Transcript:
Daniella Gibbs Léger: Hey everyone, welcome back to “The Tent,” your place for politics, policy, and progress. I’m Daniella Gibbs Léger.
Colin Seeberger: And I’m Colin Seeberger. Daniella, the internet is on fire right now. I mean, I’m telling you, I haven’t seen memes this good in years.
Gibbs Léger: It’s so great. The vibes online are immaculate, and we are so creative. When I say “we,” I just mean the general “we.” There is so much stuff out there that is hilarious and clever, and I’m loving life right now.
Seeberger: It’s giving the most joy, to be sure. And while we may be loving the online universe right now, I heard you also had a good conversation in person this week.
Gibbs Léger: I did, I sat down with Robert P. Jones, who is president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), to talk about the rise of Christian nationalism. We explored the roots of this dangerous ideology, how Project 2025 advances this agenda, and how some Christian leaders are helping push back.
Seeberger: Yeah, it’s definitely a timely conversation, especially when you have MAGA extremists out there like [Sen.] Josh Hawley (R-MO), who are openly embracing Christian nationalism and its radical vision for the country.
But first, we have to get to some news. Because at long last, on Tuesday, we found out who Vice President Kamala Harris has selected as her VP nominee, and that is none other than Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).
Gibbs Léger: Woo! OK, let me tell you something: Gov. Walz has earned his nomination after a really rigorous vetting process.
Seeberger: He has.
Gibbs Léger: And I have to say, Vice President Harris had a variety of well-qualified candidates to pick from, all with proven track records of making tangible improvements in Americans’ lives. Harris went through a rigorous process to evaluate each of them, and Gov. Walz came out on top as a demonstrated champion for American families.
As governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz signed legislation to prevent pay discrimination and to require employers to provide their employees with paid sick leave and safe time.
Seeberger: The basics.
Gibbs Léger: Yeah, exactly. He’s rolled out a free universal school meal program and passed a child tax credit that will reduce child poverty in Minnesota by 33 percent.
He’s invested $1 billion—with a “B”—in affordable housing, strengthened labor protections, and has earned United Auto Workers’ union endorsement mere hours after being announced as Vice President Harris’ running mate. It’s clear he matches Harris’ commitment to growing the middle class and making life easier for American workers and families.
And while MAGA extremists across the country are trying to rip away reproductive and LGBTQI+ rights and freedoms, Walz’s administration has pushed back on those attacks by codifying and expanding access to abortion and gender-affirming care. Walz [is] also clearly committed to protecting IVF [in vitro fertilization] access, recently sharing that his daughter was born as a result of this procedure, which is how she got her name, Hope. And I was in tears when he was telling that story.
Look, I can go on and on about all the amazing policy wins his administration has secured for Minnesota—expanding background checks, a new red flag warning system to prevent gun violence, a commitment to 100 percent clean energy by 2030. The fact is, Gov. Walz doesn’t just talk the talk; he puts actions behind his words.
Here he is at the IDEAS Conference hosted by our colleagues at the Center for American Progress this past fall.
Walz: If you truly believe in these ideas and you truly believe they’re going to improve people’s lives, why wait? Why wait to get them done?
Seeberger: Amen, governor. And his track record is especially powerful when you also compare it to the drastic and extreme record from Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance (R).
Vance, of course, supports a nationwide abortion ban, and as a senator, voted to block bills that would codify Roe v. Wade and guarantee access to IVF. His stance on IVF is particularly shocking considering how negatively he talks to the media about women who don’t have children—for example, his awful comments on quote-unquote “childless cat ladies.”
JD Vance has no interest in helping everyday Americans. He once called Social Security and Medicare the “biggest roadblocks to … real fiscal sanity.” He’s talking about benefits that ensure millions of people in this country can access health care and can retire with dignity.
Gibbs Léger: It’s awful.
Seeberger: Yeah. Might I add, this is also the same guy who got his career started by working in venture capital for a billionaire who ended up financing his political career.
He was chosen to join the Trump campaign for one reason, and that’s because he’d ultimately unquestionably be without reservation loyal to Donald Trump. And that’s even though he once called President Trump “America’s Hitler” and referred to the MAGA movement as “cultural heroin.”
He’s since done a complete 180. Now he openly supports election denialism, says he’d refuse to accept the 2024 election results, and has no problem with Trump’s plan to use the government to go after political opponents.
But Americans, I think, are seeing through it. They are sick of the extremism, sick of the division. It’s why JD Vance’s favorability rating has dropped to negative 15 points—one of the worst we’ve seen for a vice presidential candidate on record.
Meanwhile, 54 percent of Minnesota’s registered voters approve of Tim Walz as their governor. Clearly, voters support somebody who’s going to take decisive action on addressing the challenges that they’re facing and push back against radical efforts to rip away their rights.
Ultimately, though, vice presidential picks, they reflect the values of the presidential candidate, right? And that’s why Vice President Kamala Harris chose him as her nominee: It’s because he’s committed to growing the middle class, committed to protecting our rights and freedoms and to prioritizing the American people and making sure that they could have a real say in their government.
Gibbs Léger: Yeah, and JD Vance is basically just there to rubber stamp whatever Donald Trump wants to do with a second term. And we’ve seen before that he can do some pretty dangerous stuff when he’s in office—
Seeberger: That he can.
Gibbs Léger: —including potentially breaking the law. New reporting from The Washington Post recently revealed that Donald Trump may have received $10 million from Egypt to help boost his campaign in 2016—money he allegedly received five days before he was elected president. When the FBI tried to look into the incident, Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general, allegedly got in the way and blocked the investigators from accessing Trump’s bank records. Then, the prosecutor overseeing the case, chosen by Barr himself, shut the investigation down completely.
This is an alarming series of events that seems to suggest Trump loyalists may have buried some serious wrongdoing on the part of the former president. And we’ll never know definitively because the investigators never got a chance to finish their jobs.
Nobody in America should be above the law. No foreign government should be able to influence our free and fair elections. If Trump did accept a payment from Egyptian President [Abdel Fattah] el-Sisi, that would amount to a huge federal crime.
Seeberger: Sure would.
Gibbs Léger: Take, for example, Bob Menendez (D), senator from New Jersey, was recently found guilty of accepting bribes and payments from foreign governments, including Egypt—and he was convicted. But because Trump was elected president shortly after he allegedly received this huge sum of money, he may have been able to squash the case against him.
Seeberger: It’s really outrageous. And it also, I think, shows just how dangerous it is to have someone leading our country who’s willing and able to appoint people that put their loyalty to them above all else, above the public’s interest, right?
It’s alarming that if he were elected to a second term, Trump plans to replace huge numbers of civil servants with political loyalists, as detailed in Project 2025 and numerous times over the course of the past several years. We’re talking about nearly 50,000 civil service positions across the federal government.
He’s also said that he wants to weaponize the Justice Department to go after his political enemies, and it sounds like he was at least halfway there in his first term, using the Department of Justice to try to kill investigations into allegations that he may have been involved in some criminal activity.
So I have no doubt he’d try to use them again in the same way if he were elected, and that’s exactly why it’s so critical for our government agencies to be staffed with politically neutral experts for those who really take the independence of their jobs seriously—like in the case of the Justice Department—when they’re investigating serious federal crimes.
Project 2025 and Donald Trump’s plans for a second term would completely turn that upside down, right? It completely ignores decades of historical norms and how the federal government has operated, and ultimately, does all that just to consolidate power in the president and strip authority and autonomy away from these independent agencies that work in the public’s interest.
It would make our commanders in chief more like kings, right? And I think there’s nothing more un-American than that style of governance. We were literally founded—
Gibbs Léger: Right. Didn’t we leave that?
Seeberger: Yes.
Gibbs Léger: Like, that’s the whole thing?
Seeberger: Yes. That is the whole thing. It’s the whole enchilada, as they say in my home state of Texas.
And if Trump really did accept direct payments from President el-Sisi of Egypt, the implications for our democracy and our national security are incredibly grave, right? This is a country that hasn’t always had America’s best interests in mind. These are the kinds of people that Donald Trump may be doing business with? It’s ridiculous.
And with that, that’s all the time we have for this week. If there’s anything you’d like us to cover on the pod, hit us up on Twitter, Instagram, or Threads @TheTentPod. That’s @TheTentPod.
Gibbs Léger: And stick around for my interview with Robert Jones in just a beat.
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Gibbs Léger: Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the weekly newsletter “White Too Long.” His most recent book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future, has a new and updated paperback version coming out soon. He also wrote the award-winning books White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity and The End of White Christian America.
Robby Jones, thank you so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Robert Jones: Oh, thanks. I’m glad to be here.
Gibbs Léger: So we are hearing this term “Christian nationalism” a lot these days. So what is that? How does it differ from Christianity as a religion? And is it accurate to say that we’re seeing a resurgence of Christian nationalism on the right?
Jones: Right. Well it’s a fairly new term, just in the last maybe five years that term has really come into common parlance. But it, in fact, points to a very old phenomenon in the U.S., and that is basically this claim that the country is a Christian nation—a country of, by, and for Christians—and that everybody else is here in some second-class status.
So I think what we’re seeing is a hardening of those views, really in the Trump era. And we had, of course, the Christian right, which was the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement back in the ‘70s. It had elements of this as well. Even names like the “Moral Majority” was kind of a claim to being preeminent in the country. The Christian right came out of all that.
This is really the newest incarnation, but it has solidified, I think, around the MAGA movement, which makes it a little bit of a different animal, even though it has these long, long roots that really go back all the way, in fact, before the founding of the country.
Gibbs Léger: So what are the motivations behind this ideology? What is the end goal of Christian nationalists?
Jones: Well it’s always been about power at the end of the day, right? It’s who wields power, who’s in control, who’s a real American—those are the things. It’s been interesting—so I’ve been doing public opinion polling at PRRI for 15 years now. And really since the Trump era, it’s been so clear that our disagreements are less about particular policies, and they’re really more about these big questions of who’s a real American? Who belongs? Who’s the “our”? When we use these possessive pronouns, who gets counted in that and who doesn’t? And so the fault lines around immigration, for example, or around debates around critical race theory and what we’re teaching our kids about race and slavery and segregation and all of that, are about protecting this idea.
And I should say that usually when I use the term “Christian nationalism,” I usually put another word in front of it, and that is “white.”
Gibbs Léger: Yeah.
Jones: Because really, this is not just a kind of variant of Christianity; it is an outgrowth of a kind of ethnoreligious view of the country that, again, has been very, very old in the country.
In fact, just to make this point, the KKK [Ku Klux Klan] many people think of as being a kind of anti-Black terrorist organization, which of course it was. But if you dig a little deeper, it had a positive vision for America, and that vision was a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, Christian view of the country. And that’s why it was also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, right? Because this positive vision was, again, this idea of a pure America that was a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America—that’s really what we still have at the heart of the MAGA movement and what we’re today calling white, Christian nationalism.
Gibbs Léger: So the far-right authoritarian playbook known as Project 2025 is full of Christian nationalist ideas. So how would it move us toward that vision, from a policy perspective? And has Donald Trump included similar provisions in his policy platforms? I like to say there’s really not much daylight between the two, but—
Jones: Well that’s where I was going to go, too. I mean, the overlap—not only in terms of ideas, but just in terms of personnel, the people who authored Project 2025 and served in his administration or had some connection. I mean, I think somewhere like 60 percent of the people who authored Project 2025 had some connection to the previous Trump administration, so of course their fingerprints and Trump’s ideas are all over this document.
But one of the things I think has been missed and hasn’t been talked about enough with Project 2025 because all the attention has been around the extreme policies—and we ought to be, yes, putting spotlights on those and shouting about those. But at the heartbeat of this document is this idea, it is this white, Christian nationalist view of the country. And so if you read in between all of the policies, you’ll see these references to a Judeo-Christian country.
There’s also odd policy calls, for example, to celebrate the Sabbath, the Christian Sabbath, to make businesses celebrate the Christian Sabbath. And then even with COVID and its objections to masking and calling on to defund the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and those kinds of things, is this question that they ask as if it’s a rhetorical question, like, “What is the proper balance between lives saved versus souls saved?”, when they were griping about churches being shut down during COVID.
Gibbs Léger: Wow.
Jones: So this Judeo-Christian thing with a Christian Sabbath and churches saving souls, all of that is all shot through. And I’ll read one little section here that I think is the thing that all freedom-loving American citizens ought to be—just to send a chill down your spine. Because they’re talking about things that sound very familiar, like the pursuit of happiness and liberty, and these things that all of us—
Gibbs Léger: Sounds great!
Jones: —would embrace here. And yet here’s how they take this Christian nationalist view and redefine those fundamental American democratic building blocks. They say this:
When the founders spoke of the ‘pursuit of happiness,’ what they meant might be understood today as in essence ‘pursuit of Blessedness.’ That is, an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like.
Now, that’s a far cry from liberty and the pursuit of happiness as each citizen sees fit to—
Gibbs Léger: Yeah.
Jones: And it really is just straightforwardly this Norman Rockwell, 1950s, white, Christian America that is the norm for nearly everything that flows out from. There’s immigration, abortion—which they want to rename the DHHS [Department of Health and Human Services] the “Department of Life,” by the way, and to erase every term that refers to sexual orientation or gender or all of that. They literally say, “We’re going to erase this from every statute and regulation.” But it’s all, again, what you’ll hear over and over is hierarchy, order, and it is white, Christian, straight men at the top of that pyramid, and everybody else finding their place somewhere down below.
Gibbs Léger: Well that’s terrifying. We’ve recently discussed on the pod how MAGA trifecta states are a model for what a Project 2025 future could look like nationally, from states mandating the display and teaching of Christian concepts in schools to states trying to criminalize abortion, IVF, and contraception.
So let’s talk about what happens if a MAGA-led federal government wants to implement this stuff, these type of concepts. What would that look like in our everyday lives?
Jones: Well, it could be quite striking. Just to take education: One of the things they’re proposing in Project 2025 is to abolish the Department of Education altogether, go straight to letting parents take all the money that would normally be allocated to them by the state and the federal government for their child and put it toward private schools, many of which will be Christian academies or parochial school. So gutting the entire public education system.
So when you hear that, things like them installing the Ten Commandments on the wall of public schools sounds kind of “eh”—and that’s extreme enough. But I think this vision of just gutting it altogether—so there may not be a wall to hang the Ten Commandments on if they take this all the way to its logical conclusion.
Gibbs Léger: So when the U.S. blurs these lines between church and state, it doesn’t just affect what’s happening here. There are other countries with Christian nationalist tendencies. They see it as sort of creating a permission structure for them to try and do the same thing. And many U.S.-based evangelical groups use their power and influence abroad to promote these Christian nationalist agendas. For example, we saw the direct financial support contribute to the criminalization of same-sex marriages and relationships in Uganda.
So as I sit here and I think about what you’re talking about, about the dismantling of public education, and I think about how other countries treat education very differently than we do—how does injecting these ideas into American law, governance, affect the rest of the world?
Jones: Well it could be quite striking. And what I find chilling is the way that other authoritarian states—Viktor Orbán and Hungary, Putin and Russia—have actually co-opted churches to support their authoritarian agenda, and it is a kind of Christian nationalist state. So you wrap the cross and the flag together, and not just in America, but we’ve seen that playbook play out.
That playbook played out, to some extent, in Nazi Germany as well. And so you link up this kind of patriotism and this allegiance to one particular religion. And when you’ve got Trump praising people like Orbán, I mean, you see very clearly not just how we might affect other states, but we might actually take Orbán’s Hungary as a model for America if Trump gets back for another term.
Gibbs Léger: You know, I was going to ask a question about the irony, the weirdness, of Trump being the face of any Christian movement—
Jones: Yeah.
Gibbs Léger: —but I’ll skip that, and I’ll go to my last question. So to end on a more positive note, we are seeing a growing movement within Christian faith communities that are committed to combating the proliferation of Christian nationalist ideology.
So who are some of the Christian leaders who are speaking out against this, and what more can be done to unwind and unpack this thinking on the other side?
Jones: Yeah. Well I do think it’s right to point to—there’s been a multipronged pushback from within Christian circles and from within white, Christian circles, which I think is important because that’s where the problem lies, right?
And so there’s a lot of research and scholarship that has gone to exposing this and bringing it to light. So one of the earliest books is Taking America Back [for] God by Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead. We have Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Du Mez. That’s what many of my books have been about, is trying to bring this to light and raise the alarm here.
And then there’s a fair amount of organizations that have actually retooled in many ways. They put this problem front and center. So there’s Rachel Laser at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. There’s Adam Taylor at Sojourners. There’s Amanda Tyler at the Baptist Joint Committee, who has a whole program called Christians Against Christian Nationalism. So there are these grassroots things.
And I think denominations themselves are realizing, “Oh, this is actually a problem.” Tim Walz has been in the news a lot, obviously, but he’s Lutheran, and he is a part of the mainline denomination, the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And that’s one of the mainline Protestant denominations that has itself addressed Christian nationalism and is building curriculum around that.
The United Church of Christ is doing that, The Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA. So there is a realization that this is a real problem and, in fact, something that threatens not only the integrity of the country and democracy, but threatens the integrity of churches and Christians’ faith as well.
So I’m heartened by that. And I can say just personally, over the last, say, five years, I’ve probably been in nearly 200 churches who have wanted to have this conversation and said, “Look, we see this rising. We see this making inroads. We want to be part of the solution. We want to be part of a protected democracy. What can we do?” And that’s new, really, on the scene.
Gibbs Léger: Well that is really heartening to hear, and I think a great place to leave our interview. So Robby, thank you for joining us, and thank you for shedding a really important light on what’s going on.
Jones: Of course. Happy to be here.
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Gibbs Léger: All right, folks, that’s going to do it for us. As always, please go back and check out previous episodes. Colin, we are in the final days of Olympics, and I’m sad.
Seeberger: Don’t say that, Daniella.
Gibbs Léger: I know, but I have to mentally prepare myself.
Seeberger: I mean, I guess if there’s anything to look forward to about the Olympics ending, it’s that the next Summer Olympics is going to be here in the USA.
Gibbs Léger: Yes! I saw an ad with Jalen Hurts throwing the football to light the torch above the LA [Los Angeles Memorial] Coliseum—
Seeberger: Oh that’s awesome.
Gibbs Léger: —because flag football is coming to the Olympics.
Seeberger: Yes.
Gibbs Léger: Yes.
Seeberger: That’s going to be so much fun.
Gibbs Léger: It’s going to be great. So what have you been loving this week?
Seeberger: Well I have to call out Katie Ledecky becoming the most decorated woman in American swimming history.
Gibbs Léger: Yay! Amazing.
Seeberger: Yeah, 14 Olympic medals is insane—especially for somebody who’s a distance swimmer, and there are just fewer races for them to compete in. But yeah, I mean, what a resounding show of talent in hitting that record.
Speaking of distance swimming, I have to shout out Bobby Finke for setting a world record, winning the gold in the 1,500. I think my favorite race, though, is the mixed medley relay. So this is the one where there’s two women, two men, and they do the medley relay, right?
But the countries get to decide for themselves where they are having women or male swimmers, what strokes they’re doing, etc. So it’s one of those races where it could look super deceiving—
Gibbs Léger: Yeah.
Seeberger: —as to who is actually in the lead. But at the end, it was super close, and the U.S. set a new world record, won the gold.
I was super, super pumped for Gretchen Walsh getting a gold medal after her and Torri Huske had that one-two finish in the 100 fly early on in the Olympics. So yeah, it’s been an amazing, amazing display of talent in the pool. And that certainly has extended into track and field, which has been—
Gibbs Léger: It’s been great.
Seeberger: —so much fun to watch.
Gibbs Léger: It really has. I loved, obviously, Sha’Carri Richardson, who’s a runner from St. Lucia—
Seeberger: Julien Alfred.
Gibbs Léger: Julien Alfred. So fast. They run so fast. It’s like the top of their bodies aren’t moving and they’re like—it’s amazing.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Gibbs Léger: I don’t even know how. And then on the 200—
Seeberger: My body does not compute like that.
Gibbs Léger: No, no it does not.
And then Gabby Thomas winning the 200—just amazing. She is incredible. I have really loved all the gymnastics. I get really anxious on—like I’m performing myself—when they do their routines. And what really touched me is the camaraderie across teams.
Seeberger: Mm-hmm.
Gibbs Léger: These women support each other. Yes, they’re competing against each other, but they’re just as happy for their competitor to have a really good routine, right?
Seeberger: Yeah.
Gibbs Léger: Because I guess when you’re the best, you want to beat the best and compete against the best. So you cheer for that.
Seeberger: What it’s all about.
Gibbs Léger: Yeah, and on the floor, you saw Rebeca Andrade from Brazil take gold, Simone Biles came in second with silver, and Jordan Chiles got the bronze after she appealed the initial ruling, whatever it’s called. And the judges had—
Seeberger: On the infraction.
Gibbs Léger: —yeah, they had forgotten to add a skill or something.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Gibbs Léger: And the two of them very intentionally wanted to give Rebecca her flowers in real time. Now I think it’s an iconic photo of them bowing to her, and then all the cute pictures they took together—I just love it.
Seeberger: So, so cool.
Gibbs Léger: It’s so cool.
Seeberger: And you’re totally right about them having this connection. And it’s funny because it’s like, Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, they don’t speak Portuguese, right?
Gibbs Léger: No.
Seeberger: But like—
Gibbs Léger: And she doesn’t speak English.
Seeberger: And she doesn’t speak English. And yet you can just tell that there is this connection between them. And really only people who are competing at that level can truly appreciate the scale of their talents and the hard work that it takes to compete at that level.
I think for me, I totally agree. Floor was amazing. I also—every time I watch the vault, I live in complete and total fear. How these folks throw themselves over this table, twisting and flipping their bodies as much as they do, it is always so much fun to watch. And I mean, the skill is just wild.
Gibbs Léger: It really is.
Seeberger: Yeah. Simone Biles, it’s like if she lands her first vault, the triple Yurchenko—
Gibbs Léger: You’re done.
Seeberger: You’re done.
Gibbs Léger: You’re done. That’s it.
Seeberger: There is no competition.
Gibbs Léger: Exactly.
Seeberger: It’s so cool.
Gibbs Léger: It is. And what I’m going to miss the most about the Olympics is this spirit of camaraderie, of sportsmanship, of what’s really important is everybody is here giving their best. These are all athletes from across the world who worked really hard to be here, and it’s just great. I have to say, the correspondents that NBC has had out there—just amazing. Incredible.
Seeberger: Yeah, they brought it this year.
Gibbs Léger: They’ve been really, really good.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Gibbs Léger: All right. Well we’ve got a few more days to enjoy, so let’s do that, y’all do that. And football season’s going to be starting soon, folks. I’m just putting that out there.
Seeberger: I am ready. I am also ready to watch Tim Walz do some keg stands at University of Michigan or [University of Wisconsin] UW–Madison football games coming up this fall. I think it may be on deck.
Gibbs Léger: If they don’t get him on game day, what are you even doing? It’s going to be a great couple of months, folks. Buckle up. Until then, we will talk to you next week.
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“The Tent” is a podcast from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It’s hosted by me, Danielle Gibbs Léger, and co-hosted by Colin Seeberger. Erin Phillips is our lead producer, Kelly McCoy is our supervising producer, Mishka Espey is our booking producer, and Muggs Leone is our digital producer. Hai Phan, Matthew Gossage, Olivia Mowry, and Toni Pandolfo are our video team. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.