RWW: Your last book, “Power Worshippers,” focused on the rise of Christian nationalism as a dominant political force in the U.S. Describe the trajectory that led you from that book to “Money, Lies, and God.”
Money, Lies and God grew fairly organically from my reporting. When you go to a diverse conference of pastors in Virginia and they are suddenly talking about election fraud, and they are funded by a California billionaire, you start to think that the story doesn’t fit within a simple frame about white evangelicals or demographic change, for example.
As I kept researching Christian nationalism, I realized that the topic was bigger than I had imagined. I came to see that we can’t talk about Christian nationalist ideology without investigating the role it plays in the political economy. It started to look like one part of this bigger story, and that’s how my focus shifted. And as I was researching the international side of religious nationalism, I also came to the view that this is not nearly as uniquely American as some of the narratives suggest.
It struck me that one line from Money, Lies and God - “Christian nationalism and the New Right are the power couple of American fascism” – could function as a thesis statement for the book. Is that the main point you want to help people understand?
It may be the main point on the intellectual or ideological side of the story, but we cannot overlook the economic side. The new American authoritarianism is like the old fascism in that it relies on the capitulation of economic elites. That said, the New Right is the main intellectual vehicle for the most aggressive wing of this sector of financial oligarchs. So yes, maybe on second thought, that sentence can serve as an entry point into the argument of the book.
Big Money Fuels the Far Right
For years, religious-right leaders in the U.S. have preached that unregulated capitalism is God’s model, supporting the restructuring of our economy in ways that impoverished the poor, hollowed out the middle class, and funneled an increasing share of our national wealth to the very few at the top. Your book documents how that intensifying concentration of wealth is being used to fund the antidemocratic movement, as a “force multiplier” among right-wing Catholics as well as evangelicals. How does that play out in our political system right now?
Overall, the economic right has been phenomenally successful in convincing working and middle-income Americans that getting government out of the way of billionaires is going to benefit their own pocketbooks. Maybe the most interesting and saddest part of the story is that in order to achieve this perverse support for policies that work very much against the economic interests of most Americans, the leaders of the antidemocratic movement have successfully promoted a certain blend of politics and religion. It’s a type of ideology that says that only the wealthy are truly blessed, that empathy and helping the less fortunate is weakness, and that working together for the common good through a democratic government is somehow a bad thing to do.
The Farce of the Billionaire Populists
I was stuck by your description of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who made his fortune in private equity and now helps Trump take advantage of the economic dislocation and alienation that is the result of predatory capitalism. You write, “What could be better for the Funder class he represents than a population that no longer believes in democratic government as a means to constrain the oligarchy?” How do you explain the ability of moguls like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Donald Trump and others you call “jet-setting populists” to successfully posture as champions of the people?
Rather than face the reality about certain flaws in the system in which they live, Americans in this situation sometimes cling more tightly to some rather preposterous myths. They believe that those with extraordinary wealth have made all their money with their bare hands -- or at least the good ones have. They believe that Musk and Ramaswamy and the rest are self-made men. They completely overlook or ignore the fact that many of these “self-made men,” inherited huge head starts in life, as did Trump and Musk, or cornered unregulated monopolies, or made money in deeply parasitic and unethical ways.
But I think there may be something deeper at work here. In systems that are disproportionately unfair and oppressive, many people come to believe that success in life comes from domination. The basic lesson they take in is that life is cruel and only the brutal survive. So when they see a particularly vicious or immoral yet successful or wealthy person, many people regard that person as someone who has done well and is worthy of emulation or at least admiration. And the culture often lauds such people while ignoring their exploitive business practices or corrupt dealmaking or the people they exploited on their way up.
MAGA’s War on Government's Ability to Check Corporate Power
Trump has not only come up with cabinet nominees who are opposed to the mission of the agencies they’re being charged with leading, he has also empowered Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to create justifications for decimating the federal government’s ability to regulate corporate behavior. I think your book has the best succinct definition I have seen of the right’s long-term war on the administrative state: “the destruction of public administration and its replacement with a privately controlled, corporate-managed state.” How do we unpack that for people who will be hurt under that kind of regime?
I wish I knew how to unpack it because it’s happening in broad daylight, and if more people could see what was going on they wouldn’t support it. Unfortunately, this is where the “Lies,” in my title, fits in. There’s been a tremendous propaganda campaign against “government.” When Americans are surveyed about the level of waste and fraud in government, they always come back with ludicrously exaggerated estimates. That’s not to say that waste and fraud in government agencies doesn’t happen; there’s often room for improvement, just as there is in the private sector. But people need to be reminded of the very good things that government does, along with the many bad things that happen in countries with kleptocratic and cronyistic government, or those with an absence effective of government.
According to the free-market fundamentalists who are funding the movement, business is always amazing, infinitely better than government. But at the same time, many Americans know very well that many of these corporate leaders are simply out to fleece them while rewarding themselves and their people at the top with massive payouts. The health insurance industry isn’t the only one that is widely despised. So we need some more truth-telling on that front, too.
This is a movement that is constantly harkening back to the supposed glory days of the 1950s. But in those halcyon days the top tax rate was about double what it is today, while CEOs were content to make several dozen times the earnings of their average worker, not hundreds of times larger, which is what we see today.
The War on Truth
Trump family members and MAGA insiders have backed the traveling road show of conspiracy theories and extremism known as the ReAwaken America tour. You write that at another time ReAwaken America “could have been laughed off as just another festival of snake oil hucksterism in the long American tradition of separating suckers from their money through entrepreneurial grifting. But this group isn’t fringe; it is representative of what one of the nation’s two major parties has become. Majorities of Republican voters live in the same fear-filled, fact-free world.” Scholars of authoritarianism describe the destruction of the very idea of truth as a key control mechanism. You describe it as demolishing the very possibility of reasonable discussion. How does that work?
We have underestimated the importance of fact-based discourse on a functioning democracy. And we have failed to appreciate the many institutions and mechanisms that our society has developed over time to make this kind of reasonable democratic discourse possible. I know we all like to complain about the media, about “the academy,” about public schools, about the judicial system and all the rest. But these institutions and their practices have played, and must continue to play, a crucial role in making it possible for our society to deliberate on matters of public concern on the basis of fact and evidence, and not superstition or fantasy or brute power.
All of that apparatus of reasonable discourse stands in the way of would-be demagogues, or those who seek to protect unreasonable power and oligarchy. So the anti-democratic reaction has set about trying to destroy it, and tragically they are having some success.
The Trump years have brought us brazen lying, increasingly aggressive Christian nationalism, an unashamed trashing of the rule of law while mouthing support for the Constitution. As you note, some MAGA leaders like Chris Rufo seem openly proud of using deceit to advance their goals. Do you think the collapse of journalism’s business model and the rise of right-wing media and social media has enabled this open war on truth?
Absolutely. To be sure, the old media system, with its Fairness Doctrine and quasi cartel-like structure, was far from perfect. It was hardly designed to entirely promote the truth and only truth. However, it did a better job than the present system, which has produced a colossally disinformed sector of the public. The old system relied on a disguised set of subsidies, such as newspaper advertising, and unfortunately, when these subsidies were taken away, there were far fewer resources out there to sustain journalism as a public good.
Alongside the institutional changes there has also been a very damaging cultural shift away from truth. The New Right is in some ways reaping the harvest that the post-modern, deconstructionist left sowed over the past half-century. Maybe it felt good at the time to say that all claims to knowledge are just an expression of power, or that reason is a partisan project. Except now it is the New Right who seem to be saying that truth is in the hands of he who wins power, and reason is just a woke plot. People like Christopher Rufo appear to have taken up with gusto the deconstructionist idea that all truth is relative, and if you repeat a lie often enough it will count as truth.
Politics as Spiritual Warfare
Do you see the dominionist Christian-right activists you describe as “spirit warriors” representing a different kind of Christian-right activist? An ascendant part of the broader movement? Something different?
I think it’s an evolving picture, one with many different pieces. There’s no question that American religion is changing; it has never been static. One of the fastest growing features of our religious landscape today is this spirit warrior-type of religion, which is often (but not always) associated with Pentecostal or neo-charismatic movements such as the New Apostolic Reformation. Such movements are themselves politically diverse, but are vulnerable to exploitation in service of hard right politics.
It seems to me that when forms of deep injustice arise, and the world feels out-of-whack, many people become alienated from the idea that we can work together, across our differences, through human institutions that are accountable to reason and justice. Forms of religion that take as their starting point the idea that people can respect one another in spite of their differences, and work together to improve the common good, lose their appeal. Instead, they may yearn for the return of the “strong gods,” or at least a strongman, who promises to solve all their problems.
A related and important shift is the intense politicization of some sectors of religion to the point where, for a significant part of the American right, politics is the real religion, and the rest is optional or for show. One of the more intriguing developments over the past eight years is that support for Trump turned out to be a predictor of people self-identifying as evangelical Christian even if they rarely or never attend church. So just as some number of people abandoned evangelical Christianity and other forms of reactionary religion because they saw it as too closely tied to Trump and his agenda, others began to identify with those religious movements for the very same reason.
The Religious and Political War on Public Education
Your first book focused on Christian-right groups’ efforts to proselytize in public schools. Today we see those efforts coming directly from Christian nationalist politicians who are working at the same time to funnel public education funds into unaccountable religious schools, and to turn public school classrooms into virtual Sunday Schools. How do you see these two forces—the privatizers and proselytizers, as you call them—operating together to achieve the authoritarians’ goals?
When I started researching this movement sixteen years ago, the privatizers and proselytizers were more discreet about their aims. Only a few crazies were out there admitting that the end game was to starve the “beast” of public education and redirect the flow of taxpayer cash to private and religious/ideologically right-wing schools. But now they are quite up-front about it.
The important thing to understand, as you suggest, is that the two groups of actors very much need each other. The profit-making contingent needs to delegitimize public education in order to soften the ground for privatization initiatives. The proselytizers provide invaluable help by ginning up culture wars to attack public education as inherently corrupted and evil. The proselytizers likewise need the help of the privatizers to achieve their goals; they love all the talk about charters, voucher systems, and other forms of removing schools from direct government oversight because that, of course, is the way in which they hope to gain religious oversight at these schools, and to obtain direct taxpayer funding for religious schools and institutions.
You write that “The assault on public education…is about raising a population compliant with authoritarianism.” This assault has been under way for decades. Are they on the verge of succeeding?
I think it depends to some degree on where you live. The strength and the weakness of the public education system is that it is fragmented. So you have very robust systems in some school districts around the country, while other districts are teetering.
One phrase in your book that jumped out at me was that when it comes to the right’s war on public education, “it doesn’t matter who the enemy is, you just need to find one.” Their list is long: teachers unions, CRT, DEI, SEL, all matter of “wokeness.” And here’s another longer quote: “Too many Americans have trouble acknowledging the extremism that has sprung up in our midst. And here was one of America’s self-appointed holy rich men making clear that yes, indeed, the goal is to demolish the system of nonsectarian public education that powered America’s rise to middle class prosperity…and replace it with an eminently corruptive network of privatized religious and right-wing academics operating with public funds for the ultimate benefit of a sanctimonious oligarchy.” As someone who has been reporting on this authoritarian threat for years, why do you think it’s so hard for Americans to acknowledge this extremism?
Old habits die hard! We had a long run where the assumption was that the center would always hold. Post-war America grew up on the idea that there’s a magic pendulum in the sky that will swing one way or the other, but always in the end come down in the middle. That assumption just isn’t valid now -- if it ever was – but it takes time for people to shake it.
It’s also hard to write about the exploitation of religion for politics and power without people thinking you’re taking aim at religion itself. The anti-democratic right knows that very well, which is why they seek to dismiss the growing number of those writing and speaking about these issues as “angry atheists.” Which is ironic, because so many of these supposed religion-haters are themselves pastors and faith leaders.
Billionaire Whisperers
You write that “the reactionary right no longer feels the need to disguise their pursuit of totalitarian power.” I thought about your book when I saw that Donald Trump recently brought Italy’s neo-fascist prime minister to the screening of a new movie praising John Eastman, one of the lawyers who pushed Mike Pence to join Trump’s illegal scheme to stay in power. You quote conservative Steve Schmidt calling the Claremont Institute “becoming like the West Point of American fascism.” What role do places like Claremont (and Hillsdale College if you see them in a similar light) play in spreading this American authoritarianism?
The Claremont Institute, along with related institutions, play a critical role. In fact, they have two underappreciated roles. The first is that they are part of an extended welfare system for the reactionary cadre that will be staffing a new authoritarian-oriented administration. They identify people with the supposedly correct ideological orientation, and who possess some other skills, and then offer them support and networking opportunities so that they know they can build their careers and secure their economic futures in this movement.
A second underappreciated role that these institutions play is what I would call “billionaire whispering.” The rich people who are investing in the destruction of democracy, including funders I discuss in Money, Lies, and God, aren’t always as smart as they or anyone else thinks they are. They need to be validated, they need to be guided, and that’s what some of the Claremont Institute people and their fellow travelers do.
Misogyny, Manliness, and Authoritarianism
You write about the cult of “manliness” and identify anxiety about gender roles and hierarchies as “the rocket fuel of the new American authoritarianism.” MAGA political leaders seem intent on continuing to ramp up attacks on trans people as a political strategy. Can you say more about how the focus on gender roles and hierarchies fuels the broader goals of the authoritarian movement?
Authoritarian movements have always been associated with a certain type of “hyper-masculinity,” for lack of a better term. Part of it actually has to do with the disempowerment of most males that emerges in very unequal societies from which authoritarianism tends to rise. And part of it has to do with the ways in which authoritarians seek to distract people from legitimate frustrations and material concerns that might otherwise lead them to support other movements and leaders.
So authoritarian leaders manufacture and then appeal to a sense of persecution. Women are always a convenient target. There’s no man so low on the totem pole that he can’t “big himself up” by putting women down.
But there are plenty of women who support this movement, too. For those who have been failed or mistreated by the real men in their lives, or who fear that they will be failed by them, they are offered the reassurance that a “real man” will stick by his family, support his children, and fulfill his fatherly duties, and then everything will be okay. I recently read a quote from Dr. Jilly Kay, a professor at Loughborough University in England which I will share here: “It’s important to understand a long lineage of women, especially middle-class white women, making a calculation that they might be able to individually find a foothold within patriarchy by accommodating themselves to a certain set of disciplines in exchange for provisional protection, while throwing other women under the bus.”
Religious Nationalism as Cover for Kleptocracy
You have a line that I think helps explain how the amoral, self-serving, truth-debasing Donald Trump managed to come back into power thanks to the Christian nationalists and their funders, operatives and enablers: Religious nationalist countries, you write, are often “theocratic in a certain fake sense – that is, they are regimes that endorse a particular religion and attempt to impose that religion and its homophobic and patriarchal values on society. But they are more often best described as cronyistic kleptocracies with strong militaristic features and absolute suppression of free speech and political opposition.” Is that about to be us/the US?
If MAGA gets their way, then yes, and we have a role model in Russia, which is a good Christian country by its own reckoning, but is a corrupt, kleptocratic oligarchy with a sad economy. That’s the direction in which the Trump/Musk administration appears to be taking us. Whether we go there depends on whether we have a collective will to fight for a better future.
A Need for Clear Eyes and Strategic Resolve
You call the MAGA movement the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War, and you write that “American democracy is failing because it is under direct attack.” Your book was written before the 2024 election; Donald Trump’s victory makes your warning even more urgent. Given that Trump and his allies are about to take power, how do you think understanding the alliance that brought them to power can help us resist this powerful authoritarian movement? Can we take advantage of the internal contradictions to slow or stop our descent into fascism?
We can’t fight something unless we recognize it for what it is. We need to understand how it works, and details matter. So that’s a crucial first step -- a clear-eyed assessment of the strengths and the weaknesses of this movement that brought us to this point. And yes, this movement is full of contradictions and divisions, and we need to expose and exploit them. I do think it’s important here to not overestimate the movement’s strengths. Yes, Trump won an election, but he did so by a very narrow margin. He won primarily not because the country “turned MAGA,” but because of clever and sustained voter turnout operations on their side, coupled with a lack of enthusiasm among the political opposition. Those of us who wish to preserve our democracy wouldn’t wish to emulate MAGA’s most craven tactics, but we would do well to learn from their strategic resolve.