Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTube
Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.
America’s religious landscape has always been complicated, but something striking is happening inside conservative Christianity today. A movement that once spoke the language of Scripture and personal faith is now increasingly shaped by grievance, politics, and an embattled sense of cultural siege.
To explore how we got here—and what this shift means for both Christianity and American liberalism—senior editor at The UnPopulist Berny Belvedere sits down with
of Sojourners to trace the long arc from the Pilgrims to the rise of MAGA Christianity. They examine how persecution narratives, culture-war identity, and a growing rejection of liberal norms have reshaped much of the modern evangelical imagination, and look to whether a more open, justice-oriented expression of Christian faith can still thrive.We hope you enjoy.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Berny Belvedere: The Thanksgiving story as we heard it in elementary school, or grew up seeing in popular depictions year after year—especially during this holiday in late November—is considerably less neat and tidy in the actual historical record, as we all know. This is pretty much the case for all holidays, of course. Thanksgiving is no different. And while this isn’t a podcast episode on the Thanksgiving story, there is a dimension to the story that I want to use as a contrast to a particular form of Christian expression that we’re seeing today. Religion—specifically the traditions with a huge imprint in American life—is a topic that I’ve been regularly covering for The UnPopulist for a while.
But before I get into the strand of Christianity that I want to talk about today, let me say a little bit more about the particular strain of it present during the first Thanksgiving to set us up. In the 1600s, some Protestant Christians in England had major problems with the Anglican Church, the official Church of England. These problems to them were not minor. But these dissenting Christians did not agree on what the proposed fix should be. One group thought the Anglican Church could be reformed from within. Another group thought that the church was too far gone and that no fix was possible. It’s far too simplistic, I think, to call one group “Puritans,” because they wanted to purify the Anglican Church, and then the other group “Separatists,” because they wanted to separate from it. It’s too simplistic because some of the Separatists are also classified as Puritans. But I’ll go with the broad distinction here for our purposes. I want to focus on these Separatists.
There have been theological divorces in church history. In 1054, a single clause in a creed created a pretty wild fracturing of the churches of the East and the West. And, indeed, the very birth of the Protestant movement owes its existence to a rupture. In the case of the English Protestant Separatists, the issue wasn’t merely theological, but also had to do with their Christian expression in a more lived, everyday sense. This was about piety and not just dogma.
During the Thanksgiving season, we often hear about the Pilgrims. Who were the Pilgrims? Well, they were Separatists who made good on their name—they literally separated, not just theologically, but now geographically from the reach of the Anglican Church. The Protestant Christians who traveled on the Mayflower and established Plymouth Colony in what we know today as Massachusetts, those were the Pilgrims.
So here’s the laudable part of their project. These were Christians seeking religious freedom. They felt they could not live out their Christian faith in England. So they went in search of a place where they could. The more challenging part to the Pilgrims’ project, at least from the perspective of liberalism, is that the community they established was an attempt to configure society around their theological beliefs. So the religious freedom that they sought would then either not be extended to others or would create barriers to others in their community.
So, to start us off, I want to ask you: What’s something about the Pilgrims that you deeply respect? And what’s something that, in hindsight, you thought was misguided?
Tyler Huckabee: When we think about the Pilgrims, we need to go back to that era and put ourselves in the frame of mind of what they were trying to find. They call America the “New World,” and for us that’s become a figure of speech—but for them it was very literal. America was a tabula rasa upon which you could do whatever you wanted—and the opportunity and promise of that, for them, felt like a genuine miracle. They set out in search of a place to create a religious society in the way that they saw fit. And what did they find? A place where there really were no rules, where they could really create whatever they wanted to. And they took that very seriously and saw that as a real gift.
“The Pilgrims very justifiably saw themselves as a religious minority, perhaps even a persecuted minority. So when they come to this new world and land on Plymouth, one would think that would give them a certain amount of sympathy for other religious or persecuted minorities. But as we see in their own history, and as we see today, that persecution complex is a potent drug and ends up almost eating itself alive in which the persecuted minority then feels justified in persecuting other minorities from a very defensive posture. ‘If we don’t get them first, then they’re gonna get us.’” — Tyler Huckabee
I think we can understand why that would have seemed like something almost supernatural, like an answer to prayer for them. I agree with you that there was something very laudable there—the idea of liberty has been in the bones of the United States ever since. It’s in our DNA.
When you look at their writings, you can find in some of them that this idea of religious freedom made room for faiths that were not necessarily Christian. Obviously, it’s one thing to write about those things and another to allow them. It’s fair to say they did not really see the New World as a place of total religious pluralism. But they were not thinking just in terms of Christianity exclusively. The Pilgrims were not, at this point in time, thinking about building a Christian nation. I think that is admirable.
But the Pilgrims’ idea of religious liberty went awry in their treatment of indigenous people and that whole sad history. But also, if you just look at the life of a Pilgrim at this time, it didn’t look like freedom, it didn’t look like liberalism—it looked like a tremendous amount of control over what people could and could not do, particularly when it comes to women and the sexual mores of others.
So, it is complicated. I think we have this idea of what Pilgrims or Puritans or Separatists look like. In their mind, of course, it was a bit more nuanced. And there were things in that tradition that I’m grateful for, that we should all be grateful for. But some of the things they have passed down to us, particularly in American Christianity that still define broad parts of American Protestantism in particular, are very tragic and have a real body count behind them.
Belvedere: My take is that to the degree that we want to give the Puritans a pass, they should get a pass because of the age they lived in.
Don’t get me wrong, Christian thinkers throughout church history had certainly thought through the question of, “How are we supposed to live in a society that is patterned on clashing beliefs?” This wasn’t a new thing to grapple with. There’s the Old Testament material on the Israelites living in exilic contexts. There’s the early church period in which Christianity emerged in a Roman context, with Rome being syncretist and pluralist and far more accommodating of various perspectives than other ancient regimes.
But it’s also true that liberalism, as an intellectual tradition, came after, not before, the period in Christian community that we’re talking about. So, the Mayflower landed in 1620; the event known as the Great Migration, which saw over 20,000 Puritans come from the Old World to the New World, happened in the first half of that century. Now compare that with Thomas Hobbes, who is considered a very early thinker in the Enlightenment liberal tradition, writing the Leviathan in 1651. I just don’t fault the Puritans all that much for not implementing a full blown liberal utopia.
They should have done better, sure. But also, using liberalism as a framework to judge a religious community doing its thing prior to the development of that intellectual framework is, I think, anachronistic and ahistorical. With that said, the same animating impulse that drove them to want to exercise their religious freedom, to be free to live out their faith to the fullest, I think ought to have generated some psychological pressure or movement toward the position that, “Hey, those who dissent from our views ought to be free as well.”
Huckabee: That’s true, and you can see strains of that in how this plays out in the United States and in many places throughout the West. The Pilgrims very justifiably saw themselves as a religious minority, perhaps even a persecuted minority. So when they come to this new world and land on Plymouth, one would think that would give them a certain amount of sympathy for other religious or persecuted minorities. But as we see in their own history, and as we see today, that persecution complex is a potent drug and ends up almost eating itself alive in which the persecuted minority then feels justified in persecuting other minorities from a very defensive posture. “If we don’t get them first, then they’re gonna get us.” I think that defined a lot of the early Puritans’ actions towards other groups that they found here and that came later. And it continues to define a lot of American Christianity today.
Belvedere: Let’s talk about American Christianity today. There’s a kind of return to Puritanism among scores of white Christian evangelicals, reformed Christians of a Presbyterian and Baptist bent, conservative Catholics, and various other Christian traditionalists—with one major caveat. With some of these, and unlike the way it was with Puritans, the theology isn’t the thing driving the other stuff. So, with white Christian evangelicals in particular, their culture war preoccupations, their political commitments, are driving their theologies. They’re interpreting what the Christian life calls them to do based on what their politics asks of them. And that’s ruinous to a faith. What do you think?
Huckabee: I really agree, and this has been a struggle and a consistent frustration of mine as someone who works in and came from this tradition of evangelicalism.
“What you see now is a lot of older evangelicals who, whatever your other thoughts may be about them, probably do care to a certain degree about theology and doctrines and have certain ideas around what the Bible actually means for their lives. Those people are seen by this younger evangelical movement as kind of out of touch and old fuddy-duddies and they need to stop thinking about theology so much and get out on the frontlines of this civil war for society that is far more political and cultural in nature.” — Tyler Huckabee
There was a time, in the not too distant past, where at least evangelicalism specifically had some very clear doctrinal rules. It was always a sort of loose affiliation. It certainly wasn’t as strict as high church traditions. But there were real theological impulses and boundaries around, “This is what it means to be an evangelical, in terms of how we think about God and what that means about our relationship with the rest of the world.” Agree or disagree with them, those guidelines did exist. Now the term “evangelicalism” has become an amorphous, socio-cultural, political movement more interested in reshaping the culture around ideas of ethnocentrism and nationalism, wherein the boundaries between what is political, what is cultural, and what is religious become very porous.
Some of that is by design and some of that is intellectual laziness, just not being super interested in doctrinal fidelity or thinking theologically about things. There’s this term, the Bebbington quadrilateral, which is four points of evangelicalism that were seen as the four totems or the four core beliefs of what it meant to be an evangelical. And I think you can prove this even in the data that if you were to ask your average self-described evangelical to name any of those four points today, they would not be able to do so. But they can tell you who you’re supposed to vote for and what you’re supposed to think about gay people or immigrants.
Belvedere: Yeah, I grew up in an evangelical context and I’ve retained many of the theological beliefs that originally informed that. But one of the important points of emphasis that I would always hear is, “Cultural Christianity is bad and biblical Christianity is good.” I would always hear that being a “cultural Christian” is a huge problem. I think what’s interesting today is evangelicals think what they’re doing is biblical Christianity when it’s actually as close to a perfect encapsulation of cultural Christianity as it can be—where their preoccupations are all being fed in from sources that are other than what the Bible says. Have you noticed the same?
Huckabee: Absolutely, you see this very clearly in the recent evangelical canonization of the late Charlie Kirk. Kirk was obviously known mostly as a political agitator, as a useful tool for right-wing fundraising and going onto college campuses. I don’t think many people would have defined his work and output as theological in nature. You were probably vaguely aware that he identified as a Christian, but that wasn’t what his talks were about. But after he was killed, we saw this, “Well, the project was actually Christian. He was acting as a sort of missionary to secular college campuses and to the godless youths and liberals and the professors and going onto their turf and sharing the truth and the Gospel with them.”
I think that really speaks to your point about cultural Christianity. What he was doing was not rigorous or sophisticated theologically, other than alluding to Jesus and reading the Bible. But it was way more about Republican ideals and the traditional family and the role of women and immigrants in society. I think that you can extrapolate from that a lot of ideas about what it really means to be a Christian. I heard that same framework that you did when I was a kid: “Don’t be a cultural Christian. Make sure you’re a real Christian. It’s not what happens in your head, it’s what happens in your heart.”
There was probably, given the benefit of hindsight, some truth to that. And what you see now is a lot of older evangelicals who, whatever your other thoughts may be about them, probably do care to a certain degree about theology and doctrines and have certain ideas around what the Bible actually means for their lives. Those people are seen by this younger evangelical movement as kind of out of touch and old fuddy-duddies and they need to stop thinking about theology so much and get out on the frontlines of this civil war for society that is far more political and cultural in nature.
Belvedere: I’m glad you brought that up because there was one particular reaction to Kirk’s killing that really struck me as quite worrisome from a Christian standpoint: the idea that Kirk, who was a conservative influencer and activist, should be remembered as a Christian martyr. Of course, that only makes sense if one fully conflates Christianity with MAGA politics. I’ve heard church congregants tell pastors things like, “They killed Kirk, but it could have easily been you instead.” But the only reason it makes sense to some to equate Kirk with Christian pastors is because they see their messages as fundamentally the same. But, actually, a figure whose overarching ambition was winning people over to the Trump agenda is not in the same line of work, or shouldn’t be seen as being in the same line of work, as ministers who are responsible for preaching the Bible. The idea that we have to maintain that Christianity is conceptually distinct from any particular political outlook is utterly foreign now. The idea that Christians need to guard against any attempt to co-opt the Gospel into the service of a political agenda, because it’s supposed to and does transcend politics and even the culture war, feels like a relic of the past for many of these people.
Huckabee: I think you may remember this if you came from the same evangelical context or era that I did, but there was a similar “martyrification” that happened when I was a teenager in the wake of the Columbine shooting, which involved a young woman who died by the name of Cassie Bernall. She was shot at Columbine High School. She died there. In the immediate aftermath and the confusion of what happened, this story came out that the two young gunmen, before they killed her, asked her if she believed in Jesus. She said yes, they pulled the trigger, and that story spread like wildfire. There were books, there were songs, about this idea that you might need to be the next Cassie Bernall. When a gun is pointed at your head, are you going to say, “I believe in Jesus,” even if it costs you your life?
I was told this—very, very seriously—by my religious authority, my pastor, youth pastors, people in my life who I looked up to and trusted, that this was a real threat, that this was a real thing that was going to start happening with increasing frequency in America. The idea that some sort of gun regulation may also allay some of this did not factor into that framework at all. It came out much later that that story was a bit confused. They had asked somebody else if she was a Christian, and when she said yes, they let her go. Cassie probably did not say anything, which obviously doesn’t take anything away from the tragedy of her killing, but it did ruin what was a very good bit of lore about the importance of martyrdom.
“The treatment of the stranger and the immigrant is ... it’s not hyperbolic to say this is a main theme of the Bible. This is one of the major pillars—a defining part of the Christian faith is how you treat people who come into your country. The line in the Old Testament is: ‘Remember that you were once strangers as well.’ The only option that’s left for some of these more extreme figures—they are now unfortunately the mainstream—is to say, ‘It doesn’t really mean that.’ The line that they used to use all the time is, ‘God said it. I believe it. That settles it.’ Now you have JD Vance, who has been in a very public and very unusually loud feud with the Pope, the head of his own religious tradition, saying, ‘You are violating a core tenet of our faith.’ All the pope can really do is say, ‘No, I’m not’—because the weight of evidence against him and against the evangelicals who are talking about immigrants like this is so clearly not on their side.” — Tyler Huckabee
And this goes back to the Pilgrims, right? This persecution complex that we talked about and that I’ve seen from many evangelicals and from the movement altogether—this desire for martyrdom and to be seen as a persecuted class that justifies basically any actions on your behalf because you inherently see yourself as always on the verge of being stamped out by somebody else, by some outside entity. And the mythology about Charlie Kirk doesn’t really line up with the words you’re seeing about him. It’s hard to turn him into a true martyr in the sense of historic Christianity, but it’s not impossible for people with as strong and as committed a messaging system as these guys have. And that’s what they’ve turned it into. That’s why you see this idea of, “There are going to be a thousand Charlie Kirks.”
Belvedere: Yeah, I absolutely remember that story. I just remember, as a kid, reading things like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs—there’s an entire dimension to growing up as an evangelical, that the movement really wants to impress upon you, that there could be a violent end to your life. And, in that critical moment, you have to make sure that you give a profession of faith. I mean, I understand where that is coming from—Christian history has a bunch of Christians being martyred. That happened.
But it also sets up this weird cottage industry of tales and stories and incidents where it perpetuates this sense of victimization. You’re in this grand struggle, and at any moment, your life can be taken, and the central point of this drama will come down to whether you have the courage, in a moment where some violent weapon is trained on you, whether you can utter certain words or not. I think it’s a really interesting and maybe even psychologically questionable approach to the faith.
Huckabee: I agree.
Belvedere: And it always struck me as a bit odd, even though I was at times gripped by it. Is everything that has to do with my eternal destiny going to come down to whether I have the requisite courage, in a moment where a weapon is on me, to say certain words? It just seems a bit much. That’s the thing about this movement. A lot of it is a bit extra, to use a very casual way of describing it.
But today’s American Christian extremists, they really seem to despise, more than they despise anyone else, figures who actually share a lot of the views they do, but not political ones. They hate David French, they despise Russell Moore, they hate Tim Keller. And certainly there are specific things that they detest about these figures, but there are some shared characteristics that these and other prominent Christian figures embody that they hate. What is the source of all the hate that they’ve gotten from this extreme Christian sector?
Huckabee: That’s a really great question. It’s one I’ve done a lot of thinking about. I want to be careful of speculating too much about motives because I don’t know what’s going on in some of these people’s brains. What I have seen, and what I would say, if I’m going to cast this in the best-faith argument, is that they would say, “David French, Russell Moore, Beth Moore,” the sort of old guard of conservative Christianity, “you guys just don’t get it. The liberals are out to kill us. They want Christianity, our way of life, eradicated from the country. And they are attempting to do this through a number of means—by bringing in so many immigrants that we lose our cultural heritage, that Christianity goes from becoming sort of a driving, uniting force of our country to being marginalized and perhaps even persecuted and eventually wiped out. And we don’t have time to play nice like you guys are telling us to do. We don’t have time to worry about Donald Trump being a bit boorish. We don’t have time to worry about things like that we’re attacking boats off the coast of Venezuela without a trial, extra-judicially. So you guys need to wake up and get with the program.”
A line you see a lot is a quote from the Lord of the Rings movie—I don’t believe it’s in the books—which is: “Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not!” So they see themselves as the ones trying to rouse old, conservative Christianity into a new, far more aggressive stance to wipe these other influences out before they get wiped out. And they see French, Russell Moore, Beth Moore—two very important figures in older conservative Christianity, but who are not related despite their same last name—as being just sort of asleep at the wheel and, “they need to go so we can let a new, younger, more aggressive guard take their place.”
Belvedere: Yeah, on that specific point on immigration, you had a really interesting exchange with a prominent Christian author on social media who was attempting to read into Jesus’ words a kind of hostility to immigration when the text actually said the opposite.
Huckabee: I think this has happened a couple of times.
Belvedere: There was a passage from Jesus and she was like, “This is actually saying that we shouldn’t take care of the outsider or the downtrodden.” And you’re like, “Hang on a second here. What are we doing? This is the most explicit call to serve others, people who you don’t know, the outsider.”
Huckabee: This is something you see a lot. If you are in this political evangelical movement, what else can you really do? The treatment of the stranger and the immigrant is ... it’s not hyperbolic to say this is a main theme of the Bible. This is one of the major pillars—a defining part of the Christian faith is how you treat people who come into your country. The line in the Old Testament is: “Remember that you were once strangers as well.” The only option that’s left for some of these more extreme figures—they are now unfortunately the mainstream—is to say, “It doesn’t really mean that.” The line that they used to use all the time is, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”
“The strange coalitions that you see building on the right, where you have right-wing evangelicals and right-wing Catholics—historically, two groups that have famously not gotten along very well. But if you can background the theological differences, which obviously, as we’ve talked about, they have, and foreground your social cultural purposes, then it makes a lot of sense for that coalition to build because you are both reacting not against your theological differences but against this enemy in the culture which is defined as liberalism or wokeism or globalism, or sometimes even more explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories, and so that can make for very strange and very ugly reactionary movements. But sooner or later, as we’ve seen, when you acquire as much power as this movement has politically, you start running out of things to react to, so you start aiming higher and higher and at more and more nebulous targets, which eventually just becomes everybody who’s not like you.” — Tyler Huckabee
Now you have JD Vance, who has been in a very public and very unusually loud feud with the Pope, the head of his own religious tradition, saying, “You are violating a core tenet of our faith.” All the pope can really do is say, “No, I’m not”—because the weight of evidence against him and against the evangelicals who are talking about immigrants like this is so clearly not on their side.
Belvedere: I want to pick up on a thread from earlier, which is that this persecution complex seems to be core to the way that today’s Christian American extremist understands himself and Christianity writ large. I think this dovetails almost perfectly with an inclination of populism, which is architecturally designed to require an “us versus the system” motif in order to power it. It doesn’t work without it—which is why you see the hilarious absurdity of the Republican Party being in power in the fullest extent that you can be, with both houses of Congress, with a reliable majority on the Supreme Court, with a whole lot of cultural institutions bending the knee, and the way that they talk, it’s as if they’re a dispossessed minority where they need to do these extreme things because civilization is falling.
And that latched onto this long-running strand within Christianity—which sometimes was justified and sometimes, as you alluded to, was hyped up—seeing Christians and Christianity as always in danger and under existential threat. You had that populist element and you had that Christian persecution element and it became like a stronger “us versus the system” movement than it would have been had it been just one of those two things.
Huckabee: There’s probably something to that. It also describes some of the strange coalitions that you see building on the right, where you have right-wing evangelicals and right-wing Catholics—historically, two groups that have famously not gotten along very well. But if you can background the theological differences, which obviously, as we’ve talked about, they have, and foreground your social cultural purposes, then it makes a lot of sense for that coalition to build because you are both reacting not against your theological differences but against this enemy in the culture which is defined as liberalism or wokeism or globalism, or sometimes even more explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories, and so that can make for very strange and very ugly reactionary movements.
But sooner or later, as we’ve seen, when you acquire as much power as this movement has politically, you start running out of things to react to, so you start aiming higher and higher and at more and more nebulous targets, which eventually just becomes everybody who’s not like you.
Belvedere: How is MAGA Christianity different during Trump’s second term than it was during Trump’s first term?
Huckabee: It’s hard to talk about things when you’re in the middle of them, and that distinction may only become clear down the road, so I’ll try to be a little cautious here. But I do think that it has gotten more extreme, more mask off, more saying the quiet part loud. In the first term, you would not have seen this huge rift over Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson. There are certain old guards at the Heritage Foundation who do not want these people to be the future of the right. But, by many accounts, it seems that they are, and they bring with them a far more explicit embrace of nativism, of ethnonationalism, and of some real antisemitism that is fomented not out of genuine concern about the treatment of Palestinian people in Gaza in the wake of what happened on Oct. 7, but because of a concern about certain Jewish figures who control society and pull the levers of the banks and entertainment and religion and politics.
I think that stuff has gotten quite a bit louder. Those people have moved more to the center. In the first term, you maybe had some of these people who were at mid-level positions working as political aides in Congress and at certain think tanks and in the Heritage Foundation itself. And now these people have their hands closer to the wheel and they are driving both policy and messaging much more.
And I think that it’s sort of fragmenting in a way that is encouraging to me, because I don’t want this thing to go any further than it has. There’s less embarrassment about some of the extremism and much more openness about their disinterest in democracy and interest in authoritarianism and even in some cases a dictatorship.
Belvedere: I want to ask you about some manifestations of MAGA Christianity that are a little bit more aggressive than others. So, for a number of MAGA Christians today, they aren’t shy, they’re not bashful, about wanting to implement a number of genuinely illiberal public policies. Everything from banning pornography outright, to mandating the Bible be included in public school curriculum, to no-fault divorce being abolished, to getting rid of vaccine mandates of any kind, not just COVID ones, to the full blown criminalization of abortion to the point where you pursue women who get one as people who perpetrate a homicide. These go considerably farther than past Christians, who would have themselves been considered quite conservative and committed to social conservatism. This seems to be even more aggressive than that. What do you make of it? How do you account for it? Why does it seem to be going in such a distinctly illiberal direction?
Huckabee: When I was younger, there was this idea of the family as the ultimate building block of society. This was a Christian belief. Dr. James Dobson, who recently passed away, was one of the primary popularizers of this idea. And the thinking was that if we can just get the family to mirror our traditional Christian idea of it—mom and dad, the dad is working, the mom’s at home with a bunch of kids—if we can get that figured out, then the rest of society will sort of figure itself out because that’s where the whole thing starts. I was born in the mid-80s, and in the ’90s that was such a huge focus, hence the name Focus on the Family, which was the organization that Dr. Dobson started.
There is this idea now that that [prior] idea—that we transform the family unit and then watch that trickle down to the rest of society—has been tried and has failed. Instead, society has only gotten more liberal, stranger, there are more immigrants, there’s more gay people, it’s become more normalized. So, this idea goes, we need to take a stronger tack. We can’t just control our family. We have to get control over more things.
There’s this movement that’s very popular in Christian nationalism called the Seven Mountain Mandate, which identifies seven pillars of culture, and the idea is that these seven pillars—family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government—need to be captured. The movement that we call Christian nationalism is a very broad—and sort of ill-defined—idea, but it’s useful for this conversation. Now the focus has been, “We need to find a way to control those things. We can’t just control the family. We also have to have control over the government. We also have to have control over business if we want this country to be the way that it was because family isn’t enough.”
Now, it’s pretty easy to control your family. That’s not asking that much of the Christians who listen to your radio program or watch your YouTube channel to have a strong hand. But if you want control over education, over businesses, or over Hollywood, well, then, you’re going to need to move to some less democratic means of achieving that.
So I think that is part of the calculus of moving away from liberalism, away from small-L liberalism, away from democracy, and into ways where they can capture these other parts of what they see as core building blocks of society so they can make them more like the way they want them to be.
Belvedere: Let me see if I understand what you just outlined. This prior iteration of social conservatism of a Christian kind, maybe exemplified by James Dobson or others, was sort of conditionally at peace with liberalism or the broad liberal order because it thought that, maybe partly organically, but also through their public policy advocacy, society would gradually move toward a more traditional respect for family. But they started to see that that’s not what was happening.
“There is this idea now that that [prior] idea—that we transform the family unit and then watch that trickle down to the rest of society—has been tried and has failed. Instead, society has only gotten more liberal, stranger, there are more immigrants, there’s more gay people, it’s become more normalized. So, this idea goes, we need to take a stronger tack. We can’t just control our family. We have to get control over more things.” — Tyler Huckabee
Instead, there was a greater liberalization, or a movement away from that social conservatism and toward more progressive norms and policies in society. And so, because of that, their conditional respect for liberalism kind of dissolved. They then realized they [needed] to be more aggressive, because the prior approach, where they made peace with it and worked within it and broadly accepted it, led to the degradation of their values. So, now, they have to more aggressively fight for them. Do I have that right?
Huckabee: Yes, I think you see, during the Obama era, a dissatisfaction with the norms reaching a fever pitch, pushed by figures who stress that, “This isn’t working. We’re putting forward these moderate Republican candidates, guys like Mitt Romney, and they’re still being rejected. They’re still calling us racist. They’re still calling us homophobic.” There are certain figures who say, “If you guys want to keep trying to do this the old fashioned way, where we just make sure that we have our families in order and let that overflow to the rest of society, you’re welcome to try. But it isn’t working.”
Donald Trump Jr., maybe a year ago or so, actually said something to the effect of: “Turn the other cheek just doesn’t work anymore.” That’s a very explicit rejection of something that Jesus said in the Gospels, obviously, but it sums up this entire idea that, “We need to start thinking bigger, we need to start thinking stronger, we need to start wielding power with more force—because, if we don’t, we’re not going to see the sort of changes that we want.”
Belvedere: I largely agree, and I think that explains a lot. I would also say that a big factor in all of this, which is something that you noted earlier and something we can’t forget when we fill out this picture of what’s happened with American Christianity of a conservative kind, is this abiding sense that their movement is always and everywhere being persecuted.
So, another way to read the story of Christian social conservatism is that it’s been the greatest victor in recent American history. Its policies and norms and rules have patterned society more than any other constituency has been able to. Yet they’ve built out a theory of a movement that is besieged at every level, that is corroding. Certainly, you can look at data that says Christian identification is on a decline. But as a sports fan, I also know that you can manipulate the statistics by only selectively focusing on some [metrics].
So another big factor is they always have this mindset that they aren’t the dominant force in society. They aren’t the ones who have largely won and who have an outsize voice and influence in society. They think they’re on the verge of annihilation at all times. That’s part of what has fed into, “We’ve got to get more aggressive. We’ve got to get more illiberal because the past stuff wasn’t working.” Actually, it was working because you’ve influenced things more than any other group has, right?
Huckabee: Yeah, I think that’s true. A theory I have is that what MAGA Christianity is very jealous of is this sort of cool factor. We’re using very imprecise terms here, but this cultural cool kids table, where you have Hollywood celebrities and pop stars, historically, and for a while now in the U.S., lot of LGBTQ representation, which they see as a direct affront to their idea of how things should be. So that the real jealousy, or the real sense of feeling left out, is happening in the entertainment sphere. They have tried and failed to match Hollywood with Christian music and Christian movies. Those have not been super successful and I think they’re aware of that. They’re sort of embarrassed by that. So what they’re really trying to do, where they really would like to see more of an impact, is in arts, culture, entertainment where their ideas could sort of nebulously come into society as a sort of entertainment propaganda, through movies and music, but that just hasn’t worked very well.
So they have a lot of political power. They have always had a lot of political power. Through political power, they’ve been able to achieve things that I don’t think ... the idea of overturning Roe v. Wade was, as little as 10 years ago, basically unthinkable. But they have not had the sort of elite status that I think many of them would really like to have. The small wins they’ve had ... they don’t feel cool. They don’t feel punk rock in a way that would be very appealing to many of these people.
Belvedere: I want to ask you what you make of the upsurge of Christian nationalism within American Christianity. A lot of its adherents will play this game where they will set out a Christian nationalist picture, which includes a deep hostility for immigration—so it’s not just a Christian nationalism but a Christian ethnonationalism—and they’ll describe it as nothing more than just historic Protestant Christianity. I think they’re deeply mistaken. What do you think?
Huckabee: I think they’re deeply mistaken. I don’t know that I take all of those defenses, when they get accused of Christian nationalism, in good faith.
I think the term “Christian nationalism” has been very poorly defined—both by people who resist or oppose Christian nationalism, which I certainly do, and that is a big part of our mission at Sojourners, where I work, but [also when] you see this word thrown around, almost like a left-wing version of the way “woke” is used on the right, where you see something you don’t like and you call it woke, that’s the way I’ve seen “Christian nationalism” used sometimes. I wish we had better definitions for Christian nationalism and how it operates.
Christian nationalism, as I understand it, is when the boundaries between what is patriotic and what is Christian become very deliberately intermingled to the point where there is no separation between the two. Christian nationalism has basically always been in the U.S. You can trace this all the way back to some of the Founders and to the Thanksgiving story that we talked about.
Sure, there was always this sort of polite idea that part of being a good Christian is letting in other religious groups. That really did exist. I was raised quite conservative, I was homeschooled, but there wasn’t this talk of, “Well, we shouldn’t be building mosques in Texas” that you see very prominent Christian leaders talk about today. I do think that strain has gotten louder, but there are people who delude themselves into thinking this has always been historically a main tenet of the Christian faith in America.
I also think sometimes there’s this, “How dare you try to tell me what it means to be a real Christian? You accuse me of Christian nationalism? You don’t know what Christianity is. You don’t know what my faith is like. You don’t read the Bible. I’m just doing what the Bible says. And if you’d read that, you’d understand.” It provides this very easy defense that anybody who accuses you of Christian nationalism must just not get what it is to be a true Christian.
Belvedere: Christianity is not an exclusively liberal faith. It absolutely has manifestations, historically and presently, that have been illiberal and oppressive. But my position is that its fullest realization, at least when it comes to setting up a social configuration based on the ethical building blocks in biblical teaching, is that it’s liberal in a more classical or procedural sense, observing the dignity of all and affirming the imago Dei and that we have this ability to choose. So we ought to build that into the policies that society is founded on. All of that is deeply Christian. What are today’s Christians who despise liberalism getting wrong, both about the Christian faith itself and about what a liberal order requires or demands of them?
Huckabee: That’s a great question. A lot. I think what they get wrong about the Christian faith is that Jesus did not come to establish a new political order. You see over and over again in the Gospels Jesus being offered political power, people trying to make Jesus a king, ruler, or conqueror, and him explicitly rejecting it every time, saying, “You guys don’t get it. That’s not what I’m here to do. I’m here to build a different kind of kingdom, an upside-down kingdom, where the last are first, where the meek are blessed, where the kingdom of God belongs to the poor.” This was revolutionary then and it is revolutionary now. And if I was going to identify one fundamental misunderstanding that people in Christian nationalism or MAGA Christianity have of the Christian faith, that would be it. Jesus came to show that the last would be first. We’re entering the holiday season. He did not come as a prince. He was not born in a castle. He was born in a stable. And there is something very important about the way he came that we as Christians in America and Christians throughout much of the West over the entire history of Christianity have failed to fully integrate into our own understanding of faith.
Belvedere: So, what will it take for Christian evangelicalism to return to a commitment to biblical Christianity as opposed to foregrounding their political commitments?
Huckabee: The important thing for me, as a Christian, is not to preserve evangelicalism or even to redeem evangelicalism. That name was never something that was terribly important to me. I think that it coming to power is probably the clearest way to separate it from something that is truer to Christianity. I think true Christianity has always been found on the margins of society. These are not places that have a pulpit. They are not in the spotlight. But they are places where people are still doing good work, standing up for immigrants, standing up for the queer community, protecting them, trying to provide justice and liberation in small ways between neighbors and small towns. That is where I am looking for true Christianity. I’m privileged in that I get to, as part of my work, find stories where Christians are still doing very good things, very brave things. And most of those things are not happening in Washington, D.C. or in places of power, but on the street and at ICE detention centers, which is where the real work happens.
Belvedere: I’m a huge fan of Sojourners, your publication. Can you tell readers who may not be familiar with your work what you guys do and what role you’re serving in the broader Christian discourse?
Huckabee: Sure, of course. Sojourners is a kind of unique organization, about 40 years old. We are based out of Washington, D.C. and have been for a long time. We’re founded by Jim Wallis. We started out as an intentional community with what we now call Sojo Action, very involved in helping mobilize justice organizations, involved in Capitol Hill, involved in marches and protests.
That work happens independently of the editorial side, which is where I work, where we tell stories. We have a print publication, 12 issues a year, and then we have a website. As managing editor, I oversee the website where we have a culture section, an opinion commentary section, and a news section where we try to cover stories about faith from a justice perspective, which is a more pluralistic, more progressive, side of Christian faith than you’re probably going to find in most other faith oriented publications, many of whom are colleagues and friends.
So if you want to find stories about Christians who are organizing against Christian nationalism or against MAGA Christianity, if you want to read stories of religious pluralism or interfaith discussions where we will speak with Buddhists and Muslims and Hindus and people who have no particular religious tradition at all, skeptics and atheists who we feel like nevertheless have some important things to offer to the Christian tradition or to our own praxis now as justice-oriented Christians, then go over to sojo.net.
“If I was going to identify one fundamental misunderstanding that people in Christian nationalism or MAGA Christianity have of the Christian faith, that would be it. Jesus came to show that the last would be first. We’re entering the holiday season. He did not come as a prince. He was not born in a castle. He was born in a stable. And there is something very important about the way he came that we as Christians in America and Christians throughout much of the West over the entire history of Christianity have failed to fully integrate into our own understanding of faith.” — Tyler Huckabee
Belvedere: That mission is very much simpatico with our Liberalism & Religion series.
Huckabee: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve very much enjoyed you guys’ work on that.
Belvedere: Tyler Huckabee, thank you so much for joining me.
Huckabee: Thank you, Berny.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
