Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "How the Church can Defeat Trumpism" with Jonathan Rauch

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"How the Church can Defeat Trumpism" with Jonathan Rauch · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Hey humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, here's a dangerous idea for you.
• 0:10
  The institution that is best equipped to defeating Trumpism, to shoring up traditional anti-Trumpist
• 0:19
  American traditions of pluralism and tolerance, civility, reason, forgiveness, and of rescuing
• 0:28
  Western civilization from splitting apart into squabbling echo chambers of irrationalism.
• 0:33
  The institution best placed to do such things, to pull off the impossible, to save us all
• 0:41
  is the evangelical church that helped turbocharge Trump in the first place.
• 0:48
  And furthermore, the claim is that the people whom secular liberals like myself should
• 0:54
  form alliances with to save us all are white conservative American evangelicals.
• 1:01
  Well, let's acclaim that prick my ears up to say the least as someone who generally thinks of
• 1:05
  institutionalized religion as being part of the problem, not the solution to most of what
• 1:10
  ails us in the West. But when the man making the case is a man as wise as Jonathan Roush,
• 1:17
  I listen, he has a new book, Jonathan, it is entitled,
• 1:22
  Cross Purposes, Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy. And I first invited Jonathan on
• 1:28
  the show many months ago actually when I was thinking about the people who I wanted to speak to
• 1:33
  around inauguration time because I thought he would be fascinating to hear a pine about Trump
• 1:38
  2.0 and what we might expect the impact of a second Trump term to be on America's institutions,
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  on the institutions of liberalism, on American tolerance and pluralism and diversity.
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  Jonathan is an expert if you don't know him, he's a journalist, but basically an expert thinker in
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  how we can all get along and how the institutions of American democracy help either buttress or
• 2:04
  undermine our ability to get along and our ability to progress. His book before this one
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  was also a terrific book, it's called The Constitution of Knowledge, a defense of truth.
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  And when that was released, Sam Harris and I both interviewed Jonathan on Sam Harris's podcast,
• 2:21
  making sense you should go back and have a listen to that, that was one of two episodes
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  that Sam very kindly invited me to co-host. And Jonathan, look, he worked for the economist for a
• 2:31
  long time, he was at the sort of highest echelons of journalism, he now is a contributing editor
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  at the Atlantic magazine, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and this conversation
• 2:43
  sort of morphed as I read this book, he sent me a galley copy from his publisher and I thought well
• 2:49
  actually there's so much more to talk about here than the sort of I suppose mundane or prosaic
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  question about what happens over the next four years, because this is really about what happens
• 2:59
  over the next 40 years or 400 years to the future of human civilization and what kinds of institutions
• 3:05
  in order to be able to get along. And Jonathan's new book is really provocative because he
• 3:11
  identifies essentially the evangelical church as not necessarily an impediment to human flourishing,
• 3:17
  thoughtfulness, pluralism, democracy and tolerance, but an indispensable part of the American
• 3:22
  democratic toolkit. So we get into it, I hope you enjoy this as much as I did the one, the only
• 3:29
  Jonathan Roush. Check in with me, how are you? Where is your head in week two of Trump two?
• 3:39
  My head is that what we're looking at is in some ways more in the nature of a regime change
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  than an administration change, that it is a bad situation and getting worse.
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  In what way? Anything else.
• 3:59
  No, I think that better. We're not expecting lovely to talk to you again. I'll see you next time.
• 4:04
  Yeah, I just a little pick me up there. I wish I could say, you know, we'll get over at our
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  institutions are strong. We'll get some some vigorous shake up of calcified policies, but
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  unfortunately, that's not the story I'm seeing. So before every U.S. election in my memory,
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  there are people saying this is the this is the election that is going to change everything.
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  2016, our friend Andrew Sullivan responded to Bush's to Trump's first win
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  by writing a piece entitled, I think the Republic repeals itself and George W. Bush's when
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  was, you know, portrayed as catastrophic. Why is your response not just the same overblown half?
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  Well, I hope it proves to be. That's for sure, but I'm about to use a multisolabic word and it's
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  a new word to me and it will take just a moment if we have it to explain why I'm using this word.
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  That word is patrimonialism. How many syllables is that? Patrimonialism. I think that's seven.
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  You can't the SNM is one syllable. Do you know that phrase, by the way?
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  No. Does that ring a bell? So I didn't either until recently, but it turns out in the literature of
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  sociology before we had the modern concept of totalitarianism and even before we had
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  what we today call authoritarianism, this term patrimonialism was invented by Max Weber, the great
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  sociologist, like a hundred plus years ago, to indicate what he said is pretty much the most
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  the most common type of government. Patrimonialism is when you run the government as a family business.
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  So you got a big man on top and then you've got loyalty tests.
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  And the thing that matters most is loyalty to the governing person or family personal loyalty,
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  fealty, and Weber contrasts patrimonialism with basically modern bureaucratic rule. And that's
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  where you have systems, rules, institutions, an impersonal form of rule, which he argues is much more
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  recent, really it's invented by Bismarck and only recently becomes established well. And once
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  it becomes established, it pretty much out competes patrimonialism because patrimonialism has
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  problems like corruption and incompetence because you're promoting and continuing people based
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  on personal ties and back scratching and and patronage, not on the basis of merit. So if you
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  want to run a big modern state with a big modern military and economy, you need a bureaucracy.
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  And that's what we do so well. Okay, so along come a couple scholars, their names are Hansen
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  and Kapstein, I forget their first names, they just wrote a book a couple months ago called
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  the assault on the state. And I'm listening to them on a podcast and they're explaining patrimonialism.
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  And of course, the light bulb goes on. The reason they're explaining it is that this is the form
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  of government that Trump is instituting in his second term. Now this explains a lot, right? This
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  explains the loyalty tests, which he's administering to everyone he has personal loyalty to him.
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  The way they ask that is, do you believe the election was stolen? It explains why he is putting
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  in the power agencies, you know, the ones that can go out and arrest people or use military force
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  and that sort of thing. Why he's putting loyalists in there, including someone like
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  Pete Hegseth, who is incompetent by any reasonable bureaucratic convention. Why he's putting
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  someone like that at the Pentagon. This person will be loyal to him. It explains why he is installing
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  people who are mediocre or worse. You know, someone like Tulsi Gabbard, these are people who are
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  non entities without him. They rely on him for their reputation and their legacy. That's not true
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  if someone like James Mattis, his first term, defense secretary, that person can walk away and
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  still be a four star general. It explains why he's breaking the law. As a matter of course,
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  he just fired, was it a dozen inspectors general? Now he could have fired those people in a way
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  that followed the law would require giving notice to Congress that they're going to be discharged
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  in 30 days and then 30 days later. They're gone. That's not what he did. He fired them illegally. He
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  defied that law because he can. This is patrimonialism. Here's a thing to understand about
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  patrimonialism, which is where the light bulb went off for me. It's not the same as authoritarianism.
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  Often, it can be, in fact, frequently is layered on top of democratic politics.
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  You get elected governments that do this because a lot of people don't mind and because they're in on
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  the deal. Classical authoritarianism will bureaucratize itself in many cases. It will put in place
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  propaganda agencies, secret police, all of the things that you need to run an authoritarian
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  state. Patrimonialism by contrast, you can do that within the existing bureaucracy simply by
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  appointing people who are loyal to the big guy. It's much less institutionalized.
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  Over time, patrimonialism tends to merge into authoritarianism. That's what happened in Putin's
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  Russia, which starts as a classic patrimonial state where Putin's the big guy and everyone has to
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  be loyal. Over time, as it becomes more corrupt, it institutionalizes itself with authoritarianism.
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  That's probably not going to happen here because Trump is not interested in classical authoritarianism
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  and even if he were, I don't think he's capable of it. But what he is doing is instituting
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  patrimonial rule in United States by imposing it on the existing structures of government.
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  And the result of that, I don't think it'll be long-term authoritarianism, but it will greatly
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  weaken and diminish our institutional capacity. So I think that's what's happening right now.
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  And it's, no, it's not good. The last go we had with patrimonialism or anything like it was
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  probably under Andrew Jackson. What does diminish our institutional capacity made?
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  It means that a whole lot of very capable people will be fired or leave. That a lot of them will
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  be either not replaced at all or replaced by people who are incompetent or corrupt, whose qualification
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  for the job is that they did their loyal to Donald Trump and MAGA world. It will mean that the
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  rule of law will be hollowed out. It already is being hollowed out. Classic patrimonial move,
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  you pardon your friends. You punish your enemies, you take away their secret service protection so
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  they could get assassinated by a foreign government. This is all right out of the patrimonial
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  playbook, right? It's how, for example, a crime syndicate runs. So by the time you're done,
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  you've greatly weakened norms like rule of law and you've greatly weakened the institutional
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  capacity, the people and the norms that make our bureaucracies run effectively.
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  You mentioned pardoning your friends. Does Biden share blame for pardoning his friends and family?
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  I didn't like it, but you know, it's nothing like what Trump is doing.
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  Trump starts his term pardoning 1500 people, many of whom are violent attackers. There would be
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  cop killers, right? They attack police. It doesn't get more legal than that. But the new rule is
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  if you're my friend, you'll be fine. If you're not my friend, you won't be fine.
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  Again, classic patrimonialism. Is the silver lining of patrimonialism versus authoritarianism
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  that it will be undone when the US term limit kicks in and Trump is gone in four years?
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  With the exception of the fact that it does some damage to the civil service in the meantime.
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  Well, that's a big exception. It's going to damage the rule of law because this is going to show
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  the world that you can break the law for your president and get away with it. He won't be impeached
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  I think the courts will issue orders telling him to stop doing what he's doing and he will ignore
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  those orders. No one's in a position now that he's a lame duck president. No one's in a position to
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  make him stop doing things he really wants to do. And so it will weaken the remit of the courts.
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  And that will, the question is after he's gone, how hard is that to rebuild? I don't think we
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  just go right back to where we were before he was president. I don't know how much damage he does
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  along the way. I agree with you that if it's this versus classic authoritarianism where you know,
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  you start doing what Hitler did in Germany in 1933. Obviously, this is better.
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  But it's way less good than status quo anti. This raises a couple of things that you bring up in
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  your book. One of which I'll park for later, which is the erosion of trust in institutions.
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  And we can talk about what the impact of Trump to might be on that already existing trend and
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  how much of his rise is to blame on the erosion of trust in American society. But the other is,
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  there's a passage in your book in which you call bullshit on the claims of evangelicals and
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  evangelical churches that they sort of grudgingly had to support Donald Trump the first time around
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  because they didn't want to support Hillary Clinton. And there's a passage where you basically say
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  they had a million other ways that they could have expressed their antipathy or opposition towards
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  the disdain of the secular liberal left as it was instantiated in the Clinton campaign,
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  other than throwing their lot in with someone who was so antithetical to their principles.
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  And is there a similar parallel with what's going on in politics? Like how is it the case that
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  Pete Hegseth has just been confirmed by other politicians? In the view of this,
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  what's the word for it again? What's this? Patrimonialism? Yeah, it's not.
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  It's not a catchy term. No, it's a terrible name. We need like mobster regime or something.
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  But in the Patrimonial view of what's happening, how the hell has he managed to
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  like just be supported by all of these other people who aren't natural allies?
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  Well, he's their friend, right? They're his friend. But they're not. Trump made a promise
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  in his 2016 campaign. He says, I can get you the quote if you like, but he says, if I'm elected,
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  you will have power. And in 2024, he says exactly the same thing. He goes before the National
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  Association of Christian Broadcasters and says, if I'm elected, you'll have power like you've
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  never had before. And in a famous quote in one of these speeches, he's constantly promising power
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  to evangelicals. And one of them, he says, all you have to do is vote for me this time,
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  and you'll never even need to vote again. So it's a classic Patrimonial bargain.
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  It's like, you know, some guy rolls around and rolls Boris and says, hey, you know what,
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  if you support me, then you're going to get a really great deal for me. You're going to be one
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  of the ins, you're going to be a made man. And that's an attractive deal, especially if you feel
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  like you have cultural grievances and you've been, you know, disrespected and on the outside.
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  So they like that deal. So they took it.
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  Yeah, I mean, it's an attractive deal if you have no morality.
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  Oh, there's this little thing in the Bible. I know there's that, there's that. But
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  if you ignore, come on, John, message that Jesus was sent to earth to preach, then it's a great deal.
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  Something about eternal life and the next world and the least of these, I know, but set that aside.
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  Okay. You say it towards towards the end of your book, something interesting. And I'm going to
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  read it. If you offered to let me rerun my life as a heterosexual white Protestant who saw my values
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  reflected all around me and never needed to think about being persecuted or stigmatized, I'd reject
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  the deal. Why? Because I feel like being an outsider in three respects. I'm a homosexual
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  and I'm an atheist and I'm a Jew. You can be all three of those things. That I have had the
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  privileged position of not taking as much for granted. I think people in minority communities
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  are the first to perceive injustice. And I think that it has been the greatest privilege of my life
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  to work for LGBT equality as it's now called, specifically gay marriage. And I think if I just
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  been a member of a majority and taken my status in society for granted, that I don't think I'd
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  have the opportunity to make those contributions. And I'm guessing maybe, I don't know, you feel the
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  same way. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I enjoy being an outsider. I wouldn't want to be a normie.
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  But it's an interesting thing to the reason I raised it in this context is that part of the message
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  of your new book is that once one way for American Christianity to get out of the right wing
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  rut that it's in is for it to become more comfortable with the mindset that you just articulated
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  and to accept that they can be a virtue in being a minority. And like Christianity doesn't have
• 19:06
  to rule everything. It's actually at its best when it is channeling the spirit of this dissident
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  dude, Jesus, rather than constantly feeling aggrieved and terrified that it's no longer the main
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  game in town. Yeah, well, that's exactly right. Jesus is a figure who's marginal in his own time.
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  He's orthogonal to all previous thinkers. And I would argue all subsequent thinkers. Christianity
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  has its strongest moral witness when it is fighting persecution and trying to change Roman society.
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  It becomes decadent and corrupt when it gets power and uses that power very poorly and eventually
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  loses it. There's this wonderful phrase. I quote Mark Laberton. He's a former president of
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  Fuller Seminary that Christianity is an exilic religion. At least it's at its best when it's
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  exilic. That is meaning as in exile. Yeah, as in exile, as in an outsider in its own community,
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  as in bearing witness to Jesus and focusing society on the higher things of life instead of just
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  being part of the shuffle of everyday life, being a consumer good or being a political party.
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  And I think he's right. And I think a lot of Christians think he's right. And the Christians
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  attempt to integrate themselves with the Republican Party basically become the base of the Republican
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  Party and especially the MAGA movement in order to obtain power is a deal that is a lot of
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  Christians say, including Pete Wainer in today's New York Times, is corrupting Christianity.
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  It's corrupting the witness to Jesus. There is an interesting phenomenon here though,
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  which is that in addition to their perhaps being cynical reasons why religious leaders have
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  thrown their lot in with Make America Great and Donald Trump, you make the point that a lot of
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  pastors you've spoken to will say, this isn't us doing this strategically actually. This is
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  coming from the pews and we are torn between, you know, if you've devoted your life to being a man
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  of the cloth, you probably care about scripture more than you do about politics, but that the same
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  can't necessarily be said of the person who's who just goes to church once a week and might care
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  more about what Tucker Carlson says than about what the Bible says and they're feeling immense pressure
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  to be to be partisan. What do you do about that and where's that coming from?
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  Well, those are two different questions where it's coming from and what you do about it.
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  There's a survey that a group called Barna Consulting, Christian Consulting Group did a
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  couple of years ago. They asked pastors, have you seriously considered quitting the pastor
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  it over the past year? 42% said yes and the third reason they gave after the first two were like,
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  you know, loneliness and it's a hard job. The number three reason in a long list was
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  too political, too much politics. They hate it. They're there to preach the gospel of Jesus.
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  This is the first wave of of evangelical partisanship was, you know, fall well in Robertson.
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  I don't know if those names ring a bell with Australians, but these were politicized pastors
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  who played a big role in the Reagan years. So the first wave was top down. This wave of
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  politicization and secularization among evangelicals is as you say bottom up.
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  It seems a lot of it is driven by conservative media and cable news that people watch
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  cable news and come back to the church and say our way of life is under threat.
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  This is there's a war on Christianity. Our kids are going to come home from school with changed
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  sexes or changed genders and and the school won't even tell us and there's a war going on and
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  and we've got to win it and otherwise our whole way of life and our religion is endangered
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  and pastors will say, well, you know, the Bible says be not afraid and these parishioners will say,
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  well, I'm afraid. I should be afraid. We can't just do nothing. So this is what one pastor
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  I interviewed called the battlefield mindset and they hate it. They really don't like it.
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  It's not why they want to be there. It's not necessarily why most church members are there.
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  But you get these very active church members who bombard them on Monday morning after the sermon
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  with all the reasons why the thing was too squishy. You know, this Jesus stuff turned the other
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  cheek. Really? Come on. What's that about? We got to fight.
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  So some of it's coming from the outside culture and some of it is coming, be out of this,
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  what we just talked about, this desire for power, this desire for influence, this feeling like,
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  you know, Christians should have power. Exactly what Trump tells them.
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  Are we sure that they're wrong to want to fight? I mean, set aside the scriptural or spiritual
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  reasons, like let's just address the concern, you know, starting with the example that you just
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  gave, they're worried that their kids going to school are going to be in a climate that is
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  much more permissive of gender playfulness, shall we say, to be generous to the trans side. Then
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  they're comfortable with and the thumb of a trans ideology is on the scale of school boards and
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  academic institutions and bureaucrats. Is that unfounded?
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  They're certainly not wrong to believe they have a stake in politics and want to influence that
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  of course. No one's questioning that. It's a question of how you engage in the civic realm.
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  So again, I'm maybe at risk of filibustering here, but there's a big concept in my book.
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  Not original to me. And that concept is civic theology.
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  So evangelicals have a phrase, I didn't even know till I wrote this book, but it's very important
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  in their world. And it's called discipleship, also known as spiritual formation.
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  And that's the process of making yourself in the image of Jesus Christ, being like him in both
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  word and deed. And the church has been pretty good about, they use it as a verb, discipling
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  its members in their own church, their own community, you know, when the flood hits Asheville
• 25:50
  after Hurricane Helene, the churches are there. But there has been no work done in the evangelical
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  world or for that matter, the white Protestant world on how you approach larger civil society
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  in a Christlike way. So that's a question of how do you behave on social media, for example.
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  Do you call people names? And how do you behave in the political realm? Do you engage in politics
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  in a spirit of apocalyptic fear such that if we don't win the next election, it's the end of
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  everything. Do you leave yourself open for civil conversation and for compromise working with
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  others to figure things out, if you can, or you more interested in voting for the most extreme
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  candidate who will say the most extreme things? Do you want to drink the tears of the other side
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  and crush them and remove them from the country in some way? Or do you understand your role as
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  influencing politics, but sharing the country? So these are very different approaches to politics
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  and there's been no discipleship in the public realm. Some Christians now are working on that.
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  And the big surprise in my book is that the church that's doing the most work on that is the
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  church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka Mormons. They're working very hard at this.
• 27:18
  Let's ask that for a moment because I want to get to it. There's a lot already though.
• 27:24
  So one thing that struck me was that the stride and see that you're talking about in this
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  uncompromising attitude that's coming from religious institutions in the States has a parallel
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  like to channel the post liberals who are really the target of this book more than anyone.
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  And we can go into who they are and what they believe. But people who basically religious
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  religious philosophical thinkers in America who basically make the, well, why don't we start
• 27:55
  there? Why don't you articulate who post liberals? What a post liberal mindset that you're attacking in
• 28:00
  the book is, and then I'll finish my question. Well, you could probably define them as well
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  or better than I. You have them in Australia? No, but I have, for example, I interviewed Patrick
• 28:13
  Deneen when I was hosting a popular national radio show here called Late Night Live,
• 28:18
  briefly back when his book came out in 2018. The first book. The first book,
• 28:24
  Why Liberalism Failed or Something. But yeah, well, okay, let me give it a crack then. The thesis
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  would be something like smaller liberalism, meaning sort of this pluralistic ideal of freedom of
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  speech and freedom of thought and, you know, a kind of centrist, blareight, Clintonite,
• 28:48
  third way in politics is really just a veil for social justice types and lefties to impose their
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  wishes on the rest of us. It's deadening to the soul and corrosive to community and become,
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  and eventually turns into a, a liberty in my asthma where nobody has many meaning and everybody is
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  dressing in whatever clothes they want and gender is up in the air and roles are, you know,
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  household roles are up in the air and there is no mooring or no anchoring any more for society.
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  And what's needed is a, is a re-institution of a more communitarian and religious sensibility,
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  not just culturally, but also politically, and a recognition that the great liberal experimenters
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  has failed and we need a more traditional way of life. And these people are often fans of Victor
• 29:41
  Orban in Hungary and would like a more illiberal, yeah, their reactionaries essentially against what
• 29:50
  they see as a smaller liberal status quo. Is that close? Yeah, that's that's very well done. They
• 29:57
  have, so they say that liberalism, now we're talking about smaller liberalism, not modern progressivism,
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  that's probably clear to Australian audiences, but Americans get very confused about that.
• 30:11
  But they say that small illiberalism, you know, the John Locke and Emmanuel Kant and the founders
• 30:17
  and all of that, pretends to be a kind of neutral process in which all can thrive and it's not.
• 30:24
  In fact, it is an imperialistic cultural ideology that sacrifices faith, family, tradition,
• 30:34
  and the other foundations of a moral society on the altar of consumerism, individualism,
• 30:41
  radical freedom, you know, personal autonomy, unconstrained, and that it does this in a way that
• 30:48
  essentially mows down all opposition, including, you know, all of those good anchors of society,
• 30:55
  and that liberalism has undermined itself because once you undermine those values of
• 31:00
  faith, family, tradition, nation, community, there's nothing left to support liberalism except
• 31:06
  an overweaning woke state, and that they think is where we are. And so that's their view, and it's
• 31:12
  been influential in some circles, and there's a lot to say about it. So let me let me just finish
• 31:19
  the question then that I was about to ask which I didn't want to get to until we had articulated
• 31:24
  for people what we're talking about when we talk about post-liberals, which is that the post-liberal
• 31:29
  response to your criticism earlier of the stridancy of religious institutions and the
• 31:34
  partisanship of the pews is to say well of course they've been cornered into this by an
• 31:41
  increasingly strident secular left which takes no prisoners and insists on pushing its
• 31:49
  LGBTQIA plus and equality of the sexes and MeToo movement style reforms and cancel culture
• 32:01
  into every nook and crony of American public life. And so what you're seeing is an understandable
• 32:07
  reaction to a hegemonic secular cultural movement. What do you say to that?
• 32:14
  I say that the left is illiberal too, and the answer is liberalism got it right.
• 32:21
  Liberalism is not value-free. There's a marvelous new book about this by a guy named Alexander
• 32:27
  Lefevre. You might want to look into him for your show, but it's called liberalism as a way of life.
• 32:32
  But he points out something that's true, which is it's not the case that liberalism is just
• 32:37
  you know a hollow neutral procedural platform and the post-liberals are right about that
• 32:43
  in that liberalism rests on certain values of its own. And guess what? They're great values.
• 32:49
  They're things like toleration, civility, lawfulness, truthfulness. These are the things that the
• 32:56
  founders called Republican virtues and in fact counted on civil society including especially
• 33:02
  Christianity to inculcate. So the far left and the far right have in common that they believe
• 33:09
  liberalism has failed and they want to impose their own agenda using authoritarian and coercive
• 33:15
  means and they are each other's best friends. This is the flaw with the idea that the way you
• 33:20
  disempower the woke left is by empowering the authoritarian right. They love each other. They're
• 33:27
  good for each other's business. If you want to disempower the far left you strengthen the center.
• 33:34
  You strengthen that substantial and majority of Americans who you know just want a common sense
• 33:39
  playbook and the center is center right center left but that's what you do. So I think their
• 33:48
  premise is wrong and their solution is wrong other than that they're fine.
• 33:53
  How big of you. The second thing that I flagged at the beginning which I want to close the loop
• 34:01
  on before we continue is trust in institutions. The decline of trust. This is a background theme in
• 34:06
  your book or like you don't go at it as overtly as you have in your past works but I think without
• 34:13
  the decline in trust in institutions you don't get Donald Trump. You probably don't get the church
• 34:21
  as quite as partisan a political actor as it has become being the institution of last resort
• 34:28
  for religious people in a world where they feel betrayed by the institutions of state.
• 34:34
  Can you diagnose that for us? I'll keep the question about diagnosis and solution separate
• 34:40
  this time. Well you know there's a whole academic literature. It's mountainous in size that's
• 34:48
  trying to understand the collapse of trust in institutions and it's pretty much everything except
• 34:54
  the military in the United States and the later the generation that is the younger the cohort,
• 35:00
  the greater this decline is I talk to young people who say there's no institution they trust and
• 35:06
  you say really not even one and that kind of cynicism bordering on nihilism that's a that's making
• 35:13
  us ungovernable. So why it happened you know there's it's it's over explained it's what the word
• 35:23
  what's the word over determined so many things have happened. I'll tell you something I emphasize
• 35:29
  Josh that that other people don't the big the big thing people tend to say is that the institutions
• 35:35
  became corrupt during competent or self-interested and thus they lost our trust and I don't really
• 35:41
  think that's true speaking now for the United States but I think I could probably also say Australia
• 35:46
  for example as well I don't think there is an earlier era for whose whose institutions I would take
• 35:57
  in place of our own I think those institutions had equal or larger problems just for example they
• 36:04
  were viciously racist in America viciously anti-Semitic very often corrupt in ways which were not
• 36:14
  the case today it is true our institutions made big mistakes you know Vietnam war and so on but
• 36:20
  it is also true that our institutions have done reasonably good jobs of trying to correct those
• 36:26
  mistakes and rebuild and move on I point out to people that the two things that a government
• 36:33
  really needs to do the central government that no other force in society can do is defend the country
• 36:39
  from a foreign foreign adversary and back up the economy when it's in a full scale collapse and in
• 36:48
  the United States when attacked by al-Qaeda the United States effectively wiped out al-Qaeda and
• 36:56
  when the economy collapsed the government backstopped it did a very good job I think Congress came
• 37:03
  through for COVID in the United States with a lot of aid probably saved the economy again so here's
• 37:12
  where I just get off the boat with with everyone else maybe including you but I'm I just go for it
• 37:17
  which is I don't think it's so much that institutions failed the public as that the public failed
• 37:24
  our institutions starting in the 60s on the left with you know burn baby burn and don't trust anyone
• 37:31
  over 30 and all of that it became fashionable on the left to attack institutions and then starting
• 37:38
  in the era of Rush Limbaugh you get the populist right which is even more of a tuperative against
• 37:45
  institutions they're all corrupt they're all left dominated they're out to get you
• 37:50
  I think a lot of this was done for profit and for power but I think when you have a 50-year war
• 37:57
  on institutions conducted by politicians and partisans and activists who have a stake in demolishing
• 38:03
  institutions for gain eventually that will have a bad effect so it's not everyone else's
• 38:11
  explanation but I think it's a big chunk of it yeah you mentioned there maybe maybe we're on
• 38:17
  different trains there and I would say that 18 months ago or two years ago we would have been on
• 38:22
  different trains because I was more critical of institutions but now I regard the mind virus
• 38:28
  of winging about institutions as part of the the big problem itself actually like I was I think I was
• 38:39
  wrong in the latter part of covert to hold institutions to I mean I certainly didn't hold them
• 38:45
  to such an unreasonably high standard as some of my peers but I think you I think I've come around
• 38:50
  to agreeing with you that the the phenomenon of that there's a passage in your book one of the
• 38:57
  aha moments in your new book for me was to make the claim that institutions ought to be treated
• 39:06
  with the same grace as religion expects us to treat individual human beings the institutions
• 39:12
  are human-made creations and just as we shouldn't denigrate people holy and entirely no matter how
• 39:23
  bad their mistakes we shouldn't do the same to our own institutions we should have a certain
• 39:27
  amount of forgiveness and bigness of heart when it comes to our institutions just as we understand
• 39:33
  that we should to our fellow man and that hit me hard because how higher our how high is the bar
• 39:41
  that we set for human institutions that we would never expect of any other human endeavor like
• 39:47
  how right does the CDC have to get it you know how flawless does the yeah does I mean
• 39:55
  you mentioned covert I mean quite quite apart from the economic support that governments
• 39:59
  provided during covert which probably was too much because it then caused an inflation crisis but
• 40:05
  the the epidemiological that work you know the even Trump on project warp speed you know
• 40:13
  his best his signature achievement they're throwing a huge amount of money as a guarantee to drug
• 40:18
  companies that the US government would buy up whatever drugs they had regardless of whether they
• 40:22
  and cutting a lot of red tape yeah those are institutions working um the puzzle yeah yeah sorry
• 40:32
  that is that is that is so right you know we it's so easy to denigrate these institutions
• 40:38
  another podcaster Andrew Keane you may know him ask me to to say what were the five most
• 40:45
  interesting or important events of the last of 2024 and I put on that list something that's
• 40:52
  almost completely forgotten which is maybe it's unknown in Australia you're about to tell me
• 40:59
  but in April of last year a giant um what do they call it a a container ship
• 41:08
  hit the the bay bridge in Baltimore the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and took down the bridge a catastrophe
• 41:20
  did did all this did any of this surface in the Australian press not that I know
• 41:26
  so this is a traffic bridge it's a very important bridge and it spans the harbor this happened at
• 41:34
  I think it was about 125 am so the ship once it realized that it couldn't apply the brakes or change
• 41:44
  direction and it was hitting hitting straight for the pier supporting the bridge radio to distress call
• 41:53
  so the land-based authorities and within one minute literally one minute police on that bridge
• 42:04
  closed it to traffic the result of that is that only six lives were lost on that bridge
• 42:11
  and those were construction workers who were there doing work mercifully this is of course
• 42:16
  130 in the morning that helps but it's pretty hard to complain about a one-minute response time
• 42:24
  to get that bridge closed what then happens is this could take a very long time to repair but instead
• 42:35
  within I think it's oh I don't hold me to this but I think it's within six weeks the authorities
• 42:41
  in Baltimore have opened a channel through the bridge now this whole bridge is collapsed right it's
• 42:47
  there they found a channel through it and within three months they had the harbor fully functional
• 42:54
  under budget and ahead of schedule and I put that on my list Josh because no one knows it
• 43:01
  we just take it for granted when these institutions respond well or even phenomenally well
• 43:07
  so what what turned you around on this question I'm curious what changed your mind in the past 18 months
• 43:16
  I
• 43:21
  it was gradual so it's hard to pinpoint I can't identify in my head a specific moment but it's been
• 43:30
  a growing I think it's come along in parallel with my finding increasingly tired the anti-work
• 43:39
  stick that the two have been a self-reinforcing evolution that the the anti-work anti-cancel culture
• 43:49
  there are so many things you can't say anymore because the left has gone crazy
• 43:53
  stick has become obviously fatuous and whilst still true in many ways has become so cynically
• 44:02
  deployed by people who have much worse motives that I think I'm placing greater scrutiny like
• 44:08
  my bullshit detector is just more more sensitively refined than it would have been in 2022
• 44:15
  to claims of you know incompetent or secret cabals doing things terribly and betraying the
• 44:24
  common man there's just something conspiratorial and potentially authoritarian about the mindset
• 44:34
  that wants to go around hunting for ways in which dark powerful forces are corrupting everything
• 44:41
  that I've become more suspicious of well that's that's interesting wokeness is on the decline around
• 44:49
  here and that's pretty evident and yet a lot of folks in America on the right are still claiming
• 44:57
  it's as bad as ever and the institutions are all against us you know you'd never know that Donald
• 45:02
  Trump just won a famous victory and banned EI throughout the entire government from the way some
• 45:08
  of them talk they are I resonate with what you're saying which is that a lot of these guys who
• 45:15
  are denigrating institutions and complaining that they're being battered by the culture every day
• 45:22
  are actually in business for themselves and doing mighty well yeah also does the critique help
• 45:29
  like to the extent that the critique helps us reform institutions and make them more effective
• 45:34
  great but if the critique further erodes the trust that is required in order to make institutions
• 45:40
  perform then stop helping buddy yes like go and reform the institutions if you're worried about
• 45:47
  the institutions yeah that that's exactly right it kind of circles back I think to the the
• 45:54
  questioner point you made earlier which is isn't a true that there are problems with politics that
• 45:59
  Christians do want to engage with and change because they disagree and and the answer is yeah okay
• 46:05
  so how do you get that done do you do it by shrieking that it's the end of the world and you're going to
• 46:11
  to drown you know drown liberals in their own tears or do you find a way to improve the situation
• 46:18
  do you show up for example at the school board meeting screaming that your children are being
• 46:23
  propagandized by by woke socialists or do you go into that district and work with teachers and
• 46:30
  principals and others to try to figure out how to how to arrange things in a better way and what
• 46:37
  folks like Curtis Chang who you were citing earlier who's got this idea this theology about
• 46:42
  institutional love loving our institutions which are human they're human institutions and what
• 46:49
  the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is doing which is saying we should without giving
• 46:54
  up on any of our principles we should play a piece making role a role of patience negotiation
• 46:59
  and mutual accommodation what they're doing is saying you can approach these institutions in a more
• 47:05
  Christ-like way and in fact as you do that you can get better results as a result of approaching
• 47:14
  institutions in a Christ-like way the I mean there are one of the points that is foundational
• 47:22
  to the argument that you're making in the book is that there are there are common principles
• 47:27
  between the the Madisonian smaller liberal respect for institutions and Christianity which is
• 47:37
  something I hadn't really thought about I mean I've thought about it's interesting because this
• 47:41
  book is almost a rebuke to yourself of a quarter century ago but yourself of a quarter century
• 47:47
  ago is where I am still am with with respect to religion which is I think there's something
• 47:55
  deeply silly about it and deeply hypocritical and corrupting about institutionalized dogma
• 48:04
  and I think we would all just be better off if we could be more enlightened and more secular and
• 48:11
  more Danish about everything instead of as religiously to range as the United States and yet
• 48:19
  the point that you're making is that that's actually a phony binary that it is not that Christianity
• 48:25
  is set up on one side and secular liberalism on another there is a shared root system
• 48:31
  and we just have to foster that root system can you articulate what that is?
• 48:37
  well that was so articulate that I'm not sure I could I could quite match it I love shared
• 48:43
  root system as a metaphor and I may pick that up you know you have a future in journalism
• 48:51
  tell that to the public broadcaster in Australia you'll leave them in the dust
• 48:59
  so yeah I was 23 years ago I wrote what I now call the dumbest thing I ever wrote
• 49:05
  and it celebrated secularization and said religion is a source of dogma and division and will be
• 49:11
  better off without it so isn't it a wonderful thing that in America the role of religion is fading
• 49:19
  specifically Christianity and you know I'm a homosexual American born in 1960 so I grew up seeing
• 49:28
  on a industrial scale um bigotry and hate and hypocrisy and cruelty toward homosexual people
• 49:39
  and of course a good deal of that still emanates from certain quarters of conservative white
• 49:45
  Protestantism in America so I'm not whitewashing any of that but the experiment that I suggested
• 49:54
  would be great in 2003 has taken place we've seen in the United States what's called the great
• 50:00
  detourching it's really it's a collapse of Christianity and especially white evangelical Christianity
• 50:07
  that looked like the strong wing of Christianity the sort of the ecumenical
• 50:14
  mainline Christian churches collapsed in the last century but this century it's now the
• 50:19
  evangelical churches that are detourching and the it's it's happening at a stunning rate
• 50:25
  and it turns out then instead of making the country more governable it's this this has made the
• 50:30
  country less governable people are more isolated they are more lonely worse than that they are
• 50:35
  turning to substitute religions which some of them are you know they're like wica they just don't
• 50:42
  do the job of inculcating age old values um but some of them are just actively destructive like
• 50:50
  QAnon and I'd argue that MAGA is one and that wokeness is one these substitute religions part
• 50:55
  as in politics has become a kind of religion in the United States this is source of identity and if
• 51:02
  you're losing the next election that's an apocalyptic event so it turns out that the founders were
• 51:10
  right and that religion is a load bearing wall in our democracy and that they're just some things
• 51:15
  we rely on it to do like socialize people and do what the founders called republican virtue
• 51:21
  and that the substitutes for religion are much worse and that means that people like me
• 51:25
  although I don't think I'll ever be a believer I don't think I have it in me I have developed
• 51:32
  an attitude that we need to cherish our religious institutions and that that they are essential
• 51:42
  it feels a bit like throwing in the towel like the challenge was to make people
• 51:47
  less religious and to shepherd them for want of a better verb towards secularism and enlightenment
• 51:54
  values and because many of them have left formal religion and gone into woo woo be it wokeism
• 52:02
  or trumpism we therefore have to give up and herd them back into churches where they can be
• 52:11
  sold a bunch of nonsense about the nature of the cosmos and the nature of the history of
• 52:16
  what happened in the Middle East 2000 years ago instead of finding ways to create secular institutions
• 52:22
  that will be robust and thrive in the 22nd century and create a new civilization.
• 52:29
  Well it'll have to be both because I'm not for hurting anyone into any place
• 52:35
  or asking anyone to be religious who doesn't believe in religion the only reason to
• 52:40
  join a religion is because you think it's true there's no other good reason to do that and I don't
• 52:44
  want anyone to be you know to pretend to believe something they don't and couldn't make them
• 52:50
  do that if I tried so my message is actually quite different from that it's that
• 52:54
  in the annals of human sociology it appears that nothing is remotely as good as organized
• 53:03
  religion and especially the great organized religions at organizing people into worship
• 53:13
  and communal participation at inculcating core values and a certain kind of community spirit
• 53:21
  and focusing them on the larger things in life than just their personal grievances
• 53:29
  and and whims and those religions have been around for a long time for a reason they're
• 53:35
  they're pretty good at that now they also as as you and I know all too well they have a dark side
• 53:40
  we don't deny that so that being the case it appears to be just a fact that a lot of people rely
• 53:50
  on religion to give themselves a sense of purpose in life and it also appears to be an empirical
• 53:55
  fact that no the secular substitutes are not as good having set all that as I say I'm not for
• 54:03
  hurting anyone into believing anything false I'm saying something actually quite different which is
• 54:10
  the gospel of Jesus Christ is very supportive of the constitutional values of James Madison
• 54:17
  they're really very close and white evangelical Protestantism in America
• 54:24
  has turned its back on many of those Christian virtues that Christ preached and that Madison
• 54:30
  depended on and I'm not saying the Christians not saying that anyone should become a Christian
• 54:36
  who doesn't want to be and I'm also not saying the Christians should abandon Christianity to become
• 54:41
  more secular or more democratic small d large d or more republican or more liberal or
• 54:48
  I'm just saying why don't Christians give a little bit more Christianity a try because what they're
• 54:55
  doing now isn't working it's wrecking our country and it is harming their witness it is shrinking
• 55:01
  their faith so maybe the gospel of Jesus Christ and his very different approach to how you engage the
• 55:10
  world and what you think is important maybe that would be a better message for our country and for
• 55:17
  Christianity it seems like you know not the world's most controversial thing to say
• 55:25
  does that does that address your yes it does satisfaction you know you're putting about throwing
• 55:30
  in the towel I mean look I still have lingering questions about you know you mentioned briefly in
• 55:41
  the in the book Scandinavia and Japan and places like that and say well they're not as culturally
• 55:47
  diverse as the United States so maybe they're different but I still have a big question like
• 55:51
  about that about why is the US supposedly this place that can't figure out what many other countries
• 55:59
  have which is how to marry community with secularism well first thing I'd say to that is have you
• 56:07
  looked at those other countries lately have you looked at Hungary Italy Germany several Scandinavian
• 56:14
  countries though it's hard to tell them apart France have you looked at how they're becoming
• 56:20
  ungovernable have you looked at the rise of the authoritarian populist right in many of those
• 56:25
  countries the next president of France may be Marine Le Pen Poland barely managed to pull itself out
• 56:33
  of the the peace PIS government that it had but but they're waiting in the wings those are not the
• 56:41
  countries that are generally held up as being secular bastions those are some of the more religious
• 56:45
  countries in in Europe Poland we're seeing the same forces in Scandinavia we're seeing the rise
• 56:52
  of a populist right wing there it's it's all over the world and there's lots of reasons for it
• 56:57
  you know there's you can cite social media and for media fragmentation and you can cite
• 57:02
  the global migration crisis so those things are in play but it's also very plausible to say that
• 57:11
  they're having some of the same problems we are which is that when when Christianity is not doing
• 57:16
  its job of aligning public values with with with public governability I guess you could say
• 57:27
  it leaves the door open for other more sinister forces to enter and say well you want meaning
• 57:31
  in life I'll give you meaning in life it says damn immigrants it's where we're losing our life
• 57:37
  blood as a country possibly but but I mean these are places Japan and you know Denmark and Norway
• 57:43
  are places that have been non-religious for a half century and now we see this phenomenon
• 57:50
  of a growing far right and one can say we you know one can attribute the decline of religion to
• 57:58
  that but but one could also just not and could just say something else is going on that's causing
• 58:03
  the far right to emerge in places that are both religious like the United States and non-religious
• 58:09
  like Norway um I don't think it gets you very far to say like you're coming very close to
• 58:18
  bumping up against the criticism that you make of the post-liberals which is like what's your
• 58:21
  alternative exactly like you know the post-liberals are like you know we don't have community anymore
• 58:28
  and we're all atomized smaller liberal individuals to which you say and your alternative is like
• 58:40
  point me to this point me to the utopia of pleasure and plenty where everybody is living happily
• 58:46
  in a theocracy um in a way Josh that the point I'm making is is so obvious and it's such a short
• 58:56
  hop you know from premise to conclusion um that I would argue it's very different from what the
• 59:02
  post-liberals are doing which is a very long hop and and my proposition is only that our societies
• 59:10
  will be more governable if what Christianity preaches is more closely aligned with first what
• 59:19
  the gospel says and through that the republican virtues that the founders called on
• 59:25
  that when Christianity and liberal democracy are pulling in opposite directions you're going to
• 59:30
  have some very serious problems and we're facing those and that when they're more closely aligned
• 59:35
  and supportive of each other things will work better to me that seems like a fairly obvious
• 59:41
  proposition right but maybe I'm missing something no it is a fairly obvious proposition it is
• 59:46
  just as you say a smaller bore proposition than the proposition that um religion is
• 59:56
  antithetical to reason and therefore we should undertake every opportunity that we can to
• 1:00:02
  diminish its influence because I do understand what you're saying which is it's not you're not
• 1:00:07
  just calling on religion to reform itself you're also calling on secular Americans and secular
• 1:00:12
  people everywhere to reform their understanding of religion as well and to have some more empathy
• 1:00:17
  for the institutions of religion and to display some greater grace and civility I mean you make
• 1:00:22
  an interesting point about civility which I liked as well because I've always I'm I'm I find myself
• 1:00:27
  tied up in knots about this notion of civility I I don't like the expectation that every conversation
• 1:00:36
  or to be civil because the name of this podcast is uncomfortable conversation is right and I think
• 1:00:41
  there is a virtue in calling out bullshit and yet you want the bullshit calling out to be
• 1:00:49
  constructive and you want it to be done in a way where if someone did it to me I would ultimately
• 1:00:55
  be grateful for it having been done um and I think you make that point I can't I don't have it
• 1:01:01
  in front of me about civility that civility is not the same as being nice but about watch what is
• 1:01:07
  civility to you to me it's about a core liberal value of approaching everyone
• 1:01:18
  on the assumption that their dignity and value as a human being is the equal of mine
• 1:01:24
  and treating them the way I would want to be treated in that situation and of course if that
• 1:01:28
  means that they're wrong I would want to be corrected so I will correct them but I will do it
• 1:01:32
  in a way that I will it will respect their humanity and would be the way I would hope to be treated
• 1:01:37
  by them civility is you're right it's it's not just politeness and it's something that the founders
• 1:01:42
  counted on and basically it's willingness to to share the country I think it was Richard Dawkins
• 1:01:49
  who said to her a religious person who said that they were offended by his challenging
• 1:01:54
  their claims that I respect you too much to pretend to respect your stupid beliefs
• 1:02:02
  yeah and that's that's a powerful way of putting it but I like it it's not
• 1:02:05
  tackful but it's not uncivil either David Blinkenhorn who you may know he's one of the founders
• 1:02:10
  of brave or angels among other distinctions we used to be antagonists on opposite sides of
• 1:02:16
  the same sex marriage debate and became friends as a result of that in the end and he wound up
• 1:02:21
  coming over to our side on that view and became an advocate for same sex marriage but that's
• 1:02:27
  neither here nor there but but he says this very thoughtful thing which is that civility rests upon
• 1:02:34
  doubt civility means approaching someone with the idea that I might be wrong and that that gives
• 1:02:41
  me a certain certain inclination and maybe even obligation to listen to come to someone
• 1:02:50
  with a sense of curiosity and I actually I think there's something to that something about
• 1:02:56
  doubt I mean it's not very religious I gotta say like you know it like it's it's expecting a
• 1:03:04
  lot of a religious but if you truly believe that the creator of the universe wrote a book
• 1:03:10
  why should you doubt your faith it's right there in the book well I can't I won't try to answer
• 1:03:19
  that question because I don't believe the book either but when I do read the book I look at what
• 1:03:27
  Jesus Christ actually says so maybe let's can we just talk for a minute about the substance
• 1:03:34
  of the alignment between the gospel of Jesus and the constitution of Madison to me that's really
• 1:03:41
  the core idea of of the book and and maybe it'll help clarify if I spell that out is that okay for
• 1:03:48
  just a moment yeah let's describe the roots so when I ask Christians what are the essential
• 1:03:57
  tenets of Christianity if you had to recite them as it were standing on one leg they say number one
• 1:04:07
  don't be afraid possibly the most frequently repeated injunction in the Bible second imitate
• 1:04:14
  Jesus strive to be like him and third forgive each other retribution inventions belongs to the
• 1:04:22
  Lord not to us so I mean others say well there's repentance that's big and others you know but
• 1:04:31
  those three are pretty uncontroversial as the core elements of Christian teaching just say
• 1:04:39
  and be not afraid be not afraid imitate Jesus and forgive each other right so might break through
• 1:04:48
  an understanding all this and writing this book was to look at those three values and say you know
• 1:04:55
  those look a lot like the core premises of what we call Madisonian pluralism but this is to put
• 1:05:03
  it in the less fancy way this is the constitutional values that our founders gave us and depended on
• 1:05:09
  us and told us we would have to maintain they didn't just give us the constitution they said we've
• 1:05:17
  got to defend the values that underlie the constitution so be not afraid maps pretty neatly on to
• 1:05:28
  rotation and office sometimes you're going to lose an election it's not the end of the world
• 1:05:33
  you've got it you've got to have some confidence in the system and in your fellow countrymen so that
• 1:05:40
  you've lose the election but maybe you can learn something that becomes stronger and it won't
• 1:05:44
  destroy the nation so the whole idea of the flight 93 election this election is the end of the
• 1:05:49
  world just that is not a republican attitude yeah oh I'm sorry just explain that reference
• 1:05:57
  oh yeah this is a metaphor in 2016 flight 93 was the the flight that was taken over by terrorists
• 1:06:03
  and was aimed for the capital and was grounded when the passengers took it down so the idea is that
• 1:06:10
  the bad guys the woke people on the left have taken over the cockpit and this election is the
• 1:06:14
  the very last chance to stop them so that's number one be not afraid you can't you know Madisonian
• 1:06:21
  pluralism relies on trust um number two be like Jesus so Jesus is an extraordinary figure because
• 1:06:33
  he is a radical egalitarian and he judges how well a regime is doing by how it treats the least
• 1:06:41
  of these and he believes in the fundamental inherent dignity of every human being that translates
• 1:06:50
  directly into the republican virtues of everyone enjoys basic rights fundamental rights
• 1:06:59
  in alienable rights as it was put in a famous document and we all enjoy a certain basic equality
• 1:07:07
  and that that's how we're supposed to treat each other not in law but you asked about civility
• 1:07:11
  that those presumptions of basic dignity as humans and basic equality in the system that's liberalism
• 1:07:18
  in a nutshell and then number three um forgive each other so that doesn't map I think quite as
• 1:07:28
  clearly but it's pretty closely related to the liberal democratic idea of forbearance
• 1:07:35
  which means okay sometimes you're going to win an election do you then try to purge the country
• 1:07:41
  of the other side do you say you're going to crush the libs and drink their cheers and the answer is
• 1:07:47
  no you need to treat them the way you want them to treat you one of these days when they're in power
• 1:07:53
  and you're not so you need to show forbearance it's not quite the same as forgiveness
• 1:08:01
  but it's related so I'm looking at this and saying I'm not asking anything of Christians except
• 1:08:09
  to to more closely more accurately reflect what Jesus is telling them to do and I'm just saying
• 1:08:14
  if they do that I'm not a believer but if you guys do that what Jesus tells you to do it will
• 1:08:19
  be good for this country and probably good for your faith so the church that has taken has gotten
• 1:08:26
  that memo which you spend the last third of the book looking at is the Mormon church you mentioned
• 1:08:31
  it earlier do you want to just explain that to us what they're doing yeah this is the church of
• 1:08:37
  Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as they're now called and this was this was a big surprise for
• 1:08:44
  me it's wound up being one of the reasons I wrote the book they let's see how much detail Josh
• 1:08:51
  well just go back to 2008 and yeah that's where I was headed so in 2008 the Supreme Court of
• 1:09:00
  California ordered gay marriage and the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• 1:09:08
  came out fiercely against that they had all of their bishops that's what they call their pastors
• 1:09:14
  read a statement across the pulpit mobilizing Mormons to stop this thing and they succeeded in
• 1:09:22
  stopping it and there was a mighty backlash against the church which they were not prepared for
• 1:09:27
  people in our community the gay and lesbian community were were so hurt and wounded and offended by
• 1:09:33
  that and that led to a rethink which led them to compromise in 2015 with the LGBT group in Utah a
• 1:09:44
  landmark compromise that they supported and helped negotiate that passed a LGBT nondiscrimination
• 1:09:52
  bill in Utah deep red deep conservative republican Utah and also included some specific religious
• 1:09:59
  liberty carve-outs for religious organizations so that you know Brigham Young University which
• 1:10:05
  is their university would not have to house married same-sex couples in the married dorms things
• 1:10:11
  like that things that the LGBT group in the state equality Utah said yeah sure we can live with
• 1:10:17
  and the results of this was not only to provide those protections but the compromise itself the
• 1:10:22
  process of negotiating this open channels between the Mormons and the conservatives and the legislature
• 1:10:28
  and equality Utah which have lasted to this day those those bonds of trust you ask earlier how do
• 1:10:34
  you rebuild institutions well part of it is people go to do the actual work of sitting down together
• 1:10:40
  figuring it out and that is still the case today so i'm looking at this i'm gobsmacked i wonder
• 1:10:46
  what's going on and then in 2021 the number two person in their church very hierarchical who is a
• 1:10:53
  former Utah state Supreme Court justice very distinguished constitutional scholar in his own right
• 1:11:01
  gives a speech saying that our duty as Christians is to model patience negotiation and mutual
• 1:11:08
  accommodation and they in fact do that they they wound up helping put through a bill that
• 1:11:14
  enshrines my marriage same-sex marriage your your marriage if you're an American in federal statute
• 1:11:21
  even though their church opposes homosexuality as a sin and opposes same-sex marriage you can get
• 1:11:27
  excommunicated for it yet they help pass a law that enshrined it in law and added some religious
• 1:11:34
  liberty protections which put them at ease so what's going on here is that they have developed a
• 1:11:42
  theology that what Christ wants us to do on this planet as Mormons as members of the church
• 1:11:50
  is be peacemakers for them that is being like him and that doesn't mean you give up on your core
• 1:11:56
  values but it does mean you engage in patience negotiation and mutual accommodation
• 1:12:04
  you don't stoke the fires of the culture war you look for ways to bring people together
• 1:12:10
  and that's what they're actually doing is part of the one of my worries about using them as an
• 1:12:17
  analogy is that as i understand it that church regards the US constitution as one of its
• 1:12:25
  holy documents doesn't it doesn't don't they think the constitution was written by God
• 1:12:30
  they believe the constitution is divinely inspired they're not written by God they do have four
• 1:12:35
  scriptures the constitution but the constitution's not one of their holy scriptures they have four of
• 1:12:41
  those the Jewish the Jewish Bible the Christian Bible and then two of their own but yeah they do
• 1:12:49
  believe the constitution's divinely inspired but you know Josh it's an easy it's a short
• 1:12:54
  a leap for a for a Mormon to regard the the founding document of the United States as sacred
• 1:13:02
  than it is for another Christian right I mean the other Christian can say I mean our you know our
• 1:13:10
  our job here is to preside over a christendom that flourishes and that is a more that is a more
• 1:13:17
  senior pursuit than well don't don't get the wrong idea the church the church is not espousing
• 1:13:24
  these values because they think the constitution is sacred they're espousing these values because
• 1:13:29
  they think that's Christ's commandment they think that the constitution embodies those ideas and
• 1:13:37
  values but the values themselves are coming from Jesus Christ and his teaching and church teachings
• 1:13:42
  that go to some very fundamental ideas they have about free will and agency and things like that
• 1:13:50
  right right and in the in the example that you gave you talk about conversations that you've had
• 1:13:56
  with people who advocate who you know Mormons who were pushing for this accommodation with
• 1:14:02
  the gay community and them saying that it's not just a strategic I mean it's two things right it's
• 1:14:09
  a strategic policy a position because they think that getting half a loaf is better than no
• 1:14:15
  loaf in the sense that if they help write the gay marriage legislation then they can also ensure
• 1:14:22
  that it contains provisions for religious freedom that will enshrine their ability to continue
• 1:14:27
  discriminating against gay people and then on the other hand in addition to being strategic it's
• 1:14:32
  what you just alluded to which is it's also a spiritual desire to be bigger than any particular
• 1:14:39
  policy yeah so a different way of putting that I don't think they're doing this as a strategic
• 1:14:45
  call because some lobbyist in Washington told them this is a way to better to get a better deal
• 1:14:52
  the and I think we know that because I mentioned that in 2022 they they help push through an
• 1:14:59
  effort that enshrine same-sex marriage in statute which is really important by the way because
• 1:15:04
  there's a movement to overturn the Supreme Court decision that
• 1:15:10
  made gay marriage legal in America I know you Americans are always leaving everything up to the
• 1:15:14
  courts just write a goddamn law for crying out loud well that's and that's what we did it's it's
• 1:15:20
  it's a it's a it's a huge deal Josh it's just a huge huge deal for me and Michael's marriage to be
• 1:15:26
  now established established in federal law on statute so the answer is that they could have just
• 1:15:33
  sat it out they could have done nothing which or they could have done what others in Christian
• 1:15:41
  world did which is basically throw spitballs and the result of that would have been either the
• 1:15:50
  law that passed without them having to endorse it or nothing at all in which case they could say
• 1:15:55
  they had no part of gay marriage the fact that they got involved to actually push this through
• 1:16:02
  I think is more than just strategic I think it's a way of I think it is based on their
• 1:16:09
  genuine theological commitment to what they see as their role in American society right now
• 1:16:17
  right I mean my only point would be that if you can't persuade other churches on the basis
• 1:16:21
  of spirituality you might be able to persuade them on the basis of strategy I know I know I'll
• 1:16:28
  try that you know the cultural oppositionalism and the church of fear you know and the apocalyptic
• 1:16:34
  rhetoric that that gets them nothing yeah whereas so here's the other side of their problems in
• 1:16:41
  states it might get them bombs in the pews no they're bandoning the pews this is this is the whole
• 1:16:46
  problem you know I have a card here just full of statistics and it's like I mean some of this stuff
• 1:16:52
  is is a mating 40 million people just between 2008 and 2022 have completely left religion and
• 1:17:01
  are no longer attending services church membership which was 70% right through the 20th century is
• 1:17:09
  now below half just in the last 20 years you can go on and on so no it is not keeping
• 1:17:15
  bums and seats it turns out that doing partisan politics is not something people want in church
• 1:17:21
  so that's not working for them and then if you look at at what their respect for marriage
• 1:17:28
  active this is the law that made my marriage part of federal law so the other half of that law
• 1:17:37
  said that never will the United States government use tax breaks and federal dollars and federal
• 1:17:49
  contracts or anything else of that sort to try to nudge or force churches to recognize same sex
• 1:17:57
  marriages if they don't want to this takes off the table the biggest single fear the church had
• 1:18:03
  which is if we don't recognize gay marriage in our churches will lose our tax breaks and the
• 1:18:10
  left the progressive left had threatened to do that under under the respect for marriage act
• 1:18:18
  100% of the democrats in congress went on record is saying we are not going to use the federal
• 1:18:26
  government power to force you guys to recognize same sex marriage that is a in my view i think
• 1:18:34
  it's a good thing period because i for a religious freedom but that is a very big win that is way
• 1:18:43
  better than you actually do if you just hunker down in the corner and you don't engage
• 1:18:48
  there will be gay act i mean they'll again like any good compromise they'll be the yield
• 1:18:53
  cop it from both sides on this one right i mean religious people will say why should we be forced
• 1:18:57
  to get on board with a cultural shift that we're deeply opposed to and gay activists will say well
• 1:19:04
  would you be okay with carving out an exemption for churches to be racist you know why is it our
• 1:19:10
  community that has to cop it like what you know if it's a civil rights issue i mean i think you
• 1:19:16
  actually answered this beautifully in the book i have a let me let me quote you to you john
• 1:19:24
  something every writer enjoys the book is better than the movie this is a good this is as good a
• 1:19:32
  defensive pluralism as i've read when my LGBT friends you write demand that their weddings be served
• 1:19:38
  by every business no matter the enterprises size location or faith they may see enforcement of
• 1:19:45
  customer civil rights but i see doctrine a totalism if a balance can be struck allowing the
• 1:19:52
  large majority of LGBT couples to obtain wedding services while exempting a modest number of
• 1:19:58
  mostly small businesses that's not a win for one side and a loss for the other it's a win for both
• 1:20:05
  because it deescalates the tensions which tear the fabric of pluralism so there you go i've just
• 1:20:11
  answered you quit my question for you yeah that's need you beautifully said Josh i could
• 1:20:16
  I could come back this entire interview just by reading asking a question and then reading from a book
• 1:20:22
  like a pilot can i ask you something yeah um it goes back to something you said earlier but i
• 1:20:29
  just want to hear a bit more about it so you are where i was 22 years ago which is very skeptical
• 1:20:39
  of Christianity and religion thinking we'd be probably better off without it if we could
• 1:20:47
  and i want to know to what extent either this book or events generally have changed that attitude
• 1:21:01
  i'll need to sleep on this book for six months to know the answer to that question probably
• 1:21:06
  i think it's shifted something because i respect your wisdom i suppose uh not to make you feel old
• 1:21:17
  but you know i wouldn't be surprised if my own trajectory mirror yours um the
• 1:21:27
  ruthlessness and madness of the world at the moment makes me understand why some people will
• 1:21:35
  reach for religion as the missing jigsaw piece that would resolve everything um i mean you know
• 1:21:44
  not not formally religious people but you know just uh there's a there's a whole wing of the kind of
• 1:21:50
  new right that bemoans the loss of religion and leaps on the fact that Richard Dawkins called
• 1:21:58
  himself a cultural Christian or that ian her cia le has become a Christian or that you know there's this
• 1:22:05
  there's a reassuring sense of uh of stability that comes not just from religion but
• 1:22:10
  even now some people on the right calling for monarchism or you know other forms of
• 1:22:17
  traditional um institutional methods of rooting ourselves to some sort of certainty in a disorienting
• 1:22:25
  world but i just regarded as a my still it still smells to me like a cop out like throwing in the
• 1:22:33
  towel like we haven't like we're a civilization trying to that is currently going through an
• 1:22:38
  information revolution it is turning everything upside down it is about to be um exacerbated by an
• 1:22:46
  artificial intelligence revolution and this is as profound as the discovery of fire or the printing
• 1:22:53
  press and we are currently a bunch of baby giraffes trying to learn how to stand up all covered in
• 1:23:01
  placental goo and we don't know how to do so and so we're we're grasping for things that
• 1:23:06
  feel familiar and the church is one of those things it's right to me that that's probably closer to
• 1:23:12
  the truth but that if we look back at the long lens of the future you know a future historian will
• 1:23:17
  look back and go well obviously you know thinking that thinking that Christianity was the solution
• 1:23:24
  to their problem of how to converse with one another and find meaning in community was that
• 1:23:30
  was short lived are you saying it's too bad that we have to rely on this crutch but we do need to
• 1:23:35
  rely on it or are you saying we don't need to crutch at all and we'll we'll make this transition
• 1:23:40
  more effectively if we don't resort to religion i'm saying i think i suspect that humankind will
• 1:23:45
  only survive in the long term if we figure out a way to do it without religion well you may be right
• 1:23:52
  always the moment but you know it's not at some point the most frequently asked question i get
• 1:23:58
  about this book and all this this work that i've been doing is can Christianity repair itself
• 1:24:07
  can it become relevant again the you know there and there's there's a lot of sociological evidence
• 1:24:14
  that maybe it can't that maybe society is just secularizing and if that's the case you know
• 1:24:21
  then we have to see if we can find new substitutes for religion that are not as toxic as the ones
• 1:24:27
  that we're using now you know soul cycle is fairly benign but it doesn't do the job of
• 1:24:32
  providing a transcendent transcendent anchor for our values speak for yourself john
• 1:24:40
  so so then it's an open question whether i think people
• 1:24:48
  haven't innate need most people not everyone but a lot of people haven't innate need for some
• 1:24:53
  sense that they're here for a reason it's larger than themselves that they're not just you know
• 1:24:58
  a clump of random cells which which came together for a while and then and then disappeared and they
• 1:25:03
  they have a need to to feel their values are rooted in something larger and more fundamental in
• 1:25:09
  themselves there's a source of good and evil not just personal preference and right now i don't
• 1:25:16
  think there's a substitute for the great the great faiths in meeting those needs at least in the
• 1:25:22
  united states whether there can be in thirty or fifty or a hundred years maybe there can
• 1:25:30
  and of course if christian christianities dying anyway then then i've got to very much hope there
• 1:25:36
  can be a substitute yeah and i just don't know yet if the faith can be saved i think if it keeps
• 1:25:42
  doing what it doing it it probably won't but there are signs of renewal there's people there are a
• 1:25:47
  lot of christians who are unhappy with the way things are going in the maggot church and all of that
• 1:25:52
  and working on renewal and and christians christians like russle more who is a editor of christianity
• 1:25:59
  today and a man of of great integrity and deep faith says it won't be like some schism you know some
• 1:26:08
  mighty battle between the maggot church and the anti maggot church that what it is with christianity
• 1:26:13
  throughout history is renewal from the grassroots you know the planting of new churches
• 1:26:20
  the coming of a new generation there does seem to be an appetite for religion that's come up in
• 1:26:24
  jen z we're starting to see some signs of that it will be another generation of of pastors
• 1:26:31
  that it will be in the small groups which are how the evangelical churches do a lot of their
• 1:26:35
  acculturation you know the bible studies for example and that that's that's where it will come
• 1:26:41
  from if it comes look if there's a way for you know i'm not a i'm not stridently anti religious in
• 1:26:52
  the sense that if there's a way for us to a give voice to the mystery and unfathomability of the
• 1:26:59
  human condition of the nature of consciousness of the scale of the cosmos in ways that are not
• 1:27:06
  doctrinaire about their cosmological and historical claims then go for it i'd much prefer that to
• 1:27:14
  a world of rival superstitions you know a demon haunted world as Carl Sagan wrote a brilliant book
• 1:27:21
  about um if it's off the table that we're all going to become enlightened uh you know Richard
• 1:27:27
  Feynman's and uh you know create a pluralistic secular democracy if people are going to crave
• 1:27:36
  um a context for the mysteries of meaning then i'm happy for those things to be religions in the
• 1:27:42
  same way i mean as long as they're religions of the sort that my rabbi who by mitsford me who i
• 1:27:49
  saw for the first time in more than 20 years the other day um you know he he is the most secular
• 1:27:57
  spiritual guy you've ever met in your life i mean and if everyone can be like that and there
• 1:28:03
  are new churches new versions of Christianity that spring up like that then let's just say i'll
• 1:28:08
  take that as a as a long term solution over the chaos of ad hoc superstition yeah would you
• 1:28:20
  so i guess the proposition i'm making is to ask for a bit more than that from christians and to
• 1:28:28
  say that christianity in particular which is who my book is addressed to it's called um christianities
• 1:28:36
  broken bargain democracy it's not about religion generally in the united states at least
• 1:28:42
  Judaism and the Catholic church and the black church are not the problem they're not causing the
• 1:28:48
  crisis in our democracy right now the the number of the problem is white evangelical protestants
• 1:28:53
  who are numerically the largest and have become most closely aligned with politicization
• 1:29:01
  and so i want to go one step further than you do and say there's there actual there's christianity
• 1:29:09
  actual content that distinguishes it from other religions and that if believed in and practiced
• 1:29:18
  by christians would strengthen our country and strengthen our liberal democracy so please
• 1:29:25
  christians do that i want to say more than just sort of broadly well it's good if people believe
• 1:29:31
  something i want to say christians do what it says in your scripture since i've made a habit
• 1:29:39
  john throughout this interview of answering for you by quoting your words i'm going to end the
• 1:29:43
  interview with the the same habit which is this is the thing that really stuck with me this line
• 1:29:49
  my claim you write is not just that secular liberalism and religious faith i instrumentally
• 1:29:55
  interdependent but that each is intrinsically reliant on the other to build a morally complete and
• 1:30:01
  coherent account of the world i'll have to sleep on that for my six months to figure out what i
• 1:30:06
  think of it in the global sense but in the american sense i think that that is true john from your
• 1:30:13
  lips to gods ears as they say thank you for explaining it to us it's great to see you again
• 1:30:17
  thanks for having me Josh it's always a pleasure