Katherine Stewart has spent more than fifteen years studying the U.S. right and has attended countless conferences, lectures, and meetings on topics ranging from ending legal abortion to promoting Christian nationalism in the public sphere.
Her eyewitness accounts are riveting, and her latest book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is a sobering assessment of the movement’s many twists and turns.
The book divides the principal players of the religious and secular right into five categories: Funders, Thinkers, Sergeants, Infantry, and Power Players. And while schisms exist between the different constituencies—and can perhaps be utilized by folks organizing against their racist, sexist, homophobic, and antidemocratic agendas—she cautions against assuming that the right will crumble under the weight of ideological disagreements.
Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
By Katherine Stewart
Bloomsbury Publishing, 352 pages
Release date: February 18, 2025
Instead, she urges us to take Christian nationalism seriously for the partisan political activism it promotes.
“The desired end of Christian nationalism today is neither to win a majority nor to secure a seat at the table in a pluralistic democracy,” she writes, “but to entrench minority rule under the facade of democracy.”
Moreover, she notes that the right is relying on an established four-step playbook that starts with the building of “an information bubble”—think Breitbart, Fox News, The Daily Signal, and Newsmax—to skew the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” of the information that reaches readers and viewers.
Step two, Stewart explains, requires the accentuation of imminent catastrophe: “The important thing to believe is that the end is nigh and that the bad guys always look like liberals,” she writes.
Next comes the transfer of “political legitimacy from democratic processes like elections and law enforcement mechanisms to higher authorities that allegedly represent the true spirit of the nation,” enshrining a small inner circle with the power to run almost everything.
The final step, she writes, is the relentless undermining of democracy by sowing distrust in elections, journalism, public education, public health, and the rule of law.
As November’s presidential election revealed, it’s an effective combination. Thanks to well-funded think tanks, reams of policy papers are created, circulated, and promoted by astroturf groups and rightwing media to create an echo chamber of coordinated messaging: Climate change is a hoax; Christians are being persecuted; abortion is murder; critical race theory will destroy society; Planned Parenthood is enemy number one; school vouchers will restore parental control over children’s education; LGBTQ+ people aim to destroy the nuclear family; mainstream Democrats are socialists and communists; immigrants will take your jobs; and restoring school prayer is imperative.
“Scholarly” groups have a heightened role in stoking rightwing fervor on these issues. Take the California-based Claremont Institute, for example. The virtually all-male organization publishes an online magazine, The American Mind, and Stewart reports that articles have advocated armed resistance: “Given the promise of tyranny,” one author in the journal writes, “conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd.”
The upshot, Stewart writes, is that well-funded groups like Claremont are working with others to “mobilize racial, gender, and sex-related anxieties in support of an authoritarian political project.” The goal, she concludes, is to “gather up the grievances and resentments that many people have concerning race, family arrangements, and sexual order, and then offer to crush their perceived malefactors with an iron fist.”
Donald Trump’s victory at the polls underscores this observation, at least for now, but Stewart does not believe the right’s dominance has to be long-lasting. As she sees it, if progressives can create and sustain multipronged educational, social welfare, and policy institutions and build broad-based coalitions to promote human and civil rights, then they will have the strong foundation needed to take on the right.
“The new American fascism is more a political pathology than a political program,” she writes. Knowing this may be the key to dismantling its appeal.
