The Libertarian Christian Podcast

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

Audio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com

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

 Audio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com

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

Audio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com

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.

Audio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com

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?

Audio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com

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

Audio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com

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

Audio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com

Acton University is one of the most respected gatherings in the faith-and-markets world. This year four hosts from the Christians for Liberty Network were able to find out what it was like to attend. Through a scholarship from the Foundation for Harmony and Prosperity, they spent four days at Acton University among Catholics, Calvinists, Eastern Orthodox, Jews, Muslims, and free-market thinkers from more than sixty countries, and came away deeply impressed.

Doug Stuart is joined by Alex Bernardo, Cody Cook, and Kerry Baldwin to recap the experience: the core sessions, the standout speakers, the dinner-table conversations, and what it felt like to show up openly as Christian libertarians in a room that leads with virtue, stewardship, and dignity before it ever reaches policy. The short version is that it felt like being among kin.

This recap walks through what Acton University gets right, where Christian libertarians found common ground, and the friendly, sharpening conversations that made the week worth every minute.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:22 Acton University Overview
2:36 First Impressions of Acton
5:08 Ecumenical and Marketed Faith
9:16 Libertarianism Versus Libertinism
15:24 Moral Language and Shared Values
23:58 The Four Core Sessions
30:59 Questions That Challenged
43:03 Best Sessions and Standouts
48:37 Receptivity to Libertarians
52:51 Closing Reflections and Thanks

Audio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com

Black empowerment is often framed as a debate between pro-black, welfare state progressivism and anti-black, law-and-order conservatism. But what if free markets, not big government, is the key to black empowerment? In this episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast, Cody Cook talks to Dr. Rachel Ferguson about the dominant narrative that racial justice requires state intervention. Ferguson demonstrates that classical liberalism offers a more historically grounded, morally coherent, and economically effective path forward.

Ferguson argues that the worst racial injustices in American history were not failures of markets but failures of the state — from slavery to Jim Crow to redlining to welfare policies that fractured families and communities. She also highlights the long, overlooked tradition of Black classical liberals who championed individual rights, entrepreneurship, and civil society as the real engines of flourishing.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:24 Welcome and Black Liberation Through Markets
2:53 Challenging White Privilege Claims
7:04 Douglass and Classical Liberalism
9:00 Why Freedom Needs a Voice
13:19 Slavery’s Economic Costs
19:57 Defining Real Free Markets
22:57 Welfare’s Perverse Incentives
27:18 Beyond Bootstraps and Blame
31:11 Sharecropping After Emancipation
34:05 Lynching and Public Memory
37:59 Racism Beyond the Law
40:48 Populism and Immigration Fears
44:39 Churches and Civil Society

Audio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com

Most people who want to know how to study the Bible are looking for a system. A plan to finish in a year, the "right" translation, a highlighting method that finally sticks. Alex Bernardo, host of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast and a trained biblical studies student, spent this episode dismantling that instinct. There is no single correct method. There is only the daily habit of putting yourself in front of the text and refusing to leave until it has done something to you.

Doug Stuart noticed Alex's heavily marked-up Bible over breakfast at Acton University and wanted to know the man behind the exegesis. What came out is a working philosophy of Bible study that treats intellectual growth and discipleship as the same project, not competing ones. You cannot grow as a disciple without growing in understanding, and understanding that never touches your life is just trivia.

This is a practical guide to how to study the Bible over a lifetime: how to build the habit, which translations reward close reading, when to bring in commentaries, what to mark, and which popular practices are worth abandoning.

Chapters:
0:22 Welcome and Bible Reading Habits
2:53 Early Bible Memories
4:39 Faith Through the Gospels
6:06 Daily Reading Routine
8:36 Reading Without a Plan
10:26 Lectionary Life
12:05 Choosing the NASB
16:00 Paragraphs and Verse Marks
18:09 Reading as Narrative
22:22 Finding the Right Translation
28:30 Using Study Tools
33:07 Memory and Bible Flow
35:23 Marking Key Passages
41:30 What Didn’t Work

Audio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com