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Speaker 3Welcome to American Unexceptionalism.
Speaker 4I'm Matthew Taylor.
Speaker 3And I'm Susie Hayes. This is the show where we ask what Americans can learn from those who have resisted religious nationalism and authoritarianism around the globe.
Speaker 4We interview scholars and activists about the strategies they used, the lessons they learned in their fight against oppressive religious regimes.
Speaker 3The United States is facing a very serious Christian nationalist threat to democracy. But we aren't alone in this fight. It's time to put our American exceptionalism behind us. To learn how to create a future for all of us.
Speaker 4Welcome to the first episode of American Unexceptionalism, everyone. We're glad you've joined us for this limited series exploring the fight against religious nationalism worldwide. Susie and I came up with the idea for this series and partnered with Brad and Ishi and the folks at Axis Moody to make it because maybe like you, we are feeling the urgency of the moment here in the U.S.
Speaker 3Yes, indeed, Matt. You know well, based on your own scholarship on Christian nationalism and the New Apostolic Reformation, just how great a threat this moment is to American democracy and religious pluralism. It's real. And listeners of Straight White American Jesus don't need to be told how precarious a moment we are in with the dominance of various forms of Christian nationalist belief and practice and their alignment with political power that is undermining our democracy. And threatening already vulnerable communities. And meanwhile, political violence just seems to keep rising. It feels right now in this country like we are teetering on the cusp. Will we fall into more full-scale organized violence or will we pull back just in time to avoid that?
Speaker 4Look, it's a scary time to be an American who cares about freedom and religious pluralism. And equality and basic human dignity. But here's the thing. We are not alone. In the U.S., we tend to think of ourselves as exceptional. In fact, if you read a lot of the literature out there about American Christian nationalism, it sounds as though this was a unique American experience. It is not. American Christian nationalism is just one species of these emerging hybrid political movements that are installing authoritarian leaders and democracies around the globe. What is happening here? What we see around us, this growing far-right political violence, the religious nationalist and religious supremacist language that has been infecting our politics, the degradation of our government institutions to enrich one political party. This is part of a global trend.
Speaker 3And I've seen this play out a lot, even among some of my fellow former colleagues in Washington, D.C., among globally-minded and connected Americans. It's so ingrained in us to think that we are not alone. It's so ingrained in us to think that the United States is the democratic state par excellence, the city on a hill, and that we're here to dispense lessons to others around the world about how to do democracy correctly, how to advance peace and justice through civil society. I mean, this is like the thrust of my job at the U.S. Institute of Peace several years ago. Our job was to go out and to teach other folks around the world how to build peace through democratic rights and progress. It's the ways in which American exceptionalism is internalized in so many of us.
Speaker 4Susie and I are here because we love the United States. We are patriots. And like any patriots, we care deeply about our country. And truthfully, American democracy is special. Our constitution, our system of governance and civil society, the separation of church and state, checks and balances, the First Amendment, including rights to freedom of religion, speech, and protest. These are amazing historical accomplishments. The United States is one of the first modern democracies. And even more, the movements from our past who've helped protect and defend democracy, like the abolition movement, the quest for women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, have much to teach us right now. But the United States, we have never faced a threat quite like this one. Let me state it plainly. A far-right authoritarian movement in league with a religious nationalist movement has taken over all three branches of our government. They are actively dismantling the very safeguards the American founders tried to put in place to protect our democracy. If we go around taking a posture of American exceptionalism right now, especially in this moment, when we're realizing how fragile our democratic system is, how vulnerable our society is to misinformation, how quick some of our own institutions like our universities can fall, if we act like we know it all right now, we're just putting ideological blinders on. And let's not forget, even Martin Luther King himself went to India to learn from the Gandhian nonviolent direct action before launching the civil rights movement here. That movement was not solely American-grown, but grew out of lessons from elsewhere, solidarity from elsewhere.
Speaker 3So I think, you know, what Matt and I have been talking about a lot recently in recent years, and the reason why we have been able to do this, and the reason why we launched this project, was because we think this moment is calling for some major humility on the part of Americans. We wanted to flip the script of American exceptionalism and ask, what can we Americans learn from others around the world about how to protect democracy when the stakes are high? What can we as Americans learn about how to challenge forms of religious nationalism and religious supremacy, the forms of Christianity, of Christian nationalism that we see so many of our fellow American citizens being drawn to in this moment in this country? What can we learn from Buddhists in Sri Lanka, or Muslims in Turkey, or Christians in South Korea who have faced similar kinds of forms of religious nationalism in their own context and sought to deflate their power?
Speaker 4So that's the purpose for this series, and across 10 episodes, we're going to travel around the world to places where there are similar battles afoot, where exclusionary movements of religious nationalism are driving democratic backsliding. We'll be speaking with people of faith from a variety of faiths and traditions. We'll be speaking with scholars and activists to understand what is happening in these contexts, how it's similar to or different from what's happening in the U.S., and we're going to try to mine some practical lessons from those we speak to about what's worked and what hasn't in these efforts to protect democracy. So that's the
Speaker 3project as a whole, but what we're seeking to do in this first episode is to set up some of the questions and themes we'll be exploring throughout the series. Before we get to that, we should probably pause and tell folks who we are.
Speaker 4That might be good.
Speaker 3Yeah. So I'm going to start by telling folks a little bit about you, Matt. Listeners of Straight White American Jesus may already be familiar with you and all of those folks who are interested in white Christianity. I'm going to start with you, Matt, and then I'm going to turn it over to you. Okay. So I'm going to start with you, Matt. I'm going to start with you, Matt. help folks like me understand them in a more nuanced way, getting beyond any sort of pejorative or one-dimensional caricature. He brings this same ethos to his work as a scholar at the Institute for Islamic Christian and Jewish Studies based in Baltimore, engaging across divides, learning and sharing with scholars, clergy, and interfaith activists. But the thing that I appreciate most about Matt, and I'm going to be perfectly honest here, Matt does something that is rare for folks like us who are trained in religious studies. We are trained to speak in academic jargon and to deconstruct and bring a sort of critical lens and language to our analysis. And sometimes that doesn't translate well into a public audience. But Matt speaks to public audiences in ways that are legible. He distills complex ideas into digestible pieces. He offers constructive suggestions about how to move forward. Just wait, you'll hear this as we go along. And it's why National Public Radio and the New York Times and all these other major publications come to him as one of the foremost scholars and analysts of U.S. Christian nationalism out there right now. And all of that fed into why I was eager to work with Matt on this project.
Speaker 4Wow. If you don't have this on video, I'm blushing, Susie. If you can't already tell, Susie and I have been friends for more than a decade now. And we've been working on this project for a couple of years. And I have to say that when I first thought about exploring this topic, Susan Hayward was the first person that came to mind as a thought partner. Most religious studies people, and I very much include myself in this category, are just nerds who sit around at desks and in libraries. And we read and write books and read and write articles. But Susie is like the Indiana Jones of religious studies. She goes out traveling the world and doing real stuff with her learning. In addition to being an ordained United Church of Christ minister, Susie is a bonafide expert in Buddhism, Christianity, peacebuilding, and democracy. And when I first met Susie, in addition to being a Ph.D. student at Georgetown, she was also working at the United States Institute of Peace. That's the institute that Elon Musk and Doge completely dismantled in the spring of 2025. So in addition to taking classes with us at Georgetown, Susie was also traveling to Myanmar and Sri Lanka and Colombia. And she was also taking classes with us at Georgetown. And Susie was also traveling to Myanmar and Sri Lanka and Myanmar and Sri Lanka and Colombia, and she was supporting the peace building work of religious groups there. And if you know anything about those countries in the 2010s, that was some delicate work. In fact, Susie was in that role, working on religion and peace building at USIP during the first Trump administration. I'm not going to push her on this, but she has some more stories to tell. So in addition to just being a total badass practitioner of peace building, Susie's also a teacher. She's taught at Georgetown, George Washington University, Harvard Divinity School. She's the person that the Foreign Service Institute that trains all the people for our State Department brings in to teach our future diplomats about religion. Now, right now.
Speaker 3Or at least used to, Brian. I'm not sure that's still going to happen.
Speaker 4Yeah, that event's. The invitation's lost in the mail right now. Yeah. And right now, Susie is a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. She's also a pastor in Minneapolis who's deeply involved in justice work and community organizing. In fact, some of the Minnesota lawmakers and students who are targeted with violence this summer are her friends and congregants. So I am very excited to get to work with Susie on this particular project.
Speaker 3Yeah, it's a little bit like attending your own funeral and listening to your eulogy. Thanks, Matt. Okay, I want to share an anecdote. In 2016, when Trump was elected for the first time, and some of us were feeling a bit shell-shocked and uncertain about what was coming and about what this meant and concerned about the fate of our country and democracy, following the news obsessively. And I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I did something. I reached out to one of my good friends, a Palestinian-American woman involved in peacebuilding around the world. And together, we selected a bunch of women who were in our life, women from Colombia, from Libya, from Afghanistan, who were living in Washington, D.C. at the time, and from a score of other countries as well. We gathered together in my friend's living room, and we said to them, you tell us. You have been through periods of incredible political violence and instability, uncertain times, times when democracy was failing and you had to live under authoritarian rule, you and your families. What did you learn from those times about how to sustain yourself and how to take care of yourself? Your spirit and your soul in those times, even as you continued to work for democracy or work for human rights. And it was a really powerful evening. The things that, the lessons, the advice that I heard from the woman who were gathered around that coffee table that evening can continue to inspire me and to shape how I take care of myself and take care of my communities and show up these times now. And it's that experience that has really motivated me in recent years as I've become less involved in global peacebuilding overseas and more involved in the justice organizing in the United States, as Matt spoke to in his bio of me in recent years. I've been seeking to take the lessons that I've learned from religious peacebuilders worldwide and to apply them now, recognizing that we need to be doing religious peacebuilding. We need to be working for justice and working nonviolently to support the vulnerable and to protect democracy in this time. So, okay, as we set out here, we wanted to give you a little bit of an overview of some of the key themes and the trajectory of where we're going to be going. So, Matt, I think what we need to do is pull out something of a roadmap to give folks a sense of where we'll be going and what we'll be doing on our little global walkabout over the next 10 weeks. O, O, O, O'Reilly!
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Speaker 2So, first, where we're going to be going.
Speaker 3Which countries and regions of the world.
Speaker 4So, when we set out to do this, we want to explain for a range of different contexts, different regions, different histories, different religions, things that might look quite a bit different from the United States. But these are other democracies where folks are currently or have recently experienced similar kinds of challenges. So, what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about how we're going to address these kinds of challenges to what we're facing here. And let me just tell a little story that can kind of illustrate this. I got an invitation recently from a church in India, and they asked me to do a Zoom lecture presentation for them and their church to speak about Charlie Kirk's death. This is something that I had been commenting on some in American media. And because they've been hearing all these messages about Charlie Kirk in India, as Christians, and trying to understand, "What is going on with Charlie Kirk? Why is everyone talking about this particular figure?" But then they also said, "We also really want to understand this phenomenon of Christian Zionism, of Christians supporting the state of Israel for theological reasons. We don't really understand what's going on with that." And so, I said, "Great. I'm a happy person about those things. I work on those areas." And then they said, "But please don't say anything about any Indian politicians or parties." So, at the same time as you have this church that is being impacted by some of these kind of far-right propaganda messages about Charlie Kirk that are right now spreading around the globe in the aftermath of his assassination, they're also concerned about what's happening in Israel and Gaza and the impact that Christianity is having on that, at the same time as they themselves are a repressed religious minority in this context within India. And so, I think that's what we're talking about in the series, these overlapping circles that we are finding ourselves in, living at these intersections of these globally networked authoritarianisms that are on the rise.
Speaker 3And we're going to start in a couple places where Christians are the majority, or at least they hold more political power than other groups. These are countries that share a good deal of similarity with the US and its political dynamics, especially recently, places like Brazil and South Korea. Those are our first two episodes. And as we'll discover, the similarities between far-right Christian movements in both places and in the US, that's not just coincidental. There are some real transnational alliances and networks of Christian leaders and and Christian movements that are connecting these three countries and their fate.
Speaker 4Yeah, and that theme of these transnational alliances, these kind of coalitions of far right political and religious actors, that's one that we really want to focus on in some of these episodes. Because we talk about Christian nationalism, and it makes it sound like that's something that ends at America's borders. That is not, right? These are global networks that are developing. And we're not just seeing that kind of collusion between global Christian actors. Those alliances actually cross religious identities. And so we'll be discussing this in some of the episodes here. But there's a kind of global pluralist fascist alliance. And that sounds like a contradiction in terms, right? Pluralism and fascism aren't supposed to work together. But this is what we're actually seeing right now is a global pluralist fascist alliance that brings together Hindu nationalism. Nationalists in India, and Jewish nationalists in Israel, and Christian nationalists in the US, and Islamic nationalists in Turkey, and others. And we'll try to kind of wrap all those into here. And if you read some of the literature on religious nationalism, this might seem contradictory, right? Aren't religious nationalists supposed to be hostile to people of other religions? Isn't that kind of definitional to thinking that your religion is superior? But we'll talk about how these folks may discriminate against those of other faiths in their own country. And we'll talk about how these folks may discriminate against those of other faiths in their own country. I mean, look at the American far right. Anti-Semitism is a big part of US Christian nationalism. And Palestinian Christians aren't faring well in territory occupied by Israel, right? So there is real discrimination. But they're also willing to set aside those differences and embrace these shared anti-democratic tendencies and cooperate and coordinate. And that's what we want to try
Speaker 3to understand. And of course, they're also aligning on other issues as well, right? Like their shared agenda against queer. I mean, that's what we want to understand, right? Like their shared agenda against queer folks and feminists.
Speaker 4Absolutely, right? And you're seeing this global conversation about the family that is being interpreted and used by different religious groups. And just as when you watch how Donald Trump behaves, you see that he's constantly exhibiting this affinity, I would even go so far as to say an affection, for other autocrats and dictators around the world, whether it's Vladimir Putin, or Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or Narendra Modi, or Min Aung Hlaing. So too, Trump's followers and his supporters are forging alliances. They're cross pollinating with other far right religious nationalists around the world. And what they're doing is there's a lot of networking going on in the far right around the world right now. And they're building these powerful anti-democracy networks. They're learning from each other. They're experimenting. They're developing playbooks for how to destroy democracies.
Speaker 3But they're not the only ones who are networking, right? So even as we explore these far right actors and their constituencies, and the issues that they support each other on, the strategies that they seem to be learning from or mimicking from one another, we're also going to look at the kinds of transnational solidarity movements that are already formed, or forming, or that could be formed to resist these transnational far right alliances. Because they're not the only ones, again, who are creating this kind of cross border solidarity. So are those activists, people of faith, who are working to resist these movements. And we'll see that as we go along and hear from these folks in different contexts. We'll see the ways in which nonviolent activists are picking up on effective strategies that have been used elsewhere, and repurposing them for their context. So, you know, a small example is the banging of pots that we're hearing in some U.S. cities right now that is done every evening to signal resistance to the city's occupation by federal troops. I hear of that happening in Washington, D.C. It's happening in certain neighborhoods here in Minneapolis. That practice, it didn't come out of nowhere. Myanmar activists did the exact same thing to resist military troops in their streets during the 2021 coup. And long before that, it was the U.S. that was doing the same thing. The U.S. is doing the same thing. The U.S. The U.S.
Speaker 4The U.S. And that focus on resistance and resistance strategies and learning across these different cultural contexts, that's a big part of why we're even doing this series on American unexceptionalism. We want to be accurate in our diagnosis of the problems, but an accurate diagnosis is only helpful if it leads you to the remedy to those problems. We need to know the wisdom of experts and activists who actually have fought for democracy against religious nationalisms, and in some cases, they have succeeded. What can activists and political strategists from Poland teach us about how to use political alliances to defeat far-right authoritarians using elections? What can scholars and practitioners from Brazil teach us about how to hold attempted insurrectionist presidents legally accountable? What can Hindus who oppose Hindu nationalism teach those of us who identify as Christians, like me and Susie, how to use theology and speak the language of our tradition to counter abuses by our co-religionists?
Speaker 3And you'll see that people are really eager to share their lessons with those of us in the U.S. I hear this eagerness to offer wisdom a lot from my activist friends overseas in Facebook messages and Twitter. I'm sure you've heard them say that they're concerned about what's happening here, and they're concerned for our sake, but also for their own sake. They know that our fates are tied together, that if America falls into authoritarianism and illiberalism, it's going to have repercussions throughout the world. They need us to succeed in our struggle, and they want to help us succeed. They are offering solidarity. They are telling us we are not alone. We are not alone. But hearing those offers and receiving that support, again, that will require us to get beyond our own deeply embedded American exceptionalist posture, to turn towards others to receive wisdom about how to do democracy, how to protect democracy, how to organize effectively within civil society. Another part of why we're doing this is that we want to foster and build hope. It's really easy to fall into spares cynicism these days. That's by design, remember. The bastards are seeking to overwhelm the systems, the legal and political systems, but also the very personal systems, our limbic systems, literally. As we record this in the fall of 2025, the second Trump administration has fired thousands of government employees who have served this country faithfully. Many of my friends are in this category. They've destroyed entire federal agencies that were dedicated to advancing peace and feeding the hungry. They are disappearing migrants and people of color on the streets of America in a way that was unthinkable even five years ago, even during the first Trump administration. They are stealing public land to destroy it through extraction. It's a lot. But this doesn't have to be the end of the story. LESLIE KENDRICK: I have a Buddhist monk friend in Sri Lanka. And Sri Lanka is a place where a president was democratically elected and set about destroying democracy in an authoritarian power grab, all while feeling divisions between ethnic and religious groups. Sounds very familiar, right? LESLIE KENDRICK: And it's also a place where a popular uprising in 2022 that was built over four short months brought people together across generational and racial and religious and class and urban-rural divides, and led to that president's overthrow. You're going to hear more about that uprising in episode four. Last spring, my Buddhist monk friend said to me at a time when I was despairing, he said, "Susan, nothing is forever." It was very Buddhist. He said, "Nothing is forever. What is happening right now in America will not be forever, and it's not fixed. Everything is always changing. And you have to step into that change process and direct it toward good outcomes." LESLIE KENDRICK: Part of what Matt and I have discovered through interviewing these experts and these people who have been living through these kinds of struggles, protesting, organizing to protect their democracies, doing it for years, is that there's a lot more we can do. These authoritarian takeovers are not inevitable, and they're not unstoppable. But the more time that passes, the harder it is. LESLIE KENDRICK: So we need to get moving. And maybe learning from people around the world and finding the hope that they can offer, that can help us get unstuck here. So at the end of every episode, we're going to draw out the practical lessons and the good ideas that we're learning from those who we interview.
Speaker 4MIKE GREEN: So if you're someone who's concerned about American democracy and the role that religion is playing in the devolution of our politics, whether you are Christian, whether you are Christian or not, whether you are religious or not, if you care about saving our democracy from this crisis, what to do, then we made this show for you. One of the major figures in the development of religious studies is a German theorist named Max Muller, and he helped build the whole field of religious studies and comparative religion in the 19th century, and he used to say, "He who knows one knows none." In other words, if you've only studied one religious tradition, one religious community, then you don't actually know anything about religion. You're just familiar with one case or one species of religion. It's in comparing and learning about the whole group of religions that we can even begin to describe and understand the category of religion. And we'd like to suggest something similar. If you only know and understand the American form of democracy and the American form of Christian nationalism, then you don't actually know much about democracy and religious nationalism at all. And we're going to spend the next 10 weeks comparing and contrasting, figuring out what our blind spots are. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of American on Exceptionalism, and I look forward to learning to ask new and better questions about our crisis here in the United States. Would you please join us? That's it for this episode of American on Exceptionalism. Thanks for joining us.
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Speaker 3on American on Exceptionalism. All the other great series from Axis Mundi Media at www.axismundi.us.
Speaker 4This show is produced by Andrew Gill and engineered by Scott Okamoto. Funding provided by the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the International Center on Religion and Diplomacy.
Speaker 3Until next time, remember, the struggle for democracy is global and we aren't alone. American On Exceptionalism is a production of Iowa Public Television which is solely responsible for its content. No part of this recording may be reproduced without the support of Iowa Public Television's editorial staff. The program is made possible in part by.
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