The following is an adapted excerpt from Katherine Stewart's New York Times bestsellerMoney, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.
In the decades immediately following the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the new American republic became the modern world’s first great exporter of democratic revolution. “This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe, at least the enlightened part of it, for light and liberty go together,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. “It is our glory that we first put it into motion.”
Today, however, sectors of the American right have become exporters of the antidemocratic counterrevolution. Not sated with their efforts to replace democratic pluralism with authoritarianism at home, America’s Christian nationalist activists have pushed their ideas and agendas out to other countries around the world. Joining the new American counterrevolutionaries are a host of “anti-woke” culture warriors from the New Right along with the white supremacists, men’s rights activists, New Traditionalists, and others they inspire. Some groups in those other countries have proved receptive to the new ideologies. A global antidemocratic reaction has emerged that in turn contributes to the counterrevolutionary process in America.
The geopolitical axis around which this sector of the global antidemocratic reaction now turns is an extraordinary alliance between a dominant wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Even while Vladimir Putin continues to prosecute his war of aggression in Ukraine and crush democracy in Russia, with assassinations of journalists and political opponents, widespread imprisonment, and kleptocratic arrangements, the right wing of the Republican Party hails him as a hero and a strong leader.
Under President Trump, the United States has become a flashing red beacon of hope for a new, global, religious, right-wing populist movement. It calls itself a “global conservative movement” and claims that it seeks to “defend the natural family.” But it’s really about taking down modern democracy and replacing it with authoritarian, faith-based ethno-states. And you could say that it started in America -- or at least in some long-ago encounters between some Americans and some Russians.
A key figure in the global counterrevolution is Allan C. Carlson, born in Iowa in 1949 and now professor emeritus at Hillsdale College, the private Christian nationalist enterprise in Michigan. Early in his academic career, Carlson concluded that the collapse of “the natural family” was the source of every major social problem in the United States. By “natural family,” he meant a family consisting of a male head of household winning bread and embodying the dominant masculine virtues in overseeing his brood; a subordinated female domestic worker embodying the feminine virtues; and their (preferably numerous) children. Abortion was a threat to the natural family, but much bigger threats, to judge from Carlson’s preoccupations, were feminism and, perhaps worst of all, “the homosexual agenda.”
Carlson announced his hatred of all things homosexual very early in his career, and he was rewarded in 1988 when the Reagan administration appointed him to head a National Commission on Children, a position he held until 1993. It was in the context of that work that Carlson took a fateful trip to Russia in 1995. In Moscow, Carlson met with a pair of sociology professors, Anatoly Antonov and Victor Medkov, who shared his concerns about the rise of women’s equality and gay rights. By their own account, the Russians learned a great deal from Carlson, and they translated his work with reverence. The outcome of the meeting was the establishment in 1997 of the World Congress of Families (WCF), a group intended to unite America’s Christian right with like-minded activists in Russia and Europe.
The WCF soon picked up support from its two main constituencies. In America, Brian S. Brown and his fellow leaders of the National Organization for Marriage formed common cause with other reactionary groups such as the ADF and Focus on the Family, along with international allies such as the Spain-based advocacy group CitizenGO, representatives from the Vatican, the far-right Fidesz Party in Hungary, and the far-right Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland, among others. In Russia, the contributors and participants came from the echelons of the new ruling elite and priestly class.
Over the subsequent three decades, Carlson’s American-born-and-bred politics would rise to power alongside the new Russian oligarchy—and then it would turn around to hit back hard at America.
The global holy war has an unmistakably theocratic vision for the future. “I think this collaboration, cooperation, this synergy between the church and the state in Russia, is the key to the defense of traditional family values,” said Alexey Komov, an affable and attractive Russian activist who has involved himself in the American Homeschool movement as well as the American Christian film industry. According to the journalist Casey Michel, Komov has worked with Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch with links to pro-Russian military and political leaders in eastern Ukraine. Malofeev’s television station, Tsargrad TV, which was launched with the help of former Fox News producer Jack Hanick, has provided a platform for the disgraced right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, widely regarded as a leading ideologue of the movement.
Given the weakness of Russia’s position in the world, Dugin’s vision may seem far-fetched. After all, Russia remains a nuclear-armed petrostate with an aging population, sad economy, and a burden to bear from its own acts of aggression. But this makes the devolution of the American right all the more striking – and alarming. The party that now controls all three branches of the federal government appears to be bonded with the ultimate dead-enders of history. The question that hangs over the United States is how far they take us down the road to self-destruction – and whether l those of us who would prefer a different direction for our country have the determination and moral courage to fight for it.
Katherine Stewart writes about the intersection of faith and politics, policy, education, and the threat to democratic institutions. Her work appears in The New York Times, New Republic, and other publications. She is the author of several bestselling books, including The Power Worshippers and The Good News Club.
Excerpted with permission fromMoney, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (Bloomsbury, February 2025). All rights reserved.
