Making Sense with Sam Harris - #401 — Christian Nationalism and the New Right

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Sam Harris speaks with Katherine Stewart about her new book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. They discuss Project 2025, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, whether the backlash against wokeness has been overblown, the asymmetric standards between right-wing and left-wing media, Trump’s appeal to evangelicals, wealth inequality, political ideology in public schools, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,

and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Catherine Stewart. Katherine, thanks for joining me. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I recently discovered you. You wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, which they titled, Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us?

Question mark. And I want to talk about what's happening right in front of us. But before we do, perhaps you can summarize your background as a journalist. Sure, I've been an investigative journalist and reporter. My new book, Money Lies in God, Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is my third book on the anti-democratic movement, which involves the religious right, the new right, and a number of kind of features, different features, sometimes sort of, I would say, swimming in the same headwaters,

but often with kind of different contours, each group. Yeah, so your book comes out next week, which is probably when we're dropping this. So I think we're probably dropping this on your pub date. So your book, Money Lies in God, which I just got the PDF of yesterday. So I must say I have not read every word of it, but I've read a lot of it and we'll get into it,

but we will by no means exhaust what is of interest in there. So let's find a way into this, I guess starting with the current moment politically, because it's genuinely confusing how these reactionary forces in American politics are intersecting and supporting one another. We have many allies of convenience, it seems.

I mean, these people are not ideologically unified. You have Christian nationalists. You have oligarchs, some of whom are Christian, or nominally so, some of whom believe not much of anything. Some are quite reactionary Catholics who have been in the woodwork for many generations, it seems, and seem to be influential on the Supreme Court and elsewhere.

And it's a little strange to dissect all of this. It's also difficult to see how all of the summates in the person of an orange monstrosity of Donald Trump. Let's start with your op-ed and then we'll get into the book. What do you think is happening right in front of us that we should be concerned about? I mean, they told us that they were gonna dismantle

the institutions of our democracy. And that's exactly what they were doing now. This is a movement that frankly has been quite clear about what their aims are. They're not hiding. It's just that a lot of people haven't been listening. I get into the different features of the movement in my book, Money Lies in God.

I'd like to start with the title, if that's all right. Sure. I mean, money, because money is a huge part of the story, a sort of vast concentrations of wealth over the past decades have actually sort of at the tippy top of the economic spectrum, kind of destabilized the political system in a number of different ways. They've created resentments among large, massive working people and empowered people at the very top to sort of put their thumb on our politics in certain kinds of ways. Lies, because disinformation and conspiracism is a huge piece of this. It know, it's how a lot of the rank and file

have been kind of separated from the facts in certain ways or had their resentments directed toward targets that really perhaps don't deserve it quite as much as they get it. And then of course, God, because religious nationalism, I think is the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement. So in the book, I get into a group called, I call the funders.

These are the beneficiaries of those vast concentrations of wealth. And you know, religiously, they're all over the place. I'm thinking about people like the Corcorys or the Sky Foundation or Sean Filer or Barry Side or the DeVos Prince family juggernaut, Wilkes Brothers, Tom Dunn, like some of them, Tim Dunn, sorry, some of them are like evangelical, some are Catholic, some are Protestant, some are Jewish, some are frankly atheistic or nihilistic

and don't seem to believe in anything more than money. But they all agree on the need to sort of crush liberalism and investing a portion of their fortunes on the destruction, on these anti-democratic projects. They also shine a bright light on a group I call the Thinkers. These, many of them are associated with a movement called the New Right. A number of them, like Russell Vogt and Darren Beatty and others are now Michael Anton occupying positions in the Trump administration or nominees. And I would say some of them are more religious nationalist or Christian nationalist than others.

Many of them also seem quite nihilistic. Some of them actually derive a lot of inspiration from political theorists associated with the Nazis, I kid you not. Carl Schmitt. Right, Carl Schmitt. I mean, they are more was a Nazi political theorist who, you know, we can talk about him a little bit later and how his ideology has influenced this movement. But they are actually more anti, I would say hostile to the idea of democracy.

And they've been saying for a long time that they abhor democracy and its principles and institutions even as they claim to revere the founders and our founding principles. Also look at the rank and file, the people who sort of tend to vote for candidates who are radically anti-democratic in their political aims. And then I also look at the sort of cadre

of very empowered political pastors and activists, religious activists, groups I call the sergeants and the power players. And often they're the ones kind of driving the agenda and playing a very important role in connecting with the rank and file. Well, let's start with the thinkers. There was this political talking point during the election

that was dismissed by all of Trump's fans and by Trump himself as just pure misinformation. The Democratic Party was quite agitated over something called Project 2025, which is this massive document put out by the Heritage Foundation, which seemed to be a plan, a fairly reactionary plan for making some impressive changes in governance in America.

As you know, Trump pretended to know nothing about it. When he heard something about it, he said he wanted nothing to do with it. I remember, I have some friends, if you can imagine this, who voted for Donald Trump. And I remember raising the specter of Project 2025 to them. And they assured me that this was misinformation spun up by the left.

This is just, it was not a thing. Some maniacs over at the Heritage Foundation wrote something which Trump had never heard of. There's no coordination here. But you've just mentioned some of the names that are now staffing the administration. And these are some of the primary authors of Project 2025. Russell Vogt, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, I believe is the primary author of the document. Brendan Carr, Peter Navarro, Tom Homan, John Radcliffe, Michael Anton. You know, John Radcliffe is nominated to lead the CIA.

This is Project 2025 in its implementation. And it's just, it's amazing to me that you hear that there's no mea culpa ever uttered by any of the fans of Trump who wanted nothing to do with Project 2025 and were quite happy to know that he knew nothing about it, none of them are now stepping in front of a microphone saying, you know, this is not really what I voted for, right? And so how do you perceive this?

Was this, if you can imagine, was Trump just lying when he said he knew nothing about Project 2025 and wanted nothing to do with it? Or what's happening here? Well, absolutely. I mean, Russell Vogt was caught on camera speaking with a potential funder of the movement. It was kind of a setup by a couple of British journalists, essentially saying that, yeah,

you know, he's in on it, and this is what's gonna happen. The idea that this was sort of a 900 page document that was never gonna go anywhere is just total fiction. I mean, many of the contributors to Project 2025 were former members of the Trump administration, and yes, you're absolutely right. A number of contributors and architects of Project 2025 are now occupying key institutions, you know, key positions within the new administration. And what we

see in Project 2025 is a kind of marriage of the new right and the Christian right and the Christian nationalist movement. That's kind of those two influences comprised sort of, I would say, and call them the power couple of the anti-democratic movement. The power couple being Christian nationalism and the New Right. The New Right, absolutely. Yeah. What is Christian nationalism in your view?

Because it's not synonymous with the evangelical movement. I'm sure there's impressive overlap there, but how would you differentiate it from the various flavors of Christianity we have in America? Yeah, thank you. You know, Christian nationalism is not Christianity. It's not a religion. It's both an ideology,

like an also a kind of political movement. I think of it as like a mindset and a machine. So the mindset draws on this ideology that says America was founded as a Christian nation according to a very particular understanding of the Christian faith, and our laws should be based on reactionary interpretation of the Bible. And it's a sort of exploitation of this ideology for politics and power. And when we're talking about the machine, it's a political movement. The movement is leadership driven, and it's also organization driven. And we can sort of divide those, you know,

the agenda is not set by the rank and file. I mean, let's really be clear about that. So the organizations can be divided into categories. There are right-wing policy groups. There are advocacy, legal advocacy groups. There are very sophisticated data initiatives. There are legislative initiatives. There are networking organizations like the Council for National Policy,

which gets different factions of the leadership on the same page. There's a vast kind of messaging sphere that goes out and reaches the rank and file. There are these pastoral networks, groups like Watchmen on the Wall and Faith Winds and Church United and the Courage Tour, these initiatives that draw pastors into networks. And then movement leaders will do presentations with them and give them materials. They get them to turn out to their congregations to turn out to vote for the sort of hard right candidates

that the movement favors. And those pastoral networks play a really important role in election cycles because listen, sort of the rank and file of this movement represent a minority of the population. And frankly, I think even many, if most American Christians object to Christian nationalism, a number of organizations like

Christians Against Christian Nationalism and the New Evangelicals and Vote Common Good, I mean the Baptist Joint Committee, there are so many others object to Christian nationalism. But this is a group. Does anyone answer to the name Christian nationalist? Some do. Or is that a phrase that is used by those

outside the movement to describe it pejoratively? Some do. Like Russell Vogt, I think, has self-identified as Christian nationalist. We know Marjorie Taylor Greene and some others have. I just want to say, return for a moment to that infrastructure. The strength of the movement is in that dense organizational

infrastructure, and they turn out their vote in disproportionate numbers. But Christian nationalism, I think of it like authoritarianism. It's a political dynamic that affects a political system, not just a set of attitudes embraced by the rank and file. So let's say, you know, when a person decides they're going to vote their values on abortion, say, they, or they're voting to protect the American family as they think they're doing,

you know, as the movement has told them to do. They may not necessarily be arguing for major changes in the way our government is run. They're just kind of making a statement about their identity and what they value in themselves. So we might not call them a Christian nationalist, but what they are doing is lending support to a Christian nationalist agenda.

Does that make sense to you? It's like authoritarianism. it doesn't just start off as like a political program that everybody endorses. It's just like various dynamics and sort of interests act to sort of promote a kind of authoritarian agenda. What is the overlap, would you say, between Christian nationalism and what we would call the white supremacist movement in the US?

I mean, we have to really look at, what is it, a Venn diagram? There's some overlap, but it's not the same thing. Yeah. But what's very interesting is that there are a group, like the Proud Boys, when they first started, they didn't really particularly have a religious identity. But as the Christian nationalist movement has gained power and as these different identity

movements, but by the way, somewhat of these white nationalist groups have had, I mean, just want to be very clear, some of them have had a religious identity from the start, others have not. So there's differences among them, but as the movement has gained in strength, and as their leaders have been able to sort of see the power that the ideology and the movement sort of is able to marshal, some have adopted, like the Proud Boys, for instance,

has adopted more of a religious identity more overtly. So there is some variation in the different sort of militia groups and white nationalist groups. So there are obviously many ways into this. There are people who are just racist and afraid of immigration, and then they get some religious inspiration in their politics, and find themselves somewhere standing somewhere near a sincere Christian who finds that their politics is also bent around by scenes of chaos at the

southern border and wants to get a handle on that and can't figure out why anyone left of center is confused about why we would want a defensible border. And you have people who are associated with an institute like the Claremont Institute where you have intellectuals or erstwhile intellectuals. I think in your book you detail how that institution has undergone some considerable devolution in terms of its scholarly integrity. But you have people there who I think would never answer to the name of white supremacist and would at least in their own minds

consciously disavow racism, but nonetheless have time for Nazi writers like the one we named Carl Schmitt and people he's influenced. Again, I'm trying to figure out how to talk about a fairly complex Venn diagram that is clearly in the real world deranging our politics at this moment. You have the oligarchs, many of whom we'll talk about, many of whom I know personally, some of whom I know not to be religious at all, some of whom I know are religious in a strange

way that probably has as much to do with Burning Man as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But these are people who are influenced, will admit to being influenced by rather iconoclastic and free associative and I would even say confabulatory thinkers like Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin. So it's just a mess ideologically out there,

and yet they're having a good old time at Mar-a-Lago now seeming to get everything they want out of the world, I think, to the obvious detriment of our democracy and American values. What strand of this do you want to pick up first? Oh my gosh, so much to talk about. I mean, when we're talking about the oligarchs, I mean, let's be clear.

It's not all of the very rich people in this country that are supporting this. It's a sector, right, who are supporting it. And I think that, I mean, something that comes to mind when you talk about these guys going to Mar-a-Lago and sort of having a grand old time, I think a lot of people don't appreciate the degree to which a lot of these very rich people live in,

almost like islands, right? They're surrounded by people who say nice things to them. They have the sense that they can sort of deserve every penny that they earned, every penny they have with their bare hands. Many of them, by the way, they want policies that benefit their businesses. They want deregulatory environments so that they can engage in some of them and

polluting practices and others just in, you know, they run monopolistic businesses and they want an absence of regulation in ways that are going to assist those businesses. But at the same time, they also want, I would say, protective policies. You know, they want often privileged contracts, or they want, in some instances, I'm looking at you, Mr. Musk, tax privileges, tax subsidies, and things like this. But they're also living on these islands, and they, you know, in the last couple of decades, we've seen a massive concentration of wealth at the very tippy top, but we've also seen life become so much harder

for people, I would say in the bottom 90% of our country, where working and middle classes are struggling, you know, and making it hard, it's making it harder for those families to succeed. And so people at the top and their islands are sort of protected, but they can hear from like, far like over the walls, they can hear, you know, critics saying, well, you know,

what you're doing is really not okay. You should be paying your taxes and perhaps treating your workforce a little better. And maybe not killing off all those mom and pops or smaller organizations with your, you know, monopolistic businesses. And they don't like that, it makes them very defensive. And I think that that contributes to this sense of, you know, a sense that like, I think they're afraid of the people coming after them with proverbial pitchforks.

And I think that actually contributes that sense of defensiveness to some of their activities in supporting this movement. I mean, we can't know what's in people's hearts, obviously, and I'm sure there's different variants. I think the Wilkes brothers are very different from Jeff Yass, for instance, in their orientation in every way, or Peter Thiel. But at the same time, again, they have embraced these people like Curtis Yarvin and his fellow travelers at the Claremont Institute, who are basically arguing that we need more monarchical form of rule, that democracy is not sufficient to solve

all of our problems, because we're facing an absolute apocalypse because of the woke cancelers or whatever. It's like, well, who's really trying to cancel stuff here? I mean, I'm sure you, like I, saw that list of words that these sort of funded national institutes of health studies are not allowed to include, including the word woman. Yeah.

I mean, talk about cancellation. We're socioeconomic. I know. They're basically, just for people who don't know what's happening there, they circulated a, I believe I saw it as an Excel spreadsheet of key words that were now going to be screened for

in any scientific grant at the National Science Foundation. And if you take the complete set of words, some were obviously red flags for DEI-inflected work, but the complete set seemed to rule out more or less all of the social sciences. A word like woman and socioeconomic is gonna get you flagged, and we're really just talking about physics in the end.

Okay, so you mentioned the woke stuff. This is one place where I think you and I might disagree. Maybe, maybe not. It'll be interesting to figure out why we disagree, if we in fact disagree. But in reading your book and in reading, I think I, since it was given to me as a PDF, I had the advantage of being able to find every use of the word woke and wokeness in it.

Just so I'm pretty sure I understand what you said about it in your book. You seem to think that it's basically a non-issue and insofar as the people on the right are- Did I say that in my book? Well, no, I didn't. Feel free to correct me again. I'm throwing myself on your mercy

because I did not read your whole book, but I did read much of it. But you seem to think, the impression I've gotten, however haphazardly, is that you think that the right has made a demon out of this idea that the left is engaged in a kind of quasi-Marxist, and certainly post-modernist takeover of all the lead institutions. Well, I think you should perhaps read the section I write about the far left.

Okay. So I do take aim at that as well. Let me put all these dumb ideas in your mouth and you can spit them out. You seem to think that this is either, these fears are not sincerely held, or if held, they're exaggerated. And there's much less of a problem on the left than is made out by people like Christopher Ruffo

or James Lindsay or any of these other activists in the New Right who stand up in front of adoring crowds and say the woke mind virus is coming for you and your kids. Your kids' schools are trying to make them trans, et cetera. This is obviously something that Elon Musk has spoken about. And insofar as I know his mind at all anymore, I believe he, along with many millions of other people in this country, is sincere in saying that one of his major concerns is this far-left, trans-activist-centered

ideology. Yeah, I think you should actually read more of my book. Sorry, I don't have to read it. You're going to give it to me right now. It's really okay. I mean, I think it's very clear that the far left is, frankly, there's on that sector of the far left, there's the amplification of some very divisive stuff that frankly redounds to the benefit of the far right. Because what it often does, and we saw it,

like the labs at MIT Media Lab, for instance, analyzed this as did, I think it was a sector of, it was like a Harvard lab that collaborated on some of this stuff where they found some of these extremist ideas being amplified by Russia and other hostile foreign actors in order to divide. You know, some of these ideas are incredibly divisive. And one of the things that this does is it sort of makes people think, well, like the moderate liberal progressive left, they sort of throw all of it into that sort of woke communist bucket,

which is ridiculous. I mean, the people who are talking about these issues constantly are people on the right. I was recently at America Fest. It's an annual gathering held by Turning Point USA. It took place in Phoenix, Arizona. There were 20,000 sort of hardcore MAGA. Every single speaker had to talk about transgender women in sports. This is like, you're right, they're making a boogie man out of this issue. Now, whatever you or I may think about these issues, and you know, we'll probably find a lot of agreement on this particular topic.

We have 11.4 million children living in poverty. Gun violence is the number one cause of death among children and teenagers in our country, those kinds of issues can, and many DEI programs as well, can and should be examined. And are there excesses in some of the DEI programs? Of course there are, but is this the major problem facing our country? When you bring up James Lindsay and Rufo and Musk even,

Lindsay at least I saw speak at Moms for Liberty conference where he's going on and on about how, you know, the democratic parties like communist China, those extremist voices are not normalized, they're not like widespread within, I would say, democratic party politics. It's the right that talks about them all the time. It's a massive distraction. I mean, I think we have to, you know, whatever you or I may think about those issues, we have to acknowledge that they are being used as a massive distraction from the real problems

facing our country, bread and butter issues. You know, this is a movement that claims to stand for the American family, but they're endorsing politicians whose policies are making it so much harder for so many Americans to succeed. And, you know, why would they talk about these issues constantly? Well, it's like, you ever see a laser pointer cat toy where there's this red little thing that goes all over the floor and the cat jumps at it and jumps at it and jumps out. Well, if you're focused on that, like identity issue that involves sex and sexuality, which distracts everybody, all of a sudden, you're not looking at the real problems in your community. You're not looking at the source of the problems.

You're not understanding why the cost of groceries is too high and the cost of housing is impossible and why you're like a couple with, you know, two parents and four jobs, and you're still struggling to make it work. Well, I agree with that, that it's been a massive distraction that has been leveraged quite artfully and cynically by the far right.

But it was also a massive distraction on the left for the Democratic Party and all of the elite institutions, the mainstream media and scientific journals and universities and Hollywood, all of them got captured to a degree that I think the far right perceived and rightly perceived to be a problem and a massive political vulnerability.

So it's not just the laser pointer, this tiny little dot that should be meaningless but is captivating everyone. Well, I would say the right is really good at getting, I mean, they're in way more tactical. They're really good at setting traps for people to walk into. But there was no reason to walk.

We allow them to. There was no reason for Kamala Harris or anyone else in the Democratic Party to walk into those traps if they had their head screwed on straight around how fringe some of the, and insane some of these concerns actually are on the far left. I mean, we had during, I'll take you back to the golden years

of woke derangement, you know, to somewhere around 2020. I mean, you literally had NPR publishing an editorial in defense of looting, right? We had just seen lots of looting and rioting in major cities associated with the George Floyd protests. I mean, that's appalling, but that was also just one fringe idea in the free marketplace of ideas,

and you see a lot of crazy ideas on the right as well. And I'm not familiar with the editorial, but it sounds appalling. That's the thing that's, but there's, perhaps this is something you have an idea about how to fix. There is, many of us have noticed a pervasive asymmetry here where the left or anyone left of center,

any mainstream institution, the New York Times say, gets one thing wrong and it is devastating for its reputation. And- Right, and the right amplifies it over and over. And the right will seize upon that error as a sign that there's really, there is no distinction between the New York Times

and the Epoch Times or Breitbart or Fox News. We're all just in the business of smearing everyone all day long for political reasons. The right gets things wrong, and since they're continuously playing tennis without the net over there, it never matters. There's nothing to be made of it left of center because of course we know that Fox News and Breitbart and they're really not in the business of journalism. They're misinformation factories. So there's this profound asymmetry here,

which is that left of center in elite institutions, we are trying to hold ourselves to journalistic and academic standards and we succeed or fail at that and police ourselves and are policed from the outside by cynical people who want no part of the standards and the norms we're trying to defend. But we'll hold us to those standards and norms and reveal us in every moment of hypocrisy

that can be detected, right? And so it is a kind of, you know, this is like, again, it's asymmetric warfare of the sort that you see when you have a major army that's trying to, you know, follow the rules of the Geneva Convention, fighting an insurgency that is using IEDs and human shields and, you know, putting the barrels of his rifles on the shoulders of children.

And it's very hard to know how to navigate this rhetorically. Every time you admit, yes, okay, that the deplatforming of the New York Post on Twitter in response to the Hunter Biden laptop, yes, in retrospect, that looked like a bad idea. Yes, those former intelligence chiefs who signed a letter saying that it looks like Russian disinformation. Well, yeah, they do have egg on their face now because it wasn't Russian disinformation. But that

does not obviate all of the concerns about Russian disinformation that sane journalists had in mind the previous week. And it does not make Rudy Giuliani, foisting an October surprise with the Hunter Biden laptop, somehow an honest broker of information at this point. And it becomes impossible to make these distinctions because again, there's this profound asymmetry. One error on your side destroys your reputation. The other side plays by no rules at all.

That's true and I think one of the most dangerous consequences of this movement is an assault on the idea of truth itself, the idea that truth doesn't matter. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program, so if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can

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