The J6 Select Committee Didn't Mention Christian Nationalism - Despite Their Expert Testimony
Brad speaks to Dr. Andrew Whitehead (IUPUI) and Dr. Sam Perry (U. of Oklahoma) who discuss their written testimony to the J6 Select Committee on how Christian nationalism was a motivating force behind the J6 insurrection. They discuss the elements that tie J6 and Christian nationalism together - from the Big Lie to authoritarian violence to conspiracies like QAnon. They also discuss the long lasting ramifications leaving Christian nationalism out of the J6 report may have on the present and future of our public square.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I have two return guests who many of you will be very familiar with, and that is Dr. Andrew Whitehead and Dr. Sam Perry.
Many of you listening will know them from their work, their co-authored book, Taking America Back for God, which has been a kind of field-changing text when it comes to discussing and analyzing Christian nationalism in the United States.
You'll know them from their many other works and their co-authored articles on Christian nationalism, and I use these articles all the time in my classes on everything from the perceptions of police brutality to voting patterns and all kinds of stuff.
Sam has a book that came out just in the last year with Dr. Phil Gorski called The Flag and the Cross, and Andrew has numerous works, but one of them that is coming and we're all very excited about is his new book, American Idolatry, How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Church.
Nope, I messed it up.
Andrew, give me the subtitle.
How Christian Nationalism Betrays the gospel and threatens the church.
Betrays the gospel and threatens the church.
There it is.
All right.
So, Andrew and Sam, thanks for coming back and thanks for being here.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Always a pleasure.
So we're here today to talk about something I think is really important, and that is both of you wrote in a co-authored testimony just a wonderful outline of the impacts of Christian nationalism on the insurrection of January 6th.
You were invited to do this and to submit this to the United States House of Representatives, to the Select Committee, on January 6th.
I'm looking at the written testimony in front of me.
And this will be available publicly here going forward.
We'll post the link in our show notes so people can see that.
Let me just start with this.
This is a written testimony to Congress.
Most people have never done this.
Not a genre most people are familiar with.
They don't know how it works.
So would you just give us a little backstory on what happens when somebody invites you to submit a testimony to Congress and maybe what you hoped would come out of that as you did it?
Right.
So, I mean, it's, I think, being invited to do something like that, first we were really excited, but it actually, I think, was a continuation of several conversations that we had had ongoing.
First things, like, with our participation in the Baptist Joint Committee, this large report that we did with Jim Martisby and Andrew Seidel and, you know, and others, and Captain Stewart and others, on Christian nationalism and its role in January 6th.
Um, and we had, we had been able to interact with the house on various things and say like their free thought caucus and that's led by Jamie Raskin and other house reps there.
And so representatives for those politicians reached out to us and they said, hey, we're gathering a lot of information about January 6th.
The committee wants all of the experts that know anything about the kinds of things that went on there.
And of course, because we had written about Christian nationalism and its role on January 6th, and we had a lot of evidence and data, we were able to contribute what we felt was like a perspective that went beyond Just what we could all observe through video and through various pictures that were taken at the Capitol.
Those are certainly important and anybody who wants to can get, you know, days and days worth of story and footage and representation there.
But because we have lots and lots of survey data that have been collected, Not just at one point in time, but we actually had panel data that traveled with people or that followed Americans before and after the January 6th insurrection.
We were able to see how attitudes changed.
Our unique perspective we wanted to contribute was the kinds of things that we witnessed at the Capitol.
How pervasive are they and how are they tied to other really noxious kinds of political attitudes that I think threaten our very democracy.
So we wanted to Andrew, I'm wondering if I can ask you, as you did this, as Sam says, this is kind of growing organically out of the work you've been doing, the conversations you've been having, the connections between the Baptist Joint Committee and Congress representatives like Jamie Raskin and Representative Hoffman, who's come to talk on this show.
When you did this, Andrew, I'm wondering, You know, as academics, we're used to kind of dashed hopes, but we have to try.
So I'm just wondering, what were you hoping might, you know, might come out of putting all this on paper for the committee to see?
Yeah, you know, I think obviously we would hope that it would be useful to them and useful as well moving forward as we try to not only understand what happened on January 6th, but then going forward how we can prevent or be aware or respond back to what's happening out in the American public.
Because as Sam was saying, I think our unique contribution can be, well, what does public survey data tell us?
And that's what we do.
And that's kind of our bread and butter.
And, you know, many others were watching and cataloging religion, Christian symbolism on January 6th, what was there.
And then I think we can show, you know, across the American public, how pervasive, you know, are some of these beliefs of, honestly, you know, the insurrectionists as they live stream themselves.
I'm breaking into the capital and the words they were using the terms they were using the way that they were understanding what they were doing in real time.
You know we can to an extent measure that and see that.
So we, we didn't collect data from the insurrectionist but we can see.
You know, what Americans kind of think and believe about the special role of this particular expression of Christianity in American public life.
And then what is that connected to?
Because Christian nationalism isn't the only explanation of January 6th, but it's an important one.
And there are others.
And we kind of show that these things are intertwined and they're still with us.
And so I think That's what we were hoping would be useful.
Because I think, yeah, what led to January 6 wasn't new.
This wasn't our first experience of political violence, as many people have written.
And it likely won't be our last because much of this is still with us.
So, yeah, I think that's some of our hope.
Actually, I think just following up on that, I think it did materialize in terms of being able to, I think, express the contents of that testimony to a broader audience, but I think what Amanda Tyler was able to do before Congress, and she just knocked it off the mark, crushed it.
in terms of what she was able to present.
It was coherent.
It was, you know, it was powerful.
I think ultimately we were hoping to get such an opportunity.
The fact that Amanda Tyler was able to do that with her expertise, with his awareness, her awareness of all that's going on in the field, all these different parts, pieces, and contributions people have made, I think she did an excellent job.
But I think it's platforms like that so that we can actually have this really kind of national conversation about Christian nationalism.
That's, you know, what we'd hope.
And she was able to do that, which I think we were really glad for.
Yeah.
And if you're listening friends, Amanda Tyler is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee, which is an organization that fights for the separation of church and state freedom from religion for the sake of freedom of religion.
And she's also spearheading that organization's program, Christians Against Christian Nationalism.
So Amanda Tyler was able to actually testify before Congress and as part of everything we're talking about today.
Well, the two of you really identify four main elements that were influential in motivating people at the insurrection, and these are tied directly to Christian nationalism.
So, you know, I want to give people a kind of window into the testimony that you provided and the ways that you tie together The motivation for participating in J6 with Christian nationalism.
So the first one is the big lie.
And you talk about how the big lie is something we're all familiar with now.
The 2020 election was stolen.
The outcome was manipulated by fraud.
That's the idea.
One of the things I maintain in my work is that the Big Lie connected with Christian Nationalists because they have been told something like the country has been stolen from them since the 1960s.
So this is a group that's used to hearing it's been stolen from you and then the Big Lie comes along and it just taps into all of those decades and decades of people stoking the fire saying your country has been taken away from you by People who don't deserve it.
So, can you help us understand this?
How does the Big Lie, according to the data, connect with Christian nationalism when it comes to the insurrection?
Yeah, I mean, it's, it is, it's actually a, I mean, pretty, pretty astonishing, like how powerfully the two are related with one another.
So just like in previous studies, we had, we had shown that Christian nationalism, even after you, Christian nationalist ideology, as we measure it with various kinds of questions about what you agree with about the federal government establishing, you know, the United States as a Christian nation or the founding documents being divinely inspired or those kinds of things.
Just as it predicts Trump's support for the vote, it is basically associated with believing the big lie in what we'd call a linear relationship, right?
The more one increases, the other increases.
But this is important, and this is something I think we try to stress in the testimony itself.
We always want to be careful about disentangling White Christian nationalism from Christian nationalism that might reflect other kinds of attitudes and political views, say, of Black Americans.
So we show in the testimony that as Christian nationalism increases, Black Americans, for example, are no more likely to believe the big lie.
It's not something that adjusted their views in any meaningful way.
But for white Americans, it basically goes from nothing to like 90%.
Right?
Like, so in other words, at the lowest values of our Christian nationalism, as you're taking into account artisanship and ideology and region of the country and education, all those things, we show that people who strongly disagree with Christian nationalism rejected the big lie completely.
People who strongly embrace Christian nationalism were upwards around like 80 to 90%.
And so it tracks so closely with belief in that, because of the things that we're talking about, adherence to conspiratorial thinking, us versus them kind of dichotomies and allegiance to sacred myths about what the nation should be and always must be.
I think one of the things that surprised many people watching footage from January 6th is the ways that the rioters and the insurrectionists, police officers, because there seemed to be this understanding that at first they would be on their side and this is all You know, we can't speak for everyone who is there, and we don't have footage of every last person.
But there is just these clips that this committee has shown where there's this sense that, oh, they'll be on our side.
And then when they're not, when police enforcement actually try to stop them, it's, you're supposed to be on our side.
And that really leads to, I think, the second element that you all highlight, which is this comfort with political violence.
And one of the things that really sticks out for me here is that there's this idea that white Christian nationalists Are in favor of using authoritarian violence to control what are deemed to be threats and criminals and terrorists.
So if we can keep connecting dots, white Christian nationalists feel the country was created for them.
They're the founders, supposedly.
The big lie taps into the feeling that despite them founding the country, it's been taken from them.
So Andrew, how does this lead to supporting authoritarian violence to control threats and terrorists?
Why would they think that You know, for example, taking over the Capitol and occupying the Senate chamber is not an act of criminality, but an act of doing one's patriotic duty or what God wants.
Yeah, that's a great question.
And I think a lot of it aligns with what you're pointing out.
When these lines of us versus them are drawn, and then the very fate of the country is in the balance, and then you're legitimizing that view in the will of the transcendent, the sacred, that's really powerful.
And to the extent that a democratic society, you know, allows you to at least feel like you have control over where the country goes or this vision of that you believe God has given you of what this country should look like, then that's fine.
But when that begins to be blocked and they feel as though they're under attack and, you know, again, quote unquote, we are under attack and it's being taken from us, that's really powerful.
And I think what we saw, you know, then and in their own words, They were ready to lay aside, you know, pluralistic democratic society.
They're willing to lay aside respecting authorities if they feel these authorities are again blocking the will of the transcendent.
So, you know, just to quote Jenny Cutt, so she was one of the insurrectionists, owns a florist shop in Midland, Texas.
And she said, to me, God and country are tied.
To me, they're one and the same.
We were founded as a Christian country and we see how far we've come from that.
We are a godly country and we are founded on godly principles.
And if we do not have our country, nothing else matters.
And so in that sense, you can see why when they felt as though the authorities were blocking them from enacting what they wanted to do, nothing else matters.
Not respecting police, not the thin blue.
I mean, they're There's video of them beating police officers with, you know, flagpoles that that held thin blue line flags.
And so the the dissonance is incredible.
But yeah, so there's comfort with political violence where, you know, in the report, Sam and his colleague Josh Grubbs, they collected all this wonderful data.
And one of the questions they ask and other polling firms ask this question, too.
But, you know, is there a time when we would have to, as American patriots, you know, Basically move towards political violence in order to save our country.
And again, there's this strong association, once we account for a lot of other explanations, where if you believe, you know, white Americans who embrace Christian nationalism, they're much more likely to say, yeah, we're going to have to embrace political violence in order to save our country.
We'll set aside whatever if it means that we're, you know, essentially enacting God's will for what we see this country should be.
Sam, this takes me back to the flag and the cross, where you and Phil Gorski talk about three elements working together, freedom, violence, and order.
And basically, the idea is, for the white Christian nationalists, if the social order is not in the proper alignment, then they can't experience freedom.
And thus, they may need to use violence to fix that.
Just wondering if you want to jump in here on that sort of trajectory when it comes to J6 and the approach of Christian nationalists to that day.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that January 6th illustrates powerfully the distinction between the nation and the state as it relates to the imaginary of this kind of group of people.
The nation is not the state, clearly, right?
Because you can take over and you can violate, you can attack the state.
The state is the regime.
The state is the corrupt.
Uh, establishment that is working in cahoots with the left and the socialists and the woke and everybody who's taking the things from us.
The nation, though, the true Americans, the patriots, those who love this country and those who want to take it back, are those who have our same story, right?
Like, they are those who come from the very soil of the nation, right?
And their parents and fathers have shed blood and And blood is a powerful metaphor here, right?
Like as we talk about in the flag and the cross, right?
These metaphors of blood purity and bloody conquest and bloody apocalypse and all of those things are tied together in a real powerful way.
I think, yeah, what we witnessed on January 6th is really, if you needed any more evidence, that these folks are not patriots in the sense that we like to think of, you know, fighting for the country and all the things that it represents.
No, it is, they are nationalists, like in what we would argue are white Christian nationalists, or the nation is for us, by us, forever.
Yeah.
Well, this leads us to something that's really important and is element number three in your testimony, and that is the element of conspiratorial thinking.
And it's the, as you say, the close affinity between Christian nationalist ideology and believing outlandish things about one's cultural and political opponents.
You link this to QAnon.
Paul Jupe has some great data that shows how white evangelicals in particular and white Christian nationalists our adherence of QAnon in ways that far outpace any other demographic in the country.
So, Andrew, I'm just wondering if, you know, if you can help us understand, and I have my own theory about this that I'll interject here in a second, but, you know, why would conspiratorial thinking be a motivating factor to act in the way many did on January 6th at the Capitol?
And, you know, what is the appeal?
Because it's and this is a question I get all the time.
Why are white Christian nationalists and and white evangelicals so susceptible to conspiracy?
What is that?
What is baked in there that that connects them?
And so wondering how that all looks from your perspective.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, broadly, some other work that Sam and I have done with Joseph Baker, where we're looking at sources of authority, right, and how Americans who embrace Christian nationalism think about authority.
And we're kind of comparing science and the institution of science compared to the Bible, right?
And this idea of the Bible as the final authority.
And we find that for Americans that embrace Christian nationalism, there is this tension where if you give science too much, and again, there's a long history here that's been written about really well by historians and other social scientists, but right, if we give too much authority to this source, Outside of the Bible, then it's a slippery slope and who knows where we'll go.
And so there's just been this kind of circle the wagons and we believe the Bible and that's it.
Now, for certain things that, you know, certain topics that don't feel like there's some sort of moral component to them, then there's not an issue there, right?
Like, so we can drive cars, we can use electricity.
But when there's this moral component of, well, when does a human become a human or things like that, or, you know, getting vaccines, right?
It become, which is kind of strangely, but then it just turns into this moral issue.
Now all of a sudden, well, where do we go to authority and we have to turn here?
So I think in this way, it connects to conspiratorial thinking where, and I think there's some populist strains to this too that Sam and Phil talk about in their book, The Flag and the Cross, where, you know, we don't have to turn to these authorities to tell us what to believe, But within this group, we know what's best and we need to move forward with this.
And so I think it connects to our susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking.
Because, yeah, you just can't trust what the man or the people or as Sam just said, you know, the state is telling us.
And so susceptibility to the big lie, even though there's no evidence and when the lawyers are in court, they're saying, yeah, we have no evidence, you know, that doesn't matter.
Because again, we have certain sources of authority that we can trust.
And some really interesting data that was collected a little while ago, they listed some different kind of famous conspiracy theories, and you see Christian nationalism is strongly associated with every single one.
And then, which was just beautiful.
They put in a label of a conspiracy theory that doesn't actually exist.
The South Carolina or South Dakota crash, right?
That's just not actually a conspiracy theory.
And the same people are much more likely to believe that that was real.
And so you can see that when you're open to one or more conspiracy theories the rest are going to follow with you.
So it's kind of a way that they kind of enact into the world, right?
They embody the world as that we can't trust this and we move towards these other things.
And yeah, so I think that's where we see this really strong connection.
And it continues.
PRRI just had a Christian nationalism survey.
They did a big rollout like a month ago.
And yet again, they find that as they ask three different questions on QAnon, and these are, you know, really, really strongly worded questions.
Those believers in QAnon, a majority of them are strongly embracing or at least very sympathetic to Christian nationalism.
And And so again, there's this really tight Connection between understanding who we are as a country and this idea that America is for us as white Christians.
And again, particular expression of white Christianity, right?
It's not all white Christians, but quite a few.
But yeah, that it's for us and conspiracies are a big part of that as well.
I've been thinking about this in terms of a kind of offense-defense approach.
And so, conspiracies often feel like a defensive tactic, like, hey, I'm on the margins, the world's against me, and so I'm turning to these alternative explanations to give me some comfort of how the world works.
JFK was really sedestinated by so-and-so, and there was no moon landing.
And they provide a community like, hey, some other folks believe this and we all kind of feel like nobody listens to us anyway.
So, hey, we'll we'll gather together and the world won't listen.
They'll laugh.
But who cares?
You know, with white Christian nationalists, it's like there's that defensive thing of like, yeah, we're going to gather together.
No one will believe us.
But wait a minute.
We founded the country.
And we have the authority to determine what's real and what's actual and what's true.
So we're not just going to sit on the sideline and be called conspiracists and let the world kind of treat us that way.
We're going to emerge offensively into the public square and go take what's ours based on Our understanding of what is real, true, and actual.
Evidence be damned.
Data be damned.
Experts be damned.
Fauci be damned.
Doesn't matter.
So, anyway, this leads right to the fourth element, and I'll throw this to you, Sam, and that is a kind of siloed media context in the United States.
One that really, you know, puts people in, you know, an echo chamber where they're getting information from one place.
Again, I think authority comes into that.
One of the things that I think that is important for me is that we could have had a situation after the election, and even after J6, that said, this was wrong and this was incited by Donald Trump.
We could have had Fox News and all of those places you would look that said, guys, there's no big lie.
Biden won, that's it.
They were texting to each other, Fox News.
And we know that now, right?
We know that Hannity and Ingram were all texting each other, but they didn't do that.
So I guess what I'm driving here is, how does this siloed media ecosystem provide a motivating factor in J6 as it's tied to Christian nationalism?
Yeah, I mean, not just January 6th, but, I mean, I think COVID as well and all the things related to that.
And even as horrible as January 6th was, I mean, like, think about, like, the consequences to COVID and, say, like, vaccine conspiracies and, you know, suppression of the seriousness of COVID for the sake of sowing, like, doubt about, like, the Democrats and what they're trying to do and trying to wreck Trump's chances and those kinds of things.
You know, Donald Trump should be, at the end of the day, should be arrested for so many things.
But like, for my money, the one that sticks out of my mind is like, for him and all of his kind of surrogates, and that includes folks in the information silo, like to politicize COVID in a way that, so doubt about like the best ways to kind of like, the seriousness of the issue.
And I mean, how many people died as a result of that?
So January 6th is another, I mean, we have all kinds of data, and we're certainly not the only ones who have collected that, but there's this, of course, partisan media silo, the punditry that goes on to inflame these kinds of conspiracies.
At the very least, if they're not explicitly advocating these kinds of conspiracies, it's a constant hum of, well, couldn't you imagine them doing something like this, or that?
That specter of, like, I wouldn't put it past him, right?
Like, I mean, maybe they didn't do it this time, but you can imagine, right?
And so it's that kind of, that feeds into the conspiratorial thinking, right?
It's the, you don't have to believe The explicit details of Pizzagate or something like related to QAnon to say, but, you know, but they are groomers, right?
Like, but they are into that, you know, they would support something nefarious and horrible.
Because it allows you to believe the worst, most horrible things about your political opponent and it makes you feel affirmed in that kind of hatred.
And so that goes on with The Big Lie, it goes on with January 6th, it goes on with COVID and all of the other conspiratorial kind of things.
And like you said, Brad, I think it's really important that this is, it's one thing that you hold kind of You hold beliefs that don't really affect your day-to-day behavior in any meaningful kind of way.
Like, we do that all the time.
Like, there's people around the country who believe really outlandish, like, religious things or political things that they just kind of, you know.
People, our colleague Joseph Baker, who studies, like, people who believe in Bigfoot and, like, UFOs.
And, yeah, they do kind of hobbyist things, right?
Like, they're looking for Bigfoot or whatever on the side.
But that doesn't change how they vote.
That doesn't change whether or not they go in mass to go commit violent acts.
And we're entering this kind of territory where it's now becoming normalized to walk around armed, to walk around at these places and to rally in these kinds of violent ways.
And I think that's obviously problematic, but it should point us to something coming down the road, I think.
I think you're making a great point.
If you give me two or three Diet Cokes, I might tell you that I'm not sure about LeBron James going to the Cleveland Cavaliers with the number one pick, a kid from Cleveland.
But, you know, I have no intention of taking that anywhere near my state capitol or that has no effect on me voting.
It's just what I'll probably tell you after too many Diet Cokes.
And so you're right.
This is different.
It changes everything when there's violence and political violence involved.
Let me let me go to some sort of kind of conclusions that you draw here.
And I'm going to I'm going to read just a little bit and then throw it to both of you to respond.
You say Christian nationalism was not only influential soon after the insurrection, but its influence continues to reshape in real time how Americans are thinking about the insurrection.
By August of 2021, 52 percent of those same white Americans in the top quartile And 58% of those in the second-highest quartile now agreed that the protesters should be arrested.
Thus, not only were white Americans who subscribed to Christian nationalism initially more sympathetic toward the rioters, they quickly became more so within roughly half a year.
If you're listening, and that was a lot, the gist of that is that as time goes on, more and more people have become more sympathetic toward the rioters.
And I point this out in my book that As time's gone on, the big lie and the sympathy for those involved in J6 has only become more expansive.
It is not dwindled.
It is not evaporated.
And I kind of think of this as myth-making in real time.
That you're able to make this myth of J6 right in front of our eyes.
Like, we all know about myths of Thanksgiving, or myths of the, you know, I cannot lie, I cut down the apple tree, or myths of whatever may be.
But this happened, and then in front of our eyes, it was like, oh, no, no, J6 was, it was Antifa, it was a normal tourist visit, it wasn't that big a deal, whatever may be.
So I'm just wondering, you know, as those who gathered the data and have kind of reflected on it, what does it mean to you that in the period since J6, It seems there's more sympathy toward the rioters and what that means for our public square.
So, Andrew, what do you think?
Yeah, I think, you know, this was really pretty brilliant, you know, with Sam and Josh as they gathered this data to do it February, right, you know, a month after the insurrection and then six months later in August.
And yeah, in the report, you can just see the drop among those that embrace Christian nationalism.
You know, 20% more of them are at least sympathetic to the rioters and insurrectionists.
And so, you know, I think, too, this highlights how intertwined all those other elements are with Christian nationalism, because a part of it is the media landscape.
I mean, you had where they went for news consistently saying that this was not what everybody's saying it is, right?
There was no violence there.
It was not an insurrection.
You know, even today, still, they're saying it was just a peaceful tour, right, of what took place.
And so As we show Christian nationalism is so tightly intertwined with these different elements, it stands to reason that one of the implications of that is this redefinition.
And yeah, but I think your book and then you had your op-ed in the New York Times of, you know, drawing these similarities between the lost cause.
And the Civil War.
So the South lost the battle, the war itself, but then in the court of public opinion, it won.
And those implications are still with us.
And I think what we're seeing today is the same because these are surveys of the American public.
It's not of the people that were at January 6th, but these are from the people in those communities and congregations that rioters and insurrectionists went home to.
And we can see that they, for the most part, went home to places where if, you know, these folks embrace Christian nationalism, they're pretty much okay with what happened there.
And so we, yeah, we see that taking place in real time.
And so those implications, I think, are Real because even soon after the insurrection, the Republican National Committee even said that, you know, that was legitimate political discourse, what we saw.
And I mean, so normalizing that is truly worrying and should be truly worrying.
And then, too, it degrades, you know, some of the functioning of the forms of government as we go on, right?
So if somebody, I don't, I'm just speaking off hand here hypothetically, quote unquote, but say somebody commits crimes and the Justice Department needs to arrest them, if we delegitimize anything that the state does, then of course that is too problematic.
And so it's, yeah, a social scientist sitting here, it's pretty wild to see, But then as citizens, right, it's truly worrying when there is no actual reality, right?
It's all just whatever your group says it is.
And so that's what we see taking place, I think.
One of the things that you say numerous times in the testimony is that Christian nationalism provides ideological cover or theological cover for these motivations.
And I'm wondering, Sam, if, yeah, just thinking about how sympathy for J6 writers has grown, if that theological cover plays into it in your mind.
Yeah, we're watching, like you said, kind of a myth-making in real time.
It's a lost cause theology that we are watching be created.
The protesters are being ennobled as, or being kind of like, not deified, but like celebrated as patriots who are just kind of like, you know, doing Uh, doing patriotic things.
I mean, I think what, what was one, one author, uh, we were talking about this on social media a couple, couple of weeks back, like some, some author on, uh, for the American conservative called them like voter integrity, uh, demonstrations.
I mean, to that effect, you know, like, but even renaming it, right?
Like, don't know, don't want to call it a capital riots.
Don't want to call it the, you know, the insurrection, right?
Like, uh, you want to call it, you know, voter integrity protests or something like that.
And, I do think that the Christian nationalist myth provides this kind of justification for whatever you want to do.
If it is our country, rightfully, if God blessed the nation because of our values, people like us, Uh, then, then it, then, then, then it is by definition, when we take it back, even with violence, it is God's work.
It is God's blessing.
I mean, so going back to the QAnon shaman's prayer, right?
Like they had stormed the Capitol violently, and he's saying this prayer in the middle of the Senate chamber, and he thanks God, not, not praying, not asking.
He's not petitioning.
He is thanking God for, uh, for, you know, uh, allowing them, uh, to be in that chamber and, and for giving a victory for, for America being reborn that day.
Right?
Like it's, it's almost like it had happened.
He's claiming it.
And so, I mean, I think Christian nationalist theology, that political theology that, you know, it eliminates any kind of question to the contrary.
You couldn't possibly be out of God's will because, as we all know, this is our country for us, and it's been taken by Satan and demonic forces, so we got to take it back.
Well, we're going to run out of time, and we have a really big question to ask, and that's not about what's in the report, but about what did not happen—not report, but testimony.
That's about what did not happen with the testimony.
So many observers, including myself and both of you, have noted that the J6 Select Committee's report does not mention Christian nationalism.
They did not take up, it seems, your testimony in a way that made it into the final report, at least in terms of being cited or referenced.
So, I'll leave it to you.
I guess first question is, any idea why they would not do that after petitioning your testimony?
And I think the follow-up would be, you know, what are the ramifications of not mentioning Christian nationalism?
Because as both of you and many of our colleagues and all of us who are observing and analyzing this have tried to point out, Christian nationalism was an integral factor at J6, and yet it's not mentioned.
So, why do you think they left it out?
What are the ramifications of doing so?
Yeah, I mean, so in some of the reports that I've read and some of the response to, yeah, so the report comes out and then some of the responses to that saying, why isn't religion highlighted more or Christian nationalism explicitly, you know, noted?
And spokes, you know, people for those running the committee said, you know, we don't want there to be this viewpoint that any American that believes God is Bless this country is labeled a white supremacist.
And so they were, you know, fearful that talking about Christian nationalism would alienate, right, Christians in America.
And so I think there was some of that, which, you know, in our work, we're careful to highlight that Christian nationalism is not Christianity writ large, right?
It's a particular expression that then, you know, really underscores this political ideology and is forceful in that sense.
And so it isn't as though every single American Christian, you know, subscribes to Christian nationalism, but yet it is very prevalent within American Christianity, right?
So there's a tension there.
Both can be true.
And so I think You know, one of the dangers of not mentioning it is that and the committee, you know, was very kind of forthright that they wanted to focus on Trump and how Trump really was the driver and played a key role in everything that happened.
And I think that's great.
Like, we should do that.
But what laid the groundwork for Trump?
Christian nationalism is a part of that story and it's going to be here after Trump.
So Trump wasn't just something that happened, right?
But he's really an endpoint of an ongoing and, you know, Brad in your work and Sam and Phil in their book and even our book, we highlight how this is decades and centuries, right?
Right.
And Trump really is the kind of the culmination of that.
And he's long after he's gone, it's still going to be powerful.
And so I think in that sense, that's kind of the opportunity that was missed to give kind of this broader clarity and showing that this is part of the body politic and it's still with us.
And so we ignore it.
Really, it just kind of makes us blind to the next person that will come and maybe is more disciplined.
Yeah, I'll end with something kind of provocative.
stuff as Trump, but it's just a bit more disciplined.
And that I think is a threat that's still with us.
And I hope that we can meet the moment, but we won't if we're going to ignore these different elements and Christian nationalism is a part of that.
Yeah, I'll end with something kind of provocative.
I think, you know, I think the in his book, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois has this wonderful chapter on the propaganda history.
And he talks about how whites in the North were complicit in this kind of retelling of the Civil War as not about slavery, but it was about whatever.
And And they did that, he said, because they wanted to make peace and they, you know, and it was kind of a capitulation and like, hey, let's not make waves, let's not like wave the bloody shirt and like, let's kind of, you know, but he says, you actually like, you know, you allowed this real history to be erased and the motives behind the civil war of the whole group of people to be kind of like, you know, just glossed over.
I think the January 6th Committee not acknowledging that Christian nationalism played a role in this and was a motivation, if not explicitly laying the foundation of this kind of uprising like Andrew was talking about, I think it's the equivalent, right?
It's the equivalent of, and not in proportion, like I want to have proportionality here, but it is the intellectual equivalent of saying let's kind of completely ignore this foundational ideology that motivated a lot of Because we just don't want to make waves.
I feel like it's a capitulation that ultimately comes back to haunt us, as Du Bois so beautifully said, right?
Like, bad history is still bad history, right?
And this is a case of glossing over a pretty important part of this story.
So we hope to be able to magnify, to amplify that in some way.
That's a great comparison.
And it's just a great frame of reference to think about the consequences and the ways that history is shaped by documents like these and what is included and what is not.
And so anyway, a lot to think about there.
Just appreciate your insights and your willingness to come on and just talk about your testimony.
As we said, friends, we're going to post the link in the show notes so you can read that testimony for yourselves.
It will be made public.
And so It's all out there in the open.
For my money, I'll just say real quick, you know, to me, this is an example of, Andrew, you said that people, you know, there was reports of being afraid of painting all God-believing Americans as white supremacists.
And once again, you know, white evangelicalism, white Christian nationalism, white Christianity, And I don't want to make white evangelicalism and white Christian nationalism synonymous, but what I do want to do is say that there's this sense of American religion is the conservative white Christian.
And if we somehow criticize that, we're criticizing American religion or we're criticizing Christianity as a whole.
And so the fear is, well, we can't say anything about that group, otherwise, you know, the entirety of the American religious population will be offended, and we will just get lambasted from Fox News and from everyone else about being God-hating people who are anti-religion.
I will note, and I don't want to spoil anything, but you have a quote from Franklin Graham early on in the testimony, and it struck me that You know, you were making this wonderful point, and it all makes sense in the testimony that Franklin Graham's comments fit perfectly in the theological matrix that ties together Christian nationalism J6.
But here's Franklin Graham, the very prominent son of Billy Graham, the man who was counsel to eight presidents or so.
And I can just see the wheels turning, and I'm not going to name names, but just certain people on the committee thinking, if it comes out that I cite testimony where Franklin Graham is present, does that mean I'm haranguing Billy Graham?
And does that mean that going back to all the long and wide reach of the Grahams and what they mean to American Christianity, that I've done that?
No, I'm just not going to go there.
While one can get their head around that logic, it's cowardly.
I'm sorry.
It just is.
And it really leaves out an important part of the story.
So anyway, more Diet Coke and you might get the names of the people on the committee I'm thinking about someday.
All right.
Andrew Whitehead, Associate Professor of Sociology at UIPUI, Indiana University, Purdue.
Twitter and Instagram.
Try to stay, try to stay up with both of those.
sociology at University of Oklahoma.
Thanks to both of you.
Just real quick, where can people link up with y'all?
I know most people listening will be familiar, but if they want to find you, where's the best place?
Twitter and Instagram.
Try to stay up with both of those.
And yeah, so that's great.
Yeah, same.
Twitter.
Okay.
And Andrew's new book is coming out here this summer.
So we'll hope to have him back when it drops and just be on the lookout for that.
Promises to be really, really, really good.
As always, find me at Bradley Onishi.
Find us at Straight White JC.
Go to our new website and you can search episodes so you can find stuff and you won't have to email me and ask me when I said that and have me email you back and say, I have no idea.
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