The Long Game

John Inazu's new book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. John teaches on criminal law, law and religion and the First Amendment at Washington University in St. Louis. He is an expert on religious freedom. And he is a senior fellow with Interfaith America. He is also a former Air Force officer who was working in the Pentagon on 9/11 when a hijacked airliner hit the other side of that massive building. And finally, he is the son of Japanese-American father who was born in an internment camp during World War II, where his American citizen grandparents were incarcerated for three years simply because of their ethnic heritage. John's book is structured around the rhythm of a law school year. The reason, he says, is because he thinks the law has something to teach us about how to approach disagreement. We talk here about why he thinks his book has surprising advice. We also spend a lot of time talking about the protests on college campuses about the war in Gaza, which have reached a fever pitch over the past week, and what his book offers to that incredibly intense disagreement. We actually kept coming back to the issue of American universities and their purpose and mission.

We keep looking at our broken political system — the politicians who show up on our TV's and our phones, the lawmakers who end up in Congress, and the general lack of solutions to our biggest problems — and we shake our head. We promise to vote the bums out. We vow to drain the swamp. We pledge to overturn the plutocracy. But we don't think about our assembly line, the system that gives us the choices we are presented with. Remember Lee Drutman's line? "Who chooses the choices?" That's the right question. When we show up to the toy store, and don't like our choices, we're not asking who is making the decision to limit us to these options. We simply keep buying from their limited selection, hoping for a different outcome. The point of Nick's Troiano's book, The Primary Solution, is that we have to change the way we choose our choices. This means getting rid of party primaries, which have become a weapon used by ideologues and zealots to turn our politics into a bloodsport rather than something that serves its citizens. Nick's book is an explanation of how that came to be, why it should be changed, and how we can change it. You can also read a series of four Substack posts on the book here.

Break the system. That's what one New Hampshire voter, a 58-year old retired Army officer, said he wants the president to do, in an interview with Politico Magazine. It's only the most obvious example of many of us tend to do from time to time. We pretend, or actually believe, that politics is a form of magic. In other words, we think we can elect a person, or pass a law — as if we were waving a wand — and this will fix our problems. But Michael Wear argues in The Spirit of Our Politics that a politics of magic is like trying to take a shortcut, and it won't work. "Our society, politics, and churches are hampered by a technological conceit — that we can attain the kind of society we seek without coming to terms with the kind of people we are and without becoming a different kind of people," (147) he writes. "Our society produces mass shootings at an unparalleled rate and scale, for instance, not in spite of the kind of people we are, but because of the kind of people we are." What is needed, Michael argues, is a resurrection of spiritual formation. "Spiritual formation is not a question for Christians alone," (137) he says.

The 1950's and 60's were an age of widely shared prosperity in the U.S. — across class and economic lines — that have never quite returned. Things were improving for all parts of society during the post-war period, and for all groups including Black Americans, despite the real presence of racial bias and discrimination against them. And things have not improved equally in recent decades. Things have improved since then. But the rate of steady and ongoing improvement and progress has slowed in many ways, and stalled in some. All this is the subject of today's episode, an interview with journalist David Leonhardt of the New York Times. You may know David from the daily newsletter for the Times that he writes, which is the Times' flagship newsletter, The Morning. David's new book is called "Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream." It was recently named one of the year's top 10 books by The Atlantic magazine. "The economy has grown more slowly than it did in the postwar decades," Leonhardt writes, "producing less bounty for the population to share." And, he adds, "the economy has become more unequal, with a declining share of that bounty available to most Americans, because it is flowing to a relatively small percentage of affluent households" (xxiii). This is a problem for democracy, Leonhardt writes. His book is one of several recently that are, together, sending a loud signal to Democrats that they have become too strident and purist in ways that alienate large numbers of voters who they need to win elections. These books are imploring Democrats to focus on helping working class voters economically and to cast a wider and more tolerant tent on social and cultural issues. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tim Alberta's new book: The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals In An Age of Extremism, is a sobering look at the results in history when a religious movement morphs into a political movement, and allows its identity to be taken over by political imperatives and goals. Alberta's book documents the spread of Christian Trumpism, aided and abetted by conflict profiteers who have made "fear and hatred a growth strategy" inside the evangelical subculture for decades. But Alberta also writes that, to his surprise, he found evidence that the doomsday industrial complex has been "floundering" more recently and that "somewhere along the line their momentum had stalled." Alberta details the way that Russell Moore, Curtis Chang, David and Nancy French and others have begun to try to unite, connect and organize the many disparate and isolated members of the American church who do not worship a political leader or give blind allegiance to a political party. Time will tell if this is accurate and durable. But Alberta's book is a remarkable work of journalism. Tim also tells his own story of loss, heartbreak, and trying to come to grips with the moment in which we find ourselves. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a Builders conversation. I'm doing these about once a month to highlight people who are not just cursing the darkness but are also building up their local community — and the country — through making something beautiful, through problem-solving, and by stitching together places of belonging and meaning. (Thank you Joy Moore for the inspiration!) This past summer, we took our kids to visit WERU in Maine, which is near Acadia National Park. The station's General Manager, Matt Murphy, gave us a tour, and he even had our two youngest daughters do a brief on-air announcement in support of the station. We saw the floor to ceiling shelves of CD's and records, the small studio, and the kitchen, also filled with music. I wanted to interview Matt for my Builders series because, as he says: “There's so much in the world that's challenging ... and all the hard times can have a certain degree of paralysis to them." "And there's a lot of things in the world that I can't do anything about, but I can do a lot about making community radio a good environment for people to do their thing and serve the community," he told me. "So having something to do, that you feel can help make even a little bit of a difference, is really important." That's exactly it. Having something to do to make even a little bit of difference is the cure for the ways that the bigger, broader world can make all of us feel hopeless and powerless sometimes. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week's podcast interview (audio above) is with Ruy Teixeira, about his new book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. It is an argument that both parties have been co-opted by big business. It spends all its time blaming the Democrats for their part in this, but that's because the authors believe the Democrats used to be the party of the working person, and that it can and should be again. They also view the Republican party, or at least large swaths of it, as a threat to democracy. They are interested in Democrats winning elections, and winning elections is an issue of math. And they believe, based on quite a bit of statistical evidence and history, that the Democratic party has alienated key elements of the country that they need to win elections, both by losing touch with working class people on economics, and on social issues. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I have never cared all that much about the debate over evolution. But I grew up in an evangelical home and church. So in my world, the origins of the species were definitely up for question. To me, it all seemed rather silly. I didn't see any conflict between evolution and the Christian faith, or even between evolution and the Bible. But I have known others who said quite openly that if they ever came to believe that evolution was true, they feared they would lose their faith. Most evolution skeptics aren't quite as blunt or bleak. There is a wide range of evolution skepticism, from those who simply aren't sure what to believe to those who are adamant opponents. I had never really thought, however, about the ways that skepticism of evolution was one of the foundations of an anti-expertise, anti-science frame of mind that really does permeate evangelicalism. We saw it more clearly than ever during the COVID pandemic. But we've also seen it on the issue of climate change. The consensus of scientific evidence is clear, but religious conservatives reject it, or say we can't know what's true. Janet Kellogg Ray is a biology professor at the University of North Texas. She was raised a creationist, and has written two books now about the issue of evolution and evangelicals. The first, Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark? The Bible and Modern Science and the Trouble of Making It All Fit, came out in 2021. The second came out this month. It's called The God of Monkey Science: People of Faith in a Modern Scientific World. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In American politics, we saw the latest sign of total dysfunction in Congress, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted for daring to pass a bipartisan solution last week to avoid a government shutdown. Many people are desperate for a new kind of politics, and Joel Searby has dedicated the last several years of his life to that cause. Joel worked on the Evan McMullin presidential campaign in 2016, and since then has been involved in numerous efforts to find a new middle way for the many Americans who are deeply frustrated with our politics. Most recently, Joel was executive director of The Forward Party, which is building state parties around the country to give people a way to build a movement from the ground up. Joel recently left that role and we talk about what he's up to now. He remains invested in and hopeful about the future of The Forward Party. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I've interviewed Yascha Mounk about his book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which was released this week. "Mounk has told the story of the Great Awokening better than any other writer who has attempted to make sense of it," The Washington Post wrote in a review. Yascha's book says that we can reach across our differences and understand one another, and that we need to make the effort to do so, through conversation, debate, and relationship. I was not aware of the degree to which some progressive writers and intellectuals have argued that such mutual understanding is not even possible, and so they have discouraged the pursuit. It's hard for me to imagine a world in which we do not at least try to understand and appreciate one another, even those with whom we have profound differences. That effort is at the heart of a free and prosperous society, in my mind. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shannon Harris is on the podcast this week. We talk about her new book The Woman they Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife I have a particular interest in this book because it's a behind the scenes look at the culture of the church I grew up in: Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland. There is national relevance for Shannon's story, however, because she was married to Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, for 21 years. Josh's book was a national best-seller and shaped the romantic and sexual lives of countless evangelical Christians. Josh and Shannon divorced in 2019, which was big enough news at the time to be written up by CNN. I asked Shannon: I read this book very quickly. It's well-written, highly readable, and written in very short chapters. I also think Shannon deals with delicate stories involving other people — especially the leaders from our church — with a deft and tasteful touch. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Andrew is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives (theARDA.com) at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Here’sAndrew’s Substack His first book in 2020, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, with Samuel Perry, was a data-heavy sociological book that was, in their words, "the first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in the United States." Andrew's new book, American Idolatry, is a more personal look at Christian nationalism. It's still written with the rigor of an academic, but it conveys Andrew's personal convictions about what the Christian faith teaches and asks of its adherents, and how Christian nationalism "betrays the gospel and threatens the church." Andrew is a Christian who writes of his upbringing in small-town conservative America, going to church every week. And he says that when he learned the history of Emperor Constantine, he wondered "was it God's plan all along to win over the most powerful person in the world at that time to ... help Christianity flourish?" And he also wondered, "Why didn't Jesus use this same tactic and embrace imperial power?" See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Large numbers of Americans are unhappy with the idea of a Biden vs Trump rematch, polls show, but both the Democratic and Republican parties appear to be paralyzed, unable to do anything about it.There’s a reason why.Both parties are shells of their former selves, and strong political parties are the foundation of a healthy democracy, many political experts agree. For too long Americans have seen political parties as the villains, and individual politicians and voters as the heroes.That thinking has to change if American democracy is going to survive, Lee Drutman argues in a new study. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Karen Swallow Prior is the author of multiple books, including On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. Her new book is called The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. It's out August 8 from Brazos Press. She is a professor of English literature and a popular speaker and writer. Karen's new book argues that "so much ... that what evangelicals uncritically assume is 'biblical' turns out to be simply Victorian." She explains here why the Victorian age, in particular, has had such a formative impact on American Christianity. The book unpacks how numerous major themes, ideas and emphases in American evangelicalism -- such as revival, conversion, rapture, improvement, sentimentality, and empire -- have their roots in the culture and the literature of 19th century Britain. Karen is a spirited conversation partner and a really joyful champion of reading and writing and language, and she has been evolving herself over the past several years in her views of American evangelicalism and faith itself, and we talk about that as well here. Karen really does come from inside evangelicalism. She's taught at Liberty University. She's tried extremely hard to be positive and affirming of as much as she can. But she talks here about how there is a tendency inside conservative Christianity to discourage difficult questions or criticism that breeds a "gullibility" that she says provides endless grist for the "evangelical industrial mill." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I interviewed Russell Moore on the podcast this week about his new book Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, which is out next Tuesday, July 25. In his book, Moore refers to the "post-2016 era" as an "apocalypse." Now, you hear that word, and you might think Zombies! Both those reactions to the word "apocalypse" have to do with the end of the world. Yet that's not how Moore is using the term. "Apocalypse literally means unveiling and revelation,” Moore told me. “And I think that's what happened in the post 2015 era. A a lot of things were revealed," Moore said of the last eight years. "We could see patterns of behavior that were preexisting but weren't really all that clear.” "What I'm trying to say to people is, 'Yes, we're in a place of disruption and of loss. That is always the way that God works in terms of creating something new," Moore said. "And so the primary thing is to say to people, 'Don't panic about the sense of homelessness that you feel. Don't panic about the bewilderment that you feel.' That actually can be a sign of grace." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I don't know if I've ever read a book quite like John Blake's "More than I Imagine." The subtitle is: "What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew" John is a senior writer at CNN. In this conversation, John and I talk about: This book is a great, great read. John is a great writer, and his story is incredibly personal and well told. It's riveting. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A new book, "The Big Break" by Washington Post feature writer Ben Terris, is a story of how many institutions in Washington are failing those within them. But it's also a cautionary tale of how the idealism and passion of youth is being squandered in today's politics by our focus on individualism and our deemphasis on institutions. Ben's book traces the story of several characters over the period of 2021 and 2022, as Washington and the country grappled with the aftermath of the Trump presidency and struggled to understand what was normal now, in a post-Trump politics. Ben is a fantastic writer who takes us inside the lives of these characters. This book is an incredible illustration of some of the key lessons this podcast has been probing for years. It's out June 6, next Tuesday. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nobody has covered the Stanford free speech incident more closely than David Lat. He's a legal affairs writer at his Substack, Original Jurisdiction. David is a Harvard undergrad and a Yale law school graduate who has a fascinating backstory. He was originally an assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted federal crimes under former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, who of course went on to become governor of New Jersey and ran for president in 2016. We talk about the details of the Stanford free speech incident, and why David thinks the defense of free speech by Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez is such a significant milestone, and a potential turning point in the debate. At the end we discuss whether the "heckler's veto" that Dean Martinez said made the Stanford students unprotected speech might also be a way of thinking about what Peter Pomerantsev has called "censorship by noise." That's the way that authoritarians and bad actors in free societies try to "flood the zone with shit," as Steve Bannon so memorably put it, to make it impossible for truth to be distinguished from falsehood. You can read my summary of the Stanford incident at Yahoo News here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This interview is with Matthew D. Taylor, who wrote and created a recent podcast series called "Charismatic Revival Fury." Taylor is the Protestant Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, in Baltimore. We know about the Proud Boys, and the Big Lie, and former President Trump's role in spreading it and deceiving millions of Americans into believing the 2020 election was stolen from them. But there was an element in the crowd spurred on to radical anti-democratic lawlessness by something more than politics. It was "revival fury." That's the phrase created by Taylor, who has studied a sub-culture of American evangelicalism — called the New Apostolic Reformation — and mapped its 30-year history as well as its many links to the January 6 insurrection. Taylor's extensive historical research provides a depth of context to a shocking revelation: the Trump White House itself was in touch with key NAR leaders in the weeks after the 2020 election and leading up to the attack on the Capitol. In fact, one key NAR leader said "government leaders" asked him to conduct a tour of churches after the 2020 election to energize and mobilize Trump supporters to support the effort to overturn the election results. This NAR leader, Dutch Sheets, had already been part of a Trump White House outreach effort in 2019 led by Trump faith adviser Paula White Cain. The Sheets tour turned into a whirlwind tour of seven swing states over a month's time, in which roughly two-dozen self-proclaimed prophets whipped large crowds into a frenzy of religious fervor mixed with apocalyptic and violent imagery of defeating demonic forces, which were attributed to Democrats and President Biden. He calls it "charismatic revival fury" and has produced a podcast series by that name. Many of these NAR followers believed that if Trump were reinstated it would spark a religious revival leading to the conversion of a billion people to not just Christianity, but their brand of the faith. Taylor draws a distinction between personal "spiritual warfare" — a fairly standard belief held by many Christians in America and around the world — and the kind of hyper-radicalized version of "strategic spiritual warfare" promoted by NAR that risks pushing its adherents into the kind of violence we saw on January 6. Taylor also cautions that political figures on the right are playing with rhetoric that risks further radicalizing religious supporters, and that these remarks fall on a spectrum. On the most extreme, you have former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn literally calling former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a "demon." But other Republicans are also toying with such ideas. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has quoted a passage from the Bible where he replaces "the devil" with "the left." And former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley this week said that debates over how to teach children in schools about gender "is absolutely spiritual warfare." Taylor's research shows that talking about these topics requires a deftness and precision that avoids painting all conservative Christians with such a broad brush that it risks pushing them closer to extremist radicals, rather than bringing them into a broader conversation that can serve as a moderating force. "We need to be able to see the diversity within these movements, not paint with such a broad brush that says anyone who holds some theological idea or participates in some theological meme is therefore an extremist," Taylor told Yahoo News. "I think we really need to focus on people who actually behave in extreme ways and say extreme things." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D) represents Maryland in the U.S. Senate. He was in the middle of the fight over the debt ceiling in 2011, as a member of the House. That was the first of several fiscal fights over those years. Now, we're back in another debt ceiling showdown, and I talked with Van Hollen mostly about that. If you want to read what I wrote about this interview, you can click here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.