How did we end up here? Again?
Is there a moment when family, friends, people I know and love will realize the massive manipulation campaign being waged? How have Christians become loyal soldiers to a tyrant king? These are a few of the questions that drew me to Money Lies and God by Katherine Stewart. Stewart has invested the last 16 years meticulously researching, attending rallies, town halls, and conservative conferences. She crafts a gripping account and insider perspective on the complex, highly organized, well-funded anti-democratic movement growing in America. I can understand why people do not want to look too deeply. This is not a book for those looking to assuage their fears. It is, instead, a book that rings an alarm bell and calls us to bold awareness.
Stewart published her first book, The Good News Club, on the Christian Right’s assault on public school education, in 2012. For context, my family had just moved to Texas with a 3rd and 6th grader. I mention this because Texas, Michigan, and Florida, among others, have become ground zero for the power players of the anti-democratic movement. Her second book, The Power Worshippers, focused on the rise of Christian Nationalism, and her latest book, Money, Lies, and God, builds on both of her first two books as this newest book delves deeper into the structure and features of the antidemocratic movement we are experiencing in real time.
While it is tempting to simplify our current crisis or downplay its severity and see the root problem as Trump or White Christian Nationalism, Stewart urges us to look deeper. “The antidemocratic movement,” she writes, “is a symptom, not a cause of the American Crisis” (14). It is helpful to consider the soil needed to grow such a movement. Stewart explains how massive wealth inequality has provided fertile ground for the growth of anti-democratic sentiment. Stewart writes, “Between 1970 and 2020, the top 0.1 percent doubled its share of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 90 percent, meanwhile, lost a corresponding share” (5). She explains how this has contributed to a “population susceptible to conspiracism and disinformation” (5).
Christian Nationalism, while only one part of this antidemocratic movement, is a key “tool for mobilizing the grievances of the people” (13). Pastors, clergy, and anyone loosely tied to Christians use a spiritual warfare or a “good vs. evil” framework to instill fear and demand allegiance. So, “Apocalyptic visions and persecution narratives” (32) become easy tools against a perceived imminent threat. Other seemingly disparate groups with varying agendas rally around a common enemy. Groups like the Catholic Right, right-wing think-tanks and legal groups, free-market fundamentalists, small government libertarians, anyone willing to go to battle with the ultimate enemy–the common enemy for these groups becomes the “administrative state and the woke Left” (144).
I found myself enveloped in the encounters Stewart describes, recognizing themes and undercurrents so familiar in our affluent predominantly White Christian Texas town–an imminent fear of an enemy, a Christian victim narrative, a resurgence of strong masculine men as protectors, a loss of trust in public education, an “us verus them” binary, a “defend and protect” mentality, and a palpable sense of resentment and mistrust toward anyone considered “other”.
Stewart reveals a complex, well-organized structure for this book, which she defines as “Funders, Thinkers, Power Players, Sergeants, and Infantry” (9). Readers discover a cast of manipulators, those being manipulated, and what sometimes appears to be a combination of both. Once you’ve sold your soul, so to speak, you become a cog in the wheel. Or once you have compromised yourself somehow, you become beholden to the system for fear of exposure. The blatant hypocrisy is more easily understood when you see that it is a mechanism of control and manipulation in an authoritarian playbook. “Authoritarian movements always begin with a feeling of persecution and always thrive on the demonization of seemingly all-powerful others” (124).
The wheel is powered by “Funders”, like Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers or Texas billionaires Wilks and Dunn, all of whom have launched a well-funded attack on public education. Their goal, like other “Funders”, is to decimate and defund public education and to use taxpayer money to fund private Christian charter schools that would feed into their already established free-market conservative academies like Hillsdale College in Michigan or New College in Florida. But why is it necessary to destroy public education? For the movement leaders, “public education must yield to private systems capable of producing a compliant citizenry–and steady profits for the righteous and rich” (81). It sounds very much like the indoctrination they were ostensibly fighting in public schools.
The “Funders” have leaned heavily on the “Thinkers” who operate in an “intra-elite” (10) network of institutions like The Federalist Society, The Heritage Foundation, and The Claremont Institute, to name a few. Stewart notes how many “Thinkers” come from the elite colleges they critique. Again, hypocrisy is a feature and not a bug. It helps fuel the system and maintain allegiance. From these think tanks came Project 2025, which has been implemented with blunt force over the last few months, gutting our federal agencies, dismantling our social safety net programs, and destabilizing our system of checks and balances. “Stitching the movement together” (12) explains Stewart, is a small group of “Power Players” who turn money and votes into power.
In her final chapter, Stewart sheds light on a path forward. According to Stewart, the fragile alliances inside the antidemocratic movement make unlikely pairings and conflicting agendas easily susceptible to fissures. While fear and grievance are potent instigators to mobilize people, they are not cohesive in the long term. Stewart reminds us that most Americans believe in democracy, and she advises us to think locally and question how we can impact our neighborhoods, school communities, houses of worship, libraries, and municipalities.
I have joined a weekly gathering we call Hope Chat–a place that reminds us we are not alone, a place to share stories of hope and opportunities for action. I have also started marching with these new friends in peaceful resistance. I have been regularly calling my government representatives. Finally, I have been pushing myself to have uncomfortable conversations with friends and be willing to get it wrong.
What does hope in action look like for you?
One Response
Yes, a brilliant, meticulous, and devastating book.