Welcome to Democracy-ish.

I am Danielle Moody.

And I'm a Jha-Tali.

And Waj, we have a special guest that I am so excited to be in conversation with because I don't know how many

times I talk about white evangelical Christians in a week. So we have the person who literally

wrote the book on it. Please do her the honor and give our folks an introduction.

We are blessed to have Professor Kristen Dume here, who's the author

of the bestselling and much necessary book that you all need to read called Jesus and John Wayne,

how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. It's available in paperback. Thank you,

Christian, for joining us. Oh, thank you for having me. It's available in paperback. Thank you, Christian, for joining us.

Oh, thank you for having me.

It's, you know, so we talk often on this podcast about the rise of white Christian nationalism,

how it was a major factor in the January 6th violent insurrection. You know, we scratch our heads trying to figure out why so many white Christian evangelicals love this guy called Donald Trump, despite his anti-Semitism and his misogyny and his cruelty and his racism.

And the more racist he is, it seems the more that they love him.

And you, in this book and in your scholarship, you've kind of done this brilliant job of tracing it back to the 50s, even before that, to show the

seeds of what has germinated now into this full-blown movement where there's this marriage

between white evangelical Christians and the GOP. And we really want to get deep into this because

all those, all the stuff that we're talking about

in the 50s and 60s it's a comeback now it's a remake prayers and schools and school choice and

attacking women's rights and the feminists and the gays and apparently the Muslims have probably

replaced the communists but maybe the communists will make a comeback and so to connect the dots

for so many of our listeners,

...