Mini-Interview: Dr. Ruth Braunstein on Resisting Evangelical Extremism
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Brad speaks with Dr. Ruth Braunstein about her new podcast on the evangelicals resisting extremism within their communities.
https://www.ruthbraunstein.com/podcast
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Brad here and wanted to bring you something today that is short but sweet.
And that's a mini-interview with Dr. Ruth Bronstein, who is the creator of a new podcast called When the Wolves Came.
The podcast is a six-part podcast that really follows the rise of Christian nationalism, which is, of course, a story we've heard many times before, but it goes inside evangelical churches where this MAGA church movement has arisen over the last decade.
The story is really one of evangelicals inside the movement who have decided to resist the MAGA extremism and reverence of Donald Trump.
And I'm not going to lie to everybody.
It's going to be really upfront.
I think there are stories out there of this kind of quote-unquote evangelical resistance.
Not all of them are really compelling to me, and not all of the things that are being made about this kind of story are compelling to me.
And I think one of the reasons is there's sometimes an effort to whitewash them a little bit, to kind of make certain evangelicals not complicit in what's happened over the last decade in their churches and in our politics.
Today, I bring you somebody who I think is able to tell that story with nuance and to do it in a way that doesn't look to remove the burden of responsibility from certain people, but instead tries to provide a little window into hope,
into something that I personally am a little skeptical of, and that's evangelicals coming to see Trumpism as problematic and tragic.
But nonetheless, I think this storytelling and this instance is one that, in the hands of Ruth Bronstein, I'm totally and absolutely willing to give my attention because of Ruth's track record as a scholar, as a sociologist,
and as somebody who cares deeply about democracy.
The podcast is called When the Wolves Came, and Ruth is associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut.
She leads the And so,
I wanted to talk to her about what compelled her to pursue this story and...
What it might teach us about this current political moment.
Ruth, it is great to see you again and so happy to have you back.
I want to just start by asking about when the wolves came.
Tell us how this project got started and what inspired you to tell this story.
Question one.
First of all, thanks so much, Brad.
So by way of background, for the past few years, I've been tracking a growing set of organizations and individuals who are working to raise awareness about the dangers of Christian nationalism.
This is something your listeners are already super familiar with.
But as a sociologist who studies social movements in particular, I was really fascinated by how varied these efforts were.
Like some are explicitly critiquing Christian nationalism.
But others are focused broadly on extremism and maybe no less about the religious dimensions, per se.
Many are working indirectly on things like pushing back on narrow framings of American identity or on attacks on American history or they're worried about polarization or they're promoting more bridging work.
And in my view, all of these efforts are responding to the same set of empirical developments on the ground.
What we would call a resurgence of white Christian nationalist or dominionist ideology.
Now, they have really different ways of describing it and different tools for addressing it, but I wanted to try and zoom out and understand this broad field of activity.
And I wanted to do that both to help people within the field to find potential allies and also to help folks like funders identify potential gaps in areas that are in need of more investment.
Because, as we can all see pretty clearly right now, this is really an existential threat to pluralistic democracy as we know it.
And we need everybody to be as well-connected and moving in the same direction as possible.
So while I'm doing all of that research in the field, I start to hear more and more about white evangelicals who are also really concerned about the resurgence of white Christian nationalism.
And, you know, as we know from surveys and from a range of other data, the white evangelical world has really been one of the places where these extremist ideas have really taken root and spread over the past decade.
So this is not where we would expect to find resistance.
And in addition to that, those who were critical of this early on...
And so it was notable to me that a network of leaders was coalescing.
And these are leaders who had managed to kind of weather that initial storm and were now vocally voicing their concerns as insiders in the evangelical world, which is important because evangelicals are famously skeptical.
If not outright hostile toward outsiders.
And so I was extremely interested in this group of dissenters on the inside who, you know, maybe had the potential to disrupt what sociologists we would call the plausibility structure of this alliance between the MAGA movement and the evangelical church.
People who were able to say, no, these ideas are not compatible.
You know, I was also really interested in whether these evangelical insiders, who tend to be more conservative, theologically, of course, but also politically, would be able to forge connections with that broader religiously and politically diverse movement that is resisting Christian nationalism from the outside.
And so that's really the stories that we tell in the podcast.
I'll cut to the chase.
There are a lot of stories out there about evangelicals, white evangelicals, the Trump era.
I mean, we've been doing this for about a decade now.
There's been some expectation that at some point evangelicals would wake up.
They would see the light.
They would turn away and repent from their sins and figure out that Trumpism doesn't go along with the story of Christ or that he's corrupt or that something, something, something.
What makes this story, the one that you tell in the pod, one where what we expect from this group is perhaps not what we get?
Yeah, so I'll cut to the chase, too.
Maybe it won't be any different this time.
Really, you're right.
People like Caleb Campbell, who's a Phoenix-based evangelical pastor, and the person who we follow throughout the whole season of When the Wolves Came, they're really fighting an extremely uphill battle within the evangelical world.
And I don't think any of them are under any illusions that they will be able to snap their fingers.
They really view this, and they said this over and over again, as a generational struggle to reclaim their church from the grips of the MAGA movement.
And they also recognize, and this is key, that just going back to the status quo isn't enough either.
Because confronting Christian nationalism's hold on their church also meant for many of them...
Confronting the fact that white evangelicals in the U.S. were primed for this message all along.
That the seeds were planted centuries ago in the form of ideas about white supremacy, that justified the genocide of Native Americans and the institution of slavery, and then got kind of baked into evangelical theology.
And then, of course, Ideas about patriarchy and gender complementarianism and militant masculinity.
A lot of the work of people like Caleb Campbell and a lot of his partners in this field has required asking really critical questions about their own tradition and imagining new futures for their church.
So, I mean, will it work?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But I am encouraged by it for a few reasons.
And one is that so much of this moment is built on a decades-long project to convince people that the only way to be a good Christian in the United States is to vote Republican, no matter what.
Like, the Democrats are so evil and the stakes are so high that this is non-negotiable.
And this has really held this community captive to the Republican Party.
And so having leaders in that community loudly trying to pierce that illusion and giving evangelicals an off-ramp from that, saying, come to a different kind of church, what in the podcast we call a kind of misfit church, which is the language that Caleb Campbell uses in his church.
Be an evangelical first and think critically about what both parties are telling you.
Learn to live with people that you disagree with and think in complicated ways.
Don't be a captive to one party.
That has at least the potential to be an important part of this, I think.
And then the other is that this group is taking really, really seriously the fact that their church is promoting not just conservative views, but really extremist views.
And they're pushing people toward them through conspiracy theories and misinterpretation.
Misinformation that we know can push people down a very dangerous path that sometimes ends in extremist violence.
They saw January 6th with their own eyes.
And they won't be convinced that it was a peaceful protest.
They know what these ideas can lead to.
And I think that is a somewhat new development in all of this.
For evangelical leaders themselves to say this isn't just about liking Donald Trump, who is a morally flawed person.
This is about being manipulated into supporting a truly extreme and potentially violent movement.
And so having people who are willing to say that out loud, and also who are really doing their homework, developing tools that draw explicitly from the anti-extremism playbook, doing the work of, like, de-radicalizing people, building churches and communities that are more resilient to extremism,
this also...
Strikes me as a potentially important new development, and this is the story that we're telling.
Like I said, I think there's a lot of stories like this one out there, but the way you're approaching it is compelling.
And I'm wondering, what do you want people to take away from this?
What are the lessons or the dynamics, the picture that we might get in terms of America's religious landscape and how it's a little more nuanced than one might expect, including me?
A very grizzled and jaded scholar and podcaster who is so used to the stories out of evangelicalism being ones of kind of false responsibility.
And really those of people who, if they somehow resist Trumpism within evangelicalism, find themselves out of evangelicalism really quickly.
So all that to say, what is it you want folks to get from listening to this story?
And what do you want them to learn from the people involved?
I think we're really in a moment of restructuring of our political and religious fields in the U.S. So for decades, religion in the U.S. has been organized around a liberal-conservative divide, right?
Right, left.
And that divide, of course, maps onto our broader And particularly what's often called a kind of deepening partisan polarization or tribalism, where, you know, whether you're on the blue team or the red team is an increasingly salient part of our political identities.
But in this podcast, we are tracking debates and divisions in the evangelical world that are not just about liberal versus conservative views.
They're really about something deeper.
They're about whether the United States should be a pluralistic democracy or an authoritarian theocracy.
That's the new divide.
And as with that previous divide, those shifts within the evangelical world, I think we need to see them as a microcosm of broader shifts in American politics as a whole.
So what does this mean?
It means that Americans are now facing some choices.
And they're choices that are going to challenge that partisan tribalism that we've been taught to hold close for decades, for many of us, for our whole lives as adults.
So for conservatives, what does this look like?
For many people, including for many evangelicals, it's a choice between following your party's leader or fighting to preserve democracy.
And that's going to involve aligning yourself, at least in part, with members of the opposing party.
For liberals who are fighting to preserve democracy, it's a question of whether they'll be willing to partner with those evangelicals, conservatives, Republicans, who are breaking with their party's leader in order to fight to defend democracy,
because they believe that that is important to them as evangelicals, as conservatives, as Republicans.
And so I'm a nerd.
I love the show Game of Thrones.
And when I talk about this moment, I often compare it to the situation that the people of Westeros are facing when they realize that there is an army of zombies called White Walkers who are preparing to attack their continent.
And these royal families that have been fighting one another for power for generations on this continent, they face a choice, not unlike the.
The one we do now.
Do they keep fighting with one another as their world is destroyed?
Or do they set aside their differences and their grudges and their distrust of one another and somehow fight together against this existential threat?
Recognizing that if they win and they come out on the other side, they can go back to fighting with one another.
But that they won't even have that opportunity if the White Walkers win.
And I think that these attacks on our democratic institutions, we really need to understand them as an existential threat to our democracy as we know it.
And because of that, we need as big a tent as possible with liberals and conservatives, with atheists and evangelicals, with everybody to speak with one voice and say, this is not a partisan issue.
This is bigger than that.
So that's the big picture that the podcast is really trying to speak to.
And I really hope it starts a conversation about how we can all work together in this moment.
Thank you.
you you you Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That's it for today.
You can find When the Wolves Came anywhere you get podcasts, and you can check out Ruth's work and everything she's doing.
She is a fantastic scholar and writer and definitely want to check out the pod.
We'll be back on Friday with the weekly roundup.
We'll be back next week with our interview on Monday.
