‘The Fight to Save Democracy’

On Aug. 15, FFRF held an online event with Rep. Jared Huffman, about his new book, “No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism.” He was interviewed by Ron Reagan, an “unabashed atheist” and longtime FFRF supporter. (Both will be speaking at FFRF’s convention in Milwaukee in October.) The event was moderated by FFRF’s Mickey Dollens.

The following is a condensed and edited version of the full conversation. To watch the interview, go to ffrf.us/huffmanbook.

Mickey Dollens: Thank you for joining us from across the country for this special conversation hosted by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I’m Mickey Dollens, FFRF’s regional government affairs manager and state representative from Oklahoma’s 93rd House District.

Christian nationalism is no longer a fringe concern. Its influence shows up in our legislatures, our public schools, our courts, and throughout our federal government. At FFRF, confronting that threat and defending the constitutional principle that government must remain secular is central to our work.

That’s also the subject of a much-awaited, exciting new book by one of the nation’s most prominent advocates for the separation of state and church.

“No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism,” has arrived in bookstores. We’re especially pleased that the book’s author, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, chose FFRF and our members and supporters for this special conversation ahead of its release.

Rep. Huffman represents California’s 2nd Congressional District and the U.S. House of Representatives. He is co-founder and co-chair of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which promotes public policy based on reason, science and moral values while protecting the secular character of our government.

Interviewing Rep. Jared Huffman today is someone who probably needs very little introduction to an FFRF audience. Ron Reagan is a broadcaster, author and provides political and news commentary on Substack at ronpreagan.substack.com.

He is the familiar face and voice behind FFRF’s iconic “unabashed atheist” TV commercial. Millions of Americans have heard Ron declare that he’s not afraid of burning in hell, helping FFRF bring freethought and nonbelief into living rooms across the country. Ron has also been an outspoken advocate for secularism, reason and the separation of state and church for many years.

The conversation is yours.

Ron Reagan: Thank you, Mickey, and Rep. Jared Huffman, thank you so much for joining us, and congratulations on the book. We’re going to be talking a lot about that, of course, but I wanted to start out with just a little bit of your personal story, how you moved from believer to nonbeliever, and in particular, in the context of a political career. That’s a very daring thing. In 2017, you came out as a nonbeliever. Can you tell us a little about that?

Huffman: Yeah, I came out when I was already a sitting member of Congress, so that was pretty unusual, but the long odyssey that led me from being a devout Christian to being a public humanist in Congress. Started in Independence, Mo. I grew up there. That was the world headquarters of a branch of the Mormon Church called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s now called the Community of Christ. And I was very religious. It was a lot of my worldview until I was in my early 20s. I was ordained into the priesthood of that church, but as a student at UC Santa Barbara, I had some events in my life, including the death of my dad, that just led me to start questioning. Not so much the moral framework I had grown up with or the basic principles of the gospel, but the supernatural stuff, the existence of an intercessory God, and all of these other things that I had taken on faith. And it stopped working for me. So, that’s a hard thing for people who grow up deeply religious, and I spent many years kind of drifting and seeking and trying to figure this stuff out, and ultimately came to realize that all of the good stuff I liked about the religion I grew up with was just the universal values that exist from all faith perspectives, and with an awful lot of nonbelievers. Just be good people and live life here and now, in this only planet that we have, and that’s kind of humanism. So, that is the label I came to embrace, and that makes me a bit of an oddball in national politics.

Reagan: I’ll bow publicly, but I suspect that there are many members of Congress, many people in the government, who are not religious but who just can’t take the brave step that you did.

Huffman: Yes, there are many, actually. So, I don’t know if it quite mirrors the data on the population writ large, where a little over 30 percent of folks are nonreligious. But it’s probably close to that in the Democratic caucus, at least. The Republicans are kind of a Christian monolith, right? You have to be, because Christian nationalism is so fused into their party and their political identity these days. But, I think we all know many of them are fakers, and I would bet that a lot of them don’t really believe.

Reagan: Let’s jump into Jan. 6, which was a big moment, I think, for you. There’s a quote from Sinclair Lewis: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” I have to confess that before I read your book, I didn’t think of Jan. 6 as a religious event. I saw it as a sort of demented, quasi-political event inspired by this traitor who’s sitting in the White House right now. But you saw it differently. You picked up on the signs that this actually was a religious event as well. Tell us about that.

Huffman: Yeah. That’s why I opened the book with Jan. 6 as it happened. I did observe all of these symbols, and these practices of religious worship, the blowing of shofars — these were central elements of the Jan. 6th insurrection. But, in real time, I don’t think even I appreciated just how steeped in Christian nationalism this coup was. This was a Christian coup. But most of the country kind of looked away and didn’t see the religion in the insurrection. As I delved into it more after Jan. 6, I came to believe, yes, this was a lot about Trump. But it was perhaps even more so about this Christian nationalist movement. This was a very religious event.

Reagan: You wrote that Jan. 6th should have been a national wake-up call. Instead, America, including many of your colleagues in Congress, whom the mob wanted to kill, went back to sleep. Why did the Jan. 6 Commission ignore the Christian nationalist element?

Huffman: This is really an untold story. It comes down to one person — Liz Cheney. There was a bipartisan select committee tasked with telling the complete story of this insurrection, how it happened, who planned it, how it unfolded, really preserving that for history, and even for the Department of Justice, so that there could be accountability. There were criminal referrals that came out of the select committee’s investigation and report. But in that 845-page comprehensive report, nothing about Christian nationalism, and that was not an accident. In fact, the evidence was everywhere. There were witnesses who talked about it, there were depositions, there was all sorts of documentary and photographic and video evidence. And the staff team that prepared the draft of that report talked about all of it, and really, Christian nationalism was a significant part of what they had written up. Liz Cheney vetoed it and ordered all of it erased. She did not want to offend conservative Christians, and there was pushback, even from the other Republican, Adam Kinzinger, himself an evangelical, but she wouldn’t budge. She wasn’t having it, and so it was a great disservice, I believe, to the country. We missed an opportunity to name and confront this movement at a time when we could still, perhaps, knock it down and put it in its place, but they were allowed to just move right on, and today they are bigger and stronger than ever.

Reagan: We tend to think of Liz Cheney as sort of a hero, like Adam Kinzinger on the right, somebody who stood up to President Trump and ultimately sacrificed her political career. So, I’m sort of surprised to hear that she wasn’t willing to go to the mat there. Is this about her personal belief, or did she . . .

Huffman: It says something that she didn’t want to pick a fight with conservative Christians. That sort of speaks to just how deeply ingrained this movement is in Republican politics right now. But it also speaks to what I call Christian privilege. Basically, our cultural reflex to not scrutinize, much less criticize anything that purports to be Christian. We have a bible-sized blind spot when it comes to Christian extremism and Christian violence. We’re pretty good at calling out Muslims. But when it comes to Christians, we look away.

Reagan: Yeah. Sam Harris has written about this, too, and originally, one of his big points was that, look, we argue about everything in our country, but religion gets this special dispensation whereby you can’t question that. Moving on to this idea of Christian nationalism as being not just a religious movement, but a political movement. What are the mechanisms behind this? What enables this movement to exist as it does in D.C.?

Huffman: Yeah, I think the superpower for this movement is the way they have fused very intense and authentic, for many of them, religious belief that gives them a passion and an intensity, but right into the machine of Republican politics. The truth is, these huge, radical pastors, these self-declared prophets — that’s why I called the book “No Prophets” — with millions of followers, they can activate folks across the political landscape on a moment’s notice. Folks that will show up and do the things they ask them to do, because this is their religious duty. And there’s nothing else like that in American politics. It is a huge part of their power, and, of course, Trump figured that out and locked these guys into the MAGA movement. He placed a huge bet on what had previously been seen as this fringe group of prophetic Christians, mostly evangelicals, charismatic evangelicals, but they were on the rise for years and years as the rest of Christianity kind of shrank and people were leaving churches.

Reagan: I can’t believe that any of these people, though, are actually fooled into thinking that Donald Trump is really one of them. How does the sort of prophetic tradition play into this? What sort of a figure do they see him being?

Huffman: Yeah, most of us would scratch our heads and just be incredulous that anyone would see Donald Trump as a quasi-religious figure, but they do. They really do. And it does go back to that 2016 campaign, and a relationship that Donald Trump had with one of these prophetic Christians, Paula White, who, at the time, was kind of a rock star in evangelical Christianity. She had a show, the “Paula White Show,” like the “Oprah” of Christianity. Trump loved her because he saw that she was platinum blonde and very telegenic and charismatic, so they became fast friends, and she opened the door to this group of prophets known as the New Apostolic Reformation. It was a low point for this movement, because the Obergefell decision had just come down earlier from the Supreme Court. This is, of course, legalizing same-sex marriage. They were devastated by that, and they wanted a bully, basically, something new to take Republicans to a stronger fight for a conservative Supreme Court. Paula White convinced them that Donald Trump was their guy. And they came up with this prophecy, that Donald Trump was being chosen by God as the new King Cyrus — Cyrus being a pagan figure in the bible who liberated the Jews in a very unlikely way. So, to us on the outside, it looks insane, it looks like madness, looks like no one could seriously believe it. But, if you are steeped in this religious belief, and all of the prophets that you follow are telling you, this is it, God is doing it again, and we need to get on board, you do what they say, and that’s what happened. It’s a big part of how Donald Trump became president.

Reagan: You do wonder how they get away with it. How is it that they aren’t being called out for this sort of stuff? Why aren’t more Democrats more in their face about this?

Huffman: I think most Democrats don’t want to pick a fight with any aspect of Christianity. You’re immediately going to be branded anti-religious or anti-Christian. And I have a little bit of acquired immunity to that kind of backlash. As the open infidel in Congress that I am, they’ve already called me every name in the book, and so I’ve sort of seen it. I feel somewhat liberated to just tackle this stuff head on and call it as I see it. I try to do it respectfully. I try to make it clear I really have no quarrel with religion or Christianity. I’ve got plenty of Christians who are my allies in this fight and who agree with me. But we’ve, back to your point about Sam Harris, we’ve really got to start talking about this stuff and stop looking away and stop pulling back and walking on eggshells, because they’re trying to topple our government and take away our rights. They are increasingly embracing violence as a legitimate means to their end. And there’s — you’re not going to be able to avoid this — this reckoning. It’s happening whether you like it or not.

Reagan: Well, I guess if you feel that God’s on your side, or you’re on God’s side, then pretty much anything is justified, and of course, the bible itself is filled with all kinds of violence perpetrated against people who aren’t on the right God’s side, so I guess Jan. 6 was just sort of a warm-up, maybe, that they could go farther.

Huffman: Yeah, kind of tying it back to the bible, Jan. 6 was what they call a Jericho March. And, back in my days as a practicing Christian, I remember the story of Jericho being this great example of how Joshua showed great faith and did exactly what God told him to do, circling the Canaanite city of Jericho and blowing shofars and saying things just the right way, and a miracle happened, the walls came down. Christians celebrate the Battle of Jericho as this great validation of just having faith and doing what God tells you to do. But, if you read the rest of the book of Jericho, Joshua was ordered to go in and kill everyone in that town, to annihilate them, and kill all their animals, and plunder all of their treasure, and then burn the place and torch it on the way up. So, it’s dark, and it’s violent, and evangelicals have these Jericho marches today, where they will bring out their shofars and circle courthouses, for example, and try to recreate the Battle of Jericho to try to pressure judges or political officials or others to do what they want them to do. And that is what they did on Jan. 6. It was a gigantic Jericho march.

Reagan: We’ve talked about how Christian nationalism is woven into the government now, particularly on the Republican side, but I would assume that most Americans still think of this as a sort of fringe movement.

Huffman: It is big, and it’s really powerful. These folks are populating the Trump administration at the highest level. You could argue right now that Russell Vogt is the most powerful guy in Washington. He’s the head of OMB, of course, and he is steeped in this radical belief system and in Christian nationalism. He’s no friend of democracy, or pluralism, or any of our shared values. He hates separation of church and state. And these folks are open about this. They have spoken about it, they have written about it. So, yeah, you can’t just write it off. It is deeply entrenched throughout our government right now, and that’s why we’ve kind of got to hurry up and come to terms with that and understand what we’re up against.

Reagan: Any authoritarian or cigarette manufacturer or fast food person knows that you’ve got to get people young. Nobody’s gonna start smoking a cigarette when they’re 30 years old. So, they want to get into the schools. They want to change the science curriculum. They want to dumb America down, it seems to me. How organized is that, and what’s that about?

Huffman: Yeah, you’re taking me into the chapter that I called “The Dumbing of America,” and it is very much a part of this Christian nationalist movement. They don’t like secular education, they don’t like science, they don’t like higher education. They hate universities, of course, because these are all institutions steeped in inquiry, and peer review, and scrutiny and rationalism. That doesn’t sit well with a very fragile and rigid biblical worldview, where you’re supposed to believe the literal words of Genesis about how the Earth was created, and the roles of the genders, and all of these different things that they are just absolute about in their beliefs. 

Dollens: Thank you both so much for this terrific conversation, and Rep. Huffman, congratulations again on “No Prophets.” Thank you for not only joining us today, but for using your position in Congress to stand up for the constitutional separation of state and church. Ron, as always, thank you for being such an extraordinary voice for FFRF and for freethought.