The Long Game

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's how 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 people how meeting his mother at age 17 for the first time began to broaden his understanding of racial difference his view that facts don't change people, relationships do the point that an emphasis on relationships does not mean policy changes aren't necessary, or that everything can be fixed through relationships or interpersonal kindness his wild ghost story his roller coaster faith journey, and how interracial churches were the demonstration of faith's reality he needed to believe in Christianity how 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 choices how 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 problems This 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.