Pod Only Knows

Apple TV's Severance wrapped its long-awaited 2nd season recently and left us with more answers than questions. But some answers! We (sorta) know what Severance is really all about, and we (sorta, maybe) know what Lumon is up to now! So while we wait the ungodly eternity for Severance to return, John and Kelly invited scholar Niki Dolfi on to talk about the cults, religious allusions, identity, an...

Last week, the Catholic Church absolutely shook the world by electing Robert Prevost - an Augustinian from Chicago - Pope Leo XIV, making him the first ever American pope. Immediately, MAGA lost their collective minds, calling Leo XIV a woke Marxist and an anti-Trump liberal. Leo XIV's election was, without question, a statement by the Church directed squarely at MAGA and Donald Trump, but so many...

This week, author and journalist Annika Brockschmidt joins John to talk about the perception of the American Christian Right in Europe, the possibly intentional downplaying of Christian Nationalism in Trump 2.0, and Pete Hegseth's tattoos. Annika Brockschmidt studied History, German Studies, and War and Conflict Studies in Heidelberg, Durham and Potsdam. She is a freelance journalist and author, W...

William Golding's 1952 novel Lord of the Flies is one of those books most of us of a certain age were forced to read in high school and pretty much universally hated. Often presented as a bleak meditation on human nature, Lord of the Flies certainly isn't that. But why were its real themes - the destructive nature of colonialism, the inconsistency between the ideals of democratic nations and their...

Higher education is under attack in a way few saw coming. Maybe they should have, and maybe that's part of the problem. Institutions of higher education have been a laser target of the Trump administration's authoritarian project in its first two months. And while authoritarians have long prioritized going after and dismantling academic institutes, this strategy also includes the cynical use of ma...

Before you listen to today's episode, you should know that knowing about Roko's Basilisk can doom you forever. Still here? Great. This week, John and Kelly explore a few of the religion stories that have surfaced in recent weeks, including what happens and if when Pope Francis dies soon, and the evangelical backlash of Trump appointing Paula White as the White House Faith officer.  Then, we take o...

We recorded this about a year ago, for the 25th anniversary of the release of THE MATRIX. But since Elon Musk now controls the country, we're republishing an edited-down version because it's important to know how Musk thinks. Next episode, we'll be talking about a number of the other beliefs that shape Musk's worldview, among them Roko's Basilisk, so this episode is good preparation for that conve...

This is a republished episode from John's former podcast Hard to Believe featuring an interview with Chris Kluwe In light Kluwe making national news with his recent act of anti-MAGA civil disobedience, we decided to republish an interview John conducted with Kluwe in 2021, in which he describes, among other things, how he came to be an activist and advocate for justice causes. Here is the original...

What's the deal with the far-right's obsession with Tolkien? Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is, ostensibly, a story of different races coming together to defeat a shared enemy - one that intends to shroud the world in darkness and despair. Or...is it? If you ask billionaire fascist Peter Thiel - whose surveillance company Palantir is named for an evil crystal ball in Lord of the Rings - the answer is...

This week, Kelly and John are joined by Lerone A. Martin to discuss his unfortunately timely and prescient book, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism. Martin is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor in Religious Studies, African & African American Studies, and The Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar. He also serves as the Dire...

Writer and journalist Jason Kirk's debut novel, Hell is a World Without You, was released in December of 2023 to wide acclaim. Hell is a World Without You tells the story of Isaac Siena, an Evangelical teenager living in Pennsylvania at the turn of the millennium who struggles with the dual-challenges of adolescence and his faith. The novel is drawn from elements of Kirk's own life and is set agai...

Anthony Comstock might be the most significant American that it's entirely possible you've never heard of. A zealous Christian crusader against so-called "obscenity" in the late 19th century, he is the namesake of the Comstock Act, the interstate commerce law that the Heritage Foundation plans to use to curb access to abortion pills and pornography. Born in Connecticut in the mid-1800s, Anthony Co...

The 2017 film The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring human treasure Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens, is a lovely bit of an anachronistic historical revisionism (though, to be fair, it gets a number of things right both in fact and in, pardon the pun, spirit). But it also perpetuates an increasingly popular myth - that Charles Dickens...well...invented Christmas. At least, that is, Christmas as we...

(Rerelease from 2023) What better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than to have Kelly and John ruin it for you? Just kidding! We're not here to cancel Thanksgiving and we hope you have a lovely one. But holidays are weird things - we often celebrate them without really examining why, or how we arrived at the myths and rituals that emanate from their core. And Thanksgiving is, in many ways, our strang...

Directed by first time documentary directors Haley Pappas and Smiley Stevens, Breath of Fire was released on MAX in October as a four-part documentary series. Breath of Fire is based on the 2021 Vanity Fair piece The Second Coming of Guru Jagat by Hayley Phelan, who also appears in and executive produced the series. It tells the story of Kundalini yoga practitioner turned de facto cult leader/prof...

We'll just cut to the chase - this week sucked and the next four years are going to be very dark and very difficult. But we're not here just to rage and doomcast. This Kelly and John were joined by fellow religion scholar Andrew Tobolowsky to try to provide some perspective on what's ahead, what the fight is going to be, the role Project 2025 will and won't play, and why the more likely challenge...

The Salem Witch Trials may well be the single most notorious and iconic event of America's colonial period. Every Halloween, Salem, Massachusetts, hosts untold thousands of tourists who revel in the city's occult history and reputation as America's haunted capital of spookiness. But as well-known as the Salem Witch Trials are, they remain a hotbed of historical inaccuracy and misconception. So wha...

George Ratliff's 2001 documentary Hell House chronicles the development of the 10th annual Hell House Halloween production put on by Trinity Church in Texas. A Hell House is a variation on the Halloween haunted house tradition, in which actors play out horror movie scenarios as guests move room to room to be frightened out of their minds. But Hell Houses are, instead, tools of Christian indoctrina...

"They're eating the dogs" is already enshrined as one of the most memorable and iconic (and insane) phrases ever to enter the arena of American politics. Donald Trump is a ridiculous, unserious, and increasingly gullible person, and his amplifying of a fake story of Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets in front an audience of tens of millions is a new low even for him. "They're eating the dogs"...

This week, in part inspired by the anniversary of 9/11, Kelly and John invited Thomas Lecaque on the show to talk about the ways the Christian right frame the Crusades and other violent failures to justify their own acts of political and religious violence. Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic r...

Jesus Camp was 2006's other big documentary, nominated for the Academy Award for documentary feature but losing out to a little film called An Inconvenient Truth. Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (and timed, coincidentally, to the appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court) it mainly follows three young evangelical Christians as they prepare to attend the Kids On Fire summer camp, ru...

Stockholm Syndrome is a really good MUSE song. Unfortunately, it's not a good anything else.0 On a recent episode of television's worst show, The Five on Fox News, panelist Jessica Tarlov, herself Jewish, asked her fellow panelist Greg Gutfeld why Jews tend to be Democrat and not Republican. His answer? Stockholm syndrome. Most people could probably give a decent summary of what Stockholm syndrome...

Project 2025 has (finally) become an enormous national news story. But while its goals (which go after everything from contraception to the Department of Education) have rightly been in the spotlight, it's also important to understand that, far from being the fantasy wish list of a group of fringe conservatives, it is in fact a project of a major think tank, decades in the making. It comes out of...

The 1972 film Marjoe won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. And then it spent a long time having largely been forgotten until it was restored and rereleased in 2005. Marjoe is an intimate look at the life of Marjoe Gortner, who rose to fame in the charismatic evangelical revival world as the world's youngest preacher until he was ultimately unmasked as a fraud, trained (often through...

Well it's been a heck of a week of bad news, and even before the Supreme Court decided the the president was king, Kelly and John decided to look at two news stories likely to play into next year's Supreme Court decisions: Louisiana's new Ten Commandment school mandate and Oklahoma's new requirement to include the Bible in its public school curriculum. On the surface, both of these measures are cl...