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

Brooke Gladstone: Why is a presidential candidate hawking Bibles on the campaign trail. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone Gladstone. On this week's show as Trump hones his election pitch, scholars have noticed the emergence of 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: Plus, the hit movie Civil War in which the US is up in flames and the truth-teller is just another casualty.

Civil War film clip: They shoot journalists on site in the capitol. They literally see us as enemy combatants.

Zack Beauchamp: The movie is using journalism as a lens to show you what happens when social trust breaks down completely.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

Announcer: Listener-supported WNYC Studios.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Micah Loewinger is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone Gladstone. Not long-ago Trump tried out a new campaign slogan.

Former Former President Trump: We must make America pray again, pray, get educated, get motivated, and stand with me and the legions of Americans asking God to bless our great nation, to bring our great nation back.

Brooke Gladstone: For only $59.99.

Former President 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, and his sales pitch is all of a piece with his religion-infused election pitch as in this video he shared with his followers.

Trump video clip: On June 14th, 1946, God looked down on His planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker," so God gave us Trump. "I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith."

Brooke Gladstone: In February, Trump added a frisson to a message directed at Christian media.

Former President Trump: This time, the greatest threat is not from the outside of our country. I really believe this. It's from within. I'm here today because I know that to achieve victory in this fight, just like in the battles of the past, we still need the hand of our Lord and the grace of Almighty God.

Brooke Gladstone: Many scholars and journalists describe Trump and his supporters as Christian nationalists. The term is omnipresent now, even more so in the campaign runup.

News clip: In recent years, white Christian nationalists have increasingly tried to politicize and weaponize their beliefs against people.

News clip: While it is linked to Christianity, its focus is much broader with a goal of tearing down the wall between church and state.

News clip: Not only that, these folks argue the wall was actually never supposed to be there in the first place.

Brooke Gladstone: It's a term embraced by far-right crusaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: We need to be the party of nationalism. I'm a Christian and I say 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. That is not how our founding fathers intended it. I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk.

Brooke Gladstone: Others reject the term saying it allows Christianity's enemies to conceal their real intentions. Here's Tucker Carlson just this week.

Tucker Carlson: The main thing Biden is going to run against is Christianity. Of course, you're not going to say, "I'm running against Christianity," the world's largest religion, you're going to say, "I'm running against something called Christian nationalism," which was a way of making traditional Christianity seem like a threat to the country rather than the principle upon which it was founded.

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 months ahead. 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 this 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 different 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, but 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'd 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, so 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 nationals 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 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 and in the north that led to a lot of highest 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, and 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

At 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, and 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. They're very much 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 are experiencing right now, and 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, and 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, and 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, and 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, and this is what we see in part on January 6th. The rhetoric that fueled the Christian nationalism we saw on January 6th 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 If we just assume that all Christian nationalists are the same, 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, and they're going to be persuadable with different arguments about the importance of pluralism, of separation of religion and state than Protestants, and 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: So, 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, but 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, and 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, and 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 6th as some of the politicians and activists that we know by name.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, 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 Gladstone in conversation with scholar Matthew D. Taylor about how Christian nationalism shapes American politics. 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 Taylor has studied and lived.

Matthew D. Taylor I grew up evangelical. I had 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, but 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, but what holds it together is media. Part of what happens in the 1950s, 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 like was not covering these miraculous occurrences, and so 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, and 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, but 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 mega church 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 in at 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 Stephen 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, but for the millions of Christians who are listening to this media, it has become a really dominant influence for them.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. 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, but then Charisma News will often write about a new prophecy, and not in a skeptical way, but present it as, "Well, isn't this amazing?"

News clip: When praying about 2024, here's a couple of 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 are prepared for those two things will flourish. Those who are unprepared will flounder.

Matthew D. Taylor The charismatic prophets are always 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: Tell me 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're anointed. You tell me. I said, "Okay, here we go."

Brooke Gladstone: A celebrity?

Matthew D. Taylor Absolutely. He is an A-list celebrity.

News clip: Televangelist Kenneth Copeland recently bought a $36 million Gulfstream five 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 are all either prophets 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 6th to protest and sometimes to riot, and some of whom went into the capital itself, FlashPoint was everywhere. It was telling Christians, "You need to believe these prophecy. 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, and we need to be there on January 6th."

News clip: 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.

News clip: 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, but if you had, you said we would have known it was coming.

Matthew D. Taylor In 2013, Dutch Sheets, who is a very important celebrity in the Charismatic Media world, because he serves himself as 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 the unjust governments, and you keep appealing and appealing and appealing. 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 6th 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 6th, many of them are referencing Give Him 15 or posting videos from Give Him 15. Then many of the people who show up on January 6th are also carrying these appeal to heaven flags that Dutch Sheets is the one who coined as a right-wing Christian meme. They're referencing the prophecies that Sheets is referencing.

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

Matthew D. Taylor During the capital 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: 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, but 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 transformer 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? 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 Yes. 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 is 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 and 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 and 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 defanging 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 and 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 and do that 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, and he is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.

[music]

Coming up a new cinematic Civil War. This is On The Media.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone Gladstone. As of this writing the top box office movie in America is Civil War, a riveting and reverberating depiction of an America where civilizing norms have all been breached, drenching the nation in blood and anarchy.

Civil War film clip: 19 states have seceded.

Civil War film clip: The United States Army ramps up activity.

Civil War film clip: The White House issued warnings to the Western forces, as well as the Florida Alliance.

Civil War film clip: The return president assures the uprising will be dealt with swiftly.

Brooke Gladstone: The protagonists of this story are journalists and elderly New York Times guy portrayed by the trustee Steven McKinley Henderson, the novice photographer played by Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura as the Hop to Trott Reuters reporter, and as the veteran photojournalist the film's Beating Heart, Kirsten Dunst. All on a perilous road trip to interview the president who's shut down the FBI, ordered reporters shot on site, and has played by Nick Offerman with Trumpian Bombast delivers obvious lies about impending victory.

Nick Offerman: Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind. Some are calling it already. We are closer than we have ever been to victory. Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns.

Brooke Gladstone: This Civil War directed by Alex Garland does not directly speak to the one looming in the back of many American minds.

Zack Beauchamp: Based on the marketing a lot of people expected this to be a very different movie than it ended up being. It seemed like from the trailers, from the way that people talked, even from some interviews the director did, that this was going to be a movie that was about the crack up of the United States. What happened to cause this country to fall apart? It's profoundly disinterested in that. In fact, it barely even gives hints as to how the US fell apart.

Brooke Gladstone: It's an exploration of chaos, right?

Zack Beauchamp: Yes. There's one scene that really hammers this home. The journalists, they're on the road. They encounter a roadblock. They go through, and their marked press van and a sniper fires on them. They immediately pull over. They jump out of the car and take shelter next to two other soldiers who are hunting the sniper. They ask them,

Civil War film clip: Are you who's giving you orders?

Zack Beauchamp: The people they're sitting next to look at them like they're crazy.

Civil War film clip: No one's giving us orders, man. Someone's trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them.

Zack Beauchamp: The political allegiances with these soldiers couldn't matter less. What matters is that they're in a life-or-death struggle and they would like to live. That's, I think, much more what the movie is trying to show you what it means to live in a world like that than to explore the nature of American political polarization.

Brooke Gladstone: At the beginning, the journalists outlined their plans to drive to DC and a veteran reporter at what's left of the New York Times says,

Civil War film clip: They shoot journalists on site in the Capitol. They literally see us as enemy combatants.

Zack Beauchamp: It forces you to contemplate that you're living in an alternative world where everything we understand about the United States. Where the faith in institutions like the media and the media is a really important social institution. The faith that once existed in those institutions has collapsed. The movie, it is interested in what it means to be a journalist, but I think it's also using journalism as a lens to show you what happens when social trust breaks down completely. At the very beginning of the film, there's what looks a lot like a riot to get access to provisions in New York City. The police are brutal. People don't trust the food system, they don't trust the police, they don't trust the journalists. The power in New York is constantly flickering. The entire thing is broke down.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about the scene that steals the show, and that's Jesse Flemming as a psychotic soldier. I assume he's against the government. It isn't altogether clear, but the way that he treats the journalists certainly illustrates what happens when constraints are removed.

Civil War film clip: We are American journalists.

You told me that already.

Okay. We work for Reuters.

Reuters doesn't sound American.

It's a news agency.

I know what Reuters is.

Sir. Okay, I'm just saying.

Just saying just what?

We're American. Okay?

Zack Beauchamp: In the trailer, he says, this line.

Civil War film clip: What kind of American are you?

Zack Beauchamp: In response to a journal saying, we're Americans. The trailer makes you think, he's trying to figure out whether they're fighting for the enemy side or they're citizens of the wrong faction in the Civil War. Not true. What he's actually asking them is whether or not they are American citizens, and whether they're from a state that he finds acceptable because he executes foreign journalists in that scene, and he's very close to executing one of the main characters who's Latino before he finds out he's from Florida and decides that that's basically acceptable.

By the way, while saying all of these things and interrogating the journalists at gunpoint, he's standing next to a mass grave, an entire small town that he and his compatriots have massacred. The terror at being subject to the whims of a man in arms like that is one that a lot of foreign or correspondents are intimately familiar with. This guy's clearly a bigot, probably a sadist too. He gets to do that, and there's no sense that anyone will hold him accountable, and you suggest that he's fighting against the government, but honestly, I have no idea.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't have any idea either.

Zack Beauchamp: I think it's really important to the film that you don't have any idea. The point is, none of it matters. Even the rules that soldiers are supposed to abide by have broken down entirely, and this is just a place where massacres are a thing that happens. That's what life is like in the context of social collapse.

Brooke Gladstone: Talk about sadism. That scene with Clemens reminds me of a line from a Vulture Review critic Bilge Ebiri wrote about the draw of American disaster films, how viewers adore a naughty fantasy of watching our monuments getting blown up. Americans cheered sometimes when the aliens blew up the White House on Independence Day, but he wrote the quote, "No real monuments get blown up real good in this one. The spectacle this time is coyer, but somehow all consuming. What's being incinerated in Civil War is the American idea itself."

Zack Beauchamp: One way to think about the movie is that if you don't buy into this notion, this is a movie that's about Trump or about what is happening right now in the United States. Instead, you think about it as a thought experiment. What if post 2003 Iraq had happened in the United States? What would American life be like in a world where the government had been overthrown functionally, and a variety of different competing factions were vying for power?

What does that mean for an ordinary citizen? What would it mean for someone like you? The Americana, the flags, the overpasses, the strip malls are much more important here than the battle that takes place near the Lincoln Memorial because they help it feel like it's happening in your everyday life. It helps Americans connect to things that happen right now in other places.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote about the film channeling modern academic research work like Oxford Professor Stathis Kalyvas's The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars. His book argues that most people "overestimate the degree to which patterns of violence in civil wars are driven by ideology or emotions run amok." What does he say about the way violence plays out in civil wars?

Zack Beauchamp: You have to understand that most research on civil wars tends to focus on why they start or how the different major actors choose their strategies. That's not what Kalyvas is doing. What he's trying to understand is how individual soldiers, units, civilians, decide to use force. The patterns of violence are determined in large part by perceptions of who has control. If you feel like the government has a lot of control in your area, then you're much more likely to become an informer than you are in a world where informing to the government on insurgents can get you killed. That reciprocal relationship between the different military forces at play and the behavior of the civilians reshapes how people choose to fight

Brooke Gladstone: On the basis of what will enable them to survive.

Zack Beauchamp: His point is that people think that violence and civil wars is primarily about someone getting really angry or really hurt and then killing somebody else in a fit of rage, or that it's all driven by people's belief in a particular worldview, and that's just not it. It's not the entirety of the picture, it's just that people are very often making calculations about what they need to do to get through the chaos and the devastation that's inherent to a civil war.

Brooke Gladstone: In the Atlantic, the director Garland said he wanted to make the journalists heroes. He was concerned about how the idea of neutrality is delegitimized by attacks on the press, and he wanted to show them providing a vital service, and yet the veteran photojournalist played by Kirsten Dunst says,

Kirsten Dunst: Every time I survived a war song and got the photo, I thought I was sending a warning home. Don't do this, but here we are.

Zack Beauchamp: That's, at least from the director's perspective, what he thinks neutral journalism does, telling people and informing the public to make their own judgment about how bad this is and what needs to be done to avoid it. It's a thesis statement for the whole film. Not just about journalism, but in general, civil wars are really, really, really, really awful. Stop throwing around loose talk about fighting one as so many Americans seem fond of doing.

Think seriously about what it is that you're talking about, but I also think there's a simpler way to think about it. Alex Garland likes us journalists. He thinks that we do something important, and he wants other people to think that too, so that's why all the sympathetic characters are journalists, although there are times where they're quite fallible.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. You say that they are not perfect protagonists. How so?

Zack Beauchamp: Well, the print journalist of the four, he clearly seems to get a erotic thrill from writing about and witnessing violence. He explicitly says it.

Brooke Gladstone: The baby journalist, the one who hitches a ride with the veterans, is crawling out of that pile of bodies, that mass grave, and it almost seems like she's going to go into shock. Later she says,

Cailee Spaeny: I've never been scared like that before, and I've never felt more alive.

Zack Beauchamp: That's a real thing. A lot of war correspondence, they get this rush. There's truth to that. It also doesn't make them bad people, and Kristen Dunst plays Lee, the most famous of the journalists, and the movie charts the opposite course for her from someone who's steely and hardened and used to this kind of thing to someone who can't really function anymore because she's seen too much, lost too much, and that too is a real-world phenomenon.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you think is the principle message of Civil War?

Zack Beauchamp: If it's not too simple, it's that war is bad. It reminds me of this idea in classical just war theory, the basic starting point for just war theory is that because war necessarily involves killing, the presumption is that you should not go to war. You need to have a compelling reason to think that the world will be better after you fight. That's as good as any a way of understanding Civil War's basic starting point. The thing that you should take away from it before anything else is that all of this is bad, and we should do whatever we can to avoid it.

Brooke Gladstone: You know what this movie reminded me most of?

Zack Beauchamp: What?

Brooke Gladstone: This past year's Academy Award-winning foreign film 20 Days in Mariupol. Did you see that?

Zack Beauchamp: I haven't.

Brooke Gladstone: It follows reporters in Mariupol amidst the most astonishing kind of chaos, real life chaos, real dead kids, piles of dead people, pregnant women blown up. I had a weirdly similar feeling of being battered in both cases, and in both cases, the impact stayed with me longer than most films do. Although it was longer for 20 Days in Mariupol because you really felt like you were there for days and when it was over, you felt like you were betraying the people in the film by leaving.

Zack Beauchamp: I think battered is a really good way of describing the experience of watching Civil War. One thing I thought at the time is that it was a really loud movie. The gunfire felt unusually jarring. There were times when I was watching it that I'd jump a little bit in my seat. Turns out it was unusually loud even for the way that direct violence is often emphasized in films today. That to me felt like an essential part of giving you that experience, of making you feel like you're in the midst of this horrific, horrific, horrific violence. It's not just that you see bloody corpses, it's not just that you see atrocities being perpetrated.

Brooke Gladstone: For a while, at the very beginning, I was afraid I was in for a film about violence porn.

Zack Beauchamp: But it's not.

Brooke Gladstone: I was soon disabused of that.

Zack Beauchamp: No, no, no, no, no, no. The bloodiness is not for enjoyment. The bloodiness is for viscerality. In the way that the movie about Mariupol did feel the weight of conflict and the weight of war, Civil War is, I think by using American iconography, helping American audiences empathize with that more, and maybe even some foreign audiences too. American national symbols are the most recognizable in the world. Everyone is familiar with things like New York City and Washington DC and seeing those falling apart, it might help it connect in a way that a country they don't know as much about might not.

Brooke Gladstone: Zach, thank you very much.

Zack Beauchamp: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox where he covers the crisis of global democracy.

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On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang. Our engineers this week were Brendan Dalton and Shana Seng Stock. Katia Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC studios. Micah Loewinger will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone Gladstone.

 

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