Nadine Smith: A call to take action in today’s “tipping point moment”
With devastating calmness, keynote speaker Nadine Smith —president and CEO of Color Of Change — surveyed the wasteland wrought by white Christian Nationalism in alliance with their “avatar,” President Donald Trump. Smith said Christian Nationalists deploy their self-serving “belief system” to help the president avoid accountability for his “brazen sins.” Pursuing “a strategy of national division,” they embody Project 2025’s “relentless cruelty” while raiding the nation’s “coffers.”
Amid the “normalization” of “the immoral realities of white Christian Nationalism,” Smith observed that many adherents are experiencing doubts about the movement’s unholy agenda. Now is the time, she declared, that concerned Americans can help protect and advance authentic “freedom of religion and freedom from religion.”
Encouraging conference attendees to leave “the light on for people” who are searching for a way out of a destructive ideology, Smith sees “a path to reconciliation” with “reluctant” Christian Nationalists. That path is rooted in church-state separation, “the architecture of true freedom.”
Challenging Christians who believe in true religious freedom to reach across cultural and political divides, Smith called for “more people of faith” to step up in this “tipping point moment” and “create a new and inclusive world.”
John Fugelsang: “Hate is not a spiritual value”
Deploying barbed humor via sarcasm and tonal inflection, John Fugelsang — political talk show host, popular podcaster, author of the New York Times bestseller, Separation of Church and Hate: a Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds, and a Christian — drove home the “fake Christian” identity of white Christian Nationalism.
“The only thing they hate more than the Bill of Rights,” Fugelsang quipped of power-worshiping, self-centered Christian Nationalists, “is the Jesus of the gospels.” They love a political ideology, and neither know nor love the Bible.
Seriousness and urgency underlined his spirited delivery. Christian Nationalists’ “hate is not a spiritual value” and will not prevail in the face of resistance to such cruelty.
“The most effective opposition to Christian Nationalism,” he noted, has been pluralism and diverse coalitions — “the queer kids with the cool priests … atheists and believers.”
“We are called to carry the baton,” previously held aloft by many in the past who “carried freedom forward” in their own day, he declared, and “to make life better for the most unfortunate.”
Front and center in this forward-marching movement, constitutional church-state separation guaranteeing freedom of religion and from religion “is a framework that is baked into the American experience” and must prevail. Rebutting Christian Nationalist opposition to this reality, Fugelsang retorted that constitutional church-state separation “is the conservative point of view.”
Surveying our nation’s history, Fugelsang insisted that “we [as a society] are getting kinder all the time,” even though “Christian Nationalism doesn’t reflect” that reality. He offered hope for the future: “I’ve seen too much progress in my lifetime to be a cynic” about a better future.
Anna Connelly: Using “the receipts” to build trust and communicate church-state separation
Social media stardom began with a red lobster costume. Five million followers later, Anna Connelly, cooler than ever, is clamping down all the harder on white Christian Nationalist lies.
“Minnesotans do not stand down,” Connelly says of her hometown that earlier this year stood up to Christian Nationalists’ targeting of immigrants and assaults on citizens. Nor does Anna Connelly is Cool — her social media identity — stand down. In the words of one of her followers, she “is a comedian who takes on MAGA disinformation with humor, facts, and grace.”
A career communications expert, Connelly broke through on social media by telling a story — while wearing her lobster costume — about crustaceans willfully boiling themselves to death because a chef convinced them it was good for them.
Now, Anna Connelly is Cool is allied with Americans United in boiling down the ideology of white Christian Nationalism and protecting church-state separation and true religious freedom. She does so in a calm, fact-based, and relatable framing that makes it easy for her followers to share her posts in their own social spaces.
At a time when lies travel quickly in digital spaces, Connelly does the hard work of effectively countering Christian Nationalist misinformation. By including in her videos “the receipts” — evidence — carefully mined from truthful, authentic, fact-based sources, she builds trust with her ever-growing audience.
Clearly communicating the necessity of protecting the rights of religious minorities, the non-religious, and women, she helps people find the words to have conversations with Christian Nationalists intent on tearing down the wall between church and state and stripping religious freedom from those with whom they disagree.
Effective conversations with someone of a differing persuasion begin with curiosity, she noted. Conversation should relate to the person with whom one is dialoguing, be simple rather than complex and consistent rather than sporadic, and center on personal stories rather than abstract notions.
And it doesn’t take a lobster costume to help someone feel safe enough to embrace reality over Christian Nationalist ideology.