chaos and strangeness and uniqueness and individuality that makes us us as an asset in the fight against this kind of theocratic uniformity.

▲