First, thanks to those of you who have taken advantage of the 25% discount on a paid annual subscription to Redeeming Democracy—welcome! If you’re a free subscriber and would like to support my writing and get access to paid subscriber benefits like live book salons with amazing authors throughout the year, the 25% discount offer will be available through July 4th.

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Second, Barnes & Noble is running a four-day flash sale for my new book. Preorder BACKSLIDE at bn.com from 6/23-6/26 and get 25% off with code PREORDER25.

Details on both offers are below. (Note: If you take advantage of both discounts, you’ll get BACKSLIDE for just $5 compared to the full price.)

In the meantime, the first official review of BACKSLIDE has just posted over at Publisher’s Weekly. I’m so grateful for those of you who have supported my writing over these past three years as I’ve been working on the new book. And I’m excited it’s almost here.

In solidarity,
Robby

Publishers Weekly Review of BACKSLIDE (Excerpt)

I’m thrilled to see this strong review of BACKSLIDE that just posted yesterday at PW:

Bestselling religious scholar Jones (The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy) examines the connection between the rise of right-wing extremism and evangelical Christianity in his bracing latest. Jones grounds his critique in the dual theological and political roots of the term “backslide.” Jones sees this dual sense of backsliding as the core of Trumpism, arguing that “we are now living in a... backslidden nation.” Jones is adamant: “We can no longer pretend we do not know where this path will lead.” Jones presents a vision of America as “fallen into... apostasy.” But he remains hopeful, noting that “backsliding is not irreversible,” as “repentance is possible... with confession” and the “acknowledging of difficult truths.” It’s a potent reckoning.

Read the full review here.

B&N 25% Discount Offer - Flash Sale

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Redeeming Democracy 25% Discount Offer for the 250th Anniversary

In honor of Juneteenth and Independence Day, and in recognition of our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’m making available a 25% discount off of all annual paid subscriptions to Redeeming Democracy activated by July 4th.

Get 25% off for 1 year

If you are able, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter as we work to strengthen our democracy together.

Your paid subscription helps sustain my work, keeps most content free for everyone, and gives you full access to engaging community conversations and author salon webinars. It also represents your commitment to supporting unflinching writing and analysis on religion, racial justice, and democracy. That’s never been more critical.

*Note: If you’d like to receive the benefits of being a paid subscriber but cannot afford it, drop me a note at robertpjones.substack@pm.me and I can arrange a complimentary paid subscription.

Note: This post is an excerpt from a chapter entitled “Juneteenth” in my forthcoming book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, which will be published September 8 and is now available for pre-order.

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In 1852, the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, New York, invited Frederick Douglass to give a speech at Corinthian Hall, the city’s most prestigious public venue, on the 76th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That speech—delivered deliberately on July 5^th to emphasize the theme of his message—became known by Douglass’s central piercing question, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?”[ii]

After a prayer and a reading of the Declaration of Independence by two white ministers, Douglass stepped onto the familiar high speaker’s platform without an introduction, cradling his 30-page text. Douglass drew on the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, prepared to deliver an American jeremiad. But he did not merely unleash anger at the hypocrisy of white celebrations of independence in a nation where chattel slavery remained legal. Douglass crafted a piece of art, what historian David Blight describes as a rhetorical “symphony in three movements.”

In the first movement, Douglass established common ground with his white audience. He praised the genius of the founding fathers and referred to the Fourth of July as an American Passover, a holiday that holds a narrative we performatively tell ourselves about our origins, journey, and identity. But he also warned that all was not well. The nation’s two largest white religious bodies, the Baptists and the Methodists, had each split into northern and southern factions over the issue of slavery in 1845; southern politicians had succeeded in passing the brutal Fugitive Slave Act in 1850; and Harriett Beacher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published just three months prior to his speech in 1852, had fanned the flames of the abolitionist movement, deepening divisions among the country’s white population.

When Douglass spoke of “dark clouds…above the horizon…portending disastrous times,” he was describing a gathering of forces his audience palpably sensed. Yet, Douglass said, the nation’s destiny was still malleable. There was still time to avoid calamity, but only if its citizens would cling fiercely to its founding principles of freedom and equality.

Douglass then shifted to the middle portion of the speech, a crescendo he sustained for fourteen pages. He shifted his possessive pronouns from “our” to “your,” forcefully highlighting the distance between himself and his white audience. In wave after wave of powerful prose, filled with memorable metaphors, he exposed the hypocrisy of slavery in a republic founded on the Declaration of Independence. “Fellow citizens,” he finally asked, “pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?”

As he elaborated on this question, he pulled no punches:

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.

This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?[iii]

He closed the second movement of the speech with an unflinching indictment of complacent white churches, declaring that slavery “brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity a lie.” In a harrowing final image, Douglass warned that slavery was “a horrible reptile,” a “venomous creature…nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic.” [iv] The nation and its ideals, Douglass insisted, would only survive if its white citizens ripped slavery from its intimate place in their lives and cast it aside.

Douglass paused to allow the echoes of his baritone voice to fade in the still hall.

In the final movement of the speech, he again held out hope that the United States might yet live to be a nation worthy of its professed values. “Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation,” he declared, “I do not despair of this country.” Even while exposing their blind spots and contradictions, Douglass thought it appropriate to honor the memory of the “statesmen, patriots and heroes…for the good they did, and the principles they contended for.” In this masterful performance, Douglass was asking his white audience to hold their naive patriotism up next to his dissonant reality, not to cast shade but to light the road yet to be traveled.

As he wrapped up the speech, the 600 mostly white listeners spontaneously rose to their feet and let out a cheer accompanied by “a universal burst of applause.”[v] Through this ovation, the audience acknowledged the truth of Douglass’s experience. The Fourth of July was an incomplete version of the American story; it was their story, perhaps, but it was not his story and, therefore, could not be the nation’s story.

Growing up, the Fourth of July was the nation’s great official summer holiday. It provided a break between the three months separating the other two federal holidays that bookend the summer: May’s Memorial Day and September’s Labor Day. But on June 17, 2021, the status of Independence Day as the nation’s lone summer holiday changed. President Joe Biden signed legislation adding a second official summer holiday, Juneteenth, to the calendar—the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was designated in 1983.

In short, Juneteenth marks the day that enslaved African Americans in Texas finally received the news that they were free. Juneteenth celebrates the date—June 19, 1865—when the Union Army’s Major General Gordon Granger issued General Orders No. 3, an order that notably went beyond even the language of Lincoln’s declaration, specifying that the new arrangement stipulated “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”[vi]

The holiday is the oldest continuous celebration of African Americans’ emancipation from slavery in the country. It is the day African Americans themselves have most celebrated, first in Texas, and then, spreading with the Great Migration, in the rest of the nation. As Texas-born Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed notes, the holiday is also a fitting addition to the national pantheon because it originates in a state where all the strands of the American story—“a story of Indians, settler colonists, Hispanic culture in North America, slavery, race, and immigration”—are manifest.[vii] At the 2021 bill signing ceremony, President Biden declared, “By making Juneteenth a federal holiday, all Americans can feel the power of this day, and learn from our history, and celebrate progress, and grapple with the distance we’ve come but the distance we have to travel.”[viii] Biden issued a similar proclamation marking the new federal holiday in each of the four years of his presidency.

But the re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2024 marked an aggressive reversal. Consistent with his broad attempts to erase Black history from the American story, President Trump refused to issue the customary presidential proclamation recognizing Juneteenth during the first year of his second term and removed it from the list of free admission days at the more than 100 national parks across the country. Instead, on the evening of June 19, 2025, Trump posted a not-so-subtle message on Truth Social complaining that there were “too many non-working holidays” in the country and that they are “costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed.”[ix] Notably, this message echoed racist Senator Jesse Helms’s disingenuous objection to the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983. During a failed filibuster attempt to derail the bill, Helms protested that the cost of a new national holiday would be $12 billion in lost productivity.[x]

Clearly, the holiday, and the nation, are at a crossroads. We’ve had just five short years—with the first mired in the Coronavirus pandemic—to practice celebrating Juneteenth as a nation. White Americans, especially, were just beginning to connect with the holiday. And now, a white supremacist president is telling us it need not be acknowledged.

In a conversation about my own uncertainty about how to appropriately celebrate Juneteenth as a white American, my friend Rev. Jacqui Lewis, the innovative African American senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City, suggested that because of its proximity to Independence Day, both temporally and conceptually, our newest federal holiday has great potential to help rehabilitate the Fourth of July from the jingoistic Christian nationalism it all too often evokes. As I reflected on that insight, I realized that one way to more securely incorporate Juneteenth into mainstream American culture would be to cultivate what we might call a “season of critical patriotism” between the two holidays.

Among the many gifts of being in an interfaith marriage is the ongoing invitation to experience and learn from a tradition that is not your own. As I’ve celebrated the Jewish High Holidays as a Christian over the last 20 years, I’ve been moved by the power of the moral space that opens in the ten days between a celebration of the promise of the new year on Rosh Hashanah (the head of the year) and lament over the failings of the past year at Yom Kippur (the day of atonement). The sweetness of apples and honey foreshadows the bitterness of fasting and repentance. On the calendar, these holidays occur in a line. But conceptually, they orbit one another like binary stars, generating a contemplative space between them known in Judaism as the “days of awe.”

The period of 15 days that span the space between Juneteenth and Independence Day could similarly function as an enduring season of critical patriotism for our time. Alongside the celebratory fireworks and other well-established practices surrounding the Fourth of July, we could develop a new civic liturgy that include the creative interplay of lament and celebration, reckoning and repair, truth-telling and hope. Borrowing from the High Holidays model, Juneteenth could function like Yom Kippur, recalling our struggles to overcome our shortcomings and achieve freedom, while Independence Day could echo Rosh Hashanah, recommitting us to shared national ideals.

Such a practice could also embrace a conviction that is deeply engrained in Judaism, Christianity, and indeed most religious traditions—that no people can live with integrity into the future if they cannot face their past failures to live up to their principles. Douglass saw this truth clearly, noting that any nation who was false to the past also “solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” And President Biden observed this truth when he signed the legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday, “Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments. They don’t ignore those moments of the past. They embrace them…. And in remembering those moments, we begin to heal and grow stronger.”[xi]

Bringing the Juneteenth and the Fourth of July together in a creative mutual orbit, where each is embraced by the gravitational force of the other, can also help us develop other rituals that are honest about our country’s failings while also being hopeful about its possibilities.

Even amid our divisions, most Americans still want to embrace the vision of a pluralistic society. We need new rituals now more than ever. The attacks on the celebration of Juneteenth are testimony to their vital importance today. If we’ll let them, the proximity of Juneteenth to Independence Day can provide a civic space that helps us cope with the dilemma created by the gap between our highest principles and our historical contradictions. The creative energy generated by these pairings holds considerable promise for generating a new spirit of critical patriotism we sorely need.

Fairy-tale narratives of impossible national innocence are thankfully no longer credible, particularly to nonwhite or non-Christian Americans, or, as polling data consistently shows, to most Americans under the age of 40. But we ought not allow the harsh light of historical indictment to eclipse the noble principles still waiting to be realized.

So, as Ralph Ellison’s Black preacher says in this chapter’s epigraph, “let’s us tell ourselves our story,” one of America as a flawed but precious work in progress. White Christian nationalist protestations to the contrary, such a critical patriotism is not divisive; it is what may finally allow us to be whole.

25% Discount Offer for the 250th Anniversary

In honor of Juneteenth and Independence Day, and in recognition of our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’m making available a 25% discount off of all annual paid subscriptions activated by July 4th.

Get 25% off for 1 year

If you are able, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter as we work to strengthen our democracy together.

Your paid subscription helps sustain my work, keeps most content free for everyone, and gives you full access to engaging community conversations and author salon webinars. It also represents your commitment to supporting unflinching writing and analysis on religion, racial justice, and democracy. That’s never been more critical.

*Note: If you’d like to receive the benefits of being a paid subscriber but cannot afford it, drop me a note at robertpjones.substack@pm.me and I can arrange a complimentary paid subscription.

[i] Ralph Ellison et al., Juneteenth, First Vintage International edition (Vintage International, 2021), 117.

[ii] For a moving account of Douglass’ speech, see David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster, 2018), 229–36.

[iii] Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Speech, Rochester, NY, July 5, 1852, https://archive.org/details/Douglass_July_Oration/page/2/mode/2up.

[iv] Blight, Frederick Douglass, 234–35.

[v] Blight, Frederick Douglass, 236.

[vi] Gordon Granger, “General Orders, No. 3,” Galveston Tri-Weekly News (Galveston, TX), June 20, 1865, https://web.archive.org/web/20200622014256/https://www.cah.utexas.edu/db/dmr/image_lg.php?variable=di_01803.

[vii] Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth, 14.

[viii] Joseph Biden, “Remarks by President Biden at Signing of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act,” Speech, Washington, DC, June 17, 2021, https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/06/17/remarks-by-president-biden-at-signing-of-the-juneteenth-national-independence-day-act/.

[ix] Aishvarya Kavi, “Juneteenth Goes Uncelebrated at White House as Trump Complains About ‘Too Many’ Holidays,” The New York Times (New York, NY), June 19, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/us/politics/juneteenth-white-house-slavery.html.

[x] Lily Rothman, “How MLK Day Became a Holiday,” TIME, January 20, 2020, https://time.com/3661538/mlk-day-reagan-history/.

[xi] Biden, “Remarks by President Biden at Signing of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act.”

Signs of Disillusionment and Distress

Asked to choose between two statements, Americans are more than twice as likely to agree that “we are in real danger of losing important democratic rights and freedoms” than to agree that “the important democratic rights and freedoms we have will remain protected” (68% vs. 29%). In a pattern that repeats itself throughout the survey, overwhelming numbers of Democrats (86%) and independents (70%) agree with the first statement, while Republicans are divided between the two statements (51% vs. 47%).

“The fact that nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe we are in danger of losing critical rights and freedoms should set off alarm bells,” remarked PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman at the survey’s release.

The partisan divides are even stronger over perceptions of Donald Trump. Trump’s favorability is down from 41% just two years ago to 34% among the general population. But even as Trump’s favorability is slipping among most subgroups, it remains strong among the MAGA base: 79% among Republicans and 67% among white evangelical Protestants.

Notably, Americans are increasingly seeing Trump as a threat to democracy. When asked to choose between two statements, nearly 6 in 10 Americans agree that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy” (59%), up from 52% in March 2025, compared with 38% who agree “President Trump is a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.” Most Democrats (91%, up from 87% in March 2025) and independents (66%, up from 56% in March 2025) agree with the first statement, while most Republicans agree with the second statement (78%, down from 81% in March 2025).

These partisan divides—with Democrats and independents perceiving one reality and Republicans decidedly perceiving another— represent a profound threat to the democratic experiment at 250.

The Country Most Americans Want:
A Pluralistic Democracy at Home and a Good Neighbor Nation Abroad

At home, most Americans reject the vision of America as a white Christian nation and remain committed to a vision of America that is religiously and racially diverse.

Nearly eight in ten Americans prefer the U.S. to be a nation made up of people from all over the world (77%) rather than one primarily made up of people of Western European heritage (20%). And nearly two-thirds of Americans prefer the U.S. to be a nation made up of people belonging to a wide variety of religions rather than one primarily made up of people who follow the Christian faith (64% vs. 34%). However, white evangelical Protestants and Republicans are outliers, preferring to live in a nation primarily made up of Christians (68% and 60%, respectively).

Abroad, Americans are far more likely to say they would prefer the U.S. “to be a reliable neighbor that cooperates with other nations and only uses military force as a last resort” than “to be known as a mighty nation that does not hesitate to use military force to defend our interests” (70% vs. 27%). However, slim majorities of white evangelical Protestants (52%) and Republicans (52%) agree with the second statement. Solid majorities of both independents (75%) and Democrats (90%), as well as all other major religious groups, prefer the U.S. to cooperate with other nations.

As we near time of reflection precipitated by the observance of our nation’s 250th anniversary, there are clear signs of disillusionment and distress. The nation is deeply divided along lines of party, race, and religion. Indeed, our partisan divides are now expressions of our racial and religious divides, with the Republican Party increasingly becoming the party of conservative white Christians (self-identified Republicans are 68% white and Christian in a country that is 40% white and Christian) and Christian nationalist ideology.

But the survey also generates some hopeful light. Most Americans still embrace—as Abraham Lincoln eloquently put it in his first inaugural address to his fellow citizens standing on the brink of a civil war—“the better angels of our nature.” Even amid the disorienting fog produced by the MAGA machine, more of us, and hopefully enough of us, are still keeping our eyes fixed on the unfulfilled promise of becoming a truly pluralistic democracy.

25% Discount Offer for the 250th Anniversary

In honor of Juneteenth and Independence Day, and in recognition of our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’m making available a 25% discount off of all annual paid subscriptions activated by July 4th.

Get 25% off for 1 year

If you are able, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter as we work to strengthen our democracy together.

Your paid subscription helps sustain my work, keeps most content free for everyone, and gives you full access to engaging community conversations and author salon webinars. It also represents your commitment to supporting unflinching writing and analysis on religion, racial justice, and democracy. That’s never been more critical.

*Note: If you’d like to receive the benefits of being a paid subscriber but cannot afford it, drop me a note at robertpjones.substack@pm.me and I can arrange a complimentary paid subscription.

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ICYMI, today , , and I unpack the latest PRRI data showing Trump’s favorability in free fall across the political and religious landscape. The key findings are below, and you can find more details at PRRI here.

Over a year into the second Trump administration, the latest survey from finds that just 34% of Americans hold favorable views of Donald Trump, down from 41% just ahead of the 2024 presidential election, compared to six in ten Americans who hold unfavorable views of the president (62%).

Chart 1. Trump Favorability by Party Affiliation

Trump’s vulnerability becomes clear when his declining popularity is examined across a 7-part partisan scale. Notably, the sharpest drops in Trump favorability are among independents and soft Republicans.

Among “strong Republicans,” Trump’s favorability remains high and stable, standing at around 91%. However, support among less committed Republicans has weakened significantly, with favorability among “not very strong Republicans” dropping 7 points, from 70% to 63%.

Since the 2024 election, Trump’s favorability among independents who “lean Republican” has fallen 17 points, from 65% to 48%. And it has fallen 21 points among “true independents” (those who don’t lean toward either party), from 35% to 14%. Trump’s favorability among independents who lean Democrat and both strong and not strong Democrats remains in the single digits and is virtually unchanged over the last two years.

Chart 2. Trump Favorability by Religious Affiliation

Among religious groups, Hispanic Christian groups have experienced the steepest decline in Trump favorability over the last two years (14 points), with Hispanic Protestants down to 37% and Hispanic Catholics down to 23%. Non-Christian religious Americans follow, with a 9 percentage-point decline from 27% in 2024 to 18% today. Favorability of Trump among all white Christians declined by 5 percentage points, while religiously unaffiliated support of the president dropped by 4 points and now stands at 21%.

White evangelical Protestants are now the only religious group in which a majority (67%) view Trump favorably, and Trump’s popularity has dropped 5 points even among this group since the 2024 election, and 9 points from an all-time high of 76% in May 2025.

Similarly, a slight majority of white Catholics (51%) viewed Trump favorably in September 2024. Today, that number has dropped to 46%, with the majority of white Catholics (54%) holding unfavorable views. In addition, Trump’s favorability dropped 8 points among white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants from 53% in September 2024.

Since 2015, Donald Trump’s favorability among Black Protestants has remained relatively stable, never reaching higher than 19%. Trump favorability among Black Protestants stands at 13% in May 2026.

The bottom line: As this administration continues to run roughshod over democratic norms and entangle our nation in unjust wars of choice, only one-third of Americans hold a favorable view of President Trump. And with the lone exception of white evangelical Protestants, he has now lost the support of all other religious groups in the country, including those groups who gave a majority of their votes to him in 2024.

Related at Redeeming Democracy

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How To Get Your Copy of BACKSLIDE

I’m so excited that my new book, BACKSLIDE: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy, is now available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

As you may know, pre-orders play a big role in the success of a book. In fact, the single most important thing you can do to support an author is to pre-order his or her book. It signals to retailers that they should have sufficient copies on hand on publication day and encourages them to promote it in their own stores.

If you order now, the book will be delivered to your doorstep or device the day after Labor Day, September 8. What better way to kick off the fall as we face the consequential midterm elections? It’s available in hardcover, ebook, and audio book everywhere books are sold. (Note: Ordering through Bookshop or Amazon using the links below helps support this newsletter, while ordering a signed copy helps support my local independent bookstore, People’s Book).

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Here’s what Joy and some other fellow travelers have had to say about the book:

I can’t wait for this book to make its way into the world and to share it with you all.

Join me and TODAY at 1pm ET for my first public in-depth conversation about my forthcoming book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy. My book is now available for pre-order wherever books are sold, and signed copies are available from my favorite local bookstore (see details below).

I hope you can join us! I’ve been working on this book for the last three years. It’s the most personal, the most unflinching, and the the most urgent book I’ve written. And this will be my first in-depth public conversation about it.

You do not need to register ahead of time. When the livestream begins, Substack should notify you by email or app push notification, depending on your notification settings. You can join from your phone or computer. When the livestream starts, tap the Substack notification, or open the Substack app and look for the live video in your Home feed / reading queue. Tap the video to watch, and use the chat/comment area below the video to participate. If you miss it, I’ll send around the video afterward.

Hope to see you soon!

Robby

More about BACKSLIDE

I’m so excited to be sending this official post that my new book, BACKSLIDE: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy, is now available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

As you may know, pre-orders play a big role in the success of a book. In fact, the single most important thing you can do to support an author is to pre-order his or her book. It signals to retailers that they should have sufficient copies on hand on publication day and encourages them to promote it in their own stores.

If you order now, the book will be delivered to your doorstep or device the day after Labor Day, September 8. What better way to kick off the fall as we face the consequential midterm elections? It’s available in hardcover, ebook, and audio book everywhere books are sold. (Note: Ordering through Bookshop or Amazon using the links below helps support this newsletter, while ordering a signed copy helps support my local independent bookstore, People’s Book).

Buy from Bookshop

Buy from Amazon

Buy SIGNED from People's Book

Here’s what Joy and some other fellow travelers have had to say about the book:

I can’t wait for this book to make its way into the world and to share it with you all.

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ICYMI: My Ongoing Series with Joy Reid on Countering White Christian Nationalism

In this latest episode of our series, Joy and I recount the White House religious festival (on the taxpayer dime) as a day of apostasy and right wing extremist politics.

Watch the segment:

Catch the whole Countering White Christian Nationalism series here.

I’ve had a busy weekend. I spent half the day on Sunday down on the National Mall attending Rededicate250, an event sponsored by the White House as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the nation (Shout out to my friend Dr. Steve Livingston, Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, who came with me and shared his own astute observations). Today, I’ve talked to both NPR and CNN about what I saw and what I think it means.

You can watch my interview on CNN Situation Room above or here at CNN. And you can listen to the interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” below. And scroll down for a photojournalism-style account of my encounter with the bad faith on the National Mall.

Postcards from My Visit to the Rededicate250 White Christian Nationalist Event on the DC National Mall

My wife Jodi Kanter is a performance studies scholar. Over the years, she’s taught me how to read a stage. As I made my way onto the green grass of the National Mall in Washington, DC, even before I could make out the audio and hear the words of any speakers, I was struck by the setting.

The stage itself was strategically placed in the shadow of the majestic Washington monument. It was framed vertically by four 40-foot fluted columns (Trump is obsessed with columns) and a faux stone cornice with dental molding, evoking a federal government building.

The backdrop featured a different faux stone wall, this one mimicking a church with three arched stained-glass windows. The largest window, dominating the stage, contained a 30-foot white cross—notably not a crucifix that would be found in Catholic spaces but an empty cross that would be familiar sight in evangelical Protestant services.

The content followed the setting. When I first arrived, someone near me jokingly but enthusiastically exclaimed, “Look, Jesus is speaking!” On stage was actor Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus on the series “The Chosen.” Even beyond his TV fame, Roumie is a familiar figure and hero to this audience, having also appeared at Christian Right events such as the 2023 March for Life in DC. One couple with whom I spoke travel all over the country to hear Roumie speak when they’re not volunteering as crowd extras on the set of “The Chosen” (making their own costumes and giving a donation of $1,200 each to the show for the privilege).

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the layers of theological distortions on the stage. Evangelical Christianity as the glowing heart of the government. The absurdity of a bespoke-suited Jesus, wearing a shiny lapel pin depicting the instrument of his execution painted with the stars and stripes.

The speaker lineup also made it clear that this event was in no way intended to represent the rich diversity of America. All of the featured public officials were Republicans in Trump’s close orbit. Nearly all the religious leaders were Christian, many drawn from Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission or his so-called “faith advisory group.” The overwhelming majority were from the white evangelical Protestant world—a group that comprises only 13% of the public and only 20% of American Christians.

As someone who has studied religion in the public square for more than two decades, this event marks yet another bright line being crossed by the Trump administration, a further crass instrumentalization of religion for political ends. In the MAGA world, the gentler spirit of a more inclusive civil religion—present in my memories of the public celebrations of the bicentennial in 1976—has been exorcised in favor of the malevolent militancy of Christian nationalism. The call for salvation of individuals and the nation, not just through God but through “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” came not just from the likes of Franklin Graham but U.S. government cabinet member Pete Hegseth.

Overall, the vibe of Rededicate250 was somewhere between an evangelical outdoor revival meeting and a Trump rally. As you can see in the photos I took below, the attendees represented an exceedingly narrow slice of the American public and even American Christianity. I’d estimate the crowd was 95% white. While there were some families in attendance, most participants seemed to be in their 50s or 60s. You were just as likely to encounter folks decked out in Christian t-shirts as Trump merch (or both). Of the dozens I talked to, all but one (a young Catholic man who was wary of this mixing of partisan politics and faith) were some variety of white evangelical Protestant.

It was deflating to see an official event celebrating the 250th anniversary of the nation clearly taking aim at one of our most cherished and hard-one achievements, the separation of church and state that ensures a government free of religious establishment and a people free to practice a wide variety of religions or none.

As I exited past “The Freedom Truck,” however, I found hope in remembering what the data clearly show: that this narrow Christian nationalist vision is one rejected not only by two-thirds of the country by even by most Christians.

My New Book, BACKSLIDE, Now Available.

My new book, BACKSLIDE: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy, is now available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

I’ve been working on this book for the last three years, wrestling with this Christian nationalist movement that was on display at the Rededicate250 event. It’s the most personal, unflinching, and urgent book I’ve written. And it’s almost here.

BACKSLIDE is available in hardcover, ebook, and audio book everywhere books are sold. (Note: Ordering through Bookshop or Amazon using the links below helps support this newsletter, while ordering a signed copy helps support my local independent bookstore, People’s Book).

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As you may have seen, the Trump administration is sponsoring a Christian nationalist event called “Rededicate 250” this Sunday on the National mall here in Washington, DC. I’ll be attending as a witness. And I’m inviting you to join me for an inspiring event Sunday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. ET, which will provide an alternative vision of a pluralistic democracy. Details below.

Here’s how a recent piece in The Guardian describes Sunday’s event:

Rededicate 250, billed as the faith-based component of America’s semiquincentennial, features speakers including a Detroit pastor who has called the Democratic platform “demonic” and launched his own memecoin after praying at Trump’s second inauguration; a rabbi who has defended the use of torture and authored an essay titled “The Virtue of Hate;” and a Christian author and radio host who said in 2020 he would die in the fight to keep Joe Biden out of the White House and was later named in a defamation suit over 2020 election fraud claims.

Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and House speaker, Mike Johnson, are also scheduled to appear. The lineup includes no Muslims, no representatives of historically Black churches, no Indigenous faith leaders and no mainline Protestants.

I’ve been busy this week helping the media make sense of this blatant attempt to ignore America’s rich religious diversity, rewrite American history, and pretend that white evangelical Protestants stand in for all Christians and even for all religious Americans.

I have an exciting invitation to extend to everyone. I’m participating in an alternative event that you can tune into right here on the Redeeming Democracy substack channel. Here are the details from the Save America Movement, which is sponsoring the event:

Today, while Christians across America observe their holy day, thousands will gather on the National Mall to worship at a very different altar — Donald Trump’s. Join us live at 4pm ET for a screening of Bad Faith 2026: Christian Nationalism in Power, followed by a live discussion at 5:15pm ET with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Rev. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Lisa Sharon Harper and Dr. Robert P. Jones – four faith leaders unafraid to call out the threat that Christian nationalism poses to our democracy. While the White House is calling it “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving”, we’re calling it what it really is: blasphemy dressed in the garments of faith. Don’t miss this important conversation and don’t forget to check out Bad Faith here as well.

Participants:

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II
Founder and President, Repairers Of The Breach
Co-Chair, Poor People’s Campaign

Rev. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Board Chair, Repairers Of The Breach
Yale University’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy

Lisa Sharon Harper
Author, “Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican…or Democrat”
Host, Freedom Road Podcast

Dr. Robert P. Jones
Founder and President of PRRI
Author, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy

How to Watch

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ICYMI on Redeeming Democracy

“Only a coward survives the absurd.”
-Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise (2021)

Last Thursday, the federal government’s “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” released a massive 500-page report, which allegedly “details the Biden Administration’s radical efforts to punish Christians and highlights President Trump’s efforts to restore religious liberty.” The task force—involving 17 federal agencies and headed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (who took over after Pamela Bondi’s ouster) was created by President Trump’s Executive Order 14202 (issued shortly after Trump took office in February 2025).

I won’t try your patience by detailing the litany of half-truths, cherry-picked details, and misleading stories that pepper the report. But here’s just one example—my favorite—of the flimsy scaffolding on which this report is built. The report makes this claim in “Key Finding 14”: “The Biden Administration regulated and suppressed religious speech that it did not like and curtailed Christians’ ability to jointly worship and study the Bible.” As evidence of this claim, the report makes this assertion: “In 2023, a Catholic hospital in Oklahoma was told to extinguish the flame of a religious candle or risk losing its participation in Medicare and Medicaid, including Children’s Health Insurance Program funding.”

Sounds terrible, right? But what’s the real story? Saint Francis Health System, a Catholic hospital system in Tulsa, kept a sanctuary candle burning in its chapel as a Catholic devotional practice. A 2023 accreditation review cited “a lit candle with open flame burning unattended 24/7” in a hospital environment with oxygen equipment as a fire safety issue. The devotional candle was never targeted by the government as a religious practice. The government’s concern was with the safety of patients at the Catholic hospital.

Moreover, as the task force’s own report notes on p. 139, after legal and public pressure, and additional safeguards put in place by the hospital, the government ultimately issued a waiver to allow the candle remain. It was never “snuffed out.” Rather, the Biden administration and the hospital reached a reasonable agreement that ultimately balanced religious liberty concerns with safety concerns. This is how government regulation is supposed to work. But in the hands of Trump’s disingenuous task force, this episode is twisted into a blatant account of anti-Christian bias. I could go on and on with such misleading examples.

If we take a few steps back, you can see just how absurd the entire project is. I wrote the following in an article for just after Trump rolled out his original executive order:

Notably, while Trump’s executive order is peppered with references to religious liberty, it makes no mention of any other religious groups. Only Christians—who comprise approximately two thirds of the U.S. population—are singled out as particular victims deserving special protections. Never mind that according to the 2023 Hate Crimes Report compiled by the FBI, out of 2,833 hate crimes motivated by religious bias, only 10% (290 cases) were motivated by anti-Christian bias. By contrast, 71% (2,006 cases) were motivated by antisemitism, and 19% (537 cases) involved bias against members of other non-Christian/non-Jewish religions and atheists/agnostics. In other words, adjusting for their smaller percentage of the population, Jews were more than 200 times more likely than Christians to be the target of a hate crime in the US in 2023. Trump’s executive order is clearly not about protecting the religious liberty of a persecuted minority or the religious groups actually experiencing the most violence.

Moreover, I pointed out Trump’s own hypocrisy. He himself has attacked a number of Christian groups who aren’t his favored group of conservative white evangelical Protestants (Reminder: white evangelical Christians comprise only 13% of the general population and only one in five Christians).

Trump’s ludicrous posturing as the defender of the Christian faith has already been undermined by his own administration’s actions in the opening weeks of his presidency, which have explicitly targeted Christian leaders and groups. Trump called Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde “nasty” (his favorite epithet for women he finds threatening) for preaching at the Washington National Cathedral a sermon about mercy, and he allowed Elon Musk to disparage and gut funding from Lutheran and Catholic groups who have provided social services to immigrants and refugees for decades. His encouragement of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pursue arrests of undocumented immigrants even in sensitive locations like churches and synagogues has made his Department of Homeland Security the target of a lawsuit filed by 27 Christian and Jewish organizations, and his inhumane mass deportation program has earned him a rare pointed rebuke from Pope Francis, who called it “a disgrace.”

Finally, the report uses the term “traditional Christians” and “people of faith” throughout as if these terms refer to some identifiable majority of Christians. But even a cursory look at contemporary survey data shows that the actual views of American Christians are far from what Trump’s Anti-Christian Bias Task Force assumes.

• First, the premise of the entire project—that discrimination against Christians is as big a problem as discrimination against other groups—is an idea that only has majority of support among white evangelical Protestants.

• Even on so-called culture war issues, white evangelicals are outliers. Most other Christians support the legality of abortion in all or most cases, support allowing gay and lesbian couples to legally marry, and reject patriarchal conceptions of hierarchical gender roles.

• Even more telling, while Trump’s favorability remains at nearly seven in ten among white evangelical Protestants, only 37% of all other Christians hold a favorable view of the president.

Actual American Christians also hold views at odds with Trump’s obsession issue, immigration.

• While white evangelicals are more sympathetic to Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, about six in ten Christians say they believe that the U.S. immigration system should allow immigrants who are living in the country illegally a way to become citizens, provided they meet certain requirements.

• And nearly seven in ten Christians say they oppose allowing Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) officers to regularly conduct surveillance and arrests at sensitive locations like schools, hospitals, places of worship, and social service locations. Even a slim majority of what evangelicals oppose such a radical policy, which Trump unleashed the first week of his presidency.

Put another way, given what American Christians actually believe, policies that outlaw abortion and marriage equality, or use the power of the state to favor traditional hierarchical gender roles, cannot be accurately characterized as Christian. Nor can inhumane immigration policies that deny undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship or that target them for arrest at places of worship or other sensitive locations.

It’s clear that we won’t see Trump’s Department of Justice showing any concern for these Christian values, even if they do comprise the majority views of Americans who identify as Christian.

However, in this administration, one uniquely at war with the truth, advancing the bold absurdity—the Big Lie—is the point. It is a predictable strategy for advancing authoritarianism and suppressing public criticism. In the coming days, if this vision is embraced, we will almost certainly see heads of institutions and even private citizens forced to testify before Anti-Christian Bias government committees. And we are likely to see many forced to choose between affirming this irreality and being labeled domestic terrorists because of their alleged anti-Christian bias.

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Watch My Take: Press Conference Hosted by Georgetown’s Center for Faith & Justice

The Center on Faith and Justice hosted a press briefing to discuss concerns about a Department of Justice report on anti-Christian bias, with panelists arguing the report was politically motivated and fundamentally flawed. Former White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Executive Director Melissa Rogers testified that the Biden administration worked extensively with Christian leaders and communities, contradicting the report's claims of anti-Christian bias. Amanda Tyler from the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty criticized the report's misunderstanding of religious freedom principles and constitutional law, while Guthrie Graves Fitzsimmons from Interfaith Alliance highlighted the report's hypocrisy and noted their organization's legal challenges against the administration's Religious Liberty Commission. Robert Jones from Public Religion Research Institute presented data showing that while Christians make up a majority of Americans, there is significant diversity within Christian beliefs, with white evangelical Protestants being the only group supporting the report's claims of anti-Christian bias. The panelists argued that the report incorrectly characterized "traditional Christians" and failed to consult with former Biden administration officials before publication.

ICYMI, Announcing My Forthcoming Book, BACKSLIDE

An Invitation

Come join The Convocation Unscripted team for our monthly LIVE webinar, where we’ll discuss the ongoing threats to our democracy, bringing our combined expertise in religion, history, and politics to the discussion. We hope you can join us LIVE on May 7 at 5:00 PM ET. It’s free, but you’ll need to register below to receive the Zoom link.

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Dear Convocation Unscripted community…

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2 months ago · 7 likes · Robert P. Jones

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The Real Third Rail of Politics

Here’s the summary of my conversation with , who writes over at .

Robert P. Jones founded the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) because he knows that you can’t understand American politics without understanding religion. The influence of Christian nationalism, especially among white Evangelicals in the South, explains why Trump’s base has stayed with him through so much scandal — and why our politics in general is so polarized and dysfunctional. (For more on that point, read my 2023 post, “How White Christian Political Might Made the Republican Party Hard Right, in 8 Charts.”) We hear nonstop about the so-called diploma divide, but almost nothing about the much larger and more consequential religious divides.

So why do we almost never hear about religion in political reporting? As Robby and I discussed, it’s a third rail for reasons that are understandable, but not defensible. Nobody wants to risk offending or essentializing people’s most deeply held beliefs — but those beliefs, and the institutions behind them, are too important to ignore.

Other highlights of our conversation included:

• Why Trump can’t take Catholic voters for granted. He’s never had a lock on Catholics the same way he has on Evangelicals — and that was before his war on Iran and his public attacks on Pope Leo XIV. (Also, Vance is the one who should be more “careful” about theology; the Pope has been so outspoken about the war in Iran because Catholic doctrine is very clear about the immorality of wars of choice.)

  • More at Robby’s Substack: “How Trump’s Fight with Pope Leo XIV May Hurt Republicans in the Midterms.”

• How Pete Hegseth’s anti-DEI crusade is really about mainstreaming white Christian nationalism in the military.

• Why reporters who refuse to use the term “Christian nationalism” are out of step with well-grounded social science research.

• The enormous influence of Christian media on those within its bubble (which doesn’t include most political reporters).

• How the Roberts Court has weaponized (individual) religious liberty to curtail other freedoms.

A Generous Endorsement of BACKSLIDE by Kristin Du Mez

I was also so grateful to for posting a generous endorsement of my new book, BACKSLIDE: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, over on her Substack . She has more to say in the full post below, but I’m grateful for these words from her.

Du Mez CONNECTIONS

BACKSLIDE

I have a lot of friends whose writing I admire. With some of my closest friends, I actually met them first through their writing. Robby Jones is one of these…

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2 months ago · 156 likes · 29 comments · Kristin Du Mez

You can pre-order BACKSLIDE at the links below (ordering using these links helps support this newsletter):

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My Endorsement of Kristin’s New Book, LIVE LAUGH LOVE

Kristin and I first connected after the publication of her blockbuster book, Jesus and John Wayne. We’ve become friends, and I’m so excited to see her new book, LIVE LAUGH LOVE: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, coming into the world the week after mine is published in early fall. Here’s my short take on her book, which I endorsed in a longer post below. I encourage you all to pre-order it. It will make a great companion read to BACKSLIDE.

Pre-order Live Laugh Love on Bookshop

Pre-order Live Laugh Love on Amazon

If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know the high esteem I hold for , Professor of History at Calvin University and author of the New York Times bestselling bombshell book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Over the last five years, Kristin and I have become friends and collaborators—together with and for our weekly The Convocation Unscripted podcast. We’ve also been in conversation as we’ve both been writing new books that address the current threats to both Christian faith and democracy in America.

I was excited to find out that her long-awaited new book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, will be published on September 15—just one week after my new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy. While each has their own distinct focus and mission, both books take a rigorous look at history and our own cultural experiences in the evangelical world—“Calvinettes” for Kristin and “Royal Ambassadors” for me, for example—to help us understand how we got here and illuminate alternatives for those wanting to walk a different path. I think they would make perfect reading companions.

Here’s how Kristin described the book in a recent post on her own Substack newsletter :

Live Laugh Love is about exactly what you think it is. It is about prairie fiction and Amish romance, Amy Grant, Jen Hatmaker, and Joanna Gaines. It is about multilevel marketing (from Amway and Mary Kay to R+F and LuLaRoe). It is about Christian bookstores and Hobby Lobby and Altar’d State, about beauty and bloggers, about purity culture (of course) and about Elisabeth Elliot—but not exactly the Elliot you might expect. (Elliot became one of my favorite people in the book—not the missionary Elliot or the Passion & Purity Elliot, but the woman she was in between.)

The book is also about power. It is about systems of manipulation and control. (That’s partly where the “secret” in the subtitle comes in.) For people who have been immersed in these worlds and for those who have left or tried to leave, it will make so much sense of so many things. I had no idea…

Unlike Jesus and John Wayne, this book isn’t just about evangelicals. If you think about influencers and MLMs and Hallmark movies, you know that this goes beyond evangelicalism. It is about evangelicals but also about charismatic, mainline, Mormon, and secular women. And it’s about the philosophy of positive thinking: Change your attitude and you can change your life!

Since writing Jesus and John Wayne, I’ve received thousands of messages from readers. People often assume I get a ton of hate mail, but I don’t. Hardly any, actually. But almost every day, to this day, I receive letters from readers saying “thank you.” Almost all of them convey some version of the same: This is the story of my life. But I never understood how all these pieces fit together.

Live Laugh Love does the same, but this time there are more pieces, and by the end, the picture that emerges is even darker than where we arrive at the end of Jesus and John Wayne. (Yes, it features Erika Kirk and Karoline Leavitt and Kristi Noem, and that Thomas Kinkade-inspired DHS propaganda.)

In so many ways, Live Laugh Love is a bigger book than Jesus and John Wayne. It is also a more disruptive one. (I know, I know…this should be fun…)

It’s probably the most important book I’ve written. Once you see how all of these pieces fit together, you won’t be able to unsee it.

I hope you’ll join me in pre-ordering Kristin’s book. (Note: If you order using one of the links in this newsletter, a portion of your purchase goes to support my Redeeming Democracy newsletter). And stay tuned—we’ll certainly have some joint conversations about our books between now and the early September pub dates!

Pre-order Live Laugh Love on Bookshop

Pre-order Live Laugh Love on Amazon

ICYMI at Redeeming Democracy

And here’s a link to our collaborative work at :

It’s official. I now have the advance galley copies of my new book in hand. And I’m so excited to be sending this post to let you all know that my new book, BACKSLIDE: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy, is now available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

I’ve been working on this book for the last three years. It’s the most personal, unflinching, and urgent book I’ve written. And it’s almost here.

As you may know, pre-orders play a big role in the success of a book. In fact, the single most important thing you can do to support an author is to pre-order his or her book. (And thanks so much to those of you who placed those early orders to help land my previous book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week!). Pre-orders signal to retailers that they should have sufficient copies on hand on publication day and encourages them to promote it in their stores.

If you order now, the book will be delivered to your doorstep or device the day after Labor Day, September 8. What better way to kick off the fall as we look toward the consequential midterm elections? It’s available in hardcover, ebook, and audio book everywhere books are sold. (Note: Ordering through Bookshop or Amazon using the links below helps support this newsletter, while ordering a signed copy helps support my local independent bookstore, People’s Book).

Buy from Bookshop

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Buy SIGNED from People's Book

This book is my effort to speak into this perilous moment in American history; to reckon with the moral collapse among white Christians—two thirds of whom supported Donald Trump for a third consecutive time at the ballot box in 2024; and to issue an urgent call to protect American democracy. The stark jacket cover—with its upside down American flag (an appropriate display, according to the U.S flag code, “in instances of extreme danger”)—signals the gravity of our time.

As we’ve witnessed the indefensible willingness of conservative white Christians to shed their core values like inconvenient loads along the road to supporting Donald Trump, I’ve been brought back to two words from my evangelical upbringing: backslide and apostasy. It’s notable that political scientists are also now using the term “democratic backsliding” to describe the process by which a democracy— including democracy in the U.S.—slips into authoritarianism. These powerful terms help us describe our situation succinctly: We are now living in a democratically backslidden nation, abetted by an apostate white Christianity.

In the new book, through reflections on history, my upbringing in the white evangelical South, and decades of social science research, I lay bare the roots of this collapse and the dangers it poses for our future. I take readers inside a faith tradition marked by an impoverished relationship to the Bible, a rejection of a genuine search for truth, and an upside-down world where empathy is considered a vice. Yet amid the wreckage, I also find hope in growing efforts to resist the backsliding, to remake our national holiday rituals, and to recover a Christianity that remains committed to a pluralistic democracy.

This book will speak particularly to those like me who grew up part of white Christian churches, but it is also for anyone who wants to understand how we got here, with so many white Christians trading faith for power and democracy for dominion. This book is for all who are unwilling to surrender the soul of religion or the promise of democracy. And it is a reminder that the time is short for deciding which Christianity, and which America, will prevail.

Here’s what some fellow travelers have had to say about the book:

I can’t wait for this book to make its way into the world and to share it with you all. Please help me spread the word today about the new book to folks in your circles.

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As most of you know, this year and I launched a monthly series—live on the third Wednesday of each month in the 7pm hour—called “Countering White Christian Nationalism.” This week we released episode five, where we tackle the subject of the apostasy of MAGA Christianity and Donald Trump’s recent blasphemous depiction of himself as Jesus—which he made after criticizing Pope Leo XIV for being “soft of crime” of all things. It’s absurd and appalling. But what’s it all really about? We unpack the theology and the politics behind the drama.

I’m posting the most recent episode below. And you can view the whole series here.

ICYMI on Redeeming Democracy

Check Out the Redeeming Democracy Shelf at Bookshop

If you haven’t browsed there yet, check out my Redeeming Democracy booshelf over at Bookshop.com. You’ll find a curated list of recommended books—including two forthcoming books my me (BACKSLIDE) and Kristin Du Mez (LIVE LAUGH LOVE). Plus, if you purchase a book there, a portion of your purchase goes to support this newsletter.

View the RD Bookshop

I’m sharing two podcasts below, along with some analysis of the potential political fallout from these distortions of religion. But first, I want to highlight the latest from Pope Leo. Even as Trump criticizes him—calling him “weak on crime” of all things—Pope Leo continues to call out the core problem: the sullying of religion in a quest for power.

My Conversation with Brian Lehrer on NPR/WNYC:
How Trump’s Self-Depiction as Jesus Lands with Christians

SHOW DESCRIPTION: In a now-deleted social media post, President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus. He has also recently attacked Pope Leo XIV. Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, has said that the pope should “be careful” when talking about theology. Robert P. Jones, president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute and author of the Substack newsletter Redeeming Democracy and the forthcoming book Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy (St. Martin’s, 2026), talks about the range of responses from Christians.

Note: Full transcript is also available when you click through using the button below.

Listen at WNYC

My Conversation with Greg Sargent at The New Republic:
Trump Erupts in Rage as Pope’s Harsh New Rebuke Lands Surprise Blow

SHOW DESCRIPTION: Donald Trump is furious at Pope Leo. After the pope sharply criticized the war on Iran, Trump exploded in a wild Truth Social rant, slamming the pope as “WEAK on crime” and clueless about the Iranian nuclear threat. Trump then posted an image of himself as Jesus, which he took down after MAGA figures lashed out at him. Trump then angrily insisted he had no idea that image had religious significance, and seethed some more over the pope’s criticism.

In today’s episode, Robert Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, makes a fascinating point: The pope’s criticism of his war appears calibrated in a way that could stir concern and debate about the war in many local churches at a grassroots level. That’s a hidden problem for Trump, says Jones, author of several books about religion and the American right. He explains why Trump’s spin will make this worse among religious voters, why all this will resonate more deeply with Catholics than with Trump’s evangelical base, and why Catholics are a point of real vulnerability for him. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Listen at TNR

What’s the Political Risk of Trump’s Fight with Pope Leo?

I don’t believe President Trump understands the political risk of picking a fight with Pope Leo XIV. My best guess is that he believes that the unquestioning submission demonstrated by his fawning white evangelical followers exists among all of his Christian followers. But Catholics are not white evangelical Protestants.

While white evangelicals have voted more than 80% for Trump every time he has been on the ballot and have held strongly favorable views of Trump through every controversy and outrage over the last decade, Catholics have been more measured in their support. Most notably, there is a strong racial and ethnic divide among Catholics: six in ten white Catholics supporting Trump each time he has been on the ballot, but six in ten Latino Catholics have supported his Democratic opponents.

Even before Trump’s war of choice with Iran, Trump’s standing with American Catholics was shaky. In a PRRI survey prior to the U.S. attacks on Iran, Trump’s favorability among white Catholics was barely in positive territory (53%); his favorability among Latino Catholics was only 25%, down 12 percentage points from 37% just before the 2024 election.

In an IPSOS poll released last week, only 46% of white Catholics and 33% of nonwhite Catholics approved of the military strikes against Iran. And 64% of white Catholics and 75% of nonwhite Catholics supporting ending the Iran war, even if not all the goals were met.

If his support falls further, it could be game over for Republican candidates in competitive midterm elections and for the next Republican presidential candidate. While Trump and Republican candidates might be able to weather a 5-10 point drop in support among white evangelical Protestants, given that they largely live in safe deep red districts and states, the GOP would not survive such losses among Catholics—both because of their size and their location. Overall, Catholics comprise 22% of Americans, nearly double the size of white evangelical Protestants (13%). Most importantly, Catholics are much more numerous in swing states, as this heat map illustrates (produced by PRRI’s interactive American Values Atlas, check it out for yourself!).

Take this one insight: Trump won the 2024 election by winning 62% of the white Catholic vote and 41% of the Latino Catholic vote. In 2020, when his support among white Catholics was 5 points lower and support among Latino Catholics 10 points lower, he lost the election.

In the midterms elections, there are only a hand full of competitive races, and they are nearly all in states with significant Catholic populations. For example, the competitive House races are largely confined to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey, and Texas. Competitive Senate races are confined to Michigan, Maine, North Caroline, Georgia, Ohio, Alaska, and New Hampshire.

In these competitive states for the midterm elections, the Catholic vote looms large:

• In 12 of these 16 states, Catholics comprise at least 20% of residents.

• In 4 of these states, Catholics comprise at least 30% of residents.

• In California and Texas, Hispanic Catholics (reminder: Trump favorability at 25%) outnumber white Catholics by around four to one.

• In Nevada and Arizona, white Catholics and Hispanic Catholics are at parity.

As the ill-conceived war in Iran shows, Trump’s actions are guided by ego and the desire to dominate his opponents. Trump only thinks about consequences after they occur. For the midterms, the consequences are clear: a significant drop in Catholic support for Republican candidates from 2024 election levels would mean almost certain defeat. For those hoping to turn the country back toward a pluralistic democracy, these dynamics may be good news. By the time Trump feels the consequences of his feud with the pope, the power will have shifted.

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Each time we’ve released a new study, despite the transparent methodology and consistent findings over time, conservative white evangelical apologists predictably object that the term “Christian nationalism” is a term invented by religiously hostile academics to malign Christians. PRRI’s most recent findings should put an end to those protestations.

Two thirds of those who qualify as Christian Nationalism Adherents hold a favorable view of the term “Christian nationalism.”

It turns out that most of those who qualify as “Christian nationalists” by independent criteria actually now embrace the term. Here are the details, hot off the press in a large 5,000-person study released last week.

First, some context. The term “Christian nationalism” is not popular among the public. Overall, just 27% of Americans hold a favorable view of the term “Christian nationalism,” compared with 47% who hold an unfavorable view. About one quarter of Americans (23%) have not heard of this term.

The terms is also becoming more familiar to the public. Significantly fewer Americans have not heard of the term “Christian nationalism” today, compared to when we first asked about the term in 2022 (down 12 points from 35%). Compared to four years ago, the percentage who hold an unfavorable view of the term is up only 3 points (from 44%), while the percentage who who hold a favorable view is up 7 points (from 20%).

Notably, Americans who qualify as Christian nationalists using independent criteria are more likely than others to hold a favorable view of the term. Two-thirds of Christian nationalism Adherents (68%), as well as half of Sympathizers (50%) hold a favorable view of the term “Christian nationalism.” Morevover, while one quarter of Sympathizers say they are unfamiliar with the term, they are nearly twice as likely to hold positive than negative views of it. By contrast, only 19% of Christian nationalism Skeptics and 3% of Rejecters hold a favorable view of the term “Christian nationalism.”

Skeptics (28%) and Sympathizers (26%)—groups in the middle of the scale—are more likely than Adherents (20%) or Rejecters (13%) to say they have not heard of the term.

Most Republicans Now Hold a Favorable View of Christian Nationalism

Partisan divides remain stark: A majority of Republicans (53%) view Christian nationalism favorably, compared with 22% of independents and only 10% of Democrats. While support among independents and Democrats has remained relatively stable since 2022, Republicans are increasingly embracing the term, with favorable views rising a remarkable 17 points, from 36% to 53%.

White evangelical Protestants are the only religious group in which a majority hold a favorable view of the term “Christian nationalism” (54%). Hispanic Protestants—a group that is majority evangelical in orientation and supported Trump in the 2024 election—also hold a favorable view of the term. Favorability of the term “Christian nationalism” is significantly lower among all other religious groups and among the religiously unaffiliated.

Holding a favorable view of the term “Christian nationalism” is strongly correlated with holding racist conspiracy theories toward immigrants and support for concentration camps on U.S. soil.

This analysis also dispels one of the leading objections to concerns about Christian nationalism: that those who affirm Christian nationalism are merely expressing support for a strong role for Christianity in public life. But this survey demonstrates that holding a favorable view of the term “Christian nationalism” is strongly correlated with embracing racist views about immigrants and harsh immigration policies. Here are just two examples.

Among those who hold a favorable view of the term “Christian nationalism,” 62% agree with the racist “great replacement theory,” that immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background, compared with only 15% of those who hold an unfavorable view of the term.

Similarly, among those who hold a favorable view of Christian nationalism, 69% agree that the federal government should detain immigrants who are in the country illegally in internment camps until they are deported, compared with only 22% of those who hold an unfavorable view of the term.

As I argue in my forthcoming book, BACKSLIDE, we cannot afford to be passive about the clear implications of this research. Despite the objections of some white evangelical apologists, Christian nationalists—both those who embrace the worldview and the term—endanger not only the moral integrity of Christianity but the future of America as a pluralistic democracy.

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ICYMI on Redeeming Democracy

Thanks for your patience as I’ve been on vacation over the last week and work travel into next week. We had a lovely family trip anchored in London and Dublin, with a mix of truly beautiful weather and gale force winds/rain a few days as well. Amid other things, we got in college visits at Oxford and Trinity, and we saw the awe inspiring Cliffs of Moher. A few travel updates: I’m currently still in Europe attending a conference on threats to academic freedom, then over to Yale Divinity School for a conference on public theology and public policy. If you’re in the Yale area, its’ not too late to register to attend.

In the meantime, it’s also been a busy media week, with the Trump administration ramping up its holy war rhetoric in increasingly desperate attempts to justify an unjustifiable war. Below, I’m sharing two recent conversations I had on NPR and with The Contrarian.

NPR: What happens when religious fundamentalists come to power?
My Conversation with Meghna Chakrabarti and Katherine Stewart

Show Description:

This is our second episode in our look at what happens to a nation when religious fundamentalism comes to power. This little pop-up series is inspired by questions you sent us when I asked you several weeks ago what you want to know about the U.S. and Israel's war with Iran. Today, we’ll discuss how Christian extremism came to influence the Trump administration and offer moral underpinnings for the new war in the Middle East.

Guests:

Katherine Stewart, journalist and writer. Author of the books “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy” and “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”

Robert Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. Author of many books, including, most recently, “Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy.”

Listen on NPR

The Contrarian: Are We Headed Towards a Modern Day Crusade? My Conversation with Jen Rubin

Here’s the description of our conversation:

America’s Secretary of Defense dreams of a modern day crusade. Yes, those crusades of the Middle Ages, where Christians would charge into a town and slaughter its Muslim population. Hegseth is hell-bent on turning this dream into reality.

But why? Where is this coming from? What level of influence is Christian

Nationalism having on our government officials. Thankfully, Robert P. Jones, President of the Public Religion Research Institute, joins Jen Rubin to explain it all. The two discuss Hegseth’s religiously charged tattoos, Trump’s refrigerator-magnet theology, the Democrats’ confirmation hearing fumble, and so much more.

Watch at The Contrarian

ICYMI at Redeeming Democracy

Here’s my overall take:

In the wake of the ICE surge in Minneapolis that resulted in numerous injuries, including the deaths of U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the survey finds a growing majority of Americans believe the Trump administration has gone too far. Just 35% of Americans rate President Donald Trump’s handling of immigration favorably, compared with 61% who rate his actions unfavorably. Notably, nearly half (48%) of Americans hold VERY unfavorable views of his handling of immigration. By contrast, in March 2025, 48% of Americans approved of the job Donald Trump was doing on immigration.

Just 1 in 3 Americans (33%) hold favorable views of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, down 6 points from an already low 39% in September 2025. Favorable views of ICE officers have declined across the board, with significant drops among Republicans, from 78% to 73%, among independents, from 34% to 26%, and among Democrats, from 10% to 6%. The survey also reveals that these attitudes are specific to ICE and not directly at law enforcement generally: Twice as many Americans (67%) express favorable views of local police officers compared to ICE officers.

Additionally, nearly 6 in 10 Americans (57%) agree that the surge of ICE officers in places like Minnesota is making communities less safe, compared with 38% who disagree.

However, while most Americans are recoiling from the violence that ICE has unleashed in Minneapolis and other cities across the country, two groups remain supportive of Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement: Republicans and white evangelical Protestant Christians.

• Among Republicans, 78% approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, 73% hold favorable views of ICE officers, and 75% disagree that ICE surges make communities less safe.

• Similarly, among white evangelical Protestants, 69% approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, 65% hold favorable views of ICE officers, and 67% disagree that ICE surges make communities less safe.

Read the Full Report

Most Republicans — but only 24% of Americans — favor allowing ICE officers to make arrests at sensitive locations like schools, hospitals, places of worship, and social service locations. Republicans (54%) are more likely than either independents (20%) or Democrats (5%) to favor allowing ICE officers to regularly conduct surveillance and arrests at sensitive locations. Notably, there is no religious group in which a majority favor allowing ICE to make arrests at sensitive locations (only 44% of even white evangelicals favor such a policy).

One of the most disturbing findings of the survey was that 41% of Americans favor allowing the government to detain undocumented immigrants in internment camps until they can be deported. This support is driven by Republicans and white Christians, especially white evangelical Protestants and white Cathlics.

• Three-quarters of Republicans (73%) favor detaining undocumented immigrations in internment camps, compared with only 37% of independents and 17% of Democrats.

• Among religious groups, only two support this policy: 63% of white evangelical Protestants and 55% of white Catholics agree that the government should detain undocumented immigrants in internment camps. White mainline/non-evangelical Protestants are divided. Majorities of all other religious groups oppose this policy.

There was one bright spot in the survey. Despite the drastic reduction in refugee resettlement under the Trump administration, more than 7 in 10 Americans (72%)—across party and religious lines—agree that “we should provide refuge for people who come to the U.S. if they are in serious danger in their home country.”

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Click below to watch a panel of experts—Brian Fraga (National Catholic Reporter), (Author and Lutheran pastor in Minneapolis), and Jack Jenkins (Religion News Service)—discuss the report’s findings with PRRI’s and .

Spring 15% Discount Offer Through April 1

You can pre-order my book Backslide plus books from The Convocation Unscripted podcast team at my curated bookshelf on Bookshop.com. Take 15% OFF these select titles (excludes ebooks) when you enter BSO15 at checkout, valid until April 1, 2026.

Click the image or button below to get your 15% discount on the latest from Jemar Tisby, PhD , Diana Butler Bass , Kristin Du Mez , and Robert P. Jones .

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That’s the title of the section describing America in the new 10th annual Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) report that was just released this month.

In my forthcoming book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy (see below for two options to pre-order at a discount), I wrestle with these challenging questions: Where are we exactly as a nation? And what is our responsibility in such a time?

Even with the daily headlines documenting the diminishment of our nation as a pluralistic democracy, I still have conversations with well-informed people who continue to doubt—to hope against hope—that things are really not as bad as they seem, that the guardrails will hold, that the pendulum will magically swing back. The new V-Dem report provides an evidence-based reality check that should banish any remaining naiveté that the U.S. can any longer be considered a functioning pluralistic democracy.

Here’s a selection of the devastating findings from the report’s executive summary—any one of which in normal times would set off alarm bells:

• Under Trump’s presidency, the level of democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965.

• Yet the situation is fundamentally different than during the Civil Rights era. In 2025, the derailment of democracy is marked by executive overreach undermining the rule of law, along with far reaching suppression and intimidation of media and dissenting voices.

• The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.

• Legislative Constraints – the worst affected aspect of democracy – is losing one-third of its value in 2025 and reaching its lowest point in over 100 years.

• Civil Rights and Equality before the Law are also rapidly declining, falling to late 1960s levels.

• Freedom of Expression is now at its lowest level since the end of WWII.

The figure below shows the departure of the U.S. on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) from the path of other countries in North America and western Europe. It also shows how dramatically U.S. democracy has declined in just one year under the Trump regime: from 0.79 in 2023 to 0.57 in 2025. The V-Dem report concludes: “With such a sharp drop on the LDI, the level of democracy at the end of 2025 is back to the 1965 level. Symbolically, that is the year that most analysts consider the USA began its transition to a real democracy. Democracy in the USA is now at its worst in 60 years.”

If we’re collectively experiencing vertigo amid the authoritarian whirlwind, that’s normal.

• The 2025 plunge is the largest one-year drop in the LDI score in American history—going back to 1789 when the Constitution was ratified and became effective.

This drop is directly attributable to the takeover of the Republican Party by the white Christian nationalist MAGA movement under Donald Trump. In surveys, we have consistently found a strong positive correlation between support for Christian nationalism and support for right-wing authoritarianism. Nearly 8 in 10 Christian Nationalism Adherents score high or very high on the Right-Wing Authoritarian scale, compared to only 1 in 10 Christian Nationalism Rejecters. (See PRRI’s full report here for methodology and detailed findings).

• The V-Dem report also notes this remarkable finding that puts the U.S. democratic backsliding into international context: “The dramatic decline under Donald Trump took Hungary’s Viktor Orbán over four years, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić eight years, and both India’s Narendra Modi and Türkiye’s Rečep Tayyip Erdoğan about a decade.”

These results are daunting: We’ve never seen such rapid democratic backsliding in either American history or the modern world.

The V-Dem report does illuminate a narrow lane of hope. It notes that worldwide 70% of the recent autocratizations in the world have been reversed. But it also stresses that we likely only have a small window in which to act. The report concludes:

Research shows that there is no unique recipe for making a U-turn but a combination of three key factors seem to be important: (i) strong institutional safeguards acting as the “brakes” of autocratization: electoral integrity, judiciary constraints, and legislative constrains; (ii) robust societal action serving as the “engine” of democratic revival: unified opposition, robust and active civil society, independent media, and sustained non-violent mass pro-democracy protests; and (iii) acting early since most U-turns happen around the end of the first electoral cycle.

Among the institutional safeguards, the courts and the legislative branch have largely abondoned their safeguarding roles. That leaves only electoral integrity. For us, the work of protecting the midterm elections over the next seven months against overt subversion by the Trump administration will be critical. I’m encouraging everyone to volunteer to be a poll worker or observer and to support organizations such as the Carter Center or the Brennan Center who are on the front lines protecting our elections.

Ordinary citizens have more direct influence in creating “robust societal action” that can fuel democratic resilience. In these days, we need to support independent media (including independent writers on platforms like Substack) and protests such as the “No Kings” rallies that will take place this weekend on March 28. Thanks to all of you who are organizing through churches, synagogues, mosques, and other organizations to bring religious voices to the work of protecting democracy.

Finally, the V-Dem report notes the urgency of the moment. If we aren’t able to apply the brakes to America’s democratic backsliding this year, it will be much harder to turn the country around in the future.

This sense of lament, urgency, and hope is at the heart of my new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy. In the conclusion of the book, I write, “We must shoulder the terrifying realization that it is we who will determine which Christianity, and which America, becomes a reality in this world.” What we do with the remainder of 2026 will be decisive for our future.

The book will be published September 8, ahead of the midterm elections. I hope you’ll consider taking advantage of two discount offers below to pre-order your copy.

Spring 25% Discount Offer: Barnes & Noble

Preorder my new book Backslide at bn.com from 3/24-3/26 and get 25% off with code PREORDER25. Note, this discount is only available to B&N members but free memberships are available - learn more at barnesandnoble.com/membership/ .

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Spring 15% Discount Offer: Bookshop

You can pre-order my book Backslide plus books from The Convocation Unscripted podcast team at my curated bookshelf on Bookshop.com. Take 15% OFF these select titles (excludes ebooks) when you enter BSO15 at checkout, valid until April 1, 2026.

Click the image or button below to get your 15% discount on the latest from Jemar Tisby, PhD , Diana Butler Bass , Kristin Du Mez , and Robert P. Jones .

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Watch the CNN Interview

Here are more details about the CNN documentary. I think it’s exceptionally well done. It includes data and excellent interviews with Rev. and scholars and . From the official description:

In this hour, Brown examines the growing influence of Christian nationalism, an ideology rooted in the belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should reflect Christian values. Through immersive reporting and on-the-ground access, the episode explores how a movement once largely confined to the margins of white evangelical culture has gained new visibility and political power.

Spring 15% Discount on My Bookshop Shelf

Discount Alert! Shop my curated list—featuring books from The Convocation Unscripted podcast team—for your enjoyment. Take 15% OFF* these select titles when you enter BSO15 at checkout, valid until April 1, 2026. *Discount off list prices, and excludes Ebooks. Click the image or button below to get your 15% discount on the latest from , , , and .

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ICYMI and Related

Here’s a piece I wrote a year ago, warning of the dangers of Hegseth’s Christian nationalist views.

Check out the latest episode of my monthly “Confronting White Christian Nationalism” series with , which includes a conversation with .

And here’s the latest episode from , just posted yesterday.

Just dropped! On Part Four of our Countering White Christian Nationalism series, and I were joined by journalist Katherine Stewart, whose reporting focuses on the Christian far right. We discuss the wave of sexual predators being uncovered among the MAGA Christian right, and whether white Christian nationalists are ignoring the revelations about Trump and Epstein.

If you aren’t familiar with Katherine’s work, be sure to check out her NY times bestselling book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, now in paperback.

And if you missed earlier episodes of Countering White Christian Nationalism with Joy and Robby, you can catch up on the whole series here.

ICYMI on Redeeming Democracy

And don’t forget to tune in weekly at The Convocation Unscripted, a weekly podcast featuring me, , , and . Latest episode is below.

The Convocation Unscripted

Normalcy and Resistance Amid an Unjust War

This week, we open the conversation with reflections on the challenges of living daily life amid the onslaught of horrific news, so often these days instigated by our own government. We reflect on normalcy—focusing on daily tasks of caring for family, tending friendships, and connecting with local community—as a mode of resistance. We then turn to addre…

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3 months ago · 38 likes · 4 comments · Robert P. Jones