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Of This World is a podcast dedicated to discussing religion and politics. Co-hosts Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, and Nick Tabor, a journalist and author, talk with scholars, writers, and theologians working at the seam between faith and the secular. Across each episode they return to one question: can there be an effective religious left in the United States? A joint production with Commonweal magazine.
This is Nick Taber. I'm a journalist and author living in New York.
Speaker 2:And my name is Daniel Simmons Jenkins. I'm an assistant professor of history in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, and this is Of This World.
Speaker 1:Hello. This is Nick Taber, you're listening to Of This World, a show where we talk about religion and politics. Joining me is my cohost, Danny Jenkins. Danny, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Doing well. Doing well.
Speaker 1:Today, we're talking with Daniel Silliman. Daniel was both a historian and a journalist. For the last six years, he's been the news editor of Christianity Today. I can attest he's a terrific editor. He edited a piece I wrote for the magazine a while back about efforts to preserve, historic black cemeteries in the South.
Speaker 1:But also in this role at Christianity Today, he's gotten more notoriety for his reporting and writing. He's been responsible for some blockbuster investigations, including a series of stories on the megachurch pastor Ravi Zacharias, who had sexually abused and harassed a number of women, as Daniel's reporting revealed. Most recently, Daniel has taken a job at the Roy's Report, a smaller operation that focuses on investigations of the evangelical world. I should say the Roy's Report is staffed and overseen just like Christianity Today is, by Christians who want to bring reform to evangelical churches. It's not the kind of outlet that's out to do hit jobs, and I'm hoping Daniel will be able to to tell us more about the Reuters report and the work he's doing there.
Speaker 1:But in addition to his work as a reporter, Daniel was also a trained historian. He did his PhD at the University of Heidelberg. Well, he and his wife, Beth, were living in Germany. He's written two books. One is reading evangelicals, how Christian fiction shaped a culture and a faith, which is about how Christian novels and the Christian publishing industry shape the ways Christians come to think about their faith.
Speaker 1:Second book is One Richard Nixon's Search for Salvation. It's a religious biography of Nixon, an exploration of his spiritual life. Just a a fantastic book. Both of Daniel's previous books are exceptional. They're intellectually probing.
Speaker 1:Their research is everything you would expect it to be from investigative reporter. Daniel is also just a great storyteller, has a wonderful prose style. Daniel, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks. Glad to be here.
Speaker 1:I should say in full disclosure that you and I are very good friends. You know, back when I was a freshman at Hillsdale College in Michigan, this is in the mid aughts. Daniel was a senior and we were part of the same, basically part of the same social crowd, sort of the Hillsdale dissident crowd. And Hillsdale has a very conservative political culture, it's kind of the main thing it's known for. We were part of a social milieu that kind of consciously set ourselves apart from that.
Speaker 1:A lot of disaffected philosophy majors and English majors. I was English. Daniel was philosophy. And I I have to say, think there was a feeling that Daniel was probably the smartest and and most well read member of our group or or certainly certainly one of them. Before I came to campus, he had also made some waves by publishing an app ad in the college paper.
Speaker 1:The headline was something like Confessions of a Former Republican Announcing He Had Completely Broken with Hillsdale Orthodoxy and Moved Leftward Politically. So all that to say Daniel has always been an inspiration to me in terms of his reading habits as a reporter, as a historian, and also as a Christian. He's somebody I've always kind of been in dialogue with throughout my whole adult life and one of my favorite people to talk about professional questions with. So excited for this conversation.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Nick. That's nice.
Speaker 1:So what we want to talk about today is what it's like to report on the evangelical world from inside it as an evangelical working for evangelical publications, but often, or at least in some cases reporting on pretty unsavory stuff. So Daniel, I think the Ravi Zacharias story might be a good place to start. Yeah. Could you talk about who he is and what your reporting revealed about him and how you did that reporting?
Speaker 3:Sure. So Ravi Zacharias was an apologist famous for publicly making the case for the rationality of belief. Right? That it's at at minimum reasonable to believe the claims of Christianity. And actually ran an organization called Ravi Zacharias International Ministries that was the largest apologetics organization in the world.
Speaker 3:So there's sort of lots of, like, one man outfits where it's a one guy in a YouTube channel or something making the case for Christianity. And then there are, of course, like, philosophy professors and that sort of thing. But Zacharias had really built a global para church organization doing this kind of work and had a a long roster of speakers and offices in The UK and India and other places around the world. He was originally from India and became an academic and worked in Christian colleges for a while before sort of discovering he had a knack for this kind of public engagement on questions of faith and reason and doing that massive figure in in twentieth century apologetics and and American evangelicalism. And so he passed, he died in 2020 and just to give a sense of the scale, like his funeral was attended by then my vice president Mike Pence, also the football player Tim Tebow, and other sort of legit celebrities who are also evangelical world luminaries.
Speaker 3:Lecrae was there, the people like that. Mhmm. If those names mean things to to folks. Like, Mike Pence, I expect at least everybody to know.
Speaker 1:Tim Tebow, I'm not sure with this audience. We'll see.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Maybe not Tim Tebow. But but these but these are, you know, Tim Tebow played professional football. He's not a minor. He's not an obscure completely
Speaker 1:Only only to nerds.
Speaker 3:But also, like, a culture war figure. Right? Got famous for his preying on the on the field. But, anyway, Zacharias died in 2020 and had this sort of massive funeral and and sort of big send off. And shortly after that, I was leaked some information at Christian Today that he, you know, while doing all of this and traveling the world and making the case for Christianity, had also secretly owned a day spa in Atlanta where he was headquartered and that there was a history of the women who worked there being abused.
Speaker 3:So it was a legitimate massage therapy kind of place. I mean, not licensed counselors, but not a sort of, shady criminal operation in the way that sometimes spas can be. And yet there were multiple people there who accused him of simultaneously owning the place and and sexually abusing them while they were employees. So I would say, the the the person who actually tipped me off was a a guy named Steve Baughman who is a atheist and had been sort of going back and forth with Ravi Zacharias, over different claims and and, like, his arguments, but also, like, did he have exactly the credentials that he said he did in these types of fights?
Speaker 1:So is he is he is he just an Internet personality or a journalist or
Speaker 3:Yes. Internet atheist apologetics kind of
Speaker 1:a guy. Okay.
Speaker 3:I think his his YouTube channel was called banjo atheist. I haven't checked on it recently, but he would argue about atheism and also play his banjo and that was kinda his thing. And and he had just made a little bit of a storm by attacking Zacharias and sort of arguing against, you know, here's what he said and here's why I disagree and that kind of thing. And so he got this information that he owns these spas and one woman had come to him and said he abused the people who who worked there.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And Steve had the thought and had a friend encourage him that there were gonna be lots of people who just sort of didn't take this argument seriously or didn't take the evidence seriously because of the source and that if he turned it over to a journalist and especially to somebody respected in the evangelical world that that they could run a story that would be much more effective. So my initial lead was from the banjo atheists.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Do you know how he selected you in particular or Christianity Today in particular?
Speaker 3:I think a friend of his said that I would be a good person. Oh, and it wasn't me. Like, he was just trying to find somebody at Christian Today. I think I think he would have talked to my boss except she was on vacation at the time. So it was a little it was a little random, but I was the news editor at Chr.
Speaker 3:Shane Today. It wasn't about me in in particular. And at the time, I hadn't done much investigative work at Chr. Shane Today. I'd worked as a crime reporter for a couple of years and had had a few kind of investigative stories.
Speaker 3:There was, like, one about a mismanagement at a district attorney's office, that sort that sort of thing, but it wasn't like I had this reputation in the Sure. At Chrashantine as doing investigative work. But I found I so I started working on this in in 2020, a little bit after the funeral and found evidence that Zacharias did own spas, two two of them in succession pretty quickly and just thought, well, maybe that's the whole story. I mean, it's not like it's illegal, but it's it's unusual.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's not something that was known and and that maybe some people knew, but it certainly wasn't public. But then I was able to to to document the abuse. I was able to find multiple victims who were willing to talk to me with a bit of work. Uh-huh. I've talked about this before, but one of them had actually changed professions, left town, changed her name, but I was able to track her down and say, you know, I I know you know some secrets.
Speaker 3:Would you be willing to to to share with me?
Speaker 2:I read a lot of Ravi Zacharias growing up. Sure. Was a pretty incredible speaker and I had been very much influenced when I was in Bible College by the so called Biola School of people like William Lane Craig and JP Moreland. He And was more of, like, a palpable version of them just because they were very technological. But
Speaker 3:Sorry to interrupt. But he also had a real warmth that I think is often underestimated in those spaces. Right? So many of the people who get into apologetics and maybe especially the young men who get into apologetics are, like, looking for devastating arguments. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and Zacharias was actually pretty good at understanding, like, the person also needs to be nice and make you think they care about you. And and he he sort of exuded a kind of warmth while making those same kind of arguments that a William Lane Craig or somebody else make.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess I have two questions. Just, you know, this is part of our evangelical subculture, this notion of apologetics. I think for people outside of it, it's totally foreign.
Speaker 3:I think that's right. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So can you maybe explain what that's all about? I'm just thinking of the people that I hang out with now. They would they would maybe know what the Greek word means, but they wouldn't they wouldn't know, like, there's actually kind of a subsection of evangelicalism that's devoted to this business of defending the faith.
Speaker 3:Well, and it's kind of debate culture. Right? It's you so you do see more of it now, I think, than you used to. The inner the Internet has promoted a bit of debate culture. And so even you get these, you know, online videos where one person takes on 17 comers or or, you know, or the kind of thing that Charlie Kirk was engaged in going around to campuses and having anybody ask him any question and he would respond.
Speaker 3:That's debate culture that goes back to, you know, the academic and, I guess, some high schools, they're not any that I went to that would have debate clubs or debate teams. It's that style. Mhmm. But, yeah, there's a specific evangelical Christian milieu where people are doing that specifically with philosophical arguments about Christianity. Right?
Speaker 3:So there's a lot of ontological arguments just does god exist? Is that something you can prove? Is that something you can defend? But it can be other ones too. Right?
Speaker 3:There's lots of arguments about how would we evaluate the historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection would be would be sort of another topic. I'll also say that this did sort of enter the mainstream around with the, like, the new atheists. So anybody who's who's engaged with Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or someone like that saw some of the similar style and approach just with a different idea.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Yeah. That that's right. I should have connected this kind of thing to Charlie Kirk because there is similarities. Although some of it's almost populist and almost anti academic in some ways.
Speaker 2:It's like, don't need to go to your university. I can just go on your campus and just with my own reading, be able to defend the faith.
Speaker 1:Well, incidentally, Charlie Kirk took online courses through Hillsdale College to bring it back around. I think he received an honorary degree at that after he died.
Speaker 2:I think this is something that Nick's gonna probably ask as well. But, I mean, what were the larger contextual circumstances behind this? Because of course you have Me Too, you have a Never Trump movement within evangelicalism, how and I think that I always associate that with a certain segment of Christianity today. What were the subterranean currents, I guess you could say, that may have made this story possible that maybe fifteen years ago would have not given at the time of day?
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's interesting. So I mean, to back up a little bit, the the the history of Christianity Today, as a magazine and as a movement magazine, it's it's surprisingly always had a a or maybe surprisingly is not the right word, but unusually has always had a really high value of journalism. One of the first editors they hired had previously worked at United Press International. Like, they always had a history of hiring pretty straight trained journalists, you know, in a way that you would never have seen at, like, early National Review.
Speaker 3:Though there's some similarities. Right? It's a movement magazine. It's trying to define the movement of evangelicalism. It's trying to bring people into the fold and make the case and lead people a little bit.
Speaker 3:But at the same time, unlike a lot of movement magazines, there was this sort of particular value for just straight reporting and the sense that, like, we've got opinions, but our people also need some facts and need to just know some basic stuff about the world that that we care about. And that goes back to the fifties. Right? So CT's coming up on its seventieth anniversary. So back in the, late fifties, it was hiring reporters to cover missionaries and evangelicals and church meetings like this.
Speaker 3:Here's what the Southern Baptist are up to in 1958, that kind of reporting. And then in the nineteen eighties, late eighties, there was this whole series of scandals with televangelists, Jim Baker and and Jimmy Swagger being the big ones. So they they're sort of the most public highest profile evangelical ministers on TV across the country having pretty dramatic sensational sex scandals. And Christian Today made a decision at that point that the magazine should also be involved in reporting these, that they weren't just gonna comment on these things and they weren't just going to ignore them. And they end up thinking that, like, accountability is just gonna be a really important part of the legitimacy of this movement.
Speaker 3:And if we as Christians aren't holding our own accountable, it's not enough to just say, oh, he was not ever really one of us or something like that. But that they would need to be involved in in that kind of reporting. So from the eighties to the February, you know, on and off in cycles, it it takes a lot of resources to investigate, and there's always fears of lawsuits and different editors and managing editors and editors and chiefs would have have a different sense of, like, how important of a priority this was. But but there had been a pretty regular commitment to this type of reporting, whether it's just saying a scandal happened, it was reported elsewhere, and and we're going to acknowledge it in the pages of Christian Today or it was actually original reporting. So actually, after I broke the story about Zacharias and these spas, I interacted with several people who'd been at CT ten, fifteen, twenty years before who had also worked on investigations of Ravi Zacharias and had never quite got the story.
Speaker 1:Oh, So there
Speaker 3:have been, you know, as is often the case, these kind of rumors or somebody heard something. And and there would often be a kind of accountability where, like and I know this happened with Zacharias, but I think it happens with other people as well, where, like, he someone got invited to give a talk and then someone heard through the rumor mill, there's some stuff there. Like, maybe, like, maybe you actually don't wanna platform this guy at your event or something like that. But they hadn't been able to get it. They hadn't been able to sort of nail down the the story.
Speaker 3:So CT had a history of this. I wasn't, like, inventing it for evangelicals or even for or for the magazine. But in 2020, you're right. There there was kind of a moment. Right?
Speaker 3:There was some things happening. So the Me Too movement in response to Donald Trump's election and response to Trump as a candidate bragging about sexual assault and and having so many people and and prominent people and even prominent religious people kind of wave that away as somehow an acceptable kind of jocular description of of the kind of things that guys say, which has not been my experience in any locker room that I've been in, but, you know, lots of people were suddenly like, no no no, that's fine to talk that way. And that really galvanized a Me Too movement and then there was a separate version of that sort of simultaneously or parallel that people called a church too movement. So lots of people were suddenly speaking out and and speaking more openly and and and coming forward about abuse in religious contexts in in in particular. So this absolutely was sort of inspired by by those two things and and and I think people were there was a lot of development in in in new thoughts and sort of how to go about reporting these, so there was shifts on on like the craft of reporting sexual abuse that I found very helpful, that I think like might have been harder ten years before.
Speaker 3:And then there was also, you know, more sensibility to the to the victims too. You know, I've I had a really interesting conversations with each of the women that I was able to speak to where where all of them thought they were the only person. Right? Their understanding of what happened was there is this holy man, Ravi Zacharias, and I am somehow so so uniquely perverse and sexual and bad that I caused him to do this bad thing. So even when they felt like assaulted or abused, they really took the the blame on themselves and it it was difficult for them to imagine that there were many other people.
Speaker 3:And once they did have this sense that, like, no, this person has done this to many people and I'm just one of many and if the stuff isn't checked, there will be more in the future, that also allowed them to speak to me as a way to speak to other women. Right? So even when they didn't have faith that, you know, a justice system would do anything or a or a ministry would somehow hold itself accountable, there was still a willingness to just speak truth for for truth's sake and to tell other women who were like them, you're you're not alone and that was really important of of getting women to be willing to go on the record.
Speaker 1:Well, it's it's such an impressive story, really well well reported. You've started to answer this question already, but I wanted to ask how controversial it was for you to do this both kind of pre publication when you brought it to your editors and then also after the fact when it came out the way it was received. It sounds like you didn't have to fight your editors on this at all, but I wonder what kind of response you got from within the evangelical world. Was there any sense that you were airing the dirty laundry in in a way that that was not good for churches, for the movement?
Speaker 3:Yeah. There's definitely some of that. There's always some of that. Yeah. Crushed Today, I didn't have to make the case for doing the reporting.
Speaker 3:I had to make the case that I had the story. Right? And so it's it's the sort of normal, like, let's have a lawyer check to see that these sources, like, hold up to standards of reporting and and do we know that we know all of these things, that type of stuff, just sort of typical editing. Though I will say that that I know that over the years, that hasn't always been true. Right?
Speaker 3:CT's commitment to to this type of work has has waxed and waned and has shifted as priorities seem to shift, but I didn't have to make a big case for doing the kind of work. Yeah. Externally, I got a bunch of pushback. I mean, from r g I m, Ravi Zacharias' ministry, for sure, there was a bunch of really negative responses there, including sort of most dramatically a a a board member suggesting that they should just someone should just shoot me.
Speaker 1:Oh my.
Speaker 3:And then everything would go away. It was just it was the problem. Just strange thing to say as a older board member in a board meeting. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't a literal threat, but it was a it was a response. It was a choice.
Speaker 3:You know, they also talked to donors about this being sort of spiritual warfare and a kind of attack on from from a satanic attack on the good work that they were doing and that and that kind of thing. Though simultaneously, there was a a whole cohort of people who worked for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries who took it really seriously and and really pushed internally in ways that ended up having pretty far reaching consequences. So so it wasn't by any means that like everyone associated with Zacharias responded that way. I also got, yeah, some external pushback. There's definitely some people that just feel like, hey, if you're on our team, we shouldn't be doing this.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, why are we using our resources to go after ourselves?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're making Christianity look bad.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And, like, we know there are horrible people who we don't like. Why aren't we going after them? Like, let's use our time and resources to to go after our our enemies, so to speak. I also got a lot of negative response from from Indian Christians Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And also interestingly, unique conspiracies from Christians who are either Indian American or in India, you know, who suggested that this was actually like a Hindu nationalist plot to to bring him down.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I I checked. There was there was no evidence of that. I did not get any secret money from Hindu nationalists but, you know, but I think it it's not surprising when something like that disturbing, that upsetting happens. Like, people do sort of look around for any reason to to to not believe it or to to explain it away for Well,
Speaker 1:so my sense is that you don't really like segment your life by thinking like and part of my life on Sundays I'm a Christian and I go to church but then other times I'm a reporter and I just have to think like a reporter and like it's- No,
Speaker 3:yeah, that's not how I did.
Speaker 1:You think of your work as part of your Christian life and I think kind of responding to the mandates of your faith in some ways. And I wonder if you could speak about that a little bit, especially in the context of of work like this. What does it have to do with being a Christian?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I've been privileged to work as a Christian journalist in particular, you know, at Christianity Today, described it as I'm writing about evangelicals for evangelicals. Right? So many people who are on the evangelical beat are trying to do this, like, fun translation of, like, look, you've never met these people, but let me explain them to you. And that really wasn't the kind of business that I was in.
Speaker 3:And then also, man, I got to, you know, live a little bit publicly as a Christian. You know, you do talk about yourself with your sources or or publicly, like, I'm doing this because I am also an evangelical and because I care about this these claims and this movement and and this is this is my identity for sure. But, yeah, to me, journalism I I very much practice journalism as a as a way of practicing my faith. I think the love of truth and pursuit of truth is something that journalism as a discipline and Christianity as a faith very much have in common. You know, I also think that, like, Christianity makes some interesting universal claims against maybe the more natural particularist way to do things.
Speaker 3:Right? There is a claim that the truth is the truth, regardless of who it hurts. There is a sense of universal human dignity even people who aren't in our group. And there's a kind of, you know, tribalism or teamism that Christianity kind of rejects in theology, not necessarily always in in practice, but in the claims. You know, another example is, like, it's just hard to follow a God who died on the cross and then think we always have to win no matter what.
Speaker 3:Right? There's some there's some rejection rejection of will to power, and and we always gotta win, and it's just super important that we always come out ahead that, you know, it's the arguments I hear every time someone sort of explains why exposing a scandal is not worth it. There is a, like, hey. He's doing such important work and, you know, well, it's it's it's like, let's weigh the pros and cons and, like, I mean, if you're in a church of martyrs where you've had all of these people who were willing to die for the truth, and there were easier ways to accomplish their goal or or sort of short term goals. It just doesn't, like, work with that.
Speaker 3:It sort of rejects that kind of Mhmm. Logic of success,
Speaker 1:I guess. Right.
Speaker 2:Maybe I'll jump in and ask a question that connects us to broader political issues. Yeah. There have been all kinds of ways that evangelicals have justified voting for a president who clearly has not lived an evangelical lifestyle. I'm thinking of the so called Cyrus defense. Like Cyrus helped the Jews of the Hebrew Bible, even though he wasn't a Jew himself.
Speaker 2:God can use vessels for means unto his righteousness or something like this. Right? And so I'm thinking of this in light of what you're saying about Zacharias, which is he did all these things, which were horrible, but ultimately his message was supposedly
Speaker 3:Or he defended the right people, so it's okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And he's he's he's preaching the message. And and this is the same kind of logic I think maybe allows some to be okay with Trump. Right?
Speaker 2:And I guess that's the question. Are you able to extrapolate from something like the arguments that you were encountered with you push back against your pieces amongst evangelicals regarding your reporting on Zacharias. And then this larger Trump phenomenon, which is like, okay, well, yeah, he's been married multiple times. He's done all these ungodly things, but he's he's defending the pro life stance. He's trying to make the nation Christian again.
Speaker 2:He it's worth it ultimately. Is there is there or is this just by coincidence, or is this just normal? This this this kind of thing just, you know, I'm thinking of the Dreyfus affair where plenty of French people were probably like, well, it's not true, but it's good for the the unity of the nation that you know? Mhmm. So I any thoughts on this?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and I think that's right. And I think the the arguments for leaving an abusive or or toxic minister or Christian celebrity in place despite the toxicness because he's so effective is the same as this very common political argument of, you know, sure, I don't think this guy is a is a good human being and I maybe even don't agree with him on a bunch of stuff, but, like, he's going to be effective and he's going to fight for people like us and and and our agendas will will be his agenda and therefore it's effective. I do resist a little bit the way that that logic has been seen as uniquely evangelical or uniquely Christian. I mean, would argue from my own faith and my perspective that it's maybe uniquely sad to be a follower of Jesus and also say, as long as we win, we'll do whatever.
Speaker 3:Right? I I find that deeply upsetting, but I don't find the logic of we need a guy to fight for us and who cares what he's like personally. I don't find that that peculiar. I mean, go back you talk Cyrus, but but I'm I always think of, like, like, some of those old westerns, like, the searchers, that John Ford western, where, like, the movie's perspective is that John Wayne is a horrific racist and violent person who who's not fit to live in society, but also that society needs someone like that to make the world safe.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? And that we need someone to go out and be racist and violent to protect the rest of the the good people and the normal people. You know, and there's there there are arguments for that. I I I I don't wanna dismiss it forcefully, but but not that the because I disagree with it, not because there are no arguments for it. But I think a lot of politics is that way.
Speaker 3:Right? You'll get you you'll meet lots of people who are like, you know, this politician just seems like ambitious and phony and they're just siding with whoever pays the check or whatever, but I think they'll be effective so I'm gonna I'm gonna ally with them. And with Trump, you know, I I think the real surprising thing about evangelical support for Trump was that it was so consistent with evangelical support for Republicans. Like all of the uniqueness of Trump just didn't make any difference. Right?
Speaker 3:They they reacted to him exactly the same way they reacted to Reagan in almost identical numbers, you know, and and and Reagan would be another example where, like, he wasn't an evangelical. There's been some, like, retroactive hagiography, but at the time, the idea that a twice married Hollywood actor who hung out with fortune tellers was a was a good evangelical was, like, was strange and that's not what most people thought. Right? Most people thought Jimmy Carter's a good evangelical but a bad president and and not effective politically and doesn't quite have the same agendas that we do. And Reagan's not an evangelical but he is gonna get stuff done and and the and the stuff that we care about.
Speaker 3:So I think that, like, political calculus is very normal and and I I object to sort of pathologizing it as a uniquely evangelical thing. While in my own faith community, it to me, it does seem like a unique betrayal of Christian commitments.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. This connects to another question I have about the uniqueness or maybe non uniqueness of evangelicals, which is more of an epistemological matter. Yeah. Over the last decade or so, there's been a lot of talk about America in general being a post fact landscape, post reality landscape, where people just kind of choose to believe what they want to believe.
Speaker 1:And a lot of people I know, even if they're people who are not necessarily committed to one political side or one party or the other, they just kind of feel like lost in the woods when they read the news and they don't know what to trust. But you also hear a lot that evangelicals specifically are just kind of choosing their own reality. Like, you know, they don't believe in vaccines anymore. And you could say that that's just hardcore Trump supporters at large. But I think often, like, there is kind of a story out there that this is an evangelical thing.
Speaker 1:In fact, in our first episode, we talked about David Hollinger's book, Christianity's American Fate. Hollinger makes the case that this is kind of a specifically evangelical thing.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 1:I'm curious about how that given your kind of privileged perch within this world, how that syncs up with your observations or or doesn't sync up.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I do think there's pretty wide skepticism of, like, mainstream science that not like it's evenly distributed across the landscape, but you just find it in more pockets than you might think. You know, my experience as you'd growing up in Northern California among evangelicals is you'd go into a a pretty crazy health food store and and you'd find, you know, new age hippies and also right wing survivalists and also homeschool moms and it's like they they they don't agree on anything except that, like, vaccines aren't to be trusted. Mhmm. But there is that kind of common feature in in in pockets across the landscape.
Speaker 3:I do think there's a couple of things that put evangelicals in an especially skeptical position. There there are ways of thinking that that sort of lead down that route. I mean, one is just being a little bit of a cognitive minority, to use the sociological term, in the sense of, like, believing in miracles and a supernatural reality. And, yeah, it's not that rare in the American landscape. You know, Pew would tell you 80% of all Americans believe that there's more than nature.
Speaker 3:But that's not typically what's represented in schools or in our media or sort of professionalization. And so it's I think it's easy to feel like my own sense of reality doesn't match what the doctor's going to tell me and so maybe I should always caveat the kind of thing that they're saying or always believe in a kind of slight alternative like, well, that's you're right. I should take this medicine but also I'm gonna pray for healing or something like that. So I think there's at least that kind of wrinkle for evangelicals in the way they think about this. The second thing I think has happened is worldview thinking, mostly promoted by Francis Schaeffer, but there are other folks as well.
Speaker 3:And it's this kind of epistemological arguments that was supposed to I think originally was conceived as a way of providing a firm foundation for knowledge and kind of an alternative to, like, and some of Canterbury, argument for foundation of knowledge. And yet worldviewism ended up arguing that, like, it really depends on what team the thinker is on. I I think it, like, inadvertently ended up being deconstructionist and meridian.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Like, you mean as far back as Schafer, or do you think that that kinda comes comes after him? Okay.
Speaker 3:I think as far back as Schafer. I think you can see that in Francis Schafer. I think it becomes much more popular in the sort of late nineties and at the very same time that everybody is talking about postmodernism. Evangelicals are doing a weird version of postmodernism where they're they are kind of going, facts. Who can even know?
Speaker 3:Right? And and maybe it is just power and maybe it is just the positionality of the person speaking or something like that. You know, and they're real philosophical questions there, obviously, but I do think that this idea of the worldview and how ideas hang together and how coherence worked and and the foundation of our thinking being God and not just sort of facts that are out there in the world ended up allowing a lot of people to to sort of delegitimize known facts or just be extra suspicious of knowledge that maybe didn't go along with what they already wanted to believe or what their team was telling them. Mhmm. You know?
Speaker 3:So I think I think evangelicals have been not uniquely, but extra susceptible to the kind of manufactured misinformation around the environments, as an example of this, but also around vaccines and other types of things because of that weird philosophical history that's back there.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So, you know, it kinda sounds like you're saying that the bizarreness of evangelicals supporting Trump, in some ways, a little bit overblown because it kind of tracks with their support for previous Republican candidates. But I'm curious about what these last ten years of covering evangelicals in the time of Trump, like, what has it revealed to you about this world and this form of Christianity that that you didn't know or see before?
Speaker 3:It's it's so many things. So many things. I mean, there is a lot of tribalism. There's a lot of teamism. There's a lot of, like, no.
Speaker 3:It's our people. The the let's let's yeah. Sometimes I feel like evangelicals, it's like that there are two wolves inside your name. Right? There are these incredible commitments people have to loving their neighbors and self sacrifice and believing things even and and not being in it for yourself and rejecting power.
Speaker 3:And then at the same time, there's a lot of fear. I think I think I really, for myself, like, underestimated how afraid people are just to normal, how how overwhelmed people are by contemporary life, how fearful they are of of the world outside and and and how much they're gonna react to that fear by, I think, a desire for order, first of all, and then a desire for power, you know. Russell Moore, the former editor in chief of Christian Today talked about having multiple conversations with people where they would say, like, I know that Jesus says to turn the other cheek if someone hits you, but that just doesn't work anymore. That's not a practical response. We to we need that's that's too liberal.
Speaker 3:And he's like, no. I mean, that's that's not wokeism. Or if it is, then it's Jesus wokeism. Like, I I you can't just, like, throw out the sermon on the mound because it's not politically effective in the twenty first century. I mean, if it's not politically effective, maybe your religious commitment is to not being politically effective.
Speaker 3:And I think, like, I have also seen versions of that where people's commitment to following Jesus and commitment to holding the values of the New Testament turned out to be conditioned on it also being politically effective or also it doing the kinds of things that would make them not afraid to live in the world that they currently live in. It's been a tragic ten years, I think, for a lot of evangelicals who are never Trumpers.
Speaker 2:Let me ask a follow-up question to that. So much has been made about growing numbers of ethnic minorities, for instance, who threw their support behind Trump, I'm thinking in particular of Hispanics. Yeah. Also increasing numbers of black men. If I'm not mistaken, I think Trump did better with Muslim voters than he had done in 2020, even despite the Muslim ban.
Speaker 2:And of course, it had to do with the war in Gaza, I think. And is there an evangelical analog to this? Or, you know, when it comes to black evangelicals, Latino evangelicals, is that something that is also showing, like, an uptick in support for Trump as well?
Speaker 3:Some of the racial story of minorities, especially minority men coming to support Trump in 2020 or 2024, was a shift and I think it was a little bit hard to see this if if you were sort of, from a mainstream media vantage point. You know, there's just a a challenge for white people and and reporters and media outlets to see Latinos as an undifferentiated mass. And one major distinction in some of these communities is people who are evangelical versus people who are Catholic. And it was the case that not all by any means, but a number of evangelical Latinos tended to swing towards Trump support. Some of this, I think, is just who they're talking to and who they're trusting.
Speaker 3:Right? And and the way that their, white evangelical friends were saying, oh, no. Like, the racism is overblown and, like, that's not really what that means. And what about this other stuff and and these types of concerns? I also saw a little bit that, like, some of the Jeffrey Epstein sexual abuse conspiracy theories that MAGA people liked were also quite popular in some Latino communities and some Latino evangelical communities.
Speaker 3:I think when the story is a little bit different with African American support for Trump, I think that tended to be actually people who were farther away from church and more in the sort of men who felt also the same economic issues and also the same sort of cultural alienation that some younger white men felt. But those tended to be the less religious voters where at least some of the Latinos who who moved towards Trump, it was religious. At least to, like, religious context, if not exactly a religious reason.
Speaker 1:You know, in preparation for this conversation, I was looking at some recent Pew polls and some other news coverage to see kind of what the trends have been in the last year or so. Like if any evangelical support is like peeling away at meaningful levels and kind of seems like mostly not, You know, you'll see a little bit of coverage suggesting that maybe the tide is starting to turn, but you're always, I mean, that's always been happening with Trump. There's always been speculation that like whatever his latest thing is, like some policy or some insane remark is gonna finally turn the tide. I feel like the story kind of remains the same as it always has that by and large white evangelicals have remained one of Trump's, you know, most consistent, most stalwart sources of support. But I'm curious about what changes you've seen within the evangelical world in the last decade that might have something to do with political currents.
Speaker 1:How do you think
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Trump has kind of instigated changes within?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, I should I I think I think you maybe mentioned this earlier, but Christianity positioned itself explicitly as never Trump, as anti Trump.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:During the first impeachment, there was a editorial saying he's not fit to be president. Whatever the details of the impeachment case, like, he really shouldn't be president.
Speaker 1:Right. That was the was that the end of two thousand nineteen, I wanna say?
Speaker 3:That's correct. It was right after I started there. I had nothing to do with it but it happened to coincide. Yeah. You know, so that definitely is the perspective where I've seen most close most close-up.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But I do think there's a lot of change under the surface but it's not changing like evangelicals are politically this way and about to shift. It's change about the identity of evangelical. It's it's change in who is going to claim that term and who talks to who. There's a growing number of former evangelicals, people whose faith hasn't actually changed that much or has changed a little bit, who now reject the term completely, and and and one of the major reasons has been the politics.
Speaker 3:And then sometimes the politics is like a reason for rethinking other stuff. Right? If if that's if that's the truth of the community that I grew up in, I actually have to rethink what I understood about you know reading the bible or or belief in God or something like that. So there's a lot of what gets called deconstruction and ex evangelicals. In a way I would say there's a kind of left evangelicalism that is just radically smaller than it used to be and it's kind of disappearing.
Speaker 3:It's kind of eroding pretty rapidly as sort of more like Jimmy evangelicals, which I would identify with and my my dad back in the seventies would have identified with.
Speaker 1:And what and what's happening to it? Where is it going? A
Speaker 3:lot of times I mean, a lot of those people have become nuns, just sort of not religious people. Some of them, know, go to grad school
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And and just sort of drift away from any, like, religious community. Some of them are in churches that aren't evangelical like there's people who are finding their way to the Episcopal church or you know Eastern Orthodoxy or there's there's stuff like that that happens. And then there are like there's a growing number of like non denominational churches, things that look evangelical but because of their cultural commitments to things like vaccines or immigrants or something like that end up being like, well, we wouldn't claim that term. We're not we're so sometimes they get referred to as like post evangelical though that's not an especially well used term. But yeah, I do think there's like a there's many people that in 2016 would have gotten counted as evangelical that in 2026 don't get counted as evangelical either by themselves or by other people.
Speaker 3:And then the flip side is there's actually growing number of people who do identify with evangelical explicitly as a political term. So Danny mentioned Muslims voting for Trump. There's also been polls about like Muslims identifying as evangelical and Hindus identifying as evangelical and white men who never go to church and don't pray who identify as evangelical. And it it seems clear that they're identifying us with a certain sort of cultural milieu and a certain kind of positionality which has a lot to do with I think a certain way of speaking, a certain like going back to the February, we would have called it like anti PC kind of attitude. You know, you're either a a comedian with a podcast or you're just an evangelical dude, but it's that same kind of mode, I think.
Speaker 3:And and and, you know, historically, that's not what we use this word for, but it is a useful word currently for for a lot of people to say, oh, I'm like that. And what they're what they're identifying with is not, I really love to take communion and sing hymns on Sunday or something like that. Right?
Speaker 1:Right. Right.
Speaker 3:So there's a kind of there's a kind of hollowing out that's happening and a kind of polarization that's happening. I did several stories at CT on especially around 2020, around the phenomenon of what we called purple churches, which is churches with people from a lot of different ideological positions where mostly they wouldn't talk about politics, you know, and you're sort of average evangelical church, they don't see themselves as political and they'd rather not talk about it. And they're very concerned about division and and and the idea that, like, some people watch Fox and some people watch MSNBC and some people think electric cars are a great idea and other people think that's a whole fraud and scam. Like, that's okay. We should all be able to worship together.
Speaker 3:That's sort of the idea of these purple churches. And then something happens culturally where that sort of detente is no longer allowed. You know, COVID did this to a lot of places. Right? How are you gonna deal with masks?
Speaker 3:You can't kinda leave that to personal opinion. You have to make a decision as a community. But the response to George Floyd was another example. Like, do we think racism is real? Do we think racism is a problem in contemporary American culture?
Speaker 3:It kinda there are at least moments where you can't just sort of say everybody have your own opinion. You have to do something kind of collectively. And a lot of these purple churches experienced a kind of explosion in 2020 or 2021 or 2022 and had you know maybe the two or three more left families leave or the two or three more conservative folks split. So there has been kind of a polarization in evangelical culture both around the actual experience of particular communities and how unified they are politically and around the use of this term and who claims it and who doesn't want to be associated with it.
Speaker 1:Interesting. You know, the people kind of departing from evangelical world, I've seen this show up a little bit in my own life. Sure. A couple of people who I think 2020 was the breaking point for them and they were like, you know, I know people like there are people in my life who are dying from this virus, but there are evangelical leaders who are saying it's not real. They're supporting Trump who says it's not real and is bungling this so badly.
Speaker 1:And so kind of like, well, what else are they wrong about then? Like, maybe I should allow myself to ask the question of why a loving God would send people to hell, make them suffer eternal conscious torment or, you know, why have I kind of taken their word for all these years that I should be taking all my cues from this series of books that are thousands of years old and where did these books even come from? So these political things have worked as kind of a crowbar that have pried some of those questions open for people I know as well.
Speaker 3:I think that's right. I think the other sort of factor there is that evangelicalism is a very non hierarchical religious identity. It's it's it's very amorphous as a group and, you know, who's in charge and who gets to speak for it turns out to be a continually contested space. And some of it is organized around, like, I don't know, that guy seems to be saying good stuff or he has a lot of charisma, you know. And so Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I think there also becomes this issue of, like, maybe you grow up in a church and you've never heard of some guy who's saying crazy stuff and then you go to college and COVID happens and and this guy now seems like the spokesman for your religion and you're like, I don't don't know if I agree with that guy. And I think, yeah, deciding who gets to speak for evangelicals turns out to be a sort of continually tumultuous space that can often put people in a a real real uncomfortable situation where they'd say, I I thought my church was fine, but I didn't wanna be associated with that. I reported on evangelicals in Washington DC, for example, after January 6 who were like, oh, I no one I know would have stormed the capital, but I now live in a community where that's the thing my name is associated with. I gotta get rid of that name. Like, it's not worth trying to defend the brand if that's the thing that that's suddenly, like, famous.
Speaker 3:So I think that sort of shifting identification with the label and with the community is very that's the that's the thing that's moving. It's not people changing sides politically, but people shifting whether or not they're they're a part of this thing called evangelicalism.
Speaker 1:Can see that. We're about at the end of our time, but I hope it's okay for me to ask one more brief question, which is just could you tell us a little bit about what you're doing now in your new job at the Royse Report?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the Royse Report is a evangelical watchdog site, sort of small independent media company. I'm actually their first full time investigative reporter and we specifically focus on church abuse and scandal. So the kind of stuff that I was doing with Ravi Zacharias. CT was always one of the things that I did along with other types of reporting and and editing and now it will be my my main focus.
Speaker 1:Cool. And where can people find your work?
Speaker 3:I am around all the socials. I live in East Tennessee. If someone just wants to shout through the hollers, I'm around. No. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mostly go under my own name on social media. I have a sub stack that people can subscribe to where I write about media, Christian history, and prayer, and I'm writing on julieroys.com, r o y s.
Speaker 1:Cool. Alright. Well, thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thanks. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:That's all the time we have for this episode. We wanna thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.