Congressperson Jared Huffman on the Threat of Christian Nationalism (Re-release)
Brad is joined by Congressperson Jared Huffman, who represents California's 2nd District. Rep. Huffman is the only member of the House who is not affiliated with a religious tradition. He started the Freethought Caucus in 2018 to highlight the concerns and needs of Americans who are humanists, freethinkers, agnostics, and otherwise invested in freethinking in politics and the public square. Perhaps most importantly for SWAJ in March 2022 Rep. Huffman held a hearing on White Christian nationalism that reviewed a report on J6 by the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Baptist Joint Committee. He has called out Christian nationalism on the House floor and said that it is infecting our government.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, our social citizen in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And today, maybe I'm a little excited, is a big day.
We have a special guest.
All our guests are special, but it's not every week or every day that you have a sitting member of Congress stop by the show.
And so we have Representative Jared Huffman.
And as we'll talk about in our interview, Representative Huffman is one of the only two sitting congresspeople who does not affiliate with a religious tradition, the other being Kyrsten Sinema.
And as you'll hear in the interview, he has some pretty clear opinions on how she affiliates and how he does.
And so we also get into something that's of the utmost importance, and that's Christian nationalism.
Representative Huffman is one of the few congresspeople who has drawn attention to the threat that Christian nationalism poses to our democracy.
And so our conversation touches on not only the fact that he's one of only two congresspeople who are unaffiliated or nuns.
He identifies as a humanist.
But also, the work that he has done to draw attention to Christian nationalism, and doing so with people that are familiar to me, and I think many of you, Sam Perry, and Catherine Stewart, and Andrew Seidel, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the Baptist Joint Committee.
So, we had a great conversation.
I am incredibly excited, and I can't wait for you to hear it.
Before we get there, I need to let you know that this episode is brought to you by the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
The Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery is made up of a group of trauma-informed practitioners from across the United States who utilize the medium of coaching to provide access to trauma resolution and recovery to clients all over the world.
The CTRR specializes in working with individuals who have experienced religious trauma, adverse religious experience, Dan and I have both worked with the CTRR.
Dan currently is a coach with them and can't say enough about the work that they do.
or other fundamentalist groups.
To learn more or set up your free inquiry call with a practitioner of your choice, head to traumaresolutionandrecovery.com.
Dan and I have both worked with the CTRR.
Dan currently is a coach with them and can't say enough about the work that they do.
So check it out.
All right, it's time to head over to our interview with Representative Huffman.
Before we go, I want to say we have our live event in Denver coming November 18.
It's a couple of weeks away.
Some of you have not bought your tickets because you're waiting, and you're procrastinating, and time is sneaking up on you.
If you use the code SWADGE25, you can get 25% off your virtual ticket, and you need to get this done before it's too late.
All right, here's my talk with Congressman Jared Huffman.
All right, y'all.
As I said, I am joined today with a very special guest, and that is Representative Jared Huffman, who represents California's 2nd District.
First, just let me say it's an honor to have you, and thanks for taking the time.
Well, it's my pleasure.
I appreciate being on this show, and I find the title of the show fascinating and provocative as well.
Well, you represent California's 2nd District, which kind of goes from just over the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County You know, over to Mendocino, Humboldt, and then the Oregon border.
Personally, I love camping in Mendocino and Casper and Albion.
These are places I love.
A lot of folks listening who are not perhaps in your district or in the Bay Area or Northern California, just they may not have an image of this part of the coast in their head.
So, you know, we need you to say it as we get going here.
You're the representative.
Why is the North Coast the best coast in your opinion?
Well, I think it's a slam dunk, the best coast.
And for those that just haven't gotten in a car and driven north of the Golden Gate Bridge and kept going, there's this whole other side of California that is north of San Francisco.
Not the inland Sacramento Valley, but this wonderful north coast.
A third of the California coast is north of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a lot of Californians don't realize that.
I am fortunate to represent all of it, all the way to Oregon.
And you will see, if you travel one-on-one north for several hours, that the country is Big and grand and spectacular.
You mentioned great camping, incredibly rugged coast, just postcard little villages along the Mendocino Coast.
people want to go to bed and breakfasts and enjoy that scene, but just remarkable mountains and massive redwood trees.
And you think you're in another world just a few hours away.
So it's pretty spectacular place as well as having world-class wines and- I was going to mention the wine.
Yeah.
I was going to say.
Any other things to appreciate?
Well, yeah, it truly is.
I could, I could spend three hours talking about just that part of California because I feel like a kind of apologist for that coast, but we have something else in common, which is that we're both UCSB grads, and so I just want to mention this.
We're both Gauchos.
You played volleyball.
You were a three-time All-American setter at UCSB, UCSB being a powerhouse of men's volleyball, and I just want to make it clear that we share this, not only that we both went to UCSB, but when I was a graduate student there, I was also an athlete.
I played intramural basketball, and we once won the C-League championship with other grad students.
That is big.
Yeah.
So I'll let the listeners decide about whose CV kind of matches up where, but we'll just say it's always nice to connect with other Gauchos.
All right, here's what we're here to talk about.
Congress is 88% Christian, give or take a few percentage points, 6% Jewish.
There are a few Buddhists, a few Hindus, and so on.
Kirsten Sinema's in the Senate and identifies as somebody who's unaffiliated with a religious tradition, as a nun, as we call it.
You're the only member of Congress of the House who falls in what is the kind of other category when it comes to religious affiliation because you identify as a humanist.
And so I'm just wondering if you can share a little bit about when you began to publicly identify as a humanist and why it felt like that was important for you to do.
Well, I'm happy to do that.
And let me say that I also frequently see myself listed with Kirsten Sinema as being, you know, the two sort of enigmatic, no religion assigned to them.
Kirsten has not been nearly as candid as I have been about my religious views.
She's coy at best.
And even though privately for years she liked telling people she was an atheist, because that was part of her whole provocative shtick that she liked, she's become a very cautious and enigmatic in different ways politician.
So I wouldn't give her too much credit for ducking these questions and dodging a label.
Why did I decide to kind of come out as not having a God belief?
And I'm the only one to candidly say that in Congress.
I do not believe in a sky God.
I have my own notions of morality and science and creation and other things.
But I did it because I got tired of ducking the question.
You get asked all the time on questionnaires and interviews, These sort of standard things and they create profiles of members of Congress and, you know, religion is always right there.
And it didn't work for me to just continue to say none of the above or to be coy about it.
I think people are really forgiving and understanding of whatever your religious view is, if you're their representative.
Um, but they want to authentically know what makes you tick.
And, you know, where does your moral framework come from?
Where do you see yourself in the scheme of the universe?
It's okay.
I mean, it's a legitimate question and it's not a religious test.
You know, our constitution prohibits religious tests, but I think it's okay for people to want to know those things about you.
So that was it.
My dear mother was 87 at the time and deeply religious.
I thought it would be a little hurtful for her for me to do it.
But when she passed away in 2017, there was really no reason for me to sidestep the question anymore.
It really speaks, I think, to not only your own journey and how you have tried to be authentic with who you are and how you identify as a member of Congress, but I think it also speaks to just the millions of Americans who are looking for someone to represent their religious and or non-religious identity in Congress.
And so I'm wondering, you know, what Why this is important for folks who may take on the label of humanist or agnostic or free thinker, others who are religiously unaffiliated, you know, as you as you talk to folks, what does this mean to them?
Well, I have come to find that it means a lot for them to feel represented in a sense, for them to feel less disparaged.
You know, there's a lot of nuns out there, a lot of atheists and agnostics and humanists.
Statistically, I believe these nuns are the fastest growing religious demographic in America.
So, you know, we're at a point where it's got to be okay To be one of them and to advocate for them not being discriminated against and maligned, which they continue to be.
And by the way, we also see so many religious phonies in politics.
And that's another part of why I thought it was important to kind of come out.
There are fakers all over the place.
People that pretend to be devout Christians that really are not.
And that has bothered me more and more as the years go by.
So I just wanted to, you know, put those cards on the table and be real about it.
And it's ended up being perfectly fine politically.
There was no backlash.
There was no political price that I paid.
If anything, it's been a positive.
Well, yeah, I mean, I know there are people listening right now who are thankful that you came out with this decision and this identity, and that it means a lot to them.
A little while later, you formed the Free Thought Caucus with a couple of other representatives, Jamie Raskin, who many folks are familiar with now because of the J6 Select Committee, and Representative Jerry McNerney, and a few others.
What was the impetus to do that, and what does the Free Thought Caucus stand for?
Yeah, so after I came out and there was a big Washington Post story on, you know, me being this novelty in the Congress, I was having some conversations with my friend Jamie Raskin.
Jeremy McNerney kind of came to be part of that as well because he's a science guy.
He's like a PhD mathematician and very much of a He's into science and reality when it comes to the universe and astrophysics and everything else.
You get a lot of humanists and atheists and agnostics in that space.
So anyway, we shared a deep concern about the encroachment of religion into our politics in a whole bunch of different ways.
I mean, the Supreme Court and where it's been taking this tortured interpretation of religious liberty, the institutions that we see in Congress, like the Congressional Prayer Breakfast, which has become this, you know, huge thing.
That is a total encroachment of religion into the public space and it's become a huge political power center, basically.
And there was really nothing on the other side as a counterweight to defend the line of separation between church and state and to aggressively advocate for the secular character of our government.
So that was kind of the inspiration, was that maybe we should create something that could begin to do that.
It's incredible that, well, there's a lot of things that are incredible here.
One is that being a freethinker and a humanist would be such an anomaly in our Congress in 2022, and that we hadn't had something similar to or such as the Freethought Caucus before this.
This really brings us to something that, you know, for my show and for Straight White American Jesus and everything that I work on really was very important, and that is in March of this year, you and your Freethought colleagues in the House held a hearing on Christian nationalism, and you've been one of the few people in the House, or in both Houses of Congress, who've talked about this, and you invited the likes of Andrew Seidel and Sam Perry, Catherine Stewart,
You know, all friends of the program, all friends of mine, all people whose work we talk about all the time, they came to testify about the dangers of Christian nationalism following on a publication of a report by the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Baptist Joint Committee.
You know, as one of the only members of either house kind of sounding the alarm on Christian nationalism, what motivated you to do that?
Yeah, honestly, what motivated me to reach out to Andrew and others about this was The strong evidence that Christian nationalism was at the heart of the January 6th insurrection.
I mean, I watched those events unfold and I saw the symbology and the slogans and the absurd, you know, Christian prayers on the floor of the Senate after they had, you know, Spread feces all over the place and wrecked the place and caused people to be injured and killed.
It was a spectacle, but Christian nationalism was at the heart of the spectacle.
It just seemed obvious to me.
So I wanted to see if the smart folks out there who research these things, We're finding that to be the case, and it turns out absolutely that was the case.
This was the connective tissue that kind of held this motley crew together on January 6th.
I've read quotes from you and things that you've said about Christian nationalism being perhaps the thing that People just still don't comprehend about the Capitol Riot, the fact that there was an integrating mechanism.
Yes, there were various groups and individuals with various motives and various identities, but in many ways, the Christian nationalist identity was really an integrating force, a mechanism that helped all of them kind of find a common thread.
I'm wondering, you know, after hearing from Sam, hearing from Andrew, hearing from Catherine and others, What did you come away with, coupled with your view sitting as a member of Congress?
Did it further kind of instantiate the problem of Christian nationalism, whether it's related to January 6th or just our republic as we head into midterms and people start to vote?
Well, I think one thing we achieved is that we made it okay to call out Christian nationalism and white Christian nationalism, and I've been encouraged to see that happening more and more.
More of cable news shows and, you know, journalists and others, our own national security establishment, Seems to be getting over the skittishness here.
And I guess it's understandable in this country, white people would be nervous about criticizing something that has the name Christian in it.
It sounds like you are, you know, disparaging Christianity.
And of course, you know, these Christian nationalists are always Claiming to be aggrieved and discriminated against the war on Christmas and other nonsense that they are constantly propagating to make it seem like Christians in America are a persecuted class, which is absurd, absolutely preposterous.
But I think that's what has made a lot of people nervous about Just honestly calling out this central role that Christian nationalism plays here.
So I think we helped with that.
I think we helped make it okay to call it what it is.
It's amazing the privilege that one has, and I've talked about this many times in this show, if you identify as a Christian, there's just a kind of benefit of the doubt that comes along with that, and that extends all the way to January 6th writers and others.
And as you're saying, it takes a lot of work and intentionality to make it so that you can actually provide a substantive criticism that gets past the alarm bells of people saying, well, you're not allowed to just attack my faith or to victimize me, et cetera.
Just a couple of months ago, you did something that I think was also notable, and I just want to make sure people know about, which is you sent a letter to the IRS and to Janet Yellen and others talking about the need to review the Family Research Council and its tax-exempt status.
And the ways that it operates supposedly as a church that is tax-exempt but does things that seem to burst out of those categories.
I'm just wondering if you, for a moment, would again just talk about that, because that's not something I don't think that most listeners know about.
I don't think they've seen a headline, but many folks listening right now will be clapping.
I mean, they will be celebrating the fact that somebody is trying to hold the Family Research Council to account because they are full of hate speech and they're always blurring this boundary between church and political arm.
Well, I would say they're not really blurring it.
They're all politics all the time, but they do their politics in the name of religion.
And that's what has gotten us to this just unbelievable place where the IRS allowed them to become legally a church, and you just can't even believe that that would happen because they don't meet any of the objective criteria to be treated as a church.
We all know they were trying to gain church status so that They would have less scrutiny of their finances, of their big dark money donors, of their activities and how they spend their money.
And it's all about that.
But, you know, the Republicans and the right wing evangelicals have so beaten down the IRS in recent years.
I mean, from the Lois Lerner thing.
And, you know, I think that the IRS just Stopped doing its job and just found the path of least resistance, just sure we'll just call it a church.
They wanna be called a church, we'll let them do it.
And that's a terrible place to be.
We already have not even close to enough visibility into the dark money.
Political machines that are dominating our elections these days, and now we have so-called churches out there running amok.
So yeah, we wrote the letter.
We're calling for scrutiny and reconsideration, and we'll see what comes of it.
It brings a new wrinkle to the opposition to the 87,000 IRS agents and the beefed up personality IRS and the opposition to that coming from the GOP, coming from the American right.
You think about What goes into somebody being, or an organization being a tax-exempt organization like the Family Research Council, how many millions and tens of millions of dollars that means, and what that means for their status in the country.
And all of a sudden, all of those comments about the IRS and opposing its new army come into light as a kind of prop for that war.
You know, I research this, you know, Representative Huffman, I research this stuff all day and all night.
This is kind of my job as a professor, as a writer, as a podcaster.
And I try to keep up on what's happening.
You know, megachurches in San Jose, militia groups in Shasta, Michael Flynn on the Reawaken America tour, baptizing Black Robe Regiment pastors.
But your perspective is different than mine, and everyone's listening.
I mean, you have an inside position, an upfront view.
You said on the House floor that Christian nationalism is infecting our government.
And so I guess I'm just wondering if we zoom out here and just ask you point blank from where you're sitting.
What does it all look like?
Because from where I am, it looks pretty devastating in terms of the ways Christian nationalism is affecting our elections, is affecting the ways that people vote, is affecting the kinds of candidates that are being held up, and just the overall future of our democracy.
So, wondering what it looks like from where you're sitting.
Well, it looks grim.
I have more and more colleagues now serving in the United States Congress that not only tolerate this stuff, but actually incite it and use it and monetize it for their political campaigns.
Got Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, going into churches.
And proclaiming herself a Christian nationalist without probably even understanding what it means, but I think she probably does qualify.
So, it's menacing.
And when you combine it with this radical Supreme Court that is very much driving the Christian nationalist agenda, In not even subtle ways.
And you combine it with the divisions in our politics and the conflict and the violence that's beginning to creep in to all of it.
It's deeply troubling.
And it's, I think, one of the more difficult parts of a difficult political climate that I'm trying to serve in.
So, I call it out all the time.
I've got a growing number of colleagues that I think are beginning to understand that, yeah, that really is what's going on, that really does need to be confronted.
And I hope that whether it's your good work as an educator and an academic, folks in the media beginning to call attention to this, and those of us that are willing to put our necks out in politics, that That we can turn this thing around because I don't want to live in a theocracy and certainly not a dystopic like Margaret Atwood novel theocracy and we are on our way there if we don't do a lot more to confront this threat.
Well, that was going to be my next question.
You know, we've done a lot on this show to talk about what's at stake in the midterms.
I'm just wondering from your perspective.
What's at stake?
It feels as if we're not entering into a typical midterm season.
We're seeing voting in Georgia go through the roof in terms of turnout already.
We're seeing billions of dollars being poured into elections all over the place.
And in my view, there's a lot at stake here in terms of the future of what this country looks like.
In your view, what is at stake in these 2022 midterms?
I don't wanna just traffic in hyperbole and fear-mongering or anything like that, but I truly think everything is at stake.
I think if you want this democratic republic to continue as we know it, it's on the line.
It is at great risk.
The House of Representatives that we elect to count the electoral votes in the 2024 election It has the ability to either accept the will of the voters or override it and reject it, or even collude with some of these southern states that appear to be interested in rigging their elections.
So we may lose it.
We may lose the ability to have a Democratic-Republican and presidential and other elections where the voters actually drive the outcomes.
And I think this election, more than any I can ever remember, is Putting that to the test.
So it's a big deal.
And there's more than that at stake.
Obviously, you know, the climate crisis is huge, existential, and we are on the verge of either stepping up and confronting it at the scale that we need to or entering to the fossil fuel industry and maybe passing an unlivable planet onto our kids and grandkids.
So again, I hate to just, you know, seemingly Scare people or try to alarm people, but this is really going on and it's really at stake and I sure hope everybody gets out and votes because this will be 100% about turnout.
If the women of America and the other awakened Americans who care about women and these other issues turn out and vote, we will be okay.
If they don't, we're in a world of trouble.
This is the question I get all the time.
You know, you kind of led us there, right?
We're pretty honest and bleak on this show, and the emails I get are often, I agree with you.
What can I do?
You know, what's the way I can get involved?
And so, let me ask you that in two ways.
I live in California.
I teach at the University of San Francisco.
I have a state with a Democratic governor and Democratic senators.
There's a large Democratic majority in our state legislature.
So if I'm a person like that, whether that's here in California or somewhere else, What can I do?
What are the ways that, from your perspective, somebody could get involved, whether that's in races in their own state or their own community or elsewhere?
How does that work?
Well, if you want to actually get out on the ground and knock on doors and help candidates, there is a very close frontline race.
About 100 miles from here, Josh Harder is the Democrat who is being targeted by millions and millions of dollars of dark money to take him out and turn that into a Republican seat.
This majority in the House could come down to just a few swing states or swing districts.
So that's one very close by where people could go and make a difference.
But there are ways to help out with Postcards and texting and phone banking without even leaving your home these days.
It's really easy.
You just go onto your computer and there's web-based apps that walk you right through it.
And that grassroots work is going to be critical as well.
So if folks are interested in that, it's pretty easy to sort of Google your way to that solution.
But the DCCC, which is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has all of these online tools and it's easy to find online.
I'm really glad you brought up that race with Harder, because I think one of the things that some Californians assume is that, well, my state is so democratically represented that the work here is done, and so there's not a need to worry about it.
But there's a situation in which Democratic House pickups in this state would really help with the Democrats keeping a majority in the House going forward.
And so if you're a Californian, it's not like, well, this is all said and done, whether that's living in Nancy Pelosi's district or your district or out in Bakersfield and saying, well, Kevin McCarthy's just going to win anyway.
There's a lot at stake in this state.
And I guess just last question here as we wrap up is, You know, there's key races that everyone's watching.
Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin.
I think it feels overwhelming.
If I watch MSNBC at night and I'm just a normal American who goes to work every day, it's like, I don't know what to do because the whole world feels like it's crumbling.
What advice would you give to that person?
Uh, well, despair is not very productive.
It rarely leads to solutions.
So no one should just tune out and give up because this is all scary and overwhelming.
We got to stay in the arena.
We've got to keep fighting.
So just do whatever you can.
Uh, if you can cut a check to someone out there who is running in one of these key races or to some of the oversight groups that are lawyered up and ready to confront The Republicans who may attempt to steal elections or may attempt to suppress the vote.
I'm talking about, you know, ACLU and MALDEF and groups like that.
Stacey Abrams' group is doing a great job as well.
Those are great ways to, I think, do your part.
And again, just keep doing what you can.
That's all any of us can do is just get back in the arena and do what you can.
We always encourage people to do one thing, and I think that's, you can't do everything, but if you do one thing, then that is a way to contribute and to kind of dispel some of that despair, which is pretty tempting at times.
It's a tempting abyss to fall into.
Last question is just, do you have plans or are there ways that we can work together to make sure that UCSB is sort of designated as the principal UC and recognized as the best one as it relates to all of these sort of You know, ne'er-do-wells in Berkeley, and I have heard of one down in LA, and there's one in Irvine in San Diego, but I just would love to see something put forth if you have any plans to work on that.
Well, we probably need to keep the other UC campuses because not everyone can get into UCS.
So, just as sort of spillover facilities, but there's no doubt that UCSB has become the point of light in the UC system, if not the entire universe.
So, proud that we have that in common, and I again want to commend you on the name of your podcast.
It's kind of fun and farcical, but it also really does capture who these white Christian nationalists I think they are, and it's not a joke.
I know you're right, because I get emails from The Daily Wire and others that want to advertise on the show, not knowing that it's a sarcastic name, so I'll just leave that there.
We need to wrap up.
I want to say thank you so much, Representative Huffman, for your time, for your insight, and also just for the work you're doing to draw attention to the threat that Christian nationalism That would be a great way to do it.
If they want to follow me on social media, I will try to give them lots of interesting content just like you're doing.
So thanks for your leadership as well, and I enjoyed being with you.
