A Christian Nationalist Has Second Thoughts
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2024
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Reverend Rob Schenck was once one of America’s most powerful and influential evangelical leaders. He routinely lobbied legislators to adopt a Christian conservative agenda. Members of his anti-abortion activist group barricaded the doors and driveways of abortion clinics. He even trained wealthy couples to befriend Supreme Court justices in an attempt to persuade them to render judgments that would please conservative Christians.
But along the way, Schenck began doubting where the movement was taking him—and the country. His fellow activists seemed more interested in gaining power than advancing the tenets of humility and selflessness he remembers learning about when he first converted to Christianity. By the mid-2010s, he realized that he had been forging a dangerous, divisive path, one that was leading to a new Christian nationalism with Donald Trump as its figurehead.
“I’m afraid I helped build the ramp that took Trump to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” he says. “And that’s a very painful reality for me.”
Schenck has since left the movement and been ostracized by some of his former fellow activists for his opposition to Trump. In this podcast extra, Schenck sits down with host Al Letson to talk about his conversion into and out of Christian conservatism and what he’s doing today to rein in the very movement he helped to build.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When I announced publicly that I was voting for Joe Biden in 2020, for many of my fellows in the |
| 0:09.9 | Evangelical Church world, that was the final straw for them. I was gone. I was now banished, ostracized. |
| 0:20.0 | There was no place for me in their world any longer. |
| 0:25.0 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is reveal. |
| 0:35.0 | I'm Al Lettson. |
| 0:37.0 | In the weeks leading up to November 5th, we're going to be popping into the podcast midweek to bring you some additional |
| 0:44.9 | stories that look more deeply into the issues behind the election. |
| 0:48.8 | If you missed it, we just did a really great episode about a small town pastor in Pennsylvania who's |
| 0:54.4 | blurring the lines between church and state it's called In God We Vote. Be sure to |
| 1:00.1 | check out that episode in the reveal feed if you haven't heard it yet. |
| 1:03.9 | And today I'm going to dig even deeper. |
| 1:06.9 | By talking with Reverend Rob Schenck, a former Christian nationalists who was instrumental |
| 1:12.0 | in pushing elected leaders and even the Supreme Court |
| 1:15.1 | towards a more conservative agenda. Here's how he describes Christian nationalism. |
| 1:20.3 | It's a concept that America was founded as a distinctly white, and I might put that in parentheses, |
| 1:32.1 | but let's just say white Christian nation, a white Christian |
| 1:38.8 | culture and civilization, and that it must be preserved and protected as such by custom and by law. |
| 1:49.7 | And that's what I preached and I promoted and I facilitated for many years. |
| 1:57.0 | Until eventually, Rob had a change of heart and converted out of the movement, which he wrote about in his 2018 book, |
| 2:05.4 | Costly Grace, an evangelical minister's rediscovery of faith, hope, and love. |
| 2:25.0 | So as a preacher's kid as I was listening to your book and reading a couple articles and interviews preparing for this interview. The thing that struck me was your life story reminds me of stories that like I was taught when I was a kid and I'm thinking specifically |
| 2:35.3 | the story of Saul becoming Paul now I know that like some theologians say that |
... |
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