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Nonfiction Views: Money, Lies, and God, by Katherine Stewart, plus the week's notable new nonfiction [1]
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Date: 2025-01-14
After the devastating electoral loss last November, the Democratic Party seems to be settling on a handful of explanations. One, given a recent notable push by James Carville, who re-ups his Bill Clinton-era “It’s the economy, stupid.” Inflation was hurting people, they weren’t seeing the benefits of the supposedly great economy they were being told was happening, and they punished the Democrats at the polls. Another popular explanation is based on cultural ideas: too many Americans were tired of being told what they should believe by those woke coastal elites, and so they punished the Democrats at the polls.
In her forthcoming book Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (February 18th and available for preorder), author Katherine Stewart makes a good case that all that is misdirection. The presumed voter anger over the economy and the culture wars is window-dressing disguising the real problem: money and greed. Specifically, a small group of self-interested very wealthy people who have decided it is in their economic interest to undermine democracy and who are actively working to make that happen.
It’s not that there does not exist true anxiety and anger among the 90% who have seen their share of national income shrink as massive wealth has flowed to the top over the past decades. But for the wealthy, this situation suits them just fine—they’ve got theirs and are getting more all the time—and even better, the anxiety and anger are great tools to use to distract and manipulate voters. A true democracy of voters is a threat to the wealthy, and a powerful subset of them are actively working to extinguish that threat. It is a movement that created Trump and his MAGA followers, but it is a movement that will outlast them as well, and. in the author’s words, “feast on the carcass of the Republican Party.”
A big part of this anti-democracy movement is rooted in the church. The author details the many far-right religious organizations that receive funds from wealthy backers. For example, Pepsi heir James B. Lindsey and his wife Joan Holt Lindsey, have through their James and Joan Lindsey Family Foundation have donated seven-figure sums every year to many Christian nationalist, climate denialist and other far-right entities. During the Biden presidency, they poured over one million dollars into a new organization, Faith Wins, which is dedicated to using pastors to make sure their congregations turned out to vote for Trump (often urging them to vote early to avoid having their vote stolen on Election Day.) Faith Wins is also dedicated to the anti-democratic movement, preaching the Big Lie of the stolen 2020 election and pushing voter suppression initiatives to protect “election integrity” against the assault of the godless left. Ms. Stewart writes: ”The desired end state of Christian nationalism today is neither to win a majority nor to secure a seat at the table in a pluralistic democracy but to entrench minority rule under the facade of democracy.”
These religious groups pound into the hearts and minds of their congregations the twin ideas that a) this is a cataclysmic battle against a demonic, evil godless liberalism that means to take control of the world, and b) that Christians are the victims of powerful persecution meant to drive them into the shadows.
It is important to add that, whatever their ultimate causes, both the catastrophism and the persecution complex find expressions more frequently in status or cultural anxieties that in economic anxieties. “Compared to cultural factors, economic factors were significantly less strong predictors of support for Trump in 2016, according to [Robert] Jones. “Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan tapped anxieties that were less about jobs and economic mobility but more about a deep sense of protecting a white Christian America from what they perceive to be a foreign and corrupting influence.”
The Robert Jones in the above quote is author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future and a founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), which has conducted recent studies showing that 85% of people who subscribe to Christian nationalist ideals believe that “discrimination against white people is at least as big a problem as discrimination against minorities,” and that three-quarters of Republicans and Trump voters believe the same about discrimination against Christians.
The book also shows that while protestant evangelical groups get a lot of the press in examinations of the religions right, the Catholic Church also plays a big role. American Catholics are split into two political blocks; in the 2020 election they split 52-48 for Biden. Catholicism itself has a split between the progressive wing that arose in the 1960s and advocates for economic and social justice, and an increasingly ultra-conservative wing. The biggest difference between the two ideas is the wealth of who backs them. There is not a lot of big funding behind the liberal wing, but there is enormous money behind the conservative wing, funding a widespread and powerful ecosystem of Christian nationalist organizations and media outlets.
The author points out that there are six Catholic Supreme Court Justices, and five of them have been groomed to power by the conservative power brokers. (Sotomayor is the one exception.) She details some of the beliefs espoused by one of Justice Gorsuch’s mentors, John Finnis, former professor of law and legal philosophy at both Oxford and Notre Dame Universities. Among the ideas Finnis has espoused are diatribes against homosexuality (comparing it to bestiality), non-marital intercourse, that there is “no important distinction in essential moral worthlessness” between masturbation and prostitution, and that even marital sex can be an abomination if it has “gone so far that one’s sex acts, even if they are in fact with one’s spouse, are a kind of adultery.”
Suffice it to say that throughout the book you will find profoundly misogynist beliefs among the Christian Nationalist right. The author points out that they have become so convinced of the rising primacy of the movement to take away the rights of women that some of its leaders have indeed begun to speak openly of taking away their right to vote.
But despite the supposed basis in religion of these groups, the wealthy who fund, direct and use them are not necessarily interested in religion. Many of these wealthy benefactors are agnostic, beholden solely to the church of money. Some may be true believers of this corrupted view of Christianity and morality, but more just see Christian Nationalism as a tool to sway the populace into accepting the undermining of democracy. If there is a ray of hope to be found in this, it is that these relationships between the groups and their wealthy backers are in many cases extreme marriages of convenience, and their inevitable warring among themselves may contain the seeds of their demise.
Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy delves into many other ecosystems of the far right, from the book-banning Moms for Liberty to the the creators of Project 2025. In all of them, author Katherine Stewart unveils the money hidden behind all of these supposedly homegrown moral enterprises, and the unified goal of the billionaire funders in shutting down are democratic freedom. It’s a solid, well-written book, filled with fascinating and horrifying characters, and is a vital resource in helping to fight back in the days ahead. In her final chapter, she admits that her “survey of antidemocratic reaction in the United States is bound to provoke alarm and perhaps a feeling of hopelessness.” Nevertheless, she tries to end on a hopeful note and to try and point the way to regaining our country.
Meeting the present challenge won’t be easy, and there is no guarantee of success. Still, those who hope for progress can take comfort in the knowledge that the facts are on our side. In this brief afterword, I want to draw attention to six principal findings reported in this book, and which should be of interest to a pro-democratic movement: We are the majority.
They are divided.
The separation of church ans state is a good idea—and we should try it.
Extreme levels of material inequality are eroding democracy
Knowledge is power.
Organization matters.
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