One Nation Under God?

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One nation under God, God.

Indivisible or divided by our faiths.

This is Radio Atlantic.

Welcome back for the second episode of Radio Atlantic.

I am Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

And I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

I'm the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

And over there in New New York.

It's not over there, it's up there in New York.

Cardinal Direction.

Down here in New York, it's me, Alex Wagner.

I am a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Geography is very important for our magazine.

Wonderful to once again be in a studio with you, my colleagues.

And here in our fourth chair, is our wonderful colleague Emma Green, who covers religion and politics for The Atlantic.

Emma, welcome.

Hey, y'all.

Awesome.

Emma,

she's so southern.

Sometimes.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Beautiful friends.

I heard

Alex.

Moving along.

I heard no judgment whatsoever.

No judgment here.

Emma, welcome.

Thank you.

You have been covering the intersection of religion and politics for the Atlantic.

And I think you've surfaced this really interesting question, which is how much religious diversity do Americans really support?

Yeah, I think this is an important question.

There was a moment earlier this summer that sort of captured this.

It was on the floor of the Senate in a committee meeting.

Senator Bernie Sanders was questioning Russell Vogt, who was an evangelical Christian nominee for a position in the Office of Management and Budget.

And Sanders was asking Vogt about a blog post he'd written.

He wrote, Muslim, quote, Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology.

They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, his Son, and they stand condemned.

End of quote.

Do you believe that that statement is Islamophobic?

Absolutely not, Senator.

I'm a Christian, and I believe in a Christian set of principles based on my faith.

That post, as I stated in the questionnaire to this committee, was to defend my alma mater, Wheaton College, a Christian school that has a statement of faith that includes the centrality of Jesus Christ for salvation.

Again, I apologize.

Forgive me.

We just don't have a lot of time.

Do you believe that people in the Muslim religion stand condemned?

Is that your view?

Again, Senator, I'm a Christian, and I wrote that piece.

Well, what is that statement?

The statement of faith of Wheaton College.

I understand that.

I don't know how many Muslims there are in America.

I really don't know.

Probably a couple of million.

Are you suggesting that all of those people stand condemned?

What about Jews?

They stand condemned too?

Senator, I'm a Christian.

I understand you are a Christian, but this country is made up of people who are not just.

I understand that Christianity is the majority religion, but there are other people who have different religions in this country and around the world.

So this stuck out to me and a lot of other folks who watched it as an example of two world views colliding.

Clearly, Senator Sanders thought this was a slam dunk, that he was going to nail this guy on being an intolerant Islamophobe.

He questioned him, as we heard, about the limits of Judaism and Islam and other religions, whether he thought those also stood condemned.

But the candidate, as we heard, was flustered.

He wasn't sure why this was happening.

And I think this boils down to what I like to call intolerant pluralism versus sort of tough pluralism.

So this idea that diversity is acceptable only so long as those who are diverse are checking certain boxes or staying within the boundaries of certain acceptable viewpoints by which everything is okay.

Whereas tough pluralism, I think, challenges us to take viewpoints like that of an evangelical Christian nominee for office and ask the question, is it okay?

Can we live with and tolerate people who have views which say, mine is the right, true way, and I'll live in a neighborly way with you, I'll live in society with you, but I believe I'm right and you're wrong.

It strikes me that only someone who is ignorant of religion, ignorant of Christianity and Islam in particular, would be surprised and offended by a Christian who believes that Jesus is the only path to God or Jesus is the only path to heaven.

So I mean,

this goes to obviously deeper questions about

Democrats and liberals and their respect for religions as they are, not this kind of idealized, homogenized kind of

we are the world, we are the people.

Taking Pope Francis, taking the parts of Francis that everybody likes and ignoring the rest.

Aaron Powell, can I piggyback on that?

Because I wonder if you think, and I would pose this to all of you guys, whether the left has sort of unnecessarily, perhaps, alienated the Christian faithful, the Christian devout.

I mean, abortion and same-sex marriage have effectively become litmus tests for party participation.

And there are plenty of other issues that link progressives and the Christian devout, including poverty and immigration.

But I I mean, is there space in the Democratic Party for people who do believe

in evangelical Christianity, for example, like Russell

Vogt, the OMB deputy director nominee?

So this is what I've been describing as intolerant pluralism.

It's the idea that we value a diversity of views so long as they're the right kind of views.

In the example I just played for you, Senator Sanders was deriding Russell Vogt's Christian views.

But in a world of intolerant pluralism, this affects everyone.

Folks are fine with religious beliefs so long as they're universally agreeable and are in no way offensive or exclusive.

I was talking about the way this plays out in the context of Islam the other day with a Muslim journalist and Atlantic contributor, Wajahat Ali.

Here's what he said.

First and foremost, it's not Democrat or Republican.

It's an American narrative that says the only utility of a Muslim is he or she who is a good Muslim who helps our national security apparatus.

Bill Clinton essentially said that with equivocations and qualifications at the DNC.

If you're a Muslim,

if you're a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make the future together.

We want you.

And then with the Republicans, it's become so hostile to the point where Donald Trump says, I think Islam hates us.

Do you think Islam is at war with the West?

I think Islam hates us.

Seriously, it's like all of Islam hates us word?

Like 1.7 billion people?

Damn.

And what about us American Muslims?

Does Islam hate us also?

And then with Democrats, it's the tent is bigger, which has to be acknowledged.

They, you know, admit us.

Hillary Clinton, Bernie went to bat for us.

But at the same time, it's like, listen, we're not down with this God thing.

And a lot of us are secular atheists.

We got burned through misogyny or through patriarchy or through anti-LGBT homophobia.

And so we're fine with you because you're dope when it comes to, let's say, affordable health care and living wages and climate change.

But guess what?

Can you please, you know, get rid of the Quran and say that Prophet Muhammad was just a man?

And here's the litmus test when we have on our family values.

And if you check those boxes, then and only then in our pluralistic America, tolerant and open-mindedness, then and only then we'll accept you.

With the asterisk smart.

What Wajahat was describing is something I've heard from a lot of Muslims as they try to figure out their place in this time of political anxiety and turbulence.

Can I ask you a quick question about that?

It seems that people on the left might get bollocksed up by this problem.

People on the left

are

very judgmental of Christians who don't support same-sex marriage.

But there are very few mainstream Muslim clerics, certainly mainstream clerical bodies that support same-sex marriage, even in the American Muslim community, but certainly overseas.

But there doesn't seem to be that same level of judgment.

Am I wrong?

I do think that this issue area, LGBT issues, is actually one of the last frontiers of tension between leftist activists and Muslims.

And one of the reasons why it may not have been a breaking point so far is that first, I think a lot of American Muslims feel like they have nowhere to go but rallying on the left against the Trump administration, but also that there's other fish to fry right now.

There's the travel ban, there's hate crimes, mosques being burned down, et cetera, et cetera.

The attentions of the Muslim community may be focused elsewhere.

They also haven't been as vocal about this issue as evangelical groups.

So for some white Christians, same-sex marriage is the last frontier of the culture war and ultimately sort of the last bash in their hill on which they're willing to die.

But for Muslims, this isn't as much of a sort of break issue.

But what about the left's role in actually sort of contemplating the various aspects of some of these issues?

I was talking with someone whose father was a priest yesterday, and he was mentioning, you know, there is the framing of, for example, the abortion debate on the left is solely in terms of women's rights.

There's not a lot of discussion about how you sort of navigate the difficult waters of being, for example, anti-death penalty, but also pro-choice.

There is a moral and ethical aspect to abortion that is largely ignored in the sort of framing of the policy debate.

But I think it's probably incumbent upon somebody on the left.

That's a debate that probably should be had if the sort of progressive left has decided to shut its doors to pro-life Democrats.

Just

by saying this,

you would be writing yourself out of a lot of liberal conversation right now.

Exactly.

I mean, it's almost heretical.

It's moved so far in the direction of

this is not to be discussed in the Democratic Party that you would be outside the mainstream just by suggesting a conversation.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I think something you lit on there, Alex, is important, which is this idea of moral language that stands apart from legal language.

And I would add to that, scientific language.

There are only certain kinds of vocabularies that we generally will accept in the American public sphere.

One of those is saying, what should the law or policy be?

The other is, what does the science say?

But I think especially on the left, there's a reticence around making normative claims on the basis of ethics and morality.

So saying, perhaps it's immoral to abort a baby.

Perhaps a woman should have a right under the law to do that, but that it's immoral for her to do that.

That kind of subtlety and differentiation and crutching on morality as a legitimate language for the public sphere is not something that I see a lot in the American left.

But isn't that part of the argument against the death penalty?

In what sense?

Well, I just think if you look at a moral framework, like a lot of folks on the left say it is morally wrong for the state to take a life.

And that's the sort of foundation for resistance to the death penalty in some cases on the left.

So I don't think that the moral argument is totally absent from left-leaning policy positions.

It just depends on what the issue is.

Aaron Powell, I think that's true, although I would challenge you to see whether the death penalty is actually a a big rallying cry on the left.

I think this is at best a marginal issue that maybe comes up when the Supreme Court is taking this on or when there's another case on the state level.

I don't necessarily think it's marginal.

I think it's just almost 100%.

There's just consensus on it in a way that it's not controversial.

It could be.

We tend in this conversation to sort of tunnel down pretty quickly into the left and the right.

And part of what I think is actually most interesting are in subjects, the matter of pluralism, tough pluralism, intolerant pluralism, religious freedom, and all of these things is actually the tension that happens within communities.

And tensions that happen within communities of faith

are some of the biggest.

The fact is that different people, even people who share a creed, even people who've grown up in the same doctrines,

interpret them very differently and express them very differently in their lives.

And that's true within Christianity.

I'm pretty sure it's true within Judaism and it's true within Islam, certainly.

And I'm I'm curious about that.

One of the, several of the biggest conflicts that I think we see taking shape among the faithful today

are

about my interpretation is better than yours or is truer than yours, not

both of us are on the side of religion and right.

Yeah, Raj and I were talking about this, particularly as it pertains to American Muslims.

So the, for example, racial divides that sometimes emerge in American Muslim communities where the experience of black Muslims is not seen as legitimate or lifted up as much as that of people who are of Middle Eastern or recent immigrant descent.

I think this also happens within Christianity quite a bit, and we see this in political issues.

One example that comes to mind is the fight over the Johnson Amendment, which is the provision of the tax code, which essentially prohibits churches from endorsing or opposing candidates for office.

And the Trump administration has made efforts to walk back enforcement of this, even though enforcement was kind of paltry before.

Anyways, within the Christian community, even among some of the most conservative Christians, there are big divides over whether this is actually good.

Some people say it's religious freedom to be able to speak however you want, but others really don't want their churches to be politicized.

And I think that nuance is important to call out, Matt, because it does show that having a certain type of doctrinal alignment doesn't necessarily bring you to one specific conclusion on the policy spectrum.

The other day, I was talking with the Reverend Adam Hamilton,

who is the pastor of the largest congregation of the United Methodist Church out in Leewood, Kansas, near Kansas City.

And that church, the United Methodist Church, has gone through a pretty bruising couple of years within the denomination

over the issue of how do we treat gay and lesbian pastors and gay and lesbian relationships within the church.

Do we ordain gay or lesbian pastors?

Do we marry same-sex couples?

And the UMC is actually potentially going to schism over this issue.

This is an upcoming issue on the denominational docket as well.

So the issue was for them,

do we remain united as the quote-unquote United Methodist Church?

Or do we figure out how to go our separate ways as different congregations?

And that tension became

deeper and more robust as the church has globalized, as more and more congregations have been added.

In countries where public opinion has not shifted as dramatically on that subject as it has in America over the past few years, as they've added those congregations, there's been this global schism within the faith where questions about religious interpretation are also questions about just us, our culture, who we are, and what we permit.

And I think that's where some of the most interesting and also some of the most violent conflicts within faiths and about faith happen.

Wait, I thought we were fighting about Bernie Sanders.

What happened?

Well, all of these fights kind of connect because they're about the fundamental issues of identity and belief that tend to divide us not only from left to right or from non-religious to religious, but as Matt's pointing out, in international conflicts.

And I think this is an important point that within religions, there is sometimes a lack of pluralism as well, a lack of toleration from people who are more conservative and traditional in their interpretations to people who are perhaps more liberal and open and progressive.

And that's an important dynamic.

But the bet that

I don't want to use the term more serious or less serious Christians, but the bet that evangelical Christians make or serious Catholics make is that the liberals in their faiths are slowly drifting away and dying.

Their faith itself is dying.

They're making no demands on themselves.

out of their faith.

And this happens in Judaism.

This happens in Islam.

It's a big fear in American Islam that the demands of the faith will diminish over time and that people will just sort of become anodyne, liberal-minded Americans with kind of a spiritual overlay rather than real observance.

So the bet, probably not the wrong bet, not as a moral bet, but just as a practical bet.

The bet is that the liberals drift away and fall away and become irrelevant.

Is that fair or is that wrong?

I think there are considerable questions about whether whether that's accurate.

I mean, in general, the more liberal denominations, the main line is shrinking faster than the evangelical denominations.

But Southern Baptists have their own kind of baptismal and recruitment problems, too.

So I do think that in general, secularization is an issue across American faiths and Christian denominations as well.

But I think this does loop back because it gets us to this fundamental point.

As American society becomes in some segments more secular, people perhaps feel spiritual, they feel loosely religiously connected, but ultimately their creed is one of a set of shared progressive, generally humanist, generally liberal values.

Will there be space for people who believe countercultural, pre-modern, pretty radical things about what it means to be saved and who's included in their vision of God's kingdom?

Well, and who's going into the institutions of faith?

That's my other question, right?

I mean, are young,

I mean, to some degree, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If the people most attracted to the faith at this point are those that are sort of more quote-unquote hardline and more doctrinal, then the institutions necessarily become more hardline and doctrinal.

And of course,

the inverse is also true.

Do we know, Emma, what the sort of recruitment is

at synagogues and

mosques and churches these days?

I think across the board, pretty much uniformly, clergy would tell you that they are terrified about the future of their congregations largely because American millennials across the board are less religious than any other documented generation in American history they also don't join things right right but I would're on Snapchat that's it these terrible young people I'm not going to join this with all you old folks but what I will say is that the American religious landscape is experiencing a period of intense fracture.

This is a realignment of how we worship and how we internalize and practice our faith.

It's a realignment around communal organizations, as you mentioned, Jeff, the way that we actually gather to practice our faith.

And it's also just a fracture in terms of how young people think about themselves.

There's this sort of individuation in how we think about identity.

We're able to choose who we are rather than having that given to us by our ethnicity or ancestry or something that we're necessarily called to or obligated to.

But all of that doesn't necessarily result in the kind of hard line dictatorships that you had perhaps outlined there, Alex, or that are imagined in dystopias like The Handmaiden's Tale.

I think it's

by no means suggesting that that's our inevitable future.

Yeah, I think it's more that the future is going to look different.

It's going to look more fractured.

It's going to have formations and community organizations that we can't even imagine right now.

And I think the life of traditional congregations where you go to a building on a Saturday or a Friday or a Sunday is going to be reinvented.

So that reinvention, the future of religious expression in America, is what we want to talk about next after this short break.

Stick with us.

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Okay, let's get back to it.

So, Emma, we've been talking a lot about where we are at this moment in American religious life, but I want to know where we're heading.

What can you tell us about the future of faith in America?

So before we can talk about where we're going, I think we actually have to head back in time a bit.

Let me tell you a story about Dalabils.

Pick one up and you'll see the words in God We Trust.

It's one of those subtle signs of religiosity in everyday American life.

It first showed up on coins during the Civil War, but it only became widespread in the 1950s, which was a time when American culture was awash in religious devotion.

The new stamp will carry to the world America's message of liberty and faith.

Ike was actually the president who made God a more explicit part of American national identity.

He got baptized 12 days into his first term.

He was the first president to get baptized while in office.

I know, I didn't know either, actually, before I read this book called One Nation Under God by a Princeton professor, Kevin Cruz.

Cruz describes the way that Ike, along with some big businesses, created this idea of a Christian America.

A few months after the stamp ceremony, Ike added One Nation Under a God to the Pledge of Allegiance.

In 1956, he officially made In God We Trust the national motto.

That's when it got all over the dollar.

Since then, many politicians have told the story of America is a religious story.

It is why our currency proudly declares, in God we trust.

President Trump won over white evangelicals by a wide margin.

And it's why we proudly proclaim that we are one nation under God

every time we say the Pledge of Allegiance.

But it's not clear how religious Trump is himself.

About a year and a half ago, he committed a bit of a Bible gaffe, misnaming the book 2 Corinthians.

2 Corinthians, right?

2 Corinthians 3.17.

That's the whole ballgame.

In one person, Trump kind of represents the split in America.

On the one hand, it feels like God is everywhere in our political life.

But on the other hand, a lot of America is becoming less religious.

These people may not care that much about having a deeply religious president.

It's not just young urban Democrat types, it's also the white working class.

We did a study with the Public Religion Research Institute and found that white working class Americans are less likely to claim a religious affiliation compared to their college-educated peers.

Even those who do say they're religious aren't all that likely to go to church.

So secularization actually might help explain the rise of Trump.

A lot of Americans feel disconnected from their politics and from the faith-based institutions that usually ground communal and civic life.

Trump tapped into something tribal and proudly nationalist in American culture, and that has has strong appeal.

What we're seeing in American religion is not linear decline, but a sense of fracture and division.

Wouldn't you say that the sort of the question around faith-based institutions is a little bit more urgent given our increasingly fragmented society?

That

as we see an atrophy of public

faith in government institutions, as we become less reliant on community

as it is sort of manifest in neighborly involvement with one another's affairs, that religious institutions perhaps have an even

bigger role to play?

Well, definitely, I think that's the case.

And I have somewhat of a vested interest in that as a

religion reporter because I see these communities in decline, or at least that are struggling and flailing.

And I also write a lot about the way that religious communities are a linchpin, not only for the way that people worship for themselves individually, but the broader fabric of our society.

Yeah.

Talk more about that, Emma, just in terms of the economic implications of

having robust faith-based institutions in a community.

Yeah, well, so this has been something sociologists have worried about for a while, the bowling alone thesis, that not only are people not going to church, they're not going to bowling clubs or PTA, and that kind of individuation and isolation is really bad for how we cooperate with one another civically and how willing people are to or how willing people are to engage in their larger political communities.

I do think that we can look at the decline in religiosity and affiliation with religious institutions and see the creeping causality for all sorts of other social ills and problems.

There's widespread disaffiliation from religious institutions among particularly younger white working class people.

And this perhaps contributes to their sense that there's no hope in investing in education.

There's no hope in being part of this bigger political project that they feel like they're not part of.

And I do think that, in a sort of more broader, sketched way, you can see connections between the decline of religious institutions and our inability to relate to people who are different than us, our inability to emphasize.

Just bowling alone,

it's when you were, to extend the metaphor, sorry, if you're bowling in church, you're going to church, you're not just participating in the civic life of your community.

You're with people, you are with people who

come from different socioeconomic background, different work backgrounds, blue collar, white collar.

There's the best chance you have at any given moment during the week of actually being around people who are unlike you, even though you might share a faith system,

was that experience.

And that's what we're, I don't want to get too depressed about it, but

this is a serious problem.

So, I think it's worth pointing out that folks have been decrying a decrease in religious faith for a long time.

Take Toby Lester, who wrote a story in 2002 in which he quoted a sociologist saying, For nearly three centuries, social scientists and assorted Western intellectuals have been promising the end of religion.

Each generation has been confident that within another few decades, or possibly a bit longer, humans will outgrow belief in the supernatural.

This proposition soon came to be known as the secularization thesis.

I think faith, a desire to believe, is fairly hardwired in us as humans, and it would probably take like genetic reprogramming to carve that out of us.

Well, and Toby also makes the point that religion has a way of surviving and evolving.

That religions that we think of as cults have gone on to become world religions.

And in, you know, the last 20 years, there have been any number of religious sort of sects and minorities that have now gained millions of followers that we are completely unaware of.

But it's a case in point that religion survives, usually.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: That's true.

And lest we go too far down the rabbit hole of doom saying about the future decline of religion or alternatively believing that the future of religion is soul cycle and other such organizations.

That's a charge.

That's a charge being taken.

Hey, hey,

read about it on theatlantic.com.

I've got a whole piece about that.

At least Gemma didn't say CrossFit so that the internet gets mad at this moment.

That's true.

That's true.

I do think it's important to point out that globally the picture is much different.

And this to me is the largest evidence against the secularization thesis, this idea that we as human civilization are on an inevitable march towards enlightenment, which will put us past the need for religion.

Not only is this not true in America, but it's really, really not true around the world.

In Latin America, there's still huge levels of religiosity.

Pentecostalism is on the rise in traditionally Catholic Latin America.

America.

The Catholic Church is growing rapidly, but it's not growing in the United States.

It's growing in places like Africa.

And coincidentally, the places where religiosity is growing in traditional forms in the highest numbers are the places where population is going to be highest in the coming years.

This is also true for the growth of Islam around the world.

So I do think that when we're talking about this downsloping of religion, not only does it complicate the picture to look globally, it helps us to maybe see that the American trend is not necessarily going to be what happens to human civilization more generally.

Do you guys think that politics is becoming a form of religion in the United States?

Yes.

Oh, sorry.

Was that too declarative?

Full stop.

Was that too declarative?

Why, Jeff?

Everybody needs religion.

It just manifests itself in some way.

People need to believe in something larger than themselves.

They need to affiliate with something transcendent.

I think for Bernie Sanders type people, I think Bernie Sanders has become a religious figure.

And you know as well as I do that, El Trump, you know as well as I do that

atheism can sometimes express itself as a kind of fundamentalist religion, an anti-religion, but

it becomes a faith system all its own.

I just think there's a desire for

religion came about because humans desired something transcendent, something that would explain mysteries that even science couldn't explain, something that unifies them against larger, darker forces.

And politics plays that role for a lot of people.

That's one of the reasons it gets so personal.

That's one of the reasons that political language becomes so hyper-moralized.

It's not that your opponent is wrong, it's that he's evil.

And that manifests itself on all sides of the political debate.

That's a late development.

I mean, the sense that the other side is evil and that there is a sort of moral shortcoming on the other side.

Well, I mean, McCarthyism is 60 years old.

I mean, it's not.

Sure, but it feels particularly tribal right now.

Very much.

Which is to say, you know, it almost has that pitched religious fervor each side of the aisle.

I had a really interesting conversation with a professor who's now at Tufts, a political scientist named Eitan Hirsch, who wrote a paper about something he calls political hobbyism.

I think he's working on a longer project about this as well.

And the idea was that, yes, people are watching Fox News and MSNBC and CNN almost like they watch pro wrestling.

They like to check Twitter and other social media platforms as their way of getting this sense of connection.

And I do think that when we're talking about politics as a religion, the same shortcomings apply as apply to the broader religious conversation here, which is an unwillingness to step up into that civic capacity that perhaps transcends a sense of left and right.

And you're on this side of the wrestling rink and I'm on this other side.

I wonder if you think religion is becoming a regional concern in America.

That, you know, the question I think is, do Americans in big cities have to sort of navigate the question of faith in the same way that people in rural and suburban America do?

Do they grapple with it in the same way?

Does it have the same amount, the same meaning as it does in other parts of the country?

And if it is increasingly a sort of regional geographic concern, what is the implication there?

I think the urban-rural divide is the single most overlooked fracture in American religion, and particularly in the American church.

You know, with religious minorities, this is everyone from Jews to Muslims to a certain extent Mormons.

The enclaves, they do tend to be enclaves, are urban.

So, this will be concentrated populations where everybody in those communities is religious.

But I think in Christianity, because it's so huge and spread out, there are radically different orientations for those people who are in cities and those people who are in suburbs and more rural country.

And I think part of the difference is what you alluded to: that people in cities generally tend to be more progressive and they tend to be less religious.

But I do think that one interesting aspect of the city is not that it's this godless bastion for atheists or people who don't care about faith.

In fact, I think the interesting part of cities is that it forces people to mix.

So for example, immigrant populations living in urban centers tend to be very, very religious.

People who are coming from Latin America, people from Mexico certainly very Catholic, in certain cases, very Pentecostal.

Other kinds of racial and ethnic minorities tend tend to have very strong religious affiliations.

And I think grappling with this, encountering a neighbor who perhaps comes from a radically different worldview, is one of the key experiences of living in an urban setting, which perhaps doesn't happen as much in more homogenous suburban or rural communities.

Yeah, I can tell you from my perch up here in Babylon.

I'm just kidding.

New York City is a great melting point.

But at least you recognize that it's up there now, not just over there.

We're making progress.

All right, Gladly cleared that up.

So, for our very last segment, before we leave,

I am going to ask you guys to share something that you encountered recently that you do not want to forget.

That's such a sweet idea.

Aw, thank you.

I'm thinking of my, I haven't quite named this yet, but I'm thinking of my partner, Brian, who every time someone takes a snapshot, anywhere we are, he will look at their like smartphone or whatever and say, hey, that's a keeper.

And

sure enough, we always enjoy looking back at the pictures that we've taken.

So I want you to think of this as a sort of audio time capsule.

I want you to tell our listeners about a piece of media or culture or even just a slice of life that you've encountered recently that you do not want to forget, that you want to put in a time capsule, hold on to, and one day remember.

You're not going to sing that Jim Crochy song, Time in a Bottle now, are you?

Every week.

Oh, really?

I could.

And now,

podcast with added Time in a Bottle.

Are we using that song yet?

I'm not singing it.

No.

Oh, the singing portion of the podcast.

I'll start with myself, just

to model the game.

So I am going to share something that I recently discovered while rereading the book Sense and Sensibility by the immortal genius.

I told you.

I knew it.

Reread.

God, he's

editor of Ernest.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is Matt Thompson.

That is why we love you.

The context here is that Jane Austen.

Listeners might as well get used to this, right?

Jane Austen.

This is Matt.

Jane Austen entered immortality 200 years ago this July.

She died on July 18th, 1817.

And so we have been celebrating this great author with coverage on the site.

And for this, I have been rereading Since Insensibility.

And

there is this phrase that I

just stuck on and had to do a little bit of research about because I didn't understand it.

The phrase is, it was moonlight and everybody was full of engagements.

So in Jane Austen's day, think about it, there's not that much, no electric light.

And so the one night every month that the night sky is illuminated and people feel safe and comfortable, happy traveling out to their various balls and social engagements.

It is the night of the full moon.

So it was moonlight and everybody was full of engagements.

Moonlight.

I never want to forget that.

I hope that I have a celestial experience that transcendent one day.

What's your keeper, Emma?

So mine's pretty directly relevant to what we've been talking about today.

There was a wonderful New York Times piece about the widow of Srinivas Kuchibotla, who was the man killed in Oloth, Kansas, a few months ago by a gunman who was pretty clearly targeting him and a person he was sitting with because they were immigrants.

And this was a remarkable story, not only because it helped me to understand the experience of someone who is affected by a hate crime, not just the victim, but those who are left behind, but also because I think it adds nuance and texture to the way that we we talk about this kind of event.

In the Trump era, there's a lot of reductionism around bigotry and people hating each other and white nationalism and racism.

And all of this, of course, is pressing and important and potent.

But there was a line in the piece, which is set in Ola, The Heritage Reporter, go out there.

And it talks about how the people who are in the bar when this man was shot went to him and his colleague between the times that the gunman came.

The gunman came once and then he came again and that was when he committed the murder.

But they went up to him and they said, you're welcome here.

This is not who we are in Kansas.

We want you here.

We want to buy you drinks.

We want to say hello to you.

We want to talk to you.

And I really found this to be important because as much as this piece was tragic, it also showed that there are many, many different faces of how America and Americans treat and encounter difference.

And I do think that it's important in this era to remember that that it's not just a time of hatred and division and vitriol and trolls on Twitter.

It's also a time when people will get up at a bar when they see somebody else being heckled and say, that's not who we are as Americans.

That is very sweet, Emma.

Thank you for that.

We will drop that link to that piece in the show notes.

Alex, what's your keeper?

You know, guys, when I think of America, I don't think about religion or tolerance or intolerance.

I think about Big Mac.

That, for me, is a symbol of America.

And I was watching the film The Founder this week, which is an excellent film starring Michael Keaton, which tells the audience about the rise of McDonald's.

And for my entire life, I have always thought that the man, the genius, the mad genius behind McDonald's was a man named Ray Kroc.

And what I learned this week is that that is a crock of stuff.

In fact,

the mad genius behind McDonald's were two guys named McDonald's, two brothers who invented what is now known as the speedy system of food preparation and basically created the modern iteration of fast food.

Two brothers who were subsequently cut out of the business by Ray Kroc, who were not given the agreed-upon settlement deal by Ray Kroc, and who eventually lost their own family name,

their own

legacy of their work to Ray Kroc, who everyone thinks is the mad genius behind McDonald's.

What I learned is that America, for a long time, has been a place of obfuscation,

of

sharky, snarky business behavior,

but fundamentally one of entrepreneurialism and innovation.

So next time you're at McDonald's and you're biting into one of those delicious chicken McNuggets or Big Macs, think a little bit about the McDonald's brothers, who are really the guys we have to thank.

Alex, thank you for both retaining our clean rating on iTunes for this episode.

Is that a thing also?

Is that a thing we have to worry about?

Another thing you didn't tell me about?

The clean rating.

You're welcome.

And also for restoring the McDonald's to their rightful place in the American.

They belong to God.

Jeff, what would you like to keep?

I can't even compete with you guys.

I was actually going to mention the great philosopher DJ Kool, but I'm going to save him for next week because I want to work his music into the whole show.

You just wanted to drop DJ.

No,

I want to drop.

I want to respank you.

I want to drop all of DJ Cool into the podcast.

We're just going to make this hip-hop movie.

But I'm not going to go DJ Kool.

I'm going Thoreau, okay?

I'm going Thoreau, and I'm going Thoreau for a reason.

We're around the date of his 200th birthday.

One of his most famous pieces ever, and one of his most pieces for The Atlantic, was called Walking.

Those of you, a lot of people know that.

1862, published in The Atlantic.

And I've always sort of laughed at myself because I would one day like to have the

guts to write a lead the way he wrote leads.

Because the lead of his piece called Walking opens, I wish to speak a word for nature.

And one day before my career at the Atlantic comes to either a happy or unhappy end, I want to write a piece with a lead like, I wish to speak a word for nature.

That was, that was, that's writing.

That's like, that's like, I'm going out and I'm gonna, I'm gonna say something serious.

You know,

I was thinking about this recently.

And then, of course, it is his, uh, it's uh, we're in the summer of his birthday.

So, uh, big shout out to Thoreau.

And like Frederick Douglass, OG, OG Series.

But like Frederick Douglass, his contributions are ahead of him, obviously.

Thank you very much, Jeff.

Emma, thank you for joining us.

This was funny.

Thanks, Emma.

Alex, thanks as always.

Up there in New York.

Down here in New York, you're welcome, guys.

So once again, that'll do it for Radio Atlantic.

A few thanks.

Our producer for this second episode of Radio Atlantic was Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau, Katie Green, and Alice Winkler.

Audio engineering by A.K.

Adams, and additional audio support from Paul Ruist at Argo Studios in New York.

Thanks once again to my co-hosts, Alex Wagner and Jeffrey Goldberg, and to our delightful colleague Emma Green.

Thanks also to John Batiste, who recorded most of the musical cues you hear in this episode, including our stunning theme song, his rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Check us out at theatlantic.com/slash radio or facebook.com/slash radioatlantic.

If you like this episode, please rate and review us in the iTunes Store.

And once again, many, many thanks to you for tuning in and subscribing.

We'll see you next week.

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