Michelle Obama: Who's going to tell him that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?

Brooke Gladstone: Democrats depart from the high road at the DNC with some creative and purposeful jabs at the Republican candidate.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: That's what mockery does. It shows you that that great and powerful Oz is merely a little man behind a curtain.

Brooke Gladstone: Also, on this week's On the Media, while Donald Trump is selling Bibles on the campaign trail--

Donald Trump: I'm proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible. We must make America pray again.

Brooke Gladstone: We revisit a conversation about an increasingly extreme form of Christian nationalism.

Matthew D. Taylor: Christian supremacy is the idea that Christians are better than other people. Therefore, Christians should exercise maybe even a coercive influence on people who are not Christian.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York this is On the Media. Micah Loewinger is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. I've seen almost all the conventions since 1972, but I've never seen anything like this week's DNC already parsed endlessly for its breadth, its unity, and its joyful noise.

Michelle Obama: That's what we've seen from Kamala Harris, the steel of her spine, the steadiness of her upbringing, the honesty of her example, and yes, the joy of her laughter and her light.

Brooke Gladstone: The one fly in that otherwise healing ointment was that like all conventions, it offered no place for dissenters. The uncommitted delegates were referenced only during the roll call, and though in her speech, Kamala Harris depicted both sides of the conflict in Gaza is agonizing and urgent. The DNC declined requests to feature any Palestinian voices as Jon Stewart observed.

Jon Stewart: They had black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, gay Americans, Jewish Americans. Palestinian Am-- oh. Well, oh, to be fair, it was only four nights, eight hours a night. [laughter] Really it's best not to think about the consequences of our actions over there, especially given the theme of the week.

Female 1: I can feel the excitement in this arena. It's filled with energy and with joy.

Female 2: The air of joy.

Hakeem Jeffries: Joy.

Brooke Gladstone: Go ahead and laugh, but joy felt good this week, especially is applied to the joyful warriors leading the ticket. Joy infused nearly every moment to accept the ones devoted to the fear and anguish created by the overturning of Roe, the lack of effective gun regulation, the captivity of the hostages in Gaza. Those mood shifts weren't jarring because joy is entirely compatible with urgency. In fact, joy is the antidote to cynicism and paralysis, and thus a driver of action. Here's Pete Buttigieg on the GOP's political strategy.

Pete Buttigieg: They are doubling down on negativity and grievance. Committing to a concept of campaigning best summed up in one word, darkness.

Brooke Gladstone: The dems chose a light, but even more, this democratic convention engaged in an audacious display of redefinition, wrenching keywords and associations away from the GOP.

Adam Kinzinger: Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong.

Brooke Gladstone: Adam Kinzinger, a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard is a Republican and former Illinois congressman.

Adam Kinzinger: He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there. As a conservative and a veteran, I believe true strength lies in defending the vulnerable.

Brooke Gladstone: Equating empathy, caring with strength. One crucial redefinition this week involved the meaning of manliness and femininity in the political context. For decades, the GOP has been the daddy party, focused if only rhetorically on fiscal responsibility, national security, global leadership, and strength in all things.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Of course, we don't have to talk about the democratic candidates, right? No. They all look like a bunch of girly men, huh?

Brooke Gladstone: That's Arnold Schwarzenegger pumping up votes for George W. Bush in 1992, and here again at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say, don't be economic girly man.

Brooke Gladstone: The Democrats are the mommy party, a bleeding heart fixated on family issues and healthcare generous to a fault and ignorant of the ways of the world. Not this week, Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris: As Commander in Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families. I will always honor and never disparage their service and their sacrifice.

Leon Panetta: Trump tells tyrants like Putin, they can do whatever the hell they want.

Brooke Gladstone: Leon Panetta has been Secretary of Defense, CIA director, White House Chief Of Staff, Head of the Office of Management and Budget, and the California Congressman.

Leon Panetta: Kamala Harris tells tyrants the hell you can, not on my watch.

Brooke Gladstone: In his newsletter, The.Ink, Anand Giridharadas sees the rise of a new democratic political style, which involves, yes, a joyful urge to punch back hard and fast. He calls the Democratic messaging strategist, Anat Shenker-Osorio, the philosopher queen of this style, recently advising candidates in France and Brazil. She's not working on Harris's campaign directly, but she does advise PACS and committees in some battleground states. Since 2020, she's conducted at least two focus groups a week to explore what disaffected voters want to hear from democratic candidates. In a recent piece in Rolling Stone, she noted that Representative Jasmine Crockett has made an art form of the clever jab.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: She became a career prosecutor, while he became a career criminal with 34 felonies, two impeachments, and one porn star to prove it.

Brooke Gladstone: Even Michelle Obama departed from her 2016 declaration that when they go low, we go high.

Michelle Obama: Who's going to tell him that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?

Barack Obama: It has been a constant stream of gripes and grievances. That's actually been getting worse now that he is afraid of losing to Kamala.

Brooke Gladstone: Barack Obama.

Barack Obama: There's the childish nicknames. The crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes.

Brooke Gladstone: Capped with a downward glass and the suggestive hand gesture. Anat Shenker-Osorio says, "You need laughter to bring down a strong man."

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Not only I say that, but experts, historians, and people who study present-day efforts to bring down an authoritarian, or in our case a would be authoritarian, pretty conclusively demonstrated that you got to get the people to feel like this person is vincible. If they seem like a force more potent than any on earth, people aren't going to have the tenacity to stand up and resist the fight. There is a lot of despondency, but if you want people to come to your party, probably pretty good idea to throw a better party.

Brooke Gladstone: All this makes sense. Trump was made fun of through most of 2016s campaign. He was called a carnival barker, a big orange baby, and so forth. He still won. How is the Harris campaign threading that needle?

Anat Shenker-Osorio: This is actually a really important and subtle point. It is serious. You have to make clear to your voters just what MAGA Republicans, not just Trump, but the whole ilk have in store for us. This is why we've put a lot of time and attention to making voters aware of Project 2025. At the same time, you have to make it seem that it is not a fate accompli. I think in the 2016 Trump case, yes, there was absolutely derision and mockery, but the dominant message about Trump was, he's dangerous, he's dangerous, he's dangerous, he's dangerous.

He had never served before, and so he was an unknown quantity. We see this dynamic with Bolsonaro when he was first elected in Brazil. It happened just now in Argentina with Milei. When people are still in the flirtation phase with the right-wing authoritarian, they're not quite sure what's coming. It's a different story when you're trying to beat him another time.

Brooke Gladstone: That is very interesting. Another thing that really seems to be working for the Democrats is the co-opting of traditional Republican talking points. It's often been noted, this focus on the heartland and patriotism, and especially freedom.

Josh Shapiro: It's not freedom to tell our children what books they're allowed to read. It's not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies.

Joe Biden: Kamala and Tim will protect your freedom. They'll protect your right to vote.

Brooke Gladstone: Which includes caring about and helping your neighbors. Also in Walz's. words.

Tim Walz: There's a golden rule, mind your own damn business.

Brooke Gladstone: In 2022, you directed research on democratic messaging called Protect Our Freedoms. You say you've been on the freedom train 10 years longer than that.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yes. Back in the ancient times, we tested a whole bunch of messaging to look at what would actually make US voters aware of interested in mobilized by unions. Both to join them themselves, but also just understanding their fundamental purpose. What we found is that the most potent message was one about freedom. CEOs are free to negotiate their wages and bonuses as they see fit. Working people just want the same freedom, the freedom to join together in union. Many people were surprised by this.

They felt as in the framing of your question, that this was some right-wing concept. I would actually push back on that and say free at last, free at last, thank God almighty as famously, Martin Luther King Jr. ended his I Have a Dream speech. I would point to the Freedom Riders, Freedom Summer to FDRs for freedoms to more recently the very intentional switch away from the right to marry to the freedom to marry. Freedom has been a contested concept. It's neither a right nor a left.

Brooke Gladstone: What took the Democrats so long to try it out against Trump?

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Great question. Ask the suitcases under my eyes that passed for bags, what took them so long.

Brooke Gladstone: At 100 campaign events since launching his reelection in April 2023. Biden referenced democracy 386 times, and freedom about 175 times. As you found, democracy is an abstraction, whereas freedom is where the rubber meets the road. You did focus groups on this.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Not just focus groups, but in quantitative testing as well. When we would do split samples within our surveys and we would ask folks about anything from gun violence to democracy reforms. When we would frame those democracy reforms with the obvious word of democracy, it is best for our democracy if we X people would be less in agreement, but more importantly, they would be less mobilized. They would be less willing to support a candidate who favored that position than if we framed precisely the same reform as in order to protect our freedoms, we need to X.

Brooke Gladstone: Democracy is less salient because it's an abstraction. The same is true of the word economy, right?

Anat Shenker-Osorio: It's not going to buy you dinner or give you a nice present on your birthday. It's merely a convention by which we measure human activity. People obviously care more about how they're doing than how it's doing. It's a shift away from saying, for example, we grew the economy by this much to here's what we delivered to your family. Placing yourself on the side of working people rather than placing yourself on the side of maintaining or growing or keeping healthy this abstraction.

Brooke Gladstone: You have found as a democratic messaging strategist, don't ask potential voters to complete the sentence Trump is or Kamala Harris is. Ask them to complete the sentence, Trump will do and Kamala Harris will do. What's the difference between Trump is and Trump will do, or Harris is and Harris will do?

Anat Shenker-Osorio: When we were looking at a Trump-Biden ticket, that is where we first happened upon this finding that anytime that we would start a sentence with Trump is they would instantly knee-jerk rejoin. Yes, well, Biden is. Because we were talking to the so-called double haters because that's who we focus on in our research because that's who we need to move.

Brooke Gladstone: The people who hate both candidates.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yes. People would end that sentence in not very nice ways. When we would flip away from Trump is to Trump will do, they would reluctantly say, "Yes, maybe I'm not thrilled with the continuation of a status quo I don't love under Biden, which is how it felt to them. What Trump will do sounds way, way, way more nefarious and terrible to me, so fine. We saw this in the elections in Poland last year. We saw this in the Bolsonaro-Lula race in 2022. Flip people away from, this is an election about two different candidates, to this is an election about two different countries, and we're going to decide which future we will have. They are much more likely to want to head in the progressive direction.

Brooke Gladstone: Hence the emphasis on Project 2025, which really is a bunch of policies, but collectively is an idea of a very changed America. It's interesting Harris's new campaign slogan is a "New Way Forward." I'm old enough to remember "A Bridge to the 21st Century."

Bill Clinton: Tonight let us resolve to build that bridge to the 21st century, to meet our challenges and protect our values.

Brooke Gladstone: It's really working with Harris.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Harris embodies much, much more of a fighting spirit, and a sense of actually doing something about these threats that she's bringing up. That's really important to people.

Brooke Gladstone: Can we end with the observation that the Harris campaign seems to be whether deliberately or not engaged in redefining masculinity? I mean, you've referred to the work of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who's studied the playbook of a strong man who she observes promises law and order then legitimizes financial, sexual in all manner of predatory behavior. Take what you want and getting away with it becomes a symbol of masculinity, proof of male authority, right?

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yes. Unfortunately, you do have it right. I think that this is why Governor Tim Walz is such a head-scratcher for them, because he very much represents a masculinity, in addition to being a standard Midwestern white man, he's a hunter. He was in the military, he's a football coach. Need I say more? This is like the trifecta of manness. [laughter] What they're showing is that you can both quote unquote be a man and actually admire women and be excited about their leadership.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you, Anat.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Anat Shenker-Osorio is a democratic strategist and the host of the podcast, Words to Win By. This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. At the DNC Georgia's Senator and Reverend Raphael Warnock denounced Donald Trump's sales pitch to Christians.

Raphael Warnock: I saw him holding the Bible and endorsing a Bible as if it needed his endorsement. He should try reading it. It says, "Do justice, love, kindness, and walk humbly with your God." He should try reading it. It says, "Love your neighbor as yourself." It says, "In as much as you've done it unto the least of these, you have done it also unto me."

Brooke Gladstone: Apparently Trump has made $300,000 this year selling Bibles.

Donald Trump: We must make America pray again

Brooke Gladstone: For only 59.99.

Donald Trump: I'm proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible.

Brooke Gladstone: Wait, there's more. His Bible includes a copy of the Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance. The merch is all of a peace with his religion-infused election pitch. In late July, Trump addressed a crowd in Florida and he stated his goals, pretty frankly--

Donald Trump: You won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians, I love you Christians. I'm not Christian. I love you. Get out. You got to get out and vote. In four years you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed. Good, you're not going to have to vote.

Raphael Warnock: We've got to be full-throated in resisting this idea of Christian nationalism.

Brooke Gladstone: Raphael Warnock.

Raphael Warnock: Democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. This notion that each of us has within us a spark of the divine.

Brooke Gladstone: Christian nationalism is a term embraced by far-eyed crusaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: I say it probably we should be Christian nationalists.

Brooke Gladstone: Lauren Boebert.

Lauren Boebert: The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church, and I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew D. Taylor is the author of the forthcoming book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. He's written extensively about Christian nationalism and what to watch out for in the run-up to the election. Earlier this year, I asked him to grade the mainstream media on their coverage thus far.

Matthew D. Taylor: I would give the American mainstream media a solid B minus on its coverage of Christian nationalism. I'm not trying to be overly critical there. This is a very difficult topic to cover well.

Brooke Gladstone: What's the main thing we get wrong?

Matthew D. Taylor: When it gets framed as though it was a single coherent movement with everyone marching in lockstep together? Because the reality is there are a lot of different forms of American Christian nationalism. There are a lot of contributing theologies and strands of thought. It can be very easy to slap a phrase on a phenomenon and say, "Okay, now we understand it."

Brooke Gladstone: Christian nationalism is by definition in opposition to a secular state, right?

Matthew D. Taylor: Pew Research Center did a very important study on Christian nationalism in the fall of 2022, I believe. They asked the gateway question, do you think the US should be a Christian nation? Something like 45% of the American population said yes. As a scholar I would say, well, that is all Christian nationals. Then Pew asked a bunch of follow-up questions, and the picture that emerged was much more complicated. Things like, do you think that the Supreme Court should use the Bible and Christian morality in making decisions? Only about 10 to 15% of the US population said yes to that.

Do you think that the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation? Again, something like 10 to 15% said yes to that. This is what I mean when I say there's a spectrum there. I think we need to differentiate between the vague hazy, God bless America, sentimental style of Christian nationalism that is more popular and this hardened form of Christian nationalism. It tends to be more ideological and more ready to overturn even parts of the Constitution in order to enact this reality of a Christian nation.

Brooke Gladstone: You take issue with the conflation of easygoing Christian nationalists and Christian supremacists. You've also suggested that kind of conflation only widens America's yawning political rifts.

Matthew D. Taylor: I think the question is, who is persuadable in that spectrum? Who is open to pluralism? If somebody wants to have some notion that the US is in some vague way Christian, but they still think that everyone should have the same rights and there should be a separation of religion and state. Then I would say that is an acceptable position within the landscape of American religious pluralism.

We need to view the spectrum to understand why some people who might have more sympathies towards pluralism, more willingness to embrace the separation of church and state feel insulted and threatened when we paint with a super broad brush about Christian nationalism. What I would define as Christian supremacy is a Christian theological worldview that wants to say that Christians are entitled by God to have leadership over a society.

White supremacy is this idea that white people are better than other people. Christian supremacy is more the idea that Christians are better than other people, therefore Christians or Christianity should exercise maybe even a coercive influence on people who are not Christian.

Brooke Gladstone: The term Christian nationalism has been all over the news. When did the phrase first come into use?

Matthew D. Taylor: I believe you can find the phrase even being used as early as the 19th century. Those sentiments, those ideas of Christian nationalism really go back to the US founding and before. It's always been a part of American politics. It's always been an ongoing debate about this relationship between church and state, about the role of the Christian majority in America and who gets counted within that majority.

Brooke Gladstone: You talked about Mark Noll, who wrote about Christian nationalism as a root cause of the Civil War.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. Mark Noll has a great book, the Theological Crisis of The Civil War, I think we have to remember, right, the Civil War happens in the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening, which is the historical term that we apply to the surge in growth that we see among Methodists and Baptists in the roughly 1810s to the 1840s. That reconfigured the religious makeup of the United States. The founding era of the United States was not a particularly pious era. Church participation was very, very low in the late 18th century. Then in the early 19th century, we have the surge in piety, and that segues into the antebellum and the Civil War eras.

Brooke Gladstone: How you've got many Christians who are very opposed to slavery. Did you have another constituency of Christians who were in favor of it?

Matthew D. Taylor: Oh yes, absolutely. In the North, the Second Great Awakening, puts new energy into Christian abolitionism. The Protestantism of the 19th century that we would today probably call evangelical, although that wasn't the universal term at the time, was very activist, very energized. In the North that led to a lot of pious Christians being anti-slavery. In the South, it led to a lot of pious Christians being very pro-slavery.

You started to have a ramping up of theological arguments about slavery in the 1830s, 1840s. It's in that moment that many of the Protestant denominations in the United States fracture. You get a southern form of that denomination and a northern form. We still see that in our terminology today. We still talk about the Southern Baptist Convention because it broke away from the Baptist Convention because it wanted its clergy and missionaries to still be allowed to own slaves.

All that theological energy and ferment of the second-grade awakening created these different forms of Christian nationalism. If you go and read the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is a Christian nationalist hymn written by an abolitionist in the middle of the Civil War. It's envisioning the kingdom of God is marching on with the union troops. That the cause of God is synonymous with the cause of the union.

[MUSIC - Julia Ward Howe and William Steffe: Battle Hymn of the Republic]

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword

Matthew D. Taylor: The same time as that the South, you see more energized forms of Southern Christian nationalism. In fact, in the Confederacy, they very intentionally named God in the preamble to the Confederate constitution. They use this as a propaganda point to say, "Look at those godless northerners with their secular constitution that doesn't mention God." The motto of the Confederacy was "Deo vindice," God is our vindicator. There very much were these Christian nationalist sentiments on both sides that made the Civil War a type of holy war.

Brooke Gladstone: What about the Cold War? There was a resurgence then, wasn't there?

Matthew D. Taylor: Absolutely. The Cold War was the last surge before the one that we're experiencing right now. If you think back in the end of the 19th century, you had new waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants coming into the United States. It's in the 1920s, 1930s, you begin to hear that the United States is a Judeo-Christian country.

Then as you move into the Cold War, people start speaking of the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation in contrast to these godless communists. That is where you see the integration of Jews and of Catholics into this previous Anglo-Protestant establishment. Many of the manifestations you find Christian nationalists today citing as evidence for the US being a Christian nation actually were put in place in the 1950s under Eisenhower.

Brooke Gladstone: Like what?

Matthew D. Taylor: Up until the 1950s, the motto of the United States was E pluribus unum. That was what was on all of our money.

Brooke Gladstone: Out of many, one.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. In the 1950s "In God We Trust" is added to all the money. It had happened during the Civil War, but it was not widely used up until the 1950s. Similarly, the phrase "Under God" gets added into the Pledge of allegiance under Eisenhower. All of this is part of this shoring up of American identity in opposition to communism.

Brooke Gladstone: How widespread or intense is Christian supremacy right now?

Matthew D. Taylor: I think that those numbers that you find in PRRI and Pew at around 10 to 15% are a good estimate. Up until about 1990, consistently you could find about 90% of Americans saying they were Christian. Now depending again on how you ask the question and what survey you're looking at, we're down at around 62, 63% of the US identifying as Christian. At the same time that has happened, you've also had more Muslims and more forms of Islam, more Buddhists, and more forms of Buddhism coming to the United States.

More Hindus coming to the United States. Today, somewhere around 25, maybe even more than that percent of the US populations, when they're asked what their religious identity is, they choose unaffiliated or none of the above. They don't want to be labeled with religion, and that coalition largely aligns with the Democrat party today. The religious landscape has become more diverse, less Christian, and many Christians, they perceive that as a real threat. Donald Trump has proven very good at getting them activated for political mobilization.

Brooke Gladstone: If there's been this decline, you're saying it's left us with a more hardened or desperate form of Christian nationalism. Christian supremacy. You say that poses a real threat to democracy.

Matthew D. Taylor: Majorities are never more dangerous in a democracy than when they feel their majority is slipping away. As Christianity is declining in its cultural reach, the Christians who are dedicated to this vision of a Christian nation become more aggressive. This is what we see in part on January 6. The rhetoric that fueled the Christian nationalism we saw on January 6 was desperation. The sense that our country's being taken away from us by nefarious forces.

Brooke Gladstone: You feel that we need more in-depth scholarship and reporting on the different constituent movements of American Christian nationalism. Why?

Matthew D. Taylor: Well, if we just assume that all Christian nationalists are the same, that they have the exact same motivations, the exact same worldview, we're going to miss all kinds of variation. To just give a concrete example, Catholic Christian nationalists are going to approach Christian nationalism through the Catholic tradition, potentially through the Catholic hierarchy. They're going to be persuadable with different arguments about the importance of pluralism, of separation of religion and state than Protestants. There's all kinds of different forms of Protestantism that have different approaches to Christian nationalism.

Brooke Gladstone: Are they less persuadable?

Matthew D. Taylor: No. It's just going to require different arguments. For the Christian nationalists and Christian supremacists for whom theology is driving that, we need to have an intra-Christian dialogue about the theological ideas that are giving rise to some of these sentiments. Because for many Christians in America, it is a part of their piety. It's not something simply that you can make a political argument and persuade them to think differently.

It requires theological conversation. We need, I think, to come to a greater level of awareness of what the subspecies of American Christian nationalism are, and what are arguments that might be more persuasive, to some of these folks, to bring them into the coalition of American pluralism of an America that is protective of everyone's religious rights.

Brooke Gladstone: We need to pay attention to the media worlds of the most extreme and influential Christian supremacists.

Matthew D. Taylor: Absolutely. Sometimes connected to the right-wing media ecosystems that we're aware of places like Fox News. Some of these Christian media ecosystems and niche cultures are not being paid close attention to by the mainstream media. You wouldn't even think to. Yet there are millions of people following them, some of the most radicalizing media spaces, especially charismatic Christian media spaces where Trump support is assumed.

I think we also need to be paying attention to the Christian leaders who helped instigate January 6th. We have paid close attention to the politicians who did that to the activists, and white nationalists, and conspiracy theorists who've done that. We have not paid close attention to the Christian leaders who were as instrumental in what occurred on January 6 as some of the politicians and activists that we know by name.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, more from Matthew D. Taylor on the self-proclaimed prophets preaching Christian supremacy. This is On the Media. This Is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone continuing my conversation with scholar Matthew D. Taylor from earlier this year. Next, we turn to a community where the most extreme form of Christian supremacy has taken root.

Matthew D. Taylor: There's a new form of deeply politicized, independent, charismatic spirituality that has just taken hold in the Trump era and has become in many ways the pulsating heart of Christian Trumpism.

Brooke Gladstone: "If follow the money is a good journalistic dictum," Taylor says, "Follow the theology is a better guide here. Charismatic Christians believe in revival, a miraculous, unpredictable outpouring of God that ignites people's faith." It's a community of faith Taylor has studied and lived.

Matthew D. Taylor: I grew up evangel. I have many charismatic experiences myself belong to charismatic churches. There's really a beauty to people finding ways of expressing Christianity that is exciting and dynamic.

Brooke Gladstone: Most forms of Protestantism in the US regulate themselves by branching off into denominations with their own rules and hierarchies. An independent branch of charismatic Christians have opted out of that model. Among them, for example, is a movement that calls itself the New Apostolic Reformation.

Matthew D. Taylor: Because it's non-denominational, there aren't overarching institutions. What holds it together is media. Part of what happens in 1960s is you had a series of these Pentecostal healing revivals that really activated that Pentecostal charismatic world, and really alienated them in some ways from mainstream media that they felt was not covering these miraculous occurrences. You started to see the emergence of charismatic media.

One of the movements that comes out of that is called the Word of Faith Movement in the 1950s. Word of Faith is what often gets talked about as the prosperity gospel. This idea of health and wealth being a marker of piety or of God's blessing and favor on a person.

Brooke Gladstone: This is Trump's favorite. It means you wouldn't be rich if you weren't good.

Matthew D. Taylor: If you think back, respectable evangelicalism didn't want anything to do with Donald Trump because he was vulgar. He's this real estate playboy. The evangelical grassroots loved Trump. You can find surveys from even July of 2015 where he is the leading candidate for American Evangelicals. You have to remember that within about a week of Donald Trump declaring his candidacy for presidency, the Obergefell Supreme Court decision came down allowing gay marriage across the country.

For conservative evangelicals in America that felt catastrophic. Donald Trump comes on the scene and he starts saying, "I'm going to fight. I'm going to disrupt the system." Many evangelicals were attracted to that. Trump turns to his religious advisor, Paula White, and says, "I want to start meeting with evangelical leaders." She doesn't know James Dobson. She doesn't know the mainstream evangelicals. Paula White came up in the independent charismatic media world.

She's a megachurch pastor and a televangelist. She starts bringing in to meet with Trump, the people that she knows. She's bringing in prophets, messianic, rabbis, apostles and televangelists. They have a series of meetings in the fall of 2015 at Trump Tower. This is where you start seeing this genre of photos emerge of leaders gathered around Donald Trump praying over him, laying hands on him, prophesying over him. Those folks get into the ground floor of the Trump campaign.

Brooke Gladstone: They have their own media.

Matthew D. Taylor: Well, the major outlet or the major empire of the independent charismatic world is called Charisma News. They have Charisma magazine. They have a podcasting empire. It is run by a man named Steven Strang, who is in many ways the Rupert Murdoch of the independent charismatic world. This is a niche media, not something that most Americans would ever touch. For the millions of Christians who are listening to this media, it has become a really dominant influence for them.

Brooke Gladstone: Charisma News, the news in that title is about new prophecies, right?

Matthew D. Taylor: You'll find articles talking about scandals that Christian leaders have gotten into those sorts of things. Then Charisma News will often write about a new prophecy and not in a skeptical way, but presented as well, "Isn't this amazing?"

Jack Hibbs: When praying about 2024, here's a couple things the Lord showed me. Number one, that there's going to be war in 24. Number two, there will be turmoil in 24. Number three, those who were prepared for those two things will flourish. Those who are unprepared will flounder.

Matthew D. Taylor: The charismatic prophets are always kind of jockeying for position to share their prophecies. One of the most interesting of these prophecies emerged in 2015. One of these charismatic prophets named Jeremiah Johnson goes on Charisma News, publishes a prophecy, and he says that Donald Trump is like the Persian emperor in the Bible.

Jeremiah Johnson: I saw Donald Trump and the spirit of God began to speak to me about Cyrus, how just as the Lord raised up Cyrus to fulfill his purposes, that he would raise up Trump to fulfill his purposes prior to the 2016 election.

Matthew D. Taylor: This becomes one of the central ways that charismatics attach themselves to Trump. Many other prophets echo this or amplify this. Part of what happens in this world is prophecies move around like memes. They introduce new images, they introduce new ideas, and then other prophets pick those up and play with them.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's jump to the 2020 election or just before it. There's a formidable new branch of charismatic media emerging. Kenneth Copeland is a televangelist and a Trump advisor, and he created a YouTube show called FlashPoint.

Matthew D. Taylor: Kenneth Copeland is one of the old lions of the televangelism world.

Kenneth Copeland: --who you are in Christ. You tell me you're a believer, you tell me you're strong, you tell me you've been made the righteousness of God in Christ. You tell me you are anointed, you tell me. I said, "Okay, here we go."

Brooke Gladstone: A celebrity?

Matthew D. Taylor: Absolutely. I mean, he is an A-list celebrity.

Presenter 1: Televangelist Kenneth Copeland recently bought a $36 million Gulfstream V Jet.

Kenneth Copeland: The world is in such a shape, we can't get there without this.

Brooke Gladstone: FlashPoint launched right before the election, and Copeland apparently really wanted to affect the 2020 election. The concept of the show is it's a panel of commentators, similar to what you would see on CNN or on Fox News. Except they're all either pros or they are propagators of prophecy.

Matthew D. Taylor: It went from 56,000 views when FlashPoint launched in September 2020 to 152,000 views in October. Then in November, 1.4 million views. In December 6.1 million views. By January 2021, the month of the insurrection, 32.4 million views on YouTube.

Brooke Gladstone: As somebody who has dug deeply into the social media profiles of the Christians who were there on January 6 to protest and sometimes to riot, and some of whom went into the Capitol itself. FlashPoint was everywhere. It was telling Christians, "You need to believe these prophecies. Donald Trump is the rightly elected president, and it's only because of witchcraft and demonic conspiracies that he is not being put back in office. We need to be there on January 6th."

Male 1: When the majority of true Americans want honesty and integrity, and we did not get that in this election. We are going to fight for this nation like those warriors did, because we don't want the light to go out in this nation. We don't have time. Not one day in office with Biden would be good.

Kenneth Copeland: Amen.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that Charismatic media was one of the most powerful incubators for mobilization for January 6th, and no one was watching it. If you had, you said, we would've known it was coming.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: In 2013, Dutch Sheets, who is a very important celebrity in the charismatic media world, he calls himself a spiritual warrior. He was given a white flag with a green pine tree on it. The phrase across the top of the flag is "An Appeal To Heaven." This was a Revolutionary war flag. The quote "An Appeal To Heaven" is a citation from the philosopher John Locke. A very popular phrase amongst the American founding fathers.

The idea that you make these appeals to unjust governments and you keep appealing and appealing and appealing, and at some point, you make an "Appeal to Heaven". In other words, you go to war and let God sort it out. Sheets believes that he receives a prophecy about the "Appeal to Heaven" flag, that it is a sign of a new American revolution, a new revolution in American spirituality. A new revival that is going to break forth when America becomes what God intends it to be.

He starts pushing this flag everywhere. It's become very, very popular in right-wing circles. At the same time as he's doing that, he also launches an app called Give Him 15. He launches it in the fall of 2015. As soon as the election in 2020 was called for Joe Biden, Dutch Sheets made a very important pivot with Give Him 15. He turned it into a YouTube show where he would record seven days a week telling these charismatic Christians, you need to be praying for Donald Trump.

You need to be doing spiritual warfare for Donald Trump. You need to believe these prophecies, and we cannot give up this fight. Some of these prophecies, these dreams, the one that he described on January 1st of 2021, so just five days before January 6th, was an image of Sheets and his fellow prophets and apostles riding on horses.

Dutch Sheets: We found ourselves in a field and could see out in front of us, the US Capitol building. As we sat looking at the building, we heard air sirens going off. These were like the air raid sirens you would hear in Old World War II movies. As the sirens were sounding, we saw a huge hand come down from the sky and take hold of the dome of the Capitol building.

Matthew D. Taylor: They see a demonic entity rise up out of the Capitol and be dispersed by the Holy Spirit. Sheets concludes that some in our Congress need to go. This is the propaganda that is driving Christians to show up on January 6 because they believe that they are following General Dutch Sheets.

Brooke Gladstone: You know that this had an impact how?

Matthew D. Taylor: If you look at the social media feeds of the people who showed up on January 6, many of them are referencing-- Give Him 15 are posting videos from Give Him 15. Then many of the people who show up on January 6 are also carrying these "Appeal to Heaven" flags that Dutch Sheets is the one who coined as a kind of right-wing Christian meme. They're referencing the prophecies that Sheets is referencing.

Tammy: Good morning. It is January 6th. We are Tammy and Kevin Martin, but today we are in Washington DC and we're praying and decree Dutch Sheets, Give Him 15.

Matthew D. Taylor: During the Capitol riot, Dutch Sheets himself was on a prayer conference call with 4,000 people praying for the success of these protests and riots and that it would bring about a transformation in American culture.

Dutch Sheets: Perhaps up to a million have gathered in Washington DC today to intercede on site outside the US Capitol building. Whether you are physically there or not pray today as if the life of our republic depends on it.

Matthew D. Taylor: Dutch sheets has really pushed this narrative that the "Appeal to Heaven" flag and this idea of a new prophetic American revolution and spiritual warfare to bring that about is going to transform the United States. You see Christian lawmakers appropriating this "Appeal to Heaven" flag, putting it on their desks in the state legislator, putting it on state Capitol buildings. In fact, the speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, flies an "Appeal to Heaven" flag outside of his congressional office, even to this day that he was given by some pastors who are associated with Dutch sheets.

Brooke Gladstone: In summing up the impact of outfits like Charisma, and FlashPoint, and the likes of Dutch sheets. You've suggested the term stochastic terrorism. What does that mean?

Matthew D. Taylor: Stochastic is a synonym for episodic and chaotic. It's the idea of something being likely, but unpredictable. This is an idea that has emerged in counter-terrorism circles to try to understand the phenomenon of what is popularly called in media, lone wolf attacks. The theory of stochastic terrorism is that those lone wolves are not actually lone wolves. They're often tied into networks and into ideological circles. They also are feeding off of polarization and hostility that exists in broader society.

Brooke Gladstone: Like what? Give me an example.

Matthew D. Taylor: Sure. For decades, republicans have demonized Nancy Pelosi and made her into an object of hatred. In fact, in the 2022 election cycle, Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, literally said, "Nancy Pelosi is a demon," at a political rally and got a standing ovation. Just a few months after that, this man breaks into Nancy Pelosi's home in California. She wasn't there, but her husband was, and he beat Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

When he was interviewed afterwards, he said that evil had infected our government through Nancy Pelosi. Now, can you draw a one-to-one correlation and say, "Well, he was inspired by Michael Flynn or by this other rhetoric? Well, no, but you can see the connective tissue between the way that he's thinking about the violence he's perpetrating and this ramped-up rhetoric of hostility.

Brooke Gladstone: You're saying it brings the paradigms of "holy war" into contact with American politics.

Matthew D. Taylor: Now, Paul Djupe is a sociologist at Denison University, and he's done a number of different surveys trying to track these beliefs in modern prophecy and how they correlate with people's political beliefs. Across these surveys, and there's other surveys including through the Public Religion Research Institute that have shown this as well. You see there's a radicalization premium that comes with belief in charismatic prophecy.

If you believe that prophets are speaking today, entering into politics, and are saying, "Well, God wants this candidate," or, "God is opposed to this party," that is a fuel for Christian radicalization. I know it sounds wild, but millions of people believe these prophecies. The prophets themselves, I've interviewed a number of them, they really believe that these are words from God. It's not just a form of propaganda or hucksterism for them.

Brooke Gladstone: If you believe that you can't compromise good and evil is a sharp dichotomy with no shades of gray

Matthew D. Taylor: Not just good and evil, but angelic and demonic. Abortion factors very centrally into this. They would say the other side is demonic and we are the side of righteousness crusading to bring about the kingdom of God. That is the rhetoric of holy war.

Brooke Gladstone: What then can possibly be the antidote to prophecy?

Matthew D. Taylor: I don't know that there's an antidote to prophecy. I think we need to spread the word about these circles of Christian supremacy, about their increasing influence, about the media that is perpetuating these narratives. I think we also need to be careful in our media portrayals, not to castigate all Christians, not to say that all Christians are the problem. In many ways, we need Christians to have the conversations that will maybe diffuse or defang some of this radicalization.

The independent charismatics are very good at getting people in the streets, at getting people to show up for protests. I don't see a scenario in which the 2024 election is not contested. In which these prophecies and these leaders are not involved again in a campaign to see Donald Trump put in office, and to in some ways dismantle the separation of church and state and the very foundations of our democracy. We all need to figure out what are our bright lines.

What would lead us to show up in the streets to protest and stand up for and defend democracy? I say this as a scholar, as an egghead, as somebody who would much prefer to sit in a library and read books. We're entering into a time in our politics where we need to be prepared to defend our democracy. Democratically do that peacefully, do that nonviolently, but do it with devotion.

Brooke Gladstone: Matt, thank you very much.

Matthew D. Taylor: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew D. Taylor is a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. He's the author of the book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Our Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Micah Loewinger will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

 

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