The Power Worshippers Review

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We are going to talk about a book today by Katherine Stewart called The Power Worshippers. It is actually a book that has been made into a documentary that is going to be coming out soon called God and Country about Christian nationalism.

And there's a number of people who claim to even be evangelical, like David French and Russell Moore and Jim Martisby and Kristen Dumez, who are actually part of that documentary. And we played the trailer a few weeks ago on this podcast and really concluded that they were carrying the water of people who just hate Christians, who hate Christianity, don't want it to have any influence in the country, at least any political influence or social influence.

And so the question has been, why would people who claim to be Christians be part of that? And I think the answer is probably fairly simple. Maybe it's our cynical side that wants to say it, but after years of observing this, the people who are part of that, who claim to be Christians, are doing it because they want to ingratiate themselves to the world.

They want people in the world to like them, to think well of them, and they want to throw under the bus the people that they supposedly represent. And it's a sad thing, and it's a story that we've seen over and over and over, and I don't want to lament that right now, but just jogging everyone's memory, for those who listen to the podcast, we've already talked about this some, but I wanted to get into the book.

I don't know if I knew at the time when I recorded that podcast, reacting to the God and Country trailer, that it was based off of this book by Stewart. And when I read the book, and I've actually, I've listened to the book on Audible twice and then I downloaded the Kindle and kind of went through that.

And so I'm pretty familiar with what she's saying. It just strikes me as an anti-Christian diatribe. That's really what the book is. And of course, you know, she may object to that, and in fact, the people who are promoting the documentary may even object to that and say, well, they're not really against Christianity, just a certain type of Christianity, a Christianity that wants to have influence and actually believes the things the Bible says, and that's really what they're against.

And so it's, I think for this audience, most of you understand that's just true Christianity, the Christianity that actually believes what the Bible says and wants to, and sees biblical law, sees an influence of Christianity on society at large as a good thing.

That's just what Christians have always been doing, but that's viewed now as the exception. That's the freak. That's the ignorant hillbilly, racist redneck, you know, whatever negative characteristic they throw and slap onto Christians.

It's all of that. They try to tuck it away into some remote corner of the rural South or something and then say, we need to just keep condemning it because it's such a threat. But what they're really doing is they are condemning what Christians have always stood for and believed.

And that's part of the concern that I have and the reason I wanted to do this podcast. So I just want to review this book and really this serves as coming attractions. This gives you an insight into the documentary because it's what the documentary is based.

On.

The Sponsor and the Personal Context for the Review

So this is a very, this is a book that has sold a lot of copies. It's popular and it is something that we should probably know about. Now, before we get into all that, I just want to let you know about the sponsor for this particular podcast, screenitfirst .com, screenitfirst .com, great website.

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So screenitfirst .com will give you a great resource on this. And if you just want to help them screen books, you can click on the Help Screen Books tab and it'll bring to you a list of popular books that they are in the middle of trying to get reviewed for people.

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I have a slideshow that I've that I made, I actually I made it on the plane when I was coming back from California. My for those I haven't really shared, so I should probably just share briefly for those who've been praying.

I just really want to say how much I appreciate you. Yeah, it's been difficult. My grandfather died on January 1st. I flew out there, but I kind of missed by a day. I missed saying goodbye to him in person.

And and so it's been over a month now since I talked to him last. I talked to him on Christmas. And so so we flew out and it was just a perfect day. We had clouds the day after, the day before it was raining.

And we just had the most perfect, beautiful day for a graveside funeral. We had actually the military, the army came by, played taps and thanked my grandmother for his service in World War Two. And so just a special time.

And I just want to thank everyone for praying for the family. So but when I was on the plane coming back, I started collecting my thoughts on this because I had been reviewing it. And and so I put I tried to break them down into just some some general things.

And I put them into this particular slideshow. So for those who are patrons, you have access to this patrion dot com forward slash. I believe it's worldview conversation. I'll try to remember to put the link in the info section if people want to support this podcast.

But that's where you can find this to download if you want to download it. So here's my summary. This is these are my words. Summary of the book, The Power Worshippers by Catherine Stewart claims to give people and insiders look into the Christian nationalist movement throughout first through firsthand accounts around the country, expert testimony and extensive research.

Stewart gives her overall impressions, concluding that Christian nationalism is very dangerous and threatens our way of life. She exposes what she believes is dark money, government favor and sophisticated networking that gives Christian nationalists an edge on the culture war.

The book reads as a warning to modern Americans who care about the pluralistic democracy that is the United States. And so what you really find in this book is a person who is very concerned about the influence of Christianity.

And there's some personal reasons for that. I believe she talks about there's two areas you see this in the book. She talks about an older couple from another town who attempted to set up and lead a Bible study or a Bible club, they called it at her daughter's public elementary school in Southern California in 2009.

And the purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith. Now, I'm going to stop right there.

This is her quote. And ask you if you think that that is true. So the people promoting the club probably believe that if you died in your sins without repenting and putting your trust in Christ and assuming they believe in an age of accountability before the age of accountability, you suffered everlasting punishment for that in in a place called hell.

But I don't have a problem believing that that's not a stretch. But to say the purpose of the club was to convince children of this, that they would burn if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith, that gives you everything you really need to know about this book.

Of course, a club like that would say that their purpose is to preach the message of Jesus, the love of Jesus, to convince children and to help children overcome struggles in their lives and not just their lives, but the judgment to come by trusting in Jesus Christ.

It wouldn't be if you don't if you don't dare conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith, then you will burn in hell. That's that is a cartoon. And most of the book, unfortunately, is a cartoon.

It's it struck me as someone who's very paranoid and. Just, I don't know, it takes things about three steps farther than they actually are in her mind and is she's afraid she's afraid. So I haven't even gotten deep into this review and you can already just tell this is the kind of language that you're going to find in this book.

And this is this is the interesting thing to me that Russell Moore and David French and all those guys, you know, they decided that this is like the message they want to be part of. They want to be part of a documentary based on this book.

That's pretty crazy because they should be seeing the holes in this and be concerned. But yet they're joining in. So anyway, they, meaning the club, insisted on holding the club in the public school because they knew the kids would think the message was coming from the school.

Now, that's an assumption on her part, of course. She doesn't have a quote for this, but it's you know, that's why they were holding it at the school, because they wanted to confuse the kids. They referred to our public school as their mission field.

She's put that in quotes and our children as, quote, the harvest. She's trying to make them sound as creepy as she possibly can. And for those who know Christian insider lingo, you can roll your eyes at this.

But if you don't know that, if you're new to Christianity, if you don't haven't been exposed to much of it and you're reading this book, you'll probably believe it. That's the dangerous thing about this.

I thought their plan was outrageously inappropriate in our religiously diverse public school. And she then says she discovered that there there were many other of these good news clubs across the country in public schools.

And she realized that these initiatives were the fruit of a nationally coordinated effort, not merely to convert other people's children in the classroom, but to undermine public education altogether.

So then I told you she goes three steps farther. They're just trying to undermine public education. That's what they're trying to do here. That's the real secret agenda now that's going to strike for a normal suburban mom.

This is going to be scary because they rely on the public school. They that's an institution that they're involved with and their kids are involved with and they're trying to undermine it. It was a piece, she says, with their plan to destroy the confidence in our system of education and to make a way for the system of religious education more to their liking.

Now, all this is predicated on the fact that in her daughter's public elementary school, there was a Bible study. That's basically what this amounts to. There was a Bible study set up as in like an after school or, you know, an optional thing, really not even something that was mandated, but an optional thing at this this good news club.

And and that has spurred her into the existence of this club, thinking that there's this nefarious attempt to undermine the public education system and to try to convince kids to scare kids as young as, would you say, five years old or something that they're going to hell if unless they adopt a very narrow, strict interpretation of Christianity.

So that's number one. Number two, she says this in the book, she says, in the last days of December 2003, I was 13 weeks pregnant and filled with joy at the prospect of having a second child. Then one afternoon I began to bleed heavily.

The ambulance took me to St. Vincent's Hospital, a Catholic facility. And I know now that what I needed was a DNC, an abortion procedure to remove tissue from the uterus, which to kill a baby, OK, to remove a baby of tissue, she's saying.

But and I needed it immediately to to to stop the bleeding. I later learned that I lost nearly 40 percent of my blood. Only then did the hospital provide me with the abortion that saved my life. I found no explanation for the delay in treatment.

In retrospect, given what I know now about the ethical and religious directives, my best guess is that the hospital is willing to gamble with my life for the sake of preserving a child that was at that point nothing more than a fiction of their imagination.

So what you have here is a bunch of assumptions. She doesn't know. She's just assuming that the reason she did not get treatment quickly is because the hospital did not want to abort this child in order to save her life.

And it's a Catholic facility. Now, the interesting thing is she actually got the procedure. So so so if it was a prohibition, if the Catholics really just didn't want to give an abortion, they ended up doing it anyway.

And and she lived. And and I don't know. I don't know enough about the situation to know what was going on. You know, was this was this ectopic what was going on here that, you know, causes was that was the child already dead was what was this?

I don't know. But what I do know is there's a whole bunch of assumptions here and there's an ax to grind. She is finding the culprit. And the culprit isn't that people were busy that day. The culprit isn't that things were backed up and that there was incompetent people at the hospital.

The culprit has to be it's those Christians. And so these are the kind these are the little glimpses you get into her personally. She's got a personal bitterness against Christianity. She blames it for her almost death, and she also blames it for an attempt to indoctrinate, as she calls it, her child.

So it's with this in mind that we go go off on our journey. Of exposing the Christian nationals movement, supposedly, so the birth of Christian nationalism, she talks about this on page 63 that the religious right in 1979, she says, had a problem and they needed to build a new movement around the issue of defense.

They couldn't build a new movement around the issue of tax advantages of racist schools. So they they they couldn't use the segregation movement to their advantage. So instead, they basically chose that they were going to use abortion.

And and so this was a political strategy. That's what she says in the book that this was so there's a very cynical kind of reading that these Christians don't really believe this stuff as much as they do see it as an opportunity that you can really manipulate people's emotions by telling them abortions wrong and using that to politically gain power and what they really, though, wanted.

And if if that if things were different, they would just use racism. You know, they would just say we need to have all white schools or something or we should. That's really the motive. And, you know, I've read this so many times.

This is such a very common, common misconception about the religious right. And and there's some reasons for it. I think one of them is that you have people like Jerry Falwell not really taking a strong stand on abortion until like seven years after the Roe v. Wade decision, something like that.

You have even people in the Southern Baptist Convention there. I forget what they call it, but it was their equivalent of the RLC, their ethics arm, basically saying, well, you know, there's there are conditions in which maybe an abortion is acceptable.

I mean, and, you know, one of the things I tell people about this is that it was it was a new thing when it happened. It was something that a lot of working class people are like this on a lot of things, to be quite honest with you.

They're going about their lives, they're living their lives, and then their rulers make decisions on things. You know, for example, think about the same sex marriage debates, right? This was happening before it was legalized.

But there was a lot of people who just said, whatever, just can't can't we just let people who want to get married get married? It's not going to affect my life. Now you fast forward. We're talking about transgender sports and people are now realizing, oh, no, what have we done?

You know, we took a wrong turn somewhere. And sometimes there's a delayed effect. You know, we should have been talking about transgender sports 10 years ago, really. But there's a delayed effect. And it's not until it becomes a problem in your life that it affects you personally, that you start caring.

And that's really what one of the things, at least, I think that happened with the abortion issue. It was something that was somewhat rare, or at least it wasn't talked about openly in public that much.

There is a shame attached to it. And when it starts becoming mainstreamed and when people start realizing what's happening, that's when you know, when you have like a family member that has this done, that's when you start realizing, man, I need to get involved.

And and so that is a I don't know why that is not a legitimate interpretation of why there was a delay, because you don't see the evangelicals really mobilizing on other issues. The leftists try to make it sound like they were mobilizing behind Bob Jones and that this was a racist motivation.

They wanted to keep the government from regulating things like it wasn't justice, but things like maintaining certain racial makeups in schools. And the reality was there were evangelicals concerned about that, but they were concerned more because they just didn't want the national government telling private schools what to do, because if they can tell them what to do in this one area, why not other areas?

Right. It just gives them unlimited access and control. So they'll take that and they'll whittle the whole issue down to it is really just about one thing. They just hate minorities. And but it wasn't even that issue did not resonate with people like the issue of abortion did in the 1980s.

And so so she gives a very typical understanding of this and tries to make it out like, well, even she says school prayer worked for some. They could use that as a rallying point, but it alienated Catholics and they needed the Catholics.

So they had to use abortion. And it's like, man, if you were around even in the 90s, I was around for that. You know, the religious right of the 90s, they were talking about school prayer every at every turn.

School prayer was blamed, probably overblamed, honestly. They say we took God out of the schools and we took prayer out and then we got all these problems. And so she writes, she's trying to say she's an insider.

But to be quite honest with you, I don't know how inside she actually is. I think a lot of this is she went to a few events that were more recent and then she read a whole bunch of leftists on this topic.

That's that would be my impression. After reading a book like this, she does not come across as someone who's actually an insider at all. Now, the roots of Christian nationalism, the identification of religious authority, she says, with the perpetuation of the institution of slavery reflected something far more important than mere adaptation to the largest concentration of economic power in the nation.

Although it was that, too, at a deeper level, it was part of a counterrevolutionary response to the perceived liberal and irreligious excesses associated with the American Revolution. So then she tries to prove this to say the American Revolution was this low point for religious fundamentalists.

She quotes this letter from two Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse from Thomas Jefferson, and it's a prediction that all Americans would shortly convert to Unitarianism. And Thomas Paine went even further, suggesting they would abandon all traditional religions in favor of pure deism.

So she cherry picks these historical things and says, goes to like Thomas Paine is a radical example. Of course, Thomas Paine, you know, is not he writes common sense, but he goes off the rails after that and joins in with supporting the French Revolution.

And there is some thought, by the way, that before his death, though, he saw some of the errors of his ways. But, you know, I don't know. They don't quote me on that. But Thomas Paine was a radical. And, you know, Thomas Jefferson, I didn't look into this quote specifically, but it wouldn't shock me if Thomas Jefferson saw a trend toward Unitarianism in some in certain circles.

But certainly Thomas Jefferson himself was involved in financing very conservative religious efforts. He actually financed a Calvinistic church in Charlottesville, and he was friends, really close friends with the pastor who pastored it, who lived in Forest, Virginia, where he had his second house.

And they used to spend a lot of the time together. It was Charles Clay. And Thomas Jefferson himself would not have been in favor of casting all religion aside or anything like that. But she tries to take these examples to to to then make a statement, to make a generalization that the American Revolution was this godless, almost atheistic time period.

And that's just simply not the case for anyone who studied this issue in any kind of depth. You'll know that the clergy played a great role in getting the Americans on board. It was called the Black Road Regiment by people in other parts of the world, like, well, in Great Britain, some of them called it the Presbyterian Revolt because of it.

But you had the fact that a lot of historians will point to this, the fact that the first Great Awakening gave the colonies a sense of togetherness that they would not have had otherwise. And some even will say that they don't think it would have been possible without the Great Awakening.

You have the fact that the Bible by far is more quoted in the Constitutional Convention than any other document that includes Locke, that includes Blackstone. It's the Bible and the illustrations they use, the symbolism they use.

It's all biblical. It's maybe there's some Greek and Roman stuff, too, that makes its way in. But there's so much of it, I should say, not all, but there's so much of it that's biblical. And so to say that this was like this low point for religious fundamentalism is absurd.

You had nine of the 13 colonies at the time had official state religions. And the ones that didn't were if you read their constitutions or royal charters, they were pretty pro they were not just religious, but pro Christian.

So, you know, much more could be said, but it's I wrote an article actually not long ago for American Reformer on the Satan statue issue. And I go into a lot of this and it just completely refutes her position on this.

So so it's it's slavery. Apparently she tries to link that Christian nationalism starts with defending the perpetuation of slavery or wanting the perpetuation of slavery somewhat as a way, I guess, to combat the irreligious founding.

Very interesting there. And and she says among apologists for Christian nationalism today, the favorite myth is that the movement represents the extension of abolitionism. But she says that the truth is today's Christian nationalism did not emerge out of the religious movement that opposed such rigid hierarchies.

It came from one that promoted them with the Bible in one hand and the whip in the other. So, of course, this is just bombastic, outrageous language that even if, let's say, the Christian nationalist supported slavery, are they going to they're supporting it with a Bible in one hand and a whip in the other?

That's where you get the cartoon. Right. And so that's why I put that image there. I wanted the you know, this is the cartoonish kind of retelling of Christian nationalism. It's just about suppressing people of other races and women and homosexuals.

And it's just for white Christian men. That's what it is. It's a critical theory way of understanding this. It's it's Christianity, just this tool for white men to or at least Christian nationalism to exert influence and power over everyone else.

Now, I think the story is undercut. OK, it's undercut by today's emphasis on racial unity, which she admits in two places in the book. She talks about being at a values voter summit in twenty eighteen and Bishop Larry Jackson spoke in somewhat plaintive tones about the power of effecting change to racial unity.

She also talks at another point about an individual in California who she's scared about. He's very influential, but he's Hispanic. And she says it helps him. Him speaking helps the Christian nationalist movement in California inoculate itself against the charges of racism in the past and in the present.

Someone named Doman. So, you know, here you go. Like it's so racist, but yet they're platforming people who are black, who are Hispanic or Latino, who are who are bringing a message of racial unity. And of course, that's just discounted as that's not the roots.

That's not really that's not the story. So you have to be cynical and think that they're trying to cover something. Right. And that's where she ends up. It's also the story is undercut by the religious fervor present at the founding, which I mentioned already a bunch of those things.

And then the concern over the evils associated with slavery. So she likes to lean on Robert Louis Dabney and and Rush Dooney quite a bit and tries to put them as the kind of founding fathers of Christian nationalism.

And Dabney has a book called The Defense of Virginia in the South. And in that book, he defends the Confederate or Southern position. He's actually Stonewall Jackson's chief of staff. And he wrote a biography of Stonewall Jackson.

But he was a brilliant theological professor and he had a brilliant theological mind. And Dabney, though, if you read him closely, he calls the slave trade an iniquitous traffic. He supported biblical regulations on slavery.

He was not one of these people that defended slavery in the abstract as a moral good throughout time and place. He was more if you really want to understand what he's trying to say, it's really more of an anti fanatical abolitionism that would irresponsibly try to end slavery without compensation or integration, just end it.

And of course, the problems associated with that economically and socially have been with us ever since. But Dabney was against that. You find in Dabney, too, I mean, he emphasizes how Virginia was foremost in trying to suppress the slave trade.

And if it wasn't for some of the abolitionist literature in the postal crisis, they may have actually banned the practice. And he talks about these kinds of things. She I don't think she even is aware, to be quite honest.

I think she probably read something. Dabney's evil and love slavery. And I'm just going to make it about Dabney. And of course, Doug Wilson likes Dabney. So Wilson's prominent in Christian nationalism.

So there you go. Rush Dooney's another one. Now, here's the thing. Rush Dooney acknowledged where chattel slavery fell short and he opposed civil slavery. And this is one of the things that I don't think she she either understands or wanted to communicate.

But you find in Dabney this the sense of this as well. Both of these guys talk about unjust hierarchies. They talk about concern over state imposed slavery, civil slavery, not chattel slavery, but civil slavery that was coming and that this would not be known as slavery or labeled as slavery, but it would effectively make everyone into a number.

And that's where we are today. They were actually Rush Dooney and Dabney were both, despite the fact that we would probably disagree with them on some things, they actually had their finger on the pulse of some things accurately and they predicted some things.

So I would not make them the centerpin, though, of everything Christian nationalist. In fact, I would even if you really want to do abroad, here's what Christian political involvement is. You're going to have to talk about people like William Wilberforce.

You're going to have to. And if you just want to limit it to America, I suppose. I mean, you're going to have to talk about people like Billy Graham. You're going to have to talk about some pretty respected mainstream type Christians, even in today's mindset.

Some of these guys were mainstream, you know, years ago, but now they're not so much because they've been vilified. But even guys who haven't been vilified as much are going to have to be part of the story.

And she she wants to try to her whole goal is to try to find the people that can be used as well, the figures that can be vilified the most to then portray the whole movement as terrible. And of course, to her, Christian nationalism is really just Christian political involvement, trying to exert Christian influence and power in politics.

And we'll talk about that a little more. But the other thing I wanted to mention here is that, you know, would she accept, I wonder, would Catherine accept the idea that progressivism and the liberalism that she so defends having its roots in phrenology, meaning the measuring of skulls to find out the social or the mental capacity in different races or Darwinism or eugenics or abortion as like, no, these are the founding things.

These are the important things to put at the center of the story of progressivism. I don't think she would. And yet, you know, some of these things like phrenology, these are being opposed by, you know, Southern pastors that she hates.

And so it's it is an incomplete story. It is a cartoon story. The whole thing's a cartoon. The whole thing's really just a cartoon. All right, so here are the stories that she brings up or the problems that she brings up with Christian nationalism.

And I want to talk about these. So Catherine Stewart starts off with it undermines the liberal order. And I have a bunch of quotes on this. I don't know if I'm going to talk about all of them, but she says perhaps the most salient impediment to our understanding of the movement is the notion that Christian nationalism is a conservative ideology.

The correct word is radical and genuinely conservative movement would seek to preserve institutions of value that have been crafted over centuries of American history. It would prize the integrity of electoral politics, the legitimacy of the judiciary, the importance of public education and the values of tolerance and mutual respect that have sustained our pluralistic society, even as others have been torn apart by sectarian conflict.

Christian nationalism pretends to work towards the revival of traditional values. Its values contradict the long established principles and norms of our democracy. It has no interest in securing the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

It will happily steal seats and pack the court as long as it gets the rulings it wants. It cheers along voter suppression and gerrymandering schemes that allow Republicans to maintain disproportionate legislative control.

It collaborates with international leaders who seek to undermine the United States traditional alliances in the post-war world order. Let me read that again. The post-war world order built upon the past seven decades, and it claims to defend the family but treat so many American families with contempt.

Of course, you know, non traditional things that, you know, units that are called families by the left, like same sex marriages and so forth. So this is her beef. And you might sense a lot of projection in that.

Like I'm thinking these are like a lot of the complaints that conservatives have about the left. But, you know, she seems to think these are the dirty tricks that Christian nationalists want to do. They are seeking to undermine the Supreme Court by packing the court and these kinds of things.

So it's OK when when we do it, but not OK when you do it. It undermines democracy, undermines Republican, our electoral politics, you know, calls into question the legitimacy of elections and these kinds of things, and that's the danger, and that's why it's not conservative, because it undermines the liberal order.

It doesn't conserve these great things that we have. And so, you know, that's that's problem one. And I would encourage anyone concerned, you know, who wants to know more about this, go watch the series I did on liberalism with Tymon Klein and Ben Crenshaw, and you'll understand more what she's talking about here.

The truth is that Christians who are politically involved, who see that we're not a moral country anymore, who see the flaws in having an ungodly people try to work within these systems that presume a level of honesty that, you know, they are going to perhaps look for things that have been unconventional for quite some time.

They're going to look at secession and nullification and perhaps even authoritarian schemes in order to try to preserve a semblance of morality. That is the case. It doesn't mean that they've been very successful in that, and that doesn't mean there's many that do that.

And the thing for Catherine Stewart is she thinks that this is so broad, right? So she's not even talking about those people. She's talking about just people who want to lobby in D .C. For their cause, very mainstream Christian organizations like Focus on the Family.

These are the kinds of people that she's concerned about. And really for them, it's just a straw man. It's. They're not doing that, but that's what she thinks. They're just not committed sufficiently to the liberal order because she's following a religion, though she does not realize it.

Liberalism, the liberal order has a very religious kind of feel to it. You have to have a you have to pinch the incense to Caesar, and that means supporting democracy. And I remember when the January 6th thing happened.

Remember, Nancy Pelosi said they've desecrated our temple of democracy. Right. So there's you. You take even religious language and apply it to these supposedly secular things. But nature pours a vacuum.

People are going to be religious. They're going to worship something. And so you end up deifying people, figures from history like Martin Luther King Jr. Right. That becomes the new Christ figure. And so she's part of a religion.

She just doesn't realize it. And she wants her religion to be taxpayer funded. She wants the secular humanist agenda, if you want to call it that, or just the liberal order, the great the great American empire.