Faith, Lies & Power with Katherine Stewart

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1:27Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to leave a review. Good or bad, I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits, so let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now let's get into it.

2:10On today's episode, I'm talking with Catherine Stewart about a serious threat to American democracy, Christian nationalism. Catherine has spent 16 years exposing how this movement isn't just about religion. It's about power. From the public schools to the Supreme Court, wealthy backers are pushing an agenda that anti-democratic, built on misinformation, and aiming for control. How did we get here, and what does it mean for the future? Let's find out.

2:49Okay, welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is a New York Times bestselling author, Katherine Stewart. The title of the book is Money, Lies, and God, Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. What a killer book this is. And first of all, thank you for coming on. But secondarily, I was moved by your book. And I know before we went live, I was also moved by Tim Alberta's book. I learned a lot from both these books. Yours is a little different. We'll get into it in a second. But let's start with you. What got you into this? Tell us a little bit about Catherine Stewart.

3:24work. Thanks. You know, I've been writing about this movement for 16 years, and it really started on a playground in Santa Barbara, California, when I learned that a program called A Good News Club was coming to our daughters' and our children's public elementary school. This is an evangelistic program that aims to convert children who are too young to read in a really reactionary form of evangelical Christianity. As we know, evangelicalism is really diverse. But the interesting thing about this program is that the evangelical parents at our school didn't want this program coming to it. They offered them free and better space in the church literally next door to the school.

4:05Montecito Covenant Church, absolutely beautiful church, and the Good News Club leaders declined. They insisted on being in the public school. And what they're doing is they're confusing young kids into thinking that their school endorses a particular form of the Christian faith because public schools have a cloak of authority in the minds of very young kids. So this was really astonishing to me. I thought, what do my evangelical friends know that I don't know about this organization? And why do they need to be in the school as opposed to that lovely church next door? And how is it legal and constitutional for them to be operated in public elementary schools in the first place, given the First Amendment and the separation of church and state?

4:47So I started researching the legal advocacy world of the religious right, that sort of feature of the larger, I would call it a Christian nationalist movement. And that really set me down the path of investigation. And what I discovered over time is that, you know, this group was one part of a much larger sort of element of the movement that really is taking aim at public education as a pillar of democracy. But that sort of hostility to public education is just one small feature of a much larger movement that was really trying to reframe our country and turn it into something different. So most of these states were formed, founded, colonies founded on religious tolerance.

5:31I mean, there were people that were moving into Pennsylvania. They were Dutch. Some of them were Amish. And they wanted to have a different identity from various different Christian sects. And so they did that. And then there was a successful revolution. And then there was a Bill of Rights. And guess what the first one is? It's freedom of speech and free religion. So what am I missing? Like, why would somebody want to impose their religion on you? What's going on in their head? Well, they have this very, you know, the contours of their idea are really that the U.S. is founded not on any principles or principles of tolerance and pluralism and equality, but more on a specific religion and cultural heritage.

6:14They have this idea that America is really on the brink of an apocalypse, thanks to the rise of equality and pluralism and what they call the radical left, which is, by the way, includes a lot of conservatives and rhinos, anyone remotely not on board with their agenda. They have the idea that democracy won't be able to solve the problems and the idea that therefore the rules really don't apply anymore. So what we need is a strongman, an authoritarian leader who puts himself above the law and who's going to scrap, you know, the rule of law, basically seize the reins of power in favor of the iron fist.

6:50So it's really, in sum, the idea that democracy, in the sense of the government, is representative of the people, you know, of the people, by the people, for the people, respecting individual rights and true religious freedom in a pluralistic society. It's this sense that this kind of government doesn't work and that they want to smash it up and create something new. And, you know, this is emphatically not the idea of Thomas Jefferson and Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and so many others who actually helped create America as we know it. It's as anti-American as it gets. So, I mean, listen, I mean, your book scared me.

7:30And I'm going to tell you why it scared me. there's more people every year that want to be the people that you're writing about, Catherine. Meaning if I said to you, the rate of change, the slope is for more intolerance as opposed to more tolerance. And they're also smart. They're smart. They're doing what the Republicans did with Operation Red Map. They're figuring out a way to legally infiltrate their message. React to that. Am I wrong? Tell me. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, in many instances, they're using the tools of democracy to destroy democracy, but they're also using tactics that I think are frankly craven, like the spread of misinformation.

8:16I mean, this is the key to so much of the story. That's why I put the word lies right in the center of the title of my book. If you can separate a certain number of people from the facts, It makes them so much easier to control. So, you know, I've spent a lot of time over the 16 years in these spaces. I go to right-wing conferences and strategy gatherings and, you know, places like America Fest or Road to Majority Conference where you can really hear movement leaders and strategists talking amongst themselves and not just signaling to the rest of us. And you also got to know a lot of the rank and file.

8:55A lot of these people are frankly really nice people. They love their families. They care about their communities. And they think they're doing what's really right for America. They think they're saving our country from a demonic woke Borg. But, you know, they've also been like massively disinformed. One good way to demonstrate the crucial role of this information, this misinformation and conspiracism, really, is to ask Americans some really basic factual questions. You ask them, was the 2020 election stolen? What percentage of the U.S. is black or gay or Jewish? What percentage of wealth is concentrated at the top 1 % or what was, say, the inflation rate in the U.S.

9:36versus other countries following the pandemic? Did the economy grow under the former president? And the answers to these questions will really show that they do not really, you know, they've been misinformed by the facts. They live in a fantasy world where Trump won the 2020 election by a landslide and blacks and trans people add up to a majority of the population and are sucking the government dry, where Jews are 30 % of the country or something like that, where the Biden economy was a hellhole. So, these sort of conspiracy gatherings that I've covered in my book, Money Lies in God, such as America Fest, I'm sure you read that chapter, where it's this, you go into these spaces, there are thousands of people at megachurches around the country.

10:23You know, they're sort of like Trump rallies, but Trump doesn't show up. But one of his sons usually does to speak. They're, you know, organized by Mike Flynn and some of Trump's other most devoted allies. You walk in, you hear about the Great Replacement, and they're trying to microchip you. And there's like a lot of people like rhino hunting t-shirts. You know, they're really like very hostile toward insufficiently loyal Republicans, as you know. And there's a lot of very violent language. I think the language creates the permission structure for political violence. But more than that, these folks who are attending these gatherings are just massively disinformed.

11:01You know, they're hit with every, you know, 666 is emblazoned in the World Health Organization's front door. And I mean, it's every conspiracy imaginable. And it's really intended to confuse people. It's, as Steve Bannon said, flooding the zone with, and then he used the S word. And that sort of turns people around and is really about cultivating in them fear, this fear, and then holding out the promise of this, you know, magical savior on a white horse, Donald Trump, who, according to them, never did anything wrong, is this sort of perfect person who's going to battle the forces of evil. So we're really dealing with, I mean, it sounds fantastical, but if you go into these spaces, it's like entering a world of total disinformation and conspiracism.

11:49Other reporters have written about these things. You can watch a lot of the speakers on YouTube. So it's actually happening. It's not hiding. It's like a lot of folks just have not been listening. So, okay. I mean, yeah, this is an obvious question and I'm sure you've answered it a hundred times. So Mr. Trump, President Trump is a serial adulterer. He's married three times. He's broken the law. He's been a sexual aggressor. He's convicted felon in the state of New York for transgressions related to bribery and hush money payments. And so how do they reconcile all that with the perfect white knight in shining armor?

12:35And how does he get away with that, honestly? I mean, and I'm going to take notes here because I think people would like to get away with it, wouldn't they? I mean, how does he do it? I mean, gosh, there's - I don't want to get away with it, Catherine. I'm just saying that to make you laugh. It's working. Well, I mean, listen, part of it is transactional. So, you know, in the run up to the 2016 election, you know, I've been writing about this movement for a long time and I would go to these gatherings and some of the leaders of the religious right, you could tell in the beginning they wanted Ted Cruz.

13:05They really were a couple of folks like, you know, who actually couldn't say his name. But it was clear that he had like the popular touch. He really channels the aggression of his followers. And he sort of he says, you know, when they're coming for me, they're coming for you and I'm fighting for you like that kind of thing. But the leaders of the religious right, so the Christian nationalist movement, let's just pull back for a second, much of it functions as a giant voter turnout machine. They've got, you know, the relational organizing, they do it through churches, they do it through like trusted members of the community, he needed to get them on board.

13:40So he made a deal. He gathered in 2015, I think it was the summer at Marriott in New York City, with a thousand evangelical pastors. And he held up a list of potential Supreme Court justices, like shiny new bonds. And he said, I'm going to choose from this list, and all of them are pro-life. So that has been a really longstanding aim of the movement. Then he said, I'm going to have an evangelical advisory council, and I'm going to choose Mike Pence as my VP. And those three promises helped to solidify their support for him. So they really turned out their voter turnout machine on his behalf. And sometimes I'd hear at these gatherings, these speakers, leaders of the movement speak and tell their people, we don't need a savior.

14:24We already have a savior in Jesus Christ. We need a leader. And this election is about judges, judges, judges, because it's the legal advocacy sphere that I referenced earlier. You've got the Federal Society and you've got a range of, I would say, Christian nationalist legal advocacy groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Council, First Liberty Institute. There are hundreds of millions of dollars that flow into this right-wing, every year, right-wing legal ecosphere. A lot of money buys a lot of judges, but they know that if you can control the courts, you can impose policies on the rank and file that they might not necessarily want.

15:06So for instance, most Americans, actually Republican and Democrat alike, support abortion rights, at least in some form. You know, I know from personal experience that if abortion is totally illegal, it makes childbirth much more dangerous because when things go wrong, as has happened to me, I needed an abortion to save my life during a miscarriage, and it was delayed because it was, you know, for faith-based reasons. It's bad, you know, and we're already seeing women across the country in states that ban abortion dying because of these bans. ProPublica is doing a pretty good job of finding and telling some of these stories.

15:47But, you know, they still have this, you know, absolutist, no abortion ever for any reason, et cetera, take. So they know if they get the courts, I'm sorry for the digression, but they know if they can get the courts, they can get the country. But there is more to it than that. This is a movement that is fundamentally anti-democratic at its core. If you really dig into the ideology, as I've done in my three books on this topic, and especially in Money Lies in God, you can see that this is a movement that doesn't believe in democracy. It really wants something different, an autocracy. And Trump is a leader, perfect leader for an autocratic movement because he doesn't follow the rules.

16:22He breaks the law. He's like moving the goalposts and moving in again and moving again pretty soon. They're not even on the playing field. And they're often referring to him like a king, a King Cyrus or King David. Yeah. And he, trust me, that's what he wants. That's why a lot of us who love democracy and love the frailty of human beings, ourselves included, and accept that frailty don't want that. We know that always ends in terror. But let me just ask you this, because I'm fascinated by the book. I know the answer, because I read your book, but I want you to tell the people that are listening.

16:58Give me the utopia for them. So come down with the tablets and tell me what the perfect America is for the money, lies, and God group of people. What does it look like? It's interesting. The movement seems to emphasize a return to some kind of imaginary version of an allegedly better past, a past that includes element of a regressive social order, such as gender hierarchy, the suppression of certain forms of speech, attacks on religious freedom of those who don't conform, among other features. It's the kind of vision that never really existed the way that they think it did. So, you know, what is this, an America made great again?

17:46You know, it's funny because when they talk about the past, elements of the past that they really like. Often they'll hearken back to the good old days of the 1950s. Well, let's think about what was happening in the 1950s. Tax rate at the top was a lot higher than it is today. The average CEO in America could have a very nice standard of living, but they weren't making many hundreds of times the amount of their average worker unless, I mean, that's people actually living in American work. So, you know, they're sort of hearkening back to a fictitious fantasy, an unrealistic fantasy about a golden age of yore.

18:22And I think of these folks as nihilists because their vision is really not based on reality. It's based on, it's like retreating into a fantasy that is projected onto the past. Raise the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign.

19:01Terms and conditions apply. The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from, I know the way, to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to made it happen and keep striving. Visit Strayer.edu slash Jack Welch MBA to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Shevin as many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street North in Arlington, Virginia. All right. There are five groups in this book. There are funders, there are thinkers, there are sergeants, there are power players, and there are foot soldiers.

19:43So let's go through each one of them, okay? Tell me what a funder is. So in this group, I pay a lot of attention to funders. There are a lot of very wealthy people in America, but only a sector are funding this movement. So a lot of wealthy people really believe in democracy and are trying to defend it. But there is a sector of extremely wealthy oligarchs, I would call them because there's been this sort of massive concentration of wealth over the last decades of the tippy top of the economic spectrum. And they are investing in anti-democratic projects. I mean, I'm talking about people like, just to name a few names, Barry Side or the Corkeries or Sean Filer or Tim Dunn or the Wilkes Brothers or the DeVos Prince family juggernaut.

20:30Here's the thing about these folks. Some of them are evangelical, some are Protestant, some are Catholic, some are Jewish, some are frankly atheistic. But they all agree, they tend to be more motivated by economic reasons than cultural reasons. Some of them are more culturally motivated than others, but some of them really don't seem to care at all about the culture wars that they're helping to fund. Because the culture wars are really just the shiny baubles to get the little people on board, right? They want no regulation for their businesses, especially if they're in environmentally sort of businesses that are involved in any kind of environmental exploitation, degradation.

21:11They want lower taxes for the rich. They say they believe some of them in free markets. They just want capitalism and let the markets do their thing. Same time, they want protective policies for their monopolistic businesses, want privileged government contracts, and they want tax breaks. I'm looking at you, Elon Musk. So I think a lot of them, you know, some of them are really motivated by cultural reasons too. They think we need to keep an unruly public in line with religion, but some of them just see the religious nationalism is the cost of doing business, right? Then I think about the thinkers, many of whom are associated with the new right, a movement that's, I would say, less explicitly Christian nationalist and more explicitly anti-democratic.

21:55Some of them actually derive key ideas from Nazis, like the Nazi political theorist, Carl Schmitt, who came up with this idea of what I would call the permanent state of emergency. We're in an apocalyptic threat, you know, because of liberalism and pluralism. And so the rules don't apply. We need a strong man who's going to take care of it for us. It's really kind of a disgraceful idea, very anti-democratic. Then I also pay a lot of attention to the sergeants, who are these very sort of political pastors who play a really important role in turning out congregations to vote for anti-democratic candidates.

22:36And I pay a lot of attention to the power players, the sort of high-level strategists, people like Ralph Reed, and I would call Charlie Kirk now a high-level strategist, or Bob McEwen of the Council for National Policy. They're sort of directing the infrastructure of this movement. And finally, the foot soldiers. And again, you know, a lot of these people, it's a very large, diverse group, ethnically diverse, frankly, religiously diverse too. And a lot of them have, you know, to some degree, I would say, you know, you've got a lot of evangelicals, you know, white evangelicals, very reliable, but the movement is drawing new energy from a sector of like Pentecostal and charismatic movements, which are both multiracial and transnational movements, and also easily given over to sort of hard right politics.

23:23And they've got a lot of different interests and ideas, you know, when you peel away some of the culture war stuff, they generally want a better deal for themselves and for the workforce. But they're manipulated by, you know, movement leaders to vote for these culture wars that get them on board with the larger anti-democratic agenda. I, you know, I think you're explaining it beautifully, which is really the reason why I'm not interrupting you. I think that the problem I'm having is I think it's a problem you're having as you sort of expressed that you're having it in the book, is that even if they get exactly what they want, it's never enough, constant crisis.

24:01And if they get exactly what they want, they're going to blow up the social fabric of the society. So it'll end up in some kind of tumult, which will lead to less tolerance by everybody. Look, if I'm Elon Musk and I'm worth$400 billion, I guess I need to be worth a trillion because I can spend that money. Of course, I can't spend the money. And then if it costs the weakening of the social contract and the social fabric of the society for me to plunder enough from the society to get to a trillion, I don't, I guess, let me say it differently. I don't want to live in a barbed wire security mansion, Catherine, while my fellow neighbors are suffering.

24:44I don't. I don't. He's going to take care of you. And how do you know, like your staff isn't going to turn on you? I have, I've been to Latin America and the staff does turn on people there. And so I guess what I'm saying is that the whole thing is anti-Christian, the whole thing. So tell me what I'm missing. Tell me, I don't know. I think the big problem with your book and Tim Alberta's book is the disbelief. You've lived it. You've sat with these people. You've worked with them. And the reason I wanted to have you on the show is I want you to tell people who find this so illogical and find this so nonsensical that they actually don't believe it or they sweep it under the rug.

25:31I want you to break the glass, pull the fire alarm and tell them why they should be concerned about what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, just look at what's happening. They're not just going to destroy the social fabric. They're going to destroy the economy. They're going to destroy our interest. They are destroying. I mean, how is the stock market doing with these needless trade wars? They're going to raise the price of goods for everybody. Think about they're destroying the international relations that have led to a measure of post-war stability. I mean, obviously not perfectly, but at least has sort of served in America's interests and led to certain kinds of non-nuclear, non-proliferation agreements.

26:14And when it comes to nuclear weapons, they're destroying America's institutions. Trump is turning the Department of Justice into his own personal mob service. They're destroying consumer protection agencies. They're destroying, you know, Medicare. They're destroying institutions that Americans actually need and want. They're, you know, keen on eliminating public education the way that we know of it. I think that this movement is fundamentally nihilistic. Their aim is to destroy rather than to create. I would say by their actions rather than their actual words. For all of their religion talk, they're denying that there's any real value or truth in this world.

27:00They see the idea of truth as just another casualty in a political war. They don't mind spreading lies. So I actually think it's really important to pay attention. I've written my three books to try to warn people about this. What we're seeing, especially I think in our international, in the international realm, follows a classic pattern with the rise of authoritarian leaders. They need to channel their aggression and rage and the rage of their constituents on others. So, you know, authoritarians have a long history of engaging in feudal expansionist projects and declaring war with people who are formerly friendly neighbors.