Kelly is away, so our next new episode will be released in two weeks.

This is a rerelease of an episode originally published on December 19th, 2023.

But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the dusky shroud there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.

So Charles Dickens described Ebenezer Scrooge's encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in his beloved 1843 classic A Christmas Carol.

And while A Christmas Carol is best known as the endlessly-adapted and reimagined cornerstone of modern Christmas storytelling, it's also a freaky ghost story, and it turns out that, in Dickens' England, telling ghost stories at Christmas was a whole thing! There were, as it turns out, a lot of ghosts in Christmas past.

Why did Victorians like themselves a spooky Christmas? And when did spookiness get replaced with mall Santas, Bing Crosby, and family church services? Is it too late to make Christmas spooky again?

This week, Kelly and John talk to folklorists Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman, co-founders of the Carterhaugh School about lost Christmas traditions, winter hauntings, and what else you should read if you prefer ghastly specters to eggnog and Rudolph.

(Rerelease from 2023)

What better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than to have Kelly and John ruin it for you?

Just kidding! We're not here to cancel Thanksgiving and we hope you have a lovely one.

But holidays are weird things - we often celebrate them without really examining why, or how we arrived at the myths and rituals that emanate from their core.

And Thanksgiving is, in many ways, our strangest holiday - a secular celebration that is at once also an aggressively religious one, built around a series of supposedly historical events that seem to have a lot of missing pieces when you start connecting the dots.

It can also be a day that evokes painful memories for the indigenous population.

To help us unpack what Thanksgiving is and what it is not, and to shed some light on how we came to celebrate this holiday as well as how important it is that we not let that celebration obscure our understanding of early American history and the genocide of the indigenous population, we asked historian David J. Silverman - author of This Land is Their Land - to join us.

You can buy Dr. Silverman's book here: This Land is Their Land @ Amazon

Read also Dr. Silverman's 2019 piece in The New York Times: The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth

Directed by first time documentary directors Haley Pappas and Smiley Stevens, Breath of Fire was released on MAX in October as a four-part documentary series.

Breath of Fire is based on the 2021 Vanity Fair piece The Second Coming of Guru Jagat by Hayley Phelan, who also appears in and executive produced the series.

It tells the story of Kundalini yoga practitioner turned de facto cult leader/professional grifter Katie Griggs, known to her followers as Guru Jagat. Throughout its four hours, Breath of Fire touches on some recurring themes and questions, such as the power of religious fraud, abuse, orientalism, and what exactly it is that people rally want from religion.

This week, Kelly and John try to unpack its often enlightening, often disturbing implications.

We'll just cut to the chase - this week sucked and the next four years are going to be very dark and very difficult.

But we're not here just to rage and doomcast. This Kelly and John were joined by fellow religion scholar Andrew Tobolowsky to try to provide some perspective on what's ahead, what the fight is going to be, the role Project 2025 will and won't play, and why the more likely challenge will be living through a chaotic nightmare as opposed to a Christian Nationalist dystopia.

Andrew is on BlueSky at @andytobo.bsky.social

The Salem Witch Trials may well be the single most notorious and iconic event of America's colonial period. Every Halloween, Salem, Massachusetts, hosts untold thousands of tourists who revel in the city's occult history and reputation as America's haunted capital of spookiness.

But as well-known as the Salem Witch Trials are, they remain a hotbed of historical inaccuracy and misconception.

So what exactly happened? How did a sleepy, growing Massachusetts town become the epicenter of witch hysteria? Did everyone go insane, or were the Salem Witch Trials perfectly consistent with the worldview of Salem's citizens.

To help us clear this up, Kelly and John asked University of Pennsylvania history professor Kathleen M. Brown for her insights.

Brown is a historian of gender and race in early America and the Atlantic World. Educated at Wesleyan University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she is author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), which won the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association.

Her latest, Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition, was published in 2023.

George Ratliff's 2001 documentary Hell House chronicles the development of the 10th annual Hell House Halloween production put on by Trinity Church in Texas.

A Hell House is a variation on the Halloween haunted house tradition, in which actors play out horror movie scenarios as guests move room to room to be frightened out of their minds. But Hell Houses are, instead, tools of Christian indoctrination and recruitment, taking visitors through scenes of horror that led people to hell, like abortion, suicide, or being other than heterosexual.

Ratliff's film captures a pretty specific moment in the Evangelical movement, one that has morphed and evolved into something different today. But Hell House provides us some useful insights into the role horror, fear, and trauma play in the Evangelical mind.

Jason Bivins rejoins the show to talk about it. He is a specialist in religion and American culture an is the author of 2008's Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism.

If you want to connect with Jason, you can email him at [email protected].

"They're eating the dogs" is already enshrined as one of the most memorable and iconic (and insane) phrases ever to enter the arena of American politics.

Donald Trump is a ridiculous, unserious, and increasingly gullible person, and his amplifying of a fake story of Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets in front an audience of tens of millions is a new low even for him.

"They're eating the dogs" has been memed and remixed to death already, sometimes to hilarious effect. And plenty of experts on the authoritarianism highlight the need to mock and belittle authoritarians. Plenty of "they're eating the dogs" memes serve that end.

But it's also a carbon copy of the Blood Libel, the medieval conspiracy theory against Jewish populations that accused them of stealing and feeding off the blood of Christian children.

So is there a line where humor has to end and genuine outrage response has to begin?

Also, who's gonna win this election anyway?

For thoughts on that, we turned to our friend, journalist Sarah Posner, who last joined us in March.

You can find Sarah on Bluesky @sarahposner.bsky.social

This week, in part inspired by the anniversary of 9/11, Kelly and John invited Thomas Lecaque on the show to talk about the ways the Christian right frame the Crusades and other violent failures to justify their own acts of political and religious violence.

Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others. He has recently turned his attention to colonial America, examining the ways in which Christian holy war zeal shaped the American landscape

Also this week, John delivers some really bad news about ciabatta, and Thomas and Kelly go head to head in POK's exciting new game "What The Hell Was He Talking About?"

You can find Thomas on Twitter @tlecaque

Jesus Camp was 2006's other big documentary, nominated for the Academy Award for documentary feature but losing out to a little film called An Inconvenient Truth.

Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (and timed, coincidentally, to the appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court) it mainly follows three young evangelical Christians as they prepare to attend the Kids On Fire summer camp, run by a youth pastor named Becky Fischer.

Largely through interviews with Fischer and the children, Ewing and Grady paint a picture of an emerging movement to indoctrinate young people in order to take on secularism at every level of American life as adults.

18 years later, Jesus Camp provides a fascinating juxtaposition between the far-right evangelical movement then (with its obsession with George W. Bush, Harry Potter, Intelligent Design, and Ted Haggard) and the post-January 6th, Trumpian present.

Megan Goodwin again joins Kelly and John to sort through all this and more.

For an update on the three featured kids, you can check out Jennifer Tisdale's post on Distractify here: https://www.distractify.com/p/jesus-camp-where-are-they-now

Stockholm Syndrome is a really good MUSE song. Unfortunately, it's not a good anything else.0

On a recent episode of television's worst show, The Five on Fox News, panelist Jessica Tarlov, herself Jewish, asked her fellow panelist Greg Gutfeld why Jews tend to be Democrat and not Republican. His answer? Stockholm syndrome.

Most people could probably give a decent summary of what Stockholm syndrome supposedly is - the phenomenon of a hostage coming sympathize and even identify with their captor - but few of them would be able to accurately recount the story that gave rise to its supposed existence.

This stubbornly enduring - and almost certainly wrong - belief has gone on to influence the way we think about why people take on certain political positions, join cults, or even adhere to extremist religious views. So we decided it was worth taking a look at the story at its center to find out what it can tell us about why we are so wrong about how we think about out other people think.

Of the many resources used for this episode, none was better at filling in the most important gaps than Rebecca Armitage's piece for ABC News Australia

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-23/is-stockholm-syndrome-a-myth/102738084