This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 23rd, 2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When you go on TV to sell a Bible, featuring the founding documents of the American Republic,

it gets a little harder to argue that you're not advancing a version of Christian nationalism.

There is a strain of Christianity in the U.S. that views their faith tradition as the one that

ought to hold decisive sway within government.

So how much sway do those groups hold in politics right now?

Paul Matzko is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute we spoke last week.

I've sort of given up on seeing Donald Trump monetizing his fan base and saying well surely no one's going to fall for

this. Are you telling me you don't have a $200 pair of Trump sneakers, Caleb.

Or NFTs or the trading cards.

There's a Trump endorsed or owned decentralized finance platform.

But the reason you and I are talking

is because of what's called the Trump Bible,

but it is a Lee Greenwood edition of some Bible, which is the King James version.

It has the Constitution in it.

It has the Bill of Rights in it, and I'm fine with the

Constitution, the Bill of Rights in the back of my dictionary, but it is troubling to a lot of Christians like myself to see governing documents of the American Republic being so seamlessly integrated

into a book of scripture and being thought of in the same breath as that, that these things are somehow

strongly connected. We can argue about inspiration. We can talk about whether or not, you know, these things are

ultimately good or bad or what they give us in terms of our ability to pursue higher purposes.

I don't know.

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