Scott Lecture Series highlights rise of Christian nationalism in U.S.

This April, Middlebury’s Department of Religion is hosting a four-part lecture series on Christian nationalism, bringing journalists, Christian ethicists and scholars of religion to campus. The first two lectures focused on the implications of this movement for American democracy and how social media has platformed and shifted Christian nationalist messaging.

The lecture series, which is funded through the department’s endowed Charles P. Scott Fund, opened on Thursday, April 3 with a talk by journalist and author Katherine Stewart. She spoke about her most recent book “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy” and the current political landscape in the U.S. in relation to Christian nationalism.

After describing President Trump’s various attacks on American democracy over the past two months, Stewart drew parallels between three of his administration’s defining strategies — fighting a war on the truth, institutionalizing corruption and posturing as tough — to the anti-democratic political movement. 

While she said this trend has been growing in the U.S. for decades, it has only recently assumed executive power under the new administration. And while many of its policy goals are not religious in nature, the movement — and now Trump — derives much of its support from the Christian nationalist voter bloc.

“The most important thing to understand is that this movement is not particularly rational or coherent,” Stewart said. “They’re motivated more by what they want to destroy rather than what they want to create. 

Stewart spoke about the Trump administration’s attacks on the education system and targeting of universities as part of a larger campaign to erode democracy.

“Democracy relies on specialized knowledge to function. The current administration understands intuitively that specialized knowledge, rational thinking, is inimical to dictatorial power, so they’ve set about destroying centers of expertise both inside and outside of government. A disinformed public — an irrational public — is easier to control,” she said. “Again, quite simply, they understand that truth is their enemy.”

Stewart ended her talk on a note of hope, informing attendees of ways to counter both the anti-democratic and Christian nationalist movements using democratic means. 

“There is no substitute for turning out the vote,” Stewart said. “Tell people that voting matters. Tell people that democracy is theirs if they can keep it.” After that, she recommends that people become involved in local politics and support democracy-building organizations.

Stewart’s talk, also presented by the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, was followed by a Q&A with three Rohatyn Global Fellows. Referencing Stewart’s engagements with Christian nationalists while reporting on their movement, Rohatyn fellow Rowan Cleary ’27 asked, “Have you ever changed someone’s mind? And, how do we?”

Stewart replied that as a journalist, she is not there to change peoples’ minds. She also sees other forms of action as more productive in terms of shifting democratic power.

“It’s worth having those conversations, trying to find common ground… But I also think some of that energy would often be better spent motivating people who didn’t bother to vote in the last election, or holding people who would like to vote accountable,” Stewart said.

Professor of Religion James Calvin Davis helped organize the April lecture series and explained how understanding the Christian nationalist movement is fundamental to understanding how religion influences American public discourse and how this is not the only Christian perspective.

“As people who study religion, we should be talking about this instance of the relevance of religion to American public life. But also we should be talking about it in a way to help students distinguish between this particular co-opting of religion and the diversity within the Christian tradition that it is co-opting,” Davis said.

The series’ second lecture was hosted on Monday, April 7 by Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary Mark Douglas, who discussed how the rise of social media has reshaped the Christian nationalist movement. Although many regular churchgoers hold Christian nationalist viewpoints, many of them derive their viewpoints from influences outside the church, especially from social media.

Citing political scientist Dannagal Goldthwaite Young’s research, Douglas explained the unique space that social media provides the Christian nationalist movement to hone and broadcast its message.

“The people most likely to consume fringe political content on social media are highly engaged and highly politically partisan,” Douglas said. “As a right-leaning and right-directing phenomenon, contemporary U.S. Christian nationalism benefits from the trends toward both extremism and asymmetry that are arising out of society’s wider use of social media.”

Douglas then drew on the story of Protestant reformer John Calvin to find present-day strategies for combating the chaos of social media. He emphasized the power of media platforms to facilitate previously unthought-of connections and build on humanity’s natural socialization.

“One of the goods implicit in social media is that it builds relationships,” Douglas said. He proposed that building these relationships across social and political boundaries can foster understanding, not just polarization. “Maybe social media might, over time, and through its chaos, also shape us toward empathy.”

Social media, and our engagement and complicity with it, is inevitable, Douglas argued. But what we do with this complicity is up to us.

“Rather than treat complicity as something to avoid or to purify oneself from, treat complicity as something from which to learn, something through which we might discover how to love God and love neighbor. And in doing so, we may discover that the best way to relate to others — to love our neighbors, even our Christian nationalist neighbors — is to recognize what we share with them rather than what makes us better than them,” he explained.

The Scott Lecture Series will continue on April 17, with a visit from Daniel Miller, professor of Humanities at Landmark College, who will offer a queer take on Christian nationalism. The series will conclude on April 28 with a lecture by R. Ward Holder, associate professor of Theology at St. Anselm College, who will offer a Christian perspective on the subject.