The J6 Select Committee Didn't Mention Christian Nationalism - Despite Their Expert Testimony

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I have two returned guests who many of you will be very familiar with, and that is Dr. Andrew Whitehead and Dr. Sam Perry. Many of you listening will know them from their work, their co-authored book Taking America Back for God, which has been a kind of field-changing text when it comes to discussing and analyzing Christian nationalism in the United States. You'll know them from their many other works and their co-authored articles on Christian nationalism. And I use these articles all the time in my classes on everything from the perceptions of police brutality to voting patterns and all kinds of stuff.

Sam has a book that came out just in the last year with Dr. Phil Gorski called The Flag and the Cross. And Andrew has numerous works, but one of them that is coming, and we're all very excited about, is his new book American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church. Andrew, give me the subtitle.

Andrew Whitehead: How Christian nationalism betrays the gospel and threatens the church.

Brad: Betrays the gospel and threatens the church. There we go. All right. So Andrew and Sam, thanks for coming back and thanks for being here.

Andrew: Thank you.

Sam Perry: Always a pleasure.

Brad: So we're here today to talk about something I think is really important, and that is both of you wrote a co-authored testimony—just a wonderful outline of the impacts of Christian nationalism on the insurrection of January 6th. You were invited to do this and to submit this to the United States House of Representatives, to the Select Committee on January 6th. I'm looking at the testimony, the written testimony in front of me, and this will be available publicly here going forward. We'll post the link in our show notes so people can see that.

Let me just start with this. This is a written testimony to Congress. Most people have never done this, not a genre most people are familiar with. They don't know how it works. So would you just give us a little backstory on what happens when somebody invites you to submit a testimony to Congress, and what you maybe hoped would come out of that as you did it?

Sam: Right. So, I mean, it's—I think being invited to do something like that first, we were really excited, but it actually, I think, was a continuation of several conversations that we had had ongoing on various things, like with our participation in the Baptist Joint Committee. This large report that we did with Jamar Tisby and Andrew Seidel and others, and Captain Stewart and others on Christian nationalism and its role in January 6th. And we had been able to interact with the House on various things, say like their Free Thought Caucus, and that's led by Jamie Raskin and other House reps there.

And so representatives for those politicians reached out to us, and they said, "Hey, we're gathering a lot of information about January 6th. The committee wants all of the experts that know anything about the kinds of things that went on there." And of course, because we had written about Christian nationalism and its role on January 6th, and we had a lot of evidence—we had a lot of evidence and data—we were able to contribute to what we felt was like a unique perspective that went beyond just what we could all observe through video and through various pictures that were taken at the Capitol.

Those are certainly important, and anybody who wants to can get days and days worth of story and footage and representation there. But because we had lots and lots of survey data that had been collected, not just at one point in time, but we actually had panel data that traveled with people or that followed Americans before and after the January 6th insurrection, we were able to see how attitudes changed. Our unique perspective we wanted to contribute was: the kinds of things that we witnessed at the Capitol, how pervasive are they, and how are they tied to other really noxious kinds of political attitudes that I think threaten our very democracy?

Brad: Andrew, I'm wondering if I can ask you—as you did this, as Sam says, this is kind of growing organically out of the work you've been doing, the conversations you've been having, the connections between the Baptist Joint Committee and Congress representatives like Jamie Raskin and Representative Hoffman, who's come on this show. When you did this, Andrew, I'm wondering—as academics, we're used to kind of dashed hopes, but we have to try. So I'm just wondering, what were you hoping might come out of putting all this on paper for the committee to see?

Andrew: Yeah, I think obviously we would hope that it would be useful to them, and useful as well moving forward, as we try to not only understand what happened on January 6th, but then going forward, how we can prevent or be aware or respond back to what's happening out in the American public. Because, as Sam was saying, I think our unique contribution can be: what does public survey data tell us? And that's what we do, and that's kind of our bread and butter.

And many others were watching and cataloging religion, Christian symbolism on January 6th—what was there? And then I think we can show across the American public, how pervasive are some of these beliefs of, honestly, the insurrectionists, as they live-streamed themselves breaking into the Capitol, and the words they were using, the terms they were using, the way that they were understanding what they were doing in real time. We can, to an extent, measure that and see that.

So we didn't collect data from the insurrectionists, but we can see what Americans kind of think and believe about the special role of this particular expression of Christianity in American public life. And then what is that connected to? Because Christian nationalism isn't the only explanation of January 6th, but it's an important one, and there are others, and we kind of show that these things are intertwined, and they're still with us. And so I think that's what we were hoping would be useful. Because I think what led to January 6th wasn't new. This wasn't our first experience of political violence, as many people have written, and it likely won't be our last, because much of this is still with us. So yeah, I think that's some of our hope.

Sam: And I actually, I think just following up on that, I think what—as it did materialize in terms of being able to, I think, express the contents of that testimony to a broader audience. But I think what Amanda Tyler was able to do before Congress, and she just crushed it in terms of what she was able to present, it was coherent. It was powerful. I think ultimately, we were hoping to get such an opportunity. The fact that Amanda Tyler was able to do that with her expertise, with her awareness of all that's going on in the field, all these different parts, pieces and contributions people have made—I think it's platforms like that so that we can actually have this really kind of national conversation about Christian nationalism. That's what we'd hope and she was able to do that, which I think we were really glad for.

Brad: Yeah, and if you're listening friends, Amanda Tyler is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee, which is an organization that fights for the separation of church and state, freedom from religion in the state, for the sake of freedom of religion. And she's also spearheading that organization's program, Christians Against Christian Nationalism. So Amanda Tyler was able to actually testify before Congress as part of everything we're talking about today.

Well, you two really identify four main elements that were influential in motivating people at the insurrection, and these are tied directly to Christian nationalism. So I want to give people a kind of window into the testimony that you provided, and the ways that you tie together the motivation for participating in J6 with Christian nationalism.

So the first one is the big lie. And you talk about how the big lie is something we're all familiar with now. The 2020 election was stolen. The outcome was manipulated by fraud. That's the idea. One of the things I maintain in my work is that the big lie connected with Christian nationalists because they have been told something like the country has been stolen from them since the 1960s. So this is a group that's used to hearing "it's been stolen from you," and then the big lie comes along, and it just taps into all of those decades and decades of people stoking the fire saying "Your country has been taken away from you by people who don't deserve it."

So can you help us understand this? How does the big lie, according to the data, connect with Christian nationalism when it comes to the insurrection?

Sam: Yeah, I mean, it's actually pretty astonishing how powerfully the two are related with one another. So just like in previous studies we had, we had shown that Christian nationalism—even after Christian nationalist ideology as we measure it with various kinds of questions about what you agree with about the federal government establishing the United States as a Christian nation, or the founding documents being divinely inspired, or those kinds of things—just as it predicts Trump's support, like for the vote, it is basically associated with believing the big lie in what we'd call a linear relationship, right? Like the more one increases, the other increases.

But this is important, and what this is—something, I think, we try to stress in the testimony itself. We always want to be careful about disentangling white Christian nationalism from Christian nationalism that we might see that might reflect other kinds of attitudes and political views that, say, of a Black American. So we show in the testimony that as Christian nationalism increases, Black Americans, for example, are no more likely to believe the big lie. It's not something that adjusted their views in any meaningful way. But for white Americans, it basically goes from nothing to like 90 percent, right?

Like so in other words, at the lowest values of our Christian nationalism measure—taking into account partisanship and ideology and region of the country, and education, all those things—we show that people who strongly disagree with Christian nationalism rejected the big lie completely. People who strongly embrace Christian nationalism were upwards around like 80 to 90 percent believe the big lie. And so it tracks so closely with belief in that because of the things that we're talking about: adherence to conspiratorial thinking, us versus them kind of dichotomies, and allegiance to sacred myths about what the nation should be and always must be.

Brad: I think one of the things that surprised many people watching footage from January 6th is the ways that the rioters and the insurrectionists treated police officers, because there seemed to be this understanding that at first they would be on their side. And this is—we can't speak for everyone who was there and we don't have footage of every last person, but there are just these clips that the committee has shown, where there's this sense that, oh, they'll be on our side. And then when they're not, when police enforcement actually try to stop them, it's "you're supposed to be on our side."

And that really leads to, I think, the second element that you highlight, which is this comfort with political violence. And one of the things that really sticks out for me here is that there's this idea that white Christian nationalists are in favor of using authoritarian violence to control what are deemed to be threats and criminals and terrorists. So if we can keep connecting dots, white Christian nationalists feel the country was created for them. They're the founders. Supposedly. The big lie taps into the feeling that despite them founding the country, it's been taken from them.

So Andrew, how does this lead to supporting authoritarian violence to control threats and terrorists? Why would they think that, for example, taking over the Capitol and occupying the Senate chamber is not an act of criminality, but an act of doing one's patriotic duty or what God wants?

Andrew: Yeah, that's a great question, and I think a lot of it aligns with what you're pointing out when these lines of us versus them are drawn, and then the very fate of the country is in the balance. And then you're legitimizing that view in the will of the transcendent, the sacred, that's really powerful. And to the extent that a democratic society allows you to at least feel like you have control over where the country goes, or this vision that you believe God has given you of what this country should look like, then that's fine.

But when that begins to be blocked, and they feel as though they're under attack, and, again, quote unquote, "we are under attack," and it's being taken from us. That's really powerful. And I think what we saw then, and in their own words, they're ready to lay aside pluralistic, democratic society. They're willing to lay aside respecting authorities, if they feel these authorities are again blocking the will of the transcendent.

So just to quote Jenny Cudd, so she was one of the insurrectionists, owns a florist shop in Midland, Texas, and she said: "To me, God and country are tied. To me, they're one the same. We were founded as a Christian country, and we see how far we've come from that. We are a godly country, and we are founded on godly principles. And if we do not have our country, nothing else matters."

And so in that sense, you can see why when they felt as though the authorities were blocking them from enacting what they wanted to do, nothing else matters, not respecting police, not the thin blue line. I mean, there's video of them beating police officers with flagpoles that held Thin Blue Line flags. And so the dissonance is incredible. But so there's comfort with political violence where, in the report, Sam and his colleague Josh Grubbs, they collected all this wonderful data, and one of the questions they ask, and other polling firms ask this question too, but is there a time when we would have to, as American patriots, basically, move towards political violence in order to save our country?

And again, there's this strong association once we account for a lot of other explanations, where if you believe—white Americans who embrace Christian nationalism, they're much more likely to say, yeah, we're gonna have to embrace political violence in order to save our country. We'll set aside whatever, if it means that we're essentially enacting God's will for what we see this country should be.

Brad: Sam, this takes me back to The Flag and the Cross, where you and Phil Gorski talk about three elements working together: freedom, violence, and order. And basically the idea is, for the white Christian nationalists, if the social order is not in the proper alignment, then they can't experience freedom, and thus they may need to use violence to fix that. Just wondering, if you want to jump in here on that sort of trajectory when it comes to J6 and the approach of Christian nationalists to that day.

Sam: Yeah. I mean, I think that January 6th illustrates powerfully the distinction between the nation and the state as it relates to like the imaginary of this kind of group of people. Like, the nation is not the state, clearly, right? Because you can take over and you can violate, you can attack the state. The state is the regime. The state is the corrupt establishment that is working in cahoots with the left and the socialists and the woke and everybody who's taking the things from us.

The nation, though, the true Americans, the patriots, those who love this country and those who want to take it back—or are those who have our same story, right? Like they are, they are those who come from the very soil of the nation, right? And their parents and fathers have shed blood and—this is, and blood is a powerful metaphor here, right? Like as we talk about in The Flag and the Cross, right? Like these metaphors of blood purity and bloody conquest and bloody apocalypse and all of those things are tied together in really powerful way.

So I think, yeah, what we witnessed on January 6th, this, really, if you needed any more evidence that these folks are not patriots in the sense that we like to think of fighting for the country and all the things that it represents. No, they are nationalists, like in what we would argue are white Christian nationalists, or the nation is for us, by us, forever.

Brad: Yeah. Well, this leads us to something that's really important, and is element number three in your testimony, and that is the element of conspiratorial thinking, and it's the, as you say, the close affinity between Christian nationalist ideology and believing outlandish things about one's cultural and political opponents. You link this to QAnon. Paul Djupe has some great data that shows how white evangelicals in particular, and white Christian nationalists are adherents of QAnon in ways that far outpace any other demographic in the country.

So Andrew, I'm just wondering if you can help us understand—and I have my own theory about this that I'll interject here in a second. But why would conspiratorial thinking be a motivating factor to act in the way many did on January 6th at the Capitol. And what is the appeal? Because this is a question I get all the time, why are white Christian nationalists and white evangelicals so susceptible to conspiracy? What is baked in there that connects them. And so wondering how that all looks from your perspective?

Andrew: Yeah, well, I think broadly, some other work that Sam and I have done with Joseph Baker, where we're looking at sources of authority, right, and how Americans who embrace Christian nationalism think about authority. And we're kind of comparing science and the institution of science compared to the Bible, right? And this idea of the Bible is the final authority, and we find that for Americans that embrace Christian nationalism, there is this tension where, if you give science too much, and again, there's a long history here that's been written about really well by historians and other social scientists, but if we give too much authority to this source outside of the Bible, then it's a slippery slope, and who knows where we'll go.

And so there's just been this kind of circle the wagons and we believe the Bible, and that's it. Now, for certain things that don't feel like there's some sort of moral component to them, then there's not an issue there, right, like so we can drive cars, we can use electricity. But when there's this moral component of, well, when does a human become a human, or things like that, or getting vaccines, right, become, which is kind of strangely, but then it just turns into this moral issue now all of a sudden, well, where do we go to authority? And we have to turn here.

So I think in this way, it connects to conspiratorial thinking where, and I think there's some populist strains to this too, that Sam and Phil talk about in their book, The Flag and the Cross, where we don't have to turn to these authorities to tell us what to believe. But within this group, we know what's best, and we need to move forward with this. And so I think it connects to our susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking. Because, yeah, you just can't trust what the man or the people, or, as Sam just said, the state is telling us.

And so susceptibility to the big lie, even though there's no evidence. And when the lawyers are in court, they're saying, "Yeah, we have no evidence." That doesn't matter, because, again, we have certain sources of authority that we can trust. And some really interesting data that was collected a little while ago, they listed some different kind of famous conspiracy theories, and you see, Christian nationalism is strongly associated with every single one. And then, which was just beautiful, they put in a label of a conspiracy theory that doesn't actually exist. The South Carolina or South Dakota crash, right? That's just not actually a conspiracy theory. And the same people are much more likely to believe that that was real.

And so you can see that when you're open to one or more conspiracy theories. The rest are going to follow with you. So it's kind of a way that they enact into the world, right? They embody the world is that we can't trust this and we move towards these other things. And so I think that's where we see this really strong connection and it continues. PRRI just had a Christian nationalism survey. They did a big rollout, like a month ago. And yet again, there they find that as they ask three different questions on QAnon, and these are really, really strongly worded questions, those believers in QAnon, a majority of them are strongly embracing, or at least very sympathetic to Christian nationalism. And so again, there's this really tight connection between understanding who we are as a country and this idea that America is for us as white Christians. And again, particular expression of white Christianity, right? It's not all white Christians, but quite a few. But yeah, that it's for us, and conspiracies are a big part of that as well.

Brad: I've been thinking about this in terms of a kind of offense-defense approach, and so conspiracies often feel like a defensive tactic, like, "Hey, I'm on the margins. The world's against me, and so I'm turning to these alternative explanations to give me some comfort of how the world works." JFK was really assassinated by so and so, and there was no moon landing and they provide a community like, "hey, some other folks believe this. And we all kind of feel like nobody listens to us anyway. So hey, we'll gather together and the world won't listen. They'll laugh. But who cares?"

With white Christian nationalists, it's like there's that defensive thing of, like, "Yeah, we're gonna gather together. No one will believe us. But wait a minute, we founded the country, and we have the authority to determine what's real and what's actual and what's true." So we're not just gonna sit on the sideline and be called conspiracist and let the world kind of treat us that way. We're going to emerge offensively into the public square and go take what's ours based on our understanding of what is real, true and actual evidence be damned, data be damned, experts be damned, Fauci be damned—doesn't matter.

So anyway, this leads right to the fourth element, and I'll throw this to you, Sam, and that is a kind of siloed media context in the United States, one that really puts people in an echo chamber where they're getting information from one place. Again, I think authority comes into that. One of the things that I think that is important for me is that we could have had a situation after the election, and even after J6 that said this was wrong, and this was incited by Donald Trump, like, we could have had Fox News and all of those like places you would look that said, "Guys, there's no big lie. Biden won, that's it."

Sam: They were texting to each other, Fox, right?

Brad: And we know that now, right? We know that like Hannity and Ingraham were all texting each other, but they didn't do that. So I guess what I'm driving here is, how does this siloed media ecosystem provide a motivating factor in J6 as it's tied to Christian nationalism?

Sam: Yeah. I mean, not just January 6th, but I mean, I think COVID as well, and all the things related to that, and even as horrible as January 6th was, I mean, like, think about like the consequences to COVID and, say, like vaccine conspiracies and suppression of the seriousness of COVID for the sake of sowing like doubt about like the Democrats and what they're trying to do and trying to wreck Trump's chances, and those kinds of things. Like, Donald Trump should be at the end of the day, should be arrested for so many things, but like, for my money, the one that sticks out of my mind is like, for him and all of his kind of surrogates, and that includes folks in the information silo, like to politicize COVID in a way that sowed doubt about like the best ways to kind of like that the seriousness of the issue. And I mean, how many people died as a result of that thing?

So January 6th is another—we, I mean, we have all kinds of data, and then we're certainly not the only ones who have collected that. But there's this, of course, partisan media silo, the punditry, that goes on to inflame these kinds of conspiracies, at the very least, to at the very least, if they're not explicitly advocating these kinds of conspiracies, it's the constant hum of, "well, couldn't you imagine them doing something like this," right? Like, or that specter of like, "where I wouldn't put it past him," right? Like, I mean, maybe they didn't do it this time, but you can imagine, right?

And so it's that kind of that it feeds into the conspiracy, conspiratorial thinking, right? It's the—you don't have to believe the explicit details of Pizzagate or something like related to QAnon to say "now, but, you know, but they are groomers," right, like, "but they are into that," you know, "they would support something nefarious and horrible," because it allows you to believe the worst, most horrible things about your political opponent, and it just makes you feel affirmed in that kind of hatred.

And so that goes on with the big lie. It goes on with January 6th. It goes along with COVID and all of the other conspiratorial thing. And like you said, Brad, I think it's really important that this is—it's one thing that you hold kind of—you hold beliefs that don't really affect your day-to-day behavior in any meaningful kind of way, like we do that all the time. Like, there's all—there's people around the country who who believe really outlandish like religious things or political things that they just kind of, you know, people—our colleague, Joseph Baker, who studies like people who who believe in Bigfoot and like UFOs and yeah, they do kind of hobbyist things, right? Like they're looking for Bigfoot or whatever on the side, but that doesn't change how they vote. That doesn't change like whether or not they go, kind of like in in mass, to go, kind of commit violent acts.

And we're entering this kind of territory where it's now becoming normalized to walk around armed, to walk around at these places, and to rally in these kinds of violent ways. And I think that's obviously problematic, but it should point us to something coming down the road, I think.

Brad: I think you're making a great point. If you give me two or three Diet Cokes, I might tell you that I'm not sure about LeBron James going to the Cleveland Cavaliers with the number one pick—kid from Cleveland. But that I don't—I have no intention of taking that anywhere near my state capitol, or that has no effect on me voting. It's just what I'll probably tell you after too many Diet Cokes. And so you're right. This is different. This is like—it changes everything when there's violence and political violence involved.

Let me go to some sort of kind of conclusions that you draw here, and I'm gonna read just a little bit and then throw it to both of you to respond. You say Christian nationalism was not only influential soon after the insurrection, but its influence continues to reshape in real time, how Americans are thinking about the insurrection. By August of 2021, fifty-two percent of those same white Americans in the top quartile, and fifty-eight percent of those in the second-highest quartile now agreed with that the protesters should be arrested.

Thus, not only were white Americans who subscribed to Christian nationalism, initially more sympathetic toward the rioters, they quickly became more so roughly within roughly half a year, if you're listening and that was a lot. The gist of that is that as time goes on, more and more people have become more sympathetic toward the rioters. And I point this out in my book, that as time has gone on, the big lie and the sympathy for those involved in J6 has only become more expansive. It has not dwindled. It has not evaporated.

And I kind of think of this as myth-making in real time, that you're able to make this myth of J6 right in front of our eyes, like we all know about myths of Thanksgiving or myths of the, you know, I cannot lie. I cut down the apple tree, or myths of whatever may be. But this happened, and then in front of our eyes, it was like, "Oh no. J6 was—it was an Antifa. It was an enormous, normal tourist visit. It wasn't that big a deal, whatever may be." So I'm just wondering—as those who gathered the data and have kind of reflected on it, what does it mean to you that in the period since J6 it seems there's more sympathy toward the rioters and what that means for our public square? So, Andrew, what do you think?

Andrew: Yeah, I think, you know, this was really pretty brilliant with Sam and Josh as they gathered this data to do it February, right? Month after the insurrection, and then six months later in August. And yeah, in the report, you can just see the drop among those that embrace Christian nationalism. Twenty percent more of them are at least sympathetic to the rioters and insurrectionists. And so, I think too, this highlights how intertwined all those other elements are with Christian nationalism, because a part of it is the media landscape. I mean, you had where they went for news consistently saying that this was not what everybody's saying it is, right. There was no violence there, it was not an insurrection.

You know, even today still they're saying it was just a peaceful tour, right, of what took place. And so, as we show, Christian nationalism is so tightly intertwined with these different elements, it stands to reason that one of the implications of that is this redefinition. And yeah, Brad, I think your book, and then you had your op-ed in the New York Times of drawing these similarities between the Lost Cause and the Civil War. So the south lost the battle of the war itself, but then in the court of public opinion it won, and that those implications are still with us. And I think what we're seeing today is the same, because these are surveys of the American public. It's not of the people that were at January 6th, but it's these are from the people in those communities and congregations that rioters and insurrectionists went home to. And we can see that they, for the most part, went home to places where, if these folks embrace Christian nationalism, they're they're pretty much okay with what happened there.

And so we, yeah, we see that taking place in real time. And so those implications, I think, are real, because even soon after the insurrection, the Republican National Committee even said that, that was legitimate political discourse, what we saw. And I mean, so normalizing that is truly worrying, and should be truly worrying. And then, too, it degrades some of the functioning of the forms of government as we go on, right? So if somebody—I'm just speaking offhand here, hypothetically, quote unquote, but say somebody commits crimes and the justice department needs to arrest them. If we delegitimize anything that the state does, then, of course, that is too, problematic. And so it's, yeah—as a social scientist sitting here. It's pretty wild to see. But then, as citizens, right? It's truly worrying when there is no actual reality, right? It's all just whatever your group says it is, and so that's what we see taking place. I think

Brad: One of the things that you say numerous times in the testimony is that Christian nationalism provides ideological cover, or theological cover, for these motivations. And I'm wondering, Sam, if, yeah, just thinking about how sympathy for J6 rioters has grown, if that theological cover plays into it in your mind.

Sam: Yeah, I mean, it becomes a—we're watching, like you said, kind of a myth-making in real time. It's a lost cause theology that we are—we are watching like—we are watching be created, right? Like it is a—the protesters are being ennobled as—or being kind of like, not deified, but like, celebrated as patriots who were just kind of like doing patriotic things. I mean, I think what—what was one—one author, oh, we were talking about this on social media a couple couple weeks back, like some—author on for the American Conservative called them, like, voter integrity demonstration, but it was something to that effect, you know, like—but even renaming it right, like, don't want to call it a capital riots. Don't want to call it the insurrection. Right. Like, you want to call it voter integrity protests or something like that.

And I do think the Christian nationalist myth provides this kind of justification for whatever you want to do. If it is our country rightfully, if God blessed the nation as our values people like us. Then, then it—then, then, then it is, by definition, when we take it back, even with violence, it is God's work. It is God blessed. I mean, sort of going back to the QAnon Shaman's prayer, right? Like they had stormed the Capitol violently, and he's saying this prayer in the middle of the Senate chamber, and he thanks God not—not praying, not asking. He's not petitioning. He is thanking God for allowing them to be in that chamber and for giving them victory, for America being reborn that day, right? Like it's—it's almost like it had happened. He's claiming it. And so, I mean, I think Christian nationalist theology, that political theology, that—it eliminates any kind of question to the contrary, you couldn't possibly be out of God's will. Because, as we all know, this is—this is—this is our country, for us, and it's been taken by Satan and demonic forces, so we got to take it back.

Brad: Well, we're going to run out of time, and we have a really big question to ask, and that's not about what's in the report, but about what did not happen, not report, but testimony. That's about what what did not happen with the testimony. So many observers, including myself and and both of you, have noted that the J6 Select Committee's report does not mention Christian nationalism. They did not take up, it seems, your testimony in a way that made it into the final report, at least in terms of being cited or referenced. So I'll leave it to you. I guess quite first question is, any idea why they would not do that after petitioning your testimony? And I think the follow-up would be, what are the ramifications of not mentioning Christian nationalism? Because as both of you and many of our colleagues and all of us who are observing and analyzing this. Have tried to point out Christian nationalism was an integral factor at J6 and yet it's not mentioned. So why do you think they left it out? What are the ramifications of doing so?

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, so in some of the reports that I've read and some of the response to—so the report comes out, and then some of the responses to that, saying, why isn't religion highlighted more, or Christian nationalism explicitly explained, noted? And spokes—people for the those running the committee said, we don't want there to be this viewpoint that any American that believes God has blessed this country is labeled a white supremacist. And so they were fearful that talking about Christian nationalism would alienate right, Christians in America. And so I think there was some of that which, in our work, we're careful to highlight that Christian nationalism is not Christianity writ large, right? It's a particular expression that, then, really underscores this political ideology and is forceful in that sense. And so it isn't as though every single American Christian subscribes Christian nationalism, but yet it is very prevalent within American Christianity, right? So there's a tension there. Both can be true.

And so I think one of the dangers of not mentioning it is that, and the committee was very kind of forthright that they wanted to focus on Trump and how Trump really was the driver and played a key role in everything that happened. And I think that's great, like we should do that. But what laid the groundwork for Trump. Christian nationalism is a part of that story, and it's gonna be here after Trump. So Trump wasn't just something that happened, right, but he's really an endpoint of an ongoing and—Brad in your work, and Sam and Phil in their book, and even our book, we highlight how this is decades and centuries right in the making. And Trump really is the kind of the culmination of that, and he's long after he's gone, it's still going to be powerful. And so I think in that sense, that's kind of the opportunity that was missed to give kind of this broader clarity and showing that this is part of the body politic, and it's still with us, and so we ignore it, really, it just kind of makes us blind to the next person that will come and maybe is more disciplined, wants to do the exact same stuff as Trump, but is just a bit more disciplined. And that, I think, is, is a threat that's still with us, and I hope that we can meet the moment, but we won't, if we're going to ignore these different elements, and Christian nationalism is a part of that.

Sam: Yeah, I'll end with something kind of provocative. I think, in his book Black Reconstruction in America, Dubois has this wonderful chapter on the propaganda of history, and he talks about how whites in the North were complicit in this kind of retelling of the Civil War as not about slavery, but it was about whatever. And and they did that, he said, because they wanted to make peace, and they, and it was kind of a capitulation. And like, hey, let's not make waves. Let's not, like, wave the bloody shirt. And like, let's kind of—but he says, you actually, like, you allowed this real history to be erased and the motives behind the Civil War of a whole group of people to be kind of like just glossed over.

I think the January 6th committee not acknowledging that Christian nationalism played a role in this, and was a motivation, if not explicitly laying the foundation of this kind of uprising, like Andrew was talking about, I think it's—it's the equivalent, right? It's the equivalent of, and not in proportion. Like, I want to have proportionality here, but like—but it is—it is the the intellectual equivalent of of saying, let's—let's kind of completely ignore this—this foundational ideology that motivated a lot of all the best, and still dies because we just don't want to make waves. I feel like it's a capitulation that ultimately comes back to haunt us, as Dubois so beautifully said, right? Like bad history is still bad history, right? Like it's—and this is a case of glossing over a pretty important part of this story, and so we hope to be able to magnify, to amplify that in some way.

Brad: That's a great comparison, and it's just a great frame of reference to think about the consequences and the ways that history is shaped by documents like these, and what is included and what is not, and so anyway, lot to think about there. Just appreciate your insights and your willingness to come on and just talk about your testimony. As we said, friends, we're going to post the link in the show notes so you can read that testimony for yourselves. It will be made public, and so it's all out there in the open.

For my money, I'll just say real quick. To me, this is an example of Andrew, you said that people—there was reports of being afraid of painting all God believing Americans as white supremacists. And once again, white evangelicalism, white Christian nationalism, white Christianity. And I don't want to make white evangelicalism, white evangelicalism white Christian nationalism synonymous. But what I do want to do is say that there's this sense of American religion is the conservative white Christian, and if we somehow criticize that, we're criticizing American religion, or we're criticizing Christianity as a whole. And so the fear is, well, we can't say anything about that group. Otherwise, the entirety of the American religious population will be offended, and we will just get lambasted from Fox News and from everyone else about being God-hating people who are anti-religion.

I will note, and I don't want to spoil anything, but there's a—you have a quote from Franklin Graham early on in the testimony, and it struck me that you were making this wonderful point. And it all makes sense in the testimony that Franklin Graham's comments fit perfectly in the theological matrix that ties together Christian nationalism, J6 but here's Franklin Graham, the very prominent son of Billy Graham, the man who was counseled to eight presidents or so, and I can just see the wheels turning in—I'm not going to name names, but just certain people on the committee thinking, if it comes out that I cite testimony where Franklin Graham is present, does that mean I'm haranguing Billy Graham? And does that mean that going back to all the long and wide reach of the Grahams and what they mean to American Christianity that I've done that. No, I'm just not going to go there. And while one can get their head around that logic, it's cowardly. I'm sorry. It just is, and it really leaves out an important part of the story. So anyway, more Diet Coke, and you might get the names the people on the committee I'm thinking about someday.

All right, Andrew Whitehead, associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, Purdue University Indianapolis. And then Sam Perry, associate professor of sociology at University of Oklahoma. Thanks to both of you. Just real quick, where can people link up with you all I know most people listening will be familiar, but if they want to find you, where's the best place?

Andrew: Twitter and Instagram, try to stay, try to stay up with both of those. And yeah, so that's great.

Sam: Yeah, same Twitter.

Brad: Okay, and Andrew's new book is coming out here this summer, so we'll hope to have him back when it drops, and just be on the lookout for that promises to be really, really, really good as always. Find me at Bradley Onishi. Find us at Straight White JC. Go to our new website, and you can search episodes so you can find stuff, and you won't have to email me and ask me when I said that and have me email you back and say I have no idea. So do that. Check us out on Patreon, and can always use your help there. Other than that, we'll be back later this week with It's in the Code and the weekly roundup. But for now, we'll say, thanks for being here. Have a good day.