 Hello and welcome everyone to our event. My name is Cheyenne Polimaggio. I'm a fellow with the political reform program at New America. Some of my research and writing has focused on the role of faith in public life and in particular the rise of evangelicals in Brazil as a big supporter group of Jair Bolsonaro. So I'm really excited about our conversation today. Broadly speaking, New America's political reform program works to bring new perspectives on repairing the dysfunction of government, restoring trust, and realizing the promise of American democracy. In that work, we also seek to understand the ideological alliances influencing American politics. And in our hyperpolarized political environment, we're particularly interested in so-called strange bedfellows. These are partnerships that might not make sense initially, but have become powerful political influences. Today's conversation is about one of those alliances. It's about the alliance between white evangelicals and Trump and how it came to be and how it was fueled by the erosion of democratic norms. To many, it's hard to make sense of Trump's appeal to the religious right. How did a serial adulterer with no history of upholding conservative Christian values manage to successfully engage the support of a bloc that professes to be united by moral principles? So in a combination of more than a decade of on-the-ground reporting and deep historical examination, Sarah Posner's book, Unholy, White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump explores precisely that. It explores the agenda, the common agenda that binds together Trump, the religious right, and the alt-right. This conversation we hope will offer a deeper understanding of the ideological underpinnings and forces influencing the course of Republican politics. And beyond historical analysis, Sarah's book provides a very important and interesting lens through which we can understand both Trump's response to the pandemic and more recently, the country and worldwide protests over the killing of George Floyd. So we're very excited to have Sarah with us here today. Sarah is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations, her investigative reporting has appeared in series of outlets, including Rolling Stone, Vice, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and others. Her coverage and analysis of politics and religion has also appeared in the Times, The Post, The American Prospect, and many others. And obviously, Sarah is the author of Unholy. So we're very, very happy to have her here. Welcome, Sarah. And joining Sarah here today is Eddie Glaude. Eddie is the chair of the Department of African American Studies and the James Asmedano Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. His most well-known books, Democracy in Black, How Race Still Insulates the American Soul, and In a Shade of Blue, Pragmatism, and the Politics of Black America, take a wide look at black communities and reveal complexities, vulnerabilities, and opportunities for hope. And we so need those opportunities for hope. So I'm very excited to have you both here. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone who's joining us online. So the structure of the event will be as follows. Sarah will give us a brief presentation and highlight some important themes. Eddie will share some of his reactions. Then the three of us will join in conversation and we'll open it up for a Q&A towards the end. So as you hear, you know, Sarah and Eddie talking, just start thinking about those questions and pop those in the Q&A box. So without further ado, I live it to you, Sarah. Thank you so much. Thank you, Cheyenne. And thank you to New America for hosting this and to Eddie for participating in it. I'm looking forward to the conversation today. I wanted to give a little background on how this book came to be, which I think would give people who haven't read it yet some kind of basis for entering into this conversation today. I had been covering the religious right for years when Trump entered the presidential race in 2015. And I had covered the religious rights role in helping to select the Republican presidential candidates through the primary process, through endorsements and money and just generally supporting, picking one candidate or another, laying out the litmus tests of what they expected from a candidate. So religious right leadership had for years required that the candidates have a personal salvation story, talk about their own faith, talk about how they would restore the Christian nation or govern the nation from a biblical perspective. And they also demanded that the candidates have an unblemished record on their litmus test issues like abortion or LGBT rights. Trump fit none of those molds. Yet, as he launched an overtly racist campaign and overtly nativist campaign, pollsters were finding that white evangelicals were supporting him over the other candidates who seemed to be perfect candidates for the religious right leadership's litmus tests. People like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or even Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin, who was seen by a lot of religious right activists of being able to speak their language. But as it turned out, Trump was really speaking their language because at his rallies and in his TV appearances, he was really speaking to the base. And at the same time, he was electrifying what we now know as the alt-right, the sort of hodgepodge coalition of white supremacists and anti-immigrant activists and neo-Nazis who were very excited about his candidacy throughout 2015. So a question that I was asking myself as I was reporting on the primary campaign in 2015 and 2016 is, will the religious right really come around to Trump? And would they come around to Trump in spite of how he's energizing the alt-right? And the answer was yes. And maybe it wasn't necessarily in spite of. Maybe there were shared visions of what America should be, even if many in the Christian right would disavow the notion that they are white supremacists or racists. The through line of the book is that both of these movements share a hostility to the values of a liberal democracy. Both of these movements admire instead illiberal leaders like Victor Orban or Bolsonaro or Vladimir Putin. They share a hostility to a liberal democracy's promotion of human rights and dignity for all its citizens, the notion of the government protecting and promoting equal civil rights for everyone, separation of powers, and independent judiciary, and a free press. So in all of these areas, Trump has proven to be a strong man who shares those hostilities. But in particular, for the Christian right, he has given them a mechanism for enacting the agenda that they had always hoped to enact through a godly or biblical leader. Instead, they portray him as perhaps not the Christian leader that they were thinking that they wanted, but he is an anointed leader that God has put in the White House for this particular moment in time, who has given them the judges that they want, who has given them the political appointments that they want to enact the sort of agenda that they had always hoped a president who would govern from a biblical worldview would give them. And so now he is known to them as the most pro-life and the most pro-religious freedom president in history. And we can talk about that later in the context of what's happening right now because the president who's the most pro-religious freedom president in history tear-gassed protesters to go do a photo op at a church. And I think that that moment provides us probably a lot of fodder to talk about the ways in which the Christian right excuses his behavior or even promotes it as indicative of their view of him as a godly or at least an anointed president who is protecting their interests and restoring in their view a Christian nation. Great. Thank you so much, Sarah. That was great. What an important book. Really excited to dive in. But before we do that, Eddie. Sarah, thank you so much for unholy. It is such a timely text in so many different ways. As I read it, a thought came to mind or a couple of thoughts came to mind. One, of course, involves a story that is rooted in what Judith Sklar might call an ordinary vice of hypocrisy and that we might begin to think about what it means for white evangelical Christians to wrap Donald Trump or Trumpism in its own theological clothing and how that plays itself out. That's too easy. Another thought that came to mind is the way in which we tend to exceptionalize Donald Trump, where Donald Trump becomes in some ways the embodiment of all that is wrong with our society. And for many who are in the quote unquote resistance, the argument seems to be that if we only got rid of Donald Trump, then we will be OK. And what unholy reveals is that Donald Trump's spoken a language that was already extant, that he is in fact a reflection of a broad set of currents that have defined and over-determined American politics for at least 40, 50 years. And what's so beautiful about unholy is how you chart and you contrast in interesting sorts of ways this commitment, this stated commitment to faith and values with the argument against desegregation of schools, with the argument against the extension of women's rights and LGBTQ rights, the argument against affirmative action, which you generally describe as illiberal commitments actually being presented as theological views. And it makes sense in one level to think about a certain kind of theocratic approach to politics as being illiberal. But it's another way of thinking about this question that maybe their theology has nothing to do with these claims. And we see this, perhaps, in the willingness to embrace a figure like Donald Trump, who's their strongman. So I'm so looking forward to this conversation. The book is so timely, not only because we see Donald Trump deploying the theater of dictatorial power in order to take a photo op in front of St. John's. We saw the silence and the hypocrisy of white Christian evangelicals when they stood by and watched him cage children, when they stood by and watched him separate families. And they did not appeal to the gospel in that moment to offer up a more humane politics and a more humane policy. So I look forward to the conversation. Congratulations on this wonderful extraordinary book. Thank you. Great. So as I mentioned, we're going to talk a little bit amongst ourselves. We're going to try to do how we got here, what we're seeing right now, and what's beyond 2020. But before we get into your historical analysis, Sarah, tell me what's going on here. How has Trump been able to keep evangelicals by his side during this time? So the pandemic and the protests, anybody watching from the outside can't reconcile those two things. So what are some of these strategies that we're seeing right now that have helped him hold on to that base of support? Well, a big part of how he is holding on right now is that his supporters in the Christian right have created a very robust echo chamber of Trump is a wonderful, fearless, strong leader and defender of our religious freedom. And he is under siege by enemies, the deep state, the media, the lamestream media, the lying media, the Democrats, George Soros, now Antifa. And so in their echo chamber, Trump is the victim. In their echo chamber, Trump has done a fantastic job in the pandemic. So why is everybody complaining? And in their echo chamber, George Floyd's murder was terrible and deplorable. But we should not allow that to allow leftist, Antifa outsiders, agitators violently protest in the streets of America and endanger all of us. This is their framing. So there is very little that shakes them in part because he has been framed to them as the victim of all of these forces that are against him and therefore against their vision of what Christian America is and the religious freedom of those in that Christian America. And they see a lot of his use of force and talking about the militarization of the police as sort of government as a force for good. This is what the government should be doing. So Eddie, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. So this very different understanding of government, government as a force for good, as long as it serves our interests, and government as bad as faulty when it's not quite doing what his supporters and his circle want him to do. How does that fit into in the context of what we're seeing more recently? Well, I mean, it's a performative contradiction. So on the one hand, you have the argument that government is intrusive. It's intrusive on our liberties. It's constantly constraining our ability to exercise not only our faith, but exercise my discriminatory capacity because of my beliefs. The government is constantly limiting my freedom. And to the extent to which government is engaged in that practice as well as in redistributing hard work because they want to give things, take things away from hardworking people and give it to these lazy folk who happen to be more than likely black and brown. We even see the pathologizing of the poor recently. Charles Murray's last book, for example, where we get a discourse that is always centered around the quote unquote white trash being reactivated as a way to account for in some ways an economy that's devastating white working people, particularly white working men with a high school education. So you get that view, but then you get a view of government that can become a tool for their understanding of the kind of society that they want to live in. So government can be used to police a certain understanding of the society that they hold dear. So on the one hand, you get the deep state, but on the other hand, you want the state to be deployed to police your understanding of government. So it's a performative contradiction that makes little sense, but it's very, very powerful and effective. Underneath it in interesting sorts of ways is a discourse of white supremacy that into my mind is sanctified in a discourse of Christianity. We have to think about on the Venn diagram where we begin to separate one and the other and where they blur. And Sarah does such a great job in making that argument clear by excavating the historical sources, it seems to me. Great, great. And just to touch on that, Eddie, the conversation about the role of the Christian right in American politics is sort of comes back, every few years, we sort of wake up and realize that, wait, this is not quite right, what is happening here? And we forget that this didn't happen overnight. And I think that one of the greatest parts of Sarah's book is this tracing, the tracing of this trajectory. So we're talking about five decades of people organizing and the sort of grand project of really becoming this really powerful arm within the Republican establishment. So Sarah, tell us a little bit, of course we can't go over everything, but tell us a little bit about, how did we get here? Tell us a bit about Paul Weyrich. Is that, who's Paul Weyrich and what do we need to know about him and how does this legacy endure until today? So Paul Weyrich was one of the principal architects of a movement that started in the early 1970s, known then as the new right. And ultimately of organizing the religious right and bringing the religious right into the movement of other right-wing conservatives but bringing this religious contingent along with it to make this powerful coalition that became the base of the Republican party. It included people who were more interested in sort of free market principles or a strong defense and foreign policy conservatives. And that became what we knew before Trump as the conservative movement. Weyrich was a very conservative Catholic who came to Washington after having a radio program and working for GOP candidates in his native Wisconsin. He came to Washington in the late 1960s to work for a Republican senator. And then after Watergate decided that conservatives really needed to push back on liberal domination in Washington, they had the Brookings Institution which is kind of funny, like that he's sort of viewed Brookings Institution as this like far left radical thing to do in Washington. But he came to Washington to build an infrastructure, he came out to build an infrastructure that would give conservatives more dominance in Washington. So when you think of the Heritage Foundation or the American Legislative Exchange Council, these are organizations that Paul Weyrich built, the moral majority, Paul Weyrich built that with Jerry Falwell. But he also built it with a man named Robert Billings. And Billings might have been more important than Jerry Falwell in bringing white fundamentalists and evangelicals into this movement because of his role in defending the Christian school movement from the internal revenue service. And this, according to Weyrich's own account was the issue, not abortion, that brought white evangelicals into the fold of the new right and into the religious right. So after Brownby Board of Education and public school desegregation got underway, the IRS decided that its policy would be to say to private schools, if you're essentially segregated, we're gonna ask you to take on these policy changes in admissions and in hiring of teachers and staff and so forth so that you won't be desegregated. And if you continue to be basically segregated, we're gonna take away your tax exemptions because why should the taxpayer subsidize a policy that the United States government, Supreme Court and the United States government have said is illegal? That was the thinking yet Billings and his allies took this on as a huge affront to their religious freedom. It was the government engaging in social engineering, which was a term used very frequently by the new right to describe policy that they viewed as too invasive of white people's freedom. So busing, for example, was frequently called social engineering. Changes to public school curricula to be more inclusive were also referred to as social engineering. And so Billings basically built this movement of white fundamentalists and evangelicals who viewed the IRS actions as imposing quotas on them, infringing on their rights, infringing on their religious freedom. And as much as abortion later became a top issue for them, ideologically this view of government engaging in social engineering to promote the values of a liberal democracy, the opposition to that really became so much of a through line from the Wyrick era to the Trump era. Eddie, I'm gonna push us further a little bit here. Let's really look behind the curtain here. So we're talking about an argument of conservatism and religious freedom on the surface. But underneath the surface, what we're seeing here is an argument that is racist, that is white supremacist, and that successfully manages to marry that to some of these religious precepts. So what is going on in these people's minds as they reconcile those opposing concepts? How does this work in practice? Lord, I wish I knew what was going on in their minds. Sarah, but I mean, part of what we see is, part of what we have to do is kind of interrogate what the word conservative is actually singling out. Okay. Does it carry forward this kind of Berke and understand Edmund Burke understanding of conserving traditions, being resistant to kind of systemic revolutionary change? Is that the element that's going on here? What is the argument seeking to conserve? And part of what we see here is that when it comes to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, we see that there is a demand that public schools are integrated. And immediately there is a splintering of American education and Christian schools, white Christian schools play an important role. I mean, we have a Senator from Mississippi right now who comes out of that trajectory, right? Schools that started literally, right? Right as Brown v. Board and Brown v. Board too, were decided. So part of what we see is that race is driving a lot of this. And what Sarah has made so brilliantly explicit is that when we talk about private schools, when we listen to Bill Barr at Notre Dame giving his talk, it is an echo of a long standing debate when we hear a debate about school vouchers, when we hear a debate about public school funding, that it's not just happening in the moment in which we're debating, it's actually an extension of an unresolved argument that goes all the way back to 1954 in the Brown v. Board decision and the reactions to that. So I think what Sarah has done, and I don't want to reveal too much about the book, the last line of the book is really key, right? Is that this isn't going to be uprooted by just simply ridding us of Donald Trump. This view, right? Which is in some ways justified by a certain theological understanding, right? Has deep roots in the very ways in which certain segments of American society understand politics and understand more importantly, their social and moral arrangements, right? So it's not just something you just pull up out of the ground and think you've ridged yourself of the problem. If I'm answering your question, I think. This is what makes the book so exciting. Yeah, no, it's so great. And just to touch on that a little bit, one of the other really cool parts in Sarah's book is this conversation around going from a politics of quote unquote values to a much more explicit politics of resentment, right? Of not based on values, but on opposition, right? So opposition to a poorest secular liberal democracy just like surrounded by lots of resentment. What does that look like in practice? So let's look at more recently sort of the lead up to Trump's election, so the campaign trail and what we're seeing that today. What does the narrative look like and what are sort of the red flags that one should be watching for when listening to that, not just from what Trump is saying, but this cohort, right? So leaders and people on the ground when they rally to support him. What should we be listening for? So we can't talk about how Trump came to be their hero or their messiah without referencing the fact that he followed eight years of a presidency of a black man, right? So that is a very important component here. Obviously it's not just, the backlash is not just explained by the fact that we had eight years of Barack Obama, as Eddie is saying, this is something with a lot of deep historical roots. But now that Joe Biden is the nominee for the Democrats, there's gonna be a lot of tying of him to Obama and maybe not even in particularly explicit ways. But Obama is, in some cases, the backlash to Obama was explicitly racist, but a lot of it was coded in language about, he was too, they coded often in language about abortion and LGBTQ rights. So Obama was an infringer on their religious freedom because he passed the Affordable Care Act, which had the contraception coverage requirement in it, which these Christian employers and nonprofits objected to. Nevermind that the Obama administration bent over backwards to make all of these exceptions and accommodations for people who, for organizations and businesses who objected to, not businesses, but organizations that objected to providing this coverage. But remember, this led to a Supreme Court case, which is one of the seminal cases of the Obama era, giving a corporation religious freedom to say, we're not giving our employees this contraception coverage. And this is the Hobby Lobby decision, and this is a mechanism by which they used to further argue that we need these judges who are going to give us more of this kind of religious freedom or protect this kind of religious freedom that we already have from some of these victories. And obviously we got same-sex marriage under Obama, and he had given it his stamp of approval, and even though we had to wait for the Supreme Court to actually do it, right? And so there'll be a lot of tying of Biden to Obama on these quote-unquote religious freedom issues, which really aren't about religious freedom as much as they are about, we don't want these other people to have rights, right? Which is very similar to the arguments about the Christian schools that we don't want, we're gonna say it's about our religious freedom to run our schools the way we want to with free of government interference. And so we have, in the Trump era, we have lots of other things layered on, like the deep state or the portrayal of somebody like Mike Flynn as a victim of the deep state. But the tying of Biden to the Obama era is going to definitely be kind of a signal that the Obama era was this great period of great oppression of Christian religious freedom. And that could come back under President Biden. Yeah, Eddie, do you wanna add to that? You know, I was just thinking, I was just thinking, ditto, ditto, ditto, yeah, yes, that's right, that's right. And then I was thinking about these three kind of nodal points that are really important because we don't want to collapse the two, but we wanna always think about their intersection. And that is white evangelical Christians and the alt-right, where do they intersect and how does this language, right, provide cover for a certain set of really noxious views that go beyond the culture wars, right? Where do they intersect? And so the three nodal points for me, Charlottesville, the Life Center in Pittsburgh and El Paso. And each moment represents a kind of element of this politics of grievance and resentment that Sarah points out. So when you think about Charlottesville, it has everything to do with those demographic shifts, the browning of America. What does that mean, those commercials, those Cheerios commercials with those racially ambiguous people, right? What does it mean that those demographic shifts have already evidenced themselves in our politics? That is the Obama coalition, right? And how does that create a certain kind of deep anxiety about the path and direction of the country? How does that then links to what happened in El Paso, the worry about the browning of the country? I'm not doing this in order, but you get it, the question around immigration and the nativist's underpinnings has everything to do, underpinning of everything to do with a certain kind of imagining of the country as white and as Christian. And then of course, you know, the George Soros threat was present there. Remember, he's funding the Caroline. And we know that George Soros is at present with regards to the discourse around neo-Nazis, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism that led to the carnage at the light of New York in Pittsburgh. So part of what we're seeing in interesting sorts of ways is the way in which Trump's rhetoric, if I understood the initial question, right? Trades on a whole, a constellation of commitments where white evangelical Christianity exists and lives. And he deploys them in a way that when people hear them, it's familiar because it's a language that they inhabit, a set of concerns and worries that they inhabit. At least this is what I'm getting from Sarah's book, but I might be kind of reading it like I want it to be, you know, I might be reading too much into the claims there, I'm not sure. Well, I think that, you know, so in the mid-2000s, and even before that, the religious right made these very strenuous efforts to be more diverse, to reach out to more diverse audiences and potential supporters. And you saw that in the autopsy after Obama won, where the RNC did this autopsy and said we should really, you know, try to reach out to non-white voters too. And, you know, the grievance just came roaring back. Just a few years earlier, we should be reaching out to non-white voters and, you know, having a bigger Republican party. And then just a few years later, you have Trump opening his campaign calling Mexicans rapists and criminals. So, but I think that there's this sort of common language of what is political correctness? What is Western civilization? And these kinds of, that political correctness is an infringement on white Christian America. It's trying to impose these social justice warrior values on the rest of America. And we are the protectors of Western civilization, which really means, whiteness basically, right? And so you hear that, you can hear that kind of common language used sort of across the Trumpian landscape. And I think that even if deliberate, they didn't have a deliberate organizational meeting where, you know, someone from the alt-right and someone from the Christian right got together and said, we're gonna have this coalition. There were a lot of people who didn't have the right to have this coalition. There were other people sort of orchestrating that nonetheless, for example, Steve Bannon, when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention in 2016 told me that the alt-right needed the Christian right to win elections because the numbers just simply weren't there. And so by using language that kind of percolates in both communities, they're able to sort of coalesce this base around Trump where he is seen as their protector against the enemies of Christian America or the enemies of Western civilization with all of their politically correct ideas. So there have been a lot of, I just wanted to add this to this, there have been a lot of moments over Trump's presidency when people thought, okay, this is the thing that's going to break the Christian right support of him. First was Charlottesville. That was now almost three years ago, right? And there wasn't any movement, significant movement away from him. The next one, I think we've probably forgotten this in the bin of outrageous things Trump has done and said, but remember the shithole countries, right? This shithole country statement. And there was a lot of hand-wringing and then everybody moved on. And now what we're seeing with the protests against the police violence and racist policing in all across the country, you're starting to see Trump trying to stoke that maybe it's Antifa, maybe it's George Soros who's paying the protesters, where did they come from? And I'm the victim. Shifting gears a little bit. I love for us to touch on religious symbolism and all the different symbols that have come together around Trump. So when we're thinking about, you know, the Christian right and the outright coming together, there's this very apocalyptical language, right? The sort of the end of our race, everything is gonna change, everything, it is the end. While at the same time, having Trump would really be presented as kind of like the messiah, the anointed one, and a step further, right? One who's willing to fight for them, unlike, you know, you could say so many of other Republican candidates and presidents were unwilling to kind of like go that extra mile. So what does that, what does that religious language and symbolism look like in practice? How do we see it coming from people like yourself or even Paula White and what, how is that different from the way we've seen Republican candidates trying to appeal to their base? This is a lot more religious. What else is going on here? So the Christian right has long used the Esther story as a very sort of potent backdrop for why people get involved in politics and why picking the right presidential candidate is so important. You know, Esther was there for a moment such as this and that's how they often bring grassroots people into politics by saying it might be your Esther moment. You don't know. Like, you know, this could be your Esther moment where you prevent a genocide. We can talk about the contradictions and the paradox there, right? And so that was very much the kind of language that was around say George W. Bush, that he was, he is a president for America for such a time as this. It was often invoked not only because of his opposition to abortion, but I think also, you know, at the time, his foreign policy was seen as protecting America from, you know, heirists. With Trump, Trump isn't really seen as an Esther figure. Trump is seen as a Cyrus figure. So in the Bible, King Cyrus was the Persian king who helped the Jewish people return to Jerusalem and rebuild the destroyed city and returned from exile. And that is perhaps an even more potent kind of imagery for people than like, oh, it's your Esther moment. You can be this sort of heroic, rhetorical figure. In this case, it's like, you can help us. You may not be a Christian like us, but you're gonna help us restore the Christian America. I mean, that is really the message of this whole Trump is like Cyrus. And I think that to me, that that is such a sort of potent religious image for people. And the other, I would just also add that the other religious image they use quite a bit is that they claim that walls are biblical. Even though like the walls are often, walls in the Bible are not walls for the purpose that Trump is building the wall at the border. But I would be really interested to see if anyone has this discussion about walls in the context of Trump having that fencing built all around his bunker of a White House right now. Eddie, any reactions? I just find it really fascinating. I was just, yes, Sarah, yes. But I'm trying to figure out what this now is doing. What does it mean that Christian, right? What is the noun you're doing? That they're trafficking in certain kinds of languages using certain metaphors? Because I'm thinking about, I'm trying to think about a historical precedence, Sarah, to this moment, right? So we tell this story, this long story. We could go back to those initial moments with Paul Warrick. We can go back to the early stages of the moral majority. We can do all sorts of things. And I'm just thinking about what happened, what was the response to Jimmy Carter, who was, in fact, an explicit evangelical, Southern evangelical, and compare that response to the embrace of Ronald Reagan, the divorce. So we're talking about Donald Trump and the kinds of compromises made around Donald Trump. We remember the kind of compromises made around this Hollywood actor, playboy, divorcee, who wasn't quite willing to go all the way. Remember when he came and spoke to them and the reluctance of Paul Warrick and others, not Jerry Jr., but the daddy, to embrace him in some ways, right? So part of what I'm trying to think about is the way in which this language of Christianity is always in service of a set of more fundamental commitments that God is often being deployed in the service of these illiberal commitments, which then opens up a sort of kind, and here I'm getting a little out of control. You tell me, Shayana, you tell me, Sarah. No, no, keep going. Opens up a kind of worry that at the heart of this is idolatry on Christian terms. Does that make sense, Sarah? Yes, and absolutely. I mean, Trump's evangelical critics, and there are evangelical critics, have used that precise criticism of the evangelical support for Trump, that this is idolatry. He is a man. He is not anointed by God. I think that with Reagan, so Reagan, I think an important feature of both Reagan and Trump bookending this, the start of the religious right and this sort of apotheosis of the religious right with Trump is that they both performed for them, right? They're both actors in a way, right? I mean, Reagan really was an actor. Trump is more of a reality TV actor. And remember, Reagan went to this big religious right gathering and he admitted, he said, I am not one of you, but I'm coming to you. And, but Trump did that in a much more, I mean, Reagan used the language of American exceptionalism and that we were gonna be the shining beacon of freedom to the world. But Trump, over the course of the 40 years since Reagan won the presidency, the American right has seen what they believe to be a collapse of their cultural dominance. And so instead of I am gonna uphold America as it exists as a beacon of freedom, right? We're gonna say, we want to crush the America that has become, what America has become in order to uphold this other kind of notion of what the true America is. And so it's an interesting, it's an interesting performative book ending. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Great. And in preparing for this, we were talking about how many obituaries have been written about the Christian right, right? So even if we look back at 2016, I actually remember talking to somebody who was consulting in the Clinton campaign and she told me that the vibe in the room was very much one of like, this is our first like post-Christian, post-religious election, right? We're gonna be able to kind of move away from that because we have finally arrived at a moment in American democracy where religion is going to start to play a very different role and how wrong were we, right? So why do those obituaries keep being written, beyond just this kind of urge and desire to see that go away? And why do we keep getting it wrong? Why do we always think that it's the end? It's just the last, quote unquote, like few people holding on to these precepts. But once they're gone, we're good. Why do we keep making that mistake? Well, I think that we're obsessed with polling data for one thing, which doesn't tell us everything, right? And it's true that over the past, you know, 20, 30 years, the proportion of white evangelicals in the American population has decreased. That's in part because the proportion of white people has decreased, but also because the proportion of people who are Christian or identify as Christian has decreased. So in the younger generations, there are fewer white people and fewer religious people, religious people at all. You know, so like the nuns, the NONES are increasing and so are the non-white people. So I think that people look at that polling data and they think, well, these people are a minority of Americans. Well, okay, but you can look at that and think that they're thinking that they're in a death rattle, but they have spent the last 40 years building really well-funded institutions, building Christian media, television, radio, now, you know, podcasts and YouTube channels, right? And gaining access to the highest levels of power in America, right? So they are making policy, they are making law. I mean, this is why the Trump presidency is very dangerous on the legal front because if he has another four years with Mitch McConnell to install more judges friendly to this point of view in the courts, you would have basically this tyranny of a minority by having stacked the courts. So I think people really underestimate the robustness of those institutions and also the institute. So the institutions that help build and sustain an ideology and also of the institutions that help get out the vote at election time. So the white evangelicals are overrepresented in the voting population relative to their proportion in the population as a whole. And so people have to keep that in mind. You can't just think, oh, well, they're decreasing in numbers in the overall population. If they vote in an outsized way relative to that, then they have more say than their numbers. Eddie? Damn. No, just, it's a fascinating thing to wrap one's mind around because it seems to me, it ought to be at least as I read your book, Sarah, a clarion call to those who self-describe as Christians to make an argument of a more forceful case for a different understanding of Christianity in the public domain. So we know we have sojourners with Jim Wallace and others and we have Reverend Barber and Bishop Barber in the Poor People's Campaign. But it seems to me that in the public imagination, at least when it comes to politics, we tend to associate Christianity with the white evangelical right, when in fact we need a more forceful kind of understanding of Christian witness in our politics that actually doesn't stand over and against liberal norms, right? But actually shows that the notions of justice and love could animate a certain set of policy positions that would call all of this stuff into question. On Christian grounds, it seems to me. I think that's been there, not only in the people that you named, but other people as well. But I think that they operated a disadvantage in that their constituency is not as amenable to being just downloaded what you ought to think. And their constituency is not as amenable to sitting and listening to propaganda. I'm not saying that the liberal side is putting out propaganda, right? Precisely because they're not, but I think that that makes people who are followers of the Christian right like kind of a more formidable opponent in that they're willing to believe conspiracy theories or believe that it's Donald Trump that's under siege, not liberal values, right? So for example, one example is, what are they gonna do if Trump loses and he refuses to leave office? I would think that they would continue to support him because they would think that he was the victim of some kind of conspiracy. So I think that there are sort of structural differences that make it really hard for the cohort that you're talking about to get their message out in such a widespread way. The other problem is that Democrats are just generally less religious. All the time the number of the nuns is increasing. I don't know if the current moment that we're in offers some possibilities because there's nothing kind of more explicit about this conflict than what Trump did at St. John's last week, right? And how Bishop Boody, who's the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese here in DC pushed back on it. And then the same thing with Wilton Gregory, the Archbishop of the Catholic Diocese of DC about Trump's second visit to a religious site, which was the John Paul II Shrine. So I think that the media is sort of hungry for these kind of conflict stories. So that might provide some kind of opportunity to get that discussions of those Christian values out there. I don't know if it sustains over the next five months, but I think in the short term, I think we're seeing a lot of coverage of that at least. It would be odd if a photo op was more egregious than caging children. But that's another thing. I think that there's been a lot of religious figures who have gone to the border and stood at the cages and protested. It happened, but I think for all of these structural reasons and institutional reasons that we're talking about, it just doesn't get the traction. So we have a lot of really good questions coming in for our audience. I'm gonna get to those. I have one more question and let's broaden this a little bit. So let's talk about the movement that we're seeing outside of the US. So we're seeing this international wave of white, far-right nationalism, Brazil being, of course, a big example of that, but Hungary, Austria. Talk a little bit about this international movement. That's anti-globalism, anti-politicalism and how has Trump managed to both co-opt that into his platform and how does that movement resonate with the Christian, right? How do those things meet for them? So I think a lot of people easily saw the connections between the alt-right and some of these far-right autocratic movements in Europe. Obviously, someone like Victor Orban, who has deployed all these very explicit anti-Semitic tropes, sealed his borders, demonized migrants and immigrants and also dismantled a free press, independent judiciary and so forth. The alt-right was an admirer of Orban, is an admirer of Putin, is admirer of other far-right leaders who don't have as much power as Putin does in their respective countries. I think it was less obvious why the Christian right would be so supportive of someone like Victor Orban, but they are and also of Putin and of Bolsonaro. Now, Bolsonaro has deployed religious language and sort of messianic language about himself very effectively, but like another thing that he's done is sort of counterpose these quote-unquote Christian values against say LGBT rights, right? Which is something Putin has done also. And someone like Orban, who also kind of like Trump doesn't really have a very intensive religious background himself, but has used the language of our Christian roots or our Christian history. And for the religious right, I was sort of amazed when I did the reporting on this that there's been so much written about Orban's dismantling of democracy and the sort of the institutions of a liberal democracy and even boasting that he was heading an illiberal democracy, which he liked. I was surprised to find out that that was kind of okay with religious right leaders that I interviewed about this, that all those things are just procedural stuff, but that he was really defending Christian values and family values and defending these kinds of values against what they call gender ideology, which is a catchphrase that they use to encompass women's rights, reproductive rights, LGBT rights, which they portray as an attack on the family. And so a lot of the Christian rights support for these autocratic leaders is couched in the language of defending the family and against these. Again, it's counterposed against a liberal or liberal ideas of human rights and civil rights and also against these notions of political, what they would call political correctness and we would just call protecting the human rights of everyone regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity or sex. Or just simply decency. Right, right, decency. And again, the idea of keeping, of Orban keeping migrants out and keeping immigrants out of Hungary was again couched as he was just sort of defending Hungary's national character or values. So I think this is really important for us to kind of just put highlight, right? And that is one way to read unholy is just a particular story about white evangelicals and their support of Donald Trump and the history that makes it make sense. It's one way to read it. But another way of reading it, at least from our conversation and what I bring to the book is a kind of Jeremiah, right, a warning that underneath our politics, right, our forces that call into question the very assumptions that shape the very foundations that make us a democratic society. There are those among us who hold commitments and those commitments are sacred, right? And their pursuit of power is sanctified who hold commitments that are not commensurate with the idea of an open pluralistic democratic society. And they have been relentlessly pursuing power in the name of those commitments. So on the one hand, you can read it as a narrow story about white evangelical Christianity and Donald Trump. But on the other hand, it is a cautionary tale. It is a deep, more than a cautionary tale. It's a call for us to see what the stakes are, right? To see what the stakes are in this moment. As again, that last line in the book, I guess you gotta go by to get the last line, right? It lets us know that this is not just going to go away in 2020. This is not gonna go away with the election in November. This is here and it has deep roots and we have to understand what it portends for the very struggle over the meaning and form of democracy in this country. So if you both had to give Joe Biden a piece of advice in thinking about what is the messaging have to look like and how do you transcend this long-lasting, enduring alliance between Trump and the Christian right and the alt-right, what is missing here in the counter narrative to that narrative? What haven't candidates or the left or progressives, what haven't they gotten right in terms of messaging? What's missing here? I think the idea that Donald Trump is an aberration and that if, like Eddie said, that if we get rid of him, if he's voted out of office, everything is going to be a meadow full of wildflowers. So I think that, and I think you hear it a lot because you see these Lincoln project videos and George Conway and Tom Nichols and Rick Wilson and these anti-Trump conservatives who keep saying things like, these aren't our values or this isn't the Republican party that I know. And my question to them is what if it is? So I think that for Democrats, they have to raise the stakes in voters' minds and make it clear what it is that Trump and his allies would do in a second term. And I'm not just talking about nasty tweets and things like that, but policy and what would the Supreme Court look like and what would the rest of the federal judiciary look like? I think it's something like 11 of Trump's nominees to the federal bench would not in their confirmation hearings say that Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided. Now, we know that they always dodge the Roe v. Wade question because that's too hot to handle but who thought that school desegregation was too hot to handle? So I think that that kind of understanding that this is not about Trump being an aberration is very important. I don't know, I'm not an expert on political slogans and messaging, so I don't know, that's the idea that I would try to convey to them. One of the things that comes to mind, at least to me, is this, that we're not going to convince white conservative evangelicals to vote Democratic by demonstrating our Christian piety. So remember during the campaign, Hillary Clinton's private religious commitments, there was a lot about her Methodism, her faith. You remember with Obama, there was a lot about his faith and of course that became a lightning rod with Jeremiah Wright, but there's this ongoing effort on the part of Democrats and we can tell a story about how they want to kind of, can not necessarily distance themselves from this secular kind of broad brush, but to demonstrate that they too have religious commitments as a way of trying to appeal to those folks who hold or who self-describe as Christians and that is their predominant identity. That to me isn't going to work because I don't know if it's Christianity that's motivating their political decision-making. We could have that debate, right? That might be unfair, but we could have that debate. What I do know is this, is that what Joe Biden offers in his own kind of grief and sorrow and his commitment to Catholicism, as I understand it, can be a way of presenting a policy position around addressing the catastrophe that we face that could speak beyond the chatter, the noise and get to the heart of people's circumstance. On the one hand, you can say they could be watching Pat Robertson on CBN and listening to all of this stuff, but when they can't go to their mother's funeral because of COVID-19, when they've lost their job and it doesn't look like it's gonna come back, they weren't just furloughed, they were downsized and they have no prospects. When we begin to talk about these material conditions of American life, there's the possibility to offer a version, a view of what it means to be together that might be attractive. But I wanna say this, we don't need to spend our time trying to convince them to hold different sorts of commitments. Sarah's book shows us that that might not work at all. Great, thank you, thank you both. So I have a very long list of questions here from our audience, so thank you so much, everyone who's engaging. So I'm trying to, I'm gonna try to touch on things that we haven't talked about yet. So bear with me here for a second. So the first question that we have here is, if you were to break down evangelicals by communities within it, right? So Assemblies of God, Independent Baptist, Church of Christ, et cetera, et cetera, do you have a sense, Sarah and Eddie, of which ones are most pro-Trump or which ones are most skeptical of Trump and why? What are the differences there? Among evangelical denominations. Denominations, right. So a lot of evangelicals are members of non-denominational churches. And a lot of evangelicals go to more than one church. And so I've met people, I've met a guy in Texas who a very prominent lawyer and religious right activist who goes to a Southern Baptist church and Joel Osteen's church. So in a way the denominations don't really matter anymore. In a way, Robert Jeffress, who pastors an ostensibly Southern Baptist church, seems to have more in common than Paula White who pastors a non-denominational church than he does with some Southern Baptist pastors who are aghast at Trump's racism, for example, right? And even Jeffress himself told me in an interview, oh denominations don't really matter anymore, right? So I don't think it's necessarily the denominations that are at work here as much as certain ideas that get disseminated to people, not just at church, but at other organizations they belong to through media and so forth. You know. Great. Second question we have here is, can you both comment a little bit and you touched on this for a second, Sarah, on white evangelicals attitudes about immigration and refugees, especially given that evangelicals have been active in refugee resettlement per decade. So what's changed? This is true. So what we found out in the Trump era and we really knew it before because of, you know, the way that white evangelicals and the religious right played a role in stopping, say the 2013 immigration reform bill that was introduced in Congress. So yes, there is an important segment of white evangelicals who do actually work in the field, resettling refugees and helping immigrants and even not just helping them through church or whatever, but actually advocating for policy that will not keep them out of the country. But as a political and those people exist and they're real and God bless them. And, but as a movement, as a political movement, the political players in the Christian right have kind of given mostly lip service about, you know, oh, yes, we don't have anything against immigrants, but they need to come here legally. Again, it's a kind of like law and order kind of argument. And like you said, they haven't really objected this segment that is Trump space, hasn't really objected to the child separation policy. And some of them have even justified it and some have even sort of gaslighted about it. Like, oh, I went to one of these detention centers and the children were being treated really well. So what is everybody complaining about? Right, and I think again, you have to think about this against the backdrop of the demographic shifts and the anxieties that it's generated. I mean, when we think about what Stephen Miller is doing, what he's orchestrating, it has political implications because Obama's election proved that if that coalition turned out regularly that the Republican party would be a permanent minority party, period. And I think those anxieties around it have generated a whole host of responses. And one of them I think involves a kind of nativist position which demonizes immigrants. And it makes sense given what we've talked about that white evangelical Christians would fall in line with that particular approach. Great. We have another super interesting question here. So you talk about the Trump evangelical media ecosystem, but I'm also curious about the place-based ecosystems. For example, Kramer's rule, consciousness and politics of resentment. Do you have thoughts on these place-based civic reasonings and evangelical sentiment, how they work together or if they're ever intentioned? So I'm trying to translate this. So I think we're trying to get at how the rationale of my community, my community is changing, right? The stores are run by people who don't look like me. How is that place, that commitment to wanting to keep one's physical community the same and together work together with this Christian-right, alt-right rationale or how is it maybe intention? Well, in the alt-right, this is an explicit argument that our country, our communities are becoming less white and white people are in danger of white genocide. That's an explicit argument on the alt-right. That's not an argument that's made explicitly like that on the Christian-right. And in terms of like the Christian-right media ecosystem, you don't really see that kind of argument that much made that explicitly, like our communities are changing. I mean, because I think that they, particularly in sort of like the world of televangelism they want to make it seem like they, and they do in many cases have a very diverse audience and very diverse churches. And so I think making those kinds of explicit arguments doesn't really play, even though ultimately, as a political movement, they support policies that are undergirded by those kinds of grievances. So that's kind of the little nuanced answer I would give to that. I agree with that completely, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we've seen a slight dip in evangelical support for Trump, right, and there was a lot of, there was some coverage around that, but still pretty high. But why do we think that there was that dip? Is there something in particular that he said or did? Or going back to what you were saying, Sarah, are we so obsessed with polling that we see a little dip and we're like, everything's changing? That, so it was interesting. Last week, there were a pair of polls that came out. One was from Public Religion Research Institute, and that was the one that got cited. It got cited in a New York Times article that the headline was something like, I can't remember, but the headline sort of suggested that Trump was losing his white evangelical support. That poll found his favorability among white evangelicals at 62%, which was down from, I think, 70-something percent in March. But if you look at Trump's polling, by that same polling firm, by Public Religion Research Institute, over the course of his candidacy and presidency, this vacillation between the low 60s and the high 70s is very, it's just, that's the way it trends. And we don't really know why, what it is that makes that sort of 10 to 15% peel away occasionally. But he was at 62% with white evangelicals in September 2016. And then on November, what was the date of the election? November 3rd, I can't remember. But by then, which was after the Access Hollywood tape, he got 81% of the white evangelicals who came out to vote. So this is within the range of where white evangelicals are with him over the course of his presidency. We don't know why, whether the dip was over COVID or over the protests or possibly something else. We just don't know. And I would say that these are snapshots and they're not really indicative of whether he's gonna win this constituency or not and also just sort of longer trends and perceptions. And I agree with all of that. And we won't be able to determine this until we're a little ways out from this Trumpian era. But my intuition, my instinct tells me that there's something like a Trump effect when it comes to polling data. And I'm likening this to the Bradley effect, right? When Don Bradley was running for governor of California, the polling data suggested that he was well within the reach of winning. And it turned out that folk didn't want to tell poll posters that they weren't gonna vote for him. And when they went into the polls, when they went to vote, they actually voted against him, right? And so I'm thinking we have to be mindful of the way in which folk announced their support of Donald Trump and how we measure that in terms of trying to predict political behavior. Because for some to declare oneself a MAGA or however you wanna describe it is to risk a kind of social isolation, a kind of social penalty in some ways. And so we have to be mindful that the polling data is only gonna give us not only just a snapshot, Sarah, but only gonna give us certain kinds of insight about the decision-making of political actors in this moment that is so divided in so many different ways. Great, great. So another question. I'm in the UK. Thank you for revealing the mysteries of evangelical politics for me. The mysteries. And the question is, what role has Mike Pence played? How do evangelicals view Pence? Pence was a very admired figure by evangelicals long before Donald Trump came on the scene. And in fact, what his name was floated as a possible president someday. He was this very admired heroic figure from the time that he served in Congress. He represented a congressional district in Indiana and later he was governor of Indiana. So he's very well known to the base. At the time that Trump picked him to be his running mate in 2016, it was thought that, okay, here is the way that Trump is gonna sort of smooth things over with skeptical evangelicals. He's gonna bring on this guy who has like the utmost trust of evangelicals. But I think that still Trump is seen as more of a messianic heroic figure by evangelicals than Pence's. That Pence is sort of seen as his trusted, yes, man. John the Baptist kind of guy. I would put it precisely that way, but that Pence signals for the base how one is submissive to Trump. Oh, wow. And that how he shows his submission to Trump's authority. And because if evangelicals and Republicans had their opportunity to have Mike Pence be president, if they had impeached Donald Trump, if they had convicted him, Mike Pence would be president. And the Republican senators are reading the base. They're listening to the base. And so they knew that there would be penalty for them if they had voted to convict Trump. The one senator who voted to convict Trump really doesn't have to worry about evangelical voters, right? Mitt Romney in Utah. But I've watched Pence over the course of Trump's presidency. And I've really started to believe that his role, whether he intended it or not, but to me, his role seems to be how to interact with Trump. He's modeling how to interact with Trump. That's so smart. Yeah, that seems right to me. Yeah, absolutely. I'm sorry, I was just thinking out loud, I'm sorry. No, that's fascinating. Me too, I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, that's true. So we have six minutes. We are not in the business of predicting the future. But if Sarah and Eddie, if you had to kind of look ahead a few months from now and we see both scenarios, Trump being reelected or and Trump losing to Biden, what are some of the shifts or even if Trump does win, what are some of the sort of even more of a push that we are expected to see if he's given this like another four-year mandate to keep doing what he's been doing? And on the other side, if it's not, how does the community kind of coalesce and sort of re-strategize for whatever happens next? So if he wins, we will see the continued erosion of democratic norms and institutions. And I'm not sure if the country can bounce back. And that's just, in some ways, that's purely descriptive that we will see an increasing expansion of executive power where the imperial presidency will do its work. We will see institutions, right? We've already seen how gerrymandering and partisanship has impacted Congress, but we will begin to, we've already seen the compromise of institutions within the executive branch, like the DOJ. The very way in which we imagine governance will change if he gets another four years. I don't know if the country could survive that kind of character and that kind of incompetence combined, I think that's- And corruption. And corruption, just let's call them three Cs. If he loses, we're in for, we're in for disruption as well. And that's because I think his base, and Sarah knows much more about them than I do, his base would be more willing to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. We have never experienced in our history, 200 plus year history, a former president like Donald Trump will be. So we don't know how power will be transferred. And we definitely don't know how he will behave once he's out of office. And so we are in this amazingly difficult moment about the future of our country, whether he wins or whether he loses, we need to buckle up because much more is gonna be required of us in the coming days. I agree with- Alrighty. Yeah. I agree with that. And I would add also that a lot will depend on what happens with the Senate, but that everyone should be prepared for accusations of voter fraud or voting irregularity or whatever. And if we do end up voting by mail because of the pandemic, charges that this is illegitimate. And I think that we also have to be prepared. And I think the media has to be prepared for the possibility that if we do vote by mail, or if many states do vote by mail, that we will not get that immediate election night results where they have their red and blue map up on the board and they can talk about it all night long. It might be days or weeks before we know the outcome and what Trump and his allies will try to do in terms of disinformation during that period is also something that's very concerning and very important to keep our eye on. Wow. So I guess no matter what, we have to buckle up, huh? We could have done this for another hour and a half. I think that there's so much that we didn't cover, but I want to be mindful of the people who made time to join us. And I want to thank you, Sarah, so much, both for making the time, but also for such an important book. Fascinating. For those who have not bought the book yet, if you go to the chat box, there's a link there, so you can click there and read this book because this goes way beyond 2020. And thank you, Eddie, so much. Such great perspective and just like in questions. And yeah, thank you both so much and talk to you soon again.