Transcript
A (0:06)
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org we don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
B (0:35)
I'm here with Doug Wilson. Doug, thanks for joining me.
C (0:38)
Great to be with you. Thank you.
B (0:40)
So, yeah, you debated my friend Christopher Hitchens back in the day. That was probably, I don't know, 15 years ago or so. Do you remember what year you did those debates?
C (0:48)
I don't remember the year. It was a wonderful time, actually.
B (0:52)
Christmas.
C (0:52)
Christopher and I got along great, actually.
B (0:54)
Yeah, you seem to. So I watched the documentary that was born of that collision, that was literally titled Collision, and you guys were debating, if memory serves, whether Christianity is good for the world. That was kind of the focusing question.
C (1:10)
Yeah, correct.
B (1:11)
So we probably won't recapitulate much of that. I mean, I think we might fall into debate on a few topics. I think that's. But what I really want to start with here is just to have you educate me and my audience about the American religious landscape. I just have a bunch of questions for you. I should say you have a new book titled Frequently Shouted Questions about Christian Nationalism. So we'll get into that. But just to orient us, maybe just the first question is, how would you differentiate it from what most Americans might think of as mainstream Christianity if that.
C (1:46)
Phrase shirts much so in the Baskins and Robins of Christianity, what flavor. Am I right?
B (1:51)
Yeah.
C (1:52)
Rocky road. That's what I am. So basically, I grew up in an evangelical home, conservative Bible believing parents. My mom had been a missionary in Japan. My father was a Navy officer who got out to do personal evangelism. So I grew up in a home that was decidedly Christian and evangelical. Evangelical in. I was born in 53. Evangelical during my boyhood prior to Jimmy Carter simply meant conservative Bible believers outside the mainline denominations. There'd been a big battle in the first part of the 20th century in the mainlines, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, and so on, between liberalism and what came to be called fundamentalism. And basically, the liberals won and captured the mainline denominations. The conservative believers sort of retreated into the. Into the woods and built their own alternative structure. They abandoned the seminaries and built Bible colleges, built Christian radio stations and stayed there until the 1970s, more or less. And I grew up in that quadrant of the, of the Christian faith in the 70s, you might say, led by Francis Schaeffer, polarized by Francis Schaeffer, the conservative believers reengaged in what became known as the culture wars back in the days of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, those folks. And that was something that we were part of, part of. And there has been in recent years, after the election of Jimmy Carter, who was an avowed born again Christian, there was a resurgence of people identifying themselves with evangelicalism and it grew significantly, so maybe spectacularly became a movement. And then it too developed a right wing and a left wing, you know, conservative and more moderate or liberal, liberal. And the most recent iteration of it would be Covid and post Covid, where the red pilled evangelicals who have become more and more pronounced in their willingness to be Christian in public has coalesced and the moderates have done what has usually been done, which is try to mute these divisions and get, you know, play well with others and try to get along as best they may. That's basically a 30,000 foot flyover of where I think we are.
