The perils of religious extremism

Sundry aspects, angles, and links for your Monday morning

In recent weeks, several projects I’ve contributed to have gone live. As I was gathering up links, I realized a common thread uniting them all: religious extremism.

From a podcast on Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph to the current rise of Christian nationalism and religious authoritarianism, I’ve weighed in on various angles of this phenomenon.

Before I link to the podcasts, interviews, and articles, however, I wanted to alert you to an event I’ll be doing this week Thursday, on Project 2025. The webinar is hosted by Faithful America and it’s open to the public. It’s scheduled for 7:30pm ET, and you can register here.

(Also, a quick word of thanks to those of you who are paid subscribers. Your support has been essential to providing the space for me to do this media work. At some point I’ll get back to full-time teaching, but this has provided me with the space to do the public-facing work to an extent I never otherwise would have been able.)

Here are a few of the things I’ve been busy with lately:

Last week, a wonderful podcast series released from Red Wine and Blue. Sacred Politics features Katherine Stewart, April Ajoy, and myself. Here’s the teaser:

And here’s a link to the full audio episode:

Several months ago, I gave an interview on religious extremism and domestic terrorism. I’d forgotten all about it until I got a note that the podcast was out in the world. Flashpoint is a serial podcast on 1996 Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph, a foot soldier in the white-supremacist Christian Identity Movement. The series explores the threat of political and religious radicalization of homegrown terrorists.

I contributed (on background) to Episode 8: The Paradox:

Last month I also gave an interview to Adam Gabatt of The Guardian on Trump leaning into religious extremism to energize rightwing evangelicals. Here’s an excerpt, but you can read the whole piece here.

“Trump’s shameless appeals to ‘my beautiful Christians’ are unsettling and infuriating to the many millions of American Christians who proudly believe in pluralistic democracy and healthy boundaries between religion and government.”

The leaning in has continued since Trump made his incendiary speech at the Believers’ Summit. Jake Schneider, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, sent an email out on Tuesday which falsely accused Harris of supporting “taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand without limits until birth”, which was designed to appeal to the Christian base.

On Truth Social, meanwhile, Trump has accused Harris of being “anti-Catholic” and made a direct appeal to Catholics as he tries to expand his religious support.

“I think he’s really trying to win votes and shore up his quote unquote religious base,” said Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University whose research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion and politics.

Du Mez said Trump “has been unsettled by what’s transpired in the last couple of weeks, that’s been very clear”. But she said it was impossible to say whether Trump had recalibrated his speech in response to Harris replacing Biden on the Democratic ticket.

“There’s no way that isn’t a part of this context. And yet, I don’t really envision that his speech to that particular crowd would have been that different, even if he was still kind of on top of the world as he was a couple of weeks ago,” she said.

The main takeaway from the speech, Du Mez said, was the lingering fear over what Trump has planned if he wins a second term.

“Those of us who study authoritarian movements saw huge red flags right there. That language is unprecedented for a US presidential candidate, and I think it’s important to say that, because Trump is always saying weird things, and it’s important to just put down that marker,” she said.

“This is not normal for a presidential candidate in this country to say anything remotely like that.”

I also commented on the phenomenon of “cancel culture” on conservative Christian college campuses in this Newsweek article.

If you speak French, you can catch me soon on French television, where I have the pleasure of trying to explain Trump’s religious appeal to the French public.

For English speakers, there are a couple of other fun projects that will be releasing this fall…stay tuned….

Finally, if you live in the DC area, consider joining us on Sept. 19-20 at Test of Faith: A Summit to Defend Democracy. There I’ll join speakers such as Simone Campbell, EJ Dionne, Jim Wallis, Nichole Flores, Sam Perry, Cathleen Kaveny, Barbara Williams-Skinner, and Aristotle Papanikolaou.

Again, I’m deeply appreciative to all those who have contributed to this work in various ways.