Weird, Wicked, and Wild

ONUG: Promised Land

Americans were sure that God was on their side. They sought to remake their world according to a new covenant. And in this new covenant, borders seemed wrong. There was land waiting for them in the West, and all they had to do was clear the way. Expansion would be a great national project, a realization of American manifest destiny. But manifest destiny resulted in a continental empire, increasingly divided over the national crime of slavery. God's chosen people entered a stolen promised land and took one more step toward American Armageddon.

ONUG: Faith on Fire

On the heels of the American Revolution came a Second Great Awakening. It did not transform the U.S. into a Christian nation either, but it did something perhaps more volatile. In a republic with no established church, faith became a matter of choice, and with that came power. Ordinary Americans claimed the authority to interpret Scripture, experience God directly, and remake the world around them. Camp meetings dotted the landscape into the 19th century, preaching that salvation was open to all and that society itself could be redeemed. A sense of Christian duty birthed reform movements seeking to fix all manner of social ills. But the same movement that inspired people to challenge injustice also gave others the tools to defend it. In the North, revivalism fueled crusades against slavery. In the South, it helped sanctify slavery, wrapping inequality in the language of divine will. The result was not a single moral vision, but a nation convinced that God demanded action. The problem was agreeing on what that action should be.

ONUG: Endowed by Their Creator

The Founders did not create a Christian nation. They created something stranger. The American Revolution rejected the divine right of kings, but it did not reject sacred purpose. Instead, Americans transformed liberty, the nation, the Founders, and even the war itself into objects of near-religious reverence. Thomas Paine preached revolution like a revival sermon. Jefferson invoked “Nature’s God” and “divine Providence.” George Washington became a providential deliverer in the public imagination. The result was not a state church, but a civil religion -- a national faith that treated America itself as part of a divine mission.

ONUG: No King but God??

A religiously pluralistic colonial people could never unite against an empire with a state-mandated faith, could it? Thomas Paine thought it could, and while not advocating for a religious society, he deployed explicitly Christian reasoning when he called for independence in Common Sense, the wildly popular pamphlet Paine published in 1776. Nobody was likely to make Congregationalists, Baptists, Anglicans, Quakers, Catholics, and revivalists agree on religious doctrine, or clerical authority, or even religious tolerance. But after years of perceived abuse by British policy, they could agree on one thing: God was the only king they needed in America.

ONUG: Born Again?

The Salem Witch Trials frightened people, not about witches, but about the dangers of rigid orthodoxy. The following decades into the eighteenth century saw the old Puritan guard lose its grip on New England. Religion didn't disappear, but it cooled notably. Increased trade across the Atlantic and the arrival of Enlightenment thinking resulted in greater secularism in New England society, until George Whitefield arrived in the 1730s. Whitefield was a charismatic itinerant preacher who helped usher in a wave of revivalism in England and in the colonies. Historians refer to the movement as the Great Awakening, and understanding its impact is crucial to understanding American Christianity.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

The Accelerants, pt. 2

Part 2 of 2: Daddy left unfinished business in the Middle East, so Bush 43 comes to the White House in 2001 with a mission, and whether he accomplished it or not really isn't up for debate -- he didn't. That didn't stop him though, and the damage he did in the White House made his successor's election seem like salvation may have arrived. Spoiler alert: it didn't. The White House is where altruism goes to die. And the first Black president in American history revealed something ugly in this country, paving the way for horrors to come. Part 2 of the Accelerants -- George "Dubya" Bush and Barack Obama.

The Accelerants, pt. 1

Part 1 of 2: Riding his predecessor's coattails into an office that had already gone off the rails, George H.W. Bush didn’t bother asking where the brakes were. He put the pedal to the metal. He and his successors put power on a fast and dangerous track with emergency authorizations, executive orders, surveillance dragnets, corporate and banking bailouts, and forever wars, all designed to look strong on TV and in social media feeds. They used every crisis as an excuse for a procedural shortcut, and then turned every shortcut into precedent. The Oval Office became a reflex factory: act fast and first, don't apologize, and deal with governing when the cameras are gone. Hesitation is failure, restraint is bad business. In this first part of a two-part episode, we'll cover Bush 41 and Bill "Slick Willy" Clinton.

The Authorities

Inheriting a world reshaped by total war, nuclear brinkmanship, and nonstop mobilization demanded more than managerial skill. As the U.S. slid into the Cold War, presidents acted less like careful stewards of process and more like final judges of what counted as necessary, legitimate, and urgent. They waged wars without declarations, kept secrets without oversight, and shaped markets, morals, and memory by sheer force of office (and occasional charisma). The imperial presidency fused commander-in-chief, moral advocate, and national sovereign into a single role, pulling power ever closer to the Oval Office even as the bureaucracy beneath it swelled. Authority flowed downward, justified by crisis, sustained by fear, and made routine through repetition. Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan: these are the Authorities.

The Administrators

Presiding over a growing territorial and overseas empire takes a lot of power vested in the one-man office of the American presidency. The expansive scope of the President's authority had grown well beyond what a single man could control by the end of the 19th century; in the 20th century, presidents relied more and more on the growing power of the entirety of the executive branch. Administrations became exactly that -- sprawling networks of professionals and politicians that all reported to the top. Bureaucracy was the new order of the day, and it came often at the expense of domestic tranquility and international harmony. Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the Administrators.

The Abdicators

If a president of the United States won't stand up and declare unwavering support for equality, then who will? Isn't that what this country was founded on? That's what Abraham Lincoln thought, but when he was murdered in 1865, what he thought no longer seemed to matter. His next nine successors continually dropped the ball when it came to protecting Black civil rights, and their collective support for corrupt big business interests just leaves a bad taste, in our opinion. Andrew Johnson through William McKinley, the Abdicators.

The Appeasers

The next eight presidents, from Martin Van Buren (#8) to James Buchanan (#15) all served only one term as president, and they spent their terms more or less trying to appease the various national factions that threatened to pull the country apart. This was, unfortunately, especially true when it came to appeasing the slave powers of the South, entrenching and intensifying the national debate over slavery and its expansion for decades. It would take a different kind of appeasing on the part of Abraham Lincoln (#16) to save the United States, but even he doesn't get out of this unscathed. We're calling them all out.

The Architects

There are a lot of lists that rank the presidents from best to worst (or vice versa). Scholarly lists have some consensus, usually. Popular opinion lists vary wildly. We're not going to try to rank them, but we're going to look at the damage done to American society by each of the forty-five men we've elected to lead us, and we'll see how they all stack up to the current guy. In this episode, we're looking at George Washington (#1) through Andrew Jackson (#7). These guys were the architects of the U.S. presidency, for many reasons. They established and broke with precedents, they fostered traditions, and they built the executive office from its inception. And I think we'll find that the pedestals we've raised under some of them ought to be a little bit shorter.

Small Talk

Our final episode of the season tries to rescue language from the ravages of fascist Newspeak. While not invented by or used solely by fascists, Newspeak -- a term coined by George Orwell in his seminal novel, 1984 -- impoverishes vocabulary in order to limit complex and critical thought and reasoning. Newspeak may appear as historically insidious buzzwords and phrases, like “Living Space” and “Final Solution.” Newspeak may also appear harmless, such as in “Enhanced Interrogation,” or even good, like “Make America Great Again.” Pro-tip: when folks stop speaking in full sentences, watch out. We'll also sunset Season 1 and give you a heads up on our plans for Season 2.

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Vox Populi

In our penultimate episode of the season, we will try to make a distinction between populism—anti-establishmentarian political representation of the interests and voices of ordinary people—and the selective populism employed by fascist would-be autocrats. They claim to represent the will of the “true people” while identifying, excluding, and demonizing those that do not fit into their definition of the “true people.” Populism has its own drawbacks, but on the surface, it’s not an immediate threat. Selective, fascist populism, on the other hand, could make an outsider out of any of us.

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It's a Man's World??

If the patriarchy promises men power, why do so many of them still feel powerless? Episode thirteen pulls apart the myths of masculinity -- all the scripts that tell men how to stand, speak, fight, and everything else. From dueling pistols to MAGA hats, the performance has always required props, applause, and fear of failure. We trace how fascists and authoritarians have turned sex and gender into battlefields, equating sexual purity and weaponized virility with national strength. But beneath the uniforms and slogans lies insecurity, not strength. This episode asks who writes the rules of manhood, and whether anyone should.

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