S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption

Speaker 1 We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 5 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 8 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 13 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 19 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust.

Speaker 23 MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 28 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 33 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 37 Same mission, new name, MSNOW.

Speaker 39 Learn more at MS.now.

Speaker 42 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 47 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 56 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved, so you know what's working and what to fix.

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Speaker 70 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It's Wednesday.

Speaker 70 So if you're looking for political hot takes on Mayor Pete's voyage into the manosphere, Scotty Besson's damage control, Trump's approval numbers, head on over to the next level podcast with Sarah JVL and I.

Speaker 70 That's going to come out later this evening.

Speaker 71 Comes out on Wednesday evenings.

Speaker 70 But on this show, we're getting a little sociological and ecclesiastical and welcoming a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at the Atlantic.

Speaker 74 His latest book is Cross-Purpose, Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy.

Speaker 72 It's Jonathan Rausch.

Speaker 75 Hey, Jonathan.

Speaker 76 Hi. Happy to be here.

Speaker 77 Welcome, welcome.

Speaker 21 I guess you were on this pod with Charlie a while back. I was trying to check.

Speaker 10 I went and re-listened to that this morning.

Speaker 72 So it's a welcome back, not a welcome.

Speaker 22 Appreciate you.

Speaker 72 And I want to get to the new book in a bit, I promise.

Speaker 11 But

Speaker 70 I feel like I have to pick your brain about what's happening in D.C.

Speaker 73 first.

Speaker 78 You wrote a column for years called, what's called Social Studies.

Speaker 76 Is that right?

Speaker 79 Yeah.

Speaker 72 On kind of how government and society interact and function.

Speaker 29 And so looking at the first three months of this administration, do you ever imagine the social studies would look anything like this?

Speaker 81 No, no. You know, I'm in the same boat.
A lot of people are.

Speaker 81 I'm astonished, bewildered, disoriented, dismayed, distressed, distracted, sometimes depressed. You know, everything that begins with the D

Speaker 81 is what I am. We're seeing everyday things that were unimaginable in the America that I grew up in, or at least thought I grew up in.

Speaker 81 So there's that. And, you know, that's, this is on purpose.
This is a campaign of cognitive warfare to essentially create sensory overload and a sense of futility.

Speaker 81 Demoralization is the goal because demoralization is demobilization. And then we stay home and don't resist.
So

Speaker 81 that's what we're fighting.

Speaker 70 It makes sense to be demoralized in some cases. And I think about, on the other hand, you know, there is some political gravity that still exists.

Speaker 82 You know, we see yesterday Elon is maybe getting pushed out of, or maybe leaving Doge, maybe not.

Speaker 82 We'll kind of see how it goes, but I obviously at least feel some pressure to indicate that he may, both from Tesla shareholders and maybe from people inside the government.

Speaker 83 Trump's backing down on some of the tariff threats with China yesterday.

Speaker 19 I just, as somebody who's analyzed this, particularly with regards to Elon, I kind of wonder how you assess

Speaker 85 what they've been up to, what they have been effective at doing, what is counterable.

Speaker 81 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, I have

Speaker 81 always been someone who thought it might be useful to shake things up in a rational way. And I guess we're all in that camp.

Speaker 81 I have also been someone who has always thought, I wrote a book about this actually 30 plus years ago. It was called Demosclerosis, the Silent Killer of American Government.

Speaker 81 It's about how interest groups and subsidies and regulations and programs build up over time to serve vested interests and make government calcified and maladaptive and unable to solve problems.

Speaker 81 And that's where we are. And that's created a lot of grief.
The public's very unhappy about it.

Speaker 81 The problem is that if you send in, I don't know, what one political scientist I know called Mussolini meets geek squad, and you just start unplugging stuff and firing people and taking over databases, what you're doing is reducing government's capacity without reducing government's commitments.

Speaker 81 Because, you know, the commitments are still there in law. These are all things the government's supposed to do.
And that Trump will be unpopular if he doesn't get done.

Speaker 81 And reducing capacity without commitments is a recipe for, boy, I am alliterative this morning. I'm on a streak.
Chaos.

Speaker 81 And that's what we got.

Speaker 87 Mussolini meets geek squad is maybe a little kind.

Speaker 88 I mean, Mussolini wants keeping the trains running on time.

Speaker 89 Like Gaddafi meets Geek Squad, maybe, if we're going to be alliterative. I don't know.

Speaker 85 We'll have to think about that.

Speaker 70 But you have a little bit more kind of distance from this than me in the TDS trenches every day.

Speaker 71 We have a, you know, our friend Andrew Sullivan was, I think, in the lead up to the election, certainly quite a few ticks more conflicted about it than I was, maybe, so to speak.

Speaker 70 We had some disagreements, and I've been wanting to have him have a talk with him about it.

Speaker 32 We'll see if he wants to do this.

Speaker 93 But, you know, and he's been just...

Speaker 89 sounding the alarm.

Speaker 92 And he's on Bill Maher a couple of weeks ago, just hair on fire, rightly, about, you know, the threats to individual liberties that we're seeing, you know, about just the total lack of respect for the rule of law and for norms.

Speaker 28 I'm just kind of wondering where you kind of see yourself on that spectrum as far as like how big of a crisis is this as compared to what you had anticipated?

Speaker 16 What do you think worries you the most?

Speaker 79 Is there any way areas in which you think maybe I'm overboard and my panic?

Speaker 81 No, Tim, I don't think you're overboard.

Speaker 70 Sometimes I like to talk to people that are, you know, a little bit more even-tempered.

Speaker 26 So I thought maybe that'd be you.

Speaker 81 Way back August of 2022 for The Atlantic, I wrote an article on the six things that Trump would do if he got a second term to turn the United States into Hungary.

Speaker 81 And I'm terrible at remembering lists.

Speaker 81 So I won't remember them all, but they were things like purge the military, turn the civil service into a patronage machine, weaponize the Justice Department, use the pardon to immunize his friends.

Speaker 81 There was one other.

Speaker 81 And there was a sixth,

Speaker 81 and that's openly defy court orders. And what I said in that article is

Speaker 81 we know he'll do these six things, or at least we know he'll do five because he's already either done those five or attempted to do those five.

Speaker 81 And that when he does number six, which I also predicted that he would do, and which he did do at Mar-a-Lago, that's why he was indicted, defying a judge's order, that that's the end of liberal democracy in America as we know it.

Speaker 81 So within about a month, I think,

Speaker 81 five or six weeks, he had moved right through number one through five. And he did it.
faster and more brazenly than I or anyone had expected. The direction did not surprise me.
The speed surprised me.

Speaker 81 I did not see Elon Musk and, you know, the geek squad coming, so that surprised me. And now we are working on number six, which is defying court orders.

Speaker 81 You know, he's, he's playing games and defying lower courts while pretending not to, but I fully believe that's coming.

Speaker 81 And I fully believe, still believe what I said then, which is that once he does that, I think he'll get away with it. I think his party and his base will back him in defying the courts.

Speaker 81 And I think then we're in a different country. So you tell me, am I.
We might already be there.

Speaker 32 No, you know, we're aligned.

Speaker 72 You're maybe teetering me over the brink, actually.

Speaker 32 Here's your list just for folks who are trying to wrap their head around it.

Speaker 85 It was install toadies in key positions, intimidate the career bureaucracy, co-opt the armed forces, bring law enforcement to heal, weaponize the pardon, and defy court orders.

Speaker 79 Hard to argue with any of that.

Speaker 26 You did, I guess maybe the thing that gave me...

Speaker 79 Some thoughts that you might have a less apocalyptic view than I did was a really important article you wrote in The Atlantic about a month ago, which spurred wanting to get you on about the one word that describes Trump.

Speaker 84 And I want you to get into kind of how you defined the Trump government as maybe a different strain than the type of autocracy people talk about.

Speaker 21 But I want to give people the teaser if they're already down in the dumps that you said that this type of government does suffer from two inherent, in many cases, fatal shortcomings.

Speaker 96 So we're going to get to the shortcomings.

Speaker 86 But first, explain how you think it's useful for people to process the type of government Trump's trying to put in place.

Speaker 81 So this is an idea for which I'm indebted to a couple of political scientists named Jeffrey Kopstein and Stephen Hansen, who wrote an important, very short, very readable book. I recommend it.

Speaker 81 It's called The Assault on the State.

Speaker 81 And what they point out

Speaker 81 is that the best way to think about what's happening right now, not just in America, but in Russia, India, Turkey, Hungary.

Speaker 81 There's an attempt to do it in Israel by the Netanyahu government, but lots of places is the resurgence of a very old form of government.

Speaker 81 In fact, the predominant form of government until liberal democracy came along. It's called patrimonialism.
Terrible name, but it comes from a German, the German

Speaker 81 social scientist Max Weber. So, you know, you know how Germans are about words.

Speaker 24 Could we do it in German?

Speaker 88 Maybe it would have a better ring to it if it was, if we said it in the German.

Speaker 81 Let's not but say we did. Okay.

Speaker 81 So patrimonialism is when the government is run as the personal property and family business of the head of state.

Speaker 81 And monarchies were typically like that. But a lot of governments work that way.
And not just governments, but a lot of social organizations like the mafia works that way, right? That's the godfather.

Speaker 81 It's all a business.

Speaker 81 It's a godfather's business. Gangs often work that way.

Speaker 76 Cults.

Speaker 81 And it's a very, very standard, familiar form of social organization. What's interesting about it, what's sometimes a little bit hard to understand,

Speaker 81 is it's not like the kind of classic authoritarianism that we associate with the great authoritarians of the 20th century, the Mussolinis and Hitlers and Mao's and those people.

Speaker 81 Because

Speaker 81 the opposite of patrimonialism

Speaker 81 is not democracy, it's bureaucracy.

Speaker 81 In other words, what you do with patrimonialism, you can have it to an extent in a democracy, but what you do is replace rules with loyalists.

Speaker 81 So you just fill the government with people who are personally loyal to the person in charge. And the government becomes about doing the bidding of the person in charge.

Speaker 81 But what you don't do necessarily in patrimonialism is set up the great sort of authoritarian engines of state, the institutions and bureaucracies of oppression, which we all know if we read 1984, you know, the Ministry of Peace and the Ministry of Love.

Speaker 81 You know, and that would be stuff like the Politburo and the secret police force and the propaganda agencies and the special military arms. They don't necessarily do that.

Speaker 81 They just go through the government.

Speaker 7 It's like the scientists.

Speaker 24 We were talking about this with Michael Steele yesterday, right?

Speaker 3 Like a good Nazi, like a good authoritarian would...

Speaker 93 like was using the scientists to the ends of the state rather than firing all the scientists and like jailing some of them in immigration detention centers and stopping all the research right like it's the it's it's breaking everything down rather than like using it for the purpose of the state.

Speaker 81 Nazism was notoriously bureaucratic. You can go to the camps and look at the offices where they kept the bureaucrats, kept the meticulous records of everything they're doing.

Speaker 81 Patrimonialism is just, it's way more ad hoc. It's, okay, I'm going to fire the people who are there and I'm going to replace them with personal loyalists.

Speaker 81 And you can go through the whole government to do that.

Speaker 81 What you do is you snip the tendons of the institutional state, what they call the deep state, but that's the rule-based authorities where you do regulation by formal rulemaking.

Speaker 81 And you replace that with regulation is whatever I say it is today. That's why we have chaos in trade.
The new rule under patrimonialism, the government belongs to the head of state.

Speaker 81 It's his personal business. And he's decided this morning that he wants to raise tariffs.
Tomorrow he'll decide to lower tariffs. Nothing bureaucratic, nothing systematic, nothing institutional.

Speaker 81 So that's what they're doing. We see this around the world.
It does have two fatal flaws, and that's how you get at it. You focus on on those flaws.

Speaker 10 The Trump-Mussolini comparison

Speaker 19 did always kind of fall flat for me, right?

Speaker 7 But for this very reason that you're getting at is just like Trump doesn't like want the trains to run on time really.

Speaker 70 Like Trump

Speaker 90 does not have

Speaker 92 like all the same qualities.

Speaker 83 You know, like many people, I've been like going back and reading, you know, 1930s diaries and books to try to like gain some insight.

Speaker 21 And like there's some parallels, right?

Speaker 99 But then there's some other elements or like, this is not like Trump does not share like some of these fascistic tendencies.

Speaker 100 And so when I was reading your article about the patrimonialism, and you know, you quote John Bolton, who actually in an interview he's doing on Shield of the Republic, which is our foreign policy podcast, where he says that Trump can't tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is.

Speaker 78 And like that, like really

Speaker 84 feels right to me.

Speaker 95 Like this description of Trump, you know, know, as

Speaker 82 somebody who wants to run the government as his own personal piggy bank, kind of like a mob boss, like feels more on the nose.

Speaker 84 And like once you've identified it, I think then

Speaker 86 these flaws come into focus.

Speaker 97 So I don't know if you have anything more to say about Trump in particular on that front.

Speaker 81 Well, I think that's about right. You know, a pretty good guide to what we're seeing is the opening scene of The Godfather.

Speaker 81 Not sure if you remember it.

Speaker 82 Are you going to do this to me?

Speaker 88 I have to admit, I've never seen The Godfather on my own podcast.

Speaker 81 Well, most of your audience has, and they'll remember that a businessman who's on the level comes to the Godfather for help to get justice for his daughter.

Speaker 81 And what Marlon Brando, what Don Corleone says is:

Speaker 81 so now you come to me. You went to the police first.
The state didn't help you. Now you come to me and you want my help, but you have not been my friend.

Speaker 81 Why didn't you come to me from the start?

Speaker 81 Because being my friend, that's what matters. And in order to get what the man needs as the scene ends, he kisses the Godfather's ring.
He pledges personal loyalty to the Godfather.

Speaker 81 And that's a lot of what this is all about. It's enforcing personal loyalty and turning the state into the embodiment of the will of a single person.
And in a, you know, in a pretty random ad hoc way.

Speaker 81 That's kind of the point, right?

Speaker 1 We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 5 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 8 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 13 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 4 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 27 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 33 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 37 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 39 Learn more at MS.Now.

Speaker 42 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 47 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 56 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

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Speaker 72 Getting to the two inherent flaws.

Speaker 89 One of them is the incompetence. We are seeing this on full display now, and I guess we all saw it during COVID too.

Speaker 70 It's just for a variety of reasons that didn't land with certain segments of the population, but we're seeing it again, just kind of the vast incompetence.

Speaker 83 I had a friend who was kind of like a business guy, you know, finance guy who was sort of Trump-light, like, you know, just a typical, I just like the tax cuts, don't pay that much attention kind of person.

Speaker 9 Text me last night, just like, this is way more of a shit show than I thought.

Speaker 96 And I was like, you know, you don't, you don't say, Don't really.

Speaker 96 But yeah, exactly.

Speaker 99 Anyway, unfortunately, we have to all live through it for people to learn from this.

Speaker 2 But incompetence was one element of it and corruption was the other.

Speaker 78 And talk about how those shortcomings might help us get out of the morass here.

Speaker 81 Well, let's talk about them serially because they're both important and they're different.

Speaker 81 Patrimonialism was the standard form of government until, you know, the modern state, basically, more or less, until, you know, the United States and

Speaker 81 It was actually very common then until the late 19th century when we professionalized the government and until Otto von Bismarck and the modern state.

Speaker 81 And the interesting question is, why did it ever go away? Why was it replaced?

Speaker 81 And the major reason for that is that running a big modern state with a modern economy and a modern military, you know, a vast mighty war machine, this takes a lot of expertise.

Speaker 81 And it takes a whole lot of social organization. And that means it's got to be bureaucratic and rules-based.

Speaker 81 There is just no way that some guy with his whims and his family and his pals and his personal loyalty can do those things effectively.

Speaker 81 And what patrimonialists do when they snip the tendons of the administrative state and replace them with loyalty is diminish the capacity of the state to do what the state needs to do.

Speaker 81 And it turned out that patrimonialist systems were just not able to meet the demands of modern statehood.

Speaker 81 And, you know, you see that in a place like Russia when you look at the, to use your scientific term, shit show,

Speaker 81 when they tried to topple, you know, a weak neighbor. And what they wound up with wasn't a victory.
It was a traffic jam.

Speaker 82 Hertling was so good on this.

Speaker 94 I'll put it in the show notes because like years ago,

Speaker 89 I did an interview with him where he talked about just why the Russian military was much less competent than people thought.

Speaker 78 And he kind of goes through all of this.

Speaker 79 He didn't use the word patrimonialism, but it was this, right?

Speaker 90 That like he, there were the types of people that were, you know, in mid- and high-level positions in the military, like, did not have the competence to do it, did not have the willingness to tell the mob boss that there was something wrong, right?

Speaker 74 And so it like created this culture of incompetence.

Speaker 81 So Trump is doing the same thing here. It's basically a form of Putinism, at least, you know, Putin, pre-war Putin.

Speaker 81 And he's replacing competent people with incompetent people. And I think you've made that point very well on this show.

Speaker 81 The name Pete Hegseth springs to mind, but you know, there's Rutnik is a great example of this, right?

Speaker 90 Like, it's like, oh, we can, we'll find a business guy that's loyal and that'll go along with my tariff gambit, right?

Speaker 75 Rather, you know, yeah.

Speaker 81 And then when you do bring in people who are competent, like I think arguably Scott Beset is probably a competent person, you make them incompetent because you require them to do silly, crazy things.

Speaker 81 So incompetence is just baked in to this type of regime.

Speaker 81 There's some stuff they can do about it by cleaning up their act, but really not very much, especially if Trump continues as he began, which unlike in the first term where he kind of, you know, he subsided a bit and allowed some grown-ups to run the place, he doesn't seem willing to do that.

Speaker 81 So

Speaker 81 this is a major weakness. My view on this is that it usually doesn't take very long for the public to figure out that the state is incompetent because

Speaker 81 shit starts to happen, right?

Speaker 81 And after a while, it gets a little bit harder to blame the previous administration for it, say it's Joe Biden's fault, or to, you know, to fire someone and replace them with someone else and say, now we've fixed it.

Speaker 81 And we're already seeing ample evidence of this.

Speaker 81 You know, we're seeing the AP had a story yesterday about the administration members are already at each other's throats and they can't decide what Elon Musk is doing and who's in charge.

Speaker 81 And of course, you've got agencies where you've had the experts fired and then rehired and you've lost massive amounts of state capacity and you're about to lose a bunch more in the State Department and on and on and on, right?

Speaker 81 But my view of this is it is mostly self-explanatory to the public because this stuff's just going to happen.

Speaker 3 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 8 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 13 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 4 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 27 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 33 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 37 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 39 Learn more at MS.Now.

Speaker 42 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 47 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 56 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 64 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 67 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 89 Okay, so now you get to be my priest for a second, though, since you wrote a book on religion, because Sarah and I just did a secret podcast on this a couple weeks ago.

Speaker 10 So we want to let them be incompetent, right?

Speaker 82 Like we need people to see it.

Speaker 83 If like that's the weak point of patrimonialism, we don't want them to protect themselves from themselves.

Speaker 81 Yeah, you don't have a choice. You know,

Speaker 81 they've got the, of course, the executive branch, and for at least two years, they've got Congress. So they're going to be incompetent.
We don't have to do anything to make that happen.

Speaker 81 You know, if you could save them, you'd have a moral dilemma, but you can't. Yeah.
So get out the popcorn. You know, we should all feel terrible about it, of course.

Speaker 81 Because what they're doing is not just a short-term decline in competence. They are demolishing state capacity every day.

Speaker 81 They are diminishing the government's ability, not just now, but potentially for years to come, to do the things that the American people have assigned it to do.

Speaker 81 So yeah, we should feel terrible about this. Absolutely terrible.
But it won't redound to their political advantage.

Speaker 81 So Achilles heel number two, and this is the one that I really try to get people to focus on, and that's corruption. By definition,

Speaker 81 patrimonialism is everywhere and always corrupt because it substitutes the good of the leader for the good of the public. That's the whole point, right?

Speaker 81 The government becomes the personal business of that state.

Speaker 81 So you get petty corruption, you know, you get financial corruption, that's stuff like the famous meme coin exploit and on the first term, having people put up at Trump properties.

Speaker 81 And you get all that stuff.

Speaker 81 But you get the bigger form of corruption, which is political corruption.

Speaker 81 which is when you obliterate the distinction between serving the leader and serving the state, and you turn entire engines of government to the advancement of the personal interests of the guy in charge.

Speaker 81 And of course, we're seeing that in a big way.

Speaker 81 So corruption is not necessarily self-explanatory, but people don't like it. They do understand it.
And it turns out that when you look through history and different places and times,

Speaker 81 What seems to work consistently in taking down a patrimonial regime is targeting its corruption in your messaging.

Speaker 81 So in the late 19th and early 20th century, that works for the progressives in America. That's how they take down the political machines.

Speaker 81 They're relentless about the corruption of Tammany Hall and the famous Thomas Nass cartoons and all of those people.

Speaker 81 This is how in the modern world, it's how the Ukrainians take down their regime in the Orange Revolution and afterwards Yushchenko, the guy they overthrew. Yeah.

Speaker 17 Paul Manafort's man.

Speaker 81 Yeah. They highlight his corruption.
This is how the Polish democratic forces kicked out the Law and Justice Party in 2023.

Speaker 81 After, I think, eight or nine years of installing, you know, some pretty deep patrimonialist roots. They got kicked out because the opposition nailed them on corruption.

Speaker 21 This was Navalny's strategy before he was killed.

Speaker 81 It was Navalny's strategy. That's why Putin had to kill him.
Navalny went big on Putin's corruption. So you can go on and on in this way.
I think, you know,

Speaker 81 a seminal campaign and demonstration in America, in the United States, which you may remember, was Newt Gingrich's campaign against House Speaker Jim Wright.

Speaker 81 This is in the late 80s and early 90s. Your younger audience members won't remember it.

Speaker 3 I'm concerned about how old you think I am right now, because it's just this administration is aging me, is

Speaker 22 why I have the bags, Jonathan. But

Speaker 76 I was, I think, eight when this happened.

Speaker 29 So please refresh my memory.

Speaker 81 Time is slipping away from me.

Speaker 81 So Republicans are in a permanent minority in the House, and a backbencher, a kind of eccentric guy named Newt Gingrich,

Speaker 81 decides that he's going to take down the Democratic majority by taking down the Speaker of the House.

Speaker 81 And to do that, he starts launching ethics investigations against House Speaker Jim Wright, who's a Democrat from Texas.

Speaker 81 And he begins going on a massive publicity tour, which initially is just basically him, right? He's just some guy.

Speaker 81 But the theme of the tour and of everything he says, and he talks to media everywhere he can, and he gets on the House floor, and as I said, he launches House ethics probes, is most corrupt speaker ever.

Speaker 81 And after not getting traction, he does get traction, and Jim Wright falls, and a couple years later, the Democratic majority falls as well.

Speaker 81 The thing to notice about this campaign is not that the corruption was all that important.

Speaker 81 There was some stuff involving, you know, people were buying Jim Wright's book in large quantities as a way to curry favor with the speaker.

Speaker 76 Crazy.

Speaker 25 What a different era. Yeah.

Speaker 81 That's what they were going after.

Speaker 81 It wasn't the details of the actual corruption. It's the relentlessness of the messaging.
It's the same thing that Trump and his forces did to Hillary Clinton, right?

Speaker 81 Corrupt Hillary, corrupt Hillary, corrupt Hillary. What about Hillary's emails?

Speaker 81 Now, Hillary's emails were a procedural violation that never caused any actual leak of anything important.

Speaker 81 But with the help of the gullible New York Times and sheer repetition, sheer volume, they were able to frame Hillary Clinton as corrupt.

Speaker 81 Of course, Donald Trump was much more corrupt, but that doesn't matter. The point is to do this corruption campaign, you need to really focus on it as the center of your messaging.

Speaker 81 You need to organize your messaging around it. And that's something Democrats have never been able to do with Trump.
He's brilliant at the daily distraction. And he does this on purpose.
We know this.

Speaker 81 We've seen this. And he's told us that if he gets in trouble in one area, he will launch the tweet or do something outrageous in another.
And we'll all rush over there and look at it.

Speaker 81 Well, that needs to stop.

Speaker 81 The Democrats and the people opposed to Trump need to foreground corruption. It needs to be the daily story and the daily theme and everything else.

Speaker 81 And lots going on, but everything can be organized under the general rubric of corruption. And that's how you get these guys.

Speaker 82 I don't disagree with anything you said.

Speaker 21 I think that incompetence just lands a little better with Trump as far as getting people to buy it.

Speaker 29 Like the corruption thing is so tough.

Speaker 92 And this goes back to, God, I did a briefing with the Democratic super PAC in 2016 where I went over the opposition research we had on Trump in the primary and like made this case you made, like really focus on this, how he screwed over, how he's corrupt in his business dealings.

Speaker 83 He screwed over working-quest people. He just wants to enrich himself.

Speaker 92 And it's just never really stuck to him.

Speaker 16 I agree that part of it is.

Speaker 71 is his flooding the zone strategy.

Speaker 33 Part of it is the lack of democratic consistency in the message.

Speaker 77 Part of it is that people just don't buy it.

Speaker 87 Like they think that he's rich already, you know, and he's kind of successfully like conned people into thinking like that he lost money by going into politics so i don't know i mean the crypto thing is just is just so

Speaker 78 crooked and so blatant that maybe it provides an opening but that's also confusing a lot of people don't understand crypto so i well i agree with your assessment i just think it's a little bit more complicated than the incompetence side of things but tbd well as i say it's it may be a bit more complicated there may be a couple more you know logical steps to go through

Speaker 81 But I think incompetence will basically just show itself.

Speaker 81 I don't think you need to do a lot about that. On the corruption being hard,

Speaker 81 I think back to what happened to Nixon.

Speaker 81 He'd had a reputation for corruption for a while. People would call him Tricky Dick.

Speaker 81 But it takes time for this to sink in. But the American public...

Speaker 81 did come to understand

Speaker 81 that Nixon's corruption was political corruption, not financial corruption. It wasn't money in the bank for Nixon.

Speaker 81 That what he was doing was repurposing the system, the government, for his own political gain. And Trump is doing that.
He's doing it in a very big way.

Speaker 81 You know, he's shaking down law firms for a slush fund that he can play around with.

Speaker 81 So you can frame that story that way.

Speaker 81 You can, I mean, one of the interesting data points that I stumbled across is that the amount that they want to cut taxes, largely for rich people is the amount that would be necessary to keep Social Security solvent indefinitely instead of going,

Speaker 81 I think the date's what, 2035 now.

Speaker 81 So,

Speaker 81 you know, Trump's corruption is going to take your Social Security money and put it in the pocket of his rich pals. So there are lots of these stories that you can weave.

Speaker 81 But you got to build that larger narrative. The guy who knows how to do this, someone who's figured this out is Senator Murphy.

Speaker 18 Yeah, he's doing well.

Speaker 81 Chris Murphy, who went on the floor and, you know, he had the whole chart and maybe it was too complicated and there are too many steps.

Speaker 81 But he just started rolling through it, corruption, corruption, corruption, example, example, example. The problem is there's only one of that.

Speaker 81 And you need a whole rotation of Democratic senators who are on and off the floor every day, corruption, corruption, corruption. And I think that breaks through after a while.

Speaker 81 And yeah, there are a lot of people who think they're all corrupt. All politicians are corrupt.

Speaker 81 And there are people who give Trump a pass because they think he's somehow authentic and maybe less corrupt than the others or he's already super rich.

Speaker 7 Wolf in wolf's clothing.

Speaker 81 Yeah, a wolf in wolf's clothing. Exactly.
But you remember here, the goal of this campaign is not to win MAGA voters because that's hopeless.

Speaker 81 This country is basically, you know, you got

Speaker 81 40 to 45% of the country that's just going to vote for the Democrat or for the Republican, no matter who that person is. What you're going after are those votes in the middle that you can get.

Speaker 81 And those are people who think that Trump is somehow authentic.

Speaker 81 And corruption can drive a wedge there by saying, no, this guy isn't for you.

Speaker 81 This guy's for himself. He's turning the whole government

Speaker 81 into

Speaker 81 something for himself.

Speaker 81 And what you want to do, I mean, Sarah said this many times, but she's right, what you want to do is drive his approvals into the 30s and keep him there.

Speaker 81 And I think corruption is your best bet for doing that as an overarching message. Am I wrong?

Speaker 88 Well, I mean, I think the best bet for doing that is a recession.

Speaker 82 But that's not a democratic strategy item.

Speaker 85 But I think that's the safest bet for doing it.

Speaker 82 But yeah, no, look, and it's why I am obsessed with the crypto thing because I think it is the most direct element of it.

Speaker 98 But I see your point about tying it into some of these other more mundane policy issues like the tax bill that's coming up.

Speaker 81 You know, there are ways to tell these stories. Like recession is because of his corrupt trade deals.

Speaker 81 Yeah, right. You know, he's raising tariffs in order to make deals that put money in his pocket.
And it's caused a recession and we're in trouble. You know, stuff like that.

Speaker 70 Recession for everybody except Jared and the Trump kids.

Speaker 5 They're doing great.

Speaker 1 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 5 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 8 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 13 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 4 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 28 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 33 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 37 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 39 Learn more at MS.Now.

Speaker 42 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 47 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 56 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 64 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 67 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 7 Let's talk about religion. Why not?

Speaker 76 You know,

Speaker 19 at least it's different. Some light fare.

Speaker 33 Cross purposes is the book, as I mentioned at the top.

Speaker 70 It's an argument for why Christianity is needed.

Speaker 87 It's coming from a gay atheist Jew.

Speaker 72 So let's hear it.

Speaker 82 Give us the pitch.

Speaker 78 I might be a little cynical on this one, but I want to hear it from you.

Speaker 81 Well, cynicism is welcome. I understand.
I come from exactly the same place.

Speaker 81 This book is an apology for the dumbest thing I ever wrote, which was in The Atlantic in 2003. I celebrated secularization and the fading of religion as a force

Speaker 81 in American life. And I said, you know, religion is...

Speaker 39 Which is the dumbest thing you've ever wrote?

Speaker 76 I mean, congrats.

Speaker 81 Well, I also wrote in The Atlantic in 2015 that Donald Trump would never be president.

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 81 So

Speaker 81 I think my take on religion was even, even dumber than that. But

Speaker 81 you choose.

Speaker 89 Well, let me hear more about your take on secularization and then we'll grade you at the end.

Speaker 81 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 81 So I said, isn't it great that Americans are just losing interest in religion? And, you know, religion is the most divisive and dogmatic force out there.

Speaker 81 And we'll be like Scandinavia, and we'll be happier and more harmonious. And I was hugely wrong about that.

Speaker 81 In this century, the first 20 years of this century, we have seen a wave of dechurching, secularization, unlike anything in American history. 40 million people have basically abandoned the church.

Speaker 81 Now, we're talking Christianity since this is, you know, it's obviously our predominant religion.

Speaker 81 You saw just in a period of 14 years, you saw a 15 percentage point drop in the number of people saying they were Christian. And where did they go?

Speaker 81 They became so-called nuns, N-O-N-E-S, people with no religion.

Speaker 81 And far from making society less turbulent, as you know, all the indicators went south on things like loneliness, anxiety, depression, lack of social connectedness, anime.

Speaker 81 Worse than that, we saw the rise of extreme political polarization, hyper-partisanship, which looks like a kind of substitute religion.

Speaker 81 People start defining themselves, you know, when they used to devote their lives to Christ, now they're devoting themselves to being the Republican who hates Democrats or the Democrat who hates Republicans.

Speaker 81 So

Speaker 81 you get kind of the infection of politics with religious zeal. And then you get the infection of Christianity with politics, especially the the white evangelical church.

Speaker 81 Basically, this is overstating a bit, but not hugely.

Speaker 81 The white evangelical church effectively merges with the Republican Party and then effectively merges with the MAGA movement in the Republican Party.

Speaker 81 And that means that, you know, what used to be a church that stood for Christian Witness and behave in a Christ-like way becomes much more like behave in a MAGA-like way, which is not very Christ-like.

Speaker 81 So through all of those things, Christianity loses what the founders counted it on it to be able to do, which is to provide this sense of social connectedness, collective worship, a sense of where our values and meaning come from in life.

Speaker 81 You can't get that from politics. Not the first person to say it.
You've heard it many times, but you can't get meaning in life out of politics. It's not what politics is for.

Speaker 81 So boiling it all down, the claim of my book is that America is becoming ungovernable in large part, significant part, because Christianity has failed.

Speaker 81 And I have to care about that, even though I'm not Christian.

Speaker 19 I think that

Speaker 10 there's some truth in this, but I'm going to take the rabid defender of secularism side of this.

Speaker 7 And let's kind of hash it out together, you know, the rootless cosmopolitan side.

Speaker 28 The parts of the country where the social cohesion seems the highest

Speaker 83 are the places that you're talking about, though, that have become the least religious.

Speaker 100 I mean, I'm thinking about, you know, if you try to think about where in America, like things are going okay right now.

Speaker 94 Think about where I grew up, right?

Speaker 92 Like suburban Denver.

Speaker 72 Like, I would assume that you have much higher rates of college attainment right now in suburban Denver than you did 30 years ago.

Speaker 8 Lower church attendance, a higher diversity.

Speaker 83 The places that are that are creating the problems in the the country like really the places that have become more secular?

Speaker 72 I'm not sure about that.

Speaker 81 The answer is,

Speaker 81 as I understand it, yes.

Speaker 81 The higher you are on average on the socioeconomic scale, the more likely you are to be participating in organized religion.

Speaker 81 And that's not surprising because, of course, the higher you are on the socioeconomic scale, the more likely you are to be participating in everything.

Speaker 81 What we seem to be seeing is the breakdown of Christianity among those who you would think would need it most, which are people who are lower on the socioeconomic scale and who are facing the crises that we all know about, you know, deindustrialization and deaths of despair, and who don't seem to have the kinds of faith-based resources that they used to count on.

Speaker 81 We've seen a collapse in church going.

Speaker 81 in many of those communities and, you know, churches closing at an absolutely alarming rate.

Speaker 1 We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 5 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 8 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 13 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 4 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 27 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 33 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 37 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 39 Learn more at MS.now.

Speaker 42 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 47 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 56 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 64 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 67 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 95 I knew when I was asking the question that the hole in my question was the, you know, kind of deturchification also of like the industrial Midwest, right?

Speaker 79 Like rural working, or not even rural, but like small town working class, you know, kind of white folks in particular, but really across the racial divide.

Speaker 85 Even still, like listening to you, and I was listening to you and Barry talk about this and reading some of the books this morning.

Speaker 21 And it is, it resembles a conversation I was having with a fellow atheist.

Speaker 70 So, you know, or to you, I guess I would put myself one in the agnostic camp, but he is an avowed atheist.

Speaker 12 We were driving across Texas, like seeing all the Punisher stickers and Oath Keeper stickers and kind of just talking about the state of affairs.

Speaker 72 And he was basically expressing your view, right?

Speaker 83 That like this is that you've seen this, you know, in working class communities, like the deturchification, the move towards other

Speaker 72 or nothing, or the move towards other less nutritious sources of community.

Speaker 98 And like maybe that

Speaker 89 is underscoring some of the social discohesion that we have right now.

Speaker 79 There's a part of me during that conversation where I was saying to him, I was like, I don't know, man, isn't this just a couple of like globalist, you know, upper middle class, upper class, you know, people like trying to come up with an answer for something that like we don't really get?

Speaker 93 Aren't we just like grasping for a solution for some cultural problems that like have other explanations, be they economic or our phones, technology?

Speaker 32 What would you say to that?

Speaker 81 I'd say that this is something I think that I misunderstood. I come from exactly where you were.
I'm very secular.

Speaker 81 I was on board with the project of thinking society would be better off without, you know, superstitious nonsense. And I think one answer to that is that I was empirically wrong.

Speaker 81 And the second answer, that's more fundamental, which is that I have come to think that faith, and in America, that means Christianity. Let's not beat around the bush.

Speaker 81 That's what we're talking about in this conversation. And it means predominantly white Protestant Christianity.
That's our founding faith and still the predominant form of faith.

Speaker 81 That it has answers to questions that secularism can't really provide. And one of those questions is, why am I here? What's the purpose of my life on this planet?

Speaker 81 Am I more than just a random, you know, accumulation of cells that will blink in and out of existence? That's just not a satisfying way of thinking for most people. I'm okay with it.

Speaker 81 I seem to manage with it. But a lot of people need more, and faith provides it.

Speaker 81 And the second question is the question of what's the basis of good and evil that's bigger than just the personal preferences, you know, the Nietzschean world that Mago lives in or that the postmodern left lives in.

Speaker 81 That also comes from faith and in our society, Christianity. And then finally, I would avert to the founders.

Speaker 81 who told us in as many words that the Constitution and the system they were giving us is not self-sustaining, that it relies on a bedrock of what they call republican virtues, and that those have to come from civil society, by which they meant family, community, schools, but they also very largely meant Christianity.

Speaker 81 And that doesn't mean it's a Christian country. You have to be Christian to be a citizen.

Speaker 81 They deliberately kept any reference to any faith out of the founding documents, which was controversial at the time.

Speaker 81 But it does mean that they understood that if you don't have a healthy faith sector that's socializing people into these civic values and giving them some sense of purpose,

Speaker 81 everything else is just going to be a lot harder. And that's, I think, where we are.

Speaker 71 Again,

Speaker 37 I want to agree with this, but

Speaker 85 every time I try to agree with it, I start to think, okay, that there are other answers that are more satisfying to me for why

Speaker 98 we are in this period of tumult.

Speaker 11 Another example of a weakness of this argument is that if you look at the types of churches that are appealing right now,

Speaker 22 that are drawing people in, you have highly politicized churches.

Speaker 72 I mean, like, and obviously in the Catholic Church right now in America, you have a huge rise, kind of of the traditionalist Catholics.

Speaker 72 I go every year to the Turning Point USA event, which has turned into kind of like a revival.

Speaker 78 Like, and

Speaker 79 the most young church-going people I've ever been around are people at an overtly political conference who are like drawn to the more, I forget what you called it in the book, the sharp version of Christianity.

Speaker 81 The church of fear, yeah, sharp Christianity. Yeah.

Speaker 79 And the more,

Speaker 84 you know, whatever you want to call it, Jesus-like, the more modest, the more humble types of Christianity, like those, a lot of those types of churches, not all of them, we're paying with a broad bush.

Speaker 21 Like you go into a Methodist church these days, and it's like all gray hairs, right?

Speaker 72 Like it's not young folks that are being drawn to that.

Speaker 22 So, like, in practice, you know, are not the churches that are appealing to people the types of churches that are not really going to resolve the problem that you're setting out to resolve?

Speaker 81 Well, the Sharp Church, the white evangelical church, while it has been politicizing in the past, it's been more than 20 years, but it really turbocharged in the last 10 or 15

Speaker 81 when they started going 80 plus percent for whoever the Republican candidate is, including Trump, has been shrinking rapidly. And

Speaker 81 that's because as it substituted the figure of, you know, if it substituted partisan politics for the witness of Jesus Christ, people kind of figure out, well, I don't need to give up a Sunday morning for that.

Speaker 81 As Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today, has said, the reason, if you want to know why young people are fleeing the church,

Speaker 81 It might be because if all you offer them is a choice between secularization and paganization, they'll choose one or the other.

Speaker 81 So the point here is, yeah, there's a church of fear, but it's shrinking. It's not growing.
It is proving unattractive. So Tim, the core of this book is not Christianity, yay, we need more of it.

Speaker 81 It's the teachings of Jesus Christ, the core doctrines of Christianity. We need more of that.

Speaker 81 And that what we find again and again in America, but also throughout history, when the church gets corrupt, when it substitutes the gospel of power

Speaker 81 and life in this world from the gospel of truth and life in the next world, it gets into trouble because the appeal of Christianity, it's a countercultural religion, it's a radical religion, but it asks people to do three things.

Speaker 81 The first is not be afraid. The second is imitate Jesus.
And the third is forgive each other.

Speaker 81 And those are three things that James Madison and the founders also needed people to do for the sake of liberalism. Don't be afraid means it's not the end of the world if you lose an election.

Speaker 81 Have some faith in the system. You'll learn something from being out of power.
You'll come back stronger. You won't try to steal the election or lie about the election.
Imitate Jesus translates into

Speaker 81 treat every person

Speaker 81 as... an end unto themselves, not a means to an end.
Every person has dignity. Treat them with dignity, especially the least of these, especially the minorities.

Speaker 81 There are some things that government should just never do

Speaker 81 to minorities and to the weak. Like, I don't know, grab them off the street and send them to a dungeon in El Salvador for no reason.
And the third, forgive each other.

Speaker 81 That means politics is not about,

Speaker 81 to use a phrase, retribution.

Speaker 81 It's not about demolishing and crushing the other side.

Speaker 81 They're still citizens. They're still your countrymen.

Speaker 81 You share the country after you win an election. Those are the cores of Republican virtue.

Speaker 81 So my claim in this book is Christianity would be a lot more attractive and appealing as a religion and also could do a lot more to heal the country if it returned to its own Christian roots.

Speaker 81 A strange thing for a, you know,

Speaker 81 atheist gay Jew to tell the church. Interestingly, this is kind of resonating more with Christians than it is with seculars.
Secular people are, a lot of people say what you say, which is, you know,

Speaker 81 they just still kind of think, wouldn't we be better off if we could be a secular country and make that work? But a lot of Christians are saying,

Speaker 81 yeah, being more Christ-like is something that the church should do. That's not surprising to me because I think that, you know, in a lot of ways, I kind of went through my...

Speaker 70 abandonment issues with the institutions I cared about already before with the Catholics, before I got to the Republicans, you know, and so I don't have like this need inside of me to feel like that

Speaker 83 institution or that thing that is important to me is redeemed.

Speaker 32 That is not something that I concern myself with, but I understand it.

Speaker 92 I understand that impulse. And I understand that there are a lot of

Speaker 85 people that are Christians out there that are drawn to the church that want to believe, that want to have a community, but that feel

Speaker 75 alone, right?

Speaker 90 That feel like that the church has left them, that like the

Speaker 98 big churches that have the energy right now are ones that they don't like connect to.

Speaker 85 There's some exceptions to this, obviously, but like I

Speaker 100 understand that sort of yearning for trying to bring back something that they can connect with.

Speaker 83 I just wonder if those folks are the types of folks that need to be reached or whether they're going to be able to find fulfillment elsewhere.

Speaker 97 Like whether the people that need to be reached are the people that are being sucked into into other more,

Speaker 97 you know, kind of more damaging associations, if you will.

Speaker 81 Yeah, that I don't know the answer to.

Speaker 81 You know, as much as I disagree with the so-called post-liberals who you alluded to earlier, you know, these are the people like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Denin who think liberalism is over and we need to go back to a kind of traditionalism.

Speaker 81 I don't think that's right, but there's a core truth in the idea that it is really hard to be a person of faith in a modern secular society where you're dealing with cell phones and consumerism. And

Speaker 81 if you're conservative, you're hearing on Fox News that your kids are going to come back transgender from school and you won't even be told about it. So all of that creates a challenging environment.

Speaker 81 And

Speaker 81 I don't know if Christians can recover

Speaker 81 the teachings of Jesus at a large enough scale to win people back. And I can't promise that moving back to

Speaker 81 Christ-like witness will revive the church. I can only say that what they've been doing, basically turning the white evangelical church into a Republican Party auxiliary, has not worked.

Speaker 81 It has failed. It is shrinking the church and it is tarring the church with the brush of hypocrisy.

Speaker 81 There is nothing Christ-like. at all about the person and movement that white evangelicals have elevated and embraced.
And that I think their odds, at least, of winning back

Speaker 81 a following to Christianity and to democracy would be better if they followed the gospel of Jesus Christ instead of the gospel of, say, Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 That's a low bar.

Speaker 96 That's a low bar that we've crossed.

Speaker 2 I'm with you on that, Jonathan. Okay,

Speaker 78 we're getting into a bleak place contemplating our socio-cultural future.

Speaker 21 So

Speaker 11 can we end with something happier?

Speaker 25 Can we end with a happier item?

Speaker 32 Is that a laugh?

Speaker 81 Well, you know, to me, this work on Christianity, so I'm very much an outsider to Christianity.

Speaker 81 But I got to know a whole bunch of pastors and some theologians and, you know, people that you know who are deeply Christian, the late Michael Gerson, but Pete Wayner, who you know, and of course,

Speaker 76 folks.

Speaker 81 Yeah, David French.

Speaker 76 Yeah, I love them.

Speaker 81 And Russell, and a local pastor who's become a close friend and many, many others.

Speaker 81 And here's what you learn is that

Speaker 81 the church of fear, this sharp, politicized, partisan, divisive church that's all hunkered down and wants to bring the culture wars to the pulpit, that does not remotely speak for all Christians.

Speaker 81 There is a hunger in the Christian world

Speaker 81 for those principles of Jesus. The people who are most unhappy with what's happened in the church are the pastors.

Speaker 81 You know, in a poll a couple years ago, 42% of them said that they had seriously considered quitting the church in the last year. And the third biggest reason they gave, after

Speaker 81 obvious stuff like, I don't know, stress and low pay, I can't remember. But number three was politics.

Speaker 81 They want to move back in the direction of Jesus. There seem to be some green shoots, and it's very early days, but we seem to have seen finally a bottoming out of the fight from Christianity.

Speaker 81 It looks like Gen Z

Speaker 81 is interested

Speaker 81 in Christianity and in finding its way back to something more organized. It won't look like our parents or grandparents, you know, the cathedrals and the mega churches.
It'll be more customized.

Speaker 81 And Russell Moore says the way this happens, Christianity has been in trouble. because it got in bed with power and the state many times in the past.
And it's found its way back from the bottom up.

Speaker 81 You know, it's not like the epic struggle between the MAGA church and the anti-maga church.

Speaker 81 It's the grassroots, it's the influx of younger people who are actually interested in the gospel, of church plannings, new generations of pastors, the small groups which are the core of evangelical life, you know, the Bible studies.

Speaker 81 It's you begin to create new stuff and the old stuff begins to wither and shrink as it becomes more and more self-defeating.

Speaker 81 I don't know that that will happen. happen.

Speaker 81 I do think, though, that the message of Jesus, even to a secular Jew like me,

Speaker 81 the message of Jesus has inspired people for 2,000 years and is at its strongest when it's the most countercultural, when it's the most in contrast with what's going on in the surrounding society.

Speaker 81 And that means right now it's at its most appealing when it's least like politics and the MAGA movement.

Speaker 81 And so that to me at least means there's material there to work with, and it's material that Christians have found their way back to in the past.

Speaker 21 I want it to be so.

Speaker 13 I connect mostly with the torment of the Russell Moore and the Pete Wayners of the world

Speaker 70 because I just,

Speaker 82 you know, you want there to be good people like that in the world.

Speaker 10 You just want, you know, they're like an oasis in the desert and you want to drink from their cup, but I think it's a tough world out there for it.

Speaker 33 I was going to end on a different, happier note, but

Speaker 16 we're going to let people read it.

Speaker 21 You also wrote a book called The Happiness Curve, Why Life Gets Better After 50.

Speaker 77 I'm not ready to read that book yet. I've looked at it a couple of times and I've been like, you know, I'm not ready to think about that quite yet.

Speaker 38 But when I'm 48 and a half,

Speaker 82 we're going to have you back and we'll talk about that.

Speaker 77 Assuming I'm still allowed to podcast, you know, assuming I'm not in an El Salvador prison camp of some kind, or maybe I'll do a, maybe I'll have a rogue podcast from an El Salvador prison camp.

Speaker 91 We'll see.

Speaker 16 But if we make it to 48 and a half, we'll have you back to talk about why life gets better after 50.

Speaker 81 That sounds good. It sounds good.
And I hope we don't have to wait quite that long. Okay.

Speaker 24 Thank you so much, Jonathan Rausch. Thanks.

Speaker 32 Everybody, we'll be back tomorrow with somebody who has a very high motor and a very strong and resilient bladder.

Speaker 82 And I'm excited to talk to them. We'll see you all then.

Speaker 86 Peace.

Speaker 101 My lover's got a humor.

Speaker 101 She's a giggle at a funeral. Knows everybody's disapproval.
I should have worshipped her sooner.

Speaker 101 If the heavens ever did speak, she's the last true mouthpiece. Every Sunday's getting more bleak.
A fresh poison each week. We were born sick.
You heard them say it.

Speaker 101 My church offers no absolutes. She tells me worship in the bedroom.
The only heaven I'll be sent to is when I'm alone with you.

Speaker 101 I was born sick, but I love it.

Speaker 101 Command me to be well.

Speaker 101 Amen.

Speaker 101 Amen.

Speaker 101 Take me to church, I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your life.

Speaker 101 I'll tell you my sins, and you can sharpen your knife. Offer me that death, that's of good God.
Let me give you my life.

Speaker 101 Take me to church, I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your life.

Speaker 101 I'll tell you my sins, and you can sharpen your knife.

Speaker 101 Offer me that deathless death of good God. Let me give you my life.

Speaker 101 If I'm a pagan of the good time,

Speaker 101 my lovers is sunlight.

Speaker 101 Keep the goddess on my side. She demands a sagger and fights.
Drink the whole sea, get some shiny.

Speaker 101 Something meaty for the main course.

Speaker 101 That's a fine-looking high horse.

Speaker 101 What you got in the stable?

Speaker 101 We've a lot of starving faithful.

Speaker 101 That looks tasty, that looks plenty.

Speaker 101 This is hungry one.

Speaker 101 Take me to church hours, black and dark at the shrine of your light. I'll tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife.

Speaker 101 Offer me my death, as they're the good God, let me give you my life.

Speaker 101 Take me to church, I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your life.

Speaker 101 I'll tell you my sins, so you can sharpen your knife.

Speaker 101 Offer me that death, as they're the good God, let me give you my life.

Speaker 26 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 81 Find your fun again today.

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Speaker 10 Such as registry at Bombs and Panama.

Speaker 42 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 47 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 56 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 64 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 67 That's pendo.io/slash podcast.

Speaker 102 Even though severe cases can be rare, respiratory syncytial virus or RSV is still the leading cause of hospitalization in babies under one.

Speaker 102 RSV often begins like a cold or the flu, but can quickly spread to your baby's lungs. Ask your doctor about preventative antibodies for your baby this season and visit protectagainstrsv.com.

Speaker 102 The information presented is for general educational purposes only. Please ask your healthcare provider about any questions regarding your health or your baby's health.