The Sunday Interview: The Christian Turn Against Democracy (PART II)

0:00常? It looks like we're live. So hi everybody. Glad to see everybody joining us over lunch today. I am really, really happy that I have today with me. And we're going to do a kind of two-way conversation, but I have with me Brad O'Neeshi. Brad has got a brand new book out, American Caesar. Here it is. Subtitle, Hal Theocrats and Tech Lords are turning America into a monarchy. It turns out that his book is coming out one week after my book and from the same press. So we're going to have a little joint conversation today

1:00where he's going to interview me a little bit. I'll talk about my new book backslide. And then we're going to flip the tables. And I'm going to talk to him for about 20 minutes. And then we're going to go to your questions. So please do jump in on the chat. So hi, Brad. Hey Robbie, thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much for doing this. It's exciting. Our books are coming out one week apart. Same publisher, same editor. So. Yeah, shout out to Elizabeth Dezegard, right? Yeah, exactly. This is pretty exciting. And I have your book right here. So friends, I know a bunch of you probably have not gotten your hands on it yet. Unless you have an advanced copy. As you would expect from Robbie, just incredible, insightful, detailed work. And I have so many questions. So let me jump in. Is that OK? Robbie or is that OK? Yeah, let's do it. OK, yeah, because we're going to do 20 minutes this way and 20 minutes the other. So it'll go fast. So backslide, reclaiming a faith and a nation after the Christian turn against democracy. And the first question I want to raise here is just,

2:02what does it mean to backslide? You and I grew up in a certain culture. I think we were told that backsliding was bad. You would hear about, oh, did you hear about Jeff? He's sort of backslidden. He's off with the wrong crowd. Or he's doing this or that over there. I remember our senior pastor one time walked into a chapel and someone was sitting in the back. And he said, backslider, sit in the back. And that was a way to shame someone for not sitting in the front of church. What does it mean to backslide? And then there's going to be a follow-up question about what that means in a democratic setting. Well, it does depend on your context. As you said, so yeah, you and I share this evangelical teen upbringing. And there it has a very theological thing about falling away from the faith. It could mean all kinds of things. But if you seem like you're not, you haven't been to church in a while. If you haven't been praying, if you haven't been doing these things. Or if you've been overtly doing things, you shouldn't be doing. This is a sign of backsliding from the faith. And actually, if you look at the word itself,

3:03its roots are theological. It actually comes from John Knox, who talked about and used it in England who accused people who had denied their Protestant faith when Protestants were being persecuted. Under Queen Mary in England, or in Scotland, he called them backsliders there. And then it gets picked up in the King James Bible about half a century later in 1611, King James Bible. And there it's used, actually, to translate into English, for example, a pair of page out of Jeremiah talking about Israel backsliding from its faithfulness and following God. So it's got this deep theological context. But what's interesting is it does depend on, I'll give you two recent examples. So my wife is Jewish. And when I was talking to her about the title of this book, she's like, what? Like, what is that? And then when I was talking, actually, this past week, I had a conversation with a scholar who was very steep in political science.

4:04And she said, I had no idea that there was this religious thing, because in her world, it means democratic backsliding. And so I thought it was like the perfect thing to describe the moment we're in, where we have both of these things going on at one time, a kind of theological backsliding, particularly within white Christianity. And then if you Google it today, you're just as likely to get political science as you are theology today, because democratic backsliding is also kind of a big part of what you'll hear. Well, you mentioned this on page 13. You talk about how we were in a democratically backslidden nation. And I guess my question is, is when I was reading this chapter and thinking about my experience as a teenager and people talking about being backslidden, one way to succinctly sum up what it means to backslide is to lose your faith. And so as I thought about this in terms of a democratic context, the question I wanted to ask you is, is democratic backsliding losing faith in democracy

5:09and being willing to give yourself over to the idol, so to speak, of authoritarianism, because it's easier. It provides more certainty. It provides more answers. It provides more something. Is that a fair summation, or should we think about it in a different frame? No, I think that's a fair summation. And it's also important that in both contexts, it implies a gradual process. It doesn't happen all at once. And I think that's the scary thing about it is that you can drift and you can drift, and you don't quite realize that you're falling away till you come quite far. And then you're like, oh, wait, I'm not where I thought I was. And so we have heard this term a lot, but just to be really specific, this is measurable by political scientists. And there's two big surveys that look at democracies around the world. So in the book, I cite one of them. And another one actually came out after the book was put to bed. I'll give you the other one. But they both showed the same thing. So once called the Bright Line Watch Survey,

6:11this one interviews 700 leading political scientists and ask about all kinds of different aspects of the country, whether it's functioning as a democracy. And so they rank it on scale. Let me zero to 100. Like zero would be an autocratic, completely illiberal democracy or not a democracy at all. And then 100 would be fully functioning democracy. And even as late as the 2024 election, political scientists were rating the US at 67 out of 100 here. But as soon as Trump came on online, there was another survey done just in the first few months. And they rated it down to 55 in February and down to 54 in September. And when they were asked where they projected it would go by 2027, they said 47. So that's among professionals looking at multiple aspects of democracy. The other one is the varieties of democracy report. They found very similar things.

7:12They had us in the 70s prior to Trump. And it is now down to the 50s. Again, and very different, different methodologies, same findings. Their conclusion was quite stark. And they've been tracing it over history that we've essentially erased 60 years of democratic progress that were back to 1965. And what that means is, of course, that's the first year that many political scientists believe we became a fully liberal democracy by not enfranchising a huge swath of our population by just enfranchising African-Americans. So conclusion, democracy in the US has downed its worst in 60 years. So this is not just some sentiment. I mean, this is like real and measurable erosion of our democratic freedoms and rights. The next chapter is about apostasy. And I was thinking a lot about this. So backsliding, and again, correct me

8:15if you think I'm totally off here, is really a matter almost of praxis. It's you and your the practice of your spiritual life, gradually backsliding into something that is not the righteous path. Apostasy is more doctrinal or more, it's almost more belief oriented. You've adopted a belief as an apostate that is not orthodox, that is not correct. And I'm wondering if, as you say on page 13, we now live in a backslidden democracy on its way to authoritarianism that is being fueled by an apostate white Christianity. You've been writing about this for a long time, but in this chapter and in this book, what does it mean for large swaths of white evangelical and white Christian spaces in this country to be apostate? Yeah, I thought a long time about this term. It's not when I throw around in my everyday life.

9:17And it's one, I'm theological and nervous about. I mean, it's certainly been put to all kinds of nefarious use in Christian history. But I thought it was appropriate, because it literally means to stand apart from, that's kind of what the Greek roots mean. So if backsliding is kind of a process, apostasy is kind of a negative destination that one reaches at the end of a long process of backsliding. And here what I would say is, what I'm arguing in the book is that our democracy is in tough shape right now, but it's in better shape than white Christianity is. And in fact, that what we see is kind of a giving over of one's moral and ethical responsibilities to the magamoot. So I give the example of the only piece I wrote after the 2024 election was a piece, and I just called it, what white Christians have wrought? And I wrote it for Time magazine.

10:17And I wrote it because everybody was kind of hand-ringing, so what enrobeds the Trump make among black men? What enrobed did he make among Latinos? And they were parsing the T-leaves. And of course, all that stuff's important, as my day job as a president of Public Religion Research Institute, we, P-R-R-I, we do that all the time, but it was missing the bigger picture. Like I was like, yeah, but Trump does not become Trump. And the magamoot doesn't really come into existence without the steady decade-long movement of white Christians. And it turns out, even in the last election, after Trump was repeatedly running on it, kind of autocratic, I would say, fascist campaign promises. Even then, we had two thirds of white Christians showing up and voted for Trump in 2024 elections. Everybody kind of knows, okay, well, 80, 85% of white evangelicals did that, but it is 6 and 10 white, not even evangelical Protestants and 6 and 10 white Catholics. So it's really a white Christian problem writ large

11:20with evangelicals, a very special case, but they're not, the differences of the degree not of kind. So one of the things that I was mindful of as I was reading these chapters is that there's a sense of backsliding in a Christian spiritual life context. There's a sense of backsliding in a democratic context. There's a sense of being an apostate to the Christian faith. But there's also a way we could say you're an apostate to a pluralist democracy, that you've adopted a belief that is set apart from what is required. If you're going to live in a pluralist democracy, is it fair to say that you're arguing many of the white Christians you're talking about are apostates times two? By becoming Christian apostates in favor of Trumpism and the xenophobia and hatred therein, they've become apostates to also what is required to live in a pluralist democracy. I think that's right, and that's gonna be a nice bridge to your book when we turn the tables here in a minute though,

12:21but I think this idea that this is not your kind of, grandfather's Christian right. I mean, this is something a new animal that we're dealing with here that is not shying away from openly advocating anti-democratic principles. Whether that's voter suppression and supporting that whole effort. And just invoking policies that are just outright racist and outright fascists and unapologetically, doing so, the one place in the apostasy chapter I have that there are many places where we can, of course, disagree on policies and you wouldn't make this charge of apostasy, but I was thinking like, where's the place that really broke my heart looking at public opinion data and where my fellow white Christians were? And it is on the issue of concentration camps on US soil.

13:22And I am fully willing to go out on a limb here and say if you support the construction of concentration camps for black and brown people on US soil, you have left the faith. I am fully willing to say that. Like that is really across the line. And we're gonna have to have more people saying that, but what's remarkable here is that we do have a majority of white evangelicals today saying, yeah, I'm all in on supporting the internment camps for immigrants surrounding them up, until they can be deported. And I ended up having a sentence in the book. I was, you know, in the Trump era, white evangelicals attitudes about undocumented immigrants are so extreme that it seems virtually impossible to construct a policy that is too brutal for them to accept. And I should say too, this is not just evangelicals in name only, the more people go to church, the more likely they are to support these policies. So this is actually, the churches,

14:22the churches that they're currently going to, on mass and what the data demonstrates are actually amplifying their support for things like internment camps and Trump. Okay, so if we stay on this very sad theme of concentration camps, it links to a later chapter that's called Cowboys and Indians. And you relay, you know, this childhood sense of playing Cowboys and Indians, you know, and how things have changed over the decades in terms of team mascots, YMCA program that was once called Indian Guides, there's no longer called that and so on and so forth. But one of the arguments you make is that Trump's second term is really a term where manifest destiny has become an explicit ethos of the administration. And I guess as I read that chapter, I thought, well, this fits into everything you're saying about an apostate Christianity and a backslidden democracy, that manifest destiny is the sense that we are destined

15:24to control this soil, this homeland, regardless of how we need to do that. There's nothing democratic about that. There's nothing love your neighbor about that. And so I'm just wondering if, in the brief time we have, if you couldn't hover on this theme of manifest destiny and how it fits into the other two themes that we've already kind of fleshed out a little bit. Yeah, well, I dealt into this fairly deeply in my last book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy. But here I was really trying to think about, well, what I noticed is that Trump actually in his second inaugural address became, I think the only, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this, the only modern president to explicitly invoke manifest in his acceptance speech and his inaugural address. And the other thing that I think people had missed is that he made that speech inside the Capitol, Rutunda. And now he said he did it because the cold, I'm pretty sure he did it because he didn't want to have

16:25to compare his crowds to Obama's again and lie about it. But he did bring it inside, but it had one advantage. And one thing that Cameron's sitting quite pick up is, and this shows you how deep this idea of manifest acid is in our republic. The inside of our US Capitol, Rutunda, there are eight paintings around that Rutunda, four of which I would classify as some form of Christian nationalism or manifest destiny. Like so, for example, one of them that he was certainly looking at was, as he made the speech, he was staring at a painting called The Discovery of the Mississippi, and it depicts Hernando de Soto in 1541. And he's pushing his soldiers with a cannon into an indigenous village, like literally rolling in on the indigenous village there. Their weapons are on the ground. His soldiers are all armed to the teeth. And what's often ignored is in that picture is there is about a 20-foot crucifix being erected in the bottom right hand corner of that thing and planted in the middle of that indigenous village.

17:28And that is not just symbolic. That was the cleaning of their land. That was part of the doctrine of discovery. And they read this statement in Latin that none of them could of course understand, but it was like informing them, we now claim your land for us. But is this idea that, yeah, European people of European Christian descent have a divine right to all of these lands? And that was what was enacted in that. I mean, there's four other paintings there that are like the baptism of Pochahontas. For example, it was one of the other paintings there. But this is deep. It's not Trump. Trump is manifesting this in a particularly coherent and powerful way. But he is drawing on things that are deep in our DNA that we have still been wrestling with, really for most of our country. But it is being amplified in ways through, and I guess some examples in the book, for example, through the Department of Homeland Security's Twitter feed, absolute outright manifest destiny imagery coming there.

18:30And you mentioned this word, last thing I'll say, this word like our country or we, and that's what it really is, who is the we here? It's so clear and all these images and all this rhetoric about manifest destiny that it really is this image of people of European Christian descent who are gods chosen people to have dominion over these lands. Like that's the message. Okay, one of the things you do, and I know we're gonna run out of time here in a minute, and we're gonna switch lanes, but I do wanna ask you this, because I think it's really important. You do not shy away from saying that this is our 1933 kind of year or moment in the United States, comparing where we are to where Germany was in that fateful year. One of the Hanna-Aaron quotes that just really hit my heart is on page 255, where she talks about how the Nazis did threaten Germans and did coerce them externally. If you don't cooperate, this will happen to you or that. If you're a politician locally and you don't get on board,

19:31well, who knows what might happen to you. But there's this sense that the Germans were also unable of, quote, maintaining inner resistance alongside outer obedience. And I wonder if that isn't the challenge in a backslidden democracy with an apostate faith that's driving it, is we not only need to find ways to keep telling the truth, but the inner resistance part is the hardest part. And I wonder if that, if you just have any quick thoughts on that, because this was a gut punch right here for me reading those words. No, I'm with you. When I first read that from Arrent, I had the same reaction. And because she's describing in this gradual process, to go along with backsliding, it wasn't all at once. I mean, there were big moments that we can read, but honestly, I think when you're living history in real time, those big moments are hard to understand. Like I would say, the building of, again, of concentration gets on US soil, that's a pretty bright line.

20:35The equipping of ICE officers with shot gloves, that's a pretty bright line, right? And so we're crossing these bright lines already here in this country. But it's hard, it's easier to see in retrospect than it is in real time. And I think that's the thing that Arrent was saying. And what she says in that quote though, is that once people tried to, even if they tried to maintain inner resistance, if they had compromised externally, it became nearly psychologically impossible for them to maintain that inner resistance because the cognitive dissonance was so loud. And almost inevitably, what she says is they ended up calming that voice in their head, morally compromising themselves. And then after the fact, she said they became so morally anemic because of this daily compromise that they were unable to tell the truth even if they wanted to. Really striking. And so this kind of need, there's an outer need

21:38to stand up for justice and stand up for democracy. But there's an inner sort of, I would say psychological, even spiritual damage that we do to ourselves if we refuse to take those stands. I, like you, I kind of read this stuff 10 hours a day and I have my mind in the worst headlines there are all the time and it's, I sometimes get to the end of the day and I feel deflated and despair is a temptation. And I have like two tiny children and when I put them to bed and I'm like that when I finally get them to sleep and I walk out of the room and I look at them sleeping, I'm like that is my reminder of like there is no giving into the despair pal. Like you're not gonna, you're inner, your inner spiritual self is not going to give in here because you can't and you know, that's what I thought about last night after having, you know, reflected on these words of R-Anton and of you, you know, in your book. And so anyway, I know we need to switch lanes, but yeah, no, I'm right there with you.

22:40I mean, I dedicated this book to my children. For exactly the same reasons because I just think like, you know, what we do now is the world, they're gonna live it or what we don't do now is gonna determine the world that they live in. I think that's just vitally important. So yeah, so I appreciate that. Well, should we switch? Switch chair then? Sure, sure, sure. Well, there's a lot of commonality here. And so look, what I'll say is that, first off, before I ask you the first question, so here's a book again, so look, American Caesar, very aptly titled for reasons we'll get into for a moment. But what's, I think, so valuable about your book is how clear it is about some really complex developments. And so I think the way you have distilled these streams we're gonna talk about into something that you can understand and you can look at what's happening now. And I think some of the disparate things we see on the news that you're thinking,

23:40what was that about? And scratch your head. Suddenly, I think snap into focus with the lens you provided us here. So thank you for that. So the subtitles can tell us where we're gonna go. How theocrats and tech lords are turning America into a monarchy. So I think I'll start with some that we've already mentioned that come to maybe the bridge between the two books is, yeah, how is the moment we're in different, right? So we've had the Christian right around for 50 years now. Sure. It in some ways had kind of marks of being authoritarian or being hierarchical, but it's still sort of operated inside a democratic frame. But tell us like what's different about this moment of Christian nationalism and even this kind of appeals to Western civilization, which are even different. And distinguishing between those two things, I think is super helpful for the moment we're in.

24:41Yeah, I think a lot of folks who are here live with us and listening and watching, and you especially, Robbie, know that this is a country that is not foreign to authoritarianism to what we might call fascism, whether it's in the Jim Crow South, whether it's in the anti-bellum South, whether that's throughout the country, I'm Japanese American. My family was in camp during World War II. And some of them were fighting in World War II and the others were in camp, right? So I don't want to make this out as if this is a novel, sui-generous thing in our country. But if we just take the religious right that you referenced, the Jerry Falwell, Paul Wyric, Tim Le Hei, religious right of the 1970s and 80s, I think what you said there is really important that were there authoritarian tendencies in there? Yes, were there racist attitudes, of course. But the appeal they were making was that we are the moral majority, right? If we can just go around the country

25:41and get all the people on our side to vote, the people in the rural churches, the fundamentalists who've decided they don't need to participate in electoral politics, the folks that don't see themselves as needing to participate in the Civil War. If we got all of them, we will be the moral majority and we will outlaw abortion and we will do this and we'll elect a Christian president. In 1999, Paul Wyric, the architect of the religious right, writes a letter and he basically says, we are not the moral majority. I'm no longer convinced there's a moral majority. So here's a man who maybe did more than any political operative in the late 20th century to mobilize a kind of evangelical Catholic alliance that really shaped American politics, admitting, you know, more not the majority. And I think that is an easy way to understand where we've gotten to in the 21st century. If you have traditional radical Catholics, if you have white evangelicals, if you have reconstructionist Protestants

26:43in the kind of Rush Duny, Doug Wilson lineage, and they are cognizant of the fact that they are not the majority of this country and never will be. I mean, Robbie, your work is seminal for this. You're the one, I remember teaching to this to my class a decade ago, reading your work. White Christians are no longer the majority, right? No longer majority, Christ white Christian nation. And we got a black president. We've got the same sex marriage throughout the land. That was the switch that flipped for people and what happened was them realizing we're not the majority and so we're gonna have to use tactics. Yeah. Discourse, approaches and strategies that no longer play within the democratic framework. And so I think that we're seeing the manifestation of that now. I mean, I can elaborate on this for hours, but I think that's at least a basic idea of where I'm going. Yeah. Well, tell us about the strands. You've mentioned one of them is sort of like the theological strand

27:45that kind of comes out of Christian nationalism but now is kind of revved up into more anti-liberal key. But then there's the tech bros and the tech lords, you know, side of it as well. And maybe you could say a little more about the Protestant Catholic strands that there's two even inside of Christianity. So I started looking around before the 2024 election. You know, that faithful summer when Kamala Harris took over the democratic nomination and we were all wondering, could Trump really win? Again, what will happen if he does? And I started to notice something that had changed. That the discourse was beginning to be framed around saving Western civilization. Whereas like a decade previous, it was Make America Great Again or, you know, save America for God or make America Christian again. However you want to frame it. And I started investigating, well, who's saying Westerns, they want to save Western civilization? And I found three groups that had kind of coalesced around a similar discourse.

28:46And these were reconstructionist Protestants, folks coming from that Rush Duney, Doug Wilson, kind of framework. They were radical traditional Catholics, people like Paul Wyrick, many people don't know. Paul Wyrick was a very anti-Vaticant too, like all the way to Kevin Roberts, the current leader of the Heritage Foundation, and then technocrats. And they were the piece of the puzzle that I had to get my head around. Because every time I looked around, Curtis Yarvan or Elon Musk, or someone in their kind of space was saying, we need to save Western civilization. And what I realized was they were saying, we, the three of us have common enemies. Our common enemies, as you outlined in, in, in backslide, are Muslims. Islam is just simply bad. It is unassumable to Western civilization. The presence of Muslims in this country represents a presence of a non-Western, unassumable people. The same goes for people who are migrants from Africa,

29:47depending on which part, Asia, and some parts of Latin America. And so I started to wonder, well, what does this mean, save Western civilization? Is that a thinnian democracy? Is that the Roman Republic? Is that the enlightenment ideals of free thinking and personal autonomy? And it wasn't. It was, we need to save Western civilization from the exterior infidels and the internal enemies. And they're kind of one and the same in many ways. They're linked. And in order to do that, we probably need a strong man. Because, as I just said in response to the first question, we are not the majority. And we never will be. So the discourse now is, save Western civilization because Western civilization is superior to all others. And radical traditional Catholics, reconstructionist Protestants, and tech lords have this kind of loose coalition around this idea. Now they differ on AI and family and IVF.

30:47And there's a lot of places where there's cleavage and separation. But they all agree. If you see Elon Musk posting about how somebody is an enemy of the West because they're for some form of migration, you might see William Wolfe and Arch-Christian Nationalist Baptist leaders retweeting Elon Musk and saying, yeah, this is my guy. Even though Elon Musk is not somebody who talks about the Bible, doesn't talk about Christianity, never references God. Somehow they see themselves on the same team. Yeah. It makes me a little bit more about Western civilization. Because I think this is the thing that sounds a little innocuous in some settings. And we're seeing things like, I believe I just saw, University of Texas is setting up new Western civilization studies. And we're going to see this injection, I think, into academia, into the discourse here. We just saw Marco Rubio hosting a whole conference where he extolled the virtues of Western and Stephen Miller giving an absolutely chilling speech

31:48about Western civilization and crushing the enemies of Western civilization. Hexet, of course, seeing Islam as antithetical to all that. But when we hear things like, I'm just kind of thinking, what should we thinking about we hear a university suddenly standing up a program to study Western civilization? Is that, do you think that's linked to what we're talking about here? Here's the decoder ring for me on this one is, down in Texas, there's a professor who teaches Plato every semester and was told, right? Hey, you cannot teach Plato without permission and what you need to get it approved. And I'm thinking other than Jesus, is there like a preeminent thinker in the whatever we think of is the Western tradition? Plato is sort of like number one, two, three on the list. I don't know how we construct that list, but he's got to be in the top five.

32:50And you're not allowed to teach Plato unless you get permission, right? And Elon Musk had nothing to say about that. William Wolf, silence, Doug Wilson, who cares? That to me is a tell. This is not about studying Western civilization and all of its breath. Whatever Western civilization is, this is about a very cherry-picked nostalgia for a past that never was in order to create a future that is not based on anything that has ever been present in American democracy. And so when they say, save Western civilization, they're going to pluck out the parts that are favorable to their understanding of Western superiority, ruled by the few, not by the many or a power-sharing agreement called democracy, a patriarchal system that has a lot of moral and political policing of gender and family and sex,

33:50and a simple sense that you cannot, you cannot come to the United States and become an American simply by adopting the virtues of democracy and understanding our history and the basic rights of freedom of speech or freedom of religion or freedom of the press or freedom to assemble. There's a really good chance that you could never be an American no matter how hard you tried. And so we share that and we're going to do everything we can to resurrect Christendom. It's something, right? And what I've been saying, and I know there's probably people that agree with me and you may not see it this way either, Robbie, I'm not sure, but I think 10 years ago, the imagined past a lot of these folks wanted was the 1950s. I now think that they want the 1150s. They have projected themselves further and further backward in order to find pure and pure forms of the kind of civilization they want to build. And that's why we're seeing the kind of really scary

34:52escalation of things across the board from all three of the groups I talk about in the book. Yeah, no, I actually appreciated that distinction. You made it, you made it in the book. And we have certainly, we've had survey questions to ask about whether things have changed or better, changed to the worst since the 1950s. And we do see white Christians saying, oh, yes, they've absolutely changed for the worst since the 1950s. But I do, I'm with you though, I think that's right that this kind of Christendom thing is well beyond that, right? There. So at the end of the book, you do turn to, I think two things, a sympathetic, like if I'm trying to be sympathetic about what is the appeal of this world? So maybe you could say a little bit about it. And you and I both, I think, have some sense of that appeal and sometimes like what, just, it comes back to me. When I'm reading some of this stuff, it has a lure to it, a kind of seduction to it because of that past that I have it.

35:53And then I'm like, oh, yeah, I see where it's going on here and I kind of take a step back. But what is the appeal, I think, for this movement in the here and now? And then you also talk at the end, that really didn't leave us, I try to do the same thing in my boat, not leave us without hope here. But what do you think is the alternative to that appeal? Yeah, I think this goes back to your book and the idea of backsliding and apostasy. So I think that if you are somebody who's going to have faith and some people here are going to say, well, I'm a Christian or I'm a person of faith in a religious sense, you're saying that you are going to enter into an adherence to and an orientation towards something that is bigger than you, that includes uncertainty and mystery and a certain irresolvability. And to me, the best aspects of the Christian tradition are ones that orient us towards that.

36:54Okay, a sense of, I need to activate in the present in orientation to something that is irresolvable, uncaptureable in many ways beyond my comprehension. And those two things go hand in hand. The backsliding to me is losing faith. It's that unwillingness to continue on that path. And it's adopting an apostate belief that says, no, in fact, what I do need is absolute certainty and total answers. I need an answer to every facet of me and myself. And I remember this, Robbie, in the early odds, I was having a kind of dark night of the soul. I was, you know, in seminary reading everything I could get my hands on, theologically and historically. And I came across a book about post-liberal theology by the Yale Theologian George Linback. Yeah. And he basically offered this theological paradigm where, you know, one is enveloped in the biblical world. We're instead of trying to make the contemporary world

37:55understand us as Christians, we would simply recreate the kind of world of the text, the world of scripture. And everyone else would just have to deal with that, right? And that was really alluring for a certain like couple of months of my life, because I thought, I live in like Orange County, California, I'm surrounded by strip malls. We get in the car and drive on the highway. There's no sense of, like orientation around public religion and a shared way of life and a communal, you know, ethos. And this provides an answer to every aspect of who I am. This is not a compartmentalized Christianity. It's not a, it's not a kind of cafeteria version of religion. And for a moment, I thought, this is what I'm looking for. This will give me the answer of who I need to be. And that is of course, right, full's gold. Because anyone or anything that promises to solve you is going to demand absolute adherence to that thing,

38:56that person, and A, they'll never be able to deliver and B, they're gonna ask you to harm yourself and others in the process of adhering to that total devotion to person, cause, religion, movement, you name it. But I don't wanna overlook the first impulse. There are so many people around us who are beset by crisis, climate crisis, economic crisis, familial crisis, health crisis, and they want answers to themselves. And there are people willing to give it to them. That could be pastors, that could be theologians, it could be the man in the White House. I don't sympathize with any of that ideology, but I understand the human impulse to want to find a refuge in a world that feels utterly full of hopelessness and pain. And so to me, that's where we can at least start with trying to understand how people get seduced into these kinds of movements.

40:00I don't know about you, but every day, I feel like I'm juggling five things at once. I'm a writer, I'm a podcaster, I'm a small business owner, I'm somebody who has two young children. My phone ringing, emails are coming in, people are shouting from the other room. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so that you never miss an opportunity. All your calls, texts and voicemails live in one place, so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history and respond fast. You can set it up in minutes on any device, keep your existing number and add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. Money is on the line, always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash swadge. That's Quo, Q-U-O.com slash swadge. The US decloses a 95-page rule to restrict mail-in voting. USPS publishes a rule requiring voter lists from states

41:00or else how the US voting looks under Trump's finalized election plans. These are all headlines about a new rule from the United States Postal Service, but I'm looking at them on ground news, which provides me with a way to compare bias in different news sources coming from liberal, conservative or centrist outlets. Ground news is a solution for getting down to the facts of important stories and understanding how different outlets are framing what's happening in our country. I use this in order to get a picture of the entire news cycle surrounding important stories in religion and politics. Go to groundnews.com slash swadge to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage subscription. That's groundnews.com slash swadge. Use the link to get the discount and so they know I sent you. Yeah, well thanks for that. Let me go and just we're gonna have one more comment. I'm just gonna throw it open though.

42:00Throw some questions in the chat here. We'll take some of your questions here in just a minute. So this is gonna be dropping into, last one more question, we're waiting on some of those dropping into the midterm chaos as we're looking ahead. So what do you open people do with this book as they're reading it in September? Looking ahead to one of the most consequential midterm elections we've had in my lifetime for sure. Well, I'll be brief because I know we wanna get to questions. I think that a lot of us have been talking about this for however long now, decade more. Thinking about the elections that we have faced as the most consequential in our in-American history. And sometimes it's hard to keep saying that and have people keep hearing you. I'm not sure how you felt after writing Backslide, Robbie, but I think we turned these books into our publishers about the same time.

43:01And I had to kind of take about a month, I had about a month or two of like deflation. Of like, I spent two years in the weeds with some of the worst people in our world. And I had to kind of decompress from that. But when I emerged from it, I just realized like, these midterms are one of the last thresholds we have before 1933 turns into 1938. I don't know, does that make sense to you? What do you, you know, you make that marker and you're in 1933. Thanks for being here today, y'all. We are gonna continue this conversation. Robbie and I have about 15 or 18 more minutes. If you're a subscriber, stick around. If not, today's a great way to, today's a great day to subscribe. You get bonus content like this every weekend on Sundays and invite to our discord. Add free listening. And most importantly for us, you're supporting a public scholarship,

44:02newsroom that is covering religion and politics daily. We can't do this without you. We reach hundreds of thousands of people a year. We inform congressional staffers and journalists and lawyers, clergy, Sunday school teachers, public school teachers. We're here because we believe covering this stuff is important for defending democracy. So when you support us, you support all the contributors that you see on this network, me and Dan, Matt and Holly and Angela and everyone behind the scene who makes it go. We don't have a big corporate sponsor. We don't have a university behind us. We've built this from the ground up and we do it because we think this is the most important thing we could do as scholars right now. If you wanna subscribe, you can find that in our show notes. Everything is on our sub-stack and just thankful for you being part of our team, part of our family and part of those who want to continue to see democracy flourish in the United States. I'm Brad O'Neishie. Go find Robbie's book, Backslide.

45:02Go find my book, American Caesar. His comes out on 9.8, mine is out 9.15. We'll be back later this week until then, have a great day. All right, y'all, just a reminder to go to groundnews.com slash swedge. That is groundnews.com slash swedge SWAJ. To get 40% off, they're unlimited access, vantage, subscription. Make sure you use the link so they know I sent you.