Katherine Stewart first turned her attention to the Religious Right in the United States in 2007 after her child’s school hosted what’s called a Good News Club — they are Christian after-school programs for elementary school children.
She was surprised to learn of religious program in public schools, and is an investigative reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times and other major publications, so she started researching and that led to her first book on the subject, called “The Good News Club” which was published in 2008.
Stewart followed it up with her 2020 book, “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism” which laid out how the Religious Right in the United States has portrayed itself as a social movement, but she says is actually a well-organized political movement that has evolved into a Christian Nationalist movement that seeks to gain political power and impose its vision on society.
Her third book on this subject, published in February, is “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy” and she was in town recently to give a talk about it, so we had her stop by the studio to chat about the book and get her take on the evolution of the Religious Nationalism movement in the United States.
You can hear our 2022 conversation with Ms. Stewart here.
Her presentation was Nov. 11 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Naples.
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