The Current - Trump’s pitch to white Christian nationalists

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Donald Trump has suggested God has chosen him to lead the U.S., an idea that is striking a chord with white Christian nationalists. Author and religious scholar Bradley Onishi explains the role that group plays in shaping U.S. politics — and the looming election.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. As we've been hearing, in these final weeks of campaigning, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have been honing in on swing states, vying for every last vote. Throughout the campaign, they've made appeals to specific groups of voters, women, Latinos, black Americans, and young men, believing that they might help push their campaigns over the edge. For the Trump campaign, one group has stood out among the rest. Christians get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine.

You won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians. I'm a Christian. I love you. Get out. You gotta get out and vote. The former president has made a point of speaking to faith-based groups, and he suggested God played a role in saving him from a would-be assassin. I mean, the only thing I can think is that God loves our country, and he thinks we're going to bring our country back. He wants to bring it back. It's so bad right now, what's happening.

When you look at the crime, the horrible things that are happening inside our country, and it can be solved, it can be solved fairly quickly. It has to be God. I mean, how can you say it's luck? It's the only position where that bullet could have missed. That idea that Donald Trump has been chosen to lead his country back from the brink is one that has struck a chord with a particular group of Christians. Bradley Onishi is the author of Preparing for the War, the Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism. And what comes next? He is also a scholar of religion and a former evangelical Christian. Bradley Onishi, good morning. Good morning. Thanks for having me.

Bradley, who are white Christian nationalists? I think there's a misconception that white Christian nationalists are simply white evangelicals. And in fact, the category is much bigger than that. In my mind, if somebody says that they love America and they love God, that's not Christian nationalism. However, if they say, because I love God, I deserve more of America or I deserve more of the United States in terms of authority or power or privilege, now we are in the realm of Christian nationalism. Unfortunately, there are many white Christians in the United

States who adhere to this kind of worldview, and those include white evangelicals who score as Christian nationalists on high levels, but it also includes many Catholics, Pentecostals, Charismatics, and even some Latter-day Saints and other smaller Christian groups. Any idea how many of them there are? So we have data from PRRI, the Public Religions Research Initiative, from just last year that shows that anywhere between 25 to 30 percent of Americans believe that the United States federal government should declare this nation a Christian nation. When we break that down, we do have people of color mixed in to those categories, and we have to kind of take that into account. But if we talk about white Christian nationalists,

we're probably talking about anywhere from 15 to 17 percent of the country. This includes a large swath of the folks that Donald Trump often targets, and that's white evangelicals who score overwhelmingly high as Christian nationalists, anywhere between two-thirds and 80 percent. as Christian nationalists, anywhere between two-thirds and 80%. You write about how, in fact, it's more about a cultural identity or somehow protecting heritage than it is about a religious designation? I think there's a really good point to make here that not all Christian nationalists are those who attend mass or church or Bible study on a weekly basis. If you tell a story of the United States that says, this was founded as a

Christian nation, our founders intended it to be for Christians and by Christians, and therefore, not only in the past, but in the present, we should be a Christian nation. Well, that's a story I'm telling about my country. It's an identity that I can put on if I'm an insurance salesman in Omaha or a teacher in Pittsburgh. And so, whether or not I read the Bible daily may not matter as much as the story I'm telling about myself and the role I'm playing in a country that I'm proclaiming to anyone who will listen is a Christian country and therefore should have certain cultural mores and political contours. You know, Trump talks a lot about making America great again, about somehow

bringing the country back to what it once was. What was he referring to? What is this belief that white Christian nationals have? What has been eroded that they want to see return? We could talk about a history that goes back to the 1600s, and oftentimes you'll hear Christian nationalists talk about our founding. You'll hear them talk about the Puritans or the Massachusetts Bay Colony. You'll hear them talk about a city on a hill that was founded with a certain vision for a Christian nation. I think one of the more helpful modern periods is the 1960s. The 1960s in the United States is a time of great political and cultural change. The Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. We have

Supreme Court cases that make interracial marriage protected all over the country. We have sweeping immigration reform that changes how those coming from the African or Asian continents can think about migrating to the United States. It's a time of second wave feminism. The ERA is almost past. The Feminine Mystique is published in 1963. All of that to say, for many people, the 1960s represent a time when more folks were represented and gained rights in the United States. If you ask many Christian nationalists, they'll say the 1950s were, in fact, the time that were great, the time we should go back to, the time before all of that. And so the nostalgia politics is really for a time when white Christians were able to yield a kind of outsized political authority and privilege before these widespread movements for rights and representation by people of color, by women demanding autonomy and freedom and equal pay in the workplace, and by others asking for their share of the American dream.

Do you believe then that Trump is a white Christian nationalist or is he just pandering to what he knows they'll like in his messaging? Or is he just pandering to what he knows they'll like in his messaging? I think at this point, it's hard to disentangle those two. Because over the last decade, Trump has been so supported by white Christian nationalists that he now understands that this demographic is a core of his chance to get back to the White House. His campaign has played into the rhetoric that Donald Trump was created by God on the eighth day in order to be a protector and a commander and a father and a comforter. I think the better approach to all of this is to realize that going on a decade now, white Christian groups in this country, Pentecostals, Catholics, and evangelicals have thought of Donald Trump as a chosen one by God. And Donald Trump is not identifiable as an evangelical in any

real way. He's not identifiable as a Pentecostal or a Catholic. And because of that, he actually stands outside of those categories, and all three of those groups can say, he's our man, and it actually helps him. Is it why on January 6th, when they were taking the Capitol, that we saw so much religious symbols and flags and rhetoric that were being spewed that day. How important, how intertwined were those two things, what was happening and religion? They were very, very important and very intertwined. One of the things that I think is really important about the nostalgia politics, that since the 1960s, many Christian nationalists, many white Christians in the country have felt like their country has been, quote, stolen from them, that people who don't deserve it, people who have

pushed themselves into the front of the line, have now taken over the country. And the code words they use for this are globalists or Marxists or the woke left or the radical left. And so when Donald Trump proclaimed in 2020 that the election had been stolen. It resonated throughout half a century of belief that the country had been taken away, that the rightful heirs of the American founding were no longer in charge, that instead the newly immigrated, the non-Christian, the non-religious were now those making all the decisions. What that led to on January 6th was just an incredible manifestation of religious imagery and symbology. And of course, many people stopping at various times to pray. And if you listen to those prayers,

they really are a recitation of the kind of story that Christian nationalists tell about the country. We're here not as interlopers, we're here not as trespassers at our Capitol, but we're here to do God's work, to take back what is rightfully ours and rightfully His, to reinstall order and divine right in the United States. Of course, we're not doing anything criminal. Of course, we're not doing anything violent. We're here to do what a godly warrior would do. Those prayers are a recitation of the story they're living out, and they reinforce the group belief that they have permission to take this radical, unthinkable action at our nation's capital.

What's interesting in all of this, of course, is that you were once an evangelical person yourself, you had a prominent role in the church you belonged to, and you spend a great deal of time in the book trying to figure out if you would have been there on January 6th, and it seems as though you're trying to convince yourself that had you not gotten out, you would have made the right decision not to be there. Tell us a little bit about how you wrestled with that. I converted at age 14 from a largely non-religious home, and I was a minister by the time I was 18, and I was a full-time minister by the time I was 20. My young adult years were saturated by my evangelical faith. I gave everything I had to being what I thought was a faithful servant to God, and that included in politics. I used to

take literature and pamphlets to my public high school and tell people why abortion was wrong and try to convince them that they really needed to convert to Christ in order to enjoy an eternity in heaven and so on and so forth. When I watched January 6th, I thought back to that young man I was at 19 or 20, the one whose whole life was enveloped by this way of thinking. And it occurred to me that if someone at my church had approached me and said, hey, Brad, you know, on January 6th, there's a chance to stand up for God and for our country. We need men who are willing to make that sacrifice. Are you willing to do that? I'll buy you a plane ticket. Let's go. I think 19 or 20-year-old me might have said yes. You know, one's never sure. And that was hard to wrestle with as I watched what happened on January 6th. I learned later that there were people from my hometown and from my church who

were actually there. And so, it was not kind of a misguided instinct. There were, in fact, people who I once knew and once shared church space with at the riot. And were you to the point where what you believed religiously was tied to what you believed politically as we're describing today? you believed politically as we're describing today? 100%. So, in my mind, the key to the United States flourishing was for a Christian revival in our country. I would gather at my high school's flagpole every Friday to pray for our country and for our school because I thought that if people returned to God, then we would endure national

flourishing and a return to greatness. Why and how did you decide none of that was for you anymore? It was a process. One of the moments came in the 2004 election, John Kerry versus George W. Bush. I told some of the leaders at my church that I wanted to vote for John Kerry. I thought he was a more Christian candidate when it came to education and other things. And they kind of said, look, that's cute, but he's pro-choice. If you vote for him, you're voting for the murder of millions of babies. By that time, I was in my early 20s, and it occurred to me that this kind of binary thinking was probably not a way to approach the most fundamental political and ethical questions of our time. Another moment came a little bit earlier in 9-11,

political and ethical questions of our time. Another moment came a little bit earlier in 9-11, when the reactions to 9-11 on the part of my church were a desire really for retribution and for justice in the name of America. And it occurred to me at that time that the Christianity that I was practicing was as much an Americanism as anything else. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Why is abortion on the ladder of what's important to the Christian groups that we're talking about here today? Why is it on the highest rung? Why not poverty? Why not racial equity? Why not all the other things that we might mention? Well, abortion provides a uniquely potent political issue through which one can mobilize a wide array of conservative Christians. Catholics and evangelicals have been in what I would call a reproductive alliance that sees abortion as

murder, full stop. And when you explain that to the average person in the pews, look, you may not be into politics, but you know what? I know you care about dying babies. And if you vote for this party rather than that one, you vote for this candidate rather than that one, you vote for life. You vote for those evil, no good, godless people who want to murder millions of children to be out of power and for the right to life to win. person in the church pews, that for 50 or 60 years now, it has become one of the most prioritized issues across not only white evangelicalism, but also white Catholicism. You really look at the history behind this religious premise that life begins at conception, and that has changed over the years. We're there now in the religious group, it would seem, but we haven't always been there.

So, if we go back only to the 1960s, we do have a situation where about 90% of Baptists in the state of Texas believe that abortion is allowable under a Christian worldview in many cases. We have a situation where the leader of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and other Southern Baptist luminaries are saying that abortion is actually humane in many cases. We have a situation where if you go back to the 1950s, this is not a cut and dry issue. And the reason it's good to bring up is because the idea that life begins at conception and that a clump of a few cells is equal to a human person is not a unanimous belief by far in the history of the Christian tradition.

There are stalwarts like Augustine and Aquinas, there are modern thinkers who do not adhere to this idea by any means, and so it's in large part a modern mobilizing vehicle to convince conservative Christians that by voting against abortion in any case and voting for one political party, they are in fact voting the only Christian way possible. convince conservative Christians that by voting against abortion in any case and voting for one political party, they are in fact voting the only Christian way possible. But this bloc that we speak of, the white Christian nationalists, they don't necessarily see that, that it's a vehicle for votes, do they? They don't. And when I have written about this, I have gotten hundreds and hundreds of emails

saying, how dare you? I can't believe that you would suggest that there's somehow a more nuanced or complex history here. And so it's ingrained in this culture in a manner that is now incredibly hard to even nudge. I want to go back to that earlier clip from Donald Trump talking to conservative Christians, suggesting they, quote, won't have to vote anymore if they vote for him. Why do you think he'd say something like that in front of that crowd? vote anymore if they vote for him. Why do you think he'd say something like that in front of that crowd? This quote has been the subject of quite a bit of speculation and analysis. I think what's important to point out here is that he's telling them that they won't have to vote anymore, that for some reason in four years, there will be no need to have to worry about control or power or these efforts to maintain their representation by way

of Trump. So is this a slip of the tongue? Is this Donald Trump saying things that are nonsensical? Perhaps. But just like his quote about being a dictator for a day, we should take everything he says seriously because he's running to be president of the United States. We will and already have heard some murmurs about Donald Trump, 2028, a third term, a fourth term. For those of us who pay attention day in and day out to his rhetoric, this is really alarming because he's saying out loud what is often under the surface, that when he gets back into office, he may never want to leave. And we've already heard a push from theologians and pastors, from elected officials and others to say, you know, maybe we should do

away with that Roosevelt rule that president can only be in power for two terms. And maybe we should do away with this idea of constitutional checks and balances and so on and so forth. There is a surge in this country, unfortunately, where people are saying out loud that perhaps a democracy is not the solution, but rather the problem to our issues as a nation. And so maybe we should rethink that. And of course, that plays right into Donald Trump serving more than two terms as president. A lot of people are confused. If you're a Christian, why would you vote for a convicted felon?

Why would you vote for someone who's involved in extramarital affairs and even has been married several times, some will say that's not the right way to act as a Christian. How do you explain some of that? The most common way that this is explained is that Donald Trump is something like a Cyrus figure from the Hebrew Bible. And Cyrus was a king who helped the Israelites even though he was not one of them. And the way to interpret that for many in this camp is to say, well, sometimes God uses someone who is not necessarily holy or even part of our tribe, but nonetheless, they're chosen to help restore our nation, to help set things as they should be. So Donald Trump may not be perfect. He may have been married three times. He may have

had extramarital affairs. He may say things that are crude. Nonetheless, he is fighting for us, and he has promised to put the country back in order as it should be and to hurt and excise those enemies that we think are actually ruining the country. The book's name is Preparing for War. It's a pretty ominous title. What do you hope readers take away from that? Americans who have been preparing for war on their own country. They see their country as being stolen from them in the 1960s, and they vowed to take it back by any means possible. We've reached a point where our country has become less religious, has become more diverse, and has become one that has afforded more rights and representation to marginalized groups. And so the desperation to hold on to that power and privilege has only grown over time, and thus the realization that they are waging war against those who would fight for all of those things is becoming more and more apparent. So preparing for war is not a matter of a call to arms as much as it is to say, we need to realize the situation we're in before it's too late.

How are you feeling in these last three weeks before the election? I'm feeling nervous. I'm feeling a sense of dread, but I'm also hopeful. There is a broad coalition of Americans who realize the stakes of this election. The state of Georgia shattered its record for voting on the first day of the polls being opened earlier this week. We're seeing folks who are turning out because of issues like reproductive rights and abortion. We're seeing folks rally that have not done so over the last two presidential elections, whether it's humanists for Harris or evangelicals for Harris or any number of other groups, there is a broad coalition of Americans who understand that there is a lot at stake here. And no matter what happens, the world is going to be very different a month from now.

Bradley Onishi, thank you for speaking with us this morning. Thanks for having me. Bradley Onishi is the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.