Money, Lies and God: Inside Movement to Destroy American Democracy
By Katherine Stewart
© 2025: Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc. (New York)
I would not be surprised if you were thinking that this book could not possibly have any relevance to the Sierra Club in Arizona. I thought the same thing when I started reading this book. To begin to answer that, consider this quote from Lance Wallnau, a leading figure in the Reawaken America national tour and Christian Nationalist Movement.
“Environmentalists and anti-fossil fuel advocates are controlled by demons.”
I don’t know about you, but when I think about all the people I’ve met and all the activities I’ve participated in through the Sierra Club, I can find no evidence that we were controlled by demons. For me, being an environmentalist and active Sierra club member has been the most rewarding and beneficial experience of my entire life. I would imagine you feel the same way. If you agree, I doubt very much that your life is controlled by demons.
Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States of America there has been a lot of talk among us in the environmental movement about reaching common ground with Trump and the Republican party on environmental issues. If you feel this way, as I did, consider this comment by the author, Katherine Stewart in the foreward to this book:
“(The Christian Nationalist) movement is not looking for a seat at the noisy
table of democracy; it wants to burn down the house.”
Players in the movement may be familiar if you follow the news. If you follow the “School Choice” controversy you are probably familiar with former US Secretary of Education Betsy deVos. Other less famous names are Pepsi heirs James and Joan Lindsay of Montecito California, the home of UK’s Prince Harry and Megan Markle. Democracy threatens their paranoid core belief in unlimited wealth and the power and privilege it brings. The monied players givetheir money to private colleges such as Hillsdale College in Michigan and Westmont College in Montecito to educate and develop the politicians they support, including US Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, Vice President JD Vance, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The player’s money goes through nonprofit organizations such as the Claremont Institute, the Heartland Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation to networks such as Faith Wins, the Black Robe Regiment, Watchmen on the Wall, and Pastors for Trump to recruit Catholic and Protestant clergy to spread the evils of LBGT rights, Gay Marriage, Abortion, and the virtues of unrestrained market (monopoly) capitalism.
Certainly not all wealthy individuals, whether they inherited their wealth or earned it themselves, subscribe to this paranoid narcissistic obsession. John D. Rockefeller gave the land to the National Park Service that would become Grand Teton National Park. Locally one is reminded of the Pulliam Trust ,which financed the construction of the Audubon Center at the Rio Salado Preserve.
As you might remember, the Heritage Foundation and Russel Vought, currently the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, was the author of Project 2025. In Project 2024 it specifically states that the US Department of Interior’s first priority is funding fossil fuel production. Conservation of public lands and their natural resources are no longer important. Vought is well known as an enthusiastic supporter of the Christian Nationalist movement.
Why is this church-based method so effective in creating a movement of believers among people who least benefit from the paranoid delusions of this monied wealthy minority? Stewart quotes a 2023 survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) revealing that 85% of the people who subscribe to Christian Nationalist ideas believe that discrimination against white people is at least as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. This study, by Robert Jones, reveals that rank and file supporters are “Less concerned about jobs and economic mobility than about a deep sense of protecting white Christian America from what they perceive to be a foreign and corrupting influence.” Although the fear that they might lose their jobs is important, what is far more important is destroying anything that threatens their superiority and dominance over other belief systems and ethics they are unwilling to accept or unable to understand.
Consider some of these ideas that are being presented in church sermons throughout the United States:
“There is a dark hole of evil descending down from the heavens unto the Biden White House”
“The true meaning of the gospel of Matthew was not to pursue social justice
but to promote the capitalist institutions of property, markets, and free enterprise”
A key element of the Christian Nationalist agenda is education from elementary school to graduate school throughout the US. Consider this statement from lay evangelist Robert Bohlinger:
“Our goal is not just to throw stones. Our goal is to take down the education
system as we know it”
D. James Kennedy, an influential preacher who received $5.5 million through former Secretary of Education Betsy deVos, had this to say about public education in the UStoday:
“The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic, one-world
anti-American system of education in public schools has indeed become
such that if it had been done by an enemy it would be considered an act of war”
Many of us who look back fondly on our time in public education would most likely find these words quite foreign to our personal experience. One wonders what these people think of outdoor and environmental education. For Christian Nationalists, any open discussion of the pros and cons of both sides of hot environmental issues would strictly be off limits. Public and private schools would not be allowed to evaluate peer reviewed research into global warming and the rapidly diminishing supply of water in the Colorado River.
How do we go about countering the Christian Nationalist agenda? Stewart offers these steps:
- Recognize that we are still the majority: Most voters reject the politics of conquest and division and want a healthy conservation of environmental policy that represents all viewpoints, not just the capitalist oligarchy.
- They are divided: The antidemocratic alliance depends on an alliance with the disenfranchised to protect the privileged at the expense of the rest of society. Many of Chrisitan Nationalists’ most avid supporters, who aren’t wealthy and powerful, will directly suffer under the effects of their anti-environmental, anti-labor, and anti-democratic policies.
- Extreme levels of inequality are eroding democracy: As Louis Brandeis bravely illustrated, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in a few hands, but we can’t have both.” Money that finances right wing anti-environmental market policies, gerrymandered legislative and US Congressional Districts, and anti-labor legislation wouldn’t be possible without funding from Leonard Leo and the State Policy Network and other oligarchs. A progressive system of taxation that reduces the dominance of the 1% of the population that controls 70% of the wealth would help reverse this inequality. Clearly some of the wealthiest players in the Christian Nationalist movement can afford one or two fewer yachts or exotic mansions to help the nation as a whole prosper.
- Knowledge is Power: Anything that advances national public policy discourse advances democracy. The assault on public education is an attempt to raise a population that is compliant with authoritarian rule by the oligarchs.
- Organization Matters: The power players, like Betsy deVos, Russell Vought, and Leonard Leo, have built up a massive integrated organization that may not always agree on the methods, but at the core they all believe in the same core principal: protecting unlimited wealth, privilege, and power at all costs without regard to the consequences for our earth, land, and water that all of us live on. As Sierra Club members we should think about alliances with the labor movement and public education advocates. Environmentalists should build alliances with the communities that White Christian Nationalists want to deny their basic civil rights through marginalization and harassment.
Katherine Stewart has spent over 14 years covering White Christian Nationalism since she first encountered the brainwashing Good News Club in her children’s elementary school. She has been inside hundreds of meetings of the movement as an unobtrusive observer. The one hope I would offer is that over the years nations and movements that seek to demonize and dehumanize people in diverse and complex societies usually self-destruct. This happened in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Hopefully, as you read this, it is not too late to stop the Christian Nationalist movement from dominating the US with their message of exclusion, discrimination, and disrespect for opposing policy options, and for the land, air, and water of our country.