Gospel and Progressivism - Jack Jenkins on the Religious Right

Soul of the Country. It's so funny, Jack, because when we talk, it's like we consistently are talking about the soul of this country. I gotta tell you, I feel like, on a regular basis it's dead. You are I would assume maybe a lot more hopeful than I am about religion, about the separation between church and state, but about the idea, it's almost to me that progressive politics progressive religion almost seems like an an oxymoron because of how we have

been inundated with the religious right. So talk to me about the religious left and what led you to the

development of this book, American Prophets. I'll start with the second question, that leads into the first, which is that for me, when I first started doing reporting at Religion News Service years ago as an intern, I was assigned to try to find a faith story in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was happening at the time, and I went I was near the Occupy Boston encampment in Boston, and I I stumbled over there, and what I found when I got there was there was this whole inner

faith tent where there was all of these activists, and that a lot of the people who were helping organize the encampment were seminarians and divinity school students, which I

thought was interesting. And then a lot of the people that they were bringing in to speak to kind of like critique capitalism and you know, try to critique the verious different you know in results of capitalism with labor rights, etc. They were bringing in these kind of faith leaders or people who were attached to religious institutions, and so I was like, you know, I had run into this in a vague since before. But what struck me was that I was the only reporter following that with a you know,

religious lens. Now that's not because I was special, because I was assigned that by my editor. But it was one of those things where I was like, that's interesting that there's this dearth of people kind of looking into this group. And so as I continued to stay in journalism and I ended up in I think progress years later.

You know, basically my job there was equally split my time between covering the religious right and then also kind of looking at these you know, more progressive faith communities that were advocating for you know, better housing, for communities, for a better rent control, you know, to try to push back against predatory lending practices, to you know, talk about you know, immigrant rights and indigenous rights and fighting against climate change, and they're all doing it and they

would have gatherings with hundreds of people, and then I would be the only reporter there. So it's just why, why would you think? Why why was that? Why Why were you the only one that was interested in covering and covering this. So I think there's that goes back to your to your first question, which is what happened?

Why we did this dynamic come to be? And so you know, the religious left has always kind of been around in American history and various forms or that that was the abolitionist movement or the civil rights movement as one people often point too, and also around the turn of the twentieth century, and the Social Gospel movement, which still influences a lot of Christian traditions today, was actually, you know, one of the pre eminent religious movements in

the country and actually had disproportionate influence over American politics. And they kind of won. It was the New Deal was directly influenced by the Social Gospel movement that was critiquing capitalism and the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. But after they won, the fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists of that time kind of, you know, also lost in public. And this is a little bit of a simplistic retelling, but they kind of pulled back from politics a little bit and

started creating their own institutions. They created their own schools, created their own magazines, their own publishing houses, their own

radio networks, and their own television network. So by the time you got to the seventies, eighties, and particularly the nineties, when they decided to re enter politics in a really big way, they were bringing with them this huge media apparatus that kind of helped funnel and fuel a lot of their activism, and they know, kind of really dug in around two issues in particular, opposition and same sex marriage or just all LGBTQ relationships and identities and or shit,

and those issues kind of became the lynchpin throughout the nineties and into the two thousands, and it's how George W. Bush was able to secure such an arousing amount of support among Wine Evangelical Protestants in particular in two thousand and two thousand and four. What had happened in the meantime is that while religious activists had never stopped doing what they do, you know, in terms of progressive faith activists fighting for racial justice, for instance, or for immigrant rights,

those movements actually continued to exist. A lot of those large institutional organizations that had been mostly attied to white, even white mainline Protestantism, because that was what was really, you know, understood to be the big political crew in the early twentieth century, they had kind of atrophied and died.

Whereas and so secular you know, we saw this group of this growth of the religiously unaffiliated people who don't claim one religious group or another, you who may worship or go to church on regular basis, but don't claim a faith tradition or they're atheists or agnostic. That group became the largest single sub set of the Democratic Party.

Fast forward to two thousand and four or two thousand and eight, and while the Democratic Party remained mostly religious in terms of people were saying they believe in God or affiliate with the faith tradition, the power of these activists had changed dramatically. They had they didn't have this

sort of access to power that they once did. And the left in general, nothing on the left looks like the religious right, and because it's now more of a coalition of coalitions as opposed to like one white group of Christians yelling at another white group of Christians. And so we have this different system for what the left looks like today, and that's where the modern religious left kind of emerges. And that's kind of what I cover

in my book. You know, it's so interesting because one of the chapters that I really do want to dig into, just given the current climate that we're in, is chapter three, when God chooses a Leader. And I think that what has become so troubling about the religious right, aside from them being zealous. In my opinion is the weaponizing of religion and the idea that they have the power white

evangelical Christians to anoint right a leader. And what we have heard over the past three and a half years under Donald Trump in so many from so many different people, from religious leaders, but then from people withinside of his cabinet is referred to Donald Trump as the chosen one, referring to him as the one, as the leader that

God chose for this movement. You open up the chapter with talking about Jerry Folwell Junior and Liberty University and the speech that Trump gave there and he would later come out, you know, obviously to endorse him, and he has come out in fervor for Donald Trump. Talk to me about the idea of like this deity's deity, this idea of like deitizing political leaders and in crowning them in some way as if they are above reproach, because that's what it seems to me. It was like at first,

we have these issues, we are singled issue. We don't want abortion, so anyone that is against abortion we're going

to be behind. There's something different about what is being done at this particular time with Donald Trump as opposed to what happened with the Bushes before him and the religious right right, and I think there's a lot of different factors going in there, but I think the core of what I hear you talking about is this one that's actually kind of flummoxed a lot of US religion reporters as well, particularly early on in the Trump era, is that we're used to one version of what the

religious right looks like. There's these key actors and theological thinkers, and some of them really don't like Trump, and so when they came out really hard against him during the twenty sixteen campaign, we expected there to be some movement among white evangelicals to say, hey, maybe we'll let you go back a third party candator kind of looked like

the way Mormons did. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints actually did pull away from Trump at some level, more so than Why Evangelical Protestants by far, but instead he's still some Trump still was able to lock in eighty to eighty one percent of

Why Evangelical Protestants. And as we've gone back and looked through that campaign and also looked at his presidency since then, what you see is a lot of appeal to Christian nationalism, and that is arguably less a theology and more an identity. It's more of a marriage of this idea of what it means to be an American and an idea of what it means to be a Christian. And while there are some people who make theological arguments about that or like kind of they kind of retell American history in

a very specific subjective way. One of those figures is Roy Moore, for instance, the failed Alabama sent a candidate, former judge down there in Alabama. He's kind of one of these people who might make a theological or historical argument for a lot of Americans, and in white Evangelical

Protestants in particular, this idea of Christian nationalism. When Donald Trump hugs an American flag or then says, you know, we don't worship government, we worship God, that's a not so subtle dog whistle to these communities that say, hey,

that's what I am. Now. Some of these people have been to church and years, some of these people are are active worshippers, and but for them there's that shared sort of you know, longing for this very particular idea of what it means to be a Christian that often, you know, when they did a bunch of polls around the twenty sixteen election and after that about people who would might identify with Christian nationalism, and what you found

was that these people, disproportionately, compared to the rest of the population, say, had negative feelings towards immigrants, had negative feelings towards refugees in particular, or to Muslim Americans. They're disproportionately more likely to say the police are doing the right thing went in their interactions with people of color than if they're doing the wrong thing. All things, when you start to think about it, are kind of these pillars of Trumpism that he used in his campaign in

twenty sixteen. And so it was actually an in phenomenon that's happened that happened around the Trump rise where some of the traditional actors the religious right actually kind of got unseated and left adrift because they realized they the flock that they thought they had who they could you know, push in a theological direction, were more driving force behind them was more this Christian nationalism rhetoric than the theology that they were preaching at say, Wheaton College, and so

Trump's been a really interesting figure that way. And it comes back to exactly what you were saying. Trump's a person who can go down to a disaster site in the South and meet a bunch of white Christians and they hand him bibles for him to sign, to sign, to sign. Yeah, I don't understand that. And you have You've had you figures like Paula White And who is this preacher out of Florida who's some many label as

a prosperity gospel preacher? Which is this this form of Christianity that often says if you believe hard enough, good things will come to you, and that often those that are those that are wealthy, Right, those are wealthy are then perceived to be better if you are. That's how I have always broken it down in very basic terms, is that if you are wealthy, then that means that you are good. That means that you were closest to God.

And which kind of makes sense in terms of the way that poor people are treated in this country right by our government. If you are if you are poor, being poor is a product, is a failure, is a personal failure, right, It is about your laziness. If you work hard and you are wealthy, right, then you are rewarded.

So this intermingling of this idea of prosperity as it perceives as it pertains to faith, and then that as it pertains to the policies that we put together for poor people seem to me to be so disconnected from the foundation of Christian faith, right, which is this idea of serving most in need. How do we straddle that very incredible and working it in America that about poverty

and about in general. Yeah, I think, you know, to tap into a little bit of what you were saying, you know, that campaign that there was this conversation that developed basically from nineteen seventies on where there are you know, there were people in religious contexts referring to the deserving and basically undeserving poor. If you're poor, there's that's a

consequence of capitalism. But the great the people who achieve in a capitalist mindset are blessed quite literally the idea that that is that is an evidence of their faith. And in what it has done is, you know, it shores up a very specific capitalistic system. And and actually the one thing when I talked about that gap between when the fundamentalist Christians kind of lost in the early twentieth century, and that came back in the seventies and eighties.

There was a thing that happened in between that in the thirties that I think is really important, which was that there was this effort by businesses to back against the social Gospel and the results of the New Deal, and so they started developing these preaching groups where they would rap them preach these sermons that melded capitalism and of Christian faith and said that both of them can be good. And then they attached a patriotic or nationalist

identity to that. And that movement grew to thousands and thousands of pastors throughout the country, and one of the earl in its it was the breeding ground for some of the earliest prosperity Gospel preachers in the United States, including a guy named Norman Vincent Peale, who was who wrote this. He was this successful pastor who many people call as one of the first prototypical examples of a

prosperity Gospel preacher. And he was at one point Donald Trump's pastor, and he is one of the only faith leaders that Donald Trump has mentioned by name. From his past and to be able to reflect on his sermons. Now, Norman Vincent Peale might even be weak compared to some

of the modern prosperity Gospel preachers. But that's one of the that some historians that help explain how when Trump came into office, these prosperity Gospel pastors and this whole strain of Christianity that had not been really politicized, Trump brought with them because it you know, some one argument is that it reflected his own mindset, his own worldview, and it also may have reflected many conservative policies that again defend capitalism not only as a virtuous system, but

are you, but they are you as a Christian system. And as they've continued to shore that up, the religious

right aiding them along and along. You know, this is why many of the activists you have seen among the religious left, whether it's William Barber who's helping lead the Poor People's Campaign with Reverent Theo Harris, or Alexandro Accassi or Portz who is a Democratic Socialist and decided to run for office after attending the Standing Rock demonstrations and having a spiritual experience and has since been talking about on the stump, you know, fusing faith that appeals to

the least of these, to the poor, to the destitute, you basically have Now we re entered a conversation that happened in the beginning of the last century, where the poor are saying, maybe these policies aren't working out for me, these religious poor, and some folks who have didn't defending capitalism under a Christian context are just literally lifting up Trump as the chosen one. And these are two very different conversations. They're so different, and they're so contradictory to

one another. And I really don't and I think to me, you know, personally, religion has always been something that I have kept at Bay. I guess I would consider myself agnostic. I'm a verially spiritual person and believe in the connectivity of the universe and all people and living things. But prescribing to a certain religious ideology has always been something that I've kept at Bay because of the way that it's constantly weaponized. It's weaponized against the poor, it's weaponized

against black people. Martin Luther King once said, the most segregated time right in America is high noon on Sunday, right, right, And so you know, as we are kind of moving through what I have been talking about multiple pandemics in this country right and witnessing them. We are living through the coronavirus, which is an actual global health crisis, but has revealed to us the inner workings of the racial and racist pandemic that we have been living in in

this country. And then the capitalist structure that feeds into all of that, keeping some at the bottom, namely black and brown people, and then the wealthy people at the top. But when you have this justification right of prosperity and wealth being associated with good, right and godly, how do you even come together? How do you bring these two very different faiths together in order to even begin to save the soul of this country? Like? What is that? Honestly,

what does that even look like? Right? Because we've been battling for the soul of this nation since oh, I don't know, the Pilgrims stole it from the Native Americans. So it's like in every generation, at every time, we are at war right with this idea of what America should be, could be, what we want it to be,

and what it actually is. Right, I think what's a really fascinating tention that you're pointing out is that, you know, there's this concept of Christianity, right, and people always like to remember the abolitionist movement, how many faith leaders are were a part of that, and they just leave out the part where there was a bunch of pastors who propped up the institution of slavery to begin with, right, you were saying that this was God's will, and then

that when we talked about the labor movement, it were similar. There were these social gospel types they were arguing for, you know, kind of liberating the worker. And then there are a lot of people that's saying that, you know, maybe the workers deserved it and like. And so there's been this constant conversation between religious groups for quite some

time here in the United States. And then you have faith groups, for instance, talk about in the book Indigenous rights activists, for whom they say that their faith isn't

even recognized by culture in general. You know, they say that when they're fighting for sacred land and standing rock, or protests in the construction of a telescope on the top of Mount Chaa in Hawaii, people just don't even see their faith is equal as one that they could have a con when they're talking about, say Christianity or Judaism.

And so it's one of those things where we're having this debate where there's a reason you have heard of people on both sides of this debate, whether it's William Barber or someone like Jerry Foward Junior or Robert Jeffries, whose sermon when God Chooses a leader, by the way, is the sermon he delivered to Trump on his inauguration day, where there have been comments where like they both kind

of infer that the other is a heretic. And the implication there is that, you know, these might be very different strains of Christianity for whom you know, finding that sort of reconciliation. This is just in a Christian context. We're not even including the multiple parts of the religious left that are not Christian at all, you know, finding

the reconciliation across difference. There. They they're you know, they're they're praying very different prayers, they are preaching to very different groups of people, and even during this this pandemic, you know, to your point, one of the fascinating things I've seen develop is there's essentially been two strains of religious activism in the United States. One Christian conservative, there have been transaggressions of social distancing across the religious spectrum.

Conservatives in particular have taken it up as a cause, and you know, saying that these these you know, lockdowns on their houses of worship have been you know, unfair. They've been pastors in Louisiana and Florida that have been arrested, and conservative groups like the Liberty Council have come to their defense to sue local or state authorities for cracking

down on worship communities. And then meanwhile, you have groups like a Poor People's Campaign launching an initiative called Stay Home, Stay Alive because they oppose the reopening of these of these states and worship houses of worship, they say, because

he will disproportionately impact the poor. Or a Union seminary in New York teaming up with the ACLU to run ads calling for the release of prisoners who are disproportionately at risk of contracting the virus, noting that the largest COVID clusters in the United States are usually in prisons, or the you know, the Jewish group Never Again action that was helping organize for the release of immigrant TEA detainees who are also disproportionately at risk of contracting this virus.

And you see the President this past week when he released this statement saying that, you know, he wanted to push push governors to reopen churches. You know, he's only responding to one of those streams of activism and the other one that's calling for, like, you know, to pay attention to you know, what Christians might call the least

of these, the poor, the prisoner, the immigrants. That's just a it's a completely different theological conversation than the one conservative Christians are having right now is calling against these shutdowns and for you know, this religious liberty quote unquote for worship services, and they're just I know, it's a long window way of saying, I haven't even seen many conversations happening between these groups when I've gone to some

of these demonstrations, some of which I chronicle in the book. When people, for instance, when protested near Liberty University, these red letter Christians, these more progressive evangelicals, they wanted to pray with Jerry follow Junior, and instead he put out in a restaurant for one of the main organizers. So I feel like, that's how big the divide is between

these computers. And I feel like between that divide, America is falling in the cracks, right like, because you know, one of the most disturbing images that I've seen, and I've seen, you know, several from these reopened protests that are happening is a sign that was held by this young white girl that said, don't wear a mask. God has you covered. And I looked at this image and I'm thinking to myself, Oh, there's nowhere for us to go from here, right Like, you can't you can't rationalize.

You can't come up with a factual argument to somebody who is telling you that they don't need man made protection, They don't need ppees, they don't need masks and gloves and sanitizer. You just need to believe in God. The assumption would follow. Then what that the hundred thousand people who have since died to date of the COVID virus are what are all heritas are all exactly? I don't understand.

It's yeah, I mean that that is the implicit message of that of that message is that all of the all of the people who have died, were you were they not protected? By God, and I think again, I don't know how to rationalize with people who, to me seem incredibly irrational. Right. And you know your book, I I love it because it presents like a different view

from me. Right, And I'm sure many people about religion and the purpose and the role of religion in politics because we are so broken and so so shattered as

a country. I'm assuming the answer is yes, but I want you to dig into it more with the removal of religion from our government, from our systems be a way to begin to heal this country, because if you choose one side of the other, one is a losing I don't want to knock people's faith, but I want to challenge like the foundation of their thinking and who they shut out with it. You know, we're supposed to have a separation of church and state. We're supposed to

have these things, but we don't. We and we never have, right, And so I feel like different activists who respond to your question differently, because it really kind of depends on what we really mean by the separation of church and state. Right, Because there's one thing to say, you know, no violations of the Establishment Clause. A part of our constitution that says you can't establish one religion, and that's sometimes been

interpreted to mean any like religion. In general, you can't get preferential treatment to religion as opposed to those who are non religists, who often in polling or you know, fall behind every other religious category in terms of what somebody would vote for. You know, if you're an atheist, um, you were, you were, you know, according to polling, significantly less likely to be elected than if you were religious

of almost any other any other religious identity. And so I think that there has been this sort of frustration among a lot of secular activists saying like, look, you know, even even when looking at the religious left, saying, look, you know, we're we're excited about the causes you're you're supporting we have, we also share a lot of these

progressive values. But if we just trade the religious right for the religious left, then we're just going to end up with this other community that occupies space in spaces of power that you know, well, the gateway to entries you have to believe in, think like I do, and um, and if that's the gateway to entry, then then we're not going to be there. This is me speaking hypothetically on behalf of a secular activist. And to be clear, some people who are people of faith hold that exactly.

You are just articulated. You know, They're like, I go to church every Sunday, but I really don't want you to preach it me from a presidential podium, right. But I think what some of the religious left activists that I've spoken to argue is that because the religious left in its current iteration is so fundamentally different than the religious right, and that the left in its current iteration is so much, so much fund elimentally different from the

religious right, because it is this coalition of coalitions. You cannot win unless you get enough of these different groups on board that there's significantly more negotiation and compromise and you know, just working together to get a goal occurring. Then the religious right, ever has to do. The religious

right cannot compromise. It can just not compromise and still influence the Republican Party every election cycle, whereas the religious left has had to learn how to like being able to be in conversation with atheist agnostics and you know, try to elevate them. There are definitely critiques that they are not elevated enough even within these movements, but the fact that you're hearing people like you. For instance, Peo Budh Judge got a lot of attention for talking about

his faith this last go round. He would begin every one of those conversations by saying, but I want to be a president of people of all faith and no faith. You heard that similar lines articulated by Hory Booker or

Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Because they understand that you're going to have a hard time winning if you're not also able to appeal to secular voters who would occupy, who would go to the voting booth and vote for a Democrat, and so you know, whether they would I think a lot of these activists would say that you shouldn't. You know, the removal of religion from politics, I'm sorry, the removal of church from state

is like a foundational tenant. Whether you can extricate faith from politics, though, is a significantly different conversation. That's like, you know, how could you As long as there are religious human beings, religion is in and of itself and

often a political act. You know, when you organize when you make an economy, when you make your own schools, when you have your own books that you read, that will often have political implications, and so I think it would be really difficult to fully ever extricate faith from politics.

And I think from the activist's point of view, you know, they show up to support immigrants because of their sacred texts, they show up to support sacred land and indigenous activists because of the spiritual beliefs from which they were raised. So it really kind of comes down to a negotiation, I think, among progressives and the country in general, about where is that line where what your religious freedom means

can impinge on my freedom to do other things. And I think the left is having a different version of that conversation and the conservatives are, but I would expect and I actually this is an interesting question because how the religious left has kind of risen into prominence in

the last three years under Trump. Were Joe Biden the presumtive Democratic nominee to become president, I'm curious of whether or not that coalition stays together, that religious left coalition stays together, and whether a lot of the secular activists have been relatively less critical of their activism during the Trump era, if we renew that same conversation that I heard you having a few minutes ago, to say, hey, look, I get it. You're religious, you're showing up, You're you're

supporting the same cause as I am. But I do not want to live in a theocracy, and I don't want to live in a universe that only privileges people of faith, even if they know they have different faiths. So how do we have that have a society where

where my rights are just as protected as yours? And I think that's an ongoing conversation, you know, because one of the really eye opening things that I have come to realize in this current political time is that the right right, whether it be the religious right or the political right, and the left are so different in their discussion and understanding of liberty and what justice actually looks like, and what faith actually is and what I have come

to understand and I talk I talk about it, spoken about it with with several people on PM Moved but also also on woke. A f is that it seems to me that the right and the religious right, in particular, their desire and their understanding of liberty is about their

ability to persecute and oppress others. Right, it's about it's about their freedom to tell other people what they can and can't do with their body, what they can and can't do with their land, what value they do or do not offer to society based on how much money they have in their bank accounts. It's the ability to dictate. And for me, I don't see there being any reconciliation because the religious left has come to the understanding of liberty and faith as you being able to practice what

it is that you choose or do not choose. Right. But let's but let's fundamentally connect to the principles of uplifting all people right and recognizing that all people are human right and should have inalienable rights. And so it's like, you know, when we again the you know, the battle for the soul of the country, it's something that you know, Joe Biden has used that this is his call this is this is his calling card for I want to

point out that before, but he uses it. He used it in his opening political ad about the battle for the soul of this country, and we hear it all the time. So I just want you know, in our in our last few minutes together, you to tell me what you mean by the battle for the soul of

America and what that looks like today for you. I'm really glad you asked this question, because other people just skip over that because they assumed it's a it's a it's a presumed understanding, you know, like battle for the soul, like whatever. And obviously there's a religious connotation, right, and that there is this sort of debate happening between religious conservatives and religious liberals, progressives, um leftists about what it means to not only to be an American, what it

means to be a religious American. And you can even go all down all the mutations, say what does it mean to be a specific kind of Christian or not? And so those all all those those theological debates and battles are happening at the same time, and they affect one another. Right, when Catholics fight amongst each other, that

can have national implications. In fact, the opening chapter of my book is about how Catholic nuns and Catholic groups in particular had a disproportionate impact on getting the Affordable Care Act passed, but they only did that by defying the Catholic bishops who were not supportive of the final version of the Affordable Care Act, and the nuns came out and gave a lot of Catholic lawmakers covered. So those inner fights, that those internal debates, even within religious traditions,

can have very large impact. But I think what it means to have a soul of a country obviously that has both a explicitly religious definition as well as this more rhetorical definition, and I think they overlap, and that whether you come to that conversation from a perspective of faith or spirituality, or whether you come to that conversation with trying to, you know, from a more secular mindset, what we're really talking about here is that how are we allowed to treat each other? And how are we

allowed you know, what are their priorities? And who are their priorities that we are going to lift up in this country? You know, the people that I talk about. There's a reason I call the book American Profits, and that's because the religious left often uses the mechanism of protests. That's what it's been most successful in wielding. And part of the reason for that is that while the religious right has been very successful at the ballot box and

in the courts. And to be clear, there are elements of the religious left in which they have been successful in certain scenarios when it comes to showing up on election day. But the part of the reason they are using the vehicle of protests is that that is the vehicle of influencing power that those who often don't have

power still have access to. They're able to influence institutions through protests because they're not the institutions don't recognize their power reflexively to begin with, you know, That's where we're going back to. It's like, these are people in communities clamoring for society and for the powers that be to even recognize the validity of their faiths and the validity

of their people. And that's what I think a battle for a soul really is is is what are you willing to you know, whether that's a religious soul you know, which you answer to a higher power, or a secular soul that answers to everybody immediately around you. The effect is very similar, which is that what are you willing to be as a country and who are we collectively going to decide to care about? Well, that is a question that I feel like will almost never be answered,

you know. To be honest, I feel like each generation, each administration, has their own idea of what that means. Right, Who is deserving? Who isn't? American prophets, Jack, I'm so proud of you. This is amazing. I want to tell folks so that they know that I met you five years ago on a trip that we were both on to Israel and Palestine, which forever changed my perspective on a lot of things. Who was It was a hard fucking trip? It was. It was tough. It was exhausting mentally, emotionally,

experience was like every everything it was. Yeah, it was a tough trip. Have you been back? I have not been back. I've wanted to. Have you been back? Since? No, I have not, and I have, and I honestly I have wanted to. When we left, I said that I would never go back because of how traumatic the experience was.

Just I just have you know, and this is going to sound very interesting in this particular moment, being a black queer woman in America, I had never seen such overt discrimination and oppression in my entire life, and that means a lot coming from me. I had never and it was just like one of the most and the way in which religion again was used, is used to do that, to create one group that should be oppressed because they're deemed as voler less than has always sat

with me so like so deeply. Yeah, it was. It was an interesting experience. Yeah, I carry it with me. I mean I've I've written many stories based off of the reporting I did in that trip and and it has informed a lot of things I've done since then as well. And I think it's, you know, it's one of those things where as a reporter, you know, I'm a religion reporter, so understanding relation it's really important for

a variety of reasons. And just going is not reading about it on the news or you know, watching videos. It's just not the same as going. And it makes it. Yeah, it does well. Everyone needs to pick up American prophets, religious roots of progressive politics and the ongoing fight for the soul of the country. Jack, thank you so much, Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for listening to this week's PM mood. My political podcast, Woke af Daily is on Patreon for just five dollars a month.

That's five new our law shows every week for just five dollars a month. Join the conversation now at Patreon dot com slash woke AF and you can continue listening to PM mood every week absolutely free. Now more than ever we see the importance of independent media, so thank you for your support, and as always, stay in the PM mood to change the world.