Andrew Heaton is a comedian, political commentator, author, and political orphan best known for his skits on ReasonTV. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Andrew for many years and traveling in similar media circles. We both love to chat and interview people, and so when I saw he’d joined Substack, I knew we’d have to do something together.

Both Heaton and I love to talk about fantasy and sci-fi, so we cover great fiction that has inspired Andrew’s worldview, and we get into the weeds of Andrew’s atheism and roots in Eastern Orthodoxy.

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What to expect (Pretty decent AI summary)

* Good, evil, and C.S. Lewis. Kent and Heaton, with Lewis’s idea that evil is merely “a corruption of good,” and use A Clockwork Orange to probe whether pure malice can really exist.

* Demonic dread in a secular mind. Despite skepticism, Kent and Heaton admit demonic possession (and even Ouija boards) still terrifies them—evidence that ancient spiritual anxieties survive modern disbelief.

* Wealth and the eye of the needle. Heaton asks whether our unprecedented creature comforts, more than raw income, blunt any sense that we need transcendence, and discusses Jesus’ warning about riches.

* Eco-Calvinism. Heaton argues parts of today’s environmentalism act like a new religion—humanity as fallen, Earth as sacred, redemption through self-denial—echoing Joseph Campbell’s predicted “eco-myth”.

* Stories that shape a worldview. Heaton shares how Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide taught him the power of shifting perspective; Star Trek and Madeline Miller’s Circe reveal why being mortal trumps immortality

* Love beyond belief. Leaving the church didn’t sever bonds for Andrew Heaton—his old church still checks on him and offers help, showing religion’s unmatched knack for forging lasting “kinship networks”.

If you want to join up with the Political Orphanage and Andrew Heaton….

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