Pod Only Knows

Due to some scheduling difficulties, we're pushing back this week's episode to next week and then going back-to-back Tuesdays.

In the meantime, enjoy this episode from last Halloween with Kathleen M. Brown on the Salem Witch Trials

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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.

As soon as Taylor Swift announced her engagement to podcast host and occasional football player Travis Kelce, the weirdest weirdos on the Christian right burst into excitement over the possibility that Swift might finally, finally be morphing into one of them, urging her to "submit" to Kelce as a TradWife.

It seems unlikely that a billionaire in her mid-30s like Taylor Swift will feel inclined to suddenly drop everything to bake bread, rear children, and spend her weekends Konmari-ing, but who knows?!

This week, Kelly and John examine why, exactly, the right is particularly deranged when it comes to their Taylor Swift obsession, and why they feel a particular ownership over the world's most famous former Christmas Tree farm inhabitant.

Also! We bid a sad farewell to friend of the pod and recurring POK supporting character Ryan Walters, address the troubling phenomenon of the Two Charlie Kirk Algorithms problem, and check in with which child murderers the world's most powerful Christian Nationalist and former weekend talk show host Pete Hegseth is honoring this week!

Given recent events, we have decided not to release a new episode this week. Instead, given rising concerns about state retribution to political violence and the weaponization of law enforcement, we are re-releasing our conversation with Lerone A. Martin from February, in which he discusses his book The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover.

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This week, Kelly and John are joined by Lerone A. Martin to discuss his unfortunately timely and prescient book, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism.

Martin is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor in Religious Studies, African & African American Studies, and The Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar. He also serves as the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

He's is an award-winning author. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover was published in February 2023 by Princeton University Press. The book has garnered praise from numerous publications including The Nation, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, and History Today.

In 2014 he published, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion. That book received the 2015 first book award by the American Society of Church History.

His commentary and writing have been featured on The NBC Today Show, The History Channel, PBS, CSPAN, and NPR, as well as in The New York Times, Boston Globe, CNN.com, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He currently serves as an advisor on the upcoming PBS documentary series The History of Gospel Music & Preaching.

James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and author of many popular books about "Christian parenting", died in late August at the age of 89.

Dobson's death was celebrated by many ex-Evangelicals of a certain age who were raised in part or in total by Dobson's teaching and methods.

He leaves behind a complicated and questionable legacy, including a generation of ex-Evangelicals who despise him and credit him for ruining their lives on the one hand, and an Evangelical movement that seems to have moved past him on the other.

Joining Kelly and John to talk about the life and times of James Dobson is Hilde Løvdal Stephens, an associatie professor of American Studies at the University of Oslo. Her first book, Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Crusade for the Christian Home, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2019.

You can find her on Bluesky @hildelstephens

(NOTE: At about the 15 minute mark, John's audio goes crackly. We did our best to make it as listenable as possible! Our apologies to all. We'll do better next time!)

Heretic was released in theaters in 2024 and quickly developed something of a cult fandom, especially among religion nerds.

Starring Hugh Grant in a rare villainous dark turn, Heretic tells to story of two young Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, who find themselves forced to defend their faith (and their lives) against the human manifestation of dickish online atheist bros.

Whether of not Heretic is a good movie about religion is open to debate (and we take that up here), but unlike other religious horror, it pulls its thrills from a very unique source and its writers did their homework, painting faith and believers in three dimensions while not endorsing either, and showing the folly of hyper-rationality at the same time.

Shaily Patel, one of our earliest guests, rejoins us to talk about a movie she describes as one she both loves and hates.

You can find her on Bluesky @vox-magica.

We're back, and we're catching up on the things we missed this summer: Woke Superman, Ryan Walters' porn crisis, the DHS's weird fascism Twitter posts, and more!

Kelly tells us about her surgery and recovery. John talks about his trip and getting a ridiculous amount of poison ivy on him. And they both talk about how Ryan Walters, the notorious Christian Nationalist in charge of Oklahoma schools, got caught with porn.

Also, there's a new Woke Superman! James Gunn pisses off the right by deciding to make a Superman movie where Superman in an immigrant who cares about non-white people! It's very radical and disturbing!

Plus: Epstein, and how it's now cool for you to convert the person in the next cubicle to Christianity if you work for the government.

Links to the pieces discussed in this episode:

Siri Dahl vs. Christian Nationalism

With its ‘Homeland Heritage’ Campaign Trump’s DHS is Leaning Sharply into ‘Blood and Soil’ Ideology

DHS’s ‘Homeland Heritage’ Campaign Highlights Danger of Innocence Myths of a White Christian America

This week, Richard Saville-Smith joins Kelly and John to talk about his book Acute Religious Experiences – Madness, Psychosis, and Religious Studies, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.

Saville-Smith is an independent researcher who focuses on the intersection of madness, mental disorders, and acute religious experiences, from a mad studies perspective. He earned his PhD in Philosophy and Religious Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 2020.

They discuss the relatively little-known academic field of mad studies - which seeks to destigmatize and depathologize the concept of madness - and how the fields of psychiatry and religious studies, often operating in conflict with one another, have distorted our understanding of the authenticity of acute religious experiences like the ones described in the lives of Joan of Arc or Jesus.

Richard is on Bluesky @dranamorphosis

Apple TV's Severance wrapped its long-awaited 2nd season recently and left us with more answers than questions.

But some answers! We (sorta) know what Severance is really all about, and we (sorta, maybe) know what Lumon is up to now!

So while we wait the ungodly eternity for Severance to return, John and Kelly invited scholar Niki Dolfi on to talk about the cults, religious allusions, identity, and goats.

Niki Dolfi researches Christian Nationalism and white supremacy (among other things) and explores the intersection of religion and popular entertainment. She enjoys British television and is longtime Whovian

Niki is on Bluesky @profdolfi

Last week, the Catholic Church absolutely shook the world by electing Robert Prevost - an Augustinian from Chicago - Pope Leo XIV, making him the first ever American pope.

Immediately, MAGA lost their collective minds, calling Leo XIV a woke Marxist and an anti-Trump liberal.

Leo XIV's election was, without question, a statement by the Church directed squarely at MAGA and Donald Trump, but so many questions remain about what happens next.

Kelly and John share their thoughts about the selection of Prevost, what it means that he chose the name Leo XIV, and why this way well serve as a check against Trump's fascism and persecution of immigrant communities.

They also take a look at some of the findings from the Public Religion Research Institute's findings from their survey of Americans following Trump's first 100 days.

John's thoughts on Leo XIV or available on our blog.

The PRRI surveys we discuss on the episode can be found here and here

This week, author and journalist Annika Brockschmidt joins John to talk about the perception of the American Christian Right in Europe, the possibly intentional downplaying of Christian Nationalism in Trump 2.0, and Pete Hegseth's tattoos.

Annika Brockschmidt studied History, German Studies, and War and Conflict Studies in Heidelberg, Durham and Potsdam. She is a freelance journalist and author, Worked for the capital city studio of German public-broadcaster ZDF and produces the podcasts “Kreuz und Flagge” And “Feminist Shelf Control”.

She is senior correspondent for Religion Dispatches and writes for example for German daily newspaper Tagesspiegel, German online magazine Zeit Online, Frankfurt-based daily Frankfurter Rundschau, Swiss online magazine Republik, and German cross-regional weekly Der Freitag.

Her Book “Amerikas Gotteskrieger. Über die Macht der Religiösen Rechten in den USA” (American Holy Warriors. The Power of the Religious Right in the USA) was a bestseller in 2021.

Annika is on Bluesky @ardenthistorian.bsky.social