“Our enemies are waging a war, and to many of them, it’s a holy war,” says “Movement Memos” host Kelly Hayes. In this podcast episode, Hayes and guest Talia Lavin discuss the emotional impacts of the presidential election, the expansive agenda of the Christian right, and how everyday people can resist what Lavin calls “our nation’s precipitous slide into autocracy.”

Music by Son Monarcas, David Celeste & Heath Cantu

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about solidarity, organizing and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, in the wake of a disastrous presidential election, we are going to discuss one of the forces that made Donald Trump’s electoral comeback possible: the US Evangelical movement. Now that Trump has secured another term in the White House, and announced the appointment of multiple Christian Nationalists to his cabinet, it’s important to understand the agenda of this movement, and how it has amassed the outsized power it wields. As journalist Talia Lavin writes in her new book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, “for tens of millions of Americans, politics and spiritual warfare are one and the same.” Lavin argues that many people in the United States have dismissed the beliefs of Evangelicals as “the fantasies of a tiny slice of fired-up congregants rather than a large, powerful movement aiming—and often succeeding—at shaping the public sphere of the United States in its own image.” In today’s episode, Lavin and I will discuss how an Evangelical culture of demonization and abuse has warped our society, and how we can push back.

If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support our work, you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to acknowledge that our team is as alarmed as many of you are about the authoritarian threats we’re facing, right now. But we also know that journalism has a crucial role to play in the many battles ahead, and we are determined to do our part. Come what may, we intend to live our values, and publish the kind of news and analysis that fuels movements. None of this would be possible without the support of readers and listeners like you, so I want to thank you for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

KH: Talia Lavin, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Talia Lavin: Hello. Delighted to be here.

KH: How are you doing right now?

TL: I never know… I haven’t known how to respond to that question for a week.

KH: I feel bad even asking.

TL: Well, it’s more like if I said I’m doing great, that would be weird.

KH: Yes, I might actually find that weird. Supportable, but weird.

TL: You know what I mean? I don’t know. I’m feeling, I guess there’s a certain protective numbness that’s aiding me right now. But I have one response to big scary stuff that I have is just wanting to retreat from the world for various periods of time and just Bartleby out. This is what I call it, Bartleby the Scrivener, the Melville story, that he’s the main character just says, “I would prefer not to” about his clerical job, and then everything else, he sort of retreats from life. And I just feel this intense inner Bartlebyism surging up in me. Like, don’t make me do anything. And especially, it’s challenging because I write about politics, and so there’s no sort of scenario where my work is a respite or relief. It just means more and more direct gazing into the abyss at all times. And I’m trying to be judicious and self-protective to a degree, while feeling massively selfish for protecting myself in any way. So it was not the healthiest of times, let’s put it that way.

KH: Well, as someone who appreciates your work and appreciates you as a person, I am grateful for whatever you’re doing to take care of and protect yourself right now, and I just want to name that.

TL: I mean, it’s complicated, because some of it is about, you don’t want to retreat into a shell where you lose your empathy and your engagement with the world. That’s a dangerous trap. But at the same time, burning yourself out, sort of staring, like burning your eyeballs out, staring directly into the horrors and pushing yourself past emotional stability, which I’ve done lots of times in my writing life, it rarely works out for the best. And so I have this practice that I try to cultivate, I call it guarding, like guard your heart, where you just try to be very mindful of the ways that writing about shitty, traumatic stuff can and does impact your mind and your soul.

I think so much of American capitalist life militates against you taking your emotional health seriously. Obviously, there’s a line where it slips into self-indulgence, but I think especially for people who are involved in left politics, left journalism at this moment in time, conserving energy for the battles ahead makes a lot of sense.

KH: Well, I am a big believer that if we don’t make space for our emotions and process our grief, we’re going to wind up being reactive when we need to be thoughtful and strategic, and we’re going to wind up being belligerent in moments when we need to really hold and hear each other. So I really support folks doing what they need to do emotionally right now. Today, of course, we are going to talk about some tough subjects, including Christian Nationalism, sexual assault and child abuse, so I encourage everyone listening to do what they need to do to take care of themselves. I think it’s important to understand what we’re up against. As you so poignantly spell out in your book, the Evangelical movement wants to remake this country in their own image. So, now that Donald Trump has won the presidency and the Republicans have taken Congress, I think we need to really take a moment to understand some of the agendas that we are up against right now. And I really appreciate you making time to discuss this difficult subject matter while you’re on a writing break.

TL: Oh yeah, no, I can talk about this stuff all day. It’s weirdly writing that’s harder. I guess because when I’m writing, my default is like, let me dive into everything face first. And also, I’ve already written the book that you’re asking me questions about, which is a huge bonus. It’s already written, it’s done.

KH: And it’s beautifully written, by the way. As is always the case with your work. I want to discuss the book today, as well as a recent article you wrote for In These Times, but before we dive into that, could you take a moment to introduce yourself and tell the audience a bit about your work?

TL: Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Talia Lavin. I am a leftist author and writer. My first book was called Culture Warlords. It came out in October of 2020, and it was sort of a very gonzo deep dive into white supremacist subcultures online, a lot of infiltrating chat rooms, “They don’t know I’m a Jew,” kind of stuff. And then my second book, which came out in October of 2024, because I’m cursed to produce political books in election years, I guess, is about the Christian right, and the rise of the Christian right over the last 50 years, and the acceleration of that drive to power over the last decade or so.

And I also write a newsletter, The Sword And the Sandwich, where I write about politics and right-wing stuff and history and culture, and I also write about sandwiches. Every week, I take a different sandwich from Wikipedia’s list of notable sandwiches in alphabetical order and write about it, usually through the lens of history, and sometimes even colonialism or anti-capitalism, or just cuisine. But I usually try to take a more historically grounded approach, and it’s been a lot of fun.

KH: Well, as someone who also researches a lot of dark subject matter, I really appreciate the way your newsletter balances the dark and the serious with sandwiches.

TL: Yeah, you got to have both, otherwise you’ll go crazy. I mean, that’s part of the guarding your heart sort of ethos. I find that there are people on the left who think it’s sort of, and maybe this is a bit of a straw man, but I find that there’s a certain attitude of suspicion of joy, suspicion of relief, that you should always be angry. And I can’t live that way. Maybe other people can and are crushing it. But I did that for a long time and it really hurt and degraded me. So yeah, just on the “guard your heart” principle, I’ve been trying to balance out some of that very necessary sadness and sorrow with things that bring me joy, and other people joy as well.

KH: I don’t think that what you’re describing is a straw man at all. That suspicion, or even contempt for joy or relief, definitely exists in our movements, and I think it’s really destructive. So, I totally agree with you, and I could honestly talk about that all day, but I want to go ahead and ground us in the moment, and in what people are struggling with right now. You wrote a piece for In These Times recently called “The Rape Culture Election” that I think really wrestled with some of the emotions people are experiencing right now. Could you take a moment to speak to some of those concerns and feelings?

TL: Yeah. I think, I didn’t realize until fairly recently how much of my trauma around Trump getting elected the first time was about the fact that he had already been outed as a rapist and a sexual assaulter, or at that point, I guess it was more sexual assault. But you had dozens of women saying, He committed these acts of violation against me. And then the country elects him anyway.

And I am someone who, like many, many, many, many women and trans folks and non-binary folks, and many people who are listening to this podcast, I’m someone who’s experienced sexual violence in my life. And at the time I had this, I would say the most, one of the more concrete changes in my life I made after the election was, I gave up stand-up comedy, something I had been doing at that point for about seven years, because I couldn’t handle the male-dominated, rape joke-loving scene anymore. My feeling was, if I see someone else make a rape joke in public, I’m going to lose it.

And yeah, it’s not fair that I was chased out of the hobby or whatever, but I couldn’t handle it. And much, much later I was like, oh, oh, this is about being a victim of rape and watching my country elect an abuser. And for all the many, many flaws of the Harris campaign, she was naming Trump as a sexual predator. And of course, he had been adjudicated a rapist, thanks to the very brave efforts of E. Jean Carroll. And so, you watch your country elect a rapist again. I think it is not a coincidence that the party voting to strip women of their autonomy over their bodies, anyone with a uterus, is the same group that’s proudly supporting a rapist. There’s a lot in common there. The idea is you’re not allowed to say no. You are not allowed to control your own body.

And I just wanted to, in that piece, take a moment and point to that specific dynamic, which given the misogyny in the broader culture and on the left, I think maybe a lot of people, and women in particular, have not necessarily taken the space or felt able to take the space to process those feelings. At least for me also, it took me a long time to recognize that that was what I was feeling, and that was what I was viscerally responding to, and some of my grief and some of the ways my trauma manifested.

And so, yeah, I think it’s just something worth taking a moment to recognize, because like you said, if you push down your emotions, they don’t disappear, they just come out in other ways.

KH: Well, I want to thank you for naming that, and for writing that piece, which I know was not easy. This election has been devastating on a number of levels. For people who have experienced the pain or the fear of being violated, seeing a rapist reclaim the presidency, and appoint men who’ve been accused of sexual assault to his cabinet, is just awful.

The right-wing agenda itself is an assault on our bodily autonomy, and that assault has proven deadly for women like Amber Nicole Thurman, who developed a grave infection while she waited for a D & C, and Nevaeh Crain, who doctors refused to operate on until her fetus had been declared dead, even though sepsis was killing her. That violence is fundamental to the politics of the Evangelical movement, which we will be discussing today. As you wrote in your new book, “We are all caught in a spiritual war, even if we never chose it, even if we didn’t ever believe in it, and every body that can become pregnant in America is entrapped in a wild faith that would rather see us die in birth than live free.”

I want to acknowledge that we’re all grappling with the politics of “your body, my choice” having seized the entirety of the federal government, and what that means for us and for the world. I think we have to make space for the hurt that many of us are feeling. We also have to be honest with ourselves about where we’re at and what we need. Some people are still processing these events. Some folks are taking a beat. Some people are really focused on what we need to do, and for anyone who’s listening, I just want to say that whether you’re in grief mode or go mode, or both, it’s all valid, and it’s all okay. Let’s just be sure we’re all making space for our feelings, because that’s deeply important. And let’s try to be there for each other.

Now, to talk a bit about how we got here, Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was fueled by a coalition of competing but cooperative forces, including Christian nationalists, techno-fascists, corporate actors seeking........

© Truthout