Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Find Out podcast. There is a lot of news out there, a lot of bad things, but we're actually going to kind of talk about something a little bit different today because we have a guest that we have so many questions for. I know I do because I don't understand that world, but we have Monte Mater here with us. Excuse me. God, I always screw up the names.
I always do it. Who used to be part of the far-right Christian nationalist movement community or world and has now completely moved to the other side and is a culture critic, musician, and podcaster. So, Monty, welcome and apologies for screwing up your name, which I have to say to everybody when I start. Literally every time. That's okay. Every time. Every time. Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it. Yeah. So, Monty, we're... The four of us that are with you had religion in their backgrounds, but no longer have it. And I think for years we have sort of, you know, scratched our heads about how the hell do these deeply religious people Believe in and support till the end of time a man that literally like exhibits none of those traits.
And in fact, this morning took a shot at a guy who he he criticized for getting married too quickly after his wife passed away. This is the guy, Joe. He's going to talk. Joe Kent, who was under Tulsi Gabbard and resigned. So he decided to attack him, which brings up the fact that Donald Trump's cheated on all three of his wives multiple times.
Multiple times, including one home with the baby, Barron. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing and how your worldview was sort of shaped as you were growing up in this very right-wing world.
Yeah. So I grew up very much at the intersection of Republican politics and religion. That was always a married thing for me. There was never a point in my life where that wasn't in the conversation. It was always you cannot be a Christian and vote Democrat. That was that was a baseline. So there's a couple of things that happen simultaneously. I grew up out in Wyoming in a really rural area.
My family was the type of family that we stockpiled arms against the government in case they ever Ruby Ridged us. There was a lot of paranoia, a lot of if the government does this after the Columbine shooting, a lot of conversations around, well, the Democrats are going to hold you at gunpoint and it's your job to die for your faith. These were very much conversations that I grew up with as a kid.
And the hard part about it is because I not only was part of the church and my dad and his brother, my cousin were all involved in Republican politics. My dad was a state house representative later in his life. His brother was a state senator. My cousin was the county commissioner. My grandfather was kind of someone who was behind the scenes pulling a lot of strings.
And so I never had an opportunity to see a separation of those things. But also I went to all Christian nationalist schools. I was privately tutored in theology and Christian apologetics by my dad. So you're not just getting this information from your parents. You're getting it from your pastor. You're getting it from your teacher. You're getting it from your best friend's dad.
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Chapter 2: What was Monte Mader's upbringing like in an alt-right Christian Nationalist household?
Yeah. So I was trained for five years in in that type of talking form.
So, OK, so you go to Liberty University and do you go, wow, this place is liberal. Is that like what we're like? I'm sorry. I'm just I'm hung up on this. I just like I'm sorry. What was your first reaction? You're like, whoa, these people are like very progressive.
So, well, there was there was a few things that happened. It was my first time encountering people of other races. Outside of some indigenous communities. Yeah. So really, I mean, I had maybe met two black people my entire life prior to that. And so, you know, I'm in school in Virginia and it was my first time getting that different perspective. That's not Hollywoodized or churchized.
And I grew up in a very, very like homogenous white community. But I remember so I went to a Christian nationalist boarding school for eighth grade and high school. And so we had very strict dress codes. We had very strict lights out. You would actually get detention if you were caught listening to secular music of any kind.
And so getting to Liberty and I could listen to whatever music I wanted is where my roommate showed me Tupac and it changed my life. I could, I could in large part, Liberty has a dress code, but it's not super strict. It's, it's more along the lines of like, you can't wear PJs to class, but you can wear jeans and a t-shirt and you can wear flip-flops. And I was just like, this is great. And, um,
Two years in, because I had lived in boarding school for so long, someone I went to boarding school with was friends with the provost of the college. So I was able to appeal to the provost to move off campus my second year, the end of my second year. So then I was off campus and I could just kind of do whatever I wanted. And I had my own car and I was just like, this is great.
This is compared to where I had come from. It felt really a lot more relaxed. And it wasn't necessarily that the teachings were liberal. The teachers teachings were very in line with what I had grown up with. But I was getting this opportunity to talk to other people who were not in the same belief system as I was and who came from one of my best friends was from New York.
And so it was this you have this new kind of access to information and these new thought points. I had never been exposed to other opinions ever before. And so that was really what was changing for me. One, it just being more relaxed overall and the people there, the students there having differing opinions.
Monty, what was the first seed of doubt? Like how, when did, when did deconstruction begin in your, in your brain? Was it like when you were like 10, did you start asking questions in your own head or was it that it all happened as life happened?
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Chapter 3: What distinguishes Christianity from Christian Nationalism?
And I'm sitting there and I remember just getting furious because I knew that it was unfair. I knew I was like, that's not fair that like the wife has to be, doesn't get to make any decisions. She doesn't get to make any choices. And again, I didn't have the vocabulary for it, but I knew that that was unfair.
And I also knew, I remember having this thought of like, I was like, wow, it's really good to be a guy. Like, wow, how convenient. And so what I decided that day, I didn't say anything. I didn't complain. I didn't want to make God mad. So my solution to the problem was when I went home that day and went to go change my dress, I took my Bible and I threw it across the room.
And I was like, OK, I'm just not going to get married then. Cool. Like, I don't want to disobey God. Awesome. I'm just not going to get married because I'm not doing that. And that same issue came up three years later. And my dad saw my face this time I was 12. And I said, Dad, I was like, I don't believe I should have to submit to someone just because he was born with a penis and I wasn't.
Like, I don't agree with that. And then he goes into the whole, well, it's about picking the right person and he should take your opinion into account. But you couldn't convince me that a relationship where only one person gets to make decisions, only one person has resources, only one person has autonomy, only one person has leadership was fair. And I just couldn't buy that.
And the conflict that I had with that throughout my preteen and teen years was I would recognize that it was unfair and unjust and I would see how miserable women were in my church. But I would also have that opposing conflict of this is my rebellion. This is my pride. I'm rebelling against God's plan for my life. I need to push it down. I need to push it down.
And also this belief of, well, maybe when I get older, I'll understand and I'll feel differently. I also knew from the time I was 12, I didn't want kids. And that was not an option.
You know, the call for your life as a woman in this movement, like our pastor sat us down and your job is to get married, serve a husband, have as many children as you can so you can direct quote outbreed non-Christians. And so you grow up in this movement where that's what you just believe that you're supposed to do.
So I had kind of this push and pull all throughout my teen years of recognizing that was unfair, not wanting it. And just in my mind deciding I just wasn't going to get married because I didn't want to sin. But also on the other side, deciding like fighting with this. I'm wrong. I'm being prideful. I'm rejecting God's plan for my life. Yeah, that was my first one.
But my big crack, my big, oh, wait, this is wrong. Something is really wrong. Happened at twenty three.
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Chapter 4: How does the alt-right movement use victimhood rhetoric?
Yeah, sure. I just want to help. So I drive her there and we get to this room. There's about a dozen girls. The oldest is 19. The youngest is her 12. Most of them are 15, 16. All of the fathers, except for one, are over the age of 21.
Jesus.
And only one of the fathers is there because he's the age appropriate boyfriend of one of the girls. And so I'm sitting in the back of the room and pregnancy has always been in my top three fears. Like I would rather swim in open water with sharks. Like it's so scary to me. I'm sitting in the back turning green as a 23 year old, just like, oh, this is a lot.
But I realized that there was the first time in that moment that I realized I had never heard the church or my dad or anybody call for male accountability. And I was like, where are these adult men that have impregnated these 15 year olds? I want to know where the fuck they are.
And I also that was the first time that instead of just defaulting to my my preplanned thought of like, well, you know, two wrongs don't make a right. And yes, it's not her fault, but it's not the baby's fault. I was like, you know what? I don't actually know anything about abortion and the history of abortion. And I've I've been an insomniac since I was 16.
So that night I spent I was up all night researching abortion in the United States. And the first statistic I came up to was that 93 percent of abortions happened before 14 weeks. And I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked at that time. I thought that after birth abortions were real. That's infanticide. That's never happened.
I thought that most abortions I had been told most abortions happen in the second and third trimester. I had been told that pregnancy from rape never happens. It's a democratic excuse to kill babies. Like I believed all these things again, because you hear them your whole life from every adult you ever know.
And that was the first time I recognized one, that it was absolutely utterly evil to force a child to bear the consequence of a grown man. First of all, especially when it could kill her. So I was immediately pro-choice after that. I was like, nope. And that was the first time I realized I had been intentionally lied to.
So, Monty, a question in the conversations around the 12 year old. Did anyone ever say the term sexual assault or rape?
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Chapter 5: What role does gender and purity culture play in fundamentalist communities?
Yes, correct. But I watch all of those same people salivate, falling on their knees in front of this serial adulterer, disgusting, lying, racist piece of shit. And I recognize this, like, immediately. I didn't need the grab him by the pussy comment. I was like, this man is trash. What are you talking about?
And as his campaign goes, and it gets worse and worse and worse and worse, and I watch everyone I know, everyone I grew up with, fall at his feet. Call him King Cyrus. I was like, oh. oh, this was never about loving your neighbor and helping the poor and taking care of the sick. This was all about power for you people.
And that was the moment for me that I realized this had all, all of it had been a farce to just take power. And, you know, I tell people all the time because a lot of people on my page are still Christ followers.
And I'm like, listen, you can follow those teachings and understand that the organization is using these very good things to one is a guise for their own immorality, but also just to grab power. But that was the moment for me that all of the lies and all of the contradictions came into really sharp relief. And I realized that this was just a movement for power.
So what did you do with that? So you see that, right? He comes down the stupid gold elevator. You know, he's calling, you know, undocumented immigrants, rapists and murderers, which is not true.
Takes one to know one, Donnie.
So how is once you see that, like, what is the conversation with your is there a I'm out like a you know, there's a Seinfeld episode in the 90s, which I don't know. Do you like we have a contest? I'll just say they have a contest. Slaps. I'm out. Like, is that how does how does that conversation go?
So what happened with me, in that moment, again, for me, I was like, ew, no, no, thank you. But I had a couple months of really sitting with it and it's really sobering to be like, man, everything I grew up believing is a fucking lie. All of this was used to manipulate me.
All of this was used to help me parrot their talking points, be part of their talking points, give birth to their talking points. And it wasn't until the summer of 2016. And again, I my I'm a data person and I love information. So I just when I saw Christian support him, I dove even deeper. I'm like, I want to know everything. I want to research all these issues.
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Chapter 6: How does the Tradwife movement contribute to the radicalization of young men?
And he died that night.
Oh, wait, like.
He died six hours after that conversation.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God. And so I never got a chance to never had a chance to actually talk to him about it. So he passed away July 14th of 2016. And my uncle, his brother had died two weeks earlier. And then a month later, my grandmother and a close friend died on the same day.
So I was just in this whirlwind of my worldview's gone, my mentor's gone, all of this death, and then the campaign that is happening at the same time. It was a really overwhelming time, but I never actually got to tell him.
How do you feel about that today?
I wish I could have. I do wish I could have had that conversation with him. But my dad, one of the things my dad had a very hard line on was he did not tolerate people that cheated on their spouse. That was a big, hard line for my dad. And that was the reason he didn't like Trump. He was like, I will say to my father's credit that he held Trump to the same moral standard he held Bill Clinton to.
So I I think I think that it's possible that my dad wouldn't have voted that fall.
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Chapter 7: What is Project 2025 and its significance in the Christian Nationalist agenda?
And so it was very... And when he remarried my stepmom, it actually got worse. And so it was a really tough environment to go through. But the reason I went to boarding school in high school was because...
of the abuse at home and for me anywhere but there was better and my brother came the next year and we both went through part of middle school and high school in this teeny tiny school in a cornfield because it was safe for them being home he and I my younger brother and I are the only siblings that were raised our whole lives together
And at one point after my dad remarried my stepmom and we moved, we were forced to live in a dark basement for two years and we weren't allowed to be upstairs in the house. We were only allowed to come upstairs if we were leaving or going to school, um, or to clean it for her.
And we also like she would any, any small infraction, like you miss a spot scrubbing the floor, you miss something in the shower. Everything was a beating. So my younger brother, Travis and I got out as soon as we could get out.
Did your, uh, do you know why was your, was that a like religious thing or was that, I assume your father probably was also treated the same way in his household growing up is much worse.
Actually, my grandfather was vicious. Um, But the corporal punishment side of it, again, in Christian nationalism, they're very pro spank your children, break their spirit. This was during the time of like my dad was a big James Dobson follower who talked about, you know, you have to break the spirit of your children.
He called toddlers little tyrants, you know, instead of little people that are trying to learn what it means to be human. Yeah. So my dad was very much in that. So he felt that corporal punishment was like required, that it was necessary to raise your children properly. He didn't actually know about what my stepmother was doing until I was 19. And I don't know.
I still don't know how he found out. I just remember because I was in class. He sent me an email saying, hey. I've heard X, Y, Z. And he lists all these things. He's like, is this true? And I just wrote him a long letter saying, yeah. And that's that's about like 30 percent of what happened. But he also didn't believe that that was a good enough reason to get divorced.
And I think that was religiously motivated. But also he didn't want the embarrassment of a second divorce. And so he stayed with her even when he found out.
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Chapter 8: What does deconstruction of faith look like from the inside?
They never get disconnected from their community and see a different community. For women, a large part of it is they encourage you to get married young and have kids young, which makes you financially dependent, barefoot and pregnant, and then you're stuck. And so then you have not only the added you have the baseline. It's all fear motivated. Right.
Right.
They make you scared of a scapegoat. But also it's this deep human, very human longing to belong. And and people know that if they leave that movement, they lose their church, they lose their community, they'll lose their family. It's like a gay kid coming out in a Christian home knowing that they are going to be thrown in the street. is very much that feeling.
So there's a lot of that that goes on. And because so many of them don't have a lot of access to external influences in their personal life, right? They'll see something on social media now that we have social media, or they'll see something in a movie But they don't have a personal interaction with it.
So it's hard for them to take it to to think about it other than a concept because they're not having those interactions. And that's the reason that the groups are so highly controlled is because once they lose the control of information, this is the reason that Larry Ellison is pursuing this Warner Brothers merger. This is part of the Seven Mountains mandate to control information. Right.
And so they are very much put in these bubbles. Women are very often trapped, right? There's no way for them to get out. What are they going to do? How are they going to survive as a single mom? And also even Christian marriage counseling was founded by a man named Paul Popenoe, who was a white supremacist, eugenicist, who was also an atheist.
But after eugenics fell out of favor after World War II, when it became clear what the Nazis had done, he switched over into marriage counseling. And the only people that were extreme enough to listen to his viewpoints were evangelical pastors. So he would teach them that white women should never marry outside their race. White women should never be on birth control.
White women should never leave their husband, even in cases of infidelity or abuse. And this is what Christian marriage counseling is founded on. And we even see that play out where a pastor has an affair. And he gets forgiven. It was temptation he gave in. But if a woman, a married woman does that, oh, my God. Totally different. But Paul Popeno mentored James Dobson.
Ah.
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