The Justice Briefing with Dr. Jemar Tisby

What do you do when the church, workplace, organization, or community you once called home no longer reflects your values?

How do you know when it's time to stop fighting for a seat at someone else's table?

And if you decide to leave, how do you figure out what comes next?

Maybe you've spent years trying to make an institution better, only to discover that there's a limit to how much change its leaders will tolerate.

Maybe your presence is welcomed, but your perspective isn't.

Or maybe you have a vision for something different, but you're not sure you have the resources, experience, or courage to build it.

This episode of The Justice Briefing will help you think through your next move.

Dr. Jemar Tisby shares lessons from his journey out of white evangelical institutions and into building Tisby Media, an independent organization dedicated to truth-telling at the intersection of faith, history, and justice.

Drawing on his personal experiences with racial exclusion, institutional resistance, and entrepreneurship, Jemar offers three practical principles for turning dissatisfaction into constructive action.

You'll discover how to move beyond simply knowing what you want to leave behind and start identifying what you want to create.

And you'll learn why building your own table might not be what you actually need.

• How to recognize when an institution has made space for you without giving you meaningful power
• Why righteous anger can be a powerful starting point for creating positive change
• How to identify the deeper motivation that will sustain you when building something new gets difficult
• The three factors that can help you discover a mission uniquely suited to your gifts and convictions
• The surprising difference between building your own table and building your own chair

You'll also hear about Jemar's forthcoming book, Notes from an Evangelical Reject, and get updates on projects from Tisby Media, including the upcoming short film What Will We Tell Them?

If you're tired of shrinking yourself to fit someone else's vision—or you have a dream of creating something better but don't know where to begin—this episode will help you see the possibilities in front of you and take your next step with greater clarity.

Notes from an Evangelical Reject — Jemar's forthcoming book, available for preorder. Publication date: January 19, 2027.

How to Resist White Christian Nationalism — A self-paced course featuring practical action steps.

Jesus Was a Migrant — Watch the trailer and learn about community screenings at https://jesuswasamigrant.com.

What Will We Tell Them? — A new narrative short film from Tisby Studios.

Book Launch Team — Join Jemar's launch team for exclusive resources, updates, and opportunities to help spread the word about Notes from an Evangelical Reject. Join HERE.

Footnotes — Subscribe for historical insights and analysis at the intersection of race, religion, and politics. JemarTisby.Substack.com

00:00 – How to Build Your Own Table

02:27 – Why So Many People Are Questioning Their Institutions

07:48 – Jemar's Journey Through White Evangelicalism

12:58 – When You're Given a Seat but Not a Voice

17:19 – Principle 1: Identify Your Internal Driver

19:59 – How Righteous Anger Can Fuel Constructive Change

21:24 – The Vision That Pulls You Forward

22:28 – Principle 2: Create a Clear Mission

24:09 – Discovering Your Gifts and Learning to Trust Yourself

27:33 – Finding Joy and Passion in Your Work

29:29 – Identifying the Need Only You Can Address

31:09 – Principle 3: Decide What You're Actually Building

31:43 – The Difference Between Building a Table and Building a Chair

36:21 – How Jemar Built Tisby Media

40:03 – The Justice Briefing, Teaching, and the Justice Institute

42:40 – Tisby Studios and the Power of Film

44:10 – What Will We Tell Them? and the Legacy We're Creating

46:16 – Notes from an Evangelical Reject and the Book Launch Team

54:02 – Upcoming Projects and New Developments

58:04 – Why We Need New and Truer Institutions

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JTisby

The Justice Briefing is your weekly guide to current events at the intersection of faith, history, and justice.

#TheJusticeBriefing #JemarTisby #EvangelicalReject

In a rare guest interview, Dr. Jemar Tisby sits down with Dr. Matthew D. Taylor, author of the new book Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists.

They discuss Christian supremacy, Christendom, and imperialism. Going deeper, they explore how Jesus displayed and taught about power, and why the tyrants who claim his name avoid those teachings with surgical precision.

They also talk about the cost of this work. Dr. Taylor lost his job for writing this book.

You'll come away with a theological case for defying tyrants and a picture of what that looks like in the church, in politics, and in everyday life.

Get Defying Tyrants wherever you get your books.

Topics Addressed

• Pete Hegseth's speech and the new Office of Religious Affairs
• Constantine's conversion and the merging of church and empire
• Christian supremacy as the ideology beneath Christian nationalism
• Why "antichrists" in 1 and 2 John refers to Christians who harm others in Jesus' name
• The parable of the wheat and the tares
• The cost of speaking out against authoritarianism

Support conversations like this one by becoming a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com.

Resources Referenced

• Matthew D. Taylor, Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists (Broadleaf, 2026)
• Matthew D. Taylor, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy (2024)
• Matthew D. Taylor's Reckonings (Substack)
• Scripture: Mark 10:42-45; 1 John 2:18-19; Matthew 13:24-30

Get the course. Gain the confidence: How to Resist White Christian Nationalism

White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the church in the United States today. 

Most people who follow this work already know that. So why don't we have more confidence to confront it? 

In this back-to-basics episode of The Justice Briefing, Dr. Jemar Tisby names five obstacles to confidence: 

1. leaving out the "white," 

2. calling every conservative Christian a Christian nationalist, 

3. leading with facts alone, 

4. stopping at 'it isn't really Christian," 

5. mistaking understanding for resistance. 

Along the way, he brings the receipts, from PRRI's newest data showing that nearly two-thirds of Americans resist Christian nationalism to Gorski and Perry's "deep story" of a Christian America that was supposedly stolen and must be taken back.

The episode builds toward a revelation Dr. Tisby had live on the show: what people need most to resist white Christian nationalism is confidence. The truth is on our side. 

To move from understanding to action, Dr. Tisby introduces his new self-paced course, How to Resist White Christian Nationalism.

Topics Addressed

• How the plantation's paternalistic hierarchy mirrors the white Christian nationalist vision
• Tokenism: why people of color in the movement are useful but never central, and why tokens get spent
• New PRRI data: nearly two-thirds of Americans resist Christian nationalism, with Arkansas and Mississippi the least resistant states
• The "deep story" of white Christian nationalism and why we must meet a bad story with a truer story
• The third commandment, the no true Scotsman fallacy, and the responsibility of Christians to resist
• The ARC of Racial Justice and the gap between understanding and action

Resources Referenced

1. How to Resist White Christian Nationalism (self-paced course), Dr. Jemar Tisby

2. PRRI, New Report Analyzes the Two-Thirds of Americans Who Resist Christian Nationalism (September 24, 2026)

3. Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022)

4. Dr. Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise (2019)

5. Dr. Jemar Tisby, How to Fight Racism (2021), source of the ARC of Racial Justice

6. Scripture: Exodus 20:7; Isaiah 6:8

Support the Show

Fewer than 5% of subscribers make this truth-telling at the intersection of faith, history, and justice possible. For $7 a month, or $5.83 a month on the annual plan (less than a gallon of gas in LA), you can help keep The Justice Briefing going. Become a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com.

Stay informed. Stay faithful. Stay in the fight.

For decades, the religious right told Christians that abortion was the one issue that outweighed every other. 

Yet ICE recorded at least 18 miscarriages in its custody from January through September 2025, then lost count, and the movement's loudest voices have barely said a word.

In this episode of The Justice Briefing, Dr. Tisby asks why an unborn child's life should matter less because their mother is an immigrant, and how race shaped the religious right from the start.

In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention backed laws allowing abortion in cases including rape, incest, and likely harm to a mother's emotional health, then reaffirmed that stance after Roe v. Wade. 

Historian Randall Balmer argues in Bad Faith that what first mobilized conservative Christians politically was the IRS denying tax exemptions to racially discriminatory Christian schools like Bob Jones University.

So was it ever about life in the womb, or was it about power?

Support the podcast:

Is this kind of information worthwhile? That's the only question you need to answer. If yes, become a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com 

For $5.83 a month on an annual subscription, you fund the research behind every episode, along with Tisby Media's new course and films.

This episode of The Justice Briefing is different. Instead of starting with a current event and working backward to the history, Dr. Jemar Tisby does what he loves most: he tells stories.

Diving back into primary source research for his new Substack series, History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Rights Edition, left him feeling like a grad student again, brimming with material he could not wait to share. So he devoted a full episode to three of those stories.

The first is about the Congress that refused to seat more than sixty former Confederates in December 1865, overrode a president more than a dozen times, and wrote insurrection into the official record.

The second is about the 1868 Charleston constitutional convention, the only one in American history with a Black majority, where recently emancipated men wrote the most democratic document South Carolina had ever seen and included the children of the people who had enslaved them.

The third is about Amos T. Akerman, a former Confederate and enslaver who became attorney general and prosecuted the first Ku Klux Klan out of existence for forty years.

Taken together, the three stories make one argument: Congress has the power, it lacks the will, and history has the receipts.

• Why the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan disbanded in the mid-1870s and did not reconstitute until 1915
• The 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention: 76 Black delegates out of 124, and the only Black-majority state legislature in U.S. history
• What Black delegates actually wrote into the state constitution, including free public schools, protected suffrage, women's property rights, and a permanent ban on secession
• The three Enforcement Acts, and why the Ku Klux Klan Act finally worked by naming the state itself as the defendant

• Here's What Congress Did When Members Had a Spine
• When Black People Wrote the Constitution
• When the Department of Justice Prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan Out of Existence
• The Spirit of Justice by Jemar Tisby: bit.ly/spiritofjustice
• A Way Forward: Hope in Uncertain Times, Nashville, August 28-30, with Rep. Justin Pearson, Shane Claiborne, and others. Free, but registration is required: Register here

History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Rights Edition runs weekly through the 2026 midterms, roughly twelve installments in all. The episodes are free. The articles are free. The research is not.

If this is the kind of work you want more of, become a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com. It is $5.83 a month on the annual plan. Less than six dollars for history from a PhD historian who spent years learning the tools of the discipline to bring it to you.

Stay informed. Stay faithful. Stay in the fight.

On the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, Dr. Jemar Tisby closes a full history of the law by turning to the fight over it right now.

What took blood and marches to win in 1965 has been taken apart in the thirteen years since 2013, from Shelby County to Louisiana v. Callais, and almost nobody marched.

Dr. Tisby refuses to end there. He points to the faith leaders already mobilizing to protect the ballot before the November midterms, from William Barber's 100 days of action to the poll chaplains and peacekeepers being trained in local churches, and he names the moment for what it is: the civil rights movement of our generation.

The episode also launches History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Edition, Dr. Tisby's three-month series tracing the struggle over the vote from Reconstruction to today.

• Why 2026 is the civil rights movement of our generation, and how the April march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge echoed 1965
• How the Voting Rights Act was taken apart in thirteen years, from Shelby County to Louisiana v. Callais
• Faith leaders mobilizing before the midterms, including William Barber's 100 days of action
• Poll chaplains and peacekeepers: protecting voters, protecting ballots, and protecting the system itself
• The launch of History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Edition on Footnotes
• The closing charge: register, check your registration, and take somebody with you

• The Washington Informer, "Faith leaders start 100-day countdown to Nov. 3 election," featuring Rev. Dr. William Barber and Rev. Tony Lee of Community of Hope AME Church: https://www.washingtoninformer.com/faith-leaders-midterm-vote/
• Black Church PAC and its Freedom Summer events: https://www.blackchurchpac.org/
• All Roads Lead South Coalition, organizers of the 2026 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge
• History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Edition, Dr. Tisby's new Footnotes series: https://JemarTisby.Substack.com

The Justice Briefing runs on readers and listeners, not advertisers. If it helps you make sense of this moment, the best way to support it is to subscribe to Footnotes at JemarTisby.Substack.com. The annual plan comes to $5.83 a month, it keeps this work independent, and it puts every installment of History Rhymes: Democracy and Voting Edition in your inbox from now through the midterms.

The DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee just voted to have South Carolina lead off the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, and Dr. Jemar Tisby explains why that decision matters more than the news cycle will let on.

He walks through what a primary actually does, why the order of states determines momentum, money, and makes the case that this is a win for the party.

In this episode:

• What a primary actually is, and why it is not a direct vote for the nominee
• Why the order of states determines momentum, media coverage, donor confidence, and who drops out
• The South Carolina versus Nevada split and the case Latino leaders made for Nevada
• The progressive objection to a Southern first primary and what it assumes about Black Southern voters
• Six things candidates should do over the next 18 months to earn Black votes

Resources referenced:

• Previous episode: "What Every Social Movement Must Do"
• Dr. Tisby's YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@JTisby

Support the show:

There are no ads on The Justice Briefing and no sponsors. Paid subscribers are the ones who make this work possible. If the breakdown of the 2028 primary calendar was useful to you weeks before it becomes a headline, become a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com.

On the Fourth of July, the White House released a 160-page report accusing the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History of "ideological capture."

In this episode of The Justice Briefing, Dr. Jemar Tisby reads the report's own words, walks through the two congressional hearings it triggered, and makes the historian's case that the charge is a confession.

His argument is simple: there is no such thing as objective history. Facts are objective, but facts do not interpret themselves, and interpretation is the work of the craft. When the right demands "straightforward" scholarship, what they really want is a story that agrees with them.

This is not about erasing the founders. It is about expanding the narrative to tell the whole truth. History does not repeat itself, Dr. Tisby reminds us, but it rhymes.

In This Episode

• Why "objective" history is a myth, and why interpretation is the historian's job
• The fundamentalist "plain reading of Scripture," and what it shares with the demand for "straightforward" history
• Narratives of declension and their link to "Make America Great Again"
• Inside the two congressional hearings, and which committee actually holds jurisdiction over the Smithsonian
• The witnesses behind the report: the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, and Hillsdale College
• PragerU, the 1776 curriculum, and this White House's record on history
• The Lost Cause, the UDC textbook committee, and the Dunning School
• Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson on expanding the narrative, plus the ARC of Racial Justice as practical next steps

Resources Referenced

• Saving America's Story, the White House report on the National Museum of American History
• W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), and its chapter "The Propaganda of History"
• Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)
• Dr. Tisby's article on the Dunning School, at JemarTisby.Substack.com
• Jesus Was a Migrant, the first film from Tisby Studios, at jesuswasamigrant.com

Support the Show

The Justice Briefing is independent and listener-supported. Dr. Tisby is not attached to any institution on a full-time basis, which means this history reaches you because readers and listeners make it possible. If this episode gave you the background the headlines skip, support the work at JemarTisby.Substack.com. An annual membership comes out to just $5.83 a month, and it keeps the weekly articles and podcast coming.

What is the one thing every social movement must do before anything else? In this episode of The Justice Briefing, Dr. Jemar Tisby argues that it is not fundraising, filing for nonprofit status, or even getting out the vote. It's something much more foundational.

Drawing on his training as a historian of race, religion, and social movements, Dr. Tisby traces the pattern across four eras of American history. In every case, the injustice that moved people to act was violent, visible, and visceral.

Dr. Tisby then turns to the present. ICE keeps killing people, and he makes the case that under this administration, immigration is the tip of the spear: the most public, most violent, most visceral campaign of them all.

• Why every social movement must find the injustice that evokes the most moral outrage and press on it until progress comes
• The "violent, visible, visceral" test for what actually mobilizes people to act
• How abolitionists, Ida B. Wells, civil rights activists, and the Black Panther Party each pressed on their era's defining injustice
• The recent ICE killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araújo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán in Maine
• The 2,000-arrests-per-day quota, masked agents, unmarked vehicles, and the lack of accountability fueling reckless violence
• Why immigration is the tip of the spear for this administration, and why attacks on voting rights struggle to spark the same outrage
• The story behind Tisby Studios' first film, Jesus Was a Migrant, and why it is distributed through group screenings
• Concrete action steps: booking a screening, abolishing ICE, taking off the masks, demanding accountability, and emphasizing the ethics of the kingdom

• Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, on nonviolent coercion and the healthy tension that forces a society to confront its prejudice
• The Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Program
• The Color of Compromise by Dr. Jemar Tisby, and its closing chapter, "The Fierce Urgency of Now," which introduces the ARC of Racial Justice
• Jesus Was a Migrant (JesusWasAMigrant.com)
• Last week's episode, "What Mainstream Media Keep Getting Wrong about Douglas Wilson"

The best way to support The Justice Briefing is to become a paid subscriber at JemarTisby.Substack.com. Fewer than 5% of subscribers are paid; the $70 annual plan comes out to about $5.83 a month, and it keeps this podcast, and this kind of history, coming every week.

NPR just gave Douglas Wilson another splashy, in-depth interview, and Dr. Jemar Tisby has a problem with it.

Not that the media covers Wilson: the pastor from Moscow, Idaho has a direct line to power through his disciple Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, and that is newsworthy.

The problem is how they cover him.

In this episode of The Justice Briefing, Dr. Tisby makes the case that respectful, on-location, one-on-one coverage does exactly what Wilson wants.

From there, Dr. Tisby walks through who Wilson is and what he actually believes, from his rejection of the Nineteenth Amendment to his vision of a theocratic America, then names a better way to cover him.

The real question is not what Wilson believes. It is who gets to speak for Christians, and which version of God and country will prevail.

• Why NPR, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times keep making the trip to Moscow, Idaho
• The one line where Wilson admits a "respectful hearing" is the win he is after
• Wilson's theology explained: reformed fundamentalism, postmillennialism, biblical patriarchy, classical Christian education, and dominionism
• His views on repealing the Nineteenth Amendment and "household voting"
• How the Gospel Coalition, Desiring God, and other evangelical platforms gave Wilson legitimacy years before the mainstream media did
• Why the coverage centers Wilson, on his own turf, with no counter-voice in the frame
• The lack of racial analysis in most coverage of Wilson and Christian dominionism
• A better model: pass the mic to the scholars, pastors, and survivors who resist him

Scholars and books that offer a counter-narrative

• Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
• Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth
• Sheila Wray Gregoire, She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up
• Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy
• Sarah Stankorb, Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning
• Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism
• Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus
• Bryan Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church

Survivors speaking out

• Sons of Patriarchy (sonsofpatriarchy.com), hosted by Sarah Bader and Peter Bell

The best way to materially support The Justice Briefing is to subscribe to Footnotes at JemarTisby.Substack.com, the #4 ranked publication in the history category. Your subscription is what keeps this work independent and coming to you every week.