ReligionWise

Religion and the Alt-Right - Damon Berry

• Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding • Season 4 • Episode 1

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Though the categories we use to describe them can be different, "the Alt-Right", "Christian Nationalists", "White Nationalists," there is no denying the ascendency of a powerful force on the right that has affected the political and religious landscape of the United States over the last generation.

Our guest today, Dr. Damon Berry, works to understand these groups from their context and to make their worldview comprehensible to outsiders from the movement. This conversation not only considers some of the political consequences for the 2024 presidential election, but considers the development and organization of these groups over the last few decades.

Show Notes:

Chip Gruen:

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host Chip Gruen. I'm super excited about today's episode for a couple of reasons. One is the content itself is fascinating and interestingly complex, and I think really timely. Our guest is Dr. Damon Berry, who is the associate professor of religious studies and department chair at St Lawrence University. And his work focuses on, well, it's kind of hard to talk about because of the diversity present within the group. We could call it the alt-right. We could call it Christian nationalists. We could call it American white nationalism. As you listen to the episode, you'll see why I have a little bit of problem giving a single identifier or single category name for these groups, because while they agree on a lot ideologically, there is also a lot that keeps them separated from one another, whether that be goals and motivations, religious identity, or just the theory of what the relationship is between the United States, ethnicity and a common history should be. Dr. Berry has been prolific writing about these groups, With three monographs out including "Blood and Faith-Christianity and American White Nationalism,""Christianity and the Alt-Right-Exploring the Relationship," and then just out last year, "The New Apostolic Reformation, Trump and Evangelical Politics". He also wanted me to mention that he is the guest editor of a special issue of Nova Religio that is coming out very soon called"Dominion and Rebellion-The New Apostolic Reformation and the January 6 Insurrection". So I think, given the way that history of those events is being remembered and re remembered by various people in various places on the political landscape, I think that that will be again, a timely issue that will be dealt with by a number of authors in that collection. I'm also really excited to have Dr. Berry on the program, because his methods are ones that I'm very sympathetic to, the way that he works, the way that he writes, the way that he does his research. He is really interested in not making the work about him and about his feelings and opinions about the place of these groups in American society. But instead, he wants to help the reader understand these actors from their own perspective, now that shouldn't be imagined as giving a pass or condoning the beliefs and practices of these groups. In fact, you'll hear in the interview that he talks about how the underlying motivation for his work is to help stop violence help defuse the power of these groups in the public landscape of contemporary United States, but that that is not the first job at hand. The first job is to understand the context, the motivations, the practices of these groups. And I think it's a very refreshing and useful way of taking our first steps as we increase our literacy about this, you know, not insignificant group of people in our country that are affecting our political landscape and the religious landscape for that matter. It is a method I share when I teach my Christian Traditions class or my New Religious Movements class, right, understanding people who are other than us, whose worldviews might be different from ours, but understanding them by trying to cultivate as much as we can, a kind of empathetic read to a different kind of belief and practice a different worldview. So before we start the conversation, I just want to make a quick note that this is the first episode of season four of ReligionWise. We're super excited to come back. We've got a lot of good guests lined up for the next several months. And I would like to encourage you, if you're a fan of the show, if you have subscribed or are a regular listener, that we really would appreciate feedback, questions, comments or reviews on any of the major podcast apps, the algorithms work in such a way that that can really help our program reach larger audiences if there's more interaction by you the listener. If you reach out to us with questions or comments that we use in a future episode, we will be happy to supply you with a little Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding swag, if you provide your physical address to us, so please consider doing that. And without further ado, let's get to the conversation with Dr. Berry. Damon Berry, thanks for coming on ReligionWise.

Damon Berry:

Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Chip Gruen:

So as we were talking, before we started recording, I was I was saying to you, I'm kind of becoming a big fan. I've really enjoyed some of your work, and one of the reasons I've been really interested in reading your work is actually not so much about the content, but about the methodology that you use. And I want to throw one of your book blurbs back at you. This is from your book "Christianity and Alt-Right" in the front material. George Hawley, who's a professor of political science at the University of Alabama, describes your work as having,"A gift for ideological empathy." Can you talk a little bit about how you approach the subjects of your work and the challenges that studying this movement present for you?

Damon Berry:

Yes, excellent question, and thank you for your very generous introductory comments. So interestingly, there was a whole section in my first book, which was developed out of my dissertation about Christianity and American white nationalism, where I explain this tangle of empathy. And of course, religious studies has this history of you know, most people, I think it's a generally accepted thing that most people study certain religious traditions, because there's something compelling about them, there's something interesting about them, there's something they may even like about them, and I went as far in the other direction of that as I think anyone can. And yet I always felt it was important to not misrepresent, you know, even these views that I ardently disagree with in the first place, because being a historian of religions, in the Bruce Lincoln sort of way of thinking about things. I don't really think the object of my study should be my feelings about these groups. Of course, I have them. There were certain interests and frustrations and, you know, very difficult things that I was dealing with as a person, just that drew me to this topic in the first place, but I don't think anybody is well served by yet another sort of editorializing about how bad this all is. I think we're better served by a better understanding of material. So that's sort of my scholarly answer. Is developing that empathy for me was important because I wanted to represent it well. I didn't want to mischaracterize things and have the study be about me, because that's not what the object of study is. But on the other hand, I'm also, you know, deeply invested in countering extremism and and countering terrorism, and so some of the work that I try to contribute on that end were, in many cases, interviewing formers, people who have committed acts of extremism or leaving extremist movements. And if your goal is to reach these folks where they are, to maybe put them on a path to leaving these organizations, or at least not committing violent offenses, while maybe having views that we don't agree with or or we find reprehensible, then you you have to reach them at a point of of understanding, where you're willing to listen to what they have to say, and meet them where they are. Because ultimately, in that work, the goal is to save lives, and if it costs me a bit of let's say, you know, shoving my personal feelings about their ideologies or the words they use or the inclinations they have to hopefully reach them to prevent them from committing an act of violence. Then, then that's what I'll do. So that on the pragmatic side, when it comes to doing this work in the in another context, empathy is essential, because most people don't respond well to being attacked.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, I mean, I can only imagine that. I mean, for lack of a better word, your informants are going to respond a lot better to you. You're going to open up doors, you know, with with that approach, rather than being perceived as, you know, the elitist...

Damon Berry:

Right.

Chip Gruen:

...right academic who's coming down from the ivory tower to, you know, to, I don't know, to do whatever expose the movement, or what have you.

Damon Berry:

Right. And if you, if you start there, just, I mean, from an academic standpoint, and from a pragmatic counter extremism standpoint, you're not getting accurate information. They're not gonna, they're not going to be honest with you, because they don't trust you.

Chip Gruen:

So you don't have to read very far in the literature about these movements before you see that this is not a single organized ideology or worldview, that nothing really unifies these groups under a single banner. And in fact, if we look at the infamous rally that took place in Charlottesville in 2017 it went under the rubric, or under the title, Unite the Right, which, in itself, seems to signal kind of a self consciousness about the variety or disunity among these groups that being said, can you talk a little bit about that variety or disunity, or about what might hold these groups together? Even if it's from, from your scholarly viewpoint, what brings them together as an object to be studied, given that disunity?

Damon Berry:

Actually, for me, it is the disunity.That is my that is my focus, because, I think, in many ways and and sometimes for good reason. I mean, we create categories for all sorts of reasons to you know, make rational that which is very difficult to understand, and depending on your audience, those simplifying the categories can be helpful. But from an academic standpoint, I am I embrace the complexity because that's precisely what interests me. So then again, my dissertation that became my first book, and then carried over into the book you mentioned is about that disunity. So the concept of whiteness. Of course, white racial protection is the major thing that seemed to hold the interest of every one of the groups and individuals that I wrote about my first book. But by the time I get to my second book, and I look at European ethno nationalists outside the United States, they often do not embrace the concept of whiteness as articulated by American white nationalists. They think of ethnicity in different ways. So so depending on what group you're talking about and how many other groups you include in that conversation, there's almost nothing that holds them together. Even in the context of American white nationalism, where would the white homeland be and and there's disagreement over that, historically speaking. And then, of course, specifically, I talked about the disunification around religion, something that persisted through the alt-right and that the Unite the Right rally and the debacle that that became from their perspective, many of their perspectives, so you had this white Mormon woman that I spent some time talking about in in that second book, she was actually really quite put out by the way that the Unite the Right rally organizers handled the criminal charges that were pressed against people, especially the young man that killed Heather Heyer with his vehicle, injuring several others. So there's almost nothing that holds them together, almost nothing in it. And after 2017 the movement turned on itself, precisely because you have this long standing history of these groups just not really getting along very well.

Chip Gruen:

So part of that diversity that you talk about, I think, owes to the ways that these ideas are shared and spread, which is not typically in a physical community like a church or a traditional political organizing unit, but instead it's a proliferation of online communities, social media sites and new media in general. How much are those two things mirrored? Right? The ways in which this is not a brick and mortar kind of movement, and the diversity that you know, that you, that you described, you have almost nothing holding these, these groups together.

Damon Berry:

Yeah, well, the online spaces, of course, you know, with the advent of the alt-right, but you know, that was the major point of their activity. If you follow some of the documentarians that that went with people during the Unite the Right rally, they you hear all these references to meme warfare and psychological warfare, and that's primarily carried out through online spaces, but also many of the people who are attracted to these ideologies in their majority of their life, they're not going to let people know they're attracted to this. So there's one part where not having a solid, singular organization probably inhibits their ability to mobilize in certain ways. They're not like the German American Bund or Christian Front of previous generations or even clans, certainly nothing like the 1920s clan that had a rather large and impactful political presence in the entirety of the United States, not just the South. This is much more diffuse, and there's a longer history to all of this, of how the organizations developed, especially after the COINTELPRO because there's, we're familiar with COINTELPRO being, you know, targeting Vietnam War protesters, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Nationalists, but there's also a COINTEL program against clans in particular, but also various kinds of white racist extremists. And that became public knowledge, and then you had this development of a leaderless resistance, and Louis Beam is most important for of all these articulators of a cellular resistance against the government, which these white racist activists started seeing the government as their primary target, not something to be co opted, but something to be ward against. So in many ways, the cellular development of a cellular structure, rather than a sort of pyramid structure of leadership coincided with this change of moving to online platforms, beginning in the 1990s with Stormfront. So you have sort of what's on the ground is this organizational shift, but at the same time, the advent of technologies that made something like that much more effective. And then by the time you get to somebody like Dylann Roof, he's radicalized online by just doing simple Google searches about Black crime, and then before you know it, he's prepared to take a handgun to a Black church and kill nine people, precisely because he's radicalized online, because you don't need as a matter of fact, it's less effective to have a brick and mortar organization if you're going to commit acts of revolutionary violence.

Chip Gruen:

I'm thinking about, you know, the big red letter events of these groups, right? The Charlottesville, you know, January 6, like that there are these things that happen. And I don't know, I'm just weighing the sort of the what looks like, the spontaneity of that, versus these kinds of lone wolf attacks. I'm thinking about like that this is a different kind of threat, right? Than what we might be used to considering when we think about paramilitary groups or higher organization, I'm, you know, the question that I had shared with you previously was about like, how big of a threat is this? It just seems like it's, it's a different kind of threat than what we might be used to in previous generations.

Damon Berry:

Yes. And you know, when I speak with law enforcement officials, this is the one thing I try to emphasize. So, you know, so how do you prevent something like this, and, and, and to be honest, prevention is extremely difficult because you have First Amendment and Fourth Amendment protections. So you know, somebody getting online, or like Robert Bowers did before he went to Tree of Life synagogue and killed 11 people. You know, he just simply posted on Twitter, I'm sick of all the talk, or something to the effect of, I'm sick of all the talk. Screw the optics I'm going in. There's no, there's no way to know what he meant by that until after the fact, and there's nowhere way to know where exactly he's targeting. And if you have individuals using VPN or secure chat, so like a US soldier was affiliated with an atomwaffen adjacent group, neo Nazi organization, and was communicating over secure chat to get his unit ambushed in Turkey by a jihadist group, only by breaking that chat and because he's a service member, there's certain things you can do under the Uniform Code of Military Justice if you have reasonable cause that you just can't do for a 15 year old scrolling in their basement. And then, of course, do we really want the kinds of protections that would be necessary to ferret this out? But then, if you look at, you know again, Dylann Roof, Robert Bowers, the young man who went into the grocery store in Buffalo, New York, these are people who primarily were apparently radicalized online, shared information online, but none of it was necessarily actionable intelligence that would lead you to know exactly what their target was going to be until it was too late. And that's it is a new kind of threat. It is a very specific one, and it's in my view, and I don't think I'm speaking out of turn for other people who think about terrorism and extremist groups that is the most significant threat, because it's very difficult to counter.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, I'm kind of thinking of an analogy. It seems like, you know, if you see a physicist describing boiling water, or you watch popping popcorn, like the temperature of the whole system goes up, which makes it more likely for, you know, the heat, for example, to pop a pop piece of popcorn. But you never know which one it's going to be, right? And you never know which one it's going to be. And it seems to me that analogy might work, because we do get the temperature turned up on the whole system of these groups, but you never know where the lone wolf or where the action is going to come from.

Damon Berry:

No. And that cellular organization, that kind of cellular activity, rather than a hierarchical organization which would be easily infiltrated, and you can apply Rico and all this other stuff, it just doesn't exist. And by design, that's exactly what Louis Beam was articulating in the 1990s So, but also in the context of, you know, some other things that I've written about. 2023 report by PRI and Brookings Institute noted that support for political violence has increased since 2021 and that nearly a quarter of Americans 23% agree that because things have gotten so far off track. This is from the report itself, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save their country, and so I think it is applicable to say that the heat of the environment has gone up to such a degree that it's much more likely to happen. So, yeah, this, this is the major concern, and it is very difficult to counter.

Chip Gruen:

So I want to move back. I mean, obviously this is ReligionWise, and religion, it's the central discourse of what we're interested in. But it's interesting to see that, you know, political commentators, journalists of all stripes refer to these groups. I mean, we've talked about the alt-right, but Christian nationalist ends up being one of the buzzwords that gets used in dominant media, and that, of course, implies that Christian identity should be a central focus when we're thinking about these groups and thinking about their motivations. But the religious identities of these groups is not so clear cut. Can you talk about the multiple religious identities that are present within these groups? Particularly with reference to ones that we would consider outside that Christian milieu, pagan and atheist identities.

Damon Berry:

Yeah, well, again, I mean, you know, when I when I say the diversity is what drew my attention is it's precisely because of a person who was on my committee, and I had been very fortunate to learn from, is Professor Michael Barkun Professor Emeritus of Political Science from Syracuse University. And you know, he wrote a book a while ago called"Religion and the Racist Right," where he focused on Christian identity groups, a very specific kind of Christian theology that argues that the white race or Aryans or white folks in general are the chosen people of God, and Jews are pretenders, and African Americans and other people of color are not fully human, so on and so forth. Very particular kind of theological persuasion, which was, of course, of note at the time, especially, you know, in thinking about militia groups in the 1990s and, you know, Aryan Nations and how prominent they were. But there were a whole bunch of other groups, and had been for a while, since the late 60s and 70s, that were specifically not Christian in orientation. And the first person I talk about is Revilo Oliver, who was actually a professor of classics, very educated human being, who was with the John Birch Society, and wrote about Christianity being this sort of like tradition of the West, but that liberal Christianity and Marxist Christianity was perverting all that. Well has he leaves mainstream political discourse behind, relatively mainstream. Of course, John Birch might not be considered mainstream to most, but it was relatively mainstream. He was writing for National Review when National Review just first got started, so he was kind of in that milieu, very far to the right, even for that ilk. Well, as he's moving away from that, as the Birchers are purged from National Review and the conservative movement by Buckley and others, he becomes increasingly harsh in his criticism of Christianity, to the point where near the end of his life, he's writing that all religion, all religion period, is toxic to the survival instincts of the white race and should be abandoned altogether. So you have that early atheist option. You've got new religious movements like the Church of the Creator, you've got pagan movements like Odinism and various expressions of that, and the list goes on so and those are the folks I spent a lot of time talking about because that became those options became more popular than Christian identity did for a younger wave of white nationalists, and all the way to the beginnings of the 21st century, you have white nationalists recognizing this sticking point of religion and religious diversity being an inhibition to coordinating with other groups, so they advocate for religious tolerance. And I know it's weird of us to think of white nationalists as talking about tolerance, but that's exactly what they were talking about. We just shelved the religion thing for the political goal of white nationalism.

Chip Gruen:

So I want to stick with the atheist thread, because there was something that you recounted from Richard Spencer that really caught my imagination, and I think helps me understand, you know, a little bit more of this worldview and where it's coming from. But the question is about there's a description of him out there as a proud atheist, and he corrects it, and he says, No, I'm not a proud atheist. I'm a tragic atheist. Can you explain what he means by that, and how that can be a really animating force to this particular thread in the movement?

Damon Berry:

Absolutely. I mean, well, I mean he, he basically lays it out himself. He's a tragic atheist because he regrets that there is not some unifying religious principle holding the West together. It's almost a Durkheimian kind of perspective, right? That for him, religion serves this important social function, and being an atheist, he feels like that's something that's missing. So I and as best as I can understand it, that's what he means by being a tragic atheist, that he doesn't like the idea that we don't have a unifying racial religion that everybody agrees with, because that would help the organization work better. That would help them accomplish their goals better, but it would also give them a more meaningful life. And in many ways, he's sort of like to play on those words. He's like a regretful Nietzschean right, like, yeah, he's he nea... He wants this, at least at the time, was talking a lot about this need for a creative force, this, this, for lack of a better word, spiritual sort of outlet that that's part of who the white race is and always has been. But Jewish Christianity is not going to do it, and there's paganism. Is it didn't work, obviously, because it's gone right, mainly. So you we need maybe something else, but he's not sure exactly what that is. So again, that's my at the time, the way he was articulating this, that's, that's more or less what he was getting at.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, you see Nietzsche. And, you know, I've seen the argument that it's sort of not a great reading of Nietzsche, but you see Nietzsche being sort of called upon, you know, it's sort of a philosophical, you know, inspiration for some of these, these groups as well.

Damon Berry:

Yeah, yeah, it is. It's not a very good reading, because the the antisemitism would be a big deal breaker, right? Despite Nietzsche's later history of entanglements, primarily because of his sister with the Nazi movement, they didn't read him very carefully either, because he is very hard on antisemites as the quintessential person of ressentiment, right? This person who cannot live without their anger, that this target of hate and blame, which he thinks is sick. But, yeah, but I mean, it's important to remember too, on that point that many of these articulators of American white nationalism, if you have the idea that somehow they're ill educated, backward bumpkins, that's not true. They're, manyny of them are very highly educated and spent time in the university as professors in some cases, certainly is true for Revilo Oliver. So they, many of them, and I think this is part of just some the vanity of that I find in the movement so often is that they love, at least having the veneer of intellectualism, that they want to present their arguments as rational. They have this real attachment to thinking of things as rational, or at least some of them do so they have whole like magazines dedicated, you know, sort of academic, their version of academic journals dedicated to these topics, in part because some of them come from the academy, but also there's an appeal to that for them.

Chip Gruen:

So we shelved the Christian identities for a minute, but I want to come back to that, because it again, speaks to this main theme that we're coming back to is the diversity of the movement. And I think that, you know, when we're thinking about these groups, you know, people will lay it at the foot of, you know, contemporary evangelical groups, for example, although, of course, that's not a denomination itself, but a kind of a shorthand. But you chronicle in your work also other kinds of Christian identity. I mean, you mentioned Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Mormon identity. There are some Catholic, fundamentalist Catholics involved in this. Can you talk about the diversity of Christianity that is also sort of espoused or Christian identities used within these movements as well?

Damon Berry:

Yeah, in that alt-right moment in the lead up to the 2016 election through 2017 you had alt-right being used in so many different ways. So critics of in the Mormon context, so people who are critics of very hardline Mormons who wanted to be extremely exclusionary in their institutions of gay and lesbian transgender folks, they would be accused of being alt-right. But then you also had Mormons themselves identifying as Trad or traditionalist. Of course, Wife With a Purpose is a perfect example of someone who was actually involved in the Unite the Right rally she was supposed to speak before everything that happened happened. So you had Mormons moving in and out of the circles of the alt-right proper. But, you know, primarily using it as a branding mechanism, but it was also used as a slur. So the word alt-right becomes extremely complicated in a moment when Southern Baptists are having this very contentious vote in 2017 to condemn the alt-right white supremacy doesn't exactly go very well. I tell that story a little bit in the book. I was able to talk to some people that were involved sort of on the inside of that conversation to help explain what happened a little better, at least from their point of view. And then, of course, with Church Militant and Michael Voris, who has recently left Church Militant, and I'm not sure of the reasons, there was some "moral failing" that caused him to move away from the movement more recently, but at the time he became sort of this representative of traditionalism, which is not the same. It's not to be confused with people who think of themselves as traditional Catholics. So this is something that in a in a hearing on the hill, that where these words got confused by folks who just didn't quite understand how these terms are used. But traditionalism is is a broader concept about returning to this romantic period of, usually, European purity and so forth, whereas being a traditional Catholic can mean all sorts of things depending on your context, but so But Michael Voris was pulling this very, you know, again, the name, it's in the name Church Militant, this very anti homosexual, very, very aggressive sort of online radio presence, and usually at war with somebody in the Catholic Church. Usually a church, some church leadership is trying to make the church more appealing to people who are LGBTQ plus, and trying to create that bridge. Literally, Father Martin, I think his name was writing this book about how the church can make a bridge to people who are homosexual and and make the church more of a place where they feel comfortable coming and this is earned the ire of the Catholic"alt-right". So the term itself is contentious, and that's part of what the book is about, but also that each sort of different Christian denomination or expression was sort of wrestling with it in this time of what con what in what context are we alt-right? At what point does our inclusion mean, abandoning a position of traditional orthodoxy? And the alt-right became a way of negotiating that for some of them.

Chip Gruen:

So you mentioned the discourse of warfare, and we've talked a little bit about how that is literally true, you know, when you have these attacks, but it seems also to be a part of a larger narrative that animates the theological and political ideologies of these of these groups, and in particular, the again, I'm kind of interested in the Christian nationalist here, because it seems like there is a larger story, a global historical context, or a more cosmic context, a connection to the Kingdom of God that that warfare is is calling on. Can you talk a little bit about the story these people tell themselves, about themselves in that larger narrative context?

Damon Berry:

Yeah, this is where the diversity presents an issue when it comes to very clearly delineating things, because it becomes quite difficult. So just like with white nationalism and just like with the alt-right as terms, it's easy to assume that somebody who may be identified or identifies as Christian nationalists shares a lot of things in common with everybody else who shares that label. But I'll return to this report again to sort of set the stage for how I answer this question. So the report from 2023 from PRI and Brookings, Over three in 10 white evangelical Protestants, 31% along with 25% of white mainline, non evangelical Protestants. And you know the numbers go down as you go to non Christians, Black Protestants, unaffiliated Americans, Spanish Catholics agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save their country. Among white Christians, there are no differences by church attendance on this question. So that it's something non denominational, in a sense that people who feel like violence might be necessary to save the country, that white evangelicals lead that statistic as people who believe that idea. Now that's not to say that every one of them would commit an act of violence, so agreeing that violence might be necessary is not the same as threatening violence. So let's just be clear about that. But so there are for people for whom, and it doesn't necessarily break down on denominational lines, that they think that, yeah, violence is absolutely physically necessary. It's not a metaphor for anything. It's absolutely we may have to embrace strong man tactics. That's part of this report too. The same demographics sort of similarly break down along the lines of supporting an authoritarian leader who's willing to break rules to save the country. So there's something non denominational that's going on to consider, but also within that is the more deeply complex reality that there are people who are affiliating along these lines of agreeing that something drastic needs to happen to save the country, who, theologically, don't have a lot in common. So if you for example, you have Pastor Robert Jeffress, who's a Southern Baptist, praying with Trump, right alongside Paula White, who is one a female pastor, which is not something Southern Baptists have embraced, but is also, you know, affiliated with the prosperity gospel, which many Baptists are very hard on. So but this goes back to 2012 too, when you had white evangelicals voting for a Mormon Mitt Romney and Jeffress in that moment, was saying that Romney was a member of a cult, but that he was still going to vote for him. So the complexity just gets exponentially more difficult the more you look into it, and then you find that folks who are affiliated with it's not a movement per se, but a network called the New Apostolic Reformation. They use the rhetoric of war all the time, all the time. So the notion that there we're at war with demonic entities is something of course, they get from their Pentecostal charismatic lineage, and in some cases when, for example, Lance Wallnau, one of the big people in this movement, who prophesied that Trump was going to be president in 2016 you know, he's very clear when it comes to, for example, the war on Gaza, or, you know, dealing with certain protesters here in the United States, that force is absolutely necessary. So...

Chip Gruen:

So I don't I respond to this criticism, you know, at my own institution some where, we'll get people who study political science who will say things like, you know, if you're you're looking at religion and you're thinking about religious motivations, you don't really have your eye on the ball, because this is about power, right? And religion might clothe power in particular ways, but this is really, you know, religion is a red herring in, you know, these kinds of human interactions, and I always push back against that, right? I say belief and practice is, you know, among religious communities is really important. But this, you know, this hodgepodge of ideologies that are sort of coming together in what seems to be a really realpolitik kind of a moment of just getting things done, seems to support that political science point a little bit that we need to think about this just as a as a route to power, rather than anything that is, again, cosmologically significant or really rooted in in religious narratives.

Damon Berry:

Yeah, I just think, Well, I think to think in absolute terms of, one thing is religion and another thing is politics is assuming you can define either in such a way as they're mutually exclusive always, rather than just understanding that that's sort of our preference because of our cultural background. And we assume these things to be true. So then we look at the world, and by God don't, doesn't look that way sometimes. But I would argue that, in the first case, religion is often a site of political negotiation itself, because even if some of the spokespersons or mouthpieces or leaders are sort of jaded about all this, their followers aren't, they're absolutely convinced, and you know, you can say what you want about Trump, that he's a danger to democracy. You know, it's he wouldn't be anything if he didn't have a large number of people who felt very strongly that he was sent by God to save America. So what does it matter if Trump doesn't believe it? That's not even the point, but it is a site of negotiation. And you see him negotiating the abortion issue, not knowing how to handle it because he had that vote coming up in Florida where he had to vote on that ballot measure whether or not it would be a six week waiting period. He said, very clearly, it's a bad idea. Now, obviously he's saying this because he's dealing with trying to appease his evangelical base because he terminated Roe v Wade. That's what he brags about to them, but he doesn't want to be seen in a national election as the guy that terminated Roe v Wade, so he's got to play both sides. And he eventually caves and says he's probably going to vote to support the ballot. But here's the thing, we'll never know what he voted for.

Chip Gruen:

Right.

Damon Berry:

I mean, you can trust him if you want to, but he's got a record of not being very honest about things. So, so that's the first point, is that religion is the site of political negotiation, and that defining religion in a way that excludes politics altogether is probably never going to happen. And then I would argue that that there are people who are very motivated in their political activity who are legislators, I can think of one person his, his name eludes me, but he was on a news program talking about abortion restrictions in Missouri, and he says very plainly that he supported this legislation, helped push through this legislation because of his religious conviction, but also when it comes to sort of fighting back against restrictions on reproductive rights, you have religious people filing Religious Freedom Restoration Act petitions to get legal access to reproductive care that is otherwise outlawed because of their religious beliefs. So it's not just the white evangelicals who are conservative support Trump, that are sort of engaging in political activity because of their religion, or using religion to engage in political activity. For them, it's connected, and connected so much that they're willing to take this to the Indiana Supreme Court, for example.

Chip Gruen:

So we've talked, started talking a little bit about contemporary politics, right? And obviously we're sitting here in the fall of 2024 moving towards the 2024 election, and there is a site here around the vice presidents that I think maybe is an interesting way to explore the shifting dynamics here that we go from Mike Pence, and that obviously didn't end well for Mike Pence, although we'll see how he acts in the next few months, to JD Vance, who both seem recognizable in this kind of alt-right, Christian nationalist world, but in really different ways. And I wonder if you could explain sort of the constituencies that they represent that might help us understand sort of the shifting landscape as well.

Damon Berry:

Yeah, boy, it's difficult, because on the one hand, there's a way to approach this, to assume that Trump's current campaign has a strategy involved, and I think there's no reason to believe that he has embraced any strategy other than just leaning in on the things that he thinks worked for him in 2016 that's what he's got. JD Vance, I think in hindsight, many of his advisors are regretting that this happened. It's sort of like another Sarah Palin moment, because it turns out he's not very good at this sort of thing, but I think Pence was supposed to and I don't think I'm alone in this. I'm not sure if I'm saying her name correctly, but Kristin Kobes Du Mez, if, if I'm the author of"Jesus and John Wayne," and I'm not sure I'm saying her name correctly. So if I get that wrong, please forgive me out there. But she says that in some ways, that Mike Pence gave Trump this sort of veneer of evangelical bona fides, which he obviously didn't have in his person. But it's pretty clear by now she argues, and I think she's right about this, he never needed that, because virtue is not a thing that's motivating his Christian base, and certainly not the people that I wrote about in my latest book. They, I mean, Lance Wallnau again, specifically points out that Trump is this wrecking ball against political correctness, that he's that's who he's supposed to be. He's supposed to be this disruptive force, and God's going to use him anyway. So, so you know how this fits in that larger mix. Again, I think it's sort of a bit of celebrity, a bit of online memeing, a bit sort of representative of our disjointed media cultures. And I don't know if there's a whole lot of strategy beyond that. I think people are just being who they are. And in some cases, I think Vance sees an opportunity to climb because he was, of course, very hard on Trump. Said that the party should never embrace him and that he would be America's Hitler and all this other stuff. Well, he's changed his tune quite a bit. So there might be certain people with certain interests. But I don't know if any of this is terribly coordinated until you get to something like Project 2025, and I think that's probably where the real sort of organized danger might be, if we want to put it in those terms, is the people that we don't know about, the people that we're not watching, the people that will be on the ground making things happen.

Chip Gruen:

So let me put this another way, even if it is not strategic, right? Because I'm with you, right that this, I don't think that this particular candidate is, you know, cornered the market on on strategic thinking. But does he appeal? Does Vance appeal to a different set of this group that you're...

Damon Berry:

Yeah

Chip Gruen:

...these groups that you're working with than Pence, right, like, even if it's not done intentionally, is there a courting that is happening that maybe rings differently than 2016?

Damon Berry:

Well, certainly those people among the far right who are traditionalists, right? Not traditional, but traditionalists. You know, the language that he has about single people, unmarried women, childless people, is language that resonates very, very strongly. But I don't know that Vance at all has a very strong following. I think a lot of people think that he's actually hindering the campaign.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah.

Damon Berry:

But you know, again, Trump is doing his fair share of memeing. If you go on Truth Social, you see things on there, like, there's a one that got a lot of attention, where Trump was re-Truthed, a meme of you had this side cut of two images. One is this, like, nice suburban neighborhood. It's very clean and nice, and the other is just full of a bunch of swarms of people of color. And it says your neighborhood under Trump, under the white picket fence, and then if Kamala, that's his word, right? So mispronounces her name on purpose under her, and it's this horde of people of color coming into the country. And it says, If you import the Third World, you become the Third World. Well, that's something directly out of stormfront.org or any of these racist sites. That's exactly the kind of thing you see there. So I think Trump is doing his own thing that has attracted that that following to begin with, in the 2015 campaign through 2020 to some degree, and then Vance is doing this other thing that this men's rights Trad sort of milieu is, is going to be attracted to in some way. But I just think Vance as a person, is just not very good at it.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah. So I want to kind of finish up, sort of draw towards the close of our conversation by returning to where we started, which was sort of methodological. And you seem, you know, your work seems to be very interested in maintaining kind of a healthy methodological distance, not that it doesn't have implications for real world activity, right? Not that it doesn't have applications for how we react to the world, or how we act in the world, but I wanted to ask you about what your experience has been like from both the left and the right. I mean, it seems to me like you could draw both praise and criticism from the right and you could draw both praise and criticism from the left. And how has the, your, you know, your really healthy publication record been received on both sides?

Damon Berry:

Well, I think some leftists were initially worried that I was just simply becoming a mouthpiece for some of this. I spoke to a graduate class at Stanford about the my first book, and that was a concern, and I understand that point. You know that we want to be careful how we represent things, but given that it's a scholarly work, I felt it was important to represent accurately what I was being told and what I found in the source material. That's my first loyalty. I don't think anybody's served by inaccuracy or half truths. But you know, since then, people, I think, have grown appreciative of it, of that approach of just trying to be as clear, concise and detailed as possible. And so I don't, I don't really hear a lot of that anymore. And I think it might also be because, I mean, they can't see me, but my appearances, I mean, I can walk among these folks and never send up a signal ever. So I, you know, it might have been a little bit of suspicion of wondering, like, because I did get that in graduate school a lot like, why are you interested in this? So I understand that part, but that's about it, and it doesn't really happen very much anymore. I think, or at least I hope, it's been helpful to those on the left to understand these ideologies that they find repugnant and scary, that you know, I've done at least a halfway decent job of painting an accurate picture of what I see, and on the right it varies. There are some people that absolutely hate my guts, so I don't get many death threats anymore. But, you know, it's not over yet, so we'll see. But, but then there were also some into more of the intelligentsia of global white nationalism that have really been appreciative that I didn't, you know, paint a strong man picture of them. They felt that, or one person in particular felt that he was represented accurately. Obviously, he knows I don't agree with him, but when I interviewed him, I told him exactly what I meant, that I was going to be, you know, interested in only assessing what he has to say. I'm not interested in casting him in a certain light, per se. But, you know, in the same way, if I were to study any person, group or movement as a historian of religion, it's my first obligation to be accurate and to shelve my feelings about the issue, because that's not what the study is about. The study is about this phenomenon, and if I get in the way, then we just don't learn about the phenomenon very well.

Chip Gruen:

So one of the places I like to end up is, you know, I'm try to always be aware of my own myopia. You know that I have done a good faith effort of understanding your work and understanding what you see as important and how to get at this topic. But I'm always aware that I might be totally missing something. So what are we not talking about that you think we really need to talk about, or something that needs to be underscored so that our audience really understands sort of the cash value or the implications of your work?

Damon Berry:

Yeah, so I'll just return to the thing that motivates me the most anymore. So the work that I focus on now is mainly having to do with how this work can be beneficial to preventing acts of violence, especially racialized, motivated forms of violence. But you know, in general, like, how can we understand these groups, these movements, better, so as to, you know, lessen the casualties, which is about as the loftiest goal you can have in that kind of work. And I think it's more to do with, I hope that we're thinking about these movements not as aliens, not as people from some other planet or some other place, that they're American people, in many cases, they're American children in some cases. So what is it about society that makes these ideas resonate with people? What's wrong with us? What are we doing not right? That we create societies where somebody goes online and after a few months of searching, they found enough resources to motivate them to kill nine people. We can say they're defective. That's fine, but in my experience, in listening to what farmers have to say, they're not defective, there's other stuff going on. Mental illness is no indicator for how people will behave violently. We know that that's that's a that's a bad avenue to go down, to assume, because somebody's mentally ill, that they'll commit violence, and it's bad to assume, it's inaccurate to assume that, because they committed violence, they must be mentally ill. It's a bad assumption. Shouldn't have it. There's something else going on, and for me, I want this work to stand out as there's something broader socially going on, these people did not invate invent the racial categories they're working with. They didn't invent the racist language they're using. They didn't invent the images that come to their mind when they imagine the racial other. They did invent the religious traditions in many cases that they're using. And certainly, even if they do invent something, they didn't do it out of whole cloth. There's something social going on here. There's something with American culture that needs to be addressed if we want to stop this kind of violence. And if we just keep imagining that these people are safely so distant from us as human beings that we have nothing in common with them, nothing at all, then we're not looking at probably the only way to prevent these acts of, you know, what's been called lone wolf violence, is to change the social fabric in which we raise people, in which we socialize people. And to me, that's, that's the big issue that often goes under discussed.

Chip Gruen:

Right. Well. Damon Berry, thank you so much for appearing today on ReligionWise. It's not always a optimistic conversation, but I think one that you know that we all learned a lot.

Damon Berry:

Well thank you very much.

Chip Gruen:

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com There, you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts, we look forward to seeing you next time.