When the Wolves Came

NOTE: This piece was originally published at our Substack newsletter A Public Witness.

As a sociology professor at the University of Connecticut, Ruth Braunstein has spent years studying and writing about religion, politics, and money. She even wrote a book, Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide, to examine both the Religious Right and the Religious Left. But she recently decided to try a different way of analyzing these issues: a documentary podcast exploring divergent evangelical responses to Christian Nationalism.

In collaboration with The Mash-Up Americans studio, Braunstein created When the Wolves Came. The new six-episode show features insights from a number of scholars and experts like Kristen Du Mez, Robert P. Jones, Napp Nazworth, Katherine Stewart, and Jemar Tisby. But the heart of the story is told through two churches in Phoenix, Arizona. At one, the senior pastor led the church to embrace Christian Nationalism and MAGA politics, even hosting Donald Trump and regularly partnering with Trumpian activist Charlie Kirk. At the other, a former neo-Nazi skinhead led his church to reject violent, conspiratorial rightwing ideologies while he works as a missionary to Christian Nationalists. That pastor, Caleb Campbell, was previously a guest on Dangerous Dogma to talk about his book Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor.

“We really, just in this small space, are able to see churches that have during this period of time made really different choices,” Braunstein told me on this week’s episode of Dangerous Dogma. “I like to describe it as the MAGA movement hit the evangelical world like a tidal wave, and some pastors rode the wave and some pastors rode against it. And I think in this story we really see exemplary cases of both.”

While Braunstein sought to portray both sides fairly — and has heard from members of both churches saying she told their perspectives well — she told me that what particularly drew her to this project was getting to highlight Campbell’s perspective as an evangelical pastor trying to push back against Christian Nationalism.

“It really started with me saying I think I have this really interesting story to tell about White evangelical leaders who have pushed back against a huge amount of resistance within their world in order to voice a critique of what they see as really extreme ideas that have taken hold of their churches,” she explained. “It’s taken them some time to get up and running and organized, but they’re doing that now. And so we wanted to tell that story.”

Along the way, she takes listeners on a journey over the past several years through the rise of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more to see how two churches responded. She noted, for instance, that debates about virtual worship, masking, and vaccines “hit the Christian world very hard and opened up a divide there that we’re still seeing the consequences of.” Through it all, two churches that sit less than five miles from each other end up worlds apart.

“It’s very hard to know where conspiracism ends and theology begins, and also where conspiracism ends and real, genuine critiques of government and political figures begins,” she added as she noted the rise of QAnon and Christian Nationalist conspiracies among some evangelicals.

“One of the real challenges of this is that aspects of the Christian Nationalist ideology take some of the core premises from White supremacy and sort of package them in Christian theology or in language that doesn’t sound quite so alarming,” she added, which is exactly why Campbell and others are trying to advance a Christian resistance to Christian Nationalism.

You can hear more from Ruth Braunstein on this week’s episode of Dangerous Dogma. You can listen to the audio version here (or subscribe in your favorite podcast platform), and you can watch the video version here. You can also listen to her show When the Wolves Came on the show’s website or in your favorite podcast platform.

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor