The Reawaken America Tour: Anti-Semitic, Anti-Democratic, and Openly Violent
Brad talks to Rev. Nathan Empsall, the Executive Director of Faithful America. They discuss the Reawaken America Tour, which just relaunched in Las Vegas a week ago. As Rev. Nathan says, the tour platforms speakers who are anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, and openly violent. It is a dangerous movement that is, unfortunately, tying together explicit Christian practice - like baptism on stage - with insidious American nationalism. The result? Maybe the most potent magnet for Christian nationalism alive today.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I'm here today with Reverend Nathan Emsall.
So we're going to talk about a lot of things, Reverend Nathan, but let me just say thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
I'm a longtime listener, first time caller, I guess.
Well, let me tell folks about you.
You are an Episcopal priest and the Executive Director of Faithful America, a leading expert and writer on Christian resistance to Christian nationalism.
You're also a recent member of the Episcopal Church's Task Force on Care of Creation and Environmental Racism.
Now, your website says you have visited 44 states.
I want to know, what are the states you have not visited?
And we're going to try to find a way to get you there.
Alaska and Hawaii.
I don't count airports, so Nevada.
I've looked out at the strip many times, but even though we're going to talk about Nevada a lot today, I haven't actually been.
And then this chunk in the middle, Kansas, Missouri, and odd for a native Texan, but Oklahoma.
Okay, got it.
All right.
Well, I mean, I was just in Texas and I can understand that Texans, you know, they don't go to Oklahoma and Oklahomans think of Texas as their mean big brother.
So that one makes sense.
There's some jokes I'm not going to share on this podcast.
Yeah, we'll leave it for now.
Well, we're here to talk about Faithful America's protest of the Reawaken America tour and some of the ways that you partnered with a bunch of organizations and others to protest the event that did happen in Vegas this last week.
Let's talk about Reawaken America.
I think a lot of people listening will be familiar with the tour, but tell us about your perspective on Reawaken America.
I mean, what is it in your mind exactly?
Where to start?
The Reawaken America Tour, which has the unfortunate or fortunate, depending on how you look, acronym of R.A.T., is just this nasty roadshow.
It is probably the best or worst example, but certainly the most blatant example of Christian nationalism outside of legislatures since the January 6th insurrection, which it's very tied to.
So, roughly once a month, a little less often now, but for a while there, once a month, Mike Flynn, Eric Trump, and this whole host of celebrities within the Maga Christofascist movement, as well as celebrity pastors from within BNAR, the New Apostolic Reformation, they go on tour, they used to visit megachurches, now they're trying to find bigger venues, and they spend two days to an audience of 5,000 mixing baptisms and praise music.
With election denial, QAnon conspiracy theories, and defenses of January 6th and the threat of more political violence.
And all of this is done in Jesus' name.
For a while they were called Christian Nationalists, now they're calling themselves Christian Nationalists.
This is also sort of the parent organization of Pastors for Trump.
So when you hear about Pastors for Trump, they're using Reawaken America's organizers studio.
They're bringing on Flynn and Roger Stone and Eric Trump and other regular Reawaken America speakers.
Basically Pastors for Trump is a Mike Flynn subsidiary.
I think the thing that you said there at the beginning is actually really the best way for me to understand it is, this is a marriage of Christianity and nationalism that really, if you wanted to put in a textbook, what is Christian nationalism?
You would basically point to the Reawaken America Tour.
As you said, they do baptisms, and yet when you visit there, there is just this ultra-nationalist display, and a lot of it is tied to Trumpism.
As you say, you have Mike Flynn, but you also have people showing up like Alex Jones at various events, or Mike Lindell.
You know, you might get, yeah, Eric Trump or another member of the Trump family.
Here's what you wrote recently in Religion News Service about the event, and I think this is a great summary.
You say that the Reawaken America Tour is a political rally in the form of an apostolic revival.
The tour is a multi-day Christian nationalist event that includes appearances by pastors for Trump, praise music, and even baptisms combined with election denial, COVID-19 disinformation, and QAnon conspiracy theories.
And I think those last parts are really Really important to keep in mind, right?
So we have an event that is really blatantly Christian.
Hey, we're going to do baptisms.
It's blatantly nationalist.
It's Trumpist.
You have all of the Trump kind of acolytes and proxies appearing on the stage.
But then flowing from there, COVID misinformation, conspiracy theory, election denial, and you see all the tentacles flowing out.
And so it really is quite insidious.
One of the things you've argued in the past is that Reawaken America Tour gives people Yeah, I think that the threat of political violence is Reawaken America's biggest threat.
And it's rarely explicit, though sometimes it is explicit.
So there was this guy on almost every stop of the tour until recently.
His name is Scott McKay, but he goes by the name Patriot Street Fighter.
He's sort of an Instagram influencer, former NMA artist.
It came out that he's a fan of Adolf Hitler, so Eric Trump had him booted from the tour for bad optics.
But McKay, well before they dropped him from the tour, gave an interview on camera at Reawaken America where he said, citing the Black Robe Regiment, saying, just like any pastor from 1776, Drop this Bible and pick up a musket.
I'm going to put balls and bullets in the doctors and nurses who support the vaccine.
And that's in the name of Jesus Christ.
So that was an explicit threat.
I mean, he said he was going to put balls and bullets in people.
Then last time at Reawaken America in May at Trump Doral, Pastor Mark Burns, who Time Magazine has called Trump's top pastor, Said the Bible says that the violent take it and we're going to take it by force.
So equating himself with the word violent in a thread of what they're going to do with America and with elections.
And then this past weekend when we're recording was just this past weekend in North Las Vegas.
Another one of the also rants, but he shows up over and over again to fill the undercard and build up the crowd for Mike Flynn and Eric Trump.
This guy by the name of I think it was Stu Peters.
I hadn't heard of him before, but he's been on the tour for a while.
And he's one of those guys whose main hustle was trying to get you to buy gold and, you know, one of the few kind of advertisers left on Fox News.
But he was up there talking about how they want to kill Hunter Biden and Dr. Fauci.
And of course, he said, we're going to put them on trial, but we're going to try them for treason.
And then he like yells the word death for Hunter Biden.
He goes on and on about the rope they're going to use for Dr. Fauci reveling in the desire to kill people.
So there's no following the Prince of Peace here.
There's no saying those who live by the sword die by the sword.
Forget Jesus Christ.
That's when they're explicit.
For the most part, it's not about the way they get explicit.
Remember the headliner of Reawaken America's Mike Flynn, who underove to the January 6th committee, refused to say that the violence of Bethel 2 on January 6th was unacceptable or that it was wrong, either legally or morally.
Well, sometimes they go beyond refusing to say it was wrong.
They bring out January 6th participants.
They bring out the family of Ashley Babbitt, who died on January 6th, and they treat her family like heroes.
They treat her like a murderer.
They treat all of the political prisoners as political prisoners, the rioters, the insurrectionists.
And they treat them like what they did was justified.
Then they use rhetoric like armor of God, spiritual warfare, everything that you've explored on this show where that's featured in the code, all those phrases.
They tell the crowd that they're on God's side and they demonize their political opponents.
Their political opponents, of course, are anyone who's not a right wing white evangelical, maybe Catholic, Christian.
Mike Flynn is Catholic.
And so they've started saying, you're either a Christian nationalist or a godless globalist.
And of course, globalist, we'll talk about that later, maybe, is an anti-Semitic trope, sort of a dog whistle.
But they set up this binary where you're a Christian nationalist or not, which is really ironic because we know the religious right loves to play the victim, loves to act like they're religiously persecuted.
But by saying you're either a Christian nationalist or Godless globalist, they're not just attacking non-Christians.
They're erasing the black church tradition.
They're erasing mainline Protestants.
They're erasing progressive Catholics.
So when they use all this language like harbor of God and spiritual warfare and tell their audience, Clay Clark, the organizer, says this all the time, you're on team Jesus.
They're on team Satan.
And by them, he means not Christians, but he also means progressive Christians.
And he means Democrats, including Christian Democrats.
When they use this language, and of course talk about the second amendment, they don't have to put out a call to violence.
They let the audience connect the dots.
Then they can wash their hands of the whole thing.
Don't we all know what just happened?
So that's what I call a permission structure for political violence in Jesus's name.
And because it's in Jesus's name, they think anything goes.
It's all right.
It's all divinely blessed.
I, one of the things that I am keenly aware of with Rose to Reawaken America is, as you say, they're talking about Jesus as, you know, they're doing baptisms.
There's no implicit Christianity here.
This is, we are an altar call, plus we are a political rally.
So let's put it all in context.
On Thursday, Trump's indicted and arrested for, you know, he goes in and turns himself in for the fourth time.
On Friday, the Reawaken America Tour begins in Vegas and they've taken a summer break and they kind of restarted it.
And here they are all in Vegas having this tour.
We've got Mike Lindell and Mike Flynn and everyone we just talked about.
And then we've got a situation where they're saying, you're Team Jesus, they are Team Satan.
Think about how they just reduced the world into this just absolutely binary kind of approach to there's no There's no in-between.
There's no interfaith dialogue.
There's no sense of, like, living with each other, even though we're different.
It is just Team Jesus or Team Satan.
And that comes down to things like COVID vaccines and information and conspiracy theories and QAnon, which we can get into.
But it also is a lot to do with anti-Semitism.
And I think that might be something that people are not maybe expecting or wouldn't put the pieces together automatically.
When somebody on the stage at Reawaken America Tour says something about a globalist or a one-world government, can you help us understand why that is an anti-Semitic trope, as you've talked about in your recent op-ed at Religion News Service?
So the phrase globalist generally means coded anti-Semitism.
This is according to the American Jewish Committee, among others.
The phrase has been around a long time.
Most of the time, with folks who use that word, they don't say who they mean.
But when they get explicit and tell you who they mean, they almost always mean, almost exclusively, certainly disproportionately, Jews or Jewish families.
Usually Jewish think when we hear about people attacking the Rothschilds and the Morgenthau's, they're almost always naming these Jewish communities and Jewish families that supposedly run the world secretly.
They tap into all those age old anti-Semitic tropes and stereotypes about secretive Jewish leaders with their money controlling us like puppets.
George Soros is one of the latest ones.
That's another one where, you know, it's one thing to Criticize billionaire donors and yet almost every time when they talk about the billionaire donors on the left, they only name one and they even call him out as an atheist Jew.
So if the issue was that he's a billionaire donor to a cause you don't like, why are you pointing out his faith or lack thereof or his ethnicity?
So these terms, globalist and Soros, they could be taken literally and not have any negative connotation to them.
You could say the United Nations is a globalist conspiracy, but that's not the case.
They're almost always tapping into a history of anti-Semitism.
Now, Clay Clark is the guy who organizes Reawaken America, partnered with Flynn to make this happen.
He's a businessman, an entrepreneur from Oklahoma.
He's a grifter extraordinaire.
And for the most part, it seemed like when he was talking about who he'd met by globalists, he would name one name, maybe two, maybe George Soros.
But for the most part, he focused in on Klaus Schwab.
Who is definitely not Jewish.
I was raised Catholic.
His father was, I believe, a Nazi collaborator.
The guy is not Jewish.
He's tied to the World Economic Forum at Davos, and Clark would focus on him for all the COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
Well, they've now added a second name to their conspiracy theory with Klaus Schwab, and it's this guy named Yuval Noah Verrari.
who is Israeli, who is culturally, ethnically Jewish.
So as soon as they had a second name, we couldn't help yourself.
It's of course it's a Jewish person.
So they tried to hide the anti-Semitism.
They tried to have a new boogeyman in faith, but they fell right back into it.
So quickly, 50% of the folks they're naming Jewish, 50% of the world population, you may have published, is not Jewish.
It's what, 2% or less.
So very disproportionately attacking and laying into these old one-world stereotypes.
And I'll say this, when Faithful America first took note of the Rebaking America Tour, about the same time a lot of folks did, which was in November 2021, when Michael Flynn, at the stop of the tour, said that, uh, America should have only one religion.
One nation under God means one religion.
That's an attack on all non-Christians.
It's an attack on the separation of church and state.
That got a lot of attention.
What almost no one has called out, once he said this at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, which is known for its bounding pastor, John Hagee, who is an avowed Christian Zionist.
And there is some debate around whether or not you consider Christian Zionism a piece of ice.
I certainly do.
John McCain certainly did.
It had to drop Pastor Hagee and Hagee's endorsement from the 2004 presidential campaign, 2008 presidential campaign.
So, you're proclaiming we need one religion, not Judaism, in a church known for an anti-Semitic pastor.
And that set the tone for everything that followed, including Alex Jones rejoining the tour this past weekend despite supporting Ye and his anti-Semitic rant, the artist formerly known as Kanye.
Making some anti-Semitic rants of his own in the past.
They've even brought on Roseanne Barr, who's been in trouble lately for making jokes about how Jews need to die now because they didn't.
Holocaust, calling Zelensky a bad Jew, or maybe she said he's not a good Jew.
Now, Roseanne Barr, Is Jewish.
I kid and won't call her anti-Semitic.
But of all the comedians they could have chosen to join the tour in Vegas, Clark and Flynn and Eric Trump picked the one Jewish comedian making jokes against Jews for a non-Jewish audience to hear.
That may not say anything about Roseanne, but the selection of her sure says something about Mike Flynn and Eric Trump.
Uh, and the fact that they only kick people off the tour when they start praising Hitler on YouTube.
That's the lie.
Okay.
Now you said the most quiet part out loud, but anything shiny about you can stay on the tour for as long as you want.
One of the terms you've used today and you use in your writing is that the Reawaken America Tour seems to represent something that we can identify as Christofascism.
Now, we talk about Christian nationalism a lot on the show.
I've written a book about it.
You know, it's in the ether, this idea of Christian nationalism.
What to you is helpful about calling this Christofascism?
I'm not disagreeing with you by any means.
What I'm wondering, though, is for you as a minister—you're a Christian person, you're a Christian leader, you're a priest in the Episcopal Church—why does calling this Christofascism seem important to you?
Sure.
There are a couple parts there.
I call it, I have started calling it fascism since reading the book by Yale professor Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works, The Politics of Us Versus Them.
And Stanley lays out how fascism, we think of fascism as a form of government with an authoritarian ruler who wraps himself up in ultra-nationalism.
But Stanley points out that fascism isn't just a form of government.
Fascism is also the style of politics, which with those Authoritarians take power.
So dividing us through us versus them tactics, appealing to this idea of a mythical past that was better and that they took from you and I'll give back to you.
So make America great again.
What were the 50s great?
Shouldn't we go back to the 50s?
That kind of appeal for in the 1930s in Germany.
Oh, it was so great before World War One, but our leaders stabbed you in the back.
The great stab in the back conspiracy.
Uh, when they surrendered at the end of World War I and all of the economic woes that have followed are because it is this great glorious path that disappears because you were betrayed.
Uh, and the only way out of this is to villainize other communities that have an in group to, to villainize, uh, certainly LGBTQ folks, political opponents, always Jewish community professors and intellectuals, uh, and trust in me.
That's what fascism really is.
And there are so many parallels between the MAGA movement in the United States and all these historical authoritarian and fascist movements.
So what that first clicked for me was when I made my first trip abroad ever.
It was in 2017.
I went to Germany.
I was there with the Episcopal Church for the annual UN climate conference, the COP conferences.
And it was in Bonn.
And when that was over, because I'd never been abroad before, I took an extra week and I went to Munich.
Munich is a great place to be able to go see Austria, another country, to enjoy a historical city, and to go visit Dachau, to go see a concentration camp.
Not one of the biggest, but the first, the one where they tested all their new tactics.
This was 2017.
Donald Trump had been in office for 11 months.
This was the week before Thanksgiving.
And everywhere I looked at Dachau, the exhibits were old.
They were not 11 months.
And yet I kept seeing what looked like Trump quotes, but were Hitler quotes or top third right quotes.
The way that Donald Trump would talk about the fake news, Hitler and Goebbels would talk about the lying press in Germany.
The way that Hitler was used to demonize judges is how Donald Trump was demonizing judges at the time.
And in that corner of Dachau, is I don't want to use the word shrine, but almost a shrine, but like a religious exhibit with a little chapel and a look at how different religions both were complicit in and opposed the Holocaust.
And you start learning and reading about Hitler and the Deutsche Christian and how he took over large chunks of the German church.
And of course, there was the confessing church and Dietrich Bonhoeffer that opposed him.
Although Bonhoeffer was great.
We should all be like Bonhoeffer.
But even many of the Christian leaders who opposed Trump, and there were hundreds of Catholic priests locked up in Dachau, many of them only did so because of the way he opposed the Christian church's freedom of speech or the way he hurt the disabled.
They were really good about speaking up for the disabled, but not for the political opponents, for LGBTQ folks, rarely for Jews.
And you start seeing parallels between Hitler and the village Christian, between Pontius Pilate and the Pharisees and other religious leaders in the Bible, between Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, and between the Republican Party, especially Trump, but really the Republican Party since Reagan, And white evangelicalism in the United States.
So there are these patterns of how religious leaders, usually conservative religious leaders, align themselves with authoritarians to taste power, usually in these fascist regimes.
So to name the MAGA movement as Christofascism shows us exactly who we're talking about through history.
You know, we're tired of hearing Dick Durbin and Rick Santorum call each other Hitler and Nazis.
I mean, politics always had that.
And so there's a Boy Who Cried Wolf effect, but we're really there.
The wolf is here.
And when I saw that in history, and when I read Jason Stanley's book, I said, that's why we've got to call a spade a spade.
And I think it's important to call it Christofascism instead of fascism to remind us specifically of the tools they're using, of the religious hijacking of the ways that this is not a religion.
This is a political ideology co-opting the words and symbolism of religion.
And I will say, as Executive Director of Faithful America, Our main mission right now is building a multiracial democracy and reducing the role of white Christian nationalism in this country, opposing Christian nationalism.
The biggest question I get about Christian nationalism, you know, Jamar Tisby and Doug Padgett, friends of mine, both say the two biggest questions they get are, what is it?
And how do I talk to Christian nationalists in my life?
I would say those are the second and third questions I get.
The biggest question I get is, if it's not Christian, why do you call it Christian nationalism?
And one answer is, of course, well, because they're trying to build a Christian, so-called Christian nation, just like white nationalists want to build a white nation.
It doesn't mean all white folks like that.
If that is Christianity, it's just a reference form of nationalism.
But the other thing is we as Christians need to realize that we are the ones who need to speak up.
and speak out because it is our faith being hijacked by the fascists, by the white nationalists.
And so we can't just call it white nationalism.
We can't just call it fascism.
To call it Christo-fascism is a reminder to progressive Catholics and mainland Protestants that our Jewish and Muslim and atheists and Buddhist and indigenous sisters and brothers and siblings are counting on us to play a role in the solution.
And so is Jesus Christ. - Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet.
In the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say, and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
So we're talking in the context of the most recent Reawaken America tour stop, which was in Vegas.
However, Reawaken America has been happening for a year and a half to two years.
And one of the things you've done at Faithful America, along with several other organizations, is you've They've protested at almost every stop of their Reawaken America tour and helped local pastors on the ground organize to protest.
So can you tell us about that?
We had the opportunity at Straight White American Jesus to be part of one of these when you had a protest at Trump's Miami Doral property.
And the Reawaken America Tour stopped there, and we were happy and glad and so thrilled to be part of that protest.
What have you been doing as the tour has gone on to not only protest the tour, but also help local leaders organize in the face of it?
Absolutely.
The number one thing we've done, uh, not the most important, but the most visible and easiest thing is petitions.
We have petitions when, when, whether the tour is at a church or private venue or public venue, different forms of petition sending 20,000, 30,000 signatures, uh, to venue owners saying, don't give this kind of hatred, election denial, weird conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein's DNA.
Don't give this your platform.
It's entitled the free speech platform.
We've gathered tens and tens of thousands of signatures.
We always send a mobile billboard, and that was in North Las Vegas this past weekend.
The billboard calls out Mike Flynn, Eric Trump, Sean Foy, Greg Locke, and others on the tour as the false prophets they are, and it says, Stop undermining our democracy.
No, it says two things.
One says, stop undermining our religion to attack democracy, twisting our religion to undermine democracy.
The other side of the billboard says, Jesus warned us about the Reawaken America tour.
Then it quotes the Gospel of Matthew.
Beware of those profits who come to you as sheep, but are in sheep's clothing.
So that mobile billboard is always there.
Mike Flynn has complained about it from the stage.
I was told that a number of folks in North Las Vegas were asking security to remove the billboard from the park, but they were at a public park.
Anyone could be there.
So they had to just deal with the billboard.
And, you know, almost every city, sometimes it's tough because, you know, August, big vacation month.
But in almost every city, we help local pastors who want to speak out by showing them how to submit op-eds, how to speak to press, and we help them fold a press conference.
And The press always shows up.
They always listen.
The press loves to both sides most issues, which is great because for so long they had a both-sided religion.
Just listen to Franklin Graham and Tony Perkins tell them there's only one kind of Christianity.
Well, the press, at least the local press, tends to come out to these press conferences and listen to the local clergy, Episcopal bishops and Methodist supervisors and superintendents and others among them, Catholic sister at one event.
They listen to these faith leaders say, this is not our faith.
Where Christian nationalism and Reawaken America spreads political violence, we follow the Prince of Peace.
Where it spreads hatred, we spread love.
Where it spreads QAnon misinformation, Jesus teaches that the truth shall set you free.
That's key to Faithful America's work.
We're not out here teaching you how to talk to your Christian nationalist uncle.
That's important and vital and others can do that.
But we are, when people start deconstructing their faith and walking away from Reawaken America because they met Jesus, they actually read the gospel.
We're here to show no, no that is not the only kind of Christianity.
There are other places to land.
When Franklin Graham or Reawaken America tell you you have to be just like them politically if you are Christian, our mere existence at these press conferences proves otherwise.
We've also been helping a number of pastors hold prayer vigils on the night of Reawaken America.
We tend not to hold direct protests outside Reawaken America venues because these are COVID super-threatening events and they are allowing people to think political violence is okay.
We don't want our members to get sick.
We don't want to risk any sort of competition, but we will have peace vigils and prayer vigils at churches the night before across the region.
They'll have one venue.
We'll have 10 churches holding these prayer vigils.
I've gone to two of our press conferences.
These are local press conferences.
We give pastors the tools they're already looking for.
But I have gone twice.
Once in upstate New York, in Octavia, and in Miami that you just mentioned in May when Real Awakening America visited Trump's morale.
And that was so cool, the one we had at Trump's Row.
Because in addition to our mobile billboards, we also had a boat on the Miami River and in the Bay of Biscayne.
And we reached out to a number of partners and groups.
You mentioned Straight White American Jesus participating.
We got endorsements and logos on the billboards in the boat from a number of different organizations and actual churches representing over 3 million people.
So I'm holding up a petition that says here are 30,000 people who have voted for this tour, but look behind me at these logos, 3 million people.
The United Church of Christ has a whole denomination.
We were hosted by an Episcopal church, a local parish for that press conference, but a representative from the Episcopal diocese came out.
The head of the Florida Council of Churches was with us, representing all the mainland Protestant denominations in Florida.
We also partnered with the Councils of Churches in New York State and Ohio State.
We worked with Gamaliel, the big organizing network that has a million members there as well.
Sojourners, Faith in Public Light, Built Common Good.
Our most reliable partner has been, no surprise here, Christians Against Christian Nationalism, a project of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty.
Their executive director, Amanda Tyler, joined us in Miami, but she has joined many training calls with pastors ahead of their press conferences to help explain to them what Christian nationalism is.
And they've sent me a copy of their petition to hold up along with the Faithful America petitions.
So this is a movement and it shows what polls show, that white evangelical right-wing leaders and NAR leaders might be the most vocal.
And maybe, just maybe, a majority of white Christians are pretty right-wing and pro-Trump, but a majority of Christians are not, especially when we include the black church traditions and other black and brown communities.
But even among white Christianity, we are seeing, according to PRI data, you just talked to Rocky Jones, that mainline Protestants actually are about the same number now as white evangelicals, or maybe even outnumbering them, depending on when the poll was conducted.
And that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to raise up this witness that shows, no, when you say that you're either a Christian nationalist or a godless globalist, you're bearing false witness.
This is not what Jesus wants.
Please, Jesus, offer us forgiveness.
Repent and come back to faith, hope, love, truth, and peace.
One of the things that I hear a lot as a professor when I talk and as somebody who's talking about Christian nationalism is, is, hey, where's the where's the religious left?
And then, you know, where are the other kinds of Christians?
And I'm like, they're there.
They're often outspent.
The billions of dollars are often flowing into the Reawaken America tour and other right wing and Trumpist and Christian nationalist initiatives and events and programs.
But the religious left, the Christian left, They are both organizing and standing up.
I've interviewed the head of the Unitarian Church.
I've interviewed rabbis.
I've interviewed so many religious leaders, Christian and non-Christian, who are not allowing this to just go unchecked in their communities.
And so I think it's really great to hear you outline just How many times you all have protested, what you do on a local level, because ultimately what matters in these cases in many ways is what's happening locally with local leaders.
And they know their communities, they know their people, they know the churches in the area and what's happening in those places.
So it's really wonderful to hear the way that you all are conducting these protests, these petitions and these vigils.
Can you tell us how people can link up with Faithful America?
There'll be people listening who are saying, Hey, I'm not Christian.
I appreciate what you're up to.
That sounds great.
But there's others that are probably are Christian and kind of saying, Oh, well, these are kind of maybe the kind of Christians I want to be hanging around with and seeing what they're up to.
So tell us about where they can find Faithful America.
Absolutely.
That's my favorite question.
FaithfulAmerica.org.
Faithful America is the largest online community of grassroots Christians putting our faith into action for love and social justice.
We've been around since 2004, a number of different iterations.
We work for refugee and immigrant rights, for protecting the climate, for protecting God's creation.
We work certainly for LGBTQ equality, not just in politics and society, but within the church.
So the easiest way to join is to go to faithfulamerica.org and sign one of the petitions you see on the homepage.
Our most recent petition is actually nothing to do directly with Christian nationalism.
Down in Texas at the Rio Grande, Governor Abbott has been running this horrible thing where As we say, cruelty is the point.
Operation Lone Star, pushing back migrants and asylum seekers coming legally to ask for legal asylum, breaking no laws, pushing them back into the river, putting concertina wire and barge buoys in the river to hurt people.
And separating families when they do make it across.
So we are petitioning the Department of Homeland Security to reunite the families that Governor Abbott has separated and to keep them together through their asylum process.
The Department of Justice is already investigating Abbott, though that was going to be our current petition.
So it's signed that.
We know this is echoing the demands of partners on the ground in Texas, faith groups and secular groups.
It's echoing demands from Congressman Castro and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
So we launch petitions like that.
We do follow them up with events where we can, but certain call alerts, social media actions, all the good effective digital campaign tactics that were tried and true, as well as things that we've been talking about against the Reawaken America Tour.
Something else on our homepage that might interest folks, if you click in the upper right corner, the words Christian Nationalism, we've listed a number of great books and other resources, curricula you can use in your churches.
Most of the resources are designed by our friends at places like Vote Common Good or Christians Against Christian Nationalism, but we've tried to bring them into one place.
We've hosted a number of webinars ourselves with a lot of these partners, including going toe-to-toe with Tony Perkins.
You can re-watch those webinars on that page.
Check out the recommended books, titles, like Preparing for War by this random author named Bradley Rishi.
Check out those resources.
Learn how to use them in your churches.
Donate.
Not to make too blatant a plug, but we don't have billionaire supporters.
We're not Justice Thomas.
We don't have Leonard Leo in our corner.
We're actually entirely funded by grassroots donations.
No foundations are billionaires at the moment.
Average gift to Faithful America is $39.
And even if you're not a Christian, We do participate in interfaith tables and interfaith missions, multi-faith coalitions, secular coalitions.
And so if you appreciate our mission of taking on the Christian right from within its own faith, we're all in this together and we're all stronger when we're all strong.
I was just down in Dallas and Fort Worth doing an event with the Metroplex Atheists, and at the event we had Dr. Katie Hayes, Reverend Dr. Katie Hayes, I should say, from Disciples of Christ.
And I bring that up only to say that sitting at the table were myself, there were Atheists on one side, Katie Hayes, Christian minister on the other.
And you know what we all wanted?
We all wanted democracy.
We all wanted equal rights for everyone.
We all wanted the LGBTQ community to be protected.
We all wanted migrants to be treated humanely.
And so we weren't there to debate what is atheism, what is Christianity.
We were there to say, we are for Many of the same things, and we hold many of the same values, so we should be coalition partners, and I think Faithful America does a really good job at that.
So, with that, I'll say thank you, Reverend Nathan Emsol, for joining me today.
I appreciate you, appreciate all the ways you're organizing to fight back, and organizing as a Christian to fight Christian nationalism and Christo-fascism, as we've discussed.
As always, friends, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
In our show notes, you'll find our merch, you'll find our website, you'll find our ways to become a patron, and everything else that we're up to at Straight White American Jesus.
We'll be back later this week with what's in the code and the weekly roundup.
