'Money, Lies and God' details how far-right extremists work to erode democracy

Katherine Stewart's new book, "Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy," digs deep into the push to remake the country.

The far-right has raised billions of dollars, built coalitions between religions, and set an agenda of fear and paranoia, according to Stewart. She writes that it's all aimed at eroding traditional American democracy and freedoms long guaranteed.

Stewart discusses her 15 years of reporting — and, in her words, "following the money" — that paints a portrait of America's proliferating extremism and the physical and existential threats it's unleashing.

Can you briefly outline your case?

“ What I've observed over the past 16 years of reporting on this movement is that they're starting to say the quiet part out loud. The ideology of the movement has been very hostile to the institutions of democracy for quite some time, but they've become much more overt. They really don't believe in the idea of a government of, by, and for the people.”

 John Eastman, the lawyer who was indicted for his role in the attempt to overthrow the government on Jan. 6, justified his participation by saying, “But at some point, the abuses would become so intolerable that it is not only their right, but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.” He mentioned health care, OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] regulations on home office chairs, bans on gas stoves and drag queens. He said it's not only the right of the people, but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.

“ That's right. Promoting this idea that we're facing an apocalypse, liberalism and feminism and equality has gone too far, and we need to clear the way for a strongman who scraps the rule of law in favor of the iron fist.”

 You say this movement braids together atheistic billionaires, reactionary Catholic theologians, women-hating opponents of the gynocracy, as they call it, pro-natalists preoccupied with the lack of white babies, and COVID deniers, some of whom, they're just in it for the money.

“ That's true, but they're all swimming in the same headwaters. First, you have these funders, huge concentrations of wealth.

“ The funders are all over the place, but they agree on one thing, which is the need to crush liberalism and what they call the administrative state. Many of them are pursuing tax privileges. They're pursuing protective policies for their monopolistic businesses. And then you have another set of wealthy funders who are driven by, I would say, more overtly religious or cultural goals.”

W hat kind of money are we talking about here?

“ I'll just give you one example. Barre Seid, a Chicago elderly billionaire who donated $1.6 billion to form the Marble Freedom Trust, which can generate [more than] $230 million per year without touching the nut, and he put Leonard Leo in charge of it. And Leonard Leo, he turned the Federalist Society, which grooms and promotes right-wing legal talent into the powerhouse that it is today.

“Now I have to point out that there are many people of faith who oppose this movement, the Baptist Joint Committee, Christians Against Christian Nationalism, Vote Common Good, and so many others. But the religious left is not the equivalent of the religious right because they don't have the money.”

There are also people who genuinely believe in what they would call Republican ideals: a tough foreign policy, a tough fiscal responsibility. And we've spoken a lot about how 50 years ago, a group of Republicans, including Bill Kristol, walked from the rubble of Watergate, pledging to never again let their president be taken down by mainstream media. They created their own think tanks, the Heritage Foundation, their own universities, media, Fox News, and then lost control of it.

“ I think for many years, the Republican Party thought they could make use of the Christian right. And that movement has really taken over the party. In a truly conservative movement, they would want to preserve the integrity of the judiciary. They'd want to preserve public lands, public education, and improve it.”

In 2016, Trump said “ I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed. I am your retribution.”  How much of this is about that bruised feeling?

“ When Trump says, ‘I am your retribution,’ this is what dictators do. They divide people, the pure versus the impure. They make their followers feel like they're being persecuted by a sort of impure other in many of the spaces I go into. It's like a demonic or satanic other.”

 You mentioned the Black Robe Regiment. These are priests who are adopting the name of the pastors who led the American Revolution. And Watchmen on the Wall, who are they?

“ Christian nationalism is arguably the single most important piece of the anti-democratic reaction. We're facing this apocalypse due to the rise of the woke liberals, feminists, abortionists, etc.

“Look, if you can get people to vote on a single issue, you can control their vote. I mean, to hear them describe public schools, they're just these woke indoctrination factories that are changing children's gender against their will. And Donald Trump has actually repeated these lies. They want the American people to think that they're being victimized by a deep state.

“ The winners in this latest change are the hot religions. The sense of events in the world, especially political events, are expressions of spiritual battle. And this new form of religion has frankly given new energy to the Christian nationalist movement and the anti-democratic reaction. So even political leaders who are nonbelievers have learned to exploit this language.”

 What do you say to some of these Trump supporters who do say that what they're doing is the American Revolution or the Civil Rights Movement?

“The biggest dissonance within this movement is between the agenda of the funders, who really want to increase their own wealth and their own power, and the agenda of the rank and file, who really want a better deal for themselves and for their workforce.

“Many of them have legitimate resentments because they feel that they've been left behind by the information economy. Things just aren't working for them as well as they were for previous generations. I think we've been hampered by the fact that it's very difficult to talk about religion and politics.

“We want to be tolerant of one another's differences. We want to respect one another's beliefs and backgrounds. The challenge is when a movement is exploiting religion to destroy our democracy, it's really time to speak up. It was clear to me from the very beginning, even 16 years ago, that this movement had very destructive aims for public education. And the movement has only gained power since then. And so I think it's time for Americans who really do support our great democratic ideals to speak up.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Karyn Miller-Medzon produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.

By Katherine Stewart

Abraham Lincoln had it right when he said that the United States is dedicated to a proposition. The American idea, as he saw it, is the familiar one articulated in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It says that all people are created equal; that a free people in a pluralistic society may govern themselves; that they do so through laws deliberated in public, grounded in appeals to reason, and applied equally to all; and that they establish these laws through democratic representation in government. In the centuries after 1776, in its better moments, the United States exported this revolutionary creed and inspired people around the world to embrace their freedom.

But in recent years a political movement has emerged that fundamentally does not believe in the American idea. It claims that America is dedicated not to a proposition but to a particular religion and culture. It asserts that an insidious and alien elite has betrayed and abandoned the nation’s sacred heritage. It proposes to “redeem” America, and it acts on the extreme conviction that any means are justified in such a momentous project. It takes for granted that certain kinds of Americans have a right to rule, and that the rest have a duty to obey. No longer casting the United States as a beacon of freedom, it exports this counterrevolutionary creed through alliances with leaders and activists who are themselves hostile to democracy. This movement has captured one of the nation’s two major political parties, and some of its leading thinkers explicitly model their ambitions on corrupt and illiberal regimes abroad that render education, the media, and the corporate sector subservient to a one-party authoritarian state.

How did such an anti-American movement take root in America? That is the question I aim to address in this book.

As a reporter, I like to look first and theorize later. I am interested in facts, not polemics—though I won’t stand in the way of facts when they lead to pointed conclusions. This book is therefore a collection of dispatches from the front lines of the current assault on American democracy. My goal has been to record what I have seen and heard from the leaders and supporters of the antidemocratic movement in the auditoriums and breakout rooms at national conferences, around the table at informal gatherings of activists, in the living rooms of the rank and file, and in the pews of hard-line churches. The story features a rowdy mix of personalities: “apostles” of Jesus, atheistic billionaires, reactionary Catholic theologians, pseudo-Platonic intellectuals, woman-hating opponents of “the gynocracy,” high-powered evangelical networkers, Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand, pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (white) babies, COVID truthers, and battalions of “spirit warriors” who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about undermining democracy at its foundations.

I don’t pretend to cover all the angles. Others have found new and important ways to report on the subject, and I reference or cite the work of as many as I can throughout the book in the hopes that it will inspire further study. Even so, I think I have scouted enough of the territory to say something about the origins and nature of the antidemocratic movement in America.

Let me begin by repeating the obvious: this movement represents a serious threat to the survival of American democracy. Even at this late date, I continue to hear feel-good suggestions that the political conflicts of the moment are the result of incivility, tribalism, “affective partisanship,” or some other unfortunate trend in manners that affects every side of the political debates equally. All will be well, the thinking goes, if the red people and the blue people would just sit down for some talk therapy and give a little to the other side.

In earlier times this may have been sage advice. Today it is a delusion. American democracy is failing because it is under direct attack, and the attack is not coming equally from both sides. The movement described in this book isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house. It isn’t the product of misunderstandings; it advances its antidemocratic agenda by actively promoting division and disinformation. In the pages that follow, I will bring the receipts to support these uncomfortable facts.

What are the root causes of this development? There is no simple answer. But I will get the ball rolling with an observation about time frames. It can sometimes seem that the antidemocratic reaction snuck up on us and suddenly exploded in our living rooms. I confess that when I look back over the decade and a half that I have spent reporting on the subject, the escalation of the threat appears breathtaking. In 2009, I was reporting on an antidemocratic ideology focused on hostility to public education that appeared to be gaining influence on the right. By 2021, I was writing about an antidemocratic movement whose members had stormed the Capitol—and about a Republican Party whose leadership disgracefully acquiesced in the attempted overthrow of American democracy. In the 2024 election, that party was rewarded for its betrayal of American values. Yet the swiftness of the fall should not distract from the long duration of the underlying causes.

As these groups jockey for status in a fast-changing world, they give rise to a politics of rage and grievance. The reaction may be understandable. But it is not, on that account, reasonable or constructive. Although the antidemocratic movement emerged, in part, out of massive structural conflicts in the American political economy, along with investment, by antidemocratic forces, in the infrastructure of their movement, it does not represent a genuine attempt to address the problems from which it arose. The new politics aims for results that few people actually want and that ultimately harm everybody. Grounded in resentment and unreason, the new American fascism is more a political pathology than a political program.

This movement rejects the primacy of reason in the modern world at the same time that it rejects democracy. This is the darkest aspect of the phenomenon, and I describe it only after having grimly ruled out more charitable explanations. The bulk of this movement is best understood in terms of what it wishes to destroy rather than what it proposes to create. Fear and grievance, not hope, are the moving parts of its story. Its members resemble the revolutionaries of the past in their drive to overthrow “the regime”—but many are revolutionaries without a cause.

To be sure, movement leaders do float visions of what they take to be a better future, which typically aims for a fictitious version of the past: a nation united under “biblical law”; a people liberated from the tyranny of the “administrative state”; or just a place somehow made “great again.” But in conversations with movement participants, I have found, these visions quickly dissipate into insubstantial generalizations or unrealizable fantasy. There is no world in which America will become the “Christian nation” that it never actually was; there is only a world in which a theocratic oligarchy imposes a corrupt and despotic order in the name of sectarian values.

The age of economic and cultural fracture has yielded a politics of unreason. But the politics of unreason is not a random walk. It unravels in a particular direction. Unreason is the first and last resort of the enemies of democracy. In the final analysis, the antidemocratic movement is a symptom, not a cause, of the American crises. This fact, as I will lay out in a brief afterword, can be a source of hope for the future. It can serve as a guidepost for the deep structural and organizational solutions that this crisis demands. In the meantime, I invite you to leave behind the land of political theory, buckle up, and join me on a journey through the madness and the beauty of the American political landscape.

From "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy" by Katherine Stewart, out now from Bloomsbury. Copyright © 2025 Katherine Stewart. All rights reserved.