The Long Game

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 fait...

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,"...

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 an...

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 th...

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 a...

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 confus...

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 faithfully the ways that many Christians think they are living out ancient truths that are actually modern inventions how many Christians who...

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...

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...

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. Her...

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 pregna...

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...

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 badl...

  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 kee...

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: Campai...

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 b...

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 Indust...

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 ca...

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. st...

"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 su...

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...

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...

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...

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 p...

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 w...