In this episode
In this critical election year where the most dedicated base for the GOP candidate is a rising tide of White Christian Nationalism within the evangelical community, we must take the time to understand it. So, we invited the producer/director of God & Country, Dan Partland, to join us in conversation. Based on the book, The Power Worshipers by Katherine Stewart, God & Country focuses in on the inner-workings of the White Christian Nationalism Movement, the decision-makers and the funders.
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Thread or Insta Lisa @lisasharper or to Freedom Road @freedomroad.us. We’re also on Substack! So be sure to subscribe to freedomroad.substack.com. And, keep sharing the podcast with your friends and networks and letting us know what you think!
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Mentioned in this Podcast
The Power Worshippers by Katherine Stewart
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Transcript
Lisa Sharon Harper: [00:00:00] Coming to you from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the city of brotherly love and sisterly affection. I’m Lisa Sharon Harper, president of Freedom Road, a consulting group dedicated to shrinking the narrative gap. Welcome to the Freedom Road podcast. Each episode, we speak with national faith leaders, advocates, artists, and activists to have the kinds of conversations that we normally have on the front lines.
It’s just that this time we’ve got microphones in our faces and you are listening in. And in this critical election year where the most dedicated base for the GOP candidate is a rising tide of white Christian nationalism within the evangelical community, we have got to take time to understand it. So, I have invited the producer director of God and Country, a new documentary that is literally just hitting theaters [00:01:00] all over the country.
Dan Partland is joining us and he is the producer director. Based on the book, The Power Worshippers by Katherine Stewart, God and Country focuses in on the inner workings of the white Christian nationalism movement, the decision makers. And the funders, can somebody say, hello, this is what we need to understand.
So we would love to hear your thoughts and I want you to tweet to me at Lisa S Harper or to Freedom Road at freedom road us, and keep sharing the podcast with your friends and networks and letting us know what you think. So Dan, you ready to dive in?
Dan Partland: I am. Thanks for having me.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay. Awesome.
Thank you so much. So one of the things that we always do here on freedom mode is we start with our own stories and in particular our stories of faith. So I’m wondering, I mean, what is your faith story? How might it connect or intersect with the story that you tell in God and country?
Dan Partland: You know, thanks for asking.
Yeah, I [00:02:00] definitely came at this content or began with this content really with a concern about the direction of American democracy. What I learned sort of along the way is that this movement also represents a significant danger to the American church itself. That was kind of… that’s sort of the surprise that I had about my own participation and how it would reflect upon me.
I think, you know, my faith background is interesting. I’m mostly, I’m a, I’m a secular person. I come from a family of multiple generations of interfaith marriage. And that means that, you know, among… that means that I have cousins who have grandparents who don’t share the same religion that they do.
That means that of my five, you know, the five families that comprise my first cousins, literally none of us have the same faith tradition. And yet we all would… We all went to each other’s services. And when you go to the, sir, here’s the services of [00:03:00] your cousin, you practice the tradition that they practiced among those families in there.
There includes Catholics, Presbyterians, atheists, Jews, and Greek Orthodox.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow.
Dan Partland: And that’s an American family. And, you know, for my whole life, those, um, faith traditions and family that all that lived very comfortably. Together and no one thought about it. Uh, you know, it wasn’t. Like anyone felt like they were virtues signaling by participating in each other’s thing.
It was just what we did as a family. And so that’s the America that I come from. And the America that really was doing pluralism very well. And I think the crisis that we’re facing at the moment is despite great traditions of particularly religious pluralism in America. At the moment, we’re, we’re not doing it that well.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow. So what was it that actually led you to produce God and Country? How did you come across the story? What made you invest years, [00:04:00] really, in the production and directing of this, of this work?
Dan Partland: Well, so, you know, during, in the period after the 2020 election, I, of course, have been very concerned about the state of American democracy, because I think it had been, you know, American democracy has been so stable, it was just like the firmness of the earth.
Nobody ever questioned that America might have a problem with its civic and political culture. But that problem turns out was brewing. And it had been brewing for a while and you don’t see these things until they reach a crisis point until they bubble up. And it was very clear that in the period starting around 2015 or so and into present that we did have a problem.
So I was very much just trying to, you know, research and [00:05:00] consume all kinds of different angles on that when someone passed me Katherine Stewart’s book The Power Worshippers. And that really caused me to check in with this movement that I was aware of. As a politically engaged person, I was aware of the rise of the kind of eighties era movement, of the Christian right, the moral majority and things like that.
But the nature of today’s political… of today’s media silos, I think is that unless you’re in that, unless they’re in your feed, because you have those interests and you have those friends, you’re not seeing the way other people are living, you’re not seeing things through the lens that other of your countrymen are seeing them.
And so The Power Worshipers really got me to have to push outside of my own bubble and really try to dig and find it. And when I did, I was just astonished at what I found. I mean, the size and scale, the scope of [00:06:00] what has developed, in this movement that purports to have anything whatsoever to do with Christianity, but is in fact just a political movement masquerading as a faith.
The size of it and the pervasiveness of this message that this is a faith-based identity is astonishing. And that’s what I discovered and then looked to reflect in the film.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So what exactly have you come to understand about white Christian nationalism that you didn’t understand when you began?
And I know that you… there’s a lot, there’s actually a lot. Your film is incredibly informative, but is there like a number one thing that everybody has got to understand that you didn’t and you had your aha moment?
Dan Partland: Where to begin? There are so many. I think the most important thing is actually just how difficult it is to understand what [00:07:00] white Christian nationalism is. It is really, really hard.
I mean, people use it in passing all the time, but, it’s really, really hard to drill down and get your arms around it, because I think there’s a danger and, you know, some folks on the left, I think sometimes slip into this of starting to just cast anything that’s Christian and politically conservative as Christian.
I think that’s very, very problematic because really the people who we need to reach are are themselves Christian conservatives, and it’s important that they understand that there is nothing wrong with being a Christian conservative. It isn’t, it has become sadly, just in a statistical sense, Christian conservative, conservatism is virtually identical to white Christian nationalism, statistical sense, but of course, as, [00:08:00] as different ideologies and faith traditions.
There’s no reason that that has to be…
Lisa Sharon Harper: What do you mean by that? When you say it’s a statistical sense, like what are you think what’s in your mind when you say that?
Dan Partland: Well, this political identity that has been defined by a lot of good, um, scholars, um, has a list. of political deliverables.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Ah ha!
Dan Partland: That’s really what defines white Christian nationalism is a list of political deliverables, not so much any faith tradition.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Right.
Dan Partland: And, you know, there are people who are, you know, deeply devout and deeply conservative who are, who break from that particular list of deliverables and have their own.
Things and they are still conservative and they are still Christian, but the overwhelming identity of conservative Christians, [00:09:00] it involves this list of political deliverables that is really generated by the Christian nationalist movement.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So, in a Venn diagram. Right. They are 2 separate groups.
Dan Partland: They are.
Lisa Sharon Harper: But there is a very significant overlap.
Dan Partland: Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: As in the majority of people who would call themselves Christian conservatives actually would actually fall within this political vision of white Christian nationalists. They align in that vision. Not all of them, but the majority.
Dan Partland: I think that’s safe to say.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. And I mean, I think so, Oh my gosh, there’s so, there’s so many places that I want to go.
Um, I, so for you, what was it like for you to have that aha moment? Like when you, when you realize this, what did you, what did you think about the film that you were making?
Dan Partland: Well, I think it was very important to me right from the start that the film had [00:10:00] to draw a bright line between what was Christian and what was faith and what was politics.
And this is really complicated because of course people’s faith is going to inform their politics, right? That’s an MLK thing, right? Like you want to bring the moral teachings of a faith to work in your political beliefs, of course. But the difference is whether it’s informing them, or whether the faith, the alliance with faith is kind of the justification for any belief.
So MLK never came to the public and said, the reason that we need to desegregate is because my faith says so.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.
Dan Partland: Right.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.
Dan Partland: You took the virtues of the faith, the teachings of the faith, which is that because of human dignity, because [00:11:00] of justice. That’s what you argue it on, right? Because we are a pluralistic society.
And so we have to allow people to have whatever faith they want. But if they’re going to make an argument to the general civic culture, they need to actually persuade people with something more than because my faith says so, or they run afoul of our first amendment in the United States, which says that there’s no establishment of a religion in law.
But that’s only the one problem. The other problem is whether. Those beliefs really do have anything to do with the faith at all. It’s very, very hard for me to see how a political identity that has come out in favor of preemptive war is for the death penalty is against taking in political refugees is against [00:12:00] gun control and gun violence is against environmental protections.
It’s very, very difficult for me to see how this has anything to do with Christian faith.
Lisa Sharon Harper: These are our stories. You’re listening to the freedom road podcast, where we bring you stories from the front lines of the struggle for justice.
So Dan, early in the film, one of the interviewees says, if America has an irreplaceable role in God’s story, and democracy gets in the way, then democracy has got to go. And this was chilling for me as I was listening to this interviewee say this.
And yet it’s not new Martin Luther King Jr. literally said the same thing in 1967 in his book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? What he said is that the [00:13:00] segregationist would rather have an American form of fascism than democracy if democracy requires equality, right? So then in the first 20 minutes of your film, I like we get to, we literally, we get to like minute 20, and I’m like checking my pulse because it’s racing and I’m terrified.
I mean, like, truly, like what you really did in this film, you laid out in the first 20 minutes, what is going on? And then Anthea Butler clarifies the issue for anyone who was still on the fence, she says. We can lose our democracy and we are closer than we have ever been to losing it. So I want to know when you were behind the camera listening to her say this, how did you feel when you heard her say that?
Dan Partland: You know, that’s one of the… that’s one of those moments, you know, it’s important for people to understand what a documentary is.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.
Dan Partland: People, people think [00:14:00] sometimes that the documentary filmmaker has this thing that they have decided they want to say, and then they go out and they kind of get people to say the things in interviews and then they put them together.
But it’s, it’s a more genuine journey of discovery, at least for me, which is, of course, I’d read Anthea’s book. I’d read the books of all of the participants, and…
Lisa Sharon Harper: That is a lot of books.
Dan Partland: …and as well as other books for a lot of books and columns and all that. Um, but. You know, so then you’re interviewing them.
You want to give them an opportunity to lay out some, you know, their own scholarship, their own perspectives, you know, in a clear, concise way. But then what you’re really looking forward to as an interviewer is to go to the next level is the questions that you had that the book didn’t answer and have some frank talk about that.
So, when you ask questions like that, you know, you want some… I’m always, I’m just a citizen. I [00:15:00] want to be reassured that this doesn’t mean that we’re about to slip, you know, that America is about to go over the precipice and slip into a theocracy, because I, but because I very much respect the opinions and insights of all the participants.
When they have a genuine feeling that that is not the case based on their scholarship based on their expertise, it’s a shocking moment. And so, look, as an interviewer, for the sake of myself, and for the sake of the audience, I’m always somewhat in the role of the audience.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.
Dan Partland: When Anthea says, you know, the dangers United States could slip over the precipice and become a theocracy. I say, is that plausible? Is that really, does that seem true? And you know, sometimes somebody who is not, um, you know, doesn’t have the, isn’t that confident in their assertion, we’ll, we’ll draw it back.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, well, I’m not.
Well, you know, I didn’t really mean [00:16:00] that.
Dan Partland: Let me clarify what I mean. And that’s what you want. You want somebody to clarify what they mean. But in that interview, you know, given the opportunity to clarify Anthea made clear that she really does see us as in that, uh, in that great a peril.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow. Wow. Thank you so much. So when Anthea said that, You were not expecting that. And did it give you a sense of the urgency of this moment and even the need for this film?
Dan Partland: Well, absolutely. I mean, I don’t, you know, I think… I think you put together a lot of different voices so that you can color the perspective.
The film isn’t any one person’s perspective. It isn’t even, you know, exactly my perspective, right? People have a hard time understanding that sometimes you’d include you’d include comments [00:17:00] that you don’t agree with. You’re including the comments that you think are important for the audience to hear in order for them to form their own opinions.
So, you know, I think that the concern about America, you know, slipping into a theocracy. You know, I don’t, I think that there were a lot of steps away from that. What I think we are not a lot of steps away from is having more, racial, political, social strife, tension, political violence.
Based on the… surrounding this issue based on… the momentum that this white Christian nationalist movement has gathered and their sense of entitlement to being the class of people in the United States that gets to call the shots. They showed us January 6th that they feel strongly enough about that, that they’re willing [00:18:00] to attack the seat of American democracy. In order to force their will, even in light of not having won the vote. So it’s, it’s deep. That’s the core of it. It is deeply anti-democratic. And whenever you have two classes of people, meaning if there is a, if white Christians are the true stakeholders in the United States, and everybody else is kind of tolerated.
Whenever you have two classes of people, you can’t have democracy. That’s not democratic. One vote, one person, one vote is how we do it in the United States. And they need to be reminded of that.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So Reza Aslan says about halfway through your film, he says, it’s the white part. And when he said that, I was like, I mean, I literally like, Oh, let me write that down.
Cause that was like, it was a moment because up to that [00:19:00] point, you would really only talked about it as Christian nationalism. You didn’t actually say white Christian nationalism, but then he said, it’s the white part that we need to keep our eyes on. And so can you break down, like, what did he mean by that?
And what is the ultimate vision that this movement is working toward?
Dan Partland: Well, you cannot overstate the role of race, the position of race in this movement. And, you know, I myself am kind of, in my own language, I frequently speak about Christian nationalism, without using what I view as more of the complete term, which would be white Christian nationalism, which I think is an accurate term and the really… because this is not a phenomenon in the black church, let’s just be very clear about that.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.
Dan Partland: Not going on.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Well, wait, let me just say, actually. I met a [00:20:00] black white Christian nationalist, not too long ago, earlier this year, actually. And I think that you will find it in black churches that had in some very few, but still some black churches that came out of white evangelical denominations, right?
So, and usually not just evangelical, usually it’s Pentecostal, some version of Pentecostal. So keep going.
Dan Partland: Yeah. No, that’s a fair insight. I mean, look, you, you’ll find you, you’ll find exceptions to every rule, of course. You know, when we’re speaking about a broad social phenomenon, I don’t think the numbers are there to show, to show, but I have no doubt.
I mean, there, of course, are people of every different race, ethnicity, persuasion involved in this movement. But I think that’s an interesting point about the evolution about the roots of certain congregations. [00:21:00]
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. And I’m sorry. I know that I asked you a question, but I do want to I want it. I think this is worth digging into just a little bit that.
And I think that you’re actually pretty clear in the film that it’s not actually about white people. It’s about the power of whiteness, right? Like it’s, it’s about the desire for whiteness to be seen as supreme and anybody can embody or hold that value. So the person doesn’t have to be black or white or Latino… they can be black, white, Latino, or purple and hold that value.
So. I think that’s true.
Dan Partland: Yeah. And I mean, there’s, you know, I’m now I’m kind of trying to remember the exact way we characterize it in the film. It was certainly a wonderful, wonderful interview with Dr. Jemar Tisby.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.
Dan Partland: Very excellent on this topic. Um, and Um, yeah, I mean, the, the desire to, again, to [00:22:00] go down this channel for a second, down this road for a second, is that the whole culture acquiesced to the norm of whiteness.
That’s as a way of putting it, right. That’s it. And that’s, you know, that’s the cultural thing of like who we believe we are as Americans. And, you know, I think,I think that the United States has a terrific history for all the ways that we’ve fallen short of living up to our ideal of equal justice under the law and land of opportunity and all that really religious liberty.
We have done well. That really… we stand out around the globe for having done that really well. And the reason we’ve done it well, it’s because, the founders recognize that because we were founded by by a lot of different religious traditions. There wasn’t a central religious tradition. And so the only way there was going to be [00:23:00] peace and human flourishing in the United States was if we could find a way to allow people the freedom to believe what they wanted.
So when we say Americans really believe in freedom, yes, of course, we believe in freedom from tyranny, from a monarch across the sea, but really every bit is important to that or maybe very next to that is that we believe in religious freedom, that everybody should be allowed to practice whatever faith they want, whatever way they want.
And that means that the government needs to stay out of it. And the government, the laws of the land are just the thing, are the things that are, that we all, that we agree on by democratic process and that don’t infringe on people’s rights to believe what they want to believe.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So now you talked about the 2016 GOP convention as Donald Trump’s ordination. Yeah, I just thought that was wow. I mean, I had not heard it put in those terms before. Can you kind of unpack that for us?
Dan Partland: Yeah, I can. But [00:24:00] let me make sure I go back to because we went down that we went down.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh, yes.
Dan Partland: The one thing that you mentioned… an arresting thing from early in the film.
I wanted to amplify, which is when Phil Fisher says that for this community: white Christian nationalist belief is that the United States plays a special role in God’s story that only they play and that if democracy gets in the way of that, then democracy has to go. I want to just amplify that because that really is the record scratch moment.
If you can, because I think you can see how that makes sense to this ideology, which is if the United States as a country plays itself a messianic role in world history, then [00:25:00] it needs to be saved as a Christian, as especially Christian nation. So if you are of that belief, you can justify all kinds of anti democratic means to make sure that the United States stays a Christian nation for God. Right?
And then you have to look at the tradition of people justifying actions as God’s will to say, I think the tradition, not traditions, the wrong word… the history shows that the things that are justified as doing God’s will, tend to be the most vile actions of all, because they aren’t justified by other means.
You can’t win the argument by persuasion, so you say that this is beyond discussion, because it’s, it’s from the deity and that has empowered people to proceed with slavery, [00:26:00] segregation, Nazism and other horrors.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, wow. We’re going to get back to that Nazism thing in our next segment for sure that. Okay.
I can’t, I can’t, well, I will wait to kind of uncover that because we don’t have that much time in this segment, but I will, I want to ask you, given what you just said, you know, you talk about Donald Trump’s ordination at the 2016 GOP convention, and it’s not just, right? It’s not just his winning. The nomination it’s his ordination because those who came around him had that theocratic worldview.
They were thinking of this as–and they were thinking of America as the divine manifest destiny–and Donald Trump is going to be the one who saves America. And then later you talk about, or you have people who talk about Trump as Cyrus. So can you unpack those two things?
Dan Partland: Well, yeah, I mean, this is, I [00:27:00] think, just as the, as leadership in, a lot of American evangelicalism started to coalesce around Donald Trump, they viewed him as God’s choice in the election, and it’s a very strange choice because of all the ways in which Donald Trump issues Christian virtues.
But they found a biblical narrative. To justify it, which is, um, you know, biblical story of King Cyrus is the Persia is a, is it non believers, the use of a non believer to achieve the ends of a believer. And so they viewed Trump through this lens as a very flawed vessel that was going to help them to enact God’s will.[00:28:00]
Lisa Sharon Harper: Walking Freedom Road from coast to coast and around the globe. This is the Freedom Road podcast.
Well, Dan, thank you so much again for really for opening up your own story and also for sharing your vision through this… or really not your vision, what you’ve learned through your… through this incredible work. I want to ask you, and you can also say no, and you know, we won’t include it, but I want to ask you kind of a more controversial question, but it’s just I could not, after watching your film, I could not escape the parallels that are coming up for us right now in America, in our American news cycles and less actually in our news cycles and more in our social media. So you highlight the theological foundations that were offered for the Holocaust, right, provided by Gerard Kittel.
And I didn’t, I never knew that before. I [00:29:00] actually never knew who the the one major theologian was who had established that. So I really learned something there and it was quite profound, but to learn that religion itself became the justification for overturning the German democracy.
And you, and you guys talk about it, you say like religion can be and is becoming the justification for overturning, and it’s religion as in the religion of whiteness, right? The justification for overturning democracy here, and you didn’t mention Israel. I don’t remember you mentioning it at all, but right now, and of course I imagine it’s because all of this happened pretty late in your production process, but right now I’m finding myself, you know, resonating a lot with this Christian nationalism thing with what I see in hard Zionism that I find, you know in Israel.
So I’m just wondering, do you have any thoughts about that? Since, you know, God and Country has come out and you’re watching the same kind of thing happen in [00:30:00] Israel or do you see it that way?
Dan Partland: Well, that’s, so first of all, there’s no discussion of Israel in the film. The film’s finished long before the most recent conflict.
And that is a really, that is a really complicated and controversial area, you know, analogy to make. I think, what I will say is this, I think that religious nationalism is on the rise all over the world. It’s not just an American phenomenon. And it’s problematic all over the world, wherever it happens, because all countries are ultimately pluralistic.
They have to make it so that minority beliefs, minority faiths, or people who are unfaithful are also fairly represented. And you can’t do that when you have two classes of people. So the [00:31:00] analogy to Israel is that despite it being sort of known as a Jewish state: in law, Israel is a secular state for exactly this reason.
And it does allow for people, you know, Muslim and other faiths, Christians and all that to have equal treatment under the law. But just like Christian nationalism is on the rise here a Jewish nationalism is on the rise in Israel, and is making similar problems there as well because, and that’s a particular and unique problem for the Jewish state because it is known as the Jewish state.
It was established in many ways to be a Jewish state. But again, also to be a modern Democracy. And so I think that, yeah, very much the same kind of, [00:32:00] right-wing and authoritarian impulses are driving Israeli politics, Israeli domestic politics right now. And that’s very much influencing the way they’re handling the conflict right now in Gaza.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So what did you learn about the role of Christian media? You know, the radio, television and film in the promotion and proliferation of white Christian nationalism throughout the nation and then also the globe.
Dan Partland: Well, it’s enormous. It’s bigger than people, you know, it’s largely invisible to mainstream culture.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.
Dan Partland: And so they can’t, they can’t imagine actually how, how giant it is and how influential it is. But the thing that should be said is like, as big as the kind of mainstream secular media world is very… [00:33:00] it’s got a lot of different factions in it, right? It’s got, it’s diverse.
It has lots of different voices and people go and they find what they need and there’s all different aspects of it. Christian media is as monolithic as secular media is diverse. And that’s really where… why it’s actually disproportionately powerful way more powerful than any particular niche in secular media because…
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow.
Dan Partland: …it really is it really there is a tremendous, um, coordination and similarity to the messages that are being delivered across all aspects of Christian media. Um, it is not a diverse is not a very different. Not that there… It’s not all one thing, but it is, largely homogenous messaging is certainly when it comes to the political sphere.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So one of the things that actually really struck me was that, [00:34:00] you know, you named, you actually named some of the stations like K Love, right? Which is one of the two humongous, like Christian radio groups that has like groups of stations in it. And I mean, I know people who have radio programs on K Love. I know the people who are behind K Love.
And like, these are the kinds of, it’s so huge because it’s seen as innocuous and yet you named it as one of the media vehicles for white Christian nationalism. So, I mean, I’m wondering, have you gotten any pushback from that? Because these are, these are TBN, another one, right? Like where is it? CBN, not TBN, CBN, Christian Broadcast Network.
I mean, these are things that like grandma watches at night, you know what I mean? Like how…
Dan Partland: It’s important to say, and we do say in the film that not all of the content is political. And in fact, yeah. And in fact, probably most is not political. [00:35:00] And so, yeah, you know, anybody who’s watching their show on whatever it is, music, cooking or house renovations or whatever, like, these are all they just, you know, these are media groups, and they put out a lot of content.
But the question is when it’s political, what is it? And when it’s political, there’s not much diversity about what is out there. And so that creates this kind of closed system where people feel like the only way, the only reasonable way to express your, political belief as a Christian is according to this list of political deliverables.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow. And let me just say that was literally for me. That was one of the most insightful pieces that were spoken in the course of the whole film, even though the film was chock full of it, of wisdom. So when did you learn about the [00:36:00] funding streams? That was another piece that I felt like was amazing the way that you uncovered the ways that this movement is funded, and also how huge the funding streams are.
Dan Partland: Well, you know, there’s great experts in the film who taught, you know, I mean, their books and then their interviews, they taught me a tremendous amount about it. There’s been a lot of great research on it.
There… the truth is that it’s, you know, an incredibly well organized and well funded political movement. And you have to ask yourself whenever you’re into, you know, well-funded and well-organized political movements about who are they designed to benefit? And that’s really the question.
And I think when you look at these at the agendas of these groups, it’s really hard to see what people are benefiting. Now [00:37:00] there, it is ideological. It’s not just… it’s not simply business interests, although there is a fair amount of business interest. The film doesn’t get into it that much, but yes, there’s a lot of fossil fuel industry money in it.
There’s a lot of defense contracting money in it, but there’s a lot of just ideological money in it, which is. You know, people who are looking to put their idea of Christianity enshrined in law.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow. So what can we do about this? I mean, you ask us to imagine at one point, one of your participants asked us to imagine the U.S. as a fascist state, you know, is that what we’re moving toward with this white Christian nationalist movements? And especially, see, here’s the thing is that I think, and you actually do a great job of outlining this in the film, and I want to make sure people understand this as [00:38:00] and go out and watch the film, which will become available in theaters.
I think it’s February 16th. Is that right? That’s correct. All right. So make sure you go see it. …That when we look at this movement, which we have imagined to be this side movement, that’s kind of like fringe, it’s actually made its way into the halls of Congress, right now. Our speaker of the house is a white Christian nationalist speaker of the house.
That’s the third most powerful person in the United States of America. We have Christian nationalists, white Christian nationalists who are members of the Supreme Court. Right now. So I guess my question is, how far are we from this fascist state and what exactly is at stake?[00:39:00]
Dan Partland: Well, it’s that everything is at stake. American democracy is at stake. And I don’t… and just so people don’t think I’m being, you know, it’s not like American democracy is going to fall, you know, in the next election cycle or two election cycles. But degradations in the effectiveness of it as a… of the United States government as a democracy is actually responsive to the will of the people has already been on decline pretty severely.
And with, not anti-democratic means used to insert more anti democratic measures. You can see that accelerating and accelerating rather quickly in just a matter of years. I mean, the Weimar Republic famously one of the, you know, height of culture of European culture and it was enlightened they nobody could imagine how quickly the Weimar Republic fell [00:40:00] to electing Adolf Hitler as Chancellor and then his ability to disband democratic processes once he’s in power.
So I think all that stuff is, is very real. And you kind of have to shade out what that might look like or people think that you’re being that you’re being hyperbolic. But you actually touched on something that is really important, which is that a lot of people, you know, the film does make a point that one of the principle ways that these Christian nationalist movements survive is by fear mongering.
Is that fear is a very persuasive fundraising tool and it gets it… It’s a good organizing tool and people will certainly make the raise the question of is the film actually doing the same is it fear mongering in its own way, heightening state, amplifying it, [00:41:00] making them untrue in order to advance its own political agenda, its own rhetorical points, et cetera.
And that’s, you know. People can ask that question. They should. They should look at the film and they should decide if they think that’s the case. What I would just throw out there when you know, if you’re asking how severe this is and whether this is fear mongering or whatever is to say that we did have a violent insurrection of the United States Capitol. In the last election, we really did have a Christian nationalist uprising. Not everyone at January 6th was a Christian nationalist, but as it says in the film, in the cases made that Christian nationalism provides the permission structure.
We’ve talked about that already in this context. So, and like you said, despite that, just a few months ago, Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the House. We now have somebody who explicitly [00:42:00] says that his goal in office is to write biblical values, right? Put biblical virtues into law. Now, again, there’s a spectrum there.
If you’re just taking the values, you’re allowed to do that. If you can find popular support, but there’s no question that he is fully aligned with the agenda of white Christian nationalists. And like you said, he’s third in line to the presidency, and was elected by other representatives who are of like mind.
So I think there’s a tremendous reason to be very concerned if you’re an American who wants to see pluralistic democracy thrive in the United States,
Lisa Sharon Harper: What can we do about it?
Dan Partland:Well, that’s the toughest question of all you can go out and see the film.
Lisa Sharon Harper: You know that that is actually I have to say that’s important because we have to understand it so we can understand it.
We can try to understand it.
Dan Partland: It is. It’s important to understand. And I have to say, you know, a couple of, a couple of quick thoughts on that for [00:43:00] one, on one level, some people will watch the film and say, well, there’s nothing, you know, nothing new here. I knew this stuff and that, that is true. This has been a movement that’s been growing for quite some time, but you put it together in a way the effort was to put it together in a way that takes the audience on an emotional journey that hopefully gives a little more depth and meaning to all these facts that we knew about the existence of this movement and puts it in a little bit better context. So I think the film will do that. The film also is a great conversation starter. The film is really valuable, I think, for people who are maybe beginning to, they’re wondering what’s happening with their aunt or uncle, who seems like they’re a little off.
Maybe they’re not really voting consistent with their values so much. Their congregation maybe seems like it’s been, it’s moved a few degrees. And it’s a really valuable tool. Like I know that if I were sitting across the table from somebody who is sliding into this [00:44:00] white Christian nationalist ideology, I would have a very hard time to, you know, engage them and sort of take it apart piece by piece.
But the film did that. That’s what we were trying to do is make… is give a framework, and a baseline understanding where people can think about these issues and come to their own conclusions, and not hear from me, but hear from the very best voices in the world, both on American democracy and on, and on Christianity itself.
Lisa Sharon Harper: The conversations leaders have on the road to justice. This is the freedom road podcast. Thank you for joining us today. The Freedom Road Podcast is recorded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and wherever our guests lay their head that night. This episode was engineered and produced by Corey Nathan of Scan Media and Freedom Road Podcast is executive produced by Freedom Road LLC.
We [00:45:00] consult, coach, train, and design experiences that bring common understanding, common commitment, and lead to common action. You can find out more about our work at our website, freedomroad.us, and stay in the know by signing up for our updates on Substack, so we promise we will not flood your inbox. So a special treat for those who are paid Substack subscribers and Patreon patrons.
We are going to have a special backstage conversation with Dan over those on those channels. And so join the conversation on Freedom Road.[00:46:00]
