Culture, Faith and Politics with Pat Kahnke

Pat Kahnke and Adam Swenson examine three expressions of the same “theology of strength”: Trump’s speech attacking election integrity, Pete Hegseth’s mandatory testosterone testing for soldiers over 30, and Doug Wilson’s theology of masculine domination.

We’ll fact-check Trump’s claims about election security, Chris Krebs and CISA, the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, and mail-in voting. Then we’ll connect Hegseth’s obsession with military masculinity and lethality to Doug Wilson’s Christian nationalist vision of war, hierarchy, and male authority. What happens when power, aggression, and domination are mistaken for Christian virtue?

For 1,800 years, no Christian had ever heard of the Rapture. So how did a 19th-century idea become the engine driving MAGA's end-times politics — and why does it matter for the wars being fought right now?

In this episode, Pat Kahnke and Ken Napzok trace the real history of the Rapture: where it actually came from, the man who invented it, and how a doctrine that started as private comfort got turned into a political weapon. This isn't about whether you believe in the Second Coming. It's about what happens when a specific reading of end-times prophecy gives political power a theological license to crave catastrophe instead of peace.

The death of Senator Lindsey Graham and the alleged death of Senator Mitch McConnell have kicked up a dust cloud of conspiracies and conversations on how to speak of the dead when you did not agree with them in life. Pat Kahnke discusses all this and more on Culture, Faith, and Politics live!

ICE shootings, mass deportations, and the MAGA Christians who defend all of it — that's what this episode is about.  Here's my argument: none of this was necessary. Every ICE shooting is the result of a choice — the Trump administration's choice to build a system of mass deportations, to pull the FBI off counterterrorism and counterintelligence, to inflate ICE's budget by tens of billions, and to put armed agents on our streets without body cameras. And 80% of white evangelicals voted for it. When brutal authority is aimed at their brown neighbors, they call it "law and order" and reach for Romans 13 like a magic incantation — the same people who called Trump's felony convictions a "weaponization of justice" and cheered pardons for the January 6 rioters who beat police officers. This is for everyone who's exhausted, grieving, and tired of being told they're crazy for it. You're not crazy. You're awake.

Tim Whitaker (The New Evangelicals) and Pat Kahnke are go live together to take your questions, discuss the big news topics of the week, and more on this special episode from Culture, Faith, and Politics and Tim Whitaker Speaks

Graham Platner is out. JD Vance just published a book. And somewhere in between, white evangelicals became the least likely Christians to welcome a stranger. This week, Pat Kahnke and Adam Swenson take apart three stories that share one spine: the gap between what MAGA Christians say they believe and what they actually do. We examine Vance's Communion — his four stated values, the ordo amoris debate, the papal rebuke, and why the immigrants he fears are already filling his own Communion rail. We look at the Platner reckoning as a live Fruit Test: one party moves against its own, one doesn't. And we run the immigration numbers that expose how Christian nationalism has quietly replaced the Great Commission with blood and soil.

This is Trump's world... and we're all trying to move past it. The Patriot Front marched unimpeded on July 4th, and Trump and FIFA are corrupt. There is a lot of bad out there, but we've found some Christians Behaving... Good! Pat Kahnke discusses all this and more on Culture, Faith, and Politics live!

A new Johns Hopkins ethnographic study followed 21 Trump voters to answer one question: what does MAGA actually want from democracy? Pat Kahnke and Adam Swenson break down the tension between Jonathan V. Last's read and the study authors' own interpretation — moral disgust or wounded faith? We cover why so many conservatives recoil at the word "democracy," the "Faith, Family, Freedom, Place" moral foundation driving it all, and why "save democracy" messaging keeps failing with MAGA Christians. A theological look at Christian Nationalism, the illiberal core underneath it, and what it means for your MAGA family and friends.

Amy Hawk talks with Pat Kahnke about what's happening to children inside the Dilley detention center — and what she shares dismantles the "Godly" framing MAGA Christians have wrapped around family detention. In this conversation, we walk through the evidence: the "Letters from Dilley" written by detained children, the near-total rate of PTSD among kids held there, the moldy food, the denied medical care, and the case of a father whose criminal record was fabricated to justify taking his son. We also examine the revocation of Temporary Protected Status that could make 1.3 million people "illegal" overnight, and the financial machinery that keeps private detention profitable. But this isn't only a story about policy. It's a story about theology. When a movement calls the caging of children "Godly," when Romans 13 becomes a shield for cruelty, and when "pro-life" politics stops at the border — the question every Christian has to answer is whether their conscience still belongs to Christ or to a political project.

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!