How Evangelicals Have Tainted The Political Process With Diana Butler Bass
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the election in France and the terrible choice the French people have to make. Dr. Diana Butler Bass, a religious scholar who has studied the history of evangelicalism as well as how it has influenced US politics, joins them to talk about the current state of play.
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Seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff on Hollywood.
There you go.
Hollywood.
Nick Halseman with us, as always.
We're gonna be joined in a little bit by Dr. Diana Butler Bass, who is one of my favorite religious scholars.
We're going to talk about evangelical extremism and the authoritarian movement developing behind it.
But first...
Franks.
I think I'm partial to the Beatles version and myself.
I mean, listen, it's a rousing anthem.
Let's just say that.
The horns, the bursting out of song, it's a rousing anthem.
Oh yeah, I'm not sure how anybody, that seems like a really difficult song to master and learn.
Has to be.
So let's go from the heights of democracy and inspiration to the election in France that was just held.
I did a segment on this for The Weekender a couple of weeks ago, and I got to tell you, Nick, what I was worried about happening has happened.
Emmanuel Macron came through in the initial round with 27.8%.
And Marine Le Pen, racist, xenophobic, nationalistic, authoritarian, came in with 23.2%, which means that Macron and Le Pen are heading towards a runoff.
Where that goes is anybody's guess.
It's terrible.
It's just a bad situation.
The funny thing is this process they do, where if you don't get 50%, you have to do a runoff, was supposed to, I believe, eliminate the possibility of radical crazies getting into this race and actually winning.
And yet, here we are.
For whatever it's worth, the third place got 20% or something.
That person is really telling everybody they have to vote for Macron.
So, it's not like a Bernie Sanders thing, where he would finally say, okay, vote for Hillary or whatever.
He's turning on everyone to vote for Macron, but it doesn't seem like it's going to have as big an effect as people would hope.
Well, first of all, Bernie Sanders told everybody to go ahead and vote for her.
Oh, I'm sorry.
All right.
But second of all, we got to talk very quickly about Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is a left-wing socialist Democrat candidate who came in with 22% of the vote.
What we have now, running into this, and I promise, by the way, I know that we have a bunch of Francophiles who are listening who are like, yes, The Muckrake podcast is finally spending serious minutes talking about French national politics.
I promise for everybody else, we're bringing this back around to an American viewpoint and lens, American culture, cultural hegemony forever, stars and stripes.
But what we're looking at right now is the fact that in this runoff, we are now potentially looking at One of the major Western powers possibly going under the leadership of Marine LePen, who comes from the family of LePens, who are nationalistic, xenophobic, racist, sexist, you name it.
There is a very real possibility at this point, depending upon what turnout is, how the campaign over the next couple of weeks goes, this is a lot like the Trump election of 2016.
Very, very much like this.
And another reminder that this authoritarian wave that is building, that you and I spend so much time talking about and documenting and researching, that it could potentially take another election.
What's interesting, though, is that the difference between 2016 and what we're doing now is that Macron is an incumbent, you know, who's already had a record now he's running on.
And it's fascinating that he came in as this young, good-looking leader who, you know, probably was treated like Trudeau.
Like, no one knew much about him and they just felt like, well, he just kind of looks the part.
He's saying a lot of the great stuff and the good stuff that's very progressive.
But man, What happens when you get into the – I don't know the equivalent of the White House is in Paris or in France, but whatever.
Well, when you get in power – The Lucey, whatever.
Anyway.
It turns out that when you get in power, when you're Emmanuel Macron – and by the way, for the record, not a fan of Emmanuel Macron at all.
I think he sucks and I think he's a big part of the reason why we're in this situation.
We'll talk about what has happened and how we've even gotten to the point where Marine Le Pen could be within a breath of gaining the presidency of France and potentially changing the balance of power in the West.
But we'll get to that in a minute.
Macron comes in.
He's a neoliberal, first and foremost.
Second of all, his main constituency are the wealthy bourgeois French citizens.
As a result, what is he for?
Of course he's for free markets.
Of course he's for raising the retirement age.
But also, what did he do?
He looked at what was happening in France and what was happening within the West as this Islamophobia started to take hold.
He came out and started targeting Islamic people.
He started going after Muslims.
He started saying, you know, we really need to combat Islamist separation.
And what happens, Nick, when neoliberals start dipping their toes into this water?
It moves the country in a direction, and it makes room for people like Marine Le Pen.
You know, what's a little bit refreshing, and I'm trying to look through it, and I didn't really see a lot of evidence from Le Pen, was you would think she'd follow the Trump playbook, which would be already setting up the notion that this is a rigged election.
And at the very least, right, I don't think, have you seen anything about that and her out loud saying that and trying to prep everybody for this?
The right wing media in France feels a lot.
Well, actually, so like much of the mainstream media in France is also pushing this type of stuff because it's the same corporatist sort of idea, right?
It has been floated out there, the possibility that the election could be stolen, but it's not that same route at this point.
Like it has not embraced that in the same way.
You've seen it in America.
You've seen it, of course, in Hungary.
Like, that has not necessarily taken root yet.
But there's two weeks, so who knows?
And if it's close, I have no doubt that, you know, once the elections come in, and with one or two points, I'm sure that that will come out.
Someone will start arguing that.
And that's another issue.
But yeah, it's fascinating to me to see a guy like Macron go from, you know, That's such a progressive figure to, you know, changing the wealth tax to basically changing the tax structure.
Exactly what Trump did and completely benefited the wealthy, which, you know, is generally doesn't go over well when you're trying to win a national election anywhere.
Right.
And and I think that that was that was a weird one for him.
And then, yes, to to even pivot slightly on immigration, which is what he's done.
And obviously he's reading the tea leaves and he sees there must be some opening there.
Where he needs to criticize Muslims for coming into the country, and that will somehow get him some extra votes.
It's unclear to me why that is, but he must have made a calculation.
Well, so let's talk about that calculation.
And let's bring it back to USA number one, baby.
Stars and Stripes.
Wait, I don't have our national anthem cued up.
Don't, don't do it.
It pales.
It pales in comparison.
I gotta tell you.
The calculation is this.
Neoliberals, when they are figuring out how to put themselves within the political spectrum, they have to make choices.
And most of the time neoliberals like to say the right thing.
They like to talk about, you know, people lifting themselves up and making things fairer.
And they like to say the socially acceptable catchphrases, right?
They like to come out, they like to hug people, kiss babies, you know, make a big show out of all this.
Well, guess what?
We're reaching a crisis and neoliberals have a choice to make.
And I don't know if you've noticed this.
I assume our listeners have noticed this in the past few weeks as it's becoming alarmingly clear that the Democrats are going to get absolutely washed in the midterms.
And the possibility that the Republicans might also take the national election in 2024.
All of a sudden now, Nick, if you just train your ears outside, you can just hear the moderates and the neoliberals.
Compromise!
Move towards the center!
We're too far left!
And why?
Because they have no interest in talking about redistribution of wealth.
They have no interest in talking about democracy.
And what happens is that neoliberals start showing the secret face of neoliberalism, which is when their money and their power and their affluence is possibly tested, they go right.
Because those people and the neofascists have a lot in common.
Yes, well said.
And it's, yeah, basically, what can I do to survive?
Tell me what I have to say.
Please do the research.
And then I'll say it.
And it doesn't matter if it completely disagrees with what I had run on the past four years.
And I think that's the sad part about the situation is that you could win again, having flipped a lot of your key positions from the first time you won.
And, you know, just because things change or other people come out.
Why is it?
Why?
Having seen so many votes for Biden, and I know the Electoral College is a lot different than, or local politics is a little different than, you know, national, but why is it that we have to swallow this notion that the Democrats are going to lose in a landslide?
Why can't it be somebody rallying around, or everyone rallying around, like we see how dangerous this is now, and come out for the fucking midterms?
Man, it would be great if they had some sort of a message that would rouse that.
I mean, really, it would be really, really wonderful.
But the answers that have gotten us there, I mean, we're not talking about the corporations that are chiseling away at our rights.
We're not talking about these extremist movements.
Every time it's just like, ah, don't worry, they'll come back around.
The Republicans will figure it out.
They'll snap out of their daydream.
In this case, you want to go over to France, look at Macron.
Macron is competing with one of the furthest right candidates in France history to take the right.
That's literally the mindset.
They want to constantly chisel away at the right because the left is just such a third rail for them.
They couldn't even possibly start having conversations about it.
Biden has started Biden has started kind of flirting with this nascent union organizing movement, but I haven't seen anything that actually supports it outside of rhetoric.
I haven't seen any conversation about why Build Back Better got stalled.
I haven't seen any actual movement to try and make sure that people aren't being disenfranchised.
And a large part of it is fear of being seen as going too far left.
And the moment you're seen as being gone too far left, you're seen as Dangerous.
There must be a formula that maybe you've seen, having studied so many different historical eras of politics.
There's a formula, right?
After X amount of time of progressivism in politics, X amount of years, people simply bend back the other way, almost like a violin string when you pluck it or something.
I can't fathom anything else besides the fact that we've won so many of these things.
We've won Roe v. Wade.
Gay marriage, all these important milestones to make things more fair for people.
And yet, it doesn't seem like that's popular anymore, right?
Can any Democratic candidate win on saying, I'm going to protect Roe v. Wade?
Uh, I mean, that's one way to fundraise.
Okay.
I mean, you know, basically, like, and, and, and this, this gets back a lot to the, the tactics that you and I have talked about.
It's like some Democrats are so excited when Roe v. Wade is under attack, so they can go and send out their emails.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Like, it, it gives them something to say.
Like, it gives people a reason to go out.
But I do have a question for you on this.
And this is one of the things that I wanted to talk about today, and I want our listenership to think about as well.
So, okay, let's take Macron in France, right?
And Macron, by the way, has consolidated power.
He has sicked French police on citizens left and right.
I mean, that is a neoliberal sort of corporate paradise at this moment.
So I got to tell you, I do not want Marine Le Pen to win the presidency.
Marine Le Pen is a devilish, racist, authoritarian person.
By the way, where does she get her money from?
Her supporters, but also Hungary and Russia.
I'm just putting this into context because this is a larger conversation we have to have.
There was a great picture she was going to release with her and Putin up until Ukraine was invaded.
They were all set to use the Putin connection as a good thing for her.
Oh, and by the way, let's also not forget to mention that Macron having all these calls with Putin, trying to bring an end to the war, pictures of him on the phone with Putin, that was trying to appeal to the same people.
I can talk to Putin.
Don't worry, you can get your French nationalist light brand over here with Macron.
So here's the thing, Nick.
I don't want Macron to be the president of France.
I sure shit don't want Marine Le Pen to be the president of France.
How do you, and I have my thoughts on this, but I'll be interested to hear what you have to say about it.
Like, if Macron wins, or let's just, actually, let's throw out France, let's throw out America, let's take Country X, right?
Country X has a presidential battle between a neoliberal, who's a status quo-er, who might say the right things, but things don't necessarily change, and you have a fire-breathing, right-wing, authoritarian candidate that they're running against.
You don't want the fire-breathing authoritarian right-wing candidate to win.
But also, if we keep electing that neoliberal, centrist, third-way austerity corporate person, things are going to continue to get worse.
And there's going to be more and more potential for that fire-breathing right-wing person to win elections and gain power.
How do you square that in your head?
Because I think this is one of the bigger questions of our moment.
I mean, my first instinct is to say, you know, you'd never vote for that right-wing crazy.
I can't vote for that person.
Absolutely not.
But it gives you a little insight into why somebody might want Trump.
Because they want to tear it all down.
And if we tear it all down, it'll just shake the system up.
And then we'll see.
Maybe things will shake out better after that.
It never does.
It just continues down an authoritarian path.
But I hear you, man.
This is when you get to those really annoying conversations with people about how, oh, they're both terrible.
You know, I think, right?
Because Macron, like, I mean, at least if we're going to do the Democrats and Republicans, the Democrats are not, like, terrible.
Like, not like the Republicans are, right?
This is not an equal discussion.
And then with Macron and Le Pen, I mean, seriously, there's no way to put Macron on the same level as Le Pen.
There's no way, like, you know.
But it's interesting, but I think that, you know, you want to take the emotion out of it and simply say, we cannot have that person, so we have to vote for the neoliberal.
You have to.
I agree that you have to.
The thing that frightens me, and by the way, like, you know one thing that we've completely paved over?
Jean-Luc Malacone got 22% of the vote, which was only 1.2% behind Marine Le Pen and only five points behind Macron.
That is a socialist democratic candidate who, by the way, like you want to talk about how weird politics are getting?
Like he's he's anti-European union.
He doesn't care for NATO all that much.
Like that's how weird all this movement has become.
So in the midst of all this, the question now is we can't just abandon these countries and hand them over to aspiring fascists.
We can't do that, because I have to tell you, like, let's say America goes down the path that you and I are talking about right now.
All of a sudden we're talking about Russia, Hungary, France, the United States.
All of these countries starting to be run by strongmen, right?
Like we're talking about like authoritarian people who, by the way, hate liberal democracy.
That's what all this is about.
Like literally the ideology here is that not everybody deserves the same rights.
Not everybody deserves the same protections.
And by the way, when all of a sudden, you know, the waters start rising and we start losing land and resources, Someone has to pick out who suffers, and that's where this is moving, right?
We cannot simply abandon it to these people, but it's really hard to start wrapping my head around what sort of, I want to say revolutionary, but what sort of a malleable moment could possibly come that might move things in another direction, Because between neoliberals, third-wayers, and these authoritarians, it feels like we are on a trajectory for basically all of the established sort of countries and regimes to start going this route.
Well, you might remember the last time France was in a situation where they radically changed the way their country was governed and people were getting their heads chopped off and whatnot.
Well, the last time, technically, was when they let the Nazis come in.
Oh, okay.
Right.
Well, actually, let me say this.
A few French people let the Nazis come in.
And it was the ideological forebearers to people like Marine Le Pen.
They called it a wonderful surprise.
Vichy France.
Couldn't ask for anything better.
But the time before that, the heads were rolling down the street.
Yeah, and it's weird because to me, France has always been this completely liberal country and very progressive and open, right?
And in reality, it's probably only that way in my mind because they don't have as many sexual hang-ups, right?
I almost feel like that's the difference here.
We envision that about France, and they must be, you know, really progressive then, obviously, right?
But here's like what... There's a turn for you.
I'm so sorry.
I love that you just did the one for one in your mind, and that's why you saw France as liberal.
That's wonderful.
Well, I do have to say, though, this is about liberalism.
And whenever we say liberalism, the thing that comes to mind in America's mind is leftist, right?
People on the leftist.
That's not true.
Liberals are people based on, and we're going to talk to Dr. Bass here in a minute about this.
This is based on this revolutionary idea that particularly takes hold in the 18th century in the United States and within France, right?
It's the idea that capitalism is now going to be sort of the main factor.
Law is going to take the place of God in determining our relationships between each other.
But I have to tell you, there are a lot of liberals who are totally fine with authoritarian circumstances as long as it protects their money, their property, their place in society.
France has been so incredibly imperialistic and racist and the stuff that they have pulled since they kicked the Nazis out of France.
I mean, they've been at the forefront of some of the the worst indignities that have been placed upon women, immigrants, people of color, vulnerable minorities.
And this right now is just that sort of coming to the surface.
Oh, I mean, I thought you were almost getting into, like, the Napoleon era of imperialism, where, you know, having come out of a monarchy and rejecting that and then going into the Napoleon ruling, that's kind of an interesting background as well.
Like, they never really did get where they, I guess, hoped to get to after the revolution.
No, they didn't.
And basically, Napoleon came along and was like, your revolution is over.
I'm now in charge and I'm now the new emperor.
But one of the things that you've seen now, I mean, people like Le Pen, they're interested in rolling back.
And by the way, Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, all these people, they're interested in rolling times back before the king's head was chopped off.
That's what they're interested in.
They literally want to get back to a hierarchical moment where they have control.
Nobody can vote them out of office.
Nobody could possibly ever interrupt them gaining more profit and more power.
It literally is a rolling back of liberalism and liberal democracy and that revolution that unseated hierarchical hereditary power.
That's what they're interested in.
And I just had a vision of a fourth grade history teacher, a social studies teacher, you know, showing like, here's Napoleon and he was very imperialistic and bad.
He wanted to take over countries.
That's wrong class, right?
Because in America, we have everyone's, like, I almost feel like if that happened now, you'd have parents coming in and complaining about, you know, how dare you say, Someone who's like a strong leader is bad and we can't, you know, propagate that and, you know, which by the way will tie exactly into what we're going to talk about with the evangelicals in a minute.
That is the interesting thing that is fascinating to me and what we're going through in this country is that it seems like if we're already going to want to rewrite the slavery in this country, then it makes sense that we want to almost rewrite, you know, the notion of, you know, free and fair and, you know, a land of opportunity.
Well, so, again, and we're going to talk to Dr. Bass about apocalypticism here in a minute.
I got to tell you, when the climate catastrophe hits, and by the way, when the economic bust happens, and it's just over the horizon, when all of that stuff starts happening, Nick, you have to figure out a way to keep a semblance of a system going.
You know what I mean?
People still gotta go to work.
There's not enough money or resources to give them, but they need to go to work.
Well, once you start rolling back liberalism, which is an extension of capitalism, what's before that?
It's slavery.
It's literally slavery.
It's the idea that some people are going to live comfortably and some people, their bodies are going to be sacrificed for the well-being of the people who are living comfortable in the system that they are controlling and overseeing.
These people are telling you constantly that there are some people who are created better than others through religion, through Christianity, through whatever you want to call it.
They are saying that white people, particularly white men, were created to rule over everybody else.
That ideology was always in the system.
It was always right underneath the surface, but there was kind of enough stuff to go around.
You know what I mean?
Like you could pretend like the system worked and everybody could sort of have rights or whatever.
What we're preparing for right now and what we're seeing with results like this and what we've seen in America over the past couple of years is a preparation for what happens when the shit hits the fan.
And we have to figure out a way to make the system work.
Who are the people who are going to be comfortable and who are the people that are going to be worked to death?
All right.
On that note, we're going to go and have a conversation with Dr. Diana Butler-Bass.
We'll be right back in just a second.
All right, everybody, as promised, a really special treat today as we have Dr. Diana Butler-Bass, who is a religious commentator and author, holds a doctorate in religious studies from Duke University and is published in such places as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and is the author of the new book, Freeing Jesus.
Thank you so much for coming on here.
I really appreciate being on, Jared.
I have loved your work over the years, and I'm glad that we've gotten to be friends through all of the chaos that is surrounding us.
Well, you know, it's funny, you know, there aren't that many people who actually understand exactly what we're talking about, except for the people who have gone through this stuff.
So I've always very, very much appreciated your work.
And I wanted to have you on for a few reasons.
But first and foremost, this This Substack article, the last I believe that you published, it might have been like maybe the next to last, this old time religion piece, which is something that I feel like more commentators, and I wish more pundits and writers paid attention to, which is the constant influence of the evangelical right in American politics.
And I wonder if you could go ahead and sort of set the stage for this conversation and kind of for people who maybe aren't as versed in this as we are in this world that we have to swim around in.
Can you sort of tell people about how the evangelical right has established themselves and basically more or less dominated the 20th century and now the beginnings of the 21st century?
The piece that you're referring to, I put out in response to an article that was in the New York Times, and the Times had published a really pretty decent piece in certain ways about how the new religious right had blended Worship with politics.
And the two authors were talking about how the sort of political rallies they'd gone to for Trump recently, or QAnon rallies and anti-masking rallies, had all taken on the air of a religious revival.
And that the opposite is true as well.
Many American churches have become deeply politicized.
And so I read the article and I thought to myself, well, that's not new.
And then I began going back in my own both academic work and my own personal experience and thinking about how what they had identified was obviously present ever since the sort of public rebirth.
of evangelicalism in the 1970s following the election of Jimmy Carter.
And so that's a really a primary concern or something I've been tracking for a really long time in looking at this interplay between conservative evangelical religion and the development of the The right political right through the last decades of the 20th century and how that became so dominant in our, our culture.
I'm kind of curious because Jimmy Carter would arguably be one of the most religious presidents we've ever had.
And yet what you're describing is the rebirth of the evangelical movement.
It comes out of a reaction to the most religious president we've ever elected.
Is that safe to say?
Part of the story that I've been telling recently, and it comes out in Freeing Jesus, as well as some other work that I've been doing, is how in the 1970s there was this really unusual kind of form of evangelicalism.
It was politically radical.
It was very open.
It gave birth to things like Sojourner's Magazine and a couple other things that are a little bit more insider that some evangelicals would know, a publication called The Other Side.
Evangelicals for social action, evangelical feminism, you know, some things you don't associate with evangelicalism, especially today.
And so it just so happened that I was a college student at an evangelical college in the middle of the 1970s, and this is the kind of evangelicalism I knew.
edgy, radical, interested in liberation theology, very politically progressive.
And those are the evangelicals who elected Jimmy Carter, a Democrat who had, who Had a lot of these kinds of things sort of at least woven into his political views, like his views on women, for example, were for the middle of the 1970s, incredibly progressive for a white guy from Georgia, you know, and certainly his views on race as well.
So there was this sort of anomalous period of American evangelicalism that I knew well as a teenager and a college student.
But as the Carter years sort of began to raise questions about the role of religion in public life, there were evangelicals, particularly in the South,
They didn't see him as being Christian, they didn't recognize what he was doing as in any way evangelical, and so they began to form really a counter movement to him, and that counter movement involved.
being counter racial reconciliation.
It was a counter women's rights.
It was, it was more like the religious right that we know today.
And so out of, out of the Carter presidency, you know, Jerry Falwell organizes the moral majority.
And that begins a sort of a fight within evangelicalism and eventually the radical, I call it the golden tinged Jesus counterculture of California, that that begins to fade from view, and it's the right-wing form of evangelicalism that takes prominent place.
And, you know, I think a lot of people have even forgotten that there was ever such a thing as that kind of evangelicalism that is associated with a person like Jim Wallace, who's still probably the most well-known proponent of that.
Well, we care about accuracy on this podcast.
I just want to make a correction, which is that President McKinley was the most religious president because God told him to civilize the Philippines.
I mean, God literally came down and told him it was his duty to civilize the Philippines.
Joking aside, I do want to point out that that split that you're talking about, that schism around that time period, which Jerry Falwell, of course, I think best embodies, this is based on white supremacy.
It's based on the idea of old Confederate religion, the idea that God has minted the white race, particularly the American white male, in order to dominate the world.
And I want to ask you about this.
Falwell and the people around him were so effective in dominating American politics and culture that most people do not understand that there is a progressive, reform-minded evangelicalism that even exists to this day.
It's considered such a small little group that the very term evangelical is synonymous with this white supremacist project.
Can you talk about how that happened?
Well, it happened in the way that a lot of things happen in evangelicalism, is that there was an internal argument in their churches and in the institutions, particularly theological seminaries and colleges.
And so there were, through the 80s and 90s in particular, A series of what you might want to call internal crusades in these institutions to limit the power and the voice of evangelicals that might be more progressive and to forward the more conservative agendas.
And I know because I was the victim of one of those crusades myself, I got fired from an evangelical college.
And I was a very strong proponent of women's rights and also standing up for the students of color and LBGTQ students on the campus that I happen to work.
And that did not endear me to the trustees or the powers that be.
Can I ask on that?
Because that's really fascinating.
How was that communicated to you?
What was the conversation that led to that?
Well, there's some of it that I can't share publicly for legal reasons, but the basics of it, and this would be part of a public record, is that I was literally told that I didn't fit, quote unquote.
And so that meant I was not going to get tenure and I was let go.
But it became a fair, it was at the time, and this was before the internet, a fairly well-known case in some evangelical circles.
It got covered in Christianity Today.
It was picked up by the Los Angeles Times.
There were student protests at the college where I worked in order to try to keep me on the faculty.
But the criticism of the institution's moves to get rid of me Didn't have any impact.
They just went ahead and they said, no, you know, you're out of here.
And so, so that was in the early nineties that that happened.
I was in my early thirties and it was my first ever academic job.
It was very, very hard to be a woman right out of graduate school, going with all kinds of idealism about your work and about what teaching in colleges is like.
And then to find oneself on the short end of what was at that point in time, I think, a real consolidation of conservative evangelical power in right-wing institutions.
And I wasn't the only one.
There was a really interesting book written in the late 90s by a scholar named Julie Ingersoll, who does a lot of work on the religious right.
And Her, that little book was called Evangelical Christian Women.
I think the subtitle was Stories from the Battlefield or something to that effect.
And it was a whole book about women who were dismissed, gotten rid of, and otherwise removed from positions of power within evangelicalism at that time in the early 90s.
And so, so it was, it was clearly a more national kind of move against particularly progressive women, and I don't know so much about people of color at that point, in part because there just weren't a whole lot.
People of color who had any kinds of positions of power at evangelical institutions.
But there were women coming to the fore then, and that's the wave I got caught up in.
And then I had to remake a life on the other side of that.
But since I was victimized by All of this.
It made me pay attention to it more.
And in effect, a big part of my career and my life has been shaped by the questions that arose then.
Is there a percentage you can put on how much it was of your gender versus how much it was on the progressive ideas that you held in terms of why they made that decision?
It was very hard to separate.
And there were there were few people at the college who were men who would have been Quite as theologically or maybe politically progressive as I was.
I can think of maybe two or three.
And they did not wind up staying there over the longer haul.
So there was certainly some theological concern that was functioning there.
But it was also the fact that I was one of, I believe at the time, I think there were six women, maybe, who were on tenure track out of a faculty of 120 people.
So I'm curious, this is in the 90s?
Is that what you said?
Yeah, this is in the early-mid 90s.
So the context here is that we've already gone through the women's liberation movement.
Women have been a strong part of the workforce.
They'd won, right?
This argument had already been won at this point, I would say, by the 90s.
So is it shocking?
I wonder if anyone listening to this would be shocked to hear that at that late date, You're gonna start suddenly encounter a whole new wave.
I mean, tell me if I'm correct in describing this.
It's like a whole new wave of, of a certain position women need to have and where they need to be.
You know, I mean, I don't know if we want to get into like, only in the home homemakers not working, whatever.
But that's sort of what what we're, I'm getting from what you're describing.
Well, I mean, that's what JD Vance is doing right now in terms of talking about trying to bring back traditional jobs.
It's the idea that women shouldn't have to work, right?
Which basically is just opening the door for putting women back into the home, correct?
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting question, because I don't often think about it, but I am convinced this is true.
And I think it will be of interest to your listeners.
And In the 1990s, when all this was happening to me, as far as I have been able to trace down, and my My Ph.D.
is in American religious history, and my area of expertise was the study of fundamentalism in America.
So I have pretty good resources and research skills in this area.
But as far as I have been able to track down, I was actually the first ever woman hired by any evangelical college in America to teach in a religious studies department.
A subject other than Christian education or women's studies and so when I walked it on into my job.
In the in that you know what it was at 91.
I was the first ever woman to teach doctrine and church history at any evangelical college, and that includes places like Wheaton College, you know, much better known school than the place where I was, and the whole body of colleges that serve evangelicalism.
And to your question, Nick, what that means is that evangelical culture was about 20 years behind those same fights within secular culture.
And that's the point that I want to underscore.
It's not a critique necessarily of the place where I worked.
It's just to point out that there's this historical kind of lag period because evangelicalism, while it was engaged in the culture, and we tend to think of it as very much part of the culture, Also does have certain kinds of lags around certain social issues.
And I think those are the social issues that that Jared pointed out the very beginning of this.
There's a sort of a lag in understanding dimensions of race, racism, white supremacy.
And, and all of those issues.
And then there are certainly a lag related to gender issues and it could be it's purposeful I think in certain ways, you know, because they are committed very deeply.
to a hierarchical structure of society where certain people should have power and other people should not.
And so if you're holding on to that idea of society as a hierarchy of authority, you're going to be outside of certain kinds of conversations going on about human rights.
And so by the time the 90s come, and this was an old argument within, say, liberal Protestant Colleges and seminaries where they had plenty of women, plenty of female students, plenty of professors, plenty of administrators.
It was not the case in the 1990s.
It was all still very new.
And I kind of think about that sometimes today when we're looking at evangelical responses to say critical race theory and some of the attitudes towards especially LGBTQ people.
Is that there's a theological almost shield that they built around their ideas about how God has ordered society that keeps them from addressing the same kinds of issues that many of the rest of us just sort of say, oh, that's interesting, or I'm willing to think about that, or yeah, maybe that hasn't been fair.
But evangelicals haven't been doing that work for 20 years, like many of the rest of us.
And so then when they finally encounter it, it looks incredibly frightening and incredibly threatening.
And that's when it gets sort of linked up into, I think, all their political views.
And they're very good at politics.
Yeah, and part of it, you know, one of the things I'm studying for the new book is the influence of apocalypticism in terms of conservative reactionary circles.
And one of the things that they're able to do, particularly through Christianity, is to say, hey, listen, if we start letting gay people marry, if we start letting trans people live in society, if we do this, if women aren't controlled in the home, this is all leading to the apocalypse.
This is all leading to a moment where Satan succeeds, he wins over, and of course we have Falwell, we have Robertson saying that things like 9-11 and hurricanes are caused by an angry God who does this.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that place of apocalypticism in terms of reactionary conservative evangelicalism, which serves of course to help the power and control of white wealthy evangelical men Versus a more sort of a social justice, progressive type of Christianity.
How does that idea of apocalypticism sort of fit into that different frame?
In the 1970s, when evangelicalism, of course, was coming out of its sort of political hibernation, the main view of apocalypse that was present was the idea that the world was going to get worse and worse and worse.
And that wasn't such a bad thing, because the world getting worse meant that Jesus was going to be back really soon.
When Jesus returned, the notion that they held was that Jesus was going to rescue all of God's faithful people, all of the Christians who had accepted Jesus in their heart as their personal Lord and Savior.
And that Jesus was going to take all those people in the rapture up to heaven and keep those people safe while the world suffered through a terrible tribulation of violence and famine and war and the whole thing for seven years.
And at the end of that seven-year period, Jesus would return with all the raptured people and with all the angels of heaven and with everybody who was a saint who had died before And meet up with Satan's forces on a battlefield in a place called Armageddon in the Holy Land.
And that Jesus would then, with all these forces that Jesus had marshaled, defeat evil for 1,000 years and set up the kingdom of God on earth.
So, you know, it's amazing that I can still do that.
I was right there with you.
I was right there with you the entire way.
I heard the old pastor in my head.
I'm right there with you.
It's good to know I can still preach a sermon like that.
But of course, women can't ever preach a sermon like that in those circles.
So that was the view then, and you're younger than I am, so as we know, that kind of had residual power in evangelicalism through a couple decades that followed the 70s, but along the way it began to shift, and evangelicals began to think, well, Maybe we're not going to get rescued out of this mess.
Maybe the apocalypse, in a sense, or the tribulation has already in some fashion begun, and that our job is to, you know, kind of Fight it for as long as possible, so more and more people can become Christian.
And then, you know, God will just all sort it out at the end.
And so there's, there are kind of mixed, more mixed views on the apocalypse right now.
But you hear highly apocalyptic language.
When you see some of these figures in the religious right, I'm thinking about that pastor, is it down in Tennessee, outside of Nashville, whose name?
I know you know his name.
Osteen?
Is that who you're talking about?
No, it's a Patriot Church fella.
Yeah, the Patriot Church guy.
And then Greg Locke, who also is down that same area, they get up and they start preaching essentially about how completely evil and completely corrupt That really the Democratic Party is.
I mean, they're speaking in apocalyptic terms regarding Joe Biden, who I really kind of never fancied as the Antichrist.
You know, he just doesn't have the chops to be the Antichrist, as far as some of the stuff I learned in evangelicalism.
But that's what they're doing.
And so there is some sort of apocalyptic Fear, right now, that the worst has already begun.
And so they, they have a calling from God to try to defeat evil and Satan.
And the harder they fight, you know, the more people, I guess, who will get saved, who will eventually go to heaven and the more, you know, the evildoers will be punished.
So there's a sense in which they've kind of moved Armageddon into our everyday life.
And that, I find, Worrisome, because it was one thing when they thought that the world was just going to get worse and worse and worse, and you don't really have anything to do about it.
You just kind of wait for Jesus to return.
But now it's like, well, you have to politically jump into the arena and defeat Satan.
And that is a huge mobilizing force in their political outlook right now.
Well, you mentioned that you studied the history of evangelicalism, and also as it relates to politics.
I'm curious if you have a perspective on the founding fathers wanting to have a separation of church and state.
And I have to imagine that this was the reason, because they recognized it even back then.
And do you have any insight into why they would have come up with that notion in the 1700s?
There was a bit of an argument as to the separation of church and state.
Originally, that phrase comes from a gloss that Thomas Jefferson wrote on some issues that developed around the Constitutional Convention.
But the intent, I think, was pretty clear, is that the founders were, despite the evangelical propaganda to the contrary, A fairly secular bunch.
And when they weren't, you know, they were secular in the terms of the 18th century.
And they were also very liberal theologically, so they were deists.
And that meant that they were a little concerned.
with these kinds of religious movements that could develop this way, and they were familiar with them.
There were apocalyptic movements among the Puritans.
There were people who were religious extremists among the Patriots, but the Founders weren't, and so they were hesitant about extremist religious movements And they were also very hesitant of any kind of state religion, because they had just been basically you know victimized by a state religion even though 18th century Anglicanism might not seem so terribly harmful in the rear view.
The idea of having a church-state marriage where both the church and the king were sort of opposed to your rights and were, you know, heaping abuse on you, they thought was just generally a bad idea.
So they came up with these mechanisms to make sure that no religion would ever be established, that there would be kind of a more mealy, argumentative environment for religious competition.
And then separation of church and state developed out of that.
Well, and part of it is, of course, that in Europe, the Protestants and the Catholics were just absolutely committing genocide against one another, and it was tearing Europe apart.
And I wanted to ask you about this, Diana, because this is something that I've been keeping an eye on, and it's very, very strange.
Speaking of that schism between Protestants and Catholics, One of the things that's happening in America right now is this growing authoritarian movement that is both taking place in these patriot churches, which are Protestant churches, white evangelical churches, but a lot of the ideology that we're seeing is from this new right Catholic wave.
We're seeing a lot of people that are sort of starting to convert to Catholicism and starting to pick up some authoritarian tendencies.
I mean, you're seeing this from people like Steve Bannon, Rod Dreher.
I was wondering if you could talk about how this might be the one thing that gets these people together in the same room, is the idea that democracy and ascendant populations are dangerous.
But can you talk about where these two sort of groups are starting to come together?
It's actually three groups.
It's the kinds of evangelicals who love Donald Trump.
It's those Catholics who hate Pope Francis.
Yeah.
And it is the Eastern Orthodox who love Putin.
And those three groups, what they share in common is this profound commitment that society, Western society, is decadent and chaotic.
And that's revealed by things like feminism, LGBTQ rights, and racial mixing, frankly.
And that the solution is a return of order and the rightful authority of white men.
And then to restructure society so that everything has its place and everyone is in its place.
And that means that sin and lawlessness basically come from the same source, that getting out of your place, going beyond your station, messing up the order of things.
And so it's not entirely hard to see why evangelicals would be so enamored Evangelicals with that kind of orderly hierarchical worldview would be so enamored of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy because evangelicalism at its heart is a Not.
They've glommed on to this hierarchical thing, but at its best, it's usually a movement of democratic enthusiasm.
That's often what it has been in American history, where women preach and slaves are set free and, you know, abolition and women's rights have been supported.
Evangelicalism has kind of an interesting history of being on the side of democratic movements and the voice of the people.
But that hasn't been the case since the 70s.
But you can see why evangelicals who have become just committed to hierarchy love hierarchical churches.
And they love the conservative right-wing movements in hierarchical churches and don't understand that there are other forms of Catholicism and orthodoxy.
That are, you know, fighting against that kind of re-traditionalization or re-hierarchicalization of their own traditions.
And there are huge portions of global Catholicism and global orthodoxy that have been moving in much more open directions towards Passion for climate justice, real engagement in issues around poverty and economic inequality.
Even the most sort of hidebound of these groups are rethinking how they understand the role of women in their systems and structures.
And all of them are asking serious questions about gay, lesbian, transgender people.
And so you'll find in all three of these groups, in Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy, People that, you know, frankly, I would be and am thrilled to be associated with and are on the front edges of trying to think about how to live in a better, more peaceful, more inclusive, more pluralistic global environment.
And then you find these other forms of them.
The same groups that are fighting sort of on two fronts.
One, they're fighting whom they perceive to be liberal within their own denominations and their own traditions.
And they're also, this is the really, I mean, this is your bailiwick, Jared.
They're also coalescing together.
to sort of mount a global campaign against Western decadence wherever it is found.
And so, you know, I mean, it makes, it puts some really interesting light on what's going on in Ukraine.
All right.
And we have been lucky enough to be hanging out with Dr. Diana Butler Bass, one of my favorite religious commentators and favorite people out there on the internets.
Check out her sub stack and of course her book Freeing Jesus.
Dr. Bass, where can the good people find you?
Folks can find me via my website, which is just my name.
I'm a person and a website, dianabutlerbass.com.
I love writing.
My substack is called The Cottage, and I invite anyone and everyone to sign up and join in.
And I think folks can find me mostly on Twitter.
That's the main social media place where I hang out.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
All right, we are back.
That was Dr. Diana Butler Bass.
Really, really good guest.
I gotta tell you, it is It's hard to find people who understand evangelical culture and the intersection of politics.
I've been always, always welcome on the show.
Well, it kind of really makes a lot of sense with what we're seeing, you know, the evangelicals trying to control like public schools, for instance, and what's being taught.
Because again, this is where it has to start.
You can't get to, you know, as an adult to that ideology unless you're born, I would imagine, right?
You have to be raised.
No one's converting to that as a 30 year old, right?
Like Jared, no one's going to come to that level.
You know some people are starting to but it's it's in large part because what Diana and I were talking about there at the end which is this new sort of fascination with authoritarianism within the converted Catholics which is this weird thing that's starting to take off and and I was glad she brought up the opposition to the Pope which has all of a sudden created this new sort of harbor for people who like are like Authoritarian plus also anti-progress within the church.
Like, it's a really weird thing that's happening.
Right.
I mean, we've seen that for a while now as each different Pope has come a little bit inched, right?
A little bit progressive.
Right?
It just seems like... We'll save for the Nazi Pope.
Exactly, except for him.
But it almost seems like, you know, some people might be progressive, they might be that way, but they can't have the Pope do that.
No way.
The Pope, that's got to stay sacred, right?
We got to keep that anchored in a certain way, I guess.
It's really, really strange to me how, you know, but let me get to the actual, the point I was going to make was, like, I have deep respect for anyone that wants to dedicate their lives to You know, studying the Bible or studying, you know, religion and living that a life.
I mean, as long as they are truly living the life that's laid out there and the good stuff of the Bible, at least.
So it's like I don't want to necessarily, you know, instantly make a judgment on someone who decides to live their life that way.
But it's really just troubling because you're right.
It becomes this rapture and so extreme.
And then it becomes a thing where they feel like they're called to have to actually get involved in politics for this.
And then that's that's just Again, the founding fathers, I think, understood this and then somehow we couldn't keep that separate.
Well, that was intentional for sure.
I mean, faith is not a bad thing.
Let's be frank.
I have faith in you.
We're going to get on.
We're going to talk about serious things.
We know when we're going to do it.
We meet when we say we're going to meet.
You take me in good faith.
I take you in good faith.
I have faith in our listeners.
I have faith in my friends, my family, my loved ones.
That's important stuff, and it's important for how I view the world, and quite frankly, how I survive the world.
You know what I mean?
Particularly in tough times.
But when you start saying your faith is not enough, you have to start imprinting it on others.
You want to go back to the founding of liberalism.
Liberalism says that you are a person, I am a person, the law comes between both of you and protects both of you from one or the other infringing upon you.
All of a sudden you start talking about my faith overrides whatever you believe.
I mean, that's that's literal fascism.
I mean, that's that's literal totalitarianism.
And these people have gotten on board for it, for not just political power, but also their own personal profit, but also because they want the world to work the way they want it to work.
I'm a little bit worried that, you know, the notion of, you know, church is becoming more and more political.
There's some sort of monetary reward for that.
And I'm worried if that really is true or not.
I mean, I know that they were trying to change the laws where you can now be more political in churches after LBJ had the law.
My mind's blank.
You know, there was a law, but I was supposed to keep it separate.
But yeah, it would really be soul-killing if, like, all of a sudden it came out that, yes, like, obviously these churches are doing this primarily because they're going to increase their revenues by a lot.
You know, I mean, I know it makes sense that there is to some degree, but, like, Let's just pretend it was like a one-for-one.
We haven't seen evidence of that necessarily, right?
Like where... I don't know.
Take a drive down the road and look at one of the megachurches anywhere in America.
I mean, Jerry Falwell, it just can't... By the way, I can't recommend this enough.
More than I possibly can.
Jerry Falwell Jr., who by the way got totally busted for Whatever it is.
We don't have to label.
Whatever Jerry Falwell Jr.
is into.
It sure is fun to hang out with, Jared.
Whatever he's into, good luck to him.
I hope he finds peace.
He did an interview about it not too long ago, and he basically said, my dad was a complete and utter fraud, and he did it for the money, and he did it for the power, which is one of the reasons, I mean, Reaganism happened the way that it is, and why we live in an America the way that we do.
But, man, if you've ever listened to an Alex Jones, he's like, Globalist, coming to your house tomorrow, unless you buy dick pills.
And the next thing you know, you're buying dick pills.
And that exact same economic model is being done in churches, which is, New World Order is coming to your door.
You've got to give to the church.
We're under attack.
It is an incredibly lucrative thing, which the Republicans do.
Aggrievement victim politics and fundraising.
That's exactly what's going on.
I feel seen because now that's what I do on my other side when I do these ads.
I say, you know, if you don't want to get traded by your favorite team, you better use Manscaped.
You know, so I guess I'm in that boat.
I get it.
You're not telling people that the president is a reptilian New World Order agent and so you need to buy dick pills.
You're not doing that.
I know, and I'm not doing as well as Alex Jones either.
That's right.
So go figure.
That's right.
Maybe you can tell everybody the Reptilians are coming for you.
The New World Order is knocking down your door.
Come and get you some of those sweet, sweet dick pills.
We got to end on that, though.
You got to end on that.
Thank you again to Dr. Diana Butler Bass, one of my favorite people out there.
Thank you for listening.
A reminder, if you want access to the additional show every week that comes out on Friday, the Weekender Edition, you gotta go over to patreon.com slash mccrakepodcast.
This show does not advertise tickets.
No male enhancement.
No, we're not doing that.
We're not asking you to purchase anything.
We want to remain editorially independent, so we depend on you, and we are so, so grateful for you.
Again, that is patreon.com slash monkrakepodcast.
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