PODCAST · religion
The Long Game
by Jon Ward
Americans don't know how to solve problems. We've lost sight of what institutions are and why they matter. The Long Game is a look at some key institutions, such as political parties, the U.S. Senate, the media, and the church.
Episodes
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My conversation with Jonathan Rauch about his new book "Cross Purposes"
Jonathan Rauch is an important voice for our time. He was for free speech and free thought way before it was cool. In 1993, he published a book called Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. It was while reading his latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain With...
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Eliza Griswold's new book Circle of Hope is a cautionary tale about placing too much hope in your church
Eliza Griswold's new book Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church is about a church in Philadelphia that was started by a couple who became dramatic converts to Christianity in the 1970's. They became Jesus people. And unlike many others in that movement,...
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Major Garrett talks about Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death"
Major Garrett is chief Washington correspondent for CBS News, and as he told me in our conversation, he is an "accidental television journalist" who "never imagined" working in TV and "never wanted it." He was a print reporter for 17 years before entering the world of television. Since then, he's...
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Moderates Keep Fighting & Don't Look for the Easy Way Out, with Aurelian Craiutu
Aurelian Craiutu is the author of Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals. Craiutu is the chair of Indiana University's political science department. He is reclaiming a word and idea — moderation — that is typically despised and criticized as weak and cowardly. This is a misunderstanding of...
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Yuval Levin's "American Covenant" is a blueprint for peace-making and effective governance
It is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. I just finished watching the ceremony in France, where they honored WWII vets who still live, and those who never came home. It was incredibly moving. But we can't just look back and grow emotional during inspiring video montages. We must think about how to...
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Higher ed has lost sight of mission and purpose, John Inazu says
John Inazu's new book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. John teaches on criminal law, law and religion and the First Amendment at Washington University in St. Louis. He is an expert on religious freedom. And he is a senior fellow with...
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We Are Not Powerless: American Politics is "Entirely Fixable" says Nick Troiano in his new book "The Primary Solution"
We keep looking at our broken political system — the politicians who show up on our TV's and our phones, the lawmakers who end up in Congress, and the general lack of solutions to our biggest problems — and we shake our head. We promise to vote the bums out. We vow to drain the swamp. We pledge…
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What is a Christian politics? Michael Wear's new book argues it's mostly about who we are
Break the system. That's what one New Hampshire voter, a 58-year old retired Army officer, said he wants the president to do, in an interview with Politico Magazine. It's only the most obvious example of many of us tend to do from time to time. We pretend, or actually believe, that politics is a...
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David Leonhardt's book joins a chorus of warnings for the Democrats
The 1950's and 60's were an age of widely shared prosperity in the U.S. — across class and economic lines — that have never quite returned. Things were improving for all parts of society during the post-war period, and for all groups including Black Americans, despite the real presence of racial...
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Tim Alberta's new book portrays a tug of war for the soul of American Christianity
Tim Alberta's new book: The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals In An Age of Extremism, is a sobering look at the results in history when a religious movement morphs into a political movement, and allows its identity to be taken over by political imperatives and goals....
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BUILDERS Interview: Matt Murphy on how community & music help him fight the paralysis of our times
This is a Builders conversation. I'm doing these about once a month to highlight people who are not just cursing the darkness but are also building up their local community — and the country — through making something beautiful, through problem-solving, and by stitching together places of…
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Where Have All the Democrats Gone? With Ruy Teixeira
This week's podcast interview (audio above) is with Ruy Teixeira, about his new book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. It is an argument that both parties have been co-opted by big business. It spends all its time blaming the...
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Evolution denial is a bigger deal than I realized
I have never cared all that much about the debate over evolution. But I grew up in an evangelical home and church. So in my world, the origins of the species were definitely up for question. To me, it all seemed rather silly. I didn't see any conflict between evolution and the Christian faith, or...
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BUILDER interview: Joel Searby on overcoming broken politics & hopelessness
In American politics, we saw the latest sign of total dysfunction in Congress, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted for daring to pass a bipartisan solution last week to avoid a government shutdown. Many people are desperate for a new kind of politics, and Joel Searby has dedicated the last...
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Yascha Mounk's measured response to the "Great Awokening"
I've interviewed Yascha Mounk about his book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which was released this week. "Mounk has told the story of the Great Awokening better than any other writer who has attempted to make sense of it," The Washington Post wrote in a review.…
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Talking to Shannon Harris about "The Woman They Wanted"
Shannon Harris is on the podcast this week. We talk about her new book The Woman they Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife I have a particular interest in this book because it's a behind the scenes look at the culture of the church I grew up in: Covenant Life Church in...
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Andrew Whitehead argues against Christian empire with data and his own personal conviction in American Idolatry
Andrew is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives (theARDA.com) at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Here'sAndrew's Substack His first book in 2020, Taking…
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Are We Really Stuck With Biden Vs Trump, Again?
Large numbers of Americans are unhappy with the idea of a Biden vs Trump rematch, polls show, but both the Democratic and Republican parties appear to be paralyzed, unable to do anything about it.There's a reason why.Both parties are shells of their former selves, and strong political parties are...
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Karen Swallow Prior's "Evangelical Imagination" Describes a Culture in Crisis
Karen Swallow Prior is the author of multiple books, including On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. Her new book is called The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. It's out August 8 from Brazos Press. She is a professor of...
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How Russell Moore Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Apocalypse
I interviewed Russell Moore on the podcast this week about his new book Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, which is out next Tuesday, July 25. In his book, Moore refers to the "post-2016 era" as an "apocalypse." Now, you hear that word, and you might think Zombies! Both...
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John Blake was a "closeted biracial person" until he met his white mother
I don't know if I've ever read a book quite like John Blake's "More than I Imagine." The subtitle is: "What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew" John is a senior writer at CNN. In this conversation, John and I talk about: his very difficult childhood growing up in West...
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A New Book by Ben Terris Shows How Badly We've Misunderstood Power in the Age of Individualism
A new book, "The Big Break" by Washington Post feature writer Ben Terris, is a story of how many institutions in Washington are failing those within them. But it's also a cautionary tale of how the idealism and passion of youth is being squandered in today's politics by our focus on individualism...
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The Stanford Free Speech Incident with David Lat
Nobody has covered the Stanford free speech incident more closely than David Lat. He's a legal affairs writer at his Substack, Original Jurisdiction. David is a Harvard undergrad and a Yale law school graduate who has a fascinating backstory. He was originally an assistant U.S. attorney who...
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Understanding the political radicalization of Charismatic Christians, with Matthew D. Taylor
This interview is with Matthew D. Taylor, who wrote and created a recent podcast series called "Charismatic Revival Fury." Taylor is the Protestant Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, in Baltimore. We know about the Proud Boys, and the Big Lie, and former President...
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Sen. Chris Van Hollen on another debt ceiling crisis in Congress
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D) represents Maryland in the U.S. Senate. He was in the middle of the fight over the debt ceiling in 2011, as a member of the House. That was the first of several fiscal fights over those years. Now, we're back in another debt ceiling showdown, and I talked with Van Hollen...
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Sara Billups wrote a book for disillusioned evangelicals who don't want to give up on their faith
Sara Billups is a Seattle-based writer whose book Orphaned Believers is out January 24. "In the wake of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, many young evangelicals found themselves untethered, disillusioned, and—ultimately—orphaned as they grappled with the legalistic, politically co-opted...
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Fixing Congress isn't a partisan idea. Quietly, a bipartisan group has been working on this.
I talked last week with Yuval Levin about the House Speaker fight and what lessons we might draw from it. This week I've got a different angle on the problems in Congress, and how they might be fixed. House Republicans who blocked Kevin McCarthy's ascension to the speakership repeated a mantra...
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Yuval Levin is back with an optimistic take about the lessons from Kevin McCarthy's agonizing fight to become Speaker
Back in the summer of 2017 when I started this podcast, my first guest was Yuval Levin. And over the years, Yuval has been one of my most consistent conversation partners, in informal lunches and on this podcast. Levin is director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American...
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Congress is set to pass a compromise between gay rights and religious freedom, says Tim Schultz
Tim Schultz is president of the First Amendment Partnership, a group whose core mission is to advocate for religious freedom for all faiths and rights of conscience. Schultz and others say this bill gives something to both gay rights groups and to religious conservatives. It's a compromise, a...
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Paul D. Miller untangles the confusion around Christian Nationalism
Paul D. Miller is currently a professor of global politics and security at Georgetown University, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He worked at the National Security Council under Presidents Bush and Obama, and was a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army prior to that.…
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Bonnie Kristian's crucial new book on our knowledge crisis and our "screen-broken brains"
Journalist Bonnie Kristian joins to discuss her new book, "Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community." "We've spent forty years dramatically increasing how much information the average person encounters daily, and we've…
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Deconstructing Christians who leave the faith are rejecting a "shadow" of the real faith, with James K.A. Smith
James K.A. Smith discusses his new book, "How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now," which released September 20, 2022, from Brazos Press. We discuss: the role of history in helping us learn discernment and live faithfully the ways that many Christians...
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What is Christian Nationalism, and what is it not? With Philip S. Gorski, author of "The Flag and the Cross"
The topic of Christian nationalism has been much in the news recently. Republican politicians like Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia both have claimed the term as their own, and Boebert in particular has loudly proclaimed that she does not believe in the separation…
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Christine Emba talks about her book "Rethinking Sex: A Provocation"
Christine Emba's book, "Rethinking Sex: A Provocation," is written for younger generations whose experience of sex, she argues, has been disappointing. She revisits basic questions of what sex is for, and argues that casual sex has been a bad deal for younger people because it has been devalued…
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We Need More Faith in the Public Square, Says Eboo Patel of Interfaith America
Eboo Patel has spent decades thinking about interfaith work and buildnig an institution devoted to promoting it. In this conversation, we talk about his work building Interfaith America, his new book "We Need to Build," and how America can strengthen democracy by making faith more welcome in…
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Meet the Democratic activist who wants to change how Christians look at politics, with Justin Giboney
Justin Giboney is co-founder of The And Campaign, an Atlanta-based advocacy and political training organization launched in 2015, with artist Sho Baraka and Rev. Angel Maldonado. Giboney has conservative views on abortion, but also is critical of the way Republicans have often focused only on...
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David French is warning evangelicals away from authoritarianism
David French, my guest today, is senior editor at The Dispatch, contributing writer at The Atlantic, co-host of the "Good Faith" podcast with Curtis Chang. He is author of several books, most recently, "Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation." David has a long...
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Talking "Jesus and John Wayne" with Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University — a private evangelical college. Her book, "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation," has caused a huge stir. The argument in Du Mez's book is that the attempt to...
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Andy Crouch on Taking Back Our Humanity from Technology
Very few people are happy with the way technology has come to dominate our lives, argues author Andy Crouch, and he thinks it will take a while for humans to reclaim autonomy from machines. "I rarely meet anyone who thinks, 'Oh, it's really working quite well,'" Crouch, the author of a new book,...
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Deplatforming is Not Censorship, with Rick Hasen
Richard L. Hasen is one of the nation's foremost experts on election law. He teaches law and political science at the University of California-Irvine. He is co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center. He runs the Election Law Blog. And he has written numerous previous books…
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Gillian Laub's Family Almost Split Apart During the Trump Years
Gillian Laub has published books of stunning photographs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and about racism in the deep South. She also produced a documentary about the killing of a young black man by an older white man in rural Georgia. For Laub's latest project, however, she got very...
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Katherine Gehl Talks about Alaska's Voting Experiment
My guest today is Katherine Gehl. She is part of the movement to protect and strengthen democracy by restructuring our election rules. Gehl is a former CEO of the food company her father started, which she sold in 2015 to focus on political reform. She founded the Institute for Political…
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The Way Christians Read the Bible Has Big Implications
2021 was a year of whiplash, of head fakes. We thought it would be a return to normal, to the way we lived before the pandemic and before our politics became completely insane. But over the second half of this past year, i think we've discovered that in many ways 2020 was the new normal. Covid is...
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Robert Costa on "Peril" and whether American Democracy Can Survive
Robert Costa is a national political reporter for the Washington Post, and co-author with Bob Woodward of the new book "Peril." This book has made a lot of news. It is a compelling, authoritative first draft of history that covers the period leading up to the 2020 election, and into this year.…
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This Republican Strategist Says We're Being Bombarded With Disinformation
"I walked into the internet naively in 1995, thinking that it was all altruistic and going to create a better society," Krohn said. But the Seattle native now is sounding the alarm about the web's threat to a functioning country. Krohn maintains that he is still hanging on to optimism, but his...
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The 'Vital Center' of American Politics Needs Heroes & Myths to Beat Back Religious and Secular Extremists, Philip Gorski says
I've spent pretty much all of my life fascinated by the interactions between religion and public life. I grew up in a very strict fundamentalist Christian church. I went to Christian music festivals, marched in anti-abortion protests with my parents, and watched my parents become loyal…
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A New Podcast on Mars Hill Church Dives Deep into Evangelical Subculture
I've been taking a little bit of a break this summer from the podcast, but I've been listening to another podcast that was so interesting to me I decided to talk with its creator. The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a new podcast that chronicles the downfall of a celebrity pastor named Mark…
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Is There a Way Out of Information Chaos & Cancel Culture? Jonathan Rauch Shines a Light
We are in an information crisis. Viral disinformation predominates on the right, and cancel culture on the left, but Jonathan Rauch says in his new book "The Constitution of Knowledge" that both of them "share the goal of dominating the information space by demoralizing their human targets:...
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Dean Phillips, a rising star in Congress, thinks America is on the cusp of embracing ranked-choice voting
I didn't plan for this episode to be about ranked-choice voting, but when I raised the topic, I was surprised at the degree to which Congressman Dean Phillips, a Democrat from Minnesota, was really gung-ho about this reform. I've done several episodes on ranked-choice voting before, but to sum it...
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Curtis Chang Is Responding to Vaccine Hesitancy With Respect
Curtis is a former pastor who is now a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School and a senior fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary. And he's done a great job of putting together a wealth of resources that present facts and data, answers to the questions poeple are asking, and presenting it in…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Americans don't know how to solve problems. We've lost sight of what institutions are and why they matter. The Long Game is a look at some key institutions, such as political parties, the U.S. Senate, the media, and the church.
HOSTED BY
Jon Ward
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Long Game have?
The Long Game currently has 175 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Long Game about?
Americans don't know how to solve problems. We've lost sight of what institutions are and why they matter. The Long Game is a look at some key institutions, such as political parties, the U.S. Senate, the media, and the church.
How often does The Long Game release new episodes?
The Long Game publishes regularly with 175 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to The Long Game?
You can listen to The Long Game on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Long Game?
The Long Game is created and hosted by Jon Ward.
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