Pretty Heady Stuff
Pretty Heady Stuff
Pretty Heady Stuff
Katherine Stewart decrypts how Christian fundamentalism is seizing power in the United States
43 minutes Posted Jul 4, 2026 at 9:17 pm.
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Katherine Stewart has covered the intersection of faith and politics for over 17 years; her work appears in the New York Times, the New Republic, Religion News Service, the Guardian and elsewhere. Her latest book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is one of Foreign Affairs magazine’s Best Books of 2025. Her previous, award-winning title, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, formed the basis of the documentary feature, God & Country.

I wanted to speak with Katherine to talk about the United States' evangelical bet on Christianity as a means of galvanizing a divided nation, and her research into the ways that this has been leveraging by the elite as part of a movement for securing minority rule.

The Power Worshippers, our main focus here, looks at how "the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.... [T]his is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America's religious nationalists aren't just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.
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