Anthea Butler: What I try to get people to understand is that with evangelicals and morality, it’s about power. It’s not about real morality. Morality is a shield to hide from the rest of the world that they really want power. There should be no surprise why evangelicals like Donald Trump, because they’re about the same thing: we want to take care of us, but we don’t want to take care of anybody else.

Alex Lovit: Here at The Kettering Foundation, we believe that in a true democracy, everyone has rights, everyone belongs. So one thing that’s pretty dangerous for democracy is a religious movement that’s both politicized and racialized, where people are convinced their own political cause has exclusive claim on truth and righteousness, where they question whether others who look and worship differently from them are fellow citizens at all.

My guest today says there’s a religious movement in America that’s pushing things in that direction, that doesn’t want all Americans to have equal rights or an equal say.

You’re listening to The Context, from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. It’s a show about the past, present, and future of democracy. I’m your host, Alex Lovit.

Today I’m speaking with Anthea Butler. Her most recent book is White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. Anthea is also the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, and she’s the recipient of the Martin Marty Award from the American Academy of Religion. And today, she’s going to tell us about evangelical Christianity, how it’s come to play such an outsized role in American politics, and what that means for our democracy.

Anthea Butler, welcome to The Context.

Anthea Butler: Thank you so much, Alex.

Alex Lovit: So we’re going to be talking about evangelical Christianity in the United States in this conversation, so to get started let me ask what I know is a deceptively difficult question: what is evangelicalism? What does that mean in the United States right now?

Anthea Butler: What it means in the United States right now is you’re a Trump supporter, but if you want a different version of that you can ask for the religious version. And in the theological definition, most people would say that an evangelical is somebody who believed in the Bebbington Quadrilateral—and I don’t want to bore anybody with that, but if you’re listening to the show you can go look it up, okay? It’s in my book.

And I think an evangelical nowadays is somebody who has conservative beliefs but also has a definite political alignment. The word evangelical right is very fungible, and the reason I say that is because the way that it’s been used by the press is to say these are mostly White voters. It replaced WASP in some kind of way. And, that evangelical sort of means a Republican person who is also a Christian who tends to vote a certain kind of way and has certain kind of moral beliefs.

Alex Lovit: So what you’re saying there, there’s a racial connotation to the term.

Anthea Butler: Yes.

Alex Lovit: And that’s a lot of what your work is about.

Anthea Butler: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: You’re talking about how the term is used in the press. Often in the press, those things are combined. The press will say 80 percent of White evangelicals voted for Trump, implying the existence of evangelicals that are non-White. Is there another version of evangelicalism in the United States?

Anthea Butler: Oh, absolutely, there are versions, period, just like there are evangelicals plural. So we could think about Black evangelicals, people sort of like Bill Pannell or Tom Skinner and others, you can think about Latino evangelicals, you can think about Asian-American evangelicals. There’s also more liberal on the spectrum evangelicals right now.

So I think the word evangelical, unfortunately, it’s not a theological definition anymore, it’s a cultural and political definition. And so I think that’s where the differentiation is, but that’s also where the confusion lies.

Alex Lovit: Another guest on the podcast was political scientist Hahrie Han, and she wrote a book about a White-majority evangelical megachurch that created what is essentially an antiracist DEI program. And she said that evangelicalism is becoming more of a political label, as you’ve just said, than a religious one. People, if they’re getting called on a phone by a pollster, even if they believe in all the faith tenets of evangelicalism, they might say no, that’s not me, because they think they’re being asked are they a Trump supporter. So do you think it is becoming more of a political label than a religious one?

Anthea Butler: Absolutely, but I’ll give you the other converse. In 2020, after the 2020 election when Trump lost, there were more people that called themselves evangelical because they voted for Trump, but they weren’t real evangelicals. They weren’t the Bebbington Quadrilateral, I go to the conservative church thing, all the stuff. They were more what I used to call—and I still stick by my terminology—NASCAR Christians. They stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance and anthem, they’re at NASCAR, they salute the flag, they’ve got a flag flying in front of their house. Do they go to church, no, but they would tell you they’re God-fearing and love Jesus and all that stuff, but they’re not going to church.

That’s also a group of people we have to contend with, because they’re not like the First Baptist Dallas people, or they’re not like—I’ll pick on Dallas here for a minute and talk about what I would term a Black evangelical—a TD Jakes church, right? They’re not those people. They are some other kinds of people.

So I think what she identifies is true, but I also think that depending on when she did this survey, I’d love to go back to that church and see if they still want to do DEI or they’re cutting it down like everybody else.

Alex Lovit: Evangelical is becoming a political label, and there’s a cultural unity to that. But some of those folks are attending folks regularly and are religiously devout, and others aren’t.

Anthea Butler: Yes, exactly.

Alex Lovit: Is that a division within that community?

Anthea Butler: I don’t think you should about it like division, because it’s the difference between thinking denominationally, like I am a Southern Baptist which means certain things. As somebody saying I’m an evangelical, that could mean 1,000 things. So I think this is where we have to sort of use a little bit different kind of way to talk about evangelicals, is to talk about them like a movement instead of like an entity that has a place, like the Catholic Church has bishops and you’ve got a Pope and you’ve got Cardinals and all this stuff, where you see a hierarchy. Evangelicalism doesn’t have a kind of hierarchy like that. There’s people that operate like charismatic figures and things, but you can’t think about evangelicals as this giant unit, because they’re all going in different directions.

So when the press says, or Pew says or whoever it is, 80 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump, then we’re like okay, those are the people who believe in this particular way. But if I wanted to talk about Black evangelicals, I would imagine that if you polled them they would poll higher on the Democratic side than they would on the Republican side. So that’s where you have to start to think about how does this look in these different groups.

Alex Lovit: A lot of your scholarship is about history, and I’m a history guy myself, so let’s talk a little bit about the history of evangelical Christianity in the US. And one point you make in your book is that evangelicals often want to claim credit for being on the right side of history.

Anthea Butler: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: So they like to point out that Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison and other prominent abolitionists were devout Christians, which is true. But as you point out, there were also a lot of Christians who supported slavery in American history. Can you talk a little bit about the history of American Christianity being on the wrong side of history?

Anthea Butler: Well, you’ve got enslavers—let’s talk about Jonathan Edwards, slaves. Let’s talk about other people who were there who are problematic. And what I try to do in the book is say you have this moment where you have denominations breaking up—you’ve got the Presbyterians breaking up over slavery, you’ve got the Baptists breaking up over slavery. You have all of these kind of divisions that happen pre-Civil War. Post-Civil War, the divisions still exist. But then you’ve got lynching, you’ve got burning of churches and all this stuff. Who’s doing some of this stuff? Evangelicals, church people, who mean well.

But when you start to take that history as a whole, when you start to take in what happens during slavery, who were the slaveholders, who said slavery was justified by scripture, who were the people who supported Jim Crow and segregation, who were the people who were part in the 1950s of all different kinds of racialized organizations, or basically were against Brown vs. Board of Education, you have to start to realize church people and people who love Jesus were part of that too.

Alex Lovit: Looking forward in history a little bit, I think a lot of Americans have a sense that evangelical Christians have become more politically active in the last 50 years or so, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And the common story we tell about that is that it’s a response to Roe vs. Wade in 1973. And in your book, you argue the seeds of that more politically active Evangelical Church were really planted in opposition to racial integration in the 1950s and ‘60s. Can you explain why you think that, and what are the implications for how we should understand the political goals of evangelicalism today?

Anthea Butler: I think we should understand them in terms of the racial dynamics of America. It’s always been the case, so if you wanted to go back all the way you could actually say that maybe this all starts pre-Civil War. Maybe it starts with the splitting of the churches, right?

But I think it’s fair to say, and if you want to put this in a 20th century context, that I don’t see the beginning in the ‘70s, I see the beginning with Billy Graham. And Billy Graham is pushing a sort of accommodationist viewpoint, which is basically I’m going to be nice and think about African-Americans, but they should wait. He wants gradualism, right?

And so one of the things I talk about in the book is how he dealt with Martin Luther King. He invites him to come and pray when he does his thing at Madison Square Garden—I believe it’s ‘56. And after that, when King writes to him and says please don’t stand on the stage with Texas’ racist Governor because that looks bad, and he does it anyway. So I basically think it’s that.

But more importantly, Graham is the person who put himself next to Eisenhower. And so, this is the beginning of a kind of political maneuvering to be at the side of the President. And if you think about that, you think about the ways in which Judeo-Christian—which is not a real term but we’ll talk about it here for the purposes of the podcast—I think you have to understand there was a certain kind of thrust in the ‘50s that was going against communism.

And so before we even get to Roe vs. Wade, we have to deal with the fact that anybody who was for integration was called a communist. People end up being portrayed in a certain way because they want to have equal rights. It is disingenuous the way we talk about our history, to think that abortion was the only thing when quite frankly some of these major churches who were also not for interracial cooperation were actually okay with abortion.

To me, that’s the thrust, this is why we have to look back. But I think it’s really important to step back even further and think about this in terms of a racially stratified society in which White Christians and White evangelical Christians held privilege and didn’t want to give that privilege up to others because it would jeopardize their way of life.

Alex Lovit: And so a lot of what I get from your work and from this conversation is it’s complicated.

Anthea Butler: It’s very complicated, yeah.

Alex Lovit: There’s a lot of Christians in the US, and they all have different perspectives. You mentioned Martin Luther King, Jr., who was famously a minister. So that’s an example of, we’ve been talking mostly about the White Evangelical Church, but of course there’s also this longstanding Black church tradition. You contributed a chapter to the book version of The 1619 Project, and you wrote there about Black churches that were crucial sites of civil rights organizing in the 1950s and ‘60s and really much longer than that. And you write that the church evolved into the primary site of a revolutionary movement. Can you talk about the role that churches played in the African-American freedom struggle?

Anthea Butler: Come on, y’all, buy the book. No, here we go. I think we have to go back to what is the foundation of the Black church, and the foundation of the Black church is struggle and racism. When you’ve had people coming out of slavery, it’s not to say that everybody was enslaved, but when you come out of slavery into this period of reconstruction which quickly turns into redemption, right, about White people trying to get back their power, you have to realize what organizations are set up. You basically have a church in the area, you might have a benevolent organization but that’s only going to be in a bigger space of a city like let’s say Atlanta in the south or Nashville. You are going to think about how you organize. And you organize through organizations or you organize through religion. And religion is the strongest thing in the African-American community, then, that can harbor someplace.

So when you get to somebody like King, everybody thinks he just came out sui generis, but he stands on top of the shoulders of so many people who’ve already been doing this work for almost 100 years. And he couldn’t have been there without the help of everyone else who was either involved with church or involved with labor—and we forget that part too.

Alex Lovit: If I’m understanding you correctly, part of what you’re saying there is that the reason there was a Black church was segregation, was racism.

Anthea Butler: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: That Black people were forced to create—and King has that famous line about the most segregated hour in the United States is Sunday morning at 11:00. But at the same time, that segregated church became a really important civil rights site, a place where organizing happened. How do you think about how to tell that story?

Anthea Butler: I had to think about it a lot to tell the story to The 1619 book, duh. How do I think about telling that story? I mean, I tell that story every time I teach a class. I mean, you have to show that the original sin here is slavery. You can’t get away from it. I always point people to this really great chapter in one of Cornell West’s oldest books, Prophesied Deliverance, back in the ‘80s, where he goes to the genealogy of modern racism, and he talks about all the White enlightenment guys. And I think that’s, for me, that is the number one place you start. You start there with Protestants to talk about why do you come up with all these ideas about Black people being inferior, whether that’s pseudoscientific or not.

And we could start with the Catholic Church, which says anybody who is an infidel basically, we can conquer them and take their land, and fi they don’t convert to Catholicism we can enslave them. So you’ve got two things going on here at the same time. How is it that you take people across the water and think you can make them into something else, or not give them religion at all, because you already don’t want them to know how to read or write or do anything else, and take away from them their indigenous beliefs and religions, and not think this is going to turn out to be a bad thing? It has to turn out some kind of way.

But I can give you one simple answer about this, and this is something that nobody can ever argue with me about: why is it that everybody who’s racist wants to burn a Black church or shoot up a Black church or kill people in a Black church? Because they know that is the site where people organize and they have power. And so if we’re going to talk about this, let’s talk about it in the context of bringing this story to the forefront with Dylan Roof and what happened at Emmanuel AME Church. Why did he go in there? Why did he sit through a Bible study and kill nine people in cold blood? Because he knew as a racist, he wanted to start a race war.

So if this sounds harsh to you, it’s meant to be harsh, because you can’t talk about what happens with Black religion in this country without talking about violence. And if you talk about violence, you understand where this comes from.

Alex Lovit: We’ve been talking about churches as sites for political protest, for movements for cultural change, and that’s true of the Black church pushing for civil rights, it’s true of the White supremacist Evangelical Church that you often write about. One thing that strikes me is, regardless of the aim both of those are examples of pretty successful movements in rallying people behind a cause and actually promoting political and cultural change in their own ways at different times in American history. Do you think churches are a particularly important site for cultural change movements, and if so why?

Anthea Butler: You have to quantify how you want to ask that question. Are we talking about the past, are we talking about the present, or are we talking about the future, and let me say why I say that. If we’re talking about the past, absolutely, yes, there’s a great history in this country about this.

If we’re talking about the present, that’s very much in flux. If we’re talking about the future, I’m not sure that’s the future. I think if people had to look back over the 2020 campaign especially, but the 2024 campaign in particular, one of the things I think is very interesting are the para-church organizations that I see operating, like Turning Point and others, that have managed to get out and do things.

One of the big things that I’ve been watching for a while is how these organizations have operated to gather Christians outside of their churches. So there’s a way in which you can think about the church existing as a building and an entity, and then there’s another way for people to think about the church that oh, I went to a Turning Point meeting in Arizona, and they had several political people there, and I really like that guy because he loves Jesus and I’m going to vote for him. Or, the Renew America thing that was traveling around with people like General Michael Flynn, who was going around and they were baptizing people in cow [unintelligible], all right? This is not a church, this is not a denomination, but they’re baptizing people at a political meeting with religious overtones.

So if we’re starting to think about, is church going to be the future or is church the present, I would say to you that maybe it’s not. The Southern Baptists have been declining every year. Where are those people going? They didn’t all of the sudden say I don’t believe anymore, they just decided not to go there. They just decided to go run after something else that’s much more interesting. And that something else that’s much more interesting, I think, to a lot of people in America are these what I would call para-church movements that are gathering people outside of their normal neighborhood church or wherever it is they go and gives them a space in which to interact with people and to do other things.

Alex Lovit: So what do you think the pull is of these kind of larger, more politicized movements? What are they giving people that they can’t get from their smaller congregation?

Anthea Butler: Entertainment. I hate to say that, but it’s true—it’s entertainment, number one. Number two is a sense of belonging to something bigger. You know, you could be at your local church, and you’re going to be involved in the usher board or whatever it is, right? But these bigger things have a bigger purpose, and they’re sort of like, we’re going to change America, we’re going to make sure that the school board is fine and whatever. Your local church might be doing some of that, but it’s not going to do it to the scale of this large-scale organization you could belong to, right?

So you could say that I go to these Turning Point meetings, but I also met somebody from Moms for Liberty—and I’m talking about conservative because I write about conservatives, right? And now I have this meeting to go to, and I can go to Moms for Liberty all this time, and then I can go and participate in January to fight against Roe vs. Wade and have the Right to Life Day. It gives you all sorts of things, right? Your life is not in that little space, so your life just got a bunch bigger.

And I think this is part of the reason why people find meaning in all of these things, because they’re looking for something bigger. They’re looking for something that’s going to make them feel like they’re changing the world. And so for a nation that has been obsessed with individualism, being part of something like this does two things. One, it gives you the sense of community, but it also gives you the sense that you too as an individual have the power to change something.

Alex Lovit: A lot of what you’re saying there could apply to any political movement.

Anthea Butler: It could.

Alex Lovit: So do you think there’s a difference between going to a political rally that’s non-religious and going to a rally for the same cause that has religious overtones, religious language?

Anthea Butler: I think you’ve already seen it. It’s called the 2024 election.

Alex Lovit: What do you mean by that?

Anthea Butler: What I mean by that is clearly the Republicans figured it out, the Democrats haven’t yet—everybody loved the DNC Convention, let me use that as an example. Everybody loved the DNC Convention, it was great. It had entertainment, it had everything. All of Kamala Harris—this is not a criticism, this is how it was structured—all of her things had different entertainers, things like that. People were entertained, it was great, you had all these crowds stand up waiting.

For the Republicans, it was very much business as usual. And then, what did Trump do? He did two kinds of rallies. One, he would do this normal kind of rally where he’d be out in a field like he did here in Pennsylvania where the assassination attempt happened, but he also went to religious things, and he went to a lot of religious things. And so did Kamala Harris, but I don’t recall to the extent that Trump did. But whenever she went to something, she went to a church. He went to something that was like the Religious Broadcasters, or you know, I was in North Carolina in October—when I left town, he was coming into town a week later to come speak to a whole group of North Carolina pastors. It was like these big events put around religious stuff. And that’s constructed, and it’s designed to do something.

Now, am I saying that the Democrats need to do this, no. But what I am saying is that what both of these groups are doing are counter to what everybody thinks is happening. When the Republicans do this with the religious thing, they’re not just doing a religious meeting and Trump’s not going over there and getting prayed on and everything else, they’re organizing. But when Democrats go there, it’s sort of like, we hope y’all kind of vote for us, but you know, I’m just going to get up and stay 10 or 15 minutes, and I don’t want to feel uncomfortable.

Alex Lovit: Let’s talk about Trump and the connection that he has to the Evangelical Church in the United States. This has been pointed out by many people before me, that it’s in some ways a little bit of a strange partnership—you know, Trump doesn’t seem particularly devout, he’s fallen short of Christian ideals in a lot of ways in her personal behavior. How do you understand that partnership? What do evangelicals get out of Trump, and what does he get out of them?

Anthea Butler: So let me just explain this as, this is the reason my book exists, okay? This book did not exist until I wrote a piece for MSNBC, “It Should Be No Surprise Why White Evangelicals Like Donald Trump,” because they’re about the same thing: we want to take care of us and we don’t want to take care of anybody else. This is about Whiteness, this is about we believe in patriarchy, we believe in male [headship], we believe that men should run, and it’s better if White men are running things than anybody else, and that the country has gotten too soft and we need to get back to some mythical time—and some mythical time I believe in their minds is the 1950s, and they’ve watched too much of Ozzie and Harriet, because that was a television show and not real life.

What I try to get people to understand is that this history with evangelicals and morality, it’s about power. It’s not about real morality. Morality is a shield to hide from the rest of the world that they really want power. So you have to think back to, what are the two things that probably gutted them more than anything else? One was the election of Obama, and the second thing was Oberfell, when same-sex marriage was made the law of the land. These were two big losses. One was a psychic loss, which was basically a Black man became President, and the second one was a much more visceral loss, that gay people could get married.

And so, they had to go for, we need somebody stronger. George Bush wasn’t enough for them. He was not enough, because he was compassionate conservatism. They were not into compassionate conservatism anymore. They were into, let’s break some heads. And Trump was like the head-breaker.

And the mistake that I made wasn’t about Trump at the beginning, it was about the people around him. And I thought at the time, when he had Paula White and all these people, that basically it was like he’s got the D-list of evangelicals, blah-blah. No, he was really smart. He didn’t start at the top. He started at the bottom and worked his way up to the top, okay? That’s number one. He started off with these people who were desperate to be seen in public, and more often than not they were also Prosperity Gospel preachers. So he started with a whole different base of people who could be considered evangelicals, instead of going after the mainstream Southern Baptist stuff—because you have to remember, none of those people really liked him that much at the beginning.

And then they came around to him, and then by the time 2016 happened and he won, he won for two reasons. One is that they looked at the two people, and they were like, Hillary Clinton, hell no, and then we’ve got Donald Trump over here, been married three times, but he’s been married. He’s a sinner saved by grace. So, that’s how you get there.

And so, once he got there, what did he do? And this is the thing everybody forgets, and I want to just reiterate this because he’s going to do some more stuff this time. He gave evangelicals what they wanted. They got Supreme Court Justices. He favored them, he gave them what they needed. And guess what, because he gave them what they needed, Roe fell, where people who were liberals never thought that was going to happen.

And that was the mistake, because everybody looked at him as being like, he’s a nincompoop, he’s, you know, everything else. No, he was really smart. He was a great showman. He knew how to do You’re Fired on The Apprentice. But he also knew that the way you get people to like you is to promise to do some stuff and promise to hurt the people that don’t like you, and that’s why he’s going to be back in office again.

Alex Lovit: Let’s just briefly do a footnote of what the Prosperity Gospel is, and I think that’s a good example of Trump, whose public image was always about being prosperous. So, what is the Prosperity Gospel?

Anthea Butler: God wants you to be rich. He has the cattle on 1,000 hills. God wants you to be blessed. If you bless your church and give your 10 percent to tithes and offerings over and above that 10 percent, God is going to bless you richly. It starts in the late 19th century and has people like Reverend Ike and Oral Roberts and others involved in it. It’s very big around the world is places like Brazil and Nigeria and places that have been hurting and impoverished, but it’s also big in America too.

And if you want to think about megachurch pastors, let’s think about Joel Osteen or TD Jakes, and many others who have been able to gather large amounts of people into their congregations because they’ve promised things. And it’s part of the reason why in 2008 when the stock market crashed and everybody was left with these big foreclosure loans and everything, that people like Eddie Long and Creflo Dollar and others, and even Paula White, they promised people they would be rich if they just continued to give their tithes and offerings and just be obedient to God. And that didn’t work for a lot of people, because they got a lot of debt as a result.

Alex Lovit: You mentioned the Dobbs decision—so, Trump put Justices on the Supreme Court to achieve this longstanding evangelical goal of overturning Roe, but that’s done now. That’s already been done.

Anthea Butler: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: Are there still shared goals?

Anthea Butler: Absolutely.

Alex Lovit: What do you think some of those goals are?

Anthea Butler: Let’s just get started. There’s a whole book of them. It’s called Project 2025. Hello, I mean, do you have time? That whole book is about The Heritage Foundation and a Catholic leader of The Heritage Foundation putting together a plan written by different people and different chapters about what they want to see in America. So let’s talk about education. They want to change and revamp education. You’ve already got book bans in a lot of places, you already have the dismantling of DEI and other ethnic programs not just on the K-12 level but on the college level. That’s going to be a big thing in this next administration, so just watch for that, that’s number one.

And second, you’re not done with abortion, because when Trump says he’s going to push this back to the states, don’t believe him. If you’ve got the Comstock Act, that’s going to get rid of sending abortifacients through the mail. Texas is already trying to sue somebody, a doctor about this. So that’s what’s going to be coming up.

Third, what’s going to come up, I think personally, is going to be restrictions on making sure people can hire who they want to hire, and you can discriminate the way you want. I think that’s going to be another thing, that’s going to be a big piece of this.

Another big piece of this will be basically about how do you think the government’s going to run? If you’re not going to face a loyalty test—let’s say if you’re not a Christian, you’re working for the government, what will you have to see to, and will that be a reason that you get fired?

There are so many things they can do right now in the name of God, and I think people are not paying attention to that. Do I think same-sex marriage is going to fall? Not so fast. I think that’s going to take a lot longer, but that is something that is in the sights of people who want to get rid of certain things.

When they tell you that they want to make the country great again, what decade are they talking about? Are we talking about 1625, are we talking about 1950, which decade? But you can be assured, it is not the 21st century, and that’s the main thing here I think that people need to understand.

Alex Lovit: Dobbs is an example of Trump achieving this longstanding goal. It wasn’t very popular, and it doesn’t remain very popular.

Anthea Butler: No, it’s not.

Alex Lovit: Do you think there are tensions within the Republican Party? Evangelical Christians are a major portion of Trump’s support base, and presumably he’s going to try to deliver some of these additional goals you’ve just mentioned. Will there be resistance from other portions of the Republican Party?

Anthea Butler: I think so. I mean, I think this is what I call the FAFO moment, and anybody who’s out here probably means what FAFO means, right, so I don’t have to tell y’all. I think that there are going to be people who will be upset about the economic stuff first, before they get upset about everything else. And secondarily, who wants to live in a theocracy with a very flawed leader in the front who’s telling you that I’m going to sue the media and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that?

And the thing about it is whenever Trump says this stuff, he usually does it. This is what I don’t understand that everybody thinks he’s joking all the time. He’s not joking, he’s really going to do these things. And so, I believe that what Republicans will have to face is that they didn’t nip this in the bud when they could have. And so now, post January 20th, 2025, what they will be faced with is that they will have a leader who makes his own rules and may or may not follow theirs unless it’s convenient for him.

It’s always going to be about him first, because that’s what the autocrat is about. It’s about me first, and everybody else second.

Alex Lovit: Well, it’ll be an interesting four years, if nothing else, and we might see some of these tensions play out. So your book, White Evangelical Racism, makes the argument that a segment of evangelical churches in the United States have prioritized race identity and Whiteness, and that the symbols and meaning of Christianity gets mixed up with the symbols and meaning of Whiteness.

I’ve also been reading Tim Alberta’s book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, and he’s making a similar argument, I think an aligned argument, but he’s really focusing on nationalism and partisanship, that the symbols and meaning of Christianity gets mixed up with the symbols and meanings of the Republican Party, of Americanism. Do you see those as aligned arguments, and why do you think it’s important to call out race in particular?

Anthea Butler: I think it’s important to call out race in particular because it’s the thing that makes people most uncomfortable. Tim Alberta and I probably, if we sat down and had a conversation, could agree on a lot of things, because I think the nationalist part is really big, which is why I’ve been talking about it for the last three years. But I don’t think you can talk about nationalism without talking about race.

So, let’s use an example here. Why is it that Trump didn’t want to have the Republicans who had agreed on a bill about immigration vote that bill in? Because he could run on it, first of all, and secondarily he knows that running on Whiteness is getting him power.

And you’ll make the argument, the next question you’ll say is, but there’s other people who are for Trump, who are for Trump who are African-American or Latino—well, of course there are, but they want Whiteness too. They want the privilege, and if that means they have to mold themselves into what this thing is, they will do it. It’s always been that way. People want power. If power means I need to be this particular way, that’s what they’re going to do.

And so I think that for the Tim Alberta’s of the world, it may seem to be this one thing, but I would say are you blinded by who you are, and not looking at this in the totality of what American history has been?

Alex Lovit: So you see Christianity as a way that people can access, can claim Whiteness?

Anthea Butler: Absolutely.

Alex Lovit: One thing that I find confusing in reading your work and other work around politized evangelical Christianity right now is the sense of vulnerability and persecution. You mentioned The Heritage Foundation earlier. The president, Kevin Roberts, claimed shortly before the election that if Harris won, Americans would lose their ability to worship and lose their religious liberty. That’s pretty extreme rhetoric, but how do you understand the sources of that sense of that sense of persecution? What does Roberts mean, and does he actually believe it, do people believe it?

Anthea Butler: Let me say it in a nice Texas way. That is a cow chip. It’s a cow chip, because it’s an argument that is always based in evangelical grievance. We’re so persecuted, nobody wants us to share our faith, nobody wants us to do this—they’ve been able to do their faith the whole time. It’s crap, it’s just crap, I’m sorry. But it’s there because they have always seen themselves historically as the lesser person, the lesser of these big religious groups like Presbyterians or whatever, or Catholics even, or anybody else.

So some of that has to do with how they posit themselves, the story of persecution theologically. And if I wanted to put it in a mean way, it’s like they don’t ever believe Jesus died on the cross for their sins, because they’re constantly saying somebody wants to persecute them, when the core of their faith, the core of the faith they’re supposed to have is about a man who was innocent who gets killed and rises from the dead. But they don’t even have the belief strong enough to think that person who did those things, if he did those things, can save them from whatever persecution is about to happen.

So when you go into everything with a persecution mindset, that means you’re always looking for daddy. And if you’re looking for daddy all the time, that’s how you end up with a Trump.

Alex Lovit: So is the story here that it’s bad-faith leaders, bad-faith faith leaders who are feeding a story of persecution, or is the problem a bottom-up one of people demanding that?

Anthea Butler: I think it’s both-and. Let’s use immigration as the telling point. If you think somebody else is coming to get what you have, then you have to make up a story about why don’t you have that thing. And so the way you make up that story about not having that thing is that oh, I don’t have that house those people over there have, or I don’t get my welfare because those migrants are stealing my stuff. It’s not true, but it’s a good way to divide people, right? And so politicians use it, everybody uses it. It’s a wedge issue, right?

Immigration is a wedge issue, because basically if what Trump says he wants to do happens, then I challenge everybody, how are you going to deal with the fact that you don’t have avocadoes, you don’t have chips, you don’t have all this stuff you want to have when it comes time for the playoffs—I’m being really crass here, but I want to put it in real-world terms so people can understand it, because I feel like half the time most of us who are in history are talking up here, and I want to talk about this in real life stuff, okay?

So real life stuff is that you have to have an enemy. It works better if you can make the enemy somebody who doesn’t look like you. And if the enemy doesn’t look like you and you can pull out all the terrible things they’ve done, or criminality, or whatever it is, then it’s going to be a lot easier to do the awful things you do. This is why you end up with Nazi Germany.

And so the rhetoric that has been spoken about—undesirables and defective and all this kind of stuff, the kind of language that Trump has been using—is priming the pump for all of this stuff. And what I hope that people understand is that you can have a horrible thing happen over and over and over again. It just means that you have to have people who A, are willing to fight against it, and B, people who don’t buy into what that authoritarian person is trying to tell you that’s wrong with the people who don’t even know.

Alex Lovit: You’ve studied scripture much more seriously than I ever have.

Anthea Butler: Don’t be fooled, I’m a historian. Again, I like to tell people this—I study history, religious history. Scripture, not a Bible person, but we can go with that.

Alex Lovit: Well, I mean, I think in the course of studying history, I’m sure you’ve read a fair amount of interpretation of scripture and scripture itself.

Anthea Butler: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: It strikes me as someone who doesn’t know the Bible very well . . .

Anthea Butler: Good for you.

Alex Lovit: . . . that there is a lot in it that seems to me to be about neither Jew nor Gentile, about the Good Samaritan as a story about reaching across national differences, welcome the stranger. How does that stuff get lost in a movement that becomes about division?

Anthea Butler: It gets completely lost, because it’s exactly what you just said in the beginning—so I’m not going to pick on you, but I want to use it as an example. You said, I don’t know much about the Bible. Do you think the average American knows a lot about the Bible? You would be mistaken. If you’re not reading the Book of Luke or something like that, where he’s talking about mending the broken-hearted and feeding people and all this stuff, then you might think that Jesus is just supposed to get you something, a la the Prosperity Gospel.

You hear people say I’m blessed and not stressed, and all this other kind of stuff, right? So it hints at a kind of Christianity that is a Christianity of feel-good Christianity. It’s not suffering Christianity. I tell people all the time, this is why Latin America the Catholics are getting beat down, and the Pentecostals and the Prosperity Gospel people are winning, because who wants to be broke and following Jesus? You don’t want to be broke and following Jesus, you’d rather be rich and following Jesus, and that’s a different kind of thing altogether.

And when you have religious leaders, especially Christian ones, who have private jets, or somebody like Kenneth Copeland is saying I need to get a new private jet, I need you to give me X amount of dollars, Christianity takes on a whole other kind of thing.

So I think part of it is about Biblical literacy in this country actually, because people don’t know what those scriptures say. They might know a couple stories, they might know what their pastors preach on Sundays, but the fact of the matter is it’s not exposition of scripture like you think it would be exposition of scripture. And it’s basically something like Norman Vincent Peale, which is also why Trump is the way he is, because guess who was his pastor—Norman Vincent Peale, the Power of Positive Thinking.

Alex Lovit: Is that sort of a foundational Prosperity Gospel? I’m not very familiar with him.

Anthea Butler: That is very much Prosperity Gospel. And Normal Vincent Peale was big in the ‘50s and ‘60s with you have what you say, you have to think about what you get. And when Trump never says anything bad about himself—I will never forget during the first time he ran, he basically say I don’t really sin. And he said that to Bob Vander Plaats in Iowa, and everybody just went oh my God, this is terrible. I’m like, yeah, but he really doesn’t think he does, so anything he does is going to be okay. And that should’ve been—to any thinking evangelical who had been trained and went to seminary, or had done any Bible study or anything, you would have 1,000 alarms going off, but that didn’t set off any alarms. They went for it.

Alex Lovit: Well, so let’s talk a little bit about solutions here. You’ve eloquently in this interview and also in your book laid out the problem. Just now you mentioned Biblical literacy as possibly one solution. Do you see a path forward here for the Evangelical American Church to become more compatible with democracy?

Anthea Butler: People always ask me this question, what do you think are the solutions, what are you going to tell people? I’m like, the only way to get people like this to get together is the aliens have to come so we all have a united enemy. It’s like Independence Day—nobody cared. When the rabbi was in the circle, everybody got around and they started repeating Hebrew because they didn’t know what else to do, because everybody needs to pray. And so, that to me was a moment of clarity when I first saw that movie, because I was like yeah, this is probably right. This might be the only thing that does it.

Now, to not be facetious, let me say this. I don’t know how we spin out of this yet, because basically with the reelection of Trump the nationalism gets more hardcore, it gets more serious. The Christian nationalism especially gets much more hardcore. And so those people who don’t like where that’s going to go are going to be oppositional, right? And so, how do you get people onboard with you that are part of this thing?

I think you have to see the horrors. And so for me, I hate to say this because I don’t want this to happen, but I think people will experience a lot more suffering, whether that’s economic suffering or the social suffering of realizing that now they want ICE people being able to go in the churches and schools and other places to pick up undocumented people to deport them.

I think that will quickly make people have to understand they have to make choices, and some people are going to make right choices and some people are going to make bad choices. But in the midst of those making those choices, it will bring together people who are like-minded, who don’t want to see this country turn into that.

And that’s what I think. I think that a very big segment of our country voted for a certain kind of way to behave, because they were sick of borders, or as one young man who was an immigrant from Guatemala here in Philadelphia said on MSNBC, I don’t want all the rest of those people to come in. They’re criminals. And he was asked, what if people think you’re a criminal, and he says no, I’m not.

But see, that’s the point, you don’t see other people’s humanity. And when you don’t see other people’s humanity, you can do horrible things to them. And so what I am hoping is that people will start to recognize each other’s humanity, and realize that some of this is just not going to work in what this country says it would be.

As a Black woman in America, as an African-American, born and raised here but also has relatives who were enslaved, I know this country has not been a completely democratic country, because it denied my relatives democracy and the right to vote and all these things that come with democracy for a very long time. I think what people have to realize is that going back to some of that is not going to give them the satisfaction they really want.

Alex Lovit: Anthea Butler, thank you for joining me on The Context.

Anthea Butler: Thanks Alex, appreciate it.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake, Jr., and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our Director of Communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Maxine Thomas.

We’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, Kettering.org, to learn more about the Foundation or to sign up for our newsletters. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at TheContext@Kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts, or tell a friend about us.

I’m Alex Lovit. I’m a Senior Program Officer and Historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.

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