Culture, Faith and Politics with Pat Kahnke

Deconstructing Christianity doesn't mean abandoning the faith — it means finally growing into one. In this video, we walk through Brian McLaren's four stages of faith and ask the question the Evangelical Church doesn't want to answer: why does MAGA Christianity keep getting stuck at Stage One?

If you've spent years inside evangelical certainty only to find it collapsing under the weight of real questions, this is for you. Drawing on McLaren's Faith After Doubt, we map the journey from Simplicity through Complexity and Perplexity — and into what a mature, reconstructed faith actually looks like on the other side. Whether you're exvangelical, still inside the church but quietly questioning, or an atheist trying to understand why American Christianity went so sideways — this framework explains it all.

Adam Swenson joins Pat Kahnke for the first Culture, Faith, and Politics MORNING Live Stream!

Donald Trump read from 2 Chronicles at the America Reads The Bible event. What’s going on with Mark Driscoll and his claim that he was asked to speak at the main event for the national rededication on the Mall on May 17th? And we debut our new segment, Christians Behaving Badly. Join Pat Kahnke for a live chat about all this and more on Culture, Faith, and Politics live!

Trump decides who is honored and who is shamed in MAGA — but Jesus had a radically different answer. This is where the two gospels collide. In this installment of The Bible vs. MAGA, we examine one of the most powerful and least understood forces driving Christian nationalism: the weaponization of honor and shame.

Viktor Orbán lost in Hungary. JD Vance couldn’t get a deal done with Iran. The White House fought with the Pope. And Trump shared an AI photo of himself as Jesus. It was a bad week for the MAGA movement – and even their leader can’t save them. Join Pat Kahnke for a live chat about all this and more on Culture, Faith, and Politics live!

From the Duggar family to Pete Hegseth to the Oval Office — the pattern is the same. MAGA Christianity has built a theological permission structure that protects powerful men and silences women and children. Pat Kahnke and Amy Hawk trace the unbroken line from Bill Gothard's IBLP, to the Duggar family's protected abuse, to Doug Wilson's submission theology, to the men now running the United States government.

Trump and MAGA don't just disagree with Jesus — they are selling the exact system Jesus came to destroy. In this episode of The Bible vs. MAGA, we go straight to the Sermon on the Mount and let the Beatitudes do the work.

A viewer comment defending MAGA's values of honor, winning, and dominance became the entry point for a deeper question: what happens when the church adopts a worldview that Jesus spent His entire ministry dismantling? The honor-shame system that runs MAGA — the obsession with strength, the contempt for the weak, the gospel of winning — is not a Christian value. It is the ancient power structure the Beatitudes were written to expose.

If you are a Christian wrestling with the fusion of Trump and the Gospel — or trying to find the words to explain why it feels so wrong — this is the conversation you have been waiting for.

At Charlie Kirk's memorial, they didn't just grieve — they worshipped. And what happened in that room reveals something disturbing about how MAGA Christianity weaponized worship music to train a movement. Author Rick Pidcock (Weapons of Worship) joins me to expose the psychological and theological mechanics behind worship-as-warfare — from Sean Feucht's rallies to a Seattle service where a worship leader told the congregation to throw rocks at LGBTQ+ people. This isn't fringe. It's a pattern. And it's been building for years inside evangelical spaces.

Trump's Iran threats crossed a line that even seasoned political observers are calling genocidal. Charlie Sykes joins Pat Kahnke to break down what just happened — and why Christian nationalism is the theological permission structure behind it. In this conversation, Sykes and Kahnke analyze Trump's recent statements targeting Iran — statements that Sykes calls "the most deranged ever issued by a U.S. president" — and trace how evangelical Christian nationalism has moved from the fringes to the center of American foreign policy. From Pete Hegseth's holy war rhetoric to Doug Wilson's "sin of empathy" theology, this is what MAGA Christianity looks like when it has its hands on a nuclear arsenal.