THE SCENE: The Last Judgment. THE CHARACTERS: Jesus, seated at the right hand of the Father; the twenty-first-century American Christian nationalist leadership (hereafter “the godly”).
THE GODLY: O Lord, we thank Thee that we were not like other men (or, needless to say, women): the woke communists, the Marxist socialists, the baby-killers, the sodomites. We strove mightily on earth to relieve the tax burdens of the suffering rich; to ignore the pleas of the presumptuous poor; to keep misguided compassion for the sick and the homeless from unbalancing the federal budget; to instill respect for the God-given authority of fathers, husbands, and policemen; and to prevent innocent children from learning about our country’s sins. We hope you’re pleased and will now grant us everlasting life.
JESUS: Hmm…That isn’t exactly what I had in mind. What made you think it was?
THE GODLY: Lord, did you not say in Matthew 13: “To them that have much, still more shall be given; while to those who have little, even that which they have shall be taken from them”? We followed your prescription faithfully.
JESUS: Actually, that was a prophecy, not a prescription. I saw that’s how human history would go; I wasn’t recommending it. From what other words of mine did you draw inspiration?
THE GODLY: Gee, we thought that was enough.
JESUS: Well, what did you make of Dives and Lazarus? Or of “sooner will a camel pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter heaven”? Or the story of the rich young man who came to me and said: “Master, what should I do to gain eternal life?”—and to whom I said: “If you would be perfect, sell your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor”?
THE GODLY: Did you say that?
JESUS: [Sighs deeply.] And what about my final word on the subject, that passage in the Gospel of Matthew? “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, he will say to some: ‘I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me to drink, naked and you clothed me, sick and you cared for me, ignorant and you taught me. Come therefore into the Kingdom of Heaven.’ But to others he will say: ‘I was hungry and thirsty, and you passed a huge regressive tax cut; sick, and you cut a trillion dollars from Medicaid; ignorant, and you built charter schools with public money that I wasn’t allowed to attend. Go therefore to…the other place.’ But those others said to him: ‘Lord, when did we see you in trouble? You know we would never have treated you like that.’ And Jesus replied: ‘As I’ve told you often enough, whatever you did to the least of my brethren—to the poorest of the poor—you did to me.’”
THE GODLY: Um…that does ring a bell. But to be honest, we didn’t think you were serious. After all, very few Christians before us fetishized the poor like that. Can you blame us?
[Very large dark creatures with horns and wings appear and begin carrying off the godly.]
JESUS: Yes.
Whatever the godly’s posthumous fate, it can hardly be worse than the savaging Katherine Stewart inflicts on them in Money, Lies, and God. As a tableau of fatuity and fanaticism, it rivals Gibbon, though of course without the gorgeous prose. But unlike Gibbon’s, the empire it describes is ascendant, not declining.
Money, Lies, and God introduces us to a broad cross-section of Christian nationalism’s funders, theorists, organizers, and celebrity preachers, along with the foundations behind its many journals, conferences, and academic institutions, which together assure that every talented young person with conservative beliefs will find financial support. The movement is not as well-provisioned intellectually as it is financially, but Stewart traces some influences, especially on the Catholic side: Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, Aristotelian philosophers John Finnis and Robert George, and theologian Michael Novak. The Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College are the movement’s Ivy League, currently far more self-confident (and financially secure) than the actual Ivies.
Among Christian nationalists, Evangelical Protestants are in the majority, but traditionalist Catholics are growing in numbers and influence. Doctrinal differences are unimportant; the two groups are united behind a shared political agenda: a minimal role for the state in directing the economy and redistributing income; a generally skeptical attitude to regulation, including environmental protection and climate mitigation; reliance on private (usually religious) organizations to provide social services; exemption for religious employers from anti-discrimination laws; indifference or hostility to labor unions; tax and other policies promoting marriage, births, and one-career families; greater parental control over school curriculums, if not outright defunding of the public-school system; and restrictions on abortion, contraception, and sex education—all of the above to be pursued through unswerving support of the Republican Party and relentless demonization of the Democratic Party. Kevin Roberts and Russell Vought, the architects of Project 2025, Trump’s blueprint for dismantling the New Deal, are arch–Christian nationalists. Even before Trump came on the scene, this religious mobilization had produced a fateful result: the capture of a large majority of state legislatures in the years before the decennial 2010 redistricting, when Republicans undertook the most audacious and shameless gerrymandering in the nation’s history.
One of many examples in the book of how Christian nationalism functions in practice as an arm of the Republican Party is a pep talk by Chad Connelly, a high-level Republican staffer, to a gathering at a Baptist church in Virginia. “Every church you know needs to do voter registration,” he instructed his audience. “Every pastor you know needs to make sure one hundred percent of the people in their pews are voting, and voting biblical values.” What are biblical values? To begin with, “the free-market system, which of course is God’s biblical economy.” Then follow expressions of tender solicitude for those poor sheep who have strayed from the fold. “There’s a far left now that doesn’t believe in God; they’re godless completely. They believe the state is the supreme being.… It’s actually a godless, communistic, Marxist style of government.”
John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in California, “a lion in America’s Christian nationalist circles,” according to Stewart, offers more ex cathedra instruction in a sermon on “The Willful Submission of a Christian Wife”: “A woman’s task, a woman’s work, a woman’s employment, a woman’s calling is to be at home. Working outside removes her from under her husband and puts her under other men to whom she is forced to submit.” Female speakers at religious gatherings are “a total violation of Scripture.” Of course, “Biblical love excludes homosexuality.” In November 2020, he reassured his flock that “there is no pandemic.”
There are many more such outlandish pronouncements quoted in Money, Lies, and God, which would be unkind to repeat. Stewart’s purpose, in any case, is not to ridicule her subjects but, in a sense, to pay them tribute: they are, she argues plausibly, well on their way to subduing liberal democracy. They are not yet a majority, but they are so well-funded and well-organized, so mistrustful of their fellow citizens, so full of passionate intensity, and—like most other Americans in this country of eroding literacy and saturation advertising—so unpracticed in critical thinking that they may well be drafted into a replay of January 2021, when Christian nationalists overwhelmingly believed that the election had been stolen and supported—indeed partly manned—Trump’s dark legions.
While Money, Lies, and God is excellent investigative reporting, it is not an ethnography like, for example, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. With her sharp focus on the movement’s elites, Stewart does not take us deep into the homes, hearts, or histories of the movement’s foot soldiers. Eighty-two percent of Evangelicals, the most militantly religious group in America, voted for a compulsively dishonest, tax-cheating, would-be-election-stealing, maritally unfaithful, sexually abusive, non-churchgoer whose entire life, judging from most disinterested testimony about him, has manifested not a single religious impulse or a glimmer of moral self-awareness. Of Trump’s 78 million votes—a bare 2.5 million-vote majority—Evangelicals contributed 30 million—40 percent of his total. Was this purely transactional—a swap of votes for Supreme Court seats? Do they really not care a scrap about Trump’s appalling lack of character? What do they care about?
I have not spoken with the foot soldiers, so I can only guess. The excesses of wokeness and DEI are undoubtedly part of the story (that much is clear from Hochschild’s book), but I suspect that near the core of their motivations lie the fear and resentment of the 1960s. Not, of course, the actual 1960s, but the lurid political-sexual fever-dream first conjured up by Richard Nixon and Merle Haggard and kept vividly alive in the imagination of conservative voters by every Republican candidate and consultant since. As with any successful deception, there was a grain of plausibility to the caricature: the young protagonists of feminism and the New Left did indeed overreact to their discovery of racism, imperialism, and sexual hypocrisy. But a mature society could have absorbed their indignation and calmed them down. Unfortunately, then as now, Republicans could not resist an opportunity for demagoguery, and ordinary Americans were gullible.
If fear of psychic and social chaos is at the root of right-wing religious mobilization, what follows? We are all afraid of chaos, or should be, and of course we must defend the rights of racial and sexual minorities and immigrants, even if our fellow citizens are in a panic about them. But we can at least try to locate some common ground before going on the attack. We’re all Americans, after all, and debating what that means could be the beginning of reconciliation.
Other difficult questions lurk at the margins of Stewart’s account. Constitutional questions, for example: How strictly should—or can—the separation of church and state be enforced? If tax-exempt organizations are prohibited from engaging in political activities, should they also be prohibited from engaging in religious activities? Why is it unlawful to refuse to rent an apartment to a Black couple but lawful to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple? When the Constitution is ambiguous, who should decide? Should there be fifty different forums, as Justice Alito declared in Dobbs, even though the country is many orders of magnitude more integrated than it was 250 years ago?
There are also philosophical questions: What is the difference between “religious” and “moral,” and what, if any, are the relations of dependence between them? Should the state promote specific virtues and values? Is strict religious or moral neutrality possible? Given that it is impossible not to have opinions about what is good, is it possible to keep those opinions from influencing one’s preferences as a citizen or a legislator?
These questions mostly remain in the background of Money, Lies, and God, as does another one, which I imagine Stewart’s subjects would want to press on her: How much is the movement she chronicles a threat to democracy, and how much is it an expression of democracy? Her own answer is emphatic: “The movement described in this book isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.” It certainly does reject the Enlightenment root and branch, including religious toleration, which most Americans still consider a bedrock national ideal. And yet the movement is very broad-based; it is spread by persuasion; and it is focused almost exclusively on winning elections, even if it is largely financed by plutocrats for the latter’s own purposes and even if its chosen vessel, the Republican Party, is not very scrupulous about making sure the ungodly (or the non-white) can participate in those elections. Liberals have always fallen back on the Constitution, which unambiguously prescribes the separation of church and state, whatever conservative sophists may allege. But the Constitution, though a mighty fortress, is not impregnable, especially when interpreted idiosyncratically by an extremist Supreme Court, as it has been recently in such matters as gun control, political spending, and the power of regulatory agencies. Large enough majorities can change the Constitution, in any case, and at the rate Christian nationalism is growing, it may eventually achieve such majorities.
The last rampart of freedom is not lawsuits but democratic debate. Liberals can and should oppose the overweening claims of Christian nationalists in the courts, but finally we will have to meet and persuade them face to face, without lawyers in the room. If we lose that argument, and freedom is temporarily eclipsed in America, our example of democratic openness will nevertheless be the best contribution we can make to its eventual rebirth.
Money, Lies, and God
Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
Katherine Stewart
Bloomsbury
$26.99 | 352 pp.
