How Christian Nationalism Threatens Democracy

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

If you're a regular listener to Assembly Required, you likely know three things.

One, I'm from a very large family.

Two, I grew up in Mississippi.

And three, my mom was a librarian and my dad was a shipyard worker.

But in 1989, my parents changed all of our lives.

They moved the eight of us from Mississippi to Georgia because they heard a call to the ministry.

For the next three years, my parents were full-time graduate students at Emory University, pursuing their Masters of Divinity.

When mom and dad became elders in the United Methodist Church, their roles had changed, but their core ethos had not.

My parents had raised us in the church, first Missionary Baptist and then United Methodist.

But Christianity had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember.

It also undergirds my political philosophy and my activism.

Lately, though, too often I don't recognize the Christianity I practice when it's described by a distinct group.

The distance isn't just mine.

A couple of months ago after our episode on David Graham's book on Project 2025, we heard from a listener who asked a question that got our attention.

She was responding to our discussion of Christian nationalism embedded in Project 2025, and she wrote, quote, I consider myself a Christian and I cannot discern any Christian values.

Could someone explain what values of Christianity the Christian nationalists are drawing on?

Anything related to the teachings of Jesus?

That conflict is the topic we are going to tackle today.

My Christian faith is deeply important to me.

I grew up in a family that taught me that I cannot call myself a Christian and forego my responsibility to help those more vulnerable than myself.

And yet, in today's political discourse, questions of what Christianity is and how it is used vary dramatically.

Understanding how Christianity intersects or is manipulated by political ideology is crucial to how we navigate this present threat of authoritarianism.

Because religion is one of the favored tools for pitting us against them, for imposing constraints or granting freedoms, for justifying acts of grace or condemnation.

This is part of step seven, in this case, using religious identity to divide and ostracize and cast blame on others.

So let's start with some definitions.

Christian nationalism, or more accurately, white Christian nationalism, is an extremist, anti-democratic ideology whose leaders believe the United States was founded to be a Christian nation only for Christians.

This ideology is aligned with white supremacy and in practice is more about identity than faith.

Its adherents believe Americans must be a specific kind of Christian, conservative and white, to the exclusion of all others.

Christian nationalist leaders have been key allies of President Trump since his first election.

And in 2024, then-vice presidential candidate J.D.

Vance appeared at a Christian nationalist town hall.

There is little daylight between their espoused policy aims and the administration and Republican Party moving swiftly to put them into effect.

Yet, I hold to a Christian tradition rooted in what Representative James Tallarico describes as the ability to love Judas, not just Jesus.

My approach to the faith champions the ability to do the hard parts of tending to the outcast, hosting the immigrant, and putting others first.

This version of Christianity has not received as much media attention, nor has it been as prominent in current political narratives.

As a Christian, I also believe that one of America's core strengths is our diversity, including our religious diversity.

While much of this conversation centers Christianity, this is vital because the threat of Christian nationalism is the elimination of our status as a secular democracy.

America, despite the fervent rewriting of history, was founded as a nation where religion is separate from government and no one religion is supreme.

Despite an ongoing battle to scrap this basic tenet, the separation of church and state ensures that all people of all faiths or no faith are welcome.

That America is a nation where we are all equal regardless of our identity.

Yet when Christian nationalism becomes conflated with Christianity, America itself is at risk.

The Christian faith is not the same as the political doctrine of Christian nationalism.

They use the guise of religion to undermine our constitution and twist Christian values to legitimize their demonization of the gay and transgender communities, the erosion of reproductive rights, the brutal treatment of immigrants, discrimination against people of color, and their wholesale abandonment of the poor.

But believe me when I tell you, none of this aligns with Jesus' teachings.

But unfortunately, the role of right-wing religious leaders influencing our nation and our politics is nothing new.

The modern religious right, birthed as a political movement to protect school segregation and deny Jimmy Carter the presidency, has always pursued regressive policies and tactics that are anathema to the central beliefs of Christianity.

Since the beginning of this movement, right-wingers in power have wielded faith as a tool of oppression rather than liberation.

But just because it's loud doesn't mean it's right.

In order to help us understand the threat that Christian nationalism poses and how faith can instead be a powerful tool for progress, I have two extraordinary guests, Bishop William Barber, who has many titles, president of Repairs of the Breach, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, and professor at the Yale Divinity School, and Father Greg Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries, Jesuit priest and author.

And a quick note.

I know that many of our listeners come from other faith traditions or no faith tradition at all.

I promise all of you, you'll find something to take with you from this conversation.

So stick around.

I am so delighted to be joined by Father Greg Boyle and Bishop William Barber.

Thank you both so much for joining me today.

Honored to be here.

So honored.

Thank you so much to both of you.

The reason I want to have this conversation today is that I did an episode a few weeks ago with David Graham, who wrote a book on Project 2025.

And as part of that conversation, we talked a lot about how Project 2025 was written to pursue the Christian nationalist goals.

A listener then wrote to us and asked us to explain what the values of Christianity are that Christian nationalists are drawing on.

And yeah, I thought it was a good question.

I haven't talked about my faith often on the show, but I spend a lot of time in that conversation in lots of other places.

And I think it's an important conversation to have.

I know a lot of our listeners come from a wide range of faith traditions or are secular.

But this is a conversation that has both religious connotations, but has very important cultural and political connotations.

So at the most fundamental level, I have a really simple question for each of you.

And I'm going to start with you, Father Boyle.

What are Christian values?

Well,

for me, I always kind of distill it down to what are the things that Jesus took seriously?

And I think there are only four things.

They're big things, but there are only four of them.

And that's inclusion, nonviolence, unconditional loving kindness.

and compassionate acceptance.

And so I think if people want to take seriously what Jesus took seriously, then they embrace those principles.

So we're trying to find a way to distill what the faith is that can

have the clarity of invitation

and not just as an indictment of what we're not doing, but to kind of invite people to embrace something very specific and colors how we operate.

And so, if inclusion is, in fact,

you know, one of the things that Jesus absolutely takes seriously, then that colors how you see mass deportations and

the detentions that are happening as we speak here in Los Angeles, for example.

Barbara?

Well, thank you for asking a whole class in that one question.

What is

I mean, thank you.

But I think, first of all, even if you you don't get to the new, the so-called New Testament, if you're in the Hebrew Bible, we start with what Frederick Herxard said was the politics of God.

And even if you look at, say, the Ten Commandments, most people who are begging to put the Ten Commandments up really wouldn't want them if they understood what they mean.

I mean, how do you say you believe in the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not kill, but then you pass a bill that will kill 51,000 people by denying them health care in the first year alone.

The good thing about Christian, when we say the word Christian, the word Christian actually was an insult in the Bible.

It was an insult that the power structure threw at the people who were the people of the way, the people who followed Jesus.

And today,

one of the first things we have to do is take

the name Christian off of Christian Nation.

We have too many people just trying to throw the name Christian on any and everything.

We have a sermon and we have a servant.

We don't have to guess where Jesus stood.

In his first public sermon,

Jesus said, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor.

The word there translated to Greek was patokos.

It means those who've been made poor by economic exploitation.

And then he listed all of the people that the Roman Empire dismissed, degraded, and destroyed.

The broken, the blind, the bruised, and all of those made to feel unacceptable.

By the way, first sermon almost got him killed second last sermon he said every nation

every political structure will be judged by how we treat the least of these the sick

the prisoner the immigrant the thirsty the hungry the least of these so we don't have to guess we have a servant and a servant.

We have a book and we have practice.

And what we find when we look at that is so much of what's being called Christian is at best theological malpractice, but at worst is heresy.

And heresy is not a word I came up with.

One of the goals of the ancient fathers and the ancient people in the church was to distinguish between what was theology authentic and what was not.

And we're in a sense, we need a Nicene council, but a modern day one now.

because there are some things we need to stop even repeating that is Christian, because it does not line up with the servant and the sermon,

the book and the person of the book.

When I was running for office in 2018, when I stood for governor, I had already been in political office for 11 years.

When I ran the first time, it was to run for state legislature in 2006.

And my parents were living in Mississippi.

I was having a conversation with my mom and dad one day.

And

father said, you know, have you started going to churches yet?

And I said, no, I actually have been declining invitations.

And my mother said, why?

And I said, well, you guys raised us, you know, we were very politically active as children.

I was very active in college politics, but I'm also very religious.

And I said, I just don't feel comfortable melding the two.

And my dad laughed and he said, Stacey, the Bible is nothing but politics.

And he and my mother both said, you know, you have this responsibility to meet people where they are.

And often that's in places of faith.

So it's not about going there to

do politics.

You're going there because people's faith and lived experience comes out in political action.

And so, Bishop Barber, I'm going to stay with you because you've built a life that builds and blends faith and political action.

You build coalitions, you train other religious leaders in how to build political movements.

Can you talk a bit about how you came to this work and what calls you to this approach of blending faith and political action, other than your parents telling you to go and do it?

Right.

And I come from 500 years of preaching clergy on my father's side of the family and 300 years of my life.

And I ran for other reasons.

I just didn't want to be dealing with church anymore and ended up running right back into God.

I ran away and ran back.

But

first of all, I think,

Stacey,

the Bible is political.

It's not partisan.

In other words,

no one political party or one denomination has

a hold on, quote-unquote, God.

But the God of

the scriptures and the God that is spoken of in Jesus is quite political in the sense of challenging the injustices of the world.

and offering a different way forward than the way of violence and the way of destruction, as Walter Wink said in his book, Naming the Powers

and claiming about.

He was a scholar up at Union Theological Seminary.

One of the ways I open my class in public theology and public policy, which has a long history, from Moses challenging Pharaoh to Jesus challenging Herod and Caesar all the way through to the abolitionists challenging the slave masters.

I open it by coming in the classroom with a

cellophane bag full of all the scriptures in the Bible that speak to the issue of how we treat the least of these, the poor, the women, the children, and the marginalized that have been cut out.

And I dump them on the table.

And then I show them that Bible they came from.

There are more than 2,000 scriptures that call on us.

to challenge and examine and critique political realities in our world.

One of the best scriptures for me, Stacey, is Isaiah 10.

Isaiah was preaching and he said, woe unto those who legislate evil

and rob the poor of their rights and make women and children pray, P-R-E-Y.

So there is no way you can pray P-R-A-Y at an opening of a Congress or a state assembly and then pass laws that pray P-R-E-Y on the least of these these and somehow not see the contradiction.

Prophetic consciousness requires that we challenge injustice, inequality, breaking of community, destroying of the least of these.

We say what will the consequences will be if we continue down that route.

But then there's a last thing.

The prophetic imagination is always supposed to provide hope of another way.

The three movements, the critique of what's going on,

the doom or the destruction that will happen if you continue this way that is contrary to the values of God.

And then

things don't have to stay like this.

There can be redemption.

There can be hope.

Well, Father Boyle, listening to Bishop Barber, there's the responsibility of using both politics and faith to build the world we're supposed to have.

You have devoted your life to service in a way that builds opportunities for the marginalized.

Going back to my parents, my mom and dad, my mom was a librarian.

My dad was a shipyard worker.

And when they were called into the ministry, it was during a time when my dad was building a church on the grounds of a Mississippi prison, the first church to be built.

And it was non-denominational.

He intended it to be a space of worship for anyone because he believed that if you wanted people to be able to re-enter, you had to meet them where they were at their lowest moment.

And you've built this entire

entity and enterprise that has focused on former gang members who are trying to redirect their lives.

How did life and your faith lead you to build a gang rehabilitation and re-entry program?

Well, partly by necessity.

I mean, because I was a pastor of the poorest parish in Los Angeles, and we had eight gangs at war with each other in two public housing projects, which made up my parish.

And the LAPD called my parish the place of the highest concentration of gang activity in all of Los Angeles.

So I've buried 263 young people killed because of gang violence over these 40 years.

And And so we were responding

in an immediate way to what was right in front of us.

But it never occurred to me to just sort of denounce gang violence because it became clear that gang violence was about something else.

It was about a lethal absence of hope.

And so I knew that if we addressed the despair, that the violence would disappear.

And in fact, it did.

And so now we're 37 years old as an organization, but

and we've created a community of cherished belonging that kind of appears to be like the front porch of the house everybody wants to live in.

And so you're trying to announce a message.

What if we were to invest in people rather than just trying to futilely arrest our way out of

our situation and our poverty and our despair?

I mean, today, actually today,

August 11th is the 60th anniversary of the Watts riots.

And I remember I was 11 and I had a paper corner on Vermont and Beverly.

I could see Watts on fire.

But if you look back now, you know, Watts, you know, has the highest poverty rate in all of Los Angeles County today, you know, and one-third of the households are below.

what we would consider the official poverty level.

It has the highest jobless rate.

It has contaminated water.

I'm, you know, how have things really changed in those 60 years?

You couldn't point to very much in Watts right now, except for, you know, organizations that are really quite prophetic and

stalwart in their advocacy for that community.

So

everything is about something else.

The trick is to kind of find the something else.

And our faith

really helps us recall the original covenantal relationship that God says, as I have loved you, so you must have this special preferential care for the widow, orphan, and the stranger.

And

that's

who we want to stand with.

And it taps into a longing.

People long to be a part of this.

I don't think people look at it anymore and say, well, that's kind of out of step with Christianity.

No, people look at that and I think they say, if you stand on the margins,

that's the only way these margins will get erased is if you stand out

at them and people are really attracted to that.

They want to join you to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop.

and with the disposable, so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.

I think people who have an authentic sense of the God of love are drawn to an invitation that will create a community of cherished belonging.

It's kind of what Jesus had in mind.

And people are finding the invitation in that,

which is heartening.

I'm sure, Bishop Barber, going across the country, you also find people

are just so longing for your message.

One of the things, I just, when I came on this call, I just finished reading messages from three people that said they're atheists, but they listened to the sermon yesterday morning that I preached about putting light on it and about the need for love to challenge injustice, to love

the least of these, but to challenge the system.

These are three atheists that just said thank you.

And the thing about following Jesus, Jesus said, I have many who are not of this fold.

He was always inviting people in

who recognize that we don't have to live by the demon mythologies of power and empire, that there is a better way.

And I was listening to Dr.

King a three weeks ago when he said,

the country is sick.

And it is something sick about, and Jesus would say this, because what he meant by you need to be redeemed.

There's something broken.

When you see what's wrong and don't fix it, and there are five things, and I'll stop.

Systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of health care, the war economy, the militarization of our communities, and the false, distorted, immoral narrative of religious nationalism represent the sickness of our time that's in direct contradiction, not only to our constitution, but in direct contradiction to the faith that Jesus calls us to, where he says, woe unto those who act real religious, but you leave undone the most important things, which is justice

and love

and mercy and kindness.

That was Jesus's message to the power structure in his day, in his historical day.

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Bishop Barber, I love the framing that you offered about the five challenges that we should be meeting.

And I'm going to leave the nationalism for a second question.

But for both you and Father Boyle,

the fundamental question I've been grappling with my entire sentient life, watching my parents do the work they do, watching the two of you lean in and have national conversations, but also demonstrable success in your work.

How is it that we have leaders who espouse a faith tradition that is grounded in this notion of service that seems to proselytize such an un-Christian agenda?

Can you guys diagnose it and fix it in the next five minutes?

Yeah.

Father Boyo?

Yeah, you know, I think

what does this mean?

You know, like, for example, Matthew Dowd says that one-third of the American people do not believe that all men and women are created equal.

And to that, I would say, well, who are those people?

Are they stupid people?

Are they evil people?

And I'm not sure you can be well, whole, healthy, and believe that not all people are created equal.

So for me, it's sort of like health.

You know,

Vivek Murthy, who was the surgeon General, kind of left his post by saying mental health is the defining health issue of our time.

That's not about

diagnosis.

That's about how do we walk each other home to something healthier.

So if you're going to say that your response in the mass detentions and deportations is really a response to a migrant invasion, well, where?

Nowhere in the country and certainly not in Los Angeles.

Or if you were to say a migrant crime wave, where is that happening?

You know, violent crime is at a 60-year low in Los Angeles.

And if you say crime is out of control in D.C.,

it's at a 30-year low in D.C.

Today, I think the president announced that they were going to take steps to, I don't know what,

to remove all homeless and send them far away and then gather all the criminals,

you know, and put them in jails.

You know, it's like when the king is a liar, the truth is treason.

And so, but who lies at that level?

And that's why Jesus, for me, you know, even when

they're complaining to him about Jesus having dinner with tax collectors,

he kind of says, well, you know,

they want to talk about sin, but he wants to talk about health he goes you know the doctor comes for the person who's not well so I I think

you know our health

you know people are unable to

can you be healthy and at a rally for Donald Trump in the first 100 days in Michigan and the lights go down and they show images of brown men being perp walked off a plane and then handcuffed and crouched and heads shaved, and it ends up with images of brown men in cages at Seacot, which is a gulag in Salvador.

And people cheer and people roar and people clap and they start to yell USA.

My question is, can you be a healthy adult?

and do that?

I don't think so.

And so I believe everybody's unshakably good, and I believe we belong to each other.

And so how do we roll up our sleeves and help each other home

to

treasure and heart as the gospel yesterday talked about where your treasure is, there your heart is.

And where your heart is, there your treasure is.

It's interchangeable.

And that's kind of what we try to do here.

people to a place where they're flourishing and they're thriving because they know the truth of themselves.

they find their true self and loving, and then they're able to go out and be advocates for people who really are suffering right now in this city from fear and terror because of ICE raids, for example.

Stacey, let me run through some broad strokes that would, as I said, you asked these questions that would be, you come to Yale, that would be a class in and of themselves.

Because what we are in is a crisis of civilization and a crisis of morality and a crisis of faith really um i was talking to someone who uh is an expert in authoritarianism and they said one of the things authoritarians do is they get people to adjust their morality they get people to uh uh disassociate themselves from just basic human rights that's a fundamental part of authoritarianism working right

um but i want to run some some broad strokes that that that i think we'd have to unpack uh and and and and i want to go where father boyle just went um over and over in scripture

nations that are unjust toward the least of these and systems and policy are called sick

If you go to 1 Chronicles 7, it says that God, if you do certain things and repent, God will heal your land.

So

the notion is that the land is sick, right?

Jesus was always doing miracles.

And one of of the,

there's a book called The Binding the Strong Man.

And it talks about how the healing miracles were pointing to the sickness of the larger society.

And every healing miracle was about that.

For instance, if Jesus feeds 5,000,

the message inside of that is, why are 5,000 people hungry anyway?

And Jesus' miracle becomes a challenge to Caesar.

It doesn't have to be like this, which is why Caesar wants to kill it.

Because every miracle is a contradiction the the the so the second thing is we must admit what we see happening in america is us it's not all of us it's not the totality of our history but it is us it is us unrepentant it is the history of the reality that we've never had a thoroughgoing metanoia in this country a deep repentance So from founding document, we exiled women and poor white men.

And we dared, we wouldn't wouldn't say slavery in the Constitution, but we did fractionize people in that same constitution.

Every time society abuses power and hurts the least of these, there's this confident reference to being sick.

And that every time Jesus did miracles, when Jesus touched lepers, who were the people you did not touch, The question after a miracle was, why aren't you touching your own family members?

Why are you letting the people die in the street?

And if I can touch them, why is the religious cultists and the political culture throwing these people away?

So every miracle is a challenge, which is why the Bible says what they were most afraid of of Jesus is his relationship with the people and his ability to challenge the power structures.

Because every miracle would force either resentment of him or repentance.

We've never dealt with true thoroughgoing metanoia in America.

We have to own that, which is one of the reasons why the demons still live.

Because the scriptures say if you don't really repent of a demon, it comes back seven times stronger.

So, so, so, we never really repented of marginalizing women and marginalizing poor white men without land and fractionalizing people as three-fifths.

We forced people down through the years to have to have their humanity voted on.

You think about the sickness of that.

Somebody has to vote for me.

I have to have an amendment to vote in a democracy.

I have to have an amendment to say I'm a citizen.

And now

we have people who want to undo that.

So, we need a thoroughgoing repentance.

We need to recognize none of this is new, whether it's

the politics of slavery, whether it's

something I heard you mention one time, Stacey, the Southern strategy that is still with us when Dr.

King said the greatest fear of the oligarchy, the racist oligarchy was the possibility of poor whites and black folk coming together in the South and forming a brand new political structure that would shift the

economic architect.

The Southern strategy literally said, we are going to engage in positive division.

And if we get caught, we're going to lie about it.

And what we're doing might create a Frankenstein.

And if it does, we're going to say we didn't have anything to do with it.

So

what we see with Trump and MAGA is not new.

It is the continuation of that which was started.

The last three things is we're always in America dealing with Reconstruction because what happens is we'll have a Reconstruction from 1868 to 18, say, 78 or 90, then it ends.

Then we'll have another one from 1954, 1968, and it ends.

And it always ends with violence.

The first two ended with the best and the brightest of us, regardless of race, creed, and color, being either killed or killed politically in a way that they had no voice.

What happens to a nation that kills its prophets?

prophetesses and prophetic movement and then finally the Pew Foundation did a study.

And this is a critique of the church.

It's a critique of liberal politicians who, for instance, will say they are for certain things.

But it always amazes me.

We have presidential debates after debate.

140 million citizens in this country, poor and low wage, and you don't hear the word poor mentioned.

When you mentioned it in your campaign, I remember.

I was like, who's that talking?

I was in another room.

I was like, who is that?

because i it shocked me so bad to hear a politician black or white that would say we have to deal with poverty and we have to deal with low wages because most of the time the conversation is about middle class and the fight against the wealthy and whatnot the the pew foundation did a study uh father board a few years ago and said that they studied 50 000 sermons in pulpits in america and they looked at the fact that poverty and addressing the poor and the least of these was the major sermonic point of Jesus, and yet it didn't register 1% of the sermons preached in the American pulpit.

So what do you do when the pulpit dries up its prophetic voice and the media is controlled by the oligarchs?

Where do people get their prophetic imagination?

Because there can be no prophetic implementation without imagination, which then means you have to do what you're doing.

You have to do what Father's doing.

There has to be a remnant that rises up.

And that's the thing that Jesus and the scriptures tell us.

The hope of every nation

will always come when a remnant of people decide that what is going on is too bad to tolerate.

And they will make it the cause of their lives

to shift the reality.

Otherwise, you've been nodding aggressively.

Oh, yeah.

Well, I love the remnant part because I think that's the hope is that people will, that this will be kind of a yeast that will

bring something creative and will galvanize people's imagination.

Yet, for example, recently we've had this

issue of a lot of the parents of the 500 trainee gang members who work here are street vendors and they're undocumented.

And

so

we have this thing called Hope Alley, where we block off a street that lines our building.

And so we sell

food for the people who are terrified at the moment and afraid to come outside.

And so we're making the tacos and selling the tamales and the fruit and the flowers.

And we line the street.

We had a thousand people here the other day.

And people came because they, again, it galvanizes people's ability to conjure up an image of how do we resist with joy

and real practical roll up your sleeves concrete love

where people can see an actual thing happening where we are resisting the fact that you have set up a policy that terrifies people to stay in their homes and to avoid going to Home Depot and avoid working at a car wash.

And then everybody's armed and vigilant and ready.

And this is the remnant that Bishop Barber speaks about.

They're armed with cell phones because they think if they can capture this and announce it and show people,

you know, in the civil rights period in the 60s, when you had actual footage of

people being, you know, gnawed by dogs and fire hoses.

And those images went across around the world.

And they said, yeah,

I want to be part of the remnant that calls this out and calls out the harm that's actually being done to human beings.

And, you know, here we've suffered, you know, the two fires in Altadena and then in Pacific Palisades.

And

rightfully so, people honor.

the first responders who were, you know, the firefighters.

But the second responders, the people who got out there to clean in places that were quite ecologically

challenging and dangerous, the second responders were undocumented day laborers who went out there with vests and

they've cleaned the city up.

And these are people who are valuable, not just because they perform a duty that's quite significant and contributes to the life of our community, but because they're human beings.

And so now is the time for the remnant to invite

ICE agents to refuse

to separate and rip apart families and to refuse to separate children from their parents.

People need to find

the core of

their commitment to live as though the truth were true.

And

that's what a remnant does.

And that's how remnants work, which is a really powerful word, especially at the time in which we are currently living.

And you know, Stacey, I'm going to just

render it.

And there's another word that said, the stones that the builders rejected

become the chief cornerstone of a new reality.

And this is the Lord's doing.

So we're in a moment, I believe, in this crisis, not just of democracy, but of civilization, where the very rejected stones

people have rejected.

because I went in the audience the other day and I raised this question and I said, how many of you know what rejection is like?

And I started calling people up to the podium.

If you've been rejected because of your sexuality, you've been rejected because of your poverty, you've been rejected because of your handicap, your disability, you've been rejected because of your nationality, because of your citizenship status.

And people just ran.

I mean,

and when they hooked up, they were crying.

And they said, Raven Baba, for the first time, we can see that there's more of us.

And I was talking to this expert on authoritarianism.

And she said, in moments of authoritarianism,

your actions can't be so big.

They have to come down like the Mount Gummy.

It has to be where people can see it.

And then that scene gets sent out.

I had a professor in college.

He asked us one day,

why did the

Jim Crow signs come down?

I raised my hands like I knew.

I said, because the people marched.

He said, shut up and sit down.

Let me teach you.

He didn't even say that.

He said, that's not why it happened.

It happened because they marched in certain strategic places.

They had created action to happen.

And then it went all over the world.

And it embarrassed the nation to the point that people were asking the question, how can you come over here and challenge us in China, challenge us in Russia, and look at what's happening?

And he said, and that forced two things, a new conversation politically.

But when people saw that in Selma, they were drawn into it.

So we're coming in

Mississippi, we started something called Morrow Monday in the South.

We started in the Rotunda in Washington, D.C.

And,

you know, they were so mean, Stacey, they arrested a woman in D.C.

for praying who

had cerebral palsy in a wheelchair.

But when they did,

6 million people saw that on the social media.

We're going to Memphis.

We were in Memphis.

We're going to Mississippi and we're taking caskets with the number of people that will die in these states.

And we're going directly to the senators who voted for this death, who voted for this political violence.

And we're going to take them to their offices.

And people are calling.

People are saying, wait a minute.

The same people that are getting hate, just like gay people are trying to hurt public education.

The same people hurting public education are blocking living wages.

Same people blocking living wages are blocking health care.

The same people blocking health care are doing these things with our Latino brothers and sisters immigrants.

If they are cynical enough to be together, we have to be courageous enough to be together.

And in a few weeks, we'll come to LA at the invitation of pastors.

We're going to be releasing liberty vans.

Inside those vans, there's going to be a clergy, a veteran, an immigrant, and a TV crew, and a driver.

And what are those vans going to do?

Follow ice,

put them on camera, show the world.

already the the extremists are railing they hate this they don't they they love the darkness they don't want the light but jesus said you are the light of the world that's why i look forward to seeing you brother boy yeah the remnant will be

the salvation if you will the redemption of civilization and this country and this nation

it always has been that way and it's still true today

i believe

I think you're right.

And what I want to ask you, Father Boyle, you wrote a very compelling statement about how Christian nationalism fits in this moment.

I know both of you have spoken about it a great deal, but I want you, Father Boyle, to really talk about how Christian nationalism is not simply antithetical to Christianity, but harmful to society.

Yeah, I think part of the first step really is to call out the harm of it.

You know,

the recruiting campaign endeavor to hire ICE agents,

talking about defending the culture.

And that's, you know, defend the homeland, defend the culture.

And so what is the culture?

It's certainly not a multicultural,

it doesn't look like...

you know, the folks that I'm privileged to walk with.

And so it wants to kind of purify in a way that's antithetical to how Jesus is inclusive and welcoming.

And so even

critics of the current regime will, in terms of immigration, will say, you said, you promised that you were going to go after the worst of the worst.

And I suppose.

Everybody outside here, the 500 trainees, they're all felons, every single one,

just like the President of the United States.

And I've never met the worst of the worst.

And so I don't think God understands what that even means when people say it.

But part of the challenge, and certainly Bishop Barber has been extraordinary, is the kind of underscore,

you know, how do you name these things in a way that is so antithetical to who God is?

And once you know the God of love, you fire all the other gods that are,

motivating us to seek power

and riches and want to separate.

And how do we create a place where there is no us and them, there's just us.

And how do we bridge the distance so that there is no daylight that separates us?

And so the Christian nationalism

is an effort that is so contrary to what not only just scripture, but the spirit of Jesus and the heart of the God.

How do we align our

hearts to the energies of this God and recognize ourselves,

all of us, are siblings of this infinite love and somehow that people want to be part of that remnant that will address exactly this impetus right now that wants to

make America white again, really?

I don't know how else you can discuss it except to say that that has to be the case if people are indiscriminately rounding up people who are brown I went to a court the other day for an ICE hearing for one of the homegirls here I dressed like a priest which I rarely do and I went into the federal court building and they had you know I it was either National Guard or Marines and they're all seated inside the building and they all had AK-47s they had helmets their faces were masked except that I could see that there were like 10 of them.

All of them were men of color.

There was one African-American, the rest were Latino.

But we went into the building and things went well and she was courageous to show up because a lot of folks are too

terrified if they go that they're going to be detained.

But she went and I went with her.

And everybody who worked there looked at me and said, we don't agree with what's going on.

And that was remarkable to me that they wanted to make,

and perhaps they knew who I was, but they were also saying, we are not in favor of this at all.

One guy said, I'm retiring in seven days, and I can't get out of here fast enough.

So

people who are healthy and whole and well

can connect to how outrageous this is and the impetus to defend the culture that means eliminating

people

who

are brown or who are other

or who are poor.

And

what could be further from the good news?

That's right.

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I've got two last questions for you.

And the first one is for listeners who might be concerned that this conversation will lead to us advocating for Christianity, maybe a more authentic progressive variety, but for that version of Christianity to be incorporated into our government.

And I would speak for the three of us and say, I don't think that's the case.

I would love for the two of you to very

to tell why as people of faith, you think it is important to uphold the values of secular democracy as Christians.

Well, I would say, first of all, Judeo-Christian values to some degree are already incorporated in some ways within our society.

I mean, we actually say one nation under God, indivisible, liberty and justice for all.

That does not mean we promote a theocracy.

What that means is that

our deepest religious values and our deepest constitutional values and the values of basic humanity have always been, or at least there have been some who've always seen those as North stars for how we critique.

We say in the Morrow Monday movement and in Repairs of the Breach and the Poor People's Campaign, that every policy, we believe you ought to sit on top of that policy, the preamble of the Constitution and the basic tenets of faith, love, justice, mercy, compassion.

And if this policy does not establish justice, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, equal protection under the law, if it's not rooted in love and justice and mercy, then it is morally indefensible, constitutionally inconsistent, and economically insane.

You have to have some place from which you make moral discussion.

That this is just not some free-for-all morality and we've done that the second thing i want people to remember there has been no major shift in this nation where people of faith did not have a role somewhere from the abolitionists who were evangelicals like frederick douglass and william lloyd garrison who said, I'm in jail today, locked up by a racist mob for the damnable heresy of preaching that all men are created equal.

Henry Thoreau,

you continue on down the line.

Every major movement, there's been what we call a moral critique.

And what we like to say is what we're talking about is moral fusion politics, not a theocracy, but moral analysis, moral articulation.

because moral articulation gives you bigger and better language than being limited to left versus right and Democrat versus Republican, moral agenda building, and then moral action, which requires fundamentally that it's non-violent, but that love is not just love in an anemic sense.

It's love that actually takes action.

I want to see Trump and some folk out of office because I love them.

I don't want to continue to see them violate their humanity like this.

So I want to vote them out so they can go home and think about it, maybe pray a little bit and repent or do something, but leave the rest of us alone.

And we're not talking about policies that are merely bad.

We're talking about policies that are killing people, policy violence, policy murder.

And then finally,

when Father Boyle was talking,

and I've just been stuck with his idea of

not being well,

you have to have a critique that has enough moral authority

from history and depth to be able to say, this is not only not right,

This is sickness.

You know, if you have pneumonia, I was talking to the doctor the other day, if you don't catch it at a certain point,

the best antibodies are not going to help you.

You've gone to the point of no return.

They say that when you have a heart attack, you have a golden hour.

Now, we're closing hospitals and removing from people that golden hour, but societies have golden hours, not 60 minutes, but time.

If you go too far, the heart may be so damaged, right, that you can't defibrillate it, which is one of the reasons why I'm starting to struggle with

Father Bull, maybe we can talk offline, that we may be in a place.

I thought in 2016, and I spoke at the Democratic Convention, that we needed to be defibrillators.

And we had enough people in power that had enough left of their heart and consciousness that if you shock them with some love and justice and mercy.

I'm not sure if we're not where Ezekiel and Jeremiah got to, where they said, no, you need a new heart.

You got to have a whole new group of people

in the heart of politics who hold office

because folk have gone too far,

just too far.

And there needs to be a heart transplant, if you will, I'm using that metaphor, and not just, let's sit down and have a meeting and talk.

Because some of these folk, you can't talk to them.

You know, Stacey,

every morning I get up and pray

because I refuse to think that Trump is like some God,

some supernatural.

He's a human being like me.

You know what?

Every morning I get up and pray before I start anything, Lord, thank you

and keep me.

My old focus is keep me because whatever he's doing, the same possibility is in me, but for the grace of God.

But for the grace of God, there go any of us.

Any of us can be deluded by power and greed and vengeance, but for the grace and the love of God.

That's the perspective I think Father Boyle and I are talking about, not somehow making a theocracy out of this democracy.

Father Boyle, my question for you as we close,

for people of moral fusion, I love that phrasing.

People of faith, secular people, people of moral fusion, what is one action they can take the day after hearing this that they can take to improve the world, to do something about the world that we see and the world that we believe we should have?

You know, I was preaching at

a juvenile hall and a kid got up to do the reading and it was from Corinthians and it was the one we all know about love is patient, love is kind.

And he got to the end and he stopped

and there was a pause and I knew there was more to the reading.

And he looked out at everybody and he said, Love

never fails.

Wow.

And I knew that everybody in that gym, all these kids who were gang members mainly,

I knew that every single one of us believed exactly what he said.

We've lost confidence in that.

And I think that's the equalizer.

You know, love is my religion in that sense, as I think the Dalai Lama said.

And so, how do we somehow have confidence once again that love never fails?

How do we discover our true selves in loving and then discovering that loving is our home?

And if once we know that, we'll never be homesick.

And so I think the hope,

Reverend Barbara talked earlier about the issue of it's kind of like

We're not called to do great things, but small things with great love.

And so I think concretely, people have to just do what they can do.

Otherwise, they get overwhelmed with exhaustion and they think this is somehow out of reach.

But every day there's something to do

that is loving.

And

that's the thing that appeals to everybody.

I don't care what religion.

But healthy people, people who are on a path where they feel

with each day,

you know, more well and healthy and whole, that they know that love never fails and this is the thing they want to embrace.

And it's the thing, it's the great equalizer.

It's the thing that touches all religion and

it's the universal sense that God draws us to love as we are loved.

And so we're called to be in the world who God is, compassionate, loving kindness.

Father.

Greg Boyle, Bishop William Barber, thank you so much for not just today's conversation, but for the leadership that you you are showing, for the ways that you are modeling who we can be and what we can have.

Thank you so much for being with me today.

Thank you.

Blessing.

Thank you all.

Thank you.

Thank you.

As always on Assembly Required, we're here to give you real, actionable tools to face today's biggest challenges.

First, be curious.

To learn more about the progressive theology that our guests discussed, I recommend two really important texts.

First, A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez.

And second, The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cohn.

Both explore liberation theology, which is an interesting and I think important way to enter these conversations.

Second, solve problems.

I encourage you to join a secular or interfaith organization that can oppose the march of Christian nationalism and reassert our faith pluralism.

Check out the Interfaith Alliance at interfaithalliance.org, whose mission is to advocate at all levels of government for an equitable and just America.

And look for similar groups where you live.

Belonging, though, must be met with volume and action.

And third, do good.

Check out Homeboy Industries at homeboyindustries.org to learn more about how you can volunteer or donate to support their programs.

And visit poorpeoplescampaign.org to get involved with a movement led by the poor and dedicated to supporting those in poverty across the country.

As always, if you like what you hear, be sure to share this episode and subscribe on all of your favorite platforms.

And to meet the demands of the algorithms, please rate the show and leave a comment.

You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you go to listen.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to continue talking about the 10 steps to autocracy and how to fight back.

I'd love to hear more about what you're seeing on the ground, groups providing mutual aid, innovative neighbors doing extraordinary things, and issues you aren't hearing enough about.

If you have a report, a question, or a comment for me, send it in.

You can start with an email to assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail.

And you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

That wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

Be careful out there, and I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts, and our associate producer is Farah Safari.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Photopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglin, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote, and Priyanka Muntha for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.

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