How the Christian Right is Taking Over America with Talia Lavin

 REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:

And now to my guest. Talia Lavin is a journalist, author, and an expert in online extremism - and how it affects extremism offline. She's the author of Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, a deeply reported, fearless exploration of how hate spreads in the digital age. Talia's most recent book is Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America.

She's a sharp critic of far-right extremism and disinformation, and her work has appeared in outlets like The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Rolling Stone. She's also known for incisive commentary on religion, identity, and internet culture, and her expertise is really, really relevant for the times we live in right now.

And so, Talia Lavin, welcome to The State of Belief!

TALIA LAVIN, GUEST:

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

You and I met back when we both intersected at that experiment known as Huffington Post back in the stone ages of the internet. And I got to know you a little bit there. We intersected a little bit. You don't come out of the Christian White supremacy world. You weren't born into that. This is something that you have begun to really do a deep dive in. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you first entered into this world.

TALIA LAVIN:

Yeah, no, I'm not a White supremacist.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Okay, well, that's a good start.

TALIA LAVIN:

What's particularly interesting about writing this book, and I think also colored, maybe, the book's perception by critics and readers, is I'm not Christian at all. I am Jewish. I grew up Orthodox Jewish, so I am quite familiar with fundamentalist religion - religion that shapes your life and every single day every single meal every single choice you make on what to wear kind of basis.

But I did not grow up to revere Jesus, like at all. And I think that really sets the book apart from a lot of other books about Christian Nationalism, for example, The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory by Tim Alberta, and loads of other books about Christian Nationalism. In many cases, you get the sense that the project of the author is in some way to rehabilitate Christianity or to rehabilitate Jesus; to sort of say, this is doing it the wrong way. Whereas I came to it from…

I'd been studying the right and the far right for a long time. But ultimately, especially as we progressed towards the second Trump era, I came to realize that looking at the fringes was not sufficing. That I needed to look towards the center - because the center had become, even within the span of the four years between my two books, so much more radical. And such a big driver, it seemed to me, of that radicalism was this brand of religion. So I didn't so much come to Christianity as Christianity came to me.

You had this very intense, very radical and very specific set of theological principles shaping laws across the country, shaping proposed legislation, really having this heavy influence on the judiciary, in particular. And that so many members of the cabinet of Trump's first term - and his second term as well - are drawn from the echelons of the Christian right.

 And so what I compare it to a little bit in the introduction to the book is, like, if you are Christian or culturally Christian or you grew up Christian and you don't go to church anymore and you don't really consider yourself Christian but you still grew up to sort of revere Jesus and you did Easter egg hunts or whatever - Christian hegemony becomes kind of invisible to you. It becomes like background music in a store or whatever that sort of fades out of your hearing. You kind of can comfortably let it become subconscious to you.

Whereas if you're not Christian, if you're a member of a religious minority, that fading out never happens. You're always aware; and you really get a sense when the tenor of that background music changes, when it acquires this militancy, when it acquires this newly dominant kind of goose-stepping rhythm. And what you really realize as soon as you do even the faintest… I mean, the book really focuses on primary sources. So intra-evangelical documents, these books and novels, plays, TV shows, pamphlets that are by and for evangelicals.

And also a lot of primary source interviews: interviews with, particularly, people who suffer child abuse in an evangelical context, in a homeschooling context.

But what you really notice when you start digging into the rhetoric is just, the other piece of it is, that you, listener, even though you may not be aware of it, you've been drafted into a spiritual war. You are part of spiritual warfare for the soul of America. You may not know it. You may have no interest in it  and no extant belief in its premises. But that doesn't mean that to members of the Christian right, you aren't like a fully-drafted, paid up opponent on the side of Lucifer. It's a very extreme point of view. And the only reason why I'm not way out over my skis here is because I read what they have to say. And I listen to what they have to say. And that's how I base my depiction of who these folks are and what they want in Wild Faith is just taking what they have to say seriously, taking it at face value, and not measuring up against my idealized version of Jesus and what Christianity should be.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Right, right. Especially, I think, when you have someone who is not Christian listening to this. I think it's so important, the awareness that you bring as someone who isn't in that debate, and yet is totally impacted by this debate. And the image of being drafted into a spiritual war, when you didn't sign up for any war, it's very profound and disturbing.

So who were some of the actors that, as you researched this book and you heard what they had to say, you were like, oh, wow. That really explains a lot. Were there any anecdotes that you can bring to this conversation right now about people who, in particular, you were like, whoa, I can't believe I'm hearing this.

TALIA LAVIN:

I think the other distinguishing factor in this book is that a lot of what I do is to quote the name of a very famous industry, Focus on the Family. So the actual core of this book is looking at James Dobson as a much-overlooked figure in the transformation of American life. It's domination by the Christian right, as we're seeing now, to our detriment.

And so I really started by reading Dobson. I was reading Dare to Discipline, reading The Strong-Willed Child. And the introduction to one of those two books, I can't remember which one, but Dobson, who is this minister with huge influence over specifically family life in the Christian milieu; he has all these books on child-rearing, his ministry addresses, also, marriage and parenting, lots of stuff in the family sphere.

He talks about how he had this dachshund that was infuriating him by sleeping on a fuzzy toilet cover. And he beat the dachshund with a belt. He had to chase the dachshund around and he beat it with a belt. And it's presented as this funny, folksy anecdote. And I'm like, bro, you're just beating a dog for sleeping on a fuzzy toilet seat. What's wrong with you?

And then you look at the figures and it's like, this book sold millions of copies, right? And in some sense, the book started, for me, reaching out - at the time it was on Twitter, before X, and just saying, hey, if you were raised in a household with James Dobson and or Michael and Debbie Pearl and these similar kind of authors as something that was on your parents' shelf, what was that like?

And so the second half of the book really focuses on families and child-rearing and homeschooling, just the domestic sphere, and how it becomes this miniature totalitarian state, and then a model for creating authoritarians. So part of the question I had was, why are Christians in the US so eager to embrace authoritarianism? Why is there this brand of authoritarian Christianity that seems to have so much purchase in the general population?

And I really found that for many people, here as in other societies, authoritarianism begins in the home. So you have this incredibly authoritarian family structure with the father meteing out righteous justice, the mother as co-enforcer, the parents as property, objects, you know, sinners who are there to be reformed and you can't spoil, you know, spare the rod. Lots of quoting of Proverbs on the subject of the rod.

And so that's really where it started for me, examining these family dynamics and then extrapolating outwards. Like, how does the confluence of multiple generations of this dynamic of the biblical parenting movement impact the public sphere of American politics? And once you start looking at that, you see it everywhere.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

You can't kind of unsee it. Did you encounter the idea of complementarianism? You know, this idea that men and women - it's not that they're unequal, it's just they have different roles, which are essentially unequal roles - , but the complementarianism is like, clearly men are supposed to be in control, but women have their own role. Did you encounter that in Dobson's work? And I'm just curious, what the implications are for that when you have women running for president, how that is expanded into the public sphere.

TALIA LAVIN:

First of all, I was surprised by how recent that term is. I think it's only from the mid 80s that the term “complementarianism” was coined, and it was directly in response to feminism and the feminist movement, the second wave feminist movement, really asserting equality on every level. And so there comes this Christian separate-but-equal clause: women are created to nurture and be in the household sphere, and men are created to lead and be the patriarch and have, really, absolute control over the public sphere. Which isn't to say there aren't a lot of women Christian leaders: you've had Phyllis Schlafly; right now you have people like Katie Britt and Joni Ernst. You have, always, these figures who are modeling, kind of, I call them like Valkyries for submission.

Basically, they're out there, and I think people spend a lot of time kind of trying to “gotcha” and “you're a hypocrite” their way out of this situation. And what I always say is, there's no hypocrisy in a holy war. You know what I mean? If you think about it in holy war terms and people being very utilitarian about like, well, you know, God calls me to do this and to witness in this way - hypocrisy doesn't really factor into it. They're not worried about it.

Accusations of hypocrisy also don't carry weight if the person accusing you of being a hypocrite isn't someone you consider valid or important. And so if you're a liberal Christian or a non-Christian or just not on Team Evangelical, your accusations of hypocrisy are… It's like if a duck told me I was an idiot, I'm like, well, you're a duck, you know. You're not even human. So what's the point of view? I'd be like, why is there a talking duck? Okay, not the strongest metaphor, but you know what I mean.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

No, but it's pretty good.

TALIA LAVIN:

One thing I do have in the book, actually, is one chapter on what it means to be a Christian man. And then talking to a bunch of interviewees about these ideas of Christian manhood and how that impacted them. And then another complementary chapter on Christian womanhood and specifically this idea of submission. And, you know, really, how it got into people's heads, it messed them up. And also looking at these marriage manuals, reading them and being like, oh my goodness, what they actually demand of people.

You know, there's this really popular book. I looked at it and it was like, as I was looking at it, it was like number seven in marriage manuals on Amazon. And that means it's selling serious copies. And this is not a particularly new book. It's called The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormy O'Martian. And it's part of the The Power of a Praying series. So there's The Power of a Praying Grandparent and, like, I don't know what, The Power of a Praying Train Engineer, whatever.

But The Power of a Praying Wife is about how much this woman despises her husband and how she turned to God because she was so beaten down by his verbal abuse and by his ignoring of her. And she basically turns to Jesus and says, I will die to myself if you just tell me how to survive, because divorce is an abomination unto God. And so her prescription to women in unhappy marriages is to literally die to yourself, completely abnegate and destroy your desires, and live a kind of living martyrdom under your husband. I mean, it's so stark. This narrative, this language is crazy; and yet it forms this whole model of how to be a wife - which is, you cannot divorce, you cannot disobey, you can't be sour, you can't be shrill, you know?

And as to how it intersects with women running for president, lthese are people who very unabashedly are like, your role as a woman in this world is to obey. And the purpose of your body is to create babies for Christianity, right? So anyone who falls outside that mold, anyone who falls outside that very narrow, heterosexual remit is a sinner and an abomination. And so that piece of it wasn't necessarily reported out by people when they were writing these very polite, cautious, unduly deferential profiles of evangelicals, as they still do. But this idea of, you know, women being sort of abominable and trying to take on the trappings of another gender by assuming the mantle of leadership absolutely plays a role in how evangelical Christianity played into the last two elections.

 PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

You know, I interviewed Matt Taylor right after the election, and he went into all of the prayers about Jezebel and how Kamala Harris was Jezebel, which I think is just, it's another layer of this the worst of the woman temptress and going against God and all of that, and who has to be trampled. And the other person that I've spoken to recently who's doing some really important work who does come out of the evangelical community is Kristin Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, and she's been really taking on all this, about how men are being just forgiven immediately when they say, oh, you know, maybe I was an abuser, but now I'm saying I'm sorry - and they're blaming the women, again, for the temptation.

And so what you're talking about is so dangerous for women, but also really part of our politics right now. I think what's so interesting about the way you're approaching this is from this very sort of like family unit, and how they extrapolate into society and what is the correct way and how that is influencing the laws that are being passed, the people who are in places of power right now. I think what you have uncovered is the story that many of us miss. We're just seeing them in the public square, but it's really trying to project this understanding of what is appropriate and how all of us have to kind of subsume to it.

I want to go back to your first book, which was so interesting. I remember when it came out and just following you talking about it, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. When we get into the dark web of White supremacy - and you were really in it, you really put yourself in situations where you were, I would say, to my outside point of view, she is putting herself in danger of being in communication with people who are so incredibly violent and terrible. Talk about that experience a little bit. How was that for you and what did you discover?

TALIA LAVIN:

So first of all, “dark web” was my publisher's innovation. I wasn't actually on like, dot onion kind of servers, like buying drugs from White supremacists; it just is sort of a dark, shadow internet or whatever. But I was on Telegram, I was on, you know, chat apps that you've heard of. That is the point of the White supremacist internet. It exists alongside and feeds off the internet that you and I use. And yeah, it was a fascinating, often pretty rough experience.

I am a Jewish woman. I spent a lot of time undercover in White supremacist chat rooms under various assumed identities or anonymized identities. Really, I wanted to hear what they were saying when no one else was in the room. Like, when you approach things as a traditional… I mean, first of all, they wouldn't talk to me. I was kind of forced into that. Because they were like, I'm not talking to you. You're Jewish, right? I'm not talking to you. You're a woman. So because they hate Jews and they hate women and they hate Jewish women, especially - they have a special term for us, “yentas”, right? So I was kind of forced into this guerrilla, whatever, like Hunter S. Thompson style gonzo journalism - minus the LSD, because I can't imagine a worse time than being a White supremacist, a trap room on LSD.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

It's already enough of a trip. Thank you very much.

TALIA LAVIN:

Yeah, I know. If I'm on LSD, I just want to look at flowers and like kaleidoscopes, whatever. But I was looking for how they speak to each other, what methods they use to radicalize one another, and what's the rhetoric, what's the project, when they think no one else is in the room. And it got especially surreal at certain points when they were literally talking about me, Talia Levin, that happened once or twice, about how ugly I was or whatever, kind of violent, sexualized rhetoric about me as a person - and I'm there lurking under an assumed identity being, like, well I'm kind of like dissociating right now like I'm leaving my body like what's going on.

I spent five or so months luring the identity out of a Ukrainian neo-Nazi who had translated the Christchurch mass mosque shooter’s manifesto into Russian and Ukrainian and distributed it widely, which is a crime. But I spent… It's called “honeypotting”, you know, where I pretended to be an Aryan babe from Iowa and I used a very high voice like this in voice chats. I speak Ukrainian. So I was able to just kind of talk to him. And I got his identity. I fed it to Bellingcat and we published it and I think he did get intercepted by the police.

So that was my most undercover moment, but it took so long. Like, prove you're not Jewish. Send me a picture of your face with your nose. Right. And he's like, what if I sent you a picture of my d**k? And I was like, absolutely not. You know, it just got really like weird. Sometimes I was assuming like four or five identities in a day. And I had my incel guy and my Nazi babe and my…

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Oh my God. You were having your own party and you couldn't remember which one you were.

TALIA LAVIN:

Well, at a certain point you're like, is Talia Levin an identity? Like, am I assuming that? Like, who am I really? And, you know, I was finishing the book in 2020, during COVID lockdown. And it was a very weird way to be spending these moments that felt to so many of us apocalyptic. And I was like, cool, I'm spending like, you know, 16 to 17 hours a day checking neo-Nazi chat rooms. I wanted to fumigate my phone once I turned in the draft.

But yeah, I mean, it was a fascinating experience. I was definitely up to my eyeballs in this internal jargon. And thankfully, people have still - even five years after it came out, people are still - what I got to was really a little like, what are the human reasons why people are drawn to these ideologies? What are the motivations that we can understand on a human level, understanding that these are human beings and not monsters - which doesn't absolve them of any guilt - but we understand these on a human level.

And I talk a lot about the history of antisemitism and the role antisemitism plays as a theoretical prop, as a tool of rhetoric in these various branches of extremism. And so people are still reading it and they're still telling me it's useful.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

What are the ways that you see these two books intersecting? Often, one of the most clear indicators of Christian Nationalism is White supremacy or kind of racist ideology. Do you see intersections between your two books or how have you understood them?

TALIA LAVIN:

Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, I wrote a book about tech savvy White supremacists. And then I wrote a book about Christian right extremists. And then I look at who's in the government. I'm like, Oh my God, they made a Voltron. They joined together. They joined together and they made a government. Oh my God. It was like the two sides of the coin made a bargain and they were like, yeah, let's just do it together. We basically agree. We want women subservient. We want eugenics and fertility and whatever. And we'll each indulge, like, you like crypto; you like prayer. Fine. Well, we'll work together.

Things have advanced to a really alarming state without there being significant cracks in that alliance. But it's like literally the two groups I wrote books about got together and made the worst government ever. And I'm like, oh my God.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

How does your background, growing up fundamentalist, Jewish Orthodox, I mean, or I don't know if fundamentalist is the right word, but very...

TALIA LAVIN:

Well, it's not a word that my community uses, but it's accurate, I think. I was thinking about God all the time.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I'm just curious, where has this all led you as far as your own understanding of belief? I don't know if you adhere to any sort of religious practice at this point. You've been in it and really in it, and I'm just wondering how this impacts your own evolution of how you sustain your worldview or anything like that.

TALIA LAVIN:

I think one of the big differences between Judaism and Christianity is belief is just really not at the center of Judaism in the same way. So that I can say, I'm a Jew and that's who I am. And that's a huge part of who I am. It's important. I can't, nor would I, ever want to erase my fluency in Tanakh and Talmud and all this stuff that I gained in 19 years of yeshiva education. Fluency in Hebrew and then a working knowledge of Aramaic that's been lost a bit. And this just fundamental understanding of the world and religiosity, and the role God plays or whatever.

 I am not a believer in my daily life in anything but a sort of very profound and intense humanism. I really believe in like humanity, the human soul, the sort of necessity to treat each person as a sacred being. I have a very profound, almost violently intense humanism, where I'm like, no, we have to treat everyone as sacred and beautiful and you know, whatever. But I think the core attitudes of the world, like you can't ever move away from who you were as a child and how you were trained as a child, religiously... And certainly, again, like 19 years, including a year in an Israeli midrashah - that's like a women's Torah study school - that, of course, formed who I am. But so did moving away from a religious community.

So did saying, I'm going to consciously break with this faith community because I am tired of my faith treating me as a second-class citizen… You know, as a woman, it's very concrete in orthodox environments. Women are literally behind a wall, not allowed to lead prayers. And I was tired of it. Even in high school, I was just like, how can I be able to be president of the debate club in my secular life, but then in religious life, which is supposed to be so much more important, I'm not allowed to lead a prayer.

And so for me, it was just very early the sense of like, this isn't for me. I can't do it. I can't fight from within because I just don't accept the premise that I'm fundamentally inferior or separate, but equal or whatever. It is like the complementarianism is baked into the laws. And I don't accept it.

And so I left. And when I was, for this book, interviewing ex-evangelicals, there was none of this disconnect for me as there are for like journalists from secular backgrounds. Like, well, what do you mean you dressed according to a religious code? I grew up dressing according to a religious code. What do you mean God was the determinative factor in who you were going to marry? That was the expectation for me, as well. And so I think it became this stealth advantage in that whatever you threw at me wasn't going to surprise me. I grew up drenched in divinity.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

As we wind up, one thing I'm just encouraging people I talk to - everybody's like, what can I do? What can I do? Is there anything that you would love to see our listeners, one thing related to the work that you've been involved in, what would be the one thing that you would encourage our listeners to do or be aware of or investigate?

TALIA LAVIN:

Oh boy. Okay. You know, I have two small things that I hope will... Here's one thing that's a real bugbear for me, that really gets on my keister. And that is when... Like for example, that guy who shot two Minnesota lawmakers. And it came out that he was this extremely devout Christian who was deeply involved in the anti-abortion movement. And all of these responses are like, he's not Christian. He's not Christian. Or like all of these evangelical folks surrounding Trump, they're not Christian.

I really need you to take yourself and examine your impulse. to defend Christianity first, as opposed to the people who are harmed by this form of Christianity. And what are you saying, also? Are you saying that Christianity, true Christianity, equals good, and therefore that the only goodness is within Christianity? It's so universal, and to me, as a non-Christian, I'm just like, you sound crazy.

Like, of course they're Christian. They're flying crosses and, you know, they talk about Christ every other sentence. So what you're saying is like, okay, so the Crusades and the pogroms and corrupt popes and the wars of reformation and all this quintessentially Christian bad stuff that has happened, stuff that has happened throughout history, is not really Christian either. And I understand it's this impulse of wanting to condemn. But like, I need, like, bringing back apostate, heretic, you know, bad Christian, fine.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I agree with you 100% as a Christian and as a minister. You can't just say, they're not Christian. They're out there, completely Christian, and you can't… I mean, it's absolving the rest of Christianity of any responsibility. It's ridiculous. I couldn't agree more.

TALIA LAVIN:

And it's so knee-jerk. And it's also just like, I don't get to be, like, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't Jewish. I don't get to do that. It's a privilege of hegemony, right? Like, Alan Dershowitz, he's not Jewish. I don't get to say that. So where do you get off, right? So that's just one thing. And it's remarkably hard to get people to acknowledge or think about this reflex of they're not Christian. And what you mean is, they're doing it wrong, right? So say that. As a non-Christian, your internecine theological debate is not something I should be involved in. And “not Christian” isn't an insult.

And the other thing - and this is sort of semi-related - when I think about how we fight back against this sort of incredibly rigid, incredibly coordinated force that is the Christian right, that through this militant discipline across generations has worked to enact a wildly unpopular political agenda, I think we need to embrace our own cacophony. We need to embrace that we have people of many different faiths, no faith at all. We need to embrace this sort of wild orchestra that is a multiracial democracy. and say, okay, we're going to sound wild. We've got an oboe and a tuba and someone with a kettle drum and we're all moving out of sync, but we’ve got to move in the same direction. I think we need to welcome every kind of faith and no faith at all into a coalition of folks who are fighting in this moment against this dangerous uniformity.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I love that. Thank you very much.

Talia Levin is the author of two influential books, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, and Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America. You can read her work in places like The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Rolling Stone. Talia's online newsletter is titled The Sword and the Sandwich, hosted at buttondown.com.

Talia, thank you so much for being with us today on The State of Belief!

TALIA LAVIN:

It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

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