Inside Christian Nationalism with Monte Mader

Monte Mader I believe that the arc of progress, the arc of justice, it bends the way you bend it. Hope is where your hands are. So the world that we want to have is possible if we build it.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan This is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are fantastic- Excellent ... in part because someone much smarter than me is here to come on the show, and we get to hear her thoughts and things, her musings about the world, and that is always a delight. So Dan, why don't you introduce our guest?

Dan McClellan Yeah, we are very excited and honored to be joined today by Monte Mader, another social media superstar and also rock and roller. Thank you so much for being with us today on the show, Monte.

Monte Mader Thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you for your work. I was very, very excited to get this invitation.

Dan McClellan Well, I had thought about it many times in the past, like, "I got to reach out to Monte. I think she would make a lovely guest on the show." And then finally was like, "Maybe I ought to do it, actually."

Dan Beecher And I was- Maybe stop thinking about it, Dan- Yeah ... and start actually taking some action. That's not a bad idea.

Dan McClellan I'm working on it. Yeah. So yeah, we're ecstatic to be able to talk to you today, and hear lots of things are going on in your life, lots of changes, and that's great. But we want to start off by just, if you don't mind, letting our audience, I'm sure there are an awful lot of people in our audience who already know more about you than Dan and I combined, but would you mind talking a little bit about how you got to be where you are? Because we talked earlier about the fact that it was almost a year ago today that we first met in DC at one of the- Yeah, but Dan, what we should be saying is there's a whole cool conversation about all of us that only our patrons get, and if you want to hear that conversa- You always want to bring it back to business, but yes, okay ...

Dan Beecher I'm just saying, it's not a bad idea to become a patron right now and go and check out our conversation with Monte- Yes ... about how we met and everything on Patreon.

Dan McClellan We talk a lot about that.

Dan Beecher Patreon.com.

Dan McClellan I was using that as a springboard into- Yeah ... that was only evidently three months after you splashed onto social media as a- Became the queen of the internet?

Dan Beecher Is that what you're trying to say, Dan?

Dan McClellan So can you tell us a little bit about what's happened? So, yeah.

Monte Mader I've obviously had social media for a long time. I was not a big user, especially with Instagram. I typically used it to promote music. I wasn't really a regular creator of any kind. And then as 2024 had continued to happen, there were certain topics that kept coming up, certain talking points that I felt uniquely qualified to have a discussion on with my background, but it wasn't a big thing. But in December of 2024, I made a video kind of cheekily saying, "Why are we trying to put the Bible in schools when it's not working in churches?" And many people were not a fan. And I'm also someone that I don't read the comments very often. Part of it's just time. I'm so busy, I don't have time, but also mental health as well. Yeah. Because for their good comments, and there's a lot of also really vitriolic ones. But for whatever reason, one day in February of last year, a notification on that video popped up, and it was from this guy named Derek, who's like, "When have you been to church? I'm guessing never." And for whatever reason- Which is a constant...

Dan Beecher Any one of us who have posted a thing that could even be considered anti-Christian, you're going to get, "Well, you've never read the Bible. You've never been to church." Yeah. "You don't know anything about it." Yeah.

Monte Mader And for whatever reason, that particular day, and again, as someone who did not- You had time. I had time, and I was not having it. I was not having it. So I set up my phone really quick. Again, I had never shot this style of video in this way before. And I laid out my background, and I pulled my Bible into frame, and I read him for filth for 90 seconds straight, and I don't even think I breathed at any point. Yeah. And I put the phone down. I posted it, put the phone down. I went to the gym. I went to work. I was running a personal training business at the time, and I was also a full-time performer. And I came back three or four hours later, and it had 15 million views. Wow. Goodness. Yeah. And I was like, "What?" And then it got deleted off Instagram, because when someone deletes their comment, it removes the video.

Dan McClellan Oh, really?

Monte Mader It does. So I ended up having to repost it, and it still got millions of views. And so I went from having 24,000 followers in February of last year to, I'm almost at 2.6 now, 2.6 million. Wow. And that was the beginning of it. And then it just opened the door for me to talk about all of these topics, especially around Christian nationalism and the Bible with how I grew up, and that was the match that lit it. And I was shocked. And I got into March and April, and I'm sitting at 450,000, 500,000 people, and I'm like, "Oh, well, that's where it'll plateau. That's really cool. I never thought that that would happen to something like me." And it just did not stop, and it just kept going. Yeah. And then by November, I had already been planning on stepping away from the cover band music. I had been doing it for four years. It was four-hour shows multiple times a week. Oof. Really aggressive performances.

Dan McClellan Who were you covering?

Monte Mader We did all pop rock and hip hop. Oh, okay. I refuse to do country. I won't do it. Absolutely not. But we also do a lot of metal. Uh-huh. A lot of emo and metal. And so those shows get really exhausting. Yeah. And four hours, no breaks, no set ... breaks, anything like that. No breaks? So we would typically- No breaks?

Dan Beecher That's insane. Yeah.

Monte Mader And at our peak, the band and I were doing five to six shows a week. Wow. Right. And so typically, we'd start the show with a lot of classic rock, some really fun pop that everybody likes, and then there would always be a moment during the show, and I was pretty good at picking when the moment happened, that we would do Enter Sandman, and we did a medley into one with Enter Sandman. Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan Oh, nice. Nice.

Monte Mader And that is when the show would change. And I'm like- Yeah. ... "Okay, cracks knuckles. Now we're going somewhere else." And we would end up in Linkin Park, Iron Maiden, Avenged Sevenfold. It would get really rowdy sometimes. But we also had a 13-minute '90s hip hop medley. Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher There you go.

Monte Mader So, variety is the spice of life. I had been planning on stepping back for that for a while, so it was a good opportunity last fall for me to step back, give my voice and my body a recovery. Mm-hmm. And then I closed my business that I had been running for 15 years in November, and now I do this full time. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Well, and you do it astoundingly well. I will give a ringing endorsement to your Instagram/TikTok/wherever you are feed because it is something to behold. You're a powerhouse, for sure. Thank you. But we need to get into what we're here to talk about because a lot of your content, as you say, your first big, big thing is you just tearing into the Bible. So I would like you to give us just a bit of a rundown as to your background, because you have been to church. Yeah.

Monte Mader A few times, yeah.

Dan Beecher And so talk to us about sort of your background, your raising, and sort of what your life looked like as young Monte.

Monte Mader So baby Monte was born and raised on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. Mm. And grew up very, very remote, very rural, and I grew up in a very, very Christian nationalist environment that skewed very militant. And I will say to my family's credit, which is something that still shocks me so much with what's going on now, if my father had ever seen someone fly a swastika, he would've throat punched them. Yeah. So not in that space, but very much, we had stockpiles of arms across the property. We were trained with weapons at a very young age. There was a lot of rhetoric around, "The Democrats are going to hold you at gunpoint. The government might come for us. It's your obligation to die for your faith." Yeah. That escalated a lot after Columbine. Mm.

Dan McClellan I was about to say, when did Columbine happen there?

Monte Mader I was a kid when Columbine happened. Yeah. And that's really where I remember that uptick, and it was very much directed at us children, more so than hearing it in conversation in the room. Interesting.

Dan Beecher Where you needed to- They're specifically going to the children and- Yes ... giving these messages.

Monte Mader I remember journaling at night and fantasizing about martyrdom. Mm. Like fantasizing about being killed like Cassie, and fantasizing about, "Would I be strong enough to say yes for my faith?" And I knew- Yeah ... I was part of a Christian group that would go to public schools, and they would host these anti-drug rallies. Mm-hmm. And then invite kids out to a pizza party type thing on a different night where they would share the gospel. And Cassie Bernall's grandparents were part of that. I knew them personally. And I didn't find out until my 20s that that never happened. Cassie's story, and she said yes isn't real. Yeah.

Dan Beecher I don't know her. I don't know Cassie.

Dan McClellan One of the victims of the Columbine shooting. Yes. Oh, okay. Where he... Yeah. Sorry, you go ahead.

Monte Mader The story was originally, she was one of the victims in the library, and she was hiding under a table, and the story was that he came over to her and asked her, "Do you believe in God?" She said yes, and he kills her. And it didn't happen that way. He just shot her, and it- Yeah ... it happened to someone else. It was just totally falsified. Yeah. And they knew very early that it was falsified, but the book was still published. It became this huge part of the youth movement in evangelicalism and Christian nationalism with Acquire the Fire youth groups. But for how I grew up with this militant background already, it really, really escalated this sense of urgency, this sense of persecution. I was used to this idea of, "You need to have weapons to defend your faith" kind of ideology. And also, my mom left when I was young and left all six of us kids with my dad, and I very much grew up in a patriarchal household, my way or the highway, and I grew up in both a church and a home environment where, "Well, you're a woman. Your only purpose is to get married, have as many kids as possible. You don't get a say in anything. You have to submit." All of those things. I actually got kicked out of Sunday school the first time when I was nine because the teacher... I was wearing this sundress that came just above my knees, nothing immodest at all. Also, I'm nine. Uh-huh. And she reprimands me and says I need to be careful to not make a man stumble. Mm. And I don't remember how I phrased the question, but I asked the equivalent of, "How can we trust men to be leaders if they can't lead themselves?" Yeah. And I was asked to leave. I was never allowed back in her class after that. She didn't let me come back. And then two weeks later- Well- ...

Dan McClellan I was at church.

Monte Mader I hear my first "Wives, submit to your husbands" sermon. So they were really leaning into it. Yeah.

Dan McClellan I don't want to distract from the story. I am curious, though, Matthew Shepard was killed in Wyoming- Yes ... very shortly after Columbine happened. Yeah. I was at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley when Matthew Shepard was killed. I'm just curious if that came across the radar. I don't know if you were in western Wyoming or eastern Wyoming or- We were in eastern.

Dan Beecher And just for those of our listeners who don't remember, Matthew Shepard was killed for being gay in Wyoming. Yeah. Yes.

Monte Mader And he was brutally, brutally beaten- Yeah. Yeah ... and tied to a fence and left out in the cold in the winter. It was horrific. Yeah. And that was never addressed to us directly. Mm-hmm. The most I remember anyone saying about it was there was this kind of sentiment of he deserved it because he was gay. Mm.

Dan McClellan Which is a stark contrast to, "You're going to have to die for your faith," versus- Yeah ... "Well, he deserved to get-" Yeah ... "beaten to death." Yeah. That's pretty heinous. Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's so interesting to hear the messaging come to you that the Democrats are going to come to you at gunpoint. Mm-hmm. Have they met a Democrat? It feels like they haven't.

Monte Mader It feels- I mean, allegedly.

Dan Beecher Because it just seems like the ones who are coming with the violence seem to be on their side of the fence.

Monte Mader And statistically, yeah, a lot more often. I don't remember ever meeting someone who did not have this very stringent sense of ultra-conservativism, ultra-Christian nationalism ever in my childhood. I mean, my dad and my grandfather were friends with Dick Cheney. I met Dick Cheney when I was 10. Of course, I had no idea who this person is. Never saw him again. Right. And then realized, I'm like, "Wait a minute, is the new vice president the guy that..." Oh. I had no idea. I wasn't given context for this larger conversation, but my family was also involved in local Republican politics. My cousin was the county commissioner. My uncle was a state senator. My dad would later on become a state rep. Oh. At no point in my growing up years were politics and religion ever separated. They were- Yeah ... married together. You could not be a Christian and vote Democrat. Right. You could not be a Christian and pro-reproductive rights, and all of the dogma and the messaging and the misinformation that we're seeing now was exactly the same for me growing up. And I went to all-Christian nationalist schools, so I was only ever taught creation. There's still a very big gap in my knowledge about evolution and natural history. I have a huge gap of knowledge that I'm working on now. Always had a Bible class, always had PragerU-style American history. Mm-hmm. And then I was- That's the good stuff. That's the meat and potatoes right there. It's wild now to think about what I was taught as a kid, knowing what I know now. But outside of school, we were in church whenever the doors were open. I was privately trained in Christian apologetics by my dad for five years, privately trained, again, in this very narrow viewing of theology for 10 years before I went to college. Mm-hmm. And then I was forced to go to Liberty University. As one does.

Dan Beecher Yeah, sure.

Dan McClellan I didn't know they let girls in Liberty. Right? Weird. It's weird.

Monte Mader We got to wear pants and stuff, too. I did not go to school for theology. I have to clarify that quite a few times with people, like, "No. My dad..." I was pre-law originally. Yeah. Because when I was 10 years old, I started school when I was four because I could read books, and then I skipped sixth grade. And so in order to be able to skip the sixth grade, they took me into a room full of computers at one point, and they did a bunch of tests on me, reading tests, IQ tests, all these different things. Mm-hmm. And I did really, really well. I had a senior in college reading level at 10. And my dad gets this piece of paper and he realizes, "Oh, she's smart, smart." And so there's this huge pivot, and it was so distinct because I saw how my older sisters were raised and treated, and there was a huge pivot with me where he's like, "Yes, you still have to get married. You're still going to have to have kids one day. But first," and this is a direct quote, "we're going to get you into law school and on the Supreme Court so that you can help us overturn Roe." Wow. That is a direct quote from my dad.

Dan Beecher You had a path mapped out. Yeah. And so I went- You got scooped by Coney Barrett. That's not fair. I did. That's not fair.

Monte Mader She took my destiny. How dare she. No, I'm just kidding. But so I went to school originally for pre-law, and eventually ended up changing and going into the medical sciences, was where I thought I was going to be, because I wanted to help. I was already starting to have some conflicts with the calling and the mission. And Liberty, as conservative as it was, it was my first time meeting people of color. Mm-hmm. It was my first time meeting people from different areas. It was my first time seeing different forms of Christianity. But at Liberty, you still have to take theology courses. Even if that's not your degree, you're required a certain number, which for me, I was like, "I've been doing this for a decade. This is cake for me." Yeah.

Dan Beecher Oh, right. Yeah.

Monte Mader But I took them as an intensive in Israel, and it was after a previous Gaza incident. So I'm going in there fully as a Christian nationalist, and now I recognize as a Zionist. I didn't know what that belief system was at the time. But it ended up being a big breakthrough moment for me. When we were in Jerusalem, we were outside. We couldn't access Bethlehem because there had been a strike at the West Bank. Mm-hmm. But we were outside the Dome of the Rock and visiting it, and of course, they're demonizing it, and it's all this disgusting vitriol about Islam, which I've heard my whole life growing up how I did. But I'm watching these families from all over the world come to worship. Yeah. And some of them are crying, and you can see they have so much joy and reverence. And in my head, I couldn't reconcile it. I said, "That's how I feel-" Right ... being at a lot of these sites, being where they think the Sermon on the Mount was given and being in this holy place. I feel the same way, and I just on a gut level could not reconcile the hatred and the animosity for people who were worshiping very much how I felt I was worshiping. Yeah. And I realized in that moment that I didn't know that much about church history. Right. I knew a lot about theology. I had read the Bible nine times. I would memorize entire passages. Growing up, my dad would have us memorize a front and back page of verses every week, and if you didn't memorize your verses, you got beat. Wow. And every Sunday, you had to write a Christian essay and submit it to Dad. This was a regimented thing in my life. And I realized I didn't know anything about how did we get here, and those were the first questions I started asking at that time.

Dan McClellan What kind of resources did you have available?

Monte Mader The library was my biggest one. The library? Yeah. But I started with, obviously most of them still very conservative leaning, but I just started with books on church history. Then I started reading Augustine. Mm-hmm. And it just led to one source to one source to one source. And then I encountered Bart Ehrman, was another big- He's the gateway drug for- He's Ehrman! ...

Dan McClellan so many folks.

Monte Mader Bart Ehrman. I loved John Barton's work- Mm ... especially around how we got the Bible, and so I started all these sources, and it was so much information and so many things I'd never heard of. And I started to internalize that and try to understand, and just realizing that the church didn't get it right all the time, right? Yeah. I grew up in this- Wait, what? Right.

Dan Beecher How dare you?

Monte Mader What do you mean? They've not been perfect all the time. But I grew up in kind of a hybrid of these Christian nationalist movements, so very much under the Bill Gothard umbrella without attending his seminars. Mm-hmm. So I grew up in this environment that your father's the head of the household, the pastor's the head of him, and if you question either of them, you are directly questioning God. Right. Yeah. And it's defiance. Mm-hmm. I can look back now at my childhood and realize there were things I couldn't reconcile then, but I wrote it off as my own pride. It's, "You're being sinful. You're this." You squash it, and you squash it- Yeah ... and you push it back down.

Dan Beecher Well, and yeah, you were primed for that- Mm-hmm ... from birth. Yeah. These are moments that are going to happen, and they're your problem, not our- Yeah. It's never our problem. It's always going to be your problem. Yes.

Monte Mader And you have the added layer of, as a woman, you're more sinful. You have to be controlled. You're not smart enough. All of these other ideologies are stacked on top of that. So you already believe that, "Well, I'm a woman, so apparently my brain's broken. I don't know as much as men do." I've obviously strongly changed my opinion on that. Yeah.

Dan Beecher As well you should. Yeah. I think that that's a reasonable thing to change your opinion on. I do want to hear you talk a bit more about being a girl growing up in this environment and sort of what the messaging was for a girl and a young woman growing up in this totally patriarchal sort of absolutism- Mm-hmm ... patriarchy, and this idea that you are sort of inherently and by divine decree less than.

Dan McClellan And you also didn't have the benefit of an adult female figure in your household- Yeah ... it doesn't sound like, who could be there to kind of tamp things down or maybe give you a way to digest it that lessens some of the impact. It sounds like- Yeah ... you didn't have any kind of filter available to you. So you were getting the full brunt of this patriarchal system. Yeah.

Monte Mader And also, my older sisters are quite a bit older than me, and they went to boarding school. So they weren't even around. Oh, wow. But I remember when I was very, very little, it was the type of thing where I would come into the living room and my dad had all three daughters sitting in front of him, showing them how to tie a tie because they needed to do it for their husband. That was my life. And- Right ... what I will say, one of my earliest memories of feelings is I remember feeling like I was in a cage. I remember feeling so trapped as a kid, and I didn't have the vocabulary to explain what I was feeling. I just remember all the time fantasizing about running away and feeling like my life was over and feeling like I was in this cage. I can look back on it now and realize, well, yeah, you were told that your body isn't yours. You were told you can't give consent, yes, when you're a kid or when you're a young adult, but you can't say no when you're married. Your body doesn't belong to you. Your body is already property of a man you've never met. And purity culture, I think, is obviously the dominant messaging that I grew up with. But it starts with what I mentioned before when I was nine and kicked out of Sunday school. And then I get my first wives submit to your husband sermon. And I remember sitting by my dad, and I've got my Bible open, and my Bible then was like it is now. It was highlighted and marked and notated. I loved that book to literal pieces. Yeah. It was my favorite thing. And I'm looking at this, and I'm listening, and I remember starting to get mad. I could just feel this heat rising up to my face. And I was trying not to cue Dad that I was pissed off. Because I'm listening to the preacher, and I noticed he skipped the verse ahead of it that says, "Submit to one another in love." He dives right into the wives. And it just so happened that he ran out of sermon time to get to where the husbands are supposed to love their wives the way that Christ teaches the church.

Dan Beecher Oh, that's a shame. I'm sure he meant to. No, that's not a shame. No, I'm sure he meant to get to it. I'm sure he meant to get to it.

Monte Mader And even then, I remember thinking, "Well, how convenient to be a man." I remember as a nine-year-old being like, "This is perilously convenient that you have to do nothing while another person has to submit to you." Yeah. And again, I didn't have the vocabulary for it, but I remember the rage. I didn't say a word driving home. I went down to my room, and I took my Bible, and I threw it across the room and against the wall. Mm. And I made a decision. I was like, "Okay, I don't want to piss God off. I don't want to sin. So what I'm going to do is I'm just never going to have sex, and I'm not going to get married." That was my solution because I was like- Yeah ... "I'm not doing that. Mm-mm. I'm not going to submit to some guy." And I had seen how other women were treated in the church. I noticed at a very young age. I was like, "No. Mm-mm. Loophole." I'm just not going to get married. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Apparently- I'm going to go with Paul's advice in 1 Corinthians 7- Exactly ... instead of pseudo Paul's advice in Ephesians 5. Exactly.

Dan Beecher Although I did see a meme recently that was pointing out that if you never get married, you can't have premarital sex.

Monte Mader So- There's the loophole. Look at that ...

Dan Beecher you can have all the sex you want.

Monte Mader Look at this. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Loopholes all the way around. Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's extramarital, but not premarital. But not premarital- Exactly ...

Dan Beecher so there you go. Yeah.

Monte Mader And apparently, as of this juncture in my life, I took the no marriage thing very seriously. With a lot more commitment than I had planned at the time. But that was kind of my first segue into this language because I was now brought to adult church, so I started to get a lot of this messaging- Yeah ... probably younger than a lot of other kids did because I got kicked out of that Sunday school class.

Dan McClellan How old were you? I was nine. Nine? Okay.

Monte Mader When I really started to get this messaging, and then again, I was seventh grade. I was 10.

Dan McClellan So I was getting- So they're already prepping you before you've hit puberty. Yes. Yeah. That this is your role. You are being- Yeah ... sexualized, you're being objectified. Yeah. And so that by the time you do hit puberty, you are already in a rut and- Yes ... can't do anything about it. Yes.

Monte Mader And the purity culture messaging got much, much stronger because then shortly, I think, I can't remember the exact year the books came out, but "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" comes out. Mm-hmm. And, what was the other book that came out at the same time or around the same... And people would carry these things around like they were their Bibles. So there's this huge cultural resurgence of purity culture. But I remember all the analogies of if you do have sex before you're married, then you're just used gum. No man wants used gum. Right. Yeah. You're a used car. And the funny thing, when you take these analogies and really look at them, okay, so my options are to be a used car or a new car, but either way, I'm a car, not a person. Right. And so then what happens when this man buys me as a new car, and then 15 years, I'm not a new car anymore? Yeah. Does he get to trade me in for a new car because I'm an old one now?

Dan Beecher Spoiler alert. Kind of yeah, if he wants to. Kind of yeah, actually. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Well, and this is really a reinscription of what's in the Bible, where women are commodities. Yeah. Their sexual availability, their procreative capacities are commodities. That's what marriage is. It's a transaction where a man is buying that from another man in the form of a woman. Yeah.

Monte Mader And so it's- And the Bible's allowing of you could sell your daughter into sexual slavery if you want to. Yeah. Yeah. And if a man rapes her, as long as the dad okays it and he pays enough, now you have to marry your rapist. Yeah. Yeah. And, of course, they didn't dig into those passages really in depth. And when I would ask questions- No ... because I read the Bible for the first time at nine, cover to cover, and when I would have questions, it would of course get explained away, or, "That's not what it means." Right. "It was different in this time." Yeah. But really, the idea of purity culture is really just a repackaging of women as property. Yeah. And it's also why they don't believe in marital rape, and why they inherently don't believe in consent. Inherently. Yeah. Because you can't consent yes, you then can't withdraw consent when you're married. You at no point get sexual agency. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And that's precisely what's in the Bible. In- Yep ... the Iron Age, even down in the Greco-Roman period, women had no sexual agency of their own. They were sexual objects, and the man was the only real actual agent in an act of sex. And so it's so bizarre that of all the things that have been perpetuated from 3,000 years ago, that the objectification of women is one that people just still just kind of blithely and intuitively and subconsciously just keep going along with. Yep. And when- They do, and- Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry, Dan. I was just going to say, and when you call them out on it, boy, do they get mad about it. Boy, do they get mad. Yeah. They really don't want to accept the reality of the situation.

Dan Beecher Well, Dan, I think you're hitting on an interesting point, which is that so many of these Christian organizations, they say they want to live biblical lives, and they want to craft their lives to be biblically in line, and it's a deep, deep problem. No, don't live your li- We've learned some things since 3,000 years ago. We all agree that slavery's not good, so obviously we can all agree that- Not all of us. There's- Not everybody. You got like- Oh, my gosh ...

Dan McClellan Joshua Haimes and some others. Yeah. It's making a resurgence.

Monte Mader It's so stressful. These people will come back. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Because they're backing themselves into this corner of... And obviously it's going to start with a bunch of men, white men, who will benefit from everyone reverting to these- Right ... these retrograde ideas.

Monte Mader Well, and that's why they keep the purity culture idea. Right. It is so beneficial. It is the only way that a poor man automatically, de facto, gets a maid, a cook, and a sex slave. Right. Yeah. And it's- And then you get to stamp it as godly and biblically ordained. Yeah. And she can't leave you for any reason, and there's a whole terrible history with the history of Christian marriage counseling- Mm-hmm ... that was really started by a white supremacist eugenicist who is an atheist. Right. Yeah. But that was the convenient avenue that he could peddle his ideas, and he mentored James Dobson. And so, right, it's just the web is so intense. Yeah. But yeah, this whole thing of it was very clear that your body is not yours. But also because you have the doctrine of Eve, your body is inherently sinful, and it's your job to control the lust of men because if something happens to you, well, clearly it was your fault. Yeah. Clearly you did something. You led him on. You wore something you shouldn't. We see that rhetoric everywhere. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And ironically, that's not in the Bible. There's not a single point in the Bible where any woman is told you have to cover up in order to protect men from lusting after you. And we know what Jesus has to say about what you should do if you're lusting after a woman.

Monte Mader Get that spoon, gouge that eyeball out. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And it's so baffling that we're reverting to Iron Age ideologies about gender politics. It was like even they knew better than to lay blame on a woman for being sexually assaulted. And the purity culture is just an attempt to rationalize it. It's just trying to- Yeah ... build a rhetorical undergirding of what at least the Bible is more open about, that a woman is treated as property. It's, "No, no, we're trying to protect her, and we're trying to protect the men around her, and we're trying to..." It's an attempt to try to make it sound like something good. Mm-hmm. And all the rhetoric that is used, like you mentioned the chewed gum and all that one. In LDS culture, you get the licked cupcake. Ugh. That's horrible. But oddly enough, even within LDS culture, they try to be so much more sincere about it that it extends to men, too. Yeah. And it's a bizarre thing, but... And women get it a lot more than men. But there was an LDS president of the church who, during one of the, what they call general conferences, from the pulpit told a story about a kid going away to war, I think it was World War II or something like that, talking to his mom and saying, "I know you would rather I come home in a pine box than unclean." Mm. And it was kind of an endorsement of this perspective, and I remember distinctly thinking no parent wants their child- No parent wants that ... to come back in a pine box.

Monte Mader No good parent... Right. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And when you spread that rhetoric, I know the reason that you're generating this rhetoric. You want to try to emphasize how important chastity is and how important this purity culture stuff is, but you get significantly out over your rhetorical skis when you convince children that they are better off dead than having lost their virginity, their purity, their chastity, or whatever. And children have taken their own lives because of that. Yeah. A lot of corpses have been thrown onto the altar of purity culture, and it's disgusting, and people don't want to see it.

Monte Mader It's so harmful. Yeah. And to your point about the pine box comment, I remember, and every single person that I know who has walked away from some version of what I grew up in, I remember as a preteen and teen consciously thinking about and journaling, I would rather tell my parents I killed someone than I had had sex. Yeah. That is how severe it was. Yeah. And it was very much, "If you do this, you will be worthless for the rest of your life, and nobody will want you." Yeah. It was very harsh, but I also grew up in a lot of physical abuse. I grew up in a very, again, very patriarchal, but very physically abusive- Yeah ... and very psychologically abusive, which of course also has implications for your self-worth. I already felt worthless. Yeah. You couldn't convince me I could be any more worthless than I already felt. There was a period of time where my younger brother and I had to live in a dark basement for two years. We weren't allowed to be upstairs in the house.

Dan McClellan Oh, gosh.

Monte Mader And the only time we were allowed to leave is if we were working outside for Dad or going to school. We were not allowed to be physically present upstairs unless we were eating. Good lord. And so it was all of this messaging at the same time. Yeah. And for me, I ended up with a big conflict around 12. Pregnancy is in my top three fears. Mm. I would rather swim with sharks. It terrifies me so much, and it always has. But there was also this messaging of you have to remain pure, you have to remain unstained or whatever, which begs the question, because the men were never told that, so who are the men sleeping with on their way to marriage if all the women are not doing... Anyways. But I knew in my heart at the time that you have to have kids, you have to have kids, you have to have kids. But there was also this demonization of any kind of sexual contact. It ruins you. Mm. It removes your purity. If you were to get pregnant as a teenager, my dad would've thrown me into the street. I would've been a street kid had that happened. Yeah. So I started having nightmares about pregnancy at 12. Mm. I would wake up screaming in a cold sweat, so afraid of if that ever happened to me, what my dad would do to me. Yeah. It was this palatable, terrifying fear. I had no interest in boys until my senior year in high school because I was so afraid of, oh my God, if anything ever happened... And then the problem doesn't end when you get out of the house. I moved out of my parents' house when I was 15, but I was assaulted at 18 and still didn't tell my dad because I knew he'd blame me. Yeah. And when I did eventually tell him years later, because it wasn't P in V intercourse, he was like, "Oh, okay, so it wasn't a big deal then. I forgive him." Wow. Forgive him. Yes. Yeah.

Dan Beecher That was nice of your dad to forgive him. Yeah. Nice of him to forgive him.

Dan McClellan That was- On your behalf. Yeah. And one of the things I find just baffling about the whole chastity idea, and even sexual assault, the idea that you're no longer chaste, you're no longer pure, something has been taken from you. I don't know if they use that language about being taken- Mm-hmm ... from you. Within LDS culture, there was a time, I don't think they do it much anymore, where girls are told that they should fight to the death rather than- Yeah ...

Monte Mader succumb to- We were told that, too ...

Dan McClellan to being sexually assaulted. Yeah.

Monte Mader That it was better to die than to be raped. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because it's taking something from you.

Dan Beecher And biologically- Well, it's taking the thing- Absolutely ... the one thing that's the most important thing- Right.

Dan McClellan That is more- ...

Dan Beecher that you could possess or whatever. Yeah ...

Dan McClellan more important than your life. Right. Which is ultimately your The pristineness of your sexuality that is intended for your future husband. And physiologically, biologically, that is meaningless.

Monte Mader It's meaningless.

Dan McClellan It's an imaginary thing. Yeah. There's nothing that changes about a vagina after it has been entered by a penis. That's not a thing. It's entirely made up, and the idea that anything changes is fundamentally rooted in the notion that a woman is property, and that her body needs to be in pristine condition because a man is paying for it, and he doesn't want to have had any other man rooting around in his property. Yeah. Which it all comes back down to the objectification of a woman's body, which pisses me off to no end.

Monte Mader Well, and the other thing that I bring up with people is if something is ruined after you touch it, the problem is your hands. Your hands are dirty. Yeah.

Dan Beecher If it's ruined after you touch it- I mean, the whole idea of that sort of relates to the gouge your eye out thing, right? Mm-hmm. All the things that these men are doing are to avoid any mirror shining back on themselves, or to avoid- Yeah ... them ever having to examine themselves, who they are, what they've ever done. As you say, the willingness to forgive a man for something is astounding.

Monte Mader Oh, easy.

Dan Beecher Like the way that- Easy ... we're talking about the same men who will scream about what women are doing and how evil women are, are the ones who will cover up for, in the church, a pedophile or a- Yeah ... or a sexual predator or something.

Monte Mader Or they'll attend the remarriage of their friend who cheated on his wife with his secretary, and now he's marrying the secretary. Right. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Or the reinstallment of a pastor- Yep ... who had an affair or engaged in some kind of sexual impropriety. I'm sure you've read Kristin Kobes Du Mez. Yes. Excellent. "Jesus and John Wayne." What a phenomenal book. But I didn't grow up around religion, at least the years I'm conscious of. Mm-hmm. And so I was really not aware of any of this stuff. I didn't know how much of a tinderbox Colorado Springs was when I was growing up- Yes ... in Longmont, Colorado, a bit north of there. But, yeah. All of the sexual improprieties that leaders in the evangelical community were going through in the '90s is, it must've been a weird time to be associated with those movements. But yeah, they- It really was ... that's the kind of thing that you can just get right over, and you can forgive men, and you can excuse them. And the women are no longer valid. They're no longer valuable. They're no longer worthy- Yeah ... who are involved. But for the men, it's the same thing as a judge. I think this just recently happened, didn't it? Where a judge suspended somebody's sentence. Yeah. A man's sentence saying, "We don't want to ruin this kid's life."

Dan Beecher Yeah, that continually happens.

Monte Mader So there was a couple that happened last year, but the most recent one actually happened in the UK last week. Yeah. These boys, 13, 14, pinned down and raped these 13-year-old girls, filmed it, posted it online, no jail time, no consequences whatsoever, because they're young offenders. Yeah. And then last year, there was a, he's an adult, but he did this exact same thing, assaulted someone, filmed it, posted it, no jail time. He was facing 87 years for the number of counts that he was being tried for, and didn't serve a day in jail. Yeah. And it's all- It's rough ... rooted in these ideologies, and I wish people would see that. And when I talk to people about the Bible, and I teach a class bi-monthly where we kind of attack some of these big things we were all taught together, or these talking points of Christian nationalism. And we go through, and I always tell people, I'm like, "I don't want to convert you to anything. That's not my job. What I am going to do is I'm going to give you as much information as I possibly can. We're going to talk about it. We're going to ask questions. You get to decide." And you go to the Bible, and you do look at these texts where we have to-- We did a whole lesson on slavery saying, "Yeah, the Bible does allow this. And yes, it is cruel, chattel slavery. Yes, it is sex slavery. And we have to wrestle with that. We have to let the Bible be messy. What does that say about the author? Do we believe that a good God divinely wrote that? Because we have to talk about our relationship or our belief system around God if that's the case. Or do we believe that men of a certain era who had really messed up beliefs wrote this?" And we get to ask the question, "Is there a better way?" Yeah. And it is. It's this wrestling, and I tell the people that attend all the time, I'm like, "You have to let it be messy. Let it be messy. Let it be a reflection of its time. It's not a reflection of 2026 America English-speaking- Yeah ... listeners. It's something different." But the Bible, because it does contain those things and those restrictions, as horrific as they are, gets reused and justified to treat women this way. Yeah. Yeah.