Weird, Wicked, and Wild

ONUG: Jeremiad

A successful covenant is evidence of God's divine favor, but what if things go wrong? What does that prove? Colonialism is hard work; nothing was ever going to go precisely according to plans, but when internal dissent, chaotic relationships with Indigenous peoples, and external political pressures mounted, Puritans rarely recognized that the nature 0f colonialism had anything to do with it. Instead, they were convinced Satan was stalking them. That's bad for the covenant. How Puritans responded was bad for religion.

ONUG: A City Upon a Hill

Pilgrims and Puritans have an interesting reputation in American history. Popular culture has long flattened the truth about them to the point that they often come off as cartoon bad guys. The real story is that they were devout people under enormous pressure to establish a model Christian society in an unfamiliar land. Their experiences were informed by religious zealotry, imperial agency, frontier colonialism, and ideas about divine collective "chosenness." If our last episode set the stage for how wildly different American Christianity would be from the origins of the faith, this episode is all about how American Christianity took on its specific character. Those English settlers in Massachusetts planted seeds that took deep root in America. Christian nationalism is the resulting thornbush.

ONUG: In The Beginning

Sometimes it's important to hear about the history before the history. That's what this episode is about -- we'll discuss the condensed history of Christianity from the time of Jesus' crucifixion until it arrives in America. That's roughly 1600 years in about in just around an hour or so. We'll also introduce the series in a little more detail, explain why we're doing this, clarify what we're NOT doing, etc. Everything has a beginning. Here's our version.

One Nation, Under God

Don't miss this preview of the rollercoaster season we have coming your way. We are swinging for the fences, and we'll probably gain a few enemies along the way. That's how we know we're doing our jobs right!

The Aberration

Forty-three men between 1789 and 2017 demonstrated the awesome and growing power of the American presidency. Sometimes they were blunt, other times much more deliberate. But in 2017, something shifted, and since then we've seen how extremely fragile the presidency is, too. The two men who've held the office since then have exposed its frailty over and over again. One battered norms with open contempt, mistaking spectacle for strength and grievance for governance. He treated institutions as obstacles to be humiliated into submission. The other stretched executive authority past its snapping point in the name of restoration, governing through emergency and exception. Then that first guy came back, but worse, and that's where we are now. Whether through chaos or consolidation, they both marked radical departures from the managerial, post-Cold War presidency. They weren't course corrections -- they were disruptions. Joe Biden and Donald Trump: the Aberration.