What can we Americans learn from others around the world about how to protect democracy when the stakes are high? Can we as Americans learn about how to challenge forms of religious nationalism and religious supremacy? What can we learn from Buddhists in Sri Lanka or Muslims in Turkey, or Christians in South Korea who have faced similar kinds of forms of religious nationalism in in their own context and sought to deflate their power?
That’s the purpose for this series. Across 10 episodes, we travel around the world to places where there are similar battles afoot, where exclusionary movements of religious nationalism are driving democratic backslid. We’ll be speaking with people of faith from a variety of faiths and traditions. We’ll be speaking with scholars and activists to understand what is happening in these contexts, how it’s similar to or different from what’s happening in the USA, and we’re gonna try to mine some practical lessons from those we speak to about what’s worked and what hasn’t in these efforts to protect democracy.
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What if I told you that America is unique but not exceptional?
And what if I told you that when we forget the myth of our exceptionalism and embrace our place in the world, that we might learn from our neighbors about how to fight Christian nationalism and authoritarianism?
What if we took a global view of resistance to those who would deny our rights and impose religion on our bodies?
This October from Axis Mundi Media, we bring you American Unexceptionalism from Dr. Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take It by Force, and the creator of Charismatic Revival Fury.
And the Reverend Susie Hayward, a global peace builder and veteran of the U.S. Institute of Peace.
American Unexceptionalism is a limited series podcast where we ask what lessons Americans can learn from those who have resisted religious nationalism and authoritarianism from across the globe.
Matt and Susie interview scholars and activists about the strategies they used and the lessons they learned in their fight against oppressive religious regimes.
We are facing an unprecedented crisis to our Constitution, but we're hardly the only ones who've been in this type of fight before.
It's time to put our exceptionalism behind us in order to learn how to create a future for all of us.
Join us for the premiere episode, October 23rd, 2025.
My Buddhist monk friend said to me at a time when I was despairing, He said, "Susan, nothing is forever." It was very Buddhist.
Nothing is forever.
What is happening right now in America will not be forever, and if not fixed.
Everything is always changing.
And you have to step into that change process and direct it toward good outcomes.
Part of what Matt and I have discovered through interviewing these experts and these people who have been living through these kinds of struggles, protesting, organizing to protect their democracies, doing it for years, is that there's a lot more we can do.
These authoritarian takeovers are not inevitable, and they're not unstoppable.
But the more time that passes, the harder it is to reverse.
that we need to get moving.
Thank you.
What's up, y'all?
Brad here, and excited today to introduce you to a new project that I know is going to be incredibly meaningful and educational for all of us.
Introducing today American Unexceptionalism from Matthew Taylor, Dr. Matthew Taylor, and the Reverend Susan Hayward.
A couple of months ago, Matt called me, and most of you know Matt.
Matt is the author of the Violent Take It by Force.
Matt is the creator of Charismatic Revival Fury.
He is the, in my view, the leading expert on the new Apostolic Reformation.
and somebody who's just an amazing public scholar.
Reverend Susan Hayward is someone who has worked at the U.S. Institute of Peace and And someone who is a global peacemaker, who has spent time across the globe working in various communities across various religious traditions in order to bring resolution to conflict and understanding to both sides of disagreement.
Matt mentioned to me a project that they had, and that project was one in which they had gathered scholars from across disciplines and across regions who were experts in religious nationalisms in their in either their home countries or in the countries and places that they study.
And he said, look, Brad, we have come together and we've gained a collective insight into the strategies and skills that it takes to fight religious nationalism, that it takes to fight religious nationalism that's in bed with authoritarianism, that it takes to fight autocratic rulers who are using religion to bolster their power and authority and legitimacy.
And one of the things that he said and that that has stuck me with ever stuck with me ever since is that our American exceptionalism, the idea that this is unique to us, is holding us back from learning how to fight it.
And I think that most of us here, most of us listening, you know, are people who are not necessarily die hard into the idea of American exceptionalism.
For many of us, we've left that behind or see that as part of a historical trajectory, a historical lens, a narrative, a myth that is tied up with very harmful ideas like Manifest Destiny, or the idea of being a city on a hill, or we just see it as a way to um justify American violence and empire in the Reagan era or the Nixon era, or any other time.
What didn't strike me though was that we were still employing the lens of American exceptionalism, perhaps without knowing it, thinking that we were in this fight, that we were battling a movement, an ideology that we see taking over our public square, infecting our schools, destroying our way of life, our government.
And thinking that this was something we had to figure out how to resist on our own because it was an American problem.
And I think that what Matt and what Susie will teach us in this series is that this is an American problem.
It's just not unique.
And that Christian nationalism is an American phenomenon, but as they say, the resistance is global.
And so what can we learn from people in Turkey or in Ukraine or in Brazil about how to fight what we see in our own country right now?
We are not the only ones.
We are not the first ones.
And as I've gotten to work with Matt and Susie on this project over the last few months, along with people here at Access Mundium Media like Andrew Gill and Scott Okamoto and Kerry O'Neishi, we've come to see the wisdom that it is on offer from this approach.
And so today I want to introduce you to this series.
And I want to introduce you to Matt and Susie and what they're doing with American unexceptionalism.
And I want them to be able to explain it in their own words.
American exceptionalism debutes on 1023 in just a little bit here.
And we'll be bringing you episodes for the next two months about religious nationalisms and how we can learn to fight them.
Today you're going to hear from them about where this project came from and what they hope that it can teach all of us as we engage in a fight that often feels insurmountable and dire.
Both of them are just amazing public scholars and teachers.
And so I'm so thrilled to be able to bring this project to you now.
If you're a subscriber, check out Supercast today because the entire first episode of American Unexceptionalism is available in video form.
So if you'd like to watch Matt and Susie explain the project and get the full 25-minute video, uh, subscribers, it's going to be in Supercast for you.
And uh, if you're not a member uh today would be a good day to think about it.
It's 40 bucks for the whole year, and you get perks like this, as well as ad-free listening, access to our Discord, and access to our entire 900 episode archive.
So here's Matt and Susie explaining where it came from and what it's all about.
Welcome to the first episode of American Unexceptionalism, everyone.
We're glad you've joined us for this limited series exploring the fight against religious nationalism worldwide.
Susie and I came up with the idea for the series and partnered with Brad and Ishii and the folks at Access Moon to make it because maybe like you, we are feeling the urgency of the moment here in the US.
Yes, indeed, Matt.
You know, well, based on your own scholarship on Christian nationalism and the new apostolic reformation, just how great a threat this moment is to American democracy and religious pluralism.
It's real.
And listeners of straight white American Jesus don't need to be told how precarious a moment we are in with the Dominance of various forms of Christian nationalist belief and practice and their alignment with political power that is undermining our democracy and threatening already vulnerable communities.
And meanwhile, political violence just seems to keep rising.
It feels right now in this country like we are teetering on the cuss.
Will we fall into more full-scale organized violence?
Or will we pull back just in time to avoid that?
It's a scary time to be an American who cares about freedom and religious pluralism and equality and basic human dignity.
But here's the thing we are not alone.
In the US, we tend to think of ourselves as exceptional.
In fact, if you read a lot of the literature out there about American Christian nationalism, it sounds as though this was a unique American experience.
It is not.
American Christian nationalism is just one species of these emerging hybrid political movements that are installing authoritarian leaders in democracies around the globe.
What is happening here?
What we see around us, this growing far-right political violence, the religious nationalists and religious supremacist language that has been infecting our politics, the degradation of our government institutions to enrich one political party.
This is part of a global trend.
And I've seen this play out a lot, even among some of my fellow former colleagues in Washington, DC, among globally minded and connected Americans.
It's so ingrained in us to think that the United States is the democratic state par excellence, the city on a hill, and that we're here to dispense lessons to others around the world about how to do democracy correctly, how to advance peace and justice through civil society.
I mean, this is like the thrust of my job at the U.S. Institute of Peace several years ago.
Our job was to go out and to teach other folks around the world how to build peace through democratic rights and processes.
It's the ways in which American exceptionalism is internalized in so many of us.
Susie and I are here because we love the United States.
We are patriots.
And like any patriots, we care deeply about our country.
And truthfully, American democracy is special.
Our constitution, our system of governance and civil society, the separation of church and state, checks and balances, the first amendment, including rights to freedom of religion, speech, and protest, these are amazing historical accomplishments.
The United States is one of the first modern democracies.
And even more, the movements from our past who've helped protect and defend democracy, like the abolition movement, the quest for women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, have much to teach us right now.
But the never United States, we have never faced a threat quite like this one.
Let me state it plainly.
A far-right authoritarian movement in league with the religious nationalist movement has taken over all three branches of our government.
They are actively dismantling the very safeguards the American founders tried to put in place to protect our democracy.
If we go around taking a posture of American exceptionalism right now, especially in this moment, when we're realizing how fragile our democratic system is, how vulnerable our society is to misinformation, how quick some of our own institutions like our universities can fall if we act like we know it all right now.
We're just putting ideological blinders on.
And let's not forget even Martin Luther King himself went to India to learn from the Gandhian nonviolent direct action before launching the civil rights movement here.
That movement was not solely American grown, but grew out of lessons from elsewhere, solidarity from elsewhere.
So I think, you know, what Matt and I have been talking about a lot recently and in recent years, and the reason why we launched this project was because we think this moment is calling for some major humility on the apart Americans.
We wanted to flip the script of American exceptionalism and ask what can we Americans learn from others around the world about how to protect democracy when the stakes are high?
What can we as Americans learn about how to challenge forms of religious nationalism and religious supremacy, the forms of Christian nationalism that we see so many of our fellow American citizens being drawn to in this moment in this country.
What can we learn from Buddhists in Sri Lanka or Muslims in Turkey or Christians in South Korea who have faced similar kinds of forms of religious nationalism in their own context and sought to deflate their power?
So that's the purpose for this series.
And across 10 episodes, we're going to travel around the world to places where there are similar battles afoot, where exclusionary movements of religious nationalism are driving democratic backsliding.
We'll be speaking with people of faith from a variety of faiths and traditions.
We'll be speaking with scholars and activists to understand what is happening in these contexts, how it's similar to or different from what's happening in the US.
