‘Money, Lies and God’: Christian Nationalism And Threats To Democracy During Trump 2.0
(REVIEW) The invocations couldn’t have been more divergent.
Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the evangelical Christian outreach organization founded by his father, Billy, thanking God for imbuing Donald Trump with “strength and power” at the 47th president’s inauguration last month; and Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, imploring Trump to temper that power with mercy towards members of the LGBTQ+ and migrant communities “who are scared now.”
The growing influence of those who virulently disdain Budde’s sentiments while rallying behind Graham’s to the point of actively seeking the downfall of American democracy is the subject of this unsettling piece of reporting from journalist Katherine Stewart, a watchdog of the Christian right.
Author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” Stewart picks up where that 2020 book left off in her new work “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.” In it, she surveys a horizon that has only grown darker.
It is a landscape overshadowed by a well-organized, well-funded consortium of oligarchs and billionaires (democracy-despising “Funders”), strategists (well-educated, albeit “anti-intellectual” Heritage Foundation/Project 2025-type “Thinkers”), “Sergeants” (a network of clergy and organizations with names like Faith Wins and Pastors for Trump, that fuel anxieties about abortion, “the homosexual agenda” and “transgender ideology”) as well as “Power Players” (right-wing media and local activists) and “Foot Soldiers”, predominantly white evangelicals who reject “the Enlightenment ideals on which the American republic was founded.”
In their skewed version of our nation’s history, “America is not dedicated to a proposition but to a particular religion and culture.”
Infiltrating meetings and following money/paper trails, Stewart pulls back the curtain on various extreme right-wing operations such as Moms for Liberty. Supposedly founded during the pandemic by three suburban Florida mothers frustrated by mask mandates and school closures, the organization’s purported aim is to purge public school libraries, school boards and curricula of “woke” ideology.
In truth, Stewart argues, the Moms have deep, top-level connections to Florida’s GOP, with $2.1 million in revenue and generous support from the likes of Publix supermarket chain heiress Julie Fancelli, president of the foundation named for her late father George Jenkins, a sponsor of the Jan. 6 rally that inspired the attack on the Capitol.
While “parental rights” are the stated aim of groups like the Moms, they are part of a wider, longstanding Christian nationalist campaign to undermine and eradicate public education, Stewart says. The objective is to redirect “public money to fund private schools that could be counted on to teach children the truth: that America is a Christian nation, whose laws should be based on their interpretation of the Bible.”
Peter Bohlinger of Ziklag, a Texas-based Christian dominionist group with an entry level net worth requirement of $25 million or more for membership, put it more bluntly: “Our goal is to take down the education system as we know it today.”
Coopting and cleansing America’s schools of such hysteria-inducing threats as critical race theory (not an actual K-12 subject) is just one of Christian nationalism’s multi-pronged strategy for dismantling democracy in favor of a system of government (theocracy, authoritarianism, fascism; call it what you will or all three) where “certain kinds of Americans have a right to rule, and … the rest have a duty to obey.”
The plan goes something like this, Stewart writes: “Build an information bubble” with which to maintain a perennial state of fact-denial (courtesy of the Power Players at Fox News, Newsmax, Eternal Word Television Network or EWTN, a Catholic media empire and others); condition the Foot Soldier base to “expect an imminent, cataclysmic event that will threaten its identity and everything it values” (the Sergeants‘ job); surrender the reins of “democratic processes like elections” to those in authority who “allegedly represent the ‘true’ spirit of the nation,” (Thinkers and Funders) while undermining “public confidence in the democratic process” — a Trumpian tactic heavy on election results denials (unless their candidate wins).
Whereas Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson hoped the ideal of American democracy would “roll round the globe,” it is now Christian nationalists who have become “exporters of the antidemocratic counterrevolution” to other countries.
In her penultimate chapter, Stewart examines how the number of “white supremacists, men’s rights activists, New Traditionalists” and their ilk is growing in Poland, Ireland, Costa Rica, Spain and Hungary — all thanks to American “Funders.” “According to a 2020 report in OpenDemocracy,” she writes, U.S. Christian-right groups “spent at least $280 million on campaigns against the rights of women and LGBT people across five continents.”
Stewart’s proposals for fighting back (“knowledge is power,” “build coalitions” and “go local”) in her closing chapter “The Way Forward?” seem quixotic when stacked up against the dangerously armed (ideologically, financially and otherwise) coalition she describes in the preceding pages.
In fairness, however, the chilling book’s subtitle is “Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy,” not “And What to Do About It.”
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist, specializing in religion, culture and history.