The appropriation of Christian images and language by extremists who advocate violence has become a shocking feature of our time. Surveys show alarming numbers of people who self-identify as religious expressing openness to political violence. Against such a distortion of Christian witness, how can we faithfully live out our calling to be people of peace?

National security expert Elizabeth Neumann, who has worked in counterterrorism and threat prevention in two presidential administrations, offers insight and a sobering perspective. She joined us on October 11 to discuss her book, Kingdom of Rage: the Rise of Christian Extremism and the Path Back to Peace, and to help us understand how radicalization has taken root among us and what we can do.

Thank you to our co-host, Worthy Publishing, for their support of this event!

• What aspect of Elizabeth’s remarks or the conversation was most compelling to you and why?
• How does Elizabeth define “extremism”? What does she describe as the path towards extremism?
• How has social media changed the pathway towards extremism?
• Many of us know someone who has grown more radical in their political grievances. Elizabeth encourages responding with empathy more than argumentation, and noted that “psychosocial” factors are more often at play than philosophical ones. Does this square with your experience? How have you engaged with friends who are on a radicalizing path?
• What advice does Elizabeth give to individual believers and the church if political violence does occur?

Cherie Harder: Good afternoon and welcome to all of you joining us for today’s Online Conversation on “Extremism and the Path Back to Peace” with Elizabeth Neumann. We’re delighted that so many of you are joining us today. I know we have well over a thousand registrants and just really appreciate the honor of your time and attention. And I’d like to send a special welcome to our first-time registrants—I believe we have close to 75 of you joining us today—and our international registrants joining us from all over the globe. I think we have at least 16 different countries represented, from Afghanistan to Australia, Spain to Singapore and South Africa. So welcome from across the miles and across the time zones.

And if you are one of those people who are joining us for the very first time, our mission at the Trinity Forum is to cultivate, curate, and disseminate the best of Christian thought for the common good and to provide a space for leaders to wrestle with the big questions of life in the context of faith. And we hope today’s Online Conversation will be a small taste of that for you today.

Our topic today is a sobering as well as important one. It’s no surprise to say that the United States is increasingly polarized and divided, or that the stakes of political combat seem to increase, along with the contempt that we feel and register for those with whom we disagree. But with those changes has come an increasing radicalization of parts of the country, such that different recent studies have indicated that up to 25 percent of our fellow citizens claim to believe that violence may be warranted in order to “get the country back on track.” Just earlier this summer, a University of Chicago survey found that 10 percent of those surveyed felt that the use of force was justified to stop former President Trump from becoming president again. And 7 percent thought the use of force was justified to restore him to office. Other studies conducted by PBS and other outlets found even higher margins among those surveyed who believed that violence was justified to achieve political objectives.

And perhaps even more unsettling is how often our willingness to use or excuse violence is cloaked in religious language or symbols. Political extremists have long sought to co-opt and instrumentalize faith, and appeals to “defend the faith” or a way of life are part of an old and dark playbook. The bad news is it seems to be working. Our guest today is a counterterrorism expert, an evangelical Christian who has become increasingly concerned that, in her words, “the toxic soup of fear and outrage that has dominated infotainment consumed by Christians has functioned as precursor narratives that have laid the groundwork for radicalization and extremism.” The threat, she concluded, is coming from within.

So how did we get to the point where so many Christians believe that things have gotten so bad that violence and lawlessness is justified? How do we discern between a passion for justice and radicalization? And how can we resist the distortion of Christian faith and return to the path of peace?

Our guest today is Elizabeth Nuemann. Elizabeth is a national security and counterterrorism expert who served as the assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, as well as the White House Homeland Security Council for President George W. Bush. She’s currently the chief strategy officer for Moonshot, a tech-enabled company that supports government and community partners in preventing violence, and serves as a national security contributor to ABC news. She’s also the author of the new and important work Kingdom of Rage: The Rise of Christian Extremism and the Path Back to Peace, which we’ve invited her here today to discuss.

Elizabeth, welcome.

Elizabeth Neumann: Thank you for having me. I’m so delighted to be with all of you. And like Cherie said, I’m just honored that you would take time out of your busy days to talk about this important topic.

Cherie Harder: Well, Elizabeth, we’re so glad you’re here and so excited to get to talk to you. And, you know, in starting out, every book has a backstory. And I have a feeling that yours may be particularly interesting, just given your own background, both as a counterterrorism expert, but also as someone who has, you know, for all of her life been an evangelical Christian, has grown up within the church and still is. And so I’d love to hear your thoughts about what led you to write this particular book.

Elizabeth Neumann: I was in Washington, D.C. on 9/11, and I was working for the George W. Bush administration. I worked at the time on the faith-based and community initiatives. For those of you old enough to remember that time period, that was the compassionate conservative agenda. And I was very excited about that agenda. And, of course, 9/11 changed a lot of things. It changed the priorities of the first term of the Bush administration. And it definitely left a pretty big impact on me. I remember spending about four or five hours in the car trying to get home and just being— I don’t know, like, your animal instincts take over. We just got to get out of here. And so you’re trying to process, but you can’t really process because you’re just trying to do what you think the next thing is, which is get out of D.C. proper so that you somehow magically would feel safer. 

And, you know, ever since that day, I kind of made this decision. I will do whatever it takes. I’ll answer phones, I’ll make copies. Just I will do whatever it takes to make sure America never has such a dark day again. One of the moments I remember in particular about that day was, as we were driving down Independence Avenue in my little hatchback, and I think it sat four people, but there were like six people in it because nobody wanted to get on the metro. And we’re crawling. Like, people are walking faster than we could drive. But there’s a moment where the buildings parted enough that you could see the Capitol. And I remember just breathing a sigh of relief it was still there. At the time, we were getting our news through radio reports, and we knew that they were grounding flights, but that not all flights were accounted for. And just the obvious thing after the Pentagon had been hit is why wouldn’t you hit the Capitol? Right. It’s so prominent in the skyline, it would be easy to see. Like the Pentagon, in contrast, is actually quite hard to see from the air. Like, you would have had to practice. So, just intuitively, everybody was like “the Capitol’s the next target.” And so seeing it in the skyline, you just kind of breathe a sigh of relief that it’s still there. And we didn’t know it at the time, but the reason it was still there was because the brave men and women of flight 93 stormed the cockpit and took the plane down.

So that moment was very formative for me. And I ended up moving into the homeland security space. I worked at the White House Homeland Security Council for a number of years, and I’ve worked at ODNI as a contractor. Later came back into government during the Trump administration and served in the Department of Homeland Security. But this is my field, right? I now do homeland security. And I was out of government on January 6th. But I was watching on TV like many others were because we knew there were going to be some protests. And as things devolved, as it became really clear that we had a massive security situation—there were the bombs that had been detected in front of the DNC, you started to see images of the protesters get violent—I just watched with this horror. 

It was actually a two-fold horror. One, from a security perspective: what a massive security failure, because it was pretty obvious that there were individuals that were planning on protesting that had malicious intent. If you monitor anything online and open-source information, it was clear there were people with bad intent. So they should have been protected, even if none of us thought it would be that bad. Like, there should have been a better security apparatus in place. So that was my first thought. What a massive security failure.

But the second thought was, oh, you know, we’ve spent trillions of dollars trying to protect this building—I mean, the country as a whole, but this building in particular—kind of as this symbol of our country and what we stand for, governing by the people. And it wasn’t al-Qaeda. It wasn’t ISIS. It was us. It was us that finally attacked it. And I say the “us,” and I mean that very personally. We had significant representation from people who profess the Christian faith. You had lots of symbols, from Christian flags to pictures of Jesus to Bibles. There was a prayer in the Senate gallery. There were prayers outside on bullhorns, like it was saturated in Christian iconography and language and scripture.

I also say “us” in the sense of this literally was my community, the community I grew up in. As of the last time I looked at the stats in May, about 35 of the people that have been arrested and prosecuted for crimes on January 6th came from the county I grew up in, or the county I went to school in, in North Texas. And just 35 might not sound like a large number. As of May, there were 1,424 people that were arrested. It disproportionately represents, by like 300%, of what should have come from that county. So large representation from literally the towns that I grew up in.

And of course, the movement, the conservative movement that was being represented there—and I use that term very broadly because I don’t think they’re actually conservative in the classical libertarian sense—that was the community I grew up with, this idea of, you know, sometimes revolution is necessary to keep the constraints of government in place. I mean, that was the indoctrination I had growing up. I was the listener of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. I loved Fox News. Like, this was who I was 20 years ago. And there was a point at which clearly our paths diverged. But as I was watching this unfold, I couldn’t help but think what happened to us? Because it’s my community. These are my people. And I wanted to better understand how they were so deceived and so aggrieved that they got to a place where violence felt like it was the only option.

And that’s kind of what started me down the path of writing the book, being able to take the professional lens that I have of understanding why somebody radicalizes to terrorism, mainly through the lens of an ISIS and al-Qaeda, or a more organized militia group or a white supremacist group. You know, what are the factors that lead somebody to being open to that, and trying to apply it to our community to better understand what has happened and, most importantly, how do we make sure it doesn’t happen again? How do we build the protective factors in our community so that these messages aren’t so powerful?

Cherie Harder: Let me ask you about that. In the subtitle of your book is the word “extremism,” and extremism as a term gets thrown around a lot. So how exactly do you define what an extremist is? You know, often we like to define our antagonist or our opponents as an extremist. So I’d love to hear you reflect a little bit more. What’s your definition of the term? But then you just alluded to essentially that path to extremism, that something kind of went wrong. You know, there was a group that was fairly normal that got radicalized. So what’s extremism and what is the path to get there?

Elizabeth Neumann: I love that you start with defining terms, because in my community, my professional community, extremism has a definition. And it’s not the way it’s used in CNN or MSNBC or Fox News commentary. It is not about being outside the mainstream. Like, you can use the term “extreme” to imply somebody who’s just not in keeping with the Overton window. But in my field, extremism is when an in-group perceives a threat to their success or survival from an out-group, and—the “and” is important—and believes that the only solution to that situation is hostile action. 

Hostile action is a spectrum. There’s a non-criminal space that would involve bullying and harassment, threats and intimidation that might occur offline, that might occur online. But that lower end of the hostile action spectrum, in my viewpoint, is a part of extremism. Then you move into the more criminal space. So that’s where you get into property crimes. And then potentially hate crimes, eventually terrorism and genocide. And we call it a spectrum, and the other way to think about it is as a funnel, because nobody just jumps to genocide. They usually follow a path, and that path requires some moral justification. That’s where the role of ideology comes in. It’s telling you a narrative, a story, and giving you a moral justification why the hostile action is okay in this context, because most human beings are not born and go, “I want to be hostile to the other.” Usually something’s happened in their life that has given them some sort of moral justification that allows them to think that the hostility is necessary. So the ideology in an extremist worldview is what gives you the moral justification.

And usually the way extremism and radicalization works is you start on the lower end of the spectrum. And so you might just start online, just deciding you’re going to go after somebody that you don’t like. Sometimes it’s a prominent public figure. Maybe it’s not. We see this a lot right now against our election officials. They receive threats and harassment and a lot of uncivil dialogue, we’ll call it. And sometimes it’s limited to online social media spaces, but we’re also seeing it occur offline. They get phone calls at home, they get threatening people showing up at their workplace and being kind of aggressive and threatening. So we have people that have been given some sort of permission structure, if you will, to now operate in this lower end of the hostile action spectrum. And as somebody progresses down a radicalization funnel, it’s usually a much smaller percentage that’s ever going to move into something violent or criminal.

The problem that we have at the moment in our country is that the number of people operating on the lower end of the hostile action spectrum is substantially larger than we’ve ever had before. So even though, statistically speaking, the number of people that ever commit an act of terrorism or plot an act of terrorism or even just a hate crime is pretty low, when you have a small percentage of a very large whole, you end up with a much larger number, which is kind of where we are as a country at this point. We have a pretty significant uptick of violence, terrorist attack plots, mass attacks that aren’t necessarily ideologically motivated, think like school shootings or the Las Vegas shooting. That number started drastically increasing in 2015, and it hasn’t stopped. And we’ve almost become numb to it, I think, in part. Like our brains can’t handle dealing with the horrific nature of the violence that we’re experiencing. And so we just kind of shut it off unless it’s happening directly in our community.

And so when you look at the data, you kind of step back and go, “Oh my gosh, what’s happened to us?” And there are lots of reasons. There’s no one cause, right? Like, it’s a complex set of issues. But for sure, part of what has happened is we’ve created a permission structure in the country where it is permissible to be hostile to one another. And so the more people you have operating on that lower end, the easier it is to create the moral justification that you should do something more. And that’s kind of what radicalization is. You buy into a narrative, you buy into an ideology, and at some point either an external voice or your own voice goes, “Am I doing enough for the cause? Should I be doing something more?” And if your answer is, like, “I’m not doing enough,” then you move a little bit further up that next step of hostile action.

And the problem we have in our country is that, if I go back to that definition of extremism, you perceive a threat to your in-group, to your in-group success or survival by some out-group, that’s just the nature of our politics. Like, every election cycle, we get told this is the most consequential election of our lifetimes. If the other side wins, we’re going to lose our country. I know I started recognizing around 2012, I would hear sermons, and the pastor would be saying things like, “In my lifetime, I will not be allowed to preach an orthodox version of Christianity. I’m going to be thrown in jail because the persecution for us is coming.” Now, look, I think there’s a way to have conversations about our concerns about religious freedom, our concerns about how do we deal with a rapidly changing culture that has very different values than a traditional Christian ethic? But the way in which those conversations are happening in both the political sphere as well as like what I would call the Christian celebrity sphere is very tied to fear-mongering and grievance. And there’s a reason for that. That earns you clicks, that earns you money. We’ve been at social media now for 15 years. And we know. We know that the way you drive audience is you got to scare people. That’s how you get the votes. That’s how you get the money.

So we live in a world that is monetized to keep us in constant outrage and fear, and even parts of the Christian community have bought into that, because that’s how you get people to the pews. That’s how you get your tithe dollars, that’s how you sell your books. And so we kind of are in this perfect storm where our churches are telling us to be scared. Our politicians are telling us to be scared. The tribe media that we listen to tells us to be scared. And so you have a lot of scared people who are looking for solutions, and now they’re cognitively open to this idea that maybe that hostile action is what we need to do. Maybe the way of Jesus isn’t sufficient anymore. And there have actually been quite a few prominent Christians who have written intellectual pieces about why we need to abandon the way of Jesus, and that the ends do justify the means and the way to advance the Kingdom is to secure power. Very, in my view, very antithetical to what Jesus taught. But that’s how we got here. And for some small percentage, that argument isn’t enough. And they think that the violence is an important piece of being able to take that power back and make sure that they can secure a future for their faith and for their families.

Cherie Harder: Earlier you mentioned the fact that the entrance to the funnel of radicalization is perhaps so much larger right now, so many more people entering. And one of the points that your book makes, which I’d love to hear you sort of dilate on a bit, is one you briefly touched on, which is the role of social media and how, in the past, to go down the funnel to become more extreme it was, you know, it’s a relational process. And it usually took time. One needed to get more and more immersed into a community. And one of the things you’re seeing now is people essentially self-radicalizing online. And I think at one point you mentioned that the process is at least six times as fast when one radicalizes online as before. What role is our communications media playing in both the velocity and just the quantity of people who are radicalizing?

Elizabeth Neumann: Yeah, it’s a very difficult challenge because I don’t think we can put the social media genie back in the bottle. It’s kind of with us. But there is no doubt that it is a key contributor to the mass explosion of the number of people that agree with extremist narratives and sentiment, in particular that idea that hostile action is permissible. And the studies show that if you go back to about 2008, 2010, like 90 percent of the individuals that radicalized would have done so through in-person contact. So they met somebody. They were handed propaganda, maybe even mailed propaganda, maybe emailed. But it was still through a one-to-one relationship. And that radicalization process would take like 18 months to a couple of years.

Where we are now is that you don’t have to meet anybody. It just shows up in your feed. And there are some studies that would show, like, you could create a Facebook account and tell it, you know, your certain parameters, you’re this age, you’re this sex, you’re interested in, you know, innocuous things, gardening, kid stuff. And within 48 hours—you don’t touch it, you don’t post anything—within 48 hours, there would be things shown to you that were of a nature that would be on that bubble of moving towards extremism. So there is an aspect to the way that the algorithms work. And I’m not suggesting that those algorithms were built with nefarious intent. But if you talk to anybody in the tech community, one of the things they’ll tell you is we don’t quite understand— like “we play with this, we play with this.” But they actually don’t fully understand because it’s learning on its own. Right? So they’ve created this thing that the incentive structure is “promote what is going to make us money.” And it turns out what makes them money is fear and anger and outrage. That’s what gets the most engagement online. So we’re already very vulnerable to just being served up something that we never wanted to see in the first place.

By the way, if you have children, this is why you have to have very strong protections in place for what they’re viewing online. And if your kids have social media, you should assume they have seen extremist content, even if they don’t even recognize it as such. So one of the things I outlined in the book is please, please, please treat extremism just like we treat sex, just like we treat drugs, just like we treat alcohol. You have to talk to your kids early and often. Small chunks, age appropriate, what they can handle, so that when they eventually encounter it, they come to you as the trusted source to ask questions. So I’ll get off my mom soapbox there and come back to the social media question.

But the reality is now we have people who the average radicalization factor is something in the order of months. When I was serving at DHS, I was briefed on a case where the, what we call “the flash to bang,” the moment of being exposed and starting the radicalization process to the moment of planning, plotting an attack was in the order of weeks. That makes it extremely difficult for law enforcement to detect, because one of the tools in our toolkit in trying to keep our community safe is we can investigate when we start to see signs and behaviors of somebody plotting an attack. But if they’re plotting that attack very quickly, there’s not enough time to detect, for a bystander to report, for somebody to investigate and then to realize, oh, no, this is a serious threat, and we need to do something. That “flash to bang” being so short makes it really, really hard on law enforcement to use the tools that were working for us back during the al-Qaeda days.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. So I mentioned in the introduction a study that you and I had talked about done by the University of Chicago and Robert Pape, which found that 10 percent of partisans on one side thought violence was justified in regards to the upcoming election, 7 percent on the other side. And, of course, violence begets violence, and violence is often radicalizing in and of itself. It’s often a tool of extremists to try to push the non-radicalized ever further down the funnel. And, you know, within the next election, within the next month, it’s entirely possible that we will experience acts of civic violence around the country, which will serve to further pull us apart. As both a Christian and a counterterrorism expert, what should we, in our individual capacities as well as within our churches, be doing to prepare?

Elizabeth Neumann: So the first thing is to recognize it is an extremely complex threat environment. We have the domestic threats that we’re talking about here. We also know that ISIS has an intent to try to carry out attacks in the homeland. We’ve had a number of notable arrests over the last year of operatives trying to pull something off. We also have nation states that are continuing to try to influence the election. Iran, China, Russia, North Korea have been at this for several election cycles now. Russia is the most prolific, but Iran has also been gaining in its sophistication, borrowing from Russia’s playbook. So it is hard to know is what I’m seeing real? Is this report accurate? And as people who are anchored in the idea that truth matters, it’s hard to even figure out where to go and get that truth in such a complex environment. 

So I think one of the most important things we can do as a church body is, for sure, call for calm when you’re engaging with people who are starting to maybe get aggrieved, or they saw something that really made them angry. When you’re engaging with those individuals, it is important to not argue with them about their ideology or their perspective as much as seek to understand, be curious, and be empathetic where you can. And what you’re looking to have is a relationship with that person so that you could perhaps suggest—again, depending on how anchored they are in whatever they saw—perhaps suggest they might be getting manipulated. Like, “You know, I heard that there are some other countries that don’t like us and they’re trying to mess with our elections, and that really makes me mad that they would try to interfere. Like, this should just be about us. So let’s double-check what you saw and make sure that it came from a legitimate source.” That works with some people. Nobody likes to be manipulated. So suggesting that they might be being manipulated sometimes works.

If that doesn’t work, the other thing to try to encourage and suggest is, “It’s so great that we live in a country that allows us to address our grievances through various means, like the vote and petitioning our grievances. And there’s so many ways we can address this. Let’s think about how we can work together to try to make sure we address this in the coming days or years,” whatever the issue might be. What you’re trying to suggest is remind people, like, we have alternatives to violence to address our frustrations and our grievances. Suggesting that people focus locally as opposed to nationally is another tool. Like, you are way more impacted by your local officials than you are your national officials. We over-index in this country on the national. And if people really want to get engaged, roll their sleeves up and fix something, like, oh my gosh, there are so many opportunities in your local community to do something well.

Another thing I would love to see churches do is that our election officials are under a barrage of attacks, especially if you’re in a swing state or in a state that was contested in 2020, meaning it was a tight election. The election officials have been, and all of the volunteers that work during elections, have been under a lot of threats, a lot of attacks. They’re scared. They’re trying to do their jobs. Guys, nobody grows up and goes, “You know what I want to be is an election official because it pays so well.” Like, they’re mostly doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. I would love to see churches just find a way—maybe it’s dropping them a note, maybe it’s bringing them cookies, maybe it’s just showing up and being like, “Hey, I heard you have a lot going on this next month. Is there anything we could do to pray for you, to love you, to just thank you for what you’re doing for our community?” I would love for churches to be seen as, you know, caring for our local officials and supporting them and encouraging them as opposed to, unfortunately, in the national media, the extreme right, those that are participating in the hostile-action spectrum, often gets conflated with Christianity. And so it would be awesome for churches to kind of counteract that by saying, “No, no, we stand with these election officials. We’re going to encourage them, we’re going to pray for them, and we’re going to get them what they need so that they can get through the next couple of weeks.”

So those are some ideas of how we can get through the next four weeks. But certainly just reminding people our hope is not in who gets elected. Our hope is in Jesus. That is what seems to, as I looked— there are a lot of things that went wrong, I would say, in the American church. But if you had to say one thing, it’s we are living in fear and we forgot that we have an antidote to that fear, and that is in Jesus. We’re living in fear. The reason that fear has taken over for us is because we’ve put our hope into a politician or into our country. We have created idols out of things that cannot sustain what we actually need. So just constantly reminding folks our hope is in Christ. He is still on the throne no matter who wins the election, who’s sitting in the white House. Jesus is still on that throne and we’re going to be okay. We have the answers to all of that anxiety. And our non-Christian brothers and sisters don’t have that. So we really need to be that non-anxious presence in this difficult time for our country.

Cherie Harder: We’re going to turn to questions from our viewers in just a second, but before we do that, I think so many of us have had the experience of a close friend or loved one who we can see radicalizing before our eyes. And it’s, you know, deeply unsettling to watch. We all want to do something about it. You’ve pointed out in your book that often what we are likely to try doesn’t work or even backfires, that often trying to argue with someone doesn’t work. You know, their feelings don’t care about the facts or whatever it is. And you’ve also described the boomerang effect. You know, essentially arguing with someone can actually cause them to further double-down and entrench. So how do you reach the radicalizing?

Elizabeth Neumann: That’s a great question. First thing is, I want to free you up. If this is somebody that you’re in relationship with, it’s not your job to fix their ideology. And you don’t have to go to Thanksgiving dinner and be prepared to argue with your uncle or your aunt about why they’re wrong. It’s not going to fix them. It’s not going to change their mind. And as just was referenced, like, it’s actually more likely to create a backlash effect.

What we know about when people disengage from conspiracy theories or disengage from a radicalized mindset and extremism is usually they’ve had some sort of experience of realizing that that ideology is actually not meeting the needs it thought that they would. And what we know about radicalization in general is that it is not an ideology that moves somebody into extremism. The ideology is the moral justification, which is important, but it’s actually unmet psychosocial needs. And those unmet needs—and I’m oversimplifying, but I think from a Christian context, it’s kind of nice to realize the big picture—the two primary unmet needs are a need for belonging and a need for significance. So recognize when you’re talking to that individual who has this extremist mindset or is in the process of radicalizing, that’s actually what’s going on. Now you might not know the details. And one of the things you could do is be curious and find out what has happened in their life recently. Usually there’s some recent trauma or some sort of loss, maybe a loss of a job, loss of a loved one, a humiliation. You know, it can be group humiliation, too. I think that’s partly what has happened to the Christian community. I think they were used to being the dominant force in the country, in the mainstream, and then all of a sudden, we’re not mainstream anymore and our values are made fun of. And I think that for many people has felt like a group humiliation. And so there’s this— it creates that opening for extremism to start to set in. 

So recognize when you’re talking to them, you’re looking for a better understanding of what’s actually going on, what’s the unmet need, and through an ongoing relationship with that person, if and when they reach that moment of “this isn’t working for me,” you might be the safe person that they turn to to get help. And that’s kind of what you’re looking for. What we know about helping people de-radicalize is it’s actually easier to get them to disengage than it is to de-radicalize. De-radicalization takes a long, long, long time. And it’s not actually the goal of those of us in this field. It’s much more about can we change behaviors so you’re not engaging with this as much? So your role as a loved one or a trusted friend is maintain relationship to the extent that it’s safe for you. If it’s not safe, don’t do it. But if it’s safe, maintain a relationship. Demonstrate empathy. Don’t support the ideology that’s in disagreement with your values and principles, but you can still empathize with somebody’s grievance without affirming their choices. So you’re looking to maintain that relationship so that when something happens, you’re a safe person that they can come and talk to.

Cherie Harder: That’s great. Thanks, Elizabeth. So we have a lot of questions that have all queued up in the Q&A. So the first question comes from an anonymous attendee and they have asked this: they say, “The statement that people quote, ‘think maybe the way of Jesus isn’t sufficient anymore’ cuts to my heart. The original followers of Jesus were under constant threat of persecution and death, and they thought the way of Jesus was the only way. How can American Christians be brought to accept that the way of Jesus is imperative, not optional?”

Elizabeth Neumann: Oh, I love that question. And I feel the cut to the heart because every time I’ve read that, it just it actually— there’s something about it that— Jesus is so precious to me. And when somebody who professes the faith—we’re not talking about an outsider critiquing the Christian faith. This is somebody that has been walking with Jesus for a while and purports to be a scripturally grounded Christian. Some of them have even gone to seminary. And they’re walking out and going, “You know, this way doesn’t work for us. This model doesn’t work for us. We have to try something else.” And you’re like, “But Jesus wasn’t a model for, like, building a ministry. Jesus was the thing! It is the way.” And it hurts because, yeah, because he’s precious to me. And it feels like you’re critiquing Jesus. Who are we to question his methods and what he taught us?

I do think that proximity is one of the most important and powerful tools to helping people change their minds about this. And what I mean by proximity is proximity to those that are marginalized, proximity to the global church, hearing the stories of those that are persecuted overseas, hearing the stories from perhaps immigrants that have escaped horrific circumstances and made it to the United States and are now living here. You hear tremendous stories of when somebody is side by side with somebody different than them, and they’re listening and they don’t feel like they’re being targeted to change their mind, but they’re just, like, curious and listening. And then all of a sudden, slowly over time, I think the spirit works through that and changes our hearts and minds and helps us to see the sin that had been blocking us from appreciating the way of Jesus.

But it certainly is— as I was looking through all of the contributing factors to the challenges that we’re faced today, we really have a discipleship problem. We have a lot of people in this country who I think believe that they’ve been saved. And I think there are a lot of people that use the label that actually don’t subscribe to the whole, like, “I need to be saved” thing. They just throw the label on because they’re culturally, “this is where I came from.” And I’m not talking about that group. I’m talking about people who genuinely think they’re saved. But they never perhaps they’ve never read the scriptures for themselves. Perhaps they’ve been under teaching that is very prosperity-gospel-esque, that suggests that you shouldn’t ever have trials, you shouldn’t ever be scared of something. And so they’re weak believers in need of seeing the fullness of Jesus, in need of seeing, like, it actually should blow us away how his upside-down Kingdom works. That it is the opposite of what the world tells us works. And I find it beautiful.

And so part of the trick here is helping people see the majesty and the beauty of what Jesus offers. And that really is an invitation. It’s an invitation to freedom. Operating under the world system, striving and the “you got to have the power,” and living in constant fear—man, that is too heavy a yoke. It’s too exhausting. So you, in addition to maybe the proximity and the discipleship, you might look for those openings when people—especially as the election approaches and people just feel like, “Oh my gosh, this is it. If it doesn’t go my way, it’s the end”—taking them back to, actually, Jesus says that’s not the case. So there might be a gospel opportunity for those that are in your life who have misplaced their savior onto a politician or a country, to give them that freedom that Jesus offers. There might be some opportunities here in the coming weeks. 

Cherie Harder: So a question from Rebecca Sankey. And Rebecca asks, “Do you have recommendations of resources for how to have these conversations with high school students, including in Christian school settings?” And, you know, one thing I’ll just sort of ladle on top of Rebecca’s question is, in your book you talked about Jonathan Haidt’s Coddling of the American Mind—Jonathan has also been a guest at Trinity Forum—about how essentially a lot of the beliefs that young people have been fed—like fragility, what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, emotional reasoning, always trust your emotions, or kind of an us-versus-them, the world’s divided between good and bad folks—actually creates vulnerability to extremism and radicalizing. So yeah, I would love to hear you kind of address that and Rebecca’s question, like, how do you reach young people [when] the very waters that they swim in may make them vulnerable to radicalization?

Elizabeth Neumann: Yes. And I don’t have the academic data yet to back this up, but I’ve asked many of my friends in academia to go study this. I think that some of what Jonathan Haidt has discovered about what is happening to our younger generation—generation Z in particular, is where this started—I suspect that the same negative outcomes that he is identifying—the anxiety, the depression, nihilism and apathy in boys to an extreme—I suspect that that is also why we have more violence. We’re also seeing people commit acts of violence at younger ages. The average age used to be something like the 18- to 21-year-olds is who we in the security community would be worried about. As we saw in Georgia, we had a 14-year-old commit an attack. So it is skewing younger. And that’s very concerning. And as a parent, I’m desperate to better understand what’s happening.

And so while we’re waiting for some of the academic data to shake out, I think what Jonathan Haidt has pointed out is enough for us to say, like, we don’t need phones in schools. Kids do not need to be on social media until they’re 16. Kids don’t need— you know, in my opinion, group chats can cause a lot of harm too. So you’ve got to, if you’re going to let your middle schooler be on group chats or communicate that way, you got to stay on top of that and help them process what they’re experiencing or what is being said. The seeds of grievance start pretty young now. And kids are just much more vicious online than they are in person. So to the extent that you can find a school— and a lot of schools are evaluating the rules right now. A lot of schools have adopted this idea of no cell phones in schools. And so to the extent that you can find a like-minded community— because it’s really hard to do it by yourself as a parent, you kind of need the collective action. It’s the collective action challenge. So you kind of need to find like-minded people to partner with on this. So if we could create a childhood that allows kids to form their identity not through social media, I think we end up with healthier kids and less violence.

So what does that mean in terms of talking to a high schooler? I have found—and there are other people that actually are on the mission field, if you will, trying to educate teens and parents about the challenges of social media and cell phone use, and they are probably better resourced than I. And I will take as an action to— I don’t remember off the top of my head those websites, but I will get that over to the Trinity Forum so they might be able to share with this larger group. But in general, what I’ve heard from them is you want to be able to show kids, hey, the things that you’re seeing on social media aren’t actually real. So that’s one of the key principles you want. You want to be able to ground them in reality. Because one of the things that’s happening is that we’re setting an expectation for them when they’re mostly online of what life should be like, what they should be able to achieve, what they should look like, especially for girls, that is never going to be achievable. And, you know, when I grew up, high school and middle school was hard enough trying to just keep up with my peers or what was in the magazines, right? For our kids, it’s not like, “Hey, you got to get the cool jeans that are in style this month.” It’s “No, in order for you to be successful, you have to have the Learjet and be like the influencer that has, you know, 15 million followers.” That’s what it means to be cool. 

The level of what we were trying to obtain when we were forming our identity compared to what the kids now are having to compete with, it’s just mind-bogglingly different, and it’s messing with their heads. It’s messing with their identity formation. Even for Christian kids, it’s hard for them to hear, like, you’re beautiful. You’re wonderfully made. God loves you. Like, all of those core messages you want them to carry into adulthood can’t get back past that social media filter.

So I’m spending a lot of time focusing on the social media because that is so much skewing what it means to be a teen right now. And so that’s where I would start, is trying to convince teens and their parents to get off of social media, reduce their screen time, get back to in-person, in real-life relationships and in real-life service, being invested in your community, whether that’s your school or your local community, your church.

Cherie Harder: That’s great. So Fritz Heinzen asks, “Can you elaborate more about foreign influences and how they’re interfering in the US, e.g. key foreign actors, their goals, their targets, their successes and failures?”

Elizabeth Neumann: Yeah. So the foreign interference in our modern instantiation of it started in 2014. But the idea of foreign nation states influencing us or sowing discord actually dates back to before Cold War times. The term disinformation was actually coined by Stalin in the 1920s, and it was used on his own people. So this idea that you can saturate your information environment with false information, making it harder for people to know what’s true, what’s not, and then creating conflict between different people groups, that’s been a psychological tactic that Russia has been using for over 100 years now. The concept of information warfare goes back millennia. Actually, you can read certain texts in the Bible and see some of Israel’s enemies use information warfare to try to deflate or discourage Israel from fighting.

So this isn’t new is maybe the point that I want you to take away. This is ancient. It’s just that the way in which information warfare occurs is much more sophisticated, and it’s actually so much cheaper to do now than it used to be. Back in the Cold War, some of the infamous narratives that still circulate that were started by the KGB were things like “AIDs is a CIA-created illness designed to kill the African population as well as African Americans.” “JFK was killed by the CIA.” That’s, you know, the classic one that everybody knows. “We didn’t land on the moon for real.” Those were all KGB-planted conspiracy theories. In order for them to do that back then, they had to invest in agents. They had to train them. It took many, many years. They had to live here for a long time. They had to cultivate their own networks, be accepted as Americans in order for them to have the influence to be able to seed propaganda and help it spread. 

You don’t have to do that anymore. You don’t have to train an operative for a long, long time and teach them English and teach them to blend in. What they do now is they have a troll farm in some of the Soviet bloc countries, and there are people whose job it is to create a persona online. So you’ll have one person with like hundreds of personas that they manage. And, you know, it’ll be, you know, Karen from your neighborhood town in Plano, Texas, and, Celia from Miami, and they’ll talk about things in various spaces in such a way that you, a real American, go like, “Oh, yeah, it seems like they live in my town. We should meet up sometime.” And so they’ll start off very innocuous, talking about normal American things. And then when there’s a moment of strife in the country—and we watched this happen with the take-the-knee thing, Colin Kaepernick’s take-the-knee stance, we saw this happen with Black Lives Matter protests—all of a sudden, those millions or at least thousands, maybe millions of personas would take a pretty hard stance on something. And notably, they would take both sides, but they would be like, “This is outrageous that he would take a knee!” And then somebody else, the same person, maybe, but a different persona is, “Oh, this is great. We should do this more often.” And so you would hear reports of like, oh my gosh, America is really divided. And what we learned two years later is, like, most of that was what we call inauthentic, meaning those weren’t actual Americans. They were all guys sitting in Russian troll farms.

So they’ve been doing this since 2014. They use it for election periods, but they also just do it throughout the non-election period, because their goal is not one particular outcome, although there’s a caveat there with both Russia and Iran. But their ultimate goal is they just want to weaken us as a society. They want to sow discord. They want us to be so polarized, they want us to be so focused internally, that when they do whatever they’re doing overseas, we won’t react. So with Russia, it’s very easy to see now that what Putin started in 2014 was because he wanted to take over Ukraine and he actually started that back in 2014, but didn’t really start fully executing his plans until 2022. And now we kind of have a better understanding of why he wanted us to be so weak. 

Iran obviously has a huge beef with Trump and some of his national security officials, because they killed the IRGC commander. And so they would like to see a Harris win. And so they’re kind of being antagonistic towards Trump in the way that they’re influencing. Russia would prefer Trump to win. So they’re being antagonistic to Harris. China plays the long game. They’re very focused on their own agenda. And so they just want the United States to be distracted and they sow discord when they can. North Korea, not as sophisticated. They just like to be in the mix in the axis of evil, if you will.

Cherie Harder: You know, Elizabeth, there are so many questions lined up. We’re kind of running out of time. We may just have to have you back at some point. But in a moment or two, I want to give you the last word. Before that, a few things to share with all of you who are watching. Those of you who have been here before know that immediately after we conclude we will be sending around a survey or feedback form. It will appear on your screen. We’d love for you to fill it out. We always read these. We find them so valuable and we try to incorporate your suggestions to make these online conversations ever more valuable. As a small token of our appreciation, if you fill it out, we will send you a code for a free Trinity Forum Reading of your choice. There are several that we would recommend that really kind of dovetail and pertain to today’s conversation, including Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Children of Light and Children of Darkness,” “Politics, Morality, and Civility” by Vaclav Havel, “Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt, “The Federalist Papers,” “A Practical View of Real Christianity” by William Wilberforce, and “Who Stands Fast” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. So we hope that you’ll take advantage of that opportunity.

In addition, tomorrow, if you have registered for today’s program, you will be receiving an email from us with a lightly edited video link to today’s Online Conversation. We’d love for you to share this with others. Start a conversation about some of the things you’ve heard today, so be on the lookout for that. We will also be including discussion questions with that email. So if you want to have a discussion group around today’s Online Conversation, you’ll have the resources to do that.

Third, I’d love to invite all of you to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people who work to advance Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought. So as our Online Conversation today has illustrated, these are difficult times and, like attention, philanthropy often attends fear, loathing, and urgency. We at the Trinity Forum are trying to be very countercultural about that by providing opportunities for wisdom, for growth, for grace and forbearance, and by pointing to the Author of all truth. We would love for you to join the Society. We would love for you to help make programs like this possible for more people. 70 percent of our funding comes from viewers and friends like you, and we really hope that you will join us. There are many benefits of being a Trinity Forum Society member as well, including a subscription to our quarterly Readings, a subscription to our daily “What We’re Reading” list of curated reading recommendations, and as a special incentive with your new membership or your gift of $100 or more, we will send you a signed copy of Elizabeth’s excellent work, Kingdom of Rage.

In addition, there’s a number of upcoming events that we’re excited about to let you know about. Next week, same time, we’ll be hosting Byron Johnson to talk about “Faith and Flourishing.” And for those of you who are in or near the Nashville area, we will be in Nashville on November 14th with our senior fellow, James Davison Hunter, as well as governor Bill Haslam, to discuss James’s new book, Democracy and Solidarity.

In addition, as we close up, I’d like to send out some thanks both to our co-host and to the Trinity Forum team who, behind the scenes, makes programs like this possible and makes them all happen. Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Brian Daskam, Marie-Anne Morris, our new office manager Macrae Hanke, as well as our great interns. Really appreciate you all. Finally, Elizabeth, as we close out our time together, I’d love to give you the last word.

Elizabeth Neumann: I am so grateful for the opportunity to be able to join you all today. And I was just scanning through some of the questions we didn’t get to. They’re really good questions. And thank you for asking them. And I hope we can maybe, either through the Trinity Forum or if you visit my website, ElizabethNewman.org, there’s an opportunity to sign up there and maybe I can take some of those questions and write some blog posts on that. But really, really great questions. And I appreciate everybody’s interest in the topic area.

I want to leave you with an encouragement as Christian believers to not grow weary in doing good. It is a hard season. And when you do find that weariness, check and make sure that you’re placing your hope in Jesus because that is our anchor. That is what is going to help us take that next step to push back against the contempt and the anger and the outrage and the fear in our society. But we really have such an amazing opportunity to spread salt and light in a dark time in our country. And thus, I just encourage you not to grow weary in doing the good that you are doing.

Cherie Harder: Elizabeth, thank you so much. It’s been great to talk with you.

Elizabeth Neumann: Thank you.

Cherie Harder: And thank you to all of you for joining us. Have a great weekend.