Whose Jesus? The Left and Right Fight Over Faith in the Midterms
The latest episode of “Stress Test”: God is on the ballot in November.
Mother Jones
Christian nationalism—the idea that strict adherence to Christian theology should govern American political life, separation of church and state be damned—has been on the rise in America for years. Some vanguard elements of this revolutionary movement believe adherents are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States, seeking command of schools, public policy, and even the courts. Its ascendancy helped propel Donald Trump into the White House the first time, and it continues to find purchase at the highest rungs of government, including inside Trump’s second-term cabinet.
How is the movement impacting the midterm elections? Our guest on this new episode of Stress Test is Kiera Butler, a Mother Jones national correspondent who has tracked Christian nationalism for years and documented the shifting fortunes of its top leaders. In Trump’s first term, the charismatic prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation held sway. In his second, the ascendant figures are more ascetic, chief among them Doug Wilson, pastor and founder of Christ Church, a more Calvinist congregation in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson also co-created the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a global network of 160 congregations—including the one attended by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
“Pete Hegseth, who has started these worship sessions in the Pentagon, brought Doug Wilson in earlier this year as a speaker,” Kiera says. “You have this very clear line from this Christian nationalist leader, Doug Wilson, right to Pete Hegseth, who is very close to President Trump.”
Kiera joins host Garrison Hayes to discuss the movement’s rising political influence, and the current state of religion in politics more broadly: how it is shaping leaders like Hegseth and JD Vance, and how the right has pushed to rebrand basic Christian empathy as a sin.
Garrison, himself a former pastor, observes how the left is trying to reclaim the space: “You have a candidate like James Talarico, who is actively talking about Jesus as a person who invites the stranger and the immigrant. And so you have this kind of warring and competing vision of Christianity playing out in American politics.”
What’s stressing Kiera out? “Fundamentalism in all of its forms,” she says. “When I look around and I see people who are against religious pluralism and who are actively trying to undermine the separation of church and state, that’s what freaks me out.”
This transcript was generated with automated tools and may contain errors.
Garrison Hayes: Talk about faith during these midterms is kind of everywhere. We’re talking about Islam and Judaism. And of course, if you’re anything like me, you’re interested in the conversation about Christianity that’s happening again during the midterms. If you’ve been keyed in on the political conversation that we’ve been having here in America, then you know that you’re well aware that this conversation about Christianity and faith isn’t only limited to the right wing. Both Democrats and Republicans are leveraging the common language of faith to appeal to voters in this time. And so, who better to talk to than my colleague Kiera Butler? She’s been diving deep into Christian nationalism, following it closely for a very long time.
Welcome back. This is Stress Test from Mother Jones. I’m Garrison Hayes, and we’ve been talking about the midterms kind of nonstop. That’s what this show is all about. And I’m really, really excited to dig into this conversation. I’ll tell you, in the last episode, David Corn, my co-host, and I had a great conversation with Mother Jones reporter Russ Choma on the money side of the upcoming midterm election. There’s so much there around who’s funding who, campaign finance, potential malfeasance, all that stuff is kind of there, and you definitely want to go back and check it out. If you missed it, you can watch that on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/motherjones. Definitely go check that out.
But I think this conversation is also really interesting and really, really important. We’re talking about the role of faith in the current political economy. So without further ado, I want to welcome national correspondent Kiera Butler onto the stage here with me to talk about today’s topic. Kiera’s been keeping a close tab on extremism and Christian nationalism here in the United States for a while. Kiera, welcome to the show.
Kiera Butler: Thank you so much for having me, Garrison.
GH: Of course, of course. I want to start with where we are right now. You know, I made something a little over a year ago after Charlie Kirk’s death. I watched his memorial service, and it felt like a revival. It also kind of felt like the kind of peak of Christian nationalist fervor in this country. I don’t know if I’m misreading that. You’ve been, of course, staying close on this. And so a year later, heading into the midterms, are we still seeing that same momentum that many Christian nationalist types were riding after the unfortunate and untimely assassination of Charlie Kirk?
KB: Yeah, you know, that was certainly a flashpoint. Charlie Kirk’s murder hit a lot of people really hard in the Christian community, and not just Christian nationalists either. You know, I think that was a real reckoning in that community. And in some ways it was a unifying force, and in other ways, you know, we saw new divisions kind of coming to light after that. I would say that since then it’s not that there’s any less Christian nationalism, it’s just that it’s looking a little bit different, and we can get into that.
GH: Yeah, I’d like to get into it. And it felt like in some ways some people were trying to use that as a way to advance a more stringent Christian nationalist agenda. And I’m curious if you were seeing the same thing up close.
KB: Yeah, so I like to put the Christian nationalists into kind of two different buckets, right? You’ve got the kind of more old-school evangelical charismatic Christian nationalists. These are folks, I’ve done a little bit of reporting on the New Apostolic Reformation. This is a movement where, you know, self-proclaimed prophets will talk about politics as kind of a mountain to be conquered. There are these seven mountains that, you know, culture and entertainment and politics and education. There’s, you know, several more as well. And these folks, you know, if you picture kind of your evangelical megachurch, you know, the worship band, people kind of swaying back and forth, it’s a very kind of interactive style of worship.
This was the movement that really defined Trump’s first presidency. You know, this is Paula White-Cain, who is actually still Trump’s spiritual adviser, but this movement was ascendant, and you saw January 6, 2021, was a big moment for these folks. You know, that this movement was very influential in that storming of the Capitol and in election denialism.
In Trump’s second term, we’ve really seen the emergence, or I guess the ascendancy, of a different kind of Christian nationalism. We’ve seen a group of folks who I wrote about about two years ago for the first time called the TheoBros. These folks are Reformed Christians, and Reformed theology is a whole thing, as you know, Garrison. It’s—there’s a lot to it. But basically, these folks believe that God decides in advance who’s going to heaven. Their worship style is much more restrained. They sing hymns and psalms, you know, that they are not the, like, you know, soaring worship band, pastor in jeans, like, you know, strutting back and forth. They’re very almost puritanical in their worship style.
These folks, though, are pretty extreme in their beliefs. A lot of them believe women shouldn’t be able to vote. A lot of them believe in bringing—they call it prison reform, but by prison reform they mean bringing back public flogging and public execution, which, you know, we’ve seen—we’ve just seen a whole news cycle about that recently. And, you know, they also—they’re self-proclaimed Christian nationalists. They will come right out and say, you know, I believe that the Ten Commandments should be replacing the US Constitution. So I should say, you know, that was kind of a long-winded way of explaining these two Christian nationalist camps that I notice and, you know, really saying that the latter, the TheoBros, I see as more influential politically these days.
GH: Yeah, that’s a good point to kind of transition, because the idea here, you know, as you’re saying with the folks who are more influential, is to really have the ear of the president, the people who are really wanting to have a little bit more influence on exactly what kind of comes out. And I guess my question in all of this is, who are the people who have the ear of the president in this time, and who are the leaders that are influencing those who will likely be elected in these midterm elections?
KB: One of the most influential Christians who has Trump’s ear is Pete Hegseth, secretary of, as he says, war. He is a Reformed Christian. He certainly belongs to this camp of TheoBros that I was just talking about. His faith—he belongs to a church that is in a denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. This is a Christian nationalist denomination. It was started by a guy named Doug Wilson, who’s a pastor in Moscow, Idaho. I’ve spent a lot of time reporting about Doug Wilson and his beliefs, and he is the spiritual adviser of Pete Hegseth. And in fact, Pete Hegseth, who has started these, like, worship sessions in the Pentagon, brought Doug Wilson in earlier this year as a speaker at the Pentagon. So, you know, in Pete Hegseth, you have this very clear line from this Christian nationalist leader, Doug Wilson, right to Pete Hegseth, who is very close to President Trump.
I will also say that JD Vance, even though he’s a Catholic, so he’s a kind of a different flavor, he mixes pretty freely with this group of TheoBros. A lot of the TheoBros have connections to Silicon Valley. And JD Vance became acquainted with them during his time in Silicon Valley with the world of Peter Thiel, another Christian thinker. And so JD Vance is—he’s very influenced by this, by the TheoBro movement, by some of the, I would say, like, postliberal intellectual circles that JD Vance moves in have influenced him quite a bit.
GH: Yeah, well, Kiera, you kind of undersold yourself. You haven’t just been reporting on Doug Wilson. I want to come back to JD Vance and the folks inside the White House in a bit, but you haven’t just been reporting on Doug Wilson. You actually went out to Moscow, Idaho, to talk to him. You interviewed him, and I’m curious what that was like, and what did you see when you were there?
KB: Yeah, I’ve actually been to Moscow twice now. So in Moscow, it’s—I have to say, it’s an adorable town. I felt so at home there. I used to live in Berkeley, California, and it reminded me of, like, a mini Berkeley, like college town, you know, think, like, little cozy cafes and, like, couches on porches, and, you know, the University of Idaho is the big college that’s there, and their mascot is the Vandal. And so you see this, like, little Vandal things everywhere. Super cute town, really beautiful part of the country. It’s kind of in the northwest corner of Idaho.
But Doug Wilson has this project there. He’s trying to make Moscow, Idaho, into his own little Christian fiefdom. He’s said this. This is something that he’s, you know, fully, you know, states as a goal of his, and he’s done a pretty good job. He started this church, which is now a whole denomination of Reformed Christians. I think there’s something like 160 churches around the world in this denomination. In the county, Latah County, in Moscow, where he is, there are seven churches that are related to his original one. He started a publishing house that’s now a media company. It’s called Canon Press, K through 12 Christian school, a college called New Saint Andrews—
GH: I’m jumping in only because, Kiera, I imagine someone watching this is like, okay, he has a, you know, a press and a media company and he has a church that’s maybe growing, perhaps. What are some of the things that a person or someone who subscribes to Doug Wilson’s beliefs, or maybe just Doug Wilson himself—he can speak for himself—what does he believe? As I understand it, there are things that they believe about women and about the gender roles and all of this stuff. Can you get into some of the beliefs?
KB: Yeah, absolutely. So Doug is a proud—well, I’ll say Doug is a fan of the patriarchy. His religion, his denomination is patriarchal. Women do not hold leadership roles in his church. He believes in household voting, which is actually something JD Vance has mentioned too, where the head of the household would vote for the entire household. And Doug Wilson believes that men should be the heads of households, and that wives should be submissive to their husbands. That’s a strong core of his belief.
Related to that, he also believes that women are ill suited for combat roles in the military, which of course gets important when you think about what Pete Hegseth is doing with the US military. And in addition to that, you know, he has the sort of beliefs that you would expect from a kind of a fundamentalist Christian. He believes gay marriage should be illegal. He believes abortion should be illegal, that abortion should be considered murder.
GH: It actually may be helpful, Kiera, to just hear from Doug Wilson. I’d love to play a little bit of tape, a little snippet from your interview with Doug Wilson back in September, where you asked him about his relationship with the defense secretary, or the secretary of war, as he calls himself. And then I want to ask you about what you thought of his answer. So let’s hear from Doug Wilson first.
GH: You know, it really strikes me that he is almost trying to downplay his kind of connection and role. That’s what kind of stood out to me. What stood out to you, Kiera?
KB: Yeah, you know, what stood out to me in all of my interactions with Doug Wilson when I was there in Moscow is that he is kind of very different when I’m interviewing him, like, you know, when I’m talking to him in person, than he is in some of the viral clips of him that have gone around. You know, he famously said to CNN, like, women are the kind of people who people come out of. In it—I don’t know, like, in his speech at a National Conservatism Conference two years ago, he said, I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian. He talks about the tranny flag a lot. He, you know, uses the word retarded, retard. He, you know, he is so much more measured when I’ve been talking to him one-on-one, or, you know, you saw his wife Nancy there in that clip, with her as well. It really is, like, I’ve been thinking of it as, like, a tale of two Dougs.
GH: That’s fascinating. You bring out the—like, maybe you have, like, an energy that brings the respect out of him in some way. I don’t know what you think that is.
KB: Well, I think part of it is that he knows who he’s talking to, right? Before I ever went to Moscow, I’d been emailing back and forth with him, and to his credit, like, he will always answer my emails, but he’ll often work in, like, a little dig at the end. Like, he’ll be like, Okay, and that’s what I think, and you can go write that in your commie publication. So he certainly is aware of the Mother Jones readership, I guess.
The other thing I think that is relevant here is that he—every time he’s—he told me during that same interview that you just played a clip from, I asked him, like, is there any part of this when you have a clip that goes viral or, you know, when you say something particularly controversial and there’s a lot of media scrutiny, like, is there anything that’s good for you and your movement when that happens? And he said, absolutely, it’s great for us. You know, people see what I’m saying and they, you know, want to move to Moscow, Idaho, or they want to, you know, find their nearest Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches church.
Another one of his core beliefs is that Christians—like, Christian nationalism is very literal to him. So in his ideal version of a Christian America, people of other faiths would not be allowed to hold office. And he gave me an example: Like, Muslims in his Christian America would be able to practice their faith, but they would not be able to build a minaret. So this is a very kind of muscular version of Christian nationalism that he’s imagining.
GH: Yeah, there’s something about it that, you know, I don’t think it always goes unsaid, so I won’t make that statement, but it isn’t said enough that there’s something, I think, deeply bigoted about a lot of what Christian nationalism is trying to advance. I mean, you have—obviously this is Islamophobic in nature. We know that there is actually a ton of anti-Blackness that kind of pops up among some of these, quote-unquote, TheoBros, as you call them. And obviously we also have seen a great deal of antisemitism present in Christian nationalism. In the conversations that you’ve been having with Christian nationalists, have any of those elements of bigotry come up when they aren’t being polite, good little boys?
KB: Yeah, you know, anytime you ask about immigration, that’s kind of the tell, right? That, like, you know, the both kinds of Christian nationalists, both the New Apostolic Reformation, kind of the charismatic, Pentecostal evangelicals, and the TheoBros, these Reformed guys, like, none of them are, you know, pro-immigrant in any way. And the only—well, no, definitely will not say the only, but an interesting tension comes when you think about Catholics, right? And, you know, JD Vance has gotten himself into some trouble with this. JD Vance obviously is very—it’s kind of a hard line on immigration, but his Catholic faith is in conflict with that. You know, there’s social justice teaching in Catholicism, that, you know, to be welcoming to immigrants, to, you know, extend empathy to immigrants is a core tenet of that faith. So there’s been some interesting tension there. And I’m actually curious, Garrison, what you’ve noticed along those lines as you’ve been looking at folks on the left and Christians in those circles.
GH: Yeah, I mean, well, you have this big showdown happening in Texas, where you have the Republican Party has, of course, taken the position of being anti-immigration and taking pretty hard lines on immigration. And then on the Democratic side, you have a candidate like James Talarico, who is actively talking about Jesus as a person who invites the stranger and the immigrant. And so you have this kind of warring and competing vision of Christianity, I think, playing out in American politics. You know, it’s really interesting to see the way that scripture is leveraged on both sides of this conversation. I, of course, have my own perspective in all of this, but I’m really curious to see how Americans who have obviously voted now for Donald Trump—some subset, some section of Americans have voted for Donald Trump, who always ran on an anti-immigration kind of platform—they voted for him now three times, right? And obviously elected him twice. And so I’m kind of interested how a state like Texas, where this conversation isn’t just theoretical, it’s very much kind of playing out in the practical—I’m curious how that will play out from an electoral perspective.
But it is interesting to see how Christians on the center left are thinking about Christianity as a way to advance their political agenda. And I don’t think it’s necessarily new. I wouldn’t describe it as new. Black Christians have absolutely across the South been using and leveraging their faith in electoral politics for a long time. I mean, the Souls to the Polls movement has been a really significant way to get Black voters out to go vote, but I’m seeing it in kind of outside of Black circles in a way that does feel a little new, and I’ve been really curious where that’s coming from.
KB: I’m curious if you’re hearing in your circles anything about empathy, because one of the big themes over the last year or two, I would say, in the right-wing Christian nationalist circles is the notion of empathy as a sin. The idea that kind of an excess of empathy and/or misplaced empathy is sinful and is something that, you know, Christians need to repent for. And this, particularly with immigration, I would say, you know, folks are saying, like, you know, if you’re welcoming everybody and if you’re, you know, if you’re having a, you know, a bleeding heart for, you know, all of these people who are flooding over the borders, then that is a sin. You’re sinning. What are you hearing in your circles?
GH: You know, I’m certainly hearing the opposite of that. This idea is, of course, a part of, to your point, a kind of certain type of Christian nationalist thinking. It’s certainly a talking point. There’s a commentator named Allie Beth Stuckey who wrote an entire book around this called Toxic Empathy. And so I’ll take the reporting hat off for just a moment here. And as a former pastor, I will say that the notion of having some kind of empathy for the stranger, for your neighbor, understanding, welcoming them in, that is a very common theme throughout scripture. You know, whatever you do to the least of these, you’ve done unto me, and, you know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you is a really common theme throughout the synoptic gospels. And so it’s hard to kind of wrap my mind around, as a former pastor, it’s hard to really wrap my mind around this as a sin. Okay, that’s kind of difficult to find, I think, in scripture.
But I will say, you know, I’m really curious, you know, what—you know, putting the reporter hat back on, you know, maybe for a moment here—I’m really curious if this is cutting through. And I, you know, Kiera, maybe you have access to some polling data and what people are actually feeling here in the moment, but I’ve been really curious to learn more about how Christians are responding to this. I mean, truly, love thy neighbor feels so fundamental to the kind of ethic of Christianity that it’s hard to imagine what Christianity is without it. And I would, you know, use that term, love thy neighbor, as kind of a proxy for this concept of empathy.
KB: Yeah, I mean, that’s—to me, when I first heard about Allie Beth Stuckey’s book, and also a co-pastor of Doug Wilson’s, Joe Rigney, wrote a very similar book, and when I first heard about it, I thought to myself, just like you were saying, it seems incompatible with basic Christian teachings. But, you know, I think it was maybe it was last year when JD Vance was talking about this, when he sort of got into it about the ordo amoris, the Latin for rightly ordered love, I guess. He was talking about, you know, how you should love, or God wants you to love your family first and then, you know, your extended family, and it kind of is, you know, this concentric-circle model of who you should devote your care and empathy to, and the farther out you get from your kind of core nuclear family, the less you should love. And he used that to sort of explain his stance on immigration. And the pope actually came back and was like, That’s not what that means, which was—it was just kind of a funny little disagreement.
But I agree, you know, I don’t have any polling. I don’t know whether there’s polling on this issue of empathy or not, and if there is, I don’t have it at my fingertips, but I am very curious about how Christians are receiving that notion.
GH: You know, I think a lot of this really depends on something that I’ve heard pastors say for a long time, which is that people aren’t really reading their Bibles anymore, and that there’s this kind of—there’s a real concern that Christians are getting further and further removed from the kind of primary source text in all of this. I will say, as a person who again has kind of studied this stuff and was a pastor for a while, that a part of the Ten Commandments is, you know, the fourth commandment talks about the extension of rest, and it really goes all the way out to the stranger that’s in your country, the stranger in your gates, and then it works backwards from there all the way to the person who lives in your home, a family member. And so this kind of notion that one is supposed to love closer and then maybe kind of work your way out, it kind of, like, there’s something, I’d say, maybe intuitive about that, the idea of proximity, but I think the Bible writers go out of their way to invert that as a way of, I think, reaffirming the importance of loving those far away from you. Okay, this isn’t Bible study, Kiera Butler.
KB: I do want to say, though, this made me think of something, and I can’t help but mention it. There is a Progressive Baptist church—and I live in Atlanta, and there’s a Progressive Baptist church in my neighborhood—and they have a bunch of signs outside the church, and one of the signs is, like, somebody drew, like, almost like a child’s drawing of Jesus, and the speech bubble says, Y’all, that is not what I said.
GH: Right. Right. Okay. I want to move us on. You just kind of closed out a big investigation about this organization called Life Surge. I loved your episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out. It was so good. You went to this event, you kind of dug deep. If you don’t know, Life Surge is a Christian roadshow that’s tied to the former star quarterback Tim Tebow, and it was great. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit more about that and where we can go find it. What’s kind of interesting about that investigation?
KB: Yeah, so Life Surge is—their main event that they draw people in with is, like, a roadshow. It’s, like, a one-day event that’s where they kind of mix, like, worship and motivational speakers. Many of their speakers are, like, athletes, like really famous athletes like Tim Tebow, and, you know, they’ve had Magic Johnson, they’ve had David Ortiz, just, like, you know, super famous people. And during that day they try to get you to sign up for these—what they call Impact Classes, and they’re, like, financial—like, they teach you how to invest in the stock market, teach you how to, like, flip houses and, you know, allegedly make a bunch of money in real estate. And then once you go to the three-day classes, then they try to sell you on packages of investment training that cost, like, you know, packages that range from, like, $10,000 to, like, $50,000.
And so my investigation focused on how folks who have done these classes have said that the salespeople are using faith to sell them on a product that they can’t afford. So I’ve, you know, talked to people who have ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt and said things like, you know, that the salesperson said, If you’re having doubts about whether you want to buy this financial package, that was the devil. The devil was putting doubts in your mind. So that was the investigation.
You know, an interesting thing, I guess, just in the wake of the investigation, Tim Tebow cut or paused his ties with Life Surge, and a bunch of the other high-profile speakers did as well. So that was—it was really interesting to see that impact there of our investigation. But, you know, I think because the investigation really got a lot of attention, I’ve gotten a lot of tips from people and, you know, threads to follow, and it really does seem like this is sort of the tip of the iceberg, the world of Christian finance seminars that people are, you know, spending a lot of money and at times losing a lot of money. This is a real wing of, I guess, the right-wing Christian movement that I had not explored before. So I think it’s something to keep an eye on going forward, for sure.
GH: I think so, Kiera. I’m excited to see more of what you uncover. Okay, before we let you go, I want to ask you the question that we’re asking all of our guests here on this show: After all of your Christian nationalist reporting and all of that, what’s stressing you out the most?
KB: What’s stressing me out the most? Fundamentalism in all of its forms. You know, I think—and that is not unique to Christianity, of course. To me, when I look around and I see people who are against religious pluralism and who are actively trying to undermine the separation of church and state, that’s what freaks me out.
GH: Listen, to our viewers and our listeners, Kiera has another Doug Wilson story in the works, along with some of the excellent sneak preview reporting that you heard here today. It’s important, it’s fascinating. These stories are so, so important. They have incredible impact, as you already heard. So make sure you follow her reporting on MotherJones.com. Kiera Butler, thank you.
GH: That’s all we have for you in today’s episode. If you missed the previous episodes of Stress Test, you can watch them on our YouTube channel or wherever you get your podcasts. Our great journalism here at Mother Jones—Kiera’s reporting, Russ Choma’s reporting, Ari Berman’s reporting—all of that is made possible with your support. Your views, your subscriptions keep us going. So don’t forget to like and to share and to subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them for us down in the comments below. Our producers love reading your comments. We’ll be back in just a couple of days with another edition of Stress Test. Until then, take care.
