Katherine Stewart's "Money, Lies, and God"

Who paid for all those evangelical leaders to go to Washington and pray for Trump?

Last weekend, I finished reading Katherine Stewart’s new book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. Released last month, it covers a great deal of territory on what was happening among various segments of the conservative movement — secular, religious, and amalgams of the two — in the period after January 6, 2021 and before the last months of the 2024 campaign (prior to Biden dropping out).

She sets the stage in the introduction to the book, providing a road map of where she’s headed. She writes:

To sort a complex grouping of people into admittedly simplistic categories in the interest of making this project manageable, I have divided the principal actors of the antidemocratic reaction into five major categories: the Funders, the Thinkers, the Sergeants, the Infantry, and the Power Players. It is the interactions and tensions among these groups, I have come to think, that are key to understanding hte origins and evolution of the American crisis. (9)

There are many excellent books that have been written on each of these categories. There is a host of books on Christian Nationalism. There are those looking at how churches are implicated. There are books on the New Apostolic Reformation. There are excellent histories outlining the ways the partnership between evangelicals and right-wing politics were established and maintained.

There are a couple of things that stand out to me in Stewart’s book. First, she got incredible access to a variety of people and places. This took her into potentially hostile spaces as she attended events like Mike Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour or a Moms for Liberty gathering. She wasn’t undercover or trying to do some kind of James O’Keefe fake video. She was simply doing on the ground journalism.

Second, and this is what makes the book so good, is that she tries to draw out the linkages between the various actors and organizations she describes. I kept thinking of this common social media meme:

I actually researched this to learn that it comes from an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

I’m not suggesting that Katherine Stewart is caught up in conspiracy theories. Quite the opposite. She really does show the linkages between the various groups she writes about. From the nihilism of the Claremont Institute to the anti-Woke claims of Chris Rufo taking over New College of Florida to the libertarianism of Hillsdale College to Project 2025 to the prophetic movement claiming Trump as Cyrus to the Family Research Council to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a reinforcing gestalt emerges from the pages.

The Funders are supporting Claremont and the Federalist Society and the Heritage foundation. They paid for the permits for January 6 and to get people to Washington. The Power Players took arguments from the Thinkers and promoted them to the Infantry. Religious Sergeants baptized the ideas as a battle of good versus evil with civilizational-ending stakes.

While she doesn’t deal directly with the role of conservative media or Musk’s control of X/Twitter, one can see the ways that the information mechanisms amplify the rhetoric of the movement on the one hand while obscuring the role of the Funders or Thinkers who are scripting what happens on the ground.

As I was coming toward the end of the book, I started asking myself a different set of questions. Take, for example this picture of evangelical leaders praying over Trump in the oval office in September 2017.

At the time, I asked “Why were these evangelicals there?” and “What are they saying about their connection to the President?”. You may have noticed that they didn’t travel to Washington to pray for Biden.

But now, after finishing Katherine Stewart’s book, I have different questions. One is in the subtitle of today’s post: “Who paid for all those evangelical leaders to go to Washington and pray for Trump?” Another, “Why was it important to certain Movement Leaders, even if not particularly religious, to have this photo-op happen?” A third, “What was their return on investment?”

As we enter week eight of the second Trump administration, we can see the ideas of the Thinkers demolishing institutions left and right. We see the good versus evil or us versus them ideas playing out on an hourly basis as the president attempts to punish his perceived enemies and to pursue his (Musk’s) goals regardless of who gets harmed in the process.

Katherine Stewart opens our eyes to see that our current moment didn’t just happen. It’s the result of a long process of cultivation throughout these networked entities. Unfortunately, progressives currently have nothing to match it. That needs to change and rapidly.