From Good News to Bad News, From Local Beginnings to National Impact

From Good News to Bad News,
From Local Beginnings to
National Impact

Talking Money, Lies, and God and
Going Inside the Movement to
Destroy American Democracy with
Author Katherine Stewart

By Brian Tanguay | March 27, 2025

Sixteen years ago, Katherine Stewart wondered why a fundamentalist Bible club was elbowing its way into Cold Spring Elementary School, where her child was a student. The Good News Club had been offered free space at the Montecito Covenant Church, so why was it trying to establish itself in a public elementary school? Curiosity coupled with a talent for meticulous and dogged research led Stewart to write an article for the Independent, “Reading, Writing, and Original Sin,” which appeared on May 7, 2009.

Little did she know that the article would launch a career, which to date has produced three books, including her latest, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, and firmly establish her as a leading chronicler of the Christian nationalist movement. In addition to her books, Stewart is a frequent contributor to national publications, including The New Republic, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic.

I interviewed Stewart, and reviewed her second book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, for the Independent in 2020, and I recently reviewed Money, Lies, and God for the California Review of Books. What follows are the questions and answers we recently exchanged. 

I went back and read the piece you published about the Good News Club in the Santa Barbara Independent in 2009. That was the beginning of an arc of research and writing that progressed from a local context to Christian nationalism and now to threats to American democracy itself. Is there a throughline in the three books you’ve written? In what ways has Christian nationalism changed since you began researching and reporting in 2009?  The movement has substantially grown in power and influence and made efforts to broaden its appeal. It is more overt in calling for an end to pluralistic democracy. Movement leaders used to feel they had to hide their belief that only Christians of a certain, reactionary type should dominate the key features of government and society, and that our laws should be based on their preferred interpretations of the Bible. Now, they are pretty open about it. At religious right conferences I have attended, speakers sneer at Christians who emphasize Jesus’s teachings of social justice, dismissing them as “woke heretics,” “false prophets,” and even “agents of Satan.”

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this movement is its spread of lies and bad-faith arguments. Many representatives of the movement have convinced themselves that any means justifies the end when it comes to achieving supposedly “Godly” rule. For that reason, they are funding and working with massive disinformation and propaganda operations, which I discuss in Money, Lies, and God. For example, ReAwaken America, a traveling MAGA conspiracy-fest, draws crowds of thousands to megachurches around the country, and that messaging is amplified through social media platforms and programming.

In the introduction to Money, Lies, and God, you note that Christian nationalism is a mindset that includes four basic dispositions: catastrophism; a persecution complex; identitarianism; and an authoritarian reflex. The idea that conservative Christians are the principal victims of discrimination seems to be a belief without much basis in fact — I’ve never witnessed or experienced such a thing — and yet the idea is obviously compelling. Where does it come from? Can you briefly describe how and where the idea is pushed out, publicized, talked about, and popularized?  These are the key talking points of most right-wing information operations at this point. These talking points show up, over and over, in Donald Trump’s speeches; they show up in the speeches of his boosters and surrogates and allied politicians; they show up on Fox News and Newsmax and on right-wing radio. They show up in particular in places where liberals are unlikely to hear them, which is from the pulpits of America’s conservative and Christian nationalist churches, at ReAwaken America tour stops, and at gatherings of pastor networks such as Faith Wins, Watchmen on the Wall, and the Courage Tour. They show up among networks that target certain populations and seek to bring them into the political fold, such as Asociación de Ministros Hispanos del Sur de la Florida. And, of course, these messages are replicated ad infinitum on social media.

It turns out you don’t have to persecute people in order to make them feel persecuted; you just have to tell them over and over again that their “values” are being maltreated and disrespected until they believe it.

The tactical effect of these messages is to clear the way for authoritarian leadership. The irony, of course, is that the MAGA movement has managed to persuade their voters that they represent “the people” — while some of the richest men in the world are funding the operation because what they are really after is economic policies that will increase their wealth.

This mindset is not just for the little people. If you listen to Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas, you’ll see they take many of their assumptions from this same set of ideas and talking points.

The term “religious liberty” seems innocuous on its own, like religious freedom, but as the term is used by the Christian right, it is not at all innocuous. Doesn’t their “liberty” result in the restriction or elimination of someone else’s liberty? Can you provide any examples of how this plays out in society?  True religious liberty is the freedom to worship any God or sacred idea — or none. It also includes the idea that you should not be compelled to worship or fund any particular religion if you don’t want to.

But in a genuinely Orwellian move, the religious right has come up with a definition of religious liberty that amounts to discrimination against people on the basis of religion. One great illustration is the very laws and cases that allow pharmacists to deny filling medication prescriptions to women if they feel it violates their own conscience. (It’s always worth noting who gets targeted in these cases; if pharmacists declined to fill Viagra prescriptions for unmarried men because it is intended for “sin,” men across the board would be howling — and rightfully so.) “Religious liberty,” in movement-aligned jurisprudence today, is almost exclusively for approved versions of reactionary religion, and it isn’t a freedom but a special privilege.

The more famous “religious liberty” cases that the legal and policy groups like to push often involve cake decorators and wedding calligraphers. These types of plaintiffs have been chosen to suggest that this is an issue that merely pertains to an easily substituted service. After all, if a baker doesn’t want to bake your gay wedding cake, why not go to the baker across the street?

But in fact, the end goal of these rulings is to entrench the privilege of a certain group, namely conservative Christians, to discriminate against and deny service — any service — to others of whom their religion disapproves.

It’s not just about weddings and frivolity; the consequences can be life-and-death. For instance, even in those states where abortion remains legal, Catholic hospitals have the privilege of denying best-practices reproductive care, including miscarriage management needed to save a woman’s life or preserve her health, if they have decided those services violate their own “ethical” directives — even though the hospitals, in some cases, operate in regions where there are few, if any, medical alternatives.

In states where abortion is effectively illegal, the consequences are devastating. Today in America, as studies out of Louisiana and Texas show, the rate of pregnancy-related injury and death is rising swiftly. But in Texas, lawmakers who backed abortion bans are also attempting to block the collection of data on adverse maternal outcomes because it appears they wish to prevent the American public from knowing how bad it is.

According to your reporting, the new Catholic right is more committed to an explicit political ideology than the traditional church hierarchy was, so much so that they’ve conflated their faith with economic libertarianism and Republican politics. This represents a significant political and cultural shift, doesn’t it? You describe some religious nationalists as being theocratic in a false sense. Can you explain what you mean?  Catholics are, as they like to say, the jump ball of American politics; they vote in nearly even numbers across the political spectrum. In the political schism among Catholics, it is important to take note of the effects of the abuse scandals that plagued the church, as well as the influence of wealthy members of the laity in shaping the ideology of ultraconservative Catholic think tanks and advocacy organizations. These donors have, in effect, created a parallel establishment to the official church. This group is far more economically well-off and engaged in these parachurch organizations than they have ever been, and they are facing a church that is much weaker than it ever has been. So that’s a crucial shift.

How do organized money and tax loopholes undermine the barrier between church and state?  We are pretty familiar now with the inadequacies of our campaign finance system and the role of dark money, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United. But perhaps the more significant and influential corruption of the democratic process is happening in broad daylight in the nation’s conservative houses of worship. The right wing of the Republican Party, in its present form, is the main beneficiary of a shadow political party that operates with little regulation and no transparency. It’s not just tax-free; it is tax-subsidized.

Recognizing that religious leaders are often the most trusted voices in their communities, leaders of the Christian nationalist movement have drawn large numbers of conservative religious leaders into networks such as Watchmen on the Wall and Faith Wins, and they work alongside supportive organizations such as Turning Point U.S.A. Faith and others. They know very well that if you can reach the pastors, you can reach large numbers of their congregants. So, they offer presentations, programs and materials, and sometimes free travel in an effort to get them on board with the larger agenda. Pastors and faith leaders are offered comprehensive toolkits for persuading congregants to support “biblical values” at the voting booth — and the “values” inevitably center on flashpoint culture war issues rather than concern for the poor, kindness, social equality, and others that are also viewed as “biblical” by many if not most Christians.

Funders of these networks are effectively buying influence in government. As we have seen with the Supreme Court, they have managed to get justices appointed who will arguably enable their economic objectives. But it isn’t really a coincidence that the same members of the Court are also keen to erode the barriers between church and state; these things tend to come as a package. The people intent on packing the Court know they need to please their base of supporters, and they do so under the cover of sanctimony.

Aside from organizations such as Americans United (for separation of church and state), who forms the opposition to the Christian nationalist agenda?  There is significant opposition, but it is scattered. This is the nature of the predicament. On the one hand, we have a unified force that wants to take over society and run it for their benefit. On the other, those who believe in democracy are all over the map and don’t form a natural union. In order for this to shift, we need alliance-builders and tent-builders. We need to be smarter about the development of infrastructure and voter outreach. We need funders, thinkers, strategists, and every other category necessary to build a viable movement.

To bring us full circle, do you have any thoughts regarding the current mood of the funders and sponsors of Good News Clubs? I imagine they’re riding high and full of confidence.  When I started my reporting, Good News Clubs were restricting themselves to public elementary schools, with materials targeting children that are too young to read. Now they are branching out into public middle schools, and the number of Good News Clubs in public schools overall has nearly tripled.

I’d like to add that while many people are disappointed by the consequences of the 2024 election, this is no time to retreat under the covers and suck our thumbs. It’s time for moral courage. If you want hope, consider that Trump won by only a slim margin. We have elections in 2026 and 2028; those of us who share democratic values should already be considering how better to turn out the base of voters who share their values and earn the trust of low-propensity voters. There are multiple avenues for engagement, and everyone has a role to play.