Katherine Stewart
Katherine Stewart is a leading journalist, author, and speaker on the growing threats to American democracy from extremist religious and political movements. For more than seventeen years, she has investigated the networks, strategies, and institutions driving the anti-democratic movement in the United States.
Her latest book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025), is an instant New York Times bestseller and a definitive account of the movement’s political and financial power. The book is on Foreign Affairs's list of Best Books of 2025. Stewart is also the author of the award-winning The Power Worshippers (2020), which won top honors from the Religion News Association and the Morris B. Forkosch Best Book Award and formed the basis of the documentary God & Country, for which she served as executive producer. Her earlier book, The Good News Club (2012), exposed the Christian right’s long campaign to reshape public education.
Stewart is a sought-after speaker who has addressed audiences at Yale University, University of Oxford, Middlebury College, Notre Dame University, Emory University, the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, Chicago Theological Seminary, the NYU Center for Religion and Media, Union Theological Seminary, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Roosevelt Institute, Tulane, St. John’s Norwood (Episcopal) Chevy Chase, MD, Bethel Lutheran, Madison WI and many others.
Her work appears in The New York Times, The New Republic, and Religion News Service. She writes at katherinestewartbooks.substack.com and is on Bluesky at katherinestewart.bsky.social.
TOPICS
Katherine draws on these core topics and collaborates with hosts to shape each talk to its audience, schedule, and goals. Her lectures and keynotes are featured at retreats, conferences, corporate events, book and writing festivals, and universities and seminaries.
Topic: Public Education
Working title: What Happens to a Nation Without Public Education
Topic: Politics
Working title: Where Did the Assault on Democracy Come From, Where Will It Lead, and How Can We Push Back?
Topic: Where Do We Go From Here?
Working title: A To-Do List for Saving Democracy
Topic: Religious Nationalism
Working title: How Christian Nationalism Works: The Ideology, the Mindset, the Organization, and the Key Players
Topic: Technology and the Future
Working title: The Tech Right and Why It Is So Dangerous (for Democracy and for the Future)
Topic: The Importance of the Religious “Left”
Working title: How Religious Moderates, Liberals, and Progressives Are Pushing Back on the Assault on Faith and Democracy
Topic: Exporting the Counter-Revolution
Working title: How the Anti-Democratic Movement in the U.S. Is Exporting Its Means and Methods
Topic: Foreign Relations and the Global Order
Working title: How the Anti-Democratic Movement Is Corrupting the International Order
Topic: The Attack on Science
Working title: Why the Anti-Democratic Movement Has Turned Against Science
Topic: The New Right
Working title: The Highbrow Origins of the Movement, Its Current Extremism, and Its Reach Within the Administration and the MAGA Movement
Topic: The Attack on the Administrative State
Working title: The Ideological Origins — and the Damning Consequences — of DOGE
