Latest news with #NewYorkTimesOpinion
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Democratic voters slam their own party as 'inept' and 'useless' in NY Times opinion interview
A group of Democratic voters told New York Times Opinion that they were disappointed in their party, which some called "inept" and "useless." "You need to go back to the drawing board and reconnect with common people and talk about how you can work toward helping people get what they need. We know how bad it is," Terrell of Texas told the Times, before referring to President Donald Trump by saying, "No one cares how villainous he is." The Democratic Party's favorability ratings are at record lows as its leadership grapples with how to respond after Trump's win in 2024. "Focusing on Trump and how bad of a threat he was didn't work. And I think they were too focused on 2020 because it worked in 2020. But he was already in power. Moving forward, they need to do what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have done — the Fight Oligarchy tour, reconnect with people, find out what the average American wants — and then run with that platform through the midterms," Ariel of Indiana told the outlet. Democrats' Identity Crisis: Youth Revolt Rocks Party After Trump Comeback The group of voters were also very critical of Trump's presidency so far. Read On The Fox News App Ashley, a young voter from New York, told the opinion writers that it was hard to even defend the Democrats anymore. "It's so hard to even defend Democrats anymore because they don't stand on their convictions enough. Especially now over the last 100 days, it's really tiring. And I think people just need a sense of hope. And I'm not getting that. We just need to know that you are on our side, because it doesn't feel like it," she said. When asked what fighting Trump might look like, Laura, a mail carrier from Missouri, said, "I don't think fighting Trump is the entire answer. But we've got to do something to bring the two parties together to talk without shouting, because it's just not going to work any other way. We've got to talk. And that's hard." Van Jones Warns Democratic Party Is 'Screwed,' Adding They 'Don't Know What To Do' The opinion writers also asked about Democratic leaders, specifically Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. Two young Democratic voters told the writers that they were frustrated with both of them. "I'm upset with Jeffries because I saw an interview where he said: We can't really do anything. It's disappointing to hear that. And when Schumer caved on the budget proposal that he switched up on and essentially lectured people on how it should have been done and trying to defend himself, it just feels like they're not listening and they're trying to tell people how things should be done and they're doing it right and 'We know what's going on, and you don't,'" Ariel, 23, said. Ashley, 19, said she preferred Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, because the lawmaker wasn't afraid to speak her mind. "It seems like they're running out the same defense, even though they see that it's not working. You're getting killed, but you're still running the same game. You're still using the same political tactics. You gave a grand speech, and you broke a record. It's all performative. What are you doing to really reconnect with people, to galvanize and pull people together? Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture Several of the Democratic voters criticized former President Biden for running for re-election, and said Harris didn't have enough time to article source: Democratic voters slam their own party as 'inept' and 'useless' in NY Times opinion interview
Fox News
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Democratic voters slam their own party as 'inept' and 'useless' in NY Times opinion interview
A group of Democratic voters told New York Times Opinion that they were disappointed in their party, which some called "inept" and "useless." "You need to go back to the drawing board and reconnect with common people and talk about how you can work toward helping people get what they need. We know how bad it is," Terrell of Texas told the Times, before referring to President Donald Trump by saying, "No one cares how villainous he is." The Democratic Party's favorability ratings are at record lows as its leadership grapples with how to respond after Trump's win in 2024. "Focusing on Trump and how bad of a threat he was didn't work. And I think they were too focused on 2020 because it worked in 2020. But he was already in power. Moving forward, they need to do what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have done — the Fight Oligarchy tour, reconnect with people, find out what the average American wants — and then run with that platform through the midterms," Ariel of Indiana told the outlet. The group of voters were also very critical of Trump's presidency so far. Ashley, a young voter from New York, told the opinion writers that it was hard to even defend the Democrats anymore. "It's so hard to even defend Democrats anymore because they don't stand on their convictions enough. Especially now over the last 100 days, it's really tiring. And I think people just need a sense of hope. And I'm not getting that. We just need to know that you are on our side, because it doesn't feel like it," she said. When asked what fighting Trump might look like, Laura, a mail carrier from Missouri, said, "I don't think fighting Trump is the entire answer. But we've got to do something to bring the two parties together to talk without shouting, because it's just not going to work any other way. We've got to talk. And that's hard." The opinion writers also asked about Democratic leaders, specifically Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. Two young Democratic voters told the writers that they were frustrated with both of them. "I'm upset with Jeffries because I saw an interview where he said: We can't really do anything. It's disappointing to hear that. And when Schumer caved on the budget proposal that he switched up on and essentially lectured people on how it should have been done and trying to defend himself, it just feels like they're not listening and they're trying to tell people how things should be done and they're doing it right and 'We know what's going on, and you don't,'" Ariel, 23, said. Ashley, 19, said she preferred Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, because the lawmaker wasn't afraid to speak her mind. "It seems like they're running out the same defense, even though they see that it's not working. You're getting killed, but you're still running the same game. You're still using the same political tactics. You gave a grand speech, and you broke a record. It's all performative. What are you doing to really reconnect with people, to galvanize and pull people together? Several of the Democratic voters criticized former President Biden for running for re-election, and said Harris didn't have enough time to campaign.
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Right Wing Counterculture: Vitality. Masculinity. Transgression.
transcript Right Wing Counterculture: Vitality. Masculinity. Transgression. Hey, how are you? Hey Ross, how are you? I'm great. I'm great. What an amazing head of- This is great. Thank you. You look fantastic. You look vital, one might say. This is a very important part of the discourse on the online right. Well, we're going to get into that. For New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. There's been a lot talk about a vibe shift in American life since Donald Trump's return to power, a shift not just in American politics, but in American culture. Where right wing ideas and influences are suddenly driving or shaping the conversation, and a progressive cultural consensus is cracking up. And one way I've been thinking about this is in terms of a phrase that is traditionally applied to the left, and that phrase is counterculture. I think America has, for the first time in modern memory, a right wing counterculture. A kind of edgy, reactionary alternative to the status quo. And so I thought one way to talk about that counterculture was to invite someone who I see- we'll see if he disagrees- as one of its representatives. And that's you, Jonathan. So, Jonathan Keeperman, welcome to Interesting Times. Ross, it is great to be here. We've known each other for a while online, of course, and I- Purely, purely as digital entities. Well, I'm seeing your face across from me on the screen, and I'm reminded of watching Bloggingheads from 10, maybe even 15 years ago. So we've come a long way. Oh, that's- Since Bloggingheads. That's a deep cut. So that shows just how far back your online experience really goes. Yeah, that's right. Days when I had more hair and it was, me and other junior varsity pundits arguing on the internet, but I think, and you can correct me about this, I think the first time that we actually seriously interacted on the internet was after the 2020 election. And I was arguing with Lomez, who was/is your Twitter pseudonym. Correct. The persona through which you engaged with politics for a long period of time, about whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected. Correct. And at that point, you had a dual identity. As Jonathan Keeperman. You were still a lecturer, in English, at UC Irvine. Correct. That's right. And then you were Lomez, a right-wing Anon is the term that people use. That's right. Who wrote pseudonymously online. So that was 2020. And then in 2022, you founded a right wing publishing house called Passage Press. And that, I would say, raised your profile pretty dramatically to the point where you were important enough to have your real name exposed by a reporter for The Guardian. Correct. in 2024. And then by January of 2025, just recently, you were notable enough to host one of the big inaugural balls, which was called the Coronation Ball. So, did I miss anything? How is that for an account of- Those are the highlights. That all tracks and covers ground well enough for us to get started on this conversation. But I do want to point out that in 2020, when we first were having this dialogue and debate over the election, you also had something of a pseudonym. And, I was arguing as much with Ross Douthat as I was Italics Ross. And Italics Ross- you had written at least one column, maybe two, in which you made the case for why Trump might be a superior choice to lead the country, despite the amount of chaos that we'd have to endure under his leadership. And really I was trying, if I remember the whole episode correctly to get italics Ross closer to the surface of the real Ross, the underlying Ross. So we all are trafficking in certain kinds of multi-identities I guess. So those were columns that I wrote, where I essentially, deliberately cultivated a kind of split personality and drew up out of my Jungian subconscious a version of myself that would be pro-Trump, right. So I was never for Trump. I was part of 'Never Trump', whatever that may have been. Way back in the past. And I retained a basic view that it was a mistake for conservatives to latch themselves to the Trump phenomenon. And so for me, it was like, all right, Italics Ross was not the true Ross lurking below the surface. That wasn't how I thought about it, but I thought about it as a set of ideas that certainly existed in my consciousness. And that were really useful for understanding where American culture was, why people supported Trump, and that New York Times readers needed to engage with. I'm curious, before we dig into the ideas themselves, was there like a moment when you felt a kind of shift in the culture just in the last few years, where it seemed like you were going to exist as yourself as a public figure instead of an arguer online. Yeah, it's a good question when that might have happened. There certainly was a shift. But what's probably happening here is just the same old cycle of leftist excess that we've seen periodically over the course of American history, at least going back to Second World War and probably even before that. There's a decade of leftism that takes hold, creates a kind of counterculture. There's a period of pushback. And we saw this, for example, with the original neocons in the 70s. We see this cycle then play out again in the 90s with political correctness, another basically 10 year cycle. And then all we're just seeing is this same pattern emerge in the mid 2010s. I identified 2014 as this inflection point. That was the year of Michael Brown and Ferguson and the kind of rise of BLM. It's also this interesting period where the Academy at least, and I think probably this is happening within newspapers and in media is coming out of this interesting transition into the digital age and out of the recession. And there's new incentives kind of driving the content. And what happens there is that a bunch of conservatives and especially younger conservatives who are frozen out of the conservative movement or frozen out of mainstream politics or frozen out of the kinds of professions where they might have a platform to express new ideas that might regenerate conservatism, go online and go underground and start developing a unique and Native style of discourse all our own. And as that cycle of progressivism just naturally exhausts itself, which it always does, and it takes new form each time. But it kind of always follows the same plot. What we're seeing now is the emergence of this conservative. Some people counter-elite or countercultural force simply emerging in place of where the progressives have vacated. We could come up with all sorts of that's a boringly respectable story. Jonathan and I and I don't believe it. I mean, I do believe it, but I think what you're describing, there is a description of the trajectory that you see. For instance, with my former colleague Bari Weiss. And, and her publication, the free press, which has been tremendously successful. And has represented of a meeting place for former liberals disillusioned by progressivism, various eccentric people who wouldn't have called themselves conservative but have ended up on the right passage. Press you're not publishing, a respectable libertarian critique of the welfare state. You're publishing, fiction, weird stories and Radical Philosophy. You publish the Hardy Boys, the original Hardy Boys before some multicultural PC cleanups, correct. You publish a war memoir by a Russian general who fought against the Bolsheviks. Yeah you publish writing by Robert E Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian, HP Lovecraft. But someone like Curtis yarvin, who is an example of an author you've published. Curtis yarvin thinks that the United States should become a kind of based monarchy run by some kind of Silicon Valley esque chief executive. With a dissolution and revolution of the order of government in Washington, DC. Nick land is another example of subterranean, far right intellectuals who would not have fellowships at the American Enterprise Institute. Who would not operate in mainstream conservative or centrist or center right circles. So tell me, tell me about. Tell me about that stuff. So what are we trying to do. So we're trying to revive what is a genuine right wing cultural and ideological. I hate the word movement because it's not quite that, but a right wing that can form an enduring and meaningful counterweight to a dominant left and a dominant progressive March that we've seen taking place over the course of let's just say, the post-war period, certainly from the 90s and the end of the Cold War up until now. And the premise there is that the conservativism that came before. I was recently looking at a picture online of a book called Young Guns featuring Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor. I am familiar with this cover. O.K Yes. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. Yeah Kevin McCarthy. O.K, so that's the image of the failed conservative movement that what this new set of figures and cultural texts are trying to replace. So let's try and get into what is an authentic cultural right to me passage press. And the work you're doing is clearly linked to a bunch of different groups, right. So you have the Silicon Valley of someone like yarvin. Peter Thiel is obviously often invoked as a godfather in that zone. There is the Red Scare podcast. And the so-called dime square scene in New York, which is basically and again, for listeners who think this is a contradiction in terms. It's basically right wing hipsters. Yeah then you have the nietzschean former graduate student turned online essayist and influencer, Bronze Age pervert, who has received interesting profiles in mainstream publications. So those would be examples that I would see. But who do you see as your allies and fellow travelers in the cultural project. Oh Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. I think you've hit the primary people, the primary figures, and you're capturing what the zeitgeist is here, for lack of a better term. And it's still being developed. And I'd be lying to you if I said that I had some intentional project here or some intentional aesthetic that I was trying to cultivate with this. So the idea is that the future is discovered. O.K we're not going to be able to predict ahead of time what this new culture will look like. It is throwing these ingredients out there based on a kind of shared understanding at the highest level of abstraction, some kind of alignment that, at least for now, is defined in opposition of both the left and wokeness, which is easy, but it's also defined in some sense in opposition to the conservativism that has come before, not because it's antagonistic towards that kind of conservatism per se, but that kind of conservatism is limited in what it can produce creatively. And this is a lot of the frustration that people have had with the right is anytime anyone on the conservative side goes to make some kind of art or do culture. It's just bad. And the left is right about this. There's been at least for my lifetime, this critique that the right can't do art and why and why culture. So why is that. What is right wing art missing. That the right wing counterculture is trying to supply. What are the ingredients It's not. It's not historically true, but at least right in the last 30, 40 years. So I think partly it's fear of the unknown. It's a lack of tolerance for artistic license and the messiness and chaos of what is entailed by the creative process. And it's just the case that if you are going to embark on a new cultural project, you have to have some amount of taste for offense. And O.K, I'll say this. There's probably three aspects to why conservative art is bad or has been bad. And this is reductive, of course, but this might help frame things. It's moralistic. It's much too moralistic. It's didactic. It's always trying to tell you a self-consciously conservative message. It's overly sentimental. And then there's also this nostalgia thing. It's always looking backwards and and conservative art is always looking to the past because it's familiar. It's something that's already been established. It's something for which they already know what they're supposed to what's good and what's not good. So there's no risk in trying anything new. And then the third thing I'll say here is that it's grievance oriented. And this comes in two forms. It's either we're owning the libs or here's a story about all of the ways the libs are making our lives unbearable. Well, let's- I want to make this just a tiny bit more concrete and say from any period, not the last 20 years, any period in American life, modern Western history. Give me an example of something you consider successful right wing art that doesn't fall into the traps you've described. Sure, no country for Old Men as an example, but it's not self-consciously right wing, right. I doubt, the Coen brothers would call themselves on the right. And I don't even know if Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the book. It's based on. But to my mind, it is precisely right wing art, or David Lynch. Pretty much everything David Lynch touches, I think, has a certain kind of a right wing coating to it, certainly. So give me so what is the coding. What makes to a listener for whom it seems absurd to call no country for Old Men right wing. What makes that right wing to you. O.K because I like it. It's good. And therefore I want it to share my political preferences. But beyond that, and this is where there would be some points of disagreement, by the way, it also calls something like girls. The TV show girls is a right wing show. Well, that now you're just pandering to me because that was my that was my consistent view. Yes this is a hobby horse of mine Yes All right. So then we might share the premise here that what constitutes quote unquote right wing art, which is, by the way, some labeling we're grafting onto this thing after the fact. And so it's actually a very flimsy kind of labeling. But what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences references about how these events and these characters and these people. Society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right wing art. But isn't that then a little circular. Then you're saying all great art is somehow right wing. Like to me, for instance, I feel a TV show that I've enjoyed is and Andor. It's one of the few Star Wars shows that I've enjoyed. I see that as kind of left wing art. It's a show that uses the background of the empire and the Star Wars universe to tell a story about punishing militaristic tyranny and resistance to it in ways that are of left coded. But also it's a really good show. Whereas I would look at girls and say, look, it is in the end, it's a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city. And so it is coming from a right wing perspective. I feel like- So do you think- Can there be great left wing art from your perspective. I suppose Yeah. But I'll say this I think it depends. I understand your point, that it's highly reductive to just simply say, if I like it, therefore it's right wing art, or if it tells the truth, it tells the truth is what you're saying. But O.K, so what I mean by that, though, is a point of clarification is there are certain, at least modern left wing premises that support their worldview and their political agenda that I think are belied by someone telling the truth about the world. And here's an example of this. The left takes as a foundational principle of its politics the idea of equality, quality that there's a kind of flattening people. And that through carefully managed social engineering, we can produce a society that either levels out any kind of natural hierarchy or produce a system that somehow can wrangle these natural, almost supernatural, entropic forces that are constantly creating chaos and constantly requiring our maintenance and management and authority to deal with. O.K, good. That's what. So that's what I was looking for. So this takes us into one of the phrases that I think gets used to describe what the counterculture is up to. And I know you're ambivalent about this phrase, but it's the idea that gets called vitalism. Which is this term that means, let's say, a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence and an anxiety about equality and democracy. As just the way you described as leveling forces enemies of human greatness, and it gets connected to Friedrich Nietzsche. I think there's an Ayn Rand who's of a very popular novelist on the American. Whatever you make of her actual books is in some sense in this school. But that, to me, seems like one common thread in including in the books that you yourself have published. Like what links the White Russian general standing athwart the Bolsheviks to the Hardy boys, to Conan the barbarian? It is some kind of idea of human greatness beset by mediocrity and so on. What do you think about that. Yeah, I think that's right. I wouldn't contest that basic summary. I don't want to overdue. Like how we're thinking about this word vitality. For the purposes of this conversation, it's enough to say it's something a thymus, O.K, spiritedness, a self-will, a aliveness or also, I want to say that there's a certain kind of eroticism to vitality that's very important and has often been missing from the conservative view of the world. And I think that's a mistake. I think you're leaving something very important on the table by not grappling with this notion of eroticism and what that means and why it might be valuable, especially. And here's the premise we're starting from, and I think we share this view that we're reaching this phase, whether it's cyclical or there's of this longer term linear path of civilizational exhaustion, decay, decadence. That's a word I know you've used a lot. And this all requires rebirth. And the process of rebirth is not gentle. It's It can be violent and difficult. So I would say that vitality has serves these two basic functions right now. And why it's valuable for us to take on board. One, it attracts young people, young people. I think men in particular, women too, though, are naturally attracted to this notion of vitality. They see it, they know it. And they want to be around it. The right has failed for a long time to attract young people. This is finally changing over the last few years. It's also a way of overcoming, a kind of defeatism of this idea that things are past the point of saving, that we can't do you anything that all there is left for us in the 21st century is to on the one hand, merely manage playing out this end of history period. This sense of vitality, I think, offers something else. It offers the human subject the opportunity to advance positively and affirmatively into the future. So that's my defense of idealism, right. And it's an escape from. And now I'm going to move to a second term that you yourself have used. Yes it's an escape from what gets called the longhouse. And you mentioned, men and women as each vital in certain ways. But the longhouse is a specifically feminine coded narrative of like, what's wrong with contemporary life. So what is the longhouse. O.K, so I wrote this essay called what is the longhouse for First Things magazine. So you can answer the question. Yes, I would encourage anybody who's who wants to know the precise details to go read that article because I spell out what I mean by it. And here I'm going to talk and maybe more vague terms, but it's essentially an explanation, explanation and exploration of what I perceive as a kind of over feminization of society. And I don't mean that as it's explicitly women who are taking over society, because often the longhouse is managed by men, and in some cases, it's better managed by men or more severely and strictly managed by men. But it is a kind of feminine way of social management that is distinct from a kind of male or masculine coded social management and group dynamics. There's a certain it's maybe a phrase is like a regime of maternal surveillance is a phrase I've used before that preferences, for example, inclusion, conflict avoidance, consensus safety. And these kinds of priorities supersede things like truth finding and competition and the kinds of violent often. And I don't mean necessarily physically violent, but it can be that but a kind of combativeness that better characterizes a kind of masculine way of thinking about ideas. And again, why this gets back to certain other things we've talked about is the longhouse is essentially flattening. It's horizontal. Whereas masculine way of doing things in this model is hierarchical, it's vertical. And what a more combative style of discourse, for example, does, is help establish those hierarchies and where the value of ideas are relative to one another. The longhouse doesn't allow for that, because it's more interested in making sure everybody's feelings are maintained and nobody's offended. And just so listeners are clear, this is a reference to I mean, there's a kind of I'm going to call it a pseudo anthropology, because I don't think you're actually making specific claims about the human past, but there's a contrast between of longhouse culture of a literal longhouse of a tribe, crowded together under one roof with what. The freedom of the steppe barbarian. Yeah, I mean, so this comes from Bronze Age pervert. O.K Bronze Age mindset, which is one of the great texts of the 21st century. And I encourage all the New York Times' listeners to read it. It's very important if you actually want to understand this stuff. I agree. So he talks about the longhouse and he's got his own take on it. I borrowed the term. And actually why I think the term is so valuable is because it is a kind of empty signifier. I don't mean to tie it to this historical context. It's an evocative image. It's this big, long, O.K, literal house that we're all stuck inside of and you're constrained in how you can behave, how you can act. And I think it's hostile towards men in particular, having a kind of freedom of assembly with one another. So concrete examples would be the crusade against Greek life at universities. You would see as longhouse in action corporate HR departments and sensitivity trainings, longhouse in action. Well, and you can see probably the most salient example of this precisely because it's where you would least expect this kind of long housed. Cultural framing to take root is the military. And actually, Pete hedges has talked about this explicitly. Is this integration of women into the military. We don't need to get into the politics of that. Just suffice to say, though, that these traditionally male spaces, our martial culture has been now, it's open to women. And this introduces new norms. It just has to in order for it to work. And this is going to necessarily change, and I would argue, degrade the culture of masculinity that preceded it to two objections or responses. The second one will be more specific to my own worldview, but the first one, I think, is a more general one that many listeners would have. They would say, look what has actually happened in the last 25 years in the longhouse era, as you describe it, is. Guess what. We removed restrictions on women's advancement and they started out competing men. They're not long housing men. They're just getting the promotions that men used to get. And succeeding in corporate America where men used to succeed. And Yes, there are specific cases like the military where physical differences between men and women matter. And maybe there you could say gender equality has gone too far because it ignores those physical differences. But when you're talking about corporate America or political America or any of these environments, women are succeeding, men aren't. And now men are complaining that women are oppressing them. Like, isn't this just isn't the longhouse just a long male whine about a failure to adequately compete and you're pretending Oh, for the days of the steppe barbarians. But maybe you should suck it up and actually compete on the grounds that we have in 21st century America. What do you say to that. Yeah I mean, it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. And I do think over the last however many decades that there have been a number of changes in the workplace that can be attributed to women, very talented women taking on leadership roles and succeeding in those roles, and therefore introducing more women into the workplace based on that success. I think it's perfectly fine for me to concede to that. The point I'm making is that by introducing this new distribution of personnel into public life, it has an effect on how these institutions are run and the norms that these institutions run on. And then it becomes an empirical question. Have they changed for the better or have they changed for the worse. And I think most people look around at the various institutions, whether it's media, whether it's academia, whether it's the corporate boardrooms that have found themselves in all sorts of spasms over DEI stuff over the last decade. Are they more efficient or are they less efficient. Are they working properly. My argument would be that very self-evidently, the institutions in which all of these changes have occurred are now performing worse than they used to. And that is, at least in part, attributable to this change in norms. And this change in norms in turn, is attributable to this change in personnel. All right. Now, a more personal objection rooted in my own religious commitments, which is that as you say, I have a lot of sympathy for the broad view that modern, late modern life has become decadent and some kind of sense of possibility, some kind of sense of action, some kind of sense of human capacity is really important to getting us either out of this trench or through whatever weird bottleneck digital life and I are going to create. I agree with all of that. However, I'm also a Christian. And all of the authors that I've mentioned who are part of the vitalist tradition, Nietzsche, Rand, Bronze Age, pervert, see themselves operating in opposition to Christianity. They see Christianity as fundamentally it's either it's a religion of the weak. It's a religion of women. Perhaps it's against the erotic. And so when I look at when I look at the right wing counterculture right now, I see a force that has there are people who are really into traditionalist Catholicism and whatnot there. But there's also a lot of people who I think in their own story about what went wrong with the right, the Normie right, the boring right of Kevin McCarthy think at some level, it was a bunch of weak, thin, milk drinking Christians who didn't understand that what is actually best in life is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women. So I'm curious, what is your attitude towards those debates. What's your attitude towards Christianity and religion. Yeah, I mean, my belief is that there's actual tremendous amount of synchronicity between these two modes of operating in the world. And it's not just my belief my favorite author and actually a passage press comes from the book forest passage by Ernst jünger. And there's a great book of letters between younger and Martin Heidegger. And junger's Younger's view, actually, is that none of this kind of vitalism, none of this is sustainable without religion and actually Christianity specifically, and that our idea of poetics and the inscrutable forces of the universe against which are individual will is being tested at all times in which a kind of vitalist view of the world is insisting we're constantly pushing against all has to be live inside of this framework of Christianity. So I don't think these things are incompatible. But younger but so younger. If I'm remembering his trajectory correctly. He was part he's part of the German. Correct He's not a Nazi, but he serves in the Third Reich. He's not someone who listeners should think of as Heidegger, who just goes who goes Nazi in that way. But he remains very much on the anti-liberal right throughout that period. And my sense of him is that he did have that a view of Christianity, as you described to some degree, but it was Christianity as a kind of useful force for resisting the degradation of modernity and so on. And then he does actually become a Catholic in very old age. So it's like you get to be a vitalist for many decades. And then at the end, you're like, all right, all right, time to succumb to full Christianity. And it just seems to me that even in vitalism, there are people who are anti-Christian like Bronze Age pervert like the Nazis. And then there are people who want to put it to use. But I'm a little ambivalent about having my religion put to use in that way. Yeah I mean, your concern is that it's merely being, cynically operationalized, not even not even cynically, but it's more like Christianity is this great mythic structure that within which we can operate. And so on. And that's not what I believe about Christianity. So I think Christianity is a true myth and imposes constraints. I guess that's part of it, right. The Christian doesn't just think that nature imposes constraints. It's that God imposes constraints as well. But let's not let's not stay forever in the particularities of dogma. Because I want to talk about Donald Trump. Yes carry us, carry us from Ernst Jünger to Donald Trump, right. And so Trump himself, right. Again, we're trying to talk more about culture than politics. Trump starts as a cultural figure. Anyone anyone who's old enough to remember the Trump who existed before he became a politician remembers the tabloid fixture, the reality TV star, the self creator whose life is, in a weird way, its own kind of work of American popular art. But you've written a bunch about Trump as a heroic figure. You've explicitly compared him to Aeneas. Speaking of mythological heroes, talk to me about that Trump as hero. What does that mean. O.K I have a somewhat idiosyncratic view of Donald Trump. Yes as a kind of a man out of time. And so I wrote this article or essay called Aeneas in Washington. And the idea was that Donald Trump has revived or assumed really this kind of mythic stature. He's a mythic hero. And specifically, I have this concept. It's not my concept, but I've applied it to Trump, of retrocausality. Trump has this strange ability, in my view to reconstitute the past. How we understand Trump and his life before he entered politics is not a strict, linear thing that is unchanging in time. Actually, over the last five years in particular. So since he lost the 2020 election, this interim period where he was beset by these lawsuits and he was threatened with prison time and he was shot at and nearly killed. We can look back at his past and see a new narrative about his life that suggests the possibility of this kind of rebirth from this civilizational exhaustion that I think is really the core description of our present moment. Now, in this essay, I also point out this concept called charisma hunger. And there was a sociologist from the middle 20th century, Erik Erikson, quite prominent. And he had this idea that in the modern world and this has a lot to do with actually, the loss of religious conviction and religious life that we were in search of these figures, these heroes. I'm very aware of the possibility that I am succumbing to this charisma hunger that Erikson identified decades ago. And nonetheless, I do think and I think the people's reaction to Trump, their impression of him. I saw for the other day, did you see this wrestler who won the NCAA title and he's draped in the American flag, this gladiator, and he gives this great big hug to Donald Trump. And in so many ways, Trump is this kind of great father of the American people, or certain segment of the American people who have embraced him. And he's not just a politician. He's not just a president. He's not just a TV star. And to my mind, that speaks to this mythical character. Yeah I mean, look, my own view of Trump, as you probably has changed. I think we have of each moved and each shifted, and I've ended up closer to where you were four years ago, and you've gone a bit further. So I just had trouble from the beginning of seeing Trump as anything other than a symptom of decadence. The reality TV host becomes president of the United States because he's triumphing over all these mediocrities and failed politicians. And so on. But it's only and he is representing a kind of revolt against decadence, I agree, a desire for something more. But he manifests that decadence at the same time. That was my basic take. And then in over the same period that you have come to see him as a heroic figure, I've come to see him as. Yeah, someone who has a more providential place, a bigger place in history, who is still part of a decadent era, maybe is still more of an anti-hero than a hero, but is bigger than I thought. And there is some of that. Retrocausality once you have Trump surviving the assassination attempt, you read that back into the past. Yes but I wouldn't go as far as you do, I guess, for reasons. I think part of the reason maybe connects back to what we were just going back and forth about my Christian doubts, about vitalism. To me, I look at Trump, and I see someone who has more capacities than I credited with him at the start, but the capacities that he lacks are restraint, magnanimity, a sense of moral limitation. And I think that lack is connected to the fact that I don't think he's fundamentally religious. I think maybe he believes in Providence now that Providence saved him. But not in any kind of conventionally Christian way. And I think it's the reason why it's both reasonable for liberals to worry about where that appetite of side of him takes us, but also just to worry about again, the chaos and mismanagement and all the things that also come in from an absence of restraint. Yeah I mean, I think that's fair. But and I'd also say for others who share your view here in this conflict between your religious convictions and what Trump might represent, this is squarely within our Civil religious tradition. I mean, if you think about the way that for most of our history, really up until like the Obama years, we thought about our founding figures and the way that they're presented in art and the way they're written about in our political and civil religious texts. They are quite explicitly, divinely guided. I mean, the hand of God is like reaching down and moving. Thomas Jefferson, who also was not religious in any meaningful respect, and George Washington and John Adams, et cetera, and placing them, the hand of fate is on top of them. And so it's not these things like to imagine that Trump is reviving that tradition or is now occupying that same role is not in contradiction to this long tradition of civil religion that we've had previously. It might require more proof for you. You might need to see, I think the issue is more that, if you see the hand of Providence operating through George Washington and John Adams in the founding of America, you could see the hand of Providence operating through Donald Trump in the chastisement of America, right. That Trump, is a great man of history whose role is to chastise the liberal intelligentsia and the never-trumpers and all these groups that failed to govern America. But it doesn't mean that at the end of the day, he's actually saving America. Sometimes it's just a chastisement. Like that. I feel like that possibility deserves more consideration from people who have this kind of mystical reaction to the drama of the Trump era. But I wanted to just on that question of restraint part of what Trump does, part of his lack of restraint is a refusal to respect any taboos to push through whatever the taboos of progressive culture are. And in the same way, right part of the right wing counterculture is all about taboo busting. But one of those taboos, and this is something that connects Trump in some ways to the counterculture is taboos around race, right. Because there's a lot of racism in right wing counterculture in various forms. It's there in the online memes. It's there in the would be nietzscheans like bap. Anyone who goes from this conversation. And gets a copy of Bronze Age mindset and reads, certain paragraphs will say, well, this guy is a terrific racist, right. Sure and I want to offer before you interpret this, I want to offer three interpretations. Take the interviewer's privilege. I think you could say, O.K, this is just about this is about performative rebellion. A counterculture needs to shatter taboos. The taboos of liberal culture are around race and gender. Possibility to you want to reclaim and relegitimize parts of the American past. American past had a lot of racists. You're trying to restore and reconstitute a lost progressive world. It's inherent in the project that you're basically trying to rehabilitate writers and thinkers who contemporary piety would try and rule out because they held, at the very least, un-pc opinions. So those are two arguments that I see as justifications complete or not, for the kind of racist stuff. But then there's also the possibility that there's just a serious belief in racial inequality. And maybe it's not really legitimizing Nazism, but if you spend a fair amount of time online, it's not that many degrees of separation from the right wing counterculture to people on excom talking about what a great artist Hitler was such a great, such a great artist, which I so anyway, I wanted to offer those as interpretations. And then have you talk about why. Why is the right wing counterculture racist. Sure well, first, let me start by saying I don't think actually, Adolf Hitler was a great artist. I think he was actually deficient and technically deficient in certain ways that are very obvious when you look at his painting. But O.K, technically, the technical deficiencies of Adolf Hitler are definitely, definitely there in a few places in his life. Yes so this is actually this is a really interesting question. And of course, it's worth addressing. And I think all of the things you said can simultaneously be true. And I think there's a fourth point I want to add here, which is historically contextual. We started this conversation by trying to think back to where this current moment of our cultural, social, intellectual, ideological path began and we identified somewhere in the 2010s. Now everything I'm about to talk about has precursors. But something else happens here around 2012. And maybe you identify the Trevon Martin case into 2013, 2014. Certainly there's the Michael Brown, hands up, don't shoot Black Lives Matter simultaneously, that we have a kind of a discussion happening in this country around immigration. And what would happen to this country. If we started allowing people in from all over the world. Is everybody the same from everywhere. And if we're going to have a pluralistic democracy, what does that look like in a future where it's not a non-white, predominantly white country. These are legitimate things to think about a lot of people didn't want us having these conversations previously. But then what happens in 2013 14, and then scales up over the course of the 2010s. Is this insistence and again, I think this is important coming from the left, that we have our moment of racial reckoning. O.K, so a bunch of people then are being asked to have a difficult conversation about race and the prevailing view, which is taken on by the New York Times' by academia, by and large, is that any differences in outcomes among people can be ascribed to this infinitely amorphous, non-falsifiable, infinitely pervasive thing called systemic racism. And this is, if not intentionally facto, the fault of the White population in the country. So the question then is that true. Are we allowed to look at the actual causes of why these discrepancies exist. And it just is the case that when you look at these differences, they are not attributable to white racism. You can actually identify causes. So I think a lot of young people online who are finding themselves getting the short end of the stick on these, this new regime of DEI are reacting to it in. And so a lot of this kind of racialized conversation is a response, is an answer to the insistence that all of these differences are white people's fault. So I buy a version of that argument. And I think it's very clear just from watching the culture that the ascendance of certain kinds of DEI narratives Robin D'Angelo stuff, where it's like white people are conducting psychological self-scrutiny and so on to root out the hidden structural racism in their heart. All of that contributes to an emergence much more than at any point in my lifetime of a kind of distinct white racial identity among some conservatives. Younger conservatives, especially online conservatives, especially people in the orbit of the right wing counterculture, especially. This is all, I guess, several different questions, though, right. One that still might be bad, right. If it's bad to have a tribalist view of politics among non-whites, isn't it potentially bad to have a tribalist view among whites. Even if you're creating a cultural, political explanation where it's understandable. That's question one. Question 2 is more concrete. It's like, O.K, how far back are you. Are you trying to turn the dial. And I want to keep it in culture. So I'm going to give a cultural example. I grew up I was a big fan of the Tintin books. The Tintin comics, the boy detective captain haddock. And so on. Those were a huge influence in my childhood in the 1980s, 1990s. The Tintin books are from 1920 through 1960. One of the early Tintin books is called Tintin in the Congo. And it's super racist. Like it is a set of super racist caricatures of Africans that are not like friendly ethnic stereotypes. The way the appearance of like, Arabs and Italians are elsewhere in the book. They're more racist than that. Well, I'll just be really explicit. Would you publish Tintin like Tintin in the Congo. Disappeared, right. Was it good that it disappeared. I'm not familiar with this exact book. O.K well, in theory, imagine you could. You can pick another. But like is it. Yes is it O.K that certain things from the past that were very racist disappear. No so, so this is a very easy question for me to answer. And the answer is Yes. I would publish it on the assumption that it has a kind of literary value that is independent from these objections you have to these racial caricatures. So there have you seen who Framed Roger Rabbit. The movie Yes Yeah. The movie. O.K Yes. There's this great moment in who Framed Roger Rabbit, where Roger is handcuffed to the detective. And this is causing them all sorts of problems. And eventually the detective is trying to saw the handcuffs off. And Roger at one point just slips out of the handcuffs in this sight gag. It's funny. And the detective very angrily says to him, you're telling me you could do that at any time. And Roger Rabbit says to him, no, only when it's funny. And the upshot of this anecdote is that if it's funny, O.K, and funny, here now is a stand in for has artistic value independent of the thing happening, then it's worth preserving and worth participating in. So this Tintin book, or Tintin I don't is that Tintin is the snobby French way of saying it. Most Americans would say Tintin Yeah Yeah, real Americans. Which I'm a vulgar populist, Trump supporters. So I don't know how Trump supporters say Tintin. New York Times' columnists say Tintin. Yeah So the question, the operating question for me as a publisher is it funny. And again, does it have value. Does it have artistic merit. Then there's also the archival thing. The archival function is very important for a publisher. These are important texts. They tell us something not just about who we were, but in turn about who we are and simply forgetting that these things existed. Does nobody any good at all. I don't think we need to protect people from that kind of offense. The other point, which is isn't aren't these views bad, though. And so we should disarm on these questions. If I understand what you're putting to me. And I would say maybe kind of it depends, because these views do have consequences that we need to properly address. And the only way to address them is by being honest about causes. So if we're talking about, for example, crime rates and we want we see uneven incarceration rates. And our answer is, well, there's overpolicing. But then our solution to that is we get rid of police. Well that creates an increase in crime. And no, as long as disarming on these questions and not being honest about these questions allows for these kinds of social pathologies to rule over how we function in life, I think is bad, and we need to be honest about them. And this does not. Yeah Yeah. But what. But still there. There's a question beyond that about the cultural side of this. Like, again, the world of memes and discourse. And so on. Yes it includes some rehabilitation of traditional conservative arguments about problems with the welfare state or the necessity of policing that are familiar from the 1980s and 1990s, that the progressive consensus suppressed. That's different to me from kids online posting racist memes, right. And saying, it's just irony. I'm just being ironic. And busting taboos. O.K but at a certain point, doesn't the mask become the face. Doesn't the irony become indistinguishable from just being against kind of against Black people. And then for you, as a publisher. It's fine to say we should preserve these we should have historical memory. We should know what the past was like. But I don't think you'd want to be like you would have a certain audience if passage press, pivoted further. And was like, we're publishing, we're publishing Romel books by Alexander Stephens and confederates and so on. Wouldn't you worry about yourself in that scenario, even if you thought it was fine don't want these things banned, but do you want to be the person publishing all of that. No, not necessarily. I think there are publishers who are already like filling that niche. So it's not my responsibility to do that. But also if you're the kind of person who's interested in that content, it's been there and you can go find it and I'm glad you can. I think actually these things are important for us to be able to discuss. And I would say this to your concern about these racial taboos in particular. I actually don't treat them any different than any other kind of political or social taboo. There's some added, maybe vitriol or sharpness to some of these memes we're seeing now, but that's mostly because this is a topic of conversation, a category of conversation that has been entirely verboten for a while now. O.K, let's call it at least several decades. And the problem with this particular topic, in my view, is that it starts with the supposition that it's firstly a moral question, and any decent person, morally decent person already agrees with these basic anti-racist premises. So to even raise the questions, it's a mark against your character, and we can't even get to the point where we're having the policy debate. And what that creates, then, is this environment in which people who want to have this debate have to figure out a way to talk about it and get through these filters. And I think the kind of abrasive meme making that you're identifying when it comes to racial questions is a function of the manner in which this part of the discursive landscape has been previously closed off. And if we open it back up and allow for sober conversation, then it'll lose the power to carry these memes, they just won't be as interesting or funny because they're not as taboo. I guess I'm more skeptical of that. Not in the sense that I think that if you allow or encourage certain debates that suddenly the US turns into the antebellum South or Nazi Germany, but just that there are a lot of people and this there's versions of this on the left and issues around anti-Semitism, especially on the left that are of a separate conversation. But there is some overlap. I think it is bad for people to be in a position where they are questioning not what is the proper design of welfare policy and policing. But do we need to do. We need to give some reconsideration to Hitler's views about Jewish conspiracies? And I'm not saying I'm not. I'm not accusing you of taking that position. I'm just saying right now, when I look at these spaces, it's like I'm a child of the 1990s, right. I think it was O.K to live in a world where there were taboos about Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South, and that didn't have to preclude having honest debates about race and crime and policing and all of these things. But I just when I look at, again, the moral character that is encouraged by racist meme culture, not worried they're going to take over. I'm just worried about them, I guess. O.K, but Yeah, I would just ask, what exactly are you worried about. So let me start with this. First of all, lies are brittle. Ultimately they fall apart. Truth is durable, O.K. And to build anything that's lasting, it has to rest on top of truth. And so we have to start there. That's my view O.K. And in order to discover truth, we need to be willing to test our assumptions about everything and continuously test those assumptions. And if we don't continuously test those assumptions, we not just forget what we believe, we forget why we believe those things. And I think this is actually something the left has fallen in. The trap of the left has kind of forgotten how to make the argument for their own beliefs, because they've denied anybody who objects to their underlying assumptions about the world. I think it would be a mistake for us to erect a kind of discursive force field around certain categories of questions in an effort to preclude the kind of discomfort. And again, this concern that you're articulating to me is very vague. I don't actually know what you're worried about. I mean, people have been questioning these narratives for a long time. David Irving has been challenging the Holocaust for a long time is like it better to not have those conversations. I don't think it is. I think we should just let it out. It can exist in the world. Yeah and again, this is the last thing I'll say. But I think it's partially like you started out talking about how your sense I think you would put it this way that there was anti-white racism at work in progressive politics and culture in the last five or 10 years that correct that there was a critique of whiteness as this miasmic force that was functionally like functionally applied, a kind of suspicion and hostility towards anyone who was white, certainly anyone who was white and male. And I wouldn't go as far as you with that, but I don't think that's wrong. I think it was bad. It would also be bad for there to be more and more anti-black racism, or anti-Semitic curiosity on the right, just because it affects our shared life. And I think in ways that have cultural effects, have political effects. I think they have effects on the Trump administration. I think one of the ways that the Trump administration may fail, as I said before, is that it is not a racial issue per se, but it regards some of its fellow citizens with a certain kind of contempt. That's a problem for a would be great leader. I think contempt is bad. I think racism encourages a kind of contempt. And so, yeah, I don't have a single like America is going to become Nazi fear. But I do have a fear about the impact of taboo busting around race on the kind of institutions that right wing people might build and so on. So, I mean, I understand where the concerns are coming from. I guess I think it's unfounded. I don't think it actually will materialize into something real and something we'll have to worry about. And I think actually the alternative presents a much worse possibility. And I think we saw some of that with the great awokening or this post-george Floyd 2020 impulse to not just blame white people for this kind of subordinate position of people of color per se, but then make actual policy choices or institutional choices to try to level that by harming white people. And so what I'd say here is the reason that was bad was not because it pointed to racial discrepancies, but because it was wrong, it didn't pass the test of evidence. But the question is not just is the discrepancy exists, the question is, why. And if we don't allow ourselves to have an honest conversation about that, what fills the vacuum is the most incendiary and most harmful explanations. So it's actually in my view, incumbent on people in positions of prominence who can look at these questions soberly, who can evaluate the evidence and make Frank statements about the explanations for these disparities. All right. Let's just talk briefly about the future. How lasting do you think that the vibe shift or whatever else is will turn out to be. So you're at the start. I introduced you right as the host of an inaugural ball. You're appearing on a New York Times' podcast. A very prominent position. But passage press is a boutique publisher. And there is. We didn't really get into this, but there is a mass, obviously, a more mass market side of the vibe shift. I think the Joe Rogan's and Theo Vaughn's the and all the way to Andrew Tate. Vitalist right. All of that, all of that is there. And part of the culture. But even that still, to me, exists in a pretty separate universe from the people who make pop musical TV or who publish mass market fiction. So I'm curious, do you see that part of the culture moving rightward? Books, movies, TV. What would that look like. Yeah, I do. I actually think it's going to be a full scale vibe shift and I full scale Reagan era level or bigger. Yeah, I do think it very well could be Reagan era level. Now, I wasn't a lot. I was alive, but I was too young to remember. What were Reagan era. You were absorbing his charisma. But I've watched enough John Hughes movies to understand how that expresses itself in popular culture. And I think we're going to have precisely the same kind of vibe shift that infiltrates these mainstream media forms. O.K, here's an example. I sit around with my family every once in a while, and we watch American Idol. And Carrie Underwood, who sang at The inauguration, is now one of the judges on American Idol. Just the mere fact that this massive pop star, who has one of the biggest platforms in pop music, is simultaneously affiliating herself with the Trump administration is enough to suggest that there is something meaningful and enduring and broad about this vibe shift. You also have, I believe it's Larry Ellison's son who just bought Paramount Pictures. He is a kind of conservative, they're going to be doing these Top Gun esque films that really embrace a kind of patriotic zeal, I guess you could say. Now, I warned at the beginning that it would be a mistake for conservatives to simply adopt a kind of nostalgia and sentimental patriotism. So I don't hope that is all there is. But that's a perfect place for that kind of ethos and aesthetic to exist in these big blockbuster movies, and I suspect they will. People are certainly exhausted by wokeness. So it's not just that the right and this right coded art is ascendant. It's as much to do with the fact that Snow White, this new Snow White release is very unpopular. People don't want this stuff anymore. And so there's going to be a natural opening for newer, let's just say vitalist kind of art. All right. So last question. Donald Trump calls you up and he says you're in charge of the National Endowment for the Arts, and you're setting up a program to celebrate America's 250th. And part of that program is you're going to ask every high school senior to public high school senior, maybe use the leverage remaining in the half dismantled department of education to enforce this, to read one book and see one movie. Yeah what do you recommend. This is good. You put this question. I'm not going to hide the ball from the audience. You put this question to me earlier this morning. I wanted. I wanted a good answer, right. Well when you ask it, suddenly you're like oh, God, are you going to say the godfather? Because it's. O.K, good. See there you go. That's always. I'm not going to say the godfather, although I did have difficulty spontaneously coming up with a good answer. What? one book encapsulates what I'm trying to accomplish with this. So the thing I'm the thing I've thought long and hard about and what I saw when I was a lecturer at UCI. There's been this kind of severing of a continuity between the past and the present, and I think it's an intentional severing. And these kids like, they just they're not well-read. They don't really know anything. I mean, I spent half of my classes just teaching like Wikipedia tier history, just so we can have enough context to have the conversation about the actual stuff we're talking about. So one thing that I would definitely, I think is much needed is to reestablish a kind of continuity, a literary intellectual, cultural continuity with the past. So the book I would choose for this is Moby Dick, and it's a very obvious cliché choice, but it's a thing that kind of everybody from all ages if you're an American, this is a book you just should know. I think Moby Dick is essentially American, and in particular represents a kind of East Coast American founding. And it's this man against nature and God. And there's also the chaos of the plurality of the cast. And it's very American in that way. It's this industrious, pluralistic almost democracy on the boat. So it's also transcendence through conquest, which is a very American idea. And then my counterpoint to that, which I think is a nice coda is no country for Old Men would be the movie. Moby Dick is conquest and it's the Atlantic. And now Cormac McCarthy and no country for Old Men. The film in particular, the Coen brothers film, is the border, the terminus of the West, the border with Mexico, it's also late epic. It's the exhaustion of American conquest. And we're also now there's this force at the center of the book, this inscrutable, mysterious, supernatural force. It's not in Moby Dick. It's the thing they're chasing. It's the whale in a no country for Old Men. It's evil. It's chasing them that has come right to now. Fate is coming to exact. It's payback for what America has become. So it's America at the end, at this moment of civilizational exhaustion. And it's precisely this point that we need to escape out of. And this is my hope for the future is how do we take the metaphysics of No Country for Old Men and create some kind of rebirth to our national identity, our national character, our inner primordial being, and find that life force that can once again extend beyond these borders. All right. On that chthonic note, Jonathan Keeperman, Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks, Ross. This was great. Ross Douthat: There's been a lot of talk about a vibe shift since Donald Trump's election and return to office — a change not just in American politics, but in American culture, a sense that right-wing personalities are suddenly driving cultural discourse, that a progressive consensus is under threat or cracking up. One way I've been thinking about this is in terms of a phrase that is traditionally applied to the left: counterculture. I think the best way to understand politics right now is that the United States, for the first time in my lifetime, has a real right-wing counterculture — an edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo. I thought one way to talk about that counterculture was to invite someone who I see — we'll see if he disagrees — as one of its representatives. And that's you, Jonathan Keeperman, welcome to 'Interesting Times.' Below is an edited transcript of an episode of 'Interesting Times.' It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Jonathan Keeperman: Ross, it is great to be here. We've known each other for a while online, of course. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
26-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
transcript Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars? Do you want to pray before we start? By all means. So loving God, we thank you for bringing us together. We ask you to help us to proclaim the gospel and open our lips that our mouth might declare your praise. Amen. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. So interesting, in fact, that God, in his wisdom, has decided to call one Pope home and let the Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church choose another. The death of Pope Francis ends, or at least temporarily, suspends, a tumultuous period in the life of the world's largest religious institution. A period that saw the Pope often pitted against his own bishops and Cardinals. In arguments about how much and in what direction Roman Catholicism should change. My guest today and I were often on the opposite side of those debates. Father James Martin is one of the most famous Catholic priests in the United States. I think the only Jesuit to ever appear on Stephen Colbert's Late night TV program. Really, you don't have any desire to wear the scarlet- and the biretta or anything like that? Father James Martin, welcome to Interesting Times. Good to be with you, Ross. So we're speaking, I think, 72 hours after the death of Pope Francis. And I feel like I've already heard at least 117 interviews that start with a big question about the pope's legacy. So I want to start smaller by talking about Francis, as you personally experienced his pontificate, and also as you experienced him. He was the first Jesuit Pope. You are a Jesuit. You met on a number of occasions. You interacted. He wrote the introduction of your latest book. So I wondered if you could just talk about Pope Francis as a priest, which was something that he very self-consciously aspired to be. Not just the Pope of the Catholic Church, but a priest of Catholicism. Yeah, and I think that's key to understanding who he was. He was a Jesuit for most of his life, a priest for just almost as long. And that's the first way that we Jesuits came to know him. Interestingly, he had something of a checkered relationship in the Jesuits because he was, by his own admission, he was rigid and authoritarian, he said. So when he was elected, not every Jesuit was happy. In fact, in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, he was on the list. And interestingly, I was reading a piece in The Times that had a list of all the electors. And I said to a fellow Jesuit who was much older and who had worked in Rome, I said, who is this Jorge Mario Bergoglio? And this old Jesuit said, he'd be terrible. But he soon proved to be a real model Jesuit and was always very close to the Jesuits during his pontificate. And that's one of the ways I interacted with him and how I understood him. I think a lot of the stuff that he did was... could be mystifying to people questions of discernment, freedom and difference. All Jesuit concepts. And so I think that's key to understanding who he was. He was always a good Jesuit. When did you meet him for the first time? I met him for the first time after a mass at Casa Santa Marta, very briefly, and just shook his hand and he said, pray for me, reza por mi. And then, really, in earnest in 2017, he appointed me as a consultor for the dicastery for communication, which is a very low level appointment for the communications office. And I was at a— Because of your expertise in podcasting and other. That's right. I was actually kind of surprised. And before I went over, a friend of mine said, would you like to meet him? And I said, of course, would you like to meet me. That's the question. And I'd already started doing this LGBTQ ministry, and when we were at the audience, I introduced myself. And he said, I'd like to have an audience with you. And I said oh, yo también. And in September 2019, we had our first one on one meeting. And it really, I'll just be honest with you, it was really life changing. Just being with him, talking about these issues and just feeling completely relaxed. He was very warm and friendly. One of the things that I want to share with listeners and viewers is he was just a nice guy. He was just a nice guy, friendly, fun. And at the end of the meeting, I'd never spoken to a Pope before. And at minute 25, it was a half hour meeting. I thought oh my gosh, I've been talking the whole time about this one issue. Maybe he wants to talk about something else. So I said, Holy Father, what can I do for you? Meaning, do you want to talk about the American church or the Jesuits or something. He said, you can continue this ministry in peace, which I found extremely encouraging and moving. And, he didn't have to do that, and he didn't have to meet with me a couple of times. So, and we would exchange notes over email in his little kind of crabbed handwriting. And I would and I saw him- How would you get those- Would you get those notes scanned? Via email. So I ended up getting the email address for his secretaries, which were different people at different times. And I would send him more formal notes typed out and whatnot, in Spanish or Italian. Thanks to Google Translate. And they would send me back PDFs, scanned PDFs of his handwritten note, which they would have to transcribe or transliterate because it was like this tiny little handwriting. And then I would ask to have someone here to translate it. So that's how we communicate. That's how it works in the universal church. Yes. Yeah Yeah. Thanks to- yeah. Thanks to Google Translate, I was always struck and thinking about his legacy. Now I'm struck by it even more by what you might call the visual element of his papacy. After he died, a lot of people on social media were sharing the photograph of him in the empty Saint Peter's Square, holding the monstrance which holds the Eucharist. The host that Catholics believe is the body of Christ. Again, in this empty, darkened, darkened square in the midst of the worst pandemic in 100 years. And I feel like at the beginning of his pontificate, there were a lot of those kind of moments. The one that I remember most is him embracing a man who had boils, I believe, or who was disfigured in some way. And I feel like he had a certain kind of genius for, in effect, creating Christian iconography in his public moments. Yeah, that I think will be one the more lasting elements of his papacy. Well Yeah. And I mean, as Jesus who taught with words and deeds. I mean, Jesus taught with gestures as well, not just words and teaching. Frances was very good at that, I remember that. Ross, as you were saying, that, to me is the image that I'll take with me to my grave, which is him embracing that man with the skin condition, which called up Francis of Assisi, embracing the man with leprosy, Jesus embracing people. One of the great things was for me that it was natural, he wasn't doing it for show. Or I'm going to now do something that's going to impress people. This was who he was. And he naturally reached out to people like that. But yeah, it made for good teaching moments, I would say, and I agree, I think the visual is just as important as any encyclical that he did. So let's talk about the doing though as well as well as the showing. So this was a dramatic pontificate in a lot of different ways. But from my perspective, I'd say the great drama of the pontificate was could call it a push to change church teaching or practice on a host of difficult and controversial post 1960s issues. I would say that went on as a thread throughout was it 12 years. 12 years. Where you had controversies that conservative Catholics regarded as having been addressed and settled under prior popes over whether divorced and remarried Catholics should take communion without getting an annulment over the possibility of female deacons, if not female priests, the possibility of allowing blessings for same sex couples, all of these were suddenly in the air. And that mattered a great deal to you because as you just mentioned. One of the forms of work that you took up under Francis was writing and arguing about gay Catholics and their place in the church. So from your perspective as a sympathizer, I would say with that kind of push and that kind of opening of debate. How far do you think it went. How far did Francis go on those issues. That's a great question. Interestingly, I would say that while those issues were in the forefront of a lot of our minds, I think for Francis, they were secondary. The kind of hot button issues. I mean, basically what he was trying to do. And most of his homilies and his encyclicals and his apostolic pilgrimages to different places would just proclaim the gospel. So most of his time. He was just talking about Jesus, the Resurrection, mercy, love. But I think it's a fair question. How far did he go. I think he went as far as he could. Basically, one of the things I learned when I was at the synod, I was the delegate at the synod, which is this worldwide gathering of Catholics, and we met in Rome in October 23 and 2024, was realizing how much he wanted church unity. And so some issues women deacons, LGBTQ people, all sorts of things. You could see how much pushback there was from places like sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and even in the United States. And he said a couple of times, unity is more important than these conflicts. So I think he tried to open the door to the discussion about some of these issues without breaking the church. I think one of the fundamental differences, I think, between Pope Francis and a lot of his critics, particularly in the church and sometimes even in the hierarchy, sometimes even in the pages of The New York Times' sometimes was that he really spent time listening to people talk about their spiritual lives and had a real reverence for the activity, the activity of the Holy Spirit in the individual person's conscience. And so he really took that seriously. So when he talked about discernment and listening to people. And even in the synod and LGBTQ issues and in amoris laetitia, in his apostolic exhortation on the family, a lot of his critics said Oh, well, anything goes it's just we're just going to listen to people. It's all about polls and opinions, but I think what they missed was that he really did trust the Holy Spirit, active in the individual. So I think that for me encapsulates why people I think struggled with that. Because it is it's a challenge when you hear something like that. We need to meet people where they are. We need to listen to them. We need to see where the Holy Spirit is active. But to your point, he didn't want to move the church so far that he would break it. I want to talk about that question of breakage and conflict. But then what were what were the concrete changes. Because the point the point you make about of disturbing or disappointing people runs both ways, right. So you had a certain kind of disturbance from conservative Catholics to the way the Pope talked about these issues, the debates he wanted to open up. But then, especially by the end of his pontificate, there was a certain kind of disappointment from more liberal Catholics. saying, well, he's left us in a place of ambiguity where he talks about the individual soul and discernment and so on, and issues statements and teachings that can be, let's say, read in somewhat different ways depending on where you are. But there isn't like a concrete change to The Catechism in what it says about the immorality of same sex relations. He opened the debate about possibly ordaining women to the diaconate, but it didn't really go anywhere. So first of all, what concretely change do you think under Francis And then I'll ask you about where the different sides would want to push things beyond him. Yeah I mean, you could say more broadly that concretely we were brought to a greater understanding of the importance of the human dignity of migrants and refugees, for example. I mean, there's no church teaching change in that. But to your point, more specifically, for one thing, the Catechism changed on the death penalty. It's now inadmissible. That's a small thing for another. Early in his papacy, he said he wanted more. I remember this line incisive roles for women in leadership positions. And now you have a woman who's the head of a Vatican dicastery or office. The governor of Vatican City is a woman, right. So I think there have been real changes. Maybe not to The Catechism, but changes in church practice for LGBTQ people. I think there's been significant changes. The ones that are perhaps the most juridical would be the allowance of blessing of same sex couples under certain circumstances. I mean, before that document came out, you couldn't do it after the document came out. You couldn't do it. So that's a change. And then also something that's I think often overlooked is his call for the decriminalization of homosexuality. Which I think in the West people are greeted with some shrugs like a big deal. But that's a big deal over in sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe and Latin America. So yeah, I don't think he set out to change the Catechism, but I think he changed the conversation. And in a sense, in addition to these kind of specific things, I think that's the kind of change in teaching. I mean, to change the conversation and to change the approach and the tone is a kind of change in teaching. So I think he Yeah, he disappointed conservatives, certainly in different aspects. And liberals, I think, who think he didn't go far enough. But again, I came away from the synod understanding anew, or maybe for the first time, the importance of church unity and what a difficult job he had. But that the hard limit from your perspective. So let's say, that we elect Pope Francis. The second or Pope John the 24, someone who's seen a successor to Francis in terms of being open to liberalization. And you were named head of the Inquisition. I mean, sorry, you were named head of the head of the Office of doctrine, right. Would you see the limits on changes to church teaching as being primarily about church politics. You need to keep conservative Africans and more liberal Germans together in the same church. Or is there just a limit. And here I'm speaking as someone who obviously thinks there is right on just how much the church can change what it says about sex, period in no matter what changes in modern culture. Well, I think the basis as we would both agree, would be the Creed, for example. I mean, you're not going to change any obvious dogma. You're not going to say suddenly that Jesus, guess what. Jesus didn't rise from the dead or you're not going to say that. So we should start there because I think a lot of Catholics feel that Oh my gosh, Pope Francis was changing everything or anything goes, which is not accurate. I do think that that's a limit. I do think that church unity is a value. I mean, Christ said that they all may be one. I think that's a value for us. So I think anything that goes against that needs to be looked at carefully. So it's a balance for us, I think, between what you might call prophecy and unity. I'll tell you a story. I wrote to him. I would write to him fairly, not frequently, but a couple times a year. And I suggested that he do something. I forget what it was to be honest about LGBT stuff. And he said Yeah, that's a good idea. He said, but if I do that, I thought this was an interesting choice of words. I will provoke a chain reaction. And I said, and he's right. So while I thought that he could have gone further, he would have. He would have provoked a chain reaction. And he saw that as a negative thing. And I came around to agree with him. That it's not worth breaking the church over some of these things. So that. So I think his approach was to open the discussion, which again, that's a change. So for listeners who are not intimately familiar. Yeah, this is insight with endless with endless the endless wrangling within the Catholic Church, about some of these questions, which it's a wrangling that has been going on in every religious tradition. Every certainly every Christian church, but also non-Christian churches as well, that there is just this running tension between where late modern life has ended up in terms of people's lived experiences who people sleep with, two people get married to when people get divorced, all of these kind of things. And the pretty stringent line on sexual ethics that has been part of Christian teaching from the beginning. And one of the frustrations that, to be honest, conservatives, whatever, however I define myself, some kind of conservative like me sometimes have is that there's this sense of that the liberal argument is always about it's always open ended. It's always saying, we're not saying exactly what church teaching would be. We just want to start a conversation. But then it seems clear to the Conservatives that in the end, the conversation only ends when the liberal perspective carries the day, which is what has happened in a certain number more liberal Protestant denominations. So I want to push you to be a little bit concrete. I'm going to frame the question in a different way from your perspective on issues related to sex, marriage, sex and marriage in particular. What is the thing that Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ teaches, right. That has to be held on to that is different from what a nice, well-meaning, secular liberal listener of this show might believe about sex. What is the Christian difference that needs to remain, no matter what kind of conversations and evolutions we have That's a great question. I'm not a theologian. I'm not a moral theologian, so I'll try my best to answer that. I would say are. You are a Jesuit. You are a priest. You are, a man. I think you're eminently qualified. All right. Well Thank you. I would say reverence for the other person, I would say. Sex and sexuality is something that is sacred. I'm not using the other person and the value of monogamous relationships. I mean, Jesus, I mean, Jesus doesn't teach much on marriage. He teaches a lot on divorce, right. His first miracle was at a wedding feast. So there's a positive outlook. Positive he's pro that marriage at least pro that marriage favored that one. He of course himself is celibate. He doesn't get married for a number of reasons. But I would say that's the distinctive Christian contribution today, which is reverencing the other person and not using the other person and seeing sexuality as sacred and deep and not something to be just kind of used in a relationship. And I think that is different than a lot of liberal, secular understanding of sexuality. I mean, when people come to me in the confessional about that, that's one of my first questions. Are you reverencing the other person. How are you treating the other person. And I think that's different because I think in today's what Pope Francis would call throwaway culture, that's not accepted by every liberal secular person. I mean, even a good person, it's accepted by a lot of I mean, I think the secular liberal narrative of sex that I certainly hear would say they might not use terms like reverence and sacred. but they would use terms like consent and respect. And so on. And at least when I read the New Testament. And again, I quite agree. Jesus says much more about the sins of rich people than about sexual sins. That's absolutely true. But the things he says about sex are quite stringent. He doesn't say anything in particular about homosexuality, but he speaks very strongly about marriage as lifelong, permanent as divorce, as remarriage after divorce, as a form of adultery. And I would say, I became a Catholic in my teens after some time in different Protestant churches, right. And one of the things that always struck me about Catholicism in its weirdnesses, including the things it says about sex. Including like saying, masturbation is a sin. These, these kind of things is that it seemed it seemed very biblical in that way, that the Catholic Church is the only major Christian church in the West, at least that still seems to say something about what's wrong with divorce. And there are a lot of divorces in my family tree, and I have a pretty good sense, I think, of what is wrong with divorce and why it's good for a church to say something about that. And so I think conservatives in these intra Catholic debates are often framed as trying to hold on to some rigid understanding of human beings. And I think that sometimes can be true. But again, just in this conversation, I feel like I can see why I am worried that the more liberalized church of an imagined successor to Pope Francis, that some of those things would slip away. To me, it's just not enough to say, Christianity teaches some kind of generic reverence. I think it's important that Christianity teaches something like marriage is an indissoluble one flesh union that you can't easily get out of. Do you agree with that. Which part. The part that there has to be something more than just a general statement. Oh, sure. There is a specific concreteness to the way Jesus talks about sex as the way he talks about wealth and poverty. Absolutely I think, Yes. I mean, in terms of the sacrament of marriage. But I think what Pope Francis was trying to do, was to remind ourselves that we're also dealing with individuals. And so we talk about we've talked about divorce, masturbation. I brought it up just for the record. I mean it comes up in the I don't any man that comes to the confessional, at least in my experience, who does not confess that. So it's common. There's also a sense of and homosexuality in terms of all these topics, one of the things that Pope Francis is trying to teach. And I think is Christian teaching is encountering the person where they are, and as they are. And he said, the name of God is mercy. So Yes, we have obviously, we have all these rules. We have all these traditions, but what is the pastoral application of these things in the confessional in a person's life. And I do think there is something of overfocus on some of these topics. And I think Pope Francis was trying to remind us that there are other topics, because I feel like there aren't many Catholics in the world who don't understand what the Catholic Church teaches on marriage and homosexuality and masturbation and things like that. There aren't a lot of Catholics that don't know what the church teaches on poverty, the environment, those kinds of things. So I think this is what Pope Francis was trying to do. Interestingly in an interview with Jesuit magazines including America in 2013, he said something like, I'm paraphrasing, I'm not changing anything, he said. But when it comes to questions of sexuality and abortion and things like that, I feel like people know it. And it's time to a good teacher, move on to the next lesson. And I found that a really interesting insight, because I think what people saw as his ignoring that was rather him saying, we've understood this, and now let's move on to other topics which I think have been less stressed. Poverty, the stuff you pointed out. And the environment, which was a surprise. Do you think do you think that's a stable equilibrium though. I guess it's my question. Like say 100 years goes by. And that becomes the equilibrium of the Catholic Church. The church has a very pastoral case by case by case approach to issues around sex and sexuality. But nothing ever changes in the formal teaching of the church. The church never recognizes same sex unions the way it recognizes heterosexual unions. It just remains in this place. Are you personally content with that kind of. I think we should. No, because I think we should always be open to the signs of the times and what science teaches us and what we understand about the human condition. And I mean, you can go back to Thomas Aquinas, and he's talking about that. We have to understand what in terms of homosexuality, for example what are we learning. And we certainly don't want to say that we're going to be in the same place that we would be 1,000 years ago about homosexuality because we've learned things. And so I think when you look at, for example, the Second Vatican Council, it's the church in the modern world, not the church against the modern world or the church frustrating the modern world. And so I think this is where discernment comes in, honestly. And I know people might roll their eyes and say, oh, that's just like a buzzword. I think he really is. He really was the Pope trying to help us reflect on the signs of the times, say, where is the Holy Spirit active. What am I calling. What am I calling people to do. What am I calling the church to do. But that's an inherently frustrating and messy and open process. Discernment is really open ended. And that's O.K, right. So I don't know where it's going to end up, but I think I would be more how do you how do you think the modern world is going right now. Oh, not too well. Not too well O.K. So you would you be comfortable if in 100 years it seems like the church has to be more oppositional to the modern world than it did in the 1960s. I think the church is very oppositional to the modern world as it is now. I mean, just talking about the poor and migrants and refugees and the sick, and I think that's very countercultural. I think the thing is that Pope Francis all good church leaders, preached the gospel as he understood it. And if it became political, so be it. But I don't see him. And in my conversations with him, one of the things he didn't like was ideologies. He was allergic to that he wanted to meet people where they were. And if he got the sense that you were pushing an agenda or an ideology, he didn't want any part of that. And so this person who has a deeply pastoral heart. And I think that's a wonderful thing for the church. Let's pick up on that and talk about the lived, the lived experience more conservative Catholics during this pontificate, from your point of view. And from the point of view of a lot of Catholics, the Francis pontificate was experienced as just a period of greater freedom. Like you're a priest, you have vows. You're part of an order. You're under certain kinds of obedience. And it was clear to me, certainly, that there were lots and lots of people inside the church who had opinions that they didn't feel comfortable expressing under John Paul Ii and Benedict, who felt comfortable expressing them under Francis. Is that a fair. I think that's fair. That's a fair description. Yeah I mean, Tom Reese, our editor at American media, was fired by Cardinal Ratzinger, which was his right to do. The future Pope Benedict Correct And he often said that I got fired for writing things and publishing things that Pope Francis is now saying, from the pulpit. So I think that's a fair comment. People felt freer to express themselves. Yeah do you worry, in a different pontificate that you will feel less freedom. Oh, sure. Are you sitting here in this podcast worrying that things you say could be held against you. Under a future. Under a future Pope. I'm just curious. No here's the thing. Look, I didn't always agree with Saint John Paul Ii or Benedict. But I tried not to be critical. And also, I was careful not to go out of bounds and try to color in the lines. I think as a Jesuit. I mean, we've been dealing with popes for 450 years. And so you have to in a good way have to come to peace with that. And also, this is spiritual. They come and go. But the Jesuit order continues. No, what I meant was in a good way. We take vows of obedience and we have a special vow of obedience with regard to missions to the Pope. So we see him as our leader. And even if we don't disagree with them, right, we go along, we try to support his way of being Pope. So whoever the next Pope will be, I'll work with him and try to promote what he's saying and. Sure Yeah, I'm actually very excited to see who it's going to be. I think you're going to see someone who's a little bit more moderate, a little bit more of a stabilizing influence. Well, no, that's a good place to take it. Because what I'm curious what stabilization looks like. Because the flip side of what I just described, the phenomenon where some maybe many Catholics felt more comfortable, more free to speak freely under Francis was the experience of a lot of conservatives and traditionalists I knew, which was kind of a mirror image of the liberal experience under John Paul Ii. Which was that you mentioned at the outset that there were a lot of Jesuits in Argentina who felt that Francis's leadership as a young man was authoritarian and rigid. The reality is that a lot of conservative Catholics felt that his pontificate was not open and free flowing, that it was authoritarian in his own way. It used to be that the papacy would investigate more liberal religious orders, and suddenly it was conservative and traditional orders being investigated. And then especially had a very explicit crackdown on the traditional Latin mass, which is something that is attended by a very small number of Catholics, but is very meaningful to that number of Catholics. And Francis was not an admirer of traditionalists. I would say he was very he spoke very harshly at times about conservatives and traditionalists a kind of paternal but scolding in certain ways. So I'm curious. I'm curious both what you think about that perspective, having been talking about the Pope as a figure of openness and dialogue, but also whether you think, should it be possible for a Pope to be Pope without either liberals or conservatives feeling persecuted. Here's an answer you don't get from Jesuits a lot. I don't that's interesting because I would say that each person who comes in is going to have his or her or his obviously, predilection and way of governing. You might disagree with this. My sense is that Francis was a lot more patient with his critics, who were much more vocal than critics under Saint John Paul or Pope Benedict, and I think he gave them a lot of leeway. But yeah, I mean, eventually he brought the hammer down on some people. But I think he was I think that was after a long time. So my sense was that he was pretty. The tsar was very patient. Well my subject. Well, my sense was that he was very patient with people who were above and beyond. I mean, I don't know any example under John Paul or Benedict Cardinals and archbishops who were so vocal calling him a heretic and an apostate and a false Pope. I just don't I just didn't see that under John Paul and under Benedict. So I think it was I think he was more patient. Now, in terms of the Latin mass, as I understand it, the Second Vatican Council encouraged the church to turn towards the vernacular. It was in general what the council was trying to do. The Latin mass continued in certain places. Pope Benedict published something that said that it needs to be more widely accepted and more easily celebrated by priests without special permission and stuff. And this is how I understand. I know you might disagree, but that document was saying that this is a kind of testing period to see how it works. And one of the reasons I think Pope Francis limited it limited the use was because he saw that kind of testing period lead to division, where certain people say, we're more Catholic than you are. And the fall of the sixth mass doesn't count. And so I think he wanted to really stop that. I know that upsets conservatives. And let me just say that I mean, I can certainly understand that because it's such a value. I think it's less I mean, it's less from my perspective. It's less about the general idea as to me, a kind of concrete lack of pastoral care in the sense that my impression, again, observing Rome from far away is that Francis had a lot of critics. And he a lot of American critics, very vocal, very vocal, sometimes even in the hierarchy, sometimes, sometimes even in the hierarchy. I was such a critic. I think probably the most challenging emails we ever exchanged were when I was writing some very pointed criticisms of the Holy Father. But most of the people who attend Latin masses, in my experience, they're in the position of looking as so many people are in this 21st century world of ours for a tangible connection to the divine right. And I don't think it's surprising that some people find that connection more fully in an ancient liturgy. And so it seemed to me that there was a failure to again, to use the language that you've been using in this conversation, meet the conservative or really the traditionalist part of the church where those people are. And it made me worry. And this is a larger question about the question of unity and how a church that has these divisions holds together. Well, that's a really interesting question. We had an article in America media by John baldovin, who was a liturgical theologian, that talked about the Latin mass and to go back to church unity. And, I don't know if I would have made the same decision as the Pope, in terms of the limiting. But I think he saw it as a threat to Unity. I think that was behind that document that he came out with. And so if we're going to say that we need unity in terms of sexual teaching, and not breaking the church on that, I think he didn't want to break the church on that as well. On the Latin mass. That was his judgment. So like I said, I don't know if I would have done it exactly the same way. Yeah I mean, one, one interesting question connected to that right is this question of what draws people to Christianity and what draws people to church right now. Because I think one of the interesting questions hanging over the church right now is that in certain ways, the liberal conservative splits are generational, but not in the way that people usually expect, certainly among priests. If you look at. Sure Yeah. If you look at surveys of priests in the United States, for instance, I think this is true, maybe not to the same degree elsewhere in the world. Younger priests, while not necessarily politically conservative, tend to be more theologically conservative than definitely than older priests. And so as someone who is seen as more on the liberal side of the spectrum. First, what do you just what do you make of that trend. But also, what is it. What does it say to you about sources of zeal, sources of intensity. Yeah, that's a great question. Well, first of all, I think I may have said this to you before. I'm more traditional than you might think. That's the first thing. So devotion to the Saints, to the blessed sacrament, to Lourdes, to. So some of these things are right up my alley. My general rule is whatever brings you closer to God and if you like the Latin mass, wonderful. If you'd like to go to Ted's service. Wonderful if you like sant'egidio. I know this is all inside baseball stuff to non-catholics, but wonderful. And it's not surprising that people would turn to more traditional ways of being Catholic and traditional rites in times of uncertainty. I think there's a certain comfort to that in interesting times. Interesting times. There's a certain comfort in that, and I think it's great. Here's the dividing point for me. As long as people who say that. Don't say that other Catholics are somehow not Catholic. So I think as long as there's openness right to both sides, as long as you're not what a friend of mine calls a rigid-arian, then I think it's great. Look, I grew up in the 1960s, and 1970s Catholic Church, which a lot of people deride as beige Catholicism and felt banners. But you know what. It meant a lot to me. And it still means a lot to me. And I back to my home parish, which is this big 1960s a-frame parish outside of Philadelphia. And I love it. And if that appeals to me, that's great. If someone else goes to a high mass, a high solemn mass that's in Latin at some cathedral, and that appeals to them, that's great. So I think the key is not cutting off the other side. And really taking the other person's spirituality and faith seriously. And I do see that in Catholicism. I do see a lot of you're not really Catholic if you do this or that. And that's frustrating because the Catholic Church really should be here comes everyone, particularly in spirituality. I'm really strong about that. I really hate when people say, you're not a good Catholic because you don't pray the rosary, or you're not a good Catholic because you don't go to Ted's services or sant'egidio. Or something that's a little more liberal or you're not a good Catholic because you're a convert, right. There's a whole no that's a big there's a whole discourse where I mean, there are phenomena, certainly where people convert to Catholicism and within six months have decided that they know absolutely everything about the faith. Well, there's that can become very annoying. But there is also I think, a weird anti convert tendency and discourse. I hope not, given that we're speaking right after Easter and we've just welcomed one, one would think there wouldn't be. But I really do think for me, the trouble is when people say, because you don't do this, you're a bad Catholic. And it's basically because you don't do what I like doing. And that's really frustrating to me. And also I'll just say, I mean, this is not to gather sympathy. But when I tell people that I love the rosary, I went to Lourdes. People kind of cocked their head at me and say, how can you believe in that stuff. And I say, well, I'm Catholic. And that to be kind of diminished that way is a very strange feeling. How so then. How does it all hold together. You've described something that is real, right. The vast diversity of the Catholic Church. But you do have this set of issues that have led to outright schism in many of our fellow Christian churches, Anglicans, Methodists, and so on. And you do have a landscape where, as you said at the outset, the Pope pushed a certain distance on hot button issues and then said, O.K, if we're keeping the Germans and the Africans in the same church, we can't push any further. But what does hold the church together. That's actually that's actually a good question. Easy question actually, which is the Holy Spirit. Yes, truly. I mean, the Holy Spirit holds the church together, and we have to believe that. And the Holy Spirit's guiding the church. We really have to believe that Jesus Christ, who is present to us through the spirit, holds us together. We believe that in terms. That's all true, but in terms of the person we have had, we had a Great Schism where we lost, we lost the Orthodox or they lost us. We had the Protestant Reformation, an unfortunate period of trouble that we're still recovering from. So the Holy Spirit holds the church together in some form. But in this form, the Church of you and I in the 21st century, what makes people of these different perspectives want to stay together. Well, I would say the second part of that answer was the Pope and the primacy of Saint Peter. And I think that's why he was so focused on unity. And all the different things we're talking about sexual teaching, traditional Latin mass, that's the constant theme of unity and hopefully the hierarchy. And hopefully our local priests and lay leaders, those are all kind of unifying forces, we hope. But really, the unifying person is the Pope, which is, that's what he was trying to do. So he is now a cynic and I don't think I don't think this is entirely unfair. But a cynic might say it is the Pope that holds the church together. It's the papacy that holds the church together. But it does because it offers this point of influence and shaping power that everybody wants a chance to ultimately control. So no one, in the end, wants to leave the Roman Catholic Church and just become the German Catholic Church or the sub-Saharan African Catholic Church, right. Because Rome itself offers this place of influence over the world, that you would be foolish to give up. And I don't mean I think the cynical perspective has some of the truth. Like, I'm very interested as someone who was a Protestant, who watched how quickly Protestant churches could break up and split apart, how much people who really disagree with each other inside Catholicism tend to stay in Catholicism. And I really do think that's less a political thing and more of a spiritual thing. I think people really want to stay in the church because they believe in the Catholic Church. They believe in the apostolic succession, they believe in the Pope. They believe this goes back to St Peter. I just think that's so powerful. Someone said to me recently or asked me recently, do you think there's going to be a schism because of homosexuality and the teaching of the church and same sex unions and all that, the blessing stuff. And I just said these people who are opposed to what the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith published. They want to be Catholic. They don't want to leave the church who wants to leave the church. So I think it's much more a spiritual question. And that's why. And even when Pope Francis was asked, do you think there'll be a Schism. He said, no, because I think he understood that people don't want to leave. Why would they. They might want to see changes. And the other thing is, for priests and Cardinals and members of religious order, we've also made promises and vows not to leave. So right. No, no, you guys are you guys are. You guys are stuck. Let's be let's be clear about that. I also wonder, though, in this landscape. How much influence can a Pope or the hierarchy have over Catholics, lay Catholics, not priests and religious, but lay Catholics who disagree with them. Because you said, well, hopefully the hierarchy unites us. Hopefully the Pope unites us. I think the Pope is unifying. But since the sex abuse crisis I think, when I think about how ordinary Catholics think about the hierarchy, just in my own lifetime, I think it's changed dramatically. And people have just less respect for the bishops than they did. And just in terms of Catholic politics. That cashes out in this world where it just doesn't seem like the bishops have very much authority over Catholic politicians, for instance. So for a long time, you had pro-choice Catholic politicians who favored abortion rights and the bishops would criticize them. And that didn't seem to go anywhere. And now you'll have something politicians on the right who take anti-immigration stances and the bishops will criticize them. And that doesn't go anywhere either. So do you think that the hierarchy has real influence. Can it regain real influence of that kind, or is it just presiding in this way. That doesn't matter that much to a lot of ordinary Catholics. That's a great question. I definitely think you're right that the bishops have less authority in the wake of the sex abuse crisis. I think the Pope still has a great deal of influence. And I think as you were saying earlier, it's not just his words, but it's his deeds. I think that they can help people understand Catholicism and Christianity more. That's an influence, right. I think when he does speak out on the death penalty, on migrants and refugees, on the environment, I do think Catholics listen, maybe not to their local bishop. I've often had the experience of saying to someone I mean, I'm both of us are very attentive to these things. I'll say, by the way, what diocese are you in. And they won't know. Yeah I was like, well, I remember saying to a very good Catholic whose name I won't remember, well, you must know what diocese you're in. When the priest says the Eucharistic prayer and puts the Bishop's name in, what does he say. I don't but they know the Pope. And so I think he can have a great deal of influence. And, Ross, it's interesting you're talking about that where he embraced that man with the skin condition. And, I looked at that and I was terribly moved. And I thought he's influencing me. And he didn't say anything to me. I just saw this picture. So that's the kind of influence. And that's the kind of teaching. And that's a kind of unifying effect. What I mean. So beyond the kind of hot button issues we were talking about. So the answer is Yes, he can have an effect. And local bishops can do that from time to time. I don't want to dump on the bishops, but I think people see them less. No, I think I mean, they can, but I think certainly bishops, bureaucracies, national councils of bishops and so on, I feel like imagine themselves having a kind of authority that has completely evaporated. And personally, I would like to live in a world where Catholic politicians of both the left and right, not a world where they changed their position entirely because of something a bishop said, but a world where they felt like they had to address a bishops critique. And I just don't know how we get back to that world. I feel like. And I'm curious for your reaction to this, but I've been writing about this a little bit lately. I feel like there is a renewed interest in religion in the Western world right now. Definitely, but I think it's happening very much at a kind of ground level. And maybe that's where renewal always happens. But it's people reacting, as you said, to what's going on in the world, things in their own lives. But it's not about suddenly having the debate about gay marriage settled or anything like that, but it's almost if I'm being optimistic, I would say it's almost people moving past some of the culture war arguments that you and I have been having for a long time and just saying, well, these are not fully resolved, but I'm going to go back to church anyway. But there's also a way in which it feels like it's happening, and it has nothing to do with the hierarchy of the church. The hierarchy is just not in the action at all. Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think it's that people probably are looking at their secular lives, their secular lifestyles that might be, not have God in it and say, this feels empty. And I really believe that in every person's heart there's a natural desire for God. And I think if that's suppressed, it eventually comes back and I think that's what's happening culture wide. I think people are finding the secular world kind of empty, right. I mean, our hearts are restless until they rest in you, said Saint Augustine. And I think that's what's happening. Finally, I'm surprised it took this long, actually. But yeah, I don't think it has a whole lot to do with the local bishop or even the local priest. It's a kind of desire for God. And in that desire, I think we have to meet people. And they might not their churches often people say, and sometimes their Jesuit churches, these are the churches for the people on the way in and on the way out. And I think we have to meet them there, we have to meet them there. And I think that's one of the things that Pope Francis was trying to do. I would say that one of his most memorable images was the church as a field hospital, which he used in the interview with American media in 2013, which I thought was I'd never heard before. And it's just such a great image. It's open. I always think of mash the old TV show, it's open, people are coming in, they're getting their wounds dressed. They're getting treated. And then later, one of the images in the synod was the title of one of the working documents was enlarge the space of your tent, which I thought was so beautiful. And so I think one of the things that Pope Francis was trying to do was to reach out exactly to people like that who might be curious and not understand the church and say, welcome. This is about mercy and love, and you're welcome here. All right. So last two questions for you. Looking beyond some of the culture war issues and church debates we've been talking about what would you like to see the next Pope do. Gosh what a great question. Now you're going to think I'm making this up, but I want him to be a Holy man who proclaims the gospel. I don't think you're making that up, but I think it's I would say on a particular issue, I think there was a lot of convergence at the synod, big word that we used a lot at the synod on the question of women's ordination to the diaconate. I think there's actually a lot of convergence in different parts of the world, so I'd like to see him at least continue that conversation, which would be a big deal. This is still you're still staying though, with the culture. Give me some. Give me somewhere. Give me somewhere. He should go. Oh, gosh. Somewhere he should go. God, let me think about that. Where should he go. I think they've all. I mean, they've gone everywhere. They've gone everywhere. But you're his traveling Secretary, and you get to pick the first destination refugee camp. I think that would be the first place I would go where gosh. Well, I'm a little biased. I worked with refugees in East Africa. I'd go to a I'd go to a refugee camp in Northern Uganda to greet the Sudanese. That's a great question. That's a good. Yeah, that's a good answer. I'll accept. Well, let me think. There's so many other places. Yeah it's funny. Where is where Because pick it this way. How about a place you mentioned Lourdes. A place associated with the supernatural. Oh, gosh. Where should. Which a shrine, a site a? Well, let me tell you, if I were Pope, which will never happen in a trillion years, I would go to Lourdes first. O.K Yeah. No question. And then I would go to the Sea of Galilee. I mean, this is all selfish. I would go there to pray. Yeah and then I would. It's never going to happen. And then I'd go to nok. I love nok, this is in Ireland. In Ireland. I love that. But of course, this is now. This is more. This is more tourism. Catholics this is all more like for the pope's kind of personal spiritual life. But I think going to a refugee camp in Northern Uganda. Lourdes, the Sea of Galilee. And then some big, crazy city like New York, right. I'd probably go back to Argentina because I know the people in Argentina were upset. They were upset he didn't come back, which was very interesting and kind of mysterious. All right. Where would where would you have them go. I like the idea of Lourdes and the Sea of Galilee, somewhere associated with our lady of Guadalupe and Guadeloupe. But I suspect that we are headed into an era where secular. I mean, the church has been consumed with issues about sexual behavior and its relationship to secular politics and so on. And one of my prevailing views is that we're entering a much weirder time, when it might be just really good for the Pope to be at the Sea of Galilee, and in places associated with the moments when Christianity claims that God has actually reached down and touched the things of Earth. So something in that zone is appealing to me. Last question. Who is going to be the next Pope. They have that. They have that expression in Italian entra papabile ussita Cardinale, which means you enter a possible candidate, you leave a cardinal. I really don't know. I think they're going to go for someone who's a little bit more moderate, less revolutionary. Missionary some people have told me that the Italians feel like this is their last chance, right. Because it is. The church is kind of moving toward the Global South, and France has certainly appointed a lot of bishops from there. I look at the same candidates that everybody looks at. Parolin, zuppi, Tagle. I really don't know. It's kind of exciting because I think it's pretty wide open. There's something interesting going on. I think people misunderstand this statistic that Pope Francis has appointed, whatever, 75 percent 80 percent of the Cardinals as thinking they're all going to be in lockstep with him. If you think about it, I'm sure this. Francis really tried to name Cardinals from far flung places, right. So small. Small dioceses? Exactly I know the I know the Cardinal Archbishop of Mongolia now, who's a lovely guy. Giorgio marengo, Papua New Guinea. So it was less about people he liked and of historic sees and dioceses than raising things up. That doesn't mean that the bishop in the Cardinal, in these far flung places, is in lockstep with Francis. So I think it's more variegated than one would think. That's the first thing. Secondly, someone said to me, because they are kind of from far flung places, they don't know each other very well. And so that argues for a more Vatican diplomat, say, for example, who they might know from visiting the Vatican. But the third interesting thing, there's a couple of interesting things. A lot of them were at the synod. There were a lot of Cardinals at the synod in that room. And a lot of people said to me when I was there, look, look around you. The future Pope could be in this room. So I think they took their measure of one another in the Senate. And then the final thing is, I think the political situation these days, people might look around and see a rise in dictatorships and autocracies and might say, Wow, we need someone who's going to be strong, a strong voice against that. So I think all these things contribute to make it a really hard conclave to predict. Yeah I mean, I think people talk about a moderate choice, and that could just mean a boring choice, right. In the sense that you could pick someone who is a Vatican bureaucrat or a diplomat who doesn't have an incredibly strong public presence. That would be my impression of maybe unfairly. But who is the insider candidate. But my assumption is it's either going to be that very quickly. It's either going to be a situation where you have all these Cardinals, they don't know each other as well as normally they might. And so there's a very quickly a couple of frontrunners and it consolidates very quickly. But then if that doesn't happen, then it seems like you get into territory where you should just scratch off all of the leading contenders, because almost anything can happen. But then if you have people, if you scratch off the leading contenders, I don't know how well the other ones are known. That's the thing. And unlike that movie Conclave, they're not going to elect somebody who they met last week. Unless the Holy Spirit should, unless, should intervene through a wind and the open exploded windows of the Sistine Chapel, which I'm giving away too much of the movie, I would say, look, they need three things. They need someone who's Holy. That's the first thing. They need someone who is a good evangelizer that's the other thing. And then they need someone who's a good administrator. Those are three hard things to find in one person. I think each of those names that I mentioned are all three of those things. We'll see. Who knows. Only the Holy Spirit. All right. Well, on that note, and speaking in agreement in favor of openness to the Holy Spirit. Father James Martin, Thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. God bless you. Thank you. On this episode of 'Interesting Times,' Ross Douthat is joined by the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and an editor of America Magazine, to reflect on the legacy of Pope Francis and the challenges facing the next papacy. Below is an edited transcript of an episode of 'Interesting Times.' We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Ross Douthat: The death of Pope Francis ends, or at least temporarily suspends, a tumultuous period in the life of the world's largest religious institution. A period where the pope was often pitted against his own bishops and cardinals in arguments about how much, and in what direction, Roman Catholicism should change. My guest today and I were often on the opposite side of those debates, and so I'm hoping that our conversation can help illuminate the stakes in Roman Catholicism's conflicts, the prospects for the church's continued unity and the implications of these debates for the future of religion in the modern world. Father James Martin is one of the most famous Catholic priests in the United States. I think the only Jesuit to ever appear on Stephen Colbert's late night TV program, and the author of many, many books. Most recently, a meditation on the New Testament story of Jesus' raising of Lazarus from the dead. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
25-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
transcript Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics So I always enjoy conversations that I have no earthly idea how to describe. And today's fits into that mold. It's a conversation with my colleague Ross Douthat. He's the author of 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,' a book I enjoyed very much, even though quite a bit of it. I had some questions about. And he's the host of the new and really excellent New York Times Opinion podcast 'Interesting Times' — very interesting times, in fact, where he has been interviewing people on the modern American. And this is a conversation about belief, as it is intertwined with the Trump administration and with this moment of politics, return of political mysticism and the belief as it operates in our lives. Ross's argument that we should all that I should be an organized religion, and me talking about some things I did not expect to be talking about on today's show. As always, my email at Ross Douthat, welcome to the show. it is a pleasure to be here. So last year, after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, you wrote about Trump as a man of destiny that he was, quote, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics. How are you thinking about that now. Well, there were other passages in that column that are worth emphasizing. But yeah, I stand by that reading of the Trump phenomenon. I think one of the ways in which my sense of politics generally has changed over the course of the Trump era is just I have more appreciation for weird forces that are outside, certainly outside the control of people who write about politics. You can't have lived through the Trump era as a conservative columnist or newspaper writer, and not have the sense of how fundamentally unimportant columnists are to what happens in American politics. Consistent it's a consistent exercise in humility. It is. Well, but even but even beyond that, I think and I both grew up in a period that was, I think, reasonably described as a kind of time out from Grand historical dramas. It was not the end of history in a totalizing sense, but the kind of Francis Fukuyama view of the post-cold war era as one that had a certain kind of predictability and order and history under control. History felt under control. And the reality is that much of human history is just not under control in that way. And there are forces that move through history generally, forces that move through history that are of hard to predict and assess. But I do think often they are connected to specific personalities, and there is some kind of marriage between. Particular personalities and particular moments. And the idea of a man of destiny. A great man of history is a useful way of thinking about that when it happens, as I think it has happened with Donald Trump, the rise of populism, the crackup of the liberal order, and so on. The reason I laughed at the outset is that it's important to stress that someone can be a man of destiny and be bad, right. Someone can be a great man of history and be worth opposing. You can look back at Napoleon and say, man, he was above and beyond in terms of historical forces and also root for Wellington at Waterloo. That's O.K. How does the sense that Trump is a man of destiny. Because I agree with you. And I think understanding the interpretation of Trump is somehow mystic is very important to understanding his relationship now with the right. But specifically, how do you think it has changed the way his staff and his allies treat him. I mean, I think that it is very hard to go through the drama that Trump himself personally went through in the world that ran. I mean, we can go back further, but let's just say the world that ran from January 6 through his return to power. And if you're on his side through that story, not come away with the feeling that you were moving with the wave of history. For people in Trump's circle, this sense of 1, 1, there's just a sense that it doesn't matter what the polls say or the naysayers say. Certainly doesn't matter what, squishy New York Times' conservatives say, right, they saw the bottom. Trump was disgraced and ruined and persecuted, and he was going to be sent to jail. And then the next thing Assassin's bullets were missing him by a hair's breadth. And he was making this incredible, unprecedented historical comeback. And having lived through that, I think it's hard to be swayed by people saying, hey, guys, your poll numbers are not looking so great. This tariff rollout, not that well thought out. What are the implications of sending people to Salvador without due process. Those are normal, quotidian sounding objections to administration policy. And I think, at least for some people caught up in the Trump phenomenon, they just seem incommensurate to the reality that you're like riding, riding a historical wave. But I don't think it's just the external world and its judgment of Donald Trump. And you can tell me if you think this is wrong. But I think one of the biggest differences between Trump one and Trump 2 is that in Trump one, his own staff, the people who surrounded him were perfectly comfortable thinking President Donald Trump is very wrong about this, that his judgment is bad. His impulses need to be foiled. We are the resistance inside the Trump administration and in Trump two, I don't think people around him are comfortable thinking that. I think there is both a sense that they are there to serve him, but also a sense that there is something in Trump to them, not to me, that exists beyond argumentation. The fact that the tariff policy doesn't make sense on its face, the fact that what he's doing seems like a bad idea. Well, if you knew better, then you'd be in the chair. And so the unwillingness to question him because there's a belief in either a mystic purpose to him or that he has a mystic like beyond argumentation, intuition about things I think has really changed the nature of the constraints around him, or the absence of constraints around him. Yeah, I think there's also a way in which mystic drama of his return to power is also projected back onto his first term. So where the experience of Trump's first term, not just for liberals and Democrats, but for a lot of Republicans, was obviously chaotic and bizarre and difficult. And so on. But there were ways in which the results of that term were better than people anticipated. I think certainly they were better than I anticipated. I expected again, as a columnist observer economic crisis and foreign policy crisis to define Trump's first four years in office. And prior to COVID, they didn't. The economy was in good shape. I think you can make a case that his foreign policy in the first term worked better than Biden's. I think you can make a strong case, actually, that it worked better than Biden's foreign policy. And I think what's happened now is that not just people around him in the White House, but also congressional Republicans, people who would have doubts about the tariffs and so on have combined the mystical drama with surprisingly successful first term record, put them together and said it's both that Trump has some kind of mystic intuition about what to do. And it's also that we doubted him before, but it all worked out O.K. Now, obviously the problem with that is that one of the reasons it worked out O.K was precisely that there were a bunch of people in the White House the first time around who didn't have a mystical sense of Trump's his goals or anything like that. And that is, I think, very clearly what is missing this time around. There are people in the White House who could play that role. I think a lot of people expected, Scott percent, the Secretary of the Treasury, or Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, to play the kind of role that Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and HR McMaster played in the first term. But no one is actually playing that role as far as anyone can see. And so, in an odd way, the Yeah, the very success of Trump as man of destiny is unmaking the conditions that made his first term, a success, but that is itself like a dramatic arc. Like if you were writing oh, it's all very different. You were writing if you're writing the novel of the story of hubris. And nemesis, that would be a characteristic way that hubris and nemesis would manifest themselves. Well, we tend to think of fortune now as synonymous with luck. But you go back to Greek mythology, and when you are touched by fortune, when you get a fortune, when you speak to the Oracle, it often doesn't work out that well. You get a clear prophecy that seems like it foretells your success. And laced inside of that is your downfall. I think what kind of story. What kind of mystic structure you believe we're in. Is it one that is providential? Or is it one where the gods often laugh at human design. Well, I mean, I think a mistake that I think some religious people make is to see a kind of force of destiny at work in a particular figure and assume that force of destiny must mean that God, the author of history, wants you to be on that person's side directly. But in fact, if you read, let's say, the Old Testament. There's all kinds of moments when God is working through figures to accomplish something in the world, or to move history or the drama, the drama of salvation history, to put it in Christian terms, right in a particular direction. But it doesn't mean that the instrument that God is working through is, in fact, the Messiah or the chosen one, right. Like if God sends the Babylonians to chastise the wicked Kings of Israel, it doesn't mean that you're supposed to necessarily say Oh, hail Nebuchadnezzar. You are. You are the chosen one. Sometimes there are forces, I think. I think you can see Trump in several different lights. You could say he's a man of destiny, and therefore he is bringing about in some weird way that we didn't see coming, the new American golden age. And this is obviously what a lot of people are on the center, right. Wanted to believe, especially when it became clear that he was returning to power. Or you could say he's a great man of history who's unlocking some change that was necessary. But bringing chaos in order to do it right. So, I wrote a lot about the concept of decadence. This idea that the West, the developed world, was stuck in these kind of cycles and needed to break out somehow. But the reality is often can't break out of decadence without a big, big mess. So maybe Trump is the agent of that mess, but it doesn't mean, a good person. Or finally, it could just be chastisement for everyone. All are punished. As Shakespeare said, I think all of those possibilities have to be taken seriously as readings of the Trump phenomenon. How well do you remember Batman begins. I remember it, but so as a person, the League of shadows, right. Destroying Gotham. I've had this joke in my head often in the past couple of months. As somebody whose mythic analogies tend to come from the Marvel or DC universe more than the old or the New Testament. There's just like, convinced me we're not being governed by the League of shadows. And I went back and I rewatched the piece where Ra's Ghul reveals the whole plan. And he says, look, we've infiltrated every layer of Gotham's power structure. The League of shadows has been a check against human corruption for thousands of years. We sacked Rome, loaded trade ships with plague rats, burned London to the ground. Every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of its decadence, we return to restore the balance. We tried to do this through financial engineering and destroy Gotham's economy. It didn't quite work. Now we're back for number two. And the fact that we are here is proof of your decadence, right. The fact that we could do this, get this close shows that you deserve what we are about to do to you. Yes And I'm not saying we are actually being governed by the League of shadows. But when you brought up the decadence, there is a dimension of that to me when you think about this in those almost like narrative terms, a reflection of very dark sides of our own society. Well, and I mean, I've carried on a couple of different running arguments throughout the Trump era that are going to continue, I guess. And one is with people on the right who have a League of shadows view of the overall situation. It's like things, things are so bad that you might as well unleash chaos, right. And this you saw a lot of this in response to the tariffs. People mostly on social media. Not real politicians don't say this, but people on social media who are like, fine, we need a 10 year reset of the whole global economy because things are so bad and so on. And I spent a lot of time disagreeing with those people. I would prefer not to take the black pill. But I've also spent time disagreeing with the kind of liberals and sometimes, never-trump Republican critics of Trump, who I feel like don't quite grasp why he's successful and what you need to do in response, because I don't think he could be this successful if well, if it were enough to just elect Joe Biden to fix, to fix our problems. Well, clearly that didn't work. It didn't work. We tried that and definitely tried to elect him twice to fix our problems was not the winning move. I was saying a couple of months ago to Barry Weiss's podcast, and she had Louise Perry, who's a British conservative gender and sexuality writer. And Perry made this argument that I've been thinking about where she said that the difference between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate is that Peterson is a Christian and Tate is a pagan. And I think this might be unfair to historic pagans, but the argument she is making depends on it depends on the pagans, but also depends on the Christians. But the argument she was making is that Peterson is, at least in his ethic, somebody who thinks A lot about the week, who cherishes women. Tate is more interested in power, in dominance in driving his enemies before him and fathering a lot of children from a lot of people, potentially. And I've thought about that question, that war between, again, crude paganism and Christianity as really playing out right now on the right. And in the Trump administration, there are ways in which those strands seem braided through everything. The drive for power, for a renewed 19th century masculinity versus the more Christian dimensions of it. There's, in a way Vance as an emblem of the Christian side of the administration. Musk is an emblem of its pagan side with his many kids from many different women. Trump is somebody who, in his both traditionalism like as a person and also his brashness and will to power as a person has both threads inside himself at the same time. Maybe, I think I mean, honestly, I think Trump may have come to some conception of belief in God after the assassination attempt. I just observing his comments a little bit. But I think of Trump as just persistently as a kind of pagan or heathen figure, much more than he is than he is a Christian figure, notwithstanding the attempts to claim him as a kind of King David or Emperor Constantine. There's an idea that you get from religious conservative supporters of Trump that you have these figures in the Bible or Christian history who are rulers, who are sinful in various ways, but maybe in a way like I've been describing advance God's cause despite their sins and failings. I don't really think of Trump that way, but he is committed in an explicit way to Christianity and Trump. To me, the bargain with Trump has always been for religious conservatives, some mix of protection and support, a transactional bargain, and then more recently, a kind of hope that some kind of renewal of American dynamism can bring religion itself back with it, which I will say is a hope that I have indulged, indulged in myself that it's like, O.K, you have different varieties of Christianity out there, and you don't want to ally with the Andrew Tates, but you do want to ally with the people who have, big hopes for the future rather than a woke progressivism. That just seems inflected with cultural despair, that would be an argument that I think a Christian who was trying to explain to themselves how they find themselves in alliance with Elon Musk might say, right. Like, better. Elon, who has some good desires and believes that humanity is good in some way and wants a more dynamic future, better that than pure pessimism. The climate change is going to kill us all, and structural racism means we deserve it kind of perspective that would be the argument. Let me ask you about the idea that what you just described, though, is pure pessimism. Putting aside the idea that climate change will kill us all, which I don't believe, I think most people, even on the left, don't believe. They believe there's a way out. You just have to really work for it. You give at the end of your book an account of why you're a Christian and why you're a Catholic, and why you find it persuasive. And I find your account of it very moving. It's a thing that appeals to me about Christianity. And the account you give is about both the strangeness and the radicalism of Jesus Christ as a figure. How uncomfortable it is to read him. How challenging, how it's a religion about meekness. All of the rich man has a better chance of the camels, a better chance of fitting through the eye of the needle than the rich man of getting into heaven that there's always been a radicalism in that. And I Yeah, I mean, I know the Meeke will inherit the Earth is a famous line. I would say renunciation more than meekness. But there's a godliness of those who do not have power Yes And at the same time, then there is this administration I think is very self-consciously tries to be frame itself as Christian, but people in it are like JD Vance. And many, many people in the administration do not see in them in the way they act in this world, this love of those who do not have power. There's the kind of putting out of memes where they've made a Studio Ghibli meme out of an immigrant crying. There's something about the interplay here of a self-conscious Christianity and a self-conscious, mimetic cruelty that both feels like very appalling to me, but also unchristian, as I understand it. Yeah Yeah. I mean, I think the Christian, the aspect of populism. Conservative populism, right wing populism, whatever you want to call it, that does see itself in clear continuity with Christian ideas and Christian views, basically holds that it is speaking on behalf of the weak and the oppressed people who don't have a voice in society. And those people are the native born working class of the Western world who have been asked to bear inappropriate burdens, beginning with economic. I'm just framing the case. Right Beginning beginning with the economic burdens imposed by Free trade regimes that sent their jobs overseas and continuing with the burden of. Again, this is the argument of social disorder and breakdown associated with the drug trade in a globalized world, the free movement of peoples that transforms cities and neighborhoods and in ways that, again, fall most heavily on lower middle class Americans and are of avoided and evaded by the upper class. This is the narrative is basically that the beneficiaries of globalization are the equivalent of the rich person in various of Jesus's parables. And certainly Jesus does not hesitate at various moments in the Gospels to say pretty harsh things about people who have betrayed their leadership role. So one reason I pushed back on meekness is Yes, Jesus uses the word meek, but Jesus himself is not a meek figure. And you can go through the New Testament and find plenty of cases where Jesus says incredibly harsh things about powerful. Mostly about powerful people. About sinners. Where Jesus cleanses the temple and drives, drives the moneylenders out and curses the fig tree that doesn't bear fruit. You're moving. You're moving to the powerful here. What I'm asking about is the treatment of the powerless, which, even if you believe and I don't contest this point that many, many, many people in this country have borne undue burdens. Like, I understand that as central to liberal politics, too. It is the cruelty with which poor immigrants are treated. The kind of laughing about it that it's fine if you want to say they should be unkind to a New York Times' columnist, I more mean that there is an embrace of mimetic cruelty, not aimed at the powerful, but aimed at other forms of the powerless, where as I understand the radicalism of this ethic, it is that you should whether whatever your border policy, there should be a profound compassion for Haitians who came here fleeing some of the most desperate poverty in the world to work hard at jobs to build up a life for their families. There's something about the weaponization of cruelty against the powerless. It is what I am trying to get at. No and I think as I said before, I think you have what you're describing as Christian and pagan tendencies braided together in the Trump administration. And I think that but many of the things that you describe absolutely reflect more of a pagan sensibility than a Christian one. But I agree with you that particular steps the Trump administration has taken in this term are not Christian, anti-Christian. And I think the forces, I mean, I think it started with the cuts to foreign aid. I think you can completely justify some kind of renovation of the foreign aid program. Christians are not bound to support any particular set of programs. But I think the way in which the foreign aid programs were reshuffled and cut off and so on, was a failure of Christian duty in a pretty obvious way. That and the core motivations there were just different from the motivations, the evangelical motivations of the Bush era and reflected, frankly, just overall the decline of Christianity in American life since then. I will just say, though since we're taking a pretty hard line of critique, I think you watch this happen all the time on the left in different ways over the last five or five or 10 years, where people who I considered sensible, good, well-meaning, moderate people were in a coalition with people who had more intensity, more passion, more zeal, who made a certain set of demands on them. That led, again, people I knew and admired and respected to I think, compromise their own values in ways that also had of real world material consequences. I don't want to relitigate, I don't want to relitigate wokeness. But if I think this is part of the nature of politics in a landscape where there's no kind of religious consensus, there's no kind of moral consensus, right. Is that forces that appear to have energy behind them. Again, to go back to where we started, world historical energy, perhaps, will draw people who have convictions that should put them in tension with those views into certain kinds of compromises. But I agree, I absolutely think I do not admire the way that the Trump administration approaches any of the policies that you're talking about from humanitarian aid to the deportations to Salvador. I guess, to me, one of the things I'm getting at in life broadly, but in the policies specifically or in the rhetoric, in the comportment, I think a lot about JD Vance, who's a person in many ways, I think should have had some protection from this. I think he is Christian. I think he does think a lot about virtue and ethics. And you brought up the tariffs. I don't there's anything on Christian about the tariffs. I think they're bad economics, not bad religion. And a lot of these policies I actually believe that about I think people can have very mistaken views on policy because they are just wrong about what the policies will do in the world. I have had mistaken views on policies because I was wrong about what the policies would do in the world, or the they would be carried out. It's more the compatibility between what I think has become a dominant tone, and I think we're in a unstable era in terms of what I might call our political manners. Matt yglesias had a piece about the way a lot of his Hitler revisionism is beginning to happen, out of a kind of feeling that we have over penalized questions about race, questions of anti-Semitism, and that in order to widen the boundaries of debate, you have to have on World War II revisionists. And there's a sense that this politics of manners didn't work. And so politics of no manners needs to be tried now. And I think Donald Trump has been an innovator and a pioneer in that. And it's created a lot of memetic imitators who, on the hand, don't have some of his I don't lightness or authenticity or funniness, but on the other, it's just that I think I am, weirdly, even though I'm not myself religious, a little bit idealistic about religion, I feel about my own religion, which I think should create very profound sympathy for refugees. And that has not been something I've seen in the past couple of years. And I think it's a Christianity where it feels to me like it should create a kind of buffer against greed and cruelty that I often see broken when it would be politically viable to break it. So Well, 2, two things. One is that, Yes, you are describing the story of both Judaism and Christianity's engagement with history and fallen human nature. And this is something that is, in fact advertised in both the Old Testament and the New Testament and all of history since. Is that the story of the Jewish people in the Old Testament is not a story of people who are chosen by God and given a bunch of Commandments, and then obeyed them all to story of people who remain, the chosen people, despite failing in every possible way, including to fit our conversation, repeated flirtations with heathenism and paganism and idolatry. And then you can obviously tell a similar story. The New Testament Christians don't have political power, but the apostles are always screwing up and Messing up. And then, of course, the history of Christianity is entanglement with political power is filled with sins and failings that, again, this era's set, are of not atypical, I guess. But then the second point that I want to push you on is, what kind of argument is this that you think you're going to win with religious believers who disagree with you. You're like, well, I don't believe in your religion, but I really wish that you would follow your religion so that your politics were more aligned with mine. Like, that's just not much of an argument at all. And I think to the extent that all of liberalism, the ideology that you subscribe to trades on inherited ideas from Christianity about morality and equality and so on, while you've jettisoned the portrait of the universe, the metaphysical structure that gives them meaning. I think it's really hard from that point of view for you to get anywhere in arguments with people who still believe in that structure, because you're essentially saying, I've stripped away the conceptual framework that makes your moral ideas make sense. But now I'm going to complain that you're not living up to your moral ideas. I just think that's a really weak argument. Oh, but I'm not arguing it. Well, you're saying it to me. I'm right here. I'm a Christian. I'm right here. You're arguing. You're expressing sorrowful disappointment that Christians are not living up to a worldview that you think is false. Well, I think parts of it are. Well, I am unconvinced on parts of it. We'll talk about the view of the cosmos in a minute. And I'm not trying to offend you here. I'm actually asking what Ezra has anything about. Our long relationship suggests that you could possibly offend me. I've known you long enough to know when you're getting a bit heated. That's totally different headedness. I mean, as I was saying, the New Testament is filled with heated encounters. I don't think a thing I'm saying here is going to convince somebody on the Christian right to turn around their view of Donald Trump. I am genuinely curious how somebody of your politics and your religious background interprets somebody like JD Vance. So I'm asking you questions about it. Christianity does not provide some kind of incredibly strong bulwark against powerful people doing the kinds of things that powerful people do, which means self-interested conquest of various kinds and so on. What it does provide is an ongoing internal critique that those powerful people have to wrestle with and address in ways that are fairly unique in the historical relationship of power and piety. So if you look at something like, to take the most famous example, maybe the Spanish conquest of the Americas, right. In terms of what is actually done in the course of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. You can find, plenty of terrible crimes that you, would say, well, what good is your religion, if it licenses. If your civilization commits these kind of crimes. But from the very beginning, in Spain itself, in the heart of super Catholic, counter-reformation era Spain, there's an ongoing and agonizing and sometimes intensely legal and practical, sometimes high level philosophical theological debate that subjects the behavior of the Spanish conquistadors and others to this kind of sustained critique and leads to at various times, sometimes successful, mostly unsuccessful reform efforts driven by the Catholic monarchy of Spain and ultimately builds out and influences everything from the anti-slavery movement in the 18th and 19th century that's ultimately successful, down to contemporary ideas about human rights and international law. That, again, today's secular liberals take for granted as a kind of scripture. All of that emerges out of the efforts of serious Christians in a context of profound historical temptation and constant sinfulness, to generate from within the resources of their religion. And I think if you take the Trump administration, for instance, it's not as though you cannot find Christian critiques of Trump administration cruelty. They just are not at the moment the primary thing I would expect. I mean, we'll find out. We're three months into a kind of shock and awe administration. I think that and people have been, I think people have been baffled and surprised by some of the turns that things have taken. But certainly people I take seriously within conservative Christianity have spoken out against things like, the cuts to humanitarian aid or anything like that. But again, I completely agree with you that history supplies constant tests of what your religion is for, and there's no end until the end, right to the testing. And sometimes, sometimes you succeed. More often you fail. But hopefully you do something that has good effects down the road, and sometimes you fail entirely. And then maybe God sifts you and finds you wanting. I'm not kidding here. This is actually like it is important to see every moment as a potential moral test that you might well be failing. I am a conservative Christian. You could say I'm a member of the Christian right for your purposes. As Christianity has weakened in American life, a really hard question has become who is the most dangerous of your different enemies or who is most threatening to the Christian view of the good society. Is it a woke progressivism that wants to. Again, this would just be the narrative, right. I think it wants to abolish basic ideas about differences between the sexes that supports abortion at any stage in pregnancy. That's hostile to the basic religious liberties of Christians. Again, from the conservative Christian point of view, is it. Donald Trump's populism with its heathen cruelties? Is it transhumanism like, is the final boss of this era that religious believers will have to confront? Actually Silicon Valley. And if it is like, can you make alliances within Silicon Valley. Is it better to be with Elon Musk and his 117 children than to be with, some other people involved. So Neuralink is it's pushing transhumanism forward very fast, if it can. That's no, there's a lot of. But there's also different transhumanism like which what. Anyway, all I'm all no, these are actually these are things, that I myself am profoundly uncertain about in this moment Like who. What is the greatest danger from a Christian perspective to the future of the human race. I'm not entirely sure. So a big part of your book, as I read it, is about what happens when elite society becomes hostile in its view of the world, to the human impulse to seek a picture of reality that runs deeper than materialism. What happens when the seekers have nowhere to go. When organized religion weakens? When or not know where to go. What happens when they are not channeled into organized religion. And what happens when elite society becomes too materialistic? And I understand for you, and you can tell me if this is wrong, that one of the forces I think that you believe is driving the era is a kind of frustrated, seeking a desire to re-enchant the world like that has run into an elite culture, maybe its apex being the Obama administration and that moment in American life. It's the Ezra apex. Ezra, let's be honest here, although that well, we'll get into this. I always joke that the difference between you and me is more that I'm you're a Catholic and I'm a Californian than that I'm a materialist, and you're not. Because but one can use the word materialist in different ways to 1, when you use it in this context. What do you I mean, the view that all of existence, life, the universe, and everything is finally reducible to matter in motion, that matter is primary and mind is secondary rather than the other way around. I don't mean materialism in terms of Madonna's material girl or something like that, although the two can be connected. So one of the various arguments in my book. Is that disenchantment is fake, fundamentally right. The idea that you can enter a secular. Age where once upon a time, people had wild religious experiences. But now we inhabit the iron cage of modernity, and all of those are off the table. That just doesn't describe reality. Mystical experience, religious experience. It's not just the impulse. I think secular liberals are very comfortable saying oh, well, there's always a religious impulse, but it's more than that. It's that people have encounters with God, whatever God may be, some kind of higher reality that enters them and transforms them and gives them visions and gives them intense experiences. Or maybe they have them on the verge of death and come back to tell about them. This is just a feature of human life. It's a very profound and important feature of human life. Maybe it can be explained in non-religious terms. Maybe there's some reductive explanation, but there isn't a good one on offer right now. And so the persistence of that means that religion always regenerates itself, because even under conditions where almost nobody is committed to a particular church or Creed, people are going to go on having dramatic encounters. Like someone like Barbara Ehrenreich, whose famous I had her on for this book. Famous left liberal writer, wrote a whole book called famous atheist. Yes famous atheist called Living with a wild God. And it was just a book about a very secular person who had a lot of religious experiences, experiences that if you went and read William James or read like a medieval Catholic mystic or something, would be totally familiar, and she didn't have a framework, a conceptual framework to fully process them and wrote a great book, really interesting book about you tell the story that you tell in your book. I don't remember the man's name, but he's the editor of skeptics magazine or something like that. So this is Michael Shermer, who is one the more famous professional, skeptical debunkers of religious claims, supernatural things. And so on. And he in one of his books. But he's told this story several times 2 is great credit. He was getting married and his wife had. I'm going to butcher this slightly, but had a great uncle who had been very close to her and was the kind of person who would have given her away at the wedding, but had passed away. So she was feeling lonely and isolated, and they had a radio that had come from him and the radio was broken. Didn't work, had never worked. Schirmer had tried to fix it. It didn't. It just didn't work. It was broken. And at the end of the wedding, during the reception, they heard music from the back of the house and went back into a back room. And there was the radio playing a love song. And I think transitioned from that to some kind of classical music for the later in the evening and then shut off and never worked again. And this experience affected Shermer. And again, to his credit. It was like evidence. Evidence against interest. And I think, again, you have to trust, as always with these stories, right. You have to trust his general reliability and so on, that it wasn't just that there was a battery that was jiggled or something like the radio really didn't work. And really never worked again. There really was no obvious material way that this could have happened. Shermer, in the end, works out. He wants to have a theory of the multiverse where in some different timeline, much like in the movie Interstellar, his wife's great uncle is capable of accessing our timeline. And to Shermer, this is an escape from supernatural explanations. But one reason to just tell that story is that as I think because I was joking about your show being the epitome of secularization, the apogee, whatever. People have experiences like this all the time. This is why I'm not a materialist. This is a very commonplace kind of experience. Not super commonplace. You're not going to have one tomorrow. Probably but this stuff just is part of the warp and woof of reality. And so to finally, long winded answer your original question, I think what happens in conditions when you have weak institutional religions and a secular expert class that is not, militantly atheistic, but says officially these things don't happen, is that people feel like they can't really go all the way up to the creator God, Yahweh, Jehovah, outside of time and space. And they start looking for intermediate powers to become a kind of locus for their own spiritual impulses, stuff with psychedelics, stuff with literal paganism, including stuff on the right. And then the interesting zone, in a way, which is the place where science fiction ideas or science scientific ideas meet a kind of slightly supernaturalist sense of the machine God as this power that into which we are going to commend, commend ourselves. But yeah. And I think that tendency again, this is what Christians would say. But that tendency is bad. It's not that secondary spiritual powers don't exist in the universe. There are in fact, angels and demons and things like that. Saints and powers that other powers, perhaps more mysterious still, but not all of those powers have human good in mind, and it's better to approach them through one of the big old traditional religions that tries to subject them to a kind of higher ordering and says, let me hold you there, because we'll get to this. I want to distinguish two arguments that the book could make and that you take one path in particular. So I am somebody who believes deeply in mystery. I am that kind of agnostic where I'm Californian. I'm a Californian. Exactly Yeah. And this first half of the book or first 1/3 of the book is about this. It's an argument that you, I would call it an argument that you should believe that a kind of New atheist materialism is incompatible with any kind of reasonable understanding of the world and its complexity and its unruliness in the experiences people have in the things that it now increasingly requires you to believe. Like either human consciousness is somehow having some profound effect on quantum physics or if you're going to take a much more straightforward view of the math, we're splitting into cannibal. New realities at all times. The implications are getting weirder and weirder. So many podcasts, so many podcasts. I love all that stuff. But so there's an argument for belief, and then there's an argument for channeling that belief. And I understand the book to really be about the second argument. I actually think the first argument is pretty straightforward, but it's about channeling this belief into organized religion. So given the strangeness of everything you just described, and then also given that the big organized religions disagree on many things, a point you make on the book, a few. Yeah why go there, right. Why is it not enough to just say, you should believe that this world is not something we understand how to explain, and you should be open to all these things that violate a materialist intuition about it. Why, say, or what's the argument for going into organized religion as the answer for such profound unruliness? Well, a couple of things. So first of all, I don't think that the case for not being a materialist is a case for total unruliness to the contrary, I think part of the case for being a materialist, for not being a materialist, is precisely the order of the universe, right. Like one of the problems that materialism has that you gestured at is accounting for the specific ways in which the universe is ordered, the beauty and precision and symmetry involved, and also, as far as we can tell, the extreme unlikeliness that this particular order would be selected for, unless whoever selected it were interested in, listening to lots of podcasts. No creating planet stars and conscious beings. So you have the religious argument is an argument for overarching structure. And then the ways in which it is weird are not themselves entirely random. Like there are patterns in spiritual experience. Lots of there's no predictability to it overall, but the kinds of experiences that people have a certain kind of consistency. You can track different kinds of spiritual experiences across different cultures. You can track them in near-death experiences. You can track them in terms of studies of what appear to be miraculous healings and so on. And again, there just seems to be a way in which you have this overarching order. You have some mysterious relationship between our consciousness and that overarching order. And then you have a lot of religious experiences that seem like higher forces trying to be in touch with us and have some kind of relationship with us. That's the basic picture of that. Again, most of the big religions offer allowing for all their differences. Buddhism and Christianity have quite some pretty substantial differences. But they each describe a universe that's generally like that. So I want to be careful because when I say I'm a Californian, I'm being jokey about it there often. There are, of course, many Orthodox Jews in California and committed Catholic Christians in California and so on. Absolutely so, but I am very familiar with a kind of California seeker mentality. Yep And I think the answer from that perspective to what you just said is Yes, there are patterns. Yes, there are buckets. There is a consistency or a couple maybe consistencies to near death experiences or to memories that young kids have of what at least some people take to be past lives or things like the radio turning on or. But none of these really fit all, at least not all of them into any of the big religions. They don't. I've read enough of the religions to say that what I describe as the unruliness when I say that, I mean enough things that don't fit a kind of simplified view of reality that it would make me wonder about materialism. But also I don't think Judaism explains them all. I don't think that Catholicism explains them all. I'm not saying I know what does. Hinduism well, Hinduism is big enough. It's quite big actually. Maybe it explains more. Could I'm not saying that I know what does. What I'm saying is that I'm very sympathetic to how it can kind of spin you into a profound openness. I know many people who have gone there where what it seems to me now is having come to believe in these kinds of things, it's very hard for them to say where to stop believing. And they now believe a lot of things that are maybe contradictory or there are gurus who are all saying different things, but once you open yourself, it can become hard to close back down. But for them, some of them grew up in a faith tradition. For them, faith tradition didn't explain too much of what they then began to see or experience or come to believe in. I don't think any of the traditions have a really good explanation for why we have of weirdly consistent alien abduction experiences, which I don't believe to be alien abductions, but I'm not sure what to make of them. How do you answer. What is your response to someone like that. Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a balance that you have to strike in looking for a particular religious tradition, right, as opposed to just being a kind of open ended seeker. And you, do you want, I think, a religious tradition that has a set of core values that make sense of a lot of what you've described and also a certain degree of flexibility and uncertainty about some of the things that don't fit into exactly, exactly. It's world. It's world picture. But yeah, the wide the wide array of religious experiences. I think just the data on its own should would make you a kind of like the term I use in the book is perennialist. This is the theory that all the great religions encode some of the truth about reality. You kind of can't go wrong with any of them, as long as they're big enough and old enough. But none of them are like the fullness, the fullness of truth. I would say, though, just as a Roman Catholic that Roman Catholicism again, one of the things that I appreciate about it is that it has a certain kind of supernatural capaciousness. Not in terms of all its formal doctrines. It's not like you open up the Catechism of the Catholic Church and they're like, well, here's what we think about aliens. I mean, it's in there, it's on, but the pages are in the Vatican. There is quite a bit about it in the Vatican. Here's what we think about it. There is some stuff about that stuff. But if you look at actual the history of Catholic cultures, the zone, for instance, in terms of the afterlife. Zones like purgatory and limbo and so on have some kind of connection to people's arguments about ghosts and hauntings and that form of the supernatural. Catholic cultures have always been pretty hospitable to ideas about fairies. I don't know how I've ended up on nice New York Times' podcast, talking about the good people. But the idea of trickster, that there are angels and demons and then there are these weird trickster beings. If you ask me to make a case for catholicism's capaciousness, I could make that case. But then the other thing is, and this is I'm curious what you think about this. Is that one of the things I argue in the book. And it's not a provable assertion. But it's the idea that if there is this overall structure in order to the universe, and if there seem to be higher powers interested in talking to human beings, then maybe you should assume that God is not out to trick you, right. The universe is not a trick. It's not actually presenting you with this impossible, open ended question. It's basically, there's a certain number of big religions. They've stood they've stood the test of time. They've had a pretty powerful shaping influence on human history. Why wouldn't you go in for one of them rather than saying, in good Californian style like I just have to remain perfectly open, right. I think that if you can accept that the universe might have been created with us in mind, then you should give deference. So I want to say that I loved the book. I really, really enjoyed it. And this was the point where it helped me clarify where my intuitions maybe go very differently, which is, I think at a fundamental level, I expect that anything that is worked at Mass scale across many different institutional regimes as an organized religion is likely to have conformed so much to politics and institutions as to have strayed from how profoundly radical, whatever kind of spiritual truth might exist is. This is a way in which the gambit I had at the beginning about Trump is, was connected to the meat of this conversation. I found the argument that you should assume that a religion's success over time is going to correlate to some kind of fundamental truth value. I felt you could take that both ways. I felt you could also take it the other way, which is to say that the religions that survive are going to be the ones that are institutionally compatible with many different regimes and often contort themselves into those regimes. And we talked about the Spanish conquest and the Inquisition. I've been reading about the Renaissance recently, ADA Palmer's great book on inventing the Renaissance. And I wouldn't say the popes of that era cover themselves in Glory. I've seen this in I think you could say this about forms of Judaism, about forms of Buddhism, which Buddhism is a much more complicated institutional story than people who have been raised in America on West Coast Spirit Rock. Buddhism, I think, tend to believe there are all these questions where I think that I believe that whatever ultimate truth is out there is going to be extremely inconvenient and strange. And as you said earlier, and something I thought was quite stirring, the sense that every moment might be a moral test, that a religion that took that truly seriously would end up being very incompatible compatible with ruling regimes and would have a lot of trouble from them, which. Of course, at times these religions have, haven't they. I mean, they've often conformed to that as well, right. I guess to see I think you're making actually precisely the case for different ways, both Judaism and Christianity as probably divinely founded, which is to say, these religions have survived and persisted across multiple different kinds of cultures, multiple different kinds of regimes in each era. Exactly as you say, elements of these religions have made compromises, have intertwined themselves in profound ways. You couldn't get more intertwined than medieval Catholicism and medieval feudalism. This is like and and I think if you are a secular historian looking at that intertwinement, you'd say probably whenever feudalism breaks up, Christianity is going to go away to or Judaism. Judaism is a religion of Temple prayer, religion that's centered on the temple and the Holy of Holies and everything else. You look at that as a secular historian, you're like, well, obviously, if some empire will call it the Romans comes along and destroys that, then, Judaism is going to disappear too, right. That's not what happens. Instead, you have these periods of intertwinement that are then shattered in some way. And in each case, one I mean, the first thing to say is that the radicalism that you describe persists in those eras as well. And again, to go back to the point I was making earlier, this is something the religions themselves advertise the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible is a story where the Jews are failing your tests. The tests that you as recliners set. And you're like, well, if this religion was really from God, they probably wouldn't all become idolaters. And they're like, Ezra, here's our Holy book. It's all about how we became idolaters. But guess what then God did something new and people did something new. And the story continued. And I mean, I just think what you're offering, I think you think it's I don't want to impute. I think, yeah, I think you think it's. You think it's AI think you think you're setting God free a bit from what you see as the corruptions of Trump era Christianity or medieval Inquisition era Christianity. And you're like, no, God is bigger than that. Therefore, a religion that is always getting entangled with worldly power, that can't be where God is. But what you end up with is a counsel of despair, where you're like, well, the only religion that would be worthy of God is one that would be exterminated within like 50 years of its founding by the cruel state. That's you're ending up saying that a religion good enough to join could not exist on the Earth. Well, I don't think I'm saying a religion good enough to join could not exist in the Earth. I'm not trying to set God free from anything because I genuinely am not sure. It's not a pose for me. I'm not. I think a couple of times in this think I'm making an argument when I'm actually genuinely confused or if not genuinely confused, genuinely uncertain. I find the uncertainty radical, and I will say within my own belief system, to the extent it counts as a belief system, which I'm not sure it should just. Mystery and uncertainty is both very much at its heart and to me, very comforting. When I was younger, I just had a crippling fear of death. Just really, truly terrible mortality. Anxiety and somehow what eased it for me was eventually coming to the view that I just was never going to know. And I don't know why I found that comforting, and I don't know why that is stuck, but I did, and to some degree it it has. So when I say this, I am actually not saying that I think I have some answer here that you don't, I really don't. Well, I'm actually testing my intuition against yours. I want to hear your answers. You think I'm right and I'm not. I'm not trying to be too aggressive, Ezra. I think that as from reading the book, I think that the intuition that a lot of modern people have about that even if you concede that materialism is too limited, there is just this fundamental unknowability hanging over everything. I think that intuition is mistaken. I think it is correct about certain aspects of religion. I think there are issues in religion and questions in religion that hang over every tradition imperfectly resolved. I'm not here to tell you I've resolved the problem of evil. The problem of evil is a real problem. It's a real issue. Again, I think it's an issue that's there and acknowledged and wrestled with throughout the Old and New Testament. But I don't think you're going to sit down and just reason your way into a solution to that problem. I do think, though, that you can get a little bit further, just even in the example that you cited, I mean, I don't know what your metaphysical perspectives as a kid were, but I certainly agree that I would personally find it more comforting to believe that death is a mystery than to be Richard Dawkins. And believe that death is just the absolute end and never could be anything else. I just think it is, in fact more probable than not that after you die, you will, meet God, whatever God is, and be asked to account for your life. And so on. And that's not always that's not inherently comforting. Yeah you and I have had this conversation once before. It can be quite terrifying, but I think it is. It's quite terrifying. But I think that it is something that is reasonable to believe. That should give you a little bit more than just the sense of mystery. And more than that, I think it is what God himself, in his infinite mystery and power, wants you to believe which is why he has me here talking to you, I said. I've often thought of you in my life. Is heaven sent, Ross No, I mean, it doesn't mean good things about my final destination. I'm just. I'm just an instrument. But I guess the argument I'm just making is, I think one can get just a little bit further than just mystery itself. One argument you make in the book, you give the example, the canonical example of if you believe in a merciful God, how do you explain the child with leukemia. And you basically say that in any reasonable understanding of God, any reasonable understanding of religion, you can't possibly understand the plan. You can't possibly. I mean, we were in a way, talking about this with Donald Trump, that the unfolding of things will always be so far beyond the human mind that the idea that you have poked out a contradiction is a little bit ridiculous. I actually agree with that. But then I think that when it comes to the organized religions, you say a few times that you just have trouble believing a providential God would allow these religions that are wrong, that are wayward to expand and thrive in the way that they have. And I think an intuition that probably people like me have is that it. It is hard to say that some things can be resolved by, well, a God who is good would not allow x to happen. And then some things have to be resolved with you can't possibly understand why God is allowing x to happen or to happen. And so questioning it or being unwilling to take this on faith is unreasonable. Yeah I don't think you should take on faith that the major world religions are providential. And I think you could imagine yourself in a world where if you lived, if you lived in a world where the dominant set of religions all practiced human sacrifice. And I mean, you can imagine that kind of situation. I think the case for taking the big religions seriously, therefore, you've pushed me on this effectively. Yeah can't just rest on their size and scale alone. You do also have to think that in the aggregate they've had what you as someone who has particular moral intuitions given by God, one hopes at some level have had a positive impact on the world and shaped it in positive ways and and also that they have. And this is also important to my argument that they do have real overlaps. And I think that they do. I think the major world religions, if you look at them just and analyze, the ethical perspective of the major world religions, you do see a certain kind of overlap. So yeah, I think it is not enough to say these things are big and present, and you have to take it on faith that they're part of that. They're where God wants you to be. You do also have to actually look at them and pass some kind of judgment on them. Yes, as I so often do, I want to go back to fairies, please. One of the other arguments you make is that the I should call them the good. You don't want to attract too much of their attention. So why don't you call them the good people. The good people. Which actually, I will admit I am unfamiliar here and did not know that. So you've come here. Forgive me. You've come here to learn. Well, actually, this is exactly what I'm about to say. What just happened. Which, depending on whether or not you believe in the good people, I guess, which is that one of your other arguments is that if you come to the view that the world has supernatural or extrahuman forces, intelligences, agents, et cetera, If you are a seeker of that one thing the major religions have, which is, I think it's fair to say, has been largely downplayed in a lot of modern society is actually a belief about those dangers and arguably experience with those questions, including maybe what to call and not call the good people. And that one of your arguments here is that there is more spiritual danger once you accept some of these premises than people often give credit to that. It's not just about belief or unbelief, it's about the possibility of falling into the wrong beliefs, of listening to the wrong voices, of following the tricksters, of following more demonic forces. And one thing you appreciate about Catholicism is a little bit more openness to that world of forces. I just found that interesting. I always find your kind of openness to the occult to be, I don't want openness to the occult is not what I want. That's not how you want to talk about it. Well, I mean, the reality is that in the book as I have an entire chapter on supernatural experience and weirdness. And I actually debated with myself how much to write about things that are explicitly demonic. Catholicism obviously has its special focus on this through the Office of The Exorcist. There's lots of literature on the demonic and demonic possession, and I ended up feeling quite uncomfortable writing about it too much. And so there's a couple paragraphs and some footnotes, and people who are interested in it can follow that material. But there is a kind of Yeah, there's a kind of balance that you want to strike as just an observer or a writer between of acknowledging those kind of weirder and darker and more disturbing realities, but not like focusing too much attention on them. And maybe my joke. Or is it about saying the good people. It's We both are not joking. Part of that. Part of that. Hey, now, part of that perspective. But I mean, this is. Yeah, this is there are one thing I'm absolutely certain about is that if there is a realm of supernatural experience that is real, that is not just your brain chemistry. You can access it, maybe through altering your brain chemistry and taking ayahuasca and whatever. But if that reality is real, it is 100 percent dangerous dangerous. Dangerous and especially why. 100 percent well, not hundreds. I don't mean like it's. I don't mean every aspect of it is dangerous, but I mean, it is certainly dangerous. There are dangers. There are. There are serious dangers within it. Tell me about your views on psychedelics. I might not. So I have never taken psychedelics. I've never been at an ayahuasca retreat. This is entirely based on readings and conversations. My view is that some psychedelics almost certainly open you to contact with non-human spiritual entities, and that they do so in a way that is different from other forms of spiritual experience, in that it's like, again, not in every case, but it can be a shortcut. But that shortcut means that you're entering these landscapes without the kind of preparation that not only the traditional religions, but the shamans who use ayahuasca in the Amazon or wherever they use it would say is necessary for these kind of encounters. And there's a Twitter joke or a social media joke about getting one shotted by a six dimensional Mesoamerican demon or something. Something like that people make about these kind of drugs. And that's a joke. But I don't think it's entirely a joke. And so I think that Yeah, I think that possibility is real. And it does not at the same time mean that lots of people can't take these drugs and have mystical experiences that just convince them that there's more to reality than just the material, and that is a correct view. So in that sense, the drugs teach you something real about the world, but it can be like anything in human life. And one of the points I try and stress is that religion is not like out there in some compartment where it's totally different from every other thing. And you can't argue about it the way you argue about other things. And so on. In other aspects of human life, dealing with the supernatural is like dealing with the natural. There are good things and bad things and dangers and opportunities, and you just want to be aware of that before you throw yourself into a realm of experience that you might not be prepared for. But I haven't done it. And you have. Or have you say, what have you. Have you Yes So you have immediate, immediate information that I may not have, but one could argue that doing those kind of drugs and coming back from it, not with a sense that you've been possessed by a Mesoamerican demon, but coming back with a sense that man, there's more to the universe than I thought, but I can never possibly figure out the truth. Also, could be a deception that has been imposed upon you. It could be all kinds of things. I will say, without going into any detail, that I had once an incredibly profound and mystical experience. That was, to my genuine shock, completely Jewish in nature and not from a side of Judaism. That is a side that I had been brought up in and that I have never been able to shake. And that has made me much more open to my own tradition than I would have thought. And it actually. Can you give me a bit more. No O.K. That's fair. But what I will say about it is that. O.K O.K. Wait wait wait. I've done a lot. I've done I've done a lot of these conversations. And this is not the first time when someone in a conversation who is officially a mysterian, as you are, has said oh, but by the way, I did have that one experience where it did sound like God was talking to me. I've had a few conversations like that. And so what I want to frightening than that. O.K, well, even better, I'll give you a little bit, so I'll give you a little bit. I wonder how happy our editors are going to be about this conversation. Oh, I think they're happy. It felt for a very punctuated period of time a veil had been ripped open, and you could feel how terrifying these forces really were. This is not the part where I'm a mysterian. This is the part where some things are very hard to know where to put and I've been trying to figure out what to do within my own tradition. I'm in terms of what I am seeking, I'm actually seeking something closer to home, not something completely open. But it has to also feel real to me. I need to feel some gnosis from it as it is put in the book. But do you have to. Well, I feel I do like it, but. But why. I guess why isn't why isn't that so Again, without over describing your own experience to you. Like, why isn't that enough to say, O.K, the God of my fathers in some way gave me a glimpse of what's why we're Jews and not mysterians. And I'm just going to I'm just going to go to my I mean, you need to pick a politically appropriate synagogue and so on. And there are all kinds of issues with that. But I'm just going to go I'm going to go to synagogue, even if I don't feel gnosis, I mean, I don't feel gnosis from Sunday mass with my oversupply of children, right. I mean, occasionally maybe you seem more comfortable with that than I am. Yeah a lot. Well, this is an interesting psychological thing that I've found in these discussions. I think part of it is having been around other people who had spiritual experiences, and observed them and therefore accepted that O.K, some people have profound experiences. I don't. Maybe I would if I took ayahuasca, but it's O.K for me to be a person who isn't getting gnosis all the time, but is like, I feel good at Mass. Not always, but most of the time. But it just seems to me that, when you're called before the throne of the most high and the cherubim and Seraphim are there, and you're like, well, I wanted some gnosis. And God is like, I gave you gnosis. I gave you the big dose. Here's, here's I think, where the question of organized religion becomes then complicated. As I said, it comes from a part of Judaism that is not the one I grew up in or even really know how to find out there. It's definitely there. I can find it. I can talk to people in Judaism about it, but it's strange. And the reason it felt. You mean you mean the mystical part. Yes it's much more mystical part of Judaism. Hold on. Let me. Let me finish my thing. Yeah sorry. And in part because I had so little experience with that, had to actually find the structure for what it was later, that it didn't feel like something my own mind had just invented. Whoa Part of the sealing tape just fell down in front of Ross. You can take your signs where you get them. There you go. This will be better on video. This particular episode. Yep so. And then you go to sorry things happen. Then you go to your space that's more organized. And what you're seeing doesn't track that at all. Yeah no that's fair. And honestly we had I mean, as a kid, we had experiences like that in my own family where my parents, especially my mother, we were Episcopalian, which is a very anti mystical part of Christianity overall. And my mother had these intense experiences in a context of charismatic healing services. And then we wanted a church to go to. And it was hard to find, starting in mainline Protestantism, a church where it seemed like the thing that she had encountered was also there in some way. And I think in the end, we went through a lot of places and ended up as Catholics, in part because I do think Catholicism does a good job of saying, look, expecting the Holy Spirit to descend constantly all the time. It's a ritual religion, and the sacraments work, whether or not you're feeling a blast of God's presence. But it is a reasonable desire to feel like the encounter you have has some relationship to what is being done on the altar or done in the rituals. I think that's completely understandable. Let me ask you a broader question about psychedelics because the story I just offered a little bit unwittingly is I don't want to say it's common, but I've read many like it from many traditions. One perception of these drugs or medicines, or whatever you want to call them, is that they're pretty profound spiritual technologies. If you believe in them from that perspective, as opposed to believe they're just inducing some random firings of chemicals. So you might imagine this is something that in a world that got disenchanted, you would want these big traditions to try to take on, to try to build some containers of safety and knowledge around them. But they seem like a thing that can pretty reliably create an experience that actually connects people in a very profound way to their home tradition. Now, I can do other things too, but as you say, that's true for a lot of things in religion. Why should they not be used as that. Why treat them as a cult as opposed to perhaps a somewhat providential thing that emerged at this time when people badly need the help of things that create a kind of re-enchantment and breaks the shell of logic that makes for many faiths so difficult. Now, I think that's a fair question, and I think one answer is that they like all things that operate in reality from a Christian perspective. They must have some providential expression. The Catholic, the Catholic view basically, is that you're not supposed to try and commune with spirits, speak to the dead in certain ways you shouldn't go to a séance. Like there's a certain set of things that Catholics, a certain set of supernatural experiences that Catholics are not supposed to seek out. And there's some biblical warrant for this. And there's the explicit teaching, teaching of the church. And the simplest way to express why that is, maybe is to say that the church thinks there's a certain set of things that we know God is present in, and then there's a certain set of things that are just like opening doors. And God and his Providence can certainly be there when you open the door. But we don't have any kind of guarantee of that. And by opening the door, you are opening yourself in a way that is fundamentally unsafe. Now, again, does that mean that someone can't come to God by taking a psychedelic? No, absolutely. Someone can under my under this theory. But for the church itself or for Christians in general, there is a sense, I think that well, once you are, once you are in, then you aren't supposed to go looking in those places anymore because we just don't know what the potential dangers are there. Here's the other skeptic interpretation of what I just said. The very fact that you can reliably induce mystical experience. It just shows that this is just random firings of brain chemicals, that this should make you much more skeptical all the way through that mystical experience has any truth value to it at all. The fact that something that in the case of LSD, a Swedish chemist synthesized just mere decades ago can be some reliable portal to people feeling like they had some kind of mystic experience. It actually implies that none of this was ever mystic at all, that there's some kind of pattern of brain chemicals that you can fire off, that in the same way. Some patterns will make you depressed, and other patterns will make you think your body is itching and other things will do. There's just one of those patterns creates the misapprehension of the numinous, and that all this is actually not an argument for any kind of belief. None of it is a spiritual technology. What it shows you is that there's kind of nothing here, and it actually just explains away a huge category of experience that leads people towards these fantastical claims. And to be clear, I don't think that one should ever rest the case for the existence of God or the supernatural on psychedelic experiences alone, anything like that, but near-death experiences in the book. There's fasting. There's a lot of induced mystical experience or mystical experience in moments of extremists. And you do take it seriously. So I guess I'm asking, why not just the brain chemicals. I think what one should take seriously is the fact that clearly, our minds exist in a dynamic relationship to our bodies and to physical reality and religious experience. There are kinds of again, to take the Barbara Ehrenreich example, there is the kind of religious experience that falls on people unbidden in some way. And I have seen this happen. And I think it's a little bit hard to tell a brain chemistry story where it's like, why. Why do human beings like, suddenly have this God apprehension thing that just turns on. Where did this apprehension device come from. All our other apprehension devices are evolved to meet some actual reality. Well, can I force you to Steelman this. Because, I mean, if you've ever read an Oliver Sacks book or familiar. I mean, as you are, I with mental illnesses, there are many things that happen in our brains where you might say, why do we have something like that can ever turn on. But we do. Yes, but religious experience and spiritual experience are at the very least in a distinct category from mental illness. People who have religious experiences are very often entirely sane and entirely aware of the strangeness of the experience they've had, and so on. Again, which doesn't. I take your point about the sacks. The Oliver Sacks stuff, right. Could just say, O.K, well, people's brains can misfire in this way. And it yields mental illness. And they misfire in that way. And they think they're encountering they're encountering the numinous or something like that. I don't think that's an impossible view to hold. All I'm saying is that the religious world picture already takes it for granted that your body, the physicality of your body, has some kind of connection to your apprehension of the divine. And most of the time you are not supposed to be apprehending the divine. And this goes to go back to your vision. The idea that religion is a scaffolding, O.K. Like reality itself is kind of like the Silicon Valley guys that say it's a simulation, right. O.K well, it's a world that you're supposed to be in. You're supposed to be in this world. Whatever God is up to doesn't work. If we're not in this world most of the time, and having a spiritual experience is getting our mind a little bit out of this material world. But it's not the way things are supposed to work all the time. We're here as material, embodied creatures for a reason. But Yeah, I don't think there's anything internally contradictory about thinking that the clear link between the physical and the spiritual means that you could reduce the spiritual to the physical experience. I always enjoy that there are these two completely opposite theories of what the brain is doing, and I'm not saying one is it much more accepted than the other, but there's the understanding, the more materialistic sense of it that everything in our experience is the brain. Yes And then there's the theory that I have heard from some consciousness researchers that exist in the near-death experience world that some of the psychedelics people believe that the brain is kind of like a reducing valve Yes Tell me about that thought. Yeah That's just the idea that whatever the mind or soul or consciousness is capable of this much wider apprehension of reality, including divine realities, whatever those may be, that aren't really fully compatible with, being an embodied creature in the world. And so to be an embodied creature in the world, you need to be your mind's capacities and experiences need to be reduced, funneled down to the sensory inputs being processed by your eyes and nose and mouth and ears. And so that's why when you have moments when you shake up the brain through, when you put the brain in extreme circumstances via fasting or these kind of things, or when you reach the threshold of death, the mind's experience doesn't actually seem to contract, it seems to expand. And one of the challenges in explaining something like near-death experiences from the materialist perspective, is that they are described not as fragmentary hallucinations, dreamlike experiences, random, chaotic. They are described as more real than real, incredibly intense. They carry back into people's post near-death experience lives. They cause big changes to people's near-death experience lives, and it really is a little bit hard to tell an evolutionary just-so story about why the brain is wired, for some Darwinian reason, to generate its most intense experiences at a time when, for most people, you're just going to die. You talk in the book about something you call official knowledge. What's official knowledge. Official knowledge is the knowledge about the world that is considered normal and respectable in publications like the New York Times' Ivy League universities, most Wikipedia entries. The The thing I find very strange things on Wikipedia. You can but to their credit, in a certain way, the editors of Wikipedia try to impose some of the same assumptions about the world that are shared by most of the formal institutions of knowledge creation out there. One of the things that has happened to you over the years, you've written very beautifully about is you've had kind of profound struggles with chronic Lyme. And it. It made you more open to the way a lot of people feel failed by official knowledge and the institutions that produce it. And I've been interested in how that experience, which I think is based in some ways through the book. The generalizability of it for you. Like what happens when all of a sudden what is official knowledge no longer conforms to the world as you experience it. And the crowbar of skepticism that places between not just and that particular institution, but maybe you and all of them simultaneously, if this could be wrong, if this could have failed me so profoundly. Well, who's to say it's not all failing me so profoundly? Yes no, I mean, that is the feeling that you have. And so I had still have to some degree, but I'm much better. A chronic illness that is not officially recognized by the Centers for Disease Control. And indeed, to say that you have the chronic form of Lyme disease is to identify yourself in some way with just the world of everyone from RFK jr. to holistic wellness practitioners and so on a whole world that is held in severe disrepute. Disrepute by official knowledge. Official medical knowledge, you say Kind of pointing at me pointing no, no, no, I mean, I think at this conversation has been the most serious blow to official knowledge since. No, I don't know. And so that obviously like I really was sick, I really did get better using a combination of really strong antibiotics and other Stranger Things that are not recommended by the CDC. But it really did work. And I am morally certain both that chronic Lyme disease absolutely exists and the CDC'S recommendations are absolutely wrong. So then the challenge is you've seen that the pillar of official truth has a hole in it. How many holes does that mean that there are. And something that I have very self-consciously tried to do in my own thinking about this, and this applies to arguments about religion and religious belief as well, is to not assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, it's wrong about everything. That seems like a big mistake. And two, not to assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, one important thing that really affected my life, that all evidentiary standards should be thrown out or anything like that. But that's clearly a really hard psychological balance to strike. I think you just see this. I saw it myself. I spent a lot of time in worlds of chronic illness and alternative medicine, and people, just for totally understandable reasons, became full spectrum skeptics about anything the government said. Anything that American Medical Association said it was just if they're wrong about the money illness and my experience, they must be wrong about everything. The pull of that is incredibly strong. And in the case of religion, right. I think one of the things understandably, that nice secular agnostic people fear about going too far with my arguments, is that the next thing we're going to be throwing out all of modern science and progress and locking up Galileo and so on, all of these things. And, I don't want to say that that's not a legitimate fear. There clearly are ways in which religious belief and religious doctrine can end up being an impediment to finding out what is true about the world. I'm interested in what is true about the world. In the end, that is my goal is. And your goal. Hopefully All of our goal as journalists is to figure out what is true about the world. And I think to my mind very clearly, certain things are true about the world that have to do with God, and the possibility of the supernatural that are not encompassed by current official knowledge. And I think the modern liberal project is correct, that there are just limits to the kind of certainty you can have and how that certainty should cash out, certainly in politics. So there is a balance. And Yeah, any time you're trying to correct an official consensus, you are looking for a balance where the correction doesn't become an overcorrection. When we were young bloggers so many years ago, so many, many years ago, Yes, it felt then the political system seemed deeply polarized on taxes, on foreign policy, on the Affordable Care Act. And I'm not saying those polarizations don't still exist. They do. But we seem more fundamentally polarized now on official knowledge than on anything else. And the parts of the Democratic Party that were outside that consensus, led by a figure like RFK jr. Have become parts of the Republican Party, the parts of the Republican Party that were more inside that consensus and want to stay there. Some of them Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney, have moved away from at least the Trump Republican Party. And so the coalitions, which used to have a mix of people inside and outside official consensus, now are split between them. And, this feels to me like one of the things that is really deranged, our politics, that the parties are of like imbalanced in terms of their relationship to institutions. Democrats may be too trusting Republicans much, much, much, in my view, too skeptical with too little empirical and grounding anymore. I guess I was curious before you said, Yep, a bunch of times. If you agreed with that way of no, no, I absolutely do. Although, yeah, I mean, I would on your last point. Yes You would. Well, I would push harder on I think one reason that Donald Trump is President, again, is precisely that the party of official knowledge seem to do a lot of really crazy things, and that made people more sympathetic to the party of outsider knowledge. But look now, the party of but look now, the party of outsider knowledge is in power. But let me add to that story just in one way, which I think the polarization had already happened, and that's actually part of what that period represented. One of the things Democrats didn't have during that period was actually enough skepticism of the institutions of official knowledge. I think you would agree that the people pushing a lot of the ideas that you see as destructive from them, and some of them I probably also feel were ultimately destructive, were doing so wrapped in the garb of official knowledge, wrapped in credentials, coming out of universities, et cetera, that it was in part actually an institutional monoculture on the Democratic side that created a loss of some antibodies that might have created some friction between that and going way too far. Yes And then, now you have the other side in power also without any antibodies. Yes And I think one of my disappointments is about the Trump administration in the first three months is just how pure and uncut. Its outsider ISM seems to be right. And I think it was an open question when Trump was reelected would RFK jr. Be running HHS or would he be running the President's Council on making America healthy again. And we got the timeline where he's running HHS. And you could multiply apply examples. And I think in many of those examples, you can see a version of the problem that I identified to you just now, right. Which is that you can see it in the trade and tariffs debate, this assumption that the experts got something big wrong and therefore Peter Navarro should make trade policy. And the second does not follow from the first. And the huge challenge for conservatism right now is to figure out how you generate some kind of stability of actual expertise in a party that is now temperamentally, completely anti-establishment, populist and so on. And I think there was a hope that the Silicon Valley faction that migrated into the Republican camp, in part in reaction to some of the failures of expertise that you just acknowledged would play a version, a version of that role. And I think definitely Elon Musk has not played a version of that role to date. So you're the Republican Party is a party in search of a kind of stable system of official knowledge generation, besides whatever Donald Trump decides. And it doesn't have one at the moment, I think for the foreseeable future. Always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience. So I'm going to give three books on religion that connect to my attempt to shift what official knowledge or the official knowledge of New York Times' podcasters podcast listeners think about religion. The first one is a book from about 20 years ago by a physicist named Stephen Barr, called 'Modern Physics and Ancient Faith' That is, I think, despite being a little bit dated, is still really the best overall survey of where arguments in modern physics that relate to religion stand and how a reasonable person might think about it. It's not a dogmatic book. It's a very open minded and interesting book. So that's book one. Since we were talking about near-death experiences, there's a million books about near-death experiences, many of them bad. I think people who are interested in this subject interested in the conversation. One one recommendation would be a book called 'After' by Bruce Greyson, who is, I think, psychiatrist or neurologist neuroscientist from the University of Virginia who just has a good overview, I would say, from a perspective of a practicing physician, of why people take these strange stories seriously and why it might unsettle a materialist worldview. And the third book, I mean, honestly, Ezra, since you've maybe this is unnecessary since you conceded so much ground to the mysterians, but I think a final book that's useful to people who listen to this show and are like, what are these two guys smoking. Talking about consciousness. Like, this is a book that was very controversial in the philosophical community when it came out. But a book by called 'Mind and Cosmos' by Thomas Nagel, who's a famous philosopher, not religious, but arguing for the fundamental limits and problems with a materialist framework on the world. And it is a very short book, which is why I don't hesitate to recommend it. A lot of books about consciousness are not short, but this one I think you can read and get a sense of why intelligent people might at least be inclined towards an style mysterianism, if not quite towards the militant Catholicism of Ross Douthat. Ross I enjoyed it a ton. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it as well. Ezra Thank you so much. This is an edited transcript of an episode of 'The Ezra Klein Show.' You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. I always enjoy conversations that I have no earthly idea how to describe, and today's is very much in that vein. My guest is my Times Opinion colleague Ross Douthat. He's the author of 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,' a book I enjoyed very much, even though I had some questions about quite a bit of it. And he's the host of the new and really excellent New York Times Opinion podcast 'Interesting Times,' where he has been interviewing people on the modern American right. This is a conversation about mysticism and the role it is playing in the Trump administration and this era in politics. It's also about belief and the role it plays in society and in our lives — Ross's argument for why we should all be more religious. And the conversation also gets into some things I did not expect to be talking about today on the show. A note before we get into the conversation: This was recorded on Monday, April 14, the day of the Trump-Bukele meeting and a week before the death of Pope Francis. So even though both topics would have fit into parts of this conversation, we did not talk about either. But, as you'll hear, the conversation stands on its own. Ezra Klein: Ross Douthat, welcome to the show. Ross Douthat: Ezra Klein, it is a pleasure to be here. Last year, after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, you wrote about Trump as aman of destiny — that he was 'a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
