Grapevine - Ep. 2: The Seven Mountains

November 27, 2023·44 min·3 clips

Newly elected Grapevine school board member Tammy Nakamura told a Republican audience she had a list of teachers who were 'poison' and needed to be stopped — sending the district's 1,000 teachers into a panic about whether their names were on it.

1962 and 1963 set the legal backdrop. The episode opens on Supreme Court rulings that barred public schools from requiring Bible reading or prayer as religious exercises. That history is not treated like dusty case law. It becomes the start of a longer fight over what public education says about the country. Fia has spent years studying the Christian right. He says Seven Mountain dominionism once sat mostly on the fringe, centered on churches and institutions outside the main political spotlight. Then Trump changed the scale. According to Fia, Trump saw millions of people who already shared this worldview and brought some of them closer to power. The message fit MAGA cleanly enough: for believers in this frame, making America great again could mean returning America to Christian roots. The 2020 loss did not cool things down. The transcript says Trump's refusal to accept defeat energized believers instead. The politics widened too. A poll cited in the episode found that more than half of Republican voters agreed broadly with Christian nationalist ideas. Lauren Boebert comes in through a 2021 Truth and Liberty Conference tied to the seven mountains of influence. Then the story gets very local. The call was to influence school boards, right as opposition to critical race theory was becoming a major attack from the right. Fia connects the curriculum fight to fears that classroom diversity threatens the white Christian America some activists want celebrated. The theology lands in boardrooms, lesson plans, and public power.

As heard by us

A local school-board fight becomes a clear map of Christian nationalist power.

Grapevine - Ep. 2: The Seven Mountains follows a once-fringe Christian nationalist worldview as it moves from churches and institutions into politics, Trump-era rhetoric, and school-board fights.

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Why you'd press play

When a local school-board fight turns into a bigger American argument.

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