Janae Pierre: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Janae Pierre in from Melissa Harris-Perry.

The events of January 6th, 2021 were deeply unsettling from many Americans watching extremists pour over the Capitol plaza, climb its outer walls, and roam the halls of the building, looking for politicians to harm. The date produced images we as a nation will not soon forget.

Brad Onishi: The image that plagues me still is a panoramic shot in which the Trump, Christian, Gatson, and Confederate flags all fly in a row. If you didn't know better, you'd think that the rioters had replaced old glory with a new set of flags representing their new nation and its political leader/religious figurehead. My name's Brad Onishi. I am faculty at the University of San Francisco and author of the Newly released Preparing for War: The extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next.

Janae Pierre: Brad is a professor of religious studies and a former evangelical Christian. His experiences of conversion and deconversion colored the way he understood the insurrection. MHP spoke with him about it.

Brad Onishi: Later that night, as people across the globe began digesting the horrific reports and graphic videos from an armed insurrection, one thought kept looping through my mind. I could have been there. I am haunted by that question. I converted to evangelicalism when I was 14 in a church that in my mind is a white Christian nationalist church, or at least has tropes and emphases that lean in that direction.

If I had converted in 2016 or 2018, not in the late 90s when I was a teenager, would I have been brought into a church that not only talked about Christ and taking back American culture through prayer and revival but one that was chock full of rhetoric surrounding conspiracy and QAnon? The idea that the election and the country had been stolen from real Americans and real patriots. If I had been brought in to that context with the amount of zeal that I had as a teenager, I was somebody who went from a non-religious household to being a full-time minister by the time I was 20, getting ready to start seminary when I was 21.

If someone with that zeal for their faith in their church is brought into a context that is full of those kinds of components that include conspiracy and spiritual warfare rhetoric, and the need to bloody our swords in order to get the country back, maybe there would've been a man who said, Brad, I bought you a plane ticket. We're going to DC. I don't know what I would've said, but I think there's a chance.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you talk a little bit about, because there's a lot of critique here and we're going to get into it, but what parts of that religious story have you carried with you?

Brad Onishi: When I got invited to church, all of a sudden there were two things in my life automatically. One was a community. I had different colored hair and I dressed like a punk and was very into counterculture stuff, and I was welcomed. That was an incredible feeling coupled with existential answers to every question of the human condition. None of the long division is required. You're given an answer as to why you're here, why the universe is here, what's going to happen when you die. What's the point of being a good person?

There's a sense there of becoming, as my friend says, addicted to certainty. What I've carried with me is the realization that form of community and being enveloped is really hard to find elsewhere, and many of us are struggling to find it, and it reminds me when I'm frustrated or anxious or disappointed in things that are happening in my community or country. It reminds me of why people sometimes are willing to join.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: You write that ''Becoming an evangelical actually made me more white.'' Talk to me about the connection between whiteness and this addiction to certainty.

Brad Onishi: I'm a mixed-race person. I grew up in a predominantly white part of Southern California, and the church I joined was 85% to 90% white. What I learned very quickly, it was totally okay for people of color to be there. They just did not need to bring in to the community issues related to being people of color. There was really no room for conversations surrounding systemic issues surrounding race or school segregation or discrimination. What I learned is that if I backgrounded my Asian American identity, then it would not be an issue.

If it ever did come into the room, I could make a joke or I could find a way to whisk it away quickly. Over time, I came to see my Japanese American family with all of its rituals and all of its food and all of its practices, and traditions as other from my Christianity. What I didn't understand until much later is that the Christianity that I had thrown myself headlong into carried with cultural norms and an ethos that really invited me to see that part of myself as an othered part that really was not essential and actually might be dangerous because those weren't Christian contexts.

They weren't Christian practices, they weren't Christian symbols. It took me a long time after I left the community to reckon with that internalized racism and self-hatred. It's an ongoing process.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: We've walked through at least some of your experience. Let's make that the broader national history for me. What fits in our American notions of who we are that somehow dovetails so beautifully with this story given to us by this version of Christianity?

Brad Onishi: It provides you a story to tell about yourself that is very straightforward. It gives you a role to play in an American and in a cosmic narrative that our chock full of the most existential significance, white Christian nationalism says very simply, this was a Christian nation founded by Christian people, and somewhere along the line, the city on a hill was taken over by interlopers and invaders. People who are not real Americans and don't deserve to be here. It's our job to restore the country to its faith and to its founding. If we don't do that quickly, the country may no longer exist.

That sense of apocalypse I think is really important to this story. When we're in a heightened sense of danger or a heightened sense of emergency, all the normal cares of planning for the future, and they can go out the window, and just as you can become addicted to certainty, you can become addicted to emergency because it puts you in a place where everything is immediate and right now, and it gives you something to fight for every day. The sense that apocalypse is coming also flattens the story because your goal is not to respect your political opponent. You just have to turn them into an enemy that you have to conquer. Your goal is not to have to listen, it's simply to win.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: The title Preparing for War. Is this the war that you're talking about here?

Brad Onishi: It is. One of the things that I maintain in the book is that from 1964 to the present, there has been a mindset of war among white Christian nationalists and their political allies. One of the stories that I begin with historically is the nomination of Bear Goldwater to the Republican candidacy for president. In 1964, he stood up in San Francisco and very famously or infamously said, ''Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,'' and essentially encouraged his fellow Republicans to think of extremism as the mode that they needed to act in at a time when the civil rights movement was brewing.

My argument would be that war to restore America to a white Christian patriarchy never stopped. Unfortunately, in the last six years, it has really accelerated to a place where we arrived two years ago at an insurrection.

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Janae Pierre: In parts of the country, that vision has already become a reality. That's next on The Takeaway. It's The Takeaway. I'm Janae Pierre in for Melissa Harris-Perry. Let's continue now with Melissa's conversation with Professor Brad Onishi about his new book, Preparing For War: the Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism, and What Comes Next.

Brad Onishi: In the 15 years between 1964 and 1980, something really important happens. Bear Goldwater loses in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson, but the foot soldiers in his campaign, they don't give up and they don't forget, and they're determined to put into place what I take to be Goldwater's extremist approach to governance and libertarianism. They eventually join forces with figures that are familiar to some of us, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and Tim Lahaye, and other members of what's known as the religious right and eventually the moral majority.

The marriage of those two, these extreme right-wing political operatives and overwhelmingly influential religious leaders leads to the strange moment in history where those folks are doing everything they can to get Jimmy Carter out of the White House. Now, Jimmy Carter is like made in a lab when it comes to being a white Christian president. He is a Southern Baptist, marries his high school sweetheart, he's a military officer. When his dady dies, he returns home and he takes over the peanut farm. What more could you ask for? Well, he put a lot of women and people of color on the federal judiciary.

He was not openly opposed in their view to things like abortion or to representation for gay families and queer people in general. They do everything they can to vote for Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor who's divorced, who supported abortion in some sense in California as governor, who had a very shaky relationship with his older children, and whose wife Nancy was known to have astrologist follow her in the White House at times, and certainly, not evangelical preachers. This moment of history shows us that the goal was power, not piety.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, I was going to say, if you took out the peanut farmer the story of Joe Biden versus the story of former President Trump, it does feel like it has some of these similar asymmetries.

Brad Onishi: By the time we got to 2016, white Christian nationalists were a little bit exhausted thinking that rallies and revivals, that a Christian president like they thought they had in George W. Bush, would lead them to what they took to be their promised land and making the country what it should be. They want someone who's willing to be brutal. They don't want Mike Huckabee or a Marco Rubio. They don't want a pastor. They don't even really want a Christian because there's a chance a Christian might be held back by the desire to be a Christian man, so to have a messianic figure who is not one of you may actually be the best way to get what you want.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: In the book, you not only give us a history but as the subtitle tells us, you suggest to us what might be coming next. What is the American Redoubt?

Brad Onishi: The American Redoubt is a movement that began about a decade ago, that really signifies Idaho Wyoming and Montana Eastern, Washington and Eastern Oregon. In 2011, the writer and survivalist James Wesley Rawles dubbed that region the American Redoubt because redoubt means refuge or stronghold.

He said this is the last part of the country where we can gather and we can create a Christian separatist society and prepare for the collapse of the United States as we know it, the coming civil war, and the opportunity to rebuild the nation in our own image. I know that those stories sound fringe and they sound somewhat on the extreme edges but Rawles is enormously influential. He's written bestselling books. He's published by big New York publishing houses. He has a website that gets 300,000 or more hits each week from individuals.

This has created a whole movement. There are now Redoubt realtors who help people move from California and Washington. In 2018, 80,000 Californians left the state for Idaho alone. Political scientists in Idaho at Boise State have studied the effects of so many folks moving from California, and instead of making the state more liberal as one might expect, they have actually pushed the state further to the right. This part of the country is one of the most racially homogeneous parts of the country.

If we take Idaho it is something like 93% white and so when Rawles calls for a Christian separatist movement, he's doing so in the context where 9 out of 10 people in the region where he is talking about are white. If you look at county-level politics in Northern Idaho and places like Coeur d’Alene, if you look at the migration patterns and the ways that mayoral races are going in places like Eagle, Idaho you can see the dramatic effects that the Redoubt movement is having there.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you talk about Southern California?

Brad Onishi: Would love to. I think California is always seen as this liberal place on the coast. Where I grew up in Southern California is really in some sense the Bible Belt, Orange County, a well-known suburban offshoot from LA. If we do our history, we know that this is really the place for the John Birch Society, the grandfather of QAnon took root. It's a place where in the 50s there was a school of anti-communism with something like 30,000 people attending.

It's the place to Barry Goldwater campaigned and that really pushed him across the finish line when it came to his nomination in California where Ronald Reagan was spiritually at home in the middle 20th century. It was really a place that was a laboratory for cultivating this kind of politics in this kind of society. While it's changed now, it's become much more purple. It's become much more racially diverse and now, what's happening? Well, all of my former friends and colleagues from church and high school are moving to Idaho.

Not all of them are moving there to be part of an American Redoubt extremist movement, but when I tell them that that's there, they're still okay moving there.

They're still okay saying, 'Yes, my kids might go to school in those spaces and we might go to church with folks that are really into that, but I'd rather move there than somewhere else,'' and I think to me that's telling.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: What do you see as potential ways for engaging people who might as you pointed out even on January 6th like regular folks, streaming over the walls of the US Capitol in this misguided attempt to fight this war?

Brad Onishi: For me, there was a real sense at many turns in my journey that life could not be this simple. As I emerged from adolescence and into a young adulthood and I started to come into contact more and more with the overwhelming complexities of modern life and the human condition, there are always moments when you are going to have to try to cohere your religious worldview, your political worldview with the reality that you're living and you may have family members or friends, cousins, or colleagues who you care about, that have been drawn, have been seduced into certain spaces.

I think my encouragement would be that if you can have a safe relationship with them and have discussions to start with how they feel, ask them about why they're angry. Why they're anxious? They may give you answers that really are in your mind not correspondent to reality, not accurate. You can correct them if you'd like but my encouragement would be that if you start there, the conversation is really not going to lead to changed hearts and minds.

But if you allow them to tell you why they're hurt or they're angry, why they're afraid, maybe they'll let you do the same and then all of a sudden you'll be their cousin or their friend who is talking about being anxious and fearful and you might just be two human beings talking rather than in their minds two political enemies, or someone who's a godless heathen or a crazy liberal or whatever they've been told. In those moments of contact, those moments of, I think vulnerability and openness, those are the ways that we start to change our minds.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Brad Onishi is a faculty member at the University of San Francisco and co-host of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. His new book is," Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next". Thank you so much, Brad.

Brad Onishi: Thank you for having me and thank you for such wonderful questions.

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