I’m rarely receptive to a man I’ve never met introducing himself with a hug, but Dr. Cornel West is a warm man.
Warm, but terrifyingly smart, with a professor’s gaze. He teaches (now at Union Theological Seminary, but has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton), he writes (Race Matters, Democracy Matters, Truth Matters), and goes on TV to talk politics, philosophy, theology, and the general state of things in America, as “public intellectuals” are often asked to do.
In 2024, West ran as a third-party Presidential candidate (more like third parties candidate, he switched a bit). To catch you up on current events, he didn’t win. But his run pissed off people who treated the race as a precious faberge egg, that even the slightest leftist agitation would put in the crushing hand of Donald Trump. (Get real, Kamala Harris lost the race all by herself.)
We’re escorted to the third floor of First United Methodist Church of Seattle, and take a seat in a simple room with a window, table, six chairs and an upright piano pushed to the wall. Rev. Osagyefo Sekou (who set up this interview after I met him at a Christian supremacist rally in Gas Works last week) says to keep it to “a tight 30” and shuts the door. The men met “almost 30 years ago,” West says, when Rev. Sekou was still a student.
“I knew he was a special brother,” he says of Rev. Sekou, a pastor and musician who now leads the progressive Valley & Mountain Fellowship in Columbia City.
Saturday, they’ll both be at Town Hall Seattle for “Faith in the Time of Monsters,” an event to discuss Christian nationalism, and the role that faith leaders can play in combatting it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Who are the monsters?
Lord, organized greed and weaponized hatred and routinized indifference to the vulnerable, no matter who the vulnerable—those who’ve been degraded and demeaned and subjugated. And these are both forces in the society, but it’s also embedded in various figures, especially in high places. But they’re in high places because they can mobilize people.
How have you seen this mobilization play out?
Escalating fascism usually takes the form of the rule of big military. So it’s a militaristic discourse—militarizing genocide in Gaza, militarizing in occupations in LA and Washington DC, militarizing in terms of punitive attitudes and policies toward gays and lesbians and trans [people] and women, the attack on trade unions, which are one of the forms in which workers can protect themselves. These are all elements of an escalating fascism.
And Christian nationalism—well, let me put it this way—white Christian nationalism [pounds on the table with each word] plays a very formative role in facilitating this kind of fascism in the United States. I like the fact that there’s an “s” after monsters, because we got to keep track of the varieties and forms of the greed, the hatred, the indifference, the attacks, the assaults, and so forth. And of course, I haven’t even talked about the attacks on our precious immigrants.
When you look at how Christian nationalism and Christian supremacy have taken shape in the administration, we really have these three avatars: Vice President JD Vance is the avatar for the traditionalist, anti Vatican-II Catholicism taking hold in the United States. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is the hyper-reformed, the Reconstructionist, Calvinist, “Theo Bro.” You have the head of the White House Faith Office Paula White-Cain, who stands in for the supernaturalist, apostolic, prophetic, charismatic Christianity that we’ve seen show up in Seattle this summer.
These are all disparate ideologies, but they’ve united, so they say, to make society less secular. But they really seem interested in using religion as a mechanism for control. I don’t see any spirituality there. I’m curious what you see.
I see it as ways of facilitating authoritarian policies and moving toward fascist rule. But all of them are seduced by Trump because they see Trump as this “strong man.” They see Trump as someone who can impose his will and if they have access to him, then their own specific concerns can be highlighted. But it’s interesting because, you can imagine, when you have that kind of coalition you noted, there’s a lot of different tensions, conflicts. It’s going to manifest more and more. You got class conflicts, because you got the tech billionaires, you got big tech as a whole, and they’ve got distance from precisely the groups that you’re talking about.
Very different.
They live in different worlds. They view themselves as indispensable figures in this—what I’d call fascist coalition, authoritarian coalition. The same is true in terms of the children. Each one of these groups have children and relatives who are more and more adversely affected by Trump’s policies and terrors. We go on and on. All the folk aren’t crazy about the wars. All the folk aren’t crazy about throwing away the Epstein files the way Trump just viewed it as a Democratic Party hoax.
They’re not crazy about the immigrant in their community that’s suddenly gone that day.
That’s right. Just disappears on the plane to El Salvador, Uganda, whatever.
Do you see that as self-destructive?
It’s hard to say, hard to say. Fascist movements are always shot through with a lot of conflict and contestation, but a strong man at the top who’s the fascist leader can hold it together for a while. It’s going to collapse sooner or later.
They all do, and usually around a person.
Absolutely. This too shall definitely pass. There’s no doubt about that. But see, part of the problem is that the American Empire is just so sick that it’s unable to generate strong, substantive alternatives to the ugly fascism in its various forms. The Democratic Party is just milquetoast, mediocre, militaristic—
It’s hard to say what it stands for, exactly.
Exactly. It’s just rudderless, it’s feckless, it’s spineless. It stands for big money.
Yeah, it even has a limited vocabulary. None of the words they use can be too hot, they can’t be too cold. It’s so distant. It reminds you of corporate email.
On the other hand, you see, we on the left have not been able to generate the kind of effective organization or alternative vision that’s embedded in effective organization. And so though we have very important individuals, persons, groups, and organizations, it’s not strong. It’s very weak, very feeble.
Talking about these Christian nationalists and supremacists, there are a lot of ways to see them: you have some with a far right ideology at the core, gilded in Christianity. You have a corruption of faith under capitalism, and then you have a continuation of this greater American tradition where faith is a mirror held to a person’s own beliefs. So somebody says, I’m a person of God, I think this thing, and therefore this thing is ordained by God. It has no theological basis, but it can become that person’s purpose to spread that “sanctified” idea—which often can be racism, transphobia, homophobia, whatever. Especially forms of Christianity that spread the prosperity gospel, where there’s something wrong with your spirit if you don’t end up rich. There is no room for introspection.
Most institutional Christianity since Constantine, which is 312 AD, has been shot through with vicious forms of empire and tied to the accommodation to Emperor and head of either Empire or nation state. When it comes to the United States, most institutional Christianity has been profoundly white supremacist, has been profoundly patriarchal and homophobic and transphobic. So all they need to do is just push the buttons of the dominant forces and tendencies within institutional Christianity.
Now with Trump and others, they have a license and permission to be more raw in their hatred. But it’s always been there. It’s always been there. The hatred of Black people has been so much at the center of the country that it serves as a way of bringing people together, even when they don’t like each other. When I look at the present manifestations, I see the long historical traditions with depths of these forms of organized hatred. But again, as you said to the capital society, it’s always tied to the attempt to gain access to profit, attempting to gain access to resources.
But the sad thing is, is that the role of the elites at the top, the spiritual wickedness of the elites at the top. You saw it just yesterday, with tech billionaires sitting around Trump, talking about him as if you know he’s [Roman Emporer] Augustus, or he’s Caesar or something. It’s just disgusting to see that kind of capitulation. But for them, it’s not so much about Trump.
Money, power, access.
Access. Profit, power, status, which means they’ll capitulate to fascism, they’ll capitulate to liberalism. They’ll capitulate whatever it takes—just give us space to make our money. Period. They are on a very different wavelength than the masses of white supremacists and homophobes and transphobes and patriarchs who constitute so much of the white Christian nationalism.
The risk Christian nationalism brings seems plainly obvious to me. But secular society, journalism, politics does not seem to recognize the very worrisome trend, despite all the historical precedent that would indicate this is something to take seriously. I’ve never come up with a satisfying answer for why that is the case.
That’s a wonderful question. Part of it is that secular America, for so long, has lived in its own silo. It has its own networks. It has its own pecking order. It tends to look down on the religious folk and on the deplorable, whatever language you want to use, so there’s no interest in trying to understand what their world is really like. And because you get this grotesque wealth inequality, where the greed is just sucking so many of the resources of poor working people to the top, that they can’t see even the desperation, the economic desperation that’s at work in the xenophobes. Among the white Christian nationalists themselves, because they are really struggling economically. They’re just taught the scapegoat the most vulnerable rather than confront the most powerful.
And it’s good business.
Oh yes, it reproduces profit making, it reproduces hierarchy that facilitates the predatory capitalism that is the dominant tendency in the larger culture. That’s what makes it so frightening, that when you say to yourself, Well, how do we work our way out of this thing?
And what do we do?
At the moment, we don’t see a way out. You got be honest about that. It doesn’t mean we give up because we got to fight until we die. We got to bear witness till the end. But you’ve got to be very honest about it. It’s a very bleak moment. It’s like being enslaved in Mississippi in 1750, it’s hard to see a way out. You keep loving your kids. You keep trying to tell the truth, keep memories of your grandmothers and grandfathers. Sustain whatever networks you can on the plantation. You know that in the long run, there might be a way out, but you can’t see it. That’s what we are right now. So it’s a tough place to be in America, because America is always tied to overnight winners, push button solutions and push button panaceas, and that’s not going [to happen].
Do you think that we find ourselves in a bit more of a generational struggle?
Oh, no doubt about it. But what becomes probably most manifest is the self-destructive tendencies of the species, especially among the ruling classes. And the self-destruction of character of the American empire that thinks by living in denial, somehow chickens don’t come home to roost, and chickens are coming home to roost now every day. Every day, on the military front, on the economic front, on the racial front, on the gender front, on the deeply human front.
In the air, today. [At the time, smoke from six separate wildfires hung over Seattle.]
With the ecological catastrophe and so on, very much so. We have to tell the truth about those self-destructive tendencies that are deepening, and then recommit and refortify ourselves and fight that.
Do you feel that is the unifying message that will bring people together?
As many as we can [laughs].
There’s a bit of a peace that comes with admitting we are in a pickle. That it’s not Kamala Harris who is gonna swoop in and save the election. It’s not this protest that is going to stop and change everything. It’s not Gavin Newsom who’s going to come in on his California steed like a Hollywood production. It’s just not like that.
The Democratic Party is beyond redemption. It doesn’t have the capacity to provide the kind of alternative, that’s very clear. I live in New York City. I live in Harlem, and, you know, you get a progressive candidate that wins the primary, and they go berserk, they go paranoid. You think, good God, my dear brother, Zohran [Mamdani]! Zohran—we’re not talking about some radical communist or nothing. He’s a very DSA brother who functions as a kind of New Deal liberal the way Bernie functioned as a New Deal liberal. Both call themselves Democratic Socialists, but they’re basically just highly progressive liberal policies at home, and then he takes a courageous stand against barbaric genocide of precious Palestinians in Gaza and the Democratic Party can’t take it.
God forbid a man be charismatic. Bravery and charisma, two things the party does not have. It’s a gamble that, I don’t think, the party is willing to take.
Their donors and benefactors—they’re the major shapers of the party anyway. And it’s not really a party anymore. I mean, a party has a mass base with mechanisms that connect the base to the operatives and the leaders. They just have billions of dollars at the top, and these professional politicians look for the money, wherever it is, a peg, whatever lobbies are out there, And they try to make sure that their benefactors’ interests are satisfied, so that the money can continue to flow. And that’s not really a party.
It’s a brain without a body, without a heart, without a circulatory system. There’s no connection.
And a “brain” in the most narrow sense.
In the sense of a computer.
Because we’re talking about these “monsters,” people who wrap themselves in Christianity, what role do you think that the religious left has to sort of vanquish or expose these people?
Got to tell the truth. Gotta expose all their lies, all their crimes, all their hypocrisy, all their mendacity. And you have to be consistent and constant in that exposure. And then you have to bear witness. You have to put your body where your mouth is so that people can say that you say what you mean and mean what you say, rather than just say something and have no follow through on a personal and some organizational level.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the left is going to be organizationally powerful overnight. How many abolitionists were around before the Civil War? In a country of millions, a few thousand. You mean to tell me that most of you folk on the vanilla side of town really are either indifferent or support barbaric slavery, the enslavement of Black people? These Quakers and Mennonites and these other folk, the William Lloyd Garrisons and the John Browns and so forth. These are little strange people.
I’ve been told to keep it to a tight 30. So I want to ask—you talk about the bleakness of the moment, but you don’t talk about it in a bleak way. You have a hope. Where does that come from?
Lord, have mercy—I’ve got a joy and a hope and a love has been poured into me by my Mom, my Dad, Shiloh Baptist Church, the Black Panther Party, Martin King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, James Lawson. I got a whole cloud of witness and we haven’t even gotten to Curtis Mayfield and Aretha and John Coltrane and so forth. I have a rich tradition. I come from a great people, a great people who’ve been dealing with bleakness for 400 years and yet still give the world so much love and joy and sense of freedom. That’s my tradition.
I’ll put it this way, as long as part of the life of that tradition—oh, no, as long as part of the afterlife of that tradition is at work in my life, and I walk around in style and smile, but I’m not gonna live in denial I know how ugly and bleak it is. Oh, absolutely.
