The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States Samuel L. Perry (Co-Author) Interview

Episode Date: September 6, 2020

Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States Samuel L. Perry (Co-Author) Interview Why do so many conservative Christians continue to support Donald Trump despite his many overt moral failings? Why do many Americans advocate so vehemently for xenophobic policies, such as a border wall with Mexico? Why do many Americans seem so unwilling to acknowledge the injustices that ethnic and racial minorities experience in the United States? Why do a sizeable proportion of Americans continue to oppose women's equality in the workplace and in the home? To answer these questions, Taking America Back for God points to the phenomenon of "Christian nationalism," the belief that the United States is-and should be-a Christian nation. Christian ideals and symbols have long played an important role in American public life, but Christian nationalism is about far more than whether the phrase "under God" belongs in the pledge of allegiance. At its heart, Christian nationalism demands that we must preserve a particular kind of social order, an order in which everyone--Christians and non-Christians, native-born and immigrants, whites and minorities, men and women recognizes their "proper" place in society. The first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in the United States, Taking America Back for God illustrates the influence of Christian nationalism on today's most contentious social and political issues. Drawing on multiple sources of national survey data as well as in-depth interviews, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry document how Christian nationalism shapes what Americans think about who they are as a people, what their future should look like, and how they should get there. Americans' stance toward Christian nationalism provides powerful insight into what they think about immigration, Islam, gun control, police shootings, atheists, gender roles, and many other political issues-very much including who they want in the White House. Taking America Back for God is a guide to one of the most important-and least understood-forces shaping American politics. Bio: Samuel Perry is an associate professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Oklahoma. A former minister and a graduate of the University of Chicago, Sam is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed articles and 3 books including his most recent book Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, which he co-authored with Andrew Whitehead.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you all of you not just you but all of you, not just you, but all of you tuning in. Thanks for being here today with us.

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You can also go to our book club at patreon.com forward slash Chris Voss, we just launched. And also, you can see all the books of all the authors and order them up on Amazon at amazon forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. You want to put the dot com there at the end of Amazon, but I'm sure they'll figure it out on the way there. Today we have a discussion. We've kind of had this serendipitous discussion. It's been going as a theme through, well, what's going on in the current events, Black Lives Matter,

our discussions of racism, white exceptionalism, and kind of trying to figure out how everyone can just all get along with each other, which is important, and maybe we can end some of the divisiveness and live in peace. So this follows along that sort of theme. We have the author, the co-author, I should say, of Taking America Back for God, Christian Nationalism in the United States. This is Samuel Perry who is with us. He's the associate professor of sociology andigious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He's a former minister and a graduate of the University of Chicago. Sam is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed articles and three books,

including his most recent book that he co-authored with Andrew Whitehead. Welcome to the show, Sam. How are you? I'm great. Thanks so much for having me. This is awesome. Awesome sauce. Over 80 peer-reviewed articles. That's got to be tough to have a lot of peers reviewing your articles, huh? Yeah. I've been busy, fortunately, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's like being an artist. You're like, hey, critics, come on in and tell me, kick the tires and stuff, right?

Exactly. You're just opening yourself up, yeah. Yeah, definitely, like the good, bad, and ugly. I don't know if I take it well. But give us your plugs so people can look you up on the interwebs. You can just follow me on Twitter at Sosh of the Sacred. And, yeah, that's it. That's basically my, my, my habitat.

Awesome sauce. And then you can get his books on amazon.com or your local booksellers. So, uh, Samuel, why did you want to write this book? You know, it actually goes back a few years, uh, starting around Trump, uh, and his, uh, ascension, uh, within the Republican party. Uh, we started to see these poll results about evangelicals voting for Trump in huge numbers. And it shocked us, obviously, because we were, you know, historically, evangelicals really prided themselves on being what they called values voters, which they claim to value character, they claim to value things like family values and sexual modesty and all of these things. And Trump was

obviously the furthest thing from that in the universe. And so as he kind of, Trump slayed all of his competition in the Republican primaries, and eventually won the election and polls show that he won like 81% of the evangelical vote. And so they didn't sit right with this. I mean, we wanted to understand like better, okay, why did this large group of religious Americans who claim to value conservative and religious kind of morality, why did they pull for Trump so hard? And so we started to collect survey data. And what we found that it really, what we found is it really wasn't about being an evangelical Christian per se, but it was about this underlying ideology of

wanting to win back a culture and a country that you feel like is being taken from you. So if you look at all of Trump's stump speeches to religious voters, it's never about being a good neighbor. It's never about like living out Christian values. It's about, hey, those people are taking your country. They're slamming Christianity. Christianity's had a tough time recently. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to stick up for you guys. And I'm going to bring this back. People will say ridiculous things. You would say like, you know, people are going to say Merry Christmas again. Have you noticed how nobody can say Merry Christmas? I'm going to make it so that they can say Merry Christmas again, or I'm going to make it so that you guys won't be persecuted. And so

because there's that overwhelming feeling among conservative Christians that they're persecuted, that people are targeting them. And so what we wanted to do is we wanted to collect data and to understand the scope of this ideology that we call Christian nationalism, that really sees America as rightly belonging to Christians. And I put that term in quotes because it's not just like all Christians, it's Christians who are like us, right? Christians who are conservative, white, native bornborn, culturally Christian, at least by identity, but it's basically kind of all of these things. And so Christian nationalism is this ideology that understands America as rightly Christian, belonging to us, and we need to reclaim that.

Trump was basically the means to that end, and he has been, and he continues to promise that for them. So that's really what got us into this. And then as we collected more data, we found that Christian nationalism as an ideology is associated with just about every negative political value and view that you can think of across the spectrum. All of the things that are dividing Americans in terms of our culture and politics, Christian nationalism is right at the center of it. So we had to write a book about it. So would you say that's a good overview about what the book is about then? Absolutely. Right, right, right. And so just to distinguish it a little bit,

there have been a lot of books that trace this narrative of Christian nationalism throughout history. And I would recommend those to you. And I think there are even some books that are currently written right now, Ann Nelson's Shadow Network, Sarah Posner's Unholy, Catherine Stewart's The Power Worshippers. I think those are books that really get into the relationships behind the scenes going on within Christian nationalism. What our book provides is a kind of a broad statistical overview of how big is this phenomenon of Christian nationalism? How could we measure such a thing? And what are its influences on Americans' attitudes? So where there are other books that either trace it historically or they talk about kind of the behind the scenes people working the puppets,

what we do is we try to get a broader scope of like okay how many americans are christian nationalists and and and what really goes into why somebody would would adopt that ideology and it's pretty interesting to me like i've never i never really thought of the way you know i got familiar with white nationalism right when trump was elected because everyone sat around like you mentioned and went what the what the hell just happened right um you know even even like you know hillary clinton's like there's no way they're gonna vote for this dude uh he's just kind of an interesting dude uh and so i had to learn like a lot of the different keywords like heritage and you know when he emphasizes the word are you're like hold on he's not talking about all americans he's talking about a certain subset of people that's right um and uh our culture our heritage etc etc you know i learned all the

different things in the sp uh the southern property law center etc etc um but what's interesting is how you guys term this christian nationalism how different is white nationalism than christian nationalism yeah you know i would i would actually say that the two there there's a How different is white nationalism than Christian nationalism? I would actually say that there's a Venn diagram, right? Like there would be tightly overlapping centers. I think there are some people who sincerely do subscribe to Christian nationalist ideology that for them it's not so ethnic. But I think for a large percentage of people we would call Christian nationalists, they assume whiteness is a part of that. And not just whiteness, but like being born in the United States, being a citizen, being like us culturally. And so what I would say, and this is how I explain it. So like throughout the history of like the far right, they've been just so

effective at using what you'd call dog whistles, if you're familiar with that term, dog whistle politics. So a dog whistle is if I want to say something ugly about a group, and I want it to be subtext, I don't want somebody to say, hey, that's racist. So what I use is I adopt another word that people will kind of know that that's what you mean. So I say urban illegals and terrorists, rather than saying poor blacks, Mexicans, and Muslims, right? But everybody knows that's what I mean. And so for Christian nationalism, that word Christian is actually like a dog whistle. You could call it a reverse dog whistle because it's positive. And what it means is whenever I say Christian, like we're going to

make our country Christian again, or we're going to increase the prominence of Christianity in our country. It's a dog whistle. What it means is our culture, our way of life, the things and values that matter to us. And so Christian is kind of a dog whistle that means white, native-born, culturally conservative. You could actually see this even today. So Eric Trump tweets out something that says something to the effect of, I think I can get it word for word, but he says, my father will always protect, he will protect God, faith, and religious freedom in this country. Now to a Christian, that ought to sound ridiculous, because the Christian God doesn't need protection from human beings, but it makes perfect sense if God, to you, is a way of life. If God is a, it means our culture and our values, and that's exactly what Trump promises,

is he will protect Christian in the sense that that means our way of life and our culture. I think Trump actually said, too, that Biden will kill God or something. That's right. He's going to hurt God. Biden's going to hurt God. And that's exactly what he means. Every time that word God comes out of Trump's mouth, you can assume that's exactly what he means. He has no conception of God as a person or somebody he knows personally. It's always about, hey, you Christians, you guys are really into this god thing right i'm going to defend this god thing for you it's interesting too how they don't they don't they don't seem to they don't want to understand the suckerism or this the snake oil or realize they're being played um and and maybe it's because they think he's on

their side um the bible the the thing where he went to lafayette uh square lafayette park and held up the bible uh fortunately some christians finally started seeing through that right um you know i mean i read the bible as a kid i you know i i got into it some with someone the other day who's a trumper um and you know he was talking about he was talking about uh oh i i think we're having disagreement and he was and i was like man i was like man what you're doing isn't very christ-like you're being you're being really attacking and ugly and uh and uh he goes well i'm being like jesus was when he was in the temple and the money changers and i'm like well i'm not money changing i just said trump was bad so that's right i don't know why you're you you take that as your thing

um it's interesting to me um how this gets used and like you say uh you know like i'll give an example here in utah it's largely religious um and they all were like we're not going to vote for trump uh in fact there was a guy there who they're kind of going to vote for or said they were going to vote for and a lot of people across the nation either wouldn't tell pollsters who they're going to vote for they called it the shame vote and a lot of it was white suburban women uh who uh who basically they voted in shame but they didn't want to tell anybody who they were voting with because they knew they were being they were voting against their values um but in the end like even utah was like yeah we're not gonna vote for trump and then

just like you saw the results you're like uh yeah that didn't work out the way you said it would that's right and at the end of the day i fear that that's uh that that's something that like all these positive poll numbers that show trailing in these really battleground states um i think i think political science calls that the bradley effect going back to some instance where a guy named bradley basically lost because like everybody said they were going to vote for him and nobody did because they voted for like a racist kind of uh uh cause instead that was in california wasn't it i can't remember i can't remember the context i just yeah i believe it was in california i think if i'm i'm the old brains remember right i'll pull it up as we do the show but you know it's like i'm seeing

positive polling from pew and from prri and and suggesting that Trump's losing ground with his key demographic. And yet I worry when push comes to shove and nobody can see you voting in that polling booth, you know, do you end up just kind of going with like, well, I can't vote for a Democrat, you know, like I've got to go, I've got to go for my tribe here. And that's what it's really all about, I fear, is kind of a political tribalism that addresses this up with religious language. It's one of the things that we try to key on in the book. And so something readers will notice when we're talking about Christian nationalism in the book, we want to make sure that people understand we're not necessarily talking about

people who are authentically committed to their religious faith. Matter of fact, we're not necessarily talking about people who are authentically committed to their religious faith. Matter of fact, we often find Christian nationalism and sincere religious commitment go in the exact opposite direction. So let me give you an example. Christian nationalism seems to incline Americans toward more racism. So for example, the more you adhere to Christian nationalist ideology, the less likely you are to acknowledge racial injustice in policing. You're going to say, no, they treat them all, they treat blacks and whites equally, or if African Americans get shot more by the police, it's because they deserve it, they had it coming. Matter of fact, Bill Barr, who's this prominent Christian nationalist in the Trump administration, just said that the other day. He said he was interviewing with,

I think, Anderson Cooper, and he said, I don't think there's two police systems. I don't think there's inequality. I think that's kind of overblown by the media. So we find Christian nationalism is actually powerfully predictive of that kind of attitude, that just denying any inequality whatsoever. But once we account for Christian nationalism in our statistical models, we find that people who are more committed to their religious faith actually are more likely to see the racism. They're more likely to say, no, that's unjust. That's unfair. And so it's and so something we try to repeat again and again in the book is that our our fight is not with people who are sincerely committed to like trying to be like Jesus, love their neighbor, be tolerant of others, be good democratic citizens. We want those, they should be good neighbors. And we want that kind of authentic faith commitment to mold somebody into being a loving good neighbor, right?

It's Christian nationalism, this kind of political ideology that dresses itself up in religious language when really it's all about us versus you. It's about ours versus yours. It's about order and taking it back and rearranging hierarchies or reestablishing hierarchies more accurately. And so I think, yeah, one of the things that we want to get down to is that it really doesn't have to have anything to do with Christian morality

whatsoever. And in in fact it could just be the opposite um that speaks to something that's very interesting to me because i i'm an atheist okay and and and uh i read the bible and i i actually sometimes if i have a quandary over morals or something i go what would jesus do Not that I believe the book is real or Jesus. I don't mean to offend anybody. This is my opinion. But I actually look at that as a reference point. Like I reference, you know, the Ten Commandments are a good thing for,

what's the golden rule? I'm going to reference the golden rule. Like why am I good to people? Because I want people to be good to me. And it goes around and comes around. around is kind of a karma thing. But, you know, if it comes down to it, I'd be like, what would Jesus do, you know? And it's not that religious in any way, shape, or form. It's just a good self-motivational, positive role model sort of thing.

And what's funny is I'm an atheist. So when I see religious people doing the opposite, I'm just like, what the hell is going on, man? But yeah, it was Mayor Tom Bradley from Los Angeles that it happened to. And this was during the 80s, during the rise of Reagan, who also brought back the shining city on the hill. So my question to you is, is this more, because I really love the interviews and research that I did on you

guys. Um, and, and what you guys put into it and studies, and we'll get to some of that, but is this more about power or is it more about the exceptionalism, uh, that comes from the history of America? You know, why we, you know, the Puritan nature of a city on a hill or, you know, we have to, we have to enslave the heathens and the dirty Indians and all that horrific, horrible stuff that they did. Is it more about power and retaining power? Right. I would say, and there's different opinions on this,

I would draw a distinction historically between what we see now as basically white Christian nationalism that is really about power. And it's about, it's not just about power, but it's about boundaries, right? Like who does America belong to and who gets to call the shots and whose preferences get reflected in our policies and our sacred symbols and the way that we go about kind of thinking through the kinds of people that we want to be and the kind of people that we want to allow to have privileges in our country. That's Christian nationalism. And that's really what it's concerned with. Historically, though, and absolutely, I mean, I would not deny that there was all kinds of like, ethnocentrism and manifest destiny, and things that denigrated like,

allowed for the enslavement of people and the, to some degree, the extermination of Native Americans. But there was this core of, of civil religion that, that, that I, that narrative of the city on the hill. If you remember where that, that comes from, that, that famous sermon that was given on the ship, on the way, on the ships on the way over here before these Puritans come to the new world, it really was about obligations, right? Like it was about like, hey, God is going to give us this great land. And so we have obligations to love one another and to be a just and equitable society. So there was this core of civil religion that was actually really, at its best, it could be really tolerant. And it could be really championing these values that we would all agree are very good, which is why you've actually seen throughout history African American leaders referring to this kind of narrative of our obligation to call it providence, call it heaven, call it God or creator or whatever. But you had Frederick

Douglass, you had Martin Luther King Jr., you had Barack Obama most recently in his inaugural addresses, really making reference to this obligation that we have as a people to whatever power allowed us to have this great nation. And so at its best, you could say that this kind of city on a hill metaphor could be taken as an example of like look that would be an um i don't mean exceptionalism to the extent that we just denigrate every other nation or culture that's not what i'm talking about but i mean like this idea that we are united as americans around these cultural values of justice and fairness and and and a goodness as a society and i can i think that's completely different from what we

see in white Christian nationalism, which is actually something interesting that we're finding now. So even since publishing the book, we've collected new data. And what we find is we find that Christian nationalism, our little measure of Christian nationalism, which is a scale that we kind of designed to measure this thing, among white and black Americans who subscribe to this ideology, it means something completely different. And so what we conclude from that is that among whites, Christian nationalism is really about authority and power and taking back a culture that they feel like is rightfully theirs. Among African Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalism, we find that they're more likely, actually, like the more they subscribe to Christian nationalism, the more likely they are to be progressive, to say that inequality is a huge problem, that we need to talk about it, to resist kind of this narrative of it's their fault, right, one that says we have power and we should and we always should have power. That's among white Americans. But among African Americans, it means, hey, this idea of a Christian nation would have been a good thing to aspire to,

like that we've never actually lived up to because of our hypocrisy as a country. And so it really is more of an accountability thing, like, yeah, that would be great if the nation actually lived up to its professing Christian values, and yet it never has. And so it really is more of an accountability thing, like, yeah, that would be great if the nation actually lived up to its professing Christian values, and yet it never has. And so maybe we could actually work to make that happen someday. It's really interesting to me. How much of this would you say was a blowback from Obama? I know there were different things that Obama had instated. One of the things he kind of leaned on a little bit was about them using politics

and possibly taking away their IRS thing. It seems to me that was the thing that he did. Some of this comes from the rise of dark money and power through Citizens United, and I think some religions have been able to form PACs or do different things. How much is a blowback from Obama? I think there's a lot of that there, especially among white Americans. But I think the Christian nationalism narrative mixes in with that because leaders within the far right were able to point to Barack Obama's presidency, which, which by all, I think by all metrics, he was a moderate. Barack Obama wasn't some radical,

you know, like people on the far left wouldn't say Barack Obama was their champion of kind of like this, like far left agenda. He was a pretty moderate technocrat, right? Like he, and a very likable and charismatic guy, but to, to the far right, they were able to say, Barack Obama, this radical leftist, who is against religious freedom and everything that we stand for. Oh, by the way, he's also closet Muslim. And, you know, he's an African American. And that maybe has something to do with the stigma as well.

But there's a couple of things going on there. One, Christian nationalism seems to incline Americans to believe conspiracy theories, which should be no surprise, like considering Donald Trump and the birther movement, Barack Obama being a closet Muslim. We found Christian nationalism, people who subscribe to Christian nationalism are actually huge anti-vaxxers, so they're more likely to be suspicious of vaccines, which is actually a huge problem for

like coronavirus. Like if we actually think people are going to voluntarily take this coronavirus vaccine when it becomes available so that we can develop this like herd immunity from it, we're probably going to run into some problems with the Christian nationalist crowd that says, well, I'm not taking any of that, you know, that thing. It's all a hoax anyways. And so I think you have blowback from combination of threat that comes from whatever Barack Obama was perceived to be, but also this tendency to believe conspiracy theories from the government, like that the government is all just kind of in on it together. And Donald Trump portrays himself as this like crazy authentic. I

mean, whatever you, whatever, whatever you would blame Donald Trump for. And I, I blame Donald Trump for a lot. But you can't deny, I mean, the guy just kind of wears it on his sleeve. He has no plan. He has no kind of like, he's not playing 3d chess. Like there's, there's no, so I think people could look at him and say, man, this guy's not, he's not, he's no he's eating the checkers so i think people could look at him and say man this guy's not he's not he's he's not even uh playing around with what he's trying to do and there's an authenticity there that people i think rallied to and so uh up against this kind of conspiracy believing radical leftist agenda thought and donald trump who says i am what i am and i don't care and by the way i'll stick up for you guys i think there was just kind of a a desire to believe those kinds of promises

how much of uh yeah i mean when you when you when you're a racist and you see people uh well you don't see people as as the value of of being a human being you see them as uh whatever sort of racist tropes you want to take and use. You know, you can look at Obama. You know, I've seen all the different stuff that deplorables put in the Facebook groups of Obama and Michelle, and they're hideous.

And what's funny is I think Obama has been to church probably more often in his life than Trump's ever driven by a church. Oh, for sure. For sure. Same thing with Biden. I mean, like Trump's in huge trouble when it comes to comparing religious statistics with Biden, who is a lifelong devout Catholic and churchgoer, right? And sincerely seems to actually behave in consistent ways with his Catholic faith. I mean, and I would say obama as well one of the one of the things that christians

have always been doing is is pushing their religion into the system and we didn't have in in i think god we trust on the coins and then we didn't have the that part of the god part of the national anthem or the national you know where we pledge to the flag um and that i mean that got added in the 50s uh which i didn't know up until recently but uh what what's it and then recently what i've been learning i didn't know there was this huge separation between black and white uh church groups i didn't i didn't learn that until recently as we've you know been having these great discussions um and and how they broke apart, how the Civil War and racism is part of that, slavery, and oh my gosh, all this stuff. And, you know, I always just thought,

religious people are all kumbaya over there. Not exactly, no. Yeah, and there's like, and racism is part of that narrative because if you study the Civil War and all the discussions we've been having, hopefully people have been listening um but uh uh and and what you speak to in in your stuff is is about the power and you know i'll see i'll see uh republican uh and i imagine they're probably religious i'll see them say you know they're they're gonna outnumber us soon and god knows what they'll do for what we did to them.

You know, here's stuff like that, and you're like, really? You think about that? Like, that's something you're spending time on? Same thing with the immigrants and everything else. And it almost seems like it's the last grasp of dying power. Christians have always been kind of pushing their religion on us. Like, they're like, we have to put the Ten Commandments on the courthouse steps. And you're like, well, can the Satanists put their Satanist occult stuff on the...

No, they can't. Well, how come you guys are so special? And so they've always been pushing that. But this almost seems like it's just the last dying effort of a... Because most millennials aren't going into church anymore. I think religion is going to die even more with what's going because most millennials aren't going into church anymore. I think religion is going to die even more with what's going on where people aren't going to church anymore, spending more time on the Internet.

What's the point I'm trying to make here? It's kind of a long one. There were some people who said that they see Trump, the Christians kind of see Trump as like, he's kind of like the Antichrist. He's like, choose your destroyer sort of thing from Ghostbusters. Use the form of the destroyer. And so they feel like he is like their, I think there's like an angel, an archangel or an angel of destruction that's in the, maybe in the Bible, but they feel like he's,

he's the destructor of everyone else who's fighting for them. Do you see, is there any of that validated in the studies you've done? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So Tony Perkins, who's the president of either American family Institute or family research

council, I can't, I can't remember what he is, but he's a leading, you know, former politician and also very prominent leader within American Evangelical Family Associations. And, and he was asked, he was asked, you know, why do you guys like give Trump a pass on all this stuff? Why did evangelical Christians really support Trump?

And I think he said it best, like we were tired of getting pushed around by Obama and all his leftists. And, and Trump was the guy on the playground willing to punch the bully. And that's exactly who Trump is. Trump is the bully who punches the bully who's picking on you, or you think he's picking on you. And so I actually, this is one of the, this is one of the things that I'm, we're curious about, we're trying to collect more data on. You brought this is one of the, this is one of the things that I'm, we're curious about, and we're trying to collect more data on. You brought up the idea of like this being kind of a last dying gasp of conservative Christians. This is one thing that I think you had, you guys have Robert Jones on the, on the radio show the other day. And I love Robert Jones's book. He had

a, he had a great book called, before this one, he's got a great one called White Too Long, which I'm reading now is awesome. And another one called The End of White Christian America. And he wrote The End of White Christian America before Trump won. And then he actually had to write, he had to go back and write an afterword for the publisher. Because in The End of White Christian America, this is something that I would have taken issue with. He really writes about after two straight victories of Barack Obama trouncing the Republicans, he was able to kind of, I mean, I think his conclusion at first was like, hey, this is kind of, they've already lost their influence,

and we're not going to expect too much from them anymore because they're just declining in terms of like a number, a percentage of Americans. And then Trump happens and you have to go back and reinterpret what the hell just happened, right? Like, how can we explain this? Because it sounds like, man, they came out with a vengeance here and they're still pushing for him. idea that Christian nationalism is something that is always there, but it could be reactivated when there is a perceived threat that's big enough, right? So Christian nationalism, you could say, has been like a part of American's history throughout its history, but it kind of resurfaces whenever there is this kind of racial and cultural threat that white conservatives in power feel like they need to fight against. And so they're

able to rally around this Christian identity and to say, let's come together and let's fight and take back what we feel like is being robbed from us. And so on the one hand, in the book, we do demonstrate that Christian nationalism does seem to be in decline over the last, say, 15 years. Demographically, that's just because people are getting older. And like you said, younger cohorts are like replacing older cohorts. And yet, you know, I'm kind of skeptical that that like, that is just going to die out. Because I think if you if you whip up enough kind of ethnic and religious and cultural threat, I think people could be signed on who weren't signed on before because they feel like, well, we need to come together to stop these leftists from taking our country away. to show we're collecting data on it right now before the election and after the election and how much of an influence this ideology plays into whether americans are planning on voting trump again and after the election we're going to ask how much it how much it played into who ended up

voting at all you know i think you're right because one of the discussions i've been having in a lot of the books that i've been reading and authors that we've had on, Eddie Glaude Jr. in his book mapped the arc of, you know, Johnson gives civil rights. He does a lot of things for black and poor people and minorities, which, you know, just helping poor people, that helps a lot of minorities, at least back then especially, because there wasn't a social support system for people that, you know, didn't have enough money and, of course, were victims of racial prejudice and fabric of the society back then.

And then we get the knee-jerk back with Nixon. And Nixon, of course, goes after minorities. He goes after everybody. But he goes after minorities, especially out there, everybody, but he goes out to minorities, especially with like the drug war. And, you know, he was the guy who coined that term, the was a law and order president. We're on drugs,, and then we go right back in with Reagan. We've been reading a lot about Reagan back then when California was a red state. Then we go back to Clinton, and then we go right back in with Bush, and we're back at the same thing. Then we go out with Obama, and now we're back again.

We had Jean Guerrero on the show talking about her book, Hate Monger. And Stephen Miller was activated in the 80s. And so one of the concerns I have is that Donald Trump is, you see these young kids, you see them in the crowds, you see the children in the crowds. And their mothers and fathers are, you trumpate trumpate and you're like holy crap that's a whole new generation of hate and i've been looking at going you know i i was hoping we could get this whole racism thing revolve resolved but it doesn't seem like we're making progress it seems like we're just moving through waves of it through these new generations that get taught hate by whichever, you know, Nixon, Reagan, you know, Bush, Trump.

We just keep reinventing the wheel. The one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. That's right. Yeah. That's so sad to think about. That's what I'm saying. You can quote me on that that's about

yeah i think if you use the word use the word activated and it almost seems like that sometimes like it like if there's a terrorist cell or something like that or or uh or like isis recruits these kind of young disaffected people who are frustrated with life and and are able to whip them up into kind of like being mobilized for whatever cause they feel like this is something I can rally around. And Trump is able to tap into that fear and anger at his rallies. And something I mean, something that I even fear, something that I fear, I think political scientists and sociologists are also really concerned about in the future is how much forget forget Trump, like for now, right? Like, I mean, Trump's going to go away and he's just going to, he's going to slip into irrelevance

eventually. But the precedent that he's set for a leader, like there used to be some kind of a standard, like the things that he is able to say and do and to lie without, with complete impunity from any consequence whatsoever. I mean, such an erosion of the standards that we expect from political leaders, our chief political leaders. What it's become in terms of like our fighting as a culture, the divisions that we see, and Trump is so exacerbated those kinds of things. I mean, I think my greatest concern is not whatever Trump, like, again, I don't think he has a strategic bone in his body. I mean, somebody said,

I remember, I think a friend of mine, Phil Gorski said one time that, you know, Trump, Trump isn't playing 3D chess, he's playing one dimensional chess, where the king stands in the middle of the board just screams, look at me, look at me, look at me, right? Like, that's it, that's his game. But after that, the consequences for our democracy are terrifying because it's like, how do we even have conversations now after Trump? One of the things that we keep finding in our studies of Christian nationalists as we've collected more data, are there basically three sources that hardline Christian nationalists trust in terms of like news and leadership it is fox breitbart and trump everything else medical experts other news sources that's it so you've got yourself in a situation

where like you can't even have a conversation with a group of people because their their information is completely different from the information that you're getting yeah like you're getting fed a completely different narrative of facts than what you're going to get if you're somebody who's just an average American who's like listening to NBC or ABC or NPR or any other medical expert or media source. And so our ability to have conversations now, you know, I wish I could say that this was kind of a dying gasp of a people who are on their way out. And yet I feel like the consequences of what we're seeing right now could be so incredibly dire for our democracy. Yeah, I believe you're right now that I really look at it.

There's two things that I have for you. I'll ask the first question. It's kind of a go back. What percentage of, of Christians would you say are really deep into this white nationalism? Is there a way to separate them on percentage basis? Yeah, sure. So one of the, I mean, one of the key contributions of our book that we try to underscore is that we, we're the first, I think, scholars to try to measure this thing. And so what we do is we developed a scale,

and that's just kind of we gave every American a series of questions. We distributed these surveys, and they're always the same questions so that we can compare survey to survey. And we basically ask them, how much do you agree with the following statement? And we ask them six statements, things like, the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation, or the federal government should advocate Christian values, or the federal government should enforce a strict separation of church and state. So if you disagree with that one, you actually don't want a separation of church and state. Or the success of the United States is part of God's plan.

So you believe we have a special relationship with God. And so basically people who, we arrange those questions to where, and we add them all up to where people who score higher, the values range from like zero to 24. And so people who score higher on that Christian nationalism scale are more in line with Christian nationalist ideology. So what we do in the book so that we don't have to talk about whether or not somebody scores a 3 or a 9 or an 18 on that scale, is we divide them up into four groups. That is rejecters, resistors, accommodators, and ambassadors. Rejecters on the far left are the people who absolutely deny any kind of connection between Christianity and American politics.

Those two things should be kept separate. Probably where you are and where most of your listeners would be, I would guess, you'd be hardline rejecters, right? Or resistors at the very least. Ambassadors, though, accommodators are these people who are more, they're mostly Christians who are kind of friendly to Christian nationalism, but they're not hardline Christian nationalists. And then you've got ambassadors. So these are the true believers in Christian nationalism. And you'd be surprised. So this is, you'd think this might be just kind of a fringe minority. There's actually about 20% of Americans fall into this category of ambassador. It actually does in survey after survey. We've

distributed a bunch of surveys now, nationally representative surveys, and it's about 20% of Americans that are ambassadors. And so when you add them up with accommodators, that's about a third of Americans. You've got over 50% of Americans that are friendly or true believers in Christian nationalism. So that's, you know, it is not a minority group that's actually, you know, they could be activated. Those accommodators can be activated to sign on to these kinds of like hardline Christian nationalist narratives. So in your guys' book, you talk about how a lot of this correlates with the guns, Second Amendment, xenophobia, all that sort of stuff.

Tell us a little bit more about that that you have in the book. Right. So I think one of the things that we keep keying in on in our research on Christian nationalism is people who subscribe to Christian nationalism really see the world as a pretty violent place, apparently, that needs to be controlled. It's kind of a fatalistic kind of thing that we're never going to get rid of violence. And they don't even necessarily want to. They just want to have the right people do the violence. And so you can see this in the way that people who are higher on Christian nationalism respond to questions about the police, about the military, and about guns. There's this kind of feeling, what I call good guy violence or righteous violence.

But it's basically like when you see somebody who is kind of higher on Christian, good guy violence or righteous violence. But it's basically like when you see somebody who is kind of higher on Christian, those ambassadors that I was talking about, they're definitely going to be pro-Second Amendment and anti-government regulation, even common sense regulations on any kind of like gun control. They're also going to be pro-military, strong military and supporting the military. And even serving in the military makes you a moral person because it's a good thing. They're definitely going to be pro-police, right? Like, and they're going to be suspicious of any kind of claims that the police are unjust or the police use violence inappropriately. So what's going on?

All of those things, I think, tie into the same thing is that they don't have an aversion to violence like you would think a Christian might. Somebody who subscribes to the ethics of Jesus may have a problem with being violent to people. Christian nationalist has no problem with violence. It's good guy violence. So like the most, like Mike Huckabee, I don't think he originated with this, but I mean, I think he's kind of said it over and over again. That famous statement, you know, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And that's a very Christian nationalist way of thinking about it, right? Like it's not about like, hey, let's remove the opportunity for people to shoot one another, or like, let's create better values that like people, we don't have bad guys

anymore. It's, there's going to be bad guys, and they're going to have guns. And the only way you stop them is with a good guy who has a gun. And so Christian nationalism is about, let's put violence in the hands of the police, the military, good guys with guns, so that they can control deviance, terrorism, crime, disorder, and all of those kinds of things and so christian nationalism is powerfully related to what we would call like authoritarian means of social control they're all about that and in fact another kind of example of this is we find christian nationalism is is powerfully related to whether or not you want to restrict somebody's free speech which is kind of an irony right like because you would think the people who are shouting about free

speech and freedom of religion right now are the Christian nationalists. But what they mean is freedom of speech for us. They don't mean freedom of speech for some kind of Muslim teacher or somebody who writes the kinds of books that they disagree with or whatever. It's all about controlling that speech and giving it to a certain group of people. With immigration, I think we see another facet of Christian nationalism. So with guns, you see kind of the authoritarian impulse of Christian nationalism. But with immigration, you see this kind of boundary maintenance impulse within Christian nationalism. So Christian nationalism asks the question, who does America rightly belong to and who can enjoy its privileges? And the answer is always people who are like us, people who are Christian, white, native born, culturally conservative. And so immigrants are like the opposite of that. They're assumed to be of a different religion, assumed to be of a different race and a different ethnicity and a different culture. And so they're, they're assumed to be disease ridden, culturally backwards.

They're going to make impure our country. They're going to defile our country, which is why like we, we published a, we have a, we have a, you know, we have a study that's under review right now. It's one of those peer reviewed studies that we're kind of waiting to get back on. But we found that Christian National, we asked all these questions about immigration and whether you ought to restrict immigration and coronavirus. Like it was how closely tied does immigration and people of color tied to the infection rates that we're seeing in the United States. And Christian nationalism, of course, was one of the leading predictors that Americans think, you know how we solve this coronavirus problem? By restricting immigration, by building a border wall, by making sure that we kind of prevent

unclean immigrants from coming into our country. And so we see Christian nationalism really wants to claim America for a certain group of people. And part of that is excluding everybody else who doesn't fit into that category or subordinating them either excluding or subordinating them underneath the hierarchy of like who really you know deserves the privileges this may make sense as to why trump only plays that base that sticks with that base absolutely because he wants the image to them that i thought he just did it because he's an insecure little brat and anybody didn't vote for him he's upset with him but now i'm kind of starting to think that that he does it to play with him to show his loyalty exactly and and and and that's why they like it when he

destroys the norms when he destroys well everything uh is like he's fighting for us. So a lot of what you said about the guns and xenophobia and everything seems to always be coming back to power and white power under the guise of religious nationalism. Yep, I think so. And the United States is kind of an interesting example of how this is playing out. So we actually see examples of this. We didn't write about this explicitly in our book, but you see examples of this popping up all over the world.

A kind of a religious, it's really an ethnic nationalism that kind of masquerades as a religious nationalism. You see it in India. You see it in Brazil. You see it in Europe. And the differences are, one, I mean, obviously, in India, we see a different religion. It's the Hindutva movement, like it's that saying, you know, real Indians are Hindus, and the outsiders are non-Hindus. But it's an ethnic nationalism that kind of portrays itself as like, caring about Christian identity. The difference between the United

States and those countries, though, like say, Western Europe, is the United States has this very unique history of, like, evangelical language. Like, we are, by comparison, a very religious country compared to those other countries. And those other countries, nobody's going to church, nobody's reading their Bible, but they say, when they claim Christian identity, it's pretty transparent that they mean native-born white people like myself, right? In the United States, though, we can mask all of that. We can do a dance where we mask all of that ethnic and racial kind of subtext, and we flower it up with Christian language, which is why you can see like really prominent Southern Baptist, mainstream Southern Baptist preachers or reformed, you know, preachers like Robert Jeffress, most recently John MacArthur, really stumping on Trump's behalf and saying, you know, theologians like Wayne Grudem or I think

Christian leaders like Tony Perkins, really stumping on Trump's behalf in a way that sounds very overtly evangelical and Christian. But once you dig a little bit deeper into kind of, OK, what exactly do they mean by these certain code words? What they mean is ours, power, people like us, heritage. It's all code language, right? And so it's more transparent in the UK. It's less transparent here. And it's more subtextual in the United States. I wonder if these are going on around the world. Like we see the consecration camp of the Uyghurs in China. I don't know if that's part of what you're referring to as well. But it is a persecution of a minority.

But I wonder if it's because we've stepped back in the world and people are like, persecution of, of, uh, of a minority. Um, but, uh, I wonder if it's because we've stepped back in the world and people like, well, America doesn't care anymore. America isn't gonna, you know, threaten whatever. And when we're around this big stick, you know, they don't really care about themselves right now. And we can see through Trump and almost Trump sets an example to the world that says, Hey, you know, um, I had the Washington post co-editor on and

his wife yesterday or day before yesterday, and they talked about how even like with the press are more endangered in the world because around the world in different countries and governments because, you know, he treats the press so horribly. It's really interesting to me. So let me ask you this. Is this the reason that they hate cancel culture and PC? Because one thing I've seen with my religious friends is the hatred of PC. And I'm like, I mean, it's one thing to be a closet racist, but it was like they were just so resentful for so many years

that having to be PC and hold that in, you're just like, oh, my God. Like, you can't even be polite. Right. No, for sure. So, you know, I think the unfortunate thing is, I think you dig a little deeper. What they really hate is liberal democratic norms of virtue and civic kind of mindedness that you treat other citizens with respect. And so they want to play themselves as the victim. Like, no, we're targeted.

Everybody hates us and everybody's lying about us and coming after us. what i mean what i think is is going on is is if you say something hateful uh or you say something that is blatantly anti whatever group uh people call you out on it and all of a sudden you feel offended like oh you're just being pc and it's like well you're you know you're actually uh being a bad citizen being a bad neighbor for for you know i think uh with your language disenfranchising an entire group of people and i I get the concern of like, at some level, I get the concern of policing everybody's language. I'm a college professor. And it seems like every week I hear a story of some college professor who misspoke, said something that they didn't mean. And all of a sudden they're either fired or disciplined or reprimanded or whatever.

And so like, I get that. College professors worry about that kind of thing too. And yet at the, at the bottom line, I think that's kind of a red herring for these people. Like what they want to do is they want to be able to say hateful exclusionary kinds of things with impunity like Trump does. And whenever anybody kind of pushes back, they say, Oh, PC or, or you know you know oh you're just being you guys it's cancel culture and it's like well you know i i think you're you you may be exaggerating uh how much people are really kind of restricting your your freedom uh and when what you really mean is freedom to be a a public uh jerk and to say things uh that are really antagonistic to a lot,

a lot of people. That just made me think of something. He really is a spokesman for the hate they have in their heart. I've never been able to speak to that in the way I just spoke to it, but he really, they really get a boner off him because he's their spokesman and he can say the most hateful things. And what's interesting is so many of them support him.

He gets away with it. like no fortune 500 company ceo never no prior president would ever like i mean you know you you hear the uh the axiom that everyone says where they're like if obama did any of this like just once like everyone have their hair on fire fox news would be burning down can you imagine if obama made the kinds of claims that trump makes on a daily basis or if obama literally like spent his day trolling people on twitter uh like that i mean the uh and that's the thing that's kind of killing me chris is i think what what we're witnessing along with the christian nationalist support of donald trump which I feel like is toxic. And, and we, we see this kind of on the ascendancy in some ways is just the erosion of,

of, of conventional norms and behavior of, of how a president should act and behave. And I don't know how we go back from that. I mean, I think we're all scratching our heads with like, how do we get back to my, my wife and I will sometimes see Obama on TV. And just the contrast with what we see with Trump just makes me want to cry. Like he was such a, even if you didn't like Obama, you had to admit that he was just a classy guy who chose his words well and thinks carefully about what he says and he tries to be genuine and humble

and uh magnanimous and and trump is just uh a walking uh a walking you know uh troll right it's it's amazing yeah if i ever meet obama i voted for obama but i was critical of him i've been critical of every president vote for because i voted for him i've never treated him as a demagogue but yeah if i ever meet him and michelle i'm gonna be like can you guys hold me for a while um but no it's really interesting you've opened my eyes to how cancel culture and pc why that's such a big deal to me it that's also about power it's the same reason that in there was a certain time in our country where they had you know they had different f know, they had different fountains, they had different restrooms, you know, more colored and everything. This is about power. It wasn't, it wasn't just about separation. It was about power. It was me shoving it in your face that you're you, I'm me, and I'm

in power and F you. And this comes down to the conversation and the, the issues about the, about the statues we're all fighting about. It's about that power, that image of power that's there. And I really think it's really amazing what you talked about and what you have in the book, the power of the police and the power of the good guy. You know, like John Wayne, when we spoke with John Wayne and Jesus and John Wayne, author that we had on the show,

you know, it's the power of that dude who can do all the ugly stuff for them that they feel in their hearts, but then they're like, I'm like Jesus, you know. And so that really explains a lot, especially the guns thing. One thing that really blew my mind recently with the Black Lives Matter reemergence was I had a couple of friends that we used to talk about. We used to make jokes about people who love guns, the animal sexuality of it. It's like you guys really get excited about guns on like a sexual level. Like I like sex, but when you guys talk about guns, like it's like really weirdly orgasmic. Like and it's just a gun.

Like, I don't even get that much side over sex. And so we used to joke about them being homosexuals. But I saw a lot of those white guys, white friends of mine, buy guns recently. And they weren't gun dudes. And the reason they bought guns is they're like, when the mom comes to my house, I got to be able to protect myself. And I'm like, yeah, what mob is that because it's black lives matter so it's black people clearly uh so you bought guns like seriously you did that yeah and i've been seeing that lately and now i see how the whole second amendment i just thought this was the whole second amendment, I just thought this was a whole second amendment, my right, my entitlement bullshit. But now I'm seeing how that's all mixed in with the whole

splooge of it all. Um, and holy shit. I mean, just power. It's really just to me, I just hear a theme of power through it all. Right. Exactly. And I think, well, and I think what we see in Christian nationalism is a, is a response to a threat to that power. So it is a, it is a way that a group of Americans are, are trying to unite together to fight against what they feel like is a threat to their power. So Trump says, I'll give it back to you. Like I will, I will, I will take that power. I will punch the bully. I will say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done. You won't have to get your hands dirty and I will do it for you. And I will take that power back and give it to you.

And this group of people is eating it up because they really do feel threatened. It's like white conservative Christian subculture feels like, you know what? There was a time when the nation was ours back when when it was our country, and we want it back. And so really, thus the title of the book. It's taking America back for God, but it really is about God is that dog whistle word, right? Like it's God is our culture, our way of life, our power. Wow, that's why we're the enemy as Democrats,

is because we're trying to hug everybody in kumbaya and they're like they i mean it's really obvious i've heard the gop people republicans and trumpers talk about it like we're going to be a minority soon because they keep letting in the immigrants and everyone keeps reading and you know they i think it's like 2050 we're supposed to be a minority of white people which is fine with me but you they're like, what are they going to do when they have power? And you're like, well, you guys maybe should quit being dicks. So they don't, maybe they'll forget. Yeah, so think about this.

A political scientist, I love this metaphor, this kind of slogan, but a political scientist named Paul Jupe said that Christian nationalists are kind of led by what he calls the inverted golden rule. And that is expect from others what you would do to them if you had the opportunity. And, you know, that's exactly what's going on, right? When you ask the question, hey, what are these immigrants going to do when we're the minority? It's like they expect from others what they would do if they had the chance, which oppress them restrict them expel them blew my mind with reality and logic and that's kind of what i mean that's exactly what uh you see going on you know that's and then the fear of that and

self-preservation one of the things that uh i've got a friend who's writing a lot of articles on fascism because he came from a fascist country, grew up under fascism. And he's screaming a lot about how we're moving to fascism. And he talks about the vote of the white evangelicals and the suburbanite women. And then, of course, the dissolution of the middle class and the decline of income and stuff. And a lot of it has to do with self-preservation like when you get down to self-preservation where it's like you and like you know not being preserved you're like fuck it although for the guy who's gonna who's gonna look after me what's

what's even scarier to me is trump has enriched the presidency like nothing else like we have no idea what this man has made off the president but it's in the billions between all the funding of campaign funds to his thing and he knows it he knows he's got the christians going look over there and then he's he's cleaning out the bank um my fear is and this came in the conversation i had with the author of Jesus and John Wayne, is they're willing to sacrifice the Constitution for Trump. They believe he'll bring them a God country. And I think what's going to happen is if he wins re-election anymore, he doesn't need those folks for re-election again.

He doesn't need them for anything. And if you're familiar with the story of Hitler's rise to power, he courted the church. That's how he siloed his power, by using the church and courting them. And then there was a time where once he got enough power, he goes, F you too. And I believe that if Trump wins-election he's going to turn on the church people who support him just like everybody else and he's going to go for ultimate fascist power yeah and yeah because he won't need them anymore like disregard that kind of thing and so i mean the the the things that he hinted at about uh maybe we delay like he tweeted like this

kind of maybe she would delay the election uh November. I mean, people should have been freaking out, right? Like when when he said that, because even to suggest such a thing means like, you know, he knows he's losing in the polls and he will not like I mean, can you imagine that guy going willingly? Like, can you imagine Trump like humbling himself hat in in hand, and saying, good race, Biden, you really won the day? Can you imagine him not going on TV or tweeting, it's a stolen election, you ought to be up in arms, it's all lies and robbery,

and he's going to try to whip up half the American population to try to yeah keep him in power i mean that that ought to terrify us and he will you know i don't think christians see it coming but he will betray them he's betrayed everybody else yeah i mean he's just he doesn't need them after the election he's just using them right now for the election and once he does that he's going to seize ultimate power and he's that, he's going to see his ultimate power and he's going to, and he's going to silo it. I mean, just, just watching his whole family do the banana Republic on the GOP dais. I was like, does the GOP not see what's coming there? I mean, he knows he's not going to live forever, but when you've seen him tweeting about how, you know, power 12 years, uh, from now he's just recently seen the chinese uh premier or who are their

leaders i forget his title but you've seen him take ultimate power for a lifetime appointment putin of course is doing the same thing i'm sure he's sitting around counting his numbers going yeah this works for me and being the malignant narcissist that he is it it goes against all of his narratives he's the best person in the world he's the best person in the world. He's the best president in the world. He's even said he's better than every president we've ever had. So it goes against his narrative of all that stuff. There's one last question

that I have for you. And it kind of falls back to where we were earlier in the show. We talked about how Christians will pick up on this conspiracy theories and all this sort of stuff. Yeah.

And they just seem to buy it all. One of the things that was interesting to me in the reflection of the election in 2016 was there was all these websites that tried to create this fake news. And we're talking like really fabricated fake news. And they tried it first with Democrats. It was kind of funny. They were run by Democrats who were trying to just make a buck. And so they tried making these fake websites that would just do, you know,

clickbait, which is big back then, still is, I guess. And Democrats wouldn't fall for it. They would always like double check their stats and the references and stuff. But then they flipped it to GOP people, and they ate it up. And they would never check the data. They would never fact-check anything. They just eat it up. A lot of, I guess, what you would call confirmation bias.

And to me, my opinion, and so I'm looking to be corrected if I'm wrong, my opinion has been, especially from being an atheist, is if I need you to believe, this is my opinion, if I need you to believe in a boogeyman on the bed, one of the 3,000 godsmen that's been in the world, or that there's a man up in the sky who happens to be an incredible sadist and destructive, mean, vicious, angry. He watches pedophiles, you know, fiddle children and goes,

okay, well, that's fine with me. Doesn't intervene anyway. He's a real sadistic sort of guy, especially in the Old Testament. But he loves you, as George Carlin would say. And so if I can get you to suspend belief in, in reality, right? Like if I, if I walk around and I tell you that I, I'm hearing voices and people are talking to me, you'll put me in a funny farm and, and have me tested for different things. Like the guy who wrote, uh, uh, the beautiful mind.

I forget the term of his. Yeah. I forget the term of what he had, I forget the term of what he had. But if I start telling you that I'm seeing people and they're talking to me and stuff, you'll put me in a funny form. But if I tell you that it's God, you'll be like, oh, that's fine.

And that's my opinion. That's my take on it. And so my belief has always been that the reason they buy all this stuff is because once I get used to the reality, I can get you to buy anything, really. But I get used to been reality, I can get to buy anything really. But I'm thinking more of what you're saying and what a lot of I've been reading and hearing is maybe it's more confirmation bias. Right.

It's really not, maybe they don't really believe some of that stuff, but it works for them. It builds on the belief and you go, ah, take some of that shit and put it on there and whatever whatever whatever helps us keep power and keep this little machine running that's right i think we would i would call that motivated reasoning so it's it's uh it's you know it's it's a bias like confirmation bias is a great way to say it but it's it's uh it's kind of um you know this is this is on my side you know these are this is my tribe. And so I'm more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt when it's something, I'm more likely to give information the benefit

of the doubt when it plays into the narrative that makes me feel good about my choices or my group or my tribe or that kind of thing. And so somebody like puts out some fake news propaganda about Biden or whoever I don't like. And I may even, I may even acknowledge in my brain that like, yeah, that's probably BS. That's probably not true, but it plants that seed of like, but I bet he could, I bet he would do something like that. Right. Like I bet, you know, I bet that's kind of not so far from the truth. And so it becomes kind of ammo for my bias to see the Democrats, the Republicans, or whoever, whatever group, as these evil, cartoonishly evil people on the basis of just kind of, yeah, fake news and misinformation. That's really interesting. Here's the thing that I get a little bit scared by as well. So this idea of misinformation, like Trump is a notorious liar and everybody just kind of acknowledges it.

Like he just lies all the time and nobody, you can't get in trouble for it. He just lies. And so he realized like nobody's going to slap me on the wrist and nobody cares. I feel like that is a tool of fascism. If you ever read a great, if you want to read a great book, Jason Stanley's book, how fascism works. He's a philosopher at Yale. It's a fantastic book and it's influenced me a lot. Um, but he, he writes like kind of this, uh, misinformation campaigns, the whole point of them isn't to say, uh, isn't for Trump to say I'm truthful and he's a liar. It's just, it's to get you to question everybody's truth, right? Like, and, trump to say i'm truthful and he's a liar it's just it's to get you to question

everybody's truth right like and and to say okay since everybody's lying i'm just going to go with my tribe i'm just going to go with power and so it's not about who's truthful it's not about evidence it's about everybody's lying now he's lying i'm lying but i'm on your team and so vote for me right and so don't question the narrative. And so I think that's kind of the whole point is like Trump with this kind of constant barrage and cascade of lies undercuts the entire democratic process by causing us to distrust the system. He's going to do it in November. He's going to question the validity of like mail-in ballots. He's going to question the validity of actual like voting machines if he loses and so that's what it's going to be when when he lost the popular vote

he was he was making up stories about millions and millions of people who were like just you know falsely voting and uh and which is there was no evidence of course but that's what he wants to do he wants to erode kind of our trust in the democratic democratic process through just a constant barrage of lies and misinformation. And it's easy to seize ultimate power if you do that. That's right. And you're right, I fear the same thing. But yeah, you've welcomed me to a few different new angles in looking at the perception. You know, even with Stalin, he used the church and the perception of,

there was kind of like this thing with Russia where whoever was the head of Russia was kind of an agent of the church sort of thing. Okay. And he used them until he didn't have to anymore. And, yeah, you see this with fascism, with every Hitler, Mussolini stalin all of that they use that you know once once you can kill lies once you can destroy the power of intellects the death of expertise um there you are and what's interesting to me is how social media is tied into this but that's a that's a whole other thing uh we you and i could probably go on for hours and i'd love this

conversation in fact we invited that gentleman on the thing. He has a email from me, so hopefully we'll get him on the show. Anything more we want to cover about your book here as we round out the show? You know, I, I,

I, we're, we're excited that it's, it's getting a lot of attention. And so we, we really feel like it's a great time for that to happen. And because we, we want to bring it to greater visibility before the election, because we feel like this is such a powerful force for, I think, just evil and anti-democratic politics in the United States.

And so we'd love to get the word out more. And, you know, and I appreciate you calling attention to it. I think one of the things that we really want to underscore in the book, though, is just how pervasive an ideology this is. Like I said earlier, over 50% of Americans would fall into this accommodator or ambassador category. And so it's not a small percentage of people who are friendly to this ideology. And so I don't think ambassadors of Christian nationalism are really worth persuading at this point. I think they're just kind of sold and they can do whatever they want to, or Trump could do whatever they want to, and they're still going to pull from. But I think this group we call accommodators, it's like a third of Americans who are kind of friendly to it, but they're not sold completely. I think they can be reasoned with. I think a guy

like Biden, who has some actual legitimate, like religious bona fides and can come across like a sane and safe person. I think we could try to reason with that crowd and say, you know what? This, you know, Trump's not the guy. Let's call it, if you, if you don't like Biden, let's call it a reset in 2024 and just start over. But Trump's not the guy, you know? Yeah. The moment of truth is what people decide in their hearts in that poll booth that's right or or here sending in their mail things but uh i don't know it's it's interesting to me one final question i have for you i i see p i've had a different conversation with people that they say

look i voted gop all my life, and I know Trump's so bad, I know he's awful, he's a horrible person, but I've never voted for Democrat. Are they really just saying to me that they are following those classes you're doing, and they're either working on unconscious bias, whether it really has nothing to do with the GOP, it's just that deep in their hearts, they really have these sort of racist or unconscious bias tendencies. I think that's possible. I think partisan tribalism,

once you start to, and this is why, like, as a sociologist, I don't identify with the political party, and I do that intentionally because I feel like once you start to identify with a group, then group psychology starts to kick in, and I start to defend, like a sports team. I start to defend my a group, then group psychology starts to kick in and I start to defend

like a sports team. I start to defend my team, right or wrong, good or bad. I'm a Cowboys fan. And so whether they suck, I'm just going to cheer for the Cowboys. And so when we do that to politics, then we start to internalize the values of those political parties without objective thought. And so I think folks who just say I'm a lifelong Republican, or a lifelong Democrat, frankly, really are putting themselves in danger of just being a pawn and not being an intelligent, informed citizen. I would encourage everybody to be an informed, conscientious citizen whose allegiance does not come cheap, right? You don't just give away your allegiance to a religious group or a political party or a tribe without really saying, okay,

what do you guys stand for? Do I believe that? And is that evidence-based? And how do I feel about that kind of thing? And so I would hope that your friend could be pushed to critically evaluate, okay, you're a lifelong Republican, but what does the Republican Party stand for right now behind Trump, with him as their leader? Is that what you want to sign on to? I mean, maybe they could change, but is that who you are right now? And I bet a lot of people look in the mirror and say, that's not me. Yeah, I'm starting to really think that it has more to do with their confirmation bias

and the hate that's deep in their hearts. It's interesting to me. I even had to start listening to what I was saying when I was thinking. One of the things I did when Trump was first elected is I'm like, you know what? I'm going to start walking around and look at faces because that's how we kind of work on a chromosomal DNA sort of level. We look at faces. We determine if we're in danger or not. And so I started looking at faces and then listen to the conversation I was having in my head.

And why are you having that conversation about that person? That's how is that logical to me? What you mentioned before too, comes down to the mob rule. To me, I look at tribalism as mobs or they can become mobs if they become unruly. And like what you said before, where they start believing conspiracy theories and whatever it is,

you're just like, well, that's the whip up of the mob. And when they want to go crazy, they go crazy. I love this discussion that I've had with you, Samuel. Give us some plugs so people can look you up on the internets, what dot coms to go to. Yeah, so I think the book is available on Amazon, Taking America Back for God. And follow me on Twitter at Sociofthesacred, S-O-C-O-F, the sacred, you know, so just short for Sociology of the Sacred. And that's basically where I

traffic. I'm not on Facebook. Twitter is where I do most of my exchanges. So I'd love to hear from anybody in the audience. That'd be great. Do you want to play your other books too? Yeah. So my previous books, one of them was about, and you might find this one interesting, Chris, because everybody does, was about pornography in the lives of conservative Christians. And that has actually become really relevant lately with Jerry Falwell Jr. and his fall from grace, basically acting out a porn scene, apparently with his wife and some other kind of, I guess, the pool guy. So it's called Addicted to Lust, Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants. And the book before that was about evangelicals and how they were involved in kind of global adoption, something called Growing God's Family.

And so, yeah, those are my pride and joy. Proud of them. So if anybody wants to look those up, available on Amazon as well. There you go. Addicted to, addicted to. Sorry, I'm a comedian. I can't pass that joke up, which is really interesting. I don't know if you talked about it, but here in Utah, we were one of the largest, not we, well, I don't know, maybe.

We were one of the largest consumers of porn on Pornhub. It was the number one state, yet it claims to be the most religious state. So you were just like, what's going on there, people? That's right. And if you actually look up, Google Trends allows you to look at what people are searching for by state. And consistently, when you say the word porn in Google or Google Trends, it'll show Utah as this big state where tons of hits are like porn, free porn, lesbian porn, all those kinds of things that all pops up in Utah.

What's interesting, I never looked it up other than I remember seeing the news article because it kind of hit a few years back, but someone told me that a lot of it is incest porn and brother-sister stuff, which is really weird. If you know about Mormons, you

understand what that story's about. So anyway, thanks for being on the show. I certainly appreciate it, Samuel. And you're welcome to come on at any time. We should have all of the great writers and authors that we're having and hearing from. I just appreciate the course of what you guys are trying to come out. I'm an atheist. I love my Christian brothers.

I see everyone as human beings. I want us all to get along and love each other. You can have your gods. You can have your religion. You can have your churches. I'm fine with it. Just, just keep it off my lawn and I'll stay off yours. I'm not going to knock on your door at, you know, Saturday mornings and go, have you heard about nothing?

I'd like to know more about nothing. So, you know, I leave you alone, you leave me alone. We all get along, you know, we all just try and we can argue about the semantics of politics aside from that. Go check it out. Taking America Back for God, Christian Nationalism in the United States. And I certainly appreciate my audience for tuning in. Go to thecvpn.com. Refer the show.

Give us some great referrals. Five stars if you would on iTunes. I certainly appreciate that. You can see the video version of this on youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button. Go to amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. You see all the wonderful books and authors that we have on the show, and you can buy them all at once too.

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