Many political observers have noted a renewed religious fervor on the right wing of American politics.
According to sociologist Ruth Braunstein, Ph.D., much of that energy is being cultivated in Arizona.
Braunstein recently released a serialized podcast, "When The Wolves Came: Evangelicals Resisting Extremism," investigating the resurgence of Christian nationalism. The show takes a close look at the ideological and spiritual debates unfolding at two Phoenix churches — Desert Springs Bible Church and Dream City Church, which has a long-running affiliation with the right-wing advocacy group, Turning Point USA.
Braunstein, the podcast's host and executive producer, joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
RUTH BRAUNSTEIN: The reason that we were at Dream City Church was because Turning Point hosts a monthly event called Freedom Night, that really is led by Charlie Kirk, a political operative, not a pastor, who plays the role of a pastor on that night at church.
[CLIP OF CHARLIE KIRK]
SAM DINGMAN: So, you know, we've been having conversations in American politics about the influence of faith organizations on the right in particular, going back at least as far as the George W. Bush administration and even farther. But this seemed really different to you.
BRAUNSTEIN: It did, and in part because I think that there's a real stark difference between conservative Christians voicing their opinions in politics and public life, and promoting the idea that everybody else is demonic. And therefore, we've reached a level of catastrophe that requires a non-democratic takeover of the country. And a sense of catastrophe and crisis that is being used to to justify the takeover of power outside of democratic channels. And then, that it was being kind of repeated back to us by regular people in the course of explaining why these issues were important to them and why they're so concerned, really to me showed the extent to which, you know, it's working.
[CLIP OF WOMAN TALKING]
DINGMAN: One of the other main characters in this story is Caleb Campbell, who's the pastor at Desert Springs Church, also here in Phoenix. We've actually had Caleb on this very show. And he talks about being called Marxist, which is a charge that gets leveled against a number of people in the show who don't toe the hard right political line. And in a literal sense, obviously, Marxist doesn't really make a whole lot of sense because it's not like Caleb or these other folks are espousing the beliefs of Karl Marx. But it's emblematic of something deeper, it seems like, in the culture.
BRAUNSTEIN: Yeah, I mean, this is such a media story in so many ways. And I can't tell you how many times we heard from or read accounts of local pastors who used almost the same image to describe the plight that they faced. Which was, “We have people's attention for an hour once a week on Sunday. And for all of the other times during the week that they are plugged into something, right, they are listening to these other messages, often from right wing media figures, influencers, often explicitly Christian influencers online, who are having, now, an outsized influence on what they would call their 'political discipleship.'”
And so it's a lot for one hour on a Sunday, a pastor to be able to either counterbalance or untangle in some way. And, a lot of the messages that they're hearing in that right-wing media space is the idea that, A: the world is divided into people who are with us and people who are against us. That anyone who disagrees with us or the leader of our party, in this case, Donald Trump, who, you know, is the one who is right all the time, they are to be called out. And they are to be called out in a way that is meant to be delegitimizing and diminishing. And that's by using labels like Marxist — even demonic, Luciferian — you know, using these very strong terms to describe pretty much anyone who disagrees with the party line.
DINGMAN: Yeah, so this also kind of brings us to this phrase that comes up quite a bit, that comes from Caleb Campbell, who we mentioned a moment ago, the pastor at Desert Springs. That we've lost the ability to “suffer each other.”
BRAUNSTEIN: Yeah, it's a line that really sticks with me as well. You know, Caleb is part of a small but I think growing, network of evangelicals, who are in many cases quite conservative, theologically, politically, but are really concerned about the implications of Christian nationalism — for both Christianity itself and for the health of their churches, and for the health of a pluralistic democratic society.
And so, what they're doing is they're doing is they're, you know, having as many public conversations as they can to try and help evangelicals and evangelical leaders who didn't think that there were other people who were concerned about this, right? There are other people like them to recognize that this kind of disagreement and dissent within their church is happening. And that it's normal and that it's OK. That it is not normal for everybody to be in lockstep about politics. And so, one of the first steps has to do with normalizing some level of political disagreement within any community, and in their case within the evangelical community.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, a lot of this comes back to the idea of even talking to people who disagree with you in the first place. Which one of the things this show does really effectively, I think, is highlight how anathema that has come to seem.
BRAUNSTEIN: It's not easy to do. And I think that my discomfort at the Freedom Night event is kind of one way of being really honest about how difficult that is. That I was shaken by the fact that I heard over and over and over that night, the idea that people on the left were hell bent on harming children.
[CLIP PLAYS]
Is it reasonable to expect people to be in community with somebody who looks them straight in the face and says, essentially, "I think that you are part of a conspiracy to harm children,” right? To accuse somebody who is a parent of being a sex trafficker. We can't have that level of vitriolic assumptions about one another and suffer each other in the ways that I think Caleb is saying. And so, you know, I'm not, I think, in a position to tell everyone, like, You're doing it wrong, and I think that I'm doing a great job at this.” There's a lot of discomfort involved in that. And there's also an extent to which we can't even get to a place where we can, “suffer each other,” until we really turn down the volume on these kinds of accusations that we are lodging at each other.
