Last week, Vance talked to Fox News about how his views on immigration — opposed to the teachings of Christianity as they might seem — were indeed rooted in his Catholic faith and the religion’s concept of ordo amoris, or “ordered love”:
You love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus [on] and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.
Vance’s vision of a hierarchy of Christian love — which one supposes justifies things like lying about Springfield’s Haitian community and building a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay — inspired the letter Pope Francis sent on Monday to American bishops, reminding them of the Church’s clearly stated obligation to treat refugees with the same dignity they would treat anyone else — and arguing pointedly against Vance’s creative theological interpretation:
Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.
It’s not every day that the pope singles out a Catholic convert for a public scolding. Hillbilly Elegy, or Hell-Bully Energy?
The pope’s statement reflects a theological, moral, and political position very much opposed to the one held by Vance, and to the one that animates many American believers today (according to Pew Research, around half of American Catholics, and 67 percent of White evangelical Protestants support Trump). But it’s not all believers — there’s a tension here, if not an outright schism quite yet. Many members of American denominations and religious groups, however, feel the way Pope Francis does (and 27 of them have filed suit to block the administration's plans to carry out immigration raids in houses of worship).
Pope Francis also writes in the letter: “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.” That’s pretty clearly a warning for Vance, and for the United States — and whether we’re at the beginning or end of that story isn’t quite clear yet.
SPEAK UP: What do you think? Are our moral obligations a series of concentric circles, starting with our own people and moving outward and diluting with each successive circle? Or are we compelled to love equally across differences and borders?
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How did we get here?
Investigative journalist Katherine Stewart, an analyst of the religious right, American authoritarianism, and their deep connections, has some ideas about how Christian nationalism rejected that truth and embraced the hierarchical, exclusionary vision that’s enabled the rise of Vance, Trump, and their oligarch partners in fascism.
An encounter with a benign-seeming Bible study club at her daughter’s elementary school became the basis of her 2012 book The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children, and Stewart has been covering the intersection of faith and politics ever since.
Her new book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is grounded in 15 years of deep reporting on the religious right and explores the role of belief in turning Americans away from democracy and in the authoritarian political movement that’s right now consolidating power in a coup. (For a preview, read her recent New York Times op-ed.)
Anya Kamenetz talked to Stewart about the evolution of Christian nationalism, the forces of reaction that drove so many Americans to reject democracy, how oligarchs took advantage of that backlash to change to turn working people to their cause, and why, even as a fascist regime takes power, she remains hopeful about democracy in the long term.
Authoritarianism — or, to be less polite, fascism — is better understood as something that happens to a political system, rather than something that starts off as a full-fledged political program that receives majority support. So when I suggest that the antidemocratic movement is more pathology than program, what I mean is that it has a number of separate pieces and interest groups, sometimes working for different aims, but that nevertheless end up reinforcing one another. They are rowing in the same boat, in a sense, but the outcome of their collective actions can be unpredictable and lead to consequences that many of the rank-and-file, who are lending support to the effort, neither anticipate nor want.
To your point about the oligarchs, yes, they are one faction and they are pursuing what they believe to be in their interests. In the short term, many loyalist oligarchs will be rewarded with policies that are beneficial to their pocketbooks. But we should keep two points in mind: First, these oligarchs depend on the support of a huge part of the population that will not benefit from their initiatives and, if they understood properly what was going on, wouldn’t support it. And secondly, these oligarchs are not nearly as smart as they think they are. By investing in the corruption and dismantling of democracy, they may get some short-term payouts – but in the long run are making life worse for themselves or their children or grandchildren, if they have any.
A good example of the pathological aspect of the movement is its incredibly performative nature. A disproportionate number of the initiatives or issues that draw its attention have almost nothing to do with constructive policy, and everything to do with performance – with dominance displays, the ritual punishment of political enemies, the scapegoating of targets, the acting out of grievances or resentments. These are examples of behaviors that are not goal-directed, but reactive.
How did you arrive at the phrase "reactionary nihilism" and what does it mean?
I think of nihilism as a description of those whose fundamental aim is to destroy rather than to create, and who, by their actions rather than any declaration, deny that there is any real truth or value in this world. By “reactionary” I mean that rather than advance or progress toward a better state, this movement emphasizes a return to some imaginary version of an allegedly better past — a past that includes elements of a regressive social order, such as gender hierarchy, the suppression of certain forms of speech, and attacks on the religious freedom of those who fail to conform among other features.
I put those words together to describe the anti-democratic reaction. To be sure, not everybody who wants to go back to the good old days is a nihilist. But the ones who believe that a democratic political system and its ideals and institutions are so bad they need to be destroyed — and, at the same time, exalt a completely fictitious and unrealistic fantasy about the golden age of yore — I think these people count as nihilists. Their vision is not based on reality; it’s retreating into a fantasy that is projected onto the past.
I know you embarked down this road of reporting with The Good News Club because it came to your doorstep in California. What are your thoughts about why education, especially in K-12 schools, looms so large as targets of this movement?
Public schools have been flashpoints for the culture wars for decades. When I started researching this movement sixteen years ago, it was clear that the movement was deeply hostile to the institution of public education precisely because it is meant to be nonsectarian, welcoming all families regardless of their religious background and neither affirming nor denigrating any particular religious viewpoint. Jerry Falwell made the agenda clear in 1979 when he said, “I hope to see the day when there are no more public schools, churches will have taken them over and Christians will be running them.” Other powerful religious right leaders, such as D. James Kennedy, whose ministry received millions from the family of Trump’s former education secretary Betsy DeVos, said schools were “atheistic” and “amoral” and were brainwashing children in “Godless secularism.”
The destruction of public education as we know it has been a longstanding aim. However, the religious right activists and, eventually, the privatizers with whom they started to work hand-in-hand, were, even a decade ago, more discreet about it. Only a few people at the margins were out there admitting that the end game was to starve the “beast” of public education and redirect the flow of taxpayer cash to private and religious/ideologically right-wing schools. But now they are quite up-front about it.
Superficially it looks like they are trying to achieve this aim by forcing their initiatives and programming into the public schools. That’s the apparent motivation of the laws that mandate the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, or the recent law in Texas that offers to pay schools to teach elementary-age children a sectarian Christian curriculum, or the Louisiana and Oklahoma rules imposing the Bible in schools. But the expansion of voucher initiatives is just the start; the movement and its right-wing legal apparatus is presently mounting a court case that would allow for publicly funded charter schools that are explicitly religious. The fundamental goal is to create a national network of publicly financed religious schools that explicitly favor conservative forms of religion.
Movement leaders have undermined public education at every turn, igniting needless conflicts and panics over “critical race theory” and the like in order to foster mistrust in public schools and pave the way for privatization. The division and conflict these initiatives promote in diverse school communities is not an unintended consequence of their activity; it is precisely the point. The desired end state is a system where taxpayers either directly fund religious schools, or supply parents with vouchers, and then parents use those vouchers to funnel money into religious schools. Speaking rather cynically, it’s a two-fer; it promises to be very profitable for the religiously motivated entrepreneurs involved, and at the same time it is intended to help build a constituency for Christian nationalist politics.
You give this anatomy of impulses that make up this movement: catastrophism; a persecution complex; identitarianism; and an authoritarian reflex. Can you give examples of how each of them show up uniquely in this movement?
First, Christian nationalism is a form of reactionary nationalism; it’s about who gets to properly belong in a country and who doesn’t. So the premise that America was founded to be an explicitly Christian nation, and our laws should be based on a reactionary reading of the Bible, is a form of identity politics: you’re one of us or one of them, and declarations of this nature are now ubiquitous in conservative political spaces.
The persecution complex involves the idea, of course, that conservative Christians are the most persecuted group in society. The movement’s powerful legal advocacy groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, First Liberty Institute, Liberty Counsel, and the Pacific Justice Institute, are litigating cases that build upon this premise.
Catastrophism is the idea that America is going to hell in a handbasket because secularists, liberals, and insufficiently loyal Republicans have taken over and are destroying everything that is holy and good.
And that paves the way for the authoritarian reflex: the idea that the consequences of losses in the political arena are too dire to contemplate, and only a strongman who is willing to break the rules can “save” us from this absolute catastrophe.
I don't mean this to be provocative, but it strikes me that each of these descriptions could be pointed at the extreme left as well, perhaps with the exception of the authoritarian reflex. I know plenty of people on the left who catastrophize about climate change, who feel persecuted as trans folks, who organize around ethnic and racial affinity, for example.
A first point is that, yes, there are people on the left who hold elements of these and other mindsets. Sometimes they can be destructive or nihilistic, too. But it would be too simple to suggest that there is a symmetry. The catastrophism and the persecution complex become important and alarming when they are used to justify immediate and violent action and the destruction of democratic institutions, the spread of information, or an assault on democratic rights and principles, including equality, religious freedom, and free speech.
So there may be some of that on the left, but doom and gloom on the climate isn’t quite the same thing except in cases where it is coupled with attempts to overthrow the government or engage in violence. This is, in fact, what we are seeing on the right. The catastrophism and persecution complex have indeed been used to justify overturn the government and commit acts of violence; just look at January 6.
A further point is that the persecution complex isn’t about justified feelings of concern based on a large body of scientific research, as it is for climate-minded folks. Rather it is about concocted or fabricated feelings of persecution, such as the idea that Democrats wish to destroy the family or white people are the victims of a “great replacement” conspiracy or the idea of a “deep state” is as it appears in a QAnon fever dream. That’s where the danger lies.
In my view, the biggest convergence right now is not in the catastrophism and persecution complex; it’s in conspiracy thinking and irrationalism. That’s where a slice of the far left and the far right get into bed. But just because people are tagged as left or right doesn’t tell us how the phenomenon plays out or who ends up benefitting. Disinformation and irrationalism, on the whole, work very much in favor of authoritarianism.
I laughed out loud at the book’s reference to "luciferase," supposedly made from Jeffrey Epstein's DNA and included in Covid vaccines. Do you have trouble keeping a straight face when you're reporting sometimes? How do those of us outside this world know when to laugh things off and when to take things seriously?
Unfortunately, I don’t find myself laughing. Sometimes I feel sorry for the people I am covering because I think they are being bamboozled. Often I recognize that they are suffering for some reason, and they are taking refuge in this nonsense. But at the end of the day, the consequences of their actions are going to harm everybody. This is a leadership-driven movement, and the leadership is intent on separating people from the facts, which makes them easier to control.
In your opinion, what responsibility do Christians who hold different views have, to try to temper, moderate, or distinguish themselves from these people who are using Jesus and the Bible to justify their politics? What power do they have to do so?
I leave it to the theologians to argue amongst themselves about what properly counts as Christianity. However, I will note that a lot of liberal Christians are standing up and saying, in essence, religious nationalism and authoritarianism should not be carried out in my name or the name of my religion. I applaud them for that. The Christian nationalist movement has arrogated to itself a right to speak for the faith to which it is not entitled; many if not most American Christians see much of what movement leaders are advocating as heresy.
But let’s be clear: the religious left is not the equivalent of the religious right. They have neither the funding nor the organizational capacity.
Personally, I don’t think individuals, of whatever faith identity, have an obligation to distinguish themselves from extremists who happen to be co-religionists in the broadest sense, and we shouldn’t expect them to. But those who wish to do so have a certain ability, and their voices can be persuasive. It’s no accident that the movement leadership wishes to sideline and dismiss them as “heretical,” “fake Christians,” et cetera.
In your afterword, you share some reasons for optimism, which are so needed right now. Can you talk about what is making you optimistic at this difficult juncture?
Optimism is based, first, on the fact that we’re still here and publishing this Q and A on a widely accessible platform. The authoritarian movement may have an edge, but they haven’t yet managed to eliminate or silence us. As long as we can resist authoritarianism, speak freely, and work toward a better future through our democratic institutions, we will. There is no feature, as of yet, in the American political system that would ensure that the MAGA movement will rule indefinitely.
As I state in the conclusion of my book, I take heart from the fact that those of us who believe in the values of equality and justice probably represent a majority, not a minority. I continue to believe that more Americans support democracy and its institutions over some sort of cronyistic kleptocracy with theocratic and authoritarian features. I also meet a lot of people who are out there working every day to cut through the disinformation and polarization and strengthen our democracy, rather than tear it down. To be sure there’s a lot of work ahead, but I refuse to believe it is in vain.
Please go here for the original article: https://the.ink/p/pope-v-veep
Katherine Stewart’s new book is Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.
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