It's great to welcome back to the program.
Catherine Stewart, who's the author of The Power Worshipers Inside the Dangerous Rise
of Religious Nationalism.
Catherine, so great to have you back.
It's wonderful to see you again.
Thank you.
So I think that now, partially thanks to this Netflix series, The Family, there are more
people who are becoming familiar with the under the radar way in which Christian nationalism
is a thing here in the United States, despite sort of at least nominally, the separation
of church and state.
And one of the things a lot of people may not understand is all of the different sort
of centers of power and influence that that are playing a role here.
So can you kind of lay out the landscape for us a little bit?
Sure.
The political movements are pretty complicated.
And this one is, I think, more complex than most.
Most it's kind of centralists.
It consists of a variety of for profit and nonprofit organizations, legal advocacy groups,
right wing policy groups, data initiatives, media and messaging workshops, legislative
initiatives.
So, you know, the movement's leaders, are there a number of them?
They're often interconnected through some of these initiatives.
But it's it's a really vast kind of movement with a lot of different components.
And it shows the extent to which this the Christian right has organized over decades,
really, in building this kind of infrastructure.
Can you give a couple of the examples that might be more surprising to people of where
what what some of the components are?
Sure.
I mean, let's start with the legislative initiative called Project Blitz.
It operates a little bit like the American Legislative Exchange Council.
You know what that is?
They craft centrally craft legislation.
And then these different pieces of identical or near identical legislation are they flood
the states, all of them, and intending to sort of chip away bit by bit at the separation
of church and state in different ways.
So, for instance, this past year and a half in dozens of states have seen these in God
we trust bills which mandate that people put large in God.
We trust science in public school classrooms and public schools, even on public buildings,
even the windows of police cars, just to sort of get the idea in people's minds, you know,
in God we trust this is somehow, you know, unifying the idea of religion with a national
identity.
But, you know, when they these aren't God we trust does come into a state.
People think it's sort of a one off and maybe they oppose it or maybe they don't.
But the fact is, these are pieces, a piece of legislation that are crafted by project
blitz.
And so they understand one thing I'm thinking of is when when bans on same sex marriage
were effectively outlawed by the Supreme Court in June of 2015.
We talked at the time about how the battle lines against LGBT rights were going to shift
from marriage to workplace discrimination, so-called religious freedom.
And then a whole bunch of different instances of this popped up at the state level.
Was that also an example of the way in which this is this is crafted and then kind of rolled
out nationally?
Absolutely.
I mean, this the architects of Project Blitt have arranged this type of legislation, the
three categories.
The first is more, you know, you could call it symbolic.
But the third category is really about a license to discriminate against people whose so-called
lifestyles are very being that they disapprove of.
So opposition to LGBT equality is on the frontlines of that third category.
When we talk about this concept of the culture war religiosity seems to be a big part of
that.
I mean, very often when we talk about like the more religious and older Fox News demographic
and how it ties into very often supporting Republican agenda rather than Democratic agenda.
Can you talk a little bit about how you think of the concept of culture war in this concept,
context of religiosity?
Sure.
I mean, I think we're kidding ourselves if we just look at this through a culture war
framework.
The this is a political movement and it's all about power.
And if you look at the expansiveness of the positions of the leaders, look, when they're
talking to the, you know, the voters and when they're talking to pastors about how to talk
to their congregants about these issues, to turn them out, to vote, they're it's all abortion
all the time or at some of these other same, you know, same sex marriage or.
These other kinds of culture war issues.
But when you look at what they say in the forms that they share, when they're talking
to sympathetic audiences, they have incredibly expansive policy proposals, economic policy,
foreign policy, domestic policy.
And that shows that this is a much more expansive movement.
It's not just a culture war.
I mean, if you can understand really well that if you can get people to vote on one
or two issues, you can capture their vote.
So that's why they've focused so heavily on these on these particular issues.
You know, in the Corona virus situation that we're dealing with, we've seen a lot of prominent
Christian televangelists preying on vulnerable people on their disproportionately elderly
audiences, offering things like silver you can drink to cure Corona virus can.
That's Jim Baker.
Kenneth Copeland did a sort of pray away Corona virus thing with his hands covered in.
I mean, I'm guessing it's water, but some systems have wholly liquid, I'm sure is that
that's a very cartoonish representation of the connection between news and religion.
Does that have any connection to the to the movement you're talking about, which is working
legislatively, etc.?
Or are these really two totally different things?
And no, it's all connected.
Look, the movement is deeply hostile.
It's very anti-science.
They, you know, obviously are anti evolution, very take very strong in both segments of
the movement, take very strong, anti-environmental policies, because that's sort of part of their
policy.
It's a very sort of pro-business, you know, business friendly of movement because they
depend critically on the wealth of a subsection of America's plutocratic class.
So they do take anti-environmental policies.
They take in anti science policies, and they and they disparage critical thinking above
all.
And so that movement has really kind of taken control of the Republican Party.
And I think you see the consequences in the administration's reaction to the Corona virus
and a pandemic like this.
We were unable to sort of.
There's a kind of diminishment of value of expertise.
You know, the people who are around in Trump's inner circle, they're not chosen because they're
experts in their field.
They're chosen because they adhere to an extremist ideology and because they've demonstrated
like severe political like extreme political loyalty.
So we're talk a little bit about you mentioned that political divide.
Right.
Republicans and Democrats.
On the one hand, there's no question that in the electorate this is far more prevalent
on the right than on the left.
At the same time, things like the National Prayer Breakfast and, you know, prayer from.
From a chaplain before the House starts, this stuff is basically codified and not really
questioned very much by Republicans or Democrats.
So can you talk a little bit about where there is a partisan divide on this and then where
there is not?
Well, I think most Democrats support the separation of church and state and understand that it's
not just sort of a technicality in our Constitution and it's not just something for atheists.
It's a principle that served our country very well since our nation's founding, the kind
of respect for religious pluralism.
America's irreducibly pluralistic.
And I think that that's become a kind of partisan issue.
Respect for pluralism or the desire to impose a sort of single improved approved varieties
of religion on the on the rest of us and to create within America a kind of hierarch hierarchy
of rights.
At the same time, though, again, we see that there are these elements, you know, everything
from the prayer before the House comes to order and the National Prayer Breakfast, where
the lines seem more blurred in terms of that separation.
I'm wondering whether the movements you talk about, are they specifically targeting Republicans
or are they simply having sort of more success with them?
How does that work?
That movement is really seize control of the Republican Party.
Let's just look at the issues like abortion when Roe v. Wade was passed.
Most Republicans supported it.
Most Republican Protestants supported it.
And there were a Republican pro-choice organizations up into the 90s or early 2000s.
But bit by bit, they were purged because that sort of extreme wing seized control of the
party.
They knew that it was like easier in a way to unite a smaller group around a radical
core than it is to unite more disparate group of folks and create a no cohesion there.
I mean, look, it's absolutely true that religion there's always been religion, our country,
freedom of religion is one of our founding principles and freedom of conscience.
And it's worth noting, I think, that there is a very strong progressive religious movement
in America that rejects the politics of conquest and division that this movement represents.
What are the other issues?
I mean, it's obvious that abortion and gay marriage have recently been been very, very
prominent.
You sort of alluded to religious messages in civil society, in God we trust everywhere,
currency, pledge of Allegiance, et cetera.
What are some of the other policy issues that this movement is concerned with in pushing
for?
Well, they're always talking about religious freedom of religious liberty.
And it's a kind of specious idea of freedom that the religious freedom is your the right
of people, the so-called correct views, supposedly correct.
Used to discriminate against others.
But I think that calls for religious freedom are as loud and insistent as they are, not
just because people are the correct views, want the right to discriminate against others
and to destroy basically various forms of equal rights and civil rights legislation,
but also because they're really desperate to secure their tax subsidies and to expand
access to public money.
So let's think about it this way.
Religious organizations already enjoy substantial tax privileges and benefits and subsidies
that other religious non-religious nonprofits do not enjoy.
Have parsonage exemptions.
They don't have to open their books so the taxpayer can see where the money goes.
Once you know when they have it.
So so they get all these exemptions and subsidies and yet they're still eager to seize a greater
share of public money.
So this is really obvious.
I'll just give you one example.
The field of public education, America spends something like, I don't know, six hundred
billion dollars every year in public K through 12.
The movement is really desperate to see, but this is an even greater portion of that than
they are have to vouchers.
So there you know, there are already voucher programs throughout many states, something
like state of Florida, where 80 percent of the voucher money flows into religious schools,
which are free to discriminate against LGBT students and teachers, that are free to promote
creationism and to teach kind of contempt for other forms of religion.
Some of them teach a kind of Christian nationalist version of American history.
So there's.
But they they just want to seize more, more and more money.
And now there's a case in front of the Supreme Court, I think it's called it's it took place
in Montana.
Again, the name escapes me right now.
But it's another case where observers are are noting that this may open the floodgates
to even more tax punting funding for religious organizations.
So you write about like a three phase agenda and you talk to phase one is stuff like in
God We Trust on bills and on police cars, et cetera.
Is that this is just for project blitz itself?
That's not for the movement overall.
God project blitz is only one small of a much larger, much larger wheel, even larger machinery.
I mean, give us a sense of.
What is the broader plan?
So, you know, at the micro we're talking about this in God we trust type stuff.
It seems more macro is, for example, gettings getting of state money for schooling that
can discriminate on religious grounds.
What's the big picture?
Well, it's a nationalist, authoritarian, anti-democratic movement.
And I think that's kind of the bigger picture here, is that this is a movement that tries
to is trying to bring about a different kind of order.
They don't think a lot of people think of the religious right and they think, well,
they just kind of want to sit at the table.
They want, you know, in the form of noisy form of American democracy.
They just want to have their voices heard and be taken into account.
But this is a movement that really doesn't believe in my modern, pluralistic democracy
with equal rights for all.
They really want to establish an authoritarian form of power.
So let's look at it.
We can compare it to other forms of religious nationalism around the world.
When you look at what Vladimir Putin is doing in Russia or Orban in Hungary or Erdoğan
in Turkey, when these leaders bind themselves closely to conservative religious authorities
in their own countries in order to establish a more authoritarian form of power, we rightly
recognize this is a form of religious nationalism.
And I think that this is what we're seeing today with Trump's alliance with our own religious
hyper conservatives.
Yet in the limited time we have left, I wanted to ask, you know, Trump has not been known
to be a religious person for basically his entire life.
All of a sudden, the Bible's his favorite book and so on and so forth.
How much is Trump sort of controlled by this?
It's come back to bite completely because he's dependent on them for his power.
I mean, they've managed to get a lock on a bloc of voters and without their support,
he would have failed.
And I think when you look at his alliance with them, a lot of people think it's transactional.
They think he's just going to appoint justices favorable to their interests or economic policies,
favorable to their pocketbooks.
But I think it goes further than that.
I mean, Trump sort of personifies a certain kind of authoritarian power that the elite
that, you know, religious nationalism often favors, which is nationalism doesn't want
a nice leader.
They want a leader who's going to sort of break the rules and and knock heads as long
as those heads belong to their their so-called enemies.
Yes.
And and we're seeing that weekly, if not daily with with this administration.
We've been speaking here with Catherine Stewart.
The book is The Power Worshipers Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
Catherine, such a pleasure having you back on.
Thanks so much for having me