This week, author and journalist Katherine Stewart joins host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush to discuss the rise of Christian Nationalism, Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, and the weaponization of faith for political gain. Together, they dive into the current political climate, the deep divisions within American society, and how knowledge and organizing are key to defending democracy.
Katherine’s latest book, out on February 18th, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, explores the Christian Nationalist movement, which is fueled by the ultra-wealthy to protect their fortunes at the expense of democracy. Building on the foundation of her previous work, The Power Worshippers, Katherine’s new book reveals how these powerful forces exploit religious narratives to erode democratic institutions.
“Extreme levels of inequality are eroding our democracy. This is something that we need to understand. I think there was nothing more stark than to see perhaps the group of the richest men in the world attending Trump’s inauguration. You had Bezos there, you had Musk there with his salute, whatever. I mean, you have these tech billionaires there. And here’s Trump promising to work for you when he’s speaking to the right: ‘When they come for you they’re coming through me!’ And you really think that he’s going to serve you, when he’s got these billionaires that he’s really serving and who are basically paying him bribes by any other name to get policies that they want.”
– Katherine Stewart, an author and journalist who has been covering religious nationalism and the assault on American democracy for over 15 years. Her book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, was awarded first place for Excellence in Nonfiction Books by the Religion News Association, and a Morris D. Forkosch award. Katherine writes for The New York Times Opinion, New Republic, and many others, and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.
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—INTERVIEWH TRANSCRIPT—
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:
Katherine Stewart’s new book is Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. It delves into the Christian Nationalist movement funded by the super-rich, aiming to secure their wealth at the expense of democracy. Building upon her previous work, The Power Worshippers, this book exposes how these forces manipulate religious narratives to undermine democratic institutions. Money Lies in God will be published on Tuesday, February 11th. And I am thrilled to have Catherine Stewart back with us on The State of Belief. Catherine, welcome.
KATHERINE STEWART, GUEST:
It’s so great to be back.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Oh, my God. Katherine, this book, it is so gripping, compelling. I mean, my heart was literally racing. That’s just to say the writing is good. Let me start with that. We’re going to mostly spend our time on the subject matter, but as someone married to a writer, when you’re reading a book and you realize, oh, I’m just flowing through this because this narrative is so beautifully written… Congratulations.
KATHERINE STEWART:
Well, thank you so much. It’s really the culmination of 16 years of research into this movement. As you know, I’ve published two books previously on the topic. But over time, I’ve really seen how the movement has grown, how its alliances have shifted, how it’s found new populations to reach with disinformation, how it’s weaponized religion so thoroughly. So thank you so much for your praise.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Yeah, I mean, just the subject matter. Let’s get into it. First of all, let’s just say that we are now into the second Trump administration. And I got to talk to you right after the election. And I have to say, what you said that day stuck with me so much: just the way that the voting mechanism, the election mechanism through the churches, through these evangelical, really, kind of Christian Nationalist networks that weren’t relying on the billions of dollars that were being poured in to get out the vote on the other side. They were just saying, okay: trusted messenger, message is clear, get out the vote, and a huge reason why Trump won. And so we, at that point, were setting up this conversation today. So let’s get into it.
You already started to say you’ve been doing this for so long, and one of the things that I read in the book was, when you first started, you saw this movement and you have been amazed at the acceleration of this movement. Can you talk a little bit about that? Your own reaction as you’ve been almost ahead of a front row seat at what’s been happening and how it’s been just kind of exploding?
KATHERINE STEWART:
When I started writing on this topic 16 years ago, I was researching a movement that appeared to be, for most people, at the fringes of American society. They were trying to force their programming into public schools. And they say they just wanted to have their opinions heard. They just wanted to be one voice in the noisy forum of American democracy. And they claimed to stand for values.
But what soon became clear is that they had a much broader agenda. They weren’t just about having their opinions heard in the public schools. They really wanted to destroy public education at its core. But they felt more of a need to kind of hide their ultimate aims.
Today, they’re absolutely not hiding. And at the time, a lot of observers claimed that this was a fringe movement. People who were following this movement were often called hysterical. I remember one of George Bush’s speechwriters said, this is a movement that could fit into a phone booth. Well, this is now the movement that has seized control of the Republican Party. The guardrails have really fallen away, and it’s the extremists that are deeply anti-democratic, more overt in their hostility to democracy than ever before, and they are the ones driving the agenda.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Tell us a little bit about the way you decided to set up this book, because it was very strategic. You had categories of actors in a way that it was really helpful to imagine this as this is not one group just going forward. There’s lots of different components to it. And can you just begin to introduce us to some of those components that go into this broad movement, which we’re still calling Christian Nationalism. I don’t know if you’re using that term still, but it’s as good as any. I mean, we kind of know what we’re talking about, but talk about these very different components.
KATHERINE STEWART:
The movement does draw on a range of different actors – many of whom, by the way, have incompatible goals. So I titled the book Money, Lies, and God, because first, money is a huge part of the story, meaning that huge concentrations of wealth at the very tippy top of the economic ladder have destabilized the political system. Second, lies or conscious disinformation. That’s another huge feature of the movement. And third, “God” in the title, because the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement is Christian Nationalism.
And I chose the subtitle, Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, because the conclusion that I have to draw is that this movement is intrinsically destructive or nihilistic. It can actually be defeated only if we address certain fundamental structural problems in the American political economy. So “Christian Nationalism”, I do use the term. Arguably, religious nationalism, in the American context, is Christian Nationalism. It’s the most important piece of this anti-democratic reaction; but it’s more complicated than a lot of people sort of imagine.
First of all, it’s a leadership-driven movement. It’s not driven by the rank and file. I think of it as something that happens to political systems. So, for instance, the movement is leadership-driven and also organization-driven. These organizations have been invested in over decades – that’s sort of why the movement is as strong as it is. There’s a sort of dense organizational infrastructure. And you wouldn’t say that everyone working at these organizations, like the Alliance Defending Freedom, necessarily, or the Heritage Foundation, wouldn’t say any single one of those people is, quote, a “Christian Nationalist”; but their collective actions are contributing to a Christian Nationalist agenda.
And a lot of people think the movement is comprised of White evangelical voters. And certainly, a large section of the movement is; but I show in my book that a growing subsection of people of other denominations and religions, as well as racial identities, have really been joining the base of that movement. So I call the base the foot soldiers. And I show that the rank and file has to be distinguished from the leaders or political pastors or national activists, cohorts that I call the sergeants and the power players. So they’re the ones who are really driving the bus.
But I think to add to this, we have to look at some of the other factors at work. So I pay very close attention to a group called the funders. These are the people who take massive concentrations of wealth that have benefited them over the past five decades, and they’ve invested it in anti-democratic projects.
I’ll just give you a few examples.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Please do, because this is so important. And I just want to underline what you’re saying, that this is not a grassroots movement. This is actually being driven, in many regards, by very wealthy people who are investing in this movement as a means to get their ends. That’s the big contribution, I mean among many, but that’s a real major contribution. I remember when you were talking about this book a year ago, and you were saying, follow the money. You said that in one of our conversations. And this is what you’re offering here: is that money matters. Money is a really big part of what’s happening.
KATHERINE STEWART:
It’s true. And interestingly, the funders, on a religious level, are frankly all over the map. So that people like the Corkerys or the Scaife Foundation, or Sean Fieler – they’re the ultraconservative Catholic funders. You have people like Barre Seid and Jeff Yass who are Jewish. You have people, of course, like the DeVos Prince family juggernaut, or you have the Wilks brothers, or Tim Dunn, who are evangelical and different varieties of Protestant. There’s some funders that are frankly atheistic. And, you know, religiously, they’re all over the place, but they agree on one thing – which is the need to crush liberals and what they call the administrative state.
The funders often are after economic policies that are going to justify and increase their massive concentrations of wealth. They want low taxes for the rich. They want minimal regulation of extractive businesses that they may be leading. Some of them claim to be libertarians. They want freedom and pro-capitalism. And yet some of them are also after protective policies from the government for their monopolistic businesses. And in some instances, they’re very happy to take or even pursue subsidies for their businesses.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Why not? I mean, it’s really interesting. And see, that’s where it gets very tricky, because these are people who have so much money and they have to decide, well, what’s the best way to invest it so we can get even more money? And we’re not actually in it to praise Jesus..
KATHERINE STEWART:
Well, some are, and some aren’t.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
But the big play is to disempower government in order to be able to provide for all the people.
KATHERINE STEWART:
Get government to work for them, not for you.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Which is the definition of oligarchy. So it is very interesting because, as you know, I run an organization that’s on the other side. And we’re very lucky to have some wonderful funders, but it’s nowhere near at the level that this is working.
Can you give one story about one of these funders that was like, wow, that is so interesting. If I hadn’t been actually researching this book, I might not have even heard of this person, but here we are. Is there anyone who comes to mind?
KATHERINE STEWART:
I think about Barre Seid, a Jewish Chicago billionaire who donated – I think it’s the largest political donation in our history – he donated $1.6 billion, that’s billion with a B, to form something called the Marble Freedom Trust. And he put Leonard Leo in charge of it. Now, Leonard Leo has played a huge role in growing the Federalist Society, as well as a range of organizations that have shaped the right wing legal ecosystem. And he’s pursuing the culture wars.
Leonard Leo said, years ago, he said that he knew that the positions he wanted in our society would never be popular, would never pass a democratic vote. So he figured if he could take the courts, he could reshape the country in the way that he wanted. And now, we’ve got the Marble of Freedom Trust. They can spend $230 million a year without touching the nut, and all of that money is going into sort of right-wing politics, and often in culture wars.
How do you get the rank and file to vote for policies that are going to make their lives harder, you know? You get them to vote on these culture war issues, these side issues, which I often think of as shiny baubles. They’re like tiny baubles that you dangle in front of people’s faces having to do with gender and identity and all that – issues that frankly don’t pertain to a whole lot of people, and have nothing to do with the price of eggs, for sure, and shutting down your factories. But you get them to focus on these issues that touch at their core identities. And then you can sort of vote for that one issue, and then you’re ignoring these other issues that your vote is going to bring about.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
So we have the funders, we have the kind of sergeants. And then how does it get into, all of a sudden people are showing up at school boards and yelling about books. It just feels like that kind of chain of events is very intentional. How can we fight back? We have to get our people up, but it is amazing, the kind of coordination that you’re talking about.
KATHERINE STEWART:
Sometimes, as a reporter, it’s these small, seemingly irrelevant conversations that you have at the events. So I do a lot of my reporting by going to right-wing events and strategy gatherings and conferences. And sometimes, it’s the side conversations that really give you a lot of insight.
So I want to tell you one story about a lady I sat next to. I was at the Moms for Liberty annual conference in Philadelphia. and we were at a breakfast, and I sat next to her, and she’d been involved in anti-abortion politics in sort of a haphazard way in the past; but she hadn’t got – since you mentioned school boards, I’ll tell you the story. She hadn’t really been focusing on school boards, but she was following all this right-wing media – and we can talk about the disinformation in a bit, because that’s a really important part of the the problem. But so she’s sort of getting right-wing media feeds. And all of a sudden, she comes across the notice that Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank, is in her public school library. And this is somehow an outrage. And it just put her over the top.
And so I’m saying to her, what is it about Anne Frank’s diary that is so upsetting to you? And what she said to me, “It’s the lesbian scene.” And I was like, huh, what exactly are you referring to? And it turned out that, apparently, there’s some brief passage in the book where Anne Frank and her friend are expressing some adolescent curiosity, and it’s this thing that passes and it’s over and it’s not a lesbian scene.
But the moral of the story here, I think, is that there are a lot of people who are coming from uninformed or idiosyncratic takes, right? And their views are often quite offensive. Like, if you dug a little further in this woman, you might find some homophobia, and you might find some antisemitism too. But they’re also really disconnected, in a way, from all of that.
I think this movement is really good at tapping into and exploiting these kinds of unthinking prejudices. And then they mobilize them for the politics of outrage. They get people upset about stuff that, frankly, isn’t happening in their public school. Or there’s a library book that might have something in it that’s not remotely offensive. Or maybe you don’t agree with it, but it’s a book. I mean, books are supposed to express different points of view and opinions about things. And then you get these people showing up, demanding that their school boards stop teaching Critical Race Theory, or offering sex change operations to their students. I mean, this nonsense happens. But the weaponization of disinformation is really…
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Let’s get into that. I think that that was another really important part of this book. And I just really appreciate this addition to kind of the canon, of being able to understand this movement and this moment that we’re in. It is not going to go away quick. And so the more we understand it, the more we can actually work to dismantle it in a long-term strategy, because it’s not going to go away quickly.
What did you discover about the role of disinformation and how to use media? One of my favorite disinformation ideas is that Christians are under attack. They’ve never been more persecuted in this country. It’s almost impossible to say you love Jesus in public and all of these kind of things, which is, of course, nonsense. But people hear it and they’re like, God, that’s terrible. We’ve got to fight back. What are the mechanisms that they’re using, specifically, around information or disinformation, and how they’re getting it to their people in a way that motivates them to get up and go to the school board?
KATHERINE STEWART:
That’s a really great question. And we all need to be alarmed about the spread of disinformation. This is a movement that wants to separate people from the facts, because it makes them easier to control. In Money, Lies, and God, I focus on a number of disinformation operations, including “Reawaken America”, you know what that is. For anybody doesn’t, it’s a traveling MAGA pro-conspiracist roadshow. And they draw thousands of Americans to gatherings at megachurches around the country, and every conspiracist is there. I mean, you can hear every conspiracy on the ground: Great Replacement, CRT, DEI, the Illuminati, they are trying to control your money and every cent that you own… The conspiracies are so crazy that I had to write out a lot of what I heard, and it’s actually kind of a fun chapter if you sort of have a slightly sick sense of humor because it’s so absurd. The conspiracies are absolutely over the top.
I met people who thought that the vaccine microchips you, and people are saying to one another, don’t let them microchip you. I told one fellow that I’d been vaccinated and I was fine, and he sort of edged away from me because he thought I was shedding some kind of toxin or something like this. But here’s the thing. The one conspiracy they all were promoting is the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. That Donald Trump’s the rightful president; that battles in the spiritual realm are being played out every single day in the political realm, and the hand of God has fallen on Donald Trump’s shoulder, and he is the savior of the world, and he’s battling the black hats, and all of this stuff.
But this kind of conspiracism has been spread not just in these spaces, but through a range of media, through Telegram, and some of it’s gone through, now, Twitter. A lot of it’s gone through the YouTube channels that I think a lot of folks outside the movement aren’t really aware of this information sphere. Then you see it on the news channels, like Fox, or you might see it expressed on Newsmax, and then we’re all seeing it played out in America’s faith-based spaces and churches.
So I also, in the book, describe how I go to a gathering organized by a sort of network called Faith Wins. It’s funded, again, by multi, multi, multimillionaires. And they send speakers around to pastor gatherings around the country. They tell them it’s their biblical duty to turn out their congregations to vote. But then they featured an elections integrity specialist with them, this guy named Hogan Gidley, who was saying, you know, dead people are voting, and they stole the last election. And the amazing thing is he said, “Oh, you saw what happened in Arizona, didn’t you?” This was after a Republican-led group, they called themselves the Cyber Ninjas, were determined to find election fraud and election interference, and they went over every little record they could, and they really tried to find it, and they couldn’t. At the end of the day, they said, “We didn’t come up with anything. In fact, Joe Biden got a couple dozen more votes than we thought he did.”
But yet, this sort of idea that we can weaponize this election fraud was so valuable that it’s still being promoted in these kinds of churches. And I remember there was one pastor, as part of the presentations, he said, “The church is not a cruise ship. The church is a battleship.” The idea is that we are going to political battle. It’s the weaponization of faith, really.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Wow. That metaphor is wild. Well, first of all, the idea that it’s a cruise ship to start with – I mean, what is that? So, I just want to pause and say: the kind of research you do, I couldn’t do. I couldn’t sit in these spaces. You have spent hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of your one precious life listening to all of this, interacting with people. And that’s one of the great things about the book, is that it really feels like you go into those spaces. You are telling stories that really bring it all to life.
With all that this book reveals, how do you understand this current moment with Trump as president of the United States, with all of these people feeling totally vindicated, with the January 6th people all being pardoned? Where are we?
KATHERINE STEWART:
First off, I think the main thing is that we’ve seen a felonious president – a felon – using the power of his office to recruit the services of militia groups for possible future use in extra-legal… I mean, he’s vindicating them. If he wants to take extra-legal action against his political enemies and any sort of constitutional limitations or restrictions on his power, he’s got a loyal set of folks, and I think that’s frankly what the January 6th pardon story was all about.
I think more broadly, what we’re seeing is that there’s this sort of, it’s been an ostrich-like approach favored by Republicans and some people in the media, where we’re not supposed to see anything out of the ordinary in the inauguration of a president who previously attempted to overthrow the government that he now heads. And frankly, again, as I said, the guardrails have fallen off. And I think a lot of people are still kind of adjusting or becoming, in a way, fascism-curious, almost, or seeing like it might be in their interest to just get in line.
I think what we’re also seeing, quite clearly, is the acceptance of a degree of corruption that has little equal in American history. You know, I think just to give a tiny example, when oil interests bribed members of the party administration, there was at least some kind of perceived need for them to keep their operations undercover, to kind of keep it secret. So they had secret meetings in hotel rooms, they brought suitcases stuffed with cash. But when we look at Trump and his wife’s gambits in cryptocurrency, they’re just up front. Their blatantly transactional means of cashing in on the power of his office and opening the door to publicly traded bribes. We’ve seen so many of those kinds of bribery arrangements in his previous administration. So I think that’s deeply concerning. That’s just one example of many.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
What does it mean “for God”? The God part? We got the money, lies part. What does it mean for how Christian Nationalism is going to be functioning in our country, what does it mean for religion in general? I mean, it’s crazy. I think what was so interesting about the Bishop Budde moment was just how shocked his family was. They were just like, wait, what is she talking about? I saw them look at one another, like, merciful to the immigrant and stranger? I know they’re like, what kind of communist garbage is this? When it was completely biblical. But we’re at that crazy time. What do you make about this new era, what it means for religion.
KATHERINE STEWART:
You know, the bishop’s comments were moving, and I think they speak for a large group of people who see Christianity as a force that involves caring for the least of these, and loving thy neighbor, of course. But unfortunately, that’s not the Christianity that’s backing Trump. Trump knows it, and he’s very much articulating his version of religion, which is based on vengeance and the exercise of righteous power against perceived enemies. Last month I was at AmericaFest, it’s an annual gathering put on by Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s…
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Oh my God, you really do have the best life, don’t you? You have a vacation schedule that nobody wants. It’s like, let me go to another vacation from hell.
KATHERINE STEWART:
Well, it was in Phoenix, Arizona, and Phoenix is lovely. I did get out for a hike so that was a lot of fun, but I will say, I saw several presentations by Lucas Miles. He’s the head of Turning Point USA Faith. It’s their faith outreach arm. They work with churches and pastors. Lucas Miles is the author of a book titled, Woke Jesus: the False Messiah Destroying Christianity. And he made it clear in his presentations that he is profoundly hostile and other speakers were profoundly hostile to what they call progressive or woke Christianity. They said that basically all people who call themselves Christians are not. He called progressive Christianity heresy. He said, I’ve made it my mission to eradicate wokeism from the American pulpit. Well, what is wokeism in his view. He traces so-called woke Christianity back to the 1700s, and he tracked the supposed corruption of the faith through the historical Jesus movement, the social gospel.
He said, it came in with the social gospel, it came in with liberation theology, it came in with Black liberation theology, and he said to the crowd: unfortunately, we have a generation of pastors, many of them have been indoctrinated by progressive seminaries. So he’s going after the seminaries, and he called for a new kind of digital Nicene creed or council, this idea hearkening back to the 14th century gathering that established some of the core views of Christianity, core doctrines of Christianity. I claim to be working with a network of 3,500 churches to, quote, “eradicate wokeism from the American pulpit.” So he asked, is Jesus a great social justice warrior, or is he savior of all the world? And he basically said, we’ve elevated his humanity over his divinity, and we have to decide which version of Jesus we believe in.
But it’s important to note that it’s really not about doctrine, it’s about politics. So there was another pastor there named Shane Winnings, who’s running a resurrected version of the Promise Keepers, and he said, we need to tell people what’s demonic, what’s godly, and how they should be voting. How they should be voting is obviously Republican. There is another representative of Turning Point Faith Action who said, there’s absolutely no biblical justification for voting Democrat. So you can see they really see progressive or moderate forms of the faith as deeply threatening, and they want to eradicate it and go after it.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Well, you know, this is where we are. I do want to get to your concluding ideas, because I thought it was very helpful for you to conclude the book with some very sort of tactical – big-picture, but tactical – things that you see are necessary to move through this moment, and to kind of continue to imagine a future of our democracy. So would you mind going through those, and just making sure that we can hear about them?
Listen. Everybody needs to read this book. It’s kind of the book of the moment. The more we know, the more we can move forward. It’s called Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart. Katherine, you helpfully lay out a few very specific steps at the end of the book that you hope that readers will take seriously as we think about how to move forward, to protect our democracy, to improve our democracy. Can you walk us through those several ideas? We need to have this knowledge. We need to know the multifaceted movement that we are up against.
But also, Katherine ended the book with some really concrete things. It’s not the total playbook, but it’s more like, let’s pay attention to these things, and I want to give you a chance… One of the things I really liked about it, personally, because it’s the way I’m feeling right now, is that: this is not a time to say, hey, I’m okay, you’re okay. And you said it better than I am saying it, but I was like, yeah, right. It’s not okay. And it’s not kind of like, you do your thing, I’ll do my thing. That’s not what they’re doing. And so we have to get over this idea that we’re going to kind of have nice conversations our way out of this. It’s going to take something else.
KATHERINE STEWART:
Absolutely. This is the moment we need to be energized and determined. And there are reasons for that determination. We have a clear goal in front of us, which is to hang on to our democracy so we can eventually make some real reforms when we get power back. We know that this next administration is going to pursue policies that are extremist, but also very performative, right? So we know what we’re going to prepare for. We know that there’s going to be a lot of performative politics, but we also know that they’re going to overstep. And we also know that there’s a certain level of incompetence, and we also know that they are internally divided. So I want to go through some of my recommendations.
First of all, we are in the majority.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Please say that louder for the back row. I mean, we are in the majority. This is not popular.
KATHERINE STEWART:
We, broadly speaking, are in the majority. More Americans prefer to live in a democracy, however imperfect it may be, than in some sort of kleptocratic, cronyistic, authoritarian system with theocratic features. That’s not what America wants. We are in the majority, we need to act like it.
Second of all, they are divided. If you look at the sort of material divisions, you just have to understand that what the rank and file wants and thinks that they’re buying is not what the funders are selling, or the sort of thinkers of the movement, the sort of intellectual leaders of the movement are after. And those divisions should be highlighted and exploited, and they can be.
Extreme levels of inequality are eroding our democracy. This is something that we need to understand. I think there was nothing more stark than to see perhaps the group of the richest men in the world attending Trump’s inauguration. You had Bezos there, you had Musk there with his salute, whatever. I mean, you have these tech billionaires there. And here’s Trump promising to work for you when he’s speaking to the right: “When they come for you they’re coming through me!” And you really think that he’s going to serve you, when he’s got these billionaires that he’s really serving and who are basically paying him bribes by any other name to get policies that they want. So that’s really something that we do need to address.
I think that when people’s lives become more difficult and they can’t understand why the earlier generation had it easier just on an economic level than they do, and they’re struggling to make it work for their families, it makes them very resentful – and legitimately resentful. They feel like they’re falling behind. They feel like the tech revolution is leaving them, making them feel irrelevant and left behind. And when they have all these resentments, those resentments can be easily weaponized and then hurled at political enemies and weaponized through disinformation. So we need to address those inconsistencies between what the funders are buying and what the rank and file want, and then eventually address those deep inequalities.
Separations of Church and State, by the way, is a good idea, and we should try it. We’re really seeing the weaponization of faith in a way that is inhibiting religious freedom. It’s interfering with the religious conscience of so many Americans, saying what kinds of faith are acceptable and what kinds of faith are not. That’s not what true religious freedom is about.
Knowledge is power. I think we can’t really defeat this movement unless we know what we’re up against. And the details matter, certainly when we’re mounting, for instance, legal challenges and when we’re mounting political challenges. You know, arming yourself with the facts and an understanding of how this movement operates is really critical.
Organization matters. That’s the final point I’m making. Perhaps it’s the most important one. You know, when this movement lost the election that they wanted in 2020, they didn’t retreat. They didn’t hide under the covers and suck their thumbs. They organized and they strategized their way back into power. and we need to organize and strategize back. Look, we have to remember, America didn’t go MAGA. Trump won basically the same amount of support that he won in 2020. And they do it by going after low-propensity voters. They turn out their base disproportionately. That’s a lot of how the movement works. They turn out their base in disproportionate numbers. And there was a kind of lack of enthusiasm on the other side of the political aisle.
A lot of that, by the way, is engineered not just by the right – to some extent they find these very divisive issues in order to depress enthusiasm for the vote – but also we’ve seen how governments like Russia and other hostile foreign powers who want to weaken America have targeted not just the far right, but also the far left. But the sort of results of their activities redound to the benefit of the right. It’s not like they’re ever going to redound to the left, because they know that Trump doesn’t create a stronger country. He creates a weaker country.
I would say, finally, the most important thing to do is really a lot of politics is local. There are so many avenues for involvement. It’s really important to engage in any way you can, find your lane and work it. And I loved what an earlier guest of yours said. Skye Perryman was talking about how important it is to build community. I think it’s really important to have a big tent. We shouldn’t subject one another to purity tests. We’re not all going to agree on everything. In a society, a democracy as diverse as ours, we shouldn’t expect to. We can agree on some basic things. We can work together to restore our democracy.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Well, I love that you end on organization and organizing. What’s been fascinating to see, frankly, since the election results, we at Interfaith Alliance are close to doubling our affiliates around the country. People are coming out of the woodwork to create Interfaith Alliances across the country. And I’m just going to say it to our listeners: If you’re in a community and you’re interested in Interfaith Alliance, look around and see if there is one. But if there’s not, talk to us about organizing one, because that’s a way to bring people together to get organized and have a structure and support to really show up and fight back in this moment. And I think it’s so important, but nothing is more important than being aware and learning and understanding what moment we’re in. And I really just want to recommend this book to you.
Katherine Stewart is a journalist and author of crucial books like The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Her latest book, coming February 11th, is titled Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.
Katherine, thank you so much for all the work that you have done and continue to do, and for being with us here on The State of Belief.
KATHERINE STEWART:
Well, thank you for the work you’re doing. And thank you so much for the work of Interfaith Alliance. And it’s really a pleasure to speak with you today.
