The Long Game

Jonathan Rauch is an important voice for our time. He was for free speech and free thought way before it was cool. In 1993, he published a book called Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. It was while reading his latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain With Democracy, in preparation for this interview, that I realized that Jonathan's work over the past few years has been in pursuit of one overarching goal. Jonathan is one of the most prescient voices trying to prevent a return to a pre-Enlightenment society.

Eliza Griswold's new book Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church is about a church in Philadelphia that was started by a couple who became dramatic converts to Christianity in the 1970's. They became Jesus people. And unlike many others in that movement, they stayed pretty radical. Griswold's book tells the story of this couple's attempt to hand the church off to the next generation. It doesn't go well.  I thought the book was an example of something I've lived, experienced and observed: placing far too much hope in what a local church can do and provide. Griswold is a contributing writing for The New Yorker and directs the Program in Journalism at Princeton University. Her 2018 book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Major Garrett is chief Washington correspondent for CBS News, and as he told me in our conversation, he is an "accidental television journalist" who "never imagined" working in TV and "never wanted it." He was a print reporter for 17 years before entering the world of television. Since then, he's proven to be one of the most formidable, best prepared interviewers in journalism. This dude is rigorous, smart, and fun! And you know what? Damn it, he cares. Major is the host of The Takeout podcast and author of five books, including The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie, and Mr. Trump's Wild Ride: The Thrills, Chills, Screams, and Occasional Blackouts of an Extraordinary Presidency. Major read Amusing Ourselves to Death in the 1990's. He then soon after became a TV reporter for CNN, where he spent two years before moving to the then-nascent Fox News, where he became a Washington fixture as White House correspondent. That's where he was when I met him during my time as a White House correspondent for The Washington Times. I was glad, as I told him, that Major has a textured view of Postman's work. I didn't want a cheerleader. But Major talks about the impact of the work on him, his views of its shortcomings, and its lasting value.

Aurelian Craiutu is the author of Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals. Craiutu is the chair of Indiana University's political science department. He is reclaiming a word and idea — moderation — that is typically despised and criticized as weak and cowardly. This is a misunderstanding of what moderation is, he insists. Moderation is not for the weak or the indecisive, Craiutu says. Instead, it is a fighting creed which requires courage, strength, and savvy. It's not for everyone, he says. In other words, the implication is that some people don't have what it takes to be a moderate, because it's much easier to be a radical, or a purist, or an ideologue. "Maintaining our civilization is an endless and complex task," (23) Craiutu writes. Moderates do not look for silver bullets to perform this task. They recognize that it is an ongoing, never-fully-solved challenge. And they have a "willingness to exist inside open-ended situations that do not come full circle and cannot be unequivocally settled" (72). In other words, moderates are fighters who aren't looking for an easy way out or for a vacation from the ongoing and ever present task of maintaining an open and free society.

It is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. I just finished watching the ceremony in France, where they honored WWII vets who still live, and those who never came home. It was incredibly moving.  But we can't just look back and grow emotional during inspiring video montages. We must think about how to avoid the paths of division that could send future young men and women to similar fates. We can honor those brave WWII vets further — now — by listening to those who are trying to help us remember how to resolve our differences peacefully, rather than through violence or force. Yuval Levin is one of those people. My interview with him about his new book, out next week, "American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation -- And Could Again." Yuval's argument is that our Constitution is more than a legal document, though it is that. The Constitution is also a blueprint, a map, which lays out how our nation was intended to solve problems and resolve disagreements. James Madison, the nation's fourth president, was one of the chief architects of our constitutional system. And our system has a psychology of sorts, Yuval's book says. This system defines unity as acting together even when we don't agree. Madison and others designed an architecture of checks and balances and disparate power centers that are intended to pull and push us into engagement with those who are different and think different. It is that action together which creates common purpose and cohesion, a unity of "peace but not quiet," as Yuval writes. "Politics is haggling, or it is force," he quotes Daniel Bell as saying. He adds: "We have forgotten that the only real alternative to a politics of bargaining and accommodation in a vast and diverse society is a politics of violent hostility." Many Americans despair that we can repair our divisions. But Levin rejects that despair. He calls his book "hopeful" but says that does not mean he is necessarily optimistic. "Optimism and pessimism are both dangerous vices, because they are both invitations to passivity," he writes. "Hope is a virtue, and so it sits between those vices. It tells us that things could go well and invites us to take action that might help make that happen and might make us worth of it happening." The way we move toward this unity of "peace but not quiet" is by thinking more carefully about how our system is structured, and what kind of behavior it incentivizes: cooperation across difference as the Constitution intended, or pulling apart, demonizing the other side and fearing those who disagree, and performative outrage.

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 WifeI 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:who she wrote the book forhow she thinks about the idea that some will not listen to anything she says because she doesn't believe everything they dothe ways in which the church we both spent years in taught us to distrust our intuition and our gutabout her account of the sidelining and erasure of women in a religious subcultureI 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 SubstackHis 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:his very difficult childhood growing up in West Baltimore in the 60's and 70'show he grew up disliking white people even though his mother was white, in part because he was told after his mom disappeared that her family disliked black peoplehow meeting his mother at age 17 for the first time began to broaden his understanding of racial differencehis view that facts don't change people, relationships dothe point that an emphasis on relationships does not mean policy changes aren't necessary, or that everything can be fixed through relationships or interpersonal kindnesshis wild ghost storyhis roller coaster faith journey, and how interracial churches were the demonstration of faith's reality he needed to believe in Christianityhow there was a "golden age" of racial integration in America's schools from the early 70's to the late 80's, but how America believed a lie that it wasn't working and how we have now resegregated to 1968 levels, much of that due to our own choiceshow he believes racial integration is crucial to how our country grows stronger, and how our pulling apart and into racial segregation is causing many of our problemsThis 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.

Sara Billups is a Seattle-based writer whose book Orphaned Believers is out January 24. "In the wake of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, many young evangelicals found themselves untethered, disillusioned, and—ultimately—orphaned as they grappled with the legalistic, politically co-opted churches of their youth and embarked on a search for a more loving, more biblical expression of the faith and discipleship taught by Jesus," she writes. You can order the book here. Sara and I are fellow travelers in some very cool ways. We both grew up in evangelical families, we both questioned a lot about faith and evangelical culture (separate things), we both are fighting to hold on to faith, and we are both putting out books about this journey. And our books are coming out three months apart. Pretty amazing, since we didn't know each other at all before this. Sara is about as authentic and sincere as they come. She has some challenging things to say to American evangelicals. And often, evangelicals dismiss criticism because they say the person who levied the critique is "deconstructing," or in their view, isn't really even a Christian anymore. Good luck doing that with Sara. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I talked last week with Yuval Levin about the House Speaker fight and what lessons we might draw from it. This week I've got a different angle on the problems in Congress, and how they might be fixed.House Republicans who blocked Kevin McCarthy's ascension to the speakership repeated a mantra during the four-day leadership fight that ended after several rounds of dealmaking: Congress is “broken,” they said.It can sound like a talking point, one that's been recycled year after year to bash the other side. It's a reliable fundraising tactic.But as the right-wing Republicans stood under the bright glare of the TV lights on the House floor each day, a dozen other House members sat scattered around the room, having just spent four years working to address some of the same problems.It may be news to many Americans that it's not a partisan idea to think Congress needs fixing. It's not just ultraconservative Republicans who believe it's necessary. Democrats do too.Members of both parties even have some of the same ideas about how to do this — and finding consensus took years and happened away from the spotlight.I spoke to the two congressman who ran a committee -- the Select Committee on Modernizing Congress -- that ended up issuing nearly 200 recommendations for how to fix Congress. So far, 45 have been fully implemented. Another 87 have been partially implemented.Rep. Derek Kilmer is from Tacoma, Washington. He's a Democrat and he chaired the committee, after it was created in 2019. Rep. William Timmons was the top Republican on the panel. He's from northwest South Carolina, around Greenville and Spartanburg, which is one the more conservative parts of the state.So a Democrat from the Seattle suburbs and a Republican from the deep red South somehow figured out how to work with one another. What's everyone else's excuse? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Back in the summer of 2017 when I started this podcast, my first guest was Yuval Levin. And over the years, Yuval has been one of my most consistent conversation partners, in informal lunches and on this podcast.Levin is director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). This is his fifth time on this show now. Each time has been a really rich and deep conversation, and this time is no different.I found myself wondering what Yuval would think about the battle last week in the House of Representatives over the Speakership. All week as the fight raged on the House floor, I kept seeing some of the pioneering work that Yuval has done represented in the ways that observers and pundits thought about and talked about what was happening.Back in April of 2018, Yuval gave a series of three lectures at Princeton University called, "Why Institutions Matter: Three Lectures on Breakdown and Renewal." These lectures became the basis of the book "A Time to Build," which was released at the beginning of 2020.One of the fundamental insights of those lectures and that book was that so many of us today think of institutions as platforms, rather than molds. A platform is something you stand on top of, for self-promotion. A mold is something you go inside of, which shapes you. I had, like Yuval, been thinking a lot after the 2016 election about why our institutions were so broken, and his arguments were incredibly penetrating in helping me think more clearly about the problem.So plenty of people were pointing out that Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and some others were basically just opposing McCarthy to make themselves more famous. Yuval's thinking has helped a lot of people see this more clearly.But I wondered what Yuval was seeing now that the rest of us might not be. And when we sat down, it was another moment of feeling like someone was giving us a mirror to look around the corner, not at what will be, but at what could be.We talk about a lot here, and if you have any interest in American politics, or Congress, you'll find this of great interest. But I think those who really know politics well, or who work in Congress, will find this of extreme interest.In short, Yuval agrees that the Speakership fight was chaotic, but that this was not necessarily a bad thing. He's written a New York Times op-ed this week explaining why to some degree, but he talks at much greater length here about his thinking.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tim Schultz is president of the First Amendment Partnership, a group whose core mission is to advocate for religious freedom for all faiths and rights of conscience.Schultz and others say this bill gives something to both gay rights groups and to religious conservatives. It's a compromise, a tradeoff. On the left, there are some activists who say it doesn't do enough, but by and large they say they want it to pass anyway. On the right, there are a lot of prominent religious conservatives who say it doesn't give enough to their side, but they also say that they still wouldn't support the legislation even if it did give their side more.Specifically, LGBTQ groups are looking for assurances that if the Supreme Court's ruling in 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage is somehow repealed in the future, marriage licenses issued since then would still be valid. And the bill also says that states where gay marriage is not recognized, gay couples would be protected under law and their marriages recognized if their license was issued in another state.Religious conservatives are looking for protections that will allow them and their institutions to adhere to the belief that marriage is between men and women, and to live out that belief in various settings. The text of this legislation as it pertains to religious freedom requires some interpretation, so that is where the debate gets complicated. Hopefully this conversation gives some insight from an advocate who says it does provide protections for religious conservatives.Read my article on the issue here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Paul D. Miller is currently a professor of global politics and security at Georgetown University, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He worked at the National Security Council under Presidents Bush and Obama, and was a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army prior to that. Miller's book is "The Religion of American Greatness: What's Wrong with Christian Nationalism." There are all kinds of books out there on Christian nationalism. But what I like about Paul is that he's coming to this topic as someone who has spent most of his life as a conservative Christian. He's making a very robust case for why Christian nationalism is a bad idea, but he's doing so, as he writes in his book, "because of my patriotism and my Christian faith, not despite them."And because Miller comes from inside evangelical Christianity, he's careful to avoid painting with too broad a brush. He doesn't accuse any Christian involved in political activism of pushing Christian nationalism. And he also doesn't say that someone who supports Christian nationalism, or who believes that America is a Christian nation, is a fascist, an authoritarian, or a theocrat who wants the country to be governed by the 10 commandments.At the same time, Miller is quite clear in his book that nationalism usually leads to authoritarianism. He takes on nationalism first, and engages in this book with the arguments of the chief proponents of nationalism, such as R.R. Reno and Yoram Hazony. And only after doing that does Miller move on to addressing the beliefs of Christian nationalists."Patriotism—an affectionate, open gratitude for the blessings of our political life here—is a virtue, which is why is it so important to distinguish it from the vice of nationalism," Miller writes. "But America is not a chosen nation, it is not the 'nation whose God is the Lord,' (Psalm 33:12) and Americans are not the 'people who are called by my name,' of 2 Chronicles 7:14. All Christians should join in that affirmation."See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Journalist Bonnie Kristian joins to discuss her new book, "Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community." "We've spent forty years dramatically increasing how much information the average person encounters daily, and we've made no effort to equip ourselves to handle that shift," Bonnie writes. "So now … we have this deep confusion around what is knowable and what is true and who is trustworthy.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

James K.A. Smith discusses his new book, "How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now," which released September 20, 2022, from Brazos Press.We discuss:the role of history in helping us learn discernment and live faithfullythe ways that many Christians think they are living out ancient truths that are actually modern inventionshow many Christians who "deconstruct" and end up leaving the faith are actually "rejecting the minority report" of the faithhow Christian nationalism has "forgotten something very, very fundamental about what the Christian expectation of kingdom come looks like, which is precisely that it is not something that is engineered by us."how gardening helps us embrace our temporality and "experience God seasonally"Also check out James' book "You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit"See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The topic of Christian nationalism has been much in the news recently. Republican politicians like Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia both have claimed the term as their own, and Boebert in particular has loudly proclaimed that she does not believe in the separation of church and state. “I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk,” she said. “The church is supposed to direct the government; the government is not supposed to direct the church.”Perhaps the most aggressive Christian nationalist, despite his protestations about the term, is Pennsylvania's Doug Mastriano, a state senator who is the Republican nominee for governor in that state. Listen to Mastriano's comments in a 2021 zoom call a week before the January 6 insurrection, in which he baptizes conspiracy theories and his political will to power in the language of spiritual righteousness.That call was organized by a man named Jim Garlow, who is reportedly influential in something called the New Apostolic Reformation, which is a loosely connected network of men and women who call themselves apostles and prophets. These self-proclaimed divine emissaries claim that God speaks to them uniquely, and they claim authority over other people based on these grounds.Here's another example of the growing fusion throughout the country between religion and politics, in a way that confuses the two as one and the same rather than understanding them as separate but enhanced by one another if cross-pollinated in healthy ways. This is audio of an event this past July 1 in Atlanta, Georgia, in which two major figures in the NAR -- Lance Wallnau and Dutch Sheets, along with two other men, Mario Murillo and Hank Kunnemman, according to Jennifer Cohn of the Bucks County Beacon -- lead an audience in a vow to take over the U.S. government and impose a theocracy.Philip S. Gorski is an expert on Christian nationalism. He is the author of "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy," along with Samuel L. Perry, a professor at Oklahoma University. Gorski is a sociology professor at Yale University and is the author of American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump and American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present.Gorski has written this of Christian nationalism: it is "political idolatry dressed as religious orthodoxy."We talk about the ways that sometimes the term is used imprecisely to condemn anyone who is a Christian, and I ask him to help us explain the ways that political extremism, especially the growing willingness to discard democracy and pursue authoritarianism, can be motivated by this belief system.You can also check out David French's interview with Paul D. Miller about this topic here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Christine Emba's book, "Rethinking Sex: A Provocation," is written for younger generations whose experience of sex, she argues, has been disappointing. She revisits basic questions of what sex is for, and argues that casual sex has been a bad deal for younger people because it has been devalued and minimized. Chrisrine comes from a conservative background where sex was, she says, overvalued. She's trying to find a middle ground.Christine told me she wrote the book to explore "what was ailing our sexual culture, that these malaise-filled encounters had become so common. What assumptions were we holding about sex that weren't serving us, that might actually be false? Where did we think the sexual revolution should have taken us, and where did we actually end up? And the big question in this book, what ethic do we need to have good sex if consent isn't enough?"Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Eboo Patel has spent decades thinking about interfaith work and buildnig an institution devoted to promoting it.In this conversation, we talk about his work building Interfaith America, his new book "We Need to Build," and how America can strengthen democracy by making faith more welcome in public life, not less so, by embracing its diversity of faiths as co-contributors to the common good.Here's the piece I mention by John Inazu: "Interfaith Doesn't Mean Compromise"Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Justin Giboney is co-founder of The And Campaign, an Atlanta-based advocacy and political training organization launched in 2015, with artist Sho Baraka and Rev. Angel Maldonado.Giboney has conservative views on abortion, but also is critical of the way Republicans have often focused only on making sure women give birth, without much regard for what government can do to help avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place and to alleviate poverty and improve women's healthcare and resources for poor families.A lot of our conversation is about Giboney's view that American Christians on the right and left have allowed political parties and tribalism to shape their political choices, rather than applying their faith to the issues.Giboney grew up Colorado and got his his start in politics working for former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. He's co-author of the 2020 book, "Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign's Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement."Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

David French, my guest today, is senior editor at The Dispatch, contributing writer at The Atlantic, co-host of the "Good Faith" podcast with Curtis Chang. He is author of several books, most recently, "Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation." David has a long career as a lawyer who has fought for religious liberty of all faiths, but especially conservatives. He is super conservative himself, as you will hear in this conversation when he talks about his view of abortion. But over the last several years, French has become a pariah to many on the right. French has in essence become the target for conservatives who believe that America is so hostile to their views and their way of life that it is no longer possible to try to reach agreement and compromise and accommodation through the regular means of democratic processes.In short, David French has become a standard-bearer for conservatives who still believe in democracy, and a target for those on the right who range from skeptical that democracy can work for them anymore, to those who are outright hostile to democracy.In this conversation we discuss what David French and Curtis Chang are doing to try to rebuild the walls of christian conservative commitments to democracy and classical liberalism, which is different from partisan or political liberalism. Curtis was on this podcast last year to talk about his work on "Christians and the Vaccine." And then in the second half of this conversation, we talk about Roe v Wade and what happens next.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University — a private evangelical college. Her book, "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation," has caused a huge stir. The argument in Du Mez's book is that the attempt to infuse Christianity with more muscle, to make Christian men in particular more aggressive, has gone badly astray. Du Mez documents the roots of this muscular Christianity rising out of a response to industrialization and the loss of meaningful work for many men, over a century ago.Du Mez writes in the book that "for conservative white evangelicals, the 'good news' of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity."In this episode, we discuss what Du Mez means by gender difference, and what exactly she's critiquing. It's not all gender difference but a kind of black and white thinking about what men and women can and cannot be. And we also talk about the connection between the deification of men in religious subcultures, and the connection to how abuses of power -- especially sexual abuse and harassment -- have been covered up by religious institutions.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Very few people are happy with the way technology has come to dominate our lives, argues author Andy Crouch, and he thinks it will take a while for humans to reclaim autonomy from machines. “I rarely meet anyone who thinks, ‘Oh, it's really working quite well,'” Crouch, the author of a new book, said in an interview. “I just don't meet anyone who thinks we're in great shape and should just keep kind of on the path we're on.” Crouch's book, “The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World,” identifies one of the core problems of our time as a “breakdown of recognition.” “Our neurology is actually wired for this kind of face-to-face encounter. It's when another person really attends to me and knows what I'm feeling, and in a way thinking, that I can fully be myself,” said Crouch, a former executive editor at Christianity Today magazine who has written four other books on culture-making, the ethical and moral uses of power, and how to use technology rather than be used by it. There are, Crouch said, “fewer and fewer settings that I'm in where I can expect that another person knows who I am, knows what it's like to be me.” Crouch has already written a book in 2017 called “The Techwise Family,” which has plenty of practical advice. But his latest book is harder to categorize, as Crouch struggles with how to recover our humanity. His answers to this question are unconventional. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Richard L. Hasen is one of the nation's foremost experts on election law. He teaches law and political science at the University of California-Irvine. He is co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center. He runs the Election Law Blog. And he has written numerous previous books, including The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown, in 2012, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court and the Distortion of American Elections in 2016, and Election Meltdown in 2020.Hasen's new book - "Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics - and How to Cure It" - lays out a diagnosis of the problem. "The survival of American democracy depends on the success of free and fair periodic elections in which voters have access to reliable information to make ballot decisions that are consistent with their preferences and interests, and where the losers accept the results as legitimate and agree to fight another day."The entire second half of Hasen's book is a fairly detailed examination of potential ways to ameliorate the problem. Several are legal and regulatory, and then a few have more to do with civil society. In the legal arena, Hasen says that the U.S. Supreme Court is a likely obstacle to several reforms. " Hasen said the court's conservative justices have an “outmoded” view of how to apply the First Amendment's free speech protections that relies on a “marketplace of ideas model in which citizens debate ideas publicly and the truth rises to the top.” Hasen is skeptical that such a purely self-regulating marketplace of ideas has ever existed, but he is adamant that it does not now. “The marketplace of ideas is experiencing market failure,” he writes.He says that the First Amendment is a vital “bulwark against government censorship,” but adds that “the greatest danger today is a public that cannot determine truth or make voting decisions that are based on accurate information, and a public susceptible to political manipulation through repeatedly amplified, data-targeted, election related content, some of it false or misleading.”In this conversation, we talk a little bit about some of his proposed reforms, and why the Supreme Court's conservative justices are a likely obstacle to them. And we also discuss why decisions by social media platforms to remove public figures is not, in his view, censorship. You can listen to Rick's previous appearance on "The Long Game," from July 2020, here. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Gillian Laub has published books of stunning photographs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and about racism in the deep South. She also produced a documentary about the killing of a young black man by an older white man in rural Georgia.For Laub's latest project, however, she got very personal. “Family Matters” is a story -- told through photos and words -- of how Laub's family nearly broke apart during the Trump presidency. But it's also a raw self-portrait.“Those years brought out the worst in everyone and I'm part of that,” Laub said.This is a book about something that many families have gone through over the past seven years. David Brooks put it pretty well in a recent column, but I'm going to tweak his language a little bit here. 'Think of your family: your parents and siblings and their spouses and children. Now imagine if many of those people suddenly took a political or public position you found utterly vile. Now imagine learning that those family members think that your position is utterly vile. You would suddenly realize that the people you thought you knew best and cared about most had actually been total strangers all along. You would feel disoriented, disturbed, unmoored. Your life would change."That's a good summary of what Laub's book is about, within her own family. She begins by describing her grandparents and their story, with humanizing photos of her grandfather in a tiny pair of zebra print bathing trunks in his garden, and another of her grandmother's hand on her grandfather's rear end in those same tiny shorts. Her grandfather was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia who fled pogroms, and he built a real estate company in the Bronx. Laub describes the ways in which growing up she was both proud of and embarrassed by her family. She teases this tension out more as she describes the way that her husband's parents recoiled at the materialism and privilege in her family.Then one day, Laub's father sent her a photo of him at a Trump rally. Over the next several years, she and her family came to the end of themselves. But in Laub's telling, they came out on the other side.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

My guest today is Katherine Gehl. She is part of the movement to protect and strengthen democracy by restructuring our election rules. Gehl is a former CEO of the food company her father started, which she sold in 2015 to focus on political reform. She founded the Institute for Political Innovation and co-wrote a book in 2020 with business consultant and author Michael Porter, “The Politics Industry,” in which they argue that political innovation is crucial to reversing the doom loop that American politics is stuck in currently.Gehl's main focus is final five voting. Alaska is the first state to do a version of this in their fall elections this year, though it's final four and not final five. Here's what that means: There will be no party primary in this new system. All candidates of all parties will run against one another in the August 16 primary contest. The primary will not be a ranked-choice election. The top four vote-getters will proceed to the Nov. 8 general election. Only then, in the fall election, will ranked-choice voting — also known as instant runoff voting — be implemented. Maine has used ranked choice voting statewide the last few years, and a growing number of cities and localities also are using the reform. New York City's mayoral contest was the most well known example of this last year. But no state has tried what Alaska will do this fall. The hope is that it will reduce the grip that each side's most intense partisans exercise on American elections through closed party primaries followed by plurality winners in general elections.You can read my full article on this here.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

2021 was a year of whiplash, of head fakes. We thought it would be a return to normal, to the way we lived before the pandemic and before our politics became completely insane. But over the second half of this past year, i think we've discovered that in many ways 2020 was the new normal. Covid is not going away. Neither is reality denial. We have to learn to live with both.Unconventional times call for a creative response and this episode is an example of trying to think deeply about our epistemic crisis. I talk with Michael McDonald who is part of something called the Bible Project. His official title is Chief Global Focus and Strategic Relationships Officer. I'm not aware of many other institutions like this one. It's based in Seattle and for the last couple years has been attempting to re-orient the way that Christians in America and around the world read and interpret their sacred text, the Bible. Why does this matter? And what relevance does it have for anyone who's not a Christian or for politics or culture? I expect that question would loom especially large for anyone who doesn't come from the world of conservative evangelicalism. Here is why I think it's important. I come from that world of evangelicalism in which the Bible functions as a sort of Rosetta Stone for all of life. It's not simply important or sacred. It's central. This is the case for tens of millions of Americans, maybe into the hundreds of millions. The Bible project is not seeking to displace or discard or degrade the importance of the Christian scriptures. But the founders of the project do have a critique of how modern Christians read and interpret the Bible, because they say the way this is done now is not actually faithful to the way Christianity historically has done it. In short, they are seeking to guide Christians into a high view of scripture that respects its form as a piece of literature that is situated on a particular context and is intended to steer its reader: toward wisdom, and away from a simplistic and reductionist view that seeks easy answers and lowers the need for actual faith. This has big implications for American public life. It is a long term project. I find it fascinating. I hope you do too. I hope that you have a great Christmas and a Happy New year.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Robert Costa is a national political reporter for the Washington Post, and co-author with Bob Woodward of the new book "Peril." This book has made a lot of news. It is a compelling, authoritative first draft of history that covers the period leading up to the 2020 election, and into this year. The authors write that "the transition from President Donald J. Trump to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stands as one of the most dangerous periods in American history."The details are chilling. And in this conversation with Costa, we discuss what he would have told himself 10 years ago about covering Trump, how the press should cover Trump now, and politics in general, how he and Woodward reveal the ways that Trump's lies about the election were debunked even by some of his closest allies, and where the GOP and the country are headed in the years ahead. Looming over the entire conversation is the question I ask him at the end: can American democracy survive? Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“I walked into the internet naively in 1995, thinking that it was all altruistic and going to create a better society,” Krohn said. But the Seattle native now is sounding the alarm about the web's threat to a functioning country. Krohn maintains that he is still hanging on to optimism, but his warnings in the book are also dire. “Massive digital forces are corroding the fundamental pillars that support American social and political life. The damage seems illimitable. The endgame toward which we hurtle is terrifying,” he writes on the book's second page.The book is called "Bombarded: How to Fight Back Against the Online Assault on Democracy." While Krohn clearly rejects the conspiracy theories of anti-vaccine activists and former President Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election, he doesn't spend a lot of time blaming one political group more than another. Largely, Krohn keeps his focus at a more structural level. His book is thick with potential solutions, and that's a big part of why this podcast exists, to do more than point out problems, but to also talk about ways forward. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I've spent pretty much all of my life fascinated by the interactions between religion and public life. I grew up in a very strict fundamentalist Christian church. I went to Christian music festivals, marched in anti-abortion protests with my parents, and watched my parents become loyal Republicans from the Reagan era on. As a journalist I've been in rooms on the upper east side of Manhattan where secular liberals hissed and booed in 2004 at the mention of religious conservatives who they feared wanted to impose a theocracy, and I've interviewed Christians who believe America is a Christian nation and should be governed by the Bible.I've always believed that church and state should not be joined together, but I've also been skeptical of those who say religious conviction should have no role in public life or politics. And I think many people feel this way.I came across a book that is a few years old that does a compelling job of laying out this middle ground. "American Covenant" by Philip Gorski is for those who "know that the American project has a moral and spiritual core" (3) but believe that the role of religion in public life is to be prophetic, holding those in power to account and to higher principles, rather than seeking to hold power and domination.Gorski, a professor of sociology and religious studies at Yale University, argues that "religious nationalism is just national self-worship ... political idolatry dressed up as religious orthodoxy." But he also says that "radical secularism is little more than a misguided effort at cultural censorship, political illiberalism dressed up as liberal politics" (3). He also says that "one of the hidden weaknesses of secular progressivism today is its resistance to tradition" (xiii). He aims in the book to provide historical narratives and exemplary figures from history to buttress a "living tradition" (2) that can sustain a "vital center" in American public life "who share "a commitment to liberal democracy and a willingness to put national interests before political power when democracy itself is at risk, as it is now.""To be part of a tradition is to know certain stories, read certain books, admire certain people, and care about certain things," (4) he writes.Gorski writes that the civil religious tradition is what should animate the vital center. We discuss what that term means and how it is found in American history. Here is Gorski's comparison of civil religion to the other two options: religious nationalism and radical secularism."Religious nationalism fails because it is idolatrous and thus irreligious, because America was not founded as a 'Christian nation,' and because many modern-day Americans are not believing Christians but are good citizens nonetheless. Radical secularism fails because restricting religious expression violates liberal principles, because the United States was not founded on a 'total separation' of religion and politics, and because most Americans are still religious," (4) he writes."The civil religious tradition ... is neither idolatrous nor illiberal, because it recognizes both the sacred and the secular sources of the American creed, becuase it provides a poliitical vision that can be embraced by believers and nonbelievers alike, and because it is capacious enough to incorporate new generations of Americans," he says.As we get into near the end, i think there is a pretty strong connection between this book and Jonathan Rauch's "Constitution of Knowledge." Rauch's book makes the argument for how we should agree on what is true and what is not. This book provides a historical, theological, philosophical, and moral argument for why the Constitution of Knowledge is the best hope for American democracy, and how it is truly American as well. In the process, it calls out as false many of the ideas and stories being promoted by right-wing figures today, such as Tucker Carlson, and illuminates how the... Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I've been taking a little bit of a break this summer from the podcast, but I've been listening to another podcast that was so interesting to me I decided to talk with its creator.The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a new podcast that chronicles the downfall of a celebrity pastor named Mark Driscoll. I am interested in this topic because I grew up in a church that was similar to Mars Hill. Covenant Life Church, the church I grew up attending, was intense, it was insular, and it revolved around one person: the pastor C.J. Mahaney.I've reflected for years on my experience in that church, as have many others. The church that I was born into became the hub of a national organization of churches with congregations in numerous other countries, and by one estimate, over 28,000 members. But over the last decade, Covenant Life Church and the umbrella organization he oversaw, Sovereign Grace Ministries, have fallen apart under the weight of scandal. Mahaney and SGM are now largely disgraced, and in 2019 they lost their most powerful ally, Southern Baptist leader Al Mohler, who cut ties with them."The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill" is about a church that started about 20 years after Covenant Life, and its creator, Mike Cosper, from Christianity Today magazine, does an outstanding job of telling the story. I tried to think hard with him about why these stories matter not just to people of faith but also to people of no faith, or people who are not evangelical Christians. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We are in an information crisis. Viral disinformation predominates on the right, and cancel culture on the left, but Jonathan Rauch says in his new book "The Constitution of Knowledge" that both of them "share the goal of dominating the information space by demoralizing their human targets: confusing them, isolating them, drowning them out, deplatforming them, or overwhelming them so they give up on pushing back."The book is not primarily about media literacy. It's not a guide with tips about how to tell fake news from real news. It's a step back or up from that. Rauch delves into the philosophical realm to think deeply about what kind of system can fill that power vacuum in a way that preserves all the things I mentioned at the beginning: personal freedom, peace and prosperity, democracy, the futures of our loved ones and of the most vulnerable.Rauch argues that we already have this system, and in some ways need to replenish it by becoming newly aware of and grateful for it. He draws a parallel between the Constitution of Knowledge and the U.S. Constitution, in that they do something very similar: "They compel and organize social negotiation."The Constitution of Knowledge is a set of "social rules for turning disagreement into knowledge.""If we care about knowledge, freedom and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science -- open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network -- is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community," he writes.Intro music: "A Good Ending" by Dan KochPost-intro music: "St. Tom's Lullaby" by The Welcome WagonOutro music: "My Man" by Dan Koch Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I didn't plan for this episode to be about ranked-choice voting, but when I raised the topic, I was surprised at the degree to which Congressman Dean Phillips, a Democrat from Minnesota, was really gung-ho about this reform.I've done several episodes on ranked-choice voting before, but to sum it up if you're new to the idea: voters list candidates in order of preference. If no one gets above 50 percent, then the candidate with the most second- and third-place votes wins. The general idea is that it produces winners who are most preferable to the majority of voters, rather than allowing candidates to win with just 30 or 40 percent in a crowded field where other candidates split up the vote.Phillips made a little news here, I thought. He said he wants to push Democrats in the house of representatives to use ranked-choice voting in their next leadership contest, after the 2022 mid-term elections. Current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said this is her last term as Democrat leader, and so in 2022, Dems will be looking for a new Speaker if they're in the majority or a new Minority leader if Republicans win back the majority.Phillips also said he does not think Congress should mandate ranked-choice voting across the country. He said it's currently working as reforms should, starting in localities and cities and states, and proving its worth as it bubbles up. But he also said he does support the bill that we discussed on this show with Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, which would mandate ranked choice voting nationally. Maybe because he's still new to Congress or because he's a younger member at 52, or both, Phillips was pretty honest, saying he doesn't think the Beyer bill will pass but he supports it because it raises awareness of the topic.Phillips was first elected to Congress in 2018 and won reelection in 2020. He is heir to the Phillips distilling fortune, and was the company’s CEO from 2000 to 2012. He then went on to fund and manage two other investments: Talenti gelato, which he sold in 2014 and is now a national brand, and a coffee and crepe eatery in Minneapolis. He has stood out in Congress for his willingness to buck leadership at times, opposing the idea of overturning an Iowa House election, and for attempts to talk about racism and police reform in a non-reductionist way. His district is suburban and well-off, and he has received high marks from Congressional accountability groups for both bipartisanship and productivity. Minneapolis was one of the earliest adopters of ranked choice voting. The city adopted the system for its 2009 elections. There are growing numbers of cities that are now doing the same. The biggest of these is New York City, which will use ranked-choice voting in its citywide primary elections on June 22. The conservative state of Utah announced this month that after two cities used ranked choice voting in municipal... Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Curtis is a former pastor who is now a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School and a senior fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary. And he's done a great job of putting together a wealth of resources that present facts and data, answers to the questions poeple are asking, and presenting it in a way that is informative and persuasive. He's specifically aimed his project at Christians, because white evangelicals in particular are the most vaccine resistant group probably int he country. That's shown in polling. A Pew Survey in February showed that 45 percent of white evangelicals didn't plan on getting the vaccine.But his series of videos, which also have transcripts you can read, will be helpful for anyone who has questions or concerns.There are videos about whether the vaccine is safe, and about whether it is a form of government control. There a video addressing concerns about a link between abortions and vaccines, and another looking at whether Black Americans can trust the vaccine. And there’s one on how to spot fake news about the vaccine.And there is even a video addressing the question, “Is the COVID vaccine the ‘Mark of the Beast’?” That’s a reference to apocalyptic evangelical beliefs about the end of the world and a passage in the final book of the Bible, Revelation, that talks about such a mark. I just sort of laughed at that one at first, but it actually kind of blew my mind, and you'll hear why in this episode.My personal favorite of all the videos was the one in which Chang explores the three most common reactions to flawed systems. You might call this systemic compromise or institutional sin. It’s a great exercise in critical thinking about ethics. I highly recommend it, and the whole series.Outro music: "Rise Up with Fists" by Jenny Lewis Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

One of the dominant themes of the last several years, and especially the last year, is the loss of shared truth, a sense in the country that it's increasingly difficult to talk to one another when we disagree. Because increasingly, it seems like people don't know what is true and what is false, and then public debate just becomes a matter of tribalism, where our identity shapes what we believe rather than a more honest attempt to sort through facts and weigh evidence.This is a major theme of this show now. This year so far, I've interviewed one of the most insightful thinkers and writers on the topic, Peter Pomerantsev, two members of Congress who are fighting disinformation -- Democrat Tom Malinowski and Republican Adam Kinzinger -- and another activist -- David Blankenhorn -- who is trying to get Americans to sit down with others who think differently to try to understand their point of view.This episode is an interview with a guy who really understands the Internet, and has some pretty granular suggestions about how to fix it. Michael Slaby's book, "For All the People," is a trenchant analysis of what has gone wrong over the past two decades with the internet, and a passionate call for change. He writes for the leaders of private companies, for politicians and policy-makers, and for you and me, the average person who wants to know what we can do today to reclaim more control of our lives from big tech and to help repair our country.Slaby was chief technology officer on Barack Obama's 2008 reelection campaign, and then oversaw innovation and integration of tech into the entire 2012 campaign. He now runs Harmony Labs, a company working on internet reform implementation at the local scale.Outro music: "Think Too Much" by Hannah Jadagu Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/thelonggame. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.