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- [00:00]
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- [00:18]
Ramtin Arablouei
Hey, how you doing? It's Ramtin here. Before we get started, we want to thank you all for listening to Throughline. Without you, the show doesn't exist. And we've got a way for you to actually help us out by telling us what you like and how. We could improve the show by completing a short anonymous survey@npr.org throughlinesurvey. It takes less than 10 minutes, I promise. And you'll do all of us here at Throughline a huge favor by filling it out. That's npr.org throughline survey. Thank you so much. And now onto the show. April 1777, two years since the first shots of war rang out at Lexington and Concord. America is thawing after a cold winter. George Washington and his troops have notched two big victories in New Jersey, but thousands of revolutionaries are dead. Their leaders are worried about war, weariness, disease, desertion. But Reverend Nicholas street, he feels confident, really confident. He's a Congregationalist minister in Connecticut, and he believes America's victory is preordained by God. He preaches a story to his congregation.
- [01:46]
Reverend Nicholas Street
We are ready to marvel at the unreasonable vileness and cruelty of the British tyrant in endeavoring to oppress, enslave and destroy these American states. And yet we find the same wicked temper and disposition operating in Pharaoh, king of Egypt, above 3,000 years ago.
- [02:14]
Ramtin Arablouei
The story of America, he says, is the story of Exodus.
- [02:21]
Narrator
The Israelites are captive in Egypt for.
- [02:24]
Catherine Brekus
400 years, enslaved in Egypt by Pharaoh.
- [02:28]
Reverend Nicholas Street
They made them to serve with rigor, and they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, allowing them no straw and yet requiring the full tail of brick.
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Narrator
And they've lost hope. They've lost themselves. They've lost sight of God.
- [02:41]
Catherine Brekus
And God raises up someone to lead them to freedom, and that's Moses.
- [02:48]
Narrator
He rallies the Israelites and he leads them out of Egypt.
- [02:52]
Reverend Nicholas Street
And when they endeavored to make their escape from this cruel and oppressive tyrant, Pharaoh pursued after Israel with a great army unto the Red Sea.
- [03:02]
Narrator
The Israelites are escaping. And as they cross the Red Sea, God opens up the Red Sea and parts it such that they can cross over everybody.
- [03:12]
Catherine Brekus
All the Israelites crossed dry land on the other side. And then Pharaoh and his armies have charged in behind them.
- [03:21]
Narrator
And when the Egyptians arrive and in chase, the waters, of course, crash together.
- [03:26]
Catherine Brekus
And the Red Sea closes and they drown.
- [03:30]
Narrator
They can't pursue the Israelites any longer, and they are free.
- [03:35]
Reverend Nicholas Street
We in this land are, as it were, led out of Egypt by the hand of Moses. And now we are in the wilderness, Egyptians pursuing us. There is the Red Sea before us. I speak metaphorically, a sea of blood in your prospect before you.
- [04:01]
Ramtin Arablouei
Perhaps even before our country was founded, the colonists who came here used the story of Exodus to justify their journey. And when they got here, they used it to justify their exceptionalism. They saw America as a country forged against all odds to be a haven for God's faithful.
- [04:22]
Rand Abdelfattah
Today that belief has morphed into a worldview broadly described as Christian nationalism. It's a particular understanding of what it means to be American.
- [04:33]
Ramtin Arablouei
What does it mean to go back to 1776? Is it about going back to horses and carts and pitchforks and muskets? Or is it about going back to the values and morals of our forefathers that were grounded in the laws of heaven itself?
- [04:48]
Catherine Brekus
And then I realized that it was.
- [04:49]
Ramtin Arablouei
The church that didn't just inspire, but it was the church that was the reason why America was founded in the first place that rocked my world.
- [05:00]
Rand Abdelfattah
It's true that references to God and Christianity are sprinkled throughout American life. Our money has In God We Trust printed on it. Most of the United States presidents have chosen to swear their oath of office on the Bible. Christian nationalists want more and more explicit Christian foundations for the country.
- [05:22]
Ramtin Arablouei
At their core, Christian nationalist beliefs are rooted in the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, that its laws should reflect Christian values. In practice, it can mean ending your speeches with God Bless America. It can mean advocating for more prayer in schools or requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments. It can mean restricting abortion, same sex marriage and gender, affirming healthcare.
- [05:51]
Rand Abdelfattah
And versions of these beliefs are widely held by Americans of different ages, races and backgrounds. In 2022, a Pew Research poll reported that 45% of Americans believe the country should be a Christian nation. More than half of those people said the Bible should influence US Laws even more than the will of the people.
- [06:14]
Ramtin Arablouei
In this episode, we're not going to debate whether those Americans are right, whether the US should be a Christian nation. But what we are going to do is try to understand where that idea came from, what it can mean for people, and how it's become so powerful.
- [06:32]
Rand Abdelfattah
I'm Rand Abdelfattah.
- [06:34]
Ramtin Arablouei
And I'm Ramtin Arablouei.
- [06:37]
Rand Abdelfattah
On today's episode of Throughline from npr, the complicated relationship between Christianity and the United States. This is Amanda from Bend, Oregon, and you're listening to Throughline. I love this show.
- [06:55]
Narrator
Thank you so much for making it.
- [06:56]
Rand Abdelfattah
I learned something every time I listen.
- [07:00]
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- [08:26]
Rand Abdelfattah
John Winthrop steadied himself on the deck of the ship Arbella. Winthrop and roughly 1,000 Puritans, English Protestants who sought to reform the Church of England, had spent months crossing the Atlantic. They'd chosen to abandon their homes and their livelihoods for a place they'd never been, a place where they would have to start over completely, with only an idea to guide them to do more service to the Lord. Free of the Crown's oversight, 200 of these settlers would die within a year of their arrival.
- [09:02]
Ramtin Arablouei
Winthrop, at 41 years old, had left his family behind in England to serve as the governor of the new colony. And he knew if this group of persecuted Protestants was going to survive, they had to form a tight knit community. A community bound together by their faith and by their vision. And so, with that in mind, legend has it at some point during their voyage, Winthrop stood up before his shipmates and uttered a phrase that would shape American history.
- [09:32]
Catherine Brekus
The phrase the city on a hill comes from. Well, it comes from the Book of Matthew. It's biblical.
- [09:37]
Ramtin Arablouei
Catherine Brekus is a professor of history of religion in America at Harvard Divinity School.
- [09:43]
Catherine Brekus
He spelled out what he thought should be the obligations of the settlers to one another. They were supposed to bear one another's burdens as their own. They were supposed to be charitable to the point where it hurts.
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Narrator
We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.
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Catherine Brekus
And it's their obligation to set a model for what Christianity should look like for the rest of the world. The part of the speech that often people forget about is that after he said that, he warned them that if they failed to do that, if they failed to live up to their Christian obligations to one another, that they would be punished.
- [10:27]
Narrator
So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.
- [10:42]
Catherine Brekus
So what he was trying to do was to remind these settlers of the importance of what they were doing. But he also was underlining that they were special, that God had made a covenant with them, just as God had made a covenant with the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible, and that they had an obligation to live up to that covenant as God's chosen people and to provide a model for the rest of the world.
- [11:14]
Rand Abdelfattah
Most of the white settlers to the 13 colonies were Protestants. Lots of different denominations of Protestants. In New England, they were Puritans, spiritual descendants of John Winthrop and his adherents in Massachusetts Bay. But in the south, most of the colonists were Anglicans. And in between were all the other Protestants escaping religious persecution. The Quakers, Lutherans, Anabaptists, the radical Protestants.
- [11:43]
Catherine Brekus
Sometimes when I talk to people about Christianity in early America, they say, well, there are lots of Protestant groups, but they were all Protestant, and that's not the way they saw one another. There were a lot of tensions among Protestant groups, which made the thought of having any kind of established church on a national level almost impossible. Whose church would it be? Which Christian church, whose Christianity would be the dominant form? Because there isn't a single Christianity on the landscape today, just like there was not a single Christianity in early America.
- [12:22]
Ramtin Arablouei
With that said, what do you make of this argument that even if these were the ideas that framers might have written down, they're still swimming in Christianity. The society was deeply influenced by Christian ideas. Right. How much did that seep into their ideas of what we now kind of called the original ideas of the American project?
- [12:47]
Catherine Brekus
I think that Christianity was inescapable culturally in the world of the Revolution.
- [12:55]
Rand Abdelfattah
This was true even for people who were less enamored of religion itself.
- [13:00]
Catherine Brekus
I think a good example of this is Benjamin Franklin, who was fairly skeptical about religion and admitted uncertainty about the divinity of Jesus. When the Constitutional Convention was meeting, he proposed that the new seal of the United States should be an image of Moses parting the Red Sea and leading the Israelites to freedom. And so here you can see, here's someone who's skeptical about Christianity, but his association with freedom is this story from the Hebrew Bible. And I think that shows you the kind of cultural power of Christianity in this period.
- [13:47]
Rand Abdelfattah
There were other doubters too. Thomas Paine openly criticized organized religion, and then there was Thomas Jefferson.
- [13:55]
Catherine Brekus
Jefferson, what he did was he really admired Jesus as an ethical figure. So he went through the New Testament and he cut out all the miracles and he created his own Bible out of what was left, which wasn't very large. But it was basically about Jesus as a model for how to be a good human being.
- [14:18]
Rand Abdelfattah
As a new country was being formed, both religious and political leaders spoke out in support of separation of church and state. Baptists and Quakers supported it on religious grounds. Jefferson famously wrote that a wall of separation must exist between religious leaders and the federal government.
- [14:39]
Ramtin Arablouei
The separation of church and state and what the Founding Fathers meant by it, is a flash point in the debate surrounding Christian nationalism today. Some Christian nationalists say they don't have a problem with separating the institutions of church and state, but that divorcing morality from the state is a bad idea if it's even possible. Others claim the Founders came up with the First Amendment as a way of protecting the church from political influence, not vice versa.
- [15:07]
Rand Abdelfattah
The Republican activist David Barton has been a leader in this line of thinking and has even claimed the U.S. constitution contains direct quotes from the Bible. Those claims, for the record, have been debunked.
- [15:21]
Catherine Brekus
I often get asked, you know, was the United States founded as a Christian nation? On a formal level? The answer is absolutely no. The Founders provided for separation of church and state. Article 6 of the Constitution says there will be no religious tests for office holding. In other words, you didn't have to believe in God to be President of the United States. The First Amendment guarantees that there is no state church or federal church the way that there was in England where the Church of England was a established. So, you know, in one sense, this is a nation that's founded on the idea of religious freedom. But at the same time, most of the people who were in the new nation at the time of the founding, they assumed, even though the United States was going to be a place of religious freedom, that the nation would probably continue to be mostly Protestant. No one could have foreseen at the time, the waves of immigrants that would come from Ireland and Germany, the Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. So I think from the very beginning, people were really not sure where religious freedom would lead.
- [16:41]
Rand Abdelfattah
And almost immediately, things got complicated. Both during and after the Revolution, American Protestants had seen themselves as a persecuted religious minority. They used the story of Exodus as an allegory for the founding of the United States. They'd seen themselves in the oppressed Israelites.
- [17:01]
Catherine Brekus
One of the things that is so ironic or tragic about the use of this story is that American revolutionary patriots were telling the story about themselves at the same time that they were literally holding slaves. And this was not lost on African Americans at the time, and also some white patriots who called out the hypocrisy of Americans claiming this identity as the enslaved Israelites when they themselves were practicing slavery.
- [17:31]
Rand Abdelfattah
There have always been Christians who were abolitionists, who were pacifists, who welcomed immigrants. But it's also true that throughout the colonial period and well into the 19th century, many American Christians cited the Bible as a justification for slavery. Some churches provided financial support for the slave trade. Others censored stories in the Bible, including the story of Exodus, so that enslaved people would not be inspired to rebel. And as time went on, others also pointed out how the unifying Christian fabric of the early colonies was now being used to violently oppress others.
- [18:12]
Ramtin Arablouei
In the 1830s, when the US government began to carry out the Trail of Tears, a Pequot Methodist minister named William APIs compared white Protestants to Pharaoh. When a wave of Catholic immigrants came to the US during the 19th century, they were also ostracized by the Protestant majority. One American preacher accused the Catholic Church of intentionally flooding the country with immigrants in order to destroy Protestantism and democracy. Protestant Americans rioted and burned down Catholic churches and convents.
- [18:46]
Catherine Brekus
I think it's really important to recognize that this sort of belief that the nation has a special covenant with God, that it's a chosen nation, that it takes multiple forms, and there are very ugly forms. This was true in the wake of the Civil War, where we had a short period of Reconstruction where it seemed as if freed people in the south were going to be granted full rights of citizenship. And then we had this sort of closing down of that around the idea that America, the United States, was supposed to be a white republic and that black people should be excluded. If you've ever seen the movie, the famous movie Birth of a Nation, which was responsible for a lot of racial violence after it was issued in theaters, the film tells the story of a Northern family and a Southern family who are separated by the Civil War. And in the end, they come together. There's intermarriage between the two families. And the very last scene of the movie is a vision of these two couples, you know, who crossed the Northern and Southern divides, sort of dreaming of a better future. And this image comes up on the screen, and it looks like heaven. Everybody's dressed in what looks like toga, so it's kind of like the Roman Republic. Everybody in heaven is white. And as these people are sort of rejoicing in heaven, Jesus starts materializing on the screen. And Jesus is white. And the message at the end of the film is that the United States has healed its divisions and we are a white republic who are under the guidance of a white Jesus.
- [20:54]
Rand Abdelfattah
Birth of a Nation became one of the most widely watched films of its era. In the years after it was released, it would earn the modern equivalent of $1.8 billion. It was the first movie ever screened inside the White House, and President Woodrow Wilson was a fan.
- [21:14]
Ramtin Arablouei
Coming up, White Jesus takes the national St.
- [21:23]
Narrator
Hi, this is Megan from Rhode.
- [21:24]
Catherine Brekus
Island, and you're listening to Throughline.
- [21:29]
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- [22:55]
Narrator
So I was a really angsty kid. I was anxious. I overthink things. I would Lay in the driveway on my back and look up at the stars as a 13 year old and wonder, what's the meaning of life? For me, there was just big questions like, why are we here? What are you supposed to do with your life? What happens when you die? And when I went to church, I found answers to all of those questions. And there was not a lot of need to do long division. There was not three years of catechism. There was not 10 years of meditating, hoping for a breakthrough. There was an instant conversion and then locking in the meaning of your existence and everyone else's.
- [23:40]
Ramtin Arablouei
This is Bradley Onishi. He's now an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco. And as a teenager in Southern California in the 90s, the church gave him a profound sense of belonging.
- [23:53]
Narrator
You know, I think what happened for me was I was invited to church in eighth grade by a girlfriend. And my plan as I tell the story was, this is a genius way to get out of the house.
- [24:06]
Ramtin Arablouei
On a Wednesday night, Rose Drive Friends church takes up most of a block on a busy street in Yorba Linda, California. On Sundays, its parking lots fill up. And on weekday mornings, a line of cars drop off kids at Friends Christian Middle School next door.
- [24:23]
Rand Abdelfattah
Rose Drive is an evangelical church. Among their core beliefs is the idea that the world is, quote, broken by sin and corrupt, and the way to redeem it is by turning away from sin and towards purity and God. At Rose Drive, that means abstaining from premarital sex, denouncing gay marriage, speaking out against abortion. And Bradley Onishi says the stakes are high. This isn't about building a single household or even a nation in God's image. It was about saving the world one person at a time.
- [25:01]
Ramtin Arablouei
The first time he visited, Bradley says he was initially skeptical he'd fit in as a part of that world.
- [25:09]
Narrator
This is the 1990s, okay?
- [25:12]
Ramtin Arablouei
Yep.
- [25:12]
Narrator
So I'm like, thoroughly into the Pearl Jam, Nirvana, grunge movement. I've got, I think, like, pink hair at this point. And my guess is when I go to this church that they're going to be like Ned Flanders from the Simpsons and be like, who is this young punk rock, you know, individual? Get him out of here. And in reality, I show up and there's like some 20something guys teaching some, some kids my age how to play the guitar. And those 20 something guys have like tattoos all up their arms and they're like, what's your name? Who are you? Nice to meet you. Cool hair. And I'm like, oh, okay. I Thought that was going to get me thrown out, but yeah, nice to meet you too. So the visceral reaction was like surprise and delight, but also just like, oh, this is safe. I can come here and be me. And the church became this place where like, I had another family. My parents got divorced when I was starting middle school. I felt like it was a place where I could unravel myself into the warmth of a community that would do nothing but love me. And that is not something you can replicate easily anywhere. And so when people want to know, like, why would you join up in a place like this? I'm like, there's a lot of people that would say, why would you not if you can feel seen that way.
- [26:36]
Ramtin Arablouei
By the time he was in high school, Bradley was fully committed to the church. And that meant evangelizing its vision.
- [26:43]
Rand Abdelfattah
On his first day of school, he showed up an hour early to pray with 150 of his classmates. At the flagpole, he and his new friends handed out anti abortion pamphlets at school. After school, they talked to people about God's plan. Outside the movie theater and at the.
- [27:00]
Narrator
Beach, my identity became thoroughly enveloped by my Christianity. I was a child of God. I was part of the kingdom of God. I was a servant of God. And in my mind, the kingdom of God superseded all other identities.
- [27:19]
Ramtin Arablouei
Bradley Onishi grew up biracial and in Orange County, California that was overwhelmingly white. But when he walked into Rose Drive Church, he says any discomfort melted away because everyone was there for the same God. He became part of a powerful lineage of American evangelicals who over the course of decades shaped American politics.
- [27:43]
Rand Abdelfattah
And some of them got their start right where Bradley was in Orange County.
- [27:50]
Narrator
Orange county in the 50s and 60s is farmland. It's bucolic. But after World War II, the defense industry sets up in Southern California.
- [28:00]
Historical Context Narrator
Huge electronic complexes spring up near California's great city.
- [28:03]
Narrator
And so now there are defense jobs. There are jobs at manufacturers and factories that are based around American military might.
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Historical Context Narrator
California has the largest pool of skilled laborers and much of the country's top talents in the new fields of space rockets and missiles.
- [28:23]
Narrator
And if you move to this place, like my parents, my mom's parents did in 1958 from West Tennessee. Wow, you're going to get great weather. The houses are cheap as chips, believe it or not, and you're going to get a really well paying upper middle class job.
- [28:41]
Historical Context Narrator
The Golden State has just become the largest in the union. People have been coming for more than 100 years and still they come.
- [28:50]
Narrator
So you get there and you're, you're hardwired into the defense industry, which means you're hardwired into the Cold War, right? You hate communism.
- [28:59]
Ramtin Arablouei
Right.
- [29:00]
Narrator
You love America and you also love God because they're godless over there. So we're like, we're America, we're capitalist, we're individualist and we're Christian. And the churches don't really have networks there. So lone entrepreneurial ministers set up megachurches.
- [29:23]
Historical Context Narrator
If you've driven everywhere all week, there's no sense unfastening your safety belt on Sunday. Welcome to Southern California's original walk in drive in church.
- [29:34]
Narrator
Hey, come over here to the Crystal Cathedral. We're going to have a service that only lasts 50 minutes. You don't have to be at church two hours today, Rick. Don't worry. And you know what? You don't even have to get out of your car. I'm the preacher and I'm going to stand up on a platform in the parking lot of this drive in movie theater and we'll sing and we'll have the sermon all in the car.
- [29:55]
Historical Context Narrator
By the time this service comes to a close, more than 10,000 people will have streamed in and out of this church to worship in the beautiful glass sanctuary and in the privacy of the family car.
- [30:07]
Narrator
You can wear shorts. How's that sound? And when you get there, my sermons are going to be anti communism all the way through. And so Orange county becomes this place that anti communism, capitalism and a certain individualistic Christianity all enter into this perfect storm. And it gives you some of the country's first megachurches. It gives you some of the country's biggest, most expansive church campuses. It gives you a place where Barry Goldwater in 1964 gets a majority of the vote.
- [30:42]
Ramtin Arablouei
That's fascinating. And you brought up Goldwater. Can you just talk about who Barry Goldwater was, what his political strategy was to win a place like Orange County.
- [30:53]
Narrator
So Barry Goldwater is a longtime Arizona senator. He was born and raised in Arizona.
- [30:59]
Historical Context Narrator
America needs a change. Freedom needs a chance. And the Republican victory is the way to it.
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Narrator
He decides to run for president. And amidst the Cold war, amidst the increasing diversification of the country, amidst the civil rights movement, Barry Goldwater said, these are going to spell the doom of the country.
- [31:23]
Historical Context Narrator
Now, my fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false prophet. We must and we shall return to proven ways, not because they are old, but because they are true.
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Narrator
What we need is a libertarian government that is small and does not interfere with citizens lives.
- [31:51]
Historical Context Narrator
Freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature's God.
- [31:59]
Rand Abdelfattah
As a senator, Barry Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights act of 1964. In the wake of Brown versus Board of Education. He said the federal government had no place telling states whether they should desegregate their schools. His presidential campaign would become famous for pushing the Republican Party towards the extreme right at a moment when racial tensions were rising in the United States. And at the same time, Goldwater pulled a subset of American evangelicals along with him.
- [32:31]
Ramtin Arablouei
The things he was saying weren't exactly revolutionary. American politicians have, as we established, been invoking God since the revolution. But Goldwater explicitly connected what he saw as America's divine destiny to the Republican Party. He didn't position religion as separate from politics, but essential to it.
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Narrator
Barry Goldwater famously said at the Republican national convention in 1964 that extremism in.
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Historical Context Narrator
The defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also, and.
- [33:07]
Narrator
To me, that's a watershed moment because he lost that election to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide. But his appeal went straight to the kinds of white conservative Christians I grew up with. The biggest and most ruckus Goldwater supporters were in Southern California. He gave a permission structure for extremism that still resounds today. If you want your country, you got to be a radical. If you're not a radical, you're not one of us.
- [33:39]
Ramtin Arablouei
Is that message parallel to what the message. To what messages were being sent in churches?
- [33:46]
Narrator
Very much so. He was drawing a line around who's a real American. He's drawing a line around who is right under the eyes of God. He wasn't a thoroughly religious man, but he referenced God all the time. He split the world into us and them. And that was something conservative white Christians were used to. Yeah, you're either with us or against us. There's no room for debate and dialogue. We don't want a kind of conflict in the community. You either adhere to this or get out one or the other. And Goldwater gave voice to that extremism as a political philosophy, and his foot soldiers took it home. Paul Wyrick, the founder of the Heritage foundation, got his political start under Goldwater. So did Dana Rohrabacher, the congressperson. So did Richard Vigory, and so many of the people that went on to shape conservative politics in the 20th century.
- [34:36]
Ramtin Arablouei
Between 1960 and the 1980s, those political strategists helped turn American evangelicals into a powerful voting bloc that was much bigger than Orange County.
- [34:47]
Rand Abdelfattah
The seeds were planted by the economic Boom and wave of patriotism that followed World War II. Then during the Cold War, President Eisenhower signed a bill that added under God to the Pledge of Allegiance. At the time, a Presbyterian reverend in Washington, D.C. preached, quote. To omit the words under God in the Pledge of Allegiance is to omit the definitive factor in the American way of life.
- [35:14]
Ramtin Arablouei
In the coming decades, the civil rights movement, second wave feminism and opposition to the Vietnam War would create a new left pushing for social change in America. And some Christians pushed back in the name of God, America and capitalism. You can see that happening in the 1980 election when the Republican Party strategically built alliances with ministers to get Christians to the polls. They mobilized around issues like tax exemption for a private religious university, which the IRS had rolled back when the school refused to desegregate. They opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have prohibited gender based discrimination in the United States. And when neither of those strategies proved universal enough to draw in the voters it needed, the Republican Party pivoted to abortion. It would become a defining fault line in American politics and cement the religious right's control over a new form of Christian nationalism. In their view, people on the left.
- [36:22]
Historical Context Narrator
They think they're above things like the.
- [36:23]
Narrator
Pledge of Allegiance, they're above this patriotism, they're above things like God. It's an attack on God, on Christianity.
- [36:32]
Historical Context Narrator
And its attack on Western civilization. What the left has done is it's.
- [36:36]
Narrator
Replaced Christianity with secular humanism, God, family.
- [36:40]
Ramtin Arablouei
It all kind of evokes an image.
- [36:42]
Narrator
This is America and the flag, a symbol of what we stand for.
- [36:48]
Rand Abdelfattah
In the summer of 1980, the new leaders of the religious right met up in Dallas, Texas.
- [36:54]
Narrator
It's a gathering of pastors and ministers who are concerned with the nation's state and the nation's decline.
- [37:00]
Rand Abdelfattah
And also in attendance was the Republican nominee for President, Ronald Reagan.
- [37:07]
Narrator
And then when it was his turn to speak, he gave one of the most famous lines of his campaign. He said, I know you can't endorse me.
- [37:14]
Historical Context Narrator
I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing. When the Israelites were about to enter the promised land, they were told that their government and laws must be models to other nations, showing to the world the wisdom and mercy of their God. To us as to the ancient people of the Promise, there is given an opportunity, a chance to make our laws and government not only a model to mankind, but a testament to the wisdom and mercy of God.
- [37:50]
Narrator
And those who felt like they were on the outs of American society now saw an avenue to the very center of Power.
- [38:00]
Rand Abdelfattah
Coming up, a Christian nationalist vision for the future of the United States.
- [38:13]
Reverend Nicholas Street
Hey, this is Mikra Ab Aberra from.
- [38:17]
Narrator
Salt Lake City, and you're listening to live from npr.
- [38:23]
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- [38:50]
Ramtin Arablouei
June 23, 2024. The broadcast opens with an arc shot of the American flag and as the camera rises above the bright red and blue of the Star Spangled Banner, a symphony orchestra explodes into song. A message flashes across the massive LED screen behind the 100 person choir. Now the Lord is the and where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom.
- [39:31]
Rand Abdelfattah
Freedom Sunday is an annual worship event at First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. The church seats 3,000 people. More watch online.
- [39:42]
Narrator
Welcome to Freedom Sunday at First Baptist Dallas. We're so glad you're here.
- [39:48]
Rand Abdelfattah
That's senior pastor Robert Jeffress. He brings another speaker on stage, a rear admiral in the US Navy Reserve. And these men are firm but clear. America is in grave moral jeopardy.
- [40:03]
Catherine Brekus
I want to say to you today as I pause right here in the.
- [40:05]
Historical Context Narrator
Reading, I'm a little concerned our culture.
- [40:08]
Catherine Brekus
Today in America, that we're going down the wrong path and we need a turn. So when go time hits, you will glorify God and honor him and you can begin to silence the ignorance of foolish people.
- [40:23]
Rand Abdelfattah
It's a call to action. But he emphasizes, it is not a call to arms.
- [40:29]
Catherine Brekus
And let me be real clear here.
- [40:31]
Historical Context Narrator
I'm not talking about insurrection.
- [40:33]
Narrator
You hear me?
- [40:35]
Historical Context Narrator
That doesn't line up with this.
- [40:37]
Ramtin Arablouei
This is a distinction leading Christian faith leaders have felt compelled to make recently, especially since the events of January 6, 2021.
- [40:46]
Rand Abdelfattah
After the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, a coalition of more than 100 pastors and other faith leaders wrote.
- [40:53]
Narrator
An open letter condemning the role that radical Christian nationalism played in feeding the political extremism that led to the violent insurrection.
- [41:02]
Ramtin Arablouei
As mobs of rioters stormed up the steps of the Capitol, some of them carried banners with Bible verses. There were flags with Christian symbols, crosses, a four foot tall painting of Jesus wearing a Make America Great Again hat.
- [41:18]
Rand Abdelfattah
When a group of rioters broke into the Senate chambers, they stopped to pray.
- [41:25]
Ramtin Arablouei
Thank you, Heavenly Father, for giving the inspiration to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow America, the American way, and the.
- [41:39]
Historical Context Narrator
United States of America to go down.
- [41:41]
Ramtin Arablouei
We love you and we thank you. In Christ's holy name we pray.
- [41:47]
Catherine Brekus
And so if we, you know, we think about January 6th. I was initially so shocked to see all those Christian crosses in the crowd. And then I started thinking about the rhetoric that I've heard for years from some conservative Christians where the argument has been that the government is no longer supporting Christians the way that it used to and that Christians have to resist the government in order to save the nation. So the government and the nation are not the same. And they say the government is corrupt and we need to replace the government, critique the government, maybe even overthrow the government in order to preserve the special divine mandate that God gave the United States.
- [42:34]
Ramtin Arablouei
Catherine Brekus says this type of rhetoric is related to demographic changes in the United States.
- [42:42]
Catherine Brekus
In the early 1990s, about 90% of the population identified as Christian. Now we're down to about 66%. Christians have had a really privileged place in American culture, and that privileged place is disappearing. And it means that there is anger, there's fear, there's grief.
- [43:09]
Narrator
I think in this country there is a sense for many people that if Christianity is not the predominant cultural factor, then you lose the lingua franca that everybody speaks. And this is really key. Even if you don't go to church regularly, you still are participating in a kind of national civil religion. And so you may not be a three times a week Bible study person, but you may be somebody who's vehemently on Facebook saying, I want this to be a Christian nation, because it feels to you like that's the fabric that ties together the story of your nation. Even though so many of your fellow neighbors and citizens don't share that story and they have a different God that they worship or a different understanding of things. And that's exclusionary.
- [43:57]
Rand Abdelfattah
It's hurtful in retrospect. Bradley Onishi says the beliefs he subscribed to as part of Rose Drive Friends Church were Christian nationalism. He no longer identifies as part of that movement, but he still remembers that sense of belonging that drew him in.
- [44:15]
Narrator
Didn't matter if you were from Mexico or from Thailand. It didn't matter if you were from Germany or from the United States. If you were part of the kingdom of God. That's all that mattered. So it was totally fine and welcome to be a person of color in that space. It was not like someone was going to say what are you doing here? But what was going to happen is if you celebrated that, if you brought the, the cultural dynamics of that into the space, then it was going to be sort of like, hey, we're Christian here, not, we're not like super Asian, you know, that's not like, we're not going to celebrate like your quinceanera if that's what you want, because like, that's not right. It might be part of your culture, but that's not necessary to be part of the kingdom of God. That's a Mexican thing, that's not a Christian thing.
- [45:02]
Ramtin Arablouei
Right.
- [45:03]
Narrator
But the Christian thing, unbeknownst to me at the time, was always coded and contoured in a kind of white American context.
- [45:11]
Ramtin Arablouei
When did you start to become aware of that dividing line or that this kind of nationalism or patriotism interwoven with your Christianity as you started to like get older and were a member of the church?
- [45:23]
Narrator
9 11, I'm 20 years old at that time, I'm a full time minister, I'm married to my high school sweetheart and 911 happens. And the responses from my community were really about Americanism. This is about us getting justice. This is about us getting those who did this to us. And so when you think about folks who are different than us, if they're not Christian, they may not be real Americans, and if they're not Americans, they may not be Christians. We need to like invest in.
- [46:09]
Ramtin Arablouei
What did you do then? Like, that must be a terrifying realization.
- [46:14]
Narrator
You know, after 911 I started to, to doubt a lot and I started to question a lot and that continued. The problem was my entire life had been enveloped by this community. I did not have any friends outside of this church. I had no professional aspirations or training outside of being a minister. I was married already. And so the idea of changing my relationship or my partnership was going to be incredibly devastating and was almost unthinkable. At that time. I was also, on a day to day basis, a pastor to 200 teenagers who needed me.
- [46:55]
Ramtin Arablouei
In March 2005, Bradley accepted an offer to study theology at Oxford University. He moved to the United Kingdom and.
- [47:04]
Narrator
Within six months, my whole world changed. I realized that the ethical framework, the biblical framework that I'd been taught made no sense to me in terms of its coherence or its worldview. I realized that many of the people at my church were good people. But the conversion that I had to Christ was also a conversion to American nationalism. My worship of Christ on the cross was also reverence to the American flag. And it was easier for me to see that living abroad than it was living in my hometown. I had to figure out what was important, what was good, what I valued, what I cared about. It was a really wild process. I lost a lot. I got divorced. I lost a lot of my community. When I would go home after that, people in the coffee shop or the cafe would turn the other way or pretend they didn't see me and act like they didn't know me. But I gained the ability to formulate an understanding of the good and the divine and the valuable in a way that I had never done before. And that was really, truly an amazing time.
- [48:15]
Ramtin Arablouei
Today, Bradley has moved on from being a Christian nationalist to studying the movement's resurgence. He's written a book called Preparing for War, the Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and what Comes Next. He co hosts a podcast called Straight White American Jesus, and he says one of the most compelling factors driving some Americans to this movement is fear.
- [48:40]
Narrator
That is exactly what is happening. There is the recognition that as the decades go on, the country is less and less Christian. It's less and less white Christian. So there's 100% a fear of cultural decline.
- [48:55]
Rand Abdelfattah
Among white Americans. Christian nationalist beliefs are closely tied to political support for the Republican Party, but the beliefs themselves cut across racial lines. According to one study, about 20% of white Americans sympathize with these beliefs, as do around 20% of black Americans.
- [49:15]
Ramtin Arablouei
That gets at the next thing I wanted to ask, like, what's the big deal? Because I think some people would say, like, what's the real danger in people wanting the country to be more Christian?
- [49:24]
Narrator
I think the danger is it comes when we say we're going to try to impose one story of the beginning of the world, God, the divine, whatever it may be, on everyone else. And so you may not be somebody who adheres to this, but we're going to impose it on you anyway. What does that look like on the ground? What it looks like on the ground is 9% of Americans, according to Paul Jupe Dennis University, think that only Christians should be citizens.
- [49:51]
Ramtin Arablouei
Wow.
- [49:53]
Narrator
So if you think only a Christian should be a citizen, now you're saying unless you become a Christian, you don't get to vote, you don't get all the rights of citizenship. So they're imposing what they take to be a Christian worldview on everyone.
- [50:04]
Rand Abdelfattah
The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has gone down in recent years. But studies have also shown that when the United States finds itself in crisis, Americans are more likely to say that it's important to be Christian, to be truly American.
- [50:21]
Catherine Brekus
I think we're really at an inflection point or a turning point. When I look forward, I'm alarmed by some things and I have hope for other reasons. What I'm alarmed about is the growth of this movement, the sense of grievance that's within it, and the intense fusion of religion and politics, which means that people are bringing to politics this sense of ultimate good and evil are at stake. And therefore I have to fight to the death over these issues. This seems to me like a frightening time. The reason for hope is that I do think we have the power to decide what we want our nation to look like today. I do think it's really important to understand our roots and to understand the difficulty that Americans have always had trying to figure out who we should be in terms of our commitment to religious freedom. At the same time, I don't want us to be so beholden to what the founder said that we can't think creatively about. Who are we now? We are a very religiously diverse nation in a way that Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Hamilton, they never, never would have imagined this. I would love to beam them down from let's hope they're in heaven. They would be completely flabbergasted by the American religious landscape today.
- [52:05]
Narrator
To be a Christian who loves your country is not to be a Christian nationalist. To be a Christian nationalist is to be somebody who thinks that because you're Christian, you get more of the country than anyone else. So it's one thing for us to strongly disagree in the civic square and do everything we can to stop a Christian nationalist movement that would impose itself on all of us and limit everyone's freedom and lead to violence. It's another thing to treat the rank and file folks sitting in small towns and churches across the country as less than human. They're people who want community, they're people who want belonging, and they want a story to their life that is meaningful and significant. We have to understand that we all desire community, belonging and meaning, and we all need resources for creating that in our own lives. This is what they're doing. To treat them as anything less than a fellow human being is. That's not a way forward.
- [53:11]
Rand Abdelfattah
That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.
- [53:14]
Ramtin Arablouei
I'm Ramtin Arablouei and you've been listening to Throughline from npr.
- [53:19]
Rand Abdelfattah
This episode was produced by me and.
- [53:21]
Catherine Brekus
Me and Sarah Wyman, Casey Minor, Lawrence.
- [53:26]
Narrator
Wu, Julie Cain, Anya Steinberg, Christina Kim.
- [53:29]
Catherine Brekus
Devin Kadayama, Leena Muhammad, Irene Noguchi.
- [53:33]
Rand Abdelfattah
Thank you to Lisa Hagan, odette Youssef, Sarah McCammon, Johannes Durgi, Edith Chapin and Colin Campbell.
- [53:41]
Ramtin Arablouei
Thanks also to Catherine Stewart, Paul Brandeis, Rauschenberg Bush, Guthrie Graves, Fitzsimmons and Douglas Wilson.
- [53:49]
Rand Abdelfattah
Voiceover work for this episode was done by Evan Frolov and Devin Katayama.
- [53:54]
Ramtin Arablouei
Fact checking for this episode was done by Sarah McClure. This episode was mixed by Kwesi Lee.
- [53:59]
Rand Abdelfattah
Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which.
- [54:04]
Catherine Brekus
Includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.
- [54:10]
Ramtin Arablouei
We would love to hear from you. Send us a voicemail to 872-588-8805 and leave your name where you're from and say the line you're listening to Throughline from NPR and tell us what you think of the show. We might even feature your voicemail in a future episode. That number again is 872588.
- [54:36]
Rand Abdelfattah
And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us@throughlinepr.org thanks for listening.
- [54:52]
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