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it almost sounds like you're describing the Republican Party itself and and I I think that's probably an instructive comparison because what we have seen there is a death spiral you have
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moderates driven out you have open-minded or just brave people willing to speak up driven out and a party that has grown so extreme that it has become
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a threat to democracy do you see that happening to mainstream Evangelical churches I'm Ken Harbaugh this is burn the boats a show about making tough calls and tough times
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America today faces a critical test our democracy is under threat but good people are rising to the challenge now is the time to go all in now we burn
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the boats [Music] my guest today is Kristin kobez Dumay a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University her book Jesus and
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John Wayne reveals how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism Kristen welcome to burn the boats
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thank you for having me I'd love to start with an understanding of terms and I'm going to ask you to Define evangelical Christian which I know is a
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trap because even though the association of evangelicals has a definition which you cite you're the first to acknowledge that that does not match reality so who
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are we talking about when we say evangelicals yeah so I don't offer a very precise definition I don't try to Define evangelicals as much as I try to describe them and so you're right the
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National Association of evangelicals will offer a theological description of its biblicism taking the Bible seriously conversionism the born-again experience and crucis centralism the centrality of
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the Cross of Christ and then activism right that's kind of their official definition and I'd plan to use that that's what most Scholars do and and then I started looking at history and realizing that we really needed to
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understand evangelicalism more as a as a historical and cultural movement and um as a series of networks and in many ways as a consumer culture so to be an
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Evangelical is to attend an Evangelical Church absolutely to listen to Christian music Christian radio absolutely to shop at Christian bookstores to read Christian publishing if you participate
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in this culture you are shaped by these values and and that's really the evangelicalism that I'm studying as a cultural historian these days it seems like that historical slash cultural
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definition is incomplete and it kind of glosses over the the biblical or scriptural or faith-based definition but what it's really missing is the political element
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is that a a fair critique I mean politics now seems to define the Evangelical movement more than Faith itself exactly so you know if you're just looking at theological doctrines of
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evangelicalism you know by the standard definition what you'll find is the majority of black Protestants also check those boxes but the majority of black Protestants vast majority who can chuck all those boxes theologically do not
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identify as Evangelical because it's very clear to them that there's a whole lot more to Evangelical than just the Theology and that you can believe all those things but if you don't hold the same political views if you um you know
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you likely aren't attending the same churches you likely aren't reading the same books so why would we insist on grouping those together and if you look at this history Oracle cultural movement you can see that politics very much has
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come to Define kind of the boundaries of who is accepted and who is not accepted in these spaces it seems to me that it's done more than Define the boundaries it is it has moved
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the boundaries it has shifted the Overton window we recently had Angela Denker on and and she made this observation which I'd love your reaction to because I hadn't heard it before and
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it kind of shook me she said that when Faith conflicts with politics these days people leave behind their faith they identify more with their political tribe than their theological tribe
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that is very true and so but they will tell themselves that they are holding their political views because of their faith because it is God's truth because God's word dictates it but they're
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reading the scriptures they're approaching their theology they're forming their theology already with this political cultural lens so that's absolutely correct one of the things your book did for me
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was challenge this idea that the Evangelical vote for Trump was an accommodation or a compromise or somehow strategic politically you argue that's
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not really the case and and I'm not going to put words in your mouth I'll just read this section of the book and and would love your your thoughts on it Evangelical support for Trump was no aberration nor was it
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merely a pragmatic Choice it was rather the culmination of evangelicals Embrace of militant masculinity an ideology that enshrines patriarchal Authority and
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condones the callous Display of Power at home and abroad Trump isn't a compromise candidate he's their prophet yes I do make that claim and I started
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looking into researching the connections between Evangelical conceptions of masculinity and militarism and aggression more than 15 years ago and so I've kind of been tracking this and I'd
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also seen how many of the Evangelical men most promoting this uh kind of aggressive masculine ideal became implicated in Scandal in abuse of power in sexual abuse and over and over again
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I saw this pattern emerge and I saw Evangelical communities end up defending perpetrators defending abusers and ostracizing victims and and the ends justifies the means and this very
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culture wars mentality of Us Versus Them zero-sum gamer I just saw that over and over again so when we got to the fall of 2016 particularly October the release of the Access Hollywood Video and the
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question that everybody was asking is how can evangelicals betray their values to vote for a man like Donald Trump right then I knew that was the wrong question this was not a betrayal we needed to
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understand you know family values evangelicals always at the heart of family values politics has been the assertion of white patriarchal power and as soon as you put that at the center a lot of these other things fall into
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place I know the Access Hollywood tape keeps coming up again and again and and you're right that the question we're asking about Evangelical support
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was the the wrong one and I think that was really highlighted at the CNN Town Hall when we saw his mockery once again
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of an abuse victim his repeated shaming of someone he abused cheered by that crowd which just is an exclamation point on this idea that he's he's not a
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pragmatic choice he's not that they don't rationalize their support for him they they adore him yeah yeah that um you know I didn't see
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a lot of the kind of the theory was that they're holding their noses to vote for Donald Trump right I was watching very closely and I didn't see a lot of nose holding there instead I I saw a lot of um kind of praising this uh he was their
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Ultimate Fighting Champion right he was he was gonna do what needed to be done precisely because he was unrestrained by traditional Christian virtue like humility and gentleness and and meekness or you know we could even talk honesty
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right that was that was precisely what they loved about him and yes when we see how he was um you know he confessed to assaulting women and bragged about it and
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repeatedly and what I knew from researching this history is that evangelicals too you know these Family Values evangelicals who put so much emphasis on sexual purity
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and the purity of women over and over again when Evangelical men with power with when pastors and leaders abuse women sexually assault women even young
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girls over and over again they end up defending the perpetrators and blaming and shaming the victim in fact while uh the CNN Town Hall was
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going on I was just wrapping up a documentary film shoot with a couple of survivors in uh evangelicalism sex abuse survivors who are just poured out these
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harrowing stories of what it was like not just to be abused by pastors but also then absolutely blamed and shamed by their own churches you talk about
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traditional Christian virtue and its conflict with the the actual behavior of leaders within the church but I get the sense that traditional
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Christian virtue is itself being redefined to maybe mitigate that conflict when you look at when you look at the the imagery of Christ in in
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modern Evangelical churches today the way they talk about him as a vengeful Warrior Christ your words that's not a traditional depiction of Jesus at all
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and I would imagine that reframing is very useful politically exactly exactly you know evangelicals self-identify first and foremost as bible-believing
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Christians that's that's how they advertise who they are core of their identity And yet when I look at the last half century or so of conservative white
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evangelicalism it's very interesting to see in which cases they hold on to this very rigid sense of plain reading of the scripture and biblical literalism on on
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things like sexuality sexual morality of a certain sort and uh and submission of women but but there are a whole lot of other Bible passages about uh you know
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giving your money to the poor about welcoming the stranger about loving your enemies and turning the other cheek and there's all kinds of convoluted reasoning that's done around those passages to say those don't actually
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apply to us today right now all Christians do this to a certain extent all religious folks who have you know kind of sacred text are going to be um interpreting in different ways the
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evangelicals tend to be much less aware of the lenses that they're bringing to scriptures and absolutely convinced that there is no interpretation they are simply receiving God's word and doing it
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and so I will say that you know the title subtitle of my book how white evangelicals corrupted of faith and fractured a nation that corrupted a faith uh phrase is not
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a historical claim there's there's actually no such thing as you know corrupting a faith historically there's a bit of a normative claim there and although the book is a work of history that is me talking directly to
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conservative evangelicals for just a moment and saying you know you say this about yourselves take another look right take another look at the scriptures take another look at these values take another look at the figure of Jesus Christ how you've
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painted him and then look at that text again and uh and you see how they match up or see how they don't I'd love to hear some some stories about the reactions to
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your to your book I make a point of reading both the five star and the one star reviews and the one star reviews um if they weren't so menacing would I don't know they'd be kind of funny you
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get a sense of who is writing those don't you yeah yeah I will say that some of the uh critiques at least it seems to me kind of prove the point uh
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yeah you know when I I didn't want to I didn't want to say it but it's like it's angry white dudes with a bunch of guns right really angry yes uh you know when I wrote this book I'm a historian
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I I'm a historian I teach at a Christian University I um I wrote this book as I was writing it I I actually didn't give a whole lot of thought to how it
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would be received except I knew that it had to be absolutely um vetted well evidence I knew that I knew it would be a little controversial so I
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I just absolutely never went beyond my evidence right there's 30 some pages of footnotes uh or endnotes and um you send it out to you know like a dozen other Scholars experts to um
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assess before I even went into publication and then it had a thorough legal review right so it's very well vetted and I knew it would need to be because I knew that it was going to be provocative in certain spaces uh I
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expected some pushback um and and there has been some from exactly who you would expect what I didn't actually expect though I have to say is how enthusiastically this book would be received in white Evangelical
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spaces I did not anticipate that I have heard from so many because I mean the thing is about evangelicalism and even if you look at you know white evangelicalism you have that kind of notorious 81 you
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know who voted for Donald Trump that's a lot and that's a really important part of his base and a very powerful faction of the Republican Party very significant still that leaves 19 of white
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evangelicals who did not right and then you've got some evangelicals kind of right on the edge right in the middle and it's many of those who read the book and said this is absolutely true and so like within two
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days of the book's publication I started getting letters back from readers and people assume I get a ton of hate mail and I get almost none but I have gotten hundreds by now probably a couple of
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thousand of messages letters from evangelicals themselves saying this is the story of my life and thank you for helping me to see is there anything they
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can do to push back within their communities or are their numbers so small and their their opponents so militant and I'll go back to that word again menacing which is never a word you
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should be using to describe a Christian congregation but you document it Angela danker documented it uh you know we've talked to a few people who talk about that feeling of of of Menace Angela uses
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the phrase fear-based Christianity in that environment if you read a book like Jesus and John Wayne and it speaks to you what do you do yeah I love that you're connecting it to
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Angela's work because uh her book Red State Christians came out uh almost a year before Jesus and John Wayne are several months before and so she had actually reached out to me and we connected um before the release of both of our
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books because we saw we were we were describing some of the same patterns and uh so yes what can evangelicals do what I have seen and what I document in
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the book too in the last chapters is a number of white evangelicals conservative white evangelicals who have taken courageous stands in their churches in their communities against
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this militancy against this uh in terms of politics uh you know anti-democratic impulses um standing up for victims of abuse yes
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and those stories are um inspiring but they are also distressing because what happens time and again is those are the folks who are then pushed out of their organizations out of their churches if it's a pastor they're no longer
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pastoring that church if it's a Christian School teacher Christian college professor often they're the ones without a job at the end of the day and so what I see is a lot of resistance and
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even some change not a lot but certainly some on the individual level but if I look at Evangel local institutions it's a less hopeful situation that's where
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you see the the powers are able to you know donors constituents um leaders are able to keep people quiet and maintain the status quo I mean I was talking with somebody in a Christian
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Media industry um not long ago interviewing them for my next book and they told me something that that just rang absolutely true and they said kind of the the um
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inside memo here that we get is you don't have to agree with this like right-wing Trump politics and all you just can't publicly disagree and I think that very well describes the
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Dynamics so at the individual level you can dissent but if you're trying to challenge the system that's going to be trouble it almost sounds like you're describing the Republican Party itself and I I
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think that's probably an instructive comparison because what we have seen there is a death spiral you have moderates driven out you have open-minded or just brave people willing
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to speak up driven out and a party that has grown so extreme that it has become a threat to democracy do you see that happening to mainstream Evangelical churches
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yeah you know I actually use that comparison uh I look at the book how democracies die right by um Ziva and Levitsky and and they talk about the uh you know what happens because you're
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going to have wannabe authoritarian leaders um rise up all the time you do historically speaking you can see this but then they ask the question you know what what actually makes it possible for one of these wannabe authoritarians to
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seize power and the key thing there is that the the political parties do not play their necessary role of gatekeeping that you've got political party leaders
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who think you know what we can use this we can use this to our advantage we can harness this to our political advantage and they see there's like a window in which you can suppress this this kind of
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reactionary element but if you let things get too far you lose the power to do this and this is kind of the the story of of uh you know reactionary popular and I see you could apply that same
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um metric to White evangelicalism and one of the things I trace in my book is the complicity of more respectable moderate evangelicals uh in this
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reactionary movement that many people came to patriarchy when it came to racism when it came to some of these really more extreme reactionary elements inside evangelicalism that I trace and
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this this you know militancy a lot of the moderates would still say at the end of the day this is my brother in Christ so they're going to like kick out anybody who moves more Progressive on lgbtq or kick out anybody who who
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rejects kind of this patriarchy female submission model and they're no longer welcome in their Gospel Coalition but anybody to the right was kind of you know tolerated or even platformed and
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seen as one of us against the left against you know the secular threat and over years over decades we see where that has led us with which is now those folks who thought they
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controlled evangelicalism the respectable evangelicals the elites they are back on their heels and they are realizing that they actually don't have power over the movement
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in America today we cannot talk about the the patriarchal nature of that Movement we cannot talk about the militancy of today's Evangelical Church
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without talking about guns and it's striking to me how that has become a defining feature of evangelicals today and I'll I'll get us
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started by just reading back to you one of your observations about this within the church writers on Evangelical masculinity have long
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celebrated the role guns play in forging Christian manhood from toy guns in childhood to real Firearms gifted in initiation ceremonies guilty on both counts played with them as a kid grew up
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in a very religious family my graduation present was a nine millimeter guns are seen to cultivate authentic god-given masculinity a 2017 survey revealed that
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41 of white evangelicals own guns a number higher than members of any other Faith group what's going on yeah I think it's it's possible to separate like you can I bought my my son
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a BB gun for Christmas right so I'll just put that out there he he likes to hunt and he plans to um to go into the military right so uh there are ways to it's not an All or Nothing But
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in in white evangelicalism consort of evangelicals I mean you do see this this um I mean what what some evangelicals themselves will call almost an idolatry here of uh not just
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um you know thinking that guns are okay for you know limited purposes but really it's it's rooted it's connected to their core identity and that guns are necessary as um as a way to fight and as
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a way to protect your family um but then that is I mean realistically very very very few families particularly white middle-class families are in um
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you know kind of dire threat where a firearm is going to um bring them protection right but this is the rhetoric then that just defies the um this kind of
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if you understand that the world is against you and if you believe that and if you continue to leaders like stop this fear right then you are going to see a threat around every corner like
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that is by Design and it's an excellent way for leaders to consolidate power if you convince people that they are under siege that they owe you loyalty they're going to give you money and um you know
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and you're going to be able to demand Sacrifice from them this is how that system works in the case of firearms then you know it really is um
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aggression is linked to this identity of what it is to be protector even if there is no actual threat that a firearm can protect one from and that is the framework that supersedes anything such
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as you know do not murder or um you know of turning the other cheek of loving your enemies of offering yourself in sacrificial love like all of this in in Christian history there is a long tradition of pacifism a tradition
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of non-violence and what we see happening is like you can't even surface that and and there there are no there's no space anymore for actual theology for theological conversations for people to
00:25:00
come together as people of faith and say what does our scripture teach us because the politics trumps everything and um you know and it's it's in this case one that is arguably really against much
00:25:14
of Christian history and core teachings of the Christian scriptures but it doesn't matter better thanks for watching everyone we've got a quick message from our show sponsor but first I've got a favor to ask growing a
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that idolization of firearms has extended to the people who embody gun culture I'm thinking of some of these AI generated images that are coming out of
00:30:37
Jesus wielding Uzis uh and evangelicals seem not all of them but the fact that people are making those things and celebrating them is is just is just weird and then you look at and
00:30:51
this is me approaching this from a veterans perspective the idolization of military people who actually betray every martial virtue but in doing that
00:31:04
have become Heroes of the Evangelical right I'm thinking about folks like Eddie Gallagher uh war criminal murderer but the Evangelical right now
00:31:17
platforms him and he speaks from the pulpit I bet if if Lieutenant Cali had had led the mili massacre today he'd be on the the speaking circuit in Evangelical churches yes yeah and you
00:31:30
see that the popularity of somebody like Kyle Rittenhouse two in these spaces um so so yes what we have now is an ideology and kind of politics that's um blended with you know a certain
00:31:44
masculine ideal a militancy that has that stands in that that replaces kind of traditional Christian teachings what you don't hear in these spaces is any
00:31:58
meaningful discussion of the virtues you know sometimes I'm I'm I'm asked by evangelicals I I go to a lot of Evangelical churches and and speak at Evangelical colleges and
00:32:12
sometimes I'll have a white Evangelical man you know say okay well what should a Christian man do what should a Christian man be could you give us the better Christian masculinity and yeah as a historian of gender I can always say
00:32:25
okay first of all there are always many masculinities right even the question that there is one way to be a Christian man that all men should fit exactly that mold right that it's just it's it's the
00:32:37
wrong question that said like if you really want to push me I'm a historian I don't you know usually go there I don't go there in the book but I don't know as a Christian I would say maybe start with the fruit of the spirit you know what
00:32:49
does it mean to be a Christian not just man but there's not a lot in the in the Bible actually that's this is just for the men this is just for the ladies right very little actually is but what does it mean to follow Christ that's put
00:33:02
very clearly and and the fruit of the spirit if you have the spirit of Christ or in you you're going to see the evidence in kindness gentleness meekness right self-control these are the things
00:33:15
that show that you're in Christ I'm like I don't know this just take those things and apply them to what does it mean to be a man right you know that works too but those are exactly that you know you don't hear anything about these virtues you don't hear anything about
00:33:27
traditional Christian teachings on discipleship instead all of that has just been swept away for this aggression this militancy and that is called Christian and so many people are are
00:33:41
embracing that uncritically so that there's no space for actual Christian teachings to disrupt that well it could be argued that Jesus himself was was a an early example of a
00:33:54
of a feminist he he gave the women of his early church the purse strings to to manage the the finances and I bet if
00:34:06
evangelicals today confronted the historical Jesus there would be a real Reckoning he wasn't American he wasn't blonde he was the the child of uh of
00:34:19
migrants does that ever come up uh progressives love to throw those those facts in the in the uh conversation but no that that it doesn't really disrupt it and I should note that
00:34:32
just just this week a sociological study came out that that showed just how much our preconceptions shape our religious belief right what you what you brought up before in our prior commitments our
00:34:45
politics our values and so this isn't just conservative like evangelicals who do this right each of us you know if we're a person of Faith or person of the Christian faith or other Faith you know
00:34:57
we tend to be drawn to religious Traditions or interpretations in those Traditions that make us feel good about ourselves that confirm our
00:35:10
our biases or our um our values right so so everybody does that um but many people are at least more aware of the fact that they do that and what evangelicals where they are
00:35:24
different from many other Traditions is their cultural dominance right their their their numbers the political power that they wield but also that they have
00:35:37
created this vast kind of subculture and if you're an Evangelical and I say the Evangelical subculture you know exactly what I'm talking about if you're not like I use that phrase in the book
00:35:50
except in a draft it's not in the book because when I put it in the in a chapter my editor who's from completely outside this world just Mark that and said you know I don't know what these words mean the Evangelical subculture
00:36:03
right I was like okay take it out and let me let me show don't tell and but the truth is like it's invisible to people on the outside what the Evangelical subculture is is you know books that sell in the tens of millions
00:36:17
of copies Christian radio right focus on the family playing like eight hours a day in people's homes so they have this um distribution system and able to
00:36:29
really shape the world view their you know in their words of millions tens of millions hundreds of millions of people in this country and increasingly globally as well right and so that that's what's different here everybody
00:36:43
has like their own values everybody has biases everybody thinks that theirs are right and usually has like a religious or strong ethical reason for saying so but evangelicals are able to control
00:36:54
their narrative so powerfully and turn that to political um um and really mobilize politically around that in a way that is very difficult to disrupt very difficult even
00:37:08
to to complicate to Nuance to have any conversation if you challenge it you are clearly not on God's side you're evil when you talk about the cultural dominance of of Evangelical Christians
00:37:22
you probably have to acknowledge that they wouldn't see it that way they feel like they are under assault from all sides and if there's one one christly
00:37:34
virtue that they seem to embrace it's the idea of the the blessedness of the persecuted right they love that persecution complex they Retreat to their bunker and and every Sunday talk
00:37:49
about how they are being attacked am I wrong uh yeah so that that's definitely a motif here a persecution narrative and um
00:38:01
but they don't necessarily see themselves as blessed they get really angry about that although it does you know it does signify that they're God's chosen that they're so anything that they do that makes people mad is kind of see told you you know the world will
00:38:13
hate us right but um and so that that kind of inoculates them against any legitimate critique but this this persecution narrative um one of the uh kind of crystallizing
00:38:26
moments for me in my research when I when I uh was around this issue and it was actually as I was researching this strange phenomenon after 9 11 and the years after 9 11 and
00:38:39
in the Evangelical subculture of these uh ex-muslim terrorists who are taking the Christian speaking circuit by storm all over the place these former Muslim terrorists who um
00:38:53
were you know killing Christians and then got converted not just to Christianity but to evangelicalism and now they're going all around and telling other um evangelicals just how dangerous Muslims are right
00:39:05
turns out all these guys were frauds total frauds made this you know their backstory up like ridiculous ridiculously so exposed and I I came across these guys first because one of
00:39:17
them came to my Christian College and my colleague fellow historian who happens to specialize in ottoman history and knew a thing or two about Islam within five minutes of attending this guy's talk he's like this makes no sense
00:39:30
these words don't exist he's just he's making stuff up and so this guy was sponsored supported by focus on the family right this is how this works these guys are all of our focus on the family CBN like all over and so my
00:39:43
colleague actually calls and gets through and talks to the president of focus on the family it turns out they knew he was a fraud and kept putting this out there right and so that's when
00:39:55
this clicked for me that the fear is real on the part of ordinary evangelicals ordinary Christians there is a lot of fear in those spaces but it is also a manufactured fear right
00:40:07
um manufacturing this threat and I saw that in the case of those ex-muslim terrorists I saw it in the case of Mark Driscoll and his Mars Hill Church right very cross militaristic Pastor went down in this disgraceful although he's now
00:40:21
pastoring another church and but he loved this militaristic language he would be flanked on both sides by security guards when he preached always trying to drum up the sense of threat imminent threat why he could demand
00:40:34
sacrifice loyalty money from all of his followers and that's when I clicked for me the fears were real but it is manufactured and rather than militancy
00:40:46
being kind of The Logical response of feeling threatened which was what the narrative was in in 2016 right evangelicals are just so threatened their religious Liberties and so what
00:40:59
choice did they have but to run into the arms of somebody like Donald Trump I realized no we have to flip that script more often than not it's Evangelical leaders who are stoking fears manufacturing fears so that they
00:41:12
consolidate they can consolidate their own power what is so ironic and frustrating about the the co-auction of those
00:41:23
anti-islamic tropes is that Post 9 11 the whole narrative coming from the right was that Islam was a was a violent religion that it was in inherently drawn
00:41:37
to that and now you see the the Christian Evangelical Church going down that path for real and yet still scapegoating Muslims there's this passage from from your book and I trust
00:41:51
your your research on it you say that white evangelicals believe that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims if ever there was a symptom
00:42:02
of a bunker mentality that's it exactly and yet this is exactly what you will run into in in these spaces they absolutely believe that and the books
00:42:14
that they are writing and the books that they are reading are telling them this over and over again Christian radio right and and now they're telling you have to pull your kids out of Christian Schools you have to homeschool your kids
00:42:26
because the culture is against you the world is against you right nobody respects you and and people are going to denigrate you and people are going to corrupt your children like this rhetoric
00:42:38
is just pervasive in many of these spaces and it's really hard to push back against because for for many people they're utterly convinced that and I should say that right I'm talking about inside these Christian spaces Christian
00:42:51
Media but um it's it's also um very much in the secular conservative spaces and I would say secular with kind of air quotes because there's not a clear division between say Fox News and
00:43:04
right-wing Christianity it's um there's a lot of overlap there but these messages are being reinforced in those more secular media spaces as well as inside their Church spaces
00:43:17
you've talked a lot about Christian Media and the the separate culture it has created the books the radio stations but there is a massive economic component to that there's there's even
00:43:29
Evangelical cell phone networks can you talk about the business of Evangelical Christianity oh so so much money involved and and part of this is because
00:43:44
um uh I mean people like to make money uh evangelicals are always about evangelism right spread the word spread the word and so uh there's a kind of myth that evangelicals are anti-modern
00:43:58
and historians have been trying to blow that up for for for Generations now because evangelicals were always like at the cusp of whatever modern technology there was radios knew they are they are
00:44:10
on the airwaves right there because you can preach there you can spread your news the good news of the Gospel um and and then um you know Christian publishing and and and digital media and all of this right
00:44:23
um so they are motivated to spread their message and to build their um communities and the more you um the bigger your faith community grows
00:44:36
the bigger your Market and these are you know these are largely not non-profit Enterprises there is a ton of money being made because if you convince people that secular products
00:44:49
but often non-taxed right okay also that right yes very tricky here um but in some of these businesses like so the publishing arm of the SBC LifeWay Christian books you know massive Book
00:45:02
Sales here too like if you aren't in those spaces you're oblivious to just how powerful this is um in another another uh kind of Disconnect with my editor when I was writing this book was he called into questions some of my publication numbers
00:45:15
you know literally tens of millions of copies of these books sold and he just like flagged that and said yeah this this can't be accurate you need to know Publishers always inflate this where did you get these numbers and I and I
00:45:27
pointed him to the the footnote I was like well this is this was in the New York Times but my bad I'll go back and see what I can find he's like oh wait never mind if it's in the New York Times it has been vetted so the stands right this is accurate but the thing is none
00:45:40
of these books almost none of them make the New York Times bestseller list because that's a curated list and they know that their readers are not going to be going and reading the latest prophecy book but the money is so big is so that
00:45:53
um now you know what's their motivation is it just to fleece people is this just grift there's a lot of grift there's also True Believers involved it's it's all of it which is why it is so hard to
00:46:05
disrupt and so for you know more Progressive Christians who ask me what can we do here like well the Battleground is popular media but you're gonna be a huge
00:46:17
disadvantage because the thing about Progressive Christians is they aren't so scared of the secular they think they can learn things from people of other Faith Traditions they don't have to hunker down and protect
00:46:28
um which may be a virtue may may not depends on your interpretation but what it does mean is there's not going to be a massive market right so that means that the the Christian products that are out there are largely playing to that
00:46:41
right-wing market and as long as you can tap that you're going to be successful if you try to move it over here good luck trying to run a business something about that economic model
00:46:55
entwined with spreading the gospel has has always confused me which is that evangelicalism has become a global phenomenon but it is so tied to
00:47:07
nationalism in this country how do we reconcile that how does a nationalistic xenophobic movement Go Global guy what you're talking about uh because
00:47:27
you're right there there's something within Christianity and evangelicalism the spread the good news that is Universalist right that all people National borders do not matter go out into all the nations and preach the
00:47:40
gospel right those are the instructions and evangelicals do they have Mission organizations all of these big Evangelical Ministries have Global arms Christian radio is is a really big deal
00:47:51
in Christian television in Africa and Christian publishing dominates uh Evan White Evangelical American publishing dominates markets Christian markets like in Brazil
00:48:04
um so so it is global and yeah what is being exported is this nationalistic understanding of Christianity so that you have these kind of allies between
00:48:17
um right-wing Christians in Hungary even in you know Putin's Russia in Brazil with bolsonaro and I'm hearing from people around the world other countries
00:48:31
um across the globe that are um this is resonating and it's resonate I don't know we could we could try to explain it in terms of kind of a push against globalism uh you know seeking kind of
00:48:44
community and meaning and purpose and then we just have to also look that this is the Christianity that is being fed to them over and over and over again and it's often also linked with Prosperity
00:48:57
Gospel teachings right so this it's wrapped up with you believe this you participate in this and God is going to bless you God is going to bless you in your place and so so somehow this still
00:49:11
works you can uphold your National borders think that you know America first 100 but then see find common cause with the people who are saying hungry first and Russia first and somehow think
00:49:23
this is all gonna um work out okay and the kind of Truth is based on an Embrace of traditionalism of authoritarian leadership uh you know
00:49:35
the the um punishment of um lgbtq folks right enforcement of patriarchy these are the things that are holding us in common and I guess the idea is that uh you know everybody's
00:49:48
gonna stay in their in their areas and and not try to assert power over the other but it seems pretty short-sighted but that's that's what's working right now in those spaces yeah speaking of the
00:50:00
the spread of evangelicalism uh your Spanish language Edition uh recently came out and I thought the cover was was incredible I mean the American Edition
00:50:12
has that subtle relief of the guns crossed in the middle yeah of the cross the the Spanish language Edition is literally Christ nailed to guns I mean
00:50:25
it's it's it's interface did that did you sign off on that no I mean I signed off on uh the rights and then they said oh here's the title or here's the cover I was like oh
00:50:38
it was it did take my breath away what I saw it I it was phenomenal and so I I had to sit on that for a while they wanted to release it when the when um when the book released uh so it yeah it
00:50:52
is it is a stunning cover and and I will say I mean I I have been I had to finally tell the Spanish publisher I I can't do all these interviews anymore I was doing one or two a day and it just seemed indefinite for for
00:51:04
weeks and so now they've you know they said okay so they're just bringing some big ones but there's such an interest in Spain and um and the Spanish Edition also goes um is available throughout Latin America too right but in Spain and
00:51:17
I was thinking more than Latin American audience but um in Spain they're seeing the rise of of right-wing evangelicalism too um it's out in Portuguese in um uh it's available in Brazil at the request of
00:51:30
Brazilian evangelicals who see absolutely these same patterns taking hold in Brazil so it is um it's actually daunting chilling even to see how this
00:51:43
book is which is really about conservative white evangelicals in the United States I'm an American historian how much it is resonating with people around the world right now in ways that
00:51:57
that should be alarming last question and it's a total non-sequitur but something you said in a recent interview stuck with me you're a calvinist and you
00:52:08
said that Calvinists see sin in structures I have an idea of what that means but why don't you illuminate it yeah so I teach at Calvin University and
00:52:20
it's funny because a lot of the kind of the bad guys and Jesus and John Wayne are also Calvinists and and they kind of you know dominate the the public uh image of Calvinism which is you know it's not a pretty picture and so one of
00:52:32
the most controversial things that I do from time to time is you come out as a calvinist on social media just to revive people this is who I am and I am still a practicing Christian you know attend a church down
00:52:44
um down the street and um and I think that throws people off sometimes but my tradition does take sin very seriously like in all kinds of ways right we talk about Sin a lot we have
00:52:56
theology that helps us understand and soon as seen as yes personal kind of heart orientation and that's very much what evangelicals are all about but it also is also seen as structural like for
00:53:07
for Generations like Humanity has um been prone to you know pride and selfishness and greed and so over time like our societies structures reflect
00:53:20
that and it just you know it snowballs and so we understand sin as both personal making bad choices being selfish and all of that but also absolutely structural and so it's been kind of wild to see the
00:53:34
um absolute backlash against things like systemic racism and many conservative Christians including from my own tradition are just blasting that right these are the political talking points you know all of
00:53:48
a sudden CRT is a thing and it's it's the worst thing and it's and for me and you know being rooted in a theological tradition I can say wait a minute this shouldn't be a contradiction for you at
00:53:59
all you should be the first up to say of course sin Brokenness corruption is everywhere and if it is then we should always be looking at you know how do we fix that how do we
00:54:13
make it less bad and our fixes are never going to be perfect but how can we bring some healing how can we bring some restoration how can we do justice which is a very very biblical concept you know
00:54:25
what are we called to do to do justice and love kindness so yes that's where I come from and that's kind of my faith tradition and the theology that shapes how I see the world uh but then the book is is really it's it's a work of
00:54:38
academic history and um and that's the story I had to tell I think that is a great note to end on Kristen thank you so much for joining us oh thank you for having me this is great
00:54:55
thank you hey Midas Mighty love this report continue the conversation by following us on Instagram at Midas Touch to keep up with the most important news of the day what are you waiting for follow us now
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