Inside the World of Christian Nationalism with Katherine Stewart (Re-release)
This is a re-release of an episode from last year. Brad talks to journalist Katherine Stewart, author of the Power Worshipers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Her reporting takes us inside the world of Christian nationalism on the level of lived-experience. She conveys what she has seen at BBQs, political rallies, and even revival meetings at the Trump Hotel in DC. What emerges is a frightening picture of the mechanics of MAGA Nation and its religious communities.
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My name is Brad Onishi, and I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and I am here today with Katherine Stewart.
who is a journalist and a writer.
She published a book a couple years ago called The Good News Club, and we are really excited to have her back today because it is publication day for her, for her brand new book, which is getting a lot of press and is showing up all over the place, called The Power Worshippers, and it is all about Christian nationalism and its foot soldiers all over the world.
So, Catherine, thanks for being here on a very exciting day for you.
Thanks, it's so exciting to be here, Brad.
Um, let's start a little bit and talk about just how you got into writing.
I mean, you've now written for like a decade about Christian nationalism, and we're going to talk about your book.
So your book, just to explain, folks, Catherine's book is Really an investigative look into the world of Christian nationalism.
She interviewed dozens and dozens and dozens of folks, and she has really given us what I would call a ground-up view of Christian nationalism.
You know, one of the things that I love about interviewing academics like Andrew Whitehead and Ryan Burge is they are theorists who sort of look at data and they They look at things from the top down and we get this really big expansive view one of the beauties of Working with a journalist like you Catherine is you know, I'm talking to somebody who spent a decade on the ground You're you're not looking at data from above you're at the church service.
You're at the revival tent you are interviewing the leaders in West Texas and Southern California and Washington DC.
And so for you to spend 10 years of your life doing this, and I know you, we've talked, you know, many times about this, you are relentless on this topic.
I guess the first question, if you could just tell us briefly, is how did this become your passion?
How did this become the thing that you were going to spend 10 years doing?
Well, I first got interested in the topic in 2009 when a good news club came to my kids' public elementary school in Santa Barbara.
Good news clubs are designed to convert children in their earliest years of learning to a deeply fundamentalist form of evangelical Christianity.
They confuse little kids into thinking that their public school endorses their form of religion, and they encourage kids attending the clubs to proselytize and recruit their classmates.
And as you know, they target children in the very earliest years of learning, sometimes children who are young to read, too young to read.
So I was astonished to learn that there were thousands of these clubs operating in public schools nationwide, and they seemed to me wildly inappropriate in a diverse public school setting.
But you know what, first I really thought they were a relic of the American past.
It turned out I was really, really wrong about that.
The more I learned about these clubs and the movement behind them, the more concerned I became.
I, you know, I'm a researcher, an investigative reporter, and I started sort of looking at the legal movement that had enabled these groups to meet in public schools.
I was kind of stunned by its sophistication.
I was stunned by the movement's determination and coherence and this very high level of strategic thinking.
So I published a book on the topic in 2012 and over the years I just kept on digging and writing.
I discovered that good news clubs are really one part of a larger attack on public education and the attack on public ed was just one part of a larger attack on America as a modern secular democracy.
One of the things that is also great talking to you is that this was news to you, right?
So many of us grew up in evangelicalism in some way.
We were touched by it as kids or youth or whatever.
For you, this was just like it came out of nowhere.
This was not your culture.
It was not your thing.
And one of the things that I really love about the book is you explain in ways that remind me of Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry in their book.
You say, This is not a book about evangelicalism as much as it's a book about Christian nationalism.
Can you explain that?
Is that the attack you're talking about?
Well, that's absolutely true.
The movement I'm talking about really includes many people who identify as evangelical, but it also excludes many evangelicals.
Remember, four out of five white evangelicals voted for Trump, but one in five did not.
And it excludes most black evangelicals as well.
And it includes conservative representatives of other varieties of Protestant and non-Protestant religion.
I think an obvious point, but one that bears repeating, is that Christian nationalism is not representative of American Christianity or evangelicalism as a whole.
As you know, many Christians oppose the movement.
It's really about the evolution of religious conservatism, a certain kind of religious conservatism, into a nationalistic, anti-democratic, authoritarian movement.
The basic message of the book is that we're kidding ourselves if we continue to look at this through a culture war framework.
It's a political movement and it wants power.
So if you look at other countries, for example, like if you look at Vladimir Putin in Russia, or Viktor Orban in Hungary, or Erdogan in Turkey, when they bind themselves really closely to religious conservatives in their countries to consolidate an authoritarian form of power, we understand that as a form of religious nationalism.
And that's frankly what we're seeing today with Trump's alliances with our own religious ultra-conservatives.
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