Ruby Ridge Standoff | God, Guns, and Government: The Movement Shaping Modern Politics | 5

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0:21From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American Scandal.

0:44In August of 1992, federal agents surrounded a remote cabin in northern Idaho. Inside was Randy Weaver, a former soldier and Christian fundamentalist, along with his wife, children, and a family friend. The Weavers had been living off the grid for years, preparing for Armageddon. But what began as a minor weapons charge quickly spiraled into a violent standoff. By the time it ended, three people were dead. To many Americans, Ruby Ridge was a disturbing example of reckless force used by the federal government. But for some, it confirmed a deeper truth, that the state was corrupt, godless, and on the verge of tyranny.

1:20In their eyes, the Weavers weren't criminals, they were prophets. Today, the ideas that shape the Weaver's worldview, like apocalyptic Christianity and a deep distrust of democratic institutions, are no longer confined to isolated cabins in the woods. Now they're at the heart of an influential political force, Christian nationalism, an ideology that has inspired violence in places like Charlottesville and Washington, D.C., and is increasingly shaping political platforms, court decisions, and campaigns across the country. My guest today is Andrew Whitehead. He's a professor of sociology at Indiana University and the author of American Idolatry, How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church.

2:02Our conversation is next.

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3:11Andrew Whitehead, welcome to American Scandal. Thank you for having me. Now, you define Christian nationalism as a cultural framework that idealizes and advocates for a particular expression of Christianity within American civic life. Let's break that down a bit. What is this particular expression of Christianity? Yeah, that is the really important part of the definition of Christian nationalism because it highlights that there are hundreds and thousands, really, of expressions of Christianity. So the Christianity of Christian nationalism, it does refer to some of the historic orthodox theological beliefs of Christianity that most of us are familiar with, but it also includes what I like to call cultural baggage, like a desire for traditionalist social hierarchies, a comfort with authoritarian social control, strong ethno-racial boundaries around national identity, and then also a sense of populism and conspiratorial thinking that this nation is being taken away.

4:11And so what we find over and over empirically is Christian nationalism is focused on benefiting the us and the we at the detriment of others, at the detriment of the marginalized. And it's that cultural baggage that gets intertwined with the Christianity of Christian nationalism that really highlights this particular expression. So turning to the subject of this series, the Weavers, would you say that their beliefs about things like the coming apocalypse, government betrayal, these sort of things reflect strains of Christian nationalist thinking? Yeah, I think that even more so in the present day, we find strains of especially conspiratorial thinking really being present and rising up within the Christianity of Christian nationalism.

4:55And so when we look at specific cases like the Weavers and the conspiratorial thinking that kind of undergirds a lot of what took place and they were all about, we do find Americans that embrace Christian nationalism do align with that. So there are a number of studies that highlight folks that strongly embrace Christian nationalism are more likely to embrace various conspiratorial beliefs that the government is hiding something about, let's say, the JFK assassination or the moon landing. But what we also find is that when we give folks a list of conspiratorial beliefs that they think the government might be hiding information about, and then we include a conspiratorial belief in that list that is made up by the researchers, so it's not something that anybody has heard of before, we find Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are also more likely to believe the government is hiding something about a conspiracy belief that is literally made up.

5:54And so this highlights that as new conspiratorial beliefs come on the market, these folks are ready and willing to embrace that the government or elites are hiding something about this. The susceptibility to suggestion where, you know, do we have evidence? Let's say that the 2020 election was stolen. No, there is no evidence. But again, very open to the suggestion that there were improprieties or there were voting machines that were being taken over. And even today, some of the leaders of that movement saying these voting machines are even controlled by Satan, which again is not anything that can be proven or disproven, but open to that belief that there are these shadowy forces that are pushing against the real, the good Americans.

6:40And I think it's important to point out too that as we're looking at the current context of Americans that maybe strongly embrace Christian nationalism, they are and might be influenced by the stories and narratives and experiences of the Weaver family or others like them who they believe are folks that were just trying to live their lives but then were wrongly harmed by the government or whatever else. And so now we have to get involved. And so even that story has probably shifted some of the narratives within Christian nationalism in the United States. One of the founding fictions, perhaps, of Christian nationalism is, of course, the idea that this country was founded as a Christian nation.

7:22Where did that idea come from? Yeah, so it has a long history in American thought. And in many ways, depending on how we define Christian nation, we have varying levels of evidence for whether that's true or not. And so, I think that's what makes it really difficult to nail down. Because if we're looking at Christian nation and defining it as, are most of the people here generally Christian? Well, then for much of the history of the United States, and even today, yeah, a majority, over 50 % of people are a part of some Christian tradition. But if we're talking about the founding documents are explicitly Christian, we don't have any evidence of that as the Declaration of Independence never mentions Jesus or the Constitution doesn't even mention God.

8:05But what we have over time is there are folks who are intent on creating that narrative and creating, in many ways, false representations of our founding documents or the founding fathers to create a narrative that appeals to folks that want that to be true. And so, one example of this is David Barton and his group, Wall Builders, in Texas. So, he's a political operative, and for years and years, he has worked to create this narrative that the founding fathers, literally all of them, were evangelical, just like we see folks today, that the founding documents were explicitly Christian, all of these things.

8:45And that has become really powerful on the right, both politically and culturally. And so that narrative has really stuck with us. There are many folks that want that to be true, believe it to be true. And so they're willing to overlook what historians have found in favor of, again, this political operative that is telling them something that they would kind of want to be true. And so we know there are folks that are working to create that narrative and undergird it because they can build off of that and say, well, if this country was a Christian nation, then we need to push it forward towards these, again, quote unquote, Christian ends that we see for the nation.

9:25This may be an unfair question because I'm asking you to elaborate on someone's motives. But for those people who do push this notion that America is a Christian nation, do you believe that there's a cynicism in it, that they have political goals that they are trying to achieve with this fabricated narrative? Or is it more an instance of perhaps wish fulfillment or motivated reasoning? You know, I think it's really both at work. And I think those circles overlap, but they're not one and the same as you're pointing out. I do think that there are folks that truly believe this narrative to be true, and some of it might be motivated reasoning because they want so much of their identity and history and past is wrapped up in this belief.

10:04To set that aside is really difficult. And I do think there are folks who are more cynical where I don't think they're true believers at all, but they recognize the power of that rhetoric. They recognize what that can do for them in the political sphere to motivate folks. What they share, though, is that the outcomes generally align. They want a country that privileges a particular group of people, generally white, natural-born citizens who align with a traditional social ethic around gender and sexuality. They want this country to serve those folks most easily and best, with other folks falling in line behind.

10:43But these are the people that should have their hands on the levers of power. And so I think whether it is true believers or more cynical users of the rhetoric, their end goal aligns. And I think that's what brings them together and makes them such a powerful political and social force. Now, you mentioned the phrase white natural born citizens. Going back to the Weavers in the 1980s, they flirted with Christian identity, a religion of many white separatist groups that holds that Aryans are God's chosen people. Is race also embedded in Christian nationalism? Yeah. So we find over and over as we survey the American public, Americans who embrace Christian nationalism, when they hear Christian nation and that word Christian, it isn't, again, just pointing to Orthodox Christian beliefs, but it is activating racialized views of who is the ideal American, a true American citizen.

11:37And so when they're thinking of a Christian nation, in many ways, they're imagining a white Christian nation. And so race is fundamentally intertwined with this imagination of a Christian nation. And we find over and over that the more we embrace Christian nationalism, the more likely they are to believe that certain inequalities based on race across the United States, whether it's the criminal justice system or access to economic mobility or education or healthcare, those folks that embrace Christian nationalism are more likely to hold racist views in all those different areas. And so, again, when we look at it historically, too, we see that as Christianity came to these shores, even before the founding of the United States, we see that these ideas of what is Christian and good and the ideas of race and color of the skin were really melded together to where a good American or a good citizen was Christian and white, but black or brown, whether the slaves that they brought with them or the indigenous people.

12:43populations that they encountered and had to move off the land. These were folks that did not represent the good, did not represent Christian. And so again, that underscored what they saw as their right to take control of this land and these people. It goes that far back and has been a common thread in this understanding of what is a Christian nation and who are good Christians. In addition to their religious beliefs, the Weavers believed strongly in self-reliance and taking care of themselves and not relying on the government and, in fact, being quite skeptical of the government. Do you see any of those strains in Christian nationalism too?

13:19Yeah. So when we look at Christian nationalism, there are elements of kind of economic views tied up with that, particularly this devotion to capitalism and neoliberal economic values. And it's tied up with this idea of Americans as individuals, as masters of their own destiny and this desire to pick yourself up by your bootstraps and do what is necessary to make your way forward. So one example is the book written by Kevin Kruse called One Nation Under God. And he's looking at how, in his argument, corporate America created Christian America. So we had these wealthy businessmen who were afraid of the New Deal and these what they called socialist policies that were going to harm their newspaper empires or business empires.

14:08And so they lifted up these voices of Christians, like Billy Graham was a part of this, to say that capitalism is God's perfectly designed way for a nation to meet its economic needs. And so we should be afraid of socialism or anything else that moves against that. And so the Christian nationalism that we see come to the fore is really focused on this idea that you need to be a capitalist. And that led into the Red Scare of the 50s and this fear of communism. And so as we look at Christian nationalism through the 20th century and even into today, there are economic principles tied up in that. And so this underscores some of the discomfort that Americans who embrace Christian nationalism might have with any sort of federal subsidy or program that helps lift up those who are poor or in need of health insurance or anything else.

15:02because they think that it is all about the individual doing what is necessary rather than caring for all who are part of the collective. So clearly some aspects of Christian nationalism can be traced back decades or even centuries, but when did the movement of today really start to emerge? Yeah, I think the current iteration that we're experiencing around Christian nationalism really generates from the 1970s. And so there were political and religious leaders on the right who in the 70s were looking around and recognizing that there was dramatic social, cultural, and demographic change happening, really as a result of the 1960s with the civil rights movement, the gender and sexual revolution, all of those things.

15:46And so they were looking around them, and they were recognizing that this country and their beliefs of what this country is and is all about were no longer taken for granted. And when that started to happen, they recognized, well, We have to insert ourselves into the political and social cultural system to make a case for this is who this country is and has always been and where it should go and how we should get there. And that's where the current iteration of Christian nationalism with the rise of the moral majority and those groups really came on the hold. So if the most recent version started in the 1970s, could you give us a quick history of how it's modernized to today?

16:24Yeah, I think one of the ways that it's really modernized is, again, highlighting this comfort with authoritarian social control, where folks are more and more comfortable setting aside what we've always believed to be these norms of democracy, of many voices at the table coming together. We see in this current iteration that as long as democracy was giving them the results that they desired, they were fine with it. But as we've moved into, and again, Trump coming on the scene, we see more and more that they're absolutely fine setting aside democracy and setting aside any kind of semblance of the right of all people in the U.S.

17:09to vote, to take part in the democratic process. they're okay with setting that aside because again, they believe that these outcomes that God desires, right? So this vision for the United States is legitimated in the will of the Christian God, well then nothing should stand in their way, even democracy. And so I think that's something that is quite new. I think the threads were there for a long time, but that's something that is quite new. And again, I think that's because of the growing social and demographic and religious diversity of the nation has increased, they recognize more and more that numbers, in a sense, are not on their side.

17:47And so if democracy in a pluralistic democratic society won't allow them to enact this vision for the country, they're willing to set that aside.

18:12Let's talk about how influential Christian nationalism is today. It seems more prominent than ever, but would you say that these beliefs are becoming more mainstream? When we're looking at Christian nationalism and measuring it across the American public, what we find is that it is not growing. There are not more Americans embracing Christian nationalism now than ever before. In fact, what we find is probably shrinking slightly, that over the last 10 or 15 years, there are slightly fewer people who strongly embrace Christian nationalism than before. And so looking at that, we might think, well, this isn't any more influential.

18:47It's actually getting smaller. But what we find is actually the rhetoric and the salience of this cultural framework is much more present. So if we look at the first term of the Trump administration, and then while he was not in office during the Biden administration and now back in office, Christian nationalism and those narratives have been at the forefront of Trump and others in his orbit as they try to understand and make a case for who this country is and what it should all be about. It was always there with prior Republican presidents, but Donald Trump and those around him have leaned into that rhetoric even more.

19:24And then also what we find is as this group actually grows smaller, as they recognize these beliefs of Christian nationalism are no longer as broadly held by other Americans. They recognize, well, this is what actually makes us different. And so if we're going to protect this country, we have to ensure that we are the remnant that is doing everything we can to bring this nation back. And so it's kind of this flip where they may not be larger in numbers, but the salience of Christian nationalism is even stronger. And we find over and over that they're actually really politically engaged. Do you think that's this increase in salience and engagement as an artifact of their decreasing size that allows more people to embrace the term Christian nationalist?

20:12A few years ago, many would have distanced themselves from that term. Yeah, I think what it has done is it's kind of brought it to the fore where we see people feeling like they do have to place themselves on one side of the line or other. And so we have folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Josh Hawley, folks that are serving in the U.S. House or in the Senate who are adopting the term for themselves and saying, yes, I'm a Christian nationalist. And I should note that they're redefining it in a way that suits them. So they're not using the empirically supported definition that social scientists like myself views, but they're saying, yeah, we're Christian nationalists, and all it means is that we love Jesus and we love this country.

20:52Again, that's not what Christian nationalism is, but they're adopting that term. But then we see folks on the other side who are saying, I'm maybe even Christian and I think Christianity is important, but I'm definitely not a Christian nationalist as it's been defined or that we're showing what it is. And so we see folks, again, distancing themselves from it. So I think this has led to perhaps why we see the numbers of those that strongly embrace Christian nationalism declining slightly over the years as folks kind of learn what it's about and say, no, I'm not about that. But then we have folks who maybe have always strongly embraced it, more willing to say, yeah, this is who we are and this is what we're all about.

21:32And they're willing to identify with that term. This is interesting to me, the adoption of the label Christian nationalism, but at the same moment, redefining it so it seems innocuous. How else has the political rhetoric been influenced or changed to kind of nod at Christian nationalism? What we find with Christian nationalism is that it operates at some different levels. So my colleague, Sam Perry, who I co-authored our first book on Christian nationalism with, he had an article that he published recently where he was looking at some of this politicized rhetoric around Christian nationalism, and he identified it as, in some ways, it does operate as a dog whistle where folks that use it, the political operatives that use it, they know that the audiences who are most primed to hear these words as they want them to be heard are going to be drawn to it, right?

22:25Something that maybe other groups might miss, but those they're speaking to are going to hear it. But he also shows and points out how this rhetoric also operates as a mating call where it is out there and everybody knows what it's about, but this is the stuff that this group that they want to see activated politically is wanting to hear, is ready to hear, and that will draw them to their side and to get them politically motivated. And so I think that's where, again, we may have politicians that are true believers in Christian nationalism. We may have some that just recognize the power of the rhetoric, but the outcomes are the same.

23:00The words they use, the rhetoric they use, that is drawing in these groups and getting them motivated to get out, to vote to, again, defend their way of life because they believe that the very soul of the nation is at stake. I'm wondering if you could give us some examples of this specific rhetoric because it runs the risk of being repugnant to the out group, even if it is a mating call in quotes for the in group. Yeah. So there are a lot of different examples. One that we see more recently and that folks are talking about and that has kind of took place leading up to the 2024 election. is rhetoric around the idea that Christians are a persecuted minority.

23:41So we see Trump who is speaking to groups of Christians leading up to the election and then even after saying, America, the elites, the academics, the politicians, the media, all of these groups, they hate Christians. They hate you. They hate your way of life. And you need someone who is going to defend you. And he's saying, I will defend you. I will defend your way of life. We're going to defend God. We're going to defend Christianity. We're going to make it okay to be Christian again, when in all reality, Christianity is not under attack. The folks that embrace this worldview or this religion can live here freely, worship here freely, but they recognize that he's talking about a particular type of Christian.

24:25He's not talking about Reverend William Barber's flavor of Christianity, a more progressive form of Christianity. He's talking about a politically, religiously conservative expression of Christianity that aligns in many ways with Christian nationalism. And so that's an example of this rhetoric that is right out in front, that they know what it's about, who he's speaking to, but it carries with it all of this rhetorical weight because they can read into what he's saying about Christianity being under attack or persecuted, and the fact that he's speaking to this group specifically. So that's Christian nationalism as it's reflected in political rhetoric.

25:04But how is it reflected in political policy? What are some examples of Christian nationalist legislation you might see on local or national levels? Yeah, so we see a number of different aspects of this. In many ways, I think one of the more helpful guides to follow, and as journalists and others are tracking this, is Project 2025. And so this is a whole kind of roadmap for conservative political views of how the federal government should operate, the types of things that they should be doing. And there were a lot of groups that were a part of the writing of Project 2025. And some of the people and the groups were explicitly those that embraced this idea of Christian nationalism.

25:47One example is Russell Vought, who leads the Office of Management of the Budget, did that in the first term for Trump and is doing that again. And so some of the things that they highlight policy-wise align with those cultural aspects of the Christianity of Christian nationalism. So for one example, looking at traditionalist social hierarchies, right? So this is the view that the United States should be ordered where men lead, women support and follow, marriage is heterosexual between a man and a woman, and they're committed to bearing children. So this is how society should be structured. And so when we look at Project 2025 or a number of the executive orders that Trump signed and continues to sign, they do focus on gender and sexuality.

26:37So there was one that was saying that gender means a man and a woman and that's it. That's a binary. And so we can see that this is policy aimed at defining gender according to this desire for a traditionalist social hierarchy. We see executive orders that are banning transgender Americans from serving in the military. Again, that there are only two genders, there's only heterosexuality should be elevated, and folks that do not align with that should not have access to the civil benefits, the opportunities available to other Americans. And so those are just a couple within one of the cultural aspects of Christian nationalism.