Berkeley Talks: A return to monarchy? Bradley Onishi on Project 2025

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.

(Music fades out)

Carolyn Chen: Good afternoon. I am Carolyn Chen, co-director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, along with Dr. Duncan MacRae here. And I’d like to welcome you to the 2024 Berkeley Lecture on religious tolerance. In its 11th year, the lectures on religious tolerance address the conditions that allow for the flourishing of religious tolerance in a pluralist society.

Well, today we are going to talk about the very thing that your mother told you never to talk about in polite company, religion and politics. And it’s only 35 days until election day and for all of you undecided voters out there, we’re bringing you the leading expert on religion and politics, Dr. Bradley Onishi. Dr. Onishi is a scholar of religion and a public intellectual, best known as the co-host of the popular politics podcast, Straight White American Jesus. He’s also the founder of Axis Mundi Media, a platform for research-based podcasts focused on safeguarding democracy from the threats of extremism and authoritarianism.

In everything he does, Dr. Onishi seeks to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange by providing insight into life’s most fundamental questions. He often speaks about topics related to the radical conservatism and extremist religions that shape our world, some of it right in our own neighborhoods. Through his writing and public platform, Dr. Onishi is single-handedly changing the way that Americans talk and think about religion, race, and politics. He has given everyday Americans the tools to critically understand white Christian nationalism and its corrosive effects on our democracy, political system, faith communities, and so much more.

Dr. Onishi offers one of the best examples of the transformative possibility of good public scholarship and from a religion scholar no less. Dr. Onishi received his master’s degree in theology at Oxford University and his Ph.D. in religious studies at UC Santa Barbara. He’s the author of The Sacrality of the Secular: Postmodern Philosophy of Religion published by Columbia University Press, the co-author of Christian Mysticism and the editor of Mysticism in the French Tradition, both published by Ashgate.

Dr. Onishi is that impossibly cool scholar we all wish that we could be, the one who writes on esoteric topics like French mysticism, but he also publishes in Rolling Stone. He’s a prolific writer for the public and has published in outlets like the New York Times and Politico. His most recent book came out last year, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism — and What Comes Next. And you can find a riveting interview with Dr. Onishi by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

Before I turn the mic over to Dr. Onishi, I want to thank the Endowed Fund for the study of religious tolerance for generously funding this event. I’m grateful to the Social Science Matrix, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for the Study of Societal issues and the Center for Right-Wing Studies for cosponsoring this event. Finally, I want to give a big thank you to Iliana Morton, Patty Dunlap, Maddie Kim and Breana George for organizing of this event. Now, please join me in welcoming Dr. Bradley Onishi.

Bradley Onishi: Absolutely wonderful to be with you. If I knew Carolyn was going to talk like that, I would not have come, so it’s good you didn’t tell me that Carolyn. I want to thank Carolyn and Duncan and Patty and so many of the others who helped make today happen and all of you for coming out on this warm summer day in Berkeley. I want to talk today about what I think are the anti-democratic aspects of Christian nationalism. I want to talk about the ways that Christian nationalism is in fact, does not meet the bar of what we might call religious tolerance or anything beyond it. And so let me start with a metaphor that I often use when I speak to churches and humanist groups and secular groups in the public square. Many of you in the room are experts in things related to religion, politics, and you may have your favorite definition of Christian nationalism, it may come from sociologists, it may come from historians, philosophers, and so on.

When I talk to folks in the public square, what I have found is that the most effective way to explain Christian nationalism is this. A lot of folks are worried that if they’re Christian and they, quote-unquote, “love America,” then they’re Christian nationalist. And what’s so wrong with that? I just got back from Omaha and spoke at a really large church there, and there was a lot of folks in the pastor’s office before I came saying, “I can’t believe you allowed anyone from San Francisco to come here first. But second, he’s surely going to come after me because I’m Hank, a Christian man, who loves America, and I’m under attack here.” And what I said to that church and what I’ll put forth now is that when I think of Christian nationalism, I don’t think about folks who go to bed at night thinking, “Hey, I’m a person of faith and I care about this nation.” We can dissect all those phrases and the way language is used and shaped.

But what I say to folks like Hank at United Methodist Church is this Christian nationalism is the idea that because you are a Christian, because “you love God,” quote-unquote, you are more of an American than other people, that you are more American. You get more of this country because of your religious identity or your religious commitment. To me, that’s a very baseline understanding of Christian nationalism as we might understand it, whether here at Berkeley or out at a church in Omaha. And what I say next is this, why don’t we think about a round table. And it’s an impossible round table. Many of you are academics in the room and you’re going to poke holes in my metaphor, but that’s fine. We have a round table of folks from across this nation representing every demographic: racial, ethnic, linguistic, sexual identities, gender identities and so on. And before that meeting of a round table and a supposedly democratic community starts.

One person stands up and says, “Hey, it’s good to be here with everyone. I don’t have a problem with all of you. Maybe most of you, some of you. Nonetheless, it’s good to be here. And as we get the meeting going, I just need you to know that by dint of me being Christian, I’m just going to get a different place at this table than everyone else. I have a different authority, a different privilege, and just a different status here. As long as you understand that and you accept it, we’re going to be OK and we’ll be fine. As long as you know your place and you recognize mine, we’ll be in a good state. Now if you don’t, then we’ll have problems.” And surely someone raises their hand, the agnostic, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim says, “Why do you get that place?” And the answer is, well, this is a Christian country and it was founded that way. Surely because of our history and because of our founding, the present and the future should look like me.”

Now, we can dissect that history, which I’m not going to do today, and I think for most of you, perhaps I don’t need to do. You know that that’s a reductive and fallacious approach to understanding the history of the United States. What’s more important to me in that metaphor is this, that’s an anti-democratic attitude from the start. It’s a very plain way to explain to anyone listening that if you stand up around the round table and say, “I get a different status or privilege than everyone else,” you are starting with an anti-democratic approach to your relationship to everyone else in your community. And if you study Christian nationalism, if you’ve made poor life decisions like me and you follow the news incessantly every day and on Twitter.

And you read obscure pastors in Appalachia and white extremists in the Pacific Northwest and so on and so forth, and this is what you do day in and day out and you have to play with your kids and go to the playground, otherwise you’ll lose your mind, what you’ll notice is that Christian nationalism in this country is on a spectrum and the sociological data bears that out. There are folks who think that Christians should be the leader of the country just because that’s how it should be. There are folks who really would like it for In God We Trust to remain on our money, or One Nation Under God to remain in the Pledge or whatever. And those folks I disagree with and those folks, any chance I get, I have a conversation with and I try to explain why I think I’m not really sure I’m on board with that. I don’t lose sleep about them at night. They’re not the people that keep me up.

The people that keep me up at night are the folks who are openly willing to say, “Because most of the folks around the round table in the country no longer recognize my place, my status, my authority,” that democracy may not be the answer here. That the round table actually probably is not what we need to keep. The people that keep me up at night are the ones that say, “If the majority of the folks around the round table are not going to recognize the rightful heir to the American founding, then we might have to change the configuration of the table.” And so I want to take you through some real … Carolyn asked me before the talk tonight, today, “Is this going to be a depressing talk?” And I said yes. If you have a party, please invite me and I will show you I’m way more fun than the next half an hour is going to make it seem. I promise you.

What I put forth is we’re at a state in this country where openly saying that democracy is the problem and not the solution is a mainstream attitude, and it’s one that is shared by many who identify as or are rightfully called Christian nationalists. With that in mind, let’s take a look what that looks like. OK, I hate to say it, but this country needs a dictator. The clip made the rounds in the days after the Iowa Caucuses in late January of 2024. The caucuses serve as a visual reminder of how our elections are supposed to work. Each year, news programs film Iowans, whom Americans from Anaheim to Boston to Atlantis whom are all corn farmers gathering to cast their votes in a ritual that emblematizes the sharing of power and cooperation demanded of those who want to live in a democracy. It’s like the first day of Advent for the American voting season. This year was different.

A correspondent for the young Turks interviewed the man at Team Trump, Iowa commit to Caucus events in Coralville, Iowa. He’s middle-aged and wearing a red Trump hat. His face is weather-worn leathery as the jacket he wears. I hate to say it, but this country needs a dictator.

(Video clip)

Yoram Hazony: The other day, Donald Trump said on his first day is going to be a dictator for a day.

JD Vance: I like that. I like that.

Yoram Hazony: Would you rather have Donald Trump as a dictator for four years or re-elect Joe Biden for four years?

JD Vance: I would rather have Donald Trump … I’d like them see the repeal the Roosevelt law, so that he can be a President for a lot more than four years. But this country needs a dictator. I hate to say that, but it’s the truth.

(End video clip)

Bradley Onishi: Now, it’s easy to write off a man at a Trump rally as someone on the fringe, a Trump fanatic who goes to rallies and who would say something like this. It’s easy to write off this clip as one made for the internet age, something that could be sliced up, shared on IG, shared on TikTok and seen millions of times over the next couple of weeks. But a month later, another man said this.

(Video clip)

Jack Posobiec: I just wanted to say, welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here. We’ll replace it with this right here.

Speaker 17: All right. Amen.

Jack Posobiec: That’s right, because all glory is not to government all glory to God.

(End video clip)

Bradley Onishi: Now, there’s no writing this guy off as a blowhard on the street, some extremist of no consequence. Make no mistake, he is an extremist. The Southern Law Poverty Center has identified him as somebody who has worked with extreme far-right actors, pro-authoritarian figures, somebody who’s published work with white nationalists, who was a proto-QAnon conspiracy theorist.

Speaker 18: [inaudible].

Bradley Onishi: Sure. This is somebody who has published work with white nationalists and was a ringleader and architect of the Pizzagate Conspiracy from about a decade ago. His name is Jack Posobiec. He’s a right-wing provocateur. He works for Turning Point USA and has about two million followers on Twitter. Posobiec proclaimed his desire for the end of democracy, not from a high school gymnasium in Iowa, but from the stage of CPAC in February of 2024. CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference showcases the vanguard of American conservatives at its gatherings here and abroad. CPAC may host extremists like Posobiec, but it’s not fringe. Extremists can, and often do, gain political power. Expressing a desire to overthrow democracy is an extremist position, but it is also now a mainstream one in the United States.

When I began researching this book about five years ago, I would argue that making such a statement would have led to a swarm in the press, that when you had elected officials speaking at the same conference, people like Representative Elise Stefanik, people like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, people like then Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, now vice presidential candidate, I think he’s going to be on TV later tonight, JD Vance, and Donald J. Trump. They would’ve been asked, do you share these views? Is this something you agree with? Nobody seemed to care. Nobody asked those folks about Posobiec and none of them disavowed what he said. Now, we can point to a lot of factors that created this situation. I’ll put forth one here briefly, and that is Jan. 6. The Jan. 6 insurrection was simply put an attempt to end democracy. Those rioting might’ve done so in the name of justice for a quote, “stolen election,” or a quote, “rigged process,” or a quote, “deep state conspiracy.”

But if we ask what it was meant to do, if I as a religion scholar do what I do with my students on the first day of every class and say, “Hey, I don’t want to talk about religious belief. I want to talk about what religion does for people.” That’s often what we do. Intro to religion, first day I say, “Let’s talk about what religion does.” If we talk about what Jan. 6 did, not what they’re believed, we can reduce it to a very simple idea. It was engineered to stop the democratic election of the President of the United States of America. It was an attempt to overthrow democracy. GOP officials, commentators, pundits, members of the conservative influencer class have had many opportunities to disavow Jan. 6 is simply beyond the pale. Something that is outside of the Overton window, something that was extremist and deserves to be at the fringe, but they did not. Since the time I wrote this book, Jan. 6 has become an Alamo moment from MAGA nation and Trump is from sea to shining sea.

We’ve witnessed border convoys led by some of those President, J-6 caravanning to the southern border in order to prevent the country from being quote “overrun” by quote “globalists” who they claim are conspiring to keep US borders open and destroy the country. Ashli Babbitt, the woman who lost her life that day, is now emblematized on flags and patches and shirts across the country at rallies and at gatherings. At one political rally, we’ve had the Pledge of Allegiance said to an American flag that was present at J-6, making it into a relic. In October 2023, Mike Johnson, a man who did everything possible to overturn the 2020 election in the courts and as close to those who mobilize supporters to be at the Capitol on Jan. 6, was elected Speaker of the House third in line for the presidency. State courthouses have been evacuated due to bomb threats. Judges have been doxxed. One state representative in Arizona proposed a bill that would’ve declared Donald Trump the winner of the Presidential election in that state before the election took place.

Theologians, historians, think tank pundits and philosophers have published books and papers arguing that perhaps a post-constitutional America with a red Caesar or Christian Prince would be a better way forward for the country. Pastors and provocateurs have expressed the desire for blasphemy laws and other measures that would punish Americans for not obeying what they take to be biblical law. These are the small fires everywhere that the un-extinguished embers of Jan. 6 left to burn. They are reducing our democracy to ashes and they’re doing it in order to build something else. Now, what I would argue and I argue in this book is that much of this can be understood in the context of a six-decade movement to overthrow American democracy. Those Christians, Protestant and Catholic who looked around that round table 60 years ago and realized they were not going to be the majority and that they had very little chance of ever being the majority ever again, who decided then that democracy was probably an obstacle rather than a solution to what they took to be the right kind of country.

If the idea that this country needs a dictator or the desire to overthrow democracy is now mainstream, it’s because of the white Christian nationalists, organizers, pastors, fundraisers, politicians, shadow network operatives, and others who’ve been preparing for war on their own country since the 1960s. I want to continue to just share light and cheery news by proving to you I that idea. In July of this year, if CPAC was in February, in July, there was NatCon, the National Conservatism Conference. NatCon or the National Conservatism Conference is a right-wing organization dedicated to fostering national conservatism in the United States and beyond. According to its statement of principles, NatCon maintains that public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision. It’s backed by the Edmund Burke Foundation. And in recent years, NatCon conferences have become a kind of avant-garde for Christian nationalists and right-wing speakers and elected officials to articulate their visions to quote “recover and reconsolidate” the rich tradition of national conservative thought.

This year in July, the conference was in Washington, D.C. At the close of this particular panel, the moderator, Yoram Hazony asked these questions, “When you think of this coming state where the Christian commitments are maximized, is there room for Jews or fellow Bible believers? Is there room for Muslims, Hindus?” Hazony was addressing two panelists that even a few years ago would’ve seemed like an unlikely duo to appear on stage together but whose political commitments and vision now seem resonant. One was Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the other Doug Wilson, the pastor, publisher and podcaster headquartered in Moscow, Idaho. Doug Wilson is the person who famously once said that race relations were best in this country during the time of slavery.

For those attentive to Protestant politics, this was a watershed moment. The figurehead of the largest Protestant denomination in the country, sharing a stage with the firebrand provocateur who once praised slavery and has labeled himself the spokesperson of American Christian nationalism. Mohler holds sway over millions as the figurehead of the Southern Baptist Convention. Wilson reaches millions through his media empire, his books, his podcasts, his church network, and his school network. By the time Hazony asked this question, they’d been talking for almost an hour, but here’s how they responded to the query as to whether or not religious minorities in this country would be welcome in their ideal Christian republic.

(Video clip)

Yoram Hazony: When you think of this coming state where the Christian commitments are maximized, is there room for Jews or fellow Bible believers? Is there room for Muslims, Hindus? How do you approach thinking about maximally Christian committed states in a world in which the partners for getting there, quite a few of them are not going to be Christian?

Doug Wilson: I would say briefly that Jews in this ideal republic that I would envision or that we’d hammer out, Jews would be more welcome than they currently are here.

Al Mohler: I would say enthusiastically so, and so for instance, among my tribe, so to speak, theologically, it would be seen as a matter of absolute divine responsibility to be fully respectful of the Jewish people, fully protective, and to have the Jewish people fully integrated in the entire project. And I think this is where also quite honestly, where you have traditional Roman Catholics, conservative Protestants and conservative Jewish people who basically already live in the same world and acknowledge that and have a mutual dependence and appreciation. I think, and you asked the question though, you broadened it and you said Hindus and Muslims and others. I don’t think a nation can survive without theological commitments. That does not mean it cannot allow others to be a part of the community and even invite others in a certain sense into the community. But it does mean that there has to be the explicit acknowledgement that this is a nation with specific theological accountability and theological commitments. Those coming should respect that, must respect that, understand that. And so the modern secularist dream is I believe a constitutional nightmare.

(End video clip)

Bradley Onishi: The round table metaphor is one where Al Mohler just gave us an explicit answer. He said, look, if you want to be here, everyone else, Hindus Muslims and others, you need to just acknowledge this is a Christian country and if you do, we’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. Everyone will be fine. If you don’t, there’ll be issues. Doug Wilson says, I agree. A couple of weeks later, Wilson went on to clarify his statements about the place that those who are not Christian might play in his ideal republic.

(Video clip)

Doug Wilson: I had a skirmish on Twitter with someone a few weeks ago where they pointed out that there was a hubbub about … I just came back from NatCon for in Washington, D.C., and that was the eclectic affair because there were Catholics and Protestants and Jews and a couple of Hindus, and there were people raising an uproar. What are you doing with Hindus at this political thing? And I wrote, well, in the Republic I envision Hindus would not be able to hold political office. Are you in? And the person, no, no, no, no. I want Hindus to be able to run for political office in America. I said, OK, so you’re criticizing me for being willing to talk to a Hindu at a conference and you’re willing to be governed by Hindus and this makes no sense. In the Christian Nationalist project, we don’t want this smudge or hodgepodge. We want it to be explicitly Christian. We would want prayers at the political convention to God the Father in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s how we want the prayers to go.

(End video clip)

Bradley Onishi: This aligned with what Wilson said in an interview from earlier this year quote, “This is a Christian republic and you’re not singing off the same sheet of music that we are. So no, you’re not allowed to be mayor.” Wilson has been a controversial figure for decades, but he’s seen a mainstream resurgence over the last few years. He did a sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson, was praised by Charlie Kirk, then appeared on stage at NatCon with Al Mohler. But Wilson’s influence goes well beyond his own popularity as an author and a speaker. He is somebody who has cultivated several folks who are now influential in reformed Protestant Christian nationalist circles, one of those is Joel Webbon.

Joel Webbon is the founder of Right Response Ministries and Covenant Bible Church in Austin, Texas. If Wilson reaches millions per week, Webbon reaches hundreds of thousands. This is not an obscure pastor with six parishioners somewhere in a far-off corner of the country. This is somebody in Austin who reaches many, many more people than most of us in the room do on a weekly basis. He often holds conferences and does interviews with Wilson, the man that we just heard, the man who just shared a stage with Al Mohler, leader of the largest Protestant denomination in the country. When asked recently what revival in the United States would look like, Webbon said this.

(Video clip)

Joel Webbon: My hometown and my …

Bradley Onishi: (Interrupts video clip) Sorry, he’s going to talk about his hometown first and it’s really offensive.

Joel Webbon: My hometown and my neighborhood, my state is being flooded with non-citizens and then even those who are citizens, first generation immigrants who have attained citizenship, which aren’t many, but those who have are still worshiping false gods. They’re not American in any sense of our heritage, and primarily I’m talking about that being a problem as it pertains to religion. They worship other gods, they are Hindu, they are Muslim, they are Jews, they are not Christian.

Bradley Onishi: (Interrupts video clip) We see there again, an explicit answer to the question about the round table of American democracy and how he understands Christian and American to be entangled terms and identities. What would revival look like in the United States? What would a Christian nation do in order to bring itself back in alignment with God? Oops.

Joel Webbon: A true revival of the American populace and the heart, what it would then look like in the application, the political, it would look like millions of people being deported. It would look like mothers getting death row for murdering their children.

(End video clip)

Bradley Onishi: For Webbon, the idea of Christian revival goes hand in hand with mass deportation and a severe punishment for those who engage in abortion. He clarified his comments about the presence of non-Christian and non-might people in the United States in another interview recently, “Throughout scripture the idea of full-blown invasions from foreign peoples who worship foreign gods, it is never in scripture spoken of as a blessing of liberty. It is always spoken of as a judgment. I believe that America is under God’s judgment and I don’t think that the forms or the expressions of God’s judgment merely lie with drag queen story hour, but they also include the fact that my neighborhood is 30% Hindu.” When asked what we should do to get us back to a place of revival and a place where this country might be on the up and up he did not answer any affirmative when it came to democracy. “We’re degenerates, the Constitution, it’s not suited for governing degenerates, but I think for our population that is degraded morally and culturally religiously as far as we have, you need power.

Men must be governed. You need a Caesar type. I don’t think constitutioning even harder is going to get us out of our current mess. How would Christians rule if they gain power, whether through a Caesar or by other means in addition to ensuring women can’t vote an extreme position, even among American evangelicals writ large, Webbon outlines his vision thusly, “I want Christians to have power, and with that power, I want it to be wielded righteously. What does that mean? It means crushing our enemies and rewarding our friends.” Webbon’s Christian nationalism aligns closely with Stephen Wolfe’s, another reformed figure aligned with Wilson. Doug Wilson’s Canon Press, published Stephen Wolfe’s, The Case for Christian Nationalism, which is a popular book among extremist Christian nationalists. It spent about a week in the top 100 on Amazon. It’s spent about a month in the top 500. I’m an author, I might have looked at the rankings once in a while on Amazon of my book. It’s never in the top 100, it’s never close.

Amazon is what Amazon is, but if you think about a book being in the top 100 there for almost a week, it gives you a sense of the pastors, the seminarians, the young people in churches who are reading that book. That’s the case for Christian nationalism. I’ve read the book and it’s really scary. It draws on the concepts of volk and homeland in order to justify theologically the idea that Christians should love those who are more like them. It’s not, according to Wolfe, that Christians shouldn’t love all people. It’s just that societies can only be built by people who share the same ethnicity and religion and thus love each other more than outsiders and foreigners. Wolfe’s Christian nationalism is an express ethnonationalism based on blood and soil rhetoric. On the screen in his mind, nations can only be founded on a shared ethnicity because your kin have belonged to this people and this land to this nation and this place. And so they bind you to that people in place creating a common volk geist.

Wolfe’s argument for nationalism based on the shared ethnicity of a volk based in blood relations comes into focus when he explains his intended reader, “I am male and I’m rooted ancestrally in Western Europe and I’m speaking largely to a western European male audience.” Recently he spoke of his identity as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I know that some of the things we’ve watched today have been shocking and really upsetting. Buckle up.

(Video clip)

Stephen Wolfe: America are the hyphenated Americans. In a sense, these people are more complete human beings than the unhyphenated. Why? Because they have settled hearts with the people in a place albeit a foreign place, while the unhyphenated have no place of their own. But we the unhyphenated, those who trace our ancestry to Western Europe whose roots extend beyond the Immigration Act of 1965 and Ellis Island and which unite to this soil we the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who founded, built, and died for and led this country for most of its history, we are not permitted in this new America to have a people or a place that is distinctly ours.

There’s no distant place that we call home. We have nowhere else to go, but this is our home. This is our native land. We are Native Americans born of those who didn’t immigrate but who settled here. We are the sons and daughters of the people who settled this land. To describe America as a nation of immigrants writes the great Harvard political scientist, Samuel Huntington is to stretch a partial truth into a misleading falsehood and to ignore the central fact of America’s beginning as a society of settlers.

(End video clip)

Bradley Onishi: Wolfe recently finished a post-doc at Princeton and wrote his enormously popular book. He said in a recent podcast interview that it should be permissible for Christians to deem certain groups that have positions that are … Excuse me. It should be permissible for Christians to deem certain groups that have positions that are detrimental to the fundamental features of society and to rescind their political equality. In September of 2023, Wolfe tweeted, “And thus, while intermarriage is not itself wrong, groups have a collective duty to be separate and marry among themselves.” These are only a few examples of Protestants like Mohler, like Wilson, like Webbon, like Wolfe, who are outlining a Christian nationalism based on Christian supremacy. There have always been racist and ethnonationalists on the American right. The current generation, at least in these cases, has become mainstream by dint of its Christian identity and more specifically its Protestant identity.

When Al Mohler shook hands with Doug Wilson at NatCon in July 2024, it was a symbol of the embrace that legacy denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention are willing to make with extremists in order to build a coalition that will force the acknowledgement of Christian authority on all Americans in one way or another. Now, some of you came today thinking that we were going to talk about project 2025, so we should do that. What I’ve outlined so far are examples of Reformed and Southern Baptist Protestants who are arguing for a Christian nation in a certain form through what I would call ethnonationalism. However, what I’ve argued for months on my podcast and my writing in various articles is that when we turn to project 2025, we certainly see resonances with everything that I’ve outlined already and a deep overlap with this understanding of how the United States should be structured.

However, in my view at least, project 2025 is a deeply Catholic or reactionary Catholic vision for the country. It’s a Christian nationalism fueled by Catholic leaders and in many cases reactionary Catholic thought. And so I want to turn there now just to round out what are up to today. Later on we’re going to see Mr. Vance on TV and I think when Vance was chosen, he’s a first term senator from Ohio, and he is been largely seen as a choice bolstering Trump’s outsider image. A young Midwestern firebrand who would bring Silicon Valley money and youthful energy to the ticket and a knowledge of how to order donuts. One of those didn’t work out. I’ll let you decide which one. What has gone largely unnoticed is that Vance is a more radical religious politician than Pence, Mike Pence, the former vice president, even though the latter was hailed as the Christian candidate.

Vance’s Catholicism has barely registered as a driving factor in his political profile, and yet it serves as an interpretive key for understanding why Vance was chosen and how he brings a populist radicalism to a potential second Trump presidency and a direct link to Project 2025, which I will land on here in about 10 or 15 minutes, I promise. In 2019, Vance was received into the Catholic Church. He grew up with exposure to Christian churches, but by the time he entered law school described himself as an angry atheist. However, on Vance’s telling Catholicism began to appeal to him because of its intellectual approach to faith and human life. He was also influenced by his first encounter with PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who convinced him that social ladder climbing and endless pursuits of wealth were empty in comparison to living a life of significance and meaning.

In 2021, the newly converted Vance spoke to the Napa Institute, a network of conservative Catholics who are known for defying the Pope, largely opposed to the reforms of the second Vatican council, and backed by billionaire donors like Tim Bush, who are sympathetic to a Christian nationalist vision. In his speech, Vance griped that the business community is actively pro-abortion in this country. His solution would be to take active measures against businesses that use their first amendment rights to express pro-choice positions. Vance, when he converted very quickly signaled what kind of Catholic communities he was going to participate in and those that would shape him. One of those was the Napa Institute, which takes place every summer, just about 45 minutes from here. The Napa Institute really is the brainchild of conservative billionaire, Tim Bush and other billionaires in the United States along with conservative bishops who see things like a radical anti-abortion agenda, the end of contraception, outlawing pornography as some of their priorities when it comes to United States law.

They are also vehemently against things that would work to protect us from climate change. And as you can see, in Vance is telling, and I think this is an important point for today and for going forward, they have an idea that the government should use its coercive power to tax and target in order to legislate morality. The idea is that the government can be weaponized in order to shape the public square according to a certain religious vision. This is not a small … And I’m going to get to this, but this is not a small government conservatism and Vance does not represent that lineage in any sense. Here he is speaking to Charlie Kirk, the enormously influential leader of TPUSA.

(Video clip)

JD Vance: I think it’s simple, and I’ll go back to something I said earlier about we need to reward the things that we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad. You talk about tax policy, let’s tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good. If you’re making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different lower tax rate than if you’re making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple.

Charlie Kirk: I totally agree.

(End video clip)

Bradley Onishi: We can talk about the ins and outs of tax policy and child credits and so on. What’s really important for me in this clip is what he says at the beginning. We should tax the things we think are good, and we should use the tax system and other government powers to basically as a weapon to target things we think are bad. It’s a moral weapon that we can use as the government to shape morality in the country. Who are the Catholic intellectuals influencing Vance? Well, one of them is Patrick Deneen, the Catholic philosopher, the Notre Dame philosopher, author of Regime Change, also the author of Why Liberalism Failed. In an appearance with Vance in May 2023, a book launch for Regime Change, Deneen called for something more radical than Jan. 6, a complete toppling of the current American order. “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government,” he said, “I want something far more revolutionary.” This was when asked about Jan. 6. Deneen proposes an aristopopulism in which the virtuous elite provide order and structure to public life in order to ensure the flourishing of ordinary citizens who cannot provide it for themselves.

The benevolent oligarchs are thus tasked with keeping the common good intact so the hoi polloi can enjoy the good life even if they don’t know or believe or experience it as such. Deneen’s common good conservatism is a move away from Ronald Reagan’s conservative fusionism, which combines the conservative Christian foundations of family, faith and military strength with the libertarian idea that government is not the answer, but the problem toward an imposition of a certain vision of the common good on all Americans through government. But Deneen’s view of the common good doesn’t include everyone. He opposes gay marriage. Wants stricter laws on divorce, denounces CRT, and mocks healthcare for trans people as absurd. He lauds authoritarian Viktor Orban’s Hungary as a place where the state actively cultivates political and moral order. The role of government writes political scientists, Chelsea Eben about Deneen and other post-liberal Catholics is not to preserve individual rights and manage competing interpretations of the good, but to impose and enforce a singular conception of the good through the regulation of social relations.

Here’s Deneen outlining his vision for common good conservatism, “It is socially conservative preferring traditional marriage, rejecting the idea that gender is elastic opposed to the sexualization rampant in modern culture and especially that aimed at young children. It is increasingly supportive of public encouragement and maintenance of the family, and in some countries such as Hungary has affected legislation to encourage and support marriage, family formation, publicly funded child support, and increasing birth rates. This conservatism is generally patriotic in supportive of distinct national identities and cultures rejecting the ethos of cosmopolitism. It begins with the primacy, excuse me, of the family community and the human goods that can only be secured through efforts of the political community and not with the primacy of the individual.”

I just want to stop on Deneen here for a minute and say that Deneen, along with other common good conservatives, mainly Catholics people like Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard law professor or Chad Pecknold the theologian, or R. R. Reno, the editor of First Things and other figures, they are openly calling for a conservatism that is not a small government conservatism. If you take what you think you know about American conservatism from Buckley and Goldwater to … Not that Buckley and Goldwater ever got along, but Buckley and Goldwater and Reagan all the way to Mike Pence, here’s the idea that I would put forth. Mike Pence was a vestige of that Reaganite image of American conservatism. Mike Pence was openly small government, low taxes, low regulation. That’s the tried and true formula that we’ve heard everyone from Goldwater and Nixon and Reagan and all of the wannabe Reagans since then, the Marco Rubios and others put forth, small government, low regulation. The best government’s no government at all, and God bless America, Christianity, that’s Mike Pence.

They tried to kill Mike Pence on Jan. 6, if you don’t remember. And then they chose JD Vance as the next Vice Presidential candidate. And in my view, the best way to understand that pick is to choose a common good conservative who openly says it’s not that small government is the answer. It’s that when we look around that roundtable of Americans, we’re not the majority and they’re not going to listen and their children degenerates as Webbon said, so unless we get them in order and we use the government as a weapon to do so, we’re never going to win again. We’re never going to be in power again. We can’t have Mike Pence or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. We can’t have Mike Huckabee or any other Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush wannabe out here saying that the government should be shrunk so that we can have better lives. We’ve let the children run amok. The businesses are pro-choice, all of the Hindus and Muslims, all of the agnostics and atheists, they are clamoring for power and representation. We need a government that will put them in order.

We need a government that will hurt those who need to be hurt so we can have the country we want. Vance also has strong bond with Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation and a fellow Reactionary Catholic with close ties to Opus Dei. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, architect of the Religious Right. And I will just stop and say Paul Weyrich, many of you in the room know about Paul Weyrich and you understand that he was the political entrepreneur who introduced us to Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye and Pat Robertson as the moral majority, the religious right that we envision of Reagan’s 80s, those who helped defeat supposedly Jimmy Carter in 1980. What we don’t often understand about Paul Weyrich, the man who started the Heritage Foundation along with several colleagues, is that he too was an anti-Vatican II reactionary Catholic, that he too believed that because his church had pulled out of the business of building Christendom in Vatican II, that he would have to do it as a layman himself with help by imposing it through American politics.

Paul Weyrich was more than a political entrepreneur, Paul Weyrich was a radical religious actor with a revolutionary vision for American government. Kevin Roberts stands in his lineage as the leader of the Heritage Foundation. He’s a man who once called himself a cowboy Catholic. He wrote a book, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America. They had to change the title because it got so much bad press. They have not released the book yet because it was shedding so much bad light on the Vance, Trump ticket. In the book, Roberts says that contraception is linked to the breakdown of civilization. Children shouldn’t be seen as an expectation, not a choice. He said recently that there will be a second American Revolution that will remain bloodless if the left allows it. And it just so happens that JD Vance wrote the foreword to this book. The Heritage Foundation is of course the publisher of Project 2025. We’re getting closer. I know it’s not a bait and switch. I didn’t get you here for Project 2025 not to talk about it.

Roberts thinks government should be the change he wants to see in the world, the new conservative movement, as he terms it, will use the federal government as a bludgeon against any and all of its cultural and economic foes while the small-minded government folk are derided throughout as wax museum conservatives. What can big government do for you? Chiefly Roberts wants it to enforce a new America, a faith, family, community, and work what he calls the permanent things, a phrase he credits to Russell Kirk, who took it from T. S. Eliot. In 2022, Vance spoke at a conference at Franciscan University with intellectual luminaries of common good conservatism. On one panel theologian Chad Pecknold of the Catholic University of America argued that the way towards civic happiness is a public orientation to God through the restoration of Sabbath laws, religious national holidays and public liturgies. Vance wrote something I think is very resonant in First Things, “We have to recognize that America is not just a principle, it is a group of people. It’s a history, it’s a culture. And yeah, part of that story is that people can come and assimilate.”

“But if your attitude is that the only thing you need to become an American is to believe that with a little bit of hormonal therapy a man can become a woman, then you’re making it so that massive numbers of your own country either need to be reeducated or need to be cast out of the political community.” Vance said something similar when he accepted the nomination at the RNC this summer, he is prone to linking the United States to land, to homeland, to saying that the idea that the United States is an experiment or an idea is false, that it’s about what Stephen Wolfe might call kin or a volk or homeland. On a 2021 appearance on the Jack Murphy podcast, Vance reiterated a position from the reactionary monarchist, Curtis Yarvin.

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” said Vance, “I think that what Trump should do if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace him with our people. When the courts stop, you stand before the country and say, the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” Essentially he’s saying, look, the executive branch should do what they want. When the judicial branch tries to check or balance that power, the executive, the President should say to Chief Justice Roberts or anyone else on the court, where is your army? Where is your police force? Where are those who will enforce this ruling? Because I know where mine is. This idea I should say, came directly from Curtis Yarvin in what Vance has previous to this paragraph is literally, I quote, “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin.” Who’s Curtis Yarvin? Well, if this talk I’m giving today doesn’t ruin your day enough, go home and Google Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin is a self-proclaimed monarchist.

He’s considered the philosopher of the Peter Thiel entourage, the thinker, the one with all of the ideas, the house philosopher and someone who is remarked that the end of democracy would be joyous. He wants an American king to rule post-Constitutional America. JD Vance’s worldview is a Christian nationalism that imposes Christian conceptions of gender, sexuality, family structure, multiculturalism, immigration policy, education, and reproductive rights on all people. It is a call for Christendom more than a Christian country. I think if you’ve paid attention to American politics, going back to Buckley all the way to Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, whoever you’re used to hearing that this is a Christian nation. For me, Vance is not a Midwestern young pick meant to spruce up the Trump ticket. For me, Vance is something beyond the call for a Christian nation. Vance is somebody who stands with people behind him like Yarvin, like Thiel, like post-liberal philosophers like revolutionary Catholics like Kevin Roberts, who would say, we need a radical transformation of how this country is governed in order for it to be in any way flourishing.

We don’t need a Christian nation in name. We don’t need a people who claim to be Christian. We need Christendom. We need the enforcement of Christian order on the United States. This is not conservatism in the image of Reagan. It’s big government conservatism as the only way to reorder the country as the City of God. When Vance was welcomed into the church, he chose St. Augustine as his patron saint. When asked about why, he mentioned that he had flipped through Augustine’s City of God several times over the last 15 years, which probably wouldn’t pass the test, sorry, if he was writing a paper for some of your classes. He also mentioned that the City of God has had a dramatic effect on his understanding of policy and government. Vance is not alone. And what I’ll close with is that Project 2025, if you are familiar with it, if you spend any time reading it, if you spend any time studying what it proposes, it proposes a radical expansion of the executive branch of the United States. It proposes an executive branch that cannot really de facto be checked by the judicial or legislative branches.

It proposes a federal workforce at the whim of the President loyalist or be gone. It proposes we turn the Department of Health and Human Services into the Department of Life or the Ministry of Life. It proposes to legislate that the only kind of legal family one can have that is recognized by the government as a cis man married to a cis woman and presumably reproductive. Project 2025 is the vision for an executive that in my view, is more akin to a monarch or an autocrat or a king. It is the way to get a democratically elected president who can take what is an open and liberal democracy and turn it into an illiberal form of governance. It’s a way to say this is the means to the Christendom that the folks I’ve been talking about today can reach their goal. They’ve stacked the court could spend another hour, I won’t, I promise, talking about Leonard Leo and the ways that we’ve arrived at the Supreme Court that we have.

I could talk about the ways that the state legislatures, the solicitor generals, and all the soft tissue of the American body politic are being attacked by this group of folks. But I’ll just say that if you want to understand why someone like JD Vance might be chosen, it’s because he is somebody who is willing to go further than his predecessor, Mike Pence. He has said openly, “I would not have certified what happened. I would not have certified the election on Jan. 6, 2021.” But I also think that people like Kevin Roberts, leader of the Heritage Foundation, post-liberal philosophers and Silicon Valley magnates think he is their ticket to an American monarchy. I’ll just close with one more example of that and then I promise to be quiet and stop ruining your day. Two weeks ago, there was a conference in the city across the bay called Reboot 2024. Did anyone follow this? All right, Reboot 2024. This was a conference organized by tributaries in the Thiel Universe.

And it was meant to be one of those conferences that really promotes the overwhelming benefits that tech will play for humans going forward, the ways that tech will make our lives better. There was however, a surprising number of panels and talks on like family and Natalism, and it caught a lot of folks off guard. This is the fleece-wearing khaki-wearing tech group that we’re used to seeing in this region, going to what they thought was another conference about how tech is going to lead us to utopia. But there was a promised special guest, a surprise. Who might it be? Who’s the big reveal hologram of Prince? Who knows Kevin Roberts? It’s Kevin Roberts, so here’s Kevin Roberts showing up in San Francisco what conservative Christians like him think of as hell on Earth sitting with a group, very unlikely to be his audience and Silicon Valley tech folks explaining how the government should do everything possible to promote more babies, more families, more marriages, and a certain kind of governance.

And it was met with mixed results. But to me it was really amazing because I’ll be honest, I was on Twitter and I saw a big surprise guests and I was thinking, who is it? Is it JD Vance? Who’s the person? It was Kevin Roberts. To me, that’s a pretty good example from about two weeks ago of the kind of movements that are finding a new alliance in what they take to be a move toward American monarchy. I’ll stop there. Thank you very much.

Audience 1: Have you explored the relationship between the rise of the religious right and white Christian nationalism in the most recent period and its relationship with settler colonialism? Because I’m thinking about what you said about the homeland, and I’m also thinking about early American history when Christianity was used to distinguish settlers from the indigenous and to prove that they were more human than the indigenous who did not practice Christianity. And I’m also thinking about it in the context of viewing immigrants and people of color and the LGBTQ agenda in terms of almost viewing that as settler colonialism against the white Christian nation, like a takeover of the white Christian nation, so if you could speak to that.

Bradley Onishi: That’s exactly the position that Stephen Wolfe takes in the case for Christian nationalism. Stephen Wolfe is the one who said, we’re not immigrants. The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the United States is not an immigrant. They’re a settler. He says that openly. And what Wolfe represents for me is this evolution we’ve seen over the last 10 years of trying to find a way to articulate the proliferation authority that whether it’s an white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, whether it’s a white Catholic thinks they deserve in the United States. And he arrives at this inclusion that every time … I’ve showed it to you today and many of you laughed, but I’ve showed it to several audiences and everyone just laughs out loud at the absurdity of him saying the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is a settler and proudly so. And what that means is we are Native Americans. What he’s saying there is as settlers, those who founded the country, we are the Native Americans and everyone else, the people you mentioned, the people of color, the non-Christian, those who don’t construct their family according to our understanding of God’s vision for family, are others.

And they are those who deserve to be on the outside of the city walls. They should be outside the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the Massachusetts wilderness. They should be left outside the City of God. I think for me, if I think about the doctrine of discovery, if I think about the ways that we might’ve seen the white Christian conservative in previous iterations try to finesse their way around it, we’ve arrived at a place where Stephen Wolfe, this enormously popular theologian in the Reformed tradition is saying, “I’m a settler, proud of it, and that means I’m the Native American, not you.” In addition, I’ll just give you one more example. I didn’t show you today, Charlie Kirk, who’s this overwhelmingly influential, right-wing figure. If you made me list the top 10 most influential people in the American right, I might think Charlie Kirk deserved to be in there, he’s that influential. Last January during Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations, he said, “I have a controversial opinion about this, but Martin Luther King Jr. was a bad guy.”

I don’t know about you, but I spend way too much on time on Twitter and usually on Martin King Jr. Day, Ted Cruz tweets something like, a Martin Luther King Jr. quote. And then that’s followed by, that’s why we need a wall. And you’re like, OK, good. Good job. But the strategy there is clear, quote Martin Luther King Jr. and then finesse it into, that’s why he would be for what I’m for as this super right-wing immigration person, et cetera. We’re not there anymore. We’re at the place where Charlie Kirk is like Martin Luther King Jr. was a bad guy, and in addition, the Civil Rights Act was a terrible mistake. To me, there’s direct links there with what you’re asking about whether it’s Stephen Wolfe or Charlie Kirk where we’ve arrived at a place where they’re openly saying to hold the identity that I hold, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is to be the Native American, and thus all others are seen as outside the city gates and outside of the real understanding of the nation, so I hope that helps.

Audience 2: Just possibly on the other side of the rather pessimistic view that you’re presenting. Broadly speaking, 22% of Americans describe themselves as a religiously unaffiliated. And I’m just wondering whether on the other side of this matter, your views on whether, for lack of a better way of putting it, that the Democratic Party is doing, what sort of job you think they’re doing in animating that group in opposition to the values that you’ve suggested here? And when I say that, I mean animating that group to see tolerance as a salient and positive political value.

Bradley Onishi: Sure. If I zoom in on the specific group you’re asking about, I still think that there is a lot of work to do for the religiously unaffiliated to feel welcome. And I say this descriptively, not prescriptively. I’m not here to advocate for the Democratic Party, but I just say this as somebody who’s around secular people a lot and trying to figure out their political affiliations and commitments and so on, especially young religiously unaffiliated, people still feel like the Democratic Party is a party where they’re sometimes welcome, sometimes useful, sometimes not. And there’s this dance that they see the Democratic Party doing in terms of its leadership of needing to demonstrate that there are people who are Democrats and people of faith. Because the charge from the people I’m talking about today is that you can’t be a Democrat and fill in the blank. You can’t be a Democrat and a good person, that’s one. But you can’t be a Democrat and a Christian is what you normally hear.

The religiously unaffiliated person who’s 25 or 30 years old in this country still looks at the Democratic Party and sees at the top of the ticket, Joe Biden. And it sees someone like Bernie Sanders as quote-unquote “unelectable” or they just we’re never going to let him through. My point is there’s still an awkward family fit there in terms of a broad tent in the Democratic Party for this incredibly important and growing demographic in the United States and one of our political parties. Because there’s a sense that unless you’re a person of faith in the Democratic Party, there’s a ceiling as to how far you can go and how much you’re welcome. Are they really going to put you on stage? Are you really going to be somebody whose voice matters that much? And so that’s something that I’m sure many sociologists, political scientists and others will have a very close eye on in the next decade. But from what I see with activists and secular organizers, there’s still a feeling of being on the outside looking in. And yeah, I can elaborate on that if you’d like.

Audience 3: Thank you. As I understand it, there’s the NatCons and there’s the FreeCons. And I would’ve thought Peter Thiel was a FreeCon, actually. Are you arguing that the NatCons have won and the FreeCons have lost? And maybe you should say what a FreeCon is as well, not a Freekon, a FreeCon.

Bradley Onishi: I think my argument would be that, Peter Thiel’s a really interesting figure because you would think Peter Thiel would argue for a libertarian social order where the government is out of your life, you’re allowed to do what you want. Peter Thiel’s an openly gay man and would shy away from this kind of imposition or this idea of government as a weapon or this government as cultivator of the common good shaped in one particular vision. But Thiel has shown a couple of things in recent years. One has been a commitment to quote Christian values. You can find Peter Thiel doing an interview with a pastor. You can find Peter Thiel telling people like JD Vance that Catholicism may be the right path for them in terms of their understanding of themselves as a man, as a leader, as somebody who wants to be influential in the world and have a legacy.

I think Peter Thiel is exactly the case in point that I’m arguing today, which is in many ways the NatCons have won, I think, because when I think of the pick of JD Vance, and when I think of the Presidency and the candidacy of Donald Trump, I do not think of small government. I do not think of government as reduced. I do not think of government as less and less part of the average American citizen’s life. I think of the government as more and more invasive. And I think I see them … The argument for that is, look, we tried it. We tried to combine Christian patriotism and libertarian economics, and that got us so far. But by the time Barack Obama was done being President, the country was going to the previous question, less religious, more racially diverse, gay folks can get married now.

We let the market decide in the market decided against us, so we can’t do that anymore. We’ve got to use the market and the power we have as government officials to shape and could be through taxes, that could be through law, that could be through policy, so I do think so. Now, is it a total and absolute victory? Not at all. And are there still folks out there that talk about a libertarian economic order in the ways that we would recognize someone like Buckley or Reagan would talk about? Of course. Of course there are. But I think for me, the example of Thiel and the candidacy of Vance on the ticket really represent a victory for those that would be on the NatCon side.

Audience 4: With Thiel, it’s also attempting to think that he uses Rene Girard, which is his personal philosophical influence as a bridge between his own personal distance and it being good for others. But I actually wanted to ask about the City of God and JD Vance and his Augustinian friend here. Of course, this is an appalling reading of the City of God, and he can’t possibly have actually opened the book, I think. But the question raised by the City of God, the actual text which he hasn’t read, is partly a question of the nature of the church. And fundamentally, one way to read that book is that the City of God is the church, and it’s about ecclesiology, not about politics at all. And so I want to get your take on the ecclesiologies implied all over here. The Protestant figures that you talked about on the first half of your talk cannot have the same ecclesiology as the Catholics that you talked about in the second part of your talk.

And this seems to be a striking problem for Christian nationalism because they, there’s a yada, yada, yada of exactly what kind of church would underlie the political order. And that’s what Augustine is so preoccupied by is the question of the mixed church in the world and it’s only possible eschatological reality. Setting aside his reading of the City of God, how do we cope with the Augustinian question raised about what is the real church and how does it relate to our political life?

Bradley Onishi: Yeah, no. First of all, just thank you for those observations. I’ll just start with the part you mentioned, which I just agree with wholeheartedly. If the dog ever catches its tail, the Protestants and Catholics are going to have severe disagreement and we’ll be headed towards something like, something that we might compare to, not in scale or in grandiosity, but nonetheless, the European Wars of religion. Doug Wilson and Joel Webbon have a much different understanding of what American theocracy should look like than JD Vance and Kevin Roberts. Now, they are tenuous allies at the moment, and we can trace that allyship and that alliance all the way back to Weyrich and Falwell, Weyrich and Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye and those others. They have been allied for 60 years around what they call family values, which is anti-LGBTQ agenda, anti-reproductive rights, anti-ERA, so on and so forth.

That alliance has worked really well. I think if we look closely, we can see the Catholic leadership of that alliance at the moment. I’ll just for a short digression say that recently we had an Alabama Supreme Court case where IVF was the main focus, and IVF cells were considered to be human persons. That was what the opinion said. And then just after that, the SBC, the SBC of the Al Mohler we just saw, came out and said that IVF should be condemned in Christian practice as murder. To me, that never happens without the overwhelming influence of conservative Catholic understandings of personhood, reproductive rights, so on and so forth. That alliance is intact for the moment. If they ever arrive at a place where they get to the top of the mountain, there’s going to be a big fight, a big one. With that said, what kind of ecclesiology is at play?

My argument would be that if we take Paul Weyrich, this founder of the Heritage Foundation, somebody who basically left the Catholic Church over Vatican II, and why did he do this? He left the church over Vatican II because he saw that as a signal of a grand ecclesiological change. That to him, Vatican II signaled the withdrawal of the Catholic Church from its imposition on the Earth, that it was going to recognize that a pluralistic global citizenship, it was going to recognize an ecumenical setting of Christian fellowship, to Weyrich that was surrender. My argument would be just in brief that whether it’s Weyrich or Roberts or Vance, the ecclesiology and the politics that they want to advance are ones in which the church is the dominator of society and no longer recognizes the kind of ecumenical or pluralistic globe or human community that we live in.

For example, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, there was a Catholic priest who took part in an ecumenical religious service with Episcopalians and Methodists and some Jews. Paul Weyrich did everything he could to get that priest excommunicated because hours after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he had the gall to join with other Christians and help to soothe the community by offering religious services. I think the ecclesiology offered here isn’t direct opposition to what many take to be the merits of Vatican II from the Catholic Church. Now, we can talk about all the problems and all the issues, but nonetheless, many Catholics would say the Vatican II was a watershed moment in which the church opened its doors, invited a sense of communion, and communion’s the wrong word, but community at least with other Christians and other religious people in the world.

And it no longer understood things like Christendom or theocracy to be a goal or an actual good Christian practice. Many of my Catholic colleagues and Catholic friends and others see Vatican II as a real watershed moment of when the church modernized to a point of a good ecclesiology in their view. I’ll give you one example. In the first part of my career, as Carolyn said, I used to write quite a bit about Christian mysticism in the French tradition, so I spent an inordinate amount of time, even though I’m not Catholic in French Catholic spaces. I lived in the seminary in Paris for quite some time. I woke up and had breakfast, and every day the priests and the seminarians would ask me, “Why are you here? You’re not Catholic. How did you get in here?” And I would say, “I have no idea, but here I am.”

And Jean-Luc Marion, does anyone know Jean-Luc Marion? The preeminent Catholic phenomenologist is somebody who I would put at least in some sense, in the more conservative, not near, I don’t want to slander Jean-Luc Marion, but closer to Vance and Roberts than to others. And he was always telling those who were not Catholic in these circles that if you had the eyes to see, you would convert, but you don’t, so you’re not seeing the invitation God’s given you, and that’s your fault. And then Emmanuel Falque was his protege and this very different kind of Catholic, and he was always fighting with Jean-Luc, very embarrassingly in public, but in private, he would always tell me like, “Bradley, Bradley, I know you’re not Catholic.” And I’d say, “You’re right, Emmanuel, I’m not.” “Do you want to go to mass?” I said, “Sure, let’s go.”

And I said, “But I’m not Catholic. I’m not going to take part in the Eucharist and so on.” He said, “That’s fine. It’s not my job to convert you. It’s God’s job.” And to me, those two examples have always stuck with me as like, Vance has one view, “Hey, if you haven’t seen the call, it’s your fault. You deserve to be punished.” And the other is, “We’re Catholic, you’re not. Hey, we’re going to celebrate what we do. We might come to you and celebrate what you do. If you convert, that’s God’s job, not mine. I’m not going to try to do that for you.” I’m not sure if I’ve answered your question.

Audience 4: One is more Augustinian than the other.

Bradley Onishi: Sure, yeah. One has a more … I gander you take to be a more accurate understanding of Augustine’s, ecclesiology and politics.

Speaker 20: [inaudible].

Bradley Onishi: Yeah, so there’s a brand new book by Gareth Gore called Opus and Gareth in that book outlined … The book just came out four days ago. In that book, Gareth outlines the close ties of Kevin Roberts to Opus Dei. Kevin Roberts goes to the CIC and the heart of DC for spiritual formation, so there’s documented ties of Kevin Roberts to Opus Dei, and of course Kevin Roberts and Project 2025. But he also in that book, Gareth, really outlines exhaustively the connections in DC of Opus Dei and the ways that Opus Dei has worked basically for three decades to gain influence among the DC power elite. That could be Bill Barr, that could be Larry Kudlow, that could be any number of folks, that could be Rick Santorum, former senator from Pennsylvania.

There’s any number of folks in that Opus Dei web in DC, so the short answer is there certainly is an Opus Dei influence on Project 2025, and among many of the influential Catholics who have had a role in shaping our current political moment. I don’t know if that answers your question, but I would highly, highly recommend that book just for its exhaustive accounts of those connections. Ones you may already be aware of, it sounds like you already know quite a bit, so maybe you’re already … You won’t learn much.

Speaker 20: But I’m talking about the other sects to the right.

Bradley Onishi: Oh, you’re talking about the other sects?

Speaker 20: [inaudible].

Bradley Onishi: I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ll be honest. And I don’t know about the connections of those other sects to Project 2025. Is that the question? I don’t know. I have not looked into that.

Audience 5: Hi. In terms of the degree of growth of influence of the Christian nationalists, first of all, to what extent is this a growth or are we’re talking about people who were always supporting this orientation, but maybe were not as vocal about it in the past? And to the extent that there is growth, some of the things you mentioned in your comment before the last were the issues of purity, family issues, but reproductive, sexual identity, sexual orientation, abortion. Are those the drivers or are there other drivers of increasing support?

Bradley Onishi: I think the second question really is the … Well, let me back up. When you say growth, I think we have to clarify what we mean by growth. Are the numbers growing? Is the percentage of people in the United States per capita who hold what we would call Christian nationalists views growing? Not really. And it actually means that if you take white Evangelicals, white Evangelicals by the numbers about eight in 10 score as Christian nationalists. And if you go back 15 years, white Evangelicals were about 22, 23% of the country. They’re now 13% of the country, and I’m getting that from PRRI 2023, their survey of religious life and values in the country. In terms of per capita, I think we can say that it’s either stagnant or shrinking. I think the argument I’m trying to make today is that the influence has grown because of who’s at the top of the hierarchy in American politics.

And the acceleration of extremism has changed the landscape of American politics such that you can say this country needs a dictator. We’re here to overthrow democracy. Those who are not Christian should be excised from political community. My argument would be that if you go back even a decade to the Mitt Romney or John McCain candidacy’s, those kinds of statements would’ve put you far outside the Overton window. When I think of growth, I don’t think of percentages of people or even population. I think of the acceleration ideas to a place of enormous influence. And that’s a pretty trite statement. I think anyone who’s followed the Trump candidacy, Presidency candidacy, has noticed the ways that that has happened over the course of that amount of time. For me, the examples of Vance and everything related to that along with the Protestants I’ve talked about today, really brings into focus the ways that many influential Christians are now talking about American nationhood, American belonging and so on.

The drivers of that, and the ways that you can engage people on these ideas are exactly what you point to, they have in many ways been the same since the era of Weyrich and Falwell, since the era of LaHaye, Roberts and Ralph Reed and so on. There is a widespread effort to use quote-unquote “family values” as the way to keep people in this movement to energize people for this movement, and to find those who may not be Christian like you, but who are allies in your fight. For example, there is a huge, and I don’t think I have to explain this to anyone in the room. There is a concerted systematic effort to target trans people by folks in these camps. The trans community is a very small community percentage-wise in this country. Nonetheless, it’s a community that this group is banking on, many Americans have not enough familiarity with such that they can make them afraid that they will do something to their kids, or your daughter won’t get a track scholarship because of all of the trans athletes in her midst, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That’s a replay of everything that happened in the 60s and 70s when it came to the gay community and so on and so forth. The same goes for reproductive rights. The same goes for everything surrounding IVF. JD Vance said yesterday or the day before, “Our kids, they don’t know the answer to five plus five, but our kids do know that there are 87 genders.” And that’s a quote. I’m not exaggerating that. That’s the kind of message you consistently get, fear of a family, fear of a person who’s outside of the right structure. And not only does that mobilize those within these circles, but you can go find allies. If you pay attention to the book banning efforts or the anti-CRT efforts, you’re seeing something that you never thought you would see in the Tea Party era, which is like Muslim parents and evangelical parents yelling at the councilmen walking out of the meeting because they are somehow finding themselves allied in this fight against whatever they think they’re fighting, CRT, banning books, pornography in the library, whatever they’re mad about.

You’re seeing these alliances that you’re like 2010 me would’ve never expected to see the Muslim parents and the evangelical parents all yelling at the same councilmen thinking they’re on the same team. But those are the kinds of alliances we’re starting to see pop up, and you can make those alliances, and they learned this in the 60s and 70s by way of that family values agenda. I’ll give you one more example. The Trump campaign is really assuming that it’s going to get 80-something percent of the white evangelical vote. They got it in 2016 and they got it in 2020. Unless Trump really ruins the abortion issue, which he’s trying to, and they keep reining it back in, they’re going to get 80 or 82% again. Who are they trying to get now? Latino Christians and Black Christians.

The idea here is if we can foreground in those Christian communities of Latinx folks and Black folks, if we can foreground gender, family, masculinity, sex, we can background systemic racism, police brutality, and immigration, and we can foreground a family structure and a fear that might get some of those folks into our camp. And the numbers show that they’re being successful, so you can make these unlikely alliances by way of that tried and true quote-unquote “family values” agenda based around family structure, sex and gender.

Audience 6: To counter this gloom and doom, say you’re a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is trying to defend the sacred principle of separation of church and state, and we were making progress for a while it seemed against some of the cases against prayers and schools, all this stuff. What your advice besides vote and hope, that Project 2025 does not come to pass?

Bradley Onishi: I think that one of the things that I … I’m a weird person. I think you probably could tell that just by me being here for an hour, but I get invited to speak at a lot of Freedom From Religion Foundation gatherings, American atheist gatherings and humanist gatherings. And what I tell those folks all the time is there’s a lot of religious people in this country who share political values with you. They’re people who are fighting for trans rights. They’re people who are fighting for the separatist church and state. They’re people who are fighting for the inclusion of everyone in this human community we have. They’re fighting for much different immigration policies and so on. You can build a coalition with them if you’re willing. And then I also get invited to a lot of churches. I speak in a ton of churches.

I was just three days ago over at the oldest Japanese American church in the country over in San Francisco, I told you about Omaha and so on. And I tell those folks all the time, I know when you think about the American Atheists or the FFRF or whoever you think that they just get together, eat Domino’s pizza and devise ways to finally prove God doesn’t exist. I know you think that’s what they’re up to. Let’s order Domino’s tonight and really seal the deal on God for good. And every time I hang out with FFRF or American Atheists, you know what folks are talking about? Voting rights, separation of church and state, protecting trans kids, changing our immigration policies. There’s a coalition here, and there’s way more Americans that do not fit in any of the orbit that I’m talking about today.

But oftentimes there’s barriers to those folks working together because they don’t think they’re going to find resonant values. That’s one takeaway I’ll say is that there is a broad and wide coalition of Americans who see something like the separation of church and state as the really guarantor of not only the freedom of religion, but also the freedom of speech, the bodily autonomy, the sharing of power through the voting rights of each person and so on and so forth. That’s there for the taking if we’re willing to do that work. There’s been a question over here for a long time. No, no, no. Please go ahead, please.

Speaker 21: She just asked it.

Bradley Onishi: Oh, OK. All right. OK. I’m sorry.

Carolyn Chen: Just one more short question.

Audience 7: Thank you for the talk. This is related to that, but really an intra-Christian question, meaning who do you think are making effective theological arguments, Protestant or Catholic? Because basically there’s a lot of hand-wringing and a lot of worry, and I see some folks, but you feel like are making that effective theological argument to these extremists.

Bradley Onishi: Sure. I’ll give one example, and it may be one you’re familiar with and you may have your various opinions on it, happy to entertain or to engage those. The Baptist Joint Committee has a initiative called Christians Against Christian Nationalism. And the main argument there is this, they are Baptist in the Baptist dissenting tradition. When most Americans, not people in this room, but when most Americans envision Baptists, they envision southern Baptists. They don’t know that there’s a long and tried true tradition of Baptists that would say this, the freedom of religion, the freedom to practice your tradition of worship and veneration is dependent on the freedom from religion that unless you have a government that is uninfected by one religious commitment, you will always have a situation where that government has in its interest to favor and impose that one religion on all of us.

Now, you might be Baptist, you might be Presbyterian, you might be Methodist. You all have been trying to get along for a long time, even though you’re like first cousins. What will it look like if we allow a government to have one, not only religious tradition, but one Christian ethos to impose? Do you really want that? If this is an intra-Christian question, I would say to my Catholic friend or my Methodist friend or my Presbyterian friend, I know that the allure of a government that quote-unquote “protects” Christian values might sound like something seductive. Why would I ever want to give the government the authority to legislate or interpret my holy text? When I think about the state of Texas putting the 10 Commandments on the wall, you know what I’m saying to my Christian friend there? I don’t know about y’all man, but I don’t want the government deciding which translation of the holy text we use to decide is the official state translation of the New Testament or the Hebrew Bible, do I want them editing my sacred text?

Do I want the government to have the authority to decide how our public square is full of our religious symbols, our religious ideals, our religious texts? I don’t, and I actually don’t need that. What my friends of the Baptist Joint Committee would argue is if your God is so small that you need that God to step in and use JD Vance as his protector or her protector or their protector, that’s pretty weak. The Baptist tradition goes back to a place that says the City of God is the church. And the church is one built on one understanding, and one set of principles. Human government is flawed, imperfect. It’s mixed, it’s pluralistic, it’s a whole nother paradigm of how we order things. It might be seductive, Christian in the pews, to think of a Christian government that will promote Christian values. Well, who’s Christian values, which Christian? And every time we’ve done that in history, here’s what it chose. There’s going to be a time when you’re the wrong Christian.

You’re not going to be the right Christian for long. You may not have the right phenotype, you may not have the right skin color, you may not have the right kind of family, you may not have the right Bible. Donald Trump’s selling King James Bibles. Most of my Catholic friends don’t use the King James version for obvious historical reasons. You’re not going to be the right Christian for long. And if you get involved with that, you’re either going to be the wrong kind of Christian or they’re going to ask you a Christian to go get those other Christians who are the wrong ones. Do you want exist in that kind of society? Do you want ask to be making that choice? I don’t. Let the government be the government and the freedom of that government from religion will mean we’re free to be religious in our own right. And that seems the best way. That’s how I think the BJC is looking at it.

Carolyn Chen: Well, on that, please join me in thanking Dr. Bradley Onishi.

(Applause)

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Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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