The Libertarian Christian Podcast

Jeremy Todd joined host Cody Cook at this past weekend's Christians for Liberty Conference to discuss his Libertarian campaign for the Kentucky U.S. House seat, currently held by Thomas Massie until this coming January, describing how party members quickly gathered signatures after Massie lost the Republican primary. He attributed Massie’s defeat to attack advertising and Donald Trump’s criticism, and said he hoped to attract Massie supporters and independent voters.

Todd discussed how his Christian faith informs his libertarian views, including his opposition to imposing beliefs through political power, and criticized some evangelical support for Israel. He also addressed divisions and coalition-building in the Libertarian Party, concerns about affordability and political disengagement, and his campaign’s focus on money creation, foreign wars, lobbying, and government surveillance.

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Eastern Christianity is rarely associated with classical liberalism — but should it be? In this conversation with Dr. Dylan Pahman, author of The Kingdom of God and the Common Good and co‑editor of The Christian Roots of American Liberty, we explore the overlooked intellectual resources within the Eastern Orthodox tradition that support freedom, rule of law, spontaneous order, private property, and even free markets.

From sobornost (conciliar togetherness) to sophia (wisdom) to the liturgical worldview that shapes Orthodox social ethics, Dr. Pahman uncovers historical examples, forgotten thinkers, and surprising theological insights that challenge the stereotype of Eastern Orthodoxy as inherently statist or “caesaropapist.”

If you’ve ever wondered whether Orthodoxy has its own path to liberty — or how Eastern Christian thought can enrich the broader Christian conversation on freedom — this episode is for you.

Links:

- The Kingdom of God and the Common Good by Dylan Pahman

- The Christian Roots of American Liberty by Dylan Pahman and John C. Pinheiro

- https://cabasilasinstitute.org/

- https://x.com/DylanPahman

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:22 Orthodox Liberty Roots
1:06 What This Book Is
3:59 East, West, And Liberty
7:22 Frank And Spontaneous Order
13:05 Three Orthodox Contributions
21:41 Sabornost And Social Order
23:04 Trade, Fathers, And Providence
26:30 Monks, Property, And Commerce
31:14 Kabasilis And Monastic Freedom
34:16 Usury And Medieval Critiques
43:04 Basil On Wealth
48:33 Misreadings Of Caesaro-Papism
56:36 Orthodoxy Under Revolution
1:00:03 Orthodoxy And Islam
1:04:38 Christian Roots Of Liberty

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Life before the Industrial Revolution was not simpler, slower, or more humane. It was short, violent, filthy, and saturated with grief, and almost nobody alive today can picture it accurately. That gap is not harmless. It shapes how people respond to economic growth, to AI, and to every technology that promises to change how we live.

Chelsea Follett, research fellow at the Cato Institute and the mind behind HumanProgress.org, returns to the show with a new book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past. The argument is blunt: we have not only solved many of the problems our ancestors faced, we have erased the memory of them. Nostalgia fills the vacuum, and nostalgia is a terrible guide to policy. What follows takes the romantic version of the past apart and argues that gratitude for what we have is the first step toward keeping it.

Chapters:
0:22 Introduction to the Grim Old Days
1:56 Why Progress Matters
5:40 Why We Romanticize the Past
8:45 Harsh Realities of Family Life
13:54 Child Labor and Daily Work
16:24 Violence and Social Progress
20:55 Defining the Pre-Industrial Era
25:12 Fragile Paths to Progress
29:06 Sources and Historical Skepticism
32:13 The Darkest Anecdotes
34:07 Child Loss and Modern Medicine
38:27 Debunking Medieval Myths
40:46 Why the Past Still Matters

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State religious liberty laws are the part of this fight almost nobody watches. Supreme Court cases get the headlines. The statutes that decide whether a baker, a nurse, a foster parent, or a congregation ever ends up in court at all sit quietly in fifty state codes, and most Christians have no idea what their own state has on the books.

Paul Mueller, senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, co-authors Religious Liberty in the States, an annual index now in its fifth year. It scores every state on roughly fifty discrete protections grouped into twenty weighted safeguard categories. Not aspirational protections. Not vibes about whether a state feels Christian. What is actually enacted.

The rankings scramble most assumptions people bring to the map, and they make three things clear: legislation beats litigation, the red and blue shorthand fails here, and the libertarian objection to religious exemptions deserves an answer.

Chapters:
0:22 Guest Intro and Background
5:48 How the Index Works
13:33 Libertarian Tensions in Law
23:19 Why State Protections Matter
28:16 Reading the State Rankings
37:12 Why Most States Lag
40:06 Measuring Real-World Impact
44:52 Getting the Report Heard
47:53 Closing Thoughts and Podcast Plug

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Alex Bernardo stops by the LCI Greenroom to talk about his new book Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation--which is available September 15th! Alex's book introduces New Testament studies while also clarifying what it means to read the New Testament with clear eyes rather than modern, leftist assumptions.

Chapters:
0:00:22 Book Launch and Methodology
0:01:54 Why the Book Matters
0:03:38 Libertarian Ethics and Christianity
0:06:14 Three-Part Framework
0:06:51 Why Background Matters
0:10:02 Scholarship and Community
0:12:47 History as Guardrails
0:15:13 When History Becomes Necessary
0:20:09 Marxist Misreadings
0:24:25 Misusing Political Categories
0:28:14 Conference and New Project
0:29:55 Romans 13 Revisited
0:34:44 Reading Paul in Context
0:36:49 The Empire Question
0:38:22 Paul and Anti-Imperialism
0:43:20 Jesus as King
0:47:15 Witness Over Revolution
0:53:11 Losing for Christ
0:58:02 Rights and Pacifism
1:01:54 New Insights from the Text
1:04:57 Default Nonviolence
1:11:25 Closing Plugs and Release Info

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Ask why the free market works and most popular economics hands you a clever story about how it doesn't. Insurance companies are greedy. Real estate agents run a racket. Used car buyers are being fleeced. The stories sell books, and they rarely survive a phone call to the people being accused.

John Lott has spent a career making those phone calls. Economist, former chief economist at the U.S. Sentencing Commission, author of More Guns, Less Crime, he wrote Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories That Don't as a direct answer to the Freakonomics school of counterintuitive economics. The claim is not that markets are magic. It is that when a pattern holds for decades among people with their own money on the line, the odds favor a reason over a mistake. What follows is the method and the evidence: how to tell a finding that holds from one that merely sounds good, why the most famous claim in Freakonomics runs backward, and what actually explains the growth of government.

Chapters:
0:22 Intro and Freedomnomics Overview
3:35 Guns Research by Accident
8:40 Debating the Gun Evidence
17:30 Carry Laws and Crime Patterns
23:04 Freakonomics and Hidden Assumptions
31:51 Abortion, Family Change, and Crime
35:57 Challenging LoJack and Incentives
41:55 Real Estate, Cars, and Markets
49:13 Why Government Grew
53:30 Divorce, Voting, and Liberalism
57:41 Where to Find More Research

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Libertarians agree that freedom is worth defending, but not all libertarians believe that liberty needs virtue in order to survive. In this episode, Stephane Slade, senior editor at Reason and author of the new book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, argues that a free society cannot endure unless its people possess the moral habits that make freedom workable — honesty, trustworthiness, responsibility, and respect for the rights of others. Without virtue, citizens eventually demand coercion to protect themselves from one another, and liberty collapses under the weight of fear. The notion that freedom and virtue are not rivals but partners goes by the name of fusionism, and Slade provides a history of this idea, its advocates, and its enemies.

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Libertarian political strategy has always been shaped by a difficult question: should libertarians invest their energy in the Libertarian Party, or work inside one of the major parties (usually the Republican Party) to influence policy from within the duopoly? This double-header episode brings that tension into sharp relief through two contrasting voices — Mike ter Maat, who argues that the GOP is where the decisive battles for liberty can be fought and perhaps won, and James Mills, who believes the LP remains the most principled and viable home for advancing freedom.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:22 Welcome & Guest Intros
1:56 Why Leave the LP?
9:17 GOP Over LP Strategy
13:37 Using the Republican Liberty Caucus
17:17 Why the GOP Can Move
24:39 Coalition Lessons
29:39 Delegates Empowered Plan
36:19 Ohio Libertarian Bid
47:58 Ballot Access Hurdles
54:20 Reaching Libertarian Neighbors
59:15 Vote for Principle
1:03:27 Trojan Horse or Outsider?

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The ideas of the American Revolution did not appear in the summer of 1776. They had been building in colonial hearts and minds for decades, and by the time the Declaration was signed, Americans had thought harder about liberty, consent, and the limits of power than any people before them. That is the argument historian and economist Larry Reed brings to his new book Born of Ideas: How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America, and to this conversation with Doug Stuart.

Reed, President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, treats the American founding as an intellectual and moral achievement rather than an accident of geography or grievance. He answers the fashionable claim that America was defined by an "original sin," and he does it not by ignoring the country's failures but by putting them in the context of the world as the founders actually inherited it. What follows is the case the episode makes.

Chapters:
0:22 Welcome & Guest Introduction
1:02 A Book of Revolutionary Ideas
2:47 Founders and Liberty
6:01 America’s Flawed Origins
12:06 The Mayflower Compact
15:07 Anne Hutchinson’s Exile
16:41 Native Nations and the Revolution
20:31 Black Patriots and Poets
22:42 Common Sense Ignites
26:43 Hidden Economics of War
30:03 Slavery and the Founding
35:50 Reconstruction What-Ifs
37:46 Republic, Not Democracy
41:14 Heroes and Foreign Allies

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Does democracy need Christianity to survive? Jonathan Rauch — a gay, atheist, Jewish journalist at Brookings and The Atlantic — has concluded that it does. His 2025 book, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, argues that Christianity is a load-bearing wall in the American experiment, and that two decades of de-churching have left the whole structure sagging.

As an outsider who once celebrated secularization as progress and watched what filled the vacuum, Rauch now claims that democracy needs Christianity. What he found is that when the church stopped carrying its load, toxic partisanship, tribal politics, and substitute religions rushed in to take its place.

Host Doug Stuart talks with Rauch to work through why the founders counted on Christian virtue, which three teachings of Jesus underwrite liberal democracy, why compromise is a Christian act rather than a betrayal, and what the church has to recover to be worth listening to again.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:22 Guest Intro and Book Origins
4:03 Christianity’s Civic Role
7:28 Churches, Decline, and Politics
12:23 Liberalism and Democracy Defined
13:56 Founders on Virtue
18:52 Jesus and Liberal Democracy
25:10 Compromise as a Creative Process
29:53 Congress and Political Cynicism
32:50 Reforming a Broken System
33:45 Christians and Culture War
35:38 Freedom, Fear, and Public Faith
38:10 Pseudo-Religions Fill the Void
41:25 Libertarianism and Christianity
45:39 Altruism, Virtue, and Freedom
51:15 Latter-Day Saints and Agency
59:18 Make Christianity Peculiar Again

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