Our Unchristian Churches (with Peter Wehner)

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Welcome to Bank to differ the Bulwark’s weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Charron, syndicated columnist and policy editor at The Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regular, Bill Galston, of the Bookings Institute and The Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of the Nescannon Center and Damon Linker, who writes the Substack newsletter, eyes on the right. Our special guest this week is Peter Wehner, who writes for the Atlantic and The New York Times. Welcome, one and all, Before we begin, I’d like to just express our concern for Floridians and perhaps now South Carolinians.

Who are in the path of or who have already experienced hurricane Ian. We’re thinking of you. Everyone has favorite charities I know, but I’ll just put in a word for a World Central Kitchen, which does amazing work, wherever people are in need, most recently in Ukraine. They’ve also been in Pakistan. They are amazing, and they’re on the ground in Florida right now providing meals for people.

So With that, let us turn to our first topic, which is the rise of right wing populace. So right wing populist parties are continuing to make gains around the world. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats received a bit more than twenty percent of the vote recently to become the largest party in the new center right coalition in that country. And in Italy this week, The brothers of Italy, a party that traces its roots to fascism, received more than twenty six percent of the vote, making it Italy’s largest party and Georgia Maloney will be the next prime minister. So I’m gonna turn to you first Bill Galston, you wrote about this phenomenon this week.

So she has been described Maloney as as a, you know, sort of, crypto

fascist. Is that is that going too far in your judgment? It’s not going too far if you’re looking only at the origins of your political party. In her case, however, I think it is going too far. I mean, she is a conservative populist.

There’s no question about that. There’s no reason to believe based on her record or her utterances that she really wants to function as a politician outside the institutional norms of Italian democracy. Now politicians are very good at hiding their weaknesses or their intentions. But frankly, I don’t think that Italy is a particularly governable country by anyone. And I don’t think she is prepared to do anything like what Mossalini did in order to gain and hold power.

I think she is a more or less conventional politician who holds some very conservative, populist views. And I am not thrilled that she won the election and will head the coalition, but I don’t think it’s the end of Italian democracy or anything like that.

Pete Wiener in line with what Bill just head. I was talking about this with my husband the other morning, and we were saying, well, she may be bad, but this is after all Italy we’re talking about. So how long can any government last? But it is notable, isn’t it? The people who are happy about this.

It’s quite the rogue’s gallery. You’ve got Steve Bannon, Victor Orbon, Marine ten, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Green, and the list goes on and on. So they’re celebrating. So that’s that’s worrisome. Right?

Yeah. I I I think it is, and they’re celebrating for good reason from their perspective because she obviously embodies to some degree the sentiments disposition temperament that they have. And, yeah, the important thing also I think to see in this is it’s not just Italy, you had mentioned Sweden. Which to me is, in some respects, the more interesting case because the Sweden Democratic Party was founded in eighty eight and has neo Nazi roots. And you just don’t think of Sweden, the same way you think of Italy.

Mhmm. It’s a kind of Nordic liberalism is when you think of Sweden. And the fact that that’s changed and now the Sweden Democrats did so well. And in addition, you’ve got what we’ve seen in Hungary with Iran and Poland and Turkey. So this is a phenomenon that’s really sweeping northern Europe and North America.

And it’s obviously

Even South America with Bolsonaro and Brazil.

Yeah. Yeah. South America is is complicated because there it’s sort of left wing populism to — Mhmm. — mixed. There’s no question that populism itself.

I I I think is the dominant political story of the last half decade around the world, and it’s touched the United States, obviously. The one difference I would say between the other countries and what’s happening in this country is the degree of the conspiracy theory and the willingness over throw free elections is more acute in this country because of Trump and the others. Trump is a sociopath. The others are malicious, but I don’t think they fall into that category. But the net sum total of this is that this is a really precarious and fluid and dangerous time for much of the Western world and for liberalism broadly speaking.

Linda, looking at the bright side here, and admittedly, you know, there there isn’t too much bright side, but Maloney felt the need to modify some of her beliefs to make them more palatable to the Italian voting public. That’s a positive thing. I mean, when you consider the way some Republicans are behaving in our country, where the crazier and the more outlandish they are, the more some voters like it. So that’s one thing I would say. Another is that whereas some members of her coalition are sort of pro Putin.

She has pivoted away from that very strongly and has expressed her dedication to NATO and to supporting Ukraine. So in that sense, that’s a little bit of a silver

lining. You agree? That is a good thing. Although in her book, that she released last year, she had nice things to say about Putin as a Christian leader. And I think one of the things that we’ve talked about a lot on this program is the whole issue of refugees and immigration into Europe.

Has caused big disruptions and has, I believe, been the impetus for a lot of move to the right. It isn’t just populism. There’s a kind of cultural aversion, desire on the part of these right wing leaders to preserve what they see as their own native culture and European culture writ large, which is largely Christian. Although not really practicing Christian, European

feel like no. It’s vestigial.

Vestigial.

Right? Yeah. They don’t go to church, and Americans are sort of following Europeans on that path. But one of the things that I think is disturbing to me is that, you know, we now have the same kind of knee jerk anti immigrant and anti refugee sentiment going on on the right in the United States. And one of the big differences in terms of the way in which immigrants have been treated in Europe and in the United States is that US has been very successful in assimilating immigrants and we’re still very successful at assimilating immigrants.

Europe, not so much. And I think that has really exacerbated the tensions there, but you know, I think however good or bad she is, the history of Italy and the number of governments I looked it up just where we went on air. It’s had sixty nine governments since nineteen forty five. That means that they’ve had an average new government of one point one years. So however good or bad she is, she may not last long.

You know, no one looks to Italy as a paragon of stability. In Europe. And frankly, I hate to say this, but it’s not that important a country in terms of either its economy, its influence, and strategically maybe less important than it has been in the

past.

Damon, so we’ve all talked a lot about, you know, what created this appetite for right wing populace. And I have to tell you I’m not persuaded by the, you know, loss of manufacturing jobs argument. I won’t go into that now, but I went into it in some things I’ve written. Manufacturing jobs have been in the decline for decades and didn’t have this effect. Other jobs have taken their place, service jobs, and other thing.

Anyway, that’s Not a hear no there. I do, however, think that the issue of immigration is very much at play here and you can trace a lot, you know, going back to the crisis in Syria that gave rise to so many millions of refugees seeking entrance to Europe. And as Linda says, they’re really not very good at absorbing immigrants anyway. And you’ve written about this week too. What do you make of this as a worldwide phenomenon?

Well, I I mean, I didn’t emphasize in what I wrote this week the immigration issue too much, but I certainly agree with you that the refugees that came around twenty fifteen to Europe from the Middle East certainly seemed to tip a lot of scales. The alternative for Germany party, which is their far right party, got its big burst of support in the wake of that and are kind of pushed by Anglo America and others in kind of the core of the EU to accept these refugees. And this was kind of declared by leadership on the continent without making a kind of democratic appeal for support or even really making much of a case for it. And that was, I think, corrosive and not very good. Although, this is by now in the past and yet we see again the rise of the anti immigrant party in Sweden doing better than it ever has before for and now being the leading party in the incoming government coalition, which is certainly something and means that these issues remain high on people’s agendas.

I actually wanna focus on something in I Road this week, but also something in the Bill Road this week. His Wall Street Journal column was really excellent. And I say that only in part because we both are completely on the same page, which is having to deal with the issue of the collapse in support for center left parties. So the rise of these right wing populist parties goes along with having where these votes coming from. Well, they’re coming from other parties that are bleeding support and a lot of it is from declining support for the center of left.

So in Italy, the PD party or the Democratic party of Italy has declined in popularity pretty precipitously, and there’s been a lot of public pulling on kind of demographic groups in Italy and, like, who’s no longer supporting the center left, who is supporting the populace right, especially the brothers of

Italy? And when

you go down the list, you see a list of very familiar things if you’ve been following these questions in the U. S. Which is that for instance, Those who are most highly educated, vote from the center left, but that’s about it. So those who have college degrees and graduate degrees of out for the center left, those who either are less well educated post high school or don’t even have a high school degree, tend to vote for the more right wing parties. On income, if you’re wealthier and have a professional occupation, you tend to vote for the center left.

If you’re more working class, you vote for the right wing parties. And then most interesting to me, I think it might have been Linda or or Pete. I forget, brought this up a few minutes ago on passing. Religion. If you are a devout Catholic who goes to church, in Italy, you probably voted for some of the other members of this new right wing coalition.

And then if you were a secular don’t go to church, don’t really care about religion. You almost certainly voted for the center left party, the Democratic party.

The

people who voted for brothers of Italy and Maloney tended to be people who, on the one hand, think religion is very important, think of themselves as Catholics and Christians, but don’t actually attend

church. And

that’s very, very important for the American context, and maybe people jump in on this later because when trying to understand the appeal of these ascended right wing parties. I think this kind of middle position where you’re you’re not really going to church, you’re not enacting religion as a system of beliefs, or rituals, or liturgy, but you think of yourself and your identity as religious or affirming a kind of religious identity, Christianity, here, evangelicalism, or Catholicism in Italy. That’s kind of the sweet spot for these new resurgent right wing movements, and we need to wrap our hands around that and think about it. And also, as Bill argued very persuasively in his Wall Street Journal piece, the center left testific about how they are going to try to win back some of those voters who they’re losing and continue to

lose. Yes.

I will come to Bill Galston next, and it was notable that both you and Damon are on the pretty much exactly the same page this week. Tell us about the problems of the center left in appealing to working class people.

First of all, nona, I want to agree with something you said a few minutes ago quite emphatically. The current wave of populism in Europe, in my analysis, and I’ve looked in a number of different countries and survey research in those countries, the weight of cultural and identity issues has steadily increased. Mhmm. And as that has happened, A wedge has been driven between the cultural outlook of the professional classes and Damon has just characterized them I think very accurately. On the one hand, and the cultural outlook of the less educated working classes on the other.

And the more center left parties have focused on cultural issues rather than economic issues The deeper that wedge has been driven into what youth to be a center left coalition. The left has an investment in looking at this working class rightward drift is essentially an economic matter. Because then they are spared the necessity of revisiting the kinds of cultural commitments that constitute the wedge that I just referred to. And throughout the west, I see a deep reluctance to go there. Perhaps because the cultural commitments of the center left or every bit as passionate as the cultural commitments on the populist right, they’re just opposite.

Yeah. But in my judgment, the center left cannot regain credibility. Let alone competitiveness among less educated portions of the population unless they reconsider and mute their positions and modify their positions on a number of cultural issues, as I said in my column, starting with immigration, which is the golden thread that unites all of the recent developments of populism in Europe and the United States. It was the issue. Let’s not forget that brought Donald Trump to power.

It’s the issue that brought the Sweden Democrats into being. It’s the issue that has strengthened and re strengthened Victor or Bob. It’s the issue that has spark the great replacement theory and all of the pathologies and conspiracies to go along with that It is close, and I know Linda will not like hearing this, and I don’t like hearing it. But it is close to the heart of the matter. Because it touches on the preservation of cultural identities that so many people who don’t have the means to fend for themselves see as being endangered and endangered by the policies and outlook of the professional classes.

That is the dominant political phenomenon in democracies of our time, I believe. And we’re going to continue to suffer until I believe the center left takes the lead in recapturing the actual center of opinion on these issues driving the conservative populist right into the corner where they belong? Pete, I

am coming to you next. I just wanna respond really quickly to bill and just say that this presents a real quandary for me. I have to say because as a matter of analysis, I agree that this is an issue that is giving life and strength to right wing reaction.

But at

the

same time, I I’m very pro immigration and feel that the arguments are miss begotten and incorrect and so on. I’m not for open borders, but for me it’s a complicated problem and I’m not on the left and yet I find myself in sympathy with people who are and who say, well, you know, you want me to modify my views on this subject, but I think that would be wrong. Factor of policy and morality, and that’s hard. Could I respond very briefly, Mona? Yeah.

Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Let me just As is my walk, put out an area of common ground. I strongly favor the kind of balanced policies that underlay the gang of eight twenty thirteen immigration reform bill, which got nearly seventy votes in the senate. I think something like that is the way forward is a matter of policy.

Bill, for those of our listeners who don’t memorize these things, that bill would have in

Prattville would have invested massively in border security. At the same time, it would have done right by the dreamers It would have created a path to citizenship for many, though not all of the eleven million who came here illegally, mostly as adults, It would have shifted the basis of the immigration system from family reunification to economic contribution along the lines of the shift in the Canadian system — Mhmm. — which doubled public support for their immigration legislation from one third to two thirds of the electorate in a matter of just years. So if you’re not credible on the border, then you’re not gonna be able to get anything else Done. If you are credible on the border, which doesn’t mean building a wall, it doesn’t mean putting border patrol on horses to whip people back across the river.

We have to concede that Trump was on to something when he said, if you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country, that’s what most people believe. And I think it’s also true. And so we have to take that into account in a way that is compatible with morality and law. And I think we can. Okay.

Could

I just jump in, Mona, because I have not a clue on how to solve Europe’s immigration problem. I think it’s very, very different. They are attempting to bring in people who are more from Europeans than our immigrants are from Americans largely because they’re coming from the Middle East and from Africa, and many of them are

Muslims.

And I know that even in the United States that assimilation has worked very well, but the most difficult kind of assimilation happens to be religious assimilation. Those groups that have remained somewhat apart and outside have tended to be small religious groups, not necessarily big ethnic groups. So I do think that the left in the United States has consistently pushed the notion of multiculturalism of immigrants being able to preserve the culture that they came here with rather than helping them acquire the cultural attributes of Americanism, and I think this has been a big problem. And I think we cannot solve the immigration problem. Even if we were, you know, in perfect control of the border, if we are not successful at assimilating immigrants.

And I think this is where you could see some movement on the part of the left. And there has been some. I mean, they used to promote teaching Hispanic immigrants in Spanish language. Right. And it’s and in fact, insisting on keeping it in the state of California.

You could practically go through your entire career in public schools without ever being put into a mainstream English speaking class. So, and they’ve given up a bit on that because, frankly, the immigrants themselves smelled and they got rid of that kind of instruction in California. But, assimilation is the key here. And at least in the United States, I think if the left would start to talk more about assimilating people, more about helping those people who are here legally to become citizens and talking about what the responsibility of citizenship is in addition to the rights of citizenship, I think that would be a step forward. Very well

said. Okay. And, Pete, you wanted to make a point on this?

Yeah. Just very brief. I mean, I I agree with everything that’s been said. Bill’s right. Immigration is clearly the through line through this populous movement that we’re seeing throughout the world.

I would say that it’s important to disaggregate what’s going on in Sweden is different than what’s going on in the United States because there you had that huge mass migration crisis in twenty fifteen. And they just weren’t prepared to do that kind of assimilation. I think in the United States, my sense is that immigration not necessarily for the border states, but for much of the rest of the country is a proxy issue for the American right. And what it is a proxy for is lost status and lost cultural dominance. And there’s this fear in in Diana Mott’s did a study.

She’s at Penn State and twenty eighteen about the voters for Trump in twenty sixteen. It really wasn’t the hollowed out economic class. It was a sense of the threat and the feelings

of

dislocation and the enormous changes that were going on. Those are real. You have to take those into account But I think for a variety of complicated reasons, in this country, those concerns have largely located themselves in immigration And I don’t think that that’s right because I do think that America still overall does a very good job at assimilation as

Linda was saying.

Thank you. And that leads us really seamlessly into our next subject, which is the crisis in the evangelical churches.

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Pete, you’ve written very eloquently on this topic, so I’m going to stay with you. It’s related to our previous discussion because some of the figures in the evangelical right are among those who are feeling the most alienation, dislocation, loss of power. But I’d like to sort of reprise the piece that you wrote last year in the Atlantic because it was really, really eye opening about what’s happening. So I would ask you first to sort of sketch what you see as happening. So you’ve been an evangelical Christian for decades.

And you sense that the identity of Christians is becoming more politically based and less god centered. Less focused on Jesus. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah. That is a fair

statement. I think what’s

going on with several things. One is that you do see a fracturing of the evangelical church. And when I did that piece in October for the Atlantic, I reached out to probably thirty or forty pastors and theologians. And what was interesting to me is I didn’t get a single descending voice in terms of the divisions and the acrimony that’s rising within evangelical churches splitting them apart. A lot of it is political, but some of it is just stuff that’s in the air.

It’s just a tropism. To a disagreement in temperance and antipathy. But the deeper issue which you touched on and actually summarized quite eloquently. Is this matter of what I would say is core identity? Most people, if they’re evangelical Christians, if you ask them, what’s core to their being, what’s most important to their life.

They would say their faith, and they would

say

that not cynically, but with complete authenticity. I don’t think though that that’s actually what’s happening. I think that what is core and increasingly core to a lot of people with a Christian faith and particularly in the white evangelical world, is politics and culture. And in a sense, faith isn’t grafted. It’s a secondary issue.

A friend of mine uses the term hood ornament, the faith becomes a hood ornament. It validates these preexisting attitudes and ideologies. But the way it’s being done is that the people are unaware of it because they’re going through and in my experience and in my observations is their proof texting their preordained political, cultural, sociological beliefs, and then saying, this is what the Bible says. And then last point I’ll make on this, is when that happens, it can really become dangerous for politics and for faith because you’re taking already intense issues and passions and divisions. And you’re overlaying on that the sense that I have the Imprimater of of God on this.

And then you’re in a struggle of the children of light and the children of darkness. And we need politics to have the temperature turned down, not up. I’m afraid to say or and sad to say that for a lot of American Christians, They’ve made not just their faith worse, but but our politics worse. And it’s a terrible witness for the church and for the claims of being followers

of Jesus. One of the things

you point out in this piece is that you you cite a survey showing that twenty nine percent of pastors said they were considering or actively had plans to leave

the ministry. Talk about

that, if you would, about what is driving them away, what’s happening in their congregations.

Yeah. I think

it’s that a lot of the political divisions in the countries have located themselves within churches. And that’s not what pastors want to be involved with. That’s not why they got into the profession of being pastors and ministers. And it’s just wearing them down. Being pastors a hard job in any event.

There are

the portions

of administration that most people don’t know about, but you have to run churches There’s the pastoral side, ministering through people, through grief, or the sermons and so forth, so a lot is going on. And

they’re kind

of overwhelmed. And then when you get these divisions within the church, say, for example, in in the sessions of leadership positions. That’s just wearing them down, and I have a lot of friends who are pastors, and I’ve really been struck in the last two years, just personally hearing their stories and how worn out they are and how some of them are thinking about leaving the passenger there’s a real crisis among pastors in this country and the church, which one would have hoped as a person of faith, would have been largely insulated to some of these polarizations and divisions in the country. It’s not only not insulated, but in some ways it’s more accentuated there. And pastors among others are paying the price for that?

So I don’t think anybody else on this podcast is an evangelical Christian, but I’m gonna come to you, Linda, and quote, another part of Pete’s article. Where he was speaking to a Christian educator who said that the caticesis is missing. And he said, Even those pastors who are really committed to catekises get to spend on average less than an hour a week teaching their people. Sermons are short. Only some churchgoers attend adult education classes and even fewer attend bible study in small groups.

Cable news, however, is always on, and

we

wonder why there’s been this huge change. You know, I think there is a phenomenon that is going on. It’s not just in the evangelical church, by the way. I mean, one of the things that’s happening to Americans, we are becoming less churched. Fewer people, you know, galloped at a pole this year, fewer than half of Americans now.

Identify as being members of a church. And I think at least in evangelical Protestantism and Protestantism may be larger. There there is a sense that you belong to a church, that you are a member of that church in Catholicism, your membership in a a specific church is governed by geography. You are in the parish in which you live, and in fact, you have to ask permission if you want to join a parish outside the geographic region. So it’s a little different for Catholics.

But a church attendant is just down, and it’s down among Catholics as well. And interestingly, the group that has seen the steepest decline in church attendants are among Hispanics who are far less likely to be Catholic today than they were a generation ago than many of them

have.

Either become non believers or just don’t identify with any religion, and others have in fact become evangelicals. But I think that, you know, the way in which politics has taken over. I know this happened in the Catholic church, certainly in Latin America. In the sixties and seventies when politics began to drive the Catholic religion in Latin America, and I think it was quite alienating. And of course, then it was left wing Catholicism, liberation theology.

What we’re

seeing now, I think, among the evangelical churches is kind of the flip side of that coin, which is the politics of of the right sort of taking over religion. And instead of talking about religious beliefs, talking about God, even in among evangelicals, talking about Jesus, and his life and and what it is he preached. That’s all been basically, you know, just ignored. And instead, there’s a lot of preaching about what our political and cultural issues that I think would be not necessarily consistent with what we normally think of. As a Christian charity.

Damon,

again, quoting from Pete’s piece, the religious group that is most opposed to vaccines Most convinced that the twenty twenty presidential election was stolen. Oh, this might actually be from another piece. But anyway, most inclined to describe to the Q and A conspiracy theory is white evangelicals. So we talk about this, but, you know, it is kind of hard. Isn’t it Damon to know?

Just historically, if you were to take a, you know, a survey and find out what was truly in people’s hearts in nineteen thirty or whatever year, pick one, did people really follow the teachings of Jesus? Did they really believe in being meek and mild and forgiving your enemies? And you know,

who knows?

I mean, it’s really hard to say what people really believed, but what we do know for sure is that right now, the voices of media, of the Internet, and so on are just so much more dominant in general in society than anything else. And so they tend to drive everything. Is is that fair? You know,

I think it is. I mean, it seems like we wax and wane over the course of our history and probably beyond just American history, but is down through the ages between phases where religion and faith are used as kind of a standard by which to judge the powers that be, that people make appeals to a kind of higher spiritual truth. And judge the institutions and people ruling the world partially by those standards and seek to reform them and bring them into closer alignment with those standards. And then there are other periods where the religious convictions get sort of absorbed into the powers that be, if you will, and it becomes religion becomes kind of a handmaiden of those powers. And I think we are in one of the latter phases at the moment.

And it’s troubling because as Pete was indicating in his comments, what you end up with is the the same kind of ideological and political passions and commitments that people would have anyway that with, like, extra added theological fuel added to them, they end up amplifying their own opinions with this kind of added juice that they think, well, but not only am I right, but God is on my side. And so therefore, I have no occasion to stand back and question the conviction that I have to wanna wait. Is this really true? Is this really justified? Is this what my faith would have me believe or do in the political world?

Instead, it’s just a very quick move to appealing to faith as kind of an extra way of buttressing what I would do anyway. And so there’s a kind of instead of people having a healthy notion of doubt kind of in the background, even if they’re very committed and have strong convictions, they There’s a way of being that way, being committed, having commitments in the political realm and in the moral realm. And yet in the back of your mind, you realize, yeah, but I could be wrong. I should be open to arguments made in good faith on the other side in order to remain honest about myself and my own convictions. But it can easily flip the other way again into something more like what we’re seeing now, which is instead using faith to insulate one’s own political and moral convictions from any kind of doubt at all.

And that can be very dangerous and is not healthiest especially for a liberal Democratic politics, which needs to have a kind of supplements to it because we’re trying to share a very large policy with one people who disagree with us about pretty important things. So, yes, very troubling indeed. Bill

Galston, most of the major world religions teach humility as one of the key virtues and yet when religion and politics mix you get the opposite of humility, as we were just saying, you get certitude and zealotry and extremism. I mean, there are examples, I guess, of religion having a good influence on politics with Martin Luther King junior or

Lincoln or

Washington, but it’s often a dangerous mix.

I

couldn’t agree more. And Somebody else now deceased also agrees with you. The real Jerry Falwell. Jerry Falwell senior I know when I was writing a book years ago, I had occasion to read his nineteen sixty four sermon entitled ministers and marches. And the nub of that was his statement that creatures are not called upon to be politicians, but sole winners.

Mhmm. That declared what was then, I think, the canonical, evangelical protestant take on the relationship between politics and the practice of faith. Why did that change?

Well, I think

in the interest of historical accuracy and also a measure of fairness, people like Falwell saw the very explicit and successful use of religion by African American preacher leaders to bolster the political movement, the civil rights movement that they were leading. And I would characterize the views of the African American religious leadership on the question of racial segregation, its relationship to religion, as deep profound, but not devoid of certitude about which side god was on.

And to

some extent, what we’re witnessing among white evangelicals is a decades long reaction to what was in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, the principally left wing or certainly left of center deployment of religion among a lot of Catholics as part of the anti nuclear movement, the anti war movement in general. And by Black Protestants as a way of bolstering the civil rights movement, I happen to believe as Abraham Lincoln did, that if you take Christianity seriously, I am not a Christian, It is very hard to get from Christianity to racial segregation, let alone slavery. But if you take a look at the literature of eighteen hundred to eighteen sixty period, you’ll you’ll see southerners moving from a position that slavery was or credible necessity. It’s something closer to the view that it was a positive good and doing so based on propositions drawn from the bible. So at any rate, I think we have to place today’s movement in its historical context in order understand why it is the way it is and b, as a check on the kinds of rhetoric that we’re now deploying against this mix because if it tends to de legitimize the role of religion in, say, the civil rights movement, then we have a problem on our hands unless we are prepared to say which I’m not, that the civil rights movement abused Christianity.

Right. Pete, I’ll give you the last word. I I would just say that what critics like you and others are saying is you want Christian political movements to be more Christian and less political. Is that fair? Yeah.

That’s

a very good way to put it Mona. You know Martin Luther King junior said it pretty well. He said that the role of Christians weren’t to be the master of the state or the servant of the state, but the conscience of the state. I

think that’s the right

way to think about it. Justice is a through line, through the Hebrews scriptures in the new testament, and politics touches on justice, so don’t think you can separate them

completely, but it’s

also the case that I think faith rightly understood, the Christian faith and other faith as well. Is that there’s a distance from politics. It’s not co opted by politics. In a sense, as King said, is the consciousness of the state, Getting that balance isn’t easy, but honestly getting it as badly out of balance as we now see it isn’t

easy either. This

is a bad moment. The history of the Christian church has very mixed. A lot of dark periods and a lot of hopeful periods too. But right now, we’re we’re we’re at a moment where the Christian Church in America is not handling itself very well.

It’s

not embodying its best side. In many cases, it’s embodying the worst. And there’s a cost to sit earlier to the country and to the church

itself. Alright. For our

third topic, we’re going to do something a little different this week. We come into your headphones every week with our analysis of politics and policy, but I thought it might be kind of fun to do something where we tell something about ourselves that people might not know and might give a little insight into where we come from

and how

we approach things. So I’m going to invite Linda to be the first. Wow.

Okay. Well, you know, I think most people listening to this podcast or people who read what I write would assume that politics is sort of the center of my universe and that I spent a whole lot of time reading public policy books and political articles, etcetera, and I do spend some time on that. But my first love has always been literature. And when I was in school, I studied literature, that was is what my degree is in. And at the age of sixty five, I went back to school and earned a master’s of fine arts from George Mason University in creative writing.

And in my later years, I have taken to writing fiction in addition to reading it. I’ve published a half a dozen short stories and various magazines, including commentary magazine, where I did a collection of stories on North Korea and the prison camps there. And I’ve just completed a novel, my first novel, which I’m hoping to get around it. Publishers and hopefully someone will decide to publish it. And it’s about my family.

It’s based loosely on my family. So German from Spain

in

fifteen ninety seven to the New World.

And it

turns out that the reason they were coming was not just you know, seeking opportunity and fortune, but because they were conversely Jews and they were fleeing the imposition. So I’ve spent a number of years becoming all too well versed on the Spanish acquisition and have incorporated that in my So literature drives me. I tend to read far more fiction than I do non fiction. And it has remained my, I don’t know, my passion, I guess, over the years. And I’m assuming most people don’t know that about me.

I cannot wait to

read your novel. That sounds incredible. I knew about your your family history, of course, but Wow. I didn’t know you were writing a novel. That’s excellent.

Bill Galston.

Oh, Mona. How could you do this to

me? I pulled over it too,

by the way. Alright.

Well, a couple of things. In nineteen sixty eight, I was due to be married on September fifteenth. And

on September

first of that year, two weeks before my wedding day, I received my draft notice. I was in the scene of two years between Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal of draft deferment from graduate students and the initiation of the lottery. My father was a very prominent and visible anti war activist. I have never used a freedom of information request to find out what transpired at the new Haven Draft Board, you know, but I’ve harbored dark suspicions for more than half a century. Wow.

Setting that aside for a minute, I reported to the Chicago induction center and I was being marched down the hall to get inducted into the army when somebody came up to the sergeant in charge of our rag tag detail and said, hey, Sarge. Sarge. Two of the marine volunteers this morning flunked the mental test

I figured sort

of catch twenty two if you volunteered for the brain’s med med him. So,

in

fact, he failed medical tests. But apparently, they healed. They the draft board saw some distance between the two. And so the sergeant told us to halt. We straggled to halt.

He rubbed his ample belly and talked for a minute or appeared to be thinking for a minute and said, oh, waved his arms at odds. No problem. Just pick a couple of these knobs schools here. I said to myself, I’ve had a lot of bad luck, you know, to end up in this draft board at this time, but this is not happening.

Well, about fifteen

minutes later, two names came ringing out over the loud speaker. One, was the name of a badly overweight, rock guitar player from a club on the north side of Chicago with hair cascading down his back to his belt. The other was me and sufficed it to say after more drama, part of it involving the guitar player, I ended up the next morning in the Marine Corps recruit depot in San Diego, California. And I learned how to survive in boot camp, and I spent two years in the U. S.

Marine Corps in

an environment

as different from graduate school at the University of Chicago as can be a matchant. And you know what? I’m glad I did. I spent two years with people who were entirely unlikely. And that’s a form of education that I fear too many people these days don’t get.

And I learned that out of fear, I could do things that I didn’t think I could do. So that’s one item, and I’ll very quickly say that I’m a kim Philby nut. I am just obsessed with the ripple effects of the greatest betrayal perhaps in the history of modern spy craft and the way it is shaped so much a British culture ever since starting with but not ending with the late great John Lucare, who is my favorite novelist. Of the twentieth

century. You

know what, Bill? I first of all, two quick responses. First to the Second thing you said, which is about Kim Philby, I just happen to be reading Ben McEntire’s book about him right now. And as recently as five thirty AM this morning, I was just fuming about one of his betrayals It was during World War two. And these German anti Nazis had gotten in touch with the British Secret Service and were giving information about the Nazis and were they were they happened to be conservative Catholics.

And the British wanted to keep tabs on this group of people because they thought in a post war, Germany, these would be the very sort of people who could form a new democracy. And Kim Philby sent all their names to Moscow. And after the war, when they went to find them, they were all liquidated by the NKVD. So you know, you just you just it’s just so maddening. Alright.

So that’s one thing. The other thing I just want to say really quick, I have to tell a story about the Marines. This is from my late friend, Robert Bork, the great judge, who was also inducted into the Marines. In his case, it was in World War two, I think, I’ve been career, but I think it was worldwide too. Anyway, so he went through the whole process and he was waiting online.

He’s like nineteen years old and and they were supposed to issue dog tags and he goes up to the guy sitting at the at the desk and the guy says, you know, name and whatever and he gives all that and then he says, what’s your religion? And Bork says, I don’t have one. And the guy

says, well,

you must have a religion. No. I know. And he says, well well, what do you believe? And Bork said, I don’t believe anything.

And he said, alright. Fine. Protestant. Okay. So I think on that note, it would be appropriate to go

to Pete Weiner. First thing I’ll say about is

this this I love this segment, and my guess is that listeners will too. It’s it’s a great way to get to know the stories of of the different people.

For

me, like a lot of people, a lot of boys, sports was a really big influence on me during my formative years when I was young, elementary, and and junior high and high school. But sports also formed me as a writer and actually moved me in the direction of becoming a writer. And it’s because of sports writers that I read when I was young. And I still remember

reading people,

writers for sports illustrated like Mark Kramm and Curry Kirkpatrick, And then there were radio announcer, a fellow named Bill King, and John Fasend, who was the voice of the NFL. And then Tom Boswell, And I would read these folks or listen to them, and it resonated so deeply with me. And part of it was just because I was interested in boards. But it

was also that these

riders had the capacity to capture not just the grace and your excellence in in raw human talent that you see in sports. But I felt

like the best

ones went beyond the aesthetic into the realm of of human character and human drama. And that they were able to captivate us by their writing, by me, by their writing in showing how athletes

the great

athletes personify perseverance and sacrifice and courage and when they summon the will and the poise to do great things under under tremendous pressure. And that just really drew me in. And and it was the beauty of language that they used, but I also had a feeling that through the beauty of their language, they were able to open a window into a world that I both loved and felt on some intuitive level, spoke to some deeper things. And when a writer can do that, put words to explain the deeper things of human life that’s lived our spirits. That’s a gift.

So sports writers were were pretty important in my own journey. Howard Bauchner:

Fantastic. Yeah.

And therefore, I find that sports writers and music writers, for some reason, just seem to be the best stylist. It’s amazing. But, okay, great. Damon? Well,

since you

mentioned music writers, I guess, add in addition to the little story I’m gonna tell because it’s a pretty short one compared to some of the others. The fact that I wanted to be a music journalist, but obviously I still love rock music. Can I play it on piano and sing and love to write about it whenever I get a chance? So you’ve touched a chord with me, with that little reference to the music. Right?

My little story is about the multitudes I contain politically. I think a lot of of our regular listeners know that I used to be more of a self styled conservative and that I drifted more toward the center left and I’m just kind of just a centrist now. But The fact of the matter is way back, right around the time that Mona, you and Linda were about to finish up your work for the Reagan administration and when Bill was sitting around shaking his head, thinking, you know, I really wish we’d get new Democrats around here soon. This is right around nineteen eighty eight. The very first election in which I could vote when I was a off more in college.

I voted for the very first time in the Democratic primary, and who did I vote for? Jesse Jackson. Yes. That is true. I am guaranteeing you I am the only Jesse Jackson voter here, and unless it’s Bill, but I really don’t think so, given his role in helping to move the party more to the center for the Bill Clinton era.

So that’s, you know, just showing I’ve zigged and zagged a bit in my day and help your listeners, would appreciate that little nugget. I was only that far left for about six months. And really isn’t every college student entitled to a little period like that?

Absolutely. Okay.

So

my story also involves music. I have always adored music. My case runs to classical music. And I I had taken piano lessons just for a couple of years as a kid and always regretted that I didn’t keep up with it and I was a very bad piano student where I didn’t really learn very much and didn’t cooperate with my teacher and didn’t like my teacher who didn’t like children. So that was a problem.

But anyway, I encouraged it in my children and I drove them to all their lessons for many years and they became very accomplished musicians. But in my fifties, I decided, you know what? It’s never too late. And while I may not have had the a good enough teacher when I was a kid to take lessons. I do have a lot of self discipline now that I’m a grown up and I have the time.

So I took up the cello in my fifties and started at the very beginning, of course, because I’d never played a string instrument and had a clue. And so, you know, I got the books for, like, your first cello book for little cellists. I remember one of them. And anyway, I did that for a number of years. Many more years, I would say than I ever played piano.

And it was tremendously rewarding that made me love music even more and certainly appreciate string players more than I ever had. And was I any good? No. I was terrible. But it was a lesson in, you know, it’s never too late.

So if there’s something that you regret not having pursued in your youth, there’s still time, I guess, is what I would say.

Alright. Let’s

rush through highlights and the highlights of the week because we were running a little long. So I’ll start with you,

Pete

Weiner. Sherpa mentioned

Sports earlier highlight for me was the retirement of Roger Federer, forty one years old, twenty one year career, twenty grand slam titles, If he wasn’t the greatest tennis player of all time, he was the most graceful and maybe the most gracious. And this event on last Friday was his final match was Labor Cup events. It was a team event. And in his last match, he teamed up with his great rival and his great friend, Raffin Nadal. And they lost the match, but that didn’t matter.

What was so wonderful about it is that afterward, there were tributes to Federer and they they were sitting together and both of them were in tears. And there was a moment in which Better squeezed

Nadal’s hand.

And it

was it

was a beautiful moment of a great friendship, embodying a a terrific sport.

Thank you, Linda. Well, my low

light of the week is the expiration of the expanded child tax credit. There’s actually excellent article by Jeff Greenfield in political, and it’s called the sad familiar demise of the expanded child tax credit. You may remember

that

part of the pandemic relief included expanding the child tax credit in twenty twenty one and it made it also fully refundable so that people who don’t actually pay income taxes would get it cashed out essentially. And it had an enormous role. Child poverty has gone down during this period well, apparently, not enough to motivate congress to continue that tax credit. And I think that’s a low light because I think taking care of children ought to be a concern on both the right and the left, and I think allowing parents to have the money to be able to better take care of their own children. Is the most effective anti poverty program we can have.

Agreed. Bill Gallston? Well,

my low light is weak. Is the sham and cynical process with Vladimir Putin’s annexation of fifteen percent of Ukraine. Territory not with the consent of anybody but through force of arms. My highlight of the week is the publication of a book by a friend and brookings colleague of mine Richard Reeves entitled of Boys and Men, which I guarantee you will be at the center of public conversation for many weeks in which makes the case that by every conceivable measure young men are falling behind young women in contemporary America and that this is not good for either men or women in the long run. My concluding comment is that my golf game is eloquent testimony, to Mona’s dictum, that it is never too late to learn how to do something really badly.

Bravo.

By the way, at the risk of of self promotion, I have to say, I’m very much looking forward to reading the Reeves book. I it just arrived and I’m going to dig right in, but I just wanna say that I made a lot of these points in the book I published in twenty eight eighteen. So if people are inclined, it’s still available. It’s called sex matters. And I dwell at length on the problem of women doing better than men and why that is and things we can do to reverse it.

Okay. Who’s left? Damon Linker. I am

left. Yes. So my highlight of the week at the risk of being a little incestuous because I’m gonna be plugging another substack and also because I’m gonna be plugging the substack just launched by a colleague of mine at the Scanlon Center named Rick Lindsay. Is sub stack is titled the permanent problem. The first post

is titled

what is the permanent problem or the question mark.

Brink is

one of my favorite thinkers out there. He’s an original mind. He wrote an excellent book several years ago about our age of abundance. And and Mona, actually, to go back to a comment you made early in the show today, when you expressed some kepticism that right wing populism is being generated by the economic decline of kind of industrial workers and the working class brings argument in this post and I think in the subset that he’s gonna be writing from now

on, it

kind of agrees with you, and he makes kind of the opposite argument here, which is that a lot of our problems, including right wing pop realism, and in general, the rise of authoritarianism is a function of in a way the opposite that where a society where so many people have become so comfortable that we have begun to move beyond material as values, if you know the thesis about postmaterial values in our time. He’s building on those arguments. To say that in effect where society is now where so many people are so relatively well off compared to in the past. That we now sit around trying to find how to find more fulfilling ways to pursue the good life, which inevitably raise more intractable problems that lead us to fight with each other and could paradoxically lead to a kind of decline setting in where progress isn’t possible anymore because we’re arguing so much about how much we’ve achieved. So it’s a provocative argument and very fresh different than what I seeing from most other commentators at the time.

At the moment, so take a look at Brink Lindsay’s sub stack, the permanent prom.

Thank you.

I actually have already signed up because I know he is a very, very interesting, thoughtful person.

My

low light is an editorial that appeared in the Wall Street Journal titled Arizona’s School Choice election. Which the once magisterial voice of the Wall Street Journal lowered itself to the point of ignoring reality, they chose to say that the race for governor of Arizona between Cary Lake, the crazy Republican, and Katy Hobbs is really all about school choice. And it was the most obtuse editorial I’ve seen in a very long time ignoring the descent into lunacy that is the Republican Party of Arizona, and suggesting that because Cary Lake has the view that they prefer. And by the way, so do I, on school choice, that ought to be what voters make their decision based on ignoring the fact that Carrie Lake who does not believe in the rule of law who wants to overturn even now the results of the twenty twenty election. Who suggested that her election was already that they were beginning to cheat, who has said that her opponent should be in prison and on and on.

And is part of a ticket, including Blake Masters who running for Senate and Finchham running for Secretary of State. The slate of candidates in Arizona is a shame and a disgrace, and the fact that the Wall Street Journal threw its remaining prestige behind that candidate is just beyond the pale. And so I wrote about this in the Bulwark, if you care to look, and I’m just I’m ashamed of them. I used to love the Wall Street Journal editorials, and now they’re just embarrassing. And it’s kind of emblematic of what has happened to intellectual conservatism across the

board. With that,

I would like to thank our guest, Pete Weiner, and our producer, Katie Cooper, our sound engineer today is Joe Armstrong. And of course, I want to thank our listeners and we will return next week as every week.

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