On January 6, 2023 we gathered a group of scholars to discuss what we've witnesses since the Insurrection and what lies ahead for our democracy. The panel included:
Bradley Onishi, @bradleyonishi
Dan Miller,
Sara Moslener, @afterpurityproject
Matt Taylor (creator of Charismatic Revival Fury), @TaylorMatthewD
Lucas Kwong (creator of Monster in the Mirror) @KwongLucas
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Today we have a special episode.
We, on Friday, January 6th, hosted a roundtable with a group of scholars, including myself, Dan Miller, Sarah Mosliner from Central Michigan University, an expert on purity culture.
Lucas Kwong, the writer and creator of Monster in the Mirror and a professor at the City University of New York, and Matt Taylor, the writer and creator of the series Charismatic Revival Fury on the New Apostolic Reformation.
a Protestant scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Studies in Baltimore.
Together, the five of us discussed what we've seen in the two years since the insurrection, as well as what we think might come next.
It was a really good set of reflections, as well as a Q&A session.
I started the recording a little bit late, so when you hear the beginning, it's me Just starting to read a few pages from my new book, Preparing for War, and those pages are reflections on January 6th and the religious dimensions.
If you want to follow along, they're on page 173 of the text.
Thanks for being here.
As always, thank you for your support.
We are so grateful for it in the new year, and so I'll turn you over to our discussion from January 6th.
The video and photographs show that Trump flags of various kinds waving throughout the mob but mixed in the crowd are various religious banners.
One of the most popular was Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President.
Other images show people waving Jesus Saves and God Guts Guns flags throughout the crowd.
In one landscape photo showing a facade of the Capitol overrun by rioters, the Christian flag flies amid a sea of Confederate flags, Gatson flags, and Trump flags.
At least one rioter carried the Dave's Volt flag, a red medieval cross on a white background.
As a scholar of religion Matthew Gabriel observes, the red cross on a white field was supposedly the uniform of the medieval Christian crusaders, exemplified perhaps best in the military religious order of the Knights Templar.
Flags weren't the only religious artifacts manifest at the insurrection.
Some of the most violent perpetrators wore vest patches.
With a portion of Psalm 144 that read, Blessed be God, my rock, who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.
One man wore a biker-style leather jacket that read, God, guns, and Trump.
Some rioters went the extra back-breaking mile to cart around statues of Mary and Jesus as they paraded in and around the Capitol.
At least one person improvised by attaching a large crucifix to a Trump flag.
Others carried paintings.
There was one of a white, Nordic-looking Christ with the inscription, Jesus, I trust in you.
One rioter put all their cards on the table by carrying around a large poster of a European-looking Jesus wearing a MAGA hat.
And those gallows, the ones meant for Mike Pence, close-up images show that the inscriptions that rioters left on the frame read, God bless America.
In God we trust.
Next to these inscriptions, someone else wrote, Amen, agreeing with the sentiments written on an instrument meant to assassinate the Vice President of the United States.
By building the gallows, they signaled that they were done with democracy, writes the scholar of evangelicalism, Anthea Butler.
Murder was the only way they could put Trump back into office.
Rather than prayer, rather than engaging in a democratic process in the next election, murder was the choice they made.
In contrast to this murderous spirit in the air, the insurrection was marked by impromptu praise and prayer sessions.
It wasn't that rioters chose one or the other, rather the insurrectionists used prayer and other rituals to justify murderous intention.
Every time the mob crossed a new boundary, passed another police barricade, or through another doorway, certain rioters stopped to pray and thank God.
One clip showed dozens of people gathered on the Capitol lawn near the police barrier singing along with Kerry Jobe's Revelation song, a popular praise and worship song in white evangelical congregations.
In the Senate chamber, the infamous QAnon shaman, Jacob Angele, shirtless, wearing horns on his head adorned with blue face paint and carrying an American flag on a spear, led the rioters in prayer.
Let's all say a prayer in this sacred space, he said as he gathered them on and around the Senate dais.
Thank you, Heavenly Father, for this opportunity to stand up for our God-given inalienable rights, he prayed.
To all the tyrants, the communists, the globalists, this is our nation, not theirs.
We will not allow the American way to go down.
One of the most visible religious symbols throughout the riot was the shofar, an ancient instrument made from the horn of an animal such as a ram and used in Jewish religious rituals.
In my mind, such ritual acts are no accident.
Christians like the event organizer Robert Weaver, as well as my pillow CEO Mike Lindell and Trump's spiritual advisor Paula White have adopted the shofar in worship, appropriating it from Jewish rituals as a weapon of spiritual warfare meant to ward off God's enemies.
In my mind, such ritual acts are no accident.
Even amid the chaos of the riot, many in the crowd felt the need to stop to pray as they crossed into the inner depths of the congressional chamber.
They recognized that they're entering the Capitol as a crossing over, a breach of protocol and occupation. .
The rituals of chanting, singing, and praying enable them to collectively and psychologically transform the Capitol space into their own.
As the theorist of religion Tom Tweed maintains, religion maps social space.
It draws boundaries around us and them.
It constructs collective identity and committantly imagines degrees of social distances.
Thus, when the QAnon shaman thanked God for filling the Senate chamber with patriots who defend the American way and listed the globalists and communists and tyrants as the enemies of God, he drew boundaries around who is a true citizen and who is not.
He provided a story that placed the rioters in the role of God-ordained citizens, turning them all into something like Joshua's, defending the country from invaders and enemies.
The Senate chamber became theirs to inhabit because they were on the side of the Almighty.
Scholar Russell McCutcheon describes this kind of prayer as the act of granting an extraordinary reason for an otherwise ordinary thing.
In his writing on J6, Peter Manseau argues that the rioters had a quote, permission structure that provided the psychological mechanism needed to justify killing police officers and erecting gallows for the vice president.
He says, even for those without strong Christian convictions, the pervasive religious imagery provided both a permission structure and a psychological safety net that allowed self-declared patriots to rampage through a space they supposedly held sacred.
If any had second thoughts as they charged up the Capitol steps, they perhaps needed only to see a Bible thrust in the air above the crowd to be put at ease.
How could a righteous mob be wrong?
The Christian flag, symbols, rituals, and Bible verses gave the rioters' actions a sense of divine permission, reassuring them that the desacralization of the Capitol was actually a sanctification of the American way.
Through rituals of their white Christian nationalist faith, many insurrectionists rendered the profane act of desecrating the Capitol into a sacred act of reclamation on behalf of real Americans.
And so I guess for me, just to kind of close my comments, I really see Christian nationalism as an integrating force of J6 precisely because of what I just read.
It provides a story and a structure that puts everyone involved on the right side of God, on the right side of the United States, and on the right side of history.
Even if you, as Peter Manso says, haven't been to church in years.
Seeing the Bible waved, seeing people pray, seeing pastors encourage people, This is enough, perhaps, to convince you that what you're doing is just and sacred rather than disgusting and treasonous.
I'll close there.
I want to turn it over to my co-host Dan Miller and give him a chance to share some thoughts on January 6, two years on, and then we'll go around the panel from there.
So Dan, take it away.
Thanks, and thanks for that, Brad.
It's a good setup, I think, probably for a lot of thoughts people are going to share.
I'm going to start with something that, I mean, I talk about on the podcast, I talk about in my book, and some people who've heard that or read that may be tired of hearing it, but I think part of what you highlight, Brad, is that one of the things I think J6 knows us or shows us if we're talking about Christian nationalism is that we It's a big collective we, right, when I say we need to rethink what we mean by Christian identity.
I think a lot of people have a sense that being religious is about belief and believing certain things and so forth, and when it comes to Christianity in particular, there's a kind of cultural deference, right, that religion is inherently something, and maybe it's something positive, it's something good, it's something affirming, it's something peace-loving, and so forth.
And I still read a lot of analyses like, well, this can't be Christian nationalism because it isn't a church or it's full of people who don't read their Bibles all the time or it's people who maybe, if you do a Pew survey, they're not the ones who say that they pray every day or go to church or all of those kinds of things.
But what we have to understand, you talked about, you know, religion sort of orienting reality.
I mean, religion for lots of different kinds of religious practitioners in lots of different traditions, what we call religion is It's supposed to be a kind of comprehensive way of life.
It is supposed to determine everything that one does, what they feel, who they're allowed to love, what they think about their nation, what they think about outsiders, and so forth.
And I think it just highlights this, that I think there's still this sense that this is a corruption of religion or something, or something not authentic.
And I think we have to understand that for a lot of those people there, this was a very sincere religious act.
And that doesn't make it good, right?
That's the flip side is that religion is not inherently positive or affirmative or whatever.
So, I mean, that's still one of the big takeaways for me because I hear a lot of people say, okay, but why Christian nationalism?
Why do you keep saying Christian nationalism?
There's data that shows that a lot of these people don't go to church and things like that.
I think that's a big piece of it.
The other one that I think builds right into what you're saying and what you're sharing there is that if we allow ourselves to kind of get into the inner logic of the Christian nationalist—and that doesn't mean justifying it, right?
It means trying to understand it—it completely makes sense, right?
If you—any kind of nationalism in a contemporary state basically holds that not everybody in the state is equal, right?
That there's a subset of that population that is the real nation.
And if you really truly believe that, if you really truly believe that people who aren't Christian or maybe who aren't straight or who aren't white or who aren't the right kind of women or whatever, are not real Americans, and if democratic processes are failing to preserve America for the real Americans, and if democratic processes are failing to preserve America for the real Americans, then this What they did is a kind of logical extension of that.
And I think, again, we have to understand that to understand the threat that it poses, right?
That for millions of Americans, this is completely reasonable, completely rational, right?
A very natural response to what for them can only be losing America, right?
Because they're the real or the authentic Americans.
And maybe the last thing, and then I'll stop talking, is just another thing that we talk about a lot is the way that racial and religious disparities color how we talk about things that happen in the country.
For example, we've talked on the podcast, everybody here will be familiar with examples, when Somebody from a Muslim background does something, we'll talk about Muslim extremism or we'll talk about their country, this kind of big corporate sense of identity.
Whenever you have a white shooter somewhere, it's the lone gunman, it's somebody who's just mentally ill or it's isolated to the individual.
I think what J6 shows us, what the stuff that happened in Michigan before that showed us, what lots of other things show us, is I think America does have a sort of systemic white Christian man problem.
And I think that's a theme that was really, really present there and is another thing that is really hard to talk about in, I think, American media and the way that we think about these things.
So those are some of my takeaways and really looking forward to hearing what others have to say.
Yeah, thanks, Dan.
Yeah, I mean, there's so many things to say.
I'm going to just hold off and throw it over to Sarah and ask Sarah to share some of her thoughts.
So, Sarah, off to you.
Yes, thank you very much, Brad.
It's great to be with you all.
I apologize if you're picking up some weird noise.
My computer is not very healthy, so it's It's anyway.
So I have prepared some remarks because I have been in writing mode for quite some time and this is an argument I am still working out for my larger book project.
So thank you all for being willing to listen.
So 30 years ago this month, you would have found me a piously earnest 17-year-old planning my school's yearly pilgrimage to the March for Life in Washington, D.C.
Started by another student four years earlier, this trip allowed us, too young to vote, to feel that our political witness was essential to the well-being of the nation-state.
We were essential to the nation.
After all, if a nation can't protect its most innocent and vulnerable, how could any of us have to claim that, be able to claim that innocence for ourselves?
Just two years later, another group of teenagers from the Southern Baptist Convention would make a plea for personal and collective innocence on the lawn of the National Mall.
DC94 was an evangelical youth event co-sponsored by Youth for Christ and a new initiative from the Southern Baptist Church called True Love Waits.
Their aim was simple and targeted.
Introduce to the nation.
A group of young people, present in person and represented via 120,000 pledge cards, staked into the lawn.
A display of sexual innocence calling an immoral nation to account.
True Love Waits founder Richard Ross explained it this way.
Over the centuries, God has chosen to initiate sweeping revival and awakenings through youth and young adults.
In America, God has sparked revivals among those just completing their teenage years.
I believe that it will be pure, courageous, true love waits teenagers and young adults whom God will be using to change the very fabric of our society.
The sexual purity movement of the 1990s and 2000s was first and foremost an expression of white Christian nationalism.
It was rooted in the need to represent the American nation-state as inherently innocent vis-a-vis its special relationship with God, which presumably has existed since the founding.
Beginning in the 19th century, various groups have symbolized this innocence, representations drawn from the racialized history of white evangelicalism, which asserts the white evangelical family unit as the foundation for a strong Christian nation.
White women, sexually pure teenagers, and fetuses in the womb all have at some point signified the myth of national innocence used to elicit demands for increased evangelical power and social influence.
On January 6, 2021, the displays of white Christian nationalism in the nation's capital further reinforced the symbolic power, in particular, that of white women.
Stories and images of white women attacking the Capitol confounded many people.
Including the women themselves.
Accounts by and about these women roundly situate them as innocent of wrongdoing and even being subject to wrongdoing.
The symbolic power of white womanhood is deeply embedded in the genetic makeup of the United States in such a way that conflict between the two is seemingly unimaginable.
There are many examples of white women, followers of Trump, using claims of innocence to exonerate themselves and their MAGA savior on January 6.
I'd like to share the stories of two as a way to demonstrate how these women, even when actively choosing to break federal law and commit physical violence, were able to draw upon their presumed innocence for self-protection and the illusion of a just cause.
Gina Bisaggiano, a cosmetologist for Beverly Hills, California, was arrested and indicted on January 21, 2021.
At her arraignment the next month, she pled not guilty to all charges, including obstruction of an official proceeding, civil disorder, and engaging in physical violence in a restricted building.
But the video footage showed Besaggiano during the insurrection with a bullhorn, directing people to bring their weapons inside.
She said, We need strong, angry patriots to help our boys.
They don't want to leave.
We need protection.
We, the people, are not going to take it anymore.
You are not going to take away our Trumpy Bear.
You are not going to take away our votes and our freedom and I thank God that I thank God for.
This is 1776 and we the people will never give up.
We will never let our country go globalist.
George Soros, you can go to hell.
Despite evidence of her guilt, Bissegianno has insisted on her innocence many times.
She described her involvement in J6 as a passive one to her local newspaper, the Beverly Hills Courier.
She told them, I was caught up.
I was scared.
I was excited.
A guy said, A guy said to say that over the megaphone.
I don't even remember saying it.
She complained that the reviewers on her business's Yelp page were characterizing her as a terrorist, to which she responded, I want to clear my name.
Everyone in Beverly Hills knows I'm not.
I am a Christian.
Following up with a final declaration, I didn't do anything.
Visajana's cognitive dissonance around her involvement in the insurrection continued into her sentencing.
Initially pleading not guilty, she eventually signed a plea deal because of her fear of a long-term prison sentence.
And yet, with audiences of Trump supporters, she continues to maintain her belief that her actions that day were just.
Shortly after the assault, Fox News host Tucker Carlson discussed another white woman, Ashley Babbitt, a woman who was shot and killed by Capitol Police as she attempted to trespass into the building.
Carlson, who initially referred to the 36-year-old Babbitt as a girl, said this, Why did the woman go to the rally in the first place?
We did not know anything about her, but she did not look particularly radical.
She bears no resemblance to the angry children we have seen wrecking our cities.
Pasty, entitled, reckless nihilists setting fires, spray-painting slogans on statues.
She didn't look like that.
The woman in the Capitol's hallway pretty much looked like everyone else.
Why was she there?
On right-wing discussion boards, Babbitt was lauded as an innocent girl and a murderer.
She quickly became a form of propaganda, another white woman used as a tool that softens the edges of the far right, according to one journalist.
Throughout the history of the U.S., white anti-Black activists have exploited the harm or killing of white women to clarify their urgency and call for violent action.
But as a nationalistic trope, white womanhood is not uniquely deployed by the political rights and offers any white woman the ability to assert her white racial power over non-whites.
What holds this symbolic power in place is an ideology that connects sexual and racial purity with national arriving, what scholars have named white Christian nationalism.
A primary element of this ideology is the myth of national innocence, that a nation found with reverence for the Christian God cannot also be capable of forms of injustice.
Those who claim injustice and demand accountability, Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, are vilified and dismissed as a threat to the social order.
But what happens when a group that relies upon national mythologies of Innocence positions themselves against the nation.
How do they reconcile the conflict between personal and collective innocence?
How do they claim moral authority for themselves and their nation while also attempting the very thing that authority rests upon?
The solution to this dilemma, as far as I've come to discern, and there's probably more to this, I'm sure there is, the solution to this dilemma is to deploy a symbol that simultaneously represents both national and individual innocence, white womanhood.
Fortunately for those now seeking pardon from the nation for their sedition, white womanhood has served marvelously to disguise more sinister truths about the nation's complicity with and dependence on white Christian supremacy.
The real culprits, according to these women, are those quasi-citizens who cannot or will not offer the nation a veneer of respectability.
Because they challenge the nationalistic claims, Christian virtue, and white racial superiority.
What Bissagianno's and Babbitt's stories demonstrate is that white women's innocence is a powerful mythology that shapes national ideologies about race, sexuality, national survival, and security.
Whether or not white women deploy this trope in a moment of personal crisis, white Christian nationalism allows them the right and even the responsibility to do so.
Through white women's presumed vulnerability, sexual purity, and religious piety, white Christian nationalists uphold myths of the nation's white racial innocence, wherein anti-Black and other forms of state-sanctioned violence are premised as protective.
rather than aggressive.
And of course here, thinking about the history of lynching, which is where much of this is rooted.
So if you have questions about that, I'm happy to answer them.
And finally, in other words, white Christian nationalism requires the U.S.
nation state to propagate white women's incontrovertible moral authority in order to exonerate both the United States and Christianity from a long-standing history of racial Thank you.
Just fantastic reflection, Sarah.
Thank you.
And somebody already said in the chat, can't wait to read the full project when it's ready for the world.
I have about 10 pages in my book about how Christian nationalism is the original purity culture, but it is paltry in terms of Uh, what it contains compared to I, I know what you just shared and what you eventually will be in, in your book.
So can't wait for that.
And just a little teaser.
We're working on a podcast series, uh, with Sarah, um, exactly on what, uh, or very close to what she just shared.
So be on the lookout for that.
Um, all right.
All right, I want to send it over to Lucas and just get your thoughts, Lucas, on January 6th, two years later.
Thank you so much, Bradley, for this opportunity.
And thank you to Straight White American Jesus for sponsoring the podcast, Monster in the Mirror.
I'll drop the link in the chat a little later.
So, I think what I'd like to do is just very briefly sketch the thesis of the podcast and then kind of use that as a conceptual lens for thinking about J6 and kind of where it fits into the story that Christian nationalists were telling themselves that day.
So, the crux of the thesis of the podcast is that white Christians in the United States are living through the late Victorians' fears, and as a result, have revived the late Victorians' fantasies.
And what I mean by that is, at the end of the 19th century, Victorian Britain is overwhelmingly white and Christian.
But at the height of its greatness, it begins to suffer these nightmarish visions of its decline.
And there are a host of reasons for that.
But they basically boil down to the increased visibility of independent women, queer people, non-white minorities, increased information about non-Christian religions, as well as the broader context of limits on the territorial expansion of the empire and Racial science, which is always concerned with threats to the preservation of the white race.
In response to that, these fantasies, the most popular of which, of course, include Dracula and War of the Worlds, both of which were featured, by the way, on a reading list for white supremacists that journalist Teddy Wilson recently unearthed.
These fantasies specifically pit white Christians against not just villains or foreign powers, but outright monsters, demonically empowered monsters.
To effect a kind of catharsis, an exorcism of everything that white Christians are afraid of, and thereby usher in this kind of millennial rejuvenation of the nation.
Now, what that has to do with J6 is, you know, you can sort of see January 6th as the climactic scene of a late Victorian Gothic fantasy or a kind of fantasy that begins with the 2020 election, right?
So, in broad strokes, everything I've said, those of you who are tracking Christian nationalism, these are very familiar ideas, right?
A white Christian nation that is threatened, that has to reclaim its greatness and so forth.
But specifically, beginning with the 2020 election, you can see that as sort of, you know, narratologists will call it the inciting incident of a plot, the event that kicks off the plot.
And in Victorian Gothic, that's always the incursion of some foreign threat, whether it's Dracula imprisoning Jonathan Harker or, you know, I talked about the book The Beetle, about this polymorphous, basically transgender monster that imprisons a homeless British man.
In England, the election in the minds of Christian nationalists is that inciting incident.
It is the moment at which the foreign powers menacing the nation seize control and take away the rightful inheritance of white Christians.
And the PBS's frontline documentary It pinpoints the exact moment at which you could see this narrative being hatched, which is at Lin Wood's mansion in South Carolina.
In mid-November 2020, I think, he and several figures from Trump World get together and they basically hatch this narrative about Dominion's compromised voting machines.
From which, of course, you know, Sidney Powell's infamous Kraken press conference where she unveils all the monsters that are behind this coming to the fore, right?
The CCP, George Soros, you know, the ghost of Hugo Chávez, you know, this array of foreign actors.
So, between the 2020 election and January 6th, you have this mounting escalation in their minds of conflict, because what's happening?
These lawsuits are being stymied at every turn.
In their minds, the deep state is doing its best to counter the innocent heron folk of America.
So, one way to account for this massive sense of anger, coupled with religious fury, is that is that narrative.
On the day itself, this taking back of a landmark, that is a trope that is common to a lot of narratives.
For example, Dracula stalks the London Zoo.
Today, it's not well understood, but the London Zoo was an emblem of imperial greatness.
And there's this idea that it's been compromised by Dracula.
Similarly, in War of the Worlds, the Martians take over London.
So, when you have them storming the capital and you have Dutch sheets, as Matthew pointed out on the podcast, doing these prayer walks at these various landmarks, doing spiritual warfare, This is about exorcism.
It's about expelling the monster.
And in that worldview, that is the permission structure.
That is the kind of emotional context for why there's absolutely no reservation about doing this.
In terms of the actual monsters that they're fighting, of course we have George Soros, and in the episode I talk about how George Soros is basically Dracula.
I mean, I don't even mean that in a loose way.
Dracula is a coded Jewish aristocrat who is draining the nation, right?
And that's George Soros in their imagination.
Of course, the CCP is the revival of the yellow peril, right?
It's significant.
They don't say Joe Biden sold us out to Russia or Venezuela or Cuba.
It's Joe Biden sold us out to China, right?
And there was a scene of insurrectionists tearing up a Chinese scroll, a scroll of Chinese calligraphy that the New York Times captured shouting, we don't want Chinese bullshit, right?
So, they are, again, exercising this sacred space that's been defiled.
And then the last thing I'll say is about Jake Angeli, the Q Shaman, who yes, was shouting Jesus prayers, but also emblematizes this confluence of belief in Jesus with belief in literal aliens, not just metaphorical legal aliens.
Jake Angeli believes he's a starseed, a half-human alien, who is embroiled in a kind of intergalactic warfare with bad aliens, right?
The reptilians.
And we can laugh at this as ridiculous, but it's a testament to the force of these narratives that there is this outside force that's literally menacing Earth, and America in particular, that have taken on a life of their own and survived over a century, that now we see them resurface.
And, you know, that's all I can say for now.
I'm happy to share more later.
But to me, there are so many ways, genres, into which J6 fits, one of which being, like, the Western, as with the nooses is a Western iconography, right?
But one of them is the monster story.
And I think that's key to understanding the outpouring of emotion that day.
If you haven't listened to Monster in the Mirror, I highly encourage you to do that, and I think Lucas just gave a fantastic kind of outline of how he approaches all this.
The very first episode's in the chat, and he talks about the Gothic genesis of Christian nationalism, and honestly, the overlaying of these Gothic monsters onto the ways that Christian nationalism manifests in our countries In my mind, just genius.
And so check it out because you will learn a lot.
I learned a lot and it also renewed, Lucas, my jealousy that I love being a religious studies professor.
But if I had another life, I would, you know, want to be an English professor.
You get to read cool books and talk about them.
Not that, you know, not that I don't get to read cool books, but, you know, there's something very romantic about the English professor.
So you only remind me that every time we talk.
So, all right.
Matt Taylor, you are up, and I don't know if you want to start, but I think some folks would love to hear about the breaking news that you and I wrote about, and mainly you wrote about in a piece today at Religion Dispatches, about certain New Apostolic Reformation apostles being at the White House in the days before January 6th.
seems kind of like a big deal.
So off to you.
So Brad and I had a piece in Religion Dispatches.
In the final episode, we had some breaking news and Lucas caught a little bit of attention to it about this unreported, previously unreported meeting with some of these apostolic reformation leaders, especially Sheets and Greenwood, who were both very directly mentored by Peter Wagner.
We're able to trace them to the White House on December 29th, 2020.
So just about eight days before the Capitol riot and then kind of track what they were doing on the day of as well.
Maybe I'd back up a little bit and tell some of the story behind Charismatic Revival Fury and give a little background that we didn't really even give in the series.
I would start in some ways with where Brad started with his reading.
You just had so many different forms of Christianity and Christian expressions on display that day.
And I think for a lot of us who even who are religion scholars, when we looked at that, it just felt we were just kind of awash with chaos, right?
Chaotic imagery, the chaotic ideas that were there, the contradictory and hypocritical expressions were all over the place.
And then as I was looking at that, though, I saw certain patterns in the chaos, and that's what I was really trying to track down with my research over the last two years and with Charismatic Revival Theories, trying to find some of the patterns in that.
I think it's helpful in my mind to think not just about Christian nationalism as some homogenous entity, but as Christian nationalisms, that there are different forms of Christian nationalism.
And I would argue that not all forms of Christian nationalism are created equal.
Some of them are more potent.
Some of them have more juice in them.
Some of them are more violent.
Some of them are more activating for people.
And as I was trying to dig into, I think my basic question was, look, the people going into the Capitol, they're foot soldiers.
People in the crowds mostly are foot soldiers.
Who are the leaders?
Who are the theological architects behind this stuff?
Where did this stuff come from?
And as I was trying to do it in part through some of my own background and personal biography, but then also through some of the connections I was able to make academically, I realized actually a lot of people from the New Episodic Reformation were there.
And a lot of these independent charismatic leaders had a very governing role in how the crowds thought about themselves.
And you can see this in their Facebook feeds.
You can see this in the social media profiles of the people who showed up that day.
You can find who the leaders were that they were following.
And so I trace this back to C. Peter Wagner, who coined the term the Apostolic Reformation and who really built the architecture, the superstructure of it, starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
And especially this one mentoring group that he had, the Eagles Vision Apostolic Team, that was a group of about 25 to 30 people that were his family, his spiritual family.
They literally called him their father, their spiritual father, their apostolic father.
He called them his sons and daughters.
And these were an incredibly talented group of people.
Wagner was very good at finding talented, entrepreneurial Smart, articulate people and mentoring them and drawing them into his circle.
And they really became quite radicalized with his theology.
One of the things that you'll find, I find this having done interviews with a lot of these folks, nobody in the charismatic world wants to speak ill of Peter Wagner today.
People still have deep, deep respect for the man and think that he was a great leader.
And so part of what I'm trying to do is expose the reality of what he actually did and the people that he actually mentored.
So when I reached out to Brad, I don't even know, six, seven, eight months ago, and I pitched this idea of, let's track these EVAT members and tell the story of the Neo-Apostolic Reformation, but tell it through January 6th.
And we'll look at these people, Che On and Lance Wallnau and Becca Greenwood and Cindy Jacobs and Dutch Sheets, who were all directly involved that day.
And then in the course of researching and writing was when I stumbled across this evidence, Dutch Sheets, as I was gathering audio clips and really trying to track this prophecy tour that he was leading and realized, actually, there's a lot more to the story here.
And I think what So Dutch Sheets leads this prophecy tour through the swing states that I think was one of the most galvanizing pieces for gathering people to go to the Capitol and really to keep protesting, gathering in this kind of stop the steal movement.
And he says that he was inspired by government leaders who he spoke to directly, who suggested this plan to him.
And then he shows up on December 29th at the White House, and the members of his team are saying, we are talking strategy.
And so when you think about our own attention and the attention we paid to Christian nationalism, even in the aftermath of January 6th, the Trump administration knew where the juice was.
They knew where the most galvanizing forces of Christian nationalism were in people like Dutch Sheets, and they activated that, right?
And the media wasn't paying attention, and a lot of us weren't paying attention, but they knew.
And so now a lot of politicians know that.
That playbook is out in the open in some sense, and I think we need to pay closer attention as well.
Thanks.
Thanks, Matt.
And I think many of you have, and I'm seeing questions come in on this set of themes Matt's talking about.
But if you have not listened to Charismatic Revival Fury yet, I would highly encourage you to.
The New Apostolic Reformation is kind of like the stock market and retirement funds.
Everyone seems to think they know what's going on, and they will gladly tell you about it.
But they don't.
I'll just be honest.
They don't.
So Matt's done just field changing work to really present the genealogy and the family trees.
And as he just laid out how that all led us to two years ago to careening toward January 6th, including stops at the Willard Hotel and at the White House.
So anyway, all right, we have a bunch of questions and I'm going to try to conglomerate those and kind of address them to the to the panelists.
I want to say thank you to all of you.
For me, it's a big week to have my book come out, and it means a lot to me that so many of you would come.
But just to get to be here with these panelists tells me I'm doing something right to get to hang out with them and all of you who are here.
So couldn't be more grateful to have a community of people to share all of this stuff with.
So, all right, let's talk about some questions that have been posed.
This is for the panel.
And so it says, "We're actively seeing a Republican splinter in the House.
It seems as if they might get it done tonight.
We'll see.
Do we see similar divisions amongst Christian nationalist leaders?
Where's the wind blowing now that the, quote, storm didn't materialize?
Is there a sense of fracturing?
Are new myths or prophecies coming to the front?
So, I'll throw this over to anybody.
Any thoughts on kind of, as Matt just said, different Different iterations of Christian nationalism across the country in various denominational corners, various theological corners, but wondering if we're seeing any kind of fracturing or splintering as time wears on, Trump's sheen wears off, so on and so forth.
So anyone who'd like to jump in.
I can, sorry, I can take a stab at that sort of it.
And it'd be interesting, you know, Matt and I someday like sit down over a beer or a coffee or something and talk about these these twin poles.
I think of like the close-up view of like like appreciating all those differences and those nuances and at the same time that sort of zoom out view in a way because what I see is With all of those differences, you still have these kind of what I'll call formal similarities, right?
And I think everybody who maybe has come out of some of these traditions, has studied these traditions, has looked at like the history of millennialism and eschatology and prophecies about the coming of the Messiah and so on and so right.
Something to play on my phrase, right, it's like it's in the code of Christianity, right, this kind of ongoing thing, is that you can sort of fill, it's like an empty box, you can fill it in different ways, but the box kind of stays the same.
So, I think that more than seeing prominent Christian nationalists or these theological thinkers, or the ones who are really good at being activated or activating others, as Matt describes, I think more than seeing them depart from that, you just see this kind of shift.
Somebody else will occupy that, or it's the same way that prophets of these kinds have always been resistant to The prophecy not playing out, because by definition, it can always play out in the future.
That's the beauty and terror of the discourse, right?
It can never be disproven.
We might be wrong, but God's not wrong, or whatever sort of superpower force is operative is not wrong.
So I think for me, and I don't know exactly where that'll go, but I think the more interesting question is not so much, are they fracturings?
I don't think we'll see real divergences.
Otherwise, they just won't be Christian nationalists anymore.
That's what'll happen.
They'll be sort of shoved out of the movement.
I think it's, okay, who becomes the next, you know, Nebuchadnezzar, or, you know, whatever figure it was, like in the Hebrew Bible, when you would have some ancient Near Eastern king, and the prophets would say that this was God's chosen tool.
That's the logic that played out with Trump, right?
Is that God can take this flawed human being, he did the same thing with King David, and on and on and on.
I think for me the question is not so much do they fracture, but where does that go next?
Where does that land?
What does that light shine on?
Who or what is slotted into that kind of formal structure to play that role?
And I could be wrong about that, but I'm just really struck by how resilient that form is.
Precisely because different figures can be slotted in there and can fill that out, and because that sort of prophetic imaginary can never be disproven, because it is by definition always to come.
So those are some thoughts that I have, and I'm really interested in hearing what others say about this.
I'll just say, for my money, I think we're in a time right now of, I think we're in a time, I'll just be brief on this, of shifting sands.
There was a moment there where field key to Trump was kind of the admission ticket and with Trump's sort of Uncertain status.
I don't see Robert Jeffress as much in front of my face anymore.
Do you all?
Right?
I don't see some of those folks who are feeling really juiced up on a lot of Christian Nationalist caffeine just in my face all the time.
So I think there's a sense of like trying to get a handle on where the wind's blowing, how to make next moves, what is strategic, what is not.
And I think there's a little bit of like, I'm going to put my head in the sand.
And when I figure out who's in charge, who's got the mob behind them, is it Ron DeSantis?
Is it Trump?
Then I will kind of, you know, we'll get ready and regroup.
I think the thing to remember though, is that they will always regroup.
You know, if you read Anne Nelson, and I encourage everyone to read The Shadow Network, the Council for National Policy is always ready to shift to plan B, C, and D.
Like Anne Nelson taught me this more than anyone, that there is always plan B.
There's always plan C.
And so to think that there's not is a mistake.
Matt, you wanted to jump in here.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I just, specifically in this kind of independent charismatic world, I would just point out there have been two statements that have come out since January 6.
One was called the Prophetic Standards Statement, and one was called the NAR and Christian Nationalism Statement.
And they've had a variety of signatories, many of whom are apostles and prophets themselves.
And they are tacitly criticizing the prophets who supported Trump and refused to disavow their prophecies, and then criticizing Christian nationalism in the movement.
So you are seeing elements, I would say many of those people are still what I would call Christian nationalists, but they see this kind of extremism, and they want to distance themselves from it.
I'll just tell one quick story, because when I read these statements, I thought they were milquetoast and kind of silly.
They seemed mealy-mouthed to me.
The Prophetic Standards Statement, the only person I could find who was actually close to Peter Wagner who signed it was this prophet in Tennessee.
I interviewed him, and when I interviewed him, the last question I asked him was, hey, you signed this thing, what about that?
And he got tears in his eyes, and he described Total career change that he was experiencing and being blackballed by these other leaders for signing this thing.
And he said, I made them take all the stuff about Trump out of the statement.
And then I was willing to sign it.
And he still is getting attacked.
So I think there's this dual move of kind of, you're seeing fissures, but you're seeing a retrenchment, a hardening in certain forms of Christian nationalism, is unwilling to brook any disloyalty or disavowalment.
All right.
First, thanks Matt for that.
And just for zooming, you know, there's a sense here of zooming in, zooming out.
And I really, I really think both are just so important.
Um, let's stay on, on, on your sort of, uh, wheelhouse, Matt.
Um, and, and of course anyone else can jump in here, but how do new apostolic prophets like Cindy Jacobs have any credibility other than self-assumed?
So I think listening to your series, there was a lot of people that are like, can I just say I'm an apostle?
And can I just say I'm a prophet?
And like, You know, that sounds good.
And there's a lot of private jet flying around and, you know, nice jewelry on the, on the neck.
Like, it seems like pretty cool to be an apostle.
So how do you get to be one?
Do you just say it?
Or, I mean, I think I know the answer, but what, what, what do you think?
This is where I use the academic phrase that their power is mutually constitutive.
So you get into the group by getting into the group, by the group kind of recognizing you as part of that oligarchic echelon.
And so, I mean, Cindy Jacobs is at the very top of that echelon, right?
She has all these other apostles and prophets pointing to her and saying, yeah, she's real.
She's for real.
I've had people in interviews tell me there is no one in the world who hears from God more clearly than Cindy Jacobs.
And so as they kind of reinforce that for each other, that keeps kind of the myth of their charisma, the myth of their insight alive.
And that's in some ways the genius of this stuff is they can kind of hold each other all up and they never will criticize each other.
They'll never will attack each other directly because they know it's kind of a house of cards when they do that.
Any other?
Thoughts on this?
I'll just say briefly, I see this in like, if you think of professional circles, I think we see how this works, right?
Like if you, once you have someone in your network and you trust them, if you have a job, if you have a slot, if you have a thing you need done and once someone's in the group, you go call them, right?
And, you know, this happens with journalism a lot.
Like, why are all the same people on CNN all the time?
Well, because they're known figures, they're known faces, and people know what they're going to say.
And so they get called and they talk and they're the talking head.
And, you know, it's the same people over and over.
It's a little bit like this in a much different context and in much different ways with the apostolic reformation prophets and apostles and so on.
So, all right.
One question we have, and I'm wondering if Lucas you want to jump in here because I know you do work along these lines, is about positive action.
There are folks, and I get asked this question a lot, worried about creeping authoritarianism, worried about proto-fascism.
Advice on positive action.
You know, everybody is encouraged to vote, of course, but what are some other things that can be actively done to promote and protect democracy, multi-racial, pluralistic, multi-ethnic democracy in the United States?
Yeah, so that is a great question.
And, you know, just my inroad into talking about this is I got to meet Bradley through my prior work before I did this podcast.
I did an open letter about anti-Asian racism and Christian nationalism.
Today, on the Congress floor, one of the issues that was raised was, we've got to get to the bottom of what really happened in Wuhan, right?
Now this has been debunked over and over, but this goes to the heart of what I was saying that when you're dealing with stories and myth and fantasy, evidence is purely, you know, it doesn't even matter.
And so we have to think about who is telling these stories, because it's one thing to vote and voting is very important.
But to me, positive action requires us to think about the influencers, Uh, the networks through which they are allowed to gain power and gain their platform and to cut off that platform as much as possible.
And I will say in my work, which involves trying to hold Christian nationalist influencers responsible for spreading these lies about, about China.
A lot of that, um, platform is garnered through the complicity of people around them, particularly in their churches, people who might even consider themselves progressive.
So for example.
Tucker Carlson is a lifelong Episcopalian, actually.
He belongs to one of the most progressive denominations.
And yet, his neighborhood parish... I had the opportunity to speak with the priest at his neighborhood parish in Boca Grande, Florida.
Unfortunately, she...
does not, did not want to even go to the point of agreeing that Tucker Carlson says bad things.
She says something along the lines, well, I don't know what he says on his show because I don't watch it, right?
But then also, well, there's a reason they don't watch his show, which is circling because, well, you're telling me there's a reason you don't watch the show, right?
Anyway, my bottom line is there has to be direct action taken against the institutions that have given them this platform.
He has part of, His respectability is being a church attendee, same with a lot of these politicians.
So, I think there have to be actions up to and even including collective action on the part of members of these denominations confronting those churches and saying, hey, there's someone in your midst who has done great harm.
What are you doing to hold this person accountable?
And I would say also to think about the publishers.
Who's publishing who?
How can we hold those publishers accountable?
Some of these people are on publishing houses with ostensibly more progressive people.
Are they willing to put their money where their mouth is and confront their publishers?
Are we willing to confront those publishers and maybe even boycott them?
So, those are all things.
I know it's hard to get off the ground, believe me, because it requires collective action, but we have to begin by taking that threat seriously.
One of the things I appreciated most about what you did in the series, Lucas, is so Lucas is courageous.
So, he called a lot of churches and talked to Mike Pompeo's pastor and Tucker Carlson's priest and had some pretty tough questions for them.
And listening to the tapes, they weren't Oh, is that excited to talk to Lucas?
Um, you know, but part of the answer I think that you're giving Lucas is it's awkward.
It's kind of like socially disruptive.
It's not that like fun.
It's like a, a really cringy social situation.
And that's the point.
That's the point, right?
And so, um, that kind of collective action is, is it sometimes feels like grinding gears, but that's exactly what you're doing, right?
You're grinding the gears of institutions that are moving and allowing people to be platformed, to be, uh, gaining in influence and popularity and, uh, and affluence and so on.
So.
All right.
Question for the panel is about ACSI, is about Christian homeschools, curriculas.
How are they spinning J6?
You know, what's going on in private schools?
Are there ways that these institutions are trying to hide that they're drivers of the white Christian nationalists?
Kind of movements in the United States, or are they proudly kind of teaching that?
So it's a tough question.
We really haven't talked a lot about education.
I don't think any of the five of us are really in the weeds on this on a daily basis, but I'm happy for anyone to take a shot at kind of talking about how these things work in Christian day schools and other places, homeschools, of course, and so on.
So anyone want to jump in here?
I'd honestly be shocked if they even mentioned it.
The easiest way to teach about it is just to avoid it.
I was going to say, just to jump on what Matt said, I mean, that's been one prominent response to J6 ever since, right, is the trivialization side of it, right?
There's the sort of triumphalist side, but there's the, oh, it was not, there was tours.
It was like, there was like tours of the Capitol, right?
And a step down from that is, especially if you're talking about kids who like don't watch the news and don't know what's going on and like, you know, that kind of thing.
Just don't, yeah.
I mean, that can be the strategy is to just pretend that it never happened.
But keep just implicating the obvious idea that, well, of course, America is a Christian nation.
The founders are all good Christians.
That broader myth and just sort of just leave that entirely out can be its own really effective strategy.
Yeah.
I would say if you're really interested in this question, check out the work of Ryan Stoller, S-T-O-L-L-A-R.
Ryan is in the weeds on this every day and knows more about Christian homeschooling and what are being taught in those spaces than anyone I know, so he has a book coming out too in the next year and a half.
I would point you there.
We're going to take one or two more.
I know people need to run.
So one question is, and this is something I think, you know, is addressed in the NAR series, Matt, but I think it's something all of us might talk about is All of us, it strikes me, all of us, all five of us, come from some kind of evangelical tradition.
And I think all of us remember the days when the Southern Baptist Convention would have looked down upon, laughed away, the New Apostolic Reformation set of apostles and prophets and participants.
Where are we with that now?
You know, I mean, I know, like Sarah, you come from the Midwest and a very sort of particular tradition that in the Midwest to me is always home of like Reformed and Calvinist institutions and other things.
Dan, you're a former Southern Baptist.
Lucas, you come from a Chinese American context that sort of defies being placed easily on the right or left kind of spectrum in my mind.
Matt, you and I are both from Southern California.
So anyway, I'm wondering if anyone would like to jump in here and just talk about the ways that Different groups and different versions or iterations of Christian nationalism have become kind of respectable in this world since, you know, 2016.
So, any thoughts here?
Yeah, well, the first thing that comes to mind is Left Behind.
And I single that out because it's sort of like a great distillation of the way that the more buttoned-down wing of evangelicalism converges with the out-and-out fantasies.
is framed as fiction on one hand, right?
The authors are not necessarily speaking in tongues and Tim LaHaye in particular has a very long history, you know, being kind of squarely in, you know, he's not a Dutch seat.
Let me put it that way, okay?
But because Left Behind takes off and becomes so convoluted with its mythology, I think it awakens this thirst for these increasingly convoluted mythologies that have long been dormant, in which Christianity is menaced by these foreign others.
And to me, that opens the door for an openness to more Byzantine theology and kind of what I think is the MCU version of Christian theology, right?
Where you have spiritual strongholds, you have different types of demons corresponding to different types of problems, you know, and anybody can have apostolic authority.
Although, of course, you have to be in the group, right?
So, again, for me, coming at it from literary studies, it's the power of that story and the need to continually make sense of things that otherwise don't make sense, like the fact that how could Trump lose this election, that I think has forged a marriage of convenience and, in some cases, a genuine turn toward Pentecostal Christianity.
On one hand, I think that Stephen Wolfe, the guy who wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism, I don't think he'd be very comfortable.
It doesn't seem like an NAR speaking in tongues kind of convention.
But I do think he would definitely see them as useful allies.
And part of that is this deeper mythology that we have a common enemy, a monster.
And I keep going back to Dracula, but in Dracula you have...
The leader is a Catholic, you know, of a bunch of white Anglians.
That's because decline is so scary that all these denominational and theological differences sort of fade into the background a little bit because you have to fight the monster, right?
So that's sort of my take.
Sarah?
Yeah, so I come out of Midwestern Calvinist evangelicalism, very similar to what Wolf comes out of.
And what's interesting, what's helped me sort of make sense of it, and again, like I think there is, there has been sort of historically a lot of tension because Calvinists tend to be very elitist, much more intellectual, if I put that in quotes, right?
And so they need different strategies for being able to demonstrate the orthodoxy of their beliefs, right?
They don't rely on myth-making.
They don't rely on the fantasy that Lucas is talking about in the same way.
But what white Calvinist evangelicals are very, very good at is perpetuating various forms of ignorance And especially around, especially around history, especially around painful situations, right?
And I think this, you know, helps.
This is what has helped me sort of understand what's been happening with the Southern Baptist Church.
I've been studying sexual use in the SBC for about three years now.
And just sort of the You know, the respectability politics of the institutions, right?
Those are the things that need to be protected.
Those are, you know, in the same way that you protect the nation state, right?
You protect the institution.
And its leaders grew through silence, right?
Through control, through, you know, sort of respectability policing, right?
We see this over and over again as people tell their stories about, you know, as survivors of sexual abuse and the way that the SBC has sort of dealt with them.
And so it's interesting, and for me, you know, because growing up, right, the Pentecostals, even the Southern Baptists were, right, they were totally sketchy, right?
Because they were not, right, they didn't have the kind of respectability that we did.
And I don't, you know, of course didn't realize how very elitist that was.
But even with A tradition that is not, I mean, the thing about Calvinists is they're the evangelicals that are not going to be as swept up into populism and into, because populism kind of tracks nicely with anti-intellectualism, right?
So what you need then are their own set of experts.
Right?
And so this is where someone like Woof comes along and he sounds very fancy in his language and, you know, and these are people who just drive me nuts.
And in terms of, you know, using, you know, intellectualism, right, as their tool, because it gives them credibility in a way that, right, that these NAR folks aren't necessarily going to have.
Um but and to me it and see that kind of evangelicalism to me I mean in part because I'm more familiar with it but to me it has more longevity because of the respectability right because it's not it's not hot-headed Um, in the way that, you know, Pentecostals are, right?
There's, and so, so it's able to sort of, um, blend into elitist culture in ways that other folks are not.
And, um, and of course we see this at institutions.
Um, and this gets me, one of the things I've been thinking about as people have been talking is something that someone said at our Denver event, I can't remember who, but about, Remembering the kinder, gentler forms of white Christian nationalism.
And I think that's where the Calvinists are, right?
It's much more respectable.
It's much more rational.
Right?
And I think that's even more dangerous because they can make an argument that's compelling, right?
So when all this myth-making, when all this, you know, fantasy dies down, Right?
That's still going to be there.
And so this is my take, and of course it's, you know, I have a bias because this is what I study, and I think it's a very different strategy.
But yeah, it's fascinating to think about the differences.
Right?
And how all these people do share the similarities and yet, man, theologically and stylistically and in so many ways, it's like, wow, how, you know, how does this even sort of come together except without a shared enemy?
Matt, you want to give us a dispatch from our world?
I'll zoom in once more, as Deanne put it.
I think when the definitive history, the definitive religious history of the Trump administration is written in 20 years, we're going to have to grapple with the person of Paula White Cain and the absolutely central role that she played in this changeover that has happened Largely by happenstance, I would say.
She happened to be Trump's religious advisor.
He happened to catch fire with the evangelical populists.
And at the start of the Trump campaign in 2016, none of these respectable, reformed, and Southern Baptist people wanted anything to do with Donald Trump.
They didn't want to meet with him.
And so Paula White Cain was in a position where she starts bringing in the people that she knew.
And by six months, eight months later, as Trump has consolidated the entire field, suddenly James Dobson and Ralph Reed and all these respectable reform people are having to go through Paula White Kane to get access to him.
And so she was the gatekeeper who was able to kind of determine who gets access.
And she was quite the enforcer and quite powerful in that role in making sure that she kind of kept people loyal and on the same page.
And keeping these NAR and Interpreting Charismatic folks at the center of.
And just, if you need any evidence, go and look at the endorsements of Paula Kane's book that she wrote, I think it was in late 2018 or early 2019, and you've got these luminaries of evangelical intellectualism endorsing the prosperity gospel because they know that's how you cozy up to her.
Paula White had the office in the White House, so you want to get in, you got to call her up and say, hey, I'd like to come in.
And I'm sure, I'm sure Ralph Reed loved doing that.
And I got to give Reddit, I don't know if that's the right word, but because of Pentecostals, we're talking about women.
Which we don't do when we talk about the reform folks, because they're just not there.
And that's a really interesting dynamic to think about, because it's not, I mean, they're still steeped in the same theologies, but it's just, it's fascinating just from a gender studies perspective.
We're going to have to go soon, but I want to, Dan, I want to, you know, you're our Southern Baptist, so, former Southern Baptist, so we got to let you jump in here.
Yeah, I mean, just a couple thoughts that I think maps onto all of this, right, is theologically you'd have these very, you know, these different Venn diagrams and they don't mix, but when it comes to the popular experience of those religious traditions, how they actually play out, I had a conversation with an American Anglican very clearly about that once upon a time, and I said, sociology will trump theology, right, when it comes on the ground.
And so you get other things that map onto this, like regionalisms and urban versus rural and socioeconomic status and so forth.
What sort of captures it, I had a professor at a Southern Baptist College once who made the joke about growing up so far in the woods of Tennessee that the Lutherans handled snakes.
And for the like six people who get the joke, the point is that there are these distinctions that, yeah, the seminaries are going to have, the college professors are going to have, some of the pastors will have, but you keep going down that list.
And I think those become much less pronounced, and in the actual practice, lots of other things come in, including, you know, as somebody said, common enemies, including, I think, what we could call a kind of popularizing or democratizing force in Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions, right?
The free movement of the Spirit, this kind of rejection of traditional authorities, which is also the same tradition Baptists come out of, right?
Of not having a centralized authority, Not, you know, having the same strictures.
So there can be a lot of overlap, even in sort of religious practice, so that when you map it on to real cultural things that are happening, oftentimes there is this kind of common movement that is outside the control of the elite, if we want to call them that, the intellectuals within the tradition.
I think that's a really important piece of it, is the popular expression of those traditions, which is very much a part of some of the dynamics in Southern Baptist life as it relates to these kinds of movements.
I'll just jump in here briefly and say, I have a kind of analytical or philosophical perspective on this, and happy to have lots of people correct me on what they see as the shortcoming here.
But a lot of us are thinking back to decades like the 90s, the 2000s, the 2010s.
And when I think about the 1990s and the Reform and or Southern Baptist forces that were really kind of, in my experience at least, the hallmarks of Christian American evangelicalism, I'm thinking, of course, of Falwell and Dobson.
I'm thinking, of course, of Billy Graham.
I'm thinking of, you know, Robertson.
And I'm thinking of Ralph Reed.
I mean, all down the list.
There's a Baptist presence.
There's a Reformed presence.
And then we get into the kind of non-denominational era, right?
But those folks, if we just take what you said there, Sarah, about respectability, they always wanted to sell themselves as the, they're the real Americans, returning the United States to what it should be.
And they wanted to do that, like Falwell held I Love America rallies.
I mean, literally, he would have an altar call for America in the mid-1970s.
You know, Dobson wanted to do this in ways that, Sarah, you know way more about than I do, through renewing the nation and sexual purity, right?
But there was a sense to me where they thought, hey, if we can elect Ronald Reagan, if we can elect George W. Bush 25 years later, we can finally get back to the mountain, right?
And it never scratched the itch.
Like, George W. Bush just never scratched the itch.
Like, the car caught up to the, to its tail and it was like, now what?
This isn't, we didn't, I don't know.
I just thought it would feel better.
I thought it would feel, you know, we did it and, ah, I don't know.
It just, it's not happening, right?
And then they elected Barack Obama.
Holy shit.
So now we've got the prototype of what we don't want in charge of America.
A black man of mixed race with an immigrant dad, a black family, uh, grew up in Hawaii.
Is that even part of the United States?
I don't know.
I haven't checked recently.
Is that really part of the union?
Okay.
Uh, you know, all of a sudden gay marriage is legal.
And all of that respectability, I think, right?
And this is a very broad statement, but just hang with me, right?
It's like, screw it.
Screw it.
I don't George.
What is George W. Bush going to do?
What is what is Ronald?
No, no, no, no.
No.
It's time.
It's time for warfare.
It's time for battle.
It's time to get your sword bloody.
It's time to get your hands dirty.
It's time to get your weapons and get in there.
And that means Donald Trump.
And it also means if you're an apostle and you're giving me spiritual warfare battle language, this is what we need.
This is what we need.
I don't want to hear any more about a three-piece suit And Jerry Falwell up here telling me about good old-fashioned gospel hour.
I want to tear some shit down and beat some people up and get this place back in order.
You know what I mean?
And so, you know, when I think of like a grand sort of tying together, all we're saying here, to me, that, that strikes me as a kind of progression from the millennium till now.
So, all right, we really need to go.
I feel like Dan Miller, this is way past his bedtime.
And so, um, he, are you wearing, so the Sarah Miles on her bedtime as well.
The question that I've been getting a lot is, are you wearing cargo shorts right now, Dan, or no?
I'm actually wearing pajama pants.
I want to thank everybody, Sarah, Lucas, Matt, Dan, all of you who are here.
For some of you it's 9.30, for some of you it's dinner time, so we appreciate all of you.
Stay with us on Straight White American Jesus.
If you haven't listened to Matt's series, it will absolutely change your understanding.
of American Christianity in January 6th.
If you haven't listened to Lucas' Monster in the Mirror, I guarantee you he will present a literary approach to the Gothic that you never thought applied to Christian nationalism in the ways it does, and it will absolutely just change the way you think about those things.
Sarah's series is coming, and so you're going to get a lot more of what you heard tonight very soon.
And Dan and I are always here with It's in the code with interviews and with as many dad jokes as you can handle.
So there you go.
All right.
Thanks to all of you, Sarah, go ahead.
You want to jump in?
I was just going to say, and Brad from all of us, congratulations.
Oh, thank you.
We know how much work it goes into a book.
And I know for you, this was, this was a change, right?
I think this is the first time you have written a book in which you put yourself into it.
And that is a very different kind of work right you're no longer the scholar with distance and I think it is a it is a huge accomplishment and it is.
We're just also delighted to be a part of this with you, so congrats to you.
No, I really appreciate it.
Oh, thanks to all of you for showing your copies.
This is the first book I've put myself into except for the seven-volume fictional epic I've been writing where, yeah, I'm a survivalist slash surfer slash Uh, French intellectual.
So that, uh, still, still looking for a publisher.
If anyone's listening, send an email for me, but we'll see.
