How Faith Shapes Democracy: Ruth Braunstein on Competing Moral Visions in America

Sociologist Ruth Braunstein joins Faithful Politics to examine how Americans use faith and moral language to interpret citizenship, protest, and public life. Drawing on her research into religious activism across the political spectrum, Braunstein explains why democracy in the United States is often framed as a “sacred project” and how two competing moral narratives — one rooted in prophetic critique and another in patriotic preservation — shape today’s political conflicts. The conversation explores Christian nationalism, motivated reasoning, and the internal dynamics of white evangelical communities, while also highlighting progressive faith activism that often goes unseen. Braunstein argues that pluralism is difficult but necessary, and that meaningful democratic engagement starts by moving from partisan abstractions to shared local concerns. This discussion provides a sociological framework for understanding how faith communities influence politics and how citizens can hold strong convictions while navigating deep disagreement. 

Learn more: https://www.ruthbraunstein.com

Democracy is Hard Substack: https://substack.com/@ruthbraunstein

Guest Bio
Ruth Braunstein is a sociologist who studies religion, politics, and democratic life in the United States. She is the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith and Democracy Across the Political Divide and writes the Substack Democracy Is Hard. Her research examines how Americans across ideological lines use faith to interpret public responsibility, citizenship, and protest. She also hosts the documentary podcast When the Wolves Came, which explores internal debates within evangelical communities about extremism and political identity.

Transcript

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Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. I'm your political host, Will Wright, and I'm joined by your ever faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. What's going on, Josh? It's going well. Thanks for asking. And today we're joined by Ruth Braunstein, a sociologist who studies the intersection of religion, politics, and democratic life in the United States. Her work looks at how Americans across the political spectrum use faith and moral language to make sense of citizenship, protest, and public responsibility. She's the author of Prophets and Patriots, Faith and Democracy Across the Political Divide, which examines conservative and progressive religious activism. And her newer research explores how ideas about taxes, obligation, and belonging shape how people understand democracy itself. And we are just so glad to have her joining us for the first time on Faithful Politics. So welcome to the show, Ruth. Thanks so much, glad to be here. Yeah, so a question I ask every single one of our guests, uh because I'm just a naturally curious person, is like, what's the origin story of Ruth? Like, the things that you've kind of specialized in seem like it's not like the staple astronaut, president, doctor, lawyer kind of thing that you're asked oh to choose when you're in elementary school. So like, why are you in the field you're in and what is it about it that interests you? You don't think every little kid grows up and says, I want to study all the things I'm not allowed to talk about at parties. Yeah, religion, politics, money. uh No, but you know, I think that I'm drawn like a moth to a flame to these topics that are hard to talk about. um And, ah you know, I actually put out a documentary podcast earlier this year called When the Wolves Came, and I got to talk a little bit about my upbringing and how I got interested in this stuff, which is new. Usually scholars don't like sort of include that in their work. for me, it really came down to being raised in an interfaith family um where half my relatives are Jewish, half my relatives were Catholic, and then also being raised in the South where by being neither Jewish nor Catholic is really kind of the norm. The culture is very Protestant. And so, you know, I always had a foot in lots of different kind of religious and cultural worlds. And I kind of loved that position. It let me ask questions and, you know, really stress test my assumptions about things. um And I was always a really curious observer. And so when it came time to figure out, you know, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I realized that, you know, doing that careful observing and asking questions was what really felt like. a place I could add some value and I found my way into academic research. I, that's really cool. And I love your work and looking through how Americans use religious language. When I was preparing for this podcast, just kind of listening to your, you know, looking up the CV and the work that you've done and look so about that podcast was super interesting. The documentary podcast on the wolves. going to have to check that one out. But just this idea that our Americans that we use. religious language to talk about democracy, to define democracy. uh You have like immigration, right, uh protests by clergy that we're seeing right now. You have reinterpretations of January 6th on both sides of how people feel about this religiously. have uh Christian nationalist rhetoric, which we've talked about ad nauseum on on our program. uh What Can you kind of dig into that a little bit and help us understand when you say the moral meaning of democracy, that something's happening to that. What does that mean? What does morality have to do with democracy? What is this moral meaning that you're talking about? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that is I think really fascinating to people who are not from the United States is how steeped in moral and religious ideas our understanding of what it means to be an American is. And so really across the political spectrum, and I study groups from the far left to the far right and groups in between, there really is this sense that whether we use the explicit words or not, that the American democratic experiment which is quite young, it's about 250 years old uh this year, is really a sacred experiment. And that we're doing something special here. And there's different ways that we understand that. But the title of my first book is one helpful way to kind of frame the differences in those understandings. So I called the book, Prophets and Patriots, because those were kind of ways of summarizing two different. kind of visions of what it meant to be a citizen in this country. And on one hand, um there is this sense that what is sacred about this experiment is that we are working toward some sort of sacred ideal that respects all human dignity and human rights as individuals, right? Eventually will include kind of lots of different kinds of people as equal rights within this kind of political community. And that what is sacred is that future point of aspiration, that we can become this more perfect union, a multiracial pluralistic democracy that our founders imagined and set into motion, this project of working toward that, and that the heroes in this story are these prophetic uh witnesses who have at every point throughout our history pointed out where the country was not on track. and has pushed it toward that better future. And so these are the kind of prophets and they draw inspiration from the prophets of the sort of the Bible and also from a number of uh social movement leaders in American history. On the other side, there's this idea that this was a sacred project that was perfect at its inception. That, you know, God identified in the sort of young, you know, United States, this kind of perfect encapsulation of uh what a country should be, right? This idea that this is a Christian nation, a kind of homeland for white Christians of a particular sort, and that at the point of the founding, it was already perfect. It was sacred and good. And that every year since that moment has represented a kind of set of falling away moments from that ideal perfection. And that sort of falling away also gets sort of explained through the sort of imagery and language that comes from faith traditions of like a falling away from original perfection in the Garden of Eden or from other kinds of ideas. And that comes through a slippage of our kind of moral content in agreement. comes from sort of internal dissent. It comes from external threats. And all of these things are chipping away at that perfect good and that it is actually the role of citizens who are patriots to be ever sort of preserving and protecting and taking us back to that earlier moment of perfection. And so I think that these are two rival stories that continue to animate some of the disagreements that we have about what is sacred about this democratic experiment and what is our job as ordinary people. who live here to like do our part carrying forward some vision of the sacred story. um And you end up with really different answers to how to do that. You know what I love about... um that explanation is I think it provides kind of the necessary nuance to really kind of like understand religion and sort of like our public square. uh Because one of the things that I think is confusing, at least for me, um when we think about Christian nationalism, um like I just wrote a blog about Christian nationalism and I swear it took me like three months because I wanted to get it right. And uh I even I sent a copy of it to Sam Perry. I don't think he watches this episode. So, but he gave me the okay and I was like, okay, I feel a firm, fully a firm, but even still like, I'm like, so, so, so, so even. our drafts to Sam? For now on, think all of us should just, yeah, I'll put his email on the show notes. But it's like when you think about Christian nationalism as this sort of framework, right? And you turn on the TV, you watch stuff, you're like, I don't know, is this Christian nationalism or not? know, like the accommodators are saying it is. That's just, you know, a shofar. Like I've got one in my closet kind of thing, you know? So like. Is there a way, especially when you see politicians use religious language or do certain religious things, is there a way to delineate, like, this is Christian nationalism, this is just somebody practicing their faith in a public way? Does that make sense, the question? Absolutely, and it's one of those things that people do have really different ways of defining what Christian nationalism is, which then leads to identify different specific things in the world as Christian nationalist or not, right? And that can cause some of the sort of confusion. And I do think that one, it's important to remember that Christian nationalism is a kind of set of ideas that operate on a kind of spectrum. I've... written about this idea that it can range anywhere from people who are making very explicit claims that this is a white Christian nation and like literally nobody but white Christians belong here, right? So like, we would associate that with a really extremist vision of the country that is mostly said and sort of held out loud by white supremacist organizations, right? So that's like one end of the sort of spectrum. And it can range to people who are like, you know, the country has historically been a majority, uh white and Christian, its values uh are Judeo-Christian in origin, that those are our kind of unifying values, right? And so you get a much more kind of colorblind and quasi-inclusive vision of this as well. uh What ties them together in my view, and I think, you know, it... is a view that's widely held by people who study this, is that underlying narrative and that underlying story that says that the country as it was at its origin, right, was the right version of the country and that it is a static thing, that it is our job to actually preserve that particular kind of population. that particular cultural character, having that cultural unity, which is always overstated, right? There's actually, there's a lot more cultural diversity um even in the earliest days of American history um than the sort of simple story of it being a white Christian nation kind of conveys. um But like saying that like the country is this one thing and it can't change, right? That. that when the country changes in terms of its demographics, in terms of its cultural character, in terms of like who actually lives here and has power, right, then it's no longer the proper version of the country, right? People who have a more kind of civic understanding of what defines America or the United States would say that, you know, anyone who comes here and agrees to follow this particular set of rules about, you know, how we're gonna live together, they get to be the country. Right? And if they look different and have different religious ideas and, you know, speak different languages even, right? And, you know, have different cultural values, then that's what the country becomes, right? That there is no intrinsic character to what the United States is. And so when I see these kinds of arguments, right, and they can take lots of different forms, that the country is this one thing and it's our job to protect and preserve it, that begins to sort of be the, that like sort of red. red flag, right, a kind of Scooby sense of like something Christian nationalist might be undergirding this, meaning a vision of the country as a Christian nation that is uh changing and that that change is bad, right, is kind of undergirding the logic. Yeah, I really appreciate that explanation. And you know, when you were talking, I was thinking about this is such a subject. It's a complicated subject and there's a lot of reasons it's very complicated. And I think one of the things that I keep picking up in this conversation, as you're talking about, I thinking about it, but I was connecting it to other things I've seen, articles I've read, just posts I've made, comments I've had. In particular, I thinking about So the halftime show at the Super Bowl, right? I just posted something small. I said, I'm seeing two visions of America before my eyes, right? em There, and I didn't think that was very controversial, but it doesn't matter what you say. It's always controversial. so, but I stand by that in the sense that there's two visions that are being presented. Now, some people are going to look at this and they're going to think, well, it's just a cultural thing. What's wrong with just having two Cultural like what's having what's wrong with any one thing aimed to this culture one thing aimed to that culture? It's America people can make their choice and I tend to kind of be sympathetic to that Yeah, whatever I mean if there was that if there's a market for it then and they can make money doing it then why am I gonna like? Disparage or stop them from doing that even if I don't like the message I just I would come out and just combat that message or something better. So But you look at this and there's two visions Right? There's this vision of the this idealistic vision of what the United States was like at its founding and preserving that somehow. And then there's this, right? uh I guess not idealistic. I'm not sure what you call the vision there if there's a category for it, but it's more of like, or label for it rather, but it's more like, hey, we're this thing is messy and, and You know, historians, people who study history, they know that history is very messy. It's very complicated. It's never very clean. And you're always having to create a narrative based on the data that you have. And that's, you're doing the best thing you can to try to make one that's going to make sense within that framework. And so looking at these like two different visions, like how different are they? Right? I mean, I guess in some sense, like I would hear some people say, well, Like it seems like they use the same tools in some way. Like sometimes I hear people talk about they'll put maybe the entire history of the United States through the lens of slavery and basically see that lens and so slavery uh basically, even though it does affect everything else in real in reality, it did. They have put it to where it's the only thing that matters really is what this does in terms of slavery and. that's a vision of how to interpret history. Now we can argue about whether that's good or not, but that's a vision of how to interpret history. How do these two visions, what makes them so different? What's their view on authority? What's their view on order? What's their view on dissent? Maybe belonging? Why are they so different? And why is this concerning? Why should we be concerned about this? So I mean, think whether you're concerned or not probably is going to be connected to what your vision of an ideal society looks like. And so, you know, I think that there are some people, you know, there are a lot of people who would say that I prefer a society where everyone is like me. I actually think this is a good society because we are all bound together. by common ancestry, by common culture, it is lot easier to manage a society that is homogenous. And I think that that is how we all best thrive, right? And then you can also have a sort of person say, I prefer a society where there's actually huge amounts of diversity, right? Because diversity is how we learn new things, it's how we are exposed to new ideas, it's how we are able to... as individuals figure out who we want to be and where we fit and therefore more people are able to flourish. um And it's a society that's more likely to innovate and perhaps be able to better deal with others in a really complex global kind of environment. So you could have people, and then there's lots of different versions in between that, I should say, right? So those are kind of two examples, right? And so people could sort of take those different positions, right? And, um but the question is not which one you prefer in a vacuum, right? Not just that, but also what do you think this country was designed to be in terms of its like laws and history? And so one of the challenges to this debate today is that there is a side, quote unquote, in this debate that would prefer that more homogenous version of a society and sings its praises in terms of outcomes. And in order to make the case that the United States should be that, they tell an incredibly incomplete version of American history and have an interpretation of America's sort of like founding documents and laws that says it was always designed to be like that. That's actually historically inaccurate. And I think pretty hard to justify. historically. And so you end up with this really kind of sanitized mythological version of American history. Yeah, sure. love what you said. Could you explain why it's historically inaccurate? I just feel like people hear that and they're, oh, that's just what people say. That's what liberals say. Or that's does create. What makes it historically accurate? How do we know that? Yeah. so, you know, the United States was founded, right, on a number of different kinds of conflicting principles. There was a lot of contradiction built into this. Obviously, you have something like the Declaration of Independence and many people also own slaves, right? There's lots of kind of contradictions going on at the time. But if you want to just look at this question of, say, uh religious diversity, right, it's easy to look back with our current categories and say that the country was a majority white Christians and that Therefore, there was a common culture. Not true. There were lots and lots of rival sects of Christians who primarily identified with their specific kind of ethnic and religious identity. Those groups were seeking out a place where they could have religious autonomy and freedom, not only from a kind of society that they fled from in Europe, right, but also from each other. Right? This wasn't one big happy white Christian family. It was a group of people that didn't want the group of Christians down the street to tell them what to do. And so they were at the time a quite religiously diverse society. And the laws that were sort of created at the time that had said we would have no established religion and that we would protect religious freedom and practice for everybody was designed not only because there were both Christians and Jews. Right. Which often gets pointed to at the time, right. George Washington writes a letter saying that Jews religious kind of freedom would be protected, but because of these rival sects of Christians and that that kind of fundamental commitment to religious liberty and extending beyond that to a diversity of different kind of cultures, values and perspectives was part of that like landscape on which the country was built. And so, right, to look back now and be like, well, now we all think of ourselves as just white Christians. We're one group, right, is really to kind of read the past through a present sort of set of categories. um And then, you know, of course there was always a lot more diversity socially, right? There was racial diversity. There was ethnic diversity. All of those things were already present in the country. And when we now just say everyone was white, right, it kind of blurs all of those distinctions. And so, you know, I think that that's one way that it's historically inaccurate. The other way is that to say that the country was sort of perfect and peaceful back then ignores all these forms of domination and violence that were required in order to sustain that sort of fragile image of peace, which has to do obviously with the enslavement of African-Americans and had to do with the kind of violence against native peoples that occurred in order for white Europeans to colonize this land. And so those are all facts. And if you want to tell the story, right, that says, wouldn't it all be better and more peaceful if we could just go back to this place where we were all the same? There's just a lot of historical problems with that story. And so, you know, I think that when you talk about, what do we do to correct that? Right, you we can think of history as like if we've all gone to go get an eye exam and you have that big machine and they keep clicking lenses down in front of your eyes, right? Getting the real sort of picture of our history requires a bunch of different lenses. And so we're correcting a bad history, right? A simple history that is not introducing enough mess, to use your point, right? By having A lot of people pointing to, okay, let's put down the lens that brings slavery back into focus. What does that do to our story about our history? Now let's click down the lens that uses colonialism and thinking about what does that do to our story, right? Let's click down the lens that brings in gender and gender inequality and patriarchy, right? What does that do? And you kind of need all the lenses, but you can't do all of it at once. And so we go through these waves of bringing new lenses in, but I think the sort of hard work is integrating it all and constantly updating it to sort of get that crisper picture. And in my view, I think that we can be most loving and appreciative of our country if we are honest about our history and remain optimistic about the possibilities of still kind of making this work. I love that imagery of the eye thing, because I could hear the clicking sound. One or two, one or two. I want to ask you just about uh sort of conservative and progressive religious activism, because I think that at least just anecdotally, it seems like they have different characteristics. um So just to kind of give you maybe two groups to kind of compare, you know, there was a lot of religious activity at January 6th, people praying, shofars, all Jericho marches, all kinds of stuff like that. um And then recently, you know, we have a large group of clergy that showed up in Minnesota. um So both groups are using their faith to, uh you know, support perhaps an outcome that would be favorable for their sides. I'd love for you to just talk to me a little bit about what do you see as far as ideologies when you are looking at progressive and conservative religious activists? Yeah. So, I mean, again, I think it's really helpful to step back and recognize that uh faith and particularly kind of Christian and to some degree kind of Jewish and Christian faith traditions have a huge amount of kind of positive moral valence in the United States, which is why people across the political spectrum want to kind of draw on them, tap into them and kind of give the impression that they are on the side of those traditions, right? And so they become this really kind of deep well of inspiration and symbolism that lots of people wanna use in order to say, am the person with the moral high ground in this situation. And that comes because we live in a society where a lot of people follow those traditions, right? And are inclined to kind of say that if this is the quote unquote Christian thing to do, then that's good, right? But then what you see is really fundamentally different visions of what is the right thing to do coming out of this. um you know, but both of them are saying, it's okay to bring my faith into politics. It's okay to bring my faith into public life. And I think that I always like to remind people of that because there is sometimes this impression, particularly by more sort of conservative um sort of sides of these debates that the left hates the religion. But in reality, we know that a lot of people who are liberal and progressive are themselves religious, and that there's a very long tradition of bringing faith into public life across the political spectrum. And that might be uncomfortable for increasingly a secular portion of the population who are not themselves religious. um But no one side owns God. No one side is the sole spokesperson for what God wants us to do. um At the same time, again, there are those different interpretations. And so, you know, in both cases, I do think that there is an effort to look at scripture and look at history and say, what is required of me as a person who takes this tradition sort of seriously? um But like, the Bible's really long and there's lots of contradictory parts of it. And so it is not surprising that people are pulling out dramatically different kinds of interpretations of what that should look like. And I think that, you know, I grew up again in the South when a time when everybody had their WWJD bracelets, which was a bracelet that sort of, you know, reminded you to ask this question every day, what would Jesus do? And I think that some of the most like really fascinating historical scholarship that we've seen in recent years are coming from people like Kristen Dumais, who is actually looking at like a fundamental, like really dramatic shift in how conservative, particularly white evangelicals, imagine Jesus himself. And therefore when they ask that question, what would Jesus do? They're getting a different answer, not only from people on the left, but also from where people in their own community would have answered that question. And one of those really big shifts has to do with, uh as she argues in her book, Jesus and John Wayne, Jesus, really since the 1980s, being transformed from a kind of uh man of peace who uh would have preferred poverty to wealth, would have preferred uh people at the margins to people in power, became, uh a warrior, and B, somebody who celebrated the accumulation of wealth and power. as the properly Christian thing to do. And she traces this as something that is changing in the culture due to the influence of particular leaders, the influence of particular books, the influence of particular cultural objects. And what that means is that people who've been embedded in that culture over time are going to interpret what would Jesus do differently? And I think that... you know, sort of how we imagine Jesus wherever we sit is gonna really fundamentally shape how we do our public work. Yeah, I I um am compelled by your explanation. I don't even know if that's the right word as I'm listening to it. It definitely resonates. I've seen that happen. I've seen it happen like personally with people that I know where you have two different definitions or ideas of what it means that, you know, that Jesus would do this or that Jesus would put his name on this or any number of things. Right. And then I've experienced that I've experienced that culturally. I see it all the time. Right. In uh exegesis that's being used and then really applications being used on both on both sides of this. and not necessarily always having good exegesis when they're doing it. And it's like the Bible, I grew up having this view of the Bible that um I needed to read it and read it read it and read it and read it. And as long as I've read it, I was going to be OK. And I understand that view, but the problem with it, I think, is that there's an assumption that you're going to read it correctly. And there's an assumption that just because you have it's like almost like it's a magic Spell or something like that say the writing cantation say the right words hocus pocus There you go. You get what you want and yet that's you know, the Bible itself claims against magic and you know most of the issues I think people have with the Bible are normally solved through just understanding genre and understanding how ancient texts were written and understanding and not putting modern expectations on ancient texts. But all that's saying is that the Bible is so complicated that all of us, but we all want to use it. We all want to use it for our own. And it is diverse enough that you can get two different things and pull them out of context and essentially put two things that look contradictory up. um Almost every single time I've ever seen that personally, it's because There's been a genre, there's been some kind of methodological error in interpretation of understanding it. And I see that all over the place. We talked with, oh, come on, Brian Kaler at Word and Way. just had um an interview with him. We went through all the ways that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE and Department of War are putting out, using like scripture verses and things like that, and putting out a particular... application and I think this is very bad exegesis is very bad idea and yet we can't seem to uh help like going to that religious language using it. um Even thinking about in Minnesota the things happening there in UC clergy right I just write what what one clergy gets interrupted by Antifa another another uh church gets interrupted by ice coming in. Right? One in North Carolina, one in Minneapolis. And everyone's outraged um about, you know, and everyone's claiming religious liberty and this is our religious, this is our... How do sociologists work through all this stuff? Like, how do I make sense of what's happening in Minnesota from a sociological viewpoint on how it can be so diametrically opposed And yet we're both saying we're Christians. Is that really the case though? Like sociologically, I really the same? Am I really um in the same category as a trans bishop or as someone? And I'm talking about sociologically. I'm not talking about my ontological value, okay? You said they're not valuable. That's what everyone's gonna say. Whatever, that's not what I'm saying. But am I really in the same category because I believe in Jesus or as Christian or as that label is just not a very good label? I don't know. What do you think as a sociologist? Yeah, I mean, you're the pastor. Those kinds of questions might be above my pay grade. But, you know, I think that we do as, as, you know, a data-driven empirical kind of community work pretty hard to think about the right way to kind of parse people into categories that actually do make sense of some of the differences between them. And so, you know, when you look at survey reports, there's very rarely, rarely a category that just says Christians think this. um You know, we're breaking people down into much more specific categories that actually do map onto different views of issues. And so, you know, one of the kind of ways that we do this is we break people down by tradition. um And so, you know, we have people who identify as born again and evangelical are separate from people who identify as Christian and not born again or evangelical, and they're separate from Catholics. We actually increasingly, you know, in most uh surveys will break out black Christians because the particular kind of history of black denominations leads black Christians to take really different views on social and political issues. Sometimes there's a breakout of sort of racial and ethnic categories within the Catholic category and within those sort of evangelical and mainline Christian categories, which isn't to say that at the level of the church, right? They can't all be, they're not all Christians, right? Like that's not for me to say. But it is to say that socially they are very different groups in terms of A, who they imagine as part of their group, as who they imagine are like real Christians in some cases, in terms of their cultural understandings, in terms of their interpretive lenses on scripture and on politics. in terms of their practices, in terms of a lot of different kinds of things. And so to sort of use that broad brush and say, all Christians think the same way about everything would be really inappropriate and wouldn't really help us understand anything better. So that's a sociological answer, but it doesn't help us to parse these questions in practice of like, well, two groups of Christians are saying diametrically opposed things, right? Who's right? um And that really is an active act of contestation and persuasion that the public has to kind of make determinations and be really introspective and reflexive about which of them are engaging in interpretive practices that seem most legitimate and defensible, which ones are being more consistent in their application of sort of different kinds of values. Right? Which ones are engaging in very clear, motivated reasoning where, you know, they basically know in advance the answer they want and then they find some sort of like justification for it in their tradition to say, you know, this is the answer, but I'm going to, you know, go find something to, uh you know, in the Bible that I can tack onto this to make it sound good. And I think that those are the kinds of questions that we should all be asking are, you know, Christian public figures and also leaders in our own traditions, including our, you know, if we're not religious, who are the cultural and political figures that we are looking to for guidance on important questions. I'd love to ask you more about motivated reasoning here in a second, but I want to just talk a little bit about sort of these demographics, because one demographic that tends to come up a lot in discussions about Christian nationalism is white evangelicals. And I remember going back to my earlier sub-stack about Christian nationalism, you know, I mean, I'm not sure if I should say this, but the one comment Sam had was I wasn't talking about enough about white evangelicals. oh And I understood where he was coming from, but I'd love to just kind of hear from you. When sociologists talk about the group, white evangelicals, especially kind of in the political context, what's so special about them? And why are they kind of singled out? One of the reasons that they're singled out is that they are outliers on a number of measures that are pretty significant. And particularly um over the past decade or so, they've been really major outliers on measures related to support for Donald Trump and a number of the specific policy issues that he has embraced. so, you know, whenever you see a category of people that is a, uh people tend to be in agreement within that group. So we're looking at things like 70, 80, 90 % of white evangelicals are in agreement about a particular issue, um which isn't common, right? Most groups, people have internal disagreement. So you have huge amounts of internal agreement and then that group looks different than other groups in society. They're gonna get a lot of attention. um And so what... There's a couple of different things that I think are important about that. And one is how do you end up with a group with so much internal agreement on issues? And so one of the things that my work looks at is actually at like an internal cultural level, right? How do you achieve consensus inside of a community and in the, the white evangelical world, which is a world that I dug into in this documentary podcast that looked at sort of how internal descent inside of white evangelical churches. in the Trump era was really squashed and silenced, right? You have to look at how that's happening, right? This isn't, it's not always a story of like natural agreement, but rather of cultural dynamics that makes dissent more costly for people, of a culture that is able to... create a really bright line between insiders and outsiders. And if people are not in agreement on certain things, they become outsiders very quickly. And a group that has other kinds of incentives beyond the issue at hand to agree on certain issues and to be loyal, kind of, in some ways, to the interests of their in-group. And so a lot of those things are happening right now inside of white evangelical spaces in a way that makes them sociologically interesting. and also has made them as a result, an extremely powerful political block. And so, you know, I think that there's good reason for us to be talking a lot about quote unquote white evangelicals. Now, at the same time, um even when we talk about white evangelicals as a unified block, we're really still only talking about 80 % of them, which is to say that there are minority voices inside. this community. And so I've spent a lot of time talking to white evangelicals and the entire podcast follows an evangelical pastor who is really concerned about Christian nationalism and is working really hard to try and sensitize his community members to like, what is this? How is it bad for the church? Right? How is this non not Christian? How is this bad for our community? And how do we come back? to a kind of version of Christianity that he thinks is truer to his actual faith. um And trying to lift up those conversations that are happening because, you know, as much as I actually think it's sociologically and social scientifically important that we be able to identify these, you know, sort of outlier groups and understand what's happening, we also have to recognize that like we can't stereotype an entire group of people, right? And that, you know, that we have to recognize that there's internal sort of like debate inside of that community over what this means. um And so, you know, think we can hold both of those things in our heads at once, um but it can be complicated from afar when you're not close to that work or to those communities. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's like when you have It's kind of like the telescoping or the way that our vision works that that's not telescoping is what I meant, but Like when I guess like when you see something, right? I guess when I meant the telescope I can look at the moon and it just kind of looks I don't really see much in it when I look through a telescope I see a whole lot more detail whole might more everything or you go down and you break into the component parts and it gets much more complex under the surface Right, and I think that sociology seems like it is like that right because it's made of individuals who are predictable, obviously to a certain extent, but being individuals, they have a choice and that makes them unpredictable. They can move against whatever it is that is happening because they're persons. And I think like, so, so how abnormal is it in what's happening in like sociological Christian, like sociologically and like white evangelical, is this abnormal that people would be? like gathered around like a certain set of beliefs. I mean, it seems like that's not abnormal and that then they would enforce those kind of community norms through shaming, through whatever it is. And I actually, I mean, I feel very skeptical that that's, and I'm not saying you made this claim, but I feel skeptical that, somewhere to say that that is somehow unique or only within white evangelicalism that certainly, seems to be all over the place where groups decide what's norm and then they basically police their own, police their norms. And cancel culture, shaming, public shaming, that's not a right or left issue, that is a people issue. so, what, I mean, how much is this just normal stuff that you see? And how much of this is like, man, this is like super... Something really different is happening here. Or is it just we should just be paying attention to the normal scary stuff that we're seeing? I don't know, does that make sense? Absolutely, yeah. mean, so, you you're absolutely correct that groups always have a boundary around them, right? And that there are all kinds of sort of social processes that we can observe in most groups that sort of mark insiders versus outsiders, that have ways of sort of cultivating insider-ness, right? And of building kind of up the strength of that sort of group identity and community. Right? And also punishing and policing behavior. And so those are all happening. um What I would say is that some groups do that in ways that are stronger than others, where the boundaries are stronger and brighter. And so uh now two or three decades ago, one of my colleagues, Christian Smith, wrote a great book and the title does a beautiful job of telling you the argument of the book. It's called, you know, Evangelicals, Embattled and Thriving. And the argument was that a number of particularly white mainline churches were declining in membership and that we were starting to see the kind of fall away from traditional organized religious affiliation that we now call the rise of the nuns and the kind of weakening of people's commitments to religion. But we weren't seeing that among evangelicals. And he basically made the argument that this was because there was a distinct culture within evangelicalism. And it had to do with their orientation toward outsiders and this idea that they were embattled, right? That like one of the things that marked kind of evangelical culture was this sense that we are not the world. The world out there is both kind of falling prey to all sorts of moral degradation, right? And we are correct, but also the more right we are, the more they will hate us. So it was this sense that the world was dangerous and also threatening to the in-group in various kinds of ways, and also wrong, wrong about all kinds of things. uh And this, when it was sort of properly calibrated by church leaders, could help the in-group feel sort of secure, could help them feel a sense of meaning and purpose, help to sort of make their theology distinctive. and really kept people bound to the community, right? And like when a lot of people who leave evangelicalism talk about that experience, it's like, can be a really difficult experience. But one of the things when they go church shopping at other kinds of churches, that they miss that kind of intensity of community life and of the sort of experience of evangelical life that felt so confident and assured and dense in terms of its commitments. so right, embattlement becomes the key to evangelical strength. Now, in my work that I've looked at this and I've looked at some of the measures that Chris Smith looked at over time, and a number of those measures are now weakening. And there's a story that we can tell, and my sort of sense of this, I think we need to do a lot more research on it, is that embattlement can be really productive for a community up to a point, but that you can reach an embattlement tipping point, where... the sort of fear of outsiders and the commitment to kind of maintaining in-group loyalty and kind of homogeneity can get so strong. And you can start to blend your understanding of the in-group with an understanding of a political tribe in a way that sometimes starts to miss the plot. And you can fall over a tipping point where you end up in the situation where anybody who is our friend is good, even if they actually are not doing all the things we think a person should do, right? And anybody who disagrees with us is our enemy and we need to take power from them. And that not only, you know, as you're, if you sort of have internal people who are questioning this, right, they become part of the enemy camp. You're pushing people out to the margins. um You're allying with groups that don't have your actual best interests in mind as a church, uh and it can really become destructive to faith communities themselves. And so, you know, I think we're kind of in that part of the curve right now where that embattlement mentality has really been outsourced from internal church leaders who care about the health of a specific church to political leaders and influencers. who know that they can ramp up embattlement before elections and they can turn out votes. They can ramp up embattlement if they need support in a particular moment of crisis. And they don't care what it does to the community because they get what they need. They're not actually in the community. And it's instrumentalizing that sense of embattlement, threat, persecution for political gain. And I think that the evangelical leaders that I spent time talking to are mourning the fracture that this has caused inside of their churches. You know, I'm curious if you've ever done any research on kind of like tracking the making of a Christian nationalist, because I was talking to somebody recently, I think it was Matt Bodie. We were talking about Turning Point USA and about like the big ceremony that they had, or that's probably not a funeral. I'm not really quite sure what it was called. And a lot of like people turned out and there's like record church attendance and the of all this stuff, right? So um I came to the church much later in life. I was an atheist for most of my life. um 2008, I decided to join a church, primarily because I married a PK. My wife's a pastor's kid, kind of came with the territory. um And when we started attending church, I remember feeling that pull of like, because I'm a Democrat, I'm always... kind of Democrat. But I remember feeling that pull of like, he's a Democrat. Oh, he voted for Obama, you know? And there was all these sort of conservative-related messages throughout. And I was on the staff. And I've always been part of churches' staff whenever we go to different churches. So I say all that just to say, I understand that there is sort of this social pressure to want to become more conservative if you're a Christian. And I'd imagine that for some people that pull would be so strong that they would end up like storming the Capitol. So like, like I'm just curious if you don't have any research or know anything about it, let's just kind of just hear your kind of commentary. You've been doing this for a lot longer than we've been podcasting. So I'd love to uh just kind of hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, so I've actually spent, you I talk a lot in recent years about my work studying conservative Christians in spaces uh that are more right wing, but a lot of my work has been with progressive and liberal people of faith. And, ah you know, there's a lot of people in this country who are extremely liberal, would even identify as sort of far to the left, who are social justice kind of oriented and who are deeply committed to their faith and actually come to those politics through their faith. um And a lot of them are engaged in community organizing or political activism through faith communities and often in multi-faith and interfaith kinds of coalitions where they're working together with people from lots of different faith communities to kind of say, you know, what are the values that we share across our faith communities? And because that's often the form that they're coalitions take the language that they bring to public kind of work tends not to be as exclusively Christian in its form because they're making statements that sort of are more on the level of values that they share with lots of other faith traditions. And so because of that, there's often this impression that, you know, groups on the left are not Christian. But that's not to say they're not Christian. They just don't always speak in a voice that is exclusively Christian, right? Because they recognize that they are speaking for and to much more socially and religiously diverse audiences in the kind of liberal coalition. um And that has had really complicated effects. And one of those effects is that people on both the right and the left have come to believe that most Christians are conservative. and that sort of Christianity itself is a conservative tradition, instead of recognizing that there's actually a huge diversity of political ideas that you can take from a Christian kind of upbringing viewpoint and kind of uh perspective. And, you know, that's actually a place of consensus that, know, liberals and conservatives both think that Christianity is conservative. uh And increasingly, there is an impression that liberalism in the left is secular and non-religious. When again, that's not actually true. And so, you know, I do think that, oh you know, that's been a frankly failure of our politics over the last 50 years is accepting that premise. And, you know, I think that, that we would all be kind of in a healthier position to participate in our politics if we heard a lot more people. talking about how their faith animates their politics, including people on the left. I have had the fortune of sitting with people across the political spectrum who talk about that. And I've learned a huge amount from hearing that no one has a monopoly on interpretation of how their faith sort of should lead to a particular kind of society. um And so having that as like an actual debate in our politics, I think would be better for anyone and particularly because as you pointed out, right, when we come to believe that God has taken a partisan side in our debates, like we actually believe that God is on one side, this can lead to really bad outcomes. It can justify violence. It can justify the sort of illegitimate taking of power by that side because if God's with you, why shouldn't you do whatever you can to take power? Right? It really permissions almost anything. And I think that that's a really dangerous perspective for any one side to claim. Yeah, I believe there is a anti-abortion group, I forgot the name of it, that really took this to sort of that degree, right? They were actually like murder and bomb abortion claims. Yeah, absolutely. My dad had a, he had someone in his church when he was in, he planted a church in the 70s. And I think in the 80s is when he had someone who they'd left the church and they left the church because they got involved in a really extremist thing and started bombing abortion clinics. And the FBI tapped the phone or someone tapped the phone of like the church and all sorts of stuff. It was crazy. And yeah, like in jail? um No, that's because he's in jail because of his multiple murders of and no, he's not in jail at all. um So uh what I was saying, though, is that it's this this whole thing. I'm curious about how do you so I already know that the person across the street has a different moral universe than I do. um Now, how do I Like, is it do I just hate this is me, that's them. I, you know, as a Christian, I feel like I should share the gospel with people. That's what I feel like is an important thing for me personally. Right. If someone says I'm not interested, I don't want that. OK, I'm not going to like that coercion isn't part of the gospel. So I just yeah, whatever. But I'm going to share my my heart, my life, my whatever. And if I think that they're wrong. I would want to be able to express that if the relationship allowed for it and them to do so for me. how can we have strong moral commitments without kind of like basically moving as a church again to a place of absolutism that makes basically pluralism? too hard. Does that question make sense? How can we maintain strong moral commitments? Do you see that happening? Do you see people doing that? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yeah, and I, you know, I mean, just to, I completely agree with the idea that pluralism is super hard. My sub-deck is called democracy is hard, uh which is not to discourage us from seeking it, but just to prepare us that it's not actually supposed to be easy. You know, like if we want to be active participants in how our society is run, that requires some work on our part and it requires hard conversations that aren't always easy and we can't avoid our disagreements, right? We actually have to figure out ways to have those conversations. And so, yeah, it is hard. But I will also say that despite the fact that we do on one level live in these different moral universes, in your words, which I love, um I think if we click down to another level, we actually often share more in common than we think. makes sense. Yeah. so, you I think the goal is can we get out of this big conversation about partisan politics? Can we sort of move into a conversation about what you value and what I value? What keeps you up at night? What keeps me up at night? Like, tangible. Like, not what did I see on the news that concerned me, but what here in this neighborhood that we both live in? m and that we see the same stuff happening in, where can we find points of agreement? Where can we identify shared problems? Where can we figure out how to help each other solve those? And I think it's through like getting down to that more material reality that we share and tuning out some of these like larger issues that we know are distorted by our media and by our politics, right? I actually do think that we can find a of shared common ground, right? I we all want our kids to be safe and happy, right? I think we all want that. Like I fundamentally believe it. I think we all want to live in a neighborhood where the trash gets picked up on time and the snow gets cleared and we can all basically like manage our day-to-day lives. Like there's some basics that maybe we have to go back to. And then we can sort of have a bigger conversation about priorities. Right? Or we can have a bigger conversation about who we trust to do those things and to be partners with us in solving those problems. And we're going to have disagreements about that. But I think that if we can stay close to the ground, we can start building from there. I really liked that. Ruth, thank you so much for coming on the program, spending some time with us. How can people connect to you, follow your work? Where would you like to direct them right now? Sure, so right now I write a twice weekly sub stack called Democracy is Hard, where you can read my musings on various things and sort of where I try to bring research to bear on what's happening in the world. um I also have a documentary podcast called When the Wolves Came, Evangelicals Resisting Extremism that you can listen to and a new book called My Tax Dollars, The Morality of Tax Paying in America. That's awesome. Well, Ruth, thank you so much for coming on and being a part of this today. It's been a great conversation. Yeah, thanks so much. It's been great being with y'all. Absolutely to our viewers and our listeners guys Thanks for joining us for another episode of the faithful politics podcast Make sure you're sharing this with people who need it so we can kind of keep trying to rebuild our democracy one brick at a time It's hard, but we'll keep doing it together and until next time keep your conversations that right or left but up. Thanks