Americans who are confused or upset about Trump 2.0 will find a helpful guide in Katherine Stewart’s latest book, Money, Lies, and God, which examines the far-right billionaires, evangelical activists and think tanks behind MAGA’s assaults on our laws, traditions and norms.
Stewart’s deeply reported book, which was completed before the 2024 elections, traces “the rise of an antidemocratic political movement” that “represents the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War.”
This powerful movement “isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.”
Katherine Stewart
And despite Trump’s campaign pledges to make everything great, the movement he now leads “does not represent a genuine attempt to address the problems from which it arose,” but instead focuses on “some putatively alien ‘other’ supposedly responsible for all our ills,” she warns.
Stewart’s arguments aren’t theoretical. You can see them in each day’s headlines. For an example of her above claim about blaming the “other” instead of addressing problems, look no further than Trump’s claim that diversity, equity and inclusion programs could have caused the deadly January collision of a passenger plane and a military helicopter in D.C.
Trump’s expansive claim that “he who saves his country does not violate any law” reflects two of the movement’s characteristics:
- Catastrophism (“America is going to hell real fast”)
- Authoritarian reflex (“They want their Jesus to lift weights and carry a sword”)
This is Stewart’s third book on religious (and secular) conservatives who are united in their “profound rejection of the Enlightenment ideals on which the American Republic was founded.”
Out with the belief that “all people are created equal.” In with the conviction that “certain Americans have a right to rule, and the rest of us have a duty to obey.”
She got her start with her 2012 book, Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, after she discovered Child Evangelism Fellowship was, without her knowledge or consent, working to evangelize her daughter in her public school.
She explored Christian nationalism in her 2022 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
She revisits Christian nationalism in Money, Lies, and God, calling it a “substitute religion” that will never achieve its vision of a godly America but will settle for “a theocratic oligarchy imposes a corrupt and despotic order in the name of sectarian values.”
“Reactionary nihilism” is Stewart’s label for the movement that seems to animate much of the GOP’s current governing trifecta. The movement “expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order” and believes the answer lies in “brutal acts of will,” she writes.
Stewart examines the anti-democracy movement’s five major parts.
It all begins with the funders. Regulation-averse super-rich (Koch, DeVos, Musk, Thiel) fund the movement, largely for their own self-interest.
Ideology is outsourced to the thinkers. “Anti-intellectual intellectuals” working for well-funded organizations (the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation) provide disinformation and culture war marching orders, such as Heritage’s Project 2025 playbook).
The movement’s “operational masterminds” are the power players. “Leaders of the Christian nationalist movement’s policy and networking groups (and) legal advocacy organizations,” such as the Focus on the Focus-aligned Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom.
Sergeants are the people who “turn the movement’s money and messages into votes and political action at the local level.” Here’s where networks of politicized pastors (Family Research Council’s Watchmen on the Wall) get out the Republican vote.
The infantry are the people, usually middle and lower classes, who go to the voting booth and show up at school board meetings. Moms for Liberty (which has received funding from Heritage Foundation and Family Research Council) helped inspire a wave of “housewife populism.”
Meanwhile, a politicized Pentecostalism, complete with pro-Trump “prophets” declaring God wants to make America great again, have inspired “the rise of the spirit warriors.”
In a concluding chapter, Stewart shows how American groups are exporting their anti-democratic counter revolution around the world.
Stewart’s reactionary nihilists are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. Or as, Casey de Santis, First Lady of Florida put it: “Enough of the elites imposing their will against us; it’s about damn time we impose our will on them.”