Alison, Liz, and Rebecca interview Sarah Posner, author and interviewer. They discuss the evolution of the Christian right, debate how to talk about Christian Nationalism, and break down the sky high stakes of this year’s election.
Show Notes
Sarah’s new book: Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind
Anna Bower, Lawfare: “Will Georgia’s New Election Rules Allow Trump to Steal the Presidency?”
Catherine Joyce, Vanity Fair: “Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex"
Previous episode with interview of Christians Against Christian Nationalism’s Amanda Tyler
Rebecca Markert:
Welcome to We Dissent, the podcast with secular women attorneys discussing religious liberty issues in our federal and state courts, and our work to keep religion and government separate. I’m Rebecca Markert with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Liz Cavell:
And I’m Liz Cavell with the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Alison Gill:
And I’m Alison Gill with American Atheists.
We’re excited today to welcome to our podcast journalist and author Sarah Posner. Sarah has written about the Christian right and Christian nationalism for publications including The Guardian, the Nation, Salon, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the New Republic, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and the Washington Post. Also, Sarah is a columnist for MSNBC, which is where you can find a lot of her most recent articles. Her second book, Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump was published in 2020 and looks at the white Christian nationalist takeover of our democratic system. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Sarah Posner:
Thanks for having me.
Alison Gill:
Sarah, I’d love it if you could tell us a bit more about yourself and what motivates you in this work and in your writing. It’s a tremendous amount of work and it’s such an important issue.
Sarah Posner:
Well, journalism is a second career for me. Before becoming a journalist, I was a lawyer, although I did not work on any First Amendment issues, religion, separation of church and state or anything like that. But when I was in college, back longer ago than I care to admit on your podcast, I had done my senior thesis on the rise of the religious right. And so when I became tired of and disillusioned with being a lawyer, I decided to change careers. And that was in the middle or so of the first Bush administration when it was becoming pretty obvious that Bush was pretty close to the religious right and was bent on carrying out their agenda, including undermining church state separation. And so that was kind of my way into journalism to write about something that I had previously studied and knew something about and was newly relevant in that particular moment. And so as they say, the rest is history. That was 20 plus years ago, and here we are.
Alison Gill:
Amazing. Well, thank you for joining us. You’re such a wealth of knowledge on this topic and I’m excited. So why don’t we start with the election? I think it’s a good place. It’s just in a few weeks now. It seems to be all anyone is talking about these days, and we’re headed into a very consequential election with the understanding that all of our organizations are 501(c)(3)s, we’re nonprofit organizations and we can’t engage in electioneering or take positions for or against any candidate. I’d love to hear your perspective on what’s happening in this election, how it impacts the issues that we care about.
Sarah Posner:
Well, I think that this election is in many ways a referendum on Christian nationalism.
Because what we’ve seen in the past, say two to three years of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence is a further undermining of church state separation so that there’s not much left and a bolstering of Christian nationalist goals and ideals in cases like Dobbs obviously, but also in cases like 303 Creative, these cases are privileging the Christian nationalist ideas about the role of women, about how conservative Christians may or may not object to non-discrimination laws as they pertain to LGBTQ people. And so given that the two parties involved in the election have different points of view on these kinds of issues, and the Supreme Court has weighed in, and one of the other issues in the election is maybe a bit under the radar or a bit of a niche issue for people like us who follow these things pretty closely. But I think Supreme Court reform is also an issue in this election.
Alison Gill:
Absolutely.
Sarah Posner:
So these are the issues that really matter to people’s everyday lives. Will you be able to get the healthcare that you need? Will you be able to walk into the photographer’s storefront and ask them to photograph your wedding? Will your kid be forced to pray a Christian prayer at school, at football practice? At the football game? So I think these are the kinds of things that affect people’s everyday lives. And if they’re not at the forefront of people’s minds, I do think that’s a lot of these things, especially the abortion issue, are at the forefront of people’s minds.
Alison Gill:
We often joke that this podcast is brought to you by Supreme Court Reform because we talk about it almost every episode. So I appreciate you putting the plug in early. It’s so incredibly important.
Rebecca Markert:
It’s not just us talking about it.
Alison Gill:
No, exactly. I mean now we even have, president Biden has mentioned it at the beginning of the administration, if you remember, he created this commission to sort tuck it under the rug, right? And now he’s sort of talking about potential maybe not the best, but potential reforms himself. Anyway, Liz, I think you wanted to ask about Project 2025.
Liz Cavell:
Yeah, so Sarah, one of the things we try to do on this podcast because we’re all attorneys and we work on state church separation and secularism, but we’re trying to sort of draw the connection between strict state church separation and all of these other issues that we see coming under threat that may not necessarily strike people as a religion issue or a First Amendment issue, but that where we see the influence of Christian nationalism or Christian supremacy in policy really kind of taking away the rights of everyone else. And so you mentioned abortion, you mentioned the evisceration of our anti-discrimination laws. We can’t really talk about the issues at stake in the selection without talking about Project 2025. We did our last episode on a survey, a tour de force through Project 2025, and tried to really point out the through line of really Christian nationalist ideology that runs through the whole thing. So I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on Project 2025, kind of how it represents the threats that you’re talking about in terms of a referendum on Christian nationalism.
Sarah Posner:
So I know that there are other people who have particular focuses on Project 2025 who have looked at issues like national security or the environment or things like that. What I’m about to say is very much zeroed in on the issues that I write about and cover. And in that regard, I can say unequivocally that Project 2025 is a Christian nationalist document. It envisions a Christian nationalist agenda. And so let me back up a little bit and explain what I mean by that
Alison Gill:
Please.
Sarah Posner:
So Christian nationalists believe that God intended America to be a Christian nation, and that was founded as a Christian nation according to God’s directive or God’s mandate. And in their mind that Christian nation has been undermined by changes that pretty much started in the mid 20th century, increased secularization, invalidation of mandatory school prayer and Bible reading, Roe v. Wade, the Gay rights Movement, all of these things there. They think that this has undermined the Christian nation. Now they’ll call it the woke mind virus or gender ideology or whatever the term of the day is, but this is what they call it now. And so they believe that it’s their duty as Christians to take control of the government of the judiciary to ensure that our government is run according to a Christian or biblical worldview. Now, Project 2025 does not use that terminology exactly. It doesn’t say biblical worldview, but it does make reference to biblical marriage and it does discuss in the forward, that was written by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, whose book was endorsed by JD Vance.
He talks about this idea of a Christian nation or a Judeo-Christian nation where the primary tools of making a nation great is a family with a husband and a wife where they can engage in their life of devotion and spirituality as the primary driver of what makes a nation great. And the document is full of Christian nationalist directives on issues relating to family life, primarily your own personal autonomy and your family life that have been on the agenda list for the Christian right for decades. And many of them were attempted during the first Trump term. So we know that some of these political operatives have had a first run at trying to do this. Roger Severino, who’s a top official at the Heritage Foundation now, but was a political appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services during Trump’s first term. He wrote the section on the Department of Health and Human Services.
Now, HHS is an enormous federal bureaucracy that oversees just a variety of social services and public health initiatives. The Food and Drug Administration is part of it. The CDC is part of it. It does childcare and adoption. It does mental health and substance abuse programs, refugee resettlement. It has a broad portfolio. And in every of these areas, they have some ideas about how to ensure that woke ideology will be stripped away. So no more references to LGBTQ rights or no more references to abortion. These programs should implement ideas of theirs on issues like contraception and family life and what is the proper contraception. So for example, they propose in Project 2025 to ensure that faith-based organizations who get federal funding to dispense social services to people, that they will be protected if they discriminate against beneficiaries of the program based on their religious beliefs.
For example, another example is that they want to strip people of their employer provided health insurance for contraception coverage for contraception like IUDs and Plan B. That is based on a lie that is embedded in the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby, that those two methods of contraception are actually quote unquote abortifacients. They want to strip the Office of Refugee Resettlement Services from the ability to refer minors who come into that program. So these are refugees from other countries, many of whom have been sex trafficked, sexually assaulted. They want to strip the ability of the federal agency to refer these girls for abortion services if they’re pregnant. They want to ensure that deadbeat dads and their wives or ex-wives get lectures on the importance of marriage to family life. I could go on and on. It’s a very long laundry list of the things that the HHS oversees. They want to use the FDA to undo the drug approval for Mifipristone. Which is a commonly used and very safe and effective abortion medication. They want the Centers for Disease Control to promote fertility awareness-based methods of contraception over other methods of contraception. So, pejoratively known as the Rhythm method, but also a method that is preferred by conservative Catholics.
Alison Gill:
Like Severino.
Sarah Posner:
Like Severino himself, who don’t approve or agree with contraception. So they’re very clearly and deliberately laying out a very broad agenda to impose their beliefs about heteronormative, straight cisgender marriages and family abortion, contraception and LGBTQ rights on everybody else.
Rebecca Markert:
You had mentioned earlier that this has been something that’s been going on for decades. The Christian right has been working on this forever, it seems, and certainly in our last episode about Project 2025, we talked about how this was similar to a manuscript that was handed to President Ronald Reagan in his first administration that kind of outlined a lot of the same things and was really just a continuation of that work that had started over 40 years ago. So my question is, why do you think it’s seen this resurgence? Is it just because they didn’t accomplish everything in the first Trump administration? Do you think it has to do with the fact that now they have a soft place to land with the federal bench in the Supreme Court? Or are there other things that you see as why all of a sudden in 2024 they’re talking about this again and writing it down in this manner?
Sarah Posner:
Well, as you say, they’ve always written it down, but it’s never reached the level of public consciousness about it. And I think it’s because a lot of the ambitions laid out here are so extreme, and I think they’re so extreme because as you say, they’ve been given a little bit of a permission structure by the Supreme Court. So I think there’s two things happening, maybe three things happening here. One is that the Supreme Court has given them the ammunition, they’ve given them the ammunition in Hobby Lobby, they’ve given them the ammunition in Dobbs, they’ve given them the ammunition in 303 Creative and all those related cases like Masterpiece Cake Shop. And they’ve also, I think given them a bit of a permission, even though it’s not discussed that much in Project 2025, but just the overall view of a case like the Coach Kennedy case.
So just in all of those areas relating to religious freedom and church state separation and what that means in all of these different contexts, I feel like they feel like they have that permission structure.
Second, they also feel like they had a lot of unfinished business from the first Trump term. They think that he was the most pro-life president, the most religious freedom president ever. They say that about him. And so they hope that if they get another chance, maybe they can accomplish some of the things they were unable to accomplish in his first term or that have been undone by Biden. For example, the HHS rule prohibiting discrimination against trans people in healthcare. That was put in place by the Obama administration. The Trump administration reversed it, and then Biden reversed it again. They’d like to undo it again.
And then finally, I think that they are doing this with the full knowledge that all of these beliefs are incredibly unpopular. The polling on all of these things with the possible exception of trans women in school sports, all of these other things poll horribly for them. And also we’ve seen just Project 2025 polls horribly for them too. And so they are hoping that they will get another chance at an authoritarian power structure in the federal government to force these things to happen even if they have to and run laws, regulations, the administrative procedure act however they want to get it done.
Alison Gill:
That’s a really great point because most of the things you laid out as scary as they are, they can be done without passing any new laws. The vast majority of those things. And I think that’s worth noting. I’ll have to work a lot of administrative processes, but the courts aren’t going to enforce them. It’s going to be harder and harder to stop it, but they can do most of the things you talked about just now as far as health without passing any laws at all. Right.
Sarah Posner:
And I think some of the things, it was only because of people telling reporters or making it public that we even knew about it during Trump’s first term. So I’m thinking about the foster care placement agency in South Carolina that asked HHS for its own little exemption so that it would not have to place foster kids with same-sex couples or with non-Christian couples. And so they can do things like get the governor to write to someone at HHS on their behalf to undermine the federal non-discrimination rules that apply to foster care placement agencies that place kids under federal grants and federal programs. And so some of this stuff can happen totally behind the scenes and potentially people wouldn’t find out about them because HHS often deals with very vulnerable populations. And do you think that a 16-year-old who’s been sex trafficked and needs an abortion has some way of telling the public that HHS stopped her from getting an abortion? So there are a lot of areas in which it’s very concerning that there’s no public visibility on what they could be doing.
Alison Gill:
Especially like the flag you did about faith-based social services, which is an issue we’ve talked a lot before and how the government already allows these organizations to receive federal funding and discriminate in hiring. And that was based off some prior rulings that happened under the Bush administration. So that was really problematic. But you’re talking about something much worse, which is taking federal money and saying, I’m going to serve only those beneficiaries. Do you want to go to my soup kitchen and get food? Well, okay, here, you have to be baptized first. Right? I mean, there’s all sorts of things they could do that would just be really outrageous with our tax dollars. And if that’s the next step, I have to say we’re talking about an amount of money, which is incredible, like trillions of dollars. It’s very concerning to me.
Sarah Posner:
I mean, it’s very concerning on two levels. One is that this is every American’s tax dollars that are paying for this. And on another level, like I said, many of the people served by HHS funded programs are extremely vulnerable. They are poor, they are migrant, they are sexually abused, they have some kind of addiction issues. There’s just a whole panoply. That’s why they are engaging with these social services providers. And to put people like that in a position where you’re going to either give them a lecture on religion or proper family or marriage formation or require compliance with certain things, require compliance of them or require compliance of the social service organization that’s getting the federal funding to provide the services. This is some very dangerous territory in terms of people’s freedoms and liberties to access federally funded services without these kinds of strings attached.
Rebecca Markert:
So shifting gears a little bit, we know you wrote your second book prior to the 2020 election where it is still remarkably contentious to say that President Biden defeated Donald Trump and won the presidency. So our question is, were you surprised by the events that followed that election in November of 2020, and how likely do you think it is that we will see something similar no matter what the result is after this upcoming election?
Sarah Posner:
I was surprised by the events of January 6th. Yes. Even though I knew and was looking at in real time pro-Trump groups including religious organizations and religious leaders, Christian right leaders were agitating about election fraud and that the election had been stolen and so on. And maybe it was just my naivete, but as I watched that unfold, my television set on January 6th with people storming the capitol and beating police officers, I mean, I guess I wasn’t jaded enough to not be surprised by that. Now, I think that the Christian right very broadly, very much touted Trump stolen election lies. There were Christian right leaders who were involved in promoting, promoting those lies and promoting events like the Jericho marches, which claimed that they were going to unleash these prayer warriors that would result in God reversing the election and making Trump the rightful winner of the election.
As far as whether I think this is going to happen again, I think that we could see protests if Trump loses, I think we could see protests with a very Christian nationalist flavor. I’m not positive that they will be at the scale that they were in 2020, and I think as far as another January 6th with the violence and so forth, I also think that with Trump not being the incumbent, I think it would be a little bit harder to actually make that happen in the way that it happened. Not that there won’t, I fully expect there to be episodes of violence both in DC but maybe even more likely in states, in the States. But I do think it would be harder for him to pull off something on that scale just because he doesn’t have the incumbency. But unfortunately there are many Christian right, I don’t want to call them leaders, maybe antagonists who still very much believe the stolen election lie and are ready to perpetuate it again in 2024. I just don’t know. I can’t really predict what the scale of it would be or how it would interact or intersect with other sort of far right Proud Boy type, anti far right anti-government extremists doing similar things. So I guess what I’m saying is I anticipate something in terms of violence and protest will probably happen, whether it will coalesce like it did and beyond the scale that it was on January 6th, I just don’t know.
Rebecca Markert:
I– remembering back to January 6th, then seeing it unfold, sitting at my house watching it, I remember being struck by all of the religion that seemed to be part of it, seeing the Jesus sign, seeing, praying going on and all of the crosses and things like that. And I remember thinking, is this just because of the work that I do that I’m noticing all of this, or is this really shocking to everybody else? Is everybody else seeing what I’m also seeing? And I do think that there was so much shock about what happened on January 6th that I think everybody was surprised at the events and how they unfolded. And I would like to think that we couldn’t go back there again. I think I agree with you. I don’t know if that would happen in DC given the fact that he is not an incumbent, but I wonder if we will see them on smaller scales in the various states.
Sarah Posner:
I mean, I think that there are a lot of localized groups or provocateurs who could, even if it’s a small flare, it can be very dangerous because violence can escalate very easily. And yeah, I mean often the election denialism is fueled by the idea that God wanted Trump to win or it was God’s intention or God’s anointing on Trump and he had to win. And I think that that’s something, I mean, I think you and I, like Rebecca probably noticed a lot of the religious iconography at January 6th because of what we do. But I also feel like the Christian nationalist tenor of January 6th and the Christian nationalist actors who are part of the lead up to January 6th, especially the Jericho marches, I think that has been ignored far too much by the media and also regrettably by the January 6th committee, which did otherwise stellar work on what happened that day.
Alison Gill:
Well, there were certainly asks to get more of that in there, but that was something I think they were, I mean this is the problem with confronting white Christian nationalism is that a lot of leaders are afraid to talk about the Christian aspect of it. And it’s challenging and it’s kind of amazing to me. I see a lot of religious groups that are dealing with this Interfaith Alliance and Baptist Joint Committee more willing take this on because they see how it is antithetical to their own Christian beliefs, and this is an ideology. They can differentiate it from just an attack on religion. And sometimes people that are not as close to the issue can’t do that in the same ways. I dunno, does that make sense?
Sarah Posner:
Yes. But I also think that politicians tend to be nervous about being accused of being anti-religion or anti-Christian. And I think that is a lot of what held back the January 6th committee. Also, I wonder or suspect that kind of pushing that off to the side might’ve been a concession to keep the few Republicans involved in the January 6th committee on board. Because I think that somebody like Liz Cheney, for example, who is very anti-abortion, right? She’s somebody who praised the Dobbs decision when it came down, for example.
That she would’ve been hesitant or reticent to showcase the Christian nationalist aspect of January 6th out of fear that all Christians or all conservative Christians would be lumped in with the Christian nationalism of January 6th. And it is largely true that it wasn’t like you saw all evangelicals in America descend on Washington for January 6th, but white evangelicals are of all religious demographics, the likeliest to believe Trump’s stolen election lie and to continue to believe that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. So I think slicing and dicing all of this stuff when you’re trying to do a soundbite on TV or write a report for the public can get kind of complicated. So I think that those were a lot of the reasons why that got a little bit swept under the rug in terms of the January 6th Committee.
Alison Gill:
So speaking of denialism and what’s sort of fueling Sarah, there’s been a lot of election reforms. I think maybe election rigging is probably a better term than reform in a number of different swing states. And at the federal level, I think that the particular vice president issue that Trump hope to rely upon in 2020 has been sort of closed over the passed legislation to sort of deal with that for the most part. But there’s a lot of concerns. I’ve seen just recently several articles about state legislatures throwing out the vote and directing legislators to vote a particular way or other really anti-democratic scenarios that might play out. I’m curious about, have you been watching the states closely? What’s happening there and how likely is it that we might see some of this anti-democratic machinery actually come into play?
Sarah Posner:
Well, I am certainly not an expert on election law and haven’t been following. I mean, I think I’ve been reading probably a lot of the same news articles that you have. But in terms of being able to assess the likelihood of whether those schemes could or would work, I don’t think I’ve really got the knowledge for that.
Alison Gill:
Okay. Well, fair enough. Is there any of them that you’re particularly concerned about or that you’re watching closely?
Sarah Posner:
Well, I thought it was interesting. I saw something today from a tweet thread from Anna Bauer who writes, I think at Lawfare, one of those sites that covers legal issues. And she made it sound like it was highly unlikely that the changes made on that state election board in Georgia would actually result in any nefarious tinkering with the election results there. So I thought that was pretty reassuring. I mean, she gamed out different scenarios and for various reasons pretty much shot down almost all of them as being likely to happen.
Alison Gill:
We’ll have to link to that. I’ll have to read that one myself. I’m not familiar with it. But I’m curious, since 2020, how would you say that white Christian nationalism and associated movements have evolved? Has your view of the movement changed over time? I mean, has it looked different now than it did during January 6th or prior to that?
Sarah Posner:
So I think one of the biggest changes since 2020 is how prominent the so-called Rad Trad Catholics have become. So prior to Trump and the evolution of these Rad Trad Catholics, I think white evangelicals pretty much were driving the Christian nationalism as I defined it earlier in the program. They believe that in this David Barton founding myth of America, that God intended it to be Christian nation. The separation of church and state is a myth and they have to restore Christian American. It’s their duty to engage in spiritual warfare, political action to restore the Christian America that God intended. And I think the Rad Trads. So I would put JD Vance in this category. I would put Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation in this category. A lot of these increasingly prominent conservative Catholics who talk a little bit more in terms of heritage, they don’t really talk about it in exactly the same way as the white evangelicals do.
But I think that it’s giving Christian nationalism more broadly, different kinds of legs to stand on or different kinds of ideology to draw followers. So I don’t know exactly where that’s going because unlike white evangelicals where 80% of white evangelicals are Republicans and vote Republican in almost every election, more or less, plus or minus a few percentage points, whereas American Catholics are much more split partisan lines and much more split on issues like marriage equality and abortion. So it would be harder for a fringe movement within Catholicism to become the dominant force of Catholicism, the way that Republican evangelicalism has become that way. I guess what I’m saying is I feel like we’re in a moment of a little bit of a realignment of where the alliances are that I think is very interesting and also very alarming in a lot of ways because the right wing Catholics are, many of them are very extreme and many of them are converts and their ideology is unrecognizable to a lot of people who were raised Catholic. But I think that that is probably one of the most significant changes in Christian nationalism in the last few years.
Rebecca Markert:
I just want to jump in and ask, I did grow up Catholic and no longer religious, but maybe you could explain for our listeners what a Rad Trad Catholic is. I’m not sure I ever actually heard that term before.
Sarah Posner:
Okay. So Rad Trad Catholics refer to radical traditionalist Catholics.
And like I said, many of them like JD Vance, like Candace Owens, some other sort of very online influencer type people are adult converts to Catholicism. And so many people who grew up Catholic, even if they grew up during the period when the US Conference of Catholic bishops had become very right wing on issues like abortion and marriage equality and LGBTQ rights in general, they also knew Catholicism as a very helping immigrants helping the poor. So they thought of it not as just a singularly far right kind of ideology that was coming out of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. And I think particularly for people who grew up in an earlier time after Vatican Two that the Catholic church was to them had a social justice orientation. So the Rad Trads do not Pope Francis, so they think he’s like a woke, which obviously he is not.
But any little hint of empathy for gay people or any little hint of anything that deviates from just a hard right ideology they consider, and on other issues the way Pope Francis would just talk about immigrants and migrants in a much more welcoming and empathetic way. These are things that Rad Trads don’t like about Pope Francis. Some of the reasons why they call him woke. So for example, you have somebody like JD Vance who is again, an adult convert to this very sort of very online kind of person Catholicism, and he spread the lie that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating people’s pets. And the local Catholic conference in Springfield, Ohio put out a statement that was debunking it, pushing back on it, and very much defending the humanity of the Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio. So that you kind of see that split there. An article that I would very highly recommend to you and your listeners is in the current issue of Vanity Fair by Catherine Joyce, where she really dives into this whole world of these far right Catholics, many of whom have very online presences and I think are probably not very well known to people who aren’t super online, particularly on Twitter.
Alison Gill:
This is really fascinating, and I can tell that there’s at least some level of tension between these groups and even the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which as you said is very right wing compared to a lot of Catholics in the US. I think at the end of last year, the Pope recall day bishop in this country for making a lot of comments, and he was an extremely right wing bishop. So there’s definitely some pushback from the Catholic hierarchy on some of these positions, right?
Sarah Posner:
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, whatever the Catholic church’s position on some of these issues around abortion, contraception, queer rights is they have adhered to their belief in helping and welcoming immigrants and migrants, which is why Vance found himself at loggerheads. Not that he confronted them or anything, but his position was at loggerheads with the local Catholic bishops in Ohio.
Alison Gill:
Is this Rad Trad sort of group, is it the same thing– I’ve heard talk about Catholic Integralists?
Sarah Posner:
Yes, that is.
Alison Gill:
It’s the same sort of, because a sort of, I don’t know, philosophical sometimes have a legal philosophy that basically it’s kind of Catholic sharia in a way. It’s kind like that the Bible sort of defines how the government should be run. Is that a fair assessment?
Sarah Posner:
Well, I think that Catholic teaching should be the guide for how law and government are run. So I think that this right wing of American Catholicism is occupied by a big variety of types of people. So you might have somebody like Adrian Vermeule who’s a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School
Who is a Catholic integralist, but is somebody who publishes law review articles and teaches law at the most prestigious law school in the country, and then somebody like Candace Owens who’s basically an online troll with a podcast. And so the Catholic right does occupy a lot of different spaces in our discourse, and I think that’s another thing that makes it pretty interesting because I think this is a result of Catholics having a kind of more intellectual wing than evangelicals did when they were getting involved in politics. And so that’s why you have trolls and intellectuals maybe not sharing the exact same ideology, but also being both being part of the Catholic right.
Alison Gill:
But the evangelical wing of this whole movement is still out there and still very involved. Has there been any sort of change in the level of support for Christian nationalism more broadly? Has there been any sort of pullback? I’m curious about what’s going on there.
Sarah Posner:
So, I think that there are two ways of thinking about Christian nationalists, like the Evangelical wing of Christian nationalists. One is the very sort of inside the belt way, organizations like Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, and the Susan B. Anthony List, which is primarily focused on abortion. And those are run by people who are very attuned to what’s going on on Capitol Hill. What pieces of legislation are coming forward? What’s the amendment that we want to press legislators to add? They’re very enmeshed in all of that, and they’re very committed to being very intertwined in policymaking, litigation, that sort of thing. I would put Alliance Defending Freedom in that category too. So they’re very involved in litigation, and then you have another wing of it, which is pretty much more like evangelists and musicians like Sean Feucht, he’s very much involved in having these rallies, these music rallies where he talks about elections being stolen and things like that. And you have a lot of televangelists, someone like Paula White who sort of touch on policy but seem much more enmeshed in evangelizing or in some cases trolling or just being very online. So there are those two kind of wings. I think that the former still sees themselves as having a lot of influence on Trump, even though they’ve been extremely upset, or at least that’s their public persona, that they’re upset that he has tried to moderate on abortion, even though it’s just an act in a show for him.
And so I have a feeling that it’s a little bit of an act in a show for them so that they can show their base that there really are committed to a national abortion ban. So if he says, I won’t sign a national abortion ban, and they say, you must. And so everybody’s signaling to each other into the base that everybody’s still for a national abortion ban. So I don’t see a ton of agitating still among this group. I don’t see a lot of re-litigating the 2020 election in this group.
However, you do see a lot of discussion of what they call election integrity, so that’s the term they use for expressing concern that there might be irregularities in the upcoming election. And in the other group, you tend to see more ongoing deification of Trump and that sort of thing. So yeah, I’ll leave it at that.
Alison Gill:
So let’s talk about the funders of the Christian Nationalist movement. I think that’s such an important issue. We’re all kind of small groups that are opposed to this agenda. I work with groups like across movements and repro and LGBTQ, and we all feel constantly outspent by the other side. I think there’s a lot of basis in reality to that feeling as well. It’s remarkable how much money flows into that movement. I read an article about Leonard Leo today was $1.6 billion, and we’re just throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into different places each year. It’s really incredible. Where does this money all come from? I think it’s known that there’s been sort of an alliance between libertarian capitalists who want to deregulate. Is that still what’s happening these days or is it changed? I’m curious about what your thoughts are in terms of the money situation.
Sarah Posner:
I think that, I mean, the one group whose money I’ve looked the closest at, and it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done that, is Alliance Defending Freedom because they have such an enormous budget. I think when I last wrote about them, which is a few years ago, they had an $80 million, a hundred million dollars a year budget. It’s just like a eye boggling amount of money, which does enable them to hire a lot of lawyers and litigate a lot of cases and litigate a lot of cases that don’t go anywhere. But I think definitely send certain messages or intimidate in a way. But I think that a lot of these organizations do get funding from individual donors. A lot of them get funding from high wealth individuals who are Evangelical or Catholic and believe in their mission and either give it out of their own pocket, but more likely have a charitable foundation that they give through.
And then there’s that donor advised fund organization, the National Christian Foundation, which enables people who donate to these organizations to hide the fact that they were the donor. So they give the money to the National Christian Foundation, and then the National Christian Foundation gives it to the organization. So it allows the donor to mask the fact that they have given. And so in a lot of ways, there still is not very much transparency about, I mean, obviously there’s individual donors. The nonprofit is not required to divulge the identity of individual donors and shouldn’t, but even high value foundations can funnel money through the National Christian Foundation.
Alison Gill:
I think there’s been some core decisions that have allowed them to sort of have a greater level of secrecy as well when it comes to donors, I believe. And isn’t it true that ADF is registered as a church too, so they don’t have to report to the IRS, or is that–
Sarah Posner:
No, I think that was Family Research Council that changed their designation.
Alison Gill:
I wasn’t sure
Sarah Posner:
Yeah, no, I don’t think ADF has. I mean, I think it would be really tough for them to, I mean, I think it’s tough for Family Research Council to argue that, but even tougher for ADF. I mean, they go to court all the time. I mean, that seems a little, a bit of a stretch.
Liz Cavell:
So talking about white Christian nationalism becoming mainstreamed and normalized in a lot of ways, mostly by lawmakers. Lawmakers now are sort of wearing their Christian nationalism identity as a badge of honor like Marjorie Taylor Greene, right? They’re openly identifying this way. It’s kind of a double-edged sword, right? We’ve gotten a lot more visibility and alarm around Christian nationalism, I think especially post-Dobbs, and with Project 2025 becoming visible, which is good, but also we have lawmakers openly embracing the label. So how do you think about conveying the danger of the ideology and the harm that it’s causing to our country? Because obviously in the end, it’s a political ideology. It’s not just Christians who are nationalists. It’s a really harmful political ideology, and how do we keep that danger kind of salient?
Sarah Posner:
I think that if you poll people on what they think of various aspects of Christian nationalism, and when you poll people on Project 2025, which as we discussed is a Christian nationalist document, those ideas are all incredibly unpopular. And so I think people need to be better educated about why it is that we are basically undergoing a tyranny by a minority in this country. So you have white evangelicals, they’re about 15% of the population, but they play a way outsized role in our politics. The Supreme Court is dominated by conservative Catholics with hard right beliefs on issues like marriage equality, contraception, and abortion that diverge from the majority of Americans. I don’t know what your average American thinks about, well, I oppose abortion bans, but how did we end up with all these abortion bans and how did we get here and how did the Supreme Court become this way?
And why do small red states have the same representation in the Senate that large blue states do? And gerrymandering? A lot of it is that, but also the Christian right has been very deliberate about recruiting candidates to run for office who are right in the mainstream of their views, but that means they’re way outside the mainstream of American views. And so there are some structural and strategic reasons why we’re here. A lot of it has to do with organizing, getting out the vote, the culture around reinforcing Christian nationalism inside Christian nationalist communities. That doesn’t happen in other kinds of communities. So there’s a lot at work here. And I think that there’s been a lot of progress made in terms of educating people about the dangers of Christian nationalism. I was shocked a few months ago to see a big article about it in People Magazine. So it’s becoming a lot more mainstream to talk about the dangers of Christian nationalism. But I think we still have a long way to go and explaining to people, how did we get here where this minority view is dominating law and policy.
Alison Gill:
That’s a really great point. But it’s concerning because people don’t, I mean, civics education as country is already not good. And so a lot of folks don’t understand how basic democracy functions. So a lot of people don’t know a lot about civics is my point. And this is a very nuanced area of civics. I mean, they hear from other people all the time, well, the reasons you’re having these issues, they’re not being solved. Is this, it’s because of immigrants, it’s because of capitalism, it’s because of this. But we’re saying in part the same thing like, oh, the reason democracy is not functioning is because of this authoritarian ideology that’s taking advantage of it, which I think is a hundred percent accurate. But how does that compete, especially in a media landscape full of bubbles where no one’s actually hearing the truth?
Sarah Posner:
No, I mean, I don’t have any easy answers to be perfectly honest with you. I guess what I’m trying to express is that we’ve come some distance, some good distance in educating people about Christian nationalism, and that maybe it doesn’t require a ton of in the weeds explanation about how the electoral college works and that sort of thing. But when you explain to people that a few like Leonard Leo has a billion and a half dollars to run a campaign to stack our courts with ideologues who 60-70% of Americans disagree with, I think that it’s a digestible little bite that seems wrong to people.
Alison Gill:
That’s a great point. Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah Posner:
I think if you frame it in terms of what’s fair, does that seem right to you? Because I think one of the ways that the Christian right has succeeded in convincing its followers that the left is out to get them, or the left is anti-Christian, is by giving them these very sort of easy to digest, well, this gay couple might make you bake a cake for them. Isn’t that the worst thing that could ever happen? And I’m not saying that the two explanations are symmetrical or parallel to each other. I’m just saying that there’s a way of doing it where you don’t necessarily have to explain gerrymandering to someone.
Alison Gill:
No, that’s a good point. And actually thinking of an example from your book that occurred to me was where you talked about the HERO, the Houston Equal Rights Amendment, which basically a non-discrimination law that the right got repealed in Houston. And around the legal fight for this ordinance, there was this whole situation where the city’s attorneys, for various reasons ended up subpoenaing various different churches. And I was working at the Human Rights Campaign at the time, so I remember this when it was going on, and I thought, uh oh, this is going to be problematic. And it was very problematic because the righteous sort of branded this is, there’s non-discrimination laws, now they’re attacking Christians in our churches, I mean, it was just such a misstep.
Sarah Posner:
Well, it had to do with whether they had collected sufficient signatures to get a repeal referendum on the ballot. So it wasn’t necessarily attacking churches, but of course, it was very predictable that it would be perceived that way. But there was another piece of the HERO saga that’s also very instructive, and that is that the opponents of it knew that the LGB of the non-discrimination ordinance was very popular with Houstonians and that they thought they could really go after the T part to get people to turn people away from it. So they ran the repeal referendum entirely on the idea that it was going to allow men to go into women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, women’s and girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms. So they zeroed in on that. They didn’t try to make it about a lot of things. They made it about one thing that they knew would really trigger their base, and maybe there’s something to that, in that. I mean, they did that with very mal intent against trans people, but maybe there is something to a more narrow focus. I don’t know.
Alison Gill:
It’s amazing. That was one of the first major parts where they took that messaging and actually actively weaponized it and used it. And here we are 10 years later where that’s the whole theme of some of the political campaigns we’re seeing for this election, trans people. It’s amazing to me also because it’s just not that salient to voters. I mean, I know that there’s a lot of focus on it, but voters just don’t, I mean, most voters have never met a trans person.
Sarah Posner:
Or if they have, they know that the trans person hasn’t ruined their life.
Alison Gill:
Right, exactly. So it’s, anyway, really interesting stuff.
So talking about Christian nationalism, and you talked about this a little bit saying that it’s talking about a small percentage of the population that actively believes these things. There’s been some research by Andrew Whitehead and others that say, over time, Christian nationalist beliefs are decreasing, shrinking among the American population, and yet it feels like they have more of a hold on political power than ever. And I’ve drawn the connection before to schools like that. They’re trying to sort of inculcate these beliefs in younger generations trying to stop this demographic slide. Do you think that’s a fair assessment? And as you think these efforts to reach young people, is it having an impact? Is it working?
Sarah Posner:
Christian nationalist effort to reach young people?
Alison Gill:
Yeah. Yeah. Christian nationalist efforts to sort of insert in God we trust into every schools, and now they’re focused on–
Sarah Posner:
Like in Louisiana?
Alison Gill:
Yes.
Sarah Posner:
With the Ten Commandments.
Alison Gill:
The Ten Commandments, exactly. And now they want school chaplains in different states. And just recently there’s been this big push to get, what’s it, Lifewise Academy and release time is the next big push we’re seeing in different states around the country, these efforts over and over and over again pushing religion into schools.
Sarah Posner:
Well, yes. I mean, obviously when you’re dealing with elementary age kids, I don’t know, are they persuadable on this stuff? I mean, I don’t know enough about how that might work in practice in terms of that, but I do know that white evangelicals are a shrinking part of the population, especially among that 18 to 29-year-old age group. And it’s largely because they’re shrinking percentage because white people and Christian people are a shrinking percentage of the younger generation. So it’s more secular and more non-white so that would mean that math. I didn’t explain that well, but anyway, you get what I’m saying.
So I think that for the entire time I’ve been writing about the Christian, they’re always in a panic about the younger generation, but the younger generation is leaving the church and what can we do? They’re getting sucked into the woke mind virus, et cetera, et cetera. So I feel like that this is a episodic panic that they have, and I don’t feel like they, in the 20 years that I’ve been reporting on the Christian that they’ve had huge success in trying to keep the young people in. So I’m not really sure where they’re headed with that entire project. But the fact remains that for people who do grow up in evangelical communities and whose parents send them to Christian school or homeschool them or whatever, that it is a very difficult journey to extricate yourself from that. So even if they’re not being successful in drawing new people, in the people who are in it, and in many cases a rough time, you know, psychologically getting out.
Liz Cavell:
I just want to point out too, as we’re talking about white Christian nationalism, but also talking about just the decline of Protestant Christianity writ large, when we talked to Baptist Joint Committees, Amanda Tyler, about Christians working against Christian nationalism, I think she’ll often be kind of beating the drum of the idea that Christian nationalism is not necessarily a theology. I don’t have the statistics in front of me. There’s not a perfect overlap between actual practicing Christianity, how often you go to church or how observant you are as a Christian, and likelihood of belief in the Christian nationalist political ideology. Those things are overlapping a lot, but it’s not necessarily enough to just bring some fifth graders into your youth group and assume that you’re going to have a white Christian nationalist warrior in your army.
There’s a lot going on there between just growing the ranks of Christian believers versus growing the political ideology that is white Christian nationalism, which as you pointed out before, Sarah, is just as a political ideology, extremely unpopular. I was just hearing this morning on another podcast about there was one of those polls recently that does favorable unfavorable on all the candidates, and then all a whole slew of things like how favorable is capitalism and communism and Project 2025 polls as the least popular thing–
Sarah Posner:
Least popular thing in the country
Liz Cavell:
Down there with communism and stuff like that.
Sarah Posner:
No, I think communism or I think I saw the poll you’re talking about, I think socialism and or communism polled better than Project 2025.
Alison Gill:
Wow.
Sarah Posner:
It really blows their theory that their views are very popular,
Liz Cavell:
But people want this.
Sarah Posner:
Yes, exactly.
Liz Cavell:
And really that’s just really a stand in for what the Christian nationalist political philosophy has to offer. And so it’s not popular. It’s not as popular even as Christianity in terms of what will grow the Christian nationalist political movement versus the ranks of Christians.
Sarah Posner:
I disagree that Christian nationalism is just a political ideology. I do think Christian nationalism is a kind of Christianity. Just because we don’t like it doesn’t mean that, and I get what Christians like Amanda Tyler are saying that Christian nationalism isn’t Christianity or is contrary to Christianity. But my view is that there’s lots of permutations of different kinds of religions, and just because one is extreme doesn’t mean it’s not religion. And so, obviously all religion is some kind of political ideology.
Alison Gill:
That’s true.
Sarah Posner:
I mean, that’s not to disagree with you in the main that it’s unpopular. I totally agree with you that it’s unpopular, but I do get a bee in my bonnet a little bit when people say it’s not Christianity.
Liz Cavell:
I think that’s right, because essential to it as a political philosophy is a view is a Christian worldview that is this dominionist, it’s a war framing. It’s a good versus evil religious battle. And of course, there’s a political dimension to it that is beyond just I think what every Christian would adhere to. But of course, religion, Christianity is an essential part of what’s going on.
Alison Gill:
Can I push back on that a little bit actually? Because I mean, Dennis Prager is a Christian nationalist, right? He’s Jewish. Chris Rufo an atheist is, I think he is a Christian nationalist. I mean, you can have any religious beliefs and be committed to these sets of ideals around Christian nationalism. So I’m not sure.
Sarah Posner:
Okay. But I do think that Christian nationalism is a kind of Christianity that it has people who are not Christian who are adhering to it, would be say, comparable to an evangelical who, not to get into another hot button issue, but an evangelical who supports Israeli settlements in the West Bank. So just because somebody outside the religion also supports it doesn’t mean that it’s not Christianity. Christian nationalism.
Liz Cavell:
How much are we talking about the label? Right. Alison, you might, Prager might say he’s a Judeo-Christian nationalist, right? We’re talking about–
Sarah Posner:
I think he probably would say that.
Liz Cavell:
Yeah. You know what I mean?
Sarah Posner:
Yeah. It’s forming alliances towards a certain end. But I also wanted to mention this book that I read probably 10, 15 years ago that really opened my eyes to how certain ideas get reinforced in evangelical communities was by a sociologist named Lydia Bean, and I think was the title was The Formation of Evangelical Political Identity (note: the title is The Politics of Evangelical Identity) or something like that. But she compared evangelicals in the United States and Canada. And what was really interesting was how, not just in church, but in Bible study on Wednesday night or other church connected, but not sitting in the sanctuary type activities, just continually reinforce the idea that to be a true Christian, you need to be anti-abortion or to be a true Christian, that you have to be this or that be that. And because many evangelical communities are insular in the sense that you have church, but then you also have Wednesday night Bible study, and then you also have protesting at the abortion clinic on Saturday and other connected activities that these ideas about what makes you a good Christian and what makes you a good American get to continually reinforced.
So she points out that in Canada, evangelicals are not anti-abortion, just not, maybe some of them are, but it didn’t become a thing like it did in the United States, and it was like this sociology study of how that happens. And so to your point of putting the Ten Commandments in all the public schools in Louisiana, does that have a sufficient reinforcement effect of like, okay, so you’re going to go to school every day and the Ten Commandments are up on the wall, but unless the teacher is continually talking about it, which I guess could happen, but unless that’s happening, I just wonder if it’s just not the kind of thing that’s going to sink in to a ton of kids.
Alison Gill:
Yeah, it’s hard to know. I mean, we’ll see over time, unfortunately. I know we have to break in a couple minutes, but I wanted to ask you about court reform. You’ve written about how Christian nationalism has affected the bench, the court system, and it seems every year the Supreme Court goes further and further to show us how biased and compromised it is, unfortunately. Do you think lawmakers will take court reform more seriously in the coming years? Do you think there’s growing sort of movement towards that?
Sarah Posner:
I quite honestly am not super hopeful about that. I think that the number of lawmakers who understand the breadth of the problem that we’re facing, particularly with the Supreme Court, but with the lower courts too, I think the number of lawmakers who really get it is vanishingly small. And that, especially for lawmakers of a certain age who are lawyers and went to law school still stuck in their head, is the idea that the Supreme Court is the Supreme Court. It’s a-political, it’s just calling balls and strikes. You heard John Roberts who just calls balls and strikes, and I think for some of them it’s very hard to shake the idea that the Supreme Court has become, I mean, completely corrupted.
Alison Gill:
Absolutely.
Sarah Posner:
There’s no soft sugarcoating this, right? That’s what has happened. But I am very concerned that there are too few lawmakers who are willing to do something. There are too few of them who are willing to do what needs to be done in terms of court reform.
Alison Gill:
I wonder what would happen if we had a house body that would, even though knowing that probably can’t get them impeached, they can’t convict, just really thoroughly investigate Thomas, I mean, if you make his life hell and you expose corruption after corruption, that might be enough, but it’d have to be serious. You know what I mean? I’m just curious.
Sarah Posner:
Yeah. I mean, how many times has the Senate impeached, convicted a federal judge? It’s like, what is it? Just a few, right? I don’t even number.
Alison Gill:
Yeah, just a handful. Yeah.
Sarah Posner:
Right. So it’s a very rare circumstance, and I also, I just don’t think that very many of the lawmakers are of the Constitution, no pun intended to take on something like that. They’d be worried about people thinking they’re going too far. I mean, we’re talking about a public that can’t even name, most people can’t even name the Supreme Court justices, so I don’t know how you sell the possibility of impeaching them to the public.
Liz Cavell:
Although the corruption has gotten so bad that it is breaking through at least, and–
Sarah Posner:
That’s true.
Liz Cavell:
Back to the favorable, unfavorable conversation, right? Confidence in the Supreme Court is at all time lows. I mean, it should be the other way around. It should be our leaders leading us. But as public opinion and public trust continues to fall in the court, hopefully some of that trickles up to our lawmakers in terms of action, because we beat this drum on the podcast all the time. We’re all lawyers. We were all taught that the Supreme Court is the be all, end all, and we all should revere it, but it’s supposed to be apolitical. It’s not supposed to be anti-democratic, and completely outside of the constitutional order. So it can’t be the case that we have to continue to submit to the will of nine people who are so out of step in terms of anti-democratic rulings to leaving aside corruption.
Sarah Posner:
Right. I mean, the corruption, I think, is probably the more potent way to go. I know that’s right. Because then it wouldn’t even be about ideology. It would just be about, look, here’s a Supreme Court of Justice who took a trip on a private jet with this high priced donor who has business before the court. I actually think that it would probably be more persuasive to stack the court than it would be to impeach certain justices.
Alison Gill:
Really?
Sarah Posner:
Well, I mean, because I feel like impeachments would just be so ugly, and then the Dems would be in the position of they’re the ones trying to take somebody down. I think you could sell a "stack the court" as a, we are trying to build something up. I don’t know. I mean, I’m not an expert on how to deal with Supreme Court corruption, but I’ve obviously written about the corruption on the Supreme Court and spousal flags and those issues. But I wonder if message of "here we are, we’re making the Supreme Court better and more representative of the people by adding more vacancies to it" would be a more appealing way to go.
Rebecca Markert:
I could see that messaging working. I think also Impeachments lend themselves to, we’re diverting resources from things that actually need to get done in Congress, and this is just wasting time and energy. Not that I believe any of that, but I feel like that kind of resonates with the American public when you’re talking about an impeachment trial and investigation and things like that.
Liz Cavell:
And it has a more partisan image, even though I think that’s probably not warranted in terms of how infrequently it’s been used. Right.
Rebecca Markert:
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Sarah. This was a fascinating discussion. I think we all also learned a lot from you, and so we appreciate your time so much this afternoon.
Sarah Posner:
Thank you so much for having me.
Rebecca Markert:
So that’s it for today’s episode. I’m Rebecca Markert.
Alison Gill:
I’m Alison Gill.
Liz Cavell:
And I’m Liz Cavell. If you haven’t already, please follow us on our socials, Facebook, Instagram, and X. Please also remember to let us know how you’re liking this show by leaving us a review. You can also find us we-dissent.org. Thanks for listening.
Rebecca Markert:
We Dissent is a joint production of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, American Atheists, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It is hosted by attorneys Liz Cavell, Alison Gill, and me, Rebecca Markert. Other production support comes from Greta Martens, audio engineering provided by Audio for the Arts based in Madison, Wisconsin.
Thanks for listening.
