REGISTER: Tuesday’s Happy Hour with Dr. Matthew Taylor, Author of “Defying Tyrants”

Registration for Tuesday’s Happy Hour with Dr. Matthew Taylor on his upcoming book, “Defying Tyrants”

***Bette members will find the registration link below the paywall. To join our Happy Hour and Speakeasy events, please take out a paid membership.***

“Matthew Taylor shines a bright light on a dark corner of American Christianity, depicting its role in the ascendency of Donald Trump, the January 6th insurrection, and the “holy violence” it’s bringing to our political life. In brisk, engaging prose, he portrays the leaders and the followers of a movement that threatens to replace rational public discourse with strident demonology, endangering the future of our democracy.”—Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right

“Jesus was deeply and profoundly anti-authoritarian. I mean, I think Jesus Christ might have been one of the most anti-authoritarian human beings to ever live.”—Dr. Matthew Taylor, author of Defying Tyrants

It’s been two years since Dr. Matthew Taylor first joined the Bette community to discuss his 2024 book: The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.

I am bringing him back so our community can hear directly from this brilliant scholar on his upcoming book: Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus In a World Full of Antichrists.

To preorder the book, go here.

Some of you may have read my latest Hot Type column, featuring a Q&A with Matthew, based on a recent RadPod:

'False Prophets Are Making False Messiahs Out of Tyrants' - Today's Hot Type column for Byline

I recommend reading my column or reviewing RadPod Ep166 as prep for our meeting with him.

Here is an excerpt from my column:

The first time I interviewed Dr Matthew Taylor, based on his book, The Violent Take It By Force, I finally understood the deal that religious leaders had made with Donald Trump and how they sold it to their flocks. The religious scholar explained that Trump was viewed as someone who had conquered mountains – media, business, government, arts and entertainment, among them – and that Christian supremacists felt their objectives could be met by supporting him, regardless of his flagrant unChristianlike behaviors.

It was a Faustian deal, and quite frankly, Trump delivered. He delivered the judicial coup that led to the overturning of Roe v Wade, denying women bodily autonomy and health care rights – a longtime objective of the religious right. He gave them all they asked for – even moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to satisfy both evangelicals and his orthodox Jewish supporters.

As his Catholic base is forced to do some soul-searching over the fight he’s waging with Pope Leo, his Protestant Christian supporters must grapple with his recent blasphemy…

In a new interview with Matthew Taylor, who just released his latest book Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists, he offers Christian believers an off-ramp to safely turn away from supporting any global tyrants – from Trump to Putin – by explaining that Jesus was radically anti-authoritarian.

Matthew Taylor: My second book, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, was focused on this movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) that I argue were the principal theological architects of January 6 and of Christian Trumpism.

These are the folks who were serving as that point of interface between American evangelicalism and the Trump-MAGA movement. And a very important figure in there is Paula White-Cain, who is now the Director of the White House Faith Office – literally the gatekeeper for religious leaders trying to get access to Donald Trump. And the New Apostolic Reformation, this network of leaders, has supplied the theological rationales for evangelicals to support Trump…

HSC: Thank you… Let’s jump right into Defying Tyrants. What a perfect topic for this moment in time.

MT: Defying Tyrants is different in that I am trying to speak Christianly. Here, I am trying to use Christian theology. I have training in Christian theology. I can do both of those voices. And I’m trying to argue against the worst excesses of these theologies…

So the central argument of the book is that Jesus was deeply and profoundly anti-authoritarian. I mean, I think Jesus Christ might have been one of the most anti-authoritarian human beings to ever live. Right? He’s living under the Roman Empire where, literally, the Caesars proclaimed themselves to be gods that everyone has to bow and worship.

And they don’t really care whether you actually believe that they are a god. They want to see you bow, because that tells them that you are in line, that you are submissive…

And then the second sub-argument of that, and this is where the subtitle comes in – “following Jesus in a world of Christian antichrists” – I think we have, throughout the Christian tradition, largely misunderstood and misconstrued this concept of antichrist, even just at a biblical exegetical level.

I think people have just run roughshod over this biblical concept. So the word antichrist only occurs in two small epistles in the New Testament, First and Second John, and in those epistles, it’s as often plural as it is singular.

The very important pivotal passages in First John, chapter two, where the author says “you’ve heard that antichrist is coming, but now many antichrists have come”... and so clearly there’s a plural dimension to this word. And if you read those texts carefully, I argue in the book, the way it’s using this term antichrist is referring to Christians who are abusing power and claiming that they are superior to other people, superior to their fellow Christians, and superior to people outside of the church, and that therefore they are entitled to power. And from the perspective of the other church, this was antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.

And so you have this dynamic of people claiming to be aligned with Jesus, to be following Jesus, but doing the opposite, doing harm in the name of Jesus. And those are the people that get called antichrists in the New Testament. And so I think that’s actually a very valuable concept…

I think this is actually a meaningful theological concept that can help us make sense of how awful Christianity has been throughout history, because it’s a mixture of people who genuinely want to follow Jesus and who are doing good in the world, and many people who are there for just the power and the exploitation. And I think that when you use that lens to think about Christian history, I think it gives a new vigor to those of us who want to claim the way of Christ, to lay hold of the gospel and to actually defend the gospel, and not always be defending Christianity, because Christianity is a very mixed bag in its history…

‘There Are No Oligarchs In the Kingdom of God’

You see Jesus pushing for this egalitarian vision, that in the economy of God, all human beings are equalized before God, and there is no hierarchy. There are no oligarchs in the kingdom of God. There are no princes in the kingdom of God. There’s God who is the king, the king who serves, the king who sacrifices, the king who becomes one of us, who walks among us, and then there’s the rest of us who are dignified in God’s presence with us, and who then go and serve each other and care for each other.

So I think all attempts at creating Christian states and Christian governments are deeply, deeply misbegotten, and in fact, are violations of the ways that Jesus talked about and thought about politics and thought about humanity in the world. What we are seeing today is a rebellion against some of the insights of the Enlightenment.

HSC: Anywhere I go, I seek out the oldest churches, the oldest cathedrals. Last week in London, I was in a church that was initially built in 1123. And I went to a church that had laid its first stone in 675 AD, and I got to look at a preserved Roman sidewalk and a Roman arch discovered in the Blitz. And I just love feeling close to the history in these really incredible spaces. And never in my lifetime did I think that an American president would pick a fight with the Pope, put out images of himself as Christ, and of course, lie about it. But what I’d like to get a comment from you about is his behavior forces those in his camp who wear the cross, like press secretary Karolyn Levitt, who acts holier than thou, and Speaker Mike Johnson, who acts holier than thou, to have to back him and make sense of his actions and what is wrong with them? Why at the risk of everything that allegedly they may believe, do they get up there and lie for this tyrant that everybody needs to resist, regardless of their faith?

MT: I think for a lot of these Christians, they have made a cynical bargain. The simple way of putting it is, “Trump is not a good man, but he’s God’s man for this moment”. This is the idea behind the kind of Cyrus anointing prophecy that is very popular in NAR circles equating Trump to Cyrus. This is the kind of rationalization that you sometimes hear from the more Calvinist crowd that inspires people like Pete Hegseth, that he’s the Christian Prince – “He is the one who is put atop the society by the hand of God”.

Like Pilot Fish Around a Shark

And so the goal is then to kind of help shape and inspire that Christian Prince towards a particular vision of Christianity. This is nothing new in Christian history, there’s been a long legacy of Christian tyrants, people like Henry VIII, people like Constantine, who have manipulated and claimed religion for the furtherance of their own political ends and personal power. And I think part of what happens when you have a new tyrant emerging, a new Christian tyrant emerging, whether it’s Vladimir Putin, whether it’s Victor Orbán, whether it’s Jair Bolsonaro, whether it’s Donald Trump, is that almost like pilot fish around a shark, there are these theologians who emerge. They are predators who are symbiotically tied to that tyrant and feel that they need to justify and continue to frame that tyrant as a means to their own power, as a means to their enacting their vision on the world. And to put it in the terms that Jesus used, false prophets are making false messiahs out of tyrants, right? That is what we see. That’s the pattern we see throughout Christian history. And I think that those of us who are Christians, who identify as Christians, who identify as followers of Jesus, and I recognize not all of your audience would necessarily identify with that, and that’s fine, but those of us who do identify as Christians, I think it is our theological duty to call this stuff out, to confront this stuff with the gospel of Jesus…

I think that part of the problem is that so many Christians throughout history have embraced the gospel of Caesar and rejected the Gospel of Jesus while claiming that it was the gospel of Jesus. And that is this Antichrist dynamic that I’m trying to get at in the book.

I think that this is a huge problem today, because, again, it’s not just Trump. We see this happening around Vladimir Putin. There are these Russian Orthodox priests and prelates today who are who are telling the Russian people that Vladimir Putin is God’s man on the throne, and that if you go and fight in Ukraine and go slaughter innocent Ukrainians that we invaded, that is part of a holy war and part of your redemption, using the old logic of the Crusades that is still going on today right now.

It’s a different manifestation, because it’s being filtered through a Russian Orthodox tradition, but it’s the same logic. It’s what we hear from Paula White-Cain and from Pete Hegseth and from JD Vance. And so yes, it is shocking to see a US President beefing with the Pope over theology and over his own megalomania. But it is not new in Christian history. In fact, it fits a very long and old pattern.

HSC: In your book Defying Tyrants, you write: ‘If those of us who choose to follow the narrow path of Jesus Christ are true to our calling, we will incubate an entirely different way of being in the world from the way of being that supremacy offers. If we have no need to dominate, then we are indomitable.”

And that’s what I want to leave people with. I think that’s a beautiful summation of where we should be heading. Jason Stanley, the great political philosopher, who understands very much how fascism works, believes faith leaders have to lead us out of this together. And I think you’ve just made a strong argument for that…

****

---

More about Matthew here:

Dr Matthew D. Taylor is the author of The Violent Take It by Force, Defying Tyrants, and Scripture People, and his work has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Weekend Edition, On the Media, Rolling Stone, The Bulwark, Politico, Sojourners, and Religion News Service. A religious studies scholar who specializes in American Islam, Christian nationalism, and Christian extremism, he is also the creator of two podcast series: Charismatic Revival Fury and American Unexceptionalism. Taylor holds a PhD from Georgetown University and an MA from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University. You can follow his substack here and preorder his latest book here.

---

You can also order his previous book at any of the links below:

• The Violent Take It By Force:

Thank you for everything always and see many of you on Tuesday!

****

****

Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships to keep the light on.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

• Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

🤍

Begin each day with a grateful heart.

🤍

REGISTRATION LINK HERE