Faithful Politics

Jeff Schoep spent 27 years in the neo-Nazi movement, eventually becoming the leader of the National Socialist Movement, one of the largest white supremacist organizations in the United States. After decades of promoting an ideology built around racial hatred, Schoep began questioning his beliefs following a series of unexpected encounters with people he once considered enemies.

Today, Schoep works to help others leave extremist orga...

Can America confront its history of racism and political division without forcing everyone to choose a side?

Pastor, author, and Civil Righteousness founder Jonathan Tremaine Thomas joins Faithful Politics to discuss his book Make Straight the Path and his vision for what he calls "holy activism."

Jonathan shares how the 2014 Ferguson protests following Michael Brown's death transformed his understanding of the church's res...

Young men and women are growing apart - politically, socially, and romantically. Daniel Cox joins Faithful Politics to explain why that divide is widening and what it could mean for relationships, community, and American politics.

Cox is the director of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, Generation Uncoupled,...

For our October POV live show, Dr. Michael E. Heyes, religion professor at Lycoming College and author of Devils of Democracy, joins Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram to explore the history of demons and how beliefs about them have shaped Christianity, culture, and political movements.

We trace the evolution of demonic imagery from the Bible and early Christianity through medieval monasteries, witch trials, and the spirituali...

The religious vote is often treated as shorthand for white evangelical Christians. PRRI CEO and political scientist Melissa Deckman says that misses much of what is happening ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Deckman joins Faithful Politics to examine which religious voters may actually be moving, including white Catholics, white mainline Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, and Hispanic Protestants. She explains why immigration and the econo...

What if America’s political polarization is connected to the decline of traditional religion?

Christian theologian Matthew Kaemingk and Muslim political scientist Shadi Hamid make a provocative argument in their new book, Can Religion Save Democracy?: as religious participation has declined, Americans have increasingly looked to politics for identity, meaning, community, and even a struggle between good and evil.
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Albert Mohler has spent decades as one of the most influential voices in conservative evangelical Christianity. Now he is arguing that America’s Constitution should explicitly acknowledge Christianity - a position Warren Throckmorton says represents a major departure from the Baptist tradition of religious liberty.

Throckmorton joins Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram to examine Mohler’s evolving views on Christ...

Latino Christians are often discussed as a voting bloc. Rev. Dr. Cristal Silva-McCormick and Dr. Daniel Montañez explain why that misses much of what is actually happening.

Silva-McCormick, a professor at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary who researches Latino Christianity and Christian Zionism, and Montañez, founder and executive director of the Center for Public Theology and Migration, examine how theology, migration histor...

Most Americans know Hobby Lobby as a craft store. Investigative journalist Michael Blanding says the bigger story is how the Green family has used the fortune behind the company to advance its understanding of the Bible in American law, culture, education, and politics.

Blanding joins Faithful Politics to discuss his new book, The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby. We trace the family’s rise from an Oklahoma craft business ...

What happens when your political opponent becomes more than wrong and starts to look like an agent of evil?

Religion scholar Michael E. Heyes joins Faithful Politics to trace America's long history of mixing demons with politics. From spiritualists, abolition and Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War era to Billy Graham, the Satanic Panic, modern spiritual warfare, C. Peter Wagner and the New Apostolic Reformation, Heyes shows how de...

Who should choose a party’s vice presidential nominee - the presidential candidate or the delegates?

Mike ter Maat, the Libertarian Party’s 2024 vice-presidential nominee, joins Faithful Politics to explain why he wants to change how the Republican Party chooses its VP candidate. ter Maat is now seeking the GOP’s 2028 vice-presidential nomination while arguing that Republican convention delegates should ind...

For Faithful Politics, this conversation is especially local. Rep. Rob Wittman represents Virginia’s 1st Congressional District, the same district where our Josh lives.

We ask Wittman, in this shorter interview, what Congress can do about the cost of living, including energy, housing, health care, and grocery prices. We also press him on President Trump’s proposed $5,000 payment to Americans and how Congress would pay fo...

Why are millions of women walking away from American churches, and what finally pushes them to leave?

Journalist Sarah Stankorb, author of Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, traces an exodus she says has been building for decades. The conversation examines purity culture, sexual abuse and institutional cover-ups, racism, LGBTQ exclusion, political polarization, and the growin...

What happens when moderation becomes a political liability inside your own party?

Filmmakers Meg Griffiths and Scott Faris join Faithful Politics to discuss The Life of the Party, their documentary following three Republican women in Texas whose careers reveal a party undergoing significant change.

Former State Rep. Sarah Davis was once the last pro-choice Republican in the Texas House and represents a tradition of moderate diss...

The Department of Homeland Security sent undercover agents into churches to monitor anti-ICE activists. In at least one case, an agent entered a Baptist church that was already protected by a federal court order restricting certain DHS activity on the property.

Brian Kaylor, president and editor-in-chief of Word&Way, joins us to walk through the court documents behind his reporting. We discuss DHS surveillance at at leas...

Robert P. Jones argues that the crisis facing American democracy is also a crisis inside white Christianity. In this conversation, Jones, president and founder of PRRI and author of Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, explains why he believes white Christian support for Donald Trump and Christian nationalism represents both democratic backsliding and theological apostasy.

We...

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s fight over Muslim wudu stations at Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth airports opens into a much larger question: who gets protected by religious liberty in America?

Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein joins Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram to explain why facilities that existed for years suddenly became a political target, how legal experts view Abbott’s First Amendment argument, ...

Why would a parent take their child on a dangerous journey to the United States? Gabrielle Oliveira argues that one of the most overlooked answers is care.

Oliveira, a Harvard professor who studies immigration, education, and family migration, spent years following 16 migrant families from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. She explains how violence, insecurity, and a lack of opportunity push families to leave, while safe...

Historian Joseph Kelly argues that the roots of American fascism reach much further back than Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. They can be found in the antebellum South and the political system built to defend slavery and racial hierarchy.

Kelly, author of The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818 - 1915, traces how the promise that “all men are created equal” collided with a growing ideology...