The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power. Butler reveals how evangelical racism, propelled by the benefits of whiteness, has since the nation's founding played a provocative role in severely fracturing the electorate. During the buildup to the Civil War, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism's racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.

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 chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast as always we've got an amazing author in the show someone i'm pretty excited to get on the show

because I was trying to get her on last year, and she was ignoring all my emails. No, she wasn't. She was so busy. She was on all the media, and we have today Anthea Butler. She is the Geraldine R. Siegel Professor in American Social Thought, Chair, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and the part I was trying to get to contributed to MSNBC as well. She's the amazing author of

the book, the two books that have come out, the 1619 Project that you have probably heard about. She was all over the news. That's why she wasn't returning my emails. She was busy doing all the news channels there on the TV. And we'll be talking about her book too, White Evangelical Racism,

The Politics of Morality in America. And we'll be talking about her book. Both those books came out, I believe, one is in March 2022, 2021, and one is, I think, in August of 2021. And then do you have a pending paperback coming out for that one? Not yet. Okay. But coming.

Not yet. We won't talk about it Not yet. Okay. But coming. Not yet. We won't talk about it just yet. Okay. Sounds good. Probably hit maybe some updates or something. Can you talk about that? Yeah, we can talk about it later. Secrets, secrets.

All right. So welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you coming on the show today. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. Oh, you can find me, first of all, on Twitter where I'm at most of the time at Anthea Butler. Just one big string of words. You can find me online at antheabutler.com. You can also find me on MSNBC as a contributor. I'm usually writing twice a month, if not more. It depends on anything crazy that happens in religion and politics and all of that kind of stuff. And you can look out for me in different spaces. I'm usually on Black News Channel. I'm on MSNBC occasionally. I pop up everywhere. All right. So what motivated you to write the book White Evangelical Racism? Is there something going on in America we don't know about? to your listeners, I started this book before one six. Okay. And I started it in part because I was an evangelical once I went to evangelical seminary. I know evangelicals pretty well.

And I was sort of kind of really appalled at where things were going, although I knew they were always there in this kind of a space that never got talked about. And I think for me, the book represents something that is really important for people to understand. That is all this talk about morality that evangelicals do is about a shield for racism and sexism and all the other kinds of things that they like to say that they don't promote, but they do because it helps them to stay in power and especially political power. And so I think that's what your listeners need to really understand and understand how that operates. And we've had a lot of great authors on the show who've educated us on the history of how Christianity or white Christianity has really

been overrun by this white nationalist sort of theme, extremist. But I think even in the core point of white religion, there's always been that sort of racist power sort of base. Is that correct? Yeah, that's true. And especially in the American context. I mean, when people look at the title of the book, I think they think, oh, this is just going to be a long op-ed. But I know it's more about 200 years plus of a history here in America where we've had

to deal with kind of racial struggles and right-wing Christianity and especially evangelicalism. Yeah. And I did not know, and this is something that was left out of my education when I was growing up, the whitewashing of our history, which is why CRT and other things are important. I did not know that there was a line from Martin Luther King, and I'm trying to Google here, it's not coming up, but it was the line that talked about how even on Sunday, we're not able to sit together. Yeah, I do know the line. I will paraphrase because every time on Sunday, we're not able to sit together. And I do know the line. I will paraphrase because every time for historians,

we have a bunch of things in our head. But the most segregated hour in America is on Sunday at 11 a.m. And that is between churches. And that's still true today, even whether the church is online or it's meeting in person. And I did not know there was this separation of the black and white churches. There really wasn't, I guess, a whole lot of black churches until about Martin Luther King's era. Well, actually, that's not true. We can talk about that in terms of the 1619 book.

But I think one of the things that people don't know and what people don't understand is how much evangelicals have really kept their churches segregated too and the reasons why. Yeah. I remember we had an author on the show that talked about it, and I pulled up the Google, and he talked about how they would segregate inside the white churches. And I pulled up a photo, and the first thing that came up was the Ku Klux Klan in the pews. And I was like, what the hell? Yeah. And I'm an atheist, so I don't really spend a lot of time the pews. And I was like, what the hell? And I'm an atheist, so I

don't really, I don't want to spend a lot of time around that stuff. And I was raised Mormon. Oh, really? That's a whole other set of racism over there. But fortunately, I got out of that pretty quick. And so what sort of things do you talk about in the book and try and highlight for people to understand what's going on with the evangelical racism? Yeah. Well, one of the things I try to highlight is this long history. So I start the book off talking about slavery and evangelicals' complicity in that. Evangelicals usually like to tell a story about themselves, that they were abolitionists, they were good missionaries. But there's another story to tell. And there's a story about how evangelicals were slaveholders, how we have a

denomination like the Southern Baptist Convention that was born in slavery and created because slaves, people wanted to keep being slaveholders, right? And that's how the Baptists split. I talk a lot about the lost cause morality of the Confederacy and how that has influenced evangelical thinking and thought and behavior. I talk about Billy Graham and his connections to politics and his wishy-washiness about race and interracial relations. I talk a lot about the 70s and Jerry Falwell and all those people and why, where we talk about abortion as being the singular issue for evangelicals. It really did not start off that way. The singular issue for evangelicals was that they wanted to keep less integrated schools or not integrate at all. And they were upset because integration was being forced upon them

and that schools like Bob Jones would lose their tax exempt status. And then I bring that up to the 21st century, where we talk a lot about George Bush and the ways in which he ran his campaign, where you think about him as being the quintessential evangelical president. But his campaign was run very racist. And there was a lot of racism after 9-11 for Muslims and people like that. And then with, of course, President Barack Obama and the virulent racism that came up through his campaign, through birtherism, all of that kind of stuff. Then we get the Tea Party and entrance of Donald Trump, and pretty much up to the beginning of Trump. I don't deal with Trump in the book in part because I think that most people could understand where evangelicals were after Donald Trump got into office. And so it's not about Trump necessarily. It's about all the racism and all

the history that leads up to Trump that makes it very easy to see why evangelicals would have voted for him. Yeah. Plus Trump's like five volumes of your second, third, fourth. It's a lot, right? There's a lot there. But it was really wild to me. I had never heard the term white nationalist up until Trump took office.

And I never really had put much into it until I woke up the next day, hung over and went, what the fuck just went on? And I started learning all these code words and terms and tropes. And I was learning a lot that this turns out white nationalism was just rebranding of the KKK, for those who aren't aware of that. They just made it a nicer sounding thing and made it less technically swastikas, I guess. And I also think also to help your listeners understand, I think when we talk about white nationalism, the way that white nationalism was spoken about before Trump was about people who were in Idaho and all these Aryan Nation and things like that, right? These were

a subset of things. And now when we have to talk about white nationalism, we also have to put in white Christian nationalism. And that's a little more difficult because you don't like to think about, at least from some people's perspectives, Christians being nationalism and especially white nationalists, but they can be and are. And I think one of the things that's important about my book is to really see this historical trajectory about why some evangelicals today are this historical trajectory about why some evangelicals today are embracing these ideas and why some evangelicals showed up on one six to take over the white house yeah i mean it and to see the confederate flag in the in the rotunda or there was the congressional area that would just floored me i was just like my god that thing didn't even get that close in

the civil war and here we are hundreds of years later we've had a lot of great authors on the show we've talked about everything and the basis for this country 450 years of christianity and pretty much right wing white religion stuff going back the original lie of the shining city on the hill you know what we did to the indians black people i mean it's just a horror show from one of the editor if you really get into the history of it and we have a lot of authors on the Hill, you know, what we did to the Indians, black people. I mean, it's just a horror show from one of the editor, if you really get into the history of it. And we had a lot of authors on the show that talked about his stuff. I think someone hooked me up with you, Kristen Cobes-Dumay. And then one thing that was interesting to me was Robert P. Jones came on and talked about his book

White Too Long. And it was interesting how much of the polling that he does of the white Christian base, how much of it is infected with the white nationalism. And then this kind of middle department that's just kind of like, nah, I'm doing what we want. We want power, but we're not really with them. But it will sleep with them. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's an alliance that needs to be made in order to maintain power. And this is what happens. I think one of the things

that people have to understand is that it's not just the average person in the pew, it's people with a lot of money fueling all of this stuff, whether that's on the Christian side or otherwise. And I think that's also a space in which people really need to be paying attention to coming forward to the 2022 election cycle and especially in 2024. Yeah. What's interesting is there seems to have been a lot of fallout of religion. White religion seems to be paying the price for getting in bed with Donald Trump. There seems to be a lot of people leaving it. There's a lot of the preachers that were in it that are now trying to talk people, hey, you need to get out of there. That's really interesting how that's kind of

turned on them. Yeah. I mean, I think what they didn't expect was that this proximity to power would also make them have proximity to the stench, right? And so you have to understand that you take on both. But now with all the book burnings and saying that you can't have this book or that book into the thing and, you know, how they want to control women's bodies and all of this stuff, it is power, but the power is also making them become a pariah class. And I think that this is the thing that evangelicals need to understand is that those who are leaving understand that they don't want to be those people in our nation, right? But the other people want to make the nation like the kind of pariah state they want to live in. And so we have governors like Greg Abbott or Ron DeSantis and others who are embracing these hardline Christian ideals in order to shore up their political base and maybe make a run in 2024. And I think

that's where you begin to see how people are going to line up and whether or not this attrition will still happen within evangelicalism or not. I want a theory by you about what I really feel is happening in America and our politics and stuff. You tell me if I'm all right. It's a theory. But really, we have two parties, and one party is steeped in white Christian nationalism. We're steeped in Betsy DeVos' Center for National Policy and what she wants. She wants basically a theocracy, but a white Christian theocracy. And that's a fight for power and white power that they've had for 450 years. That's where everyone's siding over there. And one of the fears that they have, and shame too comes from that fear, is, and I've seen

Republicans talk about this, is that they will say, we've been really bad jerks, let's put it that way, to minorities for 450 years. And we know that within, I think it's 10 or 20 years, we're going to be a minority. And we're scared crapless. We're ashamed of what we did. And we think that once they get into power, they're going to treat us as poorly as we treated them, which probably we got to comment, maybe. Or at least those people do. I'm on the good side. Don't take me.

But, you know, and I sit and look at that and I kind of laugh as a comedian. I just go, well, maybe you should treat people nicer. And then maybe they'll think of that. I don't know. It's a silly sort of thing. But it's the shame element, too, of that that they're dealing with. Yeah. I don't know that they deal much in shame anymore.

But I think what they do deal in is the realization that, as Adam Seward said in this really great article, the cruelty is the point. The cruelties that have been happening for the last 400 years, they're afraid that cruelty will be dealt upon them instead of the brown peoples of the world. And so that's where you get this problem about how do you think about what is supposed to happen. So I think for them, I think partly what you say is true. I think part of it is also the demographic change that bothers them so much, the demographic changes that make them feel that they will be out of power. It's not even a sense of do we care about these people? Do we care if they're going to get us? They care that they're not going to be in power. And that's a much bigger fear. I mean, to give an example, look at all the things that have been said about when Biden will make his choice for a Supreme Court nominee that he

says he's going to make an African-American woman. Right now, you had a man who's supposed to be over, I believe the Dean of Georgetown Law, say that, you know what, we don't want a Black woman. That's like a lesser kind of choice. And I'm like, dude, this is the quickest way to lose this job. Like, shut up. Okay. Like let the process go forward. But the fact that you could have, what is it? 100, 200 Supreme court judges, maybe like three or four women and, and one, two black men. And then like one black woman comes in and then this, the end of the world. I mean, that's the kind of fear we're talking about. The fear of losing complete and absolute power that they've had for all of this time. And to think that might just go away because you put two or three people who have melanin in their skin more than you do over in a position that you believe that you should have.

Yeah. And I'm pretty sure you're familiar with the Betsy DeVos and the National Center National Policy. They've been trying to run the the court for years and take it over and they've gotten really close they've gotten very close right now i mean we're going to be dealing with this for a long time to come but that's also part of the book which is this was the deal that evangelicals have made and with this alliance with the republican party the republican party is basically a theocratic party you cannot think of it as a political party anymore. It is a religious party, whether that religion is evangelicalism or basically for some political actors in republicanism right now, basically a conspiracy party or white nationalist party. I mean,

these are the parts where we have to really contend with the imbalance between our two political parties right now. Yeah. And to me, the Democrats, well, I mean, no party is perfect. The Democrats, they've realized that, okay, well, this is the future where things are coming. There's going to be more women, more minorities are going to rise and become a majority of the thing. So we've just got to embrace change. And so to me, that's like you say, it's about power. It's about who's going to be in power and who's going to extend power. And it's really just extraordinary watching them go on about having a black judge at SCOTUS. You see them whipping it up and it's a total racist trope, sort of signaling racism.

And people eat it up and you're just like, what the hell? It's not even signaling anymore. It's basically a bullhorn. Yeah, it's really insane It's not even signaling anymore. It's basically a bullhorn. Yeah. It's really insane. And I don't know. I had someone say to me that I grew up in the generation of, I remember when Eddie Glock Jr. came on, he took one look at me. I had a red hat on.

It was just a red hat. He's like, holy shit, what did I get into? I called into MAGA Central. I look like most of these people from there. I grew up seeing, going in the South and seeing segregated bathrooms and stuff, fountains. But does this generation just have to die off? Is that what has to happen? The people that have come from the 40s and 50s? Because the new generations, they don't embrace religion.

They don't embrace racism as much as. Well, I wish I could say it was true. I mean, I think part of it is, yes, some of these people are going to die off, but their grandkids are going to end up like them because of organizations like Turning Point USA, Campus Reform, and others that are basically conservative think tanks and proving grounds for young conservatives and young religious conservatives. And so the kinds of things you see happening on college campuses, I've been attacked. I'm on some kind of watch list that Charlie Kirk put together, which I think is hysterical. But a professor watch list, that's what it was.

Yeah, these kinds of things. And you should have some people come on and talk about this because I think this is a space in which it's not on the radar screen for some people, but it is a very big training ground for the next generation of young evangelical conservatives who believe that they have a purpose and they want to serve God. It's like, they don't do it the same way that those people who were born in the 30s, 40s, and 50s do it, but they definitely have the same kind of ideology. And so that's the point in which I think we will continue to have this kind of political tension in our country because of these kinds of issues in a younger generation.

Yeah. I think, didn't Turning Point lose its funding or kind of went off? Oh, the guy who was funding Turning Point, whose name is going to escape me right now, just passed away in the last year. But they are massive. And I'm telling you, it is a real world organization. So when Charlie Kirk says, I believe it was something he said about the Super Bowl and that how terrible it was and everything. And then Candace Owen, unfortunately, said that she liked the halftime. And I'm like, girl, you cannot say this. You are a black woman.

And I know you might like this rap music, but you better act like you hate this stuff or your gig is up. Yeah. In fact, I made a joke about Charlie Kirk. I think I said, I think Charlie got turned on by a 50 cents, you know, big muscular. I don't know what he got turned on by, but he seems to have, I mean, the things he said about sexuality, I think just are there and very much in line with how evangelicals would talk about sexuality. And I think that's really interesting for a very young man to say the kinds of really buttoned up puritanical things that he says.

In the closet. Excuse me. Sorry. Well, you know, I cannot speak on this. All I'm just going to say is I speak on what he says. And it sounds very 1950s to me. Yeah. It's just, I don't know.

I had the hardest time dealing with all of it. I mean, I thought we'd resolved a lot of this stuff during Obama, and we certainly woke all of it. I mean, I thought we'd resolved a lot of this stuff during Obama, and we certainly woke up to. And Trump really dug out the darkest elements of people. Trump was, I don't even want to say he dug it out. He just illuminated them. He put the light on it because he was that person, and he drew people to him that were like this. And I think if one of the things that I wish I could have dealt with more in the book i would say is the role of the tea party in all of this because everybody kept saying they wrote

all these articles and said the tea party is over these people have got i'm like oh no they went right to trump and they got bigger and they the tea party became maga and that's what he pulled on when he was doing birtherism and thinking about a run in 2012, and Franklin Graham was out there promoting birtherism like every day on all of the news shows and people were inviting him to speak. This was the genesis of all of that. And so Obama's presidency really, while it would have seemed on the outside that he was the person that was going to bring us into a new era in this country, it actually threw us back into the 19th century and the kinds of virulent racism that you saw right before and during and after the Civil War. Yeah, I don't think any president got as much hate mail or threats on his life. No.

I mean, the poor Secret Service was like overtime. And so let's talk a little bit about, do you talk about CRT in your book? No, I don't. Because, you know, the CRT thing came up really after, right at the end, I turned in the book. I would say it was August 20. The book was out in March of 2021. And this was the beginning of that conversation. So it didn't really come up. But what I will say about this conversation is this is, number one, agenda conversation that it has a history. Number two, none of these people know what critical race theory is.

OK, none of them. They've just decided that it's the teaching of race in any form. And so we don't want kids to learn about slavery or the proper way to learn about the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King has been reduced to kind of a caricature and that anybody who talks about anything that implicates America in some kind of racial activity, whether that's good or bad or indifferent, is teaching CRT. And so now what you see are these kind of witch hunt, and I have used that word, campaigns against teachers and others to say if they're going to teach this. And so one of the things that has been very interesting to me being an author in the 1619 book is that there's really nothing in the chapter I wrote about Black church that isn't known, that isn't just there.

Right. But I think that for many people, the shock of finding out that America has a really jaded history and a violent history about around race relations and slavery is too much for them to bear. I think about it this way. There was some kind of law that came up. It's not law yet, about basically not, we're hurting white people's feelings in Florida. And I'm like, what about everybody else's feelings? Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, who we just celebrated the internment degree yesterday, right? What about all these other people groups in America who have had lots of things happen to them? We don't even have to go to slavery. We could just go to like a whole other list of atrocities that have happened and immigrant

groups that have come into this country. And so my question is, it's like, what are you trying to do here? What are you trying to do here? This is like, you're trying to basically regulate thought regulate what people read regulate what they listen to and as a result we're going to have a nation of dumb people and we already got a lot of dumb people and i would like us not to be stupid yeah no yeah we've had a lot of great authors in the show and highlighted different histories parts of it that were never told or hidden like in fact one of the people who came up with the line,

all men are created equal or influence the line, was I believe a Civil War general who's black. And yeah. I was thinking about that guy, Thomas Jefferson, because I live in Philadelphia and down the road from me, you know. Pull up who the author was. It was a rewrite of the Revolutionary History. A rewrite of the Constitution. the Revolutionary War history.

Let me see if I can pull that up. It's not my – It was Liberty Suite, The Hidden History of the American Revolution by Woody Holton. He said that the origin of that line – Originated of that phrase that got into the Declaration. I don't know that actually, but I would not be surprised. And I think that one of the interesting things about this is that most people who are conservatives right now, where they have these ideas about the founders and the framers, they don't even know what they were deists. They don't know that they didn't really worship God.

They're just like, God's out here somewhere. We don't know if he's doing anything, but we don't care. And that they weren't really the kinds of Christians that they are. And I think that's the, for me, that's always the most important piece is to realize that all of the sacralization of America about being a Christian nation is so far from the truth. We're not, we've never been a Christian nation. We've been a nation that was founded so that you could come and worship the way you wanted to and whatever faith you wanted to.

It's not about this everything being Christianity. Yeah, yeah. And I'm all for that because I'm an atheist. Yeah. I think I said the Civil War and I meant the Revolutionary War. You meant Revolutionary, yeah. That probably threw you way off on there because that didn't make any sense. So let's talk about the 1619 book and get an understanding of what you guys wrote to there.

Yeah. Well, this came out of the project that nicole hannah jones did for the new york times a few years back that was sort of reframing the the way that america started with 1619 with the landing of slaves now as a historian i will tell you that i like the project if i were going to think about this in a broader way though i would say that when we're black people here even earlier than that, they came with slaves because they came with the Spaniards and they came in the 1500s. So that's a whole nother thing. If you know your history about Texas and California and Florida, you know that there were African

slaves that were on the shores of America that early. So that's number one. But be that as it may, the 1619 project in this iteration in book form has different chapters about it. And so I'm going to talk about my piece because this is important. And for a lot of people, this will scare them. But I start off this chapter talking about Jeremiah Wright and Jeremiah Wright's big problem during the Obama run for presidency when he said, God damn America. And I talk about this whole history of the Black church and African-Americans who've been religious contending with the role of what America says it has been for vis-a-vis what has actually happened to Black people. In other words,

to talk about religion and a democratic process for African-Americans in America. And that's what my chapter is about. And I think it's an important one because it helps people to understand this long arc of history that has been black people and especially there was fights in the original Congress for it over, should we abolish slavery or condemn slavery and what should we do? But I forget the line, but it basically refers to us as a nation that evolves or a nation that's never arriving. It's constantly in search of itself. Yes, exactly. And sadly, though, we seem to be repeating history. Yeah, yeah. And I think one of the things that all the people who are against the 1619 book don't realize, well, first of all, I think for some of them, it's just too thick for them to read, but maybe they could pick out a chapter or two and read something. It's not sacrilege to learn about what the experience of African-Americans have been in this country. You have historians

and sociologists and people who have many degrees writing in this book. We were fact-checked more than anybody has been fact-checked in my life. I will tell you that I worked on my chapter for a year. I had three fact-checkers. I worked with the editor of the New York Times Magazine and several other editors with it. I mean, I've never had my work checked out so much as I've had this particular 8500 word chapter. So I think on that alone, where I listened to all these people who are against the book or saying that they're going to ban it because it's about CRT, they just don't want to read history. And they don't want to know that history and the history that makes them feel good are the made up histories like people like David Barton and others who have made this glorious

history of America that doesn't have any black people in it. It has all white men in it. I mean, women or whatever, it's not, that's not the history you want to hear about. And I think that's the problem.

And they're not historians either. This is like the worst part of all. It's like, they haven't sat down to train to do any of this work that you have to do to get a master's or a PhD. These are just people who are grifted and that's the worst part. Yeah. The one,

I always say the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history and we're just doomed to repeat it. It's an age old adage for a reason. And until we sit down and understand everyone's experience in America, the white experience that we saw on John Wayne all the time, that's how I grew up watching John Wayne movies. And I didn't understand the nuance of it at the time, but God,

it was clearly there when I, when you look back on it, but to understand, to be able to empathize with, and then to be able to be educated enough to go, we really should stop that or, and, or not do that again.

Yeah. And until we cross that bridge, I don't know. What do you feel has to happen in America? Is there a breaking point? Studying of history, we've had people like Ruth Bengate on the show who talked about strongmen. We're really marching towards that right-wing authoritarian fascist line where it's takeover by violence. Yeah.

And we saw portions of that on January 6th and other places. But what do you think has to happen? What's the arc of the future of America if you were to put a bet on it? Dale? Wow, man, we have to really hit the wall. I mean, yeah, we got to hit the wall. I hate to say it, but, I mean, we're already close to the wall. I mean, there's probably already, depending on whose count you want to believe,

there's over a million people who have died of COVID, okay? We're going to have people who have, and I have to bring up COVID because we're in the midst of a pandemic and everybody wants to pretend like we're not. And the other part of this is that we're going to have people that have long COVID and it's going to severely affect how we run as a country here in the next few years. So that's number one. Number two is this specter of violence, gun violence, all of this. I'm living in Philadelphia right now. We've had nothing but carjackings and murders. They found a burnt

body that's literally maybe five miles from where I live now. And I'm just like, what is going on? And I think that the specter of violence, whether that's politicized violence, the violence of people who just feel like they can go up to you in a store

and take your mask off or tell you not to wear a mask or protest at school board meetings and yell at school board leaders. This incivility is going to cause us to go down. And I don't think, and this is the most important part, for all those people who say they want freedom, I don't think they understand what that really means, that they are living in a democracy currently. And that will swiftly go away if they continue to back people who want to do these kinds of theocratic ideals. They will find themselves in a position to where they're not going to like what's going on either. It doesn't matter whether they're liberal or conservative. They're not going to like the kinds of restraints that will be put on their lives. Yeah. And authoritarians and fascism is usually destroying economy.

The trains will still run on time. But I think that's what people are complaining about now. And they just have no idea how bad it's going to be. They don't. And they think it's bad now. But I'm like, oh, no, no. These people are not about fixing you. They're all about basically making you slaves to what they want and how their lives will

run, as opposed to how your life is supposed to get better. And I see this all the time. I've been reading a lot of these stories about people who have really bought into all this sort of disinformation about COVID and then the kids ended up with no parents or families being decimated and none of them have money. I'm just like, why aren't we telling people like, just get a vaccine so you don't have to spend thousands and up to a million or $2 on a hospital bill. That to me is like a very simple thing. I think if you just say it like that, just say your kids aren't going to be able to grow up without you if you die. And who knows what, if they're going to foster care or whatever, or what happens to your family if a spouse dies. And nobody thinks about this stuff.

And I think that this is where, this is why I say we're going to run into a wall because clearly we have like a nation full of people who don't want to face the realities of what can happen to them. Yeah. I mean, I watched the middle class decline all the way going back to Reagan and more and more as people get poor, they're more desperate. I mean, even now they're getting wage raises

for the first time in 40 years, but then rents are up 40%. I just read the other day or yesterday. And it's still just uncontrollable. I love capitalism, but it's really out of control. It's very much out of control. Yeah. And I mean, I'll be the first one in the Betsy DeVos,

Betsy DeVos, what are they called? The Uyghurs? The re-education camp. The re-education camp. I'll be in the Betsy DeVos re-education camp when the Constitution is replaced by the Bible, which is what they want. And people just don't realize how bad it's going to be. Like a lot of, I have a lot of friends that are Trumper dudes who are making money and they love the making money sort of thing. And they see that as the sort of ideal with Donald Trump, which is interesting because he's a fraud and some of their coaching is a fraud, but they don't realize. I'm like,

you guys are all going to be out of a job, man. It's going to be in red lines and God knows what else when you lose democracy, people don't realize how valuable this is. And it's really sad. So what are some things that you hope people come away with from white evangelical racism, your book? I hope that they come away with, first of all, that the moral arc of evangelicals has crashed and that they realize that this has been a political game all along and ever since Billy Graham, because as much as Billy Graham said he didn't want to be political, he's with every president he possibly could be until he can walk anymore. So that's number one. Number two, I hope they realize that if they are evangelical, that their history is steeped in

racism. And that is something that they will have to reckon with. Number three, that they realize that there's still a chance of they can jump off the train, but that the train is moving and the train is taking them over a cliff and that once you go over the cliff you can't come back yeah and i think that's the most important thing i have to say is that this marriage of evangelicals with the republican party has created a monster and that monster will eat you yeah and we'll all burn from it i mean i i always have a hard time with folks that are like well i'm not that party of the religious folks. I'm the good, the middle.

You're giving them money. You're feeding the system. I learned 30 years later after leaving the Mormon church when I was 16 that they were still using my name on their rolls to promote and stuff. And I called them up and said, get my name off your. It's very hard to get your name off the rolls, isn't it? It is. Yeah. You know who else does that too? Catholic Church.

Yeah. See, I couldn't be a Catholic either because of what's going on in their thing. And when I meet Catholic friends, I just kind of go, are you serious? Like you're still – As a baptized Catholic, I will tell you it is very difficult. And it's something I've written about a lot too. Yeah. I would be yelling.

I mean, I would be yelling and screaming. Oh, I've been yelling and screaming for a long time. There you go. I yelling and screaming oh i've been yelling for a long time there you go i mean i've been yelling screaming for a long time and i mean this one the pope benedict 16th the latest little thing we're going to take a little detour here the latest thing that he said he was so sorry about what happened in munich and how he didn't deal with everything he knows he's going to die soon this is now he's now starting to think about everything that he's done that he didn't do right about sex abuse and so i I'm like, this is where we have to look at all religion and say, and I say this not being an atheist, we have to look at religion and understand that it is a system just like

anything else. And systems can be bad and systems can be harmful to people. And we need to talk about that just as much as we talk about anything else about, about how that may go awry. Right. And yeah, all of them. Yeah.

I mean, history is hard to learn. It can be difficult. It can be painful. There can be shame. When I read Cast, it took me, I don't know, a month or two to read it. I had to sometimes pull over the car because I was listening on Audible. It was really hard to get through. It's really hard to go to the lynching museum down in, what is it, Alabama?

It's really hard to face these things. But until we can really face them, learn empathy for each other, care about one another, learn a history so that when we repeat it, it's never going to get resolved. Until, like you say, maybe we have to hit the wall or maybe we just get lucky. I don't know. We got really lucky on January 6th. Oh, you just don't even know how lucky. I don't know. We got really lucky on January 6th. We did. Oh, you just don't even know how lucky. I mean, it was very close.

And I think people don't really quite understand how close it was. And the Capitol officers that stood their ground and got beat up and experienced probably to this day PTSD because of it. We have to be grateful to them and all the people of the National Guard and everybody else who came in. But I have to say that to imagine people who said they loved this country smearing feces and urine all over the walls of where our lawmakers sit, I just don't understand how anybody could think that was God ordained. Yeah. My mom was a teacher for 20, 25 years or something. And she used to call me up and she goes, they're doubling our class sizes. They're not funding this. They're taking civics out.

And she goes, we're raising just more and more of the dumbest kids ever and uneducated. And these people don't understand civics. I had somebody the other day write me, write a comment on my thing. And they're like, the Bill of Rights is more, what is it, Amendment 2, the Second Amendment. The Bill of Rights is more important than the Constitution.

You're like, do you understand that the Bill of Rights can't stand with all the Constitution? I know. They don't understand that. And your mother was absolutely right. No civic education, no idea how the government runs. They just don't know. And I sat down like a year or two, and I'm like, you know, I'm going to really read the Constitution.

I was probably forced to read it in school. But I'm like, I'm going to really read it in the federalist papers. And I encourage anybody who's listening to really sit down and go through that document and just kind of really understand the value of it. I've defended myself in court over speeding tickets and defended my corporations over lawsuits or us suing people. And being able to say those words, the Constitution gives me the right to defend myself in a court of law, call witnesses, that is powerful. That is powerful. And you don't realize how valuable that is until you're in a jam or you need to call a certain witness and they won't do a thing. So it really is something.

Anything more you want to touch on before we go out? Yeah, I think the thing I want to touch on is just for people to really think this year about the role that religion is going to play in the election cycle. And I think this is something really important to watch about how evangelicals will be moving, how certain lawmakers are going to be making assertions and claims about religion that you should really listen to and especially pay attention to. I think on a worldwide level outside of America, what's going on right now in Ukraine and everything else is really important in this reason, because religion is playing a part in there too. I mean, if we start to think about how Putin has mobilized Orthodox Church in Russia to be behind him and all that, we have a problem. And this problem is worldwide. This problem of strong men and limited democracy because of hand in hand of politics and religion is going to be a very important theme from this year forward. And I think that's something that everybody needs to pay attention to besides buy my book and read it.

There you go. Buy the book and read it. Educate yourself. Learn from history. It's the most important thing to me. It's I don't want to say it's always beautiful, but there's things that you learn. There's lessons that you learn from history. And I think that's the beauty of it, that you learn and you go, wow, this is really good or this is really awful.

And we should never do this again. That was dumb. That was really bad. And then you learn empathy. You learn what other people are saying. And I think that's the one thing we're missing in today's world, a lot of empathy for each other, their experience. We have this narcissistic attitude of like, well, it's all about me and my experience. And so it's something that needs to happen.

Well, I'm glad we finally caught up to you. Yeah, I am too. And, yeah, so we'll look forward to having you on for the next book. That's right. Which I'm sure you're working on. And, yeah, it's just great. Give us your plugs so people can having you on for the next book. That's right. Which I'm sure you're working on. And yeah, it's just great. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the internet. First thing, you can find me on Twitter at Anthea Butler, all one word, antheabutler.com.

You can also find me on YouTube at Anthea Butler. I've got some clips up there and things people can see. You can write to me through my website. You will find me most every place. And I'm on MSNBC, writing for them an opinion column, usually twice or three times a month. You can also see me on Black News Channel every now and then. I'm actually going to be on tonight at six o'clock. So if you have that on your cable, I'll be on to talk about that as well. So thank you for having me, Chris. I really appreciate

being on the show. Thank you for coming on. It was a real honor. And I'm just glad we got you. And thanks to Kristen Kumei. I was talking real honor. And I'm just glad we got you. And thanks to Kristen. I was talking to her. I always send her like articles, you know, I'm like, Hey, do you see this one?

And I'm going to just have to stop doing it. Cause she's got like 50 million people who send her the same article, but we all trade stuff back and forth. And then like half the time I'll see an article. I'll be like, Hey, Kristen should see this. And I'll be like, Oh,

she's quoted it. Okay. She is. Thanks to her for having her on the show. Guys, go pick up the book. Learn about history. Teach your children about history. Teach your children about civics.

Her books are White Evangelical Racism, the Politics of Morality in America, and a contributor and co-author, I suppose, to the 1619 Project, a new origin story. Thanks, Madis, for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. See everything we're reading, reviewing over there. All of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. See the big 132,000 group on LinkedIn and our LinkedIn newsletter, which is killing it over there. The thing's crazy.

Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. Thanks.