What happens when religious fundamentalists come to power? (Part Two)

Military service members are filing a flood of complaints about religious justifications for the U.S. war in Iran. How Christian extremism came to influence the Trump administration and offer moral underpinnings for the new war in the Middle East.

Guests

Katherine Stewart, journalist and writer. Author of the books “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy” and “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”

Robert Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. Author of many books, including, most recently, “Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy.”

Transcript

Part I    

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Today we’re going to have our second episode in our look at what happens to a nation when religious fundamentalism comes to power. This little pop-up series is inspired by questions you sent us when I asked you several weeks ago what you want to know about the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran.

Yesterday we talked about the rise of Shia extremism in Iran, and if you missed that, please do check it out in our On Point podcast feed, because there were some very revealing insights in that episode, especially about how modern Shia extremism coalesced around one charismatic character, one charismatic leader, and how that leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini strengthened his grip on power by purging opponents and slowly insinuating social change.

There was a moment where one of our guests, Alex Vatanka, who grew up in Iran, he remembered when everything tipped in his school.

It was a day in the early 1980s when all of a sudden all of the female teachers showed up wearing headscarves, something he could not imagine even a few years earlier. Today we turn our attention to religious fundamentalism in the United States government.

You really need to talk about Pete Hegseth and Christian nationalists who are actually wanting a massive war with Iran on purpose because they want to trigger Armageddon.

How Christian nationalists and their idea about the rapture influenced this.

What does it mean for Pete Hegseth to be so devoutly Christian and leading his troops against Iran?

Is he telling his base that he was ready to start a Holy War in the Middle East?

There is nowhere in the Bible, especially in Jesus’ teachings, that Jesus commands us to wage war against our enemies.

CHAKRABARTI: So from top to bottom there, you heard listeners, Alexandra in Oregon, Erin in Austin, Texas, Stewart in Hudson, Massachusetts, Mel in Madison, Wisconsin, and Carolyn in Park City, Kentucky.

Let’s start with Katherine Stewart. She’s author of Money, lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American democracy. Katherine, welcome.

KATHERINE STEWART: Hi. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: I actually want to just lead off here with the little sound of the Secretary of Defense himself, Pete Hegseth, and how he infuses his version of Christianity into almost every one of his public statements.

So this was just yesterday when the secretary was talking about the rescue of the U.S. Airmen who had been down in Iran. And here is how Secretary Hegseth phrased it.

HEGSETH: Shot down on a Friday. Good Friday, hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday and rescued on Sunday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday, a pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing. God is good.

CHAKRABARTI: Now God is good as the English version of something we frequently hear in Islam, in Arabic. Tell me Katherine, how you see Hegseth infusing his version of Christianity, Christian nationalism in his leadership of the Pentagon.

STEWART: Under his leadership, Hegseth has, the Department of Defense has put out videos with bible verses on top of videos of airmen and troops and tanks and warships. It’s a kind of conflation of religion with military domination, and we’ve seen how he does this even on his own body. He has these neo crusader tattoos that suggest a religious war.

He’s actually even appeared with the word Kafir on his bicep. The word, Arabic word for unbeliever. And this is not, he is not saying he’s an atheist by any means. He’s actually casting himself in opposition to Islam in this way. It’s almost like a provocation. In his book, American Crusader, he talks about how America’s involved in a civilizational war.

It’s deeply concerning. So this religious rhetoric helps frame the war as that part of that civilizational struggle. And I would say, I’m sorry, the appeal to this religious rhetoric also has a kind of psychological attraction to brutality and cruelty and domination and amongst Trump’s base many adhere to this idea of religion.

That properly understood is one of crushing of foes, of iron will, a kind of celebration of hyper-masculine violence.

CHAKRABARTI: You’re getting to something that I was going to ask about later, but let’s push forward on this. The way that Hegseth and other avowed Christian nationalists do talk about Jesus specifically. I was just watching a grace that Hegseth led at a White House dinner not that long ago, and he was talking about Jesus being the king of kings on his throne. It was like a very muscular, as you said, a domination driven version of Jesus, which would be utterly foreign to many Christians. Is that version of Jesus the one that Christian nationalists tend to turn to.

STEWART: This is true, but we also have to note that the Christian faith is so diverse, and this version of the Christian faith is antithetical to the way I think most American Christians understand their faith, which is really one of love and peace.

You think about, we can think about the contrast between Brooks Potteiger who is Pete Hegseth’s pastor in Tennessee, has been Pete Hegseth’s pastor. And James Talarico, who was running for Senate in Texas. Brooks Potteiger was on a podcast and he said that he thought Talarico, basically I can’t remember the exact rhetoric, but was something along the lines of he should be crucified.

And Talarico experienced this as a kind of threat on his life and said he should be crucified with Jesus, or something along those lines. And Potteiger said that’s not exactly what I meant, but you can see the difference where one is expressing aggression toward the other, Talarico has made his faith, he’s also a Presbyterian seminarian, he’s made his own faith a centerpiece of his campaign. And he’s also emphasized interfaith dialogue and interfaith values of love and respect and equality. So you see a real, I was to contrast between these two understandings of American religion.

So I want to, throughout this hour, not only discuss more the tenets of Christian nationalism, but also really practically speaking how we’re seeing those beliefs being infused into governance in the United States. Sticking with the Pentagon here, just last December, right around Christmas, Secretary Hegseth made this major announcement that he was going to change what he saw as a weakened Chaplain Corps in the U.S. military.

Now, the Chaplain Corps has historically contained or is where the ordained clergy of multiple faiths are, and they are commissioned Army officers that offer religious service, counsel, moral support to members of the military. So here’s what Hegseth said.

HEGSETH: But sadly, as part of the ongoing war on warriors, in recent decades, its role has been degraded. In an atmosphere of political correctness and secular humanism, chaplains have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers. Faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care.

CHAKRABARTI: And Hegseth went on to say that he was gonna make changes to the Chaplain Corps, and one of them he pointed to was the Army spiritual fitness guide document that he objects to because it only mentioned God one time.

HEGSETH: The guide itself reports that around 82% of the military are religious. Yet ironically, it alienates our war fighters of faith by pushing secular humanism. In short, it’s unacceptable and unserious. So we’re tossing it.

CHAKRABARTI: Katherine Stewart, and now we also very recently have in this major purge that Hegseth is undertaking in the Pentagon.

One of the people that he let go was the Army Chief of Chaplains Major General Bill Green, who I do also want to point out happens to be a Black man as well. What kind of actually concrete changes do you see going on in the Pentagon?

STEWART: We have to know that Christian nationalism is really an idea of who gets to properly belong in a country, who counts as truly American and who doesn’t.

It also includes the idea that there are hierarchies ordained of God, men over women of course. And implicitly I would say, rather than explicitly, white people over people of color. We have to note that an incredibly disproportionate number of the people who have been purged in the military thanks to Trump and Hegseth are women and people of color.

We don’t know why Major General Green was purged. There’s a terrific piece in The Bulwark by someone who knew him within the military who said he was a good man, a good general, a good pastor. Hegseth has offered no explanation, but we do have to note that religious nationalism is, creates this idea of the insider versus the outsider, the pure versus the impure.

CHAKRABARTI: Were you gonna, sorry, I didn’t, were you? I’ll just jump in here and ask you. So the pure versus the impure. Okay. And so then by, he basically, Hegseth said that in the Chaplain Corps, he wanted to reduce the recognized religions and spirituality from it was in the double digits down to fewer than 10.

So not even having the Army recognize various faith traditions anymore.

STEWART: It’s interesting to me, because even within the Christian faith there is so much diversity. The idea of reducing understanding of faith rather than encompassing the beautiful faith mosaic of our country is frankly as un-American as it gets, it’s a rejection of the quality of the principles of equality and pluralism.

That represent the best of the American promise.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Today we’re talking about Christian nationalism in the Trump administration.

Here’s a couple more examples. You’re about to hear Evangelical Pastor Franklin Graham. He led a prayer at the White House for Easter lunch last week, where he made a direct biblical comparison between teachings in the Bible and the current war with Iran.

GRAHAM: Father, you tell us in the Book of Esther that the Persians, the Iranians, were wanting to kill every Jew, woman, child and do it all in one day, but you raised up Esther to save the Jewish people. Father, we thank you. Today, the Iranians, the wicked regime of this government wants to kill every Jew and destroy them with an atomic fire. But you have raised up President Trump.

CHAKRABARTI: Raised up President Trump for a time such as this, Graham said. At that same event, Paula White-Cain spoke.

She leads the newly created under the second Trump administration White House Faith Office, and she’s also served as a spiritual advisor to President Donald Trump in both his administrations. Let me just correct myself, she’s now the new leader of the White House Faith Office. And last week White-Cain spoke at that Easter lunch and she made a direct comparison between President Donald Trump and the man central to Christianity.

PAULA WHITE-CAIN: Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. And sir, because of his resurrection, you rose up. Because he was victorious, you were victorious.

And I believe that the Lord said to tell you this because of his victory, you will be victorious in all you put your hand to.

CHAKRABARTI: Leader of the White House Faith Office, Paula White-Cain. Katherine Stewart joins us today. She’s author of Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.

And I’d like to bring in Robert Jones into the conversation now. He’s the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, author of many books. Forthcoming book is Backslide: Reclaiming A Faith and A Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy. Robert Jones, welcome back to On Point.

ROBERT JONES: Hi. Thanks. Glad to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me ask you, our listeners, at the very top, you heard, they want us to explore specifically this idea of Armageddon or the rapture or even Jesus’s second coming, and how that may be, how that situates itself in the beliefs of Christian nationalists and how it might’ve informed maybe even some decision making or at least support in the Trump administration for starting this war against Iran. Help us understand Robert.

ROBERT JONES: Sure. There are any number of these end times sort of prophecies in conservative, evangelical Christianity. They tend to be forms of what you might call Christian Zionism. And they involve this vision of the end times where there is this kind of retaking of Jerusalem and this victory of the biblical assertions to Israel into modern geopolitics. And this kind of end times battle where Jesus comes and extends his reign in the earth. And I will say that many times this has seemed to be a kind of pro-Israel position, but if you really pay attention to this theology, this does not end well for anyone who is Jewish.

At the end of the day, only the Jews who bow the knee to Jesus are actually going to be saved. Even though there’s this temporary kind of military victory that involves Israel, at the end of the day, it is a Christian vision of a victorious in times with Jesus on the throne at the end. What’s interesting also though, is I’ll say this, that this is actually not the tradition that Pete Hegseth comes out of. This is the older tradition of the Christian right that we might have been talking about 20 years ago, or even more than a decade ago.

But this new vision, this tradition that Pete Hegseth is actually much more straightforward. If you go to his mentor, Doug Wilson who heads the denomination he is associated with, it really is a straight up Christian Dominionist worldview. And it isn’t really necessarily wrapped up in complicated end times prophecy and theology.

It really is more straightforwardly a vision of Christian domination, not only at home but abroad. So not only should the U.S. be a Christian nation. But every nation should be a Christian nation.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So this is really important because as you heard at the top many listeners, and I’ll include myself among that, presume that the sort of rapture and return of Jesus Christ was central to the hyperfocus that this administration and its Christian nationalists therein have had on the Middle East.

So it’s really important to understand that maybe that is not the case. Now you said, Robert, that to go to Doug Wilson, he has spoken quite frequently and openly to all sorts of media outlets. And so we’ve got some tape here of Wilson himself. So he’s, as you said, Robert, Doug Wilson is one of the leaders of the Christian nationalist movements.

And by the way the Department of Defense does confirm that Secretary Hegseth is one of his congregants and or at least values Wilson’s wisdom. Now Doug Wilson has 150 churches worldwide, including one in Washington, D.C. and he provided the Wall Street Journal with his definition of Christian nationalism.

DOUG WILSON: Christian nationalism is the conviction that secularism is a failed project, and no society can function or exist without a transcendental grounding.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Wilson is not the only major Christian nationalist leader who believes this. He was actually in conversation through his publisher with a gentleman named Stephen Wolfe, who is author of The Case for Christian Nationalism.

STEPHEN WOLFE: Christian Nationalism, as I’ve presented it, is incompatible with secularism and if Christians get serious, then yeah, we’re a threat. We’re a threat to their regime in the sense that Christians having power would end that regime. It would end the secularist regime.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now, Wolfe also said that he often encounters other Christians who were timid about using politics to achieve these theocratic aims. And Wolfe says if those folks want Christianity to be a greater part of everyday American life, something needs to be made clear.

WOLFE: This means a civil power is going to enforce that.

And then that’s where they’re like, oh, whoa, a civil power. You can’t do that. But that’s what I’m saying, is that we should have Christian magistrates and Christian governments that enforce Christian norms on the public and also ensure that public institutions such as schools are Christian as well.

CHAKRABARTI: One more thing from Doug Wilson, going back to how this would look practically in everyday American life if Christian nationalists did indeed control all the branches of the U.S government, because Wilson envisions a non-secular America where the government tightly controls public expression on his own podcast, Doug Wilson elaborated, saying in a Christian nationalist America, there could be Muslims, there could be Hindus, there could be people of other faiths.

They could pray at home or say, if you’re Muslim, you could even pray quietly in a mosque. But he really emphasizes the quiet part.

WOLFE: Could they have a minaret, a prayer tower that issues the public call to prayer? No. Because the public spaces belong to Christ, right? We’re a Christian nation. Catholic church bells would be okay.

Catholic church bells would be okay, but a parade in honor of the Virgin Mary carrying an image of the Virgin Mary down Main Street, no.

CHAKRABARTI: So not even a parade celebrating the woman who the Bible says was the mother of Jesus Christ. Katherine Stewart. Tell me, how pervasive is this absolutist belief about the use of government power amongst Christian national believers in America?

STEWART: The movement isn’t homogenous and it draws on several different religious traditions. I would say that Reconstructionism, which is the core of this, Doug Wilson’s ministry, and it’s in a sense one of the ideological, hard ideological pillars of the Christian nationalist movement.

Even if many of the movement’s leaders and members of the rank and file do not identify explicitly as Christian reconstructionist. In fact, I would say only a subsection of movement leaders and theologians and political activists identify themselves as reconstructionist, but they’re extremely influential in guiding the movement.

CHAKRABARTI: So Robert Jones, what I’d like to understand then is given what Katherine said and the fact that you said this isn’t exactly the same thing as, say, in the early ’80s when we had focus on the family and the rise of evangelical Christianity, how then did at least the Wilsonian strain of Christian nationalism really become so influential in this second Trump administration?

JONES: Maybe this is helpful. It’s in fact the older tradition in terms of thinking in this militant way about Christianity. So all of the stuff that we, the end times, the rapture, the second coming of Jesus in that vision, which is sometimes debates about pre-millennial dispensationalism is the theological term that gets used, that’s actually only about 150 years old. It comes in the wake of the Civil War, actually in the United States, in a kind of fundamentalist movement in that part of U.S. history. But this vision as Katherine said, the tattoos that Pete Hegseth has on his body, the Jerusalem crosses the Latin phrase Deus vult, which means God wills it, above a sword.

And between a sword and an American flag on his bicep. This is the crusades right? This is back to the medieval period of Christianity that had this militant merger of Christian power with state power. That was, as Will said, this very explicit marshaling of state and military power for Christian ends.

And it was this kind of civilizational struggle that merges states, political states with theological ends. And I think that’s the vision that we’re seeing coming over. So it has a long tradition to draw on. It’s actually much older than this kind of dispensational second coming.

But it’s made a revival with Hegseth and the reconstructionist movement. And it really is about who’s in power now. And I think Hegseth has become the kind of most obvious person. And if you hear his language, just one more point, instead of calling, he doesn’t call the members are military soldiers. He calls them war fighters. He goes out of his way to use this awkward term war fighters all the time. And because it is putting forward, not defense. But a very muscular, aggressive really incursive kind of force rather than a defensive force, which is how, I was also trying to talk about, he calls himself the Secretary of War rather than the Secretary of Defense.

This is all part of this worldview.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now, Katherine Stewart, a little bit earlier mentioned a retired general who also knows Major General Bill Green, who was now the former Army Chief of Chaplains. That other general happens to be Lieutenant General Mark Hertling. He’s been speaking quite widely about Bill Green’s release from service as Army Chief of Chaplains.

He was on MS NOW. And here is what Lieutenant General Mark Hertling had to say.

HERTLING: He was one of my chaplains when I was a brigade commander, and he is one of the finest officers and ministers in the Army, and that’s why he was chosen as the chief of chaplains. When you talk about all three of them together.

It’s much more damaging and there’s a whole lot more to this story. They were standing up for something, I don’t know what the issue was, but when you hear Secretary Hegseth say that soldiers are fighting for Jesus, that just chills me to the bone, especially when you have soldiers and all military personnel who are of other faiths, and it’s on Passover weekend.

CHAKRABARTI: Robert Jones. Let follow up with that and say, there has been some reporting that other leaders in the chain of command have been telling their troops something similar, right? I don’t know if they’ve been saying directly that this is a Holy War, but, and I want to go out of my way and say not all leaders in the military by far are saying this, but just how different is this in your estimation from what nominal military culture has been.

JONES: I would, to use a military term, I would say this is an about face from the way that we have seen the military, especially the Chaplain Corps, conduct itself. That the Chaplain Corps has been long understood to be consistent with the First Amendment and freedom of religion.

And it’s designed to address all members of the military, whether they’re religious or not, or whatever religion they are from, the Chaplain Corps has long had these values of respecting religious pluralism. And even if you are a Christian chaplain, for example, you’re expected to be able to help meet the spiritual needs of other non-Christian troops who you may encounter as part of your work.

But what troubles me, I think, is that you can see this, I think of a piece that he’s not only kind of firing these kind of head people in the Chaplain Corps. But you remember a year ago, he fired a whole range of people in the Judge Advocate General corps and those are the lawyers, right?

And so if you think about this together, what Hegseth doing is clearing the barriers that would be any kind of moral guardrails or breaks to what he wants to do. So he is cleared himself with the lawyers who would be saying, Hey, this is actually a war crime. This is against the law.

And now he’s purging the Chaplain Corps that would say, yeah, these orders, this way of talking about the enemy, this way of using Jesus for the U.S. military ends is not consistent with our understanding of the faith. So he’s pulling the legal and the moral and the religious guardrails down so that he can just push forward with this Christian nationalist agenda.

CHAKRABARTI: Katherine, we have about 30 seconds before our next break. I was wondering if you wanted to follow up with what Robert said.

STEWART: Sure. I think it’s really important to note that, while Hegseth may be a different story, it’s really hard to understand or to think that Trump himself is actually doing this for high and holy purposes.

I think his broader mission is really to demonstrate that his unchecked power over everything in America and the world. This idea that he doesn’t need to go to Congress, he doesn’t need to go to our overseas allies. He doesn’t need to justify what he’s doing or build support for a war. That he can do anything he wants, and that is part of his aim to have dictatorial power.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I’m going to play a couple more clips here of Paula White-Cain and then ask you a specific question about the figure of Donald Trump himself in this Christian nationalist movement. So as we mentioned earlier, Paula White-Cain is the current head of the White House Faith Office.

Also been a spiritual advisor in both Trump administrations. She was recently on Fox News talking about how she knew that the president growing up went to Sunday school.

WHITE-CAIN: He went to sometimes three times a week to, he said it depended on the teacher, to Saturday school, Sunday School, church. It was at Norman Vincent Peale’s.

Church was a big part of his life. Of course.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, if this is true, it has not been that widely reported, but Paula White-Cain insists that it is, and in fact, it’s almost as if she’s bringing church into the Oval Office because a few times at least, she has gathered people around President Trump and asked them to do a laying of hands on the president.

WHITE-CAIN: Would you all stand and just, if you’re comfortable, stretch your hand towards our President and even if Reverend Graham, you’d like to lay hands on him and Pastor Robert. And just come in agreement with me for 2 Chronicles 7:14 declares: If my people who are called by into my name will humble themself and pray, then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sins and heal their lamb. So today, we humble ourself and we seek you, Lord Jesus.

CHAKRABARTI: Katherine, can you help us understand why the figure of Donald Trump, whose behavior is probably the least Christian of any president the United States has ever had. That he’s such a, he’s so central to how Christian nationalism is playing out in the halls of power in the United States right now.

STEWART: Sure. Leaders of the movement tell the rank and file that America is so broken and imperiled thanks to Democrats, equality, the woke or whatever, that the normal rules simply don’t apply anymore, and only a strong man is going to save America from utter destruction.

This is the way they break democracy so they tell the rank and file that Trump is a strong man that America requires, and they often compare him to a biblical king, a Cyrus figure, an imperfect ruler that God chose to enact his will. So Trump ends up filling a certain kind of hole or psychological need in their psyche for a fully realized savior in the here and now.

And this is the thing about Trump as a king, look kings aren’t the kings of democracies, are they? They’re the law unto themselves. And in this way, Trump is a perfect leader for a movement that has never believed in democracy in the first place. He shifts the goal posts and he shifts them again. He shifts them again.

There’s nothing, he ignores any rule or constitutional amendment that he doesn’t like. He acts with a complete disrespect for the rules, the kind of corruption that he engages in, enriching his family to the tune of billions of dollars. We’ve never seen anything like this at all.

It’s really a way of breaking the institutions of democracy and breaking democracy itself.

CHAKRABARTI: Never believed in democracy in the first place. Okay. Very important insight there. Because I also want to expand our vision beyond, we’ve been talking about Pete Hegseth a lot and Paula White-Cain a lot, but they’re not the only figures in the Trump administration who profess these beliefs. In fact, I would say one of the most influential people in the Trump administration is Russell Vought, who’s currently the head of the Office of Management and Budget. And he was one of the heads of directing or creating Project 2025 out of the Heritage Foundation, which laid out a Blueprint for America under a second Trump administration.

Some have even gone so far as calling that a blueprint for how to really institute Christian nationalism in American institutions. So in August of 2024, CNN obtained hidden camera video of Russell Vought, talking about Project 2025. And here’s what he said.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: So I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation, and my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nationism.

That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism. Can we, if we’re going to have legal immigration, can we get people that actually believe in Christianity? Is that something, or do we have to have, are we not allowed to have, ask questions about Sharia law?

REPORTER: What could we see America looking like? In an ideal world.

VOUGHT: In an ideal world, I think we could save the country in a sense of the largest deportation in history.

CHAKRABARTI: So no Sharia law, no even questions about Sharia law, but Christian law instead. Getting back to this also issue of the largest mass deportation in history, Robert Jones, what kind of changes have you seen or do you think are notable that people like Russell Vought are bringing to the United States government?

JONES: Yeah. I’m glad you brought him in. I think it’s absolutely right. He is part of this movement, sees himself as the instituter of a kind of, he’s like the bureaucratic backbone of the Christian nationalist movement inside the government. And he wrote the section, and as you mentioned in Project 2025 on the executive power.

And you know what the scholars who are concerned about weakening democracy call executive aggrandizement, this idea of, or the unitary executive theory, that the executive has all the power. It’s essentially a king-like proposal for how the president should be able to act. And you’re seeing them enact that really before our eyes.

And so how does, the one thing we haven’t really mentioned here is race. So we’ve mentioned Islam. And kind of anti-Muslim sentiment. But the other thing that makes sense with that this is a European Christianity that is being envisioned as the ideal for the country. And so why the mass deportation program? Well is to get rid of brown bodies actually, whatever their religion, you know what, it’s remarkable that in fact, many of the people who are being deported by ice are in fact Christian. They just happened to not be white or of European descent.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here because in this interview that I saw of Stephen Wolfe, who wrote the case for Christian Nationalism, he pretty much said this part out loud.

Because he was asked whether the concept of Christendom. Global Christendom that people who are believers in Jesus Christ, that’s enough for them to share in common to live in harmony with each other. And he pretty much said, no, that we have to share a unique history on this land in the United States.

We have to share a certain language, we have to share a certain worldview. So he was not hesitant in talking about how being Christian, even the most devout or conservative Christian somewhere else in the world was enough.

JONES: Yeah. And this is where it gets chilling, I think, because then we do start hearing the echoes of early 20th century fascism, right? Where it’s talk about a homeland and a homeland that belongs to one religious and ethnic group.

Over and against all others. There couldn’t be anything more un-American or more undemocratic than that vision. And yet that is the vision at the heart of this Christian nationalist movement. It is to really, in their language, it is about kind of restoring the nation to this vision of a kind of white, European, Christian nation, where as that clip you showed, maybe some of those other religions can be here under sufferance and in some second class citizen status, but it’s gonna be not public. They’re not gonna have the same rights everybody else is. And I should say too, it’s also a very Protestant, so it’s white.

It’s Protestant, it’s Christian. And that’s why you’re seeing a lot of the anti-Catholic tension showing up here too, because at the end of the day, this is an evangelical Protestant vision of the country. So it is not even a fully Christian vision. It’s white and Christian and it’s really even evangelical Protestant.

CHAKRABARTI: Katherine Stewart, let me ask you this, in a way, has the United States, the United States has always had a kind of extremist religious fervor to it. I’m thinking even some of the first colonists who came here came because they were too religiously extreme for the nations that they fled.

And politicians have always been very open about invoking God, invoking their religion. When talking about their political service. Here’s a moment that I remembered from July of 2016.

MIKE PENCE: I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican in that order.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s former Vice President Mike Pence at the CPAC conference in July of 2016.

So I don’t wanna say was this moment inevitable, but we shouldn’t be surprised that extreme Christianity has now burst out onto the civic sphere in such a muscular version. Should we?

STEWART: That’s true. Listen, it’s always been possible for American politicians to express their faith in the public square while also acknowledging the religious diversity of our country and respecting it.

That’s just not been a challenge for a lot of politicians, but we’re seeing something really different today. This is a movement that long preceded Donald Trump and frankly, will outlast him. But he did give it rocket fuel. I would say the movement in its present form really took shape in the late 1970s.

At the time, it wasn’t really aligned in an explicit way with any particular political party. They really felt like the Republican party was too liberal and they wanted to drag it to the right. But one of the problems is that back then the movement was really broadly understood or believed to be just wanting to express their values in the public square or preoccupied with a handful of social issues.

People didn’t think they were aiming for a wholesale revolution of the political order, but if you really dug into some of the key thinkers that time, they were, there was a nucleus of leaders and thinkers. They were aiming for dominionism, theocratic order. And over time there’s been so much financial investment in the infrastructure of that movement that they’re much closer to achieving those aims.

CHAKRABARTI: So there’s one thing I want to get back to before we run out of time. And Katherine, you had mentioned this earlier, it’s the hyper-masculinity in this version of Christian nationalism, so let’s listen to how that’s evoked by again, let’s go back to defense secretary Pete Hegseth. And here is an excerpt of what he said at the Christian Prayer Services at the Pentagon.

This is one of the most recent one, and here’s the beginning of a prayer that Hegseth is quoting but invoking again.

HEGSETH: Almighty God who trains our hands for war and our fingers for battle. You who stirred the nations from the north against Babylon of old, making her land a desolation where none dwell, behold now the wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous, snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate the wicked plans and break the teeth of the ungodly.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so there’s this, again, invocation of a very muscular, hyper masculine God, which is really interesting to me because in terms of how Christian nationalists see the temporal or terrestrial world, male power is at the center of it. We mentioned Doug Wilson before. He has very frequently preached that he does not believe women deserve the right to vote, that they should be utterly submissive to their husbands in his church, in his home base of Moscow, Idaho, families there have to embrace a very rigid, patriarchal lifestyle, and he believes a women’s purpose is simple, as he told CNN.

WILSON: Women are the kind of people that people come out of.

REPORTER: So you just think they’re meant to have babies. That’s it. They’re just a vessel.

WILSON: No it doesn’t take any talent to simply reproduce biologically.

The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three or four or five eternal souls.

REPORTER: I’m here as a working journalist, and I’m a mom of three.

WILSON: Good for you. Is

REPORTER: that an issue?

WILSON: No.

REPORTER: For you?

WILSON: No, it’s not automatically an issue.

CHAKRABARTI: Not automatically, until she would dare to challenge male power.

Robert Jones. This actually, so on the one hand, people like Hegseth want to like willingly throw themselves, submit themselves before the power of an almighty, fearful Jesus Christ. They want to disempower themselves before God, but on the other hand, they want dominion over all here in the United States.

It feels a little sad to me. This is like a sad expression of male disempowerment. Except now, it’s at the highest places in the United States Federal government.

JONES: Yeah. Another word I might use is desperate. And one of the things that’s going on here is that it is a response to a lot of demographic and social and cultural change in the country.

And one thing I’ll just point out here is that one reason why it’s come in such an aggressive form in the U.S. is because the number of white Christians that share this worldview. For example, it’s only three in 10 Americans that share this Christian nationalist worldview, and if you put all white evangelical Protestants together, they only make up 13% of the country right now.

So, in fact, they cannot take over the country by democratic means. And so that’s why the desperation, I think, is here and why the attack on democracy is here. You don’t hear words like moral majority that much anymore, which is what we heard back in the seventies and eighties, because the numbers simply aren’t there with the changing demographics in the country.

And the last thing I’ll just say is I do think it is about the imposition using the levers of power, not democratic means, but the levers of power, however they can get there. And it’s about hierarchy. And so the gender thing is actually just one part of a kind of multivalent hierarchy.

It’s men over women, but it’s also white over Black. It’s Christian, over non-Christian. It’s U.S. over other nations like the whole world is set up in this hierarchy.

CHAKRABARTI: Katherine, we only have just less than a minute to go. And I want to bring this back to our conversation about Iran yesterday.

Iran was not a democracy when the 1979 revolution there happened, the United States, on the other hand, has been a democracy for 250 years. Do you think that fact in and of itself is enough to hold back, as we’ve been describing, this Christian nationalist intrusion into civic life?

STEWART: We’ve seen civilizations fail and we’ve seen them thrive and I don’t have a crystal ball, but I don’t think there’s any reason why we can’t pull back. Trump’s support is collapsing. This war has record low levels of support among the American public, and I think that his actions in recent days have shown how desperate he is. Because he and other Republican politicians, the fact that they’re grasping at religious rhetoric.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.