good afternoon my name is boy Rogers and I am from the state of South Carolina this is my fourth principal's first conference I'm very pleased to introduce you today to our next moderator Mona cheran has had a storied and fascinating career as a journalist a speech writer for first lady Nancy Reagan a columnist a political analyst and a podcast host she presently is the policy editor for the bullwark and host of the Mona cheron Show podcast please join me in giving a warm principal first welcome to Mona [Applause] Sharon thank you all so much I'm delighted to be here thank you to the principal's first team for handling everything so well particularly the little excitement that we had earlier today I have the easiest job here at the principal first conference uh because I get to chat with two of the most insightful interesting and downright decent people in America one is David French New York Times [Applause] columnist podcaster uh and uh of course a legal expert I mean he has I David was on my podcast the Mona Chan show which will will drop tomorrow by the way if you don't subscribe please do that and you can hear more from David and me uh but uh as I said to him in an email exchange you're a utility infielder you do it all um and i' uh also delighted to welcome Russell Moore who is the editorinchief of Christianity Today um and the author of losing our religion and alter call for Evangelical America and Russell has been involved uh in the culture wars uh up to his elbows and has taken a lot of uh Flack and so and he's always been very courageous but also very gracious about uh how he's handled these things um well we're going to talk today about religion and about Christian nationalism uh but I thought it would be good to begin with something about Donald Trump because he tell me if you agree I I want to spin out something for you it's a theory of mine that he is different in two Trump 2.0 in the following way um there may be other ways but this one I'm going to test you on uh if you watched that inaugural ceremony it was drenched in religious imagery and you had Franklin Graham getting up there and instead of invoking one of the prophets or you know asking God's blessing on this great nation which is all very traditional at inaugurations he looked around and sort of gestured broadly meaning this inauguration this guy and said Look What the Lord Has Done okay so it's like and Trump has been listening to these people who have been telling him that he was spared by the almighty to do great things that that that near assassination in Pennsylvania was God moving his head fraction of an inch doesn't say what H why God didn't turn Corey uh cator's head but uh but you know I I think that this is my this is my um theory that Trump didn't have much use for God in the past because you know all that love thy neighbor stuff would have gotten in his way but now he thinks God himself is Maga so David I'll start with you uh do you do what do you think of this Theory you know I I think it's a very interesting Theory because you also have to understand who really has his ear in the Christian Movement right now and who really has his ear is not actually the Franklin Graham types as much although Franklin Graham obviously does to some extent it's not the classic old school Southern bapti apsts for example or Presbyterians it's part of this movement called the New Apostolic Reformation it's a Pentecostal movement that is drenched in prophecy about Donald Trump just drenched in it and so whereas you might have say at a Baptist or Presbyterian convention the sort of idea that well God is in control and God is Sovereign and it's sort of a general taken as a general truism with the Pentecostal prophecies around it it's not a general God is in control it is God has picked this person for this time and by the way because God has picked this person for this time that means if you're opposing Trump you are opposing God you are on the side of Satan so if you have Trump who's already steeped in this friend to enemy Dynamic anyway I mean right now the reality of American public policy both at home and abroad is if you're friends with Donald Trump you friends with the American government if you are not friends with Donald Trump you are not friends with the American government and this is something that's deeply inculcated in him and what message would be more inclined to sort of prick his ear um in the in this in the spiritual sense than one that says you are God's man everyone who's opposing you is opposing God's plan for America and I'm glad you began with that because it it really introduces the point I wanted to make the level of fanaticism that we are now seeing in the American like broader it's it's not it's it's disproportionately in Pentecostalism but not exclusively in Pentecostalism the level of fanaticism we are now seeing around Donald Trump is unlike anything that I have seen including anything I've seen in the Trump era it's just escalating and it's escalating around these Supernatural prophecies and the sort of sense of divine Mission Divine protection Divine sanction around the person of Donald Trump so Russell um is there no push back or is there not significant push back among Christians because this I mean I'm not a Christian but it sure sounds like idolatry to me um [Applause] what well I think the division that we have right now in churches uh tends to be between people who want their church politicized and people who do not want their Church uh politicized and so you have two very different psychologies at work so the people who aren't on board with this kind of thing are also the people who typically want to be unified they don't want to argue about this stuff at Sunday school or in small groups uh as opposed to those who really do want it uh politicized and I think the interesting thing that we've seen is the shift from the appeal to evangelicals in say 2016 from now now Mike Pence uh was the vice president because the Assumption was we have to appeal to evangelicals with somebody who supports traditional family values and his pro-life and and so forth I think Donald Trump tested that theory and uh found out that his constituency they they don't vote for him because he holds certain positions they adapt to certain positions because he holds them yeah and so uh I I could have never imagined uh say in 2016 that a Republican president would appoint a pro-choice Secretary of Health and Human Services would announce uh an IVF uh policy uh the way he did the other day and there would be almost nothing in response so I think he's tested that and found what it is so I want to stick with you for a second Russell because you had this um you had this line that was quoted by our friend Jonathan Rouch in his book and uh it it really summed up something um and I'd like to hear you expound upon it you said the church is bleeding out the Next Generation not because the culture is so opposed to the church's Fidelity to the truth but just the reverse the culture often does not reject us because they don't believe the church's doctrinal and moral teachings but because they EV be but because of the evidence that the church doesn't believe its own doctrinal and moral teachings so yeah when I first started out in Ministry if someone if a young Christian came to me and said I'm having a crisis of faith it was typically over Miracles or they thought the morality was too strict or something along those lines I almost never encountered that now uh instead it is I don't believe the church believes all of the things that that I have been taught I had one woman who came up to me one time and said my daughter went to college and is having a a spiritual crisis because she said the atheists she know knows demonstrate peace hope love gentleness self-control more than the people in her church wow um that's a crisis in my yeah so David um there's a lot of evidence that um churches are losing members um there are now um as I understand it more people in America who identify as none n o NES rather than nuu n uh um then all white Protestants put together um and so but what I found this really interesting little datum in the Pew research and it it said that um people were more likely to vote for Trump and I should say of course voting for Trump doesn't make you a bad person necessarily but people were more this is murmuring in the crowd Mona the crowd is turning against you I hear you believe me um there but what the what the Pew um data showed is that among frequent so in 2016 we heard that there were a lot of people who called themselves Evangelical but they weren't really churchgoers they were just casually attached and they were using that label and they voted for Trump but the really religious people the ones who were in The pews every Sunday they weren't brought they weren't caught caught in on to this at all and now you see just the opposite now in the data you see people who are weekly churchgoers are more likely to vote for Trump than those who are Loosely attached and the only group for whom this is not true at least among white Protestants is um the mainline churches so explain that please what's going on in those churches yeah so I essentially and I remember all this data too I remember late 2015 early 2016 as a lifelong Evangelical I'm like those are the non- churchgoing evangelicals that are supporting Trump and all that went away so fast and and I'll tell you the point where I really notice this shift is when he secured the nomination when there was no doubt that he was the Republic nominee and there's a statistician of religion named Ryan Burge I would urge anyone to follow him if you are curious about just the raw facts of religion and he in the United States and he he says this very well he says white evangelicals are Republicans and Republicans are white evangelicals there there's just a total total identity between the party and the church and it's so total so Mona he also charted out where did every other major religious group in America fall regarding ideologically compared to the two parties and they found that every other religious group in America whether it's uh black Protestants were slightly to the right of the democratic party LD members of the LDS church were slightly to the left of the Republican Party um atheists were slightly to the left of the democratic party every group had its own sort of individual distinct identity non-white evangelicals were to the left of the Republican party but white evangelicals were identically aligned with the Republican Party and so when Trump secured that nomination what he inherited was basically 40 Years of a culturation that has taught white evangelicals if I am an Evangelical I am a Republican and who so whoever is the Republican nominee is not evaluated on their own merits necessarily it's they're a republican I'm a republican this is part of my identity as a Christian and so therefore I am voting and so essentially what happened then is locked into that Republican nomination he became the Republican standard Bearer he became the only option for tons of evangelicals because again they had been taught for 40 years that support for a Democrat could be sinful that support for a Democrat means that perhaps you're not even a Christian and so this locked in and connected him to this church culture and then so that was stage one and then stage two two is this radicalization process that began to kick in because again they are taught again for 40 years if the media doesn't like somebody I need to like somebody right if the Democrats really are motivated against somebody then I need to have their back and so he locks into all of this and then on top of that come some of the things like I talked about just a moment ago the prophecies the Declarations from major spiritual leaders that America's about to fall if he doesn't win and so he just benefited he he kind of came in and benefited on 40 Years of acculturation in the white evangelical church and then it just got turned to 11 it just got turned to 11 because every time he got worse the intensity of the religious support for him grew all the more and that's what was so stunning to me it was as if every display of bad behavior the religious leaders who had backed him to the hilt had to dig in more they just kept digging in to the point where and I knew we were cooked totally cooked as a conservative Movement by January 7th 2021 because I could see what everyone else sort of in professional politics could see which was on January 7th of the three big most powerful Republicans in America at that point between Mitch McConnell Mike Pence and Donald Trump with Republicans Mike Pence's approval plummeted McConnell's approval plummeted and Donald Trump stayed Sky High with Republicans and that taught me that the radicalization was essentially complete yeah it was complete by that time and then fulfilled now so Russell it sounds like in this process of radicalization they've these particular kinds of Evangelical Christians have kind of bleached Jesus out you know it's like Donald Trump Jr says well turn the other cheek what has that ever gotten us um well it's worse than that as as I've mentioned before uh I started hearing from pastors who would say whenever they kind of parenthetically uh quoted from The Sermon on the Mount if you're if someone strikes you turn the other cheek that people would come up afterward and say where did you get those liberal talking points from Jesus Christ um and what was most disturbing about a lot of these stories is that when the Pastor said I'm quoting from Matthew the response is not oh I'm sorry it was well yeah that was fine for then but we're in a state of emergency right now so we we're in a hostile culture so those things don't apply as though Jesus were delivering The Sermon on the Mount in Mayberry instead of in the Roman Empire [Applause] so this is kind of what you seem to be sketching out both of you is that this is um a a kind of form of idolatry it is really postchristian right because if it doesn't really involve the gospels if it's not about traditional Christian virtues that have been successfully taught and transmitted for 2,000 years it is about you know a party and a there was a good line in a piece by Pete wayer in uh the Atlantic where he quoted a pastor I think who said for a lot of these people Christianity is more of a hood ornament than a true Faith um so what what do you make of that is that what we're dealing with are these people in a way postchristian I think that what is at the root of a lot of this is boredom H yes I think there is such uh an absence of uh genuine connection and genuine experience of transcendence in American life right now that people can get a kind of jolt sort of an artificial simulation of Life by uh hating uh people and lining up behind a a political uh ideology I mean I I think often about what Steve Bannon said to the Atlantic a while back when he said you know you've got the guy who's da from accounts payable but online he can be Ajax the warrior and Dave from accounts payable when he dies some people will you know stand up and say some words and go home Ajax the warrior has a funeral p and what I want to do is to give Dave from accounting the idea of being Ajax The Warrior all the time and so there is a sense in which there's a feeling of doing something uh by lining up behind an ideology and trying to find who The denters are and and uh Exile them I think our danger those of us who aren't on board with that is we can do the same thing with anxiety we can feel as though we're doing something simply by giving up hope and uh and worrying about it rather than marching forward okay but you have not succumbed to that um you have formed an organization called the Afterparty so uh if you could both just tell us a little bit about what you do and how that's going yeah so basically with with the Afterparty what we did is we created a new Christian political curriculum that focused much more on the what we were calling the how of politics than the what so the what would be what tax rate is there what the what would be what level of Aid to Ukraine the what would be what kind of border security and look and if you're looking for the Bible to give you the answers for all of these policy questions you're going to be looking for a long time because the Bible is like light on policy right it really is but the Bible is very heavy on virtue so it tells Christians I was I was speaking at uh Southeastern Baptist uh theolog Theological Seminary a couple years ago and somebody asked me what book are you reading right now to get you through this moment and I gave like the most Evangelical answer ever I said the Bible and I said but in a very specific way I'm reading the New Testament knowing that every syllable of that book is written to a people infinitely more oppressed than American Christians are like infinitely if you if you talk to imagine imagine you pull somebody from the Coliseum they're about to be facing the Lions and they're like you know you think you had it bad you just had a beating I know but I just endured a tweeting and and so you're just in this world where there's this sort of sense that has developed that is this sense of emergency this and so in this sense of emergency because as Russell was just saying that worked for then not now and so what we wanted to do with the Afterparty is rebalance the instruction around the biblical waiting and the biblical waiting really is on virtue it is on ethics it's on morality and our theme verse was Micah 68 which says what does the Lord require of you oh man what is good it is to act justly so you don't forget you you don't forsake Justice to be the nicest person in the room right but it says you act justly you love kindness and you walk humbly with the Lord your God and our message to the church was very simple if those three virtues those three Justice kindness and humility are not present we're not doing it right that's right and we're not doing it right and what I will tell you is it was amazing to me even amongst pastors who had join on like Zoom calls and events who are kind of friendly to our perspective still have had the same question which was but what if that doesn't work what do you mean what do you mean what if it doesn't work these are not contingent commands right it's love kindness and walk humbly unless you lose the 2016 presidential election no it's not dead at all and so and so what we were really trying to say is here are the non-negotiable minimum standards of conduct through which Christians should and how we should present present ourselves into the political Arena and oh by the way the political arena is not a special morality free zone it is not and so by trying to do that we tried to refocus the values where actually where the Bible actually emphasizes them yeah I think you said uh I'll be with you one second you said at one point that uh that some Christians you have seen say well I'm an on Twitter but I go and volunteer at the soup kitchen once a week right and that's that doesn't that doesn't obliterate the being an on Twitter they think that if you can compartmentalize it like if I'm really a great coach of my son's Little League team and I'm a fantastic Sunday school teacher I can be Ajax online yeah and be vicious and cruel to people which again there's no biblical sanction for that and also and also a lot of a lot of people in this country only encounter evangelicals through the political sphere first that's right are we putting our best foot forward there no no as a as a collectively now there are exceptions who are wonderful but collectively the message that is being spent forward from the Christian Community in this country white Evangelical community in this country is mainly I am afraid of you and I don't like you right and I am preparing to go to battle against you and that's the message that's being sent and I it's hard for me to conceive of a message more opposite of the Love Of Christ so yeah Russ it used to frustrate me in the pre-trump era whenever reporters would call and ask about evangelicals it always had to do with uh political uh action and so I said to one of them you all seem to think that evangelicals are cicas who are in dormy until the Iowa caucuses every four years and then come out and there's more to it than that but David's right we have moved into a time that is it's not just that religion has become politicized it's that in many places the boundary markers for whether you're in or out have to do with these political and partisan and ideological categories and what we found is that there actually are a lot of Christians who want Christianity and who don't want to go to a church in order to sign up for political iCal arguments of any kind right left or Center but who don't know really how to do that and so I get the question constantly from you know when I first started a Ministry I would have parents who would say you know I've got a a wayward uh adult son or daughter how do I deal with them now it's almost always the reverse where I have young Christians who are saying I really want a relationship with my mom and dad but all they want to do is argue about Trump yeah what do I do uh and there are a lot of people who are saying that's not what I'm I'm here for wherever I I am on the political Spectrum so what does it look like and and what do we do and so that's why we said this is for as as David said not the not the list of uh principles because one of the things that was really alarming to me I went through a a kind of a spiritual crisis as a teenager and one of the reasons is because there was a Christian Co ition voting guide in my church and I'm looking at the Christian position and thinking to myself where is the Christian position on the line item veto which was there uh and it just seems like the Christian position happens to line up perfectly with all of the planks of this candidates uh position you didn't read St Mark it's right in there it's in the ending yeah uh and so the question is is this just a means to an end yeah I came to the conclusion it's not it's deeper it's more important it's true uh but that's one of the reasons why it's so tragic to see it uh turned into just another arena for political ARG just just to put an exclamation point on your what you were saying earlier about how political lus tests are becoming the religious litmus test an actual person of some notoriety in the Christian nationalist World actually tweeted this out not long ago the Creeds and confessions are not enough if you want to know if your church is sound ask your pastor what he thinks of David French oh my God and if he likes me run away from that church this actually happened in the world it's utterly bizarre that's that's in the New Testament who do you say that David French is [Applause] okay I think we're running out of time just one last thing I'd ask you to um to think or talk about with us and that is um is there a hunger out there for the real thing I mean do you get that feedback that you know there are people in these churches who maybe aren't the loudest but who feel that they've been losing something because the church is getting so politicized and that there's an appetite for somebody to come along and say you know what we need to put that aside and focus back on God and one another and all that absolutely there are a lot of those people and there are a lot of those people who are very young uh who don't have the social pressure to have to belong to a church they're part of the church because they really do believe uh in Jesus and one of the things we saw on the left is in a lot of the mainline churches that became very partisan and politicized in the 60s and 70s where uh you know the Easter message is the resurrection teaches us how to recycle and that kind of thing where you had uh every issue turning into a policy sort of uh argument people could figure out if I want to do leftist politics I can just do it and now you have a lot of people who are figuring out if I want to do right-wing politics I can do that without giving up a Sunday morning and so there are a lot of people who are saying we don't want that we really do want to follow Christ but they're not sure how to do it and one of the things that I get constantly is from Christians who are saying well give us a word of Hope and my response to that is to say the Bible tells us that hope that is seen is not hope instead suffering leads to endurance endurance leads to character and character leads to Hope and so genuine hope is not reassurance well this is all going to turn out okay instead it is longterm yes things are going to turn out okay but it may be that what God is doing right now in uh the church requires a time of being baffled and bewildered rather than just coming up with another Market driven blueprint which got us into this mess in the first place David you know I I teach at at I teach at my alma Moder lipom University at Christian school in Nashville and I can tell you that the kids I'm teaching make me genuinely hopeful for the future of the church because the kids that I'm teaching are love your neighbor Christians they are not fear the world Christians right and I I think that a lot of us maybe in this room and this would be me and the churches that I grew up I grew up in fear the World Church churches where everything was about training you to go forth and do battle right go forth and fight and it created this weird sort of hair trigger mentality where you're just where's the persecution yes right and then like you're 17 in high school and someone offers you a beer and you say no and they go come on man and you go there it is there's the persecution and and so it created this sort of figh ORF flight response that is creating the problem that we have but what we really what I am seeing is that young people older folks middle-age people are hungry for kindness they're hungry for it they're desperate for it and so I think that this is a moment for love your neighbor Christianity this is a moment for countercultural Christianity one that circles around the fruit of the spirit kindness peace patience gentleness self-control we don't have too much of that out there right and so so what I have found in this land of the disconnected and this uh there's just been some incredible work done I don't know if you've read some of what Derek Thompson has written in the Atlantic about how we just don't spend time with each other anymore we're not around each other there's a group called overzero that did out a belonging index that said that about two-thirds of Americans feel a sense of non-belonging in their homes and their communities and their workplaces and from my standpoint if you're a love your neighbor Christian that's like that's like your music right any WWE fans in here like other than me okay so there's like I one of my greatest moments is I saw Jerry The King Lawler wrestle Tojo Yamamoto in a Texas cage match and R Arina live and in person so I'm me too yeah that was great incredible incredible stuff but in the in the wrestling world you always know who's coming out the door because of the music they like that's the Undertaker's music he's coming and so I feel like all of this loneliness and all of this lack of belonging there I don't know what our music would be like strains of Amazing Grace or something like that's our music that's when we come out to heal those hurts that's when we come out to demonstrate love in the face of hatred that's when we come out to demonstrate kindness in the face of Cruelty this is the moment for the church this is the moment when hatred arises love arises the greater and the and so I I think that we should not be discouraged by the hatred we can lament it we can grieve it but don't be discouraged by it don't be discouraged by the bomb threats be motivated but motivated in a specific way a motivated in a way to heal this country and that's true when there's a there's a hunger even Beyond I was teaching on a secular uh campus uh where my students I don't think any of them had ever met an Evangelical Christian until me and one of them I guess assumed because I'm anti-trump that I'm a liberal and started asking me questions and I was answering the questions and he said so wait a minute you're kind of um Bible thumping Revival preacher and I said yes I feel so seen after four years of being called a cultural Marxist that's exactly what I am and then we talked about ultimate matters of life and death there there are a lot of people who are asking those questions and who want to belong to a genuinely countercultural Community it would be a shame if there weren't a church here to do that well with that I will say thank you both so much this has been a great conversation and thank you all hey YouTube fam if you want to support the bull workk the best way to do it is by becoming a YouTube buw workk plus member the buw workk is truly independent we have no overlords we're not settling any dumb lawsuits with Trump by joining you help support our work and you can get a bunch of perks right here on this platform add free content bonus videos live streams and some emojis of me which I guess some people want so come join come hang out become a bull workk YouTube plus member and I'll be seeing you in the comments so behave