The Sunday Interview: The Christian Turn Against Democracy w/ Robert P. Jones (PART 1)

0:00When I played X Access Made Hello, welcome to the Sunday interview. This is Straight White American Jesus and I'm Brad O'Neill. Author of American Caesar, Healthy Acrats and Tech Lords are turning America into a monarchy which comes out in just about one week. It's time to get those pre-orders. You can get a signed copy at Annie Bloom's in Portland. Today I have just a distinct pleasure of bringing you some conversations I've had with Robert P. Jones. Author of a new book called Backslide, Reclaiming a Faith in a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy. Robert P. Jones is of course the president and founder of PRRI.

1:05Somebody who many of you will know as the author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, White Too Long, The End of White Christian America and more. I'm going to bring you this interview in two parts. I did a sub-stack live with Robert about a week ago and so we have an hour long conversation that includes some questions and answers. But I also have just a short conversation I had with him about the book and I want to bring you that first. So expect the Sunday interview today to be two parts and you can enjoy that over the course of this week. One thing that I really appreciate about what Robbie does in this book is he just takes an unflinching view of where we are as a country. He's somebody who never shies away from telling the truth and he says clearly in Backslide that we are in our 1933 moment in the United States comparing the discourse coming from Trump and his administration to what we saw and what we heard from Nazi Germany.

2:07One of the places that he really zeroes in on is the war on empathy and as somebody who has criticized White supremacy in White Christianity in the United States for a long time, Robbie has just a view on this that I think is really important. On page 155 of this book he says, with theology now unmoored from morality, white evangelicals have moved from viewing moral sentiments with caution to declaring them toxic or sinful. Recently they have begun to wage a dangerous war on what has been acknowledged as a foundational moral sentiment within Christianity and a civic virtue within pluralistic democracies, the idea of empathy. One of the things that caught my eye in this passage is the idea that theology has been unmoored from morality. There's two used to go hand in hand at least in many contexts and as Robbie points out in the chapter, theology is no longer about necessarily being a good person. It's about being an emissary of King Jesus, somebody who carries out the imperial marching

3:11orders of a tyrannical despot rather than loving your neighbor, caring for the sick or the poor, thinking about the vulnerable. And therefore, empathy is the new war, the new front in the war against those who are supposedly God's enemies. He says on page 164, the war on empathy is not a sincere debate among Christians of good will, it is a theological weapon strategically fashioned and deployed for authoritarian political ends. That to me is so spot on, that the war on empathy is a theological weapon. If you can separate theology from morality, you can use the war on empathy as a theological weapon for authoritarian ends. Rather than convincing people, wooing people, putting yourself in their shoes so that you can understand who they are and then explaining to them why you think they should follow the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Nope. It's a theological weapon for authoritarian ends either submit or be considered evil and

4:15our enemy. Here's what Robbie said when I asked him about this passage. Well, look, I can't help but start by just pausing here to note the oddity that we need to have this conversation. Yeah. Because I think that in itself, sometimes you and I are so in this world and have watched this evolve for so long, every now and then I have to remind myself like, wow, okay, we're having to actually defend empathy as a moral virtue. That's the world we're living in right now. So I guess I'll just start there. And I start with a more benign version of this with a good friend of mine who we have this conversation about my wife is Jewish and about the status of her soul as a Jewish person. And the round and round we went and getting pressed to what is the status.

5:18And of Jewish people in the evangelical salvation narrative. And you know, at the end of the day, after trying to kind of be nice and not sort of say what he really thought, my friend finally says, well, look, the way I read the Bible, no one comes to the Father except through Jesus. And that includes Jews. And then he kind of paused and he said, but I'd be happy if I were wrong. And I actually thought that that was quite significant. Like on the one hand, he felt pinned in by his theology, but he had this deep moral instinct that made him uncomfortable. And I kind of wanted to hold on to that moment because I think the, if you asked the question like, why, why are we suddenly or why is some segment of Christianity suddenly needing a theology that demonizes and that calls sinful, calls empathy sinful. And then I think it's because they're wanting to justify actions that their deeper human

6:19instincts tell them are wrong. And so they need a theological permission structure to do things that are in fact, ought to be unthinkable. But that's the work. So then there is this theological spade work that happens. It's okay, we need to go from here from point A to point B and justify actions C. We don't currently have the tools to do that. So let's figure that out. Well, the one thing in the way of that is empathy. So we have to kind of attack empathy to kind of mute that moral objection that might come right down the way when we start recommending things like we're going to round up immigrants and put them in concentration camps. You know, you, you write, as we discussed already today, about the 1933 moment in the United States. There's a lot of reflection on Nazi Germany. And I guess, you know, when you say a war on empathy and you frame it as if you can teach

7:23people an ideology that gives them the muscle memory, deterna way from their deep moral instincts, their human instincts, to care for others, to worry about others, to put themselves in the shoes of others. Then you're creating the conditions for dehumanization and a justification for the worst kinds of actions against people because they don't deserve our empathy. They don't deserve us worrying about their suffering. And therefore when they suffer in concentration camps, when they suffer in other inhumane ways, we are not to blame. And we have rid ourselves of any lingering guilt, shame about inflicting that kind of pain on another human. Is that the end game here? Is that where this goes or maybe we're already there, but is that what the war on empathy accomplishes? This is a theological retrofit, right, onto a political program.

8:26And it's built that way. So, and I think the political programs already laid out before us, right? We are in the middle of a mass deportation campaign and primarily the people that we need to kind of blunt our empathy for are, you know, those, and I think are like those scenes, for example, in Springfield, Ohio, right, right now, where we're law-biting people who've been here under temporary protected status, they, the law are suddenly being slapped with ankle monitors, you know, kind of aggressively arrested, threatened to be separated from their children, like all of these things, right, that ought to kind of pull at us. But we, but, you know, if you're going to implement that kind of program, you're going to need a theology that can blunt those impulses. And I think they actually learned a lesson, a very sinister lesson from the Civil Rights Movement here, because we know that one of the things that turned the tide in the Civil

9:30Rights Movement were at least two things. One was the image of a battered body of Emmett Till in his casket, where his mother against, she had to go through all kinds of stuff to demand his casket to be open. And in fact, they tried to bury him in a shallow grave in Mississippi, but she could even get his body back to Chicago. But she demanded not only that the body be back from Chicago, but that it be an open casket, because she said, I wanted to see what they have done to my boy. So I think that image, and then I think the other images were of firehoses and German shepherds attacking children and teenagers in Birmingham. And so, and those relied on white people seeing those images and having some empathetic response, even if they didn't know those people, right? Having some empathetic response. And so I think they're just thinking like, okay, we need something to inoculate, particularly white Christians against having that kind of response when they see those images of

10:31what's happening with immigrants in this country. You know, as you're speaking, I'm just sensing a connection between a war on empathy and needing to lie to yourself. Now, hear me out. Yeah. So you gave these examples, Emmett Till and the firehoses. And what the war on empathy is basically teaching you is, we're going to train you such that when you see that kind of video, you don't feel what we would all expect you to feel, which is sadness, shame, a feeling that this is not right. I can't help but think that that's happened over and over again with George Floyd, right, with how many other cases over the last 15 or 20 years in American life. And then I think of January 6th. And I just think of like the ongoing war on do not believe your eyes.

11:33Do not believe what's in front of you. There's a concerted effort now in the American right to say Derek Chauvin should be free because he actually didn't do anything wrong when it came to George Floyd, right? Ben Shapiro. Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, William Wolf, they're all saying free Derek Chauvin. Does the war on empathy go hand in hand with this sort of inner collapse that aren't talked about that we referenced earlier of needing to lie to yourself about what's going on in order just to make it through the day under a kind of certain regime? Yeah. I do think it is accurately called lying to yourself. And of course, what this war on empathy does is it gives you an alternative structure so that you can tell yourself that you're not lying to yourself, right? And so what you end up doing is you sacrifice your deepest moral sentiments on the altar of obedience. That's what this calls you to do. And so you've been given an external frame that says we're bringing about this ordered

12:35world that God wants to see on the ground. And in order to do that, we're going to have to do some things that might seem troubling to you. But at the end of the day, right, this is the world that God wants to see. This is the world we're implementing. And in fact, I mean, the most twisted version of this, they would argue that even the people you see being harmed are ultimately going to be better off. Right? And they've already made this argument about slavery. Like, you know, about like, oh, yeah, well, actually slaves were better off than they were in Africa. I mean, this is an old, old trope, you know, and they're intended to be at that place in the hierarchy of beings in the world, right? For racial reasons. And so there's this way in which even the people who are being oppressed victimize our innocence and the long run better off. And so you can even assuage your, you know, moral qualms with that kind of an idea, right?

13:36That this is all in the service of a big master plan. And so this little thing you can, you just need to kind of set it aside, because you'll see in the big picture is all for the good and all for God's good at the end of the day. Yeah. But that just let me say like that is exceedingly dangerous way of thinking, right? And it's an exceedingly irresponsible way of thinking in no Christian or no citizen of a democracy should be willing to give over their moral sensibility and their theological sensibility to that kind of thinking. One of the other aspects of Robbie's book that I just thoroughly appreciate is the fact that we live in a polarized country. And that doesn't mean that Mending Fences is going to be the answer. As I just said, he says clearly in the book that this is our 1933 moment and that we are facing something like a take over our country akin to what happened in Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes or other authoritarian autocratic regimes.

14:41Robbie has on this what Robbie's response to this is not simply to say, well, we need to reach across the aisle and we need to be able to talk to each other again. I think we've all heard that over the last 10 years. And instead, he says that we need to embrace division. And what he means by that is just we need to be able to look at folks who are holding anti-democratic, fascist, authoritarian political views and say, you're wrong. And if you're going to hold those views, it's going to be impossible for us to share a society that is democratic, that is pluralist, that is based on the values that at least in part were put in place by the American Constitution. He points out that the United States is not a 50-50 country and I think this is really important to remember. He says on page 234, rather than a 50-50 country, we are closer to a two thirds one third country with the one third attempt to claim and force a white Christian nationalist understanding

15:42of America on the rest of us. He says on 235, we are experiencing a great asymmetrical stretching of the moral and political bounds of American society. This is Robbie saying to anyone who will listen, this is not about having both sides of the argument presented fairly. This is not about saying that if we just talk to each other, we'll get there. Don't get me wrong, I think we need to, when possible, have conversations with family members and friends who are caught up in the manga movement and see if there's any way that they will enter into a good faith dialogue based on religion and politics and so on. But it doesn't mean that simply having both sides of the story, reporting both sides of the story, etc. is going to help with this country. Now, what it does mean is that, and we've already seen this, we're going to see just increasingly desperate attempts on the Trump administration to stay in power because

16:45they are only one third of the country in terms of their support. We're seeing that with elections, we're seeing that, we've seen that already with the Jaramandering that's happened across the country and the wave of redistricting that it set off. But we're also going to see it in the round to election day with misinformation and disinformation. We've already had that in 2016 and 2020. But now, as Robbie points out, we have the technological abilities of deep fake AI that are going to increasingly make it hard to know what's real and what isn't. I just, we all watched January 6th. Some of us have watched way more footage of that day than we would prefer to have done. I think anybody who's listening or watching this has seen some version of Derek Chauvin on George Floyd's neck. And yet somehow we live in a world where you're able to be convinced that January 6th was a normal tourist visit or nothing bad happened. It was a nothing burger and that Derek Chauvin did nothing wrong.

17:46And, you know, doing this work, Robbie, there's times I get kind of numb to like that whatever Doug Wilson said today. But when I really think about those two things, it sends chills down my spine because it reminds me that no matter how dastardly an evil, a thing might be that we see on video or in picture or wherever, there's a set of mechanisms and an ecosystem to convince you that that is not what happened. And a ton of people will believe it and sacrifice themselves on that alter you just talked about. It really gives me shivers in some sense. Troubling and it's going to be even more troubling, you know, in these next two elections, we didn't fully have the kind of AI deep fake technology that we're going to have unleashed on us in these next two elections that's now sophisticated enough. It is hard to believe your eyes. And then when you have a president who's saying, you could only believe what I tell you happened, which he has explicitly said, he said it a long time ago, explicitly said that. And twisting, you know, like, like, remember that Donald Trump, even when he was running

18:51this, this second time of her 2024, he was, he had a January 6th choir that he had recorded, like people who were in jail, he had recorded singing, right? And would play that at his rallies. He called them political prisoners, people who had been convicted of attacking police officers. He called them, you know, political prisoners. And then of course, did a 1500 people that he, you know, gave partens and commuted their sentences. To en masse, no matter how violent, he made no distinctions, no matter how violent or how big the evidence was, just a big sweeping thing. So yeah, never happened. Nothing bad, nothing bad to see here. And that's a real mortal danger, I think, yeah, to the country when you've got that coming from the very top leadership in the land. Robbie finishes the book with a statement, at least in the final pages that I think is really something that hit home for me. If we want our religion to help us kill in the name of a plundering empire, it will,

19:52it will oblige if we want it to assist in caring for the widow and the orphan. It is amenable to that too. I think that just extends to all of us, regardless of your world view, could be a humanist and agnostic, can be a Christian, a Buddhist, can be a Muslim, can be wicken. Religions are what people do. Dan and I have said that on this show, dozens of times, religions are what humans practice, the way they commune, the way they engage, their larger societies. We've entered a place where, as Robbie outlines throughout the book, a large sector of white Christians in this country, at least a significant sector, have given themselves over to the dictatorial demands and dreams of Donald Trump, and a sense of cruelty towards others that supports mass deportation, supports the inhumane treatment of families, children who are separated, people who are deported to countries that are not their own, folks

20:54who are demonized simply for opposing certain political ideas or practicing a religion that is not Christianity. We've got to see that. We've got to see that religion is, I mean, is, is pliable in that way, but we've also got to understand the threat that we're facing. I think we talk about that on this show all the time. All right, friends, as I said, we are going to have part two of this conversation, and it's really Robbie and I interviewing each other. So he asks me about my book and I ask him about his book, and then we take questions from the audience. So I'm going to bring that to you shortly. This is part one. It is a shorter interview than usual, and then you're kind of wondering, hey, this is only like half an hour, what's going on, pal? And it's because we're going to bring you part two here in just a little bit. So hang tight for that. Thanks for being here. We'll see you in the next part of this episode.