#401 — Christian Nationalism and the New Right
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Summary
In this episode, Catherine Stewart joins me to talk about her new book, Money Lies in God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, and why she thinks we should be worried about what's happening right in front of us.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
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I am here with Catherine Stewart. Catherine, thanks for joining me.
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So I recently discovered you. You wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, which they titled
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Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right In Front of Us? And I want to talk about what's
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happening right in front of us. But before we do, perhaps you can summarize your background
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Sure. I've been an investigative journalist and reporter. My new book, Money Lies in God,
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Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is my third book on the anti-democratic movement,
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which involves the religious rite, the new rite, a number of kind of features,
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different features, sometimes sort of, I would say, swimming in the same headwaters,
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but often with kind of different contours, each group.
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Yeah. So your book comes out next week, which is probably when we're dropping this. So I think
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we're probably dropping this on your pub date. So your book, Money Lies in God, which I just got the
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PDF of yesterday. So I must say I have not read every word of it, but I've read a lot of it and
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we'll get into it, but we will by no means exhaust what is of interest in there. So let's find a way
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into this, I guess, starting with the current moment politically, because it's genuinely confusing how
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these reactionary forces in American politics are intersecting and supporting one another.
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We have many allies of convenience, it seems. I mean, these people are not ideologically unified.
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You have Christian nationalists, you have oligarchs, some of whom are Christian or nominally so,
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some of whom believe not much of anything. Some are quite reactionary Catholics who have been
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in the woodwork for many generations, it seems, and seem to be influential on the Supreme Court and
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elsewhere. And it's a little strange to dissect all of this. It's also difficult to see how all of
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the summates in the person of an orange monstrosity of Donald Trump. Let's start with your op-ed and then
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we'll get into the book. What do you think is happening right in front of us that we should
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Well, I mean, they told us that they were going to dismantle the institutions of our democracy,
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democracy. And that's exactly what they were doing now. You know, this is a movement that,
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frankly, has been quite clear about what their aims are. They're not hiding. It's just that a lot
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of people haven't been listening. You know, I get into the different features of the movement
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in my book, Money, Lies, and God. I'd like to start with the title, if that's all right.
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I mean, money, because money is a huge part of the story, the sort of vast concentrations
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of wealth over the past decades have actually sort of at the tippy top of the economic spectrum
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kind of destabilized the political system in a number of different ways. They've created
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resentments among large, massive working people and empowered people at the very top to sort
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of put their thumb on our politics in certain kinds of ways. Lies, because disinformation
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and conspiracism is a huge piece of this. You know, it's how a lot of the rank and file have
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been kind of separated from the facts in certain ways or had their resentments directed toward
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targets that really perhaps don't deserve it quite as much as they get it. And then, of course,
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God, because religious nationalism, I think, is the most important ideological framework for the
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largest part of this movement. So in the book, I get into a group I call the funders. These are
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the beneficiaries of those vast concentrations of wealth. And, you know, religiously, they're all
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over the place. I'm thinking about people like the Corkeries or the Sky Foundation or Sean Filer
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or Barry Side or the DeVos Prince family juggernaut, Wilkes Brothers, Tom Dunn, like some of them,
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Tim Dunn, I'm sorry, some of them are like evangelical, some are Catholic, some are Protestant,
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some are Jewish, some are frankly atheistic or nihilistic and don't seem to believe in anything more
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than money. But they all agree on the need to sort of crush liberalism and investing a portion
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of their fortunes on the destruction, on these anti-democratic projects. I also shine a bright
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light on a group I call the thinkers. These, many of them are associated with a movement called the
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New Right. A number of them, like Russell Vogt and Darren Beatty and others are now Michael Anton
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occupying positions in the Trump administration or nominees. And I would say some of them are more
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religious nationalist or Christian nationalist than others. Many of them also seem quite
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nihilistic. Some of them actually derive a lot of inspiration from political theorists associated
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Right, Carl Schmitt. I mean, they are more, was a Nazi political theorist who, you know,
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we can talk about him a little bit later and how his ideology has influenced this movement.
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But they are actually more anti, I would say, hostile to the idea of democracy. And they've
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been saying for a long time that they abhor democracy and its principles and institutions,
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even as they claim to revere the founders and our founding principles. I also look at the rank and file,
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the people who sort of tend to vote for candidates who are radically anti-democratic in their political
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aims. And then I also look at the sort of cadre of very empowered political pastors and activists,
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religious activists, groups I call the sergeants and the power players. And often they're the ones
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kind of driving the agenda and playing a very important role in connecting with the rank and file.
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Hmm. Well, let's start with the thinkers. There was this political talking point during the election
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that was dismissed by all of Trump's fans and by Trump himself as just pure misinformation.
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The Democratic Party was quite agitated over something called Project 2025, which is this massive
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document put out by the Heritage Foundation, which seemed to be a plan, a fairly reactionary plan
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for making some impressive changes in governance in America. As you know, Trump pretended
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to know nothing about it. When he heard something about it, he said he wanted nothing to do with
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it. I remember, you know, some, I have some friends, if you can imagine this, who voted for
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Donald Trump. And I remember raising the specter of Project 2025 to them. And they assured me that
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this was misinformation spun up by the left. This is just, it was not a thing. Some maniacs over at the
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Heritage Foundation wrote something which Trump had never heard of. There's no coordination here.
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But you've just mentioned some of the names that are now staffing the administration. And these are
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some of the primary authors of Project 2025. Russell Vogt, director of the Office of Management and
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Budget. He, I believe, is the primary author of the document. Brendan Carr, Peter Navarro, Tom Homan,
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John Radcliffe, Michael Anton. You know, John Radcliffe is nominated to lead the CIA. This is Project 2025
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in its implementation. And it's just, it's amazing to me that you hear that there's no mea culpa ever
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uttered by any of the fans of Trump who wanted nothing to do with Project 2025 and were quite
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happy to know that he knew nothing about it. None of them are now stepping in front of microphones
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saying, you know, this is not really what I voted for, right? And so how do you perceive this?
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Was this, if you can imagine, was Trump just lying when he said he knew nothing about Project 2025 and
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wanted nothing to do with it? Or what's happening here?
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Well, absolutely. I mean, Russell Vogt was caught on camera speaking with a potential funder of the
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movement. It was a kind of a setup by a couple of British journalists, essentially saying that,
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yeah, you know, this is, he's in on it and this is what's going to happen. The idea that this was
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sort of a 900 page document that was never going to go anywhere is just total fiction. I mean,
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many of the contributors to Project 2025 were former members of the Trump administration. And yes,
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you're absolutely right. A number of contributors and architects of Project 2025 are now occupying key
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institutions, you know, key positions within the new administration. And what we see in Project 2025
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is a kind of marriage of the new right and the Christian right and the Christian nationalist movement.
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That's kind of, those two influences comprise sort of, I would say, and call them the power couple of
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I think the power couple being Christian nationalism and the new right.
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Yeah. What is Christian nationalism in your view? Because it's not synonymous with
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the evangelical movement. I mean, I'm sure there's an impressive overlap there, but
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how would you differentiate it from the various flavors of Christianity we have in America?
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Yeah, thank you. You know, Christian nationalism is not Christianity. It's not a religion.
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It's both an ideology, like an also a kind of political movement. I think of it as like
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a mindset and a machine. So the mindset draws on this ideology that says America was founded
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as a Christian nation, according to a very particular understanding of the Christian faith,
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and our laws should be based on reactionary interpretation of the Bible. And it's a sort
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of exploitation of this ideology for politics and power. And when we're talking about the machine,
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it's a political movement. The movement is leadership driven, and it's also organization
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driven. And we can sort of divide those, you know, the agenda is not set by the rank and file. I mean,
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let's really be clear about that. So the organizations can be divided into categories. There are
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right-wing policy groups. There are advocacy, legal advocacy groups. There are very sophisticated
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data initiatives. There are legislative initiatives. There are networking organizations,
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like the Council for National Policy, which gets different factions of the leadership on the same
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page. And, you know, the movement is, there's a vast kind of messaging sphere that goes out and
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reaches the rank and file. There are these pastoral networks, groups like Watchmen on the Wall and Faith
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Wins and Church United and the Courage Tour, these initiatives that draw pastors into networks. And
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then movement leaders will do presentations with them and give them materials. They get them to turn
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out to their congregations to turn out to vote for the sort of hard right candidates that the movement
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favors. And those pastoral networks play a really important role in election cycles because,
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listen, sort of the rank and file of this movement represent a minority of the population. And
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frankly, I think even many, if most American Christians, object to Christian nationalism. A
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number of organizations like Christians Against Christian Nationalism and the New Evangelicals and
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Vote Common Good, I mean, the Baptist Joint Committee, there are so many others object to Christian
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Does anyone answer to the name Christian nationalist happily, or is that a phrase that is used by those
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outside the movement to describe it pejoratively?
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Some do. Like Russell Vogt, I think, has self-identified as Christian nationalist. We know Marjorie Taylor
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Green and some others have. You know, I just want to say, return for a moment to that infrastructure.
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The strength of the movement is in that dense organizational infrastructure, and they turn out their
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vote in disproportionate numbers. But, you know, Christian nationalism, I think of it like
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authoritarianism. It's a political dynamic that affects a political system, not just a set of
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attitudes embraced by the rank and file. So let's say, you know, when a person decides they're going
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to vote their values on abortion, say, or they're voting to protect the American family as they think
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they're doing, you know, as the movement has told them to do, they may not necessarily be arguing for
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major changes in the way our government is run. They're just kind of making a statement about their
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identity and what they value in themselves. So we might not call them a Christian nationalist,
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but what they are doing is lending support to a Christian nationalist agenda. Does that make sense to
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you? It's like authoritarianism. It doesn't just start off as like a political program that everybody
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endorses. It's just like various dynamics and sort of interests act to sort of promote a kind of
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But what is the overlap, would you say, between Christian nationalism and what we would call, you know,
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I mean, we have to really look at a Venn diagram. There's some overlap, but it's not
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the same thing, you know. But, you know, what's very interesting is that there are a group like
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the Proud Boys. When they first started, they didn't really particularly have a religious identity.
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But as the Christian nationalist movement has gained power, and as these different identity movements,
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by the way, somewhat of these white nationalist groups have had, I mean, just want to be very clear,
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some of them have had a religious identity from the start, others have not. So there's differences
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among them, but as the movement has gained in strength, and as their leaders have been able to
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sort of see the power that the ideology and the movement sort of is able to marshal, some have
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adopted, like the Proud Boys, for instance, has adopted more of a religious identity more overtly.
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So there is some variation in the different sort of militia groups and white nationalist groups.
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So there are obviously many ways into this. I mean, there are people who are just racist and
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afraid of immigration, and then they get some religious inspiration in their politics,
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and they find themselves somewhere standing somewhere near a sincere Christian who finds that their
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politics is also bent around by scenes of chaos at the southern border and wants to get a handle on
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that and can't figure out why anyone left of center is confused about why we would want a defensible
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border. And you have people who are associated with an institute like the Claremont Institute,
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where, you know, you have intellectuals or Aristotle intellectuals. I think in your book,
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you detail how that institution has undergone some considerable devolution in terms of its
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scholarly integrity. But you have people there who I think would never answer to the name of white
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supremacist and would, at least in their own minds, consciously disavow racism, but nonetheless have
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time for, you know, Nazi writers like the one we named Carl Schmitt and people he's influenced.
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Again, I'm trying to figure out how to talk about a fairly complex Venn diagram that is clearly in the
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real world deranging our politics at this moment. You have, you know, the oligarchs, you know, many of
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whom we'll talk about, many of whom I know personally, some of whom I know not to be religious at all,
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some of whom I know are religious in a strange way that probably has as much to do with Burning Man
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as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But, you know, these are people who are influenced, you know,
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will admit to being influenced by rather iconoclastic and free associative, and I would even say
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You know, so it's just a mess, ideologically, out there, and yet they're having a good old time
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at Mar-a-Lago now, seeming to get everything they want out of the world, I think, to the obvious
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detriment of our democracy and American values. What strand of this do you want to pick up first?
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Oh my gosh, so much to talk about. I mean, when we're talking about the oligarchs, I mean,
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let's be clear, it's not all of the very rich people in this country that are supporting this,
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it's a sector, right, who are supporting it. And I think that, I mean, something that comes to mind
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when you talk about these guys going to Mar-a-Lago and sort of, you know, having a grand old time,
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I think a lot of people don't appreciate the degree to which a lot of these very rich people
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live in almost like islands, right? They're surrounded by people who say nice things to them,
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they, you know, have the sense that they can sort of, you know, deserve every penny that they
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earned every penny where they have with their bare hands. Many of them, by the way, you know,
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they want policies that benefit their businesses. They want deregulatory environments so that they
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can engage in, some of them are in polluting practices and others just in, you know, they run
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monopolistic businesses and they want an absence of regulation in ways that are going to assist those
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businesses. But at the same time, they also want, I would say, protective policies. You know, they
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want often privileged contracts or they want, in some instances, I'm looking at you, Mr. Musk,
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tax privileges, tax subsidies, and things like this. But they're also living on these islands and they,
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you know, in the last couple of decades, we've seen a massive concentration of wealth at the very
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tippy top. But we've also seen life become so much harder for people, I would say, in the bottom 90%
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of our country, where the working and middle classes are struggling, you know, and making it hard,
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it's making it harder for those families to succeed. And so people at the top in their islands are sort of
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protected, but they can hear from like far, like over the walls, they can hear, you know, critics saying,
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well, you know, what you're doing is really not okay, you should be paying your taxes and perhaps
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treating your workforce a little better. And maybe not killing off all those mom and pops or smaller
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organizations with your, you know, monopolistic businesses, and they don't like that makes them
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very defensive. And I think that that contributes to this sense of, you know, the sense that, like,
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I think they're afraid of the people coming after them with proverbial pitchforks.
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And I think that actually contributes that sense of defensiveness to some of their activities in
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supporting this movement. I mean, we can't know what's in people's hearts, obviously, and I'm sure
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there's different variants. I think the Wilkes brothers are very different from Jeff Yass, for instance,
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and their orientation in every way, or Peter Thiel. But at the same time, again, they have embraced
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these people like Curtis Yarvin and his fellow travelers at the Claremont Institute who are
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basically arguing that we need more monarchical form of rule, that democracy is not sufficient to
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solve all of our problems because we're facing an absolute apocalypse because of the woke cancelers
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or whatever. It's like, well, who's really trying to cancel stuff here? I mean, I'm sure you,
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like I, saw that list of words that these sort of funded national institutes of health studies are
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not allowed to include, including the word woman. Yeah. I mean, talk about cancellation.
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They're basically, just for people who don't know what's happening there, they circulated a,
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I believe I saw it as an Excel spreadsheet of keywords that were now going to be screened for
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in any scientific grant at the National Science Foundation. And if you take the complete set of
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words, I mean, some were obviously red flags for DEI inflected work, but I mean, the complete set
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seemed to rule out more or less all of the social sciences. I mean, if a word like woman and
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socioeconomic is going to get you flagged, then it's, we're really just talking about physics in the end.
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Yeah. Okay. So, well, you, you mentioned the woke stuff. I, this is, this is one place where I think
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you and I might disagree. Maybe, maybe not. It'll be interesting to figure out why we disagree if we
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in fact disagree, but in reading your book and in reading, I think I, you know, since it was given
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to me as a PDF, I had the advantage of being able to find every use of the word woke and wokeness in
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it. Just so I, I'm, I'm pretty sure I understand what you said about it in your book. You seem to
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think that it's basically a non-issue and, and insofar as, as the people on the right.
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Well, no, feel free to correct me again. I'm, I'm, uh, I'm throwing myself on your mercy because I, I,
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I did not read your whole book, but, um, I did read much of it. Uh, but you seem to think,
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the impression I've gotten, however, uh, haphazardly is that you think that the right
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has made a demon out of this idea that the left is engaged in a kind of, you know, quasi-Marxist,
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uh, you know, and certainly post-modernist takeover of all elite institutions. And there's a-
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Well, I think you should perhaps read the section I write about the far left.
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Let me, let me put all these, these, these dumb ideas in your, in your, in your mouth and you
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can, you can spit them out. You seem to think that this is either, these fears are not sincerely
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held or if held, they're exaggerated. And there's, there's much less of a problem on the left than
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is made out by people like Christopher Rufo or James Lindsay or any of these other activists on,
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in the new right who stand up in front of adoring crowds and say the, you know, the woke mind virus
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is coming for you and your kids. Your kids' schools are trying to, to make them trans,
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et cetera. This is obviously something that Elon Musk has spoken about. And, um, you know,
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insofar as I, I know his mind at all anymore, I believe, you know, he's, he, along with many
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millions of other people in this country is sincere in saying that he is, one of his major concerns is
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this far left trans activists centered ideology. Yeah. I think you should actually read.
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Sorry. I don't have to read it. You're going to give it to me right now.
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I mean, I think it's very clear that a far, the far left is frankly, there's on that sector
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of the far left, there is the amplification of some very divisive stuff that frankly redounds to
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the benefit of the far right. Yeah. Because what it often does it's, and we saw it like the labs at
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MIT media lab, for instance, analyze this as did, I think it was a sector of, it was like a Harvard
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lab that collaborated on some of this stuff where they found some of these extremist ideas being
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amplified by Russia and other hostile foreign actors in order to divide, you know, some of these
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ideas are incredibly divisive. And one of the things that this does is it sort of makes people
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think, well, well, the, like the moderate liberal, you know, progressive left, they sort of throw all
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of it into that sort of woke communist bucket, which is ridiculous. I mean, the people who are
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talking about these issues constantly are people on the right. You know, I was recently at America
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Fest. It's an annual gathering held by Turning Point USA. It took place in Phoenix, Arizona. There
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were 20,000 sort of hardcore MAGA. Every single speaker had to talk about transgender women in
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sports. This is like, you're right, they're making a boogeyman out of this issue. Now, whatever you or I
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may think about these issues, and, you know, we'll probably find a lot of agreement on this particular
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topic. We have 11.4 million children living in poverty. Gun violence is the number one cause of
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death among children and teenagers in our country. Those kinds of issues can, and many DEI programs as
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well, can and should be examined. And are there excesses in some of the DEI programs? Of course there
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are. But is this the major problem facing our country? When you bring up James Lindsay and Rufo and
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Musk even, you know, Lindsay at least I saw speak at Moms for Liberty conference where he's going on
00:25:48.780
and on about how, you know, the Democratic parties like Communist China, those extremist voices are not
00:25:55.080
normalized. They're not like widespread within, I would say, Democratic Party politics. It's the right
00:26:01.500
that talks about them all the time. It's a massive distraction. I mean, I think we have to, you know,
00:26:06.660
whatever you or I may think about those issues, we have to acknowledge that they are being used as a
00:26:11.740
massive distraction from the real problems facing our country, bread and butter issues. You know,
00:26:17.400
this is a movement that claims to stand for the American family, but they're endorsing politicians
00:26:23.600
whose policies are making it so much harder for so many Americans to succeed. And, you know, why would
00:26:30.480
they talk about these issues constantly? Well, it's like, you ever see a laser pointer or a cat toy
00:26:36.520
where there's this red little thing that goes all over the floor and the cat jumps at it and jumps at it?
00:26:41.320
Well, if you're focused on that, like identity issue that involves sex and sexuality, which distracts
00:26:46.860
everybody, all of a sudden you're not looking at the real problems in your community. You're not
00:26:51.400
looking at the source of the problems. You're not understanding why the cost of groceries is too high
00:26:57.660
and the cost of housing is impossible and why you're like a couple with, you know,
00:27:02.480
two parents and four jobs and you're still struggling to make it work.
00:27:06.040
Well, I agree with that, that it's been a massive distraction that has been leveraged quite artfully
00:27:13.060
and cynically by the far right. But it was also a massive distraction for on the left for the Democratic
00:27:21.340
Party. And all of the elite institutions, the mainstream media and scientific journals and
00:27:27.880
universities and Hollywood, all of them got captured to a degree that I think the far right perceived to
00:27:36.540
be and rightly perceived to be a problem and a massive political vulnerability. So it's not just
00:27:43.060
the laser pointer, this tiny little dot that should be meaningless, but is captivating everyone.
00:27:49.080
Well, I would say the right is really good at getting, I mean, they're in way more tactical.
00:27:54.880
They're really good at setting traps for people to walk into.
00:28:00.280
There was no reason for Kamala Harris or anyone else in the Democratic Party to walk into those
00:28:05.380
traps if they had their head screwed on straight around how fringe some of the, and insane some of
00:28:12.460
these concerns actually are on the far left. I mean, we had during, I'll take you back to the golden
00:28:18.180
years of woke derangement, you know, to somewhere around 2020. I mean, you literally had NPR publishing
00:28:24.680
an editorial in defense of looting, right? We had just seen lots of looting and rioting in major
00:28:32.020
cities associated with the George Floyd protest.
00:28:33.680
Oh, I mean, that's appalling. But that was also just one fringe idea in like the free marketplace
00:28:40.960
of ideas. And you see a lot of crazy ideas on the right as well. And I'm not familiar with the
00:28:48.600
That's the thing that's, but there's, there's, perhaps this is something you have an idea about
00:28:53.180
how to fix. There is, many of us have noticed a pervasive asymmetry here where the left or anyone
00:29:01.800
left of center, any mainstream institution, the New York Times say, gets one thing wrong and it is
00:29:08.320
devastating for its reputation. Right. And the right amplifies it over and over.
00:29:14.100
And the right will seize upon that error as a sign that there's really, there is no distinction
00:29:21.580
between the New York Times and, you know, the Epoch Times or Breitbart or Fox News, right? We're all
00:29:29.280
just in the business of smearing everyone all day long for political reasons. The right gets things
00:29:34.780
wrong. And there's just, since they're continuously playing tennis without the net over there,
00:29:40.000
it never matters. And there's nothing to be made of it left of center, because of course we know that
00:29:45.800
Fox News and Breitbart and they're not, they're really not in the business of journalism. They're
00:29:50.220
going, you know, they're misinformation factories. So there's this profound asymmetry here, which is that
00:29:55.760
left of center in elite institutions, we are trying to hold ourselves to journalistic and academic
00:30:03.500
standards and we succeed or fail at that, uh, and police ourselves and are policed from the outside
00:30:10.880
by, you know, cynical people who want no part of the standards and the norms we're trying to defend,
00:30:16.960
but will hold us to those standards and norms and reveal us in every moment of hypocrisy that can be
00:30:24.520
detected. Right. And so it is a kind of, you know, this is like, again, it's asymmetric warfare of the
00:30:30.780
sort that you see when you have a major army that's trying to follow the rules of the Geneva
00:30:35.820
convention, uh, fighting an insurgency that is using IEDs and human shields and, you know, putting
00:30:43.180
it's the barrels of his rifles on the shoulders of children. And it's very hard to know how to
00:30:48.700
navigate this rhetorically, right? Because every time you admit, yes, okay. That's that, that, uh,
00:30:54.920
the deplatforming of the New York posts on Twitter in response to the Hunter Biden laptop. Yes. In
00:31:01.400
retrospect, that looked like a bad idea. Yes. Those former intelligence chiefs who signed a letter
00:31:07.080
saying that it looks like Russian disinformation. Well, yeah, they, they do have egg on their face
00:31:11.040
now because it wasn't, wasn't Russian disinformation, but that does not obviate all of the concerns about
00:31:17.800
Russian disinformation that, that sane journalists had in mind, you know, the previous week. And it
00:31:24.120
does not make Rudy Giuliani foisting an October surprise with the Hunter Biden laptop, somehow
00:31:30.040
an honest broker of information at this point. And it's, it becomes impossible to make these
00:31:35.420
distinctions because again, there's this profound asymmetry. One error on your side destroys your
00:31:42.080
reputation. The other side plays by no rules at all. That's true. And I think, I think one of the
00:31:48.360
most dangerous consequences of this movement is an assault on the idea of truth itself, the idea that
00:31:57.920
truth doesn't matter. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to
00:32:02.940
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00:32:08.780
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