People are surprised that God is not in the Constitution
WOLF: A theme throughout the show is a belief among Christian nationalists that the US is a Christian nation and that Christianity is laced throughout the Constitution and the founding documents. There are some interesting moments in the show where it dawns on people that actually the word "God" does not appear in the Constitution. Was that something you expected? Or is it something you stumbled upon?
O'SULLIVAN: There are so many strands to what is happening in the country right now, especially when it comes to trust and distrust in democracy, and Christian nationalism is one of them. We wanted to show in this documentary how two of these strands are kind of intertwining.
When it comes to Christian nationalism specifically, the reasons that we went down that route are 1) it's something I hear all the time at these events and 2) there is increasing awareness about it.
Tim Alberta had a very good book last year about it.
(Note: Watch CNN's Christiane Amanpour interview Alberta.)
More so than anything else, it was just from speaking to evangelical and other Christian pastors who are really worried right now about what they're seeing, how their faith is being weaponized in a way to attack democracy.
A lot of it is not new in terms of this kind of rapid weaponization of conservative Christianity, if you want to call it that, but I think there's an urgency now that we hadn't seen before.
Pastors have seen members of their congregation, members of their flock who leave because their sermons weren't political enough or weren't directly supporting Trump as the candidate.
When it comes to God in the Constitution, pastor Caleb Campbell puts it pretty well in the documentary when he says that he sits down with fellow evangelicals — he's a theological evangelical and a lot of people assume that the Christian God is all over the Constitution and the founding documents, which is not the case at all.
There's nothing wrong with being a Christian. There's nothing wrong with being a patriot. But what is really happening with Christian nationalism is that they are pushing a very specific type of Christianity at the expense of other people's freedoms.
Fringe platforms foster fringe movements
WOLF: You've covered these fringe movements, but you've also covered some of the social media stuff and I wonder what you think people should know about the rise of these kinds of fringe social media platforms — Telegram is the one featured in the documentary — that are gaining traction.
O'SULLIVAN: A lot of people got kicked off the major social media platforms after January 6. Trump got kicked off, but I think what a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of his supporters got banned too because they were sharing election conspiracy theories or things like that.
We meet one of those people in the documentary, Joe Black, who said he got kicked off Facebook after he shared a meme about January 6.
(Note: Black says he felt isolated by not being able to do simple things like buy items on Facebook.)
It has driven people into these darker corners of the internet that can be a lot more extreme and a lot more radicalizing. It's a dilemma, right? Because major social media platforms like Facebook have these rules. But what happens when you kick a lot of those people off is sometimes they go to platforms that are more extreme.
Obviously, Twitter, X, has changed a lot. (Note: Twitter has changed a lot since many of its moderation protections were ended after it was bought by Elon Musk.) But I think just overall, in 2016, all the guards were down when it came to social media. There were Russian trolls and everything else.
And then in 2020 there was a big crackdown from the social media platforms, which got a huge amount of blowback from conservatives. And now I feel like we're in a whole new landscape — it has totally changed again.
Hoping for a Trump pardon
WOLF: There's a woman you interview, Rachel Powell, a mother who's on her way to prison when you talk to her. Is she in prison now? Are you still in contact?
O'SULLIVAN: She is in prison. I actually received a letter from her this week from prison in West Virginia. She sent the letter, I think, more than a month ago. But it only arrived to me this week.
She's hanging on to that hope that if Trump gets reelected, she'll be pardoned. Obviously, there's a lot riding on this election for her. It's interesting, because obviously Trump has, particularly over the last few months, has really started spotlighting the people who had been prosecuted for January 6 and has very much been kind of portraying them as martyrs.
She's in prison. She's got a cellmate. But it doesn't seem like the belief in Trump or anything like that has waned in any way.