The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right by Randall Balmer

Episode Date: March 6, 2022

Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right by Randall Balmer A surprising and disturbing origin story There is a commonly accepted story about the rise of the Religious Right in the United States. It goes like this: with righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The problem is this story simply isn’t true. Largely ambivalent about abortion until the late 1970s, evangelical leaders were first mobilized not by Roe v. Wade but by Green v. Connally, a lesser-known court decision in 1971 that threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions—of which there were several in the world of Christian education at the time. When the most notorious of these schools, Bob Jones University, had its tax-exempt status revoked in 1976, evangelicalism was galvanized as a political force and brought into the fold of the Republican Party. Only later, when a more palatable issue was needed to cover for what was becoming an increasingly unpopular position following the civil rights era, was the moral crusade against abortion made the central issue of the movement now known as the Religious Right. In this greatly expanded argument from his 2014 Politico article “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” Randall Balmer guides the reader along the convoluted historical trajectory that began with American evangelicalism as a progressive force opposed to slavery, then later an isolated apolitical movement in the mid-twentieth century, all the way through the 2016 election in which 81 percent of white evangelicals coalesced around Donald Trump for president. The pivotal point, Balmer shows, was the period in the late 1970s when American evangelicals turned against Jimmy Carter—despite his being one of their own, a professed “born-again” Christian—in favor of the Republican Party, which found it could win their loyalty through the espousal of a single issue. With the implications of this alliance still unfolding, Balmer’s account uncovers the roots of evangelical watchwords like “religious freedom” and “family values” while getting to the truth of how this movement began—explaining, in part, what it has become.

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Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show. He's the author of the book that came out on, let me pull this up here. I had the Kindle version up. August 10th, 2021. The book was called Bad Faith, Race, and the Rise of the Religious Right. Randall Balmer is on the show with us today. He's an amazing, brilliant mind. He's a prize-winning historian and Emmy Award-winning nominee.

He holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth, the oldest endowed professorship at Dartmouth College. He earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985 and taught as a professor of American religious history at Columbia University for 27 years before coming to Dartmouth in 2012. My apologies. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, Northwestern, and Emory Universities

and in the Columbia University Graduate System of Journalism. He's a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School from 2004 to 2008. Randall, welcome to the show and all my problems I'm having with numbers this morning. Good to be here, Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm going dyslexic here. I don't know what's going on with the numbers there. So give us your plug so people can find you on the…

I have a website. It's www.randallbalmer, Randall with two L's, balmer with one L,.com. And what motivated you to want to write this book? Well, it actually goes back a long, long time. I actually grew up within evangelicalism, what I call the evangelical subculture. My father was a minister for over four decades in the Evangelical Free Church. And I honor both his ministry and his memory. And I grew up within that world.

I'll put my evangelical credentials up against anybody, including Franklin Graham, although his father was probably a bit more famous than mine was. But nevertheless, this is my world. And in the 1970s, actually, I spent really the entire decade very much in the core of this evangelical subculture. That is to say, I was a student at an evangelical college, Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois. And then I went on and worked at the Divinity School on the same campus while doing a master's degree at Trinity Divinity School. And this was the time when the religious right got going. And I remember those years very well. And what I don't remember was that evangelicals were all abuzz about abortion. And years after that, I started hearing that abortion was why evangelicals became politically active in the 1970s.

And it just didn't compute with me because that was not my experience at all. And I'm sorry, this answer is probably longer than you want here, but the real catalyst was my being invited to a gathering in Washington, D.C. in November of 1990. And it turns out I arrived there and it was a kind of who's who of the religious right. Ralph Reed was there, the executive director of the Christian Coalition. Carl F.H. Henry, the founding editor of Christianity Today magazine. Richard Land from the Southern Baptist Convention was there. Donald Wildman, the founder of the American Family Association.

Richard Vigory, the conservative direct mail guru. And Paul Weyrich, who's really the architect of the religious right. And I wasn't exactly sure why I was invited there, kind of pieced it together since then, but here I am in this room. And in the course of the first session, Paul Weyrich, the architect of the religious right, made this impassioned speech. And he said, let's remember that this movement, meaning the religious right, did not mobilize in opposition to abortion. Abortion had nothing to do with the roots of the religious right. And so I perked up. And during that break, right after that session, before the next session, I went to Weyrich and I said, I want to make sure I understood you

correctly. Abortion had nothing to do with the genesis of this movement. He said, absolutely not. He said, I've been trying since the Goldwater campaign back in 1964 to get evangelicals interested in politics. I tried everything. He said, I tried the school prayer issue. I tried the pornography issue. I tried women's rights issue. I tried abortion. Nothing got their interest until in the 1970s, the IRS began to threaten the tax exempt status, racially segregated evangelical institutions. That's what got them going. It was BYU, I think, and it was the big college guy. I forget which corrupt guy it was, but it was one of the Christian colleges, wasn't

it? It was the big- Bob Jones University was the particular target, yes. Yeah. But also the segregation academies. And, of course, Jerry Falwell, who was arguably the most visible leader of the religious right, particularly in the 1970s, had his own segregation academy in Lynchburg, Virginia. Yeah.

And that's when this whole kind of movement started. I think Ann Nelson wrote about this, too, in her book, Shadow Network, we had her on the show, and how the Betsy DeVos organization and her father really was the starter of it for the Centers of National Policy. I think I have that right? Yeah. And they did a whole testing of all these, like you say, all these different ways to get out to vote for Republicans, and abortion was a sticking one. And in the end, they really don't care about it, especially if you look at how the red

states use abortion more than anyone else. So it's kind of interesting. They just found the lightning rod of what would motivate voters, and they've been running with it ever since. In fact, I often wonder if they really want Roe versus Wade overturned, because if they ever did, it might end up, they wouldn't have anything to get out of the vote. I don't know.

Yeah. I think you can make that case. And as I say, I don't know if I said in the book, but I've certainly said on other occasions, for the leaders of the religious right, the abortion issue was really a godsend. That is to say, it allowed them to deflect attention from the real origins of their movement, which was, I mean, to put it in the plainest terms, a defense of racial segregation. And they were able to kind of, with slight of hand, kind of take a more elevated topic as their signature issue. And if you even look at how they present it, they try and accuse minorities of having higher abortion rates. But if I'm correct, you correct me if I'm wrong, I believe there's more white people

using abortion, especially in the red states. I believe that's true. I haven't looked at the figures themselves. I mean, what I can tell you, and this is fairly well established, is that the abortion, since the Roe v. Wade decision, the abortion rates during Democratic presidencies as opposed to Republican presidency is far lower. It's pretty interesting how that works during those times. And that's probably primarily due to economics. So what did you find there? Was there a real agenda?

You mentioned there a real agenda with other items. Was it just the racial control? Is that about white power in America, the original sin of America, racism, or were there other aspects involved? Well, I think there was a kind of a menu of grievances. But, you know, again, the catalyst was a defense of racial segregation. As you say, America's original sin, which we still haven't atoned for, we still haven't addressed adequately. And that was clearly the provocation. And I'll give you one example of this.

Well, first of all, let's go back to the years surrounding the Roe v. Wade decision. 1968, Christianity Today magazine, the flagship magazine for evangelicalism, with another evangelical organization called Christian Medical Society, convened a conference over several days to discuss the morality of abortion. And these were the heavyweight theologians of the evangelical world. And at the end of that conference, they issued a statement saying, well, we really can't decide whether or not abortion should be morally wrong or whether it is morally wrong, but we think it should be available. Southern Baptist Convention, not exactly known as a hotbed of liberalism, passed a resolution in 1971 calling for the legalization

of abortion, which they reaffirmed in 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade, and again in 1976. And that could go on and on. I'm happy to do that. But one final bit of evidence. Jerry Falwell, by his own admission, did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 24th, 1978. That's more than five years after the Roe v. Wade decision. So, you know, I call this the abortion myth. The abortion myth is the fiction that the religious right galvanized as a political movement in opposition to Roe v. Wade. It's simply not true. Yeah. And I know that the Center for National Policy, Betsy DeVos and her father, I guess who founded it, I think her father was in the Nixon administration or advised the Nixon administration. They've been Republicans for a long time. Yeah. And I mean, their big play has been to fill the SCOTUS court.

And they're really, there's an umbrella underneath them of like, I think, 250 PACs or political agendas. I mean, there's a whole team that has agendas. They're very secretive. And they just found that abortion was the thing that got out the vote. They could use the whip up, that lightning rod. And so you talk in the book about how that's been used ever since. It has. And the way that came about, actually, was sort of an accident. It really was the 1978 midterm elections. And what happened was that Paul Weyrich, as I said earlier, the architect

of the religious right, went to the head of the Republican National Committee. At that time, it was Bill Brock, a former senator from Tennessee. And Weyrich asked Brock for money to organize to try to mobilize evangelical voters. And according to Weyrich, Brock looked across the desk at Weyrich and said, are you crazy? Who are these people? I'm not going to give you this money. And Weyrich then resolved to go out and elect some rather improbable people in 1978. This was his intentions. And what happened was in four Senate races in 1978, one in New Hampshire, one in Iowa, two in Minnesota. One of them was for Walter Mondale's unexpired term because Mondale was vice president. The final weekend of the campaign, pro-lifers, that is Roman Catholics, leafleted church

parking lots. And two days later, in an election with a very low turnout, all four favored Democratic candidates lost to Republicans. And I remember reading through Wyrick's papers out at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and it's almost like the papers started to sizzle because he realized he finally had the issue that was going to galvanize grassroots evangelicals. Even so, Frank Schaeffer has said this actually many times. Frank Schaeffer produced a series of films that began touring the country in early 1979 called, collectively, Whatever Happened to the Human Race, which featured his father, Francis Schaeffer, in many ways the intellectual godfather of the religious right, and a pediatric surgeon from Philadelphia, C. Everett Koop. And they argued in that series of films that any society that countenanced abortion would very quickly thereafter also embrace both infanticide and euthanasia.

But Frank has told me, and he's very emphatic about this, he said, when we started touring with that film early in 1979, the audiences were very small. We really couldn't whip up a lot of interest. And even as late as Ronald Reagan's appearance before this massive rally down in Dallas, Texas on August 22nd, 1980, the abortion issue, he didn't even mention the abortion. What he mentioned was the IRS going after the tax exemption of these evangelical schools. He did not even mention abortion in that huge evangelical rally in August of 1980. So it took a while for the abortion issue to kind of soak in as an issue that evangelicals were concerned about. And was that preluded by what you talk about in the book with Jimmy Carter? And if you

want to expand on that a little bit. Yeah, Jimmy Carter, I mean, this is one of the great ironies. I mean, I wrote a biography of Jimmy Carter in part because I wanted to try to figure this out for myself. Why is it that evangelical voters in 1980 would reject one of their own, an evangelical, a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, in favor of— He's almost like Jesus, too. Sorry to interrupt. He's out building homes for the last 30, 40 years. I don't know.

To me, that's the most Jesus thing ever. He's been remarkable. I mean, he lives the gospel. I mean, Jesus calls on his followers to care for the least of these, to provide shelter and food. And Jimmy Carter's been doing it really all of his life. And why would they reject Carter for a divorced and remarried? And at that time, that was a huge issue.

A divorced and remarried former Hollywood actor. Hollywood was not exactly known as a province of piety. Who, as governor of California, has signed into law the most liberal abortion bill in the country. I mean, on the face of it, it just doesn't make sense. And in many ways, it still doesn't make sense. And we have to acknowledge that Carter had rather stiff headwinds when he was heading for re-election in 1980 with the economy being very sour and the Soviets invading Afghanistan. By the way, does that sound familiar? There's things that are reverberating even today. But why they would gravitate to Ronald Reagan as their political messiah is in many ways

confounding. But I think, frankly, it has to do with racism and i'm happy to expand on that as well it does let's talk about that but one thing i want to touch on just to interject too is that same point was used with donald trump and well i don't know i don't see hillary clinton as a big religion person i mean i i think she is i know she quotes i don't even know what her faith is i i know but i know biden I'm an atheist. I did grow up in a cult, the Mormon church, until about 16. And so I understand the Bible. I understand white religion, et cetera, et cetera. Geez, you want to talk about a racist religion? Go back and read Brigham Young's stuff. But I understand it very well. And to me, I can look at Joe Biden and go,

that man is a religious dude. He goes to church like every Sunday. He prays. I think he, anybody can say maybe he's not the best person in the world. I voted for him, full disclosure. But I think he's more Christ-like than Donald Trump. And Donald Trump can't even quote things from the Bible when he's called out. And to see them embrace Donald Trump over Joe Biden is just astounding to me. Well, Chris, I think the through line for this entire conversation

is racism. And I don't want to be reductive because I understand that there are other issues. But for me, in writing Bad Faith, one of the things that I really, if I didn't know this already, I certainly relearned it in the course of writing the book, was that the real connection here between the birth of the religious right in defense of racial segregation and in defense of racism, to put it plainly, and the embrace of Donald Trump in 2016 and again in 2020, the bridge there was, frankly, Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan entered California politics in opposition to the Rumford Fair Housing Act that sought to ensure equal access to both rental and purchase of real estate. He was an outspoken opponent of both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Throughout his political campaigns,

his entire career, he frequently invoked the racially charged phrase, law and order. And for me, the kicker, aside from his decimation of the Civil Rights Commission when he was president and his continuing support for South Africa, the apartheid regime, the kicker is the fact that he opened his general election campaign for the presidency in 1980, August 3rd, 1980. And of all places, I mean, you think of all the places he could have done this. And he was a master of symbolism, so he understood what he was doing. He opened that general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

I still can't quite believe it. And this, of course, was the place where 16 summers earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan, in collusion with the Sheriff's Department, abducted, tortured, and murdered three civil rights workers. And again, Reagan, the master of symbolism, and in case anybody missed his meaning, he invoked that age-old segregationist battle cry on that occasion, I believe in states' rights.

So I think that the bridge between the origins of the religious right in defense of racism, defense of racial segregation in evangelical schools, and Donald Trump in 2016, frankly, is Ronald Reagan. Yeah. I remember growing up in that age of Southern California when segregation was the brown thing with SCOTUS and something that was coming to the park. But yeah, he raised himself on white religious Christianity power. He not only quoted what you mentioned earlier,

but his favorite thing was, and the quote of the law and order thing comes from Nixon. And of course we know how racially charged that was, the start of the war on drugs, which really was a racial war. But the other original lie he would tell is, one of the foundations of the original lie is the shining city on the hill yeah yeah yeah right and he was the guy who brought that back and that that whole that goes to the whole christianity thing that the god-given people this land was i was even raised

believing that god chose me as a special little being because to come to america because i was special and i guess the people in af Africa got screwed or Europe got screwed or something. It was really sick. It was really sick what I was taught. It really was. I mean, you're just, because I remember sitting there thinking, well, what did that guy do over there in Europe or China or wherever? How come I'm special and, but you are. And then the Jesus and John, growing up with John Wayne and all the sort of thickness that goes there.

But you really address it. There was a lot of things going on in California. There was a segregation. There was the Hispanics, a large amount of Hispanics coming in. And so he used them as a whipping post. The things that they did with the Reagan administration that just took everybody back to the Stone Age, racially or minorities, was just unfortunate. And, yeah, it was all surrounding that white religion stuff. Well, and you also had the frequent mention of the welfare queens, right?

The women of color who were supposedly living off the public dole in lives of luxury. And so he was never able to produce any of these welfare queens, but he talked about them as though they really existed. And it turned out to be a rather powerful campaign tool for him. Yeah. There was an interesting book we had Gene Guerrilla on. I wrote Hatemonger, Stephen Miller's bio, and she really documented the rise of what was going on at that time.

In fact, that recent governor, the guy who ran for governor, who's the radio show guy, he's black. Oh, yeah. Larry Miller? Larry? Larry something yeah yeah anyway he he was a big radio proponent against everybody including what was going on immigration basically just ronald reagan really tapped into that and set us back and then donald trump seemed to just i mean just repeat the same playbook it's like nixon donald trump and then i mean even, was it Willie Horton?

Or what was the stunt that W. Bush, one of the George Bushes pulled? H.W. Bush. It was Willie Horton. Yeah, Willie Horton. Yeah, that was one of the most despicable campaign ads in certainly my lifetime. And I've seen a lot of them. That was over. And so you found that there's this pattern going through the system of it almost seems to me, and I'm a layman when it comes to legal stuff, but it almost seems to me like the Republicans constantly just put up these lawsuits that they know they're going to fail before the Supreme Court.

They're usually weak. They're usually overreaching. I was surprised at the, well, I shouldn't be surprised because of the way the court is now, but I was surprised at how they'll just slap some of the most craziest stuff at SCOTUS and work it through the courts. They'll spend hundreds of million dollars of taxpayers' money to things they know they're going to fail, but you can tell what they're doing it for. They're doing it for votes. They're doing it to bring out the vote. They're bringing to fire up their base and support. And I often look at it and I go, you know, I used to be a Republican. So I would look at it and go, you're being played. That's a play. It's never going to pass. Go to some of it's really extreme where they're just eliminating abortions across the

board and rape and everything else. And you're just like, that's not going to, that's not going to go. But they realized that there's more power in the money of getting the vote out and control of power. How much of this comes down to, my theory is this. We live, like you said, we've never fixed the original sin. I know Jamar Tisby wrote a great review on your book. We've had him on the show. And to me, we have two parties.

And it just comes down, I'm condensing it a lot because they have multifac And to me, we have two parties. And it just comes down. I'm condensing it a lot because they have a multifaceted agenda. We have two parties. One which recognizes that minorities are going to rise. And within, I think, 10 or 20 years, we're going to be a minority as white people. And those are going to be a factor. More females are in the workforce, et cetera, et cetera. And we're going to have more immigrants in the society, et cetera, et cetera.

That's just a fact there's no way one of my favorite lines from no country from old men is you can't stop what's coming that's humanity and then you have this 450 years of white power white controls whites being the majority and it's about money it's about government it's about everything else but really democrats see that there's a progression there, and you might as well just embrace it and roll with it because it's going to happen anyway. But it seems like Republicans are this party that's still holding on to the white power, and it's for white power for money, for whatever, but it's about white power and voting blocks. I mean, I've seen so many Republicans say,

we're losing the battle of power because these immigrants are coming in and they're going to vote. And you're like, you're afraid of people voting? And, of course, we can see that going on in legislatures across the country. So that's really what it comes down to me is the two parties. That's what I see as the core basis for the two parties. Am I wrong? What do you think? No, I think you're right about that.

And what I would extend a little bit further by saying that one of the devices that the Republicans are using over and over again is the device all of that is questionable at best, but it's a very powerful tactic. It's a very powerful strategy to try to say, look, look at what we've lost and then point this finger. This is why we've lost it. This other side is soft on crime. You're lost it. This other side is soft on crime. You're hearing it. I mean, it's magnified just in the past few months since Joseph Biden became president, right? It's all the Democrats' fault. And in order to get back to this golden past, we have to, whatever they're saying,

we have to clamp down on LGBTQ rights and things like that. And then we'll have our golden age back again. And we won't. I mean, I think for me, the event of the at least late 20th century that people really have not fully understood in terms of its consequences was really the Immigration Act of 1965, when Lyndon Johnson signed this bill into law that eliminated immigration quotas. And we're not talking here about quotas from south of the border, our southern border, but from Asia and Southeast Asia and India and so forth. And that has, within my lifetime and yours too, I expect, utterly reshape the religious landscape of the entire country. I mean, I travel a good bit around the country because this is what I do for a living, in a sense, and I try to understand what's happening in terms of American religion.

And I see Sikh Gurdwaras and Buddhist stupas and Hindu temples and places that I would never have imagined would crop up. But, you know, that's part of our multicultural mosaic, which frankly has defined our nation since the beginning. But a lot of people say this was the beginning of our decline. I don't think it is at all, but that's the rhetoric, and it's a very powerful rhetoric. Yeah. I'm an atheist, and I think there should be all religions. Everyone should be there. I think I was talking to somebody and I'm an atheist, and I think there should be all religions. Everyone should be there. I think I was talking to somebody, and I said,

look, if you want to put the Ten Commandments on a courthouse, that's fine with me, but you've got to put everybody on the courthouse. Now, maybe that's wrong because of the Constitution, but I'm just saying, it would be fine with me. But you've got to put like a, I don't know, you've got to put an atheist thing there, so I don't know, there'd just be like a little plaque with some anti-Base or something. There'd be a Buddhist one, and you've got to make an atheist thing there. So I don't know, there'd just be like a little plaque with some empty space or something. There'd be a Buddhist one. You got to make sure everybody, but that's not what Betsy DeVos' Center for National Policy wants. She wants a theocracy.

That's right. Actually, I was one of the expert witnesses in the Alabama Ten Commandments case with Roy Moore. Oh, really? Wow. I was, yes. And that's essentially what was my testimony, was that is to say, as you just said, I would have had no objection whatsoever if, in addition to the Ten Commandments, you'd had a Hindu representation. And it is true, the Alabama Atheist Association actually said, both members no doubt, but anyway, they actually asked to have their sentiments included in that space. And Roy Moore said, absolutely not. And that's what made it a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

If he'd allowed those other representations in that space, I wouldn't have had any problem with it. No responsible judge in the country would have had any trouble with it. And here's the irony of it. And again, this was part of my testimony. Religion has flourished in this country precisely because it is not tethered to the to level this wall of separation between a church and state, that will fetishize and trivialize the faith. And that is the real problem here. And I say this as a person of faith. I mean, unlike you, I'm not an atheist.

I'm a firm believer. the First Amendment, the separation of church and state is the best thing that ever happened to this country in terms of religious vitality. Because you have this kind of free marketplace where you have, as you said earlier, you have all this competition within this free marketplace. And that lends a dynamism to religion in America that is unmatched anywhere in the world. Yeah. I mean, freedom. It all comes down to that. And the interesting thing about the Betsy DeV and what she her real agenda is i believe if i recall rightly she kind of has the i think she has the

same thing as that scotus gal the new scotus gal where she's she belongs to in a doctrine of christianity that's kind of violent i forget the name of it you might know calvinism well yeah right yeah it's a bit extreme she yeah she, she's part of the Reformed tradition, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but they want a theology, which to my understanding is they would not allow the other religions to be around. I mean, they want supreme control. They want the Bible to be the constitution from there. It's just scary to me. It is, and the extreme form of that is something called

Christian Reconstructionism or theonomy. And that gets into really scary stuff because these people are talking about revising the criminal code according to Levitical principles and things like that. You'd have capital punishment

for juvenile delinquency and things like that. I mean, people don't really realize it, but if these people, that is, Americans don't really realize what's at stake here, but if these people really got in control, it's a scary scenario. Yeah, you're running into another American ISIS where we'd have cut off hands or headings or whatever the hell they decide they want to do this week. And then me as an atheist and Catholics, I guess, and everybody else,

we'd all be in Uyghur camps being re-engineered or re-brained or whatever, and I'd probably be fed to the dogs like North Korea, but then I'd probably have to come. But ask any of my exes. So as we wrap up, what do you see happening? Because it looks like from everything I'm seeing, Robert P. Jones studies this a lot, everything I'm seeing, it seems like there's a battle going on in the white religious right

of trying to take back religion. There's a lot of people that have left over Donald Trump. I mean, I sat and watched it and went, even as an atheist, I go, what would Jesus do? Be a good person. Be good. It's simple laws. Doing others what you would have people doing to you. I wish more people would do that or claim to subscribe to his teachings. And so watching it, it seems like a lot of people have really become disenchanted. What are you seeing?

What do you think the future is of religion and maybe it's in for a reformation? Well, I think we could certainly do with some sort of reformation or reformation. There was one scholar who I admire who says we should have a reformation in the church every 500 years or so, and we're due.

And I think there's a case for that. But I don't think there's any question that Christianity is in trouble in this country. If you look at the figures, you look at the numbers, the rise of nuns, that is N-O-N-E-S, nuns, no religious affiliation, is really quite striking, particularly in a nation that has been unusually and in many ways incurably religious for most of our history. I'm actually writing a book about this right now. I'm finishing it up. And what I'm trying to argue is that if Christians, and I'm speaking as a Christian myself, of course, if Christians really want to reclaim the faith and make the faith once again relevant to this country, which I think we should, frankly, I think, and I mean no offense to anyone, including atheists. I'm not trying to hurt anybody necessarily, but if the faith is going to be vibrant and relevant, we have to reconnect with the words of Jesus.

I mean, that's the first step, I think, as well as the Hebrew prophets. Hebrew prophets calling for justice. Imagine that. Imagine if Christians or Jews as well, but people of faith, began echoing the words of the Hebrew prophets. I think we'd have a very different society. If we looked carefully at the words of Jesus, as we were just talking about, Jesus called on his followers to care for the least of these.

In fact, he made that a criterion for entering the kingdom of heaven. If you don't do it, he said, you're not going to be there. Those are pretty harsh words, and I think we need to reaffiliate with that. But I think we also need to reaffiliate with the best of our own tradition. That is to say, people like Dorothy Day, people like Walter Rauschenbusch, people like Charles Grandison Finney from the 19th century. Charles Finney, just to embroider that point for a moment, Charles Finney, by any measure, the most influential evangelical of the 19th century. And he was unsparing in his criticism of capitalism. Free market capital, he thought, was demonic. He said that a Christian businessman is an oxymoron because business elevates

avarice over altruism. Now, those are my words, not his words, but that was his argument. So I think if we're going to be relevant again as Christians in this country, we have to reaffiliate not only with the Bible, which is the foundation of the faith, but also with the best of our own tradition. And that's what I'm trying to argue in this book. I would totally agree with you. I'd love to see that. I mean, me just watching Christians with Trump, it was just, yeah, okay. And I understand a lot of it, actually. I mean, I think it comes from some of the authors we have on the show. They saw him as an angel of destruction, as a biblical angel of destruction, angel of retribution, of revenge, where he would punish us sinners, of course,

me being, of course, the main one. I've seen that movie. But no, they saw him as basically sleeping with the devil because he would be the angel of retribution. But in, in hindsight, it's really burned them. I think at one point there's been a drop of, I'm just going off fear of man. I think 30% of non's in the church in the last, it was probably since the inception of Trump. It's whatever the figure is, it's a huge dump.

And I'm hoping that religion will, because I'm an atheist, but I believe that everyone should be able to believe what they have. Whatever you need to get through this life from beginning to end, if you need to hold on to this or hold on to that or believe in that, go for it. Just don't knock on my door on Saturday mornings and wake me up from my hangovers and all the hookers in the back. I'm just kidding. There's only one. That's right. I'm just kidding, folks. I lost the hooker crowd now.

But no, I mean, I don't want to, this is why I love Jewish people because they don't knock on my door. They're not, they're never trying to get me to join their religion. They're just like, we really don't care. Screw you. And so they're wonderful people. But no, I believe everyone should be able to have their religions. They should be able to flourish. But what I hope is that, and I think this is what's happening, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that what's happening is part of that reconciliation or kind of reformation, a lot of people leaving the church, even pastors, I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to fight the white evangelical, the white nationalism part of their religion.

That's really what needs to be exercised. We need to say, you guys go back to the KKK, get the F out of our party and our religion and F you people. You see it with Marjorie Taylor Greene recently going to a neo-Nazi

thing. I mean, it's scary. Yeah. Well, I mean, I suppose at least she's honest about it. Maybe that's in some ways that's a serious comment because a lot of these other people are kind of parading as people of faith and goodwill, and they're really not. And I think Trump, a big part of the appeal of Trump to these evangelicals is, as you said, the kind of avenging angel. But also, he speaks as well as anybody I've ever heard, the rhetoric of victimization. I mean, he's always a victim, of course, in his world. But he speaks that very well.

And I think a lot of evangelicals identify with that. They see themselves as being victimized in some way by the society. Now, again, I think that's nonsense on the whole. But I think that's a big part of his appeal to the 81% of white evangelicals who voted for him. I still can't quite believe that number. But I'm sure it's true. But it's incomprehensible to me that he has that appeal. But I think that's part of it.

The politics of victimhood, it's always interesting to me in this country. And I've still been working on some sort of podcast on victimization and the rise of it in our culture. And it's evident on both sides, whether you're both left or right, that there's a victimization mentality in our world. There's no self-actualization. And it plays on both sides. You see it in the woke crowd. You see it in our world. There's no self-actualization. And it plays on both sides. You see in the world crowd, you see it in the thing.

I'm a moderate Democrat, probably as middle as you can go these days. And I've been a Republican and I've been a liberal. And now I kind of find myself more in the middle where I go, these extremes are, I mean, they're not, I would say on the left, maybe they're not so much problems. Maybe I'm in denial or maybe I'm denying that, but the extremes are really our biggest problems. So the white nationalist extremes, the woke extremes, we need to start being more in the middle and being more Americans that come together and see. I often tell people, I'll take a lie

detector. If Donald Trump would have been a Democratic president and Hillary Clinton would have been Republican or whoever, put everybody over there except for Hitler, I would have voted for anybody but Donald Trump because I understood what he represented. But yeah, I would love to see, this is why I love books like yours and a lot of the authors that have been calling this out. The white nationalism part of the party and their religion needs to go. Like that whole thing needs to be expelled and people just need to live. I've read the Bible. I've read what Jesus wrote, what he was. He seemed like a really great guy.

He did a lot of nice things. I mean, honestly, as a person, I've often thought, what would Jesus do? Be nice to people. Quit being a jerk, Chris. I don't believe in him. I don't believe in the Bible. And I'm just saying this is my thing. But I believe in his teachings and it's a good advice. And a lot of religions have good advice. I shouldn't leave them out. And it's a good thing for being a good human being.

And, but you want to see people live that truth. Like I try and live my truth. And so I think it's good. What's happening. Religion has to, I think religion has to go through this reformation or else it's going to die. Because I think a lot of the youth are the people that are leaving in mass. And we've seen that, yeah. No, I think you're a Jeffersonian, Chris. You're in the mold of Thomas Jefferson, who utterly admired Jesus and saw him as a very, perhaps the most morally worthy teacher in history, but I think that Jesus was divine. So, I mean, that's not a bad place to start.

I mean, he's everything he taught. I mean, that's the reason probably why it's the number one book in the world and has been for, I don't know, 2,000 years or however long it's been. I'm clearly not a big historian, so full disclosure. But yeah, I'm really excited to see what your new book is going to be about on top of this one. And I think it's good. I think the more people that are religious can get educated in this. And like I said, I'm all for everybody. I mean, I think when people meet atheists, they're like, oh, you're trying to destroy us. No, I don't really care. I got my little piece of work over here and I'm just living my life. We're not signing people up.

But no, I want to live in peace with everybody, and I do want us to come together as Americans, no matter what we are. We can have a little bit of political divide about stuff, but I'm glad you're calling out how the abortion thing is used as a lightning rod. And I just see it being played so hard. What was interesting to me was when Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, sadly, it was interesting how many people panicked and came out, even on the right, to vote for Joe Biden because they were really worried about Roe versus Wade being overturned.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think if it is, I think we're going to have a, there's going to be a cataclysm in this country. I mean, I'm setting aside whether or not it's the right, you know, setting aside the issue itself. I think if Roe v. Wade is overturned, I think there's going to be a huge backlash in this country. It frightens me, frankly. Yeah. I mean, anything we can do to tamp down the extremism and then the separation we have. Anything more you want to touch on or tease out on the book? Oh, my goodness.

A lovely conversation. I've enjoyed it, Chris. I've enjoyed it as well. It's wonderful to have, you know, I've always said that an author can have no greater compliment than to have someone take his or her work seriously. And you clearly have, and I appreciate that. It's been a very intelligent discussion.

Awesome. And I hope that every, everything you guys are doing will just make it so we can have a better world and we can all get along better. That's all I want. Can we all get along? There is a thought. There you go. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the,

my website is www.randallbalmer.com. And the book is bad faith, race and the rise of the religious right and let me can i put my jimmy carter biography as well please redeemer redeemer the life of jimmy carter i think it's one of my better books and the publisher has tried to hide it but it's i grew up with let's just say that my family was not excited about jimmy carter and one of the things they were using was the uh panama canal and i remember going to uh school things about the panama and i was a child i had no idea jimmy carter i don't know i was like in elementary school and and so i didn't really know who he was and I was raised with a prejudice against him.

And I didn't understand any of what Jimmy Carter was about. But in looking back on his life and what he did try to do as president, it was pretty amazing. In fact, if you look at, what is it, the FDA and the EPA and you study what he was dealing with at the time where we had rivers on fire and you had Love Canal and people really go back. But he really got out. But you look at what he's done. I mean, I saw the guy, it was a couple months ago or six months ago or something. I've lost time in COVID, Ant-Man.

But he falls. He's like 90 years old or something. He falls. He's got a bruised freaking face and he's out building homes again. I mean, to me, if there is a president who's most like what I would think Jesus Christ is, and I'm no Jesus Christ scholar, clearly, I would think it would be him. I don't know. I give that guy a lot of damn credit.

Yeah, you're right. And just quickly on the Panama Canal Treaty, I mean, just I think what he did see into the future, he understood that if the United States were going to have any meaningful relationship with third world countries, we needed to renounce imperialism. And that was his way to do that. And I think he was, I mean, he got murdered for it politically. And Ronald Reagan was one of the big killers there.

But I think that history has shown already that he did the right thing. Calling attention to human rights abuses. Again, he was pilloried for that, but I think he was absolutely right. And I think history is one of the great things about history. And I love being a historian. But one of the great things is that every few years or every generation or so, historians kind of circle back and say, let's take another look. And that's what's happening with Jimmy Carter. And I think your assessment is what they're coming to. That is a guy who really understood who he was and who acted on his convictions. And I think he did. What was interesting about him too, is he didn't really embrace the egotism of

the office. He was really down to earth. And I think a lot of, if I understand people and read properly, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that he was really, people didn't like that about him, that he was a little bit too homey, that he was a little bit too base. When I had John Avalon on the show, we were talking about Abraham Lincoln. And for a long time, I've been looking at Joe Biden. I voted for him. But I've been like, why is this guy's numbers in the doldrums? And, of course, he's been through a first year known.

A few people have been through. I can't remember a full extent of history. But he does have the same sort of Jimmy Carter softness to him. But there's not a power there. When I talked to John Avalon, we talked about Abraham Lincoln. And he talked about how Abraham Lincoln could still be a person of, have that presence of malice, of strength and power that would come across, especially when he speaked a lot of the charisma. And I think that may be what's lacking in Joe Biden. And maybe that was what was lacking in Jimmy Carter, not to present that as a lack in,

but as a way that people look at leadership and that you do have to have a malice of power that comes across, but then you also have the softness. Am I correct in that assessment or am I? Yeah, I think you're probably right. And I think Carter was not a great public speaker either. I think that, especially in contrast with Reagan, who was really quite masterful at it. And I think that probably hurt him a little bit too.

I've often speculated, right? People forget that in 1976, going into that presidential campaign, Reagan challenged Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination and very nearly secured the nomination. And I've often speculated that if Reagan had won the Republican nomination and won the presidency in 1976, given all of the historical events that unfolded during that time, the Arab oil embargo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Three Mile Island disaster. I mean, poor Jimmy Carter. I mean, he just got hit with everything.

I think if Reagan had won in 76, I expect that he too would have been a one-term president, being president late in the 1970s. It's a modification of someone else's quote, but I always say the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history, and thereby we go round and round with our folly. But, you know, if you think about it,

Jimmy Carter was really an answer to the Republican failure under Nixon, and it was a repair time for America. Absolutely. So Joe Biden is the repair time for Donald Trump. Absolutely. Where does that leave us at? Who's next? Well, I mean, and frankly, Bill Clinton for George H.W. Bush

with the economy, and Barack Obama for the Great Recession of 2008. I mean, people, you know, that's where it's useful to have some historical perspectives. You know, the economy's in a tank. Here comes a new president. He fixes it.

And then, of course, things happen. I bring you back to what Obama said that got me through the last four years was five years ago. But as Americans, as our country, we zig and we zag and we zig and we zag. And hopefully we always zag back. But yeah, we do seem to kind of bounce between the extremes, don't we? Maybe. Yeah, we do. Well, thank you very much.

We got a good plug-in for the Carter book now. Guys, order up the book. It is available on wherever fine books are sold. Bad Faith, Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. Also check out Redeemer, Randall Balmer's book. Did I go to Randall Balmer? Randall Balmer's book,

Redeemer, The Life of Jimmy Carter. You've got a lot of books. How many books do you have here? I've lost count. I think it's 16, 17, something like that. Bloody hell. Good job. Good job. Well, thank you very much, Randall, for being on the show. We really loved it. Brilliant discussion.

Chris, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Monitz, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com for us. That's Chris Voss. Go to youtube.com for us. That's Chris Voss. Hit all the bell notifications, all that crap that goes on.

See LinkedIn and all that stuff. You guys know the drill. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.