The Templeton Foundation is promoting attacks against atheists to undermine science through figures such as Ross Douthat and Alister McGrath.
Meanwhile, a survey shows that the majority of American Christians are refusing to oppose fascism.
While 81 percent of American atheists are voting against fascism in the 2026 midterm elections, only 35% of Christian Americans are doing so.
If you've been listening for the last 4 years, you know why we need to stop Christian Nationalism. This is not an abstract thing. It’s not just that we don't aesthetically like or appreciate Christian Nationalism.
This podcast is motivated by what Christian Nationalists have said that they're going to do to America and what they are actually doing to the United States of America. The project of Christian Nationalism is a project of fascism, and the historical association between fascism and nasty right wing Christianity, was there from the start. In the Spanish Civil War, and then Spanish fascism that lasted all the way until the 1970s, it was the Roman Catholic Church in Spain that supported that fascist regime because they didn't want people to become atheists, so torture and murder and dictatorship were fine with the Roman Catholic church, just so long as people said that they believed in God.
Now we have fascism here in the United States. We have Donald Trump, who has declared that the United States is a Christian nation. Never mind our Constitution. The Bill of Rights doesn't matter. The First Amendment doesn't matter anymore. Now we're just a Christian nation.
So we go to war for Christianity with Pete Hegseth telling us that the war in Iran is for Jesus, and he's citing Bible quotes left and right as we drop bombs on schools full of children.
I could go on and on about what's been going on the last couple of years, with masked secret police busting into people's homes, dragging people out of their cars, breaking their bones, putting them in concentration camps, starving them, depriving them of medication, shooting them dead on the street.
This is what the United States of America has become under Christian Nationalism.
So, please, it's election season, so go out and vote.
If you are scared about the messages of what's going to happen, that vote won't be counted. Well, go out and vote on election day anyway. Don't give them the excuse.
Wherever you are, in your local community, make sure that your ballot has the best chance of being counted. There are no more guarantees of anything under Christian nationalism anymore. Freedom is no longer taken for granted.
A lot of people are going to say, oh, don't don't blame Christianity for what the Christian Nationalists are doing, because most Christian Americans are standing against that.
You should ask them: Where's your evidence for that?
Of course, American Christians are not accustomed to giving evidence for what they say is true. They're used to just kind of asserting what they feel is true in their hearts without having to give any evidence, but I think given what we've seen from the government that Christian Americans have given us, we have the right to ask for evidence.
You see, when I say Christian Americans have given us this government, this fascism, this violence, this withdrawal of food from the hungry and medicine from the sick, I have very specific evidence of that. Exit polls in the last 3 general elections show that majorities of Christian voters voted for Trump each one of those times.
That's in the past, you may say. That's in the past, and Christian voters have learned their lesson now.
You may say that, but what about the evidence? Let me give you evidence.
A survey by Pew Research, and this is a very well established survey organization, looked at the relationship between religious identity in the United States of America and who they're going to vote for.
In this election, I'm sorry to put it so plainly, but reality has become plain. If you're voting for a Republican, to go to Congress, at this point, you are voting for fascism, and you ought to admit what you're voting for. If you're staying home and not voting, then it's kind of like just letting the fascists march down the street and take over the country, not doing a damn thing to stop it. If you're not willing to vote against the Republicans, to vote for a Democrat instead, you are voting for fascism, or you are standing by and allowing the fascists to take over and take even more power. Defending fascism is what you're doing if you vote Republican.
It turns out that once again, a majority of Christians are supporting fascism.
Among those who are going to vote, a majority of Christians are saying that they are going to vote for the Republicans.
There is a block of Christians who are just staying home and saying that they're not going to vote, they're not going to vote for either the Republican or the Democrat. Those Christians are simply sitting on their hands, while fascism burns through America, deciding not to do anything about it, after the Christian majority voted for fascism three general elections in a row
Let me give you a specific number here. The percentage of Christian American voters who are going to vote against fascism this year. Is 35%.
So if you're telling me that Christians have changed their ways, that American Christians now understand the mistakes that they made and have learned their lesson, the evidence just doesn't show that.
Two out of every three Christian voters in the United States of America are either voting for fascism or are not doing anything to stop fascism. They’re sitting on their hands and allowing the fascists to keep on doing what they're doing, not taking one step to defend the weak, to feed the hungry, to clothe the poor, to give medicine to the sick, to protect those people who need to be protected from fascist thugs, wearing masks, using electronic surveillance to go and target their neighbors.
Those Christian Americans are either voting for fascism or they're doing nothing to protect their neighbors.
Only one third of Christian American voters are standing up to fascism this year. Thank you to those one out of three, to that minority of American Christianity that is doing something. Thank you to them. Thank you sincerely. I mean that with no sarcasm at all.
Thank you to them, but what the hell is going on with the rest of American Christianity, after everything we've seen?
The USA is threatening to go toward with Canada for goodness sakes.
This is what we get when we put Christianity in government. Christian Americans are not taking responsibility by and large for what they've done to America. They're not taking responsibility.
Take a look at the evidence. It shows that most Christian Americans are quite happy with Christian Nationalism, or they're willing to do nothing to stand against fascism.
I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about what is going on out there in the media landscape to continue to support Christian fascism in the United States of America.
Of course, there are those networks that are just blatantly Christian fascist. They're the ones like Fox News that are clearly just kind of shilling for Christian nationalist fascism.
You know what's even worse? There is a project to give cover to American Christianity, even as American Christians are overwhelmingly supporting or enabling fascism.
This project pretends that Christianity is moderate and very reasonable. I want to talk about an organization that I've discovered is behind a campaign of misinformation about this.
This organization is called the Templeton Foundation. I came across them, as I was researching Ross Douthat’s book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
This is a book in which Ross Douthat claims to prove reasonable, logical reasons to believe in religion and to become Christians.
What's so wrong with that?
If you consider the title of his book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I want you to take a moment. Close your eyes and imagine a world in which everyone is religious. That's a world in which not one single person is skeptical. Not one single person asks questions of religious authorities. Not one person doubts religious authorities and their power, and what they tell us is true.
It’s a world in which no one challenges the connection between religious to political power, which we have seen so strongly.
Under that Christian control of government we have poverty. We have massive corruption. We have physical violence from our own government against our own people, and against immigrants too.
So much for welcoming strangers and all that. Screw that. American Christianity isn't into that anymore.
When you have a world in which everyone is religious, you have a society in which everybody is submitting to social authority of priests and of churches. You have a world in which everyone accepts on faith that what their leaders tell them is true, not questioning things independently.
That's the kind of world that Ross Douthat is promoting, and it's not moderate. It's a Christian Nationalist authoritarian regime.
It’s not a surprise because, if you take a look at the last chapter of the New Testament, which is where Christianity culminates, the religion is threatening to impose just that kind of society on the world. The Book of Revelation in the New Testament, is all about how Jesus comes back from the dead and tells everyone that he is going to slaughter and torture Everyone who refuses to worship him as a god.
I know a lot of people don't want to believe that that's in the Bible. I suggest that you go and read it. Read it for yourself because that's what the Bible says.
Anyway, Ross Douthat has done a terrible job writing his book in general, but one particular chapter really stood out to me. In that chapter, Ross Douthat is arguing that supernatural events are real, that there really are fairies and genies, and witches casting magic spells and demons.
There’s one story that Ross Douthat uses in this chapter to support the idea that the supernatural is common and magic is happening all over the place, and scientists are wrong.
It's a story that he retells from Barbara Luhrmann, who wrote an article in the New York Times. Luhrmann was doing an anthropology of the culture of religious belief. She tells the story of how she was reading a book from this kind of new age guru who said that Christianity and other religions were really all going toward the same idea, which is that a well-trained mind can can focus energy and can do amazing things and can make faith appear and affect physical reality without using your body or anything, but just with the power of your religious mind you can warp reality and have amazing things happen.
She was writing about how she was reading that part of that book, that religious book on a train, and she started to feel all kinds of physical sensations, like her blood really flowing, and she felt she had a feeling thatmaybe spirituality is really powerful.
Then, while she was having those physical sensations and she was reading that book, a couple of bicycle lights in her backpack that she was sitting next to started to smoke, and the plastic around the lights started to melt.
That's the story. Huh. What are the chances of that?
I did a little bit of digging, a little bit of research, and it turns out that bicycle lights are actually well known to smoke and to melt quite commonly. That's because of the lithium ion batteries that are installed in them. It's actually quite common for bicycle lights to smoke to melt and even to catch on fire. There's one case where a bicycle light, caught on fire, and burned an entire apartment, just destroyed everything that that person owned.
Ross Douthat implies Barbara Luhrmann was saying, “Wow, this is some kind of, ooh, woo, woo, um, supernatural event, magic.” The truth is different from that. She didn't actually come to that conclusion. In the end, what she wrote in that New York Times article was to say that this occasion led her to understand why people believe in magic, but it didn't change her ideas about what actual reality is.
Ross Douthat, in his book, left that part out.
Ross Douthat also didn’t mention that Barbara Luhrmann was conducting her anthropological research through a grant from an organization called The Templeton Foundation.
That's interesting. Why did she get a grant from the Templeton Foundation? The Templeton Foundation, it turns out, was founded with the goal of promoting religion. It's allowed that mission to kind of shift, at least in terms of public statements, into bringing science and religion closer together, which if you think about that, it’s kind of nonsense, because science and religion are not overlapping.
It’s true religion makes a lot of claims about literal physical realities that should be the purview of science, but religion always ends up being wrong about them.
For example, Christianity was consistently wrong about the origin and evolution of life. Biological evolution through natural selection is not there in Genesis in the Bible at all. The biblical age of the earth is completely wrong. The Bible says that there are dragons and unicorns and sea monsters, which don't exist in real life demons that don't exist in real life. Magical spells, it turns out, don't work.
With that long history of religious failure to observe and accurately study physical reality The Templeton Foundation, has its goal of bringing science and the culture of science into accord with religion, which is really making science not science, subjugating science to religion.
I thought it was striking that Ross Douthat included Barbara Luhrmann's story in his book. How did he choose that story?
I discovered that when Ross Douthat released his book, Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious, one of the first organizations to promote the book was The Templeton Foundation.
Isn't that interesting?
It looks like the Templeton Foundation has got Ross Douthat and people like Barbara Luhrmann on their payroll and is kind of paying them to do work that suggests that science should be in accord with religion and allow for the reality of supernatural events.
That is a totally unscientific point of view. Once you start to have gods and spirits and magic in a world and then claim that you're doing science in that world, nothing makes sense anymore. You can't believe the results of any experiment because you could just say, well, you know, another explanation for these results is that a magic spirit intervened and brought us the results of the experience, experiment. Once you bring in gods and spirits and magic, science becomes nonsense, absolute nonsense.
The thing is, I was driving last night, Sunday evening, and I had my radio in my car tuned to the local NPR affiliate. They had a radio show from PRX. This show is called No Small Endeavor.
I listened to this radio show as I was driving, and I was shocked, because the show’s guest was just ripping into atheists, saying that atheists are to blame for science not being as rigorous as it should be, and atheists ought to be ashamed of themselves.
The show's host asked do you think that atheists have any good points? The guest, who is a professor of theology from England, said in response, well, yeah, I suppose atheists have points about violence being bad, but really they, they don't even, they don't even argue that right. They don't even get that right.
This person could not acknowledge that there is anything wrong that Christianity does, and could not acknowledge that there's anything right that atheists do. He was just ripping into atheism.
I thought, what is this crazy extremism? Let me give you an example of how insane this was. The guest on this show, No Small Endeavor, was Alister McGrath. Alister McGrath is a professor emeritus of theology from England.
The radio show's host asked, well, what about Christian Nationalism in the United States? You're not concerned about that at all? For example, what about all of this anti-evolutionary rhetoric from American Christians?
Here’s what Alister McGrath said. I'm going to quote this word for word.
“It’s true that conservative Christians in the USA are very anti-evolution, but that's because they've read people like Richard Dawkins.”
Richard Dawkins was the author of the Selfish Gene, and also some books arguing against belief in the Christian God, and promoting his own form of atheism. Of course, every atheist has their own form. Atheism just means you don't believe in gods. You can believe a lot of things when you don't believe in gods. There's a great diversity in atheism much more than there is in Christianity.
When I heard Alistair McGrath say that the reason that Christians in the United States are so against evolution, the well established, you know, factually based model of biological evolution through natural selection, that it’s because they've read Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, who published his anti-religion books within the last 30 years, if what Alistair McGrath is saying is true, then we would have seen American Christianity before 30 years ago accepting evolution as a great idea, and only when Richard Dawkins and people like him came along, did Christians then reject the idea of evolution.
I'm in my 50s. I've been along around enough to know that actually, American Christians have been against evolution pretty much from the moment that the idea came out with Charles Darwin in the 1800s. I mean, we had the Scopes trial in the early 1900s.
When I was a young person in the 1980s, I remember my public school biology teacher was a Christian preacher: Mr. Aldridge. He was a Christian preacher and a middle school biology teacher, and he taught the students in the public schools and public schools in the United States, that's government run schools, and they’re supposed to be free from religious establishment by the Constitution.
The Christians just keep on pushing their agenda in there anyway. They don't care about the law. They don't care about the Constitution. They just push and push and push because they want to get more converts.
That's what this guy did with middle school biology. He taught that evolution through natural selection was impossible. Absolutely impossible. He taught Creationism, Christian creationism in his classroom. He taught students that people come from God, were created by the Christian God, and we should have faith, and that evolution through natural selection is absolute nonsense, because it doesn't comply with his religion.
That was in the 1980s. That was well before Richard Dawkins wrote anything about religion.
The idea that American Christians are against the teaching of evolution because atheists exist is insane, but that's what Alister McGrath was arguing. McGrath was saying, atheists just go alienating people by saying that science should be free of gods and magic and spirits, and make people angry, and that's why people don't believe in evolution.
That's why American Christians don't believe in evolution? That’s why? I has nothing to do with having a holy book that says animals were created as they are now with no evolution and people were created too, by a God, magically, in the course of one week? It has nothing to do with that?
It has nothing to do with Christian churches preaching, preaching over and over again that evolution is nonsense, that it's all a demonic lie, and it must not be believed? You think those parts of Christianity are not responsible?
That's what Alistair McGrath is saying. He's saying it's all the atheists' fault that Christians don't believe in evolution.
That radio show that hosted this extremist Christian apologist on Alister McGrath, that show, No Small Endeavor, I took a look at their webpage because I was really confused. What is public radio doing putting this Christian extremism on the air?
It turns out that show after show of No Small Endeavor features people repeating this same idea, that atheism is no good, that you have to leave atheism behind, and religion and science have to be blended together. It looks like No Small Endeavor was formed as a radio show to promote that very extreme agenda of corrupting science, of putting it under the authority of religion.
Guess what organization funds this radio show on public radio, No Small Endeavor? Yes, it's the Templeton Foundation.
I know that this show was on the air on a Sunday evening, and I know that some people are going to say, well, you know, Sunday is the day when people want to hear something religious, you know, that's the day that people take to go to church and to pray and to think about the Christian God and everything.
To that, I simply want to ask: Which people are we talking about here?
In the United States, 60% of the population is Christian. As I've said before, that Christian portion of the population is only one-third against fascism. Two-thirds of that Christian population will not stand up to fascism.
40% of America is non-Christian, and that portion of the population has been increasing, not because they make more babies, but because people keep on leaving Christianity, because Christianity promotes fascism, because Christianity promotes Donald Trump and all of his ugliness, and Pete Hegseth, and war, and all of the cruelty.
There are going to be people like Alister McGrath who say that's the atheists’ fault that Christians in America are so ugly and hateful and, brutal and fascist.
There are lots of Americans, forty percent, who are not Christian. Honestly, of the 60% who are Christian, I think a lot of them don't do anything religious on Sundays. So when we look at public radio, and we say, well, you've got to have a religious show on Sunday, I just want to ask: Do you really think that Christians lack the resources to worship if they want to?
There are churches all over the place. They control the federal government. They don't need a public radio show to attack science in order to promote the interests of extremist religion. We already have enough Christian Nationalists doing that.
To PRX and those public radio stations that broadcast No Small Endeavor on on Sunday, I'd really like them to take a look at what they're doing to help enable Christian Nationalism.
The agenda of the Templeton Foundation is to provide a softer face of Christian Nationalism, a Vichy face for fascism, which of course is not moderate, is not reasonable and is not gentle at all.