I was on Dog Shirt TV!

Also, some things I'll address next week

It was my pleasure this morning to spend an hour with Ben Wittes and Holly Berkley Fletcher on Dog Shirt TV, which Mr. Cactus calls “an effing revolution in morning television”. Holly had reached out earlier this week to ask if I wanted to come on to talk about my book, White Evangelicals, and anything else that came us. The show normally records at 8:00 EDT (which is 6:00 here in Denver). But by some miracle, Ben was in California so I didn’t have to record until a much more friendly 9:00 MDT.

Holly gave a summary on her SubStack today (which is a fabulous read as always). She wrote:

I was back “on the air” on Dog Shirt TV this week, and I’d like to flag today’s episode (it’s not up yet actually, but you’ll find it eventually here or podcast version here), featuring my friend John Hawthorne, whose book The Fearless Christian University offers a great understanding, critique, and vision for the world of Christian higher education, a key component of the expanded universe of white evangelicalism. John is definitely one of the good guys trying to make f—ed up things better.

I’m thinking of using that last sentence as my BlueSky bio!

You can watch the whole thing here.

One of the topics we discussed was the Attorney General’s Task Force on Anti-Christian Bias, which released its first report yesterday. It is a fascinating document, particularly due to its reliance on undocumented anecdote as supposed proof of some larger issue. In nearly all of the examples, there is clearly important context missing (see Liberty University, for example). But these vague assertions don’t just happen here. They also show up in claims about anti-semitism on college campuses or supposed gang members who are described as savages and terrorists. I’ll explore this further on Monday.

A related theme for next week is to examine the failure of the press to address these vague assertions. Not only do they get reported as if they were based in fact, but they are seen as the natural extension of Executive Orders, which do not carry the force of law. There has been some excellent analysis on this, along with suggestions on how the media can improve. I’ll try to address this on Wednesday.

Which leads me to the never-ending discussion about Democratic messaging. Should they move to the left, embrace the center, run away from Trump’s strength, or bide their time until 2026 or 2028. It’s a curious fact in our contemporary politics that Republicans never seem to worry about whether their message is getting traction. They had a brief moment of introspection after Romney’s 2012 loss and then decided to just double-down on their standard talking points. Watch for this next Friday.