#401 — Christian Nationalism and the New Right
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I am here with Catherine Stewart. Catherine, thanks for joining me.
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
So I recently discovered you. You wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, which they titled, “Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us?” And I want to talk about what’s happening right in front of us. But before we do, perhaps you can summarize your background as a journalist.
Sure. I’ve been an investigative journalist and reporter. My new book, Money Lies in God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is my third book on the anti-democratic movement, which involves the religious right, the new right, and a number of different features. Sometimes, I would say, swimming in the same headwaters, but often with different contours, each group.
Yeah. So your book comes out next week, which is probably when we’re dropping this. So I think we’re probably dropping this on your pub date. Your book, Money Lies in God, which I just got the PDF of yesterday. So I must say, I have not read every word of it, but I’ve read a lot of it. And we’ll get into it, but we will by no means exhaust what is of interest in there.
So let’s find a way into this, I guess, starting with the current moment politically, because it’s genuinely confusing how these reactionary forces in American politics are intersecting and supporting one another. We have many allies of convenience, it seems. I mean, these people are not ideologically unified. You have Christian nationalists, you have oligarchs, some of whom are Christian or nominally so, some of whom believe not much of anything. Some are quite reactionary Catholics who have been in the woodwork for many generations, it seems, and seem to be influential on the Supreme Court and elsewhere.
And it’s a little strange to dissect all of this. It’s also difficult to see how all of this summates in the person of an orange monstrosity, Donald Trump. Let’s start with your op-ed and then we’ll get into the book. What do you think is happening right in front of us that we should be concerned about?
Well, I mean, they told us that they were going to dismantle the institutions of our democracy, and that’s exactly what they’re doing now. You know, this is a movement that, frankly, has been quite clear about what their aims are. They’re not hiding; it’s just that a lot of people haven’t been listening. You know, I get into the different features of the movement in my book, Money, Lies, and God. I’d like to start with a title, if that’s all right.
I mean, money because money is a huge part of the story. Vast concentrations of wealth over the past decades have actually destabilized the political system in a number of different ways. They’ve created resentments among large, massive working people and empowered people at the very top to put their thumb on our politics in certain kinds of ways. Lies, because disinformation and conspiracism is a huge piece of this. You know, it’s how a lot of the rank and file have been kind of separated from the facts in certain ways or had their resentments directed toward targets that really perhaps don’t deserve it quite as much as they get it.
And then, of course, God, because religious nationalism, I think, is the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement. So in the book, I get into a group I call the funders. These are the beneficiaries of those vast concentrations of wealth. And, you know, religiously, they’re all over the place. I’m thinking about people like the Corkerys or Sky Foundation or Sean Filer or Barry Side or the DeVos Prince family juggernaut, Wilkes Brothers, Tom Dunn—like some of them, Tim Dunn, sorry—some of them are evangelical, some are Catholic, some are Protestant, some are Jewish, some are frankly atheistic or nihilistic and don’t seem to believe in anything more than money.
But they all agree on the need to sort of crush liberalism and invest a portion of their fortunes in these anti-democratic projects. I also shine a bright light on a group I call the thinkers. Many of them are associated with a movement called the New Right. A number of them, like Russell Vote and Darren Beatty and others, are now in positions in the Trump administration or nominees.
I would say some of them are more religious nationalist or Christian nationalists than others. Many of them also seem quite nihilistic. Some of them actually derive a lot of inspiration from political theorists associated with the Nazis. I kid you not. Carl Schmitt. Right, Carl Schmitt. I mean, they are more, I would say, hostile to the idea of democracy. And they’ve been saying for a long time that they abhor democracy and its principles and institutions, even as they claim to revere the founders and our founding principles.
I also look at the rank and file, the people who sort of tend to vote for candidates who are radically anti-democratic in their political aims. And then I also look at the sort of cadre of very empowered political pastors and activists, religious activists—groups I call the sergeants and the power players. And often, they’re the ones kind of driving the agenda and playing a very important role in connecting with the rank and file.
Hmm. Well, let’s start with the thinkers. There was this political talking point during the election that was dismissed by all of Trump’s fans and by Trump himself as just pure misinformation. This is the Democratic Party was quite agitated over something called Project 2025, which is this massive document put out by the Heritage Foundation, which seemed to be a plan—a fairly reactionary plan—for making some impressive changes in governance in America. As you know, Trump pretended to know nothing about it. When he heard something about it, he said he wanted nothing to do with it.
I remember, you know, I have some friends, if you can imagine this, who voted for Donald Trump. And I remember raising the specter of Project 2025 to them. And they assured me that this was misinformation spun up by the left. This is just—not a thing. Some maniacs over at the Heritage Foundation wrote something which Trump had never heard of. There’s no coordination here.
But you’ve just mentioned some of the names that are now staffing the administration. And these are some of the primary authors of Project 2025: Russell Vogt, Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He, I believe, is the primary author of the document. Brendan Carr, Peter Navarro, Tom Homan, John Radcliffe, Michael Anton. You know, John Radcliffe is nominated to lead the CIA. This is Project 2025 in its implementation.
And it’s just amazing to me that you hear, that there’s no mea culpa ever uttered by any of the fans of Trump who wanted nothing to do with Project 2025 and were quite happy to know that he knew nothing about it. None of them are now stepping in front of microphones saying, you know, this is not really what I voted for, right?
And so how do you perceive this? Was this, if you can imagine, was Trump just lying when he said he knew nothing about Project 2025 and wanted nothing to do with it? Or what’s happening here?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, Russell Vogt was caught on camera speaking with a potential funder of the movement. It was a kind of a setup by a couple of British journalists, essentially saying that, yeah, you know, this is—he’s in on it and this is what’s going to happen.
And the idea that this was sort of a 900-page document that was never going to go anywhere is just total fiction. I mean, many of the contributors to Project 2025 were former members of the Trump administration. And yes, you’re absolutely right. A number of contributors and architects of Project 2025 are now occupying key positions within the new administration.
What we see in Project 2025 is a kind of marriage of the new right and the Christian right and the Christian nationalist movement. Those two influences comprise, I would say, and call them the power couple of the anti-democratic movement. The power couple being Christian nationalism and the new right.
And the new right, absolutely.
Yeah. What is Christian nationalism in your view? Because it’s not synonymous with the evangelical movement. I’m sure there’s an impressive overlap there, but how would you differentiate it from the various flavors of Christianity we have in America?
Yeah, thank you. You know, Christian nationalism is not Christianity. It’s not a religion. It’s both an ideology and also a kind of political movement. I think of it as like a mindset and a machine.
So the mindset draws on this ideology that says America was founded as a Christian nation, according to a very particular understanding of the Christian faith. Our laws should be based on a reactionary interpretation of the Bible. And it’s a sort of exploitation of this ideology for politics and power.
When we’re talking about the machine, it’s a political movement. The movement is leadership-driven, and it’s also organization-driven. We can sort of divide those; the agenda is not set by the rank and file. I mean, let’s really be clear about that.
So the organizations can be divided into categories. There are right-wing policy groups. There are legal advocacy groups. There are very sophisticated data initiatives. There are legislative initiatives. There are networking organizations like the Council for National Policy, which gets different factions of the leadership on the same page. And, you know, the movement is—there’s a vast kind of messaging sphere that goes out and reaches the rank and file.
There are these pastoral networks, groups like Watchmen on the Wall and Faith Wins and Church United and the Courage Tour, these initiatives that draw pastors into networks. And then movement leaders will do presentations with them and give them materials. They get them to turn out to—their congregations to turn out to vote for the sort of hard-right candidates that the movement favors. And those pastoral networks play a really important role in election cycles.
Because, listen, sort of the rank and file of this movement represent a minority of the population. And, frankly, I think even many, if most, American Christians object to Christian nationalism. A number of organizations like Christians Against Christian Nationalism and the New Evangelicals and Vote Common Good. I mean, the Baptist Joint Committee. There are so many others that object to Christian nationalism.
But this is a group—does anyone answer to the name Christian nationalist happily? Some do. Or is that a phrase that is used by those outside the movement to describe it pejoratively? Some do. Like, Russell Vote, I think, has self-identified as Christian nationalist. We know Marjorie Taylor Greene and some others have.
You know, I just want to say, return for a moment to that infrastructure. The strength of the movement is in that dense organizational infrastructure, and they turn out their vote in disproportionate numbers. But, you know, Christian nationalism, I think of it like authoritarianism. It’s a political dynamic that affects a political system, not just a set of attitudes embraced by the rank and file.
So, let’s say, you know, when a person decides they’re going to vote their values on abortion, say, or they’re voting to protect the American family, as they think they’re doing, you know, as the movement has told them to do. They may not necessarily be arguing for major changes in the way our government is run. They’re just kind of making a statement about their identity and what they value in themselves.
So, we might not call them a Christian nationalist, but what they are doing is lending support to a Christian nationalist agenda. Does that make sense to you? It’s like authoritarianism. It doesn’t just start off as like a political program that everybody endorses. It’s just like various dynamics and sort of interests act to sort of promote a kind of authoritarian agenda.
What is the overlap, would you say, between Christian nationalism and what we would call, you know, the white supremacist movement in the U.S.? I mean, we have to really look at a Venn diagram. There’s some overlap, but it’s not the same thing, you know.
But, you know, what’s very interesting is that there are a group like the Proud Boys. When they first started, they didn’t really particularly have a religious identity. But as the Christian nationalist movement has gained power and as these different identity movements—oh, by the way, some of these white nationalist groups have had—I mean, I just want to be very clear. Some of them have had a religious identity from the start. Others have not.
So, there’s differences among them, but as the movement has gained in strength and as their leaders have been able to sort of see the power that the ideology and the movement sort of are able to marshal, some have adopted, like the Proud Boys, for instance, have adopted more of a religious identity more overtly. So, there is some variation in the different sort of militia groups and white nationalist groups.
So, there are obviously many ways into this. I mean, there are people who are just racist and afraid of immigration, and then they get some religious inspiration in their politics, and they find themselves standing somewhere near a sincere Christian who finds that their politics are also bent around by scenes of chaos at the southern border—and wants to get a handle on that and can’t figure out why anyone left of center is confused about why we would want a defensible border.
And you have people who are associated with an institute like the Claremont Institute, where, you know, you have intellectuals or erstwhile intellectuals. I think in your book you detail how that institution has undergone some considerable devolution in terms of its scholarly integrity. But you have people there who I think would never answer to the name of white supremacist and would, at least in their own minds, consciously disavow racism, but nonetheless have time for, you know, Nazi writers like the one we named, Carl Schmitt, and people he’s influenced.
Again, I’m trying to figure out how to talk about a fairly complex Venn diagram that is clearly, in the real world, deranging our politics at this moment. You have, you know, the oligarchs, you know, many of whom we’ll talk about, many of whom I know personally, some of whom I know not to be religious at all, some of whom I know are religious in a strange way that probably has as much to do with Burning Man as the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But, you know, these are people who are influenced, you know, will admit to being influenced by rather iconoclastic and free associative, and I would even say confabulatory thinkers like Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin. You know, so it’s just a mess, ideologically, out there, and yet they’re having a good old time at Mar-a-Lago now, seeming to get everything they want out of the world, I think, to the obvious detriment of our democracy and American values.
What strand of this do you want to pick up first? Oh my gosh, so much to talk about. I mean, when we’re talking about the oligarchs, I mean, let’s be clear, it’s not all of the very rich people in this country that are supporting this. It’s a sector, right, who are supporting it.
And I think that, I mean, something that comes to mind when you talk about these guys going to Mar-a-Lago and sort of, you know, having a grand old time, I think a lot of people don’t appreciate the degree to which a lot of these very rich people live in, almost like islands, right? They’re surrounded by people who say nice things to them. They, you know, have the sense that they can sort of, you know, deserve every penny that they earned every penny with their bare hands.
Many of them, by the way, you know, they want policies that benefit their businesses. They want deregulatory environments so that they can engage in, some of them are in polluting practices and others just in, you know, they run monopolistic businesses. And they want an absence of regulation in ways that are going to assist those businesses.
But at the same time, they also want, I would say, protective policies. You know, they want often privileged contracts or they want, in some instances, I’m looking at you, Mr. Musk, tax privileges, tax subsidies and things like this. But they’re also living on these islands.
In the last couple of decades, we’ve seen a massive concentration of wealth at the very tippy top. But we’ve also seen life become so much harder for people, I would say, in the bottom 90% of our country, where working and middle classes are struggling, you know, and making it hard. It’s making it harder for those families to succeed.
And so people at the top in their islands are sort of protected, but they can hear from, like, far, like, over the walls. They can hear, you know, critics saying, well, you know, what you’re doing is really not okay. You should be paying your taxes and perhaps treating your workforce a little better and maybe not killing off all those mom and pops or smaller organizations with your, you know, monopolistic businesses.
And they don’t like that. It makes them very defensive. And I think that contributes to the sense of, you know, the sense that, like, I think they’re afraid of the people coming after them with proverbial pitchforks. And I think that actually contributes that sense of defensiveness to some of their activities in supporting this movement.
I mean, we can’t know what’s in people’s hearts, obviously, and I’m sure there’s different variants. I think the Wilkes brothers are very different from Jeff Yass, for instance, in their orientation in every way, or Peter Thiel. But at the same time, again, they have embraced these people like Curtis Yarvin and his fellow travelers at the Claremont Institute, who are basically arguing that we need more monarchical form of rule, that democracy is not sufficient to solve all of our problems because we’re facing an absolute apocalypse because of the woke cancelers or whatever.
It’s like, well, who’s really trying to cancel stuff here? I mean, I’m sure you, like I, saw that list of words that these sort of funded national institutes of health studies are not allowed to include, including the word woman. I mean, they’re basically, just for people who don’t know what’s happening there, they circulated a, I believe I saw it as an Excel spreadsheet of keywords that were now going to be screened for in any scientific grant at the National Science Foundation.
And if you take the complete set of words, I mean, some were obviously red flags for DEI-inflected work, but I mean, the complete set seemed to rule out more or less all of the social sciences. I mean, if a word like woman and socioeconomic is going to get you flagged, then we’re really just talking about physics in the end.
Okay. So, well, you mentioned the woke stuff. This is, this is one place where I think you and I might disagree. Maybe, maybe not. It’ll be interesting to figure out why we disagree if we in fact disagree, but in reading your book and in reading, I think I, you know, since it was given to me as a PDF, I had the advantage of being able to find every use of the word woke and wokeness in it. Just so I’m pretty sure I understand what you said about it in your book. You seem to think that it’s basically a non-issue and insofar as the people on the right.
Did I say that in my book? Well, no, feel free to correct me again. I’m, I’m throwing myself on your mercy because I did not read your whole book, but I did read much of it. Uh, but you seem to think the impression I’ve gotten, however, uh, haphazardly is that you think that the right has made a demon out of this idea that the left is engaged in a kind of, you know, quasi-Marxist, uh, you know, and certainly postmodernist takeover of all elite institutions.
Well, I think you should perhaps read the section I write about the far left.
Okay.
So, um, I do take aim at that as well. Let me put all these, these, these dumb ideas in your mouth and you can spit them out. You seem to think that this is either these fears are not sincerely held or if held they’re exaggerated. And there’s much less of a problem on the left than is made out by people like Christopher Rufo or James Lindsay or any of these other activists on the new right.
Who stand up in front of adoring crowds and say that, you know, the woke mind virus is coming for you and your kids, your kids’ schools are trying to make them trans, et cetera. This is obviously something that Elon Musk has spoken about. And, um, you know, insofar as I know his mind at all anymore, I believe, you know, he’s, he, along with many millions of other people in this country, is sincere in saying that one of his major concerns is this far-left trans activist-centered ideology.
Yeah.
I think you should actually read.
Sorry.
I don’t have to read it. You’re going to give it to me right now. I mean, I think it’s very clear that a far, the far left is frankly, there’s a, on that sector of the far left, there’s the amplification. Some very divisive stuff that frankly redounds to the benefit of the far right, because what it often does is, and we saw it like the labs at MIT Media Lab, for instance, analyze this as did, I think it was a sector of, it was like a Harvard lab that collaborated on some of this stuff where they found some of these extremist ideas being amplified by Russia and other hostile foreign actors in order to divide.
You know, some of these ideas are incredibly divisive. And one of the things that this does is it sort of makes people think, well, well, the, like the moderate liberal, you know, progressive left, they sort of throw all of it into that sort of woke communist bucket, which is ridiculous. I mean, the people who are, I mean, the people who are talking about these issues constantly are people on the right.
You know, I was recently at America Fest, it’s an annual gathering held by Turning Point USA. It took place in Phoenix, Arizona. There were 20,000 sort of hardcore MAGA. Every single speaker had to talk about transgender women in sports. This is like, you’re right, they’re making a boogeyman out of this issue. Now, whatever you or I may think about these issues, and, you know, we’ll probably find a lot of agreement on this particular topic, we have 11.4 million children living in poverty.
Gun violence is the number one cause of death among children and teenagers in our country. Those kinds of issues can, and many DEI programs as well, can and should be examined. And are there excesses in some of the DEI programs? Of course there are. But is this the major problem facing our country? When you bring up James Lindsay and Rufo and Musk even, you know, Lindsay at least I saw speak at the Moms for Liberty conference, where he’s going on and on about how, you know, the Democratic Party is like Communist China.
Those extremist voices are not normalized. They’re not like widespread within, I would say, Democratic Party politics. It’s the right that talks about them all the time. It’s a massive distraction. I mean, I think we have to, you know, whatever you or I may think about those issues, we have to acknowledge that they are being used as a massive distraction from the real problems facing our country, bread and butter issues.
You know, this is a movement that claims to stand for the American family. But they’re endorsing politicians whose policies are making it so much harder for so many Americans to succeed. And, you know, why would they talk about these issues constantly? Well, it’s like, you ever see a laser pointer or a cat toy where there’s this red little thing that goes all over the floor and the cat jumps at it and jumps at it? Well, if you’re focused on that, like identity issue that involves sex and sexuality, which distracts everybody, all of a sudden you’re looking at the real problems in your community, you’re not looking at the source of the problems.
You’re not understanding why the cost of groceries is too high and the cost of housing is impossible and why you’re like a couple with, you know, two parents and four jobs and you’re still struggling to make it work. Well, I agree with that, that it’s been a massive distraction that has been leveraged quite artfully and cynically by the far right. But it was also a massive distraction for on the left for the Democratic Party and all of the elite institutions, the mainstream media and scientific journals and universities and Hollywood.
All of them got captured to a degree that I think the far right perceived and rightly perceived to be a problem and a massive political vulnerability. So it’s not just the laser pointer, this tiny little dot that should be meaningless, but is captivating everyone. Well, I would say the right is really good at getting, I mean, they’re in way more tactical. They’re really good at setting traps for people to walk into.
But there was no reason to walk in. There was no reason for Kamala Harris or anyone else in the Democratic Party to walk into those traps if they had their head screwed on straight around how fringe some of the, and insane some of these concerns actually are on the far left. I mean, we had during, I’ll take you back to the golden years of woke derangement, you know, to somewhere around 2020. I mean, you literally had NPR publishing an editorial in defense of looting, right?
We had just seen lots of looting and rioting in major cities associated with the George Floyd protests. Oh, I mean, that’s appalling. But that was also just one fringe idea in like the free marketplace of ideas. And you see a lot of crazy ideas on the right as well. And I’m not familiar with the editorial, but it sounds appalling. That’s the thing that’s, but there’s, there’s, perhaps this is something you have an idea about how to fix.
There is, many of us have noticed a, a pervasive asymmetry here where the left or anyone left of center, any mainstream institution, the New York Times say, gets one thing wrong. And it is devastating for its reputation, right? And they, the right amplifies it over and over. And the right will seize upon that error as a sign that there is really, there is no distinction between the New York Times and, you know, the Epoch Times or Breitbart or Fox News, right?
We’re all just in the business of smearing everyone all day long for political reasons. The right gets things wrong and there’s just, since they’re continuously playing tennis without the net over there, it never matters. And there’s nothing to be made of it left of center because, of course, we know that Fox News and Breitbart and they’re not, they’re really not in the business of journalism. They’re going, you know, they’re misinformation factories.
So there’s this profound asymmetry here, which is that left of center in elite institutions, we are trying to hold ourselves to journalistic and academic standards and we succeed or fail at that and police ourselves and are policed from the outside by, you know, cynical people who want no part of the standards and the norms we’re trying to defend. But we’ll hold us to those standards and norms and reveal us in every moment of hypocrisy that can be detected, right?
And so it is a kind of, you know, this is like, again, it’s asymmetric warfare of the sort that you see when you have a major army that’s trying to follow the rules of the Geneva Convention, fighting an insurgency that is using IEDs and human shields and, you know, putting the barrels of his rifles on the shoulders of children. And it’s very hard to know how to navigate this rhetorically, right?
Because every time you admit, yes, okay, that, that, that, uh, the deep platforming of the New York Post on Twitter in response to the Hunter Biden laptop, yes, in retrospect, that looked like a bad idea. Yes. Those former intelligence chiefs who signed a letter saying that it looks like Russian disinformation. Well, yeah, they do have egg on their face now because it wasn’t, wasn’t Russian disinformation, but that does not obviate all of the concerns about Russian disinformation that, that sane journalists had in mind, you know, the previous week.
And it does not make Rudy Giuliani foisting an October surprise with the Hunter Biden laptop somehow an honest broker of information at this point. And it’s, it becomes impossible to make these distinctions because, again, there’s this profound asymmetry. One error on your side destroys your reputation. The other side plays by no rules at all.
That’s true. And I think, I think one of the most dangerous consequences of this movement is an assault on the idea of truth itself, the idea that truth doesn’t matter.
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