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

Project 2025 has (finally) become an enormous national news story.

But while its goals (which go after everything from contraception to the Department of Education) have rightly been in the spotlight, it's also important to understand that, far from being the fantasy wish list of a group of fringe conservatives, it is in fact a project of a major think tank, decades in the making.

It comes out of the Heritage Foundation, an organization founded by anti-democratic far-right Christian nationalist Paul Weyrich and currently run by the like-minded Kevin Roberts...whose upcoming book has a forward by JD Vance.

This week, John and Kelly unpack a little bit about why you should take anything coming out of the Heritage Foundation very seriously.

LINKS!

P2025 Explained:

Project 2025: The myths and the facts

Democrats Are Sounding the Alarm About Project 2025. What’s in It?

What is Project 2025? What to know about the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration

Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency, explained

Other Resources:

Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration

Trump claims not to know who is behind Project 2025. A CNN review found at least 140 people who worked for him are involved

J.D. Vance has made it impossible for Trump to run away from Project 2025

Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes - Project 2025: The Christian Nationalist Vision to be Imposed on America

The 1972 film Marjoe won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. And then it spent a long time having largely been forgotten until it was restored and rereleased in 2005.

Marjoe is an intimate look at the life of Marjoe Gortner, who rose to fame in the charismatic evangelical revival world as the world's youngest preacher until he was ultimately unmasked as a fraud, trained (often through torture) to deliver sermons with fake piety while fleecing untold crowds of true believers.

The film starts with Marjoe in his twenties having made a comeback, fully aware he was still a conman and showing at least some signs of remorse and discomfort with the grift.

It's a film told from a questionable perspective, dripping with iffy journalistic ethics, but it poses (even if inadvertently) some tantalizing, unanswerable questions about, among other things, the role sincerity plays in the preacher-believer relationship and the unfortunate ease with which religion can be leveraged to stay cons.

Our friend Megan Goodwin joins us to talk through all of it.

Well it's been a heck of a week of bad news, and even before the Supreme Court decided the the president was king, Kelly and John decided to look at two news stories likely to play into next year's Supreme Court decisions: Louisiana's new Ten Commandment school mandate and Oklahoma's new requirement to include the Bible in its public school curriculum.

On the surface, both of these measures are clearly, explicitly unconstitutional, and both have plenty of precedent to back up their unconstitutionality.

But in this episode we argue that that may not matter, and that lawsuit-hungry ideas like these are designed to fine-tune a decades-long attempt to bring Christian indoctrination into the public education system.

And, given the makeup of the current court, one of them may actually work.

Some resources used in this episode: