Weekly Roundup: Pentagon Pulpit, Silenced Christians: Doug Wilson, James Talarico & the Battle for the American Soul
Doug Wilson’s appearance at a Pentagon prayer service hosted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is more than a symbolic moment—it’s a window into the kind of Christianity being elevated at the highest levels of American power. Wilson, a self-identified Christian nationalist and longtime pastor in Moscow, Idaho, has built an influential religious and media network rooted in a theology that centers male authority, rejects pluralism in the public square, and frames “Christ is King” as a political claim over the nation itself. His record—documented by journalists like Brian Kaylor and Sarah Stankorb—includes defending rigid patriarchal structures, opposing women’s suffrage, limiting public religious freedom to conservative Protestantism, and mishandling abuse cases within his orbit. That this theology is now platformed inside the Pentagon, amid ongoing fallout from the Epstein scandal and broader debates about power, sexuality, and accountability, raises urgent questions about what kind of moral vision is being fused with state authority—and who it protects.
At the same time, CBS’s decision not to air Stephen Colbert’s interview with Texas State Representative James Talarico—an outspoken Christian critic of Christian nationalism—reveals the other side of the equation. Talarico, a seminary student and public school teacher, argues that separating church and state protects both democracy and the integrity of Christian faith. His warning that Christian nationalism is “a cancer on my religion” stands in sharp contrast to Wilson’s vision of public Christianity. The juxtaposition is stark: a hardline theocrat welcomed at the Pentagon, and a soft-spoken Christian democrat sidelined from broadcast television. Together, these events underscore a growing dynamic in American public life—where the state appears increasingly willing to privilege one brand of religion while marginalizing dissenting voices, even within Christianity itself.
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I'm Brad O'Nishi, founder of Axis Moody Media, author of American Caesar, How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy.
Dan Miller's out today, and if I'm honest, I'm not feeling great, so I'm going to do my best here.
We might have a little bit of a shorter roundup just because I'm solo and under the weather, but there's a bunch of important things to talk about.
Number one is Doug Wilson made his way to the Pentagon to speak at the monthly prayer service that Pete Hegseth has started there.
And that coincides with an event at CBS and Stephen Colbert's show where Representative James Tallarico was supposed to be interviewed.
And that interview was prohibited from taking air.
It did go to YouTube and has garnered millions and millions and millions of views.
But there's some connections to be drawn between a Christian nationalist like Wilson going to the Pentagon and an anti-Christian nationalist Christian like Tallarico being banned from the airwaves in the United States.
We'll get to that and more.
Let's go.
All right, y'all.
Here's Doug Wilson at the Pentagon.
We are praying in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he does deserve it.
With his blood, he purchased all the nations of men.
And Father, this includes our nation.
So many of you know Wilson by now, and I'll go over a little bit about Wilson, but I don't know that I'm going to spend a ton of time here just acting like you don't know who he is.
Doug Wilson is a Christian nationalist pastor, a self-identified Christian nationalist, who operates out of Moscow, Idaho.
Wilson has been operating in Idaho for going on 40 years now and is somebody who has slowly and surely built a Christian nationalist empire.
Wilson not only is the leader of Christ Church in Moscow, he's also somebody who was instrumental in founding the CREC, which is a denomination based on Reformed and what I would call Reconstructionist ideas about Christianity, and we'll get to that in a minute.
There's a seminary in Moscow.
There's a college.
There is a media empire.
There is a TV network.
Doug Wilson has built things from a small outpost in the country that reaches millions of people per week.
Now, Wilson is controversial, and I think most of you know that, but nonetheless, Pete Hegseth, the so-called Secretary of War, invited him to speak at the monthly prayer service at the Pentagon.
If you've been paying attention, this is not a surprise.
Pete Hegseth attends a church that is part of the CREC.
He moved his family, meaning his third wife, with whom he had an affair while he was still married to a second wife, they moved to Tennessee with their blended family of seven children.
And one of the reasons was to attend a church led by Brooks Pottiger, who is the leader of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Church in Nashville.
Pottiger will now be headed to Washington, D.C. to lead the church plant, the newly formed Christ Church in the heart of Washington, D.C.
And that was, of course, formed by Wilson and has been led by a team of people connected to his church, including Jared Longshore and Joe Rigny.
Joe Rigny is, of course, the guy who wrote The Sin of Empathy, and we've discussed that on this show many, many times.
So Hegseth is a long-standing proponent of Wilson's brand of Christianity.
And so he invited him to speak at the Pentagon.
Now, I want to touch on a couple things he said in that clip I just played for you.
And then I want to talk about why this is such a sadly fitting set of events in the era of the Epstein files.
So Wilson says something here that I think is really important that we pay attention to.
And it may sound to some of you like standard Reformed Calvinist theology.
It may sound like standard atonement theology coming out of a certain Protestant tradition.
But in the context of American politics and Christian nationalism and the moment that we're living in right now, I really honed in on it.
He talks about how God purchased every nation, that Christ, through his sacrifice, purchased every nation.
And if you pay attention to Wilson, one of the things that Wilson and those coming from his church and his melu talk about all the time is Christ is king.
Now, we've spent much time on this podcast dissecting this idea of Christ as king.
When I was an evangelical in the 90s and the early aughts, we didn't talk about King Jesus or Christ as king.
We talked about the Lord.
We talked about the Savior.
We talked about the king of kings, but in the sense of a kingdom of God that was heavenly, was yet to come, and would never really be manifest on earth in the ways that we might think of everyday human politics.
As we've chronicled, however, on this show for the last however many episodes, Christ as King has become a rallying cry for Christian nationalists.
And the reason for that is this.
Christ as king is the idea that Christ is the king of this nation.
And if we just zero in on the United States, what that means is we have a king.
Yes, we're supposed to be a democracy.
Is this supposed to be about we the people?
Is this supposed to be about the will of the majority?
Is this supposed to be about limiting government and the executive who is at the head of our executive branch?
Is this about the separation of powers?
Is this about all of those ideas that have formed the American experiment?
Sure.
But when you say Christ is king, what you're hinting at is this.
There's an authority that goes beyond the Constitution.
There's an authority beyond the will of the people.
There is an authority beyond anything that you can imagine as part of the American experiment.
And we have a king.
We have a king.
You live in a monarchy.
And that monarch, you and this nation were purchased by God.
You were purchased by God.
I know that some of you might ascribe to the theology here the atonement theology of God purchasing nations or people through his sacrifice.
But I'm just going to say it in the context of what Doug Wilson is saying in the context of everything happening at the Pentagon these days and Pete Hegseth and his leadership.
This sounds ominous to me.
It sounds like slaveholder language.
That there's a king who purchased you and I'm the guy who represents that king.
There's a king who owns you.
He's not here right now because he's in heaven, but you know what?
I represent him as Doug Wilson or as Pete Hegseth or as Brooks Pottager or as anyone else.
So what I say goes because I represent the king.
That's really dangerous language to me.
So the Christ is king idea is one that I always pay attention to.
Here's Pete Hegseth saying it at the celebration of the Religious Broadcasters Association just this week.
Closing, as long as I have breath, I commit to you that I and we should never allow any group, no matter how large or small, to silence us from speaking the capital T truth.
Christ is king.
He died for our sins.
We are forgiven.
So there's an idea here.
Christ is king.
You live in a monarchy.
The highest authority is not the will of the people or the Constitution or the democratically elected officials or the processes that we have in place to have a liberal democracy or a republic.
Nope, you have a king.
And people like Wilson and Hagseth represent him.
So what are some of the things that Wilson says that our king wants?
We all have a king, so what does he want?
I'm going to read you a little bit from my book, American Caesar, which will be out in September.
Wilson outlines a vision in which religious minorities could live in the country without fear of punishment, as long as they accept that the public expression of their faith is not allowed.
So if you're a Muslim or a Hindu, you can live in the United States, but you will never be able to go to a mosque or a temple to celebrate.
You'll never be able to profess it.
You'll never be able to celebrate holidays.
That is just, if you go in your house and you be quiet, you'll be fine.
But that's the only way you can be a non-Christian in the United States.
I'm going to quote Wilson now.
In this mere Christendom I am talking about, Muslims could come from other lands and live peaceably.
They could buy and sell, write letters to the editor, own property, have that property protected by the cops, and worship Allah in their hearts and homes.
What they could not do is argue that minarets have the same rights of public expression that the church bells do.
The public space would belong to Jesus.
So this is the man who just preached at the Pentagon.
This is the man who is a mentor to the leader of our military forces.
The public space belongs to Jesus.
This is me now writing in my book.
Wilson wants to outlaw non-Christians from holding political office and from building temple synagogues, humanist spaces, or anything that is not a church.
He does seem to long for something like Calvin's Geneva, where dissenters were burned at the stake and power was concentrated in the hands of a few churchmen.
Now, Wilson will say, oh, no, no, no, no, you can be a Muslim here and I'm not going to burn you at the stake.
But if you go out and celebrate your religion or talk about how you're an atheist or try to set up a place to worship or gather or revere, who knows what might happen to you.
These are some of the outlines of Wilson's Christian nationalism.
Okay.
Now, Wilson and I could talk for hours about Wilson and we could spend, I mean, just so, so, so much time here.
But I want to turn to two pieces that I think will really help us.
One is Brian Kaler writing at Warden Way.
Brian was one of the first, I think he was the first, to cover the fact that Doug Wilson was at the Pentagon.
Brian is a top-notch scholar and journalist who covers these things regularly.
The Washington Post picked it up, other people picked it up, but Brian was on it.
He was reporting on it, and he really gets it right.
Let me read a bit from his piece at Warden Way, his award-winning blog.
Once considered a fringe far-right Christian figure, Wilson in recent years has found himself increasingly embraced by the broader evangelical world and the conservative political movement in the age of Donald Trump.
The biggest evidence of his rise is that Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself the Secretary of War, is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination founded by Wilson.
Brooks Pottiger, Hegseth's pastor in Tennessee, preached at the first Pentagon worship service in May and again last month.
Wilson recently announced he's sending Pottiger to Washington, D.C. to lead the new CRE church plant there, which Hagseth has been attending.
So Brian covered this.
He was on it from the start and he makes the connections among Wilson, Pottiger, and Hegseth.
Doug Wilson's Controversial Views00:11:23
Now, beyond that, I want to go to a piece by Sarah Stancorp about Doug Wilson, and some of this is going to make your blood boil, and some of it's going to be hard to listen to.
There are podcasts that have covered Wilson recently.
There are people who have started to really notice Wilson and his disgusting approaches to gender and family and sex.
Sarah Stancorp was the one who has been on this for a decade.
She wrote a blockbuster piece in Vice about Wilson.
She writes in her book, Disobedient Women and Other Places, about survivors of Wilson's church, women who were abused and assaulted and so on and so forth.
Let me read you a little bit from my book, and then I will quote Sarah.
Wilson believes that God created men and women with different roles to play in the family, in the church, and in civil society.
Echoing R.J. Rush Juni, he argues that a man's head is Christ and a woman's head is man.
This means that any man who abdicates his functional authority over his wife, one who capitulates to egalitarian feminism, is a heretic.
His sin equals denying the Trinity.
Women have been given strength in the domestic realm as homemakers and mothers.
Outside of the home, they are weak when it comes to leadership, politics, pastoral responsibilities, and, quote, the important work of violence.
Women should not be placed in roles of ecclesiastical, civil, or political leadership.
He goes so far as to characterize the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, as a matter of not of extending suffrage to half the population, but of, quote, taking it away from families.
When women were granted the right to vote, the nation had already accepted the lie that a nation is nothing more than a collection of individuals.
And so the matter was framed this way.
Men as individuals can vote, so why cannot individual women do the same?
We were so muddled, we thought we were giving the franchise to women when we were in fact taking it away from families.
Now, what happens from here is it's all of this is translated into an understanding of a dangerous understanding of human sexuality.
So we have these gender roles, and then you're like, okay, men should do this, women should do that.
A retrograde vision of how human beings work.
But that then leads to really dangerous ideas surrounding sex.
A wife must meet her husband's sexual needs, Wilson writes in reforming marriage.
This involves more than just being, quote, willing whenever he wants it.
It involves being a responsive lover.
So for Wilson, a man's sexual needs means whenever he wants sex, a woman must oblige and she must be responsive.
Period.
That is her role sexually.
That is her role in the home.
That is her role as a partner.
That is her role as a wife.
In 2021, as I just mentioned, Sarah Stancorp wrote a blockbuster piece for Vice about Wilson's understanding of men's and women's roles and the culture of secrecy, fear, and abuse in and around his church in Moscow.
One of the things that Sarah hones in on in that piece is a paragraph that many of you might be familiar with, and that is a refrain from Doug Wilson that says, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.
Instead, he argues, quote, a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants.
A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.
And that true authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessary.
Sarah talked to a woman in the church who said that, quote, a woman could be excommunicated from the church for refusal to have sex with her husband.
So this is the culture around gender and sex that pervades Wilson's theology and his ministry.
There are more examples from Sarah's incredible work from five years ago.
She chronicles how Wilson wielded his influence in order to garner leniency for a man in his 20s who was abusing an underage girl, and how he officiated the wedding of Stephen Sittler, a convicted child molester, against the wishes of the man's parole officer.
Quote, at Sittler's wedding, according to one guest, Wilson explained that sometimes people need to get married so the flesh can be contained.
Using a wife as a sexual decoy to distract Sittler from children didn't work.
Later, a judge ruled Sittler must be chaperoned around his infant son due to admitted sexual stimulation resulting from contact with the baby.
So Stancorp reports here that Wilson thought that this man getting married and having a wife who cannot refuse sex or could be excommunicated would help this man not be a child molester.
And lo and behold, it did not.
A judge ruled that terrible abusive things were happening with his own son, and thus there had to be things put in place there.
There was another case of a teenage girl whose father confessed to touching her inappropriately.
He also confessed to watching her in the shower.
When the girl asked Nancy Wilson, Doug's wife, for counsel, she was told that, quote, her father hadn't done anything illegal.
When the teenager mentioned a hug where his hand strayed to places on her body it should not be, Nancy Wilson suggested that she give him the benefit of the doubt.
Quote, that's the Christian thing to do, she was told.
So that is how sex and gender work in Doug Wilson's church and in his ministry.
That is what Sarah Stancorp reported five years ago.
We have known this for a long, long time.
So I think there's a couple of points to make about Wilson appearing at the Pentagon.
Number one fits right in with Pete Hegseth, who is somebody who has been accused of sexual assault, who is a known adulterer, and who, as a man, has seemingly been redeemed by playing the part of a devoted Christian husband.
Wilson believes that violence is a sacred thing.
He believes that men are destined for lethality in combat, and that is exactly what Hegseth believes too.
But I think there's something deeper here that I want to make sure we don't miss as Doug Wilson preaches at the Pentagon.
This is all happening in the swirl of the Epstein controversy.
This week, we are seeing the fallout of the Epstein controversy around the world.
Prince Andrew was taken into custody.
People are resigning in Europe.
People are being forced out of positions.
People are being forced to face the consequences of their actions for being involved in what really was an elite sex trafficking ring where girls were abused.
So I want you to think about it for a minute.
Not only did Doug Wilson preach at the Pentagon, not only do you live in a country where the leader of the armed services is holding prayer services every month at the lunch hour of the place where our military is headquartered.
Not only does the leader of our armed defenses look up to a man who believes that if you're a Muslim or a Hindu, you should not be able to practice your religion here.
If you're a humanist or an atheist, you should not be able to profess your religion or non-religion here.
Not only do we have a man, and I know some of you are already thinking it, and I'm not going to go over it in detail today, but Wilson also has said in the past that he believes the time of slavery was the time of the greatest harmony between the races in the United States.
Now he's backtracked and he's tried to sort of downplay it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But it's all there if you look it up and you can find it.
Wilson does not believe women should have the right to vote.
So yes, all of that is there.
I think all of you who've seen this news, who read Brian Kayler's piece, who might have seen other people breaking down Wilson at the Pentagon are making these connections.
That we've arrived at a place where someone like Wilson has gone from an outpost in a rural part of Idaho where he quietly built an empire to being invited into the heart of the American halls of power.
This is the kind of good religion that we should promote in the country, according to Pete Heckseth and other leaders.
This is the kind of leadership we need on the frontier of faith.
This is what it means to be a patriot and a Christian.
It's Doug Wilson.
A guy who thinks women shouldn't be able to vote, who thinks the time of slavery was a time of harmony.
A guy who thinks that if you are not a Christian like him, you should not be able to profess your religion.
And I would dare include in that, if you look, there's an article by Wilson from 2013 where he mentions that folks who are Latter-day Saints are included there.
He's not all that friendly or fond of Catholics either.
This is a thoroughly Protestant vision.
So humanist, atheist, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, sick, Wiccan, you are obviously on Doug Wilson's excluded list from celebrating your religion and faith in the public square.
But Latter-day Saints, Catholics, we're not sure.
Jews, definitely welcome, but only if they behave how they should.
Now, beyond that, beyond all of that, is the fact that a man whose ministry and church, if we go back to Sarah Stancorp's great reporting on all of this, who helped a child molester get married so that he could have free access to sex whenever he wanted it with his wife, who's not allowed to refuse, as the solution to his sexual deviancy and abuse.
A guy whose church is rife with stories about teenagers who are being touched inappropriately at home and told to give their abusers the benefit of the doubt.
This is the guy we're holding up as the Epstein controversy swirls.
We're seeing people face consequences across the world, but not in the United States.
We're seeing people arrested, forced out of their positions, disgraced in public, but not here.
Not Howard Luttnick, not Elon Musk, not name the dozens of people I could name.
Does Alan Dershowitz still have a job?
Does Larry Summers still have a job?
We can go down the line.
Peter Thiel, I mean, he's everywhere in the Epstein files.
Critics of Christian Patriotism00:05:02
There's a way that Doug Wilson is the most appropriate person for Pete Hegseth to bring to the Pentagon, given the Christian nationalism, the Christian supremacy, the views on women and minorities.
There's also a way that he's the most expected guy because of the way he approaches sex and abuse at his church and in his ministry and his theology and the way the Trump administration is handling Epstein too.
Like, I just don't want to look away from that connection.
I don't want to look away from that dimension of what's going on with Doug Wilson being held up as the exemplar of Christian patriotism and faith in the United States today.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and link this to what happened with Tallarico and Colbert and CBS.
All right, y'all.
So these things are all related, and I want to see if we can't make sure these connections all get synced up here.
I think all of you know by now that Stephen Colbert interviewed Representative James Tallarico on his show this week.
Here's a clip.
Tallerico comes out.
He's welcomed by Colbert.
James Tallarico.
Thank you.
Now, here's the thing.
I don't usually say this to a guest, but if people are watching this right now, it's because they found us online on YouTube.
I did an act of the show that's on tonight explaining why it's not the first time you've caused some drama.
FCC opening probe into the view after appearance by Tallarico.
Do you mean to cause trouble?
I think that Donald Trump is worried that we're about to flip Texas.
Colbert mentions there's already an FCC investigation because Tallarico was on the view.
And this interview was not allowed to air on CBS.
It was prohibited.
There was some discussions among the CBS executives and the FCC.
And so why?
Why?
What is going on here?
Well, James Tallarico is a representative from Texas who is running for Senate.
And he's been on this show.
I've interviewed James.
He's amazing for a number of reasons.
He is a thoroughgoing, overwhelmingly committed Christian.
He's a seminary student.
He's somebody who's been part of his church since he was a child, somebody who taught public school, somebody whose faith imbues every aspect of his public persona.
This is somebody who fought against the Ten Commandments bill in Texas based on the idea that he is a Christian.
This is somebody who thinks that Christian nationalism is a blight on Christianity itself, as he told me in our interview.
And here's the clip.
I'm joined today by someone I am so grateful to have taken the time to talk to me, someone who many of you probably have seen on viral videos just doing amazing work in the Texas legislature.
And that is Representative James Tallarico.
Thank you for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
One of the things that comes through every time you talk is that you're a person of faith.
You're a Christian.
Is it fair to characterize you as a Christian who is trying to combat Christian nationalism in Texas?
Yeah, I think that's a great way to describe the work I'm doing here in Texas.
There is a cancer on my religion.
And until we confess the sin that is Christian nationalism and exercise it from our churches, we can't live up to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
And so unfortunately, a lot of the time that I spend here at the Texas legislature is combating that Christian nationalism, that perversion of my faith and that subversion of our democracy.
This is somebody who thinks that the best way to be a person of faith in this country is to separate your faith from the government so the government can't mutate it, twist it, impose it on you or others.
And this is somebody who thinks that we might just see Texas flipped in the next election cycle.
So Donald Trump and Brendan Carr and the others, Brendan Carr, the leader of the FCC and others in charge, made sure this interview didn't go to air and it kind of backfired because Tallarico's raised millions of dollars and there's something like 5 million views of the interview on YouTube already.
It's a huge, huge story and they only amplified it by making it outlawed and banned.
But there's something here that I want to make sure we don't miss.
Government Becomes Screener00:11:56
Okay.
Tell Arico is not allowed to be on air.
And who is Tallarico?
Yeah, he's a Democrat.
He's somebody who's critical of Donald Trump.
A lot of people are.
John Ossuf, the senator from Georgia, the Jewish senator from Georgia, was on Colbert.
He was allowed to be there.
Why not Tall Rico?
Straightforward answer is they're afraid that they're going to flip Texas.
They're afraid that Texas is going to go blue.
They're afraid that the backlash to gerrymandering and to ICE and to everything else the Trump administration is doing is going to lead to a major political realignment in one of the biggest states in the nation.
All right.
Yeah, I'm with you.
That's there.
Totally there.
But I want to zoom out one dimension here.
Just talked for 20 minutes about how Doug Wilson was the featured speaker at the Pentagon.
I mean, the Pentagon is a place of immense power.
The kind of money that goes into our U.S. military, the kind of resources, it is the strongest, most well-funded military, perhaps in human history.
So this guy, Doug Wilson, is invited to speak to anyone who would like to come at the Pentagon.
He is a featured, celebrated, revered Christian American.
The guy who says that you and your nation were purchased by a king.
The guy who says that women cannot tell their husbands they don't want to have sex.
It's not allowed.
And if you do so, you're a heretic.
And you might be excommunicated from your church.
The guy who covers up abuse in his church and helps molesters get married and so on and so forth.
The guy who says slavery was a time of great harmony between the races.
Guy who says, quote, women are the kinds of people that people come out of.
Guy who says women should not be able to vote.
The guy who says, if you're not a Christian or the right kind of Christian, you don't get to practice your religion here.
This is the exemplary Christian American today.
And the guy like Tallarico, who told me in our interview that Christian nationalism is a blight on the country.
A guy who did everything he could to make sure the Ten Commandments were not forced on kids in classrooms because that would be the un-Christian thing to do.
I believe the separation of church and state is sacred.
I think a nation with one supreme religion is not just un-American.
I also think it's un-Christian, given how Jesus taught about religious supremacy.
But I do think if these people are going to call for a Christian nation, they need to reach for all of it.
And that is, you know, I fought the bill to require the Ten Commandments posted in every classroom.
And I've often wondered, instead of posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom, why don't they post money is the root of all evil in every boardroom?
Why don't they post do not judge in every courtroom?
Why don't they post turn the other cheek in the halls of the Pentagon?
Or it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
This is the inconsistency I'm trying to call out because they're using my tradition.
They're speaking for me.
And so I think I have a special moral responsibility to combat Christian nationalism wherever I see it.
A guy who is a soft-spoken seminary student, a former public school teacher, a guy who thanks God for everything he does in public.
This is the guy who's banned from your television.
And there's a couple of things to say about it.
One is this shows you the kind of Christianity those in power favor.
And it shows you the kind of Christianity that threatens them, that scares them.
It shows you what kind of people of faith are a menace to a totalitarian regime.
It is those that would separate faith from power, government from religion, church and state.
There is something happening here in Texas.
Here in the state capitol, a small band of Republicans and Democrats in the Texas House are coming together to stop two West Texas billionaires from taking over our state government.
Their names are Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes, and they're the biggest Republican donors in the state.
They've already bought our governor, they bought our lieutenant governor, they bought our attorney general, they bought our state senate.
And now to complete their takeover, they're trying to buy the Texas House.
Tomorrow, they'll attempt to get one of their puppets elected speaker.
One of our Republican colleagues said, quote, this is the most corrupt state government in Texas history.
Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes are not just oil and gas oligarchs.
They're also Christian nationalist pastors.
They've spent more than $100 million to ban abortion in Texas, to ban books in Texas.
And now they're trying to close our Texas public schools with a private school voucher scam.
This is bigger than party.
This is bigger than partisanship.
Texas is too big and too great to be sold to the highest bidder.
We cannot allow two billionaires to transform our beloved state into a theocracy.
We have to stop them.
But it also shows you what happens when you allow the government to be the facilitator of religion.
Dan and I have talked about this forever on this show.
But the U.S. government is now in the business of telling you, the American citizen, which kind of Christianity is good.
And shall I say, government sanctioned.
And when that happens, and if you're a Christian listening to this, I think you can see where this is going.
It is the government who's going to start telling Christians which kind of Christian they need to be to be the good kind of Christian.
Excuse me, when the government becomes the arbiter of your religion, of your scriptures, of your morals, of your ethics, of your theology, you lose.
Because the power of the government is then put behind a certain brand of your faith.
And there will always come a point when you are not the right kind of Christian.
There will always come a point when you're not the right kind of human.
There will always come a point where the religion and the power of the state coincide to dub you as a heretic, as a traitor, as something that needs to be excised from our public square.
And they will even do that to Christians.
If you look at James Tallarico on the surface, James is the least threatening person to the white Christian you could think of.
He's a white guy.
He has like boyish charm.
When you see him in person, he looks young and unassuming.
He looks like the kind of guy that might teach sixth grade or fourth grade and do so in a way that was absolutely caring and full of patience and joy and love.
This is not an aggressive guy.
It's not a dangerous guy.
It's not a guy who's out there doing anything he can to get in front of a camera.
If you've ever followed James Tallerico, he's not a showboat.
He is not an extremist.
He is not someone threatening violence or anything.
And he is the one they're scared of.
He's the wrong kind of Christian.
He's the wrong kind of guy.
He's critical of billionaires.
He's critical of the state.
He wants his faith separated from the power of Trump, of the executive branch, of the Secretary of Defense, all of that.
I just want you all to see that when you let religion be used and co-opted and branded by the government, the government then becomes the screener, the filter, the decider about what is good religion and bad religion, who is a good person of faith and who is not.
And it extends really far.
You might expect Doug Wilson and the Trump administration to think of Muslims as quote bad, Hindus as quote, unassimilable, Buddhists as never really American, atheists as a threat to family values.
You might expect that.
Terrible, disgusting, prejudiced.
Yes.
James Tallarico is a white guy born and raised in Texas who's been a Christian his whole life.
And guess what?
He is also bad.
Not really American.
Not fit for the television.
Not somebody we want you learning from, hearing from, or needless to say, winning an election.
This is not the guy that you're allowed to see.
So what happens is that these things cascade on each other.
The government becomes the filter and the force of religion.
And then they have to use the press to make sure that only the right kind of religious people are in front of you.
The freedom of the press and the freedom of religion go together.
The right to gather, the right to free speech, the right to the freedom of the press, freedom of religion.
This all is tied together like it has been since our founding.
If you trample one, you trample the other.
You live in a country where the government told the most well-loved, I mean, you can send me emails and go ahead, Kevin Hart, and you can tell me who's more popular than Colbert and all that.
That's fine.
I'm just going to say it, though.
Stephen Colbert as the most well-loved comedian in the country.
The government said, sorry, you can't air that interview that was approved by CBS, but sorry, it's just, we're not going to do it.
And CBS was like, yeah, sorry.
The government said no.
I think you all listening know this, but let's just be clear.
You live in a country now that censors people they don't want you to hear from, potential leaders who are the wrong kind of Christians.
And they invite Doug Wilson to speak at the worship services held by our military.
That is where we are.
This is the result of a couple of things.
The government deciding that it can sanction certain forms of religion and censor others.
It's also the case that someone like James Tellerico is calling for accountability when it comes to the Epstein files, pure and simple.
And Doug Wilson is the kind of guy whose church and ministry are built around protecting those who are abusive.
Those who are doing things to harm others and saying they should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Lance Wall now, who is a prophet of the New Apostolic Reformation, who's not related to Wilson, et cetera, but I will just say this week said we should give Steve Bannon a pass when it comes to his deep involvement with Epstein because Steve Bannon's a good guy.
Deep Ties and Excuses00:02:48
So we just need to look the other way.
So here's a Christian leader with millions of followers saying, hey, you know, Bannon and all that stuff he was doing with Epstein and just the deep, deep ties and all the emails.
You know, the guy who was like trafficking and abusing girls?
Just look the other way because he's on our side.
Like there's so many dimensions to all this.
Ways that abusers and authoritarians hang together.
Ways that you're supposed to be given a pass if you're powerful and on the right side.
And ways that Christianity can be co-opted to be the sanctioner of who's a real American and who isn't.
All of it coming to fruition in front of our eyes every week.
All right, y'all, I need you to do two things for me.
I need you to sign up for our newsletter, which you can find in the show notes.
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I need you to subscribe to our YouTube channel, but, and I guess this is three things, and so sorry, you can email me if you want, but three things here.
I need you to go listen to Reign of Error.
Reign of Error is something I'm helping to produce at Access Media Media, and it's by Sarah Posner, who you'll know as a great investigative journalist and an expert on Christian nationalism.
But this week, especially, she interviewed Matthew J. Kressler, and they talked about anti-Semitism and the American forms of Catholicism that are emerging on the American right.
And it is devastating stuff, but it all ties into everything we discuss today.
They go on at length about the idea of Christ is king.
To me, it's an essential conversation between two experts that you won't get anywhere else.
So I need you to go listen to Reign of Error because that is where you're going to get these deep dives and analysis, just like on Swatch, that break down the headlines, but also illuminate what's actually going on.
So go check that out right now.
I'm sorry for a shorter roundup today, but Dan is out and it's one of those February Fridays where the forces are all against us in terms of health and family to make it a little bit shorter than usual.
We'll be back Sunday, however, with an amazing interview with Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI, who will be going over with Leah Payne the new data on Christian nationalism from all 50 states that just came out this week.
So Melissa will be there with Leah.
They'll be talking about that data and what it tells us about the state of the country.
Back next week with other great content.
It's in the code, the weekly roundup, and on and on and on.
Melissa Deckman On Christian Nationalism00:00:39
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