The Long Game

This is a Builders conversation. I'm doing these about once a month to highlight people who are not just cursing the darkness but are also building up their local community — and the country — through making something beautiful, through problem-solving, and by stitching together places of belonging and meaning. (Thank you Joy Moore for the inspiration!)

This past summer, we took our kids to visit WERU in Maine, which is near Acadia National Park. The station's General Manager, Matt Murphy, gave us a tour, and he even had our two youngest daughters do a brief on-air announcement in support of the station. We saw the floor to ceiling shelves of CD's and records, the small studio, and the kitchen, also filled with music.

I wanted to interview Matt for my Builders series because, as he says: "There's so much in the world that's challenging ... and all the hard times can have a certain degree of paralysis to them."

"And there's a lot of things in the world that I can't do anything about, but I can do a lot about making community radio a good environment for people to do their thing and serve the community," he told me. "So having something to do, that you feel can help make even a little bit of a difference, is really important."

That's exactly it. Having something to do to make even a little bit of difference is the cure for the ways that the bigger, broader world can make all of us feel hopeless and powerless sometimes.

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This week's podcast interview (audio above) is with Ruy Teixeira, about his new book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.

It is an argument that both parties have been co-opted by big business. It spends all its time blaming the Democrats for their part in this, but that's because the authors believe the Democrats used to be the party of the working person, and that it can and should be again. They also view the Republican party, or at least large swaths of it, as a threat to democracy.

They are interested in Democrats winning elections, and winning elections is an issue of math. And they believe, based on quite a bit of statistical evidence and history, that the Democratic party has alienated key elements of the country that they need to win elections, both by losing touch with working class people on economics, and on social issues.

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I have never cared all that much about the debate over evolution. But I grew up in an evangelical home and church. So in my world, the origins of the species were definitely up for question.

To me, it all seemed rather silly. I didn't see any conflict between evolution and the Christian faith, or even between evolution and the Bible.

But I have known others who said quite openly that if they ever came to believe that evolution was true, they feared they would lose their faith. Most evolution skeptics aren't quite as blunt or bleak. There is a wide range of evolution skepticism, from those who simply aren't sure what to believe to those who are adamant opponents.

I had never really thought, however, about the ways that skepticism of evolution was one of the foundations of an anti-expertise, anti-science frame of mind that really does permeate evangelicalism. We saw it more clearly than ever during the COVID pandemic. But we've also seen it on the issue of climate change. The consensus of scientific evidence is clear, but religious conservatives reject it, or say we can't know what's true.

Janet Kellogg Ray is a biology professor at the University of North Texas. She was raised a creationist, and has written two books now about the issue of evolution and evangelicals. The first, Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark? The Bible and Modern Science and the Trouble of Making It All Fit, came out in 2021. The second came out this month. It's called The God of Monkey Science: People of Faith in a Modern Scientific World.

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In American politics, we saw the latest sign of total dysfunction in Congress, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted for daring to pass a bipartisan solution last week to avoid a government shutdown.

Many people are desperate for a new kind of politics, and Joel Searby has dedicated the last several years of his life to that cause.

Joel worked on the Evan McMullin presidential campaign in 2016, and since then has been involved in numerous efforts to find a new middle way for the many Americans who are deeply frustrated with our politics. Most recently, Joel was executive director of The Forward Party, which is building state parties around the country to give people a way to build a movement from the ground up. Joel recently left that role and we talk about what he's up to now. He remains invested in and hopeful about the future of The Forward Party.

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I've interviewed Yascha Mounk about his book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which was released this week.

"Mounk has told the story of the Great Awokening better than any other writer who has attempted to make sense of it," The Washington Post wrote in a review.

Yascha's book says that we can reach across our differences and understand one another, and that we need to make the effort to do so, through conversation, debate, and relationship. I was not aware of the degree to which some progressive writers and intellectuals have argued that such mutual understanding is not even possible, and so they have discouraged the pursuit.

It's hard for me to imagine a world in which we do not at least try to understand and appreciate one another, even those with whom we have profound differences. That effort is at the heart of a free and prosperous society, in my mind.

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Shannon Harris is on the podcast this week. We talk about her new book The Woman they Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife

I have a particular interest in this book because it's a behind the scenes look at the culture of the church I grew up in: Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland. There is national relevance for Shannon's story, however, because she was married to Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, for 21 years. Josh's book was a national best-seller and shaped the romantic and sexual lives of countless evangelical Christians. Josh and Shannon divorced in 2019, which was big enough news at the time to be written up by CNN.

I asked Shannon:

• who she wrote the book for
• how she thinks about the idea that some will not listen to anything she says because she doesn't believe everything they do
• the ways in which the church we both spent years in taught us to distrust our intuition and our gut
• about her account of the sidelining and erasure of women in a religious subculture

I read this book very quickly. It's well-written, highly readable, and written in very short chapters. I also think Shannon deals with delicate stories involving other people — especially the leaders from our church — with a deft and tasteful touch.

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Andrew is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives (theARDA.com) at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Here'sAndrew's Substack

His first book in 2020, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, with Samuel Perry, was a data-heavy sociological book that was, in their words, "the first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in the United States."

Andrew's new book, American Idolatry, is a more personal look at Christian nationalism. It's still written with the rigor of an academic, but it conveys Andrew's personal convictions about what the Christian faith teaches and asks of its adherents, and how Christian nationalism "betrays the gospel and threatens the church."

Andrew is a Christian who writes of his upbringing in small-town conservative America, going to church every week. And he says that when he learned the history of Emperor Constantine, he wondered "was it God's plan all along to win over the most powerful person in the world at that time to ... help Christianity flourish?" And he also wondered, "Why didn't Jesus use this same tactic and embrace imperial power?"

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Large numbers of Americans are unhappy with the idea of a Biden vs Trump rematch, polls show, but both the Democratic and Republican parties appear to be paralyzed, unable to do anything about it.There's a reason why.Both parties are shells of their former selves, and strong political parties are the foundation of a healthy democracy, many political experts agree. For too long Americans have seen political parties as the villains, and individual politicians and voters as the heroes.That thinking has to change if American democracy is going to survive, Lee Drutman argues in a new study.

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Karen Swallow Prior is the author of multiple books, including On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. Her new book is called The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. It's out August 8 from Brazos Press.

She is a professor of English literature and a popular speaker and writer. Karen's new book argues that "so much ... that what evangelicals uncritically assume is 'biblical' turns out to be simply Victorian." She explains here why the Victorian age, in particular, has had such a formative impact on American Christianity.

The book unpacks how numerous major themes, ideas and emphases in American evangelicalism -- such as revival, conversion, rapture, improvement, sentimentality, and empire -- have their roots in the culture and the literature of 19th century Britain.

Karen is a spirited conversation partner and a really joyful champion of reading and writing and language, and she has been evolving herself over the past several years in her views of American evangelicalism and faith itself, and we talk about that as well here.

Karen really does come from inside evangelicalism. She's taught at Liberty University. She's tried extremely hard to be positive and affirming of as much as she can. But she talks here about how there is a tendency inside conservative Christianity to discourage difficult questions or criticism that breeds a "gullibility" that she says provides endless grist for the "evangelical industrial mill."

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I interviewed Russell Moore on the podcast this week about his new book Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, which is out next Tuesday, July 25.

In his book, Moore refers to the "post-2016 era" as an "apocalypse."

Now, you hear that word, and you might think Zombies!

Both those reactions to the word "apocalypse" have to do with the end of the world.

Yet that's not how Moore is using the term. "Apocalypse literally means unveiling and revelation," Moore told me.

"And I think that's what happened in the post 2015 era. A a lot of things were revealed," Moore said of the last eight years. "We could see patterns of behavior that were preexisting but weren't really all that clear."

"What I'm trying to say to people is, 'Yes, we're in a place of disruption and of loss. That is always the way that God works in terms of creating something new," Moore said. "And so the primary thing is to say to people, 'Don't panic about the sense of homelessness that you feel. Don't panic about the bewilderment that you feel.' That actually can be a sign of grace."

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