Culture, Faith and Politics with Pat Kahnke

Let's go inside two BIZARRO Freedom Fests -- the MAGA-fueled Freedom 250 fair at the National Mall and Freedom Con 2026 in George , Washington. Pat Kahnke discusses all this and more on Culture, Faith, and Politics live!

In this conversation, pastor and author Brian Zahnd makes the case that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment isn't the faith once delivered — it's a settlement that won a fight in church history. We trace where the idea actually came from: the Hebrew Sheol, the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna), the Greek word aiōnios, and how Augustine and Dante's Inferno shaped the fire-and-brimstone hell we inherited.

We also ask the harder question: what does this doctrine DO to us? When you believe billions of your neighbors are already destined for an eternal torture chamber, does it become easier to stop seeing them as fully human? Drawing on his book "Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God," Zahnd argues the traditional view turns the gospel inside out — and reveals a chapter his own publisher refused to print. This is a discussion for believers, exvangelicals, and skeptics alike — anchored in scholarship, biblical languages, and church history, not fear.

For 30 years, Reverend Rob Schenck was one of the most powerful leaders inside the pro-life movement and the religious right. He was in the room. He knew the players. He helped build the platform. And now he's answering the question I've wanted to ask for a long time: Was it all a lie?

In this conversation, Pat Kahnke sits down with pastor and theologian Brian Zahnd — one of the most important voices calling the church back from its entanglement with partisan politics. Zahnd argues that MAGA theology has fundamentally misread Scripture: America is not God's chosen nation, not the New Jerusalem. The Bible gives her a different name — Babylon. This is a conversation about discipleship, allegiance, and what it means to follow Jesus in an era when the church has traded transcendence for political power.

Blue and Green make a MAGA mess! The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool chaos is the perfect metaphor for the Trump Era. Pat Kahnke discusses all this and more on Culture, Faith, and Politics live!

Senator Jon Ossoff recently walked into Beulah Missionary Baptist Church in Decatur, Georgia, opened the Book of Amos, and delivered one of the most theologically precise speeches I've heard from any political figure in years. In 8 minutes and 41 seconds, he did what MAGA pastors with massive platforms and full-time theology staffs refuse to do: name the corruption, place it in a 3,000-year-old prophetic tradition, and connect it to the suffering of real people in real zip codes.

Ossoff is not pandering. He's not decorating a political speech with Bible verses. He's doing exegesis — and he's doing it in front of a Black Baptist congregation with a 60-year covenant to the civil rights movement. That matters theologically.

Peter Thiel and JD Vance are building a future that doesn't need God — and Pope Leo XIV is the one man with the standing to call it what it is. In this episode of the Culture, Faith, and Politics Podcast, Pat Kahnke sits down with Mark Ramm to unpack the collision between Silicon Valley's most powerful MAGA billionaire and the Vatican's vision of what it means to be human. Peter Thiel has openly framed anyone who wants to restrain technology — including the Pope — as a "Luddite," and in his own lectures, a force of the Antichrist. When a New York Times interviewer asked Thiel whether the human race should even survive, he hesitated. That pause tells you everything about the worldview now funding the MAGA movement through his protégé, Vice President JD Vance.

The MAGA project promises to restore a nation built on Christ's teachings — by systematically breaking every one of them. ICE raids. Alligator Alcatraz. Gutted USAID. Slashed Medicare. Banned Pentagon plaques honoring women and minorities. That's not a Christian program. That's heresy with a flag on it. We examine the 1950s nostalgia at the heart of Christian nationalism, who that era was actually great for, and why the evangelical church's wholesale embrace of Donald Trump may be the most self-defeating theological mistake in American history.

MAGA declared war on science. People died. And the body count is still growing. In this conversation, Pat Kahnke sits down with Rebecca Watson — science communicator, founder of Skepchick, and one of the most recognizable voices in the skeptic community — to follow the evidence wherever it leads. What they find is damning.

The Freedom 250 UFC event, recent comments from Stephen Miller, and the general actions of Donald Trump's MAGA movement are examples of performative masculinity -- and that quest for power is failing. Pat Kahnke discusses all this and more on Culture, Faith, and Politics live!