Postmortem For A Country...And A Podcast
The Unreasonable Team Administers Last Rites
THE END IS AT HAND
What did you do on inauguration day? If you’re like us, you were seeking shelter from the impending storm, some sort of diversion to preserve your mental health before the inevitable onslaught to come. At Unreasonable, we went into the studio as a team to discuss the sunsetting of the podcast, what we all plan to do now, and to vent.
We all have very different responses to our current situation, and one of them might resonate with your, whether it’s disillusion, rage, nihilism, surrender, a sense of resolve and resistance, or a brave holding on to some semblance of hope. We’ll all continue our activism, but along very different lines. Listen here:
In just three weeks we’ve seen Project 2025 kick into action; presidential powers relinquished to an avaricious man-child; a governmental restructuring designed to enact political retribution; a slew of both petty and far-reaching executive orders; an army of incompetents confirmed by Congress to take control of power, and a country in chaos. It’s all a bit overwhelming and mind-scrambling (which, of course, is the point) executed, as Nina Burleigh points out in her “Freak of the Week” analysis of Elon Musk, “with speed and stealth.”
Yesterday’s New York Times provides an essential timeline which is worth perusing and preserving before history is completely rewritten.
LAST WEEK’S NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST
One of last week’s many disturbing items of note came from the bizarre American conclave known as the National Prayer Breakfast, at which the current president promised to create a task force to root out perceived anti-Christian bias. The problem is that “anti-Christian bias” is a phantasm. In the same vein as the Christian Right’s calls for “religious freedom” or “school choice.” (Check out Texas State Rep. James Talarico’s eloquent takedown of that canard here.)
When Christian Nationalists refer to anti-Christian bias, they don’t mean that people are attacking Christians in the streets or causing them physical harm or even threatening their safety; it means that society has advanced against Christian bigotry and dogma, and they don’t like that. They seek a society — made up of many religions and nones — that adheres to their personal interpretations of ancient texts.
To them, “religious freedom” does not mean everyone has the freedom to believe what they want, or not; it means that anything they deem as antithetical to their highly fungible “deeply held religious beliefs” signifies a bias against their freedom to discriminate, again, according to their variable interpretations of ancient texts.
And make no mistake: Christian Nationalism isn’t some liberal boogeyman. It’s a thing. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Johnson have expressed that. They believe, as does a majority of the Supreme Court, that America is a Christian nation and that the U.S. government needs to be more like their church. With the current occupant — whose performative religiosity took shape only once evangelicals chose him for deification — they now have the tool to do that.
But let’s get back to the National Prayer Breakfast. What is it, and why do both Republicans and Democrats attend? What is its purpose and who’s behind it? That’s a conversation we had with journalist Jonathan Larsen, who has spent years investigating the shadowy religious group that has American politicians genuflecting before it.
Since Eisenhower, every American president has attended the NPB, hosted by the Fellowship Foundation, or more familiarly, The Family. According to Larsen:
“The Family’s focus is to pursue relationships with people in power and to use those relationships to pursue relationships with people in power. Jesus plus nothing. In contrast to the sort of traditional, stereotypical Jesus image of helping the poor, washing the feet of lepers, The Family is focused on people in power.”
Listen to our conversation with Larsen here:
SOMETHING ELSE TO LISTEN TO
I’m no fan of Michael Steele who, like so many of his Republican cohort (hello, Lincoln Project!), helped usher in our current autocracy before deciding they’re against it. Or, as Molly Jong-Fast noted, “they just didn’t want fascism like that.” But like a stopped watch being right twice a day, he certainly nailed what’s wrong with the Democratic Party on a recent episode of The Bulwark podcast. It’s worth a listen.
And since, as you know, Unreasonable is based in Philadelphia, it would be remiss of us not to mention…
Don't go!