What do Silicon Valley billionaires, religious parents of six, and eugenics-curious biotech founders have in common? Welcome to the world of pronatalism—a growing movement that aims to solve the so-called population crisis by making more babies.

We follow the unlikely alliance between tech futurists and traditional conservatives who think it’s their duty to repopulate the Earth—with intelligence, ambition, and carefully screened DNA. Many believe our economic future is at stake without more humans.

“If you think of government as a business, then babies are its future customers,” said Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman. 

This week on Reveal, we go inside NatalCon, a gathering where embryo optimization meets Old Testament values. From Elon Musk’s fertility tweets to startup founders planning five-child families like product launches, this isn’t just about babies—it’s about engineering civilization. 

But in some corners of the movement, a darker theme emerges: Who’s deemed fit to reproduce, and who’s left out? We also talk with the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader in the Christian nationalist movement, about his multidecade plan to repeal abortion rights and push the American government to the right.

Dig Deeper

Read: Why Elon Musk and JD Vance Are Obsessed With You Having More Babies (Mother Jones)

Listen: What’s Behind the “Pronatalist” Movement to Boost the Birth Rate? (Fresh Air)

Read: Why Does This Billionaire Have 100 Kids in 12 Countries? (The Guardian)

Read: White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children (The New York Times)

Read: The MTV Reality Star in Trump’s Cabinet Who Wants You to Have More Kids (The New York Times)

Listen: A Christian Nationalist Has Second Thoughts (Reveal)

Watch: Former Pro-Life Leader Reverend Schenck on Abortion Ruling (Amanpour & Co.)

Read: Confessions of a (Former) Christian Nationalist (Mother Jones)

Credits

mother jones logo

Reporters and producers: Kiera Butler, Steven Rascón, Kara McGuirk-Allison, and Josh Sanburn | Editor: Catherine Winter | Fact checkers: Artis Curiskis, Alex Ngyuen, and Ruth Murai | Legal review: Victoria Baranetsky | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs, Fernando Arruda, and Julia Haney | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, and Reveal listeners.

Transcript

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Revealed. I’m Al Letson.  
Donald Trump:I’ll be known as the fertilization president, that’s okay. That’s not bad.  
Al Letson:President Trump seems to be listening to people calling for Americans to have more babies. People like Elon Musk.  
Elon Musk:I can’t emphasize this enough. If people don’t have more children, civilization, it’s going to crumble. Mark my words.  
Al Letson:Musk, of course, is making his own contribution with at least 14 kids. But he’s not the only rich, influential tech leader who wants to drive up the birth rate. The end game for people like Musk is to multiply the number of humans on earth and even the universe with smart people who can live longer. It all seems very science fictiony. And look, I love sci-fi, I’m a comic book nerd, but as it turns out, these techno-futurist people are starting to make some headway. And they found another group to work with, religious folks who’ve always thought of themselves as pro-life. Together they call themselves pronatalists. My colleague, Kiera Butler, has been writing about these pronatalists for Mother Jones. Hey, Kiera.  
Kiera Butler:Hey, Al.  
Al Letson:So, Kiera, what’s the connection between big tech and pronatalism? Why are people in the tech world suddenly so interested in babies?  
Kiera Butler:Well, there’s an economic component to this. These are folks who are kind of libertarian in their thinking, they really believe in the power of the free market. And honestly, there’s a way in which more babies means more consumers, more customers, greater economic growth. There’s also a contingent in the pronatalism movement of people who believe that we should be having as many babies as possible so we can figure out how we can optimize the human race. And this subset of people from the tech right, is interested in this project sort of like it’s a big science experiment. They’re interested in figuring out how do you make the smartest human? How do you make the strongest human?  
Al Letson:You’ve been doing some reporting on some of the people at the forefront of this movement. Tell me about the couple that have been getting a lot of press lately, the Collinses. They seem to have figured out a way to make this cause grab headlines.  
Kiera Butler:Oh yeah. So I’d been reading about this movement for a really long time, but I think the first people that I spoke to who strongly identified themselves as pronatalists were Simone and Malcolm Collins.  
Malcom Collins:Hello, I’m Malcolm Collins. This is my wife, Simone Collins. We’re often known as the face of the pronatalist movement, or the very least the tech pronatalist movement.  
Simone Collins:Hi, I’m Simone. I’m Malcolm’s wife, and we do absolutely everything together.  
Kiera Butler:Malcolm is like this very loud, very extroverted salesman kind of guy. And Simone, well, she’s taken lately to wearing like a Handmaid’s Tale getup. Simone, I can’t help but notice your outfit. You’re wearing kind a bonnet and a jumper over a peasant blouse, and it’s a little bit of an unusual outfit.  
Simone Collins:I started wearing these when I could no longer wear Siberian snowsuits from Etsy during the winter in our house because it’s really cold, and I can’t fit into them while I’m pregnant.  
Kiera Butler:Simone is currently pregnant with her fifth, and she said that she’s going to keep having babies until she’s no longer physically able to do so. She said she’s willing to die in childbirth for the pronatalist cause.  
Al Letson:Wow.  
Kiera Butler:Yeah, she calls herself a techno-puritan, kind of a nod to the fashions of colonial Protestants, who you could say were some of the country’s first pronatalists. But she also has these chunky glasses. So it’s some combination of hipster intellectual and somebody out of The Crucible. I kind of was wondering whether you were trolling me with a Handmaid’s Tale outfit.  
Simone Collins:Oh, a little bit.  
Kiera Butler:Yeah.  
Simone Collins:A little bit. No, you understand trolls. Multiple things can be true at one time.  
Kiera Butler:The Collinses are all about attracting attention, and they’ve been really successful.  
Al Letson:What’s the Collinses’ tech background?  
Kiera Butler:They basically come from a tech and finance background. Simone was the director of a group called Dialogue. It’s an exclusive social club for close acquaintances of the PayPal titan Peter Thiel, who’s also a vocal pronatalist. Malcolm used to work in venture capital. And the story they tell is that he was working for a firm in South Korea, where the birth rate is very low. And as part of his job, his company asked him to do some financial modeling about the future.  
Malcom Collins:And one of partners at my firm came to me, I was a director of strategy, and they were like, “Okay, so sort of plot where the Korean economy is going to be in 5,200 years. What’s going to be the cool technology? What are the trends going to be?” And so I go back to him and I was like, “So there’s not going to be an economy in 50 or 100 years.”  
Kiera Butler:And that experience, according to him, is what set him on this path. South Korea is one of the most well-known examples of places with low birth rates, but it’s really happening across the world. Overall, the world’s population is still rising, but there are many countries where there just aren’t enough people being born to replace the number who are dying.  
Simone Collins:And what makes us really worried about demographic collapse is there’s just a lot of vulnerable people who are going to be left high and dry if countries don’t figure this out.  
Al Letson:Is that happening in the United States? I mean, are we headed for demographic collapse?  
Kiera Butler:So it’s not as dramatic as it is in some other countries, but US birth rates are falling too. So in 25 years, almost a quarter of Americans are going to be over 65. But in some parts of Europe and Asia, the population is aging even faster. Hong Kong is one example, Hungary is another. And actually in Hungary, they have passed a few policies aimed at encouraging people to have more babies. And it almost worked, but now not so much.  
Al Letson:So what are pronatalists that you talked to trying to do to get people to have more babies.  
Kiera Butler:Well, they got together recently in Texas to try to come up with some answers. So I went to Austin, where they were having this conference to see what it was all about.  
Al Letson:So a techno-futurist conference that is there to encourage people to have more babies?  
Kiera Butler:Something like that.  
Al Letson:So did you come back with a baby?  
Kiera Butler:Oh my God, no. Been there, done that. But I did come back with some pretty interesting information.  
Al Letson:All right, let’s hear it.  
Kiera Butler:It turned out that Malcolm and Simone and I would all be in Austin on the same weekend for the pronatalism Conference, NatalCon. They planned a cocktail party the week of the conference to host some of their friends from the tech world. Some of them worked for different companies that specialized in innovating fertility. I wanted to meet these people, so I asked if I could come to the party.  
Malcom Collins:Hello.  
Simone Collins:Hello.  
Kiera Butler:Hi.  
Malcom Collins:Wonderful to see you guys. I’m Malcolm, nice to see you.  
Kiera Butler:The party’s at a fancy apartment, a penthouse that the Collinses are borrowing for the night. I’m one of the first guests. It feels informal. Simone is dumping chips in a bowl. She’s in her techno-puritan outfit, the bonnet, the jumper, the chunky glasses, the whole nine yards. And she’s carrying her baby on her back. The little girl’s name is Industry Americus.  
Malcom Collins:We have beers if you want. You can get light beers, real beers, champagne, wine.  
Kiera Butler:As more people walk in, the Collinses work the room. At one point, a small group starts talking about designer babies and the ethics of gene editing. The Collinses have not done that, but they do use IVF and send their embryos to a company that claims it can screen for traits like depression, anxiety, and also intelligence.  
Simone Collins:[inaudible 00:07:58] anyone who buys national health care.  
Kiera Butler:Simone says any parent who has health care would want this for their child. Malcolm says it’s no different from parents who screen for genetic mutations that cause cancer or cystic fibrosis in their kids.  
Malcom Collins:A lot of people who’ve had major digressive disorder don’t want to have kids because they don’t want their kids to have it. And that’s super common.  
Kiera Butler:Some of the people at this party have their own pronatalism related businesses, like one that’s trying to offer gene editing for embryos. The idea is to improve humanity. And another way to do that is to have more smart people like them breed with other people like them. That’s something I hear from one of the guests.  
Patri Friedman:I was into pronatalism for a long time, just try to convince people to have more kids. You complain about how you want there to be people like you in the world, but you’re not having any kids so people like you’re going to die out.  
Kiera Butler:This is Patri Friedman, an early Google employee, friend of the Collinses and grandson of the famous economist Milton Friedman.  
Patri Friedman:I just happen to be into a lot of different weird ideas, including this one.  
Kiera Butler:I was curious about why Patri was interested in this weird idea in particular. The work he does doesn’t have anything to do with making babies, he runs Pronomos Capital. It’s a company that supports businesses that are trying to form start-up cities and nations, deregulated zones for governments to do whatever they want. He recently got back from one of those places called Prospera. It’s a new city in Honduras that offers medical tourism. He had some work done.  
Patri Friedman:I’ve done three things so far.  
Kiera Butler:Yeah.  
Patri Friedman:I had my mouth bacteria replaced, so I’ll never get cavities.  
Kiera Butler:Oh.  
Patri Friedman:I have a chip in my hand that unlocks my Tesla and has my business card on it.  
Kiera Butler:Whoa.  
Patri Friedman:And I had gene therapy that substantially increased my cardio performance.  
Kiera Butler:Prospera is one of his projects, and he told me later that it reflects his philosophy that these new zones governments should be run like businesses.  
Patri Friedman:If you think of government as a business, then babies are its future citizens, its future customers where its tax revenue is going to come from. And so having the government subsidize population growth, from a business perspective it makes all the sense in the world.  
Kiera Butler:He says without more people to support our economy, who will take care of the elderly. But also, and this is key for tech pronatalists like Patri, we won’t have enough innovation.  
Patri Friedman:I think that a lot of our wealth comes from our global population and the specialization and trade that enables. And population crashes mean that as a species, we’re going to be poorer and have fewer resources to deal with the catastrophic threats.  
Kiera Butler:So the more ideas, like the more people we have on the planet, the more brilliance there will be.  
Patri Friedman:I’m on team humanity, and more humans sounds great.  
Kiera Butler:The day after the cocktail party I make my way over to the campus of UT Austin where the conference is, but I’m not sure if I’m going to get in. I had asked for a press pass a few months in advance, but my request was denied. So I tried registering as an attendee, denied again. I thought maybe if I pleaded my case in person, I’d get in. So I follow a group of journalists checking in. But when I walk up to the press table and say my name, someone with the conference walks over to me and says I have to leave. Hi there.  
Kevin Dolan:Hi.  
Kiera Butler:I’m a journalist with-  
Kevin Dolan:No, you need to leave.  
Kiera Butler:Oh, well, I can-  
Kevin Dolan:No, you need to leave,  
Kiera Butler:But I can-  
Kevin Dolan:No, actually we’ve reserved this entire area. This is Kiera Butler. This is actually not…  
Kiera Butler:It’s the main conference organizer, Kevin Dolan. I’ve never met Kevin before, but he had shared my name to the people at the registration table who then told him I was here.  
Kevin Dolan:She’s not an approved journalist. She’s not supposed to be here. We’re actually having her expelled.  
Kiera Butler:Not expelled, I’m just going to be downstairs where I’m allowed to be. Yeah. I was kind of surprised I couldn’t get in considering there were so many reporters who did. But I did manage to meet some conferencegoers hanging out at the hotel.  
Speaker 1:I’m just kind of here idea collecting.  
Speaker 2:I think the decline in birth rates will have significant economic and social consequences.  
Kiera Butler:Attendees are also here for community. These are people who want to have a bunch of kids and are hoping to meet other people who want the same. Some of them come from more religious groups and are more traditional, or trad, and these people have always considered themselves pronatalists. There was even a matchmaking session for singles looking for a partner to have a lot of kids with. I heard later that most of the people who attended were men. I was still curious about how exactly the people gathered here thought the rest of us could be persuaded to have more babies. So I got recordings of a lot of the speakers.  
Speaker 3:We must reverse the collapse of birth rates.  
Kiera Butler:Speakers proposed solutions like giving out government incentives.  
Speaker 4:Let’s get a bigger child tax credit. Let’s get some cool EOs. Let’s do all this stuff.  
Kiera Butler:Building more housing.  
Speaker 5:Single-family homes are associated with much higher fertility.  
Kiera Butler:Then came the tech solutions.  
Speaker 6:A lot of people in this room imagine a future where everyone does IVF.  
Kiera Butler:But not everyone was on board.  
Speaker 7:I am a Catholic and therefore I am not a huge fan of IVF.  
Kiera Butler:There was disagreement between the tech speakers and the trad religious speakers about some fundamental stuff like gender roles, who should be having a family and when life begins.  
Speaker 7:I’m told by all the tech geniuses around me that we are soon getting IVF for everyone. Surrogate mills, embryonic, genetic editing and factory baby farms filled with Matrix-style artificial wombs and more. I can’t wait.  
Kiera Butler:But between the trads and the techs, there was also a lot of common ground. Many of the speakers leaned conservative with libertarian values, and together they saw themselves as a coalition.  
Speaker 6:The left has no answer or solution right now, there’s no point in listening to them or talking to them. It’s us. It’s the tech right and the trads.  
Kiera Butler:Blaming falling fertility rates on liberal ideology.  
Speaker 7:Liberal feminism has mostly backfired.  
Kiera Butler:And ultimately wanting to create a culture for their kids and their grandkids that reflects their own values. One speaker suggested parents should be able to cast proxy votes on behalf of their children for elections.  
Speaker 8:And thus recalibrate the entire political center of our nation around the family.  
Kiera Butler:They’re blunt about the kind of world they want and speakers like alt-right activist Jack Posobiec see pronatalism as fundamental to their existence.  
Jack Posobiec:We’re not going anywhere. This is a war and natalism is our sword and shield and we will not abandon the front lines.  
Kiera Butler:I wrote story about my weekend with this new generation of pronatalists, a strange bedfellows situation of techies and religious trads who’ve come together around this issue. And right after my piece ran, the conference organizer, Kevin Dolan, called me. He wanted to talk about why he kicked me out. Okay, so-  
Kevin Dolan:Can we talk briefly about that? Do we have time to talk about that?  
Kiera Butler:I would love to talk about that. Kevin told me he had denied my attempts to buy a ticket and flagged my name because he thought the publication I write for, Mother Jones, was going to slander his friends. But then he read the story I actually wrote and he thought it was fair.  
Kevin Dolan:And then I sort of felt a little bad about the way that I had dismissed your request, and so I reached out…  
Kiera Butler:And he agreed to talk to me about how he came to be the guy running a pronatalism conference. He leans more trad. He’s Mormon and has six kids with a seventh on the way. And he tells me part of the reason he became a pronatalist was after watching Tucker Carlson’s TV special, The End of Men.  
The End of Men:The decline of manhood, of virility of physical health, all of which together threaten to doom our civilization.  
Kevin Dolan:And that was very focused on the biological component of it, so declining sperm counts and declining fertility.  
Kiera Butler:And that got Kevin thinking about why it was that men were not interested in starting families. Kevin says Tucker attributes this to men being less masculine, not as virile. So maybe that was part of the reason that the birth rate was declining.  
Kevin Dolan:And I was like, well, this is a bigger issue than just the medical side of it.  
Kiera Butler:One of the things Kevin did to address this issue for men was start a fraternity called EXIT. This was after he got fired from his job in 2021 for posting racist, homophobic, and antisemitic content on Twitter. Kevin says EXIT has since become a place for men to create entrepreneurial opportunities for themselves. He says they’re doing this because they feel oppressed by emasculating corporate work culture, a culture he blames for why guys have low sperm counts and fewer babies. These corporate jobs where they live only to push papers and obey their managers instead of facing danger to protect their families.  
Kevin Dolan:I would analogize it to breeding in captivity.  
Kiera Butler:When he described the problem that he sees with American office culture, he made a comparison to pandas. I guess pandas in captivity have trouble breeding.  
Kevin Dolan:What if we just gave the pandas some extra kibble? Would they breed if they had extra kibble? And it’s like, I don’t actually think kibble is the problem. It’s a spiritual thing. It’s a deep thing. It’s about meaning. And it’s about what’s worth doing.  
Kiera Butler:When it comes to the goals of the pronatalist movement, Kevin sees an ally in the Trump administration.  
JD Vance:So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.  
Kiera Butler:That’s Vice President JD Vance at the March for Life rally in January 2025. And he’s a good poster child for this new era of pronatalism. He’s a recent convert to Catholicism and someone with connections to Silicon Valley. Kevin is a fan.  
Kevin Dolan:You can imagine playing Xbox with him and our first millennial in the White House.  
Kiera Butler:So far, the Trump administration hasn’t made major policy changes meant to encourage childbearing. But the White House has talked about creating a Trump savings account for babies and about a medal for women who have six or more children. The medal thing makes some people uneasy. Motherhood medals were offered in Nazi Germany with a clear goal of breeding more babies from the superior race. Back in 2023, Kevin was asked about eugenicism on a podcast called the Jolly Heretic.  
Kevin Dolan:So I think that the pronatalist and the eugenic positions, they’re not in opposition, they’re very much aligned.  
Kiera Butler:So I asked him about that. I guess maybe the trickiest part of all of this to talk about is the eugenics part, and that’s been something that you have been accused of.  
Kevin Dolan:Yeah.  
Kiera Butler:And you’ve been accused of being a eugenicist, of wanting to breed a superior race.  
Kevin Dolan:Sure.  
Kiera Butler:And you’re giggling about it, but-  
Kevin Dolan:It is silly. It’s silly. Okay, go on.  
Kiera Butler:So I asked him about something I’d seen on his Substack that talked about groups of people that could be genetically eradicated or replaced if they don’t have more babies.  
Kevin Dolan:So that’s a description, not a prescription. To be clear. In fact, that I regard as kind of a warning to the people who are not having kids.  
Kiera Butler:He told me that he wants everyone to have more kids, even the liberals and progressives whose views he disagrees with. Kevin tells me that his kids are what drive this work for him. He wants them to grow up in a culture where there’s something more waiting for them than an emasculating office job. He wants the woke culture to get out of the way. And if everybody won’t get out of the way, well, he says it makes him think of a quote from Tucker Carlson, which he paraphrases.  
Kevin Dolan:Where he said, “I don’t worship capitalism, I worship God. And it’s just a system. And if your system makes it impossible for me to raise a family, then I’m happy to set your system on fire.”  
Kiera Butler:After spending time among the pronatalists here’s the idea I came away with. This movement is kind of a crucible where techs and trads mix and mingle, forming alliances and sharing ideas. Those ideas might seem outlandish, handing out medals to mothers with big families, building new alternative societies, thinking of government as a business and citizens as consumers. But they’re not just spitballing, their friends in high places include titans of Silicon Valley and leaders at the highest levels of government. They’re hoping to parlay those relationships to change both policy and culture, to influence people’s choices about how to make a family. Choices about whether to have babies and how many to have.  
Al Letson:That story was reported by Mother Jones national correspondent Kiera Butler and produced by Reveal’s Steven Rascon. Before techies got involved with the pronatalism movement, it was mostly religious conservatives who were pushing Americans to have more babies. Sometimes through campaigns of fear.  
Rob Schenck:I would have fundraisers who raised millions and millions of dollars who would tell me we need more fear and more anger.  
Al Letson:When we come back I talk with one of the former architects of the religious nationalist movement about his multidecade plan to repeal abortion rights and push the American government to the right. You’re listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. We just heard how Tech Bros are advocating for larger families, aligning themselves with traditionalists who have long pushed, so-called family values. My next guest, Reverend Rob Schenck, was an OG traditionalist. He was a leader in the Christian nationalist movement and spent decades getting close to powerful lawmakers and Supreme Court justices trying to influence American laws and policies and push them to the right, and he was extremely successful until eventually, Rob had a change of heart and converted out of the movement. I invited him onto the show to reflect on his work, paving the way for the political right. I started our conversation by asking about his early career as a minister.  
Rob Schenck:My first ministry assignment, I took a job as a residential counselor for a home for recovering heroin addicts, and I lived with them, bunked with them, and that was a very, very meaningful, wonderful experience for me. I developed deep bonds. It was an all-male program, so these were all young men. And from there I went on to do Christian humanitarian relief work in Mexico. So that was my whole orientation until the mid-nineteen eighties. It was then that I was introduced to a very different permutation of Christianity, a highly politicized one, and that would lead to what I call a second conversion in my life, which was not for the gut.  
Al Letson:What was it about the teaching of the politicized version of Christianity, the politicized, and I think it’s fair to say, right-wing version of Christianity? What was it about it that attracted you away from doing the work that you were already doing?  
Rob Schenck:I’m going to say in a very amateur way, it was kind of ego, it was pride. As I look back on it now, I took my seat at the table of National Evangelical leadership. I was kind of one of those young bucks coming up. I was gaining quite a platform and preaching to very large congregations, speaking at very big national and even international conventions and so forth. And as a result of that, I was invited into some pretty influential spaces in the evangelical subculture, and one of those was the National Association of Evangelicals, where Ronald Reagan became the first sitting president to address.  
Ronald Reagan:If someone asked me whether I was aware of all the people out there who were praying for the president, and I had to say, yes, I am. I felt it. I believe in intercessionary prayer, but I couldn’t help but say to that questioner after he’d ask the question that or at least say to him then that if sometimes when he was praying he got a busy signal. It was just me in there ahead of him.  
Rob Schenck:And that was in appreciation for our support for him, which had been cultivated by figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and others who had marshaled evangelical support for Reagan and the Republican Party. When I was first born again into the Christian community, the vast majority of people I knew were Democrats. They weren’t Republicans, and they were very pro-labor. They were very pro-women’s rights. They were very much for social safety nets and so forth. In fact, I cast my first presidential vote at age 18 for Jimmy Carter. And why? Because he seemed to exemplify all the attributes that Jesus espoused in his mission and ministry.  
Al Letson:So I was very young when Jimmy Carter was elected. He was the first president that I can remember knowing who the president was. But years later, looking back or whatever, I saw this clip of Jimmy Carter making a presidential conversation with the country, and basically he was telling America that we were headed down the wrong path, that we were just going to become consumers and that we weren’t caring for each other and so forth and so on.  
Jimmy Carter:The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national world. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity.  
Al Letson:And Ronald Reagan was telling everybody, it’s morning in America and everything you’ve done is great and fine, and you’re good and you’re great. And it feels like Christianity, well, the version of Christianity that you were a part of took that and said, yes, we are great. And followed down that path.  
Rob Schenck:Wow. Wow. Al, today you’re like my pastor because you’re really helping to clarify even my own reflections on that period and what was going on. The overall effect, I think, was to eventually utterly corrupt the message and to turn the movement from a people-centered movement to a political enterprise, and one that became much more concerned about wielding power and influence than it was caring for souls.  
Al Letson:So that leads me to my next question, which is about a painful chapter in your life. You were a part of the National Pro-Life Religious Council, which had a close relationship with Norma McCorvey, otherwise known as Jane Roe from the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade.  
Rob Schenck:Yeah.  
Al Letson:In 1973, the court ruled on the case saying the Constitution generally protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. Can you talk to me about your relationship with Norma?  
Rob Schenck:Yeah. I really came to love Norma. She was the real Jane Roe in the famous or infamous Roe v. Wade case. And Norma was a very complicated person, had lived a very rough, very difficult life. She had been sexually abused as a young teenager. She had been remanded to a “girl’s home” as they used to call them. So her whole life was all about survival, and when she became the famous Jane Roe, it only complicated her life more so.  
 By the time I met her, she had come out as a convert to the anti-abortion movement. She was identified with the pro-choice movement for a number of years, but met a colleague of mine, a street creature, who baptized her in a backyard swimming pool, and she came out on a public stage. I brought her to Washington, DC. It’s difficult to even tell this part of the story because Norma’s gone now. She’s passed on, and I can’t ask her forgiveness for this, but I used her, as many did. She became a trophy for the anti-abortion pro-life movement that I was very much part of in leadership. And she was rewarded. She was rewarded financially, she was given big audiences.  
 She was feted and celebrated, and we knew, for example, that she was secretly in a same-sex romantic relationship, in fact, a long-term romantic partnership with a woman. And that was, of course, unacceptable in my world. So we kept that quiet. We hushed it up. We told her not to talk about it, to keep it a secret, that that was nobody’s business but her own. But we were managing her image for our movement, and I see that as another kind of abuse.  
Al Letson:Staying on the topic of abortion, years ago you worked with or were a part of Operation Rescue. That time around the issue of abortion became extremely volatile. As in abortion, doctors were arguing with anti-abortion activists. You yourself got into several heated arguments with people. From your vantage point, you are trying to save lives, infant lives. From their vantage point, they are trying to protect a woman’s right to decide what to do with their body. Would that be a fair way to look at it?  
Rob Schenck:Yes. Operation Rescue was one component of that, and it involved blockading clinics. We would block doors to clinics using our own bodies. We would lay down in driveways to prevent both medical staff and their patients from entering parking lots and so forth. In some cases, some of our people, I never did this, but some people entered into even procedure rooms and handcuffed themselves to procedure tables. And of course then there had also been a number of years of fire bombings, other kinds of damage to clinic properties, and then there was shooting.  
 I would have fundraisers who raised millions and millions of dollars for the organizations I led during some of those years who would tell me, literally, they would sit at a conference room table and say to me, “We need more fear and more anger. We need to make people more afraid and madder than hell. If you give us a lot of fear, we’ll raise you a lot of money. You give us a little fear, we’ll only raise a little money. More fear.”  
 And so you learn to start generating-  
Al Letson:Language.  
Rob Schenck:Yes, that satiates that demand, and that brings about predictable results.  
Al Letson:When we come back, Reverend Rob Schenck talks about how he and other Christian nationalists created a playbook that remade Washington politics.  
Rob Schenck:I’m afraid I helped build the ramp that Trump took to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  
Al Letson:You’re listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Reverend Rob Schenck, who spent much of his life doing what he thought was God’s work trying to bend American society and laws towards a Christian nationalist ideology. In his crusade for political power, Rob needed Washington power brokers by his side, so he set out to win hearts and minds in DC.  
Rob Schenck:When I first arrived in Washington in 1994, I saw an immediate opening to begin sitting with members of Congress in the House and in the Senate. It was the year of the Republican Revolution, when not only did the Republican Party gain they hadn’t had in decades, but there was also an influx of an enormous, relatively, in our thinking enormous, but certainly a very significant number, of evangelicals who were elected to Congress that same year. I had immediate allies.  
 I went in and the first thing I did was I gave out what we call National 10 Commandments Leadership Awards with these very nice, lovely, carved stone and wood plaques with the 10 Commandments displayed on them. We asked house members and senators to display and obey them. We did lots of public events together, but mostly worked behind the scenes to craft legislation, which began with laws restricting abortion and then restricting personal behavior, reinforcing restrictions on LGBTQ folks and same-sex relationships, and so forth.  
 Anything to stop what we saw as a cavalcade of immorality in our society. But it wasn’t enough to do that legislatively. Because no matter who was in the Congress, what laws were being passed, what president was signing them into law didn’t matter because we would come up against the Supreme Court. It would be the brick wall that all of these efforts would eventually meet up against. We had to get to the justices and get them to render the strongest possible majority opinions. Even when they weren’t in the majority, we needed them to render very strong dissenting opinions to set the stage for a future revisiting of those questions.  
Al Letson:You had a name for it, Operation Higher Court. Tell me about that. What was Operation Higher Court, and how did you achieve those goals?  
Rob Schenck:The whole process was to inject trained what I called stealth missionaries into the private social circles of particular justices we thought of, I thought of, and my fellows thought of as low-hanging fruit because they were already conservative. And so what I did was there’s a private society associated with the court called the Supreme Court Historical Society, which does a lot of good educating the public on the role of the court. But it’s a private nongovernmental entity, which made it more permeable, a lot easier to access than a highly defended bureaucratic government agency. It allowed for face time, so I trained some of my wealthier constituents to go in and garner face time in these small, exclusive, invitation-only receptions. It gave them opportunities to introduce themselves and even to hint at some benefits that they might enjoy as a result of palling around with each other. They would mention their luxurious vacation homes and how lovely it would be for the justice to come with his wife and visit and enjoy the atmosphere.  
 Over time, these couples would entertain the justices at high-priced restaurants and buy them endless glasses and bottles of very expensive wine and trays of oysters and giant 40-ounce steaks, or whatever they wanted. They showed them a good time. Frankly, the justices enjoyed it very much. Bonds were developed and the conversation always eventually got to the whole point of it. That was we need you to render the strongest, most conservative opinions you can from the bench, and eventually we need a majority on this bench that will do the right thing for America, and that is return America to its Christian values.  
 I now live with a lot of regret that we were quite successful in that endeavor.  
Al Letson:Of course, that success came during Donald Trump’s term in office when he appointed three justices who tilted the Supreme Court more to the right. How did Trump end up hitching his cart to the Christian nationalist movement?  
Rob Schenck:Yeah, when it comes to Donald Trump, by the time Trump emerged as a choice originally and then the choice of all my fellow evangelical leadership personalities around the country, I had already started a process of dismantling the frame I had built for my worldview, for my approach to politicized religion. Even the organization that I had built, which was substantial, I mean, we had a headquarters across the street from the Supreme Court, and I had had my own kind of awakening. But it was still contained.  
 But when Trump emerged, it was a bridge too far for me for a couple of reasons. One is because I had grown up in New York state with Donald Trump playing in the headlines continuously almost through my entire life, or at least my conscious life. When I was in Bible college being trained as a minister, I was in what we call a homiletics class, or a preaching instruction, where my instructor said to the class one day in a sermon, “You always want to use a real-life illustration if you can pick one to make your point.” He gave an example and he said, “Let’s just say we’re talking about what it means to live opposite of Jesus’ model and message. Well, you might pick somebody like Donald Trump to illustrate that.”  
 For me, from the very beginning, Donald Trump was the opposite of what it meant to live as a Christian. At one point, I had taken a leave of absence from my work, and I was finishing a late-in-life doctoral degree, and I flew back east to attend a tribute gala for Pat Robertson, one of the luminaries in Christian media. His guest of honor was Donald Trump years before he would announce his serious Republican presidential candidacy. I was troubled by that from the get-go, and eventually I would break with my fellows over their choice of Donald Trump as their champion. I found him repugnant. I thought he was a charlatan, a fake, a carnivillain.  
 I said, “I can’t go with you on this,” so I parted company with my old gang when it came to support for Trump. But when I announced publicly that I was voting for Joe Biden in 2020, for many of my fellows in the evangelical church world, that was the final straw for them. I was gone. I was now banished, ostracized. There was no place for me in their world any longer. In many ways, I see Trump as an act of idolatry for my movement, that they’ve literally traded Jesus for Donald Trump. For me, that’s nothing short of apostasy. It’s abandoning the faith.  
 This is the first time, Al, I’m going to say this in a public forum. I don’t think you can be a Christian and embrace Donald Trump because I see him as the antithesis of everything Jesus stood for, everything he modeled, and in my theology, everything he died for.  
Al Letson:Far from me to push back on your assertions, but I think what I have heard in some Christian circles is the idea that he is a flawed vessel, but he will deliver to Christian nationalists what they want. And so a lot of Christian nationalists and a lot of people who maybe don’t consider themselves nationalists but just Christian, they hold their nose and vote for him because they’re getting exactly what they want. He delivers.  
 If you pull back and look at it, he actually delivers better than Bush ever did, better than even Reagan ever did. As far as Republican presidents go, he’s delivered on everything that he said that he would give to the Christian right. They got everything they wanted.  
Rob Schenck:Yeah. My white evangelical fellows have gotten just what they demanded. I agree with you. He has delivered. There was a Faustian bargain made with Donald Trump, and when my fellows said, “We want this,” he said, “I’ll give you that. You want the end of Roe v. Wade? I’ll give you the end of Roe v. Wade, but you will give me your unqualified support. You will give me religious cover. You will sacralize me, you will sanctify me, you will protect me. That’s our deal. I give you the judges and justices you want, and you give me everything I want. That’s the deal we made.”  
 I call that, Al, a deal with the devil.  
Al Letson:Okay, so last question, and this is a really hard one, do you think the work that you did created the runway for or helped create the runway for what we’re seeing now with Trump in Christian conservative circles?  
Rob Schenck:Yeah, I’m afraid I helped build the ramp that Trump took to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and that’s a very painful reality for me. I don’t expect people’s sympathy. I don’t expect people to feel sorry for me in that. It’s my just deserts to live with that.  
 But I will tell you one thing: I’m taking very, very seriously the task of dismantling that ramp. I’m trying to do it literally every day. I don’t always succeed. I sometimes lapse, but I’m intent on helping to dismantle that apparatus.  
Al Letson:Rob, thank you so much for being so open and having this conversation with me.  
Rob Schenck:Well, thank you for giving me the safe space to do that, Al.  
Al Letson:Rob Schenck wrote about his journey into and out of Christian nationalism in his 2018 book Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love. That interview originally aired as a podcast special, and it helped pave the way for what would become our weekly interview show called More to the Story. That’s right. Not only can you listen to Reveal right here every week, but we also have more on the Reveal podcasts, including deep-dive conversations between me and some of the biggest newsmakers of our time. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.  
 This week’s show was produced by Josh Sanburn, Kara McGuirk-Allison, and Steven Rascón. Steven was also our lead producer. We had editing help from Catherine Winter and editorial support from Marianne Szegedy-Maszak. Artis Curiskis and Alex Nguyen fact checked today’s show. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is the great Zulema Cobb. Score and sound designed by the Dynamic Duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man yo, Arruda. They had helped from Julia Haney. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Our theme music is by Comorado Lighting.  
 Support for Reveal is provided by the Riva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story.  

Steven Rascón is the production manager for Reveal. He has also produced the KQED podcast On Our Watch: New Folsom, a serial investigation into the death of two whistleblowers inside California’s most dangerous prison. Their reporting has aired on NPR stations such as Capital Public Radio, WHYY, and KCRW. He also helped produce the Peabody-nominated Reveal podcast series Mississippi Goddam. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.

Kara McGuirk-Allison is a senior radio editor for the Center for Investigative Reporting, where she works on podcast strategy and audio production. In her three decades of audio work, she has produced for a number of NPR news programs, including the award-winning Justice Talking, and was the founding producer of NPR’s Hidden Brain. Before joining CIR, Kara was a podcast producer for Marvel/Disney.

Josh Sanburn is a producer for Reveal. He previously worked as a national correspondent for Time magazine, where he covered policing, criminal justice, and societal and demographic trends across the United States. After Time, he worked as a producer for Gimlet Media, where he helped develop and produce special series for the Wall Street Journal’s daily podcast. He’s also produced documentary series for ABC News and National Geographic and has written features for Vanity Fair. Reach him at jsanburn@revealnews.org or follow him on X @joshsanburn.

Victoria Baranetsky is general counsel at the Center for Investigative Reporting (d/b/a Foundation for National Progress), where she advises the organization on its full range of legal activities, including counseling reporters on newsroom matters (newsgathering, libel, privacy, subpoenas), advising the C-level on business matters, and providing legal support to the board. She has litigated on various issues on behalf of the organization, including arguing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Prior to CIR, Victoria worked at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the New York Times. She also clerked on the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals. She holds degrees from Columbia University, Columbia Journalism School, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University. She teaches at Berkeley Law School as an adjunct professor and is a fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center. She is barred in California, New York, and New Jersey.

Nikki Frick is a copy editor for Reveal. She previously worked as a copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and held internships at the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and WashingtonPost.com. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an American Copy Editors Society Aubespin scholar. Frick is based in Milwaukee.

Zulema Cobb is an operations and audio production associate for the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is originally from Los Angeles County, where she was raised until moving to Oregon. Her interest in the wellbeing of families and children inspired her to pursue family services at the University of Oregon. Her diverse background includes banking, affordable housing, health care, and education, where she helped develop a mentoring program for students. Cobb is passionate about animals and has fostered and rescued numerous dogs and cats. She frequently volunteers at animal shelters and overseas rescue missions. In her spare time, she channels her creative energy into photography, capturing memories for friends and family. Cobb is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, three kids, three dogs, and cat.

Jim Briggs III is a senior sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. He joined the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014. Jim and his team shape the sound of the weekly public radio show and podcast through original music, mixing, and editing. In a career devoted to elevating high-impact journalism, Jim’s work in radio, podcasting, and television has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, IRE, Gerald Loeb, and Third Coast awards, as well as a News and Documentary Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Sound. He has lent his ears to a range of podcasts and radio programs including Marketplace, Selected Shorts, Death, Sex & Money, The Longest Shortest Time, NPR’s Ask Me Another, Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, WNYC’s live music performance show Soundcheck, and The 7 and Field Trip from the Washington Post. His film credits include PBS’s American Experience: Walt Whitman, the 2012 Tea Party documentary Town Hall, and The Supreme Court miniseries. Before that, he worked on albums with artists such as R.E.M., Paul Simon, and Kelly Clarkson at NYC’s legendary Hit Factory Recording Studios. Jim is based in western Massachusetts with his family, cats, and just enough musical instruments to do some damage.

Fernando Arruda is a sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. As a multi-instrumentalist, he contributes to the music, editing, and mixing of the weekly public radio show and podcast. He has held four O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary abilities. His work has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, Gerald Loeb, Third Coast, and Association of Music Producers awards, as well as Emmy and Pulitzer nominations. Prior to joining Reveal, Arruda toured internationally as a DJ and taught music technology at Dubspot and ESRA International Film School. He also worked at Antfood, a creative audio studio for media and TV ads, as well as for clients such as Marvel, MasterClass, and Samsung. His credits also include NPR’s 51 Percent; WNYC’s Bad Feminist Happy Hour and its live broadcast of Orson Welles’ The Hitchhiker; Wondery’s Detective Trapp; and MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening?. Arruda releases experimental music under the alias FJAZZ and has performed with jazz, classical, and pop ensembles such as SFJazz Monday Night Band, Art&Sax quartet, Krychek, Dark Inc., and the New York Arabic Orchestra. He holds a master’s degree in film scoring and composition from NYU Steinhardt. Learn more about his work at FernandoArruda.info.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.) When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.