Weird, Wicked, and Wild

Americans were sure that God was on their side. They sought to remake their world according to a new covenant. And in this new covenant, borders seemed wrong. There was land waiting for them in the West, and all they had to do was clear the way. Expansion would be a great national project, a realization of American manifest destiny. But manifest destiny resulted in a continental empire, increasing...

On the heels of the American Revolution came a Second Great Awakening. It did not transform the U.S. into a Christian nation either, but it did something perhaps more volatile. In a republic with no established church, faith became a matter of choice, and with that came power. Ordinary Americans claimed the authority to interpret Scripture, experience God directly, and remake the world around them...

The Founders did not create a Christian nation. They created something stranger. The American Revolution rejected the divine right of kings, but it did not reject sacred purpose. Instead, Americans transformed liberty, the nation, the Founders, and even the war itself into objects of near-religious reverence. Thomas Paine preached revolution like a revival sermon. Jefferson invoked “Nature’s God”...

A religiously pluralistic colonial people could never unite against an empire with a state-mandated faith, could it? Thomas Paine thought it could, and while not advocating for a religious society, he deployed explicitly Christian reasoning when he called for independence in Common Sense , the wildly popular pamphlet Paine published in 1776. Nobody was likely to make Congregationalists, Baptists,...

The Salem Witch Trials frightened people, not about witches, but about the dangers of rigid orthodoxy. The following decades into the eighteenth century saw the old Puritan guard lose its grip on New England. Religion didn't disappear, but it cooled notably. Increased trade across the Atlantic and the arrival of Enlightenment thinking resulted in greater secularism in New England society, until Ge...

A successful covenant is evidence of God's divine favor, but what if things go wrong? What does that prove? Colonialism is hard work; nothing was ever going to go precisely according to plans, but when internal dissent, chaotic relationships with Indigenous peoples, and external political pressures mounted, Puritans rarely recognized that the nature 0f colonialism had anything to do with it. Inste...

Pilgrims and Puritans have an interesting reputation in American history. Popular culture has long flattened the truth about them to the point that they often come off as cartoon bad guys. The real story is that they were devout people under enormous pressure to establish a model Christian society in an unfamiliar land. Their experiences were informed by religious zealotry, imperial agency, fronti...

Sometimes it's important to hear about the history before the history. That's what this episode is about -- we'll discuss the condensed history of Christianity from the time of Jesus' crucifixion until it arrives in America. That's roughly 1600 years in about in just around an hour or so. We'll also introduce the series in a little more detail, explain why we're doing this, clarify what we're NOT...

Don't miss this preview of the rollercoaster season we have coming your way. We are swinging for the fences, and we'll probably gain a few enemies along the way. That's how we know we're doing our jobs right!

Forty-three men between 1789 and 2017 demonstrated the awesome and growing power of the American presidency. Sometimes they were blunt, other times much more deliberate. But in 2017, something shifted, and since then we've seen how extremely fragile the presidency is, too. The two men who've held the office since then have exposed its frailty over and over again. One battered norms with open conte...

Part 2 of 2: Daddy left unfinished business in the Middle East, so Bush 43 comes to the White House in 2001 with a mission, and whether he accomplished it or not really isn't up for debate -- he didn't. That didn't stop him though, and the damage he did in the White House made his successor's election seem like salvation may have arrived. Spoiler alert: it didn't. The White House is where altruism...

Part 1 of 2: Riding his predecessor's coattails into an office that had already gone off the rails, George H.W. Bush didn’t bother asking where the brakes were. He put the pedal to the metal. He and his successors put power on a fast and dangerous track with emergency authorizations, executive orders, surveillance dragnets, corporate and banking bailouts, and forever wars, all designed to look str...

Inheriting a world reshaped by total war, nuclear brinkmanship, and nonstop mobilization demanded more than managerial skill. As the U.S. slid into the Cold War, presidents acted less like careful stewards of process and more like final judges of what counted as necessary, legitimate, and urgent. They waged wars without declarations, kept secrets without oversight, and shaped markets, morals, and...

Presiding over a growing territorial and overseas empire takes a lot of power vested in the one-man office of the American presidency. The expansive scope of the President's authority had grown well beyond what a single man could control by the end of the 19th century; in the 20th century, presidents relied more and more on the growing power of the entirety of the executive branch. Administrations...

If a president of the United States won't stand up and declare unwavering support for equality, then who will? Isn't that what this country was founded on? That's what Abraham Lincoln thought, but when he was murdered in 1865, what he thought no longer seemed to matter. His next nine successors continually dropped the ball when it came to protecting Black civil rights, and their collective support...

The next eight presidents, from Martin Van Buren (#8) to James Buchanan (#15) all served only one term as president, and they spent their terms more or less trying to appease the various national factions that threatened to pull the country apart. This was, unfortunately, especially true when it came to appeasing the slave powers of the South, entrenching and intensifying the national debate over...

There are a lot of lists that rank the presidents from best to worst (or vice versa). Scholarly lists have some consensus, usually. Popular opinion lists vary wildly. We're not going to try to rank them, but we're going to look at the damage done to American society by each of the forty-five men we've elected to lead us, and we'll see how they all stack up to the current guy. In this episode, we'r...

Our final episode of the season tries to rescue language from the ravages of fascist Newspeak. While not invented by or used solely by fascists, Newspeak -- a term coined by George Orwell in his seminal novel, 1984 -- impoverishes vocabulary in order to limit complex and critical thought and reasoning. Newspeak may appear as historically insidious buzzwords and phrases, like “Living Space” and “Fi...

In our penultimate episode of the season, we will try to make a distinction between populism—anti-establishmentarian political representation of the interests and voices of ordinary people—and the selective populism employed by fascist would-be autocrats. They claim to represent the will of the “true people” while identifying, excluding, and demonizing those that do not fit into their definition o...

If the patriarchy promises men power, why do so many of them still feel powerless? Episode thirteen pulls apart the myths of masculinity -- all the scripts that tell men how to stand, speak, fight, and everything else. From dueling pistols to MAGA hats, the performance has always required props, applause, and fear of failure. We trace how fascists and authoritarians have turned sex and gender into...

If weakness is to be despised, dying as a hero is a great way to ensure you’re never seen as weak. Episode twelve laments the victims of such a mindset. The powerful—fascist and otherwise—have forever sent idealistic young people to die in the mud over wars of words and ideas. These poor children are hailed as patriots, but they’ll never know it, because they are dead. Their blind loyalties to the...

The fascist’s utter disdain for weakness is the topic of episode eleven. To be clear, we’re talking about weakness as perceived by the fascist . Strongmen have always legitimized their control by contrasting their ideas about strength to the weaknesses they identify in their opposition. Whether it’s a physical disability, a lack of financial stability, or even lower television ratings, fascists wi...

In episode ten, we will see that for the fascist, life is permanent warfare—we live only to struggle. All must be prepared to fight, endlessly, for the leader’s vision. If you are truly one of us, then you will destroy the enemy at every opportunity. If you are not willing to fight, then you must be the enemy, or at least trafficking with the enemy. Fascists remind us that pacifism is akin to dege...

In our ninth episode, we try to wrap our minds around the duality of man, specifically the enemy, who is both weak and simultaneously too strong. The fascist tells us that the enemy is not only different from us, lesser than us, but that their differences—race/ethnicity, religion, political affiliations—are overwhelming. Furthermore, they are too many, they have too much, and they want to take mor...

Our eighth episode reminds us that the plot is all around us. Like the ancient god-kings they try to emulate, fascists are obsessed with the external and internal conspiracies that seek their ruin. From secret assassination cabals to the burning Reichstag to the sad fate of household pets at the hands of immigrants in suburban Ohio, there seems to be no limit to the forces arrayed against the fasc...