Yes, January 6 Was an Organized Religious Coup: Rep. Jared Huffman on the Christian Nationalist Menace

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Tuesday, August 18, 2026. Over the years, we've done many shows, especially recently, about the complicated and problematic relationship between religion and politics, Christianity and politics in the United States. Some people have been very fearful. Many people have written books laying out the dangers, but we haven't had a book laying out the dangers by a politician, a sitting American politician, and today, we do. Jared Huffman is a relatively local congressman, actually, for me. He's the congressman for San Rafael. He's talking to us from there, just over the bridge. I'm in San Francisco. He is working for you or at least working for his constituencies, in the North Bay of San Francisco. And he has also just come out with a book today. It's called No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism, and he's joining us from San Rafael. Jared, it's an unusual book, or at least it's an unusual book from a sitting congressman. Explain why you've written this book.

00:01:46 Jared Huffman: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for having me. Look. You're right. A lot of books have been written about Christian nationalism, many of them from academics and sociologists and religious scholars delving into the theology and different aspects. But nobody inside government, nobody, at my level of national politics has really dared to touch the issue. So why did I do this? Because it is, an issue that can be divisive. It could be something that's unpleasant because when you scrutinize it, you're often accused of being anti-Christian, which is false, but it comes with the territory. I did it because the January 6 insurrection was something I lived through and saw, and I saw the religious elements of it. Most people do not understand that this attempted coup was a religious event. There was all of this religious choreography, all of these symbols and worship practices that were front and center. I saw much of it that day. Scholars of religion were shouting about it, demanding that these religious extremists be held to account. And I watched the country sort of go back to sleep and not at all confront the religious element of the insurrection. And so what happened is I saw this dangerous movement, basically be allowed to continue on, to regroup, to grow stronger, to continue to be the shock troops for Donald Trump whenever he needs them. And that puts us in a very, very dangerous place today. So I wanted to sound the alarm and do my part to get our country more focused on what I think is the most dangerous threat to our democracy today.

00:03:35 Andrew Keen: Shock troops. It's quite radical language. What do you mean by that?

00:03:40 Jared Huffman: Well, what I mean is that thousands of Christians don't just show up at the Capitol and try to topple the government. It happened for a reason on January 6. They were radicalized by groups like the New Apostolic Reformation, this very virulent Christian supremacist group that has embraced a very militant, any-means-necessary agenda to achieve Christian dominion. And, that includes taking over our government, being done with democracy, and imposing its religious dogma on the rest of us.

00:04:18 Andrew Keen: I don't wanna put words into your mouth, Jared, but the way you're presenting January 6—

00:04:18 Jared Huffman: Yeah.

00:04:24 Andrew Keen: As if it was some sort of religious coup. Is that what you're saying?

00:04:28 Jared Huffman: It is exactly what I'm saying. And you don't have to just believe me. Religion scholars were lighting their hair on fire about this in real time. There was an online exhibit put together by the Smithsonian Institution, in partnership with the University of Alabama. It's still online. It's called Uncivil Religion. You can look it up, and you can see all of the sights and sounds of the insurrection with all of the religion that was so central to it. And all of this, of course, was on the verge of being written up into the 845-page report that the select committee on the insurrection was tasked with preparing. But as I explained in the book, something happened so that all of that Christian nationalism was erased from the final report. And to this day, our country really has not reckoned with the religious dimension of the insurrection. And, you know, I can just tell you that this is not just me. One of my Republican colleagues, Adam Kinzinger, who served on that bipartisan select committee, told me, and I quote him in the book, that Christian nationalism wasn't just part of the insurrection. It was the whole story, the whole thing.

00:05:48 Andrew Keen: What about the role of Liz Cheney? She, of course, was also prominent with Kinzinger on that committee.

00:05:56 Jared Huffman: Yeah.

00:05:56 Andrew Keen: Do you suggest in the book that for one reason or other, Cheney sidestepped that issue?

00:06:03 Jared Huffman: She did more than sidestep it. She intervened to absolutely erase any reference to Christian nationalism from this final report. And I think as much as I admire the way she stood up to Donald Trump, very few Republicans were willing to do that at the time. She did the country a terrible disservice by erasing this very important part of what happened that day. And as a result, we are less safe today because of it.

00:06:30 Andrew Keen: Was it a conspiracy, though, in your mind, Jared? I mean, were there organizers of January 6? We've all seen the images, the photographs, the video, they've become part of American folklore, now political folklore. Were there organizers, religious organizers, trying to literally seize power?

00:06:49 Jared Huffman: Yes. They were. And the fact is they were in the White House days before January 6. They had rooms at the Willard Hotel, which is, of course, where the war room that Rudy Giuliani and others had set up. They were tasked by the Trump campaign with mobilizing right-wing Christians. They spent about two months doing it leading up to January 6, and many of them were on-site, preaching and issuing prophecies and leading folks in worship service as this riot unfolded. So they were central to this whole affair.

00:07:27 Andrew Keen: And you mentioned Giuliani. Presumably, Trump was in on this. I mean, was it his idea? Who's— who was shaping who? Is it Trump pushing these religious conspiracies, or was it the other way around?

00:07:41 Jared Huffman: It was both. I mean, Trump certainly has always found this Christian nationalist movement very useful to him. They have incredible power. They have the ability to mobilize millions of people who are religiously charged in a way that nothing else in American politics can really match that mobilization power. But this group also recognized in Trump something that was very, very useful to them. He mainstreamed them. He platformed them. He took many of these radical faith leaders out of the fringe and made them VIPs in the White House. He has done a lot to advance their project, and their project, you know, if we wanna get to the end game, their project is theocracy. It is a right-wing authoritarian theocracy. They are absolutely on a collision course with democracy, and Donald Trump has been a powerful instrument for them to get there.

00:08:37 Andrew Keen: Couple of years ago, we had Margaret Atwood on the show. Of course, she warned us about this coming supposedly coming theocracy in The Handmaid's Tale. Was she right to warn? I mean, is this have these people literally read, maybe have it have or haven't, or they've somehow consumed, this warning and are trying to implement a religious dictatorship?

00:09:05 Jared Huffman: Yeah. I found The Handmaid's Tale really chilling. And I think the reason Atwood was right and the reason her fictional story landed with such force is because she didn't entirely make it up. She reverse-engineered Gilead from the real America, including our puritanical past and some of our theocratic roots, and certainly the militancy. And, you know, there's a really important part of that too. In Atwood's story, it didn't happen all at once. Gilead began using fake emergencies and other things to sort of gradually break down, the scaffolding of our democracy, and people found themselves in an authoritarian— [ed.: approx. 25 seconds of audio missing from raw transcript here]

00:10:06 Andrew Keen: Of course, Atwood's warning was deeply gendered about the treatment of women in this theocracy. Is this reflected in this plot that you write about in the book, the January 6 plot to reestablish some sort of theocracy in America? If these people had seized power, would we have a nation of trad wives, Jared?

00:10:29 Jared Huffman: For several subcultures of Christian nationalism, yes. Very much like what Atwood portrayed. And to give you one example of that, Pete Hegseth, our so-called Secretary of War. He is from one of the top three religious subcultures of MAGA Christian nationalism. They are very patriarchal. It's a group that is known as the TheoBros. The official name of the denomination is the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. They're led by a guy named Doug Wilson, a pastor from Idaho, who openly says that it was a mistake to pass the Nineteenth Amendment to give women the right to vote. He believes men should vote on behalf of the entire household, that women should not be allowed to hold positions of authority in either the church or in government or politics or business or anything else, that they basically should simply be quiet and stay at home and take care of the family. So, yeah, Atwood is not far at all from that very significant and growing threat of Christian nationalism. You'll find, some pretty similar stuff in one of the other subcultures, which is radical traditionalist Catholics. These are folks who, you know, wanna go back way before Vatican II to a traditionalist form of Catholicism where, you know, women not only can't be priests and play no major role in government or society, but they, you know, wear veils and submit themselves, even at church.

00:12:03 Andrew Keen: More and more ironic, given American ideological hostility to the veiled nature of Iranian theocracy. A lot of people are gonna be watching, listening to this and thinking, oh, this guy, he's the one of the cofounders of the Congressional Freethought Caucus. He's the most explicit anticlerical figure in Congress along with Jamie Raskin. But they'd actually be surprised as I was, Jared, that your background is in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You grew up in this tradition. Tell me about your childhood.

00:12:44 Jared Huffman: Yeah. Thank you. So I did grow up in a branch of the Mormon church. It was called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Independence, Missouri. It has since renamed itself. It goes by Community of Christ and is actually a pretty progressive church relative to these LDS ones that you just showed on the website there. They believe in women in the priesthood. They are LGBTQ-affirming. You know? They've come a long way, and certainly taken a different path than the Mormons. But I fell out of faith and stopped being religious, when I was about 20 years old. Prior to that, I was very devout. I was ordained into the priesthood of my church. And, you know, when I stopped believing in the supernatural precepts of that particular faith, I spent many years thinking and searching, and ultimately decided that the label that fits me best is humanist, which means, I do have a moral framework. I believe in lots of things, but none of it's supernatural. I believe in, you know, what we can see and validate and prove. And I think, as far as I know, this world and this one time around is all we've got.

00:13:57 Andrew Keen: Did you have, so to speak, a humanist moment on this road to Damascus where you suddenly discovered that the faith that you were brought up in, wasn't correct, wasn't true?

00:14:12 Jared Huffman: Little bit. I mean, my father's death when I was 20, certainly led me to start questioning a lot of things that I had taken purely on faith, and I just didn't find good answers. And so, you know, I think like a lot of people, when you lose your religion, when you fall out of faith, that can be really hard. It took many years for me to kinda realize that the things I liked about my religious upbringing, the, the basic teachings really of Jesus Christ, if you look at the Sermon on the Mount, are universal values. You don't have to believe in heaven and hell and an intercessory God or any of that stuff. You can just be a good person and resonate quite nicely with the Sermon on the Mount. So that's sort of where I've settled in as a humanist or, you know, maybe you'd even call me, a born-again atheist, but, you know, certainly a Christ-loving atheist. I'm good with the teachings. I just don't, I don't subscribe to the supernatural.

00:15:14 Andrew Keen: We did. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work of the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch, old friend of the show. His latest book is called Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy. And he actually argues it's a very, original argument. He argues, and I think you'll find it quite interesting, actually, Jared, if you haven't read the book, that American Christianity in terms of American democracy can learn much from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, formerly known as Mormons. Do you given your own background and your own familiarity with this reformed church, do you think that Jon Rauch is right?

00:15:54 Jared Huffman: Well, I'm not sure what his premise is in terms of what we would learn what we would need to learn from the LDS.

00:16:00 Andrew Keen: Learning from a respect for, shall we say, diversity and democracy, a kind of pluralism in spite of their commitment to the idea of God?

00:16:12 Jared Huffman: Yeah. I don't see it in the LDS movement. They still don't allow women in the priesthood. I think they've got a long way to evolve before I would hold them up as a paragon of, you know, diversity and pluralism. But they're, you know, they are multiracial now. They there was a time when their dogma was that, you know, Black people bore the mark of Cain and, you know, were not welcome in the church or in the priesthood, and they did change that sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. But, you know, I think they got a long way to go.

00:16:49 Andrew Keen: Interesting. You mentioned, Trump, and, of course, there are many prominent Christian figures, in the Republican Party. Mike Johnson comes to mind. I'm not sure how centrally involved he was in January 6. But are you particularly concerned with this, if not rightward shift within the Republican Party, certainly the shift towards overt Christianity where the Speaker of the House is very proud to be praying at 3 a.m. in the Capitol. Does this concern you?

00:17:27 Jared Huffman: Yeah. Mike Johnson is a theocrat. He talks about what he calls biblically sanctioned government. He rejects church-state separation outright. This is one of the most central pillars of our democracy and our founding. He argues that it's just a misunderstanding that it doesn't even exist. And while he may not have been, you know, arming the insurrectionists on January 6, he was very active in mobilizing them. He was participating in prayer calls with many of these Christian nationalist faith leaders in the weeks leading up to January 6 to thousands and thousands of Christians, many of whom did show up that day to storm the Capitol. And he was one of the principal legal architects of the failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election in court. So he was filing the amicus briefs and leading the legal efforts on behalf of congressional Republicans to try to undo the election. He's pretty extreme, and I think most people have no idea just how extreme, but he spent almost his entire adult life pushing this very theocratic, very fundamentalist, religious dogma into public life.

00:18:44 Andrew Keen: You're talking to us from San Rafael, just over the bridge in California, but, of course, you spend much of your life in DC. And I know that the book, in many ways, No Prophets, speaks of this new theocratic culture in Washington, DC. What's it like, Jared, when you wander around? Is it like wandering around the government perhaps in Tehran, lots of cloaked figures praying to their own version of God?

00:19:13 Jared Huffman: Not quite. Not quite, but I think, there are some folks who would like to take us much closer to something like that. My colleague Adam Kinzinger jokes that these Christian nationalists are like the American Taliban, that they really do want a rigid and authoritarian, all-controlling religious government. So, no. What it's like in Washington every day is that folks who embrace Christian nationalism and this extreme agenda are trying every day in ways big and small to chip away at the separation of church and state. They hate it. They detest it. And so they're constantly pushing boundaries, trying to have more and more public sectarian Christian religious ceremonies and practices and, you know, forming caucuses that are about these Christian Zionist beliefs. Like, there is no West Bank. There is only Judea and Samaria, and it is Israel's by birthright. So this stuff is playing out, far more than most Americans realize. And it's one of the reasons I wrote this book to kinda take you behind the scenes and show you how this shadow theocracy, as I call it, actually operates in the Capitol.

00:20:31 Andrew Keen: Can you make jokes? I mean, when they come up to you and you chat to them in the aisles, or would you get into trouble if you made a rather humorous remark about what these people get up to?

00:20:44 Jared Huffman: I like jokes. I think sarcasm and humor are wonderful things, but, you know, many of these are folks who believe in this absolutist form of fundamentalist Christianity where folks who disagree with you aren't just, you know, the political adversary. They are demons. They are antichrists, and they believe it is their religious duty to destroy anything that stands in the way of their religious agenda. So I don't think it would go over very well, Andrew.

00:21:16 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I better keep it where— I don't think I would go over very well there. You mentioned you're a humanist, Jared, but you didn't describe yourself as an American humanist, which I'm sure you're comfortable with as well. But I wonder whether you trace your own humanism back, for example, to the founding fathers, of course, who constructed the church— the very formal church-state division in the United States and the country itself, to the surprise of many people, actually, was created by, if not atheist, certainly people who were ambivalent about Christian doctrine.

00:21:52 Jared Huffman: Yeah. You know, back at the time of our founding, we didn't use the term humanist, at least not in the same sense that we do today. But I think you're right, Andrew. I think that Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, certainly Thomas Paine, and many other towering figures, of our founding era would qualify as humanists. And a humanist is simply a person who believes that we have a moral obligation to lead decent lives and to treat each other well, but it's not grounded in any incentive involving an afterlife or fear of hell. It's not supernatural in any way. It is based on the natural world and what we can see and verify. Those were our founders. I mean, Jefferson writing about natural law and ridiculing revealed religion, you know, going after the clerical class and supporting science in the face of what he called priestcraft. Ben Franklin, you know, watching his invention of the lightning rod be opposed by the clerics of his day because they thought it was an arrogant attempt by humans to stand in the way of God's will and that it was far better to keep sending people up in the church tower to sprinkle holy water to try to prevent lightning from striking churches. So, yeah, this was, very much one of the fault lines of our founding era, and our founders were on the side of the enlightenment, on the side of rebuking, religious orthodoxy and upholding natural rights and government of the people.

00:23:36 Andrew Keen: I take your point, but the whole history of the United States, we've done many shows on this over the last two hundred and fifty years, Jared, has been about organized or unofficial religions, belief in magic, some kind of metaphysical take on America and the world. So aren't you, in a sense, fighting against America or at least the American tradition?

00:23:59 Jared Huffman: I'm fighting, I think, in the founding tradition, of a of an America that is a country of many faith perspectives, including people that don't practice any religion. That's one of the great things about this country. That is— that was never done. The American secular contribution to the world in the form of our constitution, Article VI, no religious tests, First Amendment, no establishment of religion, these were things no government had ever done in its founding documents. And it's made us great, and it's been good for religion too. Religion has thrived for two hundred and fifty years with that secular firewall between church authority and government authority. I just wanna keep it that way.

00:24:48 Andrew Keen: Not I mean, most of our audience, as you can probably guess, will be Democrats, and many of them will be sympathetic. But there are some Democrats who might be a little uncomfortable with what you're saying and the arguments in No Prophets. I think of somebody like Marie Perez, congresswoman from Washington state, who sometimes she's a centrist, who sometimes complains that she feels more at home amongst religious Republicans. Is there a danger, Jared, that this kind of argument and your opposition to what you call theocracy, but others might simply see it as Christianity, might be, might make it difficult for centrist or conservative Democrats like Marie Perez?

00:25:37 Jared Huffman: Well, look, I will defend Marie's right to practice her faith in any way she wants and to embrace evangelical beliefs. It's a great thing about America that we have the freedom to do that. I won't make any adverse judgments at all about her for that. But what you can't do is try to harness the coercive power of government to impose that faith on others who don't believe it. That is crossing the line. That is infringing on true religious liberty. So, we're gonna part ways when it comes to things like Ralph Drollinger's Bible study, which my friend Marie Perez has attended. This is extreme and radical stuff that teaches in fact, teaches things that she does not believe in.

00:26:31 Andrew Keen: So what is this study? Can you say a little bit more about it?

00:26:34 Jared Huffman: Yeah. This is in my book, a chapter I call Shadow Theocracy, I write about these ministries that exist throughout the Capitol and now exist in the executive branch as well. Capitol Ministries is one of the biggest led by a guy named Ralph Drollinger who has, developed all of these different Bible studies that tell people in power how God wants them to use their power. And what you have, it's actually online. If you wanna look up Capitol Ministries, you can see these Bible studies that teach everything from taxation. God doesn't like taxes, apparently. Apparently, God is very deregulatory and hates the regulatory state. God's very libertarian in that sense. But God's very interventionist when it comes to the bedroom and people's bodies and people's individual rights. So these are the things that are taught in these Bible studies that my friend Marie goes to. And she can't believe in all of that stuff. In fact, I know she does not, but, you know, she apparently believes there is some bipartisan value to lending her name and her presence to this radical stuff. I disagree with her on that.

00:27:47 Andrew Keen: Are characters, in your view at least, like Drollinger, Jared, are they opportunists? Do they see a political opportunity here and take advantage, or are they simply believers?

00:27:59 Jared Huffman: I think they're both. I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. Certainly, there's a lot of grifters, a lot of people in this space that, you know, are trying to make a buck and build up these ministries that also enrich themselves. But I would not discount the element of true religious belief in many of these people.

00:28:21 Andrew Keen: And what about Trump? I mean, I don't wanna turn this into another conversation about Trump because it gets boring. But, I mean, he's so self-evidently—

00:28:25 Jared Huffman: Yeah.

00:28:30 Andrew Keen: Not only un-Christian. Many people see him as a physical incarnation or certainly a metaphorical incarnation of the devil. What's his role in all this?

00:28:41 Jared Huffman: Well, it's interesting. We can all see that he's not a religious person. Right? And so that's obvious. However, for this Christian nationalist movement, he is a religious figure, and I think it's important to understand that. I write in the book about how that paradox actually came to be. And this is that Trump recognized, especially in this group of independent charismatic evangelicals that was so ascendant throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, he recognized that that was his winning ticket politically. He became very close to them, and they recognized in him someone who could really be an instrument to advance their cause, which is very theocratic. And so it really is a codependency. They each see the other as instruments. For these prophetic right-wing Christians, though, they have developed this narrative that God is using Trump as a flawed vessel just as he used others, including the pagan King Cyrus, to save the Jews in the Bible. And they've developed this entire mythology, called the Cyrus anointing where Trump is seen as the modern-day King Cyrus and has a prophetic destiny to save his new chosen people, American Christians.

00:30:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, Cyrus was Persian or Iranian, so maybe there's some more irony there. Might this be an opportunity, Jared, for the Democrats? I mean, if you're right and January 6 was indeed, a formal coup by the Christian right to seize power, destroy American democracy. Shouldn't this be the core thing—the core platform—that the Democrats run on in 2028? There's all sorts of pieces now about AOC—she might run—about revisiting or rethinking wokeism. And, Mamdani, of course, has launched, in some people's mind at least, an attack on the rich in New York City—higher taxes. But the Democrats are still scratching around for a core message to run against Vance or Rubio, whoever else in 2028. Shouldn't this be the thing in itself for the Dems to be running on?

00:31:02 Jared Huffman: I think every Democrat interested in leading in this moment and certainly in the next presidential cycle should have something to say on this subject, by which I mean the threat to democracy that Christian nationalism poses and the affirmative agenda of religious liberty that I think Democrats should own. I think religious liberty and religious freedom have been completely surrendered to the Democrats by Republicans because they have so fused their party into this anti-democracy explicit theocratic agenda. Christian nationalism and the Republican Party are now one and the same. And most Americans want nothing to do with it. So I see a golden opportunity for Democrats to engage with the majority of Americans who don't wanna live in a theocracy, who value religious freedom, who accept pluralism and diversity. But I also see most Democrats afraid to touch the subject because they just find the intersection of politics and religion too dicey, too awkward. The refreshing exceptions to that, Andrew, I don't know your thoughts on this, but, I think James Talarico is a fantastic messenger on this stuff.

00:32:19 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I know you're a big fan of Talarico. Why? I mean, he's religious himself, but why is he so refreshing for you?

00:32:26 Jared Huffman: Because he's not afraid to take it on head on. He is calling out Christian nationalism. Now he's doing it from a faith perspective, but that makes him harder to dismiss as anti-Christian. And so he's a little bit of a breakthrough messenger, for all of us. And what I like about his message is he's not just talking to Christians. He's talking about his own personal faith for sure. That's who he is. I'm fine with that. But he's making it clear that he's talking to non-Christians, to atheists, to everyone who loves democracy and supports basic decency in our country and in our government. That's pretty good stuff. Now it would be great to see other Democratic leaders speaking just as comfortably on the subject, but I understand why most of them just avoid it like the plague because it's something that Democrats are not very good at talking about.

00:33:21 Andrew Keen: Gavin Newsom's been on this show a few times. In fact, met with him several times. We've done all sorts of events recently. Have you told him that? I mean, he's a Marin guy, so you must know him quite well.

00:33:33 Jared Huffman: Yeah. Well, I've told him about my book. You know, I really should get him a copy of my book.

00:33:39 Andrew Keen: You definitely should. Yeah.

00:33:41 Jared Huffman: I would be surprised if Gavin weighed— you know, waded into this subject. And, you know, back to who you were showing a moment ago, AOC is a great friend of mine. I think the world of her, she's a great person and a great talent. She has steered clear of this, conspicuously so, and, you know, has certainly, I've invited her a number of times to join the Freethought Caucus, and she politely declines at every turn. So I'd be very surprised if suddenly she takes up, you know, the banner of religious freedom and the fight against Christian nationalism, but, you know, it'd be great if she did.

00:34:19 Andrew Keen: Many are called. Few are chosen. Do you have political ambitions of your own? If you did, in national terms, would you run on—

00:34:35 Jared Huffman: [ed.: approx. 10 seconds of audio missing from raw transcript here] …politics, Andrew. I am kinda career-limited as a straight white male from Northern California. I'm good with that. There are others who are gonna, lead for the next generation, and I'll root for them.

00:34:51 Andrew Keen: Well, I certainly respect you for your fearlessness. You self-describe as the only member of Congress to admit that you don't believe in gods. Finally, Jared, this is an ideological struggle, but it might be more than that. Does America need to change its laws, its attitude to education? If I take your point that you don't wanna run for national office. But, if somebody did and— and seizes this mantle, is there a need to, go back to the constitution to change fundamental laws in this country to make sure that January 6 never happens again?

00:35:32 Jared Huffman: Thankfully, no. It's one of the things that our founders truly got right. It's all right there. In Article VI, in the First Amendment, it is one of the central founding ideals of this country. We've just got to, give it meaning again. We've gotta stop this chipping away at church-state separation, the death by a thousand cuts. We gotta push back when the Supreme Court tries to read the Establishment Clause out of existence and essentially make separation of church and state a violation of the Free Exercise Clause. That's absurd. That is upending the entire founding ideal of secular government. So all of it is right there. We've just gotta, stand our ground and, fight for this because there are folks very actively right now trying to just end church-state separation, and they're not gonna stop there. They wanna end democracy too. And, that's a big part of why I wrote this book, to sound an alarm and a wake-up call about that threat.

00:36:37 Andrew Keen: It's a chilling message. The book is out today. No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism. We've had these kind of books before, but not from a sitting politician. Jared Huffman. Huffman is the congressman from, San Rafael just over the bridge. So congratulations on your bravery. Jared, I hope you're wrong, but I fear you may be right. And best of luck with the book.

00:37:02 Jared Huffman: Thanks so much for having me, Andrew.