Religious Right

IN NOVEMBER, THE United States joined Argentina (Javier Milei), India (Narendra Modi), and Hungary (Viktor Orbán), among other countries, when it elected an authoritarian as its chief executive. In the case of Donald J. Trump, examples of these far-right tendencies include plans for mass deportations, promises to replace nonpartisan government employees with loyalists, and threats to put political critics on trial.

How did we get here? And what do we need to know to mitigate harm, save what and who we can, and work toward a more free and equitable future? Some of us may feel weary and defeated, but journalist Katherine Stewart, who has investigated the authoritarian movement for more than 15 years, encourages curiosity: “We can’t address our problems unless we know what they are.” Those problems include “decades of investment in a larger anti-democratic movement that would not have dissolved even if they had been defeated at the ballot box in this election cycle.”

In her forthcoming book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, Stewart explores a network of strange bedfellows who drive a broad authoritarian movement both in the United States and abroad. The players in this network have different motivations: Ultra-rich funders aim to destroy the regulatory state to gain even more wealth, funneling resources to groups that further their aims. “New Right” academics and proto-academics pursue the ascendance of their pet ideologies. Veteran political operatives find new partners in the hunt for power.

Though many of the funders and power players within this movement are not Christian or even religious, Christian symbols, pastors, and churches have played a key role. Christian leaders — white evangelicals, but also conservative Catholics, Pentecostals, and others — and the warped theologies they peddle have helped convince voters that we are in a state of emergency. As evidence, these Christians baptize anxieties about sexuality and gender, the economy, and shifting demographics as evidence that America has lost its way and needs to be saved by a strongman.

Stewart’s other books include The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children (2012) and The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (2020), which was the basis for the 2024 documentary God & Country. Stewart spoke with Sojourners editor Julie Polter before and after the November 2024 U.S. election. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RICH MULLINS HAD a museum of a personality. The singer-songwriter, who died in a car accident in 1997, loved to show off anything he found interesting, his friends say. From music to movies to the places he traveled, Mullins loved “for you to experience what he loved,” his friend and collaborator Mitch McVicker told Sojourners.And more than just about anything else, Mullins loved Jesus.

Mullins’ career tracked alongside the evolution of contemporary Christian music (CCM), which went from marginal in the 1970s to a powerhouse genre that sold a combined 31 million albums in 1996. Best known for the modern hymn “Awesome God,” Mullins wrote his fair share of songs that fit Christian radio. But more often, his music was a kaleidoscope of faith and humanity, offering a tour of human frustration and failure.

On “Hard to Get,” Mullins, as modern psalmist, asks God, “Do you remember when you lived down here, where we all scrape to find the faith to ask for daily bread? / Did you forget about us, after you had flown away?”

In other places, Mullins plays minor prophet. “I wrote this for the Religious Right,” he declared before singing that Jesus “came without an axe to grind [and] did not toe the party line,” during a performance of “You Did Not Have a Home.”

Churches have been barred from directly supporting or opposing candidates since the passage of the Johnson Amendment in 1954. But pastors can still work on the election in meaningful ways without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status, so long as they are mindful of the rules.

The Religious Right was not wrong to tell people of faith that the Bible is political. Its critical mistake and enduring sin is not that it challenged Christians to engage in public life, but that it invited us to join a reactionary coalition driven by racial fear, male chauvinism, and corporate greed. Decent people with sincere motives joined the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition to put their faith into practice. But these organizations made fallible people worse than we would have been otherwise. They led us astray.

It seems that no matter where we look, we are confronted with alliances between the religious right and the political right. The Christian right in the U.S. sees Donald Trump and his administration as some sort of a messiah for white Protestant Christianity. In Muslim-majority Southeast Asian states like Malaysia and Indonesia, various levels of government are finding it hard to not acquiesce to the demands made by conservative Muslim groups on matters related to condemning the LGBT community. Perhaps such incursions by the religious right into politics have become more prominent recently because they are abetted by the ascendancy of the authoritarian and anti-intellectual personality.

A widely-respected white evangelical leader recently expressed to me his personal agony over how “white evangelicalism has destroyed the ‘evangel’ of Jesus — the bringing of ‘good news’ to the poor.” Another leader of a top national evangelical organization told me in a personal conversation that evangelical support of Trump “will destroy our integrity for at least a generation.”

A decade ago, a critic accused me of writing a book about a “nonexistent” threat from the religious right. One reviewer called my work a “paranoid rant,” while another detractor wrote my “alarmist” views were “exaggerated and implausible.”

In The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans For The Rest Of Us, published in 2006, I had warned that a well-financed and highly organized group of religious and political leaders was seeking to impose their narrow extremist beliefs and harsh public policies on the United States, even as our nation’s population was increasingly multireligious, multiethnic, and multiracial.

Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, has come under fire for his friendship with Russian president Vladimir Putin – who is suspected of trying to tip the election to Trump – his lack of diplomatic experience, and the fact that he is a corporate bigwig who champions fossil fuels, even as the threat of global warming grows.

But Tillerson, whose nomination was announced on Dec. 13, may also face criticism from an unexpected quarter – social conservatives whose support was critical to Trump’s unexpected election last month.

For some, the choice is not clear. Clinton-Kaine may be the more personally religious ticket, but Trump-Pence is more cozy with the religious right, aka the evil empire among atheists. Then there’s Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has no chance of victory, but is the only candidate who reached out to nonbelievers and asked for their vote.

So what’s an atheist to do?