By Katherine Stewart
Thank you Annie Laurie Gaylor, Dan Barker, FFRF staff and everyone here today. I am incredibly honored to receive this award. It is such an encouragement and I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you.
I want to say a little bit about the threats we face generally. Then I want to talk about why it’s so important for us to keep fighting for the separation of church and state, and for democracy, especially at a time when the legal landscape can be so challenging.
If you spend some time in the world of Christian nationalist activists, you’ll find yourself in a world where the so-called “deep state” is bent on arresting true believers — where public schools are communist indoctrination factories; where the past three and a half years of robust economic growth, low unemployment and investment in new energy technologies has been a total hellscape and the worst period in American history; where depriving women of their most intimate and impactful decisions is the ultimate expression of religious freedom; where Donald Trump is not an isolationist and a criminal but the president our allies crave and the innocent victim of a diabolical conspiracy. That is the world as they see it.
How did they arrive at this state of conspiracism and disinformation and, frankly, delusion? We can’t understand this predicament unless we understand the role of Christian nationalism in cultivating that worldview.
Let me say up front that when I use the term “Christian nationalism” here, I am referring to a political phenomenon, and not just to an ideology or to a religion — because the movement contains a multitude of denominations and ideas, not all of them mutually consistent. As Michelle Goldberg pointed out yesterday in her convention speech, the movement has changed significantly from the old days of the Moral Majority, but our understanding has not always kept up. So, I want to highlight some key aspects of this movement and its transformation.
Political movement
First, this is a leadership-driven, organization-driven political movement, not just a social movement. Its leaders want political power and all of its perks. They want to use that power to impose their vision on every aspect of government and society. Sure, some of them claim to be just focused on, say, abortion policy. But abortion politics is just one means to an end. Even if movement leaders get everything they want on reproductive rights, which is, by the way, a total national ban, they will quickly pivot to something else. And, in fact, the movement has been successful in generating other culture war issues to fixate on. They are using the politics of outrage to deflect attention from their radically antidemocratic and unpopular agenda.
It is important to grasp how well-funded this movement is. It receives the largest share of funding from a subset of America’s plutocratic class that has decided to invest its fortunes in the destruction of democracy. To give but one example, a couple years ago, a secretive Chicago billionaire named Barre Seid donated $1.7 billion to form the Marble Freedom Trust and put it under the direction of Leonard Leo, the ultraconservative Catholic moneyman who has played an outsized role in shaping the courts through right-wing and Christian nationalist legal organizations. That amount, large as it is, is unfortunately just one piece of the much larger financial resources the movement has at its disposal.
A lot of money buys a lot of law and policy. And, by the way, a lot of the funders aren’t especially religious themselves. They may not care in any sincere way about religion. Instead, they want far right economic policies and deregulatory policies that will justify and increase their own fortunes. But, and this is important, they certainly understand the utility of religious nationalism in getting the rank and file on board. So, sometimes they cultivate an aura of sanctimony to lend legitimacy and respectability to their efforts.
Cultivating, exploiting
Christian nationalism succeeds in part by cultivating and then exploiting a certain mindset. That mindset has certain key features:
• First, there’s the apocalypticism: Once America was great. Now, thanks to the secularists and woke liberals, we are facing an absolute emergency. To borrow the language of contributors to Project 2025, we have one shot to save our country — and, if we fail, it is all over for America.
• Then there’s the persecution complex. It is easy to think of many types of people who suffer some form of discrimination. Christian nationalists can often name only one such group: themselves. At their conferences, you often hear people say that if they don’t win the next election, the bible will be banned and churches will be outlawed. The paranoia really is extreme.
• The third feature is something that honestly reminds me of what my daughter had to deal with in middle school. It’s mean-girl stuff. You’re in or you’re out. One of us or one of “them.” You’re pure and worthy, or impure and deserving of contempt. Christian nationalist leaders promote the idea that people like themselves are the only true and authentic representatives of the nation.
• And finally, there’s the strongman reflex. Movement leaders reject the ideals of pluralism, equality, justice and rule of law upon which the institutions of democracy depend. In fact, they believe we are too far gone to follow the rules anymore, and so they long for someone willing to flout the rules of democracy in order to defeat the supposed “internal enemy.”
The persecution narrative and paranoia are driving forces and I can give any number of examples. But, I believe it’s a mistake to think that all the paranoia is driven by external factors. I would suggest that much of what drives it comes from within. It is the consequence of adopting and committing oneself to what is, from a logical standpoint, a belief system that is vulnerable to reason, and, as a consequence, takes a lot of work to sustain.
Throughout history, one finds that the most zealous and oppressive enforcers of belief are often the ones who themselves harbor inner and unacknowledged doubts, or are living a double life. So, they lash out at others, try to force them to believe and obey, in hopes that that will help them believe and conform.
It is for this reason that avowed nonbelievers, atheists, secularists, outspoken freethinkers are often the most hated targets. It’s why religious authoritarians focus much of their persecution narrative on them.
Foundations of morality
I want to say something about the conflation of atheism and “amorality.” Do you guys remember former Attorney General Bill Barr’s speech at Notre Dame? In that speech, he said America is going to hell because liberals are nihilists and secularists are the source of our problems. I want to note something important here: Running underneath this line of thinking is confusion about the foundations of morality.
I can assure you that many people in the Christian nationalist movement haven’t thought it through. They don’t examine the false assumption that morality only works if it’s a fixed, absolute value system imposed by command from on high. Their only conception of morality is obedience. They can’t imagine that human beings might actively pursue the good on their own and on the basis of reason. This drives the religious right to attempt to legislate their own particular moral codes. And it makes them poor candidates for compromise.
Much is at risk in the outcome of the 2024 election, and I’m going to skip over the obvious issues, like women’s rights, voting rights, public education, and, of course, the courts. Instead, I’ll note just a couple of areas that Americans tend not to talk about as much.
The first is that the Republican frontrunner and the people behind him have promised to destroy what the right calls the “administrative state.” The big money interests that back the GOP love this plan because they resent the federal bureaucracy. More exactly, they loathe the regulatory parts that interfere with often dubious business practices, like polluting and degrading the environment, or various monopolistic practices. But they have great affection for those parts of the state that help protect their interests. So really, it’s “administrative state for me, but not for thee.”
In the event of a second Trump presidency, MAGA cronies will occupy positions in every major department of the federal government — and they will make sure that federal money and power is devoted not to improving life for all Americans, but to enriching Trump’s political backers. This is the way corrupt dictatorships always work.
Americans also tend to overlook the issue of international relations and international security. Many of America’s closest allies are horrified by the prospect of the Republican nominee winning the election. They know he will undermine the relationships and agreements upon which our national security — and theirs — depends. A Trump win would be a major victory for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and dictators around the world who want to diminish America’s economic and geopolitical power.
To put it simply, Trump is the biggest national security risk that the United States faces right now. He is a convicted felon who needs money, he is open to bribery in many different forms, and he has zero respect for the handling of classified information. He could not get a job as a low-level operative in any national security organization in the United States. And, yet, many Americans seem prepared to make him president.
Tools of democracy
With the stakes this high, we need to remember that the basic tools of democracy are still available to us. We need to make use of them, not just for ourselves, but for future generations.
To conclude, I would like to turn to a subject that is more important than ever: the separation of church and state. I hardly need to remind you how central this principle was to the founding of the American republic, how often and how flagrantly it has been betrayed throughout our history and how important it is for our future. But I do want to make a couple of suggestions about how we should think about this issue.
First, let’s not forget that the separation of church and state is about money, too. There is a simple motive driving many of the people working to fuse church and state, and it isn’t religious fervor. It’s money. The push for the privatization of the public school system through vouchers, unregulated charters and outright subsidies to religious schools is a giant corruption machine. It takes taxpayer money and funnels it through religious organizations, which don’t have to report how they spend the money, and from there it can flow into the pockets of corrupt politicians, demagogues and religious leaders.
The second point I would make is that we should think about the separation of church and political party, too. Now, all parties have political outreach, and many religious organizations, of all types, favor this or that political position, and we’re not going to change that. But, the reality is that a huge network of conservative religious institutions have become a tax-subsidized branch of one political party. Your tax dollars and mine are not just paying for these religious establishments, but paying for their partisan political campaigns, too.
The third point I would make is that we can’t leave it all to the courts. We have this idea that because the separation of church and state is in the Constitution, it all comes down to appointing reasonable justices to the Supreme Court. Good luck with that, as they say. But there are three branches of government, and then there are the state and local governments, too, and they all have a part to play. We need laws, not just decisions, from Congress and from state legislatures and, yes, from the executive branch, to help guard against the destruction of our democracy.
Thank you for listening.
